Brexit consequences

[Spinflight]

Can't find the old one, despite a search. Hence a year on...

I started it to compare the doom and gloom predictions from people who should know better, especially the treasury, to actual observable facts.

Thus far the treasury predicted our borrowing costs would soar by over 130 points. In fact they're down about 100.

No trade deals possible before (I forget the date they said, was far in the future though) compared to actual negotiations beginning with the USA later this month with the president firmly behind them. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India, South Korea and several others I've forgotten have shown a great desire for a deal quickly.

Ftse 100 and 250 are well up, just shy of 7500.

Best of all from a macro economic perspective is inflation touching 3%. When you are £1800 billion in debt rating that away with inflation is far preferable to actually paying it off.

Growth has dropped a bit, though nowhere near the instant recession that was predicted. Bit early to say though this is likely due to the referendum.

External investment is actually nicely up, with several major companies announcing various large commitments.

Things could be rosier, though it would be a struggle to describe them generally as bad, quite contrary to 'informed' opinions. Even the oecd recently ate their pre referendum words.

We haven't offically left, article 50 is the start of the process, we leave in 2 years and this can be turned back.

I said using the £18 bn figure is rubbish because its the gross figure, any renegotiation would probably bring us down to a smaller figure over all.

The Barker review doesn't mention anything about immigration but talks about low building rates have increased the price of houses. Who was it that put the building of houses into the hands of the private building firms?

No need to ask you sore arse, you already know.

Thatcher did not leave the country in a better position than she found it, unemployment was much higher, manufacturing gutted, over reliance on the city etc.

We had to spend money on the state after the 18 years of Tory government, because they had run down the public services so badly. Still Labour managed to run a surlplus, and keep the deficit to the same level as the Tories till the world financial crisis.

BTW if the Tories are sooo amazing, how come they've managed to gut the public services for 7 years, and still have a higher deficit than Labour did between 1997 and 2007 .

Thea:
Maybe I hit a raw nerve and you have ‘Sociology’ or something similar, and wonder why it doesn’t get you a high skilled job, in an ever higher skilled world, but still have the debt to pay off.

Actually, you come across as a more ‘theology’ type, falling in luv with ‘ideas’, like this big honking Europe, with all the signs that it can all go to hell in a hand cart, but you convince yourself ‘well at least there will be no more European wars’.

Offensive, much?
I went to university free in Ireland. I have no debt to pay off. Nice job, thank you very much, and in addition I can express myself using complete sentences, which is an advantage no matter what one's career path may be - even those with STEM degrees can find themselves making presentations, writing reports, expressing themselves in writing. Those with degrees in, let's say, economics or psychology, which are both maths heavy, can still find themselves writing essays, papers, etc.

And there is always a place for rigorous analysis, even in Theology - and even in a debate on Brexit, however much you cast aspersions on the skills that degrees in 'ologies and humanities in general offer. Rigorous analysis is needed especially in a debate on Brexit, because Brexit purports to be a practical solution to a set of practical problems, with nothing at all to do with nostalgia run amok, racism, xenophobia, and the desire to hear the soothing sound of simple answers to complex questions.

If you refuse to pay heed to solid evidence of the coming catastrophe, or if you are unwilling to try to comprehend what lies ahead, then it appears to be you and not supporters of remaining in the EU who has fallen in 'luv' with pie in the sky, jam tomorrow, faraway green hills, etc.

After all, it was Remain voters who decided to stay in an arrangement that is not without flaws, but Leavers who decided to take a giant leap into the unknown.

Mentioning the Grenfell disaster is rather lame in a country economic model context
It is completely pertinent in the context of a critique of the low reg model you are advocating as the future for the UK. In the Grenfell case, low regs and poor oversight led to gruesome death. Grenfell wasn't the first fire to claim the lives of the poor and it won't be the last.

