Brexit – The Death of a Unicorn

I mean actually studies show that Brexit has already cost us dear

Brexit will have soon cost the UK more than all its payments to the EU over the past 47 years put together

Brexit will have soon cost the UK more than all its payments to the EU over the past 47 years put together

• Bloomberg said the cost of the UK's vote to leave the EU had already reached £130 billion.
• A further £70 billion is likely to be added by the end of 2020, the economist Dan Hanson found.

 

Here is a video with another view from a more left wing commentator

And something from the more right wing Finacial Times

- Pound is becoming an emerging market currency, says BofA analyst

Thing is as I’ve said the repercussions of Brexit policies well take place over years – but so far I can find no objective observer that believes that the UK has gained from the vote to leave the EU so far and few that belive it will do so in the medium to long-term future

 

Renn

Why do you like Mal's post?

What do you like about the video rant of the far right politician - did it have much evidence in it to back up his assertion?

 

Dealing with Unicorns

Back during the leave campaign it was all about the deal - the great deal - the wonderful deal - the fantastic deal.

And not just the deal we would get with Europe but the deals we would get with everyone, deals that would be universally better than anything we could have got through EU membership.

Back then the idea of not getting a deal was not really mentioned - except as a wink wink bargaining chip that we would never have to use (then later complained that the EU hadn’t actually believed them)

Or the no deal scenario was portrayed as part of the remainers project fear, because we would get a deal, a better deal, we held all the cards and we were from Great Britain.

Basically any argument that denied the existence of the unicorn was dubbed project fear or a sign of unpatriotically running the country down - of hating the English and of loving foreigners.

Only later after the campaign was over did the idea that a deal might actually be worse than the one we already had and people began to talk about what became boiled down into the slogan ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’ but even then most levers seem to see ‘no deal’ as a threat that could be used to frighten the weak foreigners into giving ‘us’ what we wanted.

I never really understood that threat as any objective observer could see that a no deal situation would hurt the UK far, far more than the EU.

Even in the 2019 General election Boris Johnson was lying about having an ‘oven ready deal’ all set to go as soon as he got elected. This was meant to reassure those that still feared there would be a no deal however by then many hard line leavers had convinced themselves that was wanted they really wanted all along.

The unicorn great deal, the wonderful deal, the fantastic deal was in fact a myth or has had its meaning subverted so that the deal mentioned was actually the worst outcome possible the absence of a deal.

The reality all along was that we could never get a better deal than the one we already had, not with the EU and not with the other countries we have deals with through the EU. With the EU it was always going to be worse with the other counties it would be the same or worse.

As it seems to have turned out we have a few deal and none better than what we already had and some like the US trade deal seems by all accounts to be very bad for the UK so much so that the Brexit government are keeping the negotiations secret (unlike the ones with the EU) even to the point that they will not be revealed until five years after they are signed. Although Boris’s allowing the lowering of food standards are an indication of the direction of travel.

It would also indicate that far from increasing our political independence by leaving the EU we have actually lessened it, leaving the EU has revealed the UK weakness not its strength.

 

Vlad is trying to associate Boris with Gunnar, seeing as how Gunnar was supporting brexit and the British peoples opinions, decisions by majority vote, Therefore, in Vlads mind, brits are neo nazis too, since many see gunner as such and also states the positive to Brexit, as does Boris.

It is madness and divisive the tactics Vlad uses.

 

Mal

LOL well I’m beginning to think you have a thing for far right politicians – this video has Jerome Riviere member of what was the French National Front (now called National Rally because the old title had become too associated with neo-Nazis).

And again another rant lacking in substance or content.

Mal what does it say about you that the people you want to associate with are from the very far right or even neo-Nazis?

 

Breach

But many people do think Gunnar is a neo-Nazis and he is a member of the far right Alternative for Germany that doesn’t seem disputed, but that doesn’t mean all those that voted to leave in the UK are neo-Nazis although it does seem like all those with neo-Nazis views seem to have support leaving.

I don’t think that is been divisive it is just been accurate. I mean Mal has put up two politicians so far both of which are seen as far right extremists.

