I see history is being rewritten as rapidly as ever. To read some of the comments here, anyone not politically aware might get the impression that Labour and the LibDems didn't support the referendum.
Hush.
One for the ages. Careful what you wish for and all that. Puts Uncle Vince's verbal contortions this week into perspective - "first referendum on the facts".
Cameron screwed up on many levels on this, but he was at the end of quite a line of our leaders since (in my view) about Maastricht.
Labour reneging on the Lisbon referendum was an almighty clanger. Huge. That was the moment when people could still have said "stop, have a rethink" without having to hit the nut with a sledgehammer. But having been denied that it fed into the decision of many I'm sure (me for one) that June 23rd 2016 was the only chance we were ever going to get to call a halt. It wasn't going to be given to us again, no second chance in five years, you're in the hands of the Junckers of this world forever, no going back whatever. So many a personal 51/49 decision was forced into a binary 100/0 and sledgehammer it was.
Cameron, sadly for him, tee'd the nut up with his tactics but was merely at the end of a long line.
@GuidoFawkes: Remain Cabinet ministers' bullishness about winning this argument rightly has Brexiters worried.
If we end up close to an EEA-style deal but without having to buy in to the full EU/EEA freedom of movement directive, that would be an excellent outcome. As always, though, the issue isn't what the UK government wants, let alone what individual ministers want, it's what we can negotiate with our EU friends.
If we do go for EEA, is it possible to extract ourselves from this further at a later date? Also does it allow us to make trade deals independently from the EU?
Thanks for you summary on Brexit the other day by the way.
Do we really want to have to make our own trade deals? Surely that was never regarded as being particularly desirable in itself - rather just one of the inconveniences that we'd have to endure in return for the myriad of Brexit goodies.
Pathetic.
In what way?
Yes, we want to make our own trade deals. No, we don't need someone to tie our shoe laces.
Shoelaces don't come into it. I quite enjoyed the muscle we had, swaggering around as a key member of the greatest trading bloc on the planet. Still, you know best.
I see history is being rewritten as rapidly as ever. To read some of the comments here, anyone not politically aware might get the impression that Labour and the LibDems didn't support the referendum.
Seriously...you want to blame Clegg? Is that right? Re the Referendum.... The Tories did it and own it, end of mate.
The British people did it. 52 % to 48 %. Anti-democrats like yourself got owned.
Mate...I'm surprised in retrospect that the win wasn't bigger. The EU vote was a free vote to put an extra 350 million into the NHS, and make Britain great again. The Farage poster equating the EU with the migrant crisis was genius. Many people thought we'd be leaving the next day.
Well the 48% was to stop the economy collapsing the day after a leave vote.
People voted because they didn't want to be in the EU. You've been told this repeatedly for over a year and yet you still can't comprehend it. In your mind people were simply duped by a bus that 99% of people never ever even saw.
That is a bit disingenuous 99% might never have physically seen the bus.However the images and it's message were all-over the media where a vast majority will have seen it.
The people who did see it only did so alongside the outrage that it was completely untrue. It was presented to them as "look at this disgusting lie the leave campaign have come up with". To try and claim this swung the election is clutching at straws.
Almost no one saw it in the context as an advert for Brexit.
What Remainers say: it is an outrage against decency and truthfulness that sleazy lying rat bag leaver scum are conning the electorate by daubing their bus with filthy lies about £350m a week for the NHS;
What the electorate hears: wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble £350M A WEEK FOR THE NHS!!!
@GuidoFawkes: Remain Cabinet ministers' bullishness about winning this argument rightly has Brexiters worried.
If we end up close to an EEA-style deal but without having to buy in to the full EU/EEA freedom of movement directive, that would be an excellent outcome. As always, though, the issue isn't what the UK government wants, let alone what individual ministers want, it's what we can negotiate with our EU friends.
If we do go for EEA, is it possible to extract ourselves from this further at a later date? Also does it allow us to make trade deals independently from the EU?
Thanks for you summary on Brexit the other day by the way.
Do we really want to have to make our own trade deals? Surely that was never regarded as being particularly desirable in itself - rather just one of the inconveniences that we'd have to endure in return for the myriad of Brexit goodies.
Pathetic.
In what way?
Yes, we want to make our own trade deals. No, we don't need someone to tie our shoe laces.
When did having 'our own' trade deals become the defining virility symbol of national sovereignty and why? As far as I can tell most of the people who bang on about them aren't really interested in trade policy.
When the EU demonstrated it was incompetent at negotiating on our behalf. Which is why we don't have a trade deal with even one nation outside of Europe with a bigger economy than our own.
Outside the EU we are only dealing with either nations with smaller economies than ours, or bigger nations the EU has been unable to reach a deal with.
@GuidoFawkes: Remain Cabinet ministers' bullishness about winning this argument rightly has Brexiters worried.
If we end up close to an EEA-style deal but without having to buy in to the full EU/EEA freedom of movement directive, that would be an excellent outcome. As always, though, the issue isn't what the UK government wants, let alone what individual ministers want, it's what we can negotiate with our EU friends.
If we do go for EEA, is it possible to extract ourselves from this further at a later date? Also does it allow us to make trade deals independently from the EU?
Thanks for you summary on Brexit the other day by the way.
Do we really want to have to make our own trade deals? Surely that was never regarded as being particularly desirable in itself - rather just one of the inconveniences that we'd have to endure in return for the myriad of Brexit goodies.
Pathetic.
In what way?
Yes, we want to make our own trade deals. No, we don't need someone to tie our shoe laces.
Shoelaces don't come into it. I quite enjoyed the muscle we had, swaggering around as a key member of the greatest trading bloc on the planet. Still, you know best.
Greatest trading bloc on the planet?
The USA alone is bigger than the EU. NAFTA is bigger still.
Yet we lack a deal with America because the EU is incapable of reaching one. On our own we have a chance.
I see history is being rewritten as rapidly as ever. To read some of the comments here, anyone not politically aware might get the impression that Labour and the LibDems didn't support the referendum.
Seriously...you want to blame Clegg? Is that right? Re the Referendum.... The Tories did it and own it, end of mate.
The British people did it. 52 % to 48 %. Anti-democrats like yourself got owned.
Mate...I'm surprised in retrospect that the win wasn't bigger. The EU vote was a free vote to put an extra 350 million into the NHS, and make Britain great again. The Farage poster equating the EU with the migrant crisis was genius. Many people thought we'd be leaving the next day.
Well the 48% was to stop the economy collapsing the day after a leave vote.
People voted because they didn't want to be in the EU. You've been told this repeatedly for over a year and yet you still can't comprehend it. In your mind people were simply duped by a bus that 99% of people never ever even saw.
That is a bit disingenuous 99% might never have physically seen the bus.However the images and it's message were all-over the media where a vast majority will have seen it.
The people who did see it only did so alongside the outrage that it was completely untrue. It was presented to them as "look at this disgusting lie the leave campaign have come up with". To try and claim this swung the election is clutching at straws.
Almost no one saw it in the context as an advert for Brexit.
What Remainers say: it is an outrage against decency and truthfulness that sleazy lying rat bag leaver scum are conning the electorate by daubing their bus with filthy lies about £350m a week for the NHS;
What the electorate hears: wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble £350M A WEEK FOR THE NHS!!!
