Monday 12 February 2018

Will Brexit die yet?

Interesting times in the remain, the switch is set to full-on. Barnier has been lined up with some red-lines that he knows won't pass muster with the UK Government, Soros has turned on the funding taps and the remainers are feeling strong.


Just today, Anna Soubry is happily sitting alongside Chuka Umanna arguing for voting down any Brexit bill in the House of commons.


It is all very worrying for those on the leave side. On the plus side, PM May is going to make some speeches this week and next to set out finally what the UK cabinet expects from Brexit. Expect these to get short-shrift from Brussels.


Unexpected support for the leavers comes from the UK Labour party, whose leadership are uninterested in Brexit or even actively against it as the EU would prevent most of their wild nationalisation fantasies from being enacted. Indeed, with Labour not whipped to vote Umanna and Soubry maybe very surprised to see the commons handily voting through the Government agenda on Brexit in a few months.


The House of Lords will remain recalcitrant, fighting a rear-guard against democracy as only they know how.


Of course, it seems likely all this force is set against a Government that only wants to leave in name only and will quickly sign up to the EU terms to keep the economy on track.


This is all without mentioning the death threats now emanating from the more loony remainiacs to known leave supporters and funders - certainly the rage of the establishment knows no ethical boundaries.


BTW - Apologies for lack of blogging of late, Capitalists are hard at work currently!

16 comments:

andrew said...


I suppose the question is :-

Does GDP trump Sovereignty?

Of course that is a false dichotomy, we will be about as much a sovereign nation in the EU as out - if you want to export to them, you follow their rules - if you buy something it will be EU compliant.
They are still ~50% of all exports and ~75% of imports.

Also it is now clear that if we don't stay in the customs union,
the UK will be breaking the Good Friday agreement.
If we do that, there will be blood.

(visions of Boris Johnson eating cake whilst belfast burns
- it could be worse, it could have been Gove fiddling)

But

having said all that, they asked the UK the question and the consequences were pretty clear at the time and the UK gave an answer.

It would be even more damaging to ignore the referendum.

Mark Wadsworth said...

"the UK Labour party, whose leadership are uninterested in Brexit or even actively against it"???

Anonymous said...

Labour voters are split, middle classes aghast at Brexit, workers in favour. Corbyn's people know that without Brexit all public ownership dreams are gone.

The well-funded globalist Blairite crowd are waving temptation under Corbyn's nose - "just f*** Teresa around a bit on Brexit, how about "single market or else"? - we know some of her MPs will be with you or abstain, GE, Corby 4 PM !".

Then they'd immediately call for Referendum 2, LP splits, and Corby shortest PM in history but Brexit postponed again - or that would be the theory. These people are a) desperate b) totally unprincipled. Wrecking the LP would be a small price to pay if we stayed in, from their perspective, with the bonus of thumping Corbyn.

I think they realise a second referendum right now would expose the lack of principle, after all the previous interval was 36 years - but if we have a couple of years of confusion, well, surely a revisit is in order...?

Anonymous said...

There was an LSE report on the impact of Brexit which pointed to the shape of different economies such as

* we export proportionately less of our GDP than Germany (28% to 46%) so trade deals are not that important

* we have a demand led economy so internal demand / population growth is important. A drop in population growth will depress GDP unless it can be replaced by exports. So trade deals are important - see above

* We use cheap labour a lot. 20% of jobs are low paid compared to 10% in France and 8% in Denmark. This like population growth limits consumption and so GDP.

* To stimulate spending, we revalue house prices to provide the equity on which domestic debt can be secured. Less population growth means less pressure on house prices.

Bottom line is that Brexit really is an irrelevance as our economic woes - government debt / consumer debt / lack of exports - are so entrenched that it would take a major shift in domestic attitudes to wean us of consumption and debt.

Or perhaps Brexit is really about shaking the place up.

Sobers said...

The thing to realise about Brexit is its like when one person suddenly says to their spouse 'I want a divorce!'. However much talking and rationalising goes on after that point, and whatever earnest agreements are arrived at, fundamentally the relationship is toast. It may drag on for a while, but the end state is never in doubt, the two parties will be going their separate ways at some point.

