Brexit Penny Dropping?

[ManxTaxPayer]

1 hour ago, P.K. said:

Boris Johnson’s biggest lie about Europe is finally coming home to roost

Simon Jenkins has got a bit of a cheek. Iirc he was originally a supporter of leaving the EU. He's right here about Johnson though. 

 

Edit to add this...  Not really fair of me to say he was a supporter, he voted remain. But his optimism seems a little err, optimistic!

Edited September 9, 2021 by ManxTaxPayer

[ManxTaxPayer]

"European rules capping credit and debit card interchange fees at 0.2% and 0.3% no longer apply to UK businesses."

So Paypal, Visa and Mastercard are all hiking them. Considerably. 

[ManxTaxPayer]

Three follows EE and Vodafone in confirming a return to roaming charges for UK customers visiting mainland Europe from next year despite signalling in the past that it had no plans to do so.

Edited September 9, 2021 by ManxTaxPayer

[joebean]

This was always going to happen. Short-term issues created by leaving the EU and Remainers trying to portray them as long-term consequences. Personally, as an Englishman and Brit, I can live with the short-term issues to protect the freedom of the UK and the benefits of national sovereignty and democracy. But if the EU and submission to the interests of other countries and big business is your bag, keep selling the illusion. It doesn't really matter. 

 

[pongo]

Britain was doing really well before it stupidly decided to leave the EU.

But the really dumb thing was leaving Mrs Thatcher's Single Market.

Britain voted to leave the EU - though many British people were denied the opportunity to vote on giving up their freedoms and the economic benefits.

Britain did not vote to leave the Single Market. The Conservative government chose to do that.

We are less free and economically much worse off long term.

[joebean]

1 hour ago, pongo said:

Britain was doing really well before it stupidly decided to leave the EU.

But the really dumb thing was leaving Mrs Thatcher's Single Market.

Britain voted to leave the EU - though many British people were denied the opportunity to vote on giving up their freedoms and the economic benefits.

Britain did not vote to leave the Single Market. The Conservative government chose to do that.

We are less free and economically much worse off long term.

So, you can predict the long-term can you? That is very clever and you should quit MF and become an advisor to business and Government. Look, all these predictions of economic catastrophe have been proven wrong, to date. The loss of trade as a result of leaving the EU cannot be predicted in the longer term yet as nobody really knows how the EU/UK relationship will develop over time. Additionally, nobody really knows what economic benefits will arise from UK deals with other countries and trade blocs. To present leaving the Single Market as necessarily problematic in the long term is premature and based on a very narrow set of predictors. 

[manxman1980]

10 hours ago, joebean said:

So, you can predict the long-term can you? That is very clever and you should quit MF and become an advisor to business and Government. Look, all these predictions of economic catastrophe have been proven wrong, to date. The loss of trade as a result of leaving the EU cannot be predicted in the longer term yet as nobody really knows how the EU/UK relationship will develop over time. Additionally, nobody really knows what economic benefits will arise from UK deals with other countries and trade blocs. To present leaving the Single Market as necessarily problematic in the long term is premature and based on a very narrow set of predictors. 

This is an example of why you will never convince the brexit hardliners that it was a bad idea.  They have invested so much into their vision that they will not acknowledge the experienced reality.

Obviously COVID-19 has had a big impact on the UK economy but that also gives the UK Government a "scapegoat" and an opportunity to blame problems on the pandemic rather than Brexit.  There do, however, remain underlying issues that Brexit has played a big part in;

1.  Shortage of HGV Drivers (alongside IR35 and COVID-19);

2.  Shortage of agricultural and food (meat packing etc) processing workers;

3.  Delays with goods crossing the UK/EU borders (both ways);

4.  The increased cost of trading with the EU.  I know of several businesses who were exporting to the EU prior to Brexit but have now gone in administration or are in serious financial trouble due to the challenges of exporting their goods and a limited market in the UK.  At least one of these also saw their UK market contract massively due to COVID-19 but that was the smallest part of their business.

5.  The whole situation with the Northern Ireland border which is still not resolved and was largely ignored prior to the EU referendum;

I look forward to all the promised benefits of Brexit but I just cannot see when they are going to arrive.

