To paraphrase a man whose name I shall never again say or write.
The UK cabinet, with collective responsibility supposedly fully restored, made the following statements within 24 hours on no deal: “make sure that there’s adequate food supplies”, “obviously an attempt to try and ramp up the pressure”, “that kind of selective snippet that makes it into the media, to the extent that the public pay attention to it, I think is unhelpful”, “well, I think that’s a rather irresponsible thing to be coming from the other side. We ought to be trying to reassure citizens on the continent and also here.” ,“Of course, if we have no deal we have to make sure that we are prepared at the border with the knock-on effects that that would have if, on the EU side, they take the worst-case scenario approach, which is frankly irrational”, “We are working with industry for the potential need for stockpiling in the event of a no-deal Brexit”,”I hope that even under a no-deal scenario that there will still be smooth movement in through ports”. What?
Neither collective nor responsibility seem to be in force here. Also Raab’s recent Select Committee-appearance was enlightening: it apparently dawns on this trained lawyer that letting a no-deal scenario run its course exposes him to serious personal liability. People will inadvertently die, and no politician can let this happen.
The Chequers-alternative is evidently rejected both by Westminster and Brussels. By prioritizing goods and agrifoods (non-London) over services (London) it means 80% EU rule taking for 20% of economic activity at the expense of the country’s financial and intellectual powerhouse. A worthy Maidenhead brainchild. The logical next step is EFTA, unlikely to find a majority either.
Long gone is any suggestion of potential net benefits of leaving; the will of the people a concept frozen in the past. The Brexit-project stumbles along on the crutches blackmail and coercion.
Meanwhile, Juncker has demonstrated that pure muscle is all that counts in global trade negotiations (and some psychological intelligence, also in short supply in Brexitland). Any doubts about the natural order in the cue remaining? Fox’ desperate attempts to divert the discourse to a post-membership UK-US special trade relationship is becoming increasingly absurd: Trump needs the EU against the real trade-problem China. TTIP light is back on, and open to Britain, but nobody has time for just the UK.
Finally, it is official that continued EU membership on current terms is still available, if chosen soon.
Despite the last two years’ irritating experience, I still believe that the UK is too intelligent to miss that opportunity. And I am looking forward to my retirement as a Brexit-blogger. The answer is too clear now for the question to be interesting any longer.
* Arnold Kiel is a self-employed Management Consultant, father of two sons in British education, and very concerned about their future in this Europe
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48 Comments
‘But what about the people?’
‘The people… will no longer be a problem.’
Wouldn’t it be marvellous if the title of this post were true. Unfortunately I have noticed that the Tories are now treating Brexit in the same way as they used to talk about the Market. In the 80s the adoration of the Market stretched from Thatcher to her local cohorts. It was like a religion, the Market could do no wrong and it would sort everything out.
Now Brexit is talked about in the same hallowed tones. Brexit is a golden opportunity, it will sort itself out, it will be the answer to all our problems. Unfortunately the same adoration seems to be present in Labour’s leadership. It’s a case of the Emperor’s new clothes and no one except the Lib Dems is prepared to speak the truth to the nation.
I’m very much afraid our voice won’t be loud enough and we’ll have to go through economic degradation before we come out of this national fugue state. Opinion may be turning but it’s very slow. The EU has said they’ll extend the timescale if we are going to have a referendum on the terms but will it be enough?
As Dav has said
“The people… will no longer be a problem.”
We will soon have “unconditional surrender to the EU”!
Resistance is futile, eh?
I can imagine you sitting in a swivel chair, stroking your white cat and saying ‘You are “too intelligent to miss that opportunity.” Mr Bond! ‘ 🙂
https://www.libdemvoice.org/unconditionally-surrender-to-the-eu-or-be-a-failed-state-54724.html
Do you mean the people who were for a decade marginalised and impoverished, and then sold, with Russian money and stealth digital campaigning in an illegal campaign, a cheap, easy, pain-free, and quick Brexit as a panacea? The ones who will now happily accept the expensive, difficult, painful, and slow real Brexit on offer, and happily succumb to more and accelerated marginalisation and impoverishment, under the auspices of Putin and Bannon?
Well obviously the Brexit extremists never will accept the people’s minds can change. Neither will they accept a substantial number of their fellow’s are no longer with us. They are incapable of change and as Churchill said “a fanatic is someone who won’t change his mind and can’t change the subject” a quote that more than adequetly sums up our brave Brexiteers.