My view of Boris is that he is a self-orientated opportunist so if it’s possible that if he thought it would be advantageous to him to be a neo-Nazis I think he’d be happy to say he was one.

Dominic who is really running the show is a neoliberal utopian not a neo-Nazis but also not really caring for democracy or rule of law if they got in the way for his goals

 

what does it say about you when you dismiss everyone that doesnt agree with your bullshit , by calling them far this or neo that ? I dont even know why you bother replying to my posts as you have already tried to call me a Liar and worse ! I just do it to you to expose the lengths you go to to try to promote a failed ideal when the rest have moved on , and realised its not turning out like scaremongers like yourself tried to say it would (only you seem to be the only one still clinging to that daft notion )
also not quoting the post you are replying to is a stupid tactic you use to make it look like people have nothing to say as a retort (If I dont reply its cos I cant really be arsed nothing more ! )

 

Did you delete my post about how much Covid and the lockdowns were going to cost various EU countries?

You think that's not relevant to Brexit now?

What were the most negative estimates for the cost of Brexit over 5 years? 1/10th of what your country just spent handling Covid in the last 5 months

 

Mal

Yes I disagree with fascists and racist are you saying you don’t?

I mean there are many moderate right wing people that supported leaving the EU I don’t think they are neo-Nazis I have family that voted to leave I don’t think they are far right or neo-Nazis

I’m just pointing out that you keep posting up stuff from far right people and neo-Nazis.

What does it say of anyone that the people they wish to be associated with are from the very far right or who are thought of as neo-Nazis?

That is the thing - we can’t move on - we are stuck in this Brexit process – that’s my point Brexit is still with us and will be for years and so far it has failed to bring about any of the things that those pushing for it claimed it would.

LOL but the predictions of the remainers are the ones that have or are becoming true. I mean come on where are the Brexit benefits can you see any and if so where is your evidence?

 

VG

The cost of Covid is costing virtually all countries something often depending on how seriously they took thee risk. The Boris/Cummings government didn’t take it seriously and England is paying a high cost for that.

The cost of Brexit is going to be bad –how bad depends on how badly it is handled and so far the Boris/Cummings government’s handling of it has been pretty bad. So the impact could be heavy with an economic hit that is equal to that of the covid hit to the UK.

The Brexit impact on the EU will not be as severe as that on the UK, again how bad it will be depends on its handling and the countries that could be hit worst have done reasonable job of trying to mitigate the effects.

Even before the hammer blow of Covid in the UK the vote to leave had cost the country’s economy so we are going to end up getting hit twice once by nature and the other by design. While most countries only have one economic woe to deal with the English have chosen to impose two on the UK.

 

The Price of a Unicorn

One thread of the unicorn myth, was the saving of money – those that wanted to leave pushed a story of waste, red tape and bureaucrats on the gravy train for doing next to nothing – they nurtured the belief that ‘they’ the EU foreigners were taking ‘us’ the English for a ride that ‘we’ were been ripped off by lazy and mendacious foreigners. While any benefits of EU membership were ignored, played down or even spun to seem like drawbacks through lies and misdirection.

Wouldn’t it be better to spend that money on ourselves and not on wasteful foreigners they said beginning in whispers then growls but growing to screams.

However it’s beginning to become clear that those EU bureaucrats and institutions that we were giving a contribution to were actually doing things that were needed and that going alone actually increases the cost and the number of bureaucrats that we now have to pay for.

Larger numbers of new civil servants and customs officers. New regulations, more paperwork, increased bureaucracy. Also new departments and institutions are having to be set up from scratch and at great expense to do the work once done through the EU, for example it has estimated that it will cost up to £40m annually to create an independent UK aviation safety agency, against a current contribution to the European wide agency of £1m to £4m a year.

Also money is been wasted by having to do things to mitigate for the lack of any coherent plan, like setting up huge lorry parks outside of ports or putting in place physical customs posts that had never had been needed before.

And while it has been calculated that our trading potential is falling that of the EU is expanding.

