:brexit: Brexit - The Ramifications

Wow.

You’re like a little, white Nelson Mandela.

MOD EDIT: fixed quote.

Half Nelson.

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Fucking quote bastard

Ah, bollocks @Fatso. I can’t help but like the pub people more. Effort, init.

That said, fascinating comments on the referendum. I’m sure they’ll be decisive in any future poll.

With neither camp happy Bob?

To my mind that doesn’t bode well, but maybe it’ll all turn out ok and it was all a dream (a la Dallas) or I was just being overly pessimistic and the next 50 years will just fly by…

I’ll just leave this here…

What a fool.

You’d better hope they fly by, as we’ll probably still be trying to work out how we got into the position of being a place with “no country-specific commitments” in the WTO.
Would we have bent over far enough by then?

Pap: I don’t do insults just good honest debate…

AG: well I do insults : you really do love yourself and believe your own bullshit. I don’t think you lack self awareness, but you seem to wank yourself raw with little internet ‘victories’ - as said before, you read a lot but seem naive and narrow minded in the conclusions you draw from it … from over simplification of supply and demand to ignorance on trade surplus being somehow the only variable in economic growth… we may have a small deficit with the EU… but its still a market of over 200bn… we will eventually work something out to mutual benefit but the eventual trade will be smaller meaning shrinkage of our exports overall - less jobs and potentially recession - how many more poor do we need requiring food banks? This has been the Tory Euro sceptics plan all along - wait for an appropriate time when we are economically fucked post glabal crisis and then convince the poor it’s all the EU fault … then ensure hard brexit to make it worse to further entrench the anti-EU views… and you are happy with this undemocragic opportunistic power grab because you demand democracy by any means and at any cost…

You are comfortable not knowing what will happen but seem prepared to take the risk - sadly you seem willing to sacrifice the ones at greatest risk on the alter of your ‘principles’ - they are not principles , just blind faith in an out dated political doctrine…

Maybe I’m just naive and believe in the inherent goodness of people and that something will be sorted to eveyone’s mutual benefit.

I wish I could share your POV as its a nice one to have… but I just look at this that set this up and their rational for delivering this schism - things born out of such selfish drivers rarely turn out well…

Some interesting points there, AG.

First, I’m not sure you’re insulting me by saying that I love myself and believe my own bullshit. I think you’re describing a broad human trait, unless you thin self-loathing and self-doubt are the default positions for humans. I would be interested in your view on that.

I’m also interested in how it is you came to the conclusions you did in making a lot of the assertions you did, when they’re clearly at variance, with well, themselves.

We don’t have a small deficit with the EU. Overall, it is minus 67 biillion sterling. Take services out of the equation, and focus on goods, and it’s minus 95 billion. Those aren’t small numbers. To put that into context, 772 billion is the entire welfare budget, which would probably be a lot smaller if some the near 100bn of goods purchases were translated into domestic production.

Take services out of the equation?
Not sure how you can do that, but i suppose @Map-Of-Tasmania can now discount anything that makes his argument stronger.
What’s your thoughts on the graphs for distance, and the “Rotterdam effect”?
The ONS seem to think it’s important.

If you truly believed that Bob, you’d surely have voted Remain.

Bletch, you are usually the voice of reason on the forum. Tell me you are not joining the “all brexiters are evil bastards” brigade

(Quick correction UK total revenues are approx 772 billion, you need to put the 67 bn balance of trade deficit in context of the UK GDP of approx 2.2 trillion. The annual welfare budget is approx 130 bn, pensions 165 bn and health 150bn… ) But we can ignore that here as its not relevant to the point i am making.

See this is where its about exploring what these figures might mean as opposed to using them to suit a POV. It is TRUE that IF we produced more it may mean that we have have greater revenues should those jobs be paying at levels that mean the worker do pay tax as well as NI… which means that they need to work in good industries which pay well… usually because they produce excellent products many of which are exported and the companies thrive… this is more difficult if our goods and services are more expensive abroad when tariffs are applied - do we want to be in a country where we are forced to buy UK goods despite them being inferior … because we import so little? Remember the shit the former soviets used to ahem to put up with?

