The UK Politics and EU Referendum thread - merged

[TightEnd]

It’s a little risky to have your failed negotiation contingency plan rely on the cooperation of your failed negotiation counter-party

yes there is a mutual interest (EU economies affected too), but it's like we've put a gun to our own head, and then wrapped our opponents finger around the trigger and told them we're pretty sure they won't pull the trigger because they'll get bloody If they do.

perhaps the temporary game here is a series of "no deal deals" eg aviation (so planes still fly) and maybe a rolling extension of A50,but its going to be hairy i think

of course if this contingency plan fails, it’s easy then to blame it not on your own negotiating tactics but the “failed” counterparty and its stubbornness. Especially if you know that a lot of the media will back that message to the hilt. But that is only for internal UK consumption.

[neeko]

apologies, just reporting some good news facts actually happening now as opposed to project fear speculation potentially happening in the future.

That said, is a big net fall in Euro migration causing further strain on social infrastructure? Or is that perhaps another positive.

"The number of EU nationals working in the UK is falling, leaving a skills shortage. And the government is doing too little to stop it." writes maikebohn in the New Statesman

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/brexit/2018/08/brexodus-real-and-it-will-hurt-uk

Another positive of Brexit will be that the government will need to actively address a skills shortage in our workforce

As we can see this problem was papered over by using migration labour

Great opportunity to improve the skills of British labour and keep that revenue in the British economy rather than losing it abroad

As we

The benefit of course is leaving the EU is that we can scrap pesky rules on qualifications, so that builders can be instantly classified as doctors and start operating the next day.

The reality of course is that nothing will change and we won’t train more people we will import doctors from around the world to fill our skills shortage, disgraceful really as we are just getting foreign governments to pay for the training of our doctors, pretending that we are limiting immigration and then letting the same people in anyway

[MANTIS01]

Where would all these new migrant doctors live?

Reckon builders should stick with their current profession.   

[MANTIS01]

IMF data predicts that by 2020 90% of world GDP growth will come from outside EU.

UK will be free to exploit that opportunity and Liam Fox is targeting £100b increase in exports.

[TightEnd]

IMF data predicts that by 2020 90% of world GDP growth will come from outside EU.

UK will be free to exploit that opportunity and Liam Fox is targeting £100b increase in exports.

!

The message of the government's no deal Brexit preparation documents? No deal will mean a catastrophic loss of economic control for the UK. @Independent :

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/no-deal-brexit-documents-domnic-raab-uk-leave-eu-technical-transport-medicines-a8504541.html

[TightEnd]

The U.K. will signal that it wants life to continue as normal in the event of a “No Deal” Brexit, in the face of warnings that aircraft might be grounded and hospitals run short of medicine

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-22/u-k-s-raab-wants-business-as-usual-after-a-no-deal-brexit

which is interesting. You can’t pull out of hundreds of international treaties and then carry on as if those treaties were sill in force. Forget politics. This is just logic.

[TightEnd]

Philip Hammond today risked a major Government bust-up as he warned leaving the EU without a deal could be devastating for Britain - in flat contradiction to a Cabinet colleague.

https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/foreign-affairs/brexit/news/97765/philip-hammond-sparks-fresh-cabinet-row-over-risks-uk-no

[TightEnd]

this is a brilliant article

'The UK government’s negotiations with the EU lack any positive economic strategy - it is caught between a rock and a hard place, between economic disaster and English nationalism, and the status quo.'

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/08/23/the-roots-of-brexit-lie-in-britains-broken-economic-model-now-a-new-social-settlement-is-needed-urgently/

[TightEnd]

our good friend Ian Dunt's take on the Brexit No Deal notices.

eg "Theresa May needs no-deal to look awful, because a comparison with it is the only thing to recommend her own rubbish Chequers plan. The ERG hardliners on the backbenches need it to look completely normal, because it is the only form of Brexit which does not demand that they face the existence of objective reality." :-)

http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2018/08/23/sweaty-and-terrified-raab-fumbles-his-brexit-no-deal-announc



And if you think it sounds bad, you won't want to read what a senior Civil Servant told one journalist yesterday: "however bad it looks from the outside it is a thousand times worse from the inside."

[TightEnd]

A great if rather sad listen, worth a few minutes of your time

Arch Brexiteer Mr Isaby of Brexit Central doesn’t understand the difference between import and export tariffs

The five seconds of acutely embarrassing silence when he realises he's been found out as knowing absolutely nothing are absolute gold.

https://soundcloud.com/bbcradiokent/nodealbrexit-heated-debate

[TightEnd]

meanwhile a word from the (un)official opposition

[Doobs]

IMF data predicts that by 2020 90% of world GDP growth will come from outside EU.

UK will be free to exploit that opportunity and Liam Fox is targeting £100b increase in exports.

I know Liam is a doctor and everything, but how do we sell more when our biggest export markets impose tarriffs than we do when they don't?   It seems hopelessly optimistic to me.    Though the current plan of deliberately trashing the economy, and making sterling less valuable seems to be working to an extent.   

[TightEnd]

The Leader of the Labour Party has been revealed as saying that 'Zionists' aren't really properly English.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/jewish-labour-mp-feels-unwelcome-in-party-after-footage-emerges-of-jeremy-corbyn-saying-british-a3919091.html

[TightEnd]

Any remark about “British Zionists” will feel to the majority of Britain’s Jews that it is about them.

Bush on why Corbyn's 2013 remarks to a room of Islamists hosted by a holocaust denier are so inflammatory:

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2018/08/why-are-jeremy-corbyn-s-remarks-about-british-zionists-offensive

[nirvana]

this is a brilliant article

'The UK government’s negotiations with the EU lack any positive economic strategy - it is caught between a rock and a hard place, between economic disaster and English nationalism, and the status quo.'

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/08/23/the-roots-of-brexit-lie-in-britains-broken-economic-model-now-a-new-social-settlement-is-needed-urgently/

Agreed, I can't articulate my thoughts properly around the interaction between our economy and freedom of movement and the way it builds on and magnifies the social issues we face but this guy has done a great job of it

One reason that EU free movement has been a problem in the UK is that it has exacerbated the structural imbalances and distributional inequalities of our consumption-driven growth model. One of the transmission mechanisms between free movement and bad outcomes for many people in the UK is through the impact upon training and skill formation. To be clear, the UK’s poor record on training is not caused by EU free movement. It is caused by the fundamental difficulty capitalist economies have of providing collective goods in the absence of direct state provision. Skill formation is such a collective good: the costs are to the employer but gains are quickly socialized as a worker moves jobs. As a result, economies based on wage labour will systematically under-invest in skills.

EU free movement of labour rules have provided employers in the UK with a way of escaping the financial burden and risk of investing in skills. Without institutional remedies of the sort that exist in more regulated and institutionalized labour markets, the impact on training is severe. The latest official figures for apprenticeships makes for grim reading: a 31% drop in the number of people in in-work training schemes between last August and May of this year. On the very same day, newspapers were reporting that universities were unable to fill their places.

Another transmission mechanism is the factor mix. High levels of net migration into the EU have encouraged businesses to pursue labour-rich extensive growth strategies. Employing more people is one way to gain a competitive edge, especially in some service sectors, but over time its drags down productivity as firms invest less in new technology and in the training required to enable existing employees to get the best out of this technology. There are some small signs that a tightening labour market is beginning to stimulate a move to intensive growth strategies, which would mean more capital investment, but UK productivity growth is as flat as ever.