The impact of a no deal Brexit will be far worse than currently understood for two reasons. The first is supply chain management. We rely on a lot of imports in order to provide what we export. The insertion, not just of tariff costs, but the cost of administration of the paperwork undermines our competitiveness across the board. Any attempt at tariff subsidy would most likely be deemed illegal, so we risk being completely shut out of critical export markets if we do that. The second is investment. For example BMW are already investing in Slovakia, rather than the UK for the new electric version of their Mini. The overseas owners of much of our manufacturing have to make rational decisions and the poor productivity, uncertain investment environment and capricious government policy means that the commitment to UK investment by both UK and overseas owners is now very weak.
Taken together, the impact could certainly be 20% of GDP capacity. Hard Brexit=Hard Times.
I actively WANT Diamond Brexit now. Just do it. We leave. We're out. Don't give them a penny. Lorries pile up at Dover. Who fucking cares. Treat it as a a warlike experience.
Alistair Meeks can go live in nazi Hungary. The rest of us will defend our island.
Do it.
Our nation is not an island. And it cannot be towed across the face of the globe.
PB is becoming unreadable.
Always remember that SeanT is clickbait when in one of his regular "F*uck Off" moods. They come and go with predicable regularity much like Daily Express headlines on Princess Di, cataclysmic UK weather, benefits cheats and immigrants barbecuing the Queen's swans.
I actively WANT Diamond Brexit now. Just do it. We leave. We're out. Don't give them a penny. Lorries pile up at Dover. Who fucking cares. Treat it as a a warlike experience.
Alistair Meeks can go live in nazi Hungary. The rest of us will defend our island.
Do it.
Our nation is not an island. And it cannot be towed across the face of the globe.
PB is becoming unreadable.
Always remember that SeanT is clickbait when in one of his regular "F*uck Off" moods. They come and go with predicable regularity much like Daily Express headlines on Princess Di, cataclysmic UK weather, benefits cheats and immigrants barbecuing the Queen's swans.
He's also got an unfortunate habit of telling people to leave PB.
The great unspoken truth of that wretched war is, of course, that Britain lost and West Germany won. But I'm not sure if helps much trawling through history (although, for the record, we should never have joined the EEC in the first place.) We are where we are.
The reasons for ditching the EU now are that (a) most people still aren't interested in being part of a United States of Europe, which is where all of this is going, and (b) voters are fed up of endless waves of uncontrolled mass immigration, which is the main contributor to a wholly unsustainable and unnecessary population growth rate of 500,000 per year. The rest is noise.
All of this has little or nothing to do with rampant xenophobia, nostalgia for a long dead empire, wanting to boss about the neighbours, or any of the other assorted random motives commonly ascribed to it by liberal commentators struggling to come to terms with a country which, it turns out, they barely know or understand. If there is any other important factor behind the Leave vote then it is probably simple exhaustion: in cultural terms Europe is a wonderful thing, but geopolitically it's been a running sore and a source of repeated conflict, misery and death for centuries. And nor is the EU a viable solution to the problem, for us anyway. There isn't enough room here for me to critique the wrong-headed analysis of the events of the first half of the 20th Century which led to the genesis of the European Project: suffice it to say that we weren't entitled to tell the other European countries not to gradually merge themselves out of existence if they were determined to do it, but we shouldn't have joined in and it was a great mistake to have done so.
If you think that's wrong then try this thought experiment: if it were physically possible to sail the country to another part of the world, and moor it perhaps just off British Columbia, or perhaps New Zealand, then do you seriously think that most of the British population would hesitate for a second before breathing a sigh of relief, and nodding in assent? Would it not make us, and the other Europeans, happier? As it is, we can't escape our geography but we can do our best to reorient the country away from Europe, and make ourselves less reliant on it and less involved in its endless, largely self-inflicted, problems.
Most Britons wish neither to be part of a political Europe, nor to do it harm. They just want nothing to do with it at all.
The last sentence of your well argued post is the key one. As long as most of Europe chooses to incorporate themselves into the EU, we have no choice but have a great deal to do with it. Leaving the EU doesn't change that fact. It just makes dealing with the EU more difficult, more distracting and less satisfactory in results.
Taken together, the impact could certainly be 20% of GDP capacity. Hard Brexit=Hard Times.
The UK has, relatively speaking, a very low export gearing - and to the extent that it is dependent upon exports, more than half of those already go outside of the EU, and the bulk of that fraction under WTO terms. Parts of manufacturing industry are going to have to learn to cope with non-tariff barriers on imported parts; much of it won't. Should we end up with tariff barriers with the EU to contend with then there is nothing at all to stop the Government from slashing business taxation to compensate: assuming that Trump plays that card first in the US, then the informal G20 agreement on tax competition is dead in the water and the UK would be free to follow suit.
Should we raise our own tariffs then this will make EU imports more expensive and give advantage to our producers within the home market; if, on the other hand, we do what some right-wing economists are urging and adopt unilateral free trade then domestic businesses will have a tougher time with competition from cheaper imports, but by the same token they'll also gain access to tariff-free imports of raw materials, and the cost of food and consumer goods in the shops will fall. And what we must assume to be a major clampdown on unskilled migration, due as soon as we leave the EU, ought also to be of net benefit to the economy. If I may quote from yesterday's Evening Standard:
"It is the proud boast of UK governments that the British economy has created three million new jobs in the past 12 years. What is said less frequently is that most of these jobs are low paid and about three-quarters of them have gone to migrants, the majority from the EU. Thus the paradox of UK growth. It is a fact that if most new jobs pay below the national average, then that national average will gradually fall. Growth should not be the sole measure of success; it is growth in income per head that matters.
