If you're still on, can I address your contention that a Hard Brexit would painlessly solve our Balance of Payments/Current Account issue.
I think there is a constant misunderstanding about the nature of trade among non-economists. Imagine that you are a company, Acme Ltd., and you need to acquire widgets to make your diggers.
There are two suppliers of widgets: Francois SA, based in France, and Nippon Inc., based in the US (yeah, yeah). Without tariffs, the two products would have identical prices. Because there are tariffs on imports from the US (2.8% on average) and not on those from the EU, Francois SA's widgets are cheaper.
Hard Brexit arrives. Suddenly, both EU and US products are subject to the same tariff schedule. You now choose to buy your widgets from Nippon Inc rather than Francois SA. The UK now runs a smaller current account deficit with the EU (yay!). But it's overall position hasn't changed, merely where goods are imported from.
There is a simple correlation, with a very high R^2, between current account deficits, and savings rates. Countries with high savings rates (Germany, Switzerland, China) have current account surpluses. Countries with low savings rates (the UK, the US) have current account deficits.
If you want to solve the UK's imbalances, you need to raise the UK's savings rate. (This is something that will need to happen at some point irrespective of Brexit.) The only problem is that this process is likely - in the short term - to be painful.
Presumably auto enrollment will help, especially if people don't notice.
(And I thought the usual name for American companies was Nippon Corporation of America)
On the court case, and I'll defer to @AlastairMeeks on this one, how would this scenario play out, 6-5 to uphold the High Court decision but Lords Sumption and Neuberger on the dissenting side? I was getting the feeling that those two in particular seemed displeased with case. A decision like that could well cause a crisis within the SC itself if the pre-eminent experts on constitutional affairs are over-ruled by lesser justices. A low chance, but Brexit hasn't been without its long shots so far.
Suspect they will defer judgement until there is a unanimous view
They could not bring themselves to admit that the EU does not share our aims and values.
Even when the deep divisions on this question are staring you in the face, you still write as if you speak for everyone. The EU's aims and values are perfectly in harmony with a large part of the country.
A single federal state may be your desire but it is a vision shared by a tiny minority of the country. SO yes I speak for far more of the country than you ever could.
Gardenwalker, being part of the EU makes sense if you're a true believer, that is, you think we should be part of a new nation called Europe.
That may be what you believe, and that's a coherent intellectual position , albeit one I totally disagree with.
Being a grudging member of the EU, constantly trying to slow down and frustrate the process of integration seems a bit pointless to me. It's better to leave than be a grudging member.
I am actually boring myself with my posts, and am surely boring everyone else. But for the record, I do not believe in a nation called Europe. But neither do I believe that a nation called Europe is the ultimate end point. On the evidence - which is to say, reviewing the last decade or so - there have no substantive steps toward such a nation.
The EU is annoying and clumsy. The Commission is a kind of abomination, and I'll concede that it seems stuffed with a "professional European" class with whom 99% of us have no ideological affinity.
But this could be said of bureaucracies everywhere.
At the end of the day, the EU is a mechanism for cooperation largely but not exclusively on economic affairs. And it's been very largely to our benefit to work so closely with our neighbours, and to enable freer trade between us.
And, as I said upthread, over 25 years of economic strategy has been predicated on our membership.
That we are grudging members is I believe largely a result of the right wing press who found, in battling Delors, a folk demon to sell newspapers and bait successive Prime Ministers with. And mostly, each PM has been all too happy to blame Europe for messes of their own making.
Leaving the EU jeopardises our economy, and estranges us - whether we are willing to admit it or not - from our closest neighbours. It even, as we now see, calls the European defence architecture into question.
This doesn't make me feel "freer". Quite the reverse.
Anyway, more interestingly, CNN is apparently reporting (via Telegraph) that the US will withdraw from NAFTA within 200 days and replace it with a Canada only agreement which will be joined in due course by the U.K.
2016, like 2001 and 1989, has been a pivot. One era has ended. A new one begins.
They could not bring themselves to admit that the EU does not share our aims and values.
Even when the deep divisions on this question are staring you in the face, you still write as if you speak for everyone. The EU's aims and values are perfectly in harmony with a large part of the country.
Tyndall has made it his life's work to leave the EU. He has an admirable and acute understanding of its deficiencies, but unfortunately he's a monomaniac and can no longer see the wood for the trees.
Not at all. I live a rich and fulfilling life. Some of us are able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
If you want we can discuss the necessary reforms to our own political system instead. We might even be in agreement on that. But on this issue I see far more clearly than you do and from a far more informed position.
Remain voters believe there will be bad economic consequences from Brexit; whilst Leave voters don't. But if there actually are economic consequences - and people link them to brexit - then what people say now will be a poor guide to how they feel then.
Absolutely. But if there are economic consequences and Brexit will certainly be long drawn out and messy, I don't expect most Leave supporters to link those consequences to Brexit. They will be blamed on the wilfulness of the EU and lack of will of the part of Remainers/ the liberal elite. In fact that blame is already happening.
Gardenwalker, if you were looking for an impoverished view of our future you could do no better than remaining shackled to a failing and unreformable EU, which is why your side failed to make any sort of positive case for doing so.
The only thing shackled is your brain. As you've got it into your head that the EU is failing and unreformable, logically you will not be persuaded by any positive case.
Not that the Remain campaign made any attempt to provide that case.
You have not, to my knowledge, ever dared to make a positive case on here beyond vague platitudes. I strongly suspect that is because we would find your argument to be full of holes and based on fallacies.
Comments
(And I thought the usual name for American companies was Nippon Corporation of America)
The EU is annoying and clumsy. The Commission is a kind of abomination, and I'll concede that it seems stuffed with a "professional European" class with whom 99% of us have no ideological affinity.
But this could be said of bureaucracies everywhere.
At the end of the day, the EU is a mechanism for cooperation largely but not exclusively on economic affairs. And it's been very largely to our benefit to work so closely with our neighbours, and to enable freer trade between us.
And, as I said upthread, over 25 years of economic strategy has been predicated on our membership.
That we are grudging members is I believe largely a result of the right wing press who found, in battling Delors, a folk demon to sell newspapers and bait successive Prime Ministers with. And mostly, each PM has been all too happy to blame Europe for messes of their own making.
Leaving the EU jeopardises our economy, and estranges us - whether we are willing to admit it or not - from our closest neighbours. It even, as we now see, calls the European defence architecture into question.
This doesn't make me feel "freer". Quite the reverse.
Anyway, more interestingly, CNN is apparently reporting (via Telegraph) that the US will withdraw from NAFTA within 200 days and replace it with a Canada only agreement which will be joined in due course by the U.K.
2016, like 2001 and 1989, has been a pivot.
One era has ended. A new one begins.
If you want we can discuss the necessary reforms to our own political system instead. We might even be in agreement on that. But on this issue I see far more clearly than you do and from a far more informed position.
Uber versus the DMV over autonomous cars.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/cars/2016/12/uber-wont-apply-for-an-autonomous-car-permit-in-california/
They need slapping down. hard.