That is what a political project is all about, not a ‘Common Market’ of trade hopefully open to trade across borders outside, the UK thought they joined all those years ago.
Do you realise that it was the UK, acting as a tool of the US in its geopolitical ambitions and hoping that expansion would lead to wider and not deeper union (because the Tories thought that co-ordinating such a big EU would be like herding cats) that pushed harder than anyone else for the inclusion of states like Turkey and the former Eastern Bloc in the EU? When that appeared to be a problem, the UK decided to try to opt out of the consequences of toadying.

You realise that you as a voter and possibly a member of a political party had a chance to have your voice heard every single time EEC or EU issues arose?

Contrary to your firmly held belief, those who run the EU are elected by the citizens of member states. There is a staff of professional civil servants to see to the nuts and bolts, just as in the UK.

You live in a pretty 'cruddy' club. Part of your club includes territory of a neighbouring island, many of whose residents do not wish to be part of anybody's kingdom. Part of it will hold another independence referendum in the next five years. Those two parts were incorporated into the UK by means of war, ethnic cleansing, and/or military occupation. I prefer consensus and gloop myself as a means of arriving at decisions on political structures.

By the way, as late as September 2016 Boris Johnson was still advocating Turkish membership. He campaigned to leave the EU based on the threat to security posed by possible Turkish membership.

Is Boris stupid, do you think? Or just really, really forgetful?

Yes I had noted the inability of sore arse to write coherently, she wouldn't pass a degree.

piie.com/newsroom/short-videos/posen-discusses-damage-brexit-british-economy
This guy has a few degrees. Well worth listening.

Mathsanxiety

Re your (whimper) "Offensive, much?" as an observation to your theoretical' EU garden of roses' view?

Whereas when you say 'are you English?', 'can you speak English?', 'I refuse to acknowledge any of your facts as I can't understand your sentence structure' - and worse to that effect, is that your attempt at a respectful and constructive debate?

It appears a few poster here are so full of self importance, that feel they can GIVE IT, but don't have to take any criticism of their views - I can do both on a 'treat others as...' view, but prefer to keep it civil, sticking to the facts.

You can generalise the benefits of the EU as much as you like, and say "Leavers who decided to take a giant leap into the unknown.", but similar to the referendum in Scotland, voters knew WHAT they were leaving - and the structural problems in the EU was a European 'guilty secret', papered over by successive governments wanting to be 'good Europeans' - and crossing their finger that the EU gets its shit together.

As while you say "it was Remain voters who decided to stay in an arrangement that is not without flaws" - how many Remainers KNEW about the EU flaws - who knew the result of too tight labour laws on such high Eurozone unemployment, or THEIR youth unemployment/Temp contracts rates, while telling OUR youth that jobs over there was THEIR future?

The FACT is, while the EU was some great concept to the UK thinker elites, it was not working on an everyday level for the majority of UK citizens - and to suggest that they did not have the right to express that in a Referendum on the subject - is sooooo 'Brussels'.

(And you can blame as many people or parties as you want, rather than accept it.)

Motheroffourdragons

Regarding what the European Parliaments Brexit co-ordinators says about the HIGHER UK’s contribution whether we change our Leave minds now, or re-join at a much later date.

“Britain could stay in EU, but only on poorer terms – Verhofstadt”

”Britain is welcome to change its mind and stay in the European Union, but it should not expect to keep getting its EU budget rebates or complex opt-outs from EU rules, the European Parliament's Brexit coordinator said on Wednesday.”

While both you and Bathildabigshot1 are “pretty sure” that INCREASED contributions is not true, who are you to deny either what a senior Brexit official says, OR the EU ‘direction of travel’?

The most senior EU faces (especially Verhofstadt and Juncker) are Federalists, wanting a United Gloop of Europe superstate, and as the article mentions, those in Brussels and other member states have long been peed off about the EU contributions rebate Thatcher negotiated.