Sue Sutherland is quite right. Fundamentalist religion is one of the best metaphors for what is going on. Various disreputable characters, guardians of the one true faith, compete for the role of high priest.
Dealing with fundamentalism while trying to maintain a generous, compassionate spirit is painful and emotionally draining, but serious and honest politicians have to be resilient and take what for many may seem to be hard decisions. The desire to reach out and heal divisions should not compromise doing what is right.
Come what may, even if we remain in the EU, we have many years ahead of difficult reconciliations to face. I worked in South Yorkshire during the 1980s coal strike and there were those who still hadn’t forgiven those members of their families who were on the “wrong” side in 1926!
I’m really interested in what sort of a job Dominic Raab makes of his latest task. He always struck me as a bit of a clever dick so now’s his chance to put his money where his mouth is.
I see that Steve Bannon intends to get involved in the next EU elections, which could prove to be a watershed for the organisation. What if right wing nationalism does make large inroads? Could we be seeing the end of the federalist dream? If so, we might want to reconsider our decision to leave. It will all depend of whether we can get an extension to Article 50.
“What about the people ?”, whoever they are “the people” can, and do change their mind, otherwise it wouldn’t be a democracy. In 1975 there was a decisive vote on our membership of the common market. Brexiteers didn’t accept that as the final say, so why should a sloppy, badly defined referendum in 2016 be any more final.
Mind you having voted at every opportunity, at every level for 49 years and never, ever supported a winning candidate I have issues with what we call democracy……. oh sorry, except for Euro elections where those beastly Europeans actually added my votes to a pile to elect a Lib Dem.
I’ve never seen it mentioned on LDV, but Brexit was a Lib Dem own goal. A bit of joined up thinking might have avoided the current mess. Research by Thiemo Fetzer at Warwick University clearly shows support for Brexit was a backlash against the Coalition welfare cuts implemented with Lib Dem support in the lobbies.
Fetzer’s research can be downloaded as a PDF from the following article in The Independent on 27 July.
“Austerity-induced reforms, including widespread cuts to the welfare state since 2010, were an important factor behind the decision of many people to shift their political support to UKIP and, subsequently, support Leave in the EU referendum
How David Cameron’s welfare cuts led directly to the Brexit vote”.
The Independent-27 Jul 2018
Just to provide a direct line to the article David Raw refers to:
How David Cameron’s welfare cuts led directly to the Brexit vote
@David Raw
That would be of course a Labour own goal in leaving the terrible state of Government fiances and not regulating the banks properly which lead to the financial meltdown – although I suspect you would say that was the fault of Lloyd George as Lib Dems in Government seem to be the source of all evil! And of course Alistair Darling would have had even bigger cuts.
Of course actually we were part of the biggest spending and borrowing Government of all time.
Well that’s all right then. We can blame the Brexit mess on Nick Clegg and those dreadful Lib Dem Ministers!
Doesn’t help us get out of the mess though.
Indeed Michael1. We borrowed massively by printing money and spent it on saving the bankers, while cutting the money spent on the poor. I suggest all Lib Dems consider carefully where this all came in “building a … fair society” and how it “balanced the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community” and “where no-one shall be enslaved by poverty …”
We are supposed to be better than Labour and the Tories. So why did our leaders handle things so badly that we took all of the blame?
Arnold Kiel i take it you still believe we should take the people out of any decision re Brexit, as per your past comments, and they should just ” submit ” to the decisions of the powers that be/political elite.
I’m quite happy with the idea of giving the people another vote on the matter – it’s a democracy.
Michael 1 30th Jul ’18 – 8:36pm………………….That would be of course a Labour own goal in leaving the terrible state of Government fiances and not regulating the banks properly which lead to the financial meltdown………………………
I can’t believe that there are still those who parrot “It was all Labour’s fault”. In case you’ve forgotten the ‘meltdown’ was worldwide. I suggest you read about the causes of the ‘Subprime Mortgage Crisis’……If you can explain how a UK government (of any shade) could have stopped the fallout from the US crash I’d love to hear it. The seeds were sown in the 1980s by deregulation and, with it’s adoption by the world’s biggest economy, there was no way back…
Occam”s Razor @David Raw. Despite the best efforts of bien pensant apologists to pretend otherwise because it doesn’t fit their romantic notions of the proletariat, a large proportion of those who voted for Brexit did so because they don’t like foreigners.
