Brexit discussion thread XIV (Please read OP before posting)

'Course he is. He's staunch RCC and likely taking direction from them. That's the way of criminal enterprises and their fellow gangsters.

Tayto was sold by Largo foods to some German crowd a few years ago. Nordie tayto is still nordie-owned, i think.

But I fail to see how Tayto is relevant to a discussion about MG choosing the EU over the UK. Its not like Ireland voted to leave the EU so they could bring back Sam Spudz!

Just on a point about the lying, I actually don't think the likes of JRM, Farage, Davies etc were lying. I do think that they firmly believed that the UK would get everything it wanted. I think they really did believe that they held all the cards.

They often cite Cameron coming back from the EU 'empty handed' as if they were ever anything he could have got. They saw that as a failure of Cameron to use the power of the UK to get what it wanted. Brexit, by scarring the EU by threatening to leave, would see the EU finally come to its sense that the UK was not messing and they would accept whatever the UK demanded to simply keep the UK involved.

There is no doubt that they are lying now. But at the time I think they really believed their own guff.

One of the biggest issues with this initiative is that, far from beginning to rekindle a working/trading relationship with the EU27, it should precipitate still more disincentives into maintaining whatever is currently left of that relationship, and offset the hoped-for bootstrapping of the UK economy from that notional rekindling, by still more years.

The EU27 have moved on, growing ever more disinterested and warier of the unstable UK-

-and, looking at that Lotus Emira story just a few posts before, so does the rest of the world.

   I asked if France and the UK, for example, could negotiate a bi-lateral treaty or agreement that might create a kind of Common Travel Area as between Ireland and the UK to allow freedom of movement, residence, and work between the British and the French.

it would appear that the author of this article was a uk minister of state for europe and seems not to understand what schengen area means. Or does he think france would leave the schengen area to have a common travel area with the uk and give up , no passport controls with 4 eu countries and a EEA country

But to sell goods abroad, China has to produce the goods to the standards in those countries. This is the fundamental issue which Brexit promoters have been ignoring for years. They can make higher power vacuum cleaners if they want, they just won't be able to sell them.

The "lax regulations" which has benefited China are in terms of working conditions, planning, environmental protection, etc. Britain (well London) is a high cost, services based economy, trying to replicate China is not realistic and would mean setting the country back a century overnight.

If there's a reputable economist who argues that the UK can rebuild a manufacturing export sector by slashing wages, working conditions and environmental standards, now would be a good time to name them.

We also have to remember the Brexiteer strategy of negotiating a networks of free trade deals to replace and (they fondly imagine) improve on the trade deals they lost by brexiting. Modern trade deals invariably include non-regression clauses on labour standards, environmental standards, etc, and the UK's new trade deals all include these. Even if the UK did want to beggar its population and destroy its environment in the way that salonfire imagines, the governments of other countries have no particular wish to expose their own domestic industries to competition from low-wage, low standard economies. They would pay a substantial domestic political price for doing so.

"How does China get away with it?" By not making trade deals, is the answer; China has virtually no trade deals with other countries. It relies on its produce being so cheap that, even if it suffers tariffs and other barriers to entry into export markets, it will still be competitive in those markets.

For the UK to follow this course would be a repudiation of the course the Brexit has taken up to now - not in favour of a more sane course, but in favour of an even more insane one. Why do I say this? Because in this scenario — abandoning trade deals, and instead competing by lowering wages and gutting labour and environmental standards — UK's principal competitor would be, yes, China itself. And, to a lesser extent, Vietnam, Indonesia, India and other industrialising developing-world economies who have adopted similar strategies. To compete successfully, the UK would need to lower wages, working conditions, environmental standards and standards of living to levels comparable with those prevailing in these competitor economies. A British government mad enough to adopt this objective would not last long.

Ooh, I am so going to steal that.