Westminstenders: Where are we now?

[RedToothBrush]

Twenty thousand people
Cross Bösebrücke
Fingers are crossed
Just in case
Walking the dead

Where are we now, where are we now?
The moment you know, you know, you know

Just that.

Don't really want to reflect more than that right now.

There needs to be the same tax - and NI - financial rules for pensioners as for all other ages,
but the UK state pension as a % of average wages is miserly compared to other European countries.

A substantial minority of Uk pensioners are very poor and did not manage to get in early and make a property windfall, or even to buy their own home

We somehow can't find the time to negotiate with the EU, but apparently now have time on our hands to start opening negotiations with Australia and New Zealand

Well, why not import wine from literally half way round the world, when there is stuff a 20 mile sea crossing away? Who cares about those air miles, or shipping polluting the oceans?

Eliminating tariffs on wine is a red herring anyway - it’s about 9p for a standard bottle of red or white compared to the £2.23 UK excise duty.

Yes, some WTO tariffs are absolutely trivial; some are not, see pic 1

The only hope for a deal is a bare bones no-tariff one

• which would look good to those who understand nothing about trade,

but the NTBs (Non-tariff barriers) are what will hammer UK exporters in some sectors

A slight caution on the new drug hope for Covid. The science is unpublished. Releasing news by press release isn't usually a good way of doing things.
arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/cheap-steroid-may-lower-covid-19-death-rate-but-experts-urge-caution/

I can hope that it's indicative of political panic, but we're all a bit concerned in this.

I don't think the article mentioned wine, but to me the whole business still smacks of Empire. For example, why on earth import frozen New Zealand lamb from half way across the world, when we have the upland pasture for fresh lamb - and a need to find a new market, now that the Brexiters are hell bent on closing the door on the EU market?

Why aren't they opening negotiations with South Africa - could it be because there is no longer a White Government in charge?

Forgive the cynicism.

Mind you, I think I would prefer frozen New Zealand lamb to hormone ridden US beef.

Peregrina the dire Johnson promo video makes a big play on the UK importing wine and Tim Tams and exporting boomerangs

Why aren't they opening negotiations with South Africa

The UK and the Southern African CU has put in place an Economic Partnership Agreement which mirrors the current EU agreement.

Interesting stuff on importing lamb Peregrina. Found this online too
britishmeatindustry.org/industry/imports-exports/sheepmeat/

It's interesting to read that New Zealand failed to fulfil its quota. Do we expect it will now do so? I noted also that tariffs with China are being reduced with the aim to eliminate them.

Now if I was breeding sheep in New Zealand, which would I go for? A huge market of 1.4 billion with an emerging middle class looking for higher standards, or a country of increasingly older people of 65 million?

Distance is probably not quite such a big factor - 7,000 miles to China vs 12,000 to the UK.

Here's an interesting - if grim - parallel to BCFs graph posting ...

Distance is probably not quite such a big factor - 7,000 miles to China vs 12,000 to the UK.

I was amazed at how dirt cheap shipping is (or used to be). It's more expensive to move something from Dover to Birmingham, than it is from Hong Kong to Dover.

Whether or not that's a good thing, I'll leave as an exercise for later .

But to flip the telescope, physical location is the least of a companies worries when looking into infrastructure. Which is not a great thing to discover if you've been basing your - and your electorates - economic plans on "being near Europe".

Institutional racism is alive and well, in what used to be called the Tory Party at Prayer.

DG Very much depends on what you're shipping

Frozen containers or goods not requiring temperature control are much cheaper per tonne to transport in huge ships, with weeks to fill out documentation
than
Fresh produce which must move swiftly and be carefully handled to stay fresh

• 55% of fruit & veg the UK consumes comes from the EU

To keep that coming in - since it's difficult to replace - means avoiding logjams at and around ports,
caused by British exports to the EU being examined in detail as WTO rules

A sensible system for Uk exports would be to regulate the flow of those outgoing lorries,
to a number that ensures Calais etc can process them without increasingly long queues

Shame there isn’t a figure for this but it is there in the article

“Of EU Member States, the UK is by far the largest importer from the global market”

DG Very much depends on what you're shipping

In isolation, yes. But when it's added into the overall cost, it's still amazingly cheap. Even refrigerated cargo.

