Brexit Penny Dropping?

[Apple]

2 minutes ago, P.K. said:

During the UQ Ian Brady was sitting in the HoC on the far left of the tory benches. Wearing a poor taste bright yellow tie....

I thought I had seen him. So who is lying and what was she really doing...and with whom one wonders.

[John Wright]

You can never be sure. Beware deep fake or correction. Just watch The Capture. LT is digitally generated and manipulated. It explains a lot! 

[P.K.]

1 hour ago, Apple said:

I thought I had seen him. So who is lying and what was she really doing...and with whom one wonders.

I'm not sure he was there all the time of course...

The only reason Thick Lizzy would have see him would be to try and get assurances on protocol. All the Liz supporters (who want to keep their cabinet posts) are claiming that another long, drawn-out election of a new leader would be a disaster. Probably correct. However the 1922 lot can change the rules so it excludes the very stupid membership (probably all of it) and the whole thing could be done in a week.

[woolley]

On 10/18/2022 at 9:29 AM, P.K. said:

During the UQ Ian Brady was sitting in the HoC on the far left of the tory benches. Wearing a poor taste bright yellow tie....

Graham Brady. Or else deep fake technology is even more far-reaching and sinister than we thought.

[P.K.]

17 hours ago, woolley said:

Graham Brady. Or else deep fake technology is even more far-reaching and sinister than we thought.

Whatever.

A smug git with poor taste in ties which, I freely admit, doesn't exactly narrow it down. Better than shocking bad hats I suppose...

I guess we'll find out how many "boot Thick Lizzy out" letters he has this am.

Of course, what will stay the hand self-serving Tories, which is to say pretty much all of them, is the fear of getting creamed in a General Election.

Had to laugh at the number of times Hunt trotted out the "compassionate conservatism" nonsense when we all know that the only difference between compassionate conservatism and conservatism is that under compassionate conservatism they actually tell you they're not going to help you but that they're really sorry about it (I think that's right....) He even played the totally amoral Boris Johnson "fastest growth in the G7" card which is actually a Joker and we all know it.

Interesting times ahead. But not for the most vulnerable in society who will suffer the greatest pain under this or any other tory administration just like they always do...

Edited October 20, 2022 by P.K.
Add OECD Growth Graph

[snowman]

2.6 million views so far.  This is from the FT

https://youtu.be/wO2lWmgEK1Y

 

 

[P.K.]

Mark Carney defends claim UK economy has shrunk from 90% size of Germany's to 70% since Brexit

Last month, in an interview with the Financial Times, Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, added to the considerable evidence about the harm done by Brexit to the UK economy with a striking statistic. He told the FT:

In 2016 the British economy was 90% the size of Germany’s. Now it is less than 70%.

This figure was widely quoted on social media, but it was also strongly contested, even by economists who accept that Brexit has held back the UK economy. One of the most prominent critics was Jonathan Portes, a former government economist who is now a professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London, who the Daily Mail dug up because he described it as a “zombie statistic” and “nonsense”. He said Carney was measuring the size of the two economies according to the prevailing exchange rates. But he said the normal method for comparing economies was to use “purchasing power parity”. (Put crudely, this is a measure that tries to evaluate how rich Britain is not by looking at how much stuff we could buy if we took our pounds and went to the US or China, but by how much stuff we could buy if we spent it in the UK.)

The pound has risen by almost 10% against the dollar since the Truss nadir. Has the UK economy really grown by almost 10% relative to the US in a few weeks?

Similarly, Carney is choosing a date when the pound was abnormally high against the euro (January 2016), another one when the pound was much lower, and then saying we’ve underperformed Germany by 20%.

That’s just obvious complete nonsense. If you look at actual annual growth rate in domestic currency, the UK and Germany have grown by quite similar amounts since 2016.

But this morning, in an interview on the Today programme, Carney defended his use of the 70% figure. He said the value of the pound started to fall when the referendum was called, it went down sharply when the result was announced and “it hasn’t recovered”.