The UK is having to do catch up on all the trade deals we once had through the EU (some 40 covering over 70 countries) and the many more trading agreements that we already had as part of the EU and will lose once the transition period is over. So far the largest economy the UK has successfully brokered a trade deal with is Switzerland. In the meantime the EU has new agreements with Singapore, Japan and Mercosur (the South American trading bloc) and it has been calculated that these give the potential of some 500 billion in trade about the same amount that would be lost if the UK stopped all together with trading with the EU. Added to this the EU has other agreements already in the pipeline most notably Australia and New Zealand.

Most countries in the world are waiting to see what happens with the EU trade deal before they commit to trade talks - for many because it will reveal how desperate the English government will be and so how many advantageous concessions they can force because of it.

There is already talk of regions suing the Westminster government over the EU development funds that having been going to some of the most deprived areas of the UK. The Cornwall council for example has called on the government to provide it with £700 million in extra funding which the Brexit-backing region will lose when it leaves the EU. In the campaigns the promise was that any EU development money would be matched by a leave government but many think that is now in doubt. The EU has just passed a Covid relief fund that many of those deprived areas would have got a good share of but due to leaving they now will not.

What has been discovered is that the supposed Brexit benefits have turned into a deficits, study after study has made it plain that asking to leave has cost the UK economy dear and is going to cost us more going ahead.

Even before the hammer blow of Covid the vote to leave had cost the country so we end up getting hit twice once by nature and the other by design. While most countries only have one economic woe to deal with the English have chosen to impose two on the UK.

 

This is one of the more negative estimates for the cost Brexit from 2018

£26 billion a year

Brexit has cost Britain 500 million pounds a week, study says


This is an article on the OBR estimates on what the Covid response has cost the UK in just 4 months, March to June 2020

£300 billion this year

Cost of UK response to COVID rises to 132.5 billion pounds: OBR

 

ONE

Brexit will have soon cost the UK more than all its payments to the EU over the past 47 years put together

• Bloomberg said the cost of the UK's vote to leave the EU had already reached £130 billion.
• A further £70 billion is likely to be added by the end of 2020, the economist Dan Hanson found.

From the post above

TWO

But remember as I keep repeating but which you just keep ignoring is we are at the moment in the transition period nothing has radically changed yet and we still don’t know how the UK will be trading in 5 months’ time.

THREE

And again as I keep pointing out and you keep ignoring - Brexit is a process that will be going on for years.

FOUR

So you know admit Brexit is not good for the UK?

 

I’m not trying to downplay Covid I'm just saying it is madness to continue on with Brexit while in the middle of a global pandemic.

The most sensible and prudent thing to have done was to ask for an extension of the transition period of say a couple of years which the EU would have been happy to grant and done it at the very beginning of this crisis rather than trying to carry on with Brexit.

The whole of government could have then been concentrating on Covid rather than been split on two big events.

The money been spent by government on Brexit preparations could have been diverted to covid response

The money been spent by the private sector on Brexit preparations could have been diverted to covid response

We would not have to be dealing with the disruption to supply chains and new ways of working that any form of Brexit will cause over the next cuple of years at least.

We could have a period of trading stability

And so on and so on.

That opportunity has been missed and even if it happened now much damage has already been caused, but it would still be the best thing to do even now.

Thing is that Covid has hit us the Brexit transition period ending doesn't have to

 

As someone has just put it to me - if you are in hospital with a respiratory virus that means you are about to be put on a ventilator is that the best time to decide to cut your leg off.

 

The Union of the Unicorn

Britain voted to leave the EU but it didn’t vote evenly, it comes across as a very nationalistically English project.

In Scotland and Northern Ireland the vote was to remain and the example of Wales is also telling because as a study by Oxford University indicates those that identified as Welsh were more likely to have voted to remain while those who thought of themselves as British but living in Wales (mainly English people) were more likely to have voted to leave.

Many people living in Wales were not born there they are English people that have moved there, often to retire, with nearly a quarter of those migrants been aged over 65. Wales only voted for Brexit by around 82,000 votes. And it has been noted that border towns and areas of central Wales with large English communities, such as Wrexham and Powys, recorded a higher proportion of leave votes, whereas Welsh-speaking areas such as Gwynedd and Ceredigion had high remain votes.

The United Kingdom is made up of four nations - Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England and it seems that a majority of Northern Irish, Scots and Welsh wanted to remain with only a majority of English wanting to leave. So it is the English that is imposing its will on those that didn’t and don’t want it.