Remainers still do not realise this.
Leave won (just) on a lie - simple as that.
Leave achieved a very narrow victory by promising a scenario in which the UK would continue to enjoy all the benefits of EU membership with none of the costs. "Have our cake and eat it" in the immortal words of the Foreign Secretary.
It is not surprising that people voted for this scenario - a very enticing prospect. But quite impossible to deliver.
@GuidoFawkes: Remain Cabinet ministers' bullishness about winning this argument rightly has Brexiters worried.
If we end up close to an EEA-style deal but without having to buy in to the full EU/EEA freedom of movement directive, that would be an excellent outcome. As always, though, the issue isn't what the UK government wants, let alone what individual ministers want, it's what we can negotiate with our EU friends.
If we do go for EEA, is it possible to extract ourselves from this further at a later date? Also does it allow us to make trade deals independently from the EU?
Thanks for you summary on Brexit the other day by the way.
Do we really want to have to make our own trade deals? Surely that was never regarded as being particularly desirable in itself - rather just one of the inconveniences that we'd have to endure in return for the myriad of Brexit goodies.
Pathetic.
In what way?
Yes, we want to make our own trade deals. No, we don't need someone to tie our shoe laces.
When did having 'our own' trade deals become the defining virility symbol of national sovereignty and why? As far as I can tell most of the people who bang on about them aren't really interested in trade policy.
When the EU demonstrated it was incompetent at negotiating on our behalf. Which is why we don't have a trade deal with even one nation outside of Europe with a bigger economy than our own.
Outside the EU we are only dealing with either nations with smaller economies than ours, or bigger nations the EU has been unable to reach a deal with.
What are the GATT rounds and development of the WTO if not trade deals? Do you think the EEC/EU has played no role in making all of that happen?
On top of that, the EU has more FTAs, and more preferential trade agreements than the USA. Would you characterise the USA as incompetent on trade?
I see history is being rewritten as rapidly as ever. To read some of the comments here, anyone not politically aware might get the impression that Labour and the LibDems didn't support the referendum.
Seriously...you want to blame Clegg? Is that right? Re the Referendum.... The Tories did it and own it, end of mate.
The British people did it. 52 % to 48 %. Anti-democrats like yourself got owned.
Mate...I'm surprised in retrospect that the win wasn't bigger. The EU vote was a free vote to put an extra 350 million into the NHS, and make Britain great again. The Farage poster equating the EU with the migrant crisis was genius. Many people thought we'd be leaving the next day.
Well the 48% was to stop the economy collapsing the day after a leave vote.
People voted because they didn't want to be in the EU. You've been told this repeatedly for over a year and yet you still can't comprehend it. In your mind people were simply duped by a bus that 99% of people never ever even saw.
That is a bit disingenuous 99% might never have physically seen the bus.However the images and it's message were all-over the media where a vast majority will have seen it.
The people who did see it only did so alongside the outrage that it was completely untrue. It was presented to them as "look at this disgusting lie the leave campaign have come up with". To try and claim this swung the election is clutching at straws.
Almost no one saw it in the context as an advert for Brexit.
What Remainers say: it is an outrage against decency and truthfulness that sleazy lying rat bag leaver scum are conning the electorate by daubing their bus with filthy lies about £350m a week for the NHS;
What the electorate hears: wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble £350M A WEEK FOR THE NHS!!!
Remainers still do not realise this.
Leave won (just) on a lie - simple as that.
Alternatively, they won because your side produced bad arguments.
@GuidoFawkes: Remain Cabinet ministers' bullishness about winning this argument rightly has Brexiters worried.
If we end up close to an EEA-style deal but without having to buy in to the full EU/EEA freedom of movement directive, that would be an excellent outcome. As always, though, the issue isn't what the UK government wants, let alone what individual ministers want, it's what we can negotiate with our EU friends.
If we do go for EEA, is it possible to extract ourselves from this further at a later date? Also does it allow us to make trade deals independently from the EU?
Thanks for you summary on Brexit the other day by the way.
Do we really want to have to make our own trade deals? Surely that was never regarded as being particularly desirable in itself - rather just one of the inconveniences that we'd have to endure in return for the myriad of Brexit goodies.
The ability to agree our own trade deals is precisely why I voted for Brexit. The EU has not got a trade deal with any non-European nation with a bigger economy than our own.
There are only three non-EU economies bigger than the UK and they the USA, China and Japan so you are not exactly giving them a long list of choices.
Indeed, during the coalition government years, many British conservatives berated Chancellor George Osborne for abandoning his tough fiscal targets too quickly and criticized the Bank of England’s money-printing. Yet when they look across the Channel, these critics suddenly discovered their inner Keynesian, blaming all the eurozone’s misfortunes on an inability to devalue and spend borrowed money.
In fact, Portugal has achieved the kind of turnaround of which British conservatives can only dream. The country turned a budget deficit of 9% in 2012 into a deficit of just 1.5% in 2016, compared with a U.K. budget deficit in the year to March 2017 of 2.4%. It turned a current-account deficit of 6% into a surplus of 0.7%, compared with a U.K. current-account deficit of 4.4%. And Portugal has grown its exports as a percentage of gross domestic output from 29% to 45%, compared with just 28% in the U.K.
@GuidoFawkes: Remain Cabinet ministers' bullishness about winning this argument rightly has Brexiters worried.
If we end up close to an EEA-style deal but without having to buy in to the full EU/EEA freedom of movement directive, that would be an excellent outcome. As always, though, the issue isn't what the UK government wants, let alone what individual ministers want, it's what we can negotiate with our EU friends.
If we do go for EEA, is it possible to extract ourselves from this further at a later date? Also does it allow us to make trade deals independently from the EU?
Thanks for you summary on Brexit the other day by the way.
Do we really want to have to make our own trade deals? Surely that was never regarded as being particularly desirable in itself - rather just one of the inconveniences that we'd have to endure in return for the myriad of Brexit goodies.
The ability to agree our own trade deals is precisely why I voted for Brexit. The EU has not got a trade deal with any non-European nation with a bigger economy than our own.
There are only three non-EU economies bigger than the UK and they the USA, China and Japan so you are not exactly giving them a long list of choices.
Quite - and an FTA between EU and Japan is well on its way.
It's Leaver's careful attention to details and keen grasp of the facts that fills me with confidence for our Brave Brexit future.
The hysterics of Gove regarding US chlorinated chicken show that Brexit Britain is not going to be some free trading titan.
Mr. Eagles, I wonder if those who are alarmingly relaxed about Comrade Corbyn becoming PM remain that way having read Labour's socialist nationalisation policy.
Well Comrade Corbyn as PM might look appealing after a bad Brexit deal has trashed the economy. That's a bit John Major for a lefty. All the benefits you list, pretty much, are benefits to the comfortably off with high disposable income, a category which excludes most people. If you thing EUref created the issues you identify, meditate on the fact that in 2010 Brown was calling Mrs Wossname a bigot, but in 2015 item 4 on the Edstone was "Controls on immigration."
