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The first calling point of the UK's negotiator immediately after #Brexit will not be Brussels, it will be Berlin, to strike a deal
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/17/boris-johnson-foreign-secretary-tory
e.g. - https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/uk-s-expat-pensioners-now-safe-but-will-brexit-mean-deportation-for-others-1.3208135
Personally, I think Barnier's brief is to stop Brexit. I'm pretty sure that won't work, but how things will develop over the next year I am far from sure and I do think an unplanned hard Brexit is very much a possibility. In terms of the economic impact, I expect it will hurt some more than others.
It’s the rich wot make the trouble
It’s the poor wot get the blame
It’s the same the ‘ole world over
Ain’t it all a bleedin’ shame!
Maybe we're all pricks thinking everyone else is Hitler.
Neither main party had a unanimous position behind which to line up, but following the vote both have been reluctant to work across party lines. Both parties have seen a core element of their vote angered by their subsequent tack.
The vote was wrongly marketed as a massive victory when by any objective assessment it was a narrow win in a deeply divided country. Nothing good has come of it, nor will for the forseeable future.
It's a classic case of being careful what you wish for.
F1: post-race ramble of Singapore here: http://enormo-haddock.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/singapore-post-race-analysis-2017.html
Mr. Monksfield, not unlike Trump, our departure from the EU is symptomatic of division. The media and political class didn't care, and scarcely noticed, when the division seemed in their favour.
I must confess though I did enjoy your comparison to St Sebastian, although it was not quite as good as your one on the Turkish conscript.
If extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence to support them, then that claim is going to require something almost obscenely extraordinary.
I agree with Alastair (I think) that this is not any particularly clever strategy on the EU's part, it is simply the way that they do things. It is not in fact in their interests but Alastair is correct in pointing out that that obvious fact does not sweep all before it and will not change the mode of operation. They are what they are and it is not easy to herd 27 nations.
As I said some months ago we need to have a stripped down list of our priorities and some sort of transitional agreement that allows us to sort out the details of other matters later. Like membership itself our relationship with the EU will not be finally resolved by this deal, it will continue to evolve over time becoming closer in some areas and more distant in others.
Having such a list is not the same as achieving it though. Hammond recently stated the Treasury were making contingency plans for a no deal Brexit. This is only common sense and really should have been started a year ago. The unreality that Alastair describes means a lot of time has been wasted.
One final thought. It really is time we moved past remainers and leavers. There are no bonus points for I told you so on either side. We, as a country, have some serious work to do to make the best of Brexit. That requires all hands to the pumps. There will be time for the allocation of blame later, if anyone is still interested.
Normally the problem with these election post-mortems is they consist of an uncritical list of whatever the winning side did, in a self-congratulatory, post hoc ergo propter hoc sort of way. This time it is mainly Lynton Crosby but also others on the Tory side telling us why everything was someone else's fault and can they have another £4 million next time please?
I'm not sure that slow and bureaucratic properly describes the problem with the EU's negotiating stance. The sticking point is surely that they are demanding essentially all their wishes be agreed before they will even discuss ours; absent some modification to that stance, a successful negotiation is politically impossible. It's certainly true, though, that our government was exceedingly slow in grasping that point, rather than trying to handwave it away.
As far as the economic consequences are concerned, an immediate post-Brexit shock was a possibility, even if it never materialised, depending as it did on market perception.
Post Brexit consequences are an entirely different matter, and the current insouciance of the markets tell us very little either way; markets are notoriously poor at forecasting major economic shocks.
https://www.joe.co.uk/news/rupert-murdoch-has-apparently-stormed-out-of-a-party-in-a-huff-over-the-general-election-results-128814
1. What a fight; lived up to all expectations. I thought Alvarez edged it (smarter, more effective work) but can live with the result. Could have lived with a Triple G win also.
2. Boris: what an utter, utter twat.
3. Is Amber Rudd edging back (further?) into leadership contention?
Your final paragraph is asking for the impossible. Remainers believe Leavers are morons -the evidence of which is muliplying by the day-and thus will do do everything in their powers to reverse a decision which many believe is suicidal.
