UK Politics: What Goes DUP Must Come Down

[A Horse Named Stranger]

There's no such thing as a maanged no deal.

[The Marquis de Leech]

1 minute ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

There's no such thing as a maanged no deal.

Oh, do tell Mervyn King that. I'm sure he'll be fascinated.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Another old one from Dunt back from December. On EU no-deal prep, and delusions of managed no-deal.

[The Marquis de Leech]

2 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Another old one from Dunt back from December. On EU no-deal prep, and delusions of managed no-deal.

You still aren't addressing the point. Namely preparation.

If the UK Government had said on the invocation of Article 50 that as of 29th March 2019, the UK would exit the Customs Union, Single Market, and EU political structure - and then spent those two years preparing for that eventuality, none of this would be an issue.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

You are clearly overestimating the UK's power to influence things.

The UK would not just be cut off from the EU, it would also lose all the Trade Agreements the EU had negotiated. In simpler words, that even our leave poster here would understand. The UK would have zero Trade Agreements. Is that one understood?

Now then, the whole fun part of going thru the implications sector by sector begins.

Car manufacturers need the frictionless trade for the JiT manufacturing model. Same goes for Airbus and aviation industry. Tariffs are not a big. It's the customs hold up. (check article 1). Business can't stockpile everything, they can do that for a month maybe, because they simply lack the capacity to do just that. Then there's also medicine and stuff. Cancer medicine is particularly tricky, as it is highly perishable.

So how do you prepare for that?  Please, be a bit more specific, than the UK had two years time.

Aviation was covered in Dunt 3.

 

Brexiters delusion of a standstill agreement with the EU was/is not gonna fly. The EU would simply refuse to play ball.

[Spockydog]

Brexit is dead. Theresa May knows it, the ERG knows it, and by the look on Nigel Farage's face yesterday, so does he.

Does anyone seriously believe that any of those ERG flipfloppers would have done so had they believed they could still get a no deal? Not a chance. 

 

[The Marquis de Leech]

23 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

You are clearly overestimating the UK's power to influence things.

The UK would not just be cut off from the EU, it would also lose all the Trade Agreements the EU had negotiated. In simpler words, that even our leave poster here would understand. The UK would have zero Trade Agreements. Is that one understood?

Now then, the whole fun part of going thru the implications sector by sector begins.

Car manufacturers need the frictionless trade for the JiT manufacturing model. Same goes for Airbus and aviation industry. Tariffs are not a big. It's the customs hold up. (check article 1). Business can't stockpile everything, they can do that for a month maybe, because they simply lack the capacity to do just that. Then there's also medicine and stuff. Cancer medicine is particularly tricky, as it is highly perishable.

So how do you prepare for that?  Please, be a bit more specific, than the UK had two years time.

Aviation was covered in Dunt 3.

Brexiters delusion of a standstill agreement with the EU was/is not gonna fly. The EU would simply refuse to play ball.

New Zealand somehow negotiate trade agreements... and our national GDP is less than one twelfth of yours. We also don't have massive shortages of cancer medicine, because while we don't have free trade agreements with various places (hell, up until about twenty years ago, we only had an agreement with Australia), we still trade anyway. We still trade with the EU (and UK), despite facing tariffs and checks. We've only had a FTA with China since 2008, and it wasn't as if we were dirt poor before then.

In this case, the key is giving time for business models to adapt to the end of frictionless trade. Will this hurt? Yes. But a business with two years to prepare can actually prepare, because they know what they're facing - and one can adapt prior fiscal and monetary policy to compensate for the shock, along with state-support once Brexit has taken place.

(There's also the obvious point about replacement agreements - and the UK has been negotiating those - but an upfront clarity about what Brexit would actually entail would reduce the fundamental problem of uncertainty).

[A Horse Named Stranger]

I don't mean to be disrespectful towards New Zealand, however your economy is totally different from the UKs [fill in sheep joke here]. So that if NZ can do it, the UK can easily do it, too, it is not a serious argument.

And your economy is not that deeply intervined with the EUs as the UKs. I am (obviously) happy, that there's no problem with getting cancer medicine into NZ, however the UKs supply line is the EU (Netherlands or Belgium iirc), and with those highly perishable goods proximity is a freaking big factor. It's not like some piece of sheep meat you can throw onto some ship and transport it around the world in a deep freeze state. If you were cut off from Australia (I presume that's where you get those precious isotopes from) you have an actual problem.

Business having to adapt to alternatives to frictionless trade, yeah, that's one possibility. Just moving business elsewhere with frictionless trade intact  sounds like a more convenient way. BMW and Airbus already strongly hinted that they'd move operations to the continent. Car manufacturers will do the same, or have already revealed plans to that. Congratulations, you just managed to do a Thatcher 2.0 for the manufacturing sector. Of course the big bread winner in the UK, the service industry, you also just managed to shut it off the European market.

The loss of all trade agreements is actually also a fucking big deal. Apart from the lack of infrastructure to perform food checks on a level the UK would actually need, getting food on WTO default terms means stuff in the supermarket gets significantly more expensive (and also way less on the shelves). Add to that the value of pound dropping, this doesn't really sound like fun.

[Seli]

7 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Oh when we voted to join the EEC? A largely economic union of 6 other countries? Did we also vote for all the other changes that have happened since that time? Maastricht etc?

and the ‘oh well everything else is rubbish so why are you complaining’ argument for staying in is hardly inspiring.