It has been pointed out that if the UK was more like the EU where any single nation can veto such an important decision then Brexit could never have happened. The EU turns out to be less controlled by the dictates of Brussels than the other nations of the UK are to the dictatorial rule of Westminster.

The Tory Party is official called ‘The Conservative and Unionist Party’ and has had a long history of supporting and preserving the union of the United Kingdom. I think that is now over and the Tory party has now become the Brexit party which is a nationalistic English party. Theresa May was an old style Tory a unionist who rejected the EU idea of a border down the Irish Sea as part of the Withdrawal agreement but when Boris Johnson took over he was very happy to cut that deal while lying through his teeth that it wouldn’t really be a border. He could so easily do that because he knew the old Tory party that cared about the union was dead.

A border down the Irish Sea makes it easier for Northern Ireland to trade with Eire than it will for it to trade with the rest of the union. There will continue to be a frictionless border between the north and south of Ireland but no frictionless border between Northern Ireland and the mainland of England and Scotland, with border checks and extra paperwork been inevitable. Because that will also impact Eire’s transportation of goods the Dublin government is looking at alternative route to the rest of Europe that bypass England (in the same way that many European companies are doing the same but going the other way). If this is successful then Northern Irish firms that trade with the EU will very likely take up those routes as well bring the North and South even closer together.

The Scottish are not happy and the desire for independence has grown as is growing. Now it might be said that they only had a vote 2014 that voted to remain but it has to be remembered that back then there were two things that that the scots were promised if they voted remain. One was extra powers for Holyrood and less interference from Westminster and Second that the UK would never leave the EU.

The Brexit vote destroyed that, the extra powers never really appeared and with Brexit powers are actually been taken away, and while the Scottish didn’t vote to leave the English nationalist party headed by Johnson and Cummings is imposing the unpopular policy on the country, and if that isn’t interference from Westminster on a grand scale nothing is.

If this situation had actually been designed to bring about Scottish Independence it could not have done a better job.

Even in England the vote was not consistent research suggests that most of England’s leave votes came from the south of the region, with the highest numbers in areas populated with affluent older people, such as Hampshire, Cornwall and Devon, again like Wales these places are were many go in their retirement.

And studies have indicated that one factor was age, the older a person was in 2016 the more likely the person was b likely to vote to leave while the younger the voter was the more likely they were to vote to remain.

Another factor was racial with white people being the most likely to vote pro-Leave, followed by those of an Indian background who were almost twice as likely to support Leave as other minority groups. There were much higher levels of support for Remain amongst Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Black Caribbean and Black African groups – on average a quarter being more pro-Leave than Remain.

Basically if you were older, white and identified as English then you were more likely to have voted to leave than people who were not.

 

"London (CNN Business)UK economic output shrank by 20.4% in the second quarter of 2020, the worst quarterly slump on record, pushing the country into the deepest recession of any major global economy.

This crash in GDP in the April-June period, compared with the first quarter, is the worst since quarterly records began in 1955. Industries most exposed to government lockdown measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic — services, production and construction — saw record drops.

Compared with the end of 2019, UK economic output fell by a cumulative 22.1% in the first six months of 2020, a worse outcome than Germany, France and Italy, and double the 10.6% fall recorded in the United States, the Office for National Statistics said.

UK recession is worst of any major economy - CNN

 

The cost of Covid is costing virtually all countries something often depending on how seriously they took thee risk. The Boris/Cummings government didn’t take it seriously and England is paying a higher cost because of that.

The cost of Brexit is going to be bad –how bad depends on how badly it is handled and so far the Boris/Cummings government’s handling of it has been pretty bad. So the impact could be heavy with an economic hit that is equal to that of the covid hit to the UK.

The Brexit impact on the EU will not be as severe as that on the UK, again how bad it will be depends on its handling and the countries that could be hit worst have done reasonable job of trying to mitigate the effects.

Even before the hammer blow of Covid in the UK the vote to leave had cost the country’s economy so we are going to end up getting hit twice once by nature and the other by design. While most countries only have one economic woe to deal with the English have chosen to impose two on the UK.