The Brexit Arms

[BrandySours]

And so it is done....! 🙌

Finally!

🥳 🎉 🇬🇧 🍾 🥂

Merry Xmas!!

@DemolitionBarbie

Happy Christmas! We're finally getting Brexit done.

I for one am happy to volunteer to be one of the first to lose my job and live on nothing but turnips, it's a small price to pay to make me feel like a winner just like all those lovely hedge funders who share my ideals.

[quote DemolitionBarbie]@yellowspanner

Sovereignty means having power over your own country.

Sovereignty is just a concept unless you do something with it. Sovereign nations enter agreements with other sovereign nations in which both sides agree to be bound by certain rules. It doesn't reduce either side's sovereignty to do this.

Do you think the other EU member states are not sovereign? If so, who is sovereign over them?

Do you think that if we enter trade agreements with other nations then we'll no longer be sovereign?

I think by sovereignty many Brexit supporters mean Imperial power, the ability to do what we want without any compromise or consequence. That doesn't exist now and it's shameful that it ever did.

Arguably Brexit reduces our sovereignty as we will now follow EU rules without any role in shaping them.[/quote]
This ^^

The flag-shaggers have 'won', have they? Marvellous, enjoy your pyrrhic victory. What a load of hairy old gonads.

Brexit is the pinnacle of nationalistic stupidity. Slow hand clap - the next ten years will be taken up with damage limitation.

4 more days after today and we are finally away from the EU's control. 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧

It has been agreed, and now we can move forward, and if the EU misbehave we can pull out and go no deal.
Seems like we did ok.

4 more days after today and we are finally away from the EU's control.

This is just bollocks. Most of Europe thought of us as the most powerful nation and influential country within the EU. Germany and France were often at loggerheads with UK able to pick positions we preferred. The idea that we were at the whim of either is just an absolute fantasy. The UK won an absurd amount of votes in EU, and had a host of other countries who looked to line up behind us on positions.

All that influence has been pissed down the drain because people such as yourself believed such a daft fantasy. Congrats.

@sally067

4 more days after today and we are finally away from the EU's control.

This is just bollocks. Most of Europe thought of us as the most powerful nation and influential country within the EU. Germany and France were often at loggerheads with UK able to pick positions we preferred. The idea that we were at the whim of either is just an absolute fantasy. The UK won an absurd amount of votes in EU, and had a host of other countries who looked to line up behind us on positions.

All that influence has been pissed down the drain because people such as yourself believed such a daft fantasy. Congrats.

See thats the thing i don’t understand

When we were in i was under the impression that we were a powerful member, one of the top ones with the power of veto and rule makers and virtually the only country (might not have been but can’t be arsed to check ) who kept their own currency

But apparently i was wrong...we were actually as weak as fuck, we were bossed about completely unable to veto anything and had to do everything the EU said

We PAID for that position!! I’m fairly neutral as I can see both benefits to membership and the potential of not. But I’m baffled by remainers continually repeating that we had a better ‘deal’ as a member than as not whilst neglecting to mention that we paid for that position. The rest of the EU countries didn’t allow that out of the goodness of their hearts ..... we paid for it ...... anything between 7-10 billion NET every year. That’s one hell of a membership fee so the question is going to be .... which can only be answered once we are a few years down the line ..... was membership worth it?

I honestly think only time is going to tell on this.

Climate change is going to lead to a mass exodus of people from flooded areas and i do think migration and free movement played a part in why many voted for Brexit even though many people deny the claim.

I’ll admit I feel slightly more at ease that we have the potential to protect our borders in the future but am equally concerned at what cost.

@Noname99 But that fee was an absolute pittance in geopolitical terms when you take into account the GDP gain just from having access to the single market. The financial services industry, for better or worse, accounts for 25% of the treasuries total tax take - even if we caught 500 times more fish it won't make up that difference lost. The OBR forecasts a 5% drop in GDP which will be hundreds of billions of pounds less for the treasury to spend on other things.

I think your figure works out at around 34p a day per person purely from an income tax point of view (if you want to do it that crudely and not account for corporation tax, capital gains, vat, etc going towards the costs). That's one hell of good deal, I'd pay that a year on top of my mobile phone fee just to be able to roam or send texts at UK rates when abroad on holiday. Let alone having the EHIC card on top. Let alone businesses being able to trade freely and not be uncompetitive due to tariffs, create jobs, pay more tax into the system, etc etc.

We PAID for that position!!

I know

I honestly think only time is going to tell on this

Absolutely

I honestly think only time is going to tell on this.

Absolutely. For every institution that provides a negative model, there is another that provides a positive model. That’s all they are though - models.

It will be interesting to see how this evolves over time and what the benefits and negatives of non membership are because, despite the insistence of some individuals, there will be both.

Yes we paid to be a member of the EU but some of that money helped pay for the central agencies of the EU which we derived benefit from. One example was the European Medicines Agency which evaluates and supervised medicinal products across the EU. (The EMA was based in London but post the referendum had to move to Amsterdam so it was still based in an EU member state.)

Now we have left, the UK has to maintain and fund its' own agency. The UK MHRA (medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency) will now do the approval work for all medicines seeking Uk approval. Previously the work was shared between all member states so doing all the extra work will carry a cost.