If you haven’t I suggest you listen to the LBC phone in show with James O’Brien https://inews.co.uk/video/james-obrien-exasperated-by-ukip-caller-on-lbc/
@expats
OK – I was being a little provocative!
We get blamed for being a fifth of the Government who came along and cleared up the mess but Labour apologists let them get off Scot free! Clearly Governments around the world didn’t regulate the banks properly but if memory serves me right one of those Governments for 13 years was Labour with a very significant financial centre to oversee.
You can if you prefer blame the Tories in the 80s and 90s, other Governments and the banks themselves – and they probably all deserve a share of the blame along with Blair/Brown government but it is difficult to blame the Lib Dems as if memory serves me right we hadn’t been in Government for a fair few years.
@David Evans
i am as critical of the coalition government as the next person. But the criticism from many seems akin to that against someone who finds a building collapsed – rebuilds it and then gets criticised that it is still missing a few floors from before.
Clearly the coalition was not a utopia of milk and honey – not least because there wasn’t much milk and honey about. But if you examine the record – spending on public services was much higher than under the previous Labour Government, and we helped the poorer with things like the personal allowance increase, the pupil premium, Steve Webb’s good work on pensions etc. etc.
I favour generous benefits but actually the small decreases were less than taxpayers who fund them were seeing their wages squeezed.
Now presentation wasn’t good whether any better could have been achieved is difficult to say. But it is tough when you have every newspaper against you – even the few such as the Guardian which had been mildly supportive in the past.
We lost the third of our support that inclined more Labour as we had gone in with the Conservatives and the third that inclined Tory might as well vote for the actual thing – it a minor miracle we hung on to the third that was our “hard core” support.
I find it debatable whether spending cuts are to blame for Brexit. France, Germany and Italy upheld most spending, but show similar political phenomena, Italy decisively so, France was close. The countries with the big cuts, Spain, Greece, Portugal swung more left than right, and remain rather EU-committed.
The biggest factor was, IMO, lies. The link between economic hardship and EU-membership is a dishonest construct that was nowhere as carefully engineered and nurtured as in the UK. A hard core of Tory right-wingers, supported by their offspring UKIP and the press dominated by big money, drove Tory moderates a little less in the same corner. Labour fell for a Lexitist, and moderate politicians of all sorts (some LibDems included) failed to frontally take on the national eurosceptic undercurrent.
My problem with another referendum is that these forces still reign unchallenged and are, unlike the entirely defensible remain-cause, battle-ready in the worst sense of the word. Remain now has a compelling fact-base on its side, but do facts still matter? If they don’t, what is the justification of referenda?
I do understand the logic of cancelling out the last result with a congruent method, so better a peoples’ vote than let the train hit the wall, but I strongly hesitate to call this coming propaganda war democratic or in any way settling. Whatever the result, its implementation would still require an aligned parliamentary majority and executive, something we are missing today and are not guaranteed to get in the future. The already arising constitutional crisis will worsen with every turn until, inevitably but with diminished options, Parliament again raises to the challenge of leading the nation. I would prefer that to happen sooner rather than later.
Britain, mainly England which has by far the biggest population, just isn’t very European. It hasn’t really been that linked to the grand notion of Europe since it broke with the Catholic church!
Personally, I suspect the Maastricht agreement would never have survived any number of referendums in the 1990s, which is why they were avoided. The point being that the EU political project isn’t that popular In the UK and this is why it’s advocates tend to concentrate on economic arguments.
@Glenn. SOME of England, even a small majority, may not like Europeans, but a lot of us who live in England – and I suspect more as time goes on, esp young people – are pro EU and working with our European neighbours.
I largely agree with Arnold Kiel that a referendum is marginally better than the train crash we are heading for, but if anyone believes that it will be easy, or even possible, to win that referendum they are living in a fantasy world. Referenda almost never answer the question posed, but some other one. In any event, the final decision in a parliamentary democracy rests with Parliament and sadly, as Arnold so correctly says, our Parliament shows no sign at all of acting for the benefit of the UK.
So who’s most to blame for Brexit? The Lib Dems, the Tories, the Labour Party? There’s not much to choose in my opinion. The innate non-Europeanism of the UK population. This has to be a factor. The anti democratic nature the EU itself? Possibly that too.