I concede more folks in work means less requirement for ‘welfare’ but only if they are paid at levels that are beyond the poverty line… and most of the jobs vacated by the former Eastern Europeans are low paid, low skilled…

Second, for that not to happen, we need to be producing stuff consumer want both here and abroad at a price we can afford… what are we going to produce to address this balance? A big contributor to our deficit is high quality manufactured goods - cars, appliances etc… we dont produce any of these… and we wont do so again… So I will repeat my question and my POV. What industrial renaissance will occur to create this surplus and more importantly GROWTH… a balance of trade surplus on a much lower GDP and thus much lower revenues will help no one…

I’ll take a stab.

Isn’t the answer - the impact of the US in those figures?

Well, strictly speaking the impact of the US, some Gulf-states and China.

From those figures, we exported $99.6Bn to the US out of a total of $284.1Bn outside EU exports in 2016.

So about 35% of the UK’s exports outside of the EU in 2016 were accounted for by an enormous anglophone (largely), services-consuming market that we have long historical ties to.

About 17% (the next largest percentage, BTW!) of the remainder is some Gulf states and China is also about 17% of the outside-EU exports.

So, put another way, ~69% of our exports outside the EU are to 3 countries.

Finding that out shocked me. Again, nearly 70% of our exports outside the EU go to 3 countries/country-groupings.

I take the point you were making @pap, and as a soundbite it sounds convincing, but I think when you break it down like that, it simply says that either through historical happenstance or sheer market size, we have a lot of trade with a small number of countries that skews the term “rest of the world trade”.

So the “few formal deals” and “trade surplus” from your question seem to not acknowledge the skewing of the total towards a small number of countries.

Should we export more to the EU? Yes.

Should we make more stuff instead of selling services? Yes.

Are either of those things the fault of the EU? No.

Can we nail the fault of that to Thatcher - and Blair. Probably.

If we leave the EU, will we sell more to the EU or less? Dunno.

I think I’ve been guilty of not doing the research into what the term “rest of the world” means in terms of trade.

Your use of the term suggests (to my ear, not stating that you meant it to suggest this) that there is a large market of countries out there waiting for us to trade with them and that if we could just escape the gravity of the EU’s restrictive conditions, we will make up for any shortfall in the trade with the EU countries post-Brexit.

I’m not sure that is the case because outside the top 10 in terms of export value the countries get tinier and tinier from a trading persepective.

Outside of that, the others make up 1% or less of the trade total.

Another interesting fact that I found during the cursory research I’ve just done, is outside the EU (RoW) we have WTO deals with 24 countries (the three countries/groupings I mentioned above are carried out under mixed WTO and EU terms I believe) whereas for 68 other countries free trade is enabled, and better terms granted, by being part of the EU.

So another benefit of EU membership? Yes, but let’s not think I’m crowing about that as a massive positive of being in the EU because when you start to think about it those 68 countries must be worth buttons in terms of the potential export value to us.

Then again, it is at least 68 buttons.

So that’s another 68 countries we will have to come to some beneficial relationship with that must be on terms at least as good as those we already enjoy as an EU member, or we will suffer the economic consequences.

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Our current foreign policy means we will probably sell more weapons so that’s a bonus :lou_facepalm_2:

Lol.

No, I’m not joining that brigade. Far from it. I drink with some of these cunts.

What I was aiming for with my pithy reply was that IF @BTripz really did…

believe in the inherent goodness of people and that something will be sorted to eveyone’s mutual benefit

He would have been happy with the status quo before the referendum.

Well, the last time “we” went to the EU asking for something Cameron came back all Chamberlain, waving a paper and declaring “peace in our time”. Yet it turned out to be nothing at all.

The EU has a history of intransigence that will only get worse when we leave, my belief is pointed to the rest of the world.

Or maybe I’m an arch realist and I know we’re fucked whichever way we go!!

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Yet another interesting (I think it’s interesting) snippet I found concerns average WTO tariffs.

From this BBC Article.

(…which took its source from this Centre for European Policy Studies document).

So I recognise that for some it’s about as biased as you can get so I present it here with that caveat*.

Anyway, they have computed an average tariff for WTO members which looks like this.

Commentary from BBC article…

If the UK had to trade under WTO rules, tariffs - a tax on traded goods - would be applied to all UK exports.

The average WTO tariff varies from product to product, from 0% on mineral fuels and pharmaceuticals, to around 20-35% on processed food and 45-50% on meat.

The CEPS document goes on to qualify the average calculation by saying it ranges from zero to very high, so it may or may not have value.

However, IF those figures are in any way representative, it shows the potential impact on the cost of our exports in a WTO-only world.

I guess, the continued lowering of the value of the pound would offset some of those costs.

* glad I caveated that.

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