[ManxTaxPayer]

12 minutes ago, manxman1980 said:

 benefits of Brexit 

For the sake of balance it would be good if contributors could list some of these. I would if I could recognise any. There was the vaccine rollout which became the Johnson government's response to pretty much any criticism, whether relative or not. That's looking rather less impressive these days though in a comparative sense. Anything else? 

[P.K.]

37 minutes ago, ManxTaxPayer said:

For the sake of balance it would be good if contributors could list some of these. I would if I could recognise any. There was the vaccine rollout which became the Johnson government's response to pretty much any criticism, whether relative or not. That's looking rather less impressive these days though in a comparative sense. Anything else? 

Bozo Johnson mentions the vaccine rollout at every possible moment. What he fails to mention is that the Vaccine Taskforce was the brainchild of Sir Patrick Vallance, the Logistics Corps are doing the heavy lifting after getting Matt Hancock's arse out of a sling over PPE not getting to point of need and the jabs are being driven by our NHS Heroes with their slap-in-the-face 1% payrise.

[ballaughbiker]

40 minutes ago, ManxTaxPayer said:

For the sake of balance it would be good if contributors could list some of these. I would if I could recognise any. There was the vaccine rollout which became the Johnson government's response to pretty much any criticism, whether relative or not. That's looking rather less impressive these days though in a comparative sense. Anything else? 

The vaccine rollout decisions were not dependent on EU non-membership.

[P.K.]

As well as her triumph in getting NZ to sign up to a "negative benefit to the UK" trade deal it seems the Liz Truss deal with Australia is somewhat shallow on the "UK benefit" side of things:

David Henig (@DavidHenigUK) Tweeted:
Always worth reminding ourselves of @DmitryOpines UK-Australia trade deal article - "Remarkably, it is not clear what UK negotiators managed to extract in reciprocal concessions". It looks like this may come back to damage the UK government and rightly.

https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/australia-sweeps-table-uk-trade-deal

Kevin Rudd was right...

Edited September 10, 2021 by P.K.
wrong url

[joebean]

12 hours ago, manxman1980 said:

This is an example of why you will never convince the brexit hardliners that it was a bad idea.  They have invested so much into their vision that they will not acknowledge the experienced reality.

Obviously COVID-19 has had a big impact on the UK economy but that also gives the UK Government a "scapegoat" and an opportunity to blame problems on the pandemic rather than Brexit.  There do, however, remain underlying issues that Brexit has played a big part in;

1.  Shortage of HGV Drivers (alongside IR35 and COVID-19);

2.  Shortage of agricultural and food (meat packing etc) processing workers;

3.  Delays with goods crossing the UK/EU borders (both ways);

4.  The increased cost of trading with the EU.  I know of several businesses who were exporting to the EU prior to Brexit but have now gone in administration or are in serious financial trouble due to the challenges of exporting their goods and a limited market in the UK.  At least one of these also saw their UK market contract massively due to COVID-19 but that was the smallest part of their business.

5.  The whole situation with the Northern Ireland border which is still not resolved and on  largely ignored prior to the EU referendum;

I look forward to all the promised benefits of Brexit but I just cannot see when they are going to arrive.

I felt disinclined to comment on this when I first read it; it is just the type of complete arrogant nonsense spouted by those opposed to Brexit that has been heard so many times since the debate began it has become completely boring. If you support Brexit you are portrayed as having "invested so much into their vision that they will not acknowledge the experienced reality" by someone who, from previous posts, is definitely opposed to leaving the EU and determined to see everything as proof of their own "vision", if they ever had one. Let us just examine the delusions here. The arguments and projections about what would happen by even voting to leave and then the experience before and after actually leaving proved two things. First that the projections were not projections at all but just lies spun to the UK electorate to try and win an argument that had no basis and second, the results of leaving were nothing like they said it would be. They were, in fact almost completely wrong. But still the Remain camp spin the same garbage and treat every setback as proof of economic ruin. Shortages of HGV drivers, as an example, is presented here as a big issue. It is not. It is a temporary glitch which will be solved by recruiting more drivers and making HGV training more available. A likely outcome is that UK-based HGV drivers will get paid more and more UK people will get the opportunity of taking up this employment. Presumably the poster thinks it is preferable to keep importing cheaper labour from Europe and artificially suppressing UK driver's pay. 