All of these are of course factors. But there’s one that stands out most of all. Economics. All the main political parties, both in the UK and the EU, have signed up to the mainstream ideas on that. If people are net moving into the UK from the EU it must follow that economic conditions must be even worse there than they have been here. Notwithstanding the recent warm summer, people don’t move to Manchester for the weather!
So economics has to be the factor behind the asymmetric migration pattern into the UK which was the number one concern of most Leave voters. Economics was also the factor behind the austerity that we’ve seen recently. So when Prof Thiemo Fetzer at Warwick University claims support for Brexit was a backlash against the Coalition welfare cuts implemented with Lib Dem support in the lobbies he’s not completely wrong. But welfare cuts are only a small part of it. It isn’t welfare cuts that cause low wages and low productivity growth.
Prior to the GFC, the mainstream advice was that Govts should attempt to balance their budgets and control the economy by raising and lowering interest rates. The result was the creation of too much private debt in the economy in everywhere. In the eurozone, America, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc. Credit and debt bubbles can form and burst in spectacular style as we saw in 2008. Unfortunately this wasn’t enough to cause any big change in thinking so the result nearly everywhere was to reduce interest rates even further to encourage everyone to borrow more and take on even more private debt to make up for there being too much private debt prior to the crash.
This gives a temporary respite but what happens next when interest rates are close to zero and can’t easily be lowered any further? It might seem hard to belief but some economists are seriously advocating abolishing cash and moving to negative interest rates!
Mainstream economists are just crazy people! It’s no wonder we are in the mess we are!
https://www.ft.com/content/7967908e-5ded-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2
“Finally, it is official that continued EU membership on current terms is still available, if chosen soon.”
I missed the 27 heads of govn, euro commission and eu parliament confirming that but they will probably grudgingly let us go on paying in money etc if we ask them very nicely but that may not be enough to win the second vote. Some kind of associate membership with no political involvement whilst they go for euro country integration and some kind of committee to sort out the acceptability new laws coming through and a fixed net fee of maybe half what we pay now would probably win out.
The one piece missing from the puzzle though is a common language rather than the current babble, if we had been in right at the start English would probably have won out (given that we had saved europe and there was huge US involvement post WW2)… don’t think that is a problem we have to sort. Probably, overall we would have felt more at home getting into a deeper relationship with America than Europe despite them being so far away. Probably would have wrecked the UK, though, as there would have been a massive brain drain to the US if you could move there without visa hassles.
It is quite amusing to watch Trump all but scowling when a foreign leader insists on speaking their own language at press events and he has to use a translator earphone to hear what is going on… surprised he has not come up with the notion that he will only trade with English speaking nations.
For 40 years successive governments have blamed the EU for unpopular decisions that had to be made but taken the credit for the popular ones. Couple that with fake news – straight cucumbers, threats to ‘British’ traditional products (sausages, jam, ice cream and milk chocolate), Turkish immigrants, EU army and other such tripe – and the Daily Mail and Sun pouring its bile on immigrants, it’s no wonder a lot of people don’t like the EU. The Leave Facebook campaign was EU threat to our cuppa!
It costs about £75 a year each to be in the EU. Jacob Rees-Mogg charges his European Research Group membership fee (£2000 a year) to his Parliamentary expenses! Hypocritical!
If we fall back to WTO rules, the increase in food prices alone will be £150 a year per person. We need to produce a shopping basket showing which products will increase in price (and by how much) to get it through to people.
@ Glenn,
“Personally, I suspect the Maastricht agreement would never have survived any number of referendums in the 1990s, which is why they were avoided.”
I’m sure you are quite right. But should they have been avoided? I think we all agree that we shouldn’t have government by referendum. We elect a Parliament which can then pretty much do its own thing until the Parliament is dissolved and we elect another one. That can then, usually, undo everything the previous Parliament has done and set a new political direction. It may not be the most efficient process, I’m sure technocrats hate it, but it has to be the least worst of all options.
But what about if a Parliament can’t undo what a previous Parliament has done because it’s signed some binding Treaty with a foreign power?
That’s different. That’s when we need to refer the matter directly to the people in a referendum. That’s why we should have had referendums after the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties were agreed , but before they were signed. We can consider the 2016 referendum to be a much delayed referendum on that whole process.