The UK is asking for both respect, and in mutually beneficial stuff, like trade, to be as close as before as possible, nothing more or less, but its their call, as is what the UK is obliged to pay them in a divorce bill, or if EU citizens should be ruled by the ECJ supreme over our courts.

P.S. When EU Negotiator Barnier was asked at the last press conference WHY should the UK government agree to what you don’t legally have with other nations, when we LEAVE.

His answer in spluttered French, was basically ‘I don’t know, we (in the EU) will have problems adapting to something new, as a member leaves.

So please don’t pretend that you understand EU reasons for cutting their own nose to spite their trade face, or any other decision Brussels makes - as its all political including our Contributions REBATE.

The point is we were asked do we want to be in or out.
The Majority who voted said out please.
Our govenment then has agreed to follow our stated position and is working towards getting us out.
By the way the EU are stalling this now not the UK.

One consequence is the EU has show it's self to ruled by some very nasty vindictive people.
If time is so pressing imagine delaying talks till Dec because they don't like the fact we won't just leave them a blank cheque.

...is that your attempt at a respectful and constructive debate?

Yes it is.

Because in order to have any debate, let alone a respectful or constructive one, it is necessary for all the parties to understand what the rest are saying.

The point of written communication is to make your thoughts known to others in such a way that other people can understand what you are saying. I am not complaining about your sentence structure to have a go at you. Your poor written English makes it really, really hard to follow your thoughts.

When someone's written English is as hard to follow as yours is, readers generally ask themselves if it is possible that the writer's first language is not English. Are you so angry about this because you feel your Britishness is being questioned? If yes, is it a terrible thing, in your mind, not to be British?

The FACT is, while the EU was some great concept to the UK thinker elites, it was not working on an everyday level for the majority of UK citizens - and to suggest that they did not have the right to express that in a Referendum on the subject - is sooooo 'Brussels'.
'Thinker elites' as opposed to what? Are you part of the Great Unthinking Majority? I would laugh at that term but the poverty of thought that lies behind it is a sorry indictment of UK culture and the education system. It smacks of 'Ignorant and proud of it'/ 'them and us' - very black and white concepts, and there is not much evidence of thought or analysis there.

Wrt your conviction that the vote represents a clear statement that the EU was not working for the majority, allow me to remind you that the vote was very close. 48-52 means that almost half of the voters felt that the EU, warts and all, was working for them.

Alternatively, they they felt that it would be insane and dangerous to leave because they recognise that the EU is the UK's biggest trading partner. Or they were rightly repulsed by the involvement of the execrable Nigel Farage in the Leave campaign, with his racism and xenophobia worn on his sleeve. Many people have friends or family members who are 'forrin' after all. Or they decided that they would not screw over Ireland - a sizeable majority in Northern Ireland voted to remain. Or they realised what utter crap the Leave side were spouting when they talked of trade deals here, there and everywhere after leaving the closest trading partner. Then there were City voters who maybe did not want to have to uproot families and move to Frankfurt or elsewhere, settle children in a different education system, persuade spouses to follow and leave behind jobs and friends, maybe elderly parents, hoping they too could find a job where their spouse went, hoping they could learn another language well enough to make life pleasant.

All sorts of practical considerations went into the vote to Remain besides those I have mentioned. People sat down and considered whether the leap into the unknown was worth it. They decided it was not, and that the EU was working well enough for them, or maybe they sat down and realised that the EU was demonstrably not the problem, because other EU economies were doing just fine, other EU societies had less inequality and more social mobility, other EU education systems were fit for purpose, other health systems were not in a state of dire crisis, other countries seemed to be climbing out of the recession better, doing better at providing social housing...

