In my view the money paid to the EU works a bit like this: You give this bloke £100 per week. This bloke is very thankful that you keep giving him £100 per week, so every week as a thank you he buys you a pint of lager. Now then - some people are so daft that they are insisting that you should keep paying this bloke £100 per week because if you don't then he won't buy you a pint of lager.
Or it's a bit like your lass has a bank account with both your money in it. £100 a week. She won't buy you anything and keeps spending the money on herself and her friends. You have the option of putting the money into a joint account but there is a fee of £20 a week for doing so but you know if you do that then you can have £40 a week and so can she. Do you A. Put the money into the joint account where £40 goes to you £40 to her and £20 to the bank? Or B. Put the money in her bank account where she spends £100 a week on herself and you get nothing
Or C. Tell her to pi.ss off - and keep all the money yourself - because you know if she gets hold of the money she will only give it away to already wealthy arable farmers.
Or D, Keep all the money we used, to stay in the single market and then watch firms shutting down country going into recession, back to the good old Thatcher years.
Why so pessimistic? We can negotiate with the rest of the world without one hand tied behind our back. USA, China and Japan are doing quite well outside the EU. I'm old enough to remember the UK before we joined the EEC and we did well enough then. We dealt more with the commonwealth countries who actually like us
Perhaps Liam Fox should actually employ enough negotiators to talk to the rest of the world. He admitted last week that they do not have enough people to do it and were wanting to just copy the EU deals. We can negotiate as much as we want for trade. Unfortunately the first female Prime Minister of this country got rid of much of the manufacturing base in preference for services. Currently a massive chunk of our exports are service-related (~70% to Europe is service related by £s), and those are not (and will probably never be) covered by any trade deal. And the stuff we do make usually relies on imports for raw materials, which have significantly increased in price over the last year. Anyone that makes or sells something entirely within the UK should be reasonably ok, with probably a small drop due to decreased consumer demand. Anyone that imports or exports is likely to experience problems and anyone that is part of a cross-border supply chain or service industry is probably screwed in the medium term. BTW China (20x), USA (5x) and Japan (2x) are all much larger than us in terms of their internal market and established industry base. Japan is also really pushing TPP to open its borders for trade with the other Pacific nations - that is much more important to Japan and Australia than we will ever be. Oh, and ~90% of the population of the Commonwealth is quite significantly poorer than the population of Europe. Canada, Oz, New Zealand, some bits of the other countries are doing ok by our standards. But most of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, etc are very poor indeed.
E. Keep all the money we paid into the EU, then realise it will actually cost us more money per week due to currency devaluation and lost trade than we were hoping to save. I believe the current figure is running at a £300m or so loss on May-2016 levels. For the banking analogy, we are going to stop paying our wages into the bank we use now and are going to build our own bank next door complete with staff and safe just for our money, charge potential customers for the privilege and then complaining about why we are not getting interest on the money we have in the bank.
The headline figure is a lie. The Office for National Statistics say so. Annoyingly it was meant to be a Boris Johnson is a lovely person thread but it got hijacked.
Boris Johnson is a **** of the highest order. An uber**** who is responsible for a national omnishambles along with Gove, Farage and the other *****. At some point in the future, they will suffer the consequences of their lies.
Well now you've said that - although I posted about keeping all the money - I don't think that is actually practical. What I'd be looking at in relation to EU is a period of say 10 years where we pay a much reduced amount to EU to keep links to open markets but at the same time be able to have our own rules on immigration.
Agree. Brexit is a journey towards a freer, more democratic, global looking UK rather than a destination for nutters. EFTA would be an ideal first move imho.
But surely Nigeria is only poor because they have all this money locked away from deceased billionaires in bank accounts etc. which they, unfortunately, cannot access without people in this country helping them. It appears nobody will as we keep ignoring all those wonderful letters and emails full of offers to do so with a huge share of the proceeds to make us all millionaires. Very generous of these marvellous Nigerian chaps and very uncharitable of us British not to take them up on it .
Do you really think the EU will exist in anything remotely like its current form in 10 years? Besides FoM is as far as Junckers Verhofstadt and Tusk is concerned is inseparable from access to the free market (pure politics since the two are economically unrelated).
Hopefully in ten years it will be a fully integrated political, economic and social union with standard tax across all countries and working on legislation under central control (along with a defence policy, currency and all the other stuff that the Brexiteers get all frothy about and the UK was holding back). Fingers crossed I'll be over there enjoying it.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-boris-johnson-nhs-not-a-pointless-squabble-a7955541.html Ignoring the Brexit stuff this is what matters.