Today we were hearing from the PCC of West Midlands (in relation to knife crime) that there is a huge underclass of unemployed male youths who, for one reason or another, feel it necessary to carry a knife. He said it many times (R4, 7.40-ish).
But hold on, isn't unemployment at record low levels, employment at record highs? How come in the West Midlands, across the region, we are being told that the PCC is working with the Mayor to try to find a solution for this unemployment.
What gives?
(genuine question - I might have to jump on to Google to find out)
I think West Mids is one of the places with some islands of high unemployment. I know the constituency I live in has > 10 % unemployment, was the highest in country the last time the mirror or whoever ruined the data.
One difficulty for the Tories (and the SNP) is that no one really believes the "statistics" that come from their PR departments. Even the members of the party are suspicious. Simple reason when you think about it - they bear no relationship to the real life experiences of people outside of the bubble. When we lie to Politicians, we go to jail, when Politicians lie, they get elected!
I would pay attention to this, but anyone who can't use a quote function has some more serious problems to contend with than someone disagreeing with them on the internet.
I quoted myself using someone else's version as a base. Those that think they know it all, very rarely do!
@GuidoFawkes: Remain Cabinet ministers' bullishness about winning this argument rightly has Brexiters worried.
If we end up close to an EEA-style deal but without having to buy in to the full EU/EEA freedom of movement directive, that would be an excellent outcome. As always, though, the issue isn't what the UK government wants, let alone what individual ministers want, it's what we can negotiate with our EU friends.
If we do go for EEA, is it possible to extract ourselves from this further at a later date? Also does it allow us to make trade deals independently from the EU?
Thanks for you summary on Brexit the other day by the way.
Do we really want to have to make our own trade deals? Surely that was never regarded as being particularly desirable in itself - rather just one of the inconveniences that we'd have to endure in return for the myriad of Brexit goodies.
The ability to agree our own trade deals is precisely why I voted for Brexit. The EU has not got a trade deal with any non-European nation with a bigger economy than our own.
There are only three non-EU economies bigger than the UK and they the USA, China and Japan so you are not exactly giving them a long list of choices.
Indeed I'm not. People on the Remain side like to imply the UK is small or insignificant or lacks weight on our own - but as you've aptly pointed out yourself we're bigger than all but three other nations in the entire world outside Europe.
Take for instance @Stark_Dawning "enjoyed the muscle we had, swaggering around" - except that muscle had come to absolutely nothing with nations bigger than us and we obviously have our own muscles for everyone smaller than us.
So we leave the EU, sign a deal with Europe and are then free to sign our own deals with those bigger that the EU was unable to reach a compromise with. For everyone else we sign a deal using our own swagger.
@Philip_Thompson - One of the original prominent Eurosceptics, James Goldsmith, based his argument primarily on his disagreement with the EU's promotion of global free trade which he viewed as a profound mistake.
@Philip_Thompson - One of the original prominent Eurosceptics, James Goldsmith, based his argument primarily on his disagreement with the EU's promotion of global free trade which he viewed as a profound mistake.
And at the time of Goldsmith I was a europhile as a result.
Sadly the progress the EEC was making in opening up trade has stalled in recent years. I would have liked the TTIP but it is dead in the water.
There are only three non-EU economies bigger than the UK and they the USA, China and Japan so you are not exactly giving them a long list of choices.
Indeed I'm not. People on the Remain side like to imply the UK is small or insignificant or lacks weight on our own - but as you've aptly pointed out yourself we're bigger than all but three other nations in the entire world outside Europe.
Take for instance @Stark_Dawning "enjoyed the muscle we had, swaggering around" - except that muscle had come to absolutely nothing with nations bigger than us and we obviously have our own muscles for everyone smaller than us.
So we leave the EU, sign a deal with Europe and are then free to sign our own deals with those bigger that the EU was unable to reach a compromise with. For everyone else we sign a deal using our own swagger.
I am not here to argue for the "Remain" side - I have said that repeatedly. So on that basis I feel it is only fair to point out that if we do Brexit then you could add the EU as another "economy" bigger than ours. Given your logic, it would be ironic if we failed to negotiate a trade deal with the EU.
Finally - remember that the EU/Japan FTA seems to be coming along nicely.
Mr. Eagles, I wonder if those who are alarmingly relaxed about Comrade Corbyn becoming PM remain that way having read Labour's socialist nationalisation policy.
Whatever you think of Labour's policy, I doubt even the worst excesses of a hard left Govt could actually do anything as utterly corrosive and divisive to the country as calling that EU vote. For that one act of monumental incompetence the Tory deserves a footnote in history, and we may well have seen the last time it wins an election.
Precisely. Agree 100%. By any measure the worst decision in the postwar era.
Absolutely. The Conservatives never deserved their self proclaimed reputation for economic competence in the first place. They sure as heck can't pull that one again.
If I was PM, I would definitely say the word "Renaisssance" if I were in Florence. I would also called the hard line remainers a load of Monas. (Remonas)
@Philip_Thompson - One of the original prominent Eurosceptics, James Goldsmith, based his argument primarily on his disagreement with the EU's promotion of global free trade which he viewed as a profound mistake.
And at the time of Goldsmith I was a europhile as a result.
Sadly the progress the EEC was making in opening up trade has stalled in recent years.
Is that objectively true? When De Gucht was Trade Commissioner between 2010 and 2014 there were a lot of new trade deals signed and Malmstrom is keeping up that pace.
If it's really the stalling of TTIP that bothers you, you can't hardly blame the EU alone for that, and based on present noises, a UK-US deal that the US would accept would be no easier to get through Westminster.
There are only three non-EU economies bigger than the UK and they the USA, China and Japan so you are not exactly giving them a long list of choices.
Indeed I'm not. People on the Remain side like to imply the UK is small or insignificant or lacks weight on our own - but as you've aptly pointed out yourself we're bigger than all but three other nations in the entire world outside Europe.
Take for instance @Stark_Dawning "enjoyed the muscle we had, swaggering around" - except that muscle had come to absolutely nothing with nations bigger than us and we obviously have our own muscles for everyone smaller than us.
So we leave the EU, sign a deal with Europe and are then free to sign our own deals with those bigger that the EU was unable to reach a compromise with. For everyone else we sign a deal using our own swagger.
I am not here to argue for the "Remain" side - I have said that repeatedly. So on that basis I feel it is only fair to point out that if we do Brexit then you could add the EU as another "economy" bigger than ours. Given your logic, it would be ironic if we failed to negotiate a trade deal with the EU.
Finally - remember that the EU/Japan FTA seems to be coming along nicely.
Indeed my logic is in assuming we can and will reach a deal with the EU. If we fail to reach a deal with the EU then I think we will be in a worse position than before.
@Philip_Thompson - One of the original prominent Eurosceptics, James Goldsmith, based his argument primarily on his disagreement with the EU's promotion of global free trade which he viewed as a profound mistake.
And at the time of Goldsmith I was a europhile as a result.
Sadly the progress the EEC was making in opening up trade has stalled in recent years.
Is that objectively true? When De Gucht was Trade Commissioner between 2010 and 2014 there were a lot of new trade deals signed and Malmstrom is keeping up that pace.