The labour market will address the issues of labour supply as markets usually do. If there is demand, there will be supply. Temporary shortages will be just temporary, unless we give up on agricultural products and packed meat, to use the examples above. The Northern Ireland border is a thorny issue but one that a political solution will be found. The current position is unsustainable and was never one of the UK's chosing but insisted upon by Brussels. 

The mistake made in the above post is to assume that the benefits of Brexit are all economic and that there was ever a belief that economic benefits would be realised immediately. I presume the poster is a Manx man. Perhaps he should consider the following scenario. The Island joins a trading agreement, with the consent of the Manx public. The Manx Government agrees to extensions of that agreement without further referral to the Manx electorate. Essentially this means that large swathes of Manx law is determined by other countries; that disputes over the use of these laws on the Island are subject to a court based in another country and the electorate here have no democratic right to influence these laws; that the Island has no control over its own borders and anybody from many other countries, far outnumbering the population of the Isle of Man can come here and be employed here, regardless of any local permit legislation. How might the average Manx voter react to this? Would they readily accept their loss of sovereignty; their loss of democracy and loss of control of their own borders? Would they at least ask why all this was agreed without the need to seek their consent? 

I suspect that most Leave voters voted for greater control of their own destiny and rejected the assimilation into the European political project and they did this with an understanding that some short to medium term issues would arise. I don't know; I don't live in the UK and I have been here long enough to not have qualified for a vote in the referendum. I know what my contacts back in the UK think and why they voted, but unlike the poster, I don't presume to base my opinion on a few personal contacts. As I said before, predictions of doom are just premature; they are evidence of a wish to see their opposition to Brexit be justified and are not necessarily based on experience or reality. 

Edited September 10, 2021 by joebean
typo

[ManxTaxPayer]

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Edited September 10, 2021 by ManxTaxPayer

[manxman1980]

11 hours ago, joebean said:

Waffle

The UK has left the EU.  It matters not one bit that my preference was to remain in the EU.

All I would like now is to see some of the benefits of Brexit.  So far I don't believe there have been any.

Illegal immigration and border control, which I believe was meant to be an upside to Brexit,  has only got worse.  

If you read my post properly you will have noted that I said that the IR35 regulations and COVID-19 had also impacted on the HGV driver situation.  

As for that being a short term issue that isn't what many logistics companies are saying. 

As for the Northern Ireland border situation please remember that the current situation stemmed not from the EU but from Johnson's "oven ready" deal.  The reality is that there cannot be a hard border on the Island of Ireland due to the Good Friday Agreement but Brexiteers don't want to hear that.

As for your analogy of the Isle of Man...  We are a part of the Common Travel Area and really have no control over the people who choose to move here from the UK.  The only flimsy control we have is the work permit system.  The Isle of Man population had no say in Brexit despite the fact it affected everyone living here as well.

So, cheer me up.  Its almost a year since the UK left the EU.  What has demonstrably changed for the better?

 

[P.K.]

1 hour ago, manxman1980 said:

As for the Northern Ireland border situation please remember that the current situation stemmed not from the EU but from Johnson's "oven ready" deal.  The reality is that there cannot be a hard border on the Island of Ireland due to the Good Friday Agreement but Brexiteers don't want to hear that.

So, cheer me up.  Its almost a year since the UK left the EU.  What has demonstrably changed for the better?

EU rejects UK’s demand to scrap Northern Ireland protocol

Brussels repeats warning that renegotiation will mean more instability and insists Brexit protocol is ‘only solution we have’

European Union leaders have stressed they are not seeking a “political victory” over the UK as they pushed back sharply against demands that the Northern Ireland Brexit protocol be scrapped.

After a two-day trip to Northern Ireland, the European Commission vice-president, Maroš Šefčovič, repeated his warning that a renegotiation would merely lead to more instability for businesses and communities.

“I will not mince my words. The protocol is not the problem. On the contrary, it is the only solution we have. Failing to apply it will not make problems disappear, but simply take away the tools to solve them,” he said.

Just hours after the Democratic Unionist party had threatened to collapse the Stormont assembly with elections nine months earlier than scheduled, Šefčovič said he had listened to the leaders of all parties and was “ready to explore all the flexibilities” being proposed but renegotiation was a non-starter.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/10/scrapping-northern-ireland-protocol-will-only-make-things-worse-says-eu

So the "oven ready deal" was anything but. It was just another Johnson lie...

 

Edited September 11, 2021 by P.K.