Yes you did. All changes are a result of unanimous decisions of the member nations. All nations represented by governments formed by their local flavour of democracy.

It could be you weren't paying attention. But of course you are also the victim of a political system and a style of journalism that is very happy to blame the EU for uniquely local decisions.

[Heartofice]

7 minutes ago, Seli said:

Yes you did. All changes are a result of unanimous decisions of the member nations. All nations represented by governments formed by their local flavour of democracy.

The point I was responding to implied that the UK population voted to enter the EU. In fact they didn't, they voted to join what was then the EEC (actually technically to remain in the EEC) , with the view to it being a purely trade based relationship. We have then never been asked what our opinion was on each subsequent treaty that increased the political proximity. The one time the UK public was asked its opinion on its relationship with the EU it resulted in us leaving.  

[A wilding]

... in a very close result after a campaign of lies on a Trumpian scale. Perhaps most notably the lies that the departure would be a soft Brexit in which the UK would quickly be able to negotiate a deal with the EU that would "be the easiest one in history" and where it "would hold all the cards", resulting in it keeping just about all the advantages of being in the EU. There was no talk of economic damage, of no-deal, of WTO rules, or of "Dunkirk spirit" then.

 

[Werthead]

5 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

You still aren't addressing the point. Namely preparation.

If the UK Government had said on the invocation of Article 50 that as of 29th March 2019, the UK would exit the Customs Union, Single Market, and EU political structure - and then spent those two years preparing for that eventuality, none of this would be an issue.

How?

Leaving the EU without any other trade deals in place means automatically adopting WTO base tariffs in, which will mean an overnight, immediate increase in price on just about every import Britain needs. So we'll supermarket prices increasing - on average - between 12 and 14% overnight. There is no way to minimise that without having continuity holdover agreements in place (like we now have with, er, the Faroe Islands and Chile) or a transition agreement which keeps us under the EU banner (which is what May's deal is supposed to achieve). Whilst minor countries are happy to engage with continuity holdover agreements, none of the major countries are remotely interested in doing that.

So we'll have a situation where the USA will demand that we lower food hygiene standards to allow our markets to be swamped by cheap American food imports, but if we do that the EU will be much less inclined to give us a free trade agreement, out of the reasonable fear of cheap-arse US food getting into the EU using us a back door. The US will also want to open up the NHS to price increases (American Big Pharma already rubbing their hands with glee about being able to double to quadruple their charges to the NHS now we won't have the EU backing up our position). India and China have also said that in return for free trade agreements, they want visa entry requirements to the UK to be massively relaxed, to the point where we may be swapping free movement of people from the EU for free movement from elsewhere. But of course Brexit was never about race, so I'm sure those pro-Brexiters will be delighted when the immigration rates for non-white people start shooting up. Even Japan has said they want to rinse us to get a much better deal out of the UK than they did with the EU.

Since we also can't start negotiating trade deals until we physically leave the EU (and this is non-negotiable), then it doesn't matter if we had 2 years or 20 years warning, we simply can't do any preparatory work for getting new deals in place for when we leave. The general feeling seems to be that it will take between 5 and 7 years to negotiate the new trade deals with the EU, US, Japan and other major world economies, and even smaller ones like Canada, in which time we will be in limbo under WTO rules.

Throw into that the fact that Britain doesn't fucking make anything that other countries can't get elsewhere, and our strongest economic sector (services) is also something that can go overseas easily, we don't have a particularly winning hand here.

[DireWolfSpirit]

22 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

Hello. Has Brexit killed you all yet? Is England still there? Is Whales?

Whales present and accounted for! 

 

[Guest]

57 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

Whales present and accounted for! 

 

Whales is a myth.

[DireWolfSpirit]

https://images.app.goo.gl/tvV2zH8QjSEv9ijU9

[Martell Spy]

5 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

Whales present and accounted for! 

 

Well you joke, but the Orca whales are now dying out in the Puget Sound. Long live J50 AKA Scarlet.

[Which Tyler]

In news that I'm sure will shock everyone, the Tories appear to split on the prospect of a snap election at the moment: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-47763034

 

[Impmk2]

Can anyone explain how a fresh election to resolve Brexit would be perfectly democratic, but a 2nd referendum on Brexit undemocratic?

The irony of course being that a 2nd referendum would actually give a clear course to follow, while an election may very well end in a similar mess.

[Which Tyler]

A GE absolutely will end in another mess, the only thing it will solve is her not going to back on her word not to hold a 2nd referendum (she'll just go back on her word not to hold a snap election... again, and to not lead the Tories through another election, so she'll only be breaking her word twice with a new GE, rather than o CE on a 2nd ref).

The "advantage" is that it will force labour to put their cards on the table for what they want to do with Brexit - the plan is that labour would split nearly as badly as the Tories would with a GE.

 

So nothing whatsoever to do with governing, or what's good for the country try, and entirely to do with party politics, though this time aimed at splitting the opponents, rather than purely Tory infighting.

[Heartofice]

Mays words hinted that she thought that the current Parliament had reached the limit of what it could achieve, it being so utterly split, and that it couldn't move on a realistic way forward in its current form. Was she hinting at a GE? I don't know. I think it would be a pretty daft idea, much like the last GE was a daft idea led by Tory motivations. More than likely it would simply result in a hung parliament or tiny majority for one side or the other and nothing would be be solved.