“economists are just crazy people! It’s no wonder we are in the mess we are!”
How true Peter, how very true.
Peter Martin
I think there should have been a referendum before Maastricht, To me the crux of the problem is how the of idea of representative democracy is interpreted. Some see it as trying to represent the views of the majority of voters others as more a lawyer representing what she/he believes is in the best interests of a client. So you end up with a conflict between politicians as elected representatives of communal decisions and politicians as technocrats. I by and large favour the former.
Mick Taylor.
It’s not about disliking Europeans. You can work all over the world if you have the skills. You do not need to be in a political union to work in other countries. The EU is a geographically and arguably culturally specific political project. Some people see it as a good thing, others don’t. I don’t.
Lord Owen: ‘Parliament has let down the country and Theresa’s May’s bespoke Brexit plan will end badly’
“I think Parliament has let down the country,” he thunders, “Parliamentarians are a miserable lot, frankly. I think they were gripped by a religion and they can’t stop believing in it. And they have really managed to convince themselves that they are entitled in a strange way to thwart Brexit. They forget that they voted for the referendum.
‘Parliament has to accept that it’s gone out of their hands. But they can’t accept it.’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/07/30/lord-owen-parliament-has-let-country-theresas-mays-bespoke-brexit/
@ Innocent Bystander,
Please don’t misquote me by omission. I said:
“Mainstream economists are just crazy people!……”
To make that clearer ….not all economists! The Economics profession must be unique in the sense that the cranks have taken over the mainstream and shoved sensible opinion out on to the fringes.
This is a sensible economist!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_Kelton
While I’m on the topic I might just say that although many might think economics is a difficult subject, I’d just make the point that much of it is very simple but yet poorly understood. For example, Arnold Kiel recent made the comment , to the effect, and if I understood him correctly, that UK citizens were serfs to the debt of the UK government.
On the other hand German citizens have a much better existence because of their debt aversion. I hope I am not misrepresenting his argument. German people do tend to spend less than earn.
But so what? It just means that someone else has to spend more to make up, and keep the economic wheels turning.
How is that a difficult concept?
Brexit is being pursued by an ideologically driven group of people who have staked their political reputations on the idea. It needs to be treated with this in mind. It is necessary to show them that they have backed the wrong horse.
Peter Martin posed the question early this morning; “So who’s most to blame for Brexit?” and proceeded to offer a list. I’ll tell you the answer, Peter, DAVID **!! CAMERON. What did Danny Dyer call him, by the way?
@ John Marriott,
If David Cameron had spent some time in my local pub, chatting to the clientele, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have called the referendum! My friend was quite convinced that Leave would win, despite what the opinion polls were saying, just on the basis of what we could see around us and won a couple of hundred after he’s backed his hunch!
So the question is: Was it DC Cameron’s fault for calling the referendum? Or was it a failure of the EU and its supporters to sell itself and win the argument?
@Peter Martin
It’s just the psychology of the Lynch Mob.
Problem being that it is so hard to stop a Lynch Mob and the only alternative is to deflect it onto another target. Trouble was the natural candidate would have been himself and the Tory Party.
@P.J, “Problem being that it is so hard to stop a Lynch Mob and the only alternative is to deflect it onto another target. Trouble was the natural candidate would have been himself and the Tory Party.”
I came across this from a report, from the Guardian” on the Party’s 2012 Party Conference [about the time I resigned from the Party]
“Good day: Nick Clegg. He got through the speech without being booed and got through the week without being lynched..”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/sep/26/liberal-democrat-conference-numbers-shrink
I rejoined the Party earlier this year – believing that NC would have lost all influence and the Party would looking for a new direction – but instead found that he was still influential and complimented despite the fact that his record as leader can only be viewed as an abject failure – by any measure.
A more ruthless party would have expelled him for ‘bringing the party into disrepute’ with regard to his broken pledge on tuition fees. This action may well have drawn a line under the Coalition years which has caused the Party’s dramatic loss of popularity.
Same Guardian report: “Never short of an extravagant soundbite, Paddy Ashdown [who still hasn’t eaten a real hat] was challenged to admit Vince Cable would be a better Lib Dem leader than Nick Clegg. “Nick is by far the best leader this party has or has had in 100 years – and that includes me,” he stoutly replied. So much for saintly Jo Grimond and rascally Lloyd George.
