Brexit discussion thread XIV (Please read OP before posting)

Remind me again what date the EU invaded Britain and forced them into their union?

Once you give me that date I'll entertain your "comparison".

It's amazing those who are pro EU genuinely think their opinions are superior, the rest of us are all stupid and they can belittle and insult those who have a different opinion.

They aren't democratic, they don't accept democracy when it doesn't suit and they are completely intolerant.

You'd think lessons would be learned. Brexit was a very tough lesson.

Yet it seems nothing has changed. The EU's most important member left and this should be a wake up call. No?

Anything learned?

The EU’s most important member????

Don’t make me laugh !

I'm not even overly pro EU. There's pros and cons to membership, I think the pros outweigh the cons.

You're most definitely anti EU though. So the fact you think you're the rational one in this debate is laughable.

You've also got some sort of Stockholm syndrome when it comes to the UK. Do you have union Jack swimming shorts?

Leaving the EU doesn't really change the UK position on defense. Most of the EU is in NATO so the UK is still dragged into any way on the EU side.

What you said was stupid and there is no getting around it.

I don't think you've ever posted an actual fact on this subject.

Might is right, whether you like it or not.

Massive majority in favour of EU membership in Ireland for its entire history in this Country, has always meant that dissenting voices have come a cropper. Sinn Féin have learned that (and still are learning it) to their detriment.

Besides, opinions in favour of the EU in this Country are superior. There is simply no argument for Ireland being better off now, or at any time since joining, by not being in the EEC/EC/EU.

I think your understanding of the EU is betrayed by your opinion that GB were the "most important member"! I'm not even sure what you mean by that, but it'd be amusing to hear it.

Anyway, let's assume you mean something along the lines of the redundant Brexit argument; 'they need us more than we need them.'

That was clearly bollocks from the moment David Cameron was sent home empty handed when he went looking for concessions to redefine British membership within the Union, prior to the 2016 referendum.

Many Brits - most Brits really - failed to grasp the fact that GB was dependent on its EU partners of the time for 45% of its trade. Basically half of everything they made and everything they did. The reciprocal figure at the time was 11%. Its a damn sight less now and the consequences are evident in the financial forecasts issued by the Bank of England last week.

The Covid era economic camouflage is over, its full on Brexit catastrophe now.

The US is way more than a currency union. It's a federation of States, governed by the same laws. It's a military, political AND economic union.

For another few days anyway.

I think Elliott has always had a warmer view towards Brexit than most who write for the Guardian.

This piece doesn't strike me as all that persuasive. He points out, reasonably enough, that factors like the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine have negatively affected the UK's economic performance, plus the UK had economic woes even before Brexit. But, seriously, who questions this? The first half of his article is devoted to demolishing the view that Brexit is largely or exclusively responsible for the UK's current woes. But, since nobody advances that view, it seems to me he is attacking a straw man of his own creation.

The real issue is whether Brexit has also negatively affected the UK's economic performance (not least by limiting the UK's capacity to respond to these other shocks). He addresses this only by recycling quotes from a briefing paper from "Briefings for Britain" which, in a telling mistake, he calls "Briefings for Brexit". The mistake is ironic, because "Briefings for Britain" is a partisan source; it was set up explicitly "for the expression of opinion which believed that the future welfare of Britain and Europe required that the choice made in the 2016 Referendum should be fully and positively carried out".

So what Elliott is doing here is, essentially, recycling views from a partisan think-tank, without comment or analysis. That's lazy journalism, at best.

But even that paper can't muster much more than the fairly lukewarm conclusion that "while there is little evidence yet that Brexit is doing much to help the UK economy, neither is there evidence of much harm". Gosh — think-tank ideologically motivated not to spot harms resulting from Brexit doesn't find "much evidence of harm".

Other views are available. Economist John Springford, working at the Centre for European Reform ("We regard European integration as largely beneficial but recognise that in many respects the Union does not work well") has been running a long-term project comparing the economic performance of the UK since 2016 against the performance of a "doppelganger UK" - a weighted index of comparable developed economies whose performance closely tracked the UK's in the 20 years up to 2016. The idea is that "doppelganger UK" is a proxy for the UK, if the UK had not brexited. Data for Doppelganger UK reflects the impact of Covid, the impact of the Ukraine war, etc. Doppelganger UK has a similar population, similar level of education, etc to real UK. The main difference between doppelganger UK and real UK is that the countries that make up doppelganger UK haven't been through brexit. It's important to note that the components of doppelganger UK, and their relative weightings, were determined before Brexit,, so there can be no suggestion that doppelganger UK was constructed in order to produce a bad result; when they constructed it, they didn't know what result it would produce. All they knew was that it had broadly the same characteristics as real UK, and that it's performance matched the performance of real UK before Brexit.

The project is ongoing — I think the plan is to run it for 10 years, up to 2026. But the results so far do suggest evidence of harm from Brexit so far. real UK's GDP is 5.2% lower than doppelganger UK's GDP. Investment is 13.7% lower; goods trade is 13.6% lower.

Now, perhaps Springford's methodology could be criticised. But if Elliott treated Springford's findings as he treats those of "Briefings for Britain", he would simply repeat them as evidence that Brexit has been significantly harmful. In fact so far as I am aware he has completely ignored them; hasn't written about them at all.

I found it an extremely disingenuous article, particularly this part;

Over the years, the argument from the anti-Brexit camp has changed. Where once it was “Brexit will crash the economy” it now is “the economy would be performing better were it not for Brexit”.

It is actually the pro-Brexit side that has changed their tune. They spoke of all the benefits of that it would allow but now they can't point to a single benefit and instead say "well at least it didn't crash the economy". In the Brexit campaign, the pro-Brexit side weren't promoting making a generation defining change on the basis that things would stay the same, they claimed that things would be measurably better for making that change. That has not been the case.

While some on the Remain side may have gone overboard with predictions that “Brexit will crash the economy”, most simply pointed out the obvious implications of leaving the trade block. And unsurprisingly, many of these things have come to pass; Brits have lost certain rights in EU countries, they do have to queue longer at passport control, businesses have been hit with more red tape and costs to export, Britain is out of Horizon, Erasmus and other schemes, tade deals have been hard to come by and the USA isn't interested in one with them, it is harder to send refugees back to other countries, etc. Iven all these things, the suggestion that “the economy would be performing better were it not for Brexit” is entirely reasonable.

So there are plenty of negatives to point to, even if the economy hasn't completely crashed. Unless someone can start coming up with some positives soon, and pretty major ones at that, it is clear that negatives outweigh the positives.