If it's really the stalling of TTIP that bothers you, you can't hardly blame the EU alone for that, and based on present noises, a UK-US deal that the US would accept would be no easier to get through Westminster.
The stalling of TTIP does bother me and I do blame the EU for that. It stalled prior to our referendum when Obama was still President and TPP was signed.
Trump subsequently voided TPP but had Trump not been elected then the TPP nations would have had a deal but we would not due to European - not American - intransigence.
There are only three non-EU economies bigger than the UK and they the USA, China and Japan so you are not exactly giving them a long list of choices.
Indeed I'm not. People on the Remain side like to imply the UK is small or insignificant or lacks weight on our own - but as you've aptly pointed out yourself we're bigger than all but three other nations in the entire world outside Europe.
Take for instance @Stark_Dawning "enjoyed the muscle we had, swaggering around" - except that muscle had come to absolutely nothing with nations bigger than us and we obviously have our own muscles for everyone smaller than us.
So we leave the EU, sign a deal with Europe and are then free to sign our own deals with those bigger that the EU was unable to reach a compromise with. For everyone else we sign a deal using our own swagger.
I am not here to argue for the "Remain" side - I have said that repeatedly. So on that basis I feel it is only fair to point out that if we do Brexit then you could add the EU as another "economy" bigger than ours. Given your logic, it would be ironic if we failed to negotiate a trade deal with the EU.
Finally - remember that the EU/Japan FTA seems to be coming along nicely.
Indeed my logic is in assuming we can and will reach a deal with the EU. If we fail to reach a deal with the EU then I think we will be in a worse position than before.
But even a full FTA with the EU would leave us in a worse position because leaving the single market creates non tariff barriers *by definition*.
Beverley_C - it is a bit artificial, iPhones, Google ads, etc, are really American imports. They just trade through the Irish Republic for tax reasons.
Yet we lack a deal with America because the EU is incapable of reaching one. On our own we have a chance.
When I last looked, we had a trade surplus with the USA. Do you really think that they want to give us trade terms to make our surplus BIGGER?
I suspect that any trade agreement the US offers will be intended to redress the balance in their favour, not ours.
Trade is not a zero sum game. More trade is a good thing yes I do think we can reach a good deal.
Exactly. It is also necessary to have something to trade. The big advantage of being in the single market is having a large home market which allows for economies of scale, thus making our goods more competitive in other markets. So getting good deals is quite possible outside the EU. But taking advantage of them will become harder.
There are only three non-EU economies bigger than the UK and they the USA, China and Japan so you are not exactly giving them a long list of choices.
Indeed I'm not. People on the Remain side like to imply the UK is small or insignificant or lacks weight on our own - but as you've aptly pointed out yourself we're bigger than all but three other nations in the entire world outside Europe.
Take for instance @Stark_Dawning "enjoyed the muscle we had, swaggering around" - except that muscle had come to absolutely nothing with nations bigger than us and we obviously have our own muscles for everyone smaller than us.
So we leave the EU, sign a deal with Europe and are then free to sign our own deals with those bigger that the EU was unable to reach a compromise with. For everyone else we sign a deal using our own swagger.
I am not here to argue for the "Remain" side - I have said that repeatedly. So on that basis I feel it is only fair to point out that if we do Brexit then you could add the EU as another "economy" bigger than ours. Given your logic, it would be ironic if we failed to negotiate a trade deal with the EU.
Finally - remember that the EU/Japan FTA seems to be coming along nicely.
Indeed my logic is in assuming we can and will reach a deal with the EU. If we fail to reach a deal with the EU then I think we will be in a worse position than before.
But even a full FTA with the EU would leave us in a worse position because leaving the single market creates non tariff barriers *by definition*.
The purpose of the FTA would be to leave as few non-tariff barriers as possible. A good reciprocal deal should be possible.
There are only three non-EU economies bigger than the UK and they the USA, China and Japan so you are not exactly giving them a long list of choices.
Indeed I'm not. People on the Remain side like to imply the UK is small or insignificant or lacks weight on our own - but as you've aptly pointed out yourself we're bigger than all but three other nations in the entire world outside Europe.
Take for instance @Stark_Dawning "enjoyed the muscle we had, swaggering around" - except that muscle had come to absolutely nothing with nations bigger than us and we obviously have our own muscles for everyone smaller than us.
So we leave the EU, sign a deal with Europe and are then free to sign our own deals with those bigger that the EU was unable to reach a compromise with. For everyone else we sign a deal using our own swagger.
I am not here to argue for the "Remain" side - I have said that repeatedly. So on that basis I feel it is only fair to point out that if we do Brexit then you could add the EU as another "economy" bigger than ours. Given your logic, it would be ironic if we failed to negotiate a trade deal with the EU.
Finally - remember that the EU/Japan FTA seems to be coming along nicely.
Indeed my logic is in assuming we can and will reach a deal with the EU. If we fail to reach a deal with the EU then I think we will be in a worse position than before.
But even a full FTA with the EU would leave us in a worse position because leaving the single market creates non tariff barriers *by definition*.
The purpose of the FTA would be to leave as few non-tariff barriers as possible. A good reciprocal deal should be possible.
Would you agree that, assuming we can create the goodwill for a deal, the main variable is the extent to which we wish to be able to diverge from the EU?
Yet we lack a deal with America because the EU is incapable of reaching one. On our own we have a chance.
When I last looked, we had a trade surplus with the USA. Do you really think that they want to give us trade terms to make our surplus BIGGER?
I suspect that any trade agreement the US offers will be intended to redress the balance in their favour, not ours.
Hard to believe the amount of deluded dreamers on here, we are not going to get a good deal from anyone.
Malcolm - I have reached the point were the only sensible action is to assume that Brexit will happen, be a disaster of some proportion or other and we need to have all our assets as liquid as possible. I am even drawing down my pensions early and reinvesting them elsewhere. The business is now more or less "closed" as a UK based business and I am having work done abroad.
If Brexit is a disaster I will not be heavily impacted by it. If it is a success then I can decide where the greatest opportunity lies and go that way. I suspect that many businesses larger than mine are taking similar decisions.
There are only three non-EU economies bigger than the UK and they the USA, China and Japan so you are not exactly giving them a long list of choices.
Indeed I'm not. People on the Remain side like to imply the UK is small or insignificant or lacks weight on our own - but as you've aptly pointed out yourself we're bigger than all but three other nations in the entire world outside Europe.
Take for instance @Stark_Dawning "enjoyed the muscle we had, swaggering around" - except that muscle had come to absolutely nothing with nations bigger than us and we obviously have our own muscles for everyone smaller than us.
So we leave the EU, sign a deal with Europe and are then free to sign our own deals with those bigger that the EU was unable to reach a compromise with. For everyone else we sign a deal using our own swagger.
I am not here to argue for the "Remain" side - I have said that repeatedly. So on that basis I feel it is only fair to point out that if we do Brexit then you could add the EU as another "economy" bigger than ours. Given your logic, it would be ironic if we failed to negotiate a trade deal with the EU.
Finally - remember that the EU/Japan FTA seems to be coming along nicely.
Indeed my logic is in assuming we can and will reach a deal with the EU. If we fail to reach a deal with the EU then I think we will be in a worse position than before.