There was also the money that UK projects, farmers etc received. As one of the poorest areas of the UK, Cornwall received large amounts of EU funding. It has been reported that it requested £700m from the Gov over the next 10 years to replace the funds lost from the EU. But so far the Gov has only said there will be £200m for the entire country. So it seems Cornwall and other poor areas are not going to see their EU funding replaced.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-cornwall-55279468

For every institution that provides a negative model, there is another that provides a positive model.

Not true; it's more like 1:9. This shows how the BBC's policy of 'balance' led to false equivalence. But pointless debating this now.

It will be interesting to see how this evolves over time and what the benefits and negatives of non membership are because, despite the insistence of some individuals, there will be both

Just listened to an economist talk through both.

Losses - disruption as business come to terms with deal, less uk/eu trade due to non tariff barriers, red tape, delays at border, longer recession, less tax take. no deal for financial services.

Gains - Johnson has more freedom for state aid for the regions, this will help his levelling up agenda.

Gains - Johnson has more freedom for state aid for the regions, this will help his levelling up agenda.
Except that Regional Aid as against business specific was ALWAYS allowed within the EU
in fact its regional State Aid that paid for the new centre of Merthyr and the new seafront at West Bay and the new social centres in Camborne

The The Tories have always put £95 into London for every £5 they put into the regions
that will not change

That was based on a value equation that looked at where the money invested would make most money @Listening, and when you have an economy biased towards financial services and the southeast, it was easy to make a best case for spending money to increase productivity in London. It would have been a much slower payback in the SW, NW or NE. So now we have inner city London schools, some in disadvantaged areas that receive almost twice as much money per student as our local secondary does. Our student funding is about £3800 per capita; in London it's closer to £7000 per capita. And rural deprivation is no nicer than inner city squalor.

Xing
And rural deprivation is no nicer than inner city squalor.
But that funding formula could have been corrected at any time during the last 10 years.
It was an entirely UK decision
as was Austerity

what makes you think the Tories will change their spots now ?

My dear friends in the Arms. I humbly beseech you to honour me with a moment of your time.
Campaign to replace the House of Lords with an elected Senate.
And get rid of our First Past The Post system which disenfranchises even people you approve of.
Then I might even agree with you.
Go on, use your mighty powers to actually unite people against anti democratic processes and bodies.

We have already spent more on brexit than we paid for the entirety of our EU membership.

It's quite a good psychological trick to make people focus on the idea of being out of pocket because you pay something, without taking the full context into account.

Evening All - I left a pile of logs outside, so help yourself. I've brought some kimchi and jars of rollmops and have left them on the bar.

The problem I found by EU Regional Development Funds as distributed via LEADER+ is that the criteria required a great deal of admin and self-funding that very few can actually qualify; I really don't think they managed to spend all this area's allocation.

Not to mention the additional and unecessary layers of admin and payroll of the LEADER+ staff. So Direct Funding by Govt to the UK Regions and to the grassroots is a more efficient use of Levelling-Up Funding. The local structures/organizations are already in place.

Nice to see you all and I see 'U' had regained her serene expression as she got in her limo this morning. She gave me a wink and a wave as she pulled off. Nice work Armors.

Pisco Sours all round - I put 3 bottles with the Herrings - bet some of you thought it was Vodka.

brohoritje!

@DemolitionBarbie

We have already spent more on brexit than we paid for the entirety of our EU membership.

It's quite a good psychological trick to make people focus on the idea of being out of pocket because you pay something, without taking the full context into account.

You could even say that taxpayers don't pay a penny towards it. If you think about it a drop of GDP of 5% which is the prediction and over twice as much as the 2008 financial crisis - equates to around £300 billion (back of a fag packet calculation).

That is largely companies that provide services to EU companies such as an advertising agency doing a campaign for Google or a finance company doing some transactional accounting for JP Morgan.

They will pay VAT and corporation tax on all of that. I can guarantee you that the amount they pay into the treasury to have that luxury equates to more than the £7-10 billion membership fee. It's so emotive stating it comes out of your paye. 25% of the entire governments tax take comes from the finance sector, they pay the EU membership fee and in return we get more jobs and more money to spend on public services.

My friends employer wanted to set up a new insurance company and began planning in about 2015 (ish). The preference was to situate it in London, but because of Brexit and the continuing uncertainty over whether UK insurers could continue trade in the EU, it was set up in Dublin. And this new, growing insurance company now employs people in Dublin instead of London, is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland, and pays its corporation tax to the Irish government, not HMG.

And the much lower rate of corporation tax in Ireland had absolutely no bearing on that decision? No, No, tinkly laugh... of course not.

Corporation tax in Ireland is significantly lower than it is in the Uk... I want to say 20% in the UK and 12% in Ireland (don't use those figures because I didn't check them). There is a reason that so much internet business is booked out of Eire and Luxembourg, and quite a bit of it is about taxation rates.

And the much lower rate of corporation tax in Ireland had absolutely no bearing on that decision? No, No, tinkly laugh... of course not.
Blerdy Soverignty
Countries inside the EU setting their own systems

Yay - the Arms has re-opened again. Previous resident and name change here.

Plenty of hand sanitiser out front as well I see. 🍾 is at the ready 🎉

Grabbed one of logs left by @TheHatelsNotGood to stoke up the fire. Large glass of Red please barkeep.