Westministenders: Danger of "accidental" Brexit (whoops !) ?

[BigChocFrenzy]

i.e. Brexit without a deal - NOT intentionally so - due to UK govt incompetence and mutual UK/EU misunderstandings

The govt is proceeding from abysmal ignorance on a Brexit journey which may blunder into disaster.

Prominent Leave campaigner Richard North:

"The UK Government's narrative seems to rest on the belief that the EU will cave in under pressure, and is thus giving every sign that it is prepared to push negotiations to the wire.

If, on the other hand, the EU are determined not to budge, especially as, with their own White Paper on "The Future of Europe" triggering internal discussions unrelated to Brexit, they are not necessarily fully focused on the "British problem".

As a result, we could end up with an "accidental Brexit",
where the UK negotiators overplay their hand, ending up in the UK leaving without an agreement, forcing it to rely on WTO rules.

Most likely, it will take very little to convince the EU that Mrs May is bluffing – as the effect of the WTO option is likely to be disastrous for the UK economy.

We could thus have each side misreading each other, making the accidental Brexit all the more likely."

www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=86395

Plus infacts "https://infacts.org/boris-johnson-wrong-eu-single-market-hurts-growth/"

You have to be quite thick skinned to persist with a methodology in the face of such scathing criticism but then he is a sociologist living in Ho Chi Minh City

I just had a quick look at the Civitas report. There are several problems with it:

• The extrapolation of the UK economy from before joining the single market to afterwards is nonsense because (a) it uses what is clearly a linear trend to generate an exponential prediction, and (b) many other things happen after 1972 that have affected growth rates.

• There are no sufficiently similar economies to the U.K. (in terms of sectoral composition and location which is crucial to modelling trade flows) to do an a benchmarking analysis.

• There is a huge difference between staying out of a trade agreement which might have implied a slow adjustment over time, to suddenly introducing massive barriers to trade from one day to the next (a huge negative trade shock).

He's also wrong to say that there are is no serious modelling of the impact of leaving the single market, the treasury have been working on a range of models (I know people working on this), they are just not releasing them to the public. As have the Scottish and Irish governments, and most EU countries. These are actual models looking at the impact by sector.

Last but not least, the person who wrote this is a sociologist (not an economist!).

Sorry xpost as it took me a while to write. Thanks for the link ron!

MissMoon You were so much more articulate

Right, so if that's the best Civitas can come up with...

Anyone taken in by its reports is in for a nasty surprise before long. Oh dear what a shame never mind.

A bit hard on the rest of us who will also have to suffer, though. And who will have seen it coming and had longer to worry about it. Depressing myself now.

Only read bits of the report but it does seem that he is living in the same looking glass world as the government.

It reminded me of the White Paper (only with more words and better grammar ): lots of assumptions and wishful thinking.

He doesn't seem to understand that Hard Brexit means outwith the Single Market (unless he's fallen for the "access to the Single Market" line) or that the Single Market requires FoM (and/or that we are important big enough to negotiate away that requirement ). He complains that countries outside the EU but inside the Single Market (like Norway) have had better growth - yet doesn't look at what the structural issues within the UK have constrained our productivity and growth.

His comment about customs and non-tariff trade barriers not being a significant issue illustrate his ignorance that he is a sociologist and not an economist and doesn't gave a clue what he is talking about "Indeed, much of that agreement is in effect already written since customs on both sides of the Channel are already applying exactly the same rules"

I know that we don't respect actual experts these days but if all Civitas, and the right wing generally, can come up with to advise Theresa May on her negotiating strategy, and he does offer her quite extensive advice entirely devoid of any pertinent facts or expertise, is a sociologist living in Vietnam, then we are truly doomed. There is an acronym in Asia for westerners who make an easy living in developing economies from their substandard expertise - FILTH perfectly prepared to admit it could apply to me too

Is Banks the first, bar the Trump boys ignorant baiting of Khan, to make political capital out of this horrific tragedy? I am sure those innocent people tragically killed and injured on the bridge will be grateful for his opportunism

"This morning, though, Leave.EU, the leave campaign run by the Nigel Farage ally and onetime Ukip donor Arron Banks, has put out a lengthy statement essentially blaming the attack on mass immigration. It says:

We are sick, tired but perhaps even more so we are angry that recent governments across Europe have enabled these attacks through grossly negligible policies that have left us vulnerable. How many times must we #PrayForNice? For Brussels? Berlin? Paris? London? The list is endless.

The statement is not attributed to anyone by name."

From the Guardian live coverage.

Sadiq Khan speaks for most Londoners

""We must never accept terrorists being successful. We must never accept that terrorists can destroy our life or destroy the way we lead our lives. We must never accept politicians not being accessible to the public. We must never accept a situation where people try and divide Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus from each other, of those who are not members of organised faiths. We must never accept a situation where people can incite hatred against people because of the faith they belong to.
When you think about why terrorists want to attack London, it’s because they hate the fact that we don’t simply tolerate each other, whether you are a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, member of an organised faith or not, we respect, embrace and celebrate each other. And that’s going to carry on."