And who in their right minds wouldn't try to prevent a suicide......
Of those figures something like 12% of GDP is exported to the EU and we import something like 15% of GDP. Let's assume, for the moment that we have no deal and get WTO tariffs of something like 10%. Let's assume, somewhat unrealistically, that there is no currency movement that offsets that. Let's assume, even more unrealistically, that that tariff is reflected in an equivalent reduction in trade by that amount.
The net effect of no deal in that scenario is that our exports might fall by 1.2% of GDP. Our imports would fall by 1.5%. The net effect on growth would, in theory, be positive but that is clearly optimistic as there would be considerable knock on consequences in terms of integrated trade patterns and possible knock on effects in investment (although that would also be positive and negative with import substitution).
The biggest part of the economic shock would be in the currency. I would expect Sterling to fall by at least 10%, offsetting any tariffs for our exporters. This means the effects I describe above will be more positive than indicated, albeit we would all be paying even more for our new Iphones. It is noteworthy that a bigger currency movement in the last year has had very little effect on our growth or (unfortunately) our net trade.
The point I really want to make, however, is that these effects are small. The net effects are likely to be tenths of a percent one way or the other. We don't want to suffer any negative effect if we can avoid it but the UK is a large economy with a big domestic market. The effects will be at the margins. A sense of perspective is important as these negotiations proceed.
As for the political establishment, two-thirds or so of MPs were pro-EU. Only one party had a clear majority against it, and that was a small party.
It doesn't attempt to understand the world outlook of those who vote Sinn Fein or DUP.
Or membership as it is also known.
A reasonable diagnosis (given your Remain leanings), but the prognosis suggesting a logical progression may be flawed.
Barnier and Juncker as lead negotiators was always a statement of intent ... "Ils ne passeront pas." As De Gaulle used to say to Heath. It may play well in some EU capitals, but it won't in the UK, and it shows the EU don't care about British public opinion.
That is why a second referendum will never happen. We are not roast beef eating surrender monkeys. The EU's idea that faced with a united front (or the appearance of one), we will meekly surrender and scuttle back into line is flawed.
I don't expect sanity to break out, but a hint of common sense may eventually appear. if not it shows we were right to leave.
Copeland and its predecessor, Whitehaven, has only been won once by the Conservatives since 1906. This was in 1931. Therefore a Conservative win would take Labour back to 1931. At the 1931 GE Labour lost 225 seats and dropped to 52. The 52 is generous as it includes 6 breakaway ILP MPs.
And while I don't have much time for Corbyn's beliefs as outlined above, the economic model of Venezuela and getting rid of the nuclear deterrent were not policies actually laid out in the manifesto. Probably because Corbyn knows that PLP opposition to it means that it would be very difficult to implement those things even if he really wanted to.
As always, Antifrank makes some interesting points. I genuinely think a lot of people thought we would leave the EU on June 24th 2016 and based their predictions on that inaccuracy. The economic fundamentals haven't changed appreciably since the Referendum and in many ways things are going well though low productivity and a reliance on cheap labour rather than technological innovation to boost that productivity is a concern.
After the vote, we moved into one holding pattern awaiting the triggering of the A50 notice and now we are in another as the negotiations move forward.
I also think after the vitriol of the referendum people stopped wanting to talk much or think much about Europe and the EU (except on here and similar places) so the field was defaulted to Theresa May (who looked a competent pair of hands) and the brilliant "Brexit means Brexit" which meant both everything and nothing at the same time. Anyone could project their hopes for the A50 negotiations onto the Prime Minister whether it be BINO or WTO.
This also prevented the serious public debate we needed to have after the vote over what kind of relationship (political and economic) we wanted not just with Europe but with the rest of the world in the 2020s and beyond. All we had to do, Conservatives told us, was "trust Theresa".
The problem was the vote to Leave didn't slay the dragons of the Conservatives' own internal debate as Cameron had hoped. All that happened was that the terms of the debate changed from "will we leave?" to "how will we leave?". The Devil is in the detail and the Conservatives look to this unfriendly critic of the Party, to be as split on this issue as ever.