John Marriott – I’m not normally the sort who would defend David Cameron. However in fairness to him he was the latest in a string of Prime Ministers who were forced to deal with the real problem here – the fall-out from Maastricht ratification in 1992/3. Everything has flowed from that ratification. Back in the mid 1990s I swore blind there was no need for a referendum – I was totally wrong. It was glaring.
Everything that has happened since then has really been symptom, not cause. Blair masked it as the economic sun was shining, but he never faced the implications of the ongoing arguments over Maastricht and the constitutional deficit. His idea that EMU is economic and not political was one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard in all my days. Cameron just ran out of political road, the Constitution/Lisbon debacle forcing the issue. If it wasn’t Cameron it would have been someone else holding a referendum. If it wasn’t UKIP it would have been something similar.
The stark reality is that there has likely been a leave majority in the UK for most of the past 25 years. And that says as much about the quality of REMAIN arguments as anything else. The argument was never won in 1992/3.
What I don’t think I realised in 1992/93 was how much that EU IN/EZ OUT status would just ramp up problems. Much of it wasn’t Cameron’s fault, he was the one holding the time bomb when the economic and political misalignment became too much. In 1992 we should have had a full blown EZ with real political union, explicitly irreversible. Alongside that we should have and an EEA type arrangement. We may yet end up with something along these lines ironically. The UK should have been in the EEA for the past 25 years.
Now of course having the referendum on IN/OUT on the cheery assumption of no outcome other than an IN win was, to say the least, not one of Cameron’s better decisions. But I will defend him to the extent that he was fighting symptoms of problems that started much earlier than 2010.
Luckily or unfortunately, I cannot make an informed contribution to UK history before 2015. I also frankly don’t care much for the political dimension of this debate: from what I have witnessed, I would not conclude that greater national legislative autonomy and less EU-influence would have been in any way beneficial to the UK’s overall wellbeing, quite the contrary.
But here is my what-if analysis: rejecting Lisbon and Maastricht, and thereby exiting or bringing about a 2-tier EU-integration model would not have been sufficient. A timely rejection of the freedom of movement without exclusion from the single market would also have been necessary, but hardly attainable. This would have resulted in an economic development with less imported labour, but also less capital inflow. It would have been a clear signal to Germans and Japanese: buy these industrial ruins only to supply these islands, which they would have politely declined. It would have signalled to the eurozone: develop your own financial hub on the continent. It would have signalled to British farmers: pay up, mechanise, and fight for import-tariffs to stay in business. And it would have meant for British consumers: eat local produce, don’t develop a taste for all this imported food, and accept higher cost of living. And for many British towns it would have meant: board up, and the last one, please switch off the light.
Had history run this course, the UK would today passionately apply for EU-membership, provided the intervening political radicalisation did not stay in the way of fulfilling the admission criteria.
“Now of course having the referendum on IN/OUT on the cheery assumption of no outcome other than an IN win was, to say the least, not one of Cameron’s better decisions.”
Perhaps it doesn’t say much for his capacity for critical thinking..? So much for a posh education…?
Arnold
I think the EU would missing it’s second largest financial contributor and would possibly have a smaller membership. I will not speculate beyond that as it delves in to alternative history territory , which is better suited to fiction.
“Had history run this course, the UK would today passionately apply for EU-membership….”
We can all play “what if” games and speculate what course history might have taken if key events had not occurred. We are where we are.
The decision of the UK to Leave the EU will probably be considered by future historians to be the time we declined to join the euro and be part of the Schengen zone. So to that extent, we didn’t fully accept Maastricht or the Lisbon Treaties even though we signed them. We negotiated yet more opt outs. Hardly anyone in the UK is sufficiently in favour of the EU to want to be memebers to that extent. Even the Remainers on the this blog only like the EU if they don’t have to have too much of it! A bit like Marmite I suppose! But then there are those of us who aren’t keen on it at all.
We’ve got to do better in our exports. I’m sure we all agree on that. But the problem for the UK is that the countries of the EU are either economically depressed or they are highly mercantilistic. They are crap export markets. Not to put too fine a point on it! We have a huge trade deficit. And yet our supposedly ” industrial ruins” do much better in our worldwide trade with a £40 billion surplus last financial year. That’s where we need to be looking for the future.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-exports-to-non-eu-countries-continue-to-outstrip-eu
Glenn, Peter Martin,
while slowly admitting that Brexit will be a painful mess, you gentlemen now argue that leaving is (for some opaque sovereignty-argument, or some things that are wrong with the EU) still a historical inevitability which had better occurred at a more convenient moment in the past, but so be it. I strongly disagree: EU membership has been a resounding success for a country with a rather narrow but profound skills base, like the UK. There never is, will be, or has been a good moment to try again things on your own which you have already failed at in the past, in a much more benign competitive environment.