But even a full FTA with the EU would leave us in a worse position because leaving the single market creates non tariff barriers *by definition*.
The purpose of the FTA would be to leave as few non-tariff barriers as possible. A good reciprocal deal should be possible.
Would you agree that, assuming we can create the goodwill for a deal, the main variable is the extent to which we wish to be able to diverge from the EU?
It would be a main variable yes. Its not the only one.
Yet we lack a deal with America because the EU is incapable of reaching one. On our own we have a chance.
When I last looked, we had a trade surplus with the USA. Do you really think that they want to give us trade terms to make our surplus BIGGER?
I suspect that any trade agreement the US offers will be intended to redress the balance in their favour, not ours.
Hard to believe the amount of deluded dreamers on here, we are not going to get a good deal from anyone.
Malcolm - I have reached the point were the only sensible action is to assume that Brexit will happen, be a disaster of some proportion or other and we need to have all our assets as liquid as possible. I am even drawing down my pensions early and reinvesting them elsewhere. The business is now more or less "closed" as a UK based business and I am having work done abroad.
If Brexit is a disaster I will not be heavily impacted by it. If it is a success then I can decide where the greatest opportunity lies and go that way. I suspect that many businesses larger than mine are taking similar decisions.
You are not the only one. £ = $1.35 seems to me a great opportunity to get out of sterling since a car crash Brexit will inevitably be accompanied by a sterling crisis.
There is a great deal of misplaced optimism in financial markets - for many years political decisions have always been supportive of "business" and even now many people cling to the idea that a government will never do something they knew to be economically damaging. Only a few weeks ago I was at a presentation at which an investment manager expressed the view that a transitional deal within a few months was more or less certain.
Could you clear up something for me, please? I assume you don't approve of referendums? Hence you wouldn't approve of another one to rejoin?
You're not, as far as I know, an LD voter, so I won't ask you to explain their logic ... but how do the residual Remainers (if I may call you one of them) square the circle of being for democracy only when it produces the answer you want?
We have a Parliamentary Democracy.... I vote one time every five years and expect the MP's to take care of running the country. If people wanted Brexit so much they should have given a Parliamentary majority to UKIP.
Sometimes Parliament takes difficult decisions contrary to public opinion.
If we had a referendum tomorrow on increasing taxes on the top 5% and multi national corporations to put 350 million in to the NHS how would people vote?
In the post-second world war period referendums were often argued to be too open to manipulation by unscrupulous politicians to be a sensible way of taking decisions. Hitler was, after all, transformed from chancellor to fuhrer with dictatorial power because the German people voted to do so in a referendum. Franco also used referendums to validate his position after the Spanish civil war. With these examples in mind the post-war German constitution, written by the allies, explicitly forbids the use of national referendums.
Switzerland, a country in which the pace of social progress is dictated by referendums, did not give women the vote until 1971. Had the Roy Jenkins social reforms of the 1960s - abortion, gay rights etc - been the subject of referendums it is very unlikely they would have been agreed at that time
Putin's annexation of the Crimea, which is not recognised by any western country, was supported by its people in a referendum.
Referendums are not the ultimate form of democracy - they frequently take bad decisions - the EU referendum is the latest of many occasions in which voters have been told that the exercise of their vote would produce an outcome which those who offered it knew could not be delivered.
I see history is being rewritten as rapidly as ever. To read some of the comments here, anyone not politically aware might get the impression that Labour and the LibDems didn't support the referendum.
Hush.
One for the ages. Careful what you wish for and all that. Puts Uncle Vince's verbal contortions this week into perspective - "first referendum on the facts".
Cameron screwed up on many levels on this, but he was at the end of quite a line of our leaders since (in my view) about Maastricht.
Labour reneging on the Lisbon referendum was an almighty clanger. Huge. That was the moment when people could still have said "stop, have a rethink" without having to hit the nut with a sledgehammer. But having been denied that it fed into the decision of many I'm sure (me for one) that June 23rd 2016 was the only chance we were ever going to get to call a halt. It wasn't going to be given to us again, no second chance in five years, you're in the hands of the Junckers of this world forever, no going back whatever. So many a personal 51/49 decision was forced into a binary 100/0 and sledgehammer it was.
Cameron, sadly for him, tee'd the nut up with his tactics but was merely at the end of a long line.
Only a few weeks ago I was at a presentation at which an investment manager expressed the view that a transitional deal within a few months was more or less certain.
And this is why the political crisis is fast approaching. At the moment the average non-Brexit-obsessed person thinks it's all going to turn out ok. The scales will fall from people's eyes as we head towards the end of the year.
@GuidoFawkes: Remain Cabinet ministers' bullishness about winning this argument rightly has Brexiters worried.
If we end up close to an EEA-style deal but without having to buy in to the full EU/EEA freedom of movement directive, that would be an excellent outcome. As always, though, the issue isn't what the UK government wants, let alone what individual ministers want, it's what we can negotiate with our EU friends.
If we do go for EEA, is it possible to extract ourselves from this further at a later date? Also does it allow us to make trade deals independently from the EU?
Thanks for you summary on Brexit the other day by the way.
Do we really want to have to make our own trade deals? Surely that was never regarded as being particularly desirable in itself - rather just one of the inconveniences that we'd have to endure in return for the myriad of Brexit goodies.
The ability to agree our own trade deals is precisely why I voted for Brexit. The EU has not got a trade deal with any non-European nation with a bigger economy than our own.
There are only three non-EU economies bigger than the UK and they the USA, China and Japan so you are not exactly giving them a long list of choices.
Indeed I'm not. People on the Remain side like to imply the UK is small or insignificant or lacks weight on our own - but as you've aptly pointed out yourself we're bigger than all but three other nations in the entire world outside Europe.
Take for instance @Stark_Dawning "enjoyed the muscle we had, swaggering around" - except that muscle had come to absolutely nothing with nations bigger than us and we obviously have our own muscles for everyone smaller than us.
So we leave the EU, sign a deal with Europe and are then free to sign our own deals with those bigger that the EU was unable to reach a compromise with. For everyone else we sign a deal using our own swagger.
We only get deals from any country by giving more than that country has now. There is status quo for, say, Sierra Leone, or there is better than it has now. The UK, meanwhile, cannot afford the status quo, because we have worsened our trading situation by leaving the single market and customs union. We need deals. For the other side they are nice to haves if the terms are right.
Yet we lack a deal with America because the EU is incapable of reaching one. On our own we have a chance.
When I last looked, we had a trade surplus with the USA. Do you really think that they want to give us trade terms to make our surplus BIGGER?
I suspect that any trade agreement the US offers will be intended to redress the balance in their favour, not ours.
Hard to believe the amount of deluded dreamers on here, we are not going to get a good deal from anyone.
Malcolm - I have reached the point were the only sensible action is to assume that Brexit will happen, be a disaster of some proportion or other and we need to have all our assets as liquid as possible. I am even drawing down my pensions early and reinvesting them elsewhere. The business is now more or less "closed" as a UK based business and I am having work done abroad.
If Brexit is a disaster I will not be heavily impacted by it. If it is a success then I can decide where the greatest opportunity lies and go that way. I suspect that many businesses larger than mine are taking similar decisions.