"Politicians bang on about how good they are at making the economy grow — making the overall size of the cake bigger. What they never say is that it has taken so many extra workers to do this that the average share everybody gets rises very little. If the number of people wanting a share of the cake grows as fast as the cake, no one’s slice gets larger.
"The coming curbs on unskilled immigration make it likely that many low-paid jobs in areas such as food-processing, catering and agriculture will disappear — the firms will have to automate or go out of business. This will hit overall growth, but counter-intuitively, because it is the below-average low-paid jobs to go first, the average of what is left will be higher."
The entire UK manufacturing sector is worth 14% of GDP, and the total value of all UK exports of everything to the entire world is 28% of GDP. Taken together with the fact that the average WTO tariff is significantly lower than the fall in the value of sterling since the Brexit vote, the notion that a fifth of the entire economy could just disappear down the tubes without an EU trade deal is daft.
If anything, we must remember that the Government is right to say that no deal is better than a bad deal: there is no point in committing ourselves, say, to paying ridiculously high exit charges and submitting to bad terms on services, not to mention restrictions on our ability to vary tax rates and trade with the rest of the world, in exchange for decent terms on food and manufactured goods which will only benefit the French and Germans a great deal more than they do us. We would be better off walking away with nothing.
I actively WANT Diamond Brexit now. Just do it. We leave. We're out. Don't give them a penny. Lorries pile up at Dover. Who fucking cares. Treat it as a a warlike experience.
Alistair Meeks can go live in nazi Hungary. The rest of us will defend our island.
Do it.
Our nation is not an island. And it cannot be towed across the face of the globe.
PB is becoming unreadable.
Always remember that SeanT is clickbait when in one of his regular "F*uck Off" moods. They come and go with predicable regularity much like Daily Express headlines on Princess Di, cataclysmic UK weather, benefits cheats and immigrants barbecuing the Queen's swans.
He's also got an unfortunate habit of telling people to leave PB.
Most recently that award goes to murali so its not an exclusive endearment.
Share the view that Theresa May is very overrated but at least she has some self knowledge. She avoided the media circus over the years and that has meant she has minimised the scope of others to attack her over whatever her opinions are.Unlike Johnson or Osborne who both wanted to be PM she played the referendum smarter than they did
Comments
Taken together, the impact could certainly be 20% of GDP capacity. Hard Brexit=Hard Times.
Should we raise our own tariffs then this will make EU imports more expensive and give advantage to our producers within the home market; if, on the other hand, we do what some right-wing economists are urging and adopt unilateral free trade then domestic businesses will have a tougher time with competition from cheaper imports, but by the same token they'll also gain access to tariff-free imports of raw materials, and the cost of food and consumer goods in the shops will fall. And what we must assume to be a major clampdown on unskilled migration, due as soon as we leave the EU, ought also to be of net benefit to the economy. If I may quote from yesterday's Evening Standard:
"It is the proud boast of UK governments that the British economy has created three million new jobs in the past 12 years. What is said less frequently is that most of these jobs are low paid and about three-quarters of them have gone to migrants, the majority from the EU. Thus the paradox of UK growth. It is a fact that if most new jobs pay below the national average, then that national average will gradually fall. Growth should not be the sole measure of success; it is growth in income per head that matters.
"Politicians bang on about how good they are at making the economy grow — making the overall size of the cake bigger. What they never say is that it has taken so many extra workers to do this that the average share everybody gets rises very little. If the number of people wanting a share of the cake grows as fast as the cake, no one’s slice gets larger.
"The coming curbs on unskilled immigration make it likely that many low-paid jobs in areas such as food-processing, catering and agriculture will disappear — the firms will have to automate or go out of business. This will hit overall growth, but counter-intuitively, because it is the below-average low-paid jobs to go first, the average of what is left will be higher."
http://www.standard.co.uk/business/anthony-hilton-hit-from-hard-brexit-could-be-softer-than-feared-a3528261.html
(TBC)
The entire UK manufacturing sector is worth 14% of GDP, and the total value of all UK exports of everything to the entire world is 28% of GDP. Taken together with the fact that the average WTO tariff is significantly lower than the fall in the value of sterling since the Brexit vote, the notion that a fifth of the entire economy could just disappear down the tubes without an EU trade deal is daft.
If anything, we must remember that the Government is right to say that no deal is better than a bad deal: there is no point in committing ourselves, say, to paying ridiculously high exit charges and submitting to bad terms on services, not to mention restrictions on our ability to vary tax rates and trade with the rest of the world, in exchange for decent terms on food and manufactured goods which will only benefit the French and Germans a great deal more than they do us. We would be better off walking away with nothing.
She avoided the media circus over the years and that has meant she has minimised the scope of others to attack her over whatever her opinions are.Unlike Johnson or Osborne who both wanted to be PM she played the referendum smarter than they did