@ Arnold,
I think you must be confusing me with someone else! Possibly Glenn too as I can’t see where either of us have ‘slowly admitted’ anything of the sort.
I have said on a different thread that I think there is a case for having another referendum because the remain side generally, I do accept, did say we would negotiate a better deal outside the EU than in it. It looks very possible, even very likely, that there will be no deal at all. It does need two to tango, so to speak.
So we need to consider whether ‘no deal’ is really better than what we had. It’s what I expected tbh. The negotiating won’t stop after March 29th. I’d say that when we are fully out the real negotiations will start. Maybe we will have to be out for a little while before they do just so that everyone can get used to the idea that we’ve really gone! Yes, It is going to be harder than many of us thought. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it though. We won’t easily be forgiven if we do go crawling back!
Last year you said ” It will take years until it (ie the UK) learns (and is trusted) again to be a constructive, let alone influential EU member.” I think you’re right there! I know what ‘learning’ means in the EU lexicon! We’ll have to learn to love the euro! Well Nein Danke, my friend!
I notice you like to use words like ‘failure’, ‘failed’, ‘industrial ruins’ etc in connection with the UK. But here you are living in our land of ineptitude! You aren’t alone. There many more people wanting to come here than leave for other EU countries. If we’re that bad, what does it say about everywhere else?
Arnold
I’ve not admitted leaving the EU will be a painful mess. To be honest, I think we’re just seeing the final spasms of Britain’s involvement in the EU and it’s British supporters are understandably upset.
Arnold Kiel – ‘I also frankly don’t care much for the political dimension of this debate’
You can’t separate the politics from this – that’s the whole point! This is profoundly political from any angle you care to look. What you think about that is another matter but to pretend that the EU and EMU are a politics-free zone is just delusional. Given what has happened in the past 10 years for you to say this is an, ‘opaque,’ argument is staggering. I guess it’s, ‘opaque,’ when you aren’t the one on the sharp end!
‘a historical inevitability which had better occurred at a more convenient moment in the past, but so be it.’
No…a historical inevitability with a more appropriate set of political arrangements being pursued. We should have had a two tier Europe back then and we may well get one in years to come.
Had the UK joined EMU there is little doubt in my mind that we would have made Ireland look benign – https://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2013/jun/02/britain-euro-what-if-joined.
Peter, I used the terms failure and ruins for the British state of affairs before foreign capital and management fixed many brands. And they will be in use again, after both have been driven out by you and likeminded fellow countrymen. Today’s population influx is based on liberal labour markets, a prevalent labour-intensive service sector with stagnant productivity, and continued ineptitude of local labour. I am so upset because I quite like your country. Luckily, I am not young anymore, and do not have to create an evonomic existence here (and suspect you are in the same situation). If I were and had to, i would be desperate.
Glenn, sorry for misinterpreting you. You believe Brexit is right and will be neither painful mor a mess. I shall remember that. Thank you for reading my stuff anyhow.
It is true that the EU is making all of the running on free trade, signing up Japan
( totalling 20% of all world trade), plus India, Australia and New Zealand soon, after May veto’ed a previous EU – India trade deal based on migration issues and hence the Indian government detests her.
Brazil is also making progress with the EU and now Trump wants an EU deal to add to the above plus 53 countries with free trade deals, plus the EU 27 and another 3 countries joining in 2025.
All that is left of consequence is China, who play dirty at a lot of levels, burn off investors and Intellectual property and were too much for Tesco, our biggest retailers, who pulled out.
“…. and continued ineptitude of local labour”
Grrr! Labourers are first and foremost people who might also ‘labour’ for a living. People are not just ‘unit costs’ to be factored into manufacturing profitability !
Arnold.
If I’m wrong, I’ will say “blimey, I got that one wrong” and if I’m right I will be a little smug. I don’t think I will be wrong, but equally I don’t think I’m infallible or a seer or anything. So we’ll see.