On 15 Jul 2016 at 2:48am frexit wrote:
Dear Brexiters (or is it Brexiteers?).
Please read the attached article which explains in plain language the Brexit dilemma that our new Government faces. Can any of you geniuses explain how Britain is going to "take back control" in any real sense under any of the potential options? I can't see that any attempt to cut a "deal" by Theresa May and David Davis has any chance of being sold as a success to the leave brigade back home. The options range from catastrophic to disastrous. And please don't comment without taking time to read the damn thing because that's been the problem with the leavers the whole time. They were too lazy to actually try to understand what difficulties lay ahead.
The leavers had no proper plan, but David Davis has one written down on the back of an envelope which he tweeted out during the campaign, so he's now been brought in to save the day. However his plan involves making bilateral deals with the various EU nations. Unfortunately no-one seems to have told him that it's part of the EU charter that individual EU nations are cannot enter into bilateral trade deals with non-EU nations and so his negotiation strategy is already holed below the water-line. I would suggest that anyone who thinks they have a solution to the issue write a nice letter to DD himself explaining what the answer is. Otherwise he's going to come back from Brussels with egg on his face and lose his job before he's even had a chance to rearrange the pens and blotter on his desk.
Check it out here »
On 15 Jul 2016 at 9:55am Clement Attlee wrote:
That is a really good article & I just hope all members of the new cabinet are reading it.
On 15 Jul 2016 at 4:04pm Kazak 94 wrote:
Interesting and well researched piece, thanks for bringing it to our attention
On 15 Jul 2016 at 5:24pm Fairmeadow wrote:
There are problems with the mechanism for leaving, yes, but what about the problems of staying? Last year the UK population grew by 550,000 (probably, depending on which figures you use; certainly not less, and could be a lot more if we use NI data rather than the absurd passenger survey). Two thirds (minimum) of this increase is due to in-migration to the UK. BUT we built only 135,000 new homes, and we live at just over two people per home, not four. This has been going on every year for over a decade, under three governments, and no one has managed to do anything about it; hence the housing crisis. The same applies to every other aspect of infrastructure - we haven't built any new railways and hardly any roads in the South-East so travel has got much more difficult. We are already quite a small and crowded island, especially in this corner, and I for one value our English countryside, and want to keep some of it. It doesn't make any sense to seek to move more and more of the world's jobs, and more and more of the world's people to do them, to one small corner of the UK. Yes, GDP increases, and the unlamented George Osborne can claim our economy is a great success, but if financial growth is matched by population growth no one is any better off, apart from a few people at the top who skim off an increasing percentage of GDP for their own personal use.
And why should any employer bother to train anyone here if they can just import ready-trained staff from other more desperate parts of the world? Why should they offer decent wages and conditions, when the desperate will come here and do whatever they say for however little they offer?
Take the NHS as an example. There are far more than enough British kids desperate to train as doctors and nurses, but training places are deliberately restricted in both cases. UK medical schools have three times as many good applicants as they are allowed to accept. It is cheaper to bus in ready-trained doctors from India. If you are an NHS hospital nurse you are very likely to be expected to work 13-hour shifts, which makes the administration easier. Not very family-friendly though, so we have many qualified UK nurses doing other things, and many hospital nurses imported from other, desperate, countries.
Lots of people very reasonably felt on 23 June that something had to be done, and that carrying on with the Blair-Cameron-EU approach was no longer an option. And remainers keep talking about the single market as if it really meant something. If they trade in Euros and we trade in £ that creates much bigger currency risks for international traders than any likely tariffs. I'm old enough to remember the same people ("experts") who now say Leave will be a disaster telling us what a nightmare it would be to leave the ERM or fail to join the Euro. They were wrong then and my money is on them being equally wrong now. Economists preach on models based on assumptions and the assumptions are invariably incomplete, oversimplified or just wrong.
This post must be rivalling PN's for excessive length.
On 15 Jul 2016 at 5:47pm Observer wrote:
Some fair points, but I don't understand what most of that has to do with the EU, seeing that most immigration (including the Indian doctors you mention) is non-EU and already under our control. The other problem, which you don't mention, is that we could also see millions of ageing Brits in Spain heading back home with all the medical costs and burdens that implies.
On economics, though - completely wrong. We've already seen major companies reconsidering their commitment to the UK. We'll see a lot more of that over the next few years.
On 15 Jul 2016 at 9:23pm Earl of Lewes wrote:
@Fairmeadow - Unlike PN's libertarian drivel, your post is spot on. I completely agree with your views on population, but this position seems to be unfashionable in Lewes, where many people would rather bury their heads in the sand and ignore one of the most pressing issues of our time. What is the point of having a strong economy if housing is unaffordable due to excessive demand?
On 16 Jul 2016 at 3:17pm frexit wrote:
Hey Earl of Lewes and FairMeadow. It looks like you two didn't read the attached article.
Whether or not there is a problem with immigration is not the question posed. That's a completely different question.
The question you geniuses need to answer is how does the UK extricate itself from the EU and obtain anything like a deal that will satisfy the majority of leave votes. If immigration is the main issue how is the Ministry for Brexit going to get a deal on free movement without crashing the economy?
On 16 Jul 2016 at 9:18pm Fairmeadow wrote:
In read the article. But where is the real threat? Do you really think the EU will introduce tariffs against us when they sell twice as much to us as we sell to them? If they do Toyotas will get cheaper, VWs dearer. I drive a Toyota anyway, my fifth as it happens and they are great cars. You have been taken in by Project Fear. There isn't any real problem. We old people have survived being told by "experts" it would be a disaster if we left the ERM and a disaster if we didn't join the Euro. It wasn't true, and neither are the dire predictions of Project Fear. Don't panic Private Pike. Just hold your nerve. It will be fine.
On 16 Jul 2016 at 10:06pm frexit wrote:
"Do you really think the EU will introduce tariffs against us when they sell twice as much to us as we sell to them?"
No. It doesn't work like that. The German car manufactures are not calling the shots. There are 27 countries who have to agree a new deal. Any one of them can veto it. It doesn't matter if the Germans want to sell us cars without a tariff. They can't if one of the other 26 nations objects.
Take a look at this graph attached. It shows the export of goods and services from the other EU countries as a percentage of GDP. For Germany it's about 4%. For Croatia it's about 1%. The car industry is a fraction of that 4%
As I pointed out earlier the UK cannot enter into a bilateral agreement with any one nation. But in any case. What damage will it do to Germans car industry if we don't have access to the single market? We won't stop buying Audis VW's and BMW's we'll just buy a few less because we'll pay more for them. German manufacturers can just put more effort into marketing in other countries and the loss to German as a whole is miniscule. The fact that we buy more to the EU as a whole than we sell to them is to their benefit now ours.
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