The motivation of the 52 percent of voters who voted for Leave? There are well documented cases where people voted Leave to give the government a kick up the arse, without intending to be part of a majority and thus causing the invocation of Article 50. There are clearly really, really stupid people whose entire livelihood depends on being able to sell products in the EU who voter Leave - farmers for instance. There are people in Northern Ireland whose Leave vote was inspired by pig-headed insistence on sticking it to their Catholic and nationalist fellow Northern Irish, with the added motivation of seizing the chance to destroy the Good Friday Agreement that guaranteed power sharing in the province, something the hardline Unionist Leavers find as intolerable as the idea of removing Confederate statues and flags in the US. There are people whose regions depend heavily on EU funds who voter Leave, some of whom have since the Referendum realised that the EU was, in fact, working for them. I am thinking of Cornwall in particular, crying to Westminster to cough up the same amount in subsidies that your hated Brussels used to, though Wales is another example. Voting Leave must surely have indicated a level of ideologically-inspired blindness to reality in those groups and regions. Perhaps they found the message of the racist Farage more attractive than an appeal to their ability to recognise assess reality? In other words, maybe they were ideologically driven voters?

Mummy By the way the EU are stalling this now not the UK.

No, that is not actually the situation.
Unless you really believed that the UK would be out of the EU the day after the referendum, you must surely understand that treaties and agreements made with other states have had an impact on those states, and that those states have a right to renogotiate their position with the UK now that the treaties are to be set aside.

Those other states are particularly concerned about the fate of people formerly allowed to travel to the UK, work there, set up a business, buy a home, marry a Briton, have children whose citizenship is British, and the position of Britons abroad also has to be regularised. Unless the government comes up with a coherent and acceptable plan about EU nationals in the UK and Britons in the EU states, the EU does not know what the starting point of discussions should be. The EU has been clear from the start as to its position on UK and EU nationals' rights.

Next is Northern Ireland. You are clearly unaware of the Good Friday Agreement, and how the referendum was conceived without any thought as to the importance of the EU as a partner in that historic agreement that has guaranteed power sharing, guaranteed the civil and human rights of all NI citizens by means of the ECHR and ECJ (where formerly internment without trial was an option for the Westminster government and where rampant discrimination in the delivery of social services, housing, and constituency gerrymandering by the politically dominant Unionist group were the order of the day). What institutions can now guarantee human and civil rights for all the people of Northern Ireland? Almost half of the NI population does not trust the Westminster government or the DUP as far as they could throw them, a conclusion based on past performance. What is to happen about customs and immigration checks at the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland?

And what about money owed by the UK to the EU as part of treaties entered into after due debate and agreement in Westminster?

Details, details...

So far, the EU side has been clear what its starting point is. The UK government otoh has only just got around to publishing papers on various really important topics.

Are you one of the non-thinking majority (compared to Thea's 'thinking elites') who prefers simple solutions to complicated problems? Did you in fact believe that the UK would be out as soon as the votes were counted?

Thea, I take it that reality is beginning to dawn, as evidenced by your focus on the prospect of not actually leaving, or rejoining.

Congratulations. There is a glimmer of understanding there that the UK actually had a pretty good deal with the EU, with opt-outs, special considerations, ability to set its own tax and monetary course, etc.

...you would think with all that sovereignty plus access to a big-and-getting-ever-bigger market right next door, that the UK would already be Singapore-on-Thames. How did it all go so wrong?

No I always expected to have talks.
What I don't see is how you can be presented with a bill before you have discuse what the bill is for.
We agreed to fund projects, agreed with this.
More people have joined since we agreed who have use of these projects, should they not then on a pro rata basis, pay some of the cost and we get a refund on no longer being able to use these things.
Assets, the EU does have a lot, including WINE. since we paid towards this things should we not get a share of the value back,
A building that has increased in value like a home, you get your share in the divorce.
Have the employees not paid into a pension pot, as we sure have to, and the sums that are awarded are above and beyond normal, Rich men being made richer, they go on to another job more money but the pension is just there, how many normal working men have that.
I mean in the end who do the EU assets belong to... if not the countries in the EU.

You seem to think the UK has been funding other people's projects, and that EU money has not been used to fund any UK regional development. This is a pity.

