And didn’t it start with her selling off the council housing to the tenants for peanuts, crushing the unions and flogging off the utilities?
It seemed to go downhill from there - but everyone was going to be a millionaire weren’t they, so who needed the unions for instance and who ultimately owned all the shares in BT and British Gas once the proles sold off their shares after making one-off small returns on selling them?
Biggest con trick by the Conservatives ever.
Shameful.
Remember what you said there, the next time you hear, public spending is just a bribe to the voters from Labour.
It’s the perfect reply.
To be fair @Saint-or-sinner I’m sick of the lot of them whatever way they lean politically-
Give me a party that is genuinely there for all of the people and they’ll get my vote.or give us a “none of the above” option on our ballot papers.
I’m getting good at drawing knobs on my ballot papers…
You should’ve voted for Russell brand
I think that’s who I try to draw on my ballot papers tbf
I think you over-estimate the longevity of US economic hegemony, if it even still exists. While it is true that it is home to some massive corporations, it is also true that they’ve made their money by outsourcing their work to places with little to no workers’ rights, and low rates of pay.
China is already realising that this relationship is not tenable. The pollutants that their industrial miracle has produced have led to situations where entire communities get the same type of cancer. What is corporate malfeasance on US soil is standard corporate practice in China. Apple’s big supplier Foxconn has fucking suicide nets installed on its high buildings, FFS.
With a growing middle class, China is already at the point where it needs to change its modus operandi.
At the same time, Trump’s trade war is causing input costs to rise for manufacturers in the US. He’s done the steel industry a world of good while causing others a world of pain.
I’ve said this since forever, but as someone that lives on a small island, I know that the US has everything it needs within its borders. As an observer of its international relations, I know it’s not tenable for the world for it to get everything it wants.
That’s all very nice and if you want to talk about China’s* problems, start a new thread.
None of what you have said changes the fact the the deals are, or already have been done.
P. S My last sentence in the op wasn’t a dig, just a potential reality.
What’s Fox been up to?
What deals? I haven’t heard anything concrete, apart from TTIP is dead. Moreover, we already trade with loads of countries outside the EU without a formal trade deal. We and the US are each other’s biggest foreign investors, and while we benefit from things such as the visa waiver system, no overall trade deal exists.
Answer me one question. If trade deals are so necessary, how comes we have a trade deficit with the EU, and a trade surplus with the Rest of the World, where we have few formal trade deals?
The government’s own figures.
Only the one question?
Ok, our “few formal trade deals” come under the deals done by the big powerful group called the EU*
Once we leave the EU**, we’re potentially*** fucked, as WTO agreements where also done as part of a powerful group.
*you know, like when you can get all the workers to act together. Bit a like a trade union.
**I share many of your issues about corporate unelected EU and their policies.
***yes only potentially, but if you look at how corporate America does things, this is it.
Don’t forget your true objectives for society, just because you’ve had everyone on your back for a while. The way this is being done serves no one but the very richest.
Sorry, you’re wrong.
We’ve no overall trade deal with the US. Neither does the EU. Despite all that, we’re each other’s biggest inward investors.
The WTO exists precisely to govern trade where no formal trade deal exists, or doesn’t cover all things. There are only a handful of countries that don’t have it, and the EU is a big separate space where its rules are not the main ones.
Why would the WTO have problems with us using their system in those circumstances?
Sorry, @Saint-or-sinner, your post just doesn’t make any sense unless you start casting an international facilitator of trade as a blocker.
I’ll try to dig out the link I posted previously, but being able to simply fall back to WTO trade rules is not certain.
As I understand it, and I recognise that the expert I saw may have an agenda, and it was in a very friendly interview with James O’Brien, the UK has applied to join the WTO and wants to be bound by WTO conditions based on its previous relationship as a part of the EU.
I’m sketchy but it means that the UK is trying to join as a separate entity and enjoy the same import / export quotas and tariffs with the rest of the world that it currently enjoys as a member of the EU. There have been objections to this from a number of countries - I remember Australia being one.