Indeed, during the coalition government years, many British conservatives berated Chancellor George Osborne for abandoning his tough fiscal targets too quickly and criticized the Bank of England’s money-printing. Yet when they look across the Channel, these critics suddenly discovered their inner Keynesian, blaming all the eurozone’s misfortunes on an inability to devalue and spend borrowed money.
In fact, Portugal has achieved the kind of turnaround of which British conservatives can only dream. The country turned a budget deficit of 9% in 2012 into a deficit of just 1.5% in 2016, compared with a U.K. budget deficit in the year to March 2017 of 2.4%. It turned a current-account deficit of 6% into a surplus of 0.7%, compared with a U.K. current-account deficit of 4.4%. And Portugal has grown its exports as a percentage of gross domestic output from 29% to 45%, compared with just 28% in the U.K.
Indeed, and they paid a very heavy price for it in equity and unemployment.
And I don't want to be like Portugal: for a first-world Western country, it is still a rather poor one.
Indeed, during the coalition government years, many British conservatives berated Chancellor George Osborne for abandoning his tough fiscal targets too quickly and criticized the Bank of England’s money-printing. Yet when they look across the Channel, these critics suddenly discovered their inner Keynesian, blaming all the eurozone’s misfortunes on an inability to devalue and spend borrowed money.
In fact, Portugal has achieved the kind of turnaround of which British conservatives can only dream. The country turned a budget deficit of 9% in 2012 into a deficit of just 1.5% in 2016, compared with a U.K. budget deficit in the year to March 2017 of 2.4%. It turned a current-account deficit of 6% into a surplus of 0.7%, compared with a U.K. current-account deficit of 4.4%. And Portugal has grown its exports as a percentage of gross domestic output from 29% to 45%, compared with just 28% in the U.K.
Indeed, and they paid a very heavy price for it in equity and unemployment.
And I don't want to be like Portugal: for a first-world Western country, it is still a rather poor one.
Why do you think the UK in the Euro wouldn't have been like Germany (which remember was called the sick man of Europe at the time the Euro was launched)?
@GuidoFawkes: Remain Cabinet ministers' bullishness about winning this argument rightly has Brexiters worried.
If we end up close to an EEA-style deal but without having to buy in to the full EU/EEA freedom of movement directive, that would be an excellent outcome. As always, though, the issue isn't what the UK government wants, let alone what individual ministers want, it's what we can negotiate with our EU friends.
If we do go for EEA, is it possible to extract ourselves from this further at a later date? Also does it allow us to make trade deals independently from the EU?
Thanks for you summary on Brexit the other day by the way.
Do we really want to have to make our own trade deals? Surely that was never regarded as being particularly desirable in itself - rather just one of the inconveniences that we'd have to endure in return for the myriad of Brexit goodies.
The ability to agree our own trade deals is precisely why I voted for Brexit. The EU has not got a trade deal with any non-European nation with a bigger economy than our own.
There are only three non-EU economies bigger than the UK and they the USA, China and Japan so you are not exactly giving them a long list of choices.
Indeed
We only get deals from any country by giving more than that country has now. There is status quo for, say, Sierra Leone, or there is better than it has now. The UK, meanwhile, cannot afford the status quo, because we have worsened our trading situation by leaving the single market and customs union. We need deals. For the other side they are nice to haves if the terms are right.
In the case of Sierra Leone, we can lower agricultural tariffs for a start. I suspect, in their case, they'd be even more interested in a deal with us as we'd be with them.
What you are referring to is asymmetric economic weights.
Mr. Eagles, I wonder if those who are alarmingly relaxed about Comrade Corbyn becoming PM remain that way having read Labour's socialist nationalisation policy.
Well Comrade Corbyn as PM might look appealing after a bad Brexit deal has trashed the economy.
I think I'm beyond the economic arguments of it all. For me the worst part of the EU vote is how it has fundamentally divided the country, young against old, north versus south, rich versus poor, university educated versus non university educated...and this on top of unleashing anti foreigner sentiment.
Whether Brexit delivers a better economic future is doubtful. What is has done is make this country a far less pleasant.
I live in Norwich (south). It really is a lovely place. Genteel, friendly, safe, chilled, clean, loads of culture (gigs, cinemas, jazz), independent shops galore, lovely parks, vibrant, great mixture of young and old, great restaurants, fantastic pubs, well tended green space, accessible GP surgeries, relatively wealthy....the type of place where the estate agents cycles to appointments, people still get their milk delivered and the ice cream van trundles around on hot days.
I am convinced this is the England that Brexit heartlands yearn for, yet it is a nailed on Remain area with a Corbynite, mixed race MP who returned to his seat with a thumping majority.
Indeed, during the coalition government years, many British conservatives berated Chancellor George Osborne for abandoning his tough fiscal targets too quickly and criticized the Bank of England’s money-printing. Yet when they look across the Channel, these critics suddenly discovered their inner Keynesian, blaming all the eurozone’s misfortunes on an inability to devalue and spend borrowed money.
In fact, Portugal has achieved the kind of turnaround of which British conservatives can only dream. The country turned a budget deficit of 9% in 2012 into a deficit of just 1.5% in 2016, compared with a U.K. budget deficit in the year to March 2017 of 2.4%. It turned a current-account deficit of 6% into a surplus of 0.7%, compared with a U.K. current-account deficit of 4.4%. And Portugal has grown its exports as a percentage of gross domestic output from 29% to 45%, compared with just 28% in the U.K.
Indeed, and they paid a very heavy price for it in equity and unemployment.
And I don't want to be like Portugal: for a first-world Western country, it is still a rather poor one.
Why do you think the UK in the Euro wouldn't have been like Germany (which remember was called the sick man of Europe at the time the Euro was launched)?
Our economies are more different than it seems on face-value. For a start, they are bigger on manufacturing and exports, we are based more upon services. Their trade patterns are more continentally European than ours. Their home ownership rates are far lower, with ours much higher and more on flexible rates, meaning we are more susceptible to interest rate rises.
But, you know all this, just as you know the Euro was a political decision as well as an economic one.
I see history is being rewritten as rapidly as ever. To read some of the comments here, anyone not politically aware might get the impression that Labour and the LibDems didn't support the referendum.
Seriously...you want to blame Clegg? Is that right? Re the Referendum.... The Tories did it and own it, end of mate.
The British people did it. 52 % to 48 %. Anti-democrats like yourself got owned.
Mate...I'm surprised in retrospect that the win wasn't bigger. The EU vote was a free vote to put an extra 350 million into the NHS, and make Britain great again. The Farage poster equating the EU with the migrant crisis was genius. Many people thought we'd be leaving the next day.
Well the 48% was to stop the economy collapsing the day after a leave vote.
People voted because they didn't want to be in the EU. You've been told this repeatedly for over a year and yet you still can't comprehend it. In your mind people were simply duped by a bus that 99% of people never ever even saw.
That is a bit disingenuous 99% might never have physically seen the bus.However the images and it's message were all-over the media where a vast majority will have seen it.
The people who did see it only did so alongside the outrage that it was completely untrue. It was presented to them as "look at this disgusting lie the leave campaign have come up with". To try and claim this swung the election is clutching at straws.