The last proper piece of strategy work I did involved using an IoT infrastructure to feed a blockchain for provenance and tracking of seaborne freight - including refrigerated goods. (One of the inputs was the ability to log temperatures onto the blockchain to ensure compliance with regulatory bodies). I was taken aback that the costs had fallen from what they apparently were in the 1990s. Fallen significantly.

The bottom line is, if I wanted to make RossettiWidgets, the very last thing I would worry about would be the cost of transporting them around the world. I'd be much better off trying to get a 1% discount from DPD/ParcelForce/Yodel/Hermes for the UK hub distribution.

Brilliant question from Alistair Carmichael in the Commons just now about Scottish/British beef farming. Deserved a much better answer from the PM than he got.

Basically saying that companies can call beef “British” if it is ‘packed’ here but no more is necessary. Excactly the sort of nonsense we should be stopping post Brexit.

Yes, import of widgets and raw materials
but the UK is v heavily dependent on the EU for fresh produce, which is much more difficult to source from elsewhere

And of course about half of UK exports are to the EEA, which will likely be the biggest economic effect
Brexiters try to downplay this by only listing figures for exports to individual members, but it is the total that matters, since the rules & roadblocks are the same for all

It doesn't mean that the Uk won't suffer from a No Deal Brexit,
... just that if any other country decided to leave, they'd likely be in even worse difficulties

Brexit has brought this home to EU members, even the public,
so although they'll whinge about things they don't like, polls have consistently shown signifiantly higher support for EU membership
and even the far right parties have dumped Frexit, Dexit etc from their campaigning

Yep, DG It's really the NTBs (non-tariff barriers) that would hammer DG-widget export,
if you avoided tariff-bearing widgets

Transport is no longer the % expense it once was,
but for fresh produce, it's not the cost - it's the handling & time,
the fact they would be non-sellable if not delivered promptly and in good condition

Excactly the sort of nonsense we should be stopping post Brexit.

What as a Brexiter are you going to do about it?

Back to shipping - costs are not what they were. Should we be shipping goods half way around the world? Mind you, I read the other day about a firm using a sailing ship to bring in coffee. We could profitably bring back sail for goods which don't require speedy delivery.

Brilliant question from Alistair Carmichael in the Commons just now about Scottish/British beef farming. Deserved a much better answer from the PM than he got.

...the one where BJ thought that Liar Carmichael was SNP because he included in his answer that if Scotland were independent, they would be wanting to return to the EU?

The trade deals so far suggested / realised with some other countries come nowhere near even in total
compensating for the expected drop in GDP from not having a comprehensive EU trade deal

After the govt's own figures that a USA FTA would only increase UK GDP by 0.16% ...

Sebastian Paynee@SebastianEPayne*

A trade deal with New Zealand might actually UK reduce GDP by -0.01% according to @tradegovuk
's internal model.
Best case scenario will increase growth by 0.01%.

Figures for a trade deal with Australia are a little better
DIT says it will increase UK GDP by 0.01% - 0.03%

Back to shipping - costs are not what they were. Should we be shipping goods half way around the world?

Why not. As I said, it's cheaper than shipping them from Dover to Birmingham

Mind you, I read the other day about a firm using a sailing ship to bring in coffee. We could profitably bring back sail for goods which don't require speedy delivery.

You could. If you were willing to invest in reacquiring and redistributing the skills involved, which I can assure you as a modern swashbuckling investor you are not. And if you were so inclined, you'd look into using the UKs canal network for similar uses long before you started arsing about on the high seas.

Of course, the US (quietly) already takes advantage of the Mississippi to move millions of tonnes a year by barge. If anyone has a few moments to spare they should see how they do it. One barge can replace 50 lorries ..

A standard barge is 200 feet long, 35 feet wide, and when loaded to its 1500-ton capacity needs a nine-foot depth of water to float. Barges are cabled together into a “tow,” which can be longer than three football fields.

You could also piggyback a UK national water main via the canal network so we no longer have to hear the South East whinging ever time the sun shines for more than a day.

There are lots of things we can do to make things better. There always have been. The main problem is old peoples being taken hostage to the past.

I write this as a person whose uncle (DMs brother) spent 20 years in the merchant navy where he bought my DGPs an African Grey parrot that nipped me aged 2 ...