Its why I'm sanguine about the whole 'Brexit is being betrayed!' shtick, what the Remainers fail to understand is the tectonic plates have shifted, and things can never go back to how they were on the 22nd June 2016. They can try and put it back together, but what has been said and done cannot be ignored, and the fault lines will fracture irrevocably at some point, if not in the immediate process, then at some point in the not too distant future.

I can live with that, given the alternative was be absorbed into the EU borg for good.

E-K said...

If Brexit dies (I think it will) there is no point in voting ever again.

I really can see Corbyn getting in.

CityUnslicker said...

Anon - super comment. Indeed the best thing about Brexit is that it will force in time things to be tackled instead of 'blaming Europe' which the politicians loved so much.

EK - It really depends when the election is, anytime in the next 2 years and Corbyn will win, after that, well, things change.

Anonymous said...

anon 2.05 - agreed, very good post. But I feel we have more chance of addressing these issues when we can make our own laws. Brexit is necessary though not sufficient.

(In a sane post-Brexit world sterling would lose another 20%, which would reflect reality better, but at which point we'd need to think about how to avoid having our entire housing stock owned overseas)

Steven_L said...

but at which point we'd need to think about how to avoid having our entire housing stock owned overseas

We've got to export something.

CityUnslicker said...

I think the housing stock issue is righting itself. As horrible as the stamp duty issue is, the effect has been to dramatically slow overseas investment at the top end. This is all that matters as it is from there that the trickle down impact occurs.

Scrobs. said...

Come on!

Brexit is definitely going to happen!

We may have some pretty weak 'negotaitors' on the staff, but at the end of their day - promptly at 5.30pm, they must just say, 'well we don't agree, our democratic system demands we leave, so we're walking away'!

Job done! Sue us if you like, who cares? Piss off EU charlatans, try your hardest, we'll just ignore any demands and do the 'Arkell v Pressdram' letter!

Why are our politicians so f*****g pathetic?

DJK said...

Anon:

All of what you say is true, but the LSE report seems to me to be about gaming GDP figures. If GDP is all that matters then (because of the way it is calculated) all a country has to do is grow its population through unlimited immigration and juice house prices. But do we honestly think that is the way to prosperity, or even the way to increase the sum of human happiness?

The UK has a nominal GDP about twice that of Russia. But does anyone seriously think this country is richer than Russia? By just about any metric (population, land area, fighter jets, space rockets, steel production) Russia has at least twice as much as the UK. So clearly, GDP figures are complete cobblers and any policy choice based on maximising GDP is a dead end.

Charlie said...

I don't really see why any attention is being paid to "leaked" (read: planted) documents predicting a large drop in GDP after Brexit. Leave won the referendum despite well-publicised, dire predictions about the impact of Brexit on the economy. 52% of voters either decided it was a load of bollocks, or thought it was a price worth paying to get out of the EU.

I don't really understand why the Remain side think that making the same arguments that lost them the referendum (while calling Leave-voters a bunch of thick racists, natch) will change a single mind. It's a terrible strategy. To have any hope of overturning Brexit (which will mean changing people's minds, not simply ignoring the vote), they need to show how they'll deal with the issues that led to them losing the vote, namely uncontrolled mass immigration and its impact on public services, community cohesion, the jobs market and housing.

Yet another round of spouting fag-packet GDP predictions isn't the money shot that Remain think it is. I'm quite surprised at how crap their strategy is, to be honest.

Bill Quango MP said...

Excellent points Charlie.
remain strategy is saying "The Eu is bad. But we would all perish without being a member. So let's just forget about leaving."

E-K said...

The difference being they now add "old people hate you and ruined your life."

andrew said...

EK

Bremainers look to be channelling Philip Larkin 'this be the verse' (c)1971
Larkin would have been an exiter (imo).


How to make people change their minds - make them feel a valued part of the larger whole, geographically, culturally, economically and spiritually.
- Not happening in the UK.

In a weird way, lookng at a map of Germany and support for AFD etc, I have the feeling Germany likes the EU partly because it distracts from the feeling that it isn't really one country.