Almost no one saw it in the context as an advert for Brexit.
What Remainers say: it is an outrage against decency and truthfulness that sleazy lying rat bag leaver scum are conning the electorate by daubing their bus with filthy lies about £350m a week for the NHS;
What the electorate hears: wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble £350M A WEEK FOR THE NHS!!!
Remainers still do not realise this.
Leave won (just) on a lie - simple as that.
Alternatively, they won because your side produced bad arguments.
And becausecthe Remain lies were even more ludicrous and dishonest.
@GuidoFawkes: Remain Cabinet ministers' bullishness about winning this argument rightly has Brexiters worried.
If we end up close to an EEA-style deal but without having to buy in to the full EU/EEA freedom of movement directive, that would be an excellent outcome. As always, though, the issue isn't what the UK government wants, let alone what individual ministers want, it's what we can negotiate with our EU friends.
If we do go for EEA, is it possible to extract ourselves from this further at a later date? Also does it allow us to make trade deals independently from the EU?
Thanks for you summary on Brexit the other day by the way.
Do we really want to have to make our own trade deals? Surely that was never regarded as being particularly desirable in itself - rather just one of the inconveniences that we'd have to endure in return for the myriad of Brexit goodies.
The ability to agree our own trade deals is precisely why I voted for Brexit. The EU has not got a trade deal with any non-European nation with a bigger economy than our own.
There are only three non-EU economies bigger than the UK and they the USA, China and Japan so you are not exactly giving them a long list of choices.
Indeed
We only get deals from any country by giving more than that country has now. There is status quo for, say, Sierra Leone, or there is better than it has now. The UK, meanwhile, cannot afford the status quo, because we have worsened our trading situation by leaving the single market and customs union. We need deals. For the other side they are nice to haves if the terms are right.
In the case of Sierra Leone, we can lower agricultural tariffs for a start. I suspect, in their case, they'd be even more interested in a deal with us as we'd be with them.
What you are referring to is asymmetric economic weights.
Of course - we will give them more than they have now. That's pretty cost free for us. But move up the economic scale and that stops being the case. Once we get to countries where a trade deal might actually be helpful to the UK, the cards are largely on the other side of the table.
And becausecthe Remain lies were even more ludicrous and dishonest.
It doesn't get more dishonest than this from James Cleverly, whose mother comes from Sierra Leone, but who spread lies about trade policy towards Africa in order to win support for Brexit.
Yet we lack a deal with America because the EU is incapable of reaching one. On our own we have a chance.
When I last looked, we had a trade surplus with the USA. Do you really think that they want to give us trade terms to make our surplus BIGGER?
I suspect that any trade agreement the US offers will be intended to redress the balance in their favour, not ours.
What is this fixation with bilateral surpluses or deficits? A country that runs an overall surplus is impoverishing the current generation by building up assets abroad for the future. And a country that runs an overall deficit is running down its assets abroad for present consumption at the cost of future consumption. Sometimes either of those may be the right thing to do, but otherwise the benchmark is to aim for balance. Bilateral balances simply reveal comparative advantage in the composition of traded goods of the surplus country wrt the deficit country. The fact that we run a surplus in bilateral trade with the USA even though there are tariffs both ways does indeed suggest that the surplus will increase if tariffs etc are eliminated. But that is to the benefit of consumers in both countries. It may be to the detriment of some producers which had hitherto been protected behind the tariff (etc) wall, but why should that be a big concern for whichever government?
Plenty of Remainers realised this. They realised precisely this that the more it was spoken about the more £350m/NHS became a thing.
But it was of course a lie. And an embarrassing one. Even that bellwether PB Leaver Richard Tyndall didn't like it and wished they hadn't used it.
It worked, people liked what they heard, whatever they heard, and Leave won. But no one really comes out well from its use.
Indeed. The claim was so patently false I was one of a few Leavers on here complaining about it well before the actual vote. What I could not understand then and still do not understand now is why they didn't use the gross contribution figure of £288 million a week. It was still an eye watering amount if money and had the distinct benefit of being an accurate reflection of how much money we actually paid.
We only get deals from any country by giving more than that country has now. There is status quo for, say, Sierra Leone, or there is better than it has now. The UK, meanwhile, cannot afford the status quo, because we have worsened our trading situation by leaving the single market and customs union. We need deals. For the other side they are nice to haves if the terms are right.
Not true.
For example, when the EU did a deal with Mercosur they traded access to the European premium beef market (which was a significant positive for Mercosur and a negative for the UK) for access to the Latin American electronic market (which was a positive for Germany/North Italy).
That is a trade deal in which both the EU as a whole and Mercosur ended up better off, but the UK suffered.
A more tailored trade deal - in which we either restrict access to the premium beef market or in which we allow continued access in return for something that we want - could be a positive for the UK without negatively impacting Mercosur.
On topic, it's not completely impossible for May to turn it around. Corbyn was doing a lot worse than May is a year ago and he is now in a very strong position.
Mr. Eagles, I wonder if those who are alarmingly relaxed about Comrade Corbyn becoming PM remain that way having read Labour's socialist nationalisation policy.
Whatever you think of Labour's policy, I doubt even the worst excesses of a hard left Govt could actually do anything as utterly corrosive and divisive to the country as calling that EU vote. For that one act of monumental incompetence the Tory deserves a footnote in history, and we may well have seen the last time it wins an election.
Precisely. Agree 100%. By any measure the worst decision in the postwar era.
Absolutely. The Conservatives never deserved their self proclaimed reputation for economic competence in the first place. They sure as heck can't pull that one again.
It is not an act of incompetence to ask the People what they want. A referendum on the EU was inevitable at some point as there was a huge demand for it.
Plenty of Remainers realised this. They realised precisely this that the more it was spoken about the more £350m/NHS became a thing.
But it was of course a lie. And an embarrassing one. Even that bellwether PB Leaver Richard Tyndall didn't like it and wished they hadn't used it.
It worked, people liked what they heard, whatever they heard, and Leave won. But no one really comes out well from its use.
Indeed. The claim was so patently false I was one of a few Leavers on here complaining about it well before the actual vote. What I could not understand then and still do not understand now is why they didn't use the gross contribution figure of £288 million a week. It was still an eye watering amount if money and had the distinct benefit of being an accurate reflection of how much money we actually paid.
Politics 101. Get people talking about "how many millions of £s?"
Could you clear up something for me, please? I assume you don't approve of referendums? Hence you wouldn't approve of another one to rejoin?
You're not, as far as I know, an LD voter, so I won't ask you to explain their logic ... but how do the residual Remainers (if I may call you one of them) square the circle of being for democracy only when it produces the answer you want?
We have a Parliamentary Democracy.... I vote one time every five years and expect the MP's to take care of running the country. If people wanted Brexit so much they should have given a Parliamentary majority to UKIP.
Sometimes Parliament takes difficult decisions contrary to public opinion.
If we had a referendum tomorrow on increasing taxes on the top 5% and multi national corporations to put 350 million in to the NHS how would people vote?
In the post-second world war period referendums were often argued to be too open to manipulation by unscrupulous politicians to be a sensible way of taking decisions. Hitler was, after all, transformed from chancellor to fuhrer with dictatorial power because the German people voted to do so in a referendum. Franco also used referendums to validate his position after the Spanish civil war. With these examples in mind the post-war German constitution, written by the allies, explicitly forbids the use of national referendums.