I also believe that the WTO is a glacially slow organisation, has a massive number of individual members (150+) and I THINK they all have to agree to approve a deal. EDIT Thinking about this I’m not sure that is the case.
It’s not cut and dry that we will just fall back to WTO trading. I’m sure we could, but we would not enjoy the weight of the benefit we have enjoyed (tariffs and quotas) when were negotiating as one twenty-eighth of a bloc.
EDIT: Here’s an interview with Bloomberg’s correspondent who writes about the WTO.
And here’s an article with a bit more detail on the problems we have at the moment. Incidentally the 4 countries that have flagged objects are the US, Argentina, New Zealand and Brazil (NOT Australia as I previously suggested).
So is it your contention that we won’t be able to join?
Even though the likes of Liberia, Afghanistan, etc are let in?
I was thinking of this @pap.
Roberto Azevêdo, head of the WTO.
“Britain is a member of the WTO and will continue to be a member of the WTO. But it will be a member with no country-specific commitments. We have had no other situation like that,” he said.
“It is very difficult to predict. Russia’s accession to the WTO took 20 years. Other negotiations happened faster. It will be a very high risk bet to hope that negotiations would be quickly completed and that negotiations would be uneventful,” he said.
Trade will still be done, but we’re bent over a barrel and the rest of the world know it.
Edit. No idea how i done that to the quote.
No. Not at all.
I was just adding background to your dismissal out of hand of @Saint-or-sinner’s position.
My assertion is that we can’t fall back to WTO terms at the same level we currently enjoy. Which I think was @Saint-or-sinner’s point.
Falling back to WTO terms without the EU bloc-negotiated quotas and tariffs is really punitive and really ugly and if we want anything like the terms we already ‘enjoy’ as one twenty-eighth of the EU then those will be challenged and will need to be negotiated and that can take 90 days plus one year to even be heard.
Or put another way, we will be able to fall back to trading with the rest of the world on the terms enjoyed by Libya and Afghanistan. Anything more will take time and diplomacy.
See, this is where the whole thing really, really pisses me off. Petty bureaucracy!!
Why the fuck can’t they just take the EU terms and rewrite them under the UK, surely it can’t be that difficult?
But going back to the first article you quoted Bryce Baschuk said
The UK is currently a WTO member in its own right"
Surely that means we can fall back to WTO rules easily?
However he then goes on to say
Of trading with the WTO countries, Bryce warns: “There are no sharks in Lake Geneva, but the WTO is full of them. They smell blood in the water and they’re going to demand their pound of flesh.”
Why can’t people just be nice to each other or are we paying for the sins of our colonial past?
Point of Order!! Should these WTO discussions be moved to their own thread outside of the Brexit and Try ones??
So if you’re Argentina and you’ve had both a war and limited beef export quotas with the UK in recent years, and the UK has bent over to touch it’s toes, what would you do?
It’s naive in the extreme to think that every nation we want something better from isn’t going to want something better in return.
And in the background I wouldn’t be surprised to see the EU making it difficult for the UK if it thinks it will suffer from the UK’s improved terms.
PS yes I think you should move the wto content to the Brexit thread. It doesn’t seem to belong here.
Someone sent me this. Surprisingly engaging and informative.
The guy who brokers trade deals seems to know quite a bit about the ‘rules’. The guy who transports stuff around Europe obviously knows some issues with getting stuff around. The other guy with the hat is the stooge.
Er no, @Map-Of-Tasmania . I’m saying that last year, we had a surplus balance of payments with the rest of the world, and a deficit with the EU.
The surplus is already happening with the rest of the world. It isn’t happening with the EU.
Perhaps if you’d clicked the link, you’d not have crafted such an incoherent and ill fitting response.
Saw this at the weekend.
I particularly enjoyed the part where the haulage multimillionaire was crying about closing his business.
Did you enjoy the preaching though, converted one? 