The fact is the UK signed up to EU budget contributions after due negotiation and debate and agreement in Westminster, and those obligations are still due.

A building that has increased in value like a home, you get your share in the divorce.
To use your divorce analogy, debts that have accrued in the marriage must be paid off upon divorce. Creditors of 'Mr and Mrs, Inc.' are paid what is due to them - the house is sold so the mortgage can be repaid (only if the mortgage is repaid can any equity built up be divided), often the joint credit card debt is apportioned amongst the parties, any car payments are similarly apportioned. The contributions of each party to the future private education of the children are decided. You can't walk away from your joint debts just because you are no longer married.

What I don't see is how you can be presented with a bill before you have discuse what the bill is for.

Who has presented whom with a bill? The discussions are about the framework for deciding what liabilities the UK has on brexit day, and how they will be met. The EU has not "presented a bill" to anyone.

It's this degree of cluelessness that makes sensible discussion about brexit so very difficult.

Mathsanxiety

Re that rather long post starting with

"...is that your attempt at a respectful and constructive debate?"

"Yes it is."

I can see why you are obsessed with my English, as you you sooo much of it and say sooo little, the days of trying to bore the Leavers into submission has gone.

Could you please try again and just use some salient points, bullet points if you have to - as if you still can't understand that in England the pressures the EU Freedom of Movement put on our homes, services and jobs, and that was reflected in the vote - I can't keep reading waffle.

Cameron pre Referendum pleaded with Juncker to do something about that pressure, but in typical EU Brussels bureaucrat style - 'der (EU) rules are der rules' - this is a political project, not a people project, so LUMP IT.

Can't say they didn't see it coming.

Mathsanxiety

"You seem to think the UK has been funding other people's projects, and that EU money has not been used to fund any UK regional development. This is a pity."

Of course the EU politically decides where some of our money goes, so where does our NET several billions of contribution to the EU go?

Mistigri

"Who has presented whom with a bill? The discussions are about the framework for deciding what liabilities the UK has on brexit day, and how they will be met. The EU has not "presented a bill" to anyone."

So there was no Euro 60-100 bil circulating around Brussels for the past several months?

If no UK to EU future liabilities (we have agreed to pay in principle) has not been presented from a city of EU bureaucrats, why not, if they said THEY were ready to negotiate, and are clearly in a much better position to know the liabilities of 27 other member states than we are.

So if they have not PRESENTED a divorce bill, how on earth can they claim with a straight face, that due to the UK, that there has been no negotiations progress on the issue?

The facts is, there is already disquiet over there who will make up our shortfall, so they need to extort as much as they can get, for WHAT, as they won't even tell us that, is filed under 'future relationships'.

I have seen better skilled 'negotiators' throw a brick through a window before a heist.

I've read this whole thread and want to thank Math for her patient and intelligent contribution. Thea, I know you can't/won't acknowledge it, but it really is virtually impossible to follow your argument. I have tried! Please consider using more full stops at least, and do stop conflating the EU and individual nation states within it.

Yes dear, but when I mention the EU and Eurozone, it is relevant for reasons I mentioned earlier several times - so if you can't keep up, why not ask questions - or better still, contribute yourself.

So there was no Euro 60-100 bil circulating around Brussels for the past several months?

Among Brussels correspondants, sure. But they are not negotiating brexit.

No bill has ever been presented by the negotiating team, whose mandate is to establish the method of calculating the UK's liabilities. Only once this is negotiated will it be possible be work out the total.

If no UK to EU future liabilities (we have agreed to pay in principle) has not been presented from a city of EU bureaucrats, why not, if they said THEY were ready to negotiate, and are clearly in a much better position to know the liabilities of 27 other member states than we are.

What does this even mean? It doesn't help that it starts with a double negative.

The EU position paper on the financial settlement is here: ec.europa.eu/commission/publications/position-paper-essential-principles-financial-settlement_en

Where is the UK position paper?