Switzerland, a country in which the pace of social progress is dictated by referendums, did not give women the vote until 1971. Had the Roy Jenkins social reforms of the 1960s - abortion, gay rights etc - been the subject of referendums it is very unlikely they would have been agreed at that time
Putin's annexation of the Crimea, which is not recognised by any western country, was supported by its people in a referendum.
Referendums are not the ultimate form of democracy - they frequently take bad decisions - the EU referendum is the latest of many occasions in which voters have been told that the exercise of their vote would produce an outcome which those who offered it knew could not be delivered.
.
Putin's Crimean referendum was rigged.
There were referendums in Gib and the Falklands too
We only get deals from any country by giving more than that country has now. There is status quo for, say, Sierra Leone, or there is better than it has now. The UK, meanwhile, cannot afford the status quo, because we have worsened our trading situation by leaving the single market and customs union. We need deals. For the other side they are nice to haves if the terms are right.
Not true.
For example, when the EU did a deal with Mercosur they traded access to the European premium beef market (which was a significant positive for Mercosur and a negative for the UK) for access to the Latin American electronic market (which was a positive for Germany/North Italy).
That is a trade deal in which both the EU as a whole and Mercosur ended up better off, but the UK suffered.
A more tailored trade deal - in which we either restrict access to the premium beef market or in which we allow continued access in return for something that we want - could be a positive for the UK without negatively impacting Mercosur.
A good fact based argument, a rarity in the Brexit debate. But why stop at the UK? Should we do deals on a regional basis? Scotland has very different interests to the South East for example.
Comments
Cameron screwed up on many levels on this, but he was at the end of quite a line of our leaders since (in my view) about Maastricht.
Labour reneging on the Lisbon referendum was an almighty clanger. Huge. That was the moment when people could still have said "stop, have a rethink" without having to hit the nut with a sledgehammer. But having been denied that it fed into the decision of many I'm sure (me for one) that June 23rd 2016 was the only chance we were ever going to get to call a halt. It wasn't going to be given to us again, no second chance in five years, you're in the hands of the Junckers of this world forever, no going back whatever. So many a personal 51/49 decision was forced into a binary 100/0 and sledgehammer it was.
Cameron, sadly for him, tee'd the nut up with his tactics but was merely at the end of a long line.
Outside the EU we are only dealing with either nations with smaller economies than ours, or bigger nations the EU has been unable to reach a deal with.
The USA alone is bigger than the EU. NAFTA is bigger still.
Yet we lack a deal with America because the EU is incapable of reaching one. On our own we have a chance.
It is not surprising that people voted for this scenario - a very enticing prospect. But quite impossible to deliver.
On top of that, the EU has more FTAs, and more preferential trade agreements than the USA. Would you characterise the USA as incompetent on trade?
Indeed, during the coalition government years, many British conservatives berated Chancellor George Osborne for abandoning his tough fiscal targets too quickly and criticized the Bank of England’s money-printing. Yet when they look across the Channel, these critics suddenly discovered their inner Keynesian, blaming all the eurozone’s misfortunes on an inability to devalue and spend borrowed money.
In fact, Portugal has achieved the kind of turnaround of which British conservatives can only dream. The country turned a budget deficit of 9% in 2012 into a deficit of just 1.5% in 2016, compared with a U.K. budget deficit in the year to March 2017 of 2.4%. It turned a current-account deficit of 6% into a surplus of 0.7%, compared with a U.K. current-account deficit of 4.4%. And Portugal has grown its exports as a percentage of gross domestic output from 29% to 45%, compared with just 28% in the U.K.
Quite - and an FTA between EU and Japan is well on its way.
It's Leaver's careful attention to details and keen grasp of the facts that fills me with confidence for our Brave Brexit future.
The hysterics of Gove regarding US chlorinated chicken show that Brexit Britain is not going to be some free trading titan.
Vince has curate's egg ratings.
Take for instance @Stark_Dawning "enjoyed the muscle we had, swaggering around" - except that muscle had come to absolutely nothing with nations bigger than us and we obviously have our own muscles for everyone smaller than us.
So we leave the EU, sign a deal with Europe and are then free to sign our own deals with those bigger that the EU was unable to reach a compromise with. For everyone else we sign a deal using our own swagger.
Sadly the progress the EEC was making in opening up trade has stalled in recent years. I would have liked the TTIP but it is dead in the water.
Finally - remember that the EU/Japan FTA seems to be coming along nicely.
I suspect that any trade agreement the US offers will be intended to redress the balance in their favour, not ours.
If it's really the stalling of TTIP that bothers you, you can't hardly blame the EU alone for that, and based on present noises, a UK-US deal that the US would accept would be no easier to get through Westminster.
Trump subsequently voided TPP but had Trump not been elected then the TPP nations would have had a deal but we would not due to European - not American - intransigence.
If Brexit is a disaster I will not be heavily impacted by it. If it is a success then I can decide where the greatest opportunity lies and go that way. I suspect that many businesses larger than mine are taking similar decisions.
There is a great deal of misplaced optimism in financial markets - for many years political decisions have always been supportive of "business" and even now many people cling to the idea that a government will never do something they knew to be economically damaging. Only a few weeks ago I was at a presentation at which an investment manager expressed the view that a transitional deal within a few months was more or less certain.
I really did think it was now or never.
https://twitter.com/glasgowcathcart/status/910847149545590784
And I don't want to be like Portugal: for a first-world Western country, it is still a rather poor one.
What you are referring to is asymmetric economic weights.
But, you know all this, just as you know the Euro was a political decision as well as an economic one.
NEW THREAD
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/africa-eu-poverty-james-cleverly_uk_5720d08be4b0a1e971cad84f
A country that runs an overall surplus is impoverishing the current generation by building up assets abroad for the future. And a country that runs an overall deficit is running down its assets abroad for present consumption at the cost of future consumption. Sometimes either of those may be the right thing to do, but otherwise the benchmark is to aim for balance.
Bilateral balances simply reveal comparative advantage in the composition of traded goods of the surplus country wrt the deficit country.
The fact that we run a surplus in bilateral trade with the USA even though there are tariffs both ways does indeed suggest that the surplus will increase if tariffs etc are eliminated. But that is to the benefit of consumers in both countries. It may be to the detriment of some producers which had hitherto been protected behind the tariff (etc) wall, but why should that be a big concern for whichever government?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2017/sep/21/may-brexit-speech-florence-cabinet-meets-to-discuss-theresa-mays-florence-speech-on-brexit-politics-live
13:35
For example, when the EU did a deal with Mercosur they traded access to the European premium beef market (which was a significant positive for Mercosur and a negative for the UK) for access to the Latin American electronic market (which was a positive for Germany/North Italy).
That is a trade deal in which both the EU as a whole and Mercosur ended up better off, but the UK suffered.
A more tailored trade deal - in which we either restrict access to the premium beef market or in which we allow continued access in return for something that we want - could be a positive for the UK without negatively impacting Mercosur.
Who knows what might happen in the next 5 years.