Brexit discussion thread XIV (Please read OP before posting)

Mortifying eh!!

at the same time would i be wrong that tesla is the highest valued car maker on the stock market because it has the best batteries.

Well, topically for the thread, the current side discussion about automotive/EVs and batteries, and now your mention of Tesla…

…now would be a good time to recall Tesla picked Berlin for its European battery manufacturing and assembly plant instead of the UK, due to uncertainty created by Brexit.

The plant was built 2019-2021 and opened last March 2022. An expansion is already in the works.

Haven't been away since the pandemic started so grabbed a Canary Island jaunt and it was jarring to see brexit for the first time in human terms as UK passport holders had to go through the very slow moving schengen scanning booths.

I won't be surprised if Spanish police use the threat of a schengen ban when dealing with troublesome louts.

Starmer has said that he doesn't believe that rejoining the Single Market would boost economic growth, and that there is no case for going back into the Single Market.

Frankly, this is a weird thing to say. It's pretty much undisputed that the construction of the Single Market did boost UK growth to a signficant degree, that exiting the Single Market signficantly constrained UK growth, and that rejoining would remove Brexit barriers to trade and so boost growth again. Even Brexiters largely accept this; they don't oppose the Single Market on the basis that staying out is economically advantageous but rather on the basis that, despite being economically disadvantageous, it is justified by considerations of autonomy, democracy, sovereignty, etc. To be honest, it's not really credible that Starmer doesn't accept that the economic consequences of remaining out of the Single Market are what they are.

So why say this?

I think there are two possibilities here. One, he was caught off-guard by the question. On the issue of re-entering the Single Market, the real reason for Not Going There is that he things the party that is seen to reopen the toxic Brexit debate will be electorally disadvantaged. But he can hardly say that out loud, so he had to come up with some other reason and, on the spur of the moment, this was the one he came up with.

But that's not very credible. How likely is it that he and his advisers hadn't anticipated this question and prepared a reply? Not very likely at all, I think. So this was probably a pre-prepared reply, and we need to find another reason for preparing this reply.

Why prepare a reply that no person of ordinary intelligence will take seriously? Perhaps to signal to those who favour closer alignment or re-entry is not a serious or strongly-felt position. In truth, he sees no good reasons for staying out of the SM because, if he did, he'd have mentioned them in this interview. So, although he has adopted this position, he has no solid reason for adopting it and you can think that maybe he's not wedded to it, if that's what you want to think. And of course the beauty of it is that Brexiters cannot attack him for this, without saying that staying out of the SM is economically harmful, which obviously is something they largely know to be true but cannot say out loud.

Cynical? Maybe. But I'm not sure whether it's me or Starmer being cynical.

He should be pointing out that being part of the SM and respecting the Brexit vote are not mutually exclusive. The narrative that they are was first developed under May and seems to be seen as sacrosanct since, despite nobody putting any stock in anything else May said.

Starmer should be trying to change the narrative. I suspect many Brexiters would actually be happy with that as it would allow them to disown the chaos caused by Brexit without having to admit they were wrong. They have already taken the first step by saying "this is not the Brexit I voted for". Somebody needs to come forward with another form of Brexit soon or they will continue blindly down a path nobody wants to be on. Starmer should be taking the lead on this, not parroting Tory soundbites which are getting increasingly stale.

The voters gave a clear mandate in 2019. That GE was effectively a ref on the Johnson deal, which included ending FoM, trade barriers and NIP.

While one can argue whether people knew what they voted for in 2016 due to the vagueness of the question, there really is little doubt about what was being put forward by Johnson in 2019 GE.

Which, of course, makes all the noise about the NIP and it not being the "brexit I voted for' a total nonsense. THis is exactly the Brexit that the UK wanted, and voted for.

A great many seem to be of the opinion that he’s just making Brexity noises for <reasons> and will pivot if elected.

Anyone who has paid close attention to British politics in the past 7 years and not taken their eye too far off the ball too often, will hopefully attest to the fact that, where Brexit is concerned, no amount of idiocy by British politicians can ever be overestimated, irrespective of whether the said politicians are in power or in opposition.

And on that basis, I’m more minded to take Starmer at his word, as a face-eating-leopard-party kind-of-way, than to infer or lend any credence to hidden pivoting designs down the road. Until he and Labour can prove any different, and let me tell you that is one tall Himalayan summit of evidence they’d have to climb.

Starmer can't have it both ways, he knows that well no doubt. I think people would be just as happy if he were completely honest and direct and let the cards fall where they will.

Irrespective, the EU will be monitoring the positions of all UK parties closely and won't be entertaining any double-talk.

It does seem that Sunak is keen to do a deal to deal substantively with the Protocol, but the EU shouldn't bend over backwards for him, they know he's in a very weak position.

Honestly, I feel if Britain were left to stew as they are for another five years or so, it would be better for them in the long term, to purge the ultra right wing spoof balls from the scene altogether.

would it be so bad if they change their opinion on something that seems to be a vital future industry if it is connected with wind farms. so to me that almost sound like a small brexit benefit that they have to think a bit more future ...

i would say this is an area where europe as an whole was way to slow, and while not brexit related, i guess its kind of good that both the eu and uk focus more on it .

from what i read there is also a lot of battery state subsidisation in the eu now . and while i think tesla ,at the end , declined 1 billion state subsidy in brandenburg they got a free train station built and the plant seems to cause a lot of water issues in the area that will cost also quite a bit to find solutions in the future.

iam not sure how much it speaks for germany as a car industry nation that they got tesla and europe on the whole . its obviously great for brandenburg but iam not sure how good it is for volkswagen bmw renault etc to have a company in germany that is ahead of them and likely to eat market shares from them and directs profits into the usa out of the eu.

I think this is basically it. For all the Bregret that the polls are showing, the same polls show zero appetite for re-entry, for re-litigating the question, for revisiting the toxic, depressing debate.

If we assume that Starnmer's priority is winning the next election, this combination of sentiments suits him quite well. If people regret Brexit but feel that reversing it is either impractical or excessively painful, they are likely to blame the Tories for having lead the UK into a mistake which, they feel, cannot now be remedied. That works well for Labour. For Labour now to position itself as aiming to roll back Brexit to any significant degree will alienate the remaining Leavers, plus those Regretters who would prefer not to do anything about it. Why would he alienate them?

If he plans to do anything at all about Brexit beyond remedying the more lunatic aspects of Tory Brexit, I think it's a second-term objective. He'll wait for a public head of steam to build demanding that he do more to repair the damage the Tories have done, and then he'll seek a mandate for that in the 2029 election. And if that public head of steam never builds, well, he'll never do anything about it.

In equal fairness, the UK hadn’t properly Brexited in 2019, and Covid has provided rather the anticlimactic filter to its burgeoning consequences…until now.

There’s 2 years or so until the next GE. That is a long time coming in politics.

Even if Starmer was genuinely double-speaking about Brexit to regain the Red-Blue wall onside in 2024, surely he knows equally well, that he’s busy already boxing himself up in that ERG-esque political corner 2 years before the vote, and he must know just as well how that’s worked out for successive No.10 tenants since 2016.

I look at Tory performative ‘governance’ of the past 6-7 years, I’m seeing that same performative effort now starting in anger from Labour, which is flip-flopping about Brexit worse than it ever has in years, and the only conclusion that seem valid, is that British politicians far and wide are only concerned about focus groups’ findings, and efforting solely and permanently about elections, having comprehensively forgotten what the actual point of winning elections is.