We then had the farce of the GE this spring and early summer which produced, in all honesty, the worst possible result (and I exclude a Corbyn minority Government from that). May's authority was smashed (despite the continued whining of her apologists on here) and the divisions were laid bare once again.
I am still completely unclear as to what it is the UK wants from A50 - we cannot remain in the Single Market (which I consider a pernicious mechanism) without Freedom of Movement (and as some point out the country is pretty much split down the middle on this as well). The obvious (though they never are) fault line is single market/open door migration vs control over immigration/no more single market. Both have their adherents, neither is perfect.
I wanted EFTA membership and an opportunity for the UK to re-invent that organisation for the 2020s as a free market counterweight to the EU (and if the EU members want to move toward closer political and economic integration, that's fine, I wish them well) but that seems off the table for reasons I'm not wholly clear about.
Statistics however don't take account of decisions made on business and political grounds, such as financial institutions moving from London to Frankfurt, Paris and Dublin. It does not take account of the potential effects of the loss of the customs union, i.e BMW moving MINI production from the UK to the Netherlands for supply-chain certainty. Etc. etc.!
There may be one or two areas where we agree to conform to retain equivalence. Financial services is a possibility in exchange for the Passport. But if we don't get the passport that will not happen. If we do it is hard to imagine that London will not continue to play a major role in rule formulation.
In hindsight, the demographic profile of Copeland was perfect for the Conservatives.
But we will not be at the table to help construct those rules any more. We will I'm sure rely on goodwill and the fact that it is the FCA that usually pushes for more stringent regulations to be included in some of those discussions, but for all practical purposes, for a sector accounting for a largish proportion of the UK economy, it will be situation: no change.
Hope your new-found freedom makes doing the hoovering a more pleasurable experience.
"It should be noted that the people showing sympathy towards the young on issues such as student debt, housing and stagnant wages tended to vote Leave."
I happen to agree that "Osborne fans seem to take the opposite attitude." - I wasn't challenging that. But the first assertion implies Remainers didn't care about the the young, which I feel is too much of an unfair generalisation.
Once it has, what's the positive progress you'd then be looking for? To rejoin the EU, or to establish the UK in a closer economic relationship, like the EEA?
The political elites decided to put the very principle of British sovereignty in hock for seemingly little more than a few magic coffee beans for their weekly lattes.
It may be too late in any case, continuity Remain seems to have adopted it as a badge of pride.
At the end of the day, Theresa May didn't give potential new Conservative voters many reasons to vote for her, and looked like she was losing her grip as the campaign progressed.
England 53.3% LEAVE
But there would then be an outside chance that a majority in Britain could be constructed that saw the merits of closer cooperation with the EU, that saw that such cooperation could not be exclusively on the terms that Britain wished for and was willing to explore a form of détente. And then at least Britain would be back on an upward trajectory.
I too took grief over that, but I was right.
Toyota, Nissan or Honda would be more apt to make that argument with. Then you'd have to look at how many sales were within the UK v. mainland Europe.
Nobody who buys a Mini cares if it is assembled in Oxford or Holland. Especially since the parts come in a box from Germany regardless
EU = profligate gold-digger
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4893478/Disgraced-Kids-Company-founder-spent-55-000-ONE-addict.html
Is it about "integration" or people "not like us coming here and behaving differently" ? Are we, as an insular race, naturally or culturally suspicious of outsiders?
I don't know but that there is a problem or an issue and that it played a role in the 2016 referendum vote is for me undeniable. It's not easy to talk about it rationally or sensibly because vitriol soon gets into the mix.
My personal position is I've no problem with planned levels of immigration - planned in terms of jobs and accommodation paid for and supplied by employers who also make an additional contribution to infrastructure costs (transport, health services etc). I also think the immigration system should be transparent and equitable from wherever you are in the world.
We will always need and should always welcome people with skills we need and people willing to learn from us who can take those skills back to their home countries.
I also think we need to help those in genuine need or in genuine fear for their lives but whether that support is in terms of providing asylum here or supporting other aid agencies closer to the areas affected is going to be different on a case-by-case basis. Leaving people to rot in camps is no solution either.