TM has confirmed the attacker is believed to be British born. Not that the facts ever bothered teats like banks or garage

Thanks autocorrect 🙈

Hashi You made me laugh so hard, I had a coughing fit in the office.

The inside story of the Tory election scandal
The unexpected Conservative election victory of 2015 transformed British politics. Now an unprecedented Electoral Commission investigation has raised the question of whether it was even a fair fight.
www.theguardian.com/news/2017/mar/23/conservative-election-scandal-victory-2015-expenses

I have not managed to finish the article yet, but it is very interesting.

Wrt the terrorist attack yesterday.

Here is a quote from the historian Timothy Snyder's (Bloodlands, the Black Earth, the Red Prince) latest book 'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century':

Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.

Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.

That Brendon Cox again, talking sense "The person who did this is no more representative of British Muslims than the person that killed Jo is representative of people that are from Yorkshire."
Brendan Cox.

TM has confirmed the attacker is believed to be British born

So why are we obssesed with foreign terrorists ?????

TM has confirmed the attacker was known to MI5

So what are these new powers that the security services need to have, if they can't manage with the ones they have ????

Dh tells me that someone on the Jeremy Vine Show today was proposing re-introducing internment camps

So who would be sent to them?

Foreign born people?
Muslims?
People with extremist views?
Wrong thinking people?

The fact that such a suggestion could even be articulated on our public service broadcaster is horrifying

Big Timothy Snyder fan, will order his latest.

LH the pattern is well established in all European countries,.
The terrorists are mostly known by the Police. They are mostly national born and of theybarent, they've been living in that country for years and years.

But the message of terrorists =foreigners is feeding a theory that we are better than them, that we need to control immigration and is also ensuring that all,the blame is put on someone 'outside' rather than looking at what we are doing wrong.

Farage embracing the American fad for fake news, I did not think he could get more loathsome "We’ve made some terrible mistakes in this country, and it really started with the election of Tony Blair back in 1997, who said he wanted to build a multicultural Britain.

His government even said they sent out search parties to find immigrants from all over the world to come into Britain. Do you know what? I don’t think we vetted a single one of them.

The problem with multiculturalism is that it leads to divided communities. It’s quite different to multiracialism. That’s fine, that can work very happily and extremely well. But we’ve finished up with very divided communities.

I’m sorry to say that we have now a fifth column living inside these European countries. Surely an American audience seeing this horrendous thing happening in Westminster should start to say to itself that when Donald Trump tries to put in place vetting measures, he is doing it to protect your country.

Frankly, all those people out protesting in Fifth Avenue in New York and elsewhere need to have a good, long hard think about what they are doing.

Frankly, if you open your door to uncontrolled immigration from Middle Eastern countries, you are inviting in terrorism.

I do actually think that the moment has come for us to actually point the blame. What these politicians have done in the space of just 15 years may well affect the way we live in this country over the next 100 years."

Lets not allude to the fact that this terrorist was British.......

My dad was an "unvetted" immigrant (as were my brother and I, but as we were only 1 and 3, we were probably ok ). Was he a risk? Or was the fact that he was white, a respectable ex farmer coming to study to be a doctor and from a "nice" Commonwealth country mean that he was/is OK?

He had a Secret Service file on him in his home country as he was considered to be a subversive. Would this have stopped us being able to escape apartheid?

Russia is so important to the French economy and politics.

@maxseddon: Marine Le Pen is visiting Moscow tomorrow, as one does when running for the presidency of... France https://t.co/ibj16bLaP0

We're back to the binary divide here .

Mrs May said 12 Britons were admitted to hospital and other victims included three French children, two Romanians, four South Koreans, one German, one Pole, one Irish, one Chinese, one Italian, one American and two Greeks

Now, as an London born, English Briton, that statement makes me incredibly proud - it's a marvellous testament to the incredible wealth of humanity from all over the globe that moves everyday in London.

But to some people, it's "wrong".

My favourite tweet today

@simonnricketts
Nigel Farage is 52 and from Kent. So is the alleged Westminster attacker. When will we tackle this problem of 52-year-olds from Kent?

LH :(:(:(

TM is just pouring oil onto the fire there.
This was one of the most touristic area of London. So yes there was a lot of tourists there (as well as 'immigrants' that have actually been born here).
Insisting on their nationality is very very bad taste.

As if it mattered where the victims are coming from!

Insisting on their nationality is very very bad taste.

"Insisting" ?

Tomato, tomayto. I just thought it highlighted what a people-hub London is and should be proud of.

I don't think TM was in any way pouring oil into fire (for once), Peppers, lots of other countries will be interested to know if their nationals were involved and people from those countries would want to hear their citizens acknowledged for want of a better word. I don't think there was any implication that they were nasty immigrants, the Romanian, for example, was the woman who was fished out of the Thames and she was just here for a couple of days on a family celebration, I heard, poor thing.