Carney accepted that there was a difference between the purchasing power parity exchange rate and the market exchange rate. The market exchange rate was what ultimately mattered, he said, because it affected the UK’s ability to buy goods from abroad. He went on:

It’s relatively rare that you get big differences between the two [exchange rates]. But you get them when you have a long-standing shock to productivity in the economy and that is unfortunately what we’re getting in the UK. It was predicted that we would get that. It is coming to pass. And … it is one of the issues the Bank of England is facing.

This is what we said [before Brexit] was going to happen, which is that the exchange rate would go down, it would stay down, that would add to inflationary pressure, the economy’s capacity would go down for a period of time because of Brexit, that would add to inflationary pressure, and we would have a situation – which is the situation we have today – where the Bank of England has to raise interest rates despite the fact that the economy is going into recession.

Carney said that he and Portes had a “difference of opinion” on this. But, Carney said, in his view what mattered was “the purchasing ability, the international weight of the economy”. And that has shrunk, he argued.

Another way to put it is that that structural shift is in part what the government, and all of us, are dealing with in the UK. We’ve had a big hit to our productivity, our capacity in the economy … and we have to take some tough decisions in order to get it back up. And that’s one of the consequences of the Brexit decision taken a few years ago.

[Freggyragh]

On 10/24/2022 at 11:47 PM, snowman said:

2.6 million views so far.  This is from the FT

https://youtu.be/wO2lWmgEK1Y

 

 

I know quite a few elderly 'less than clever' Daily Express / Daily Mail readers who are just waking up to the fact that most of those foreigners that used to staff the NHS, the dentist's, the vet's and the chemists have gone, and won't be replaced, so waiting times and costs are just going to keep on getting worse. This effects them more than the economy, which they can blame on incompetent politicians, covid, or Putin, but even they are slowly realising the idiocy of Brexit. 

[The Bastard]

On 11/6/2022 at 9:06 AM, Freggyragh said:

I know quite a few elderly 'less than clever' Daily Express / Daily Mail readers who are just waking up to the fact that most of those foreigners that used to staff the NHS, the dentist's, the vet's and the chemists have gone, and won't be replaced, so waiting times and costs are just going to keep on getting worse. This effects them more than the economy, which they can blame on incompetent politicians, covid, or Putin, but even they are slowly realising the idiocy of Brexit. 

I think, like Trumpism, Brexitism is a cult, so won't be so easy to undermine.

The Brexit cult was never based on the facts, even before the vote - remember the old "bent bananas" and "£350 million a week could go to the NHS" tropes - so for the Daily Mail massive, the fact that Brexit is a disaster will completely escape them in the same way that the MAGA cult still thinks that Trump was the greatest president in history despite being a lying, corrupt, Russia-colluding fascist moron.  

Edited November 7, 2022 by The Bastard

[manxman1980]

We need more foreign workers says Brexit supporter...

 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/10/brexit-next-boss-foreign-workers-uk-lord-wolfson

[Max Power]

I have to say that I was partly in favour of Brexit, I didn't like the waste and how the EU is structured. I also don't agree with its long term aims. 

I think the referendum was triggered by Cameron's pique at being shunned when he suggested reform. That was something which wound up the electorate in Britain and led to the leave vote. 

On the face of it, these seem pretty good reasons to tell the EU to shove it! The main failing of the remain campaign was that they failed to gauge the depth of anger amongst people who didn't have all the facts to make an educated decision. There was a lacklustre attempt by simpering intelligencia to lay out some of the benefits of EU membership. Remainers were seen, with some justification, as big state proponents who always look for a safety net and expect the state to pick up the pieces when they fall. Brexiteers saw themselves as thrusting, self reliant individuals who would 'Make Britain Great Again' (Apologies to Donald) 

Nobody was able to explode the myth that we would be cutting trade deals everywhere, that the EU would be on its knees to us. Where is the much promised US trade deal for example? I think Johnson, Gove and Farage must have crapped themselves when we voted leave. Nobody saw through the fact that there were three prize lemons leading the charge!       

[P.K.]

Personally I think the Remain camp completely failed to see that they should have been campaigning on a very basic level. Then they might have made some headway against what are essentially meaningless slogans like "Take Back Control" etc etc and exposed the lies behind them. The only problem with that, of course, is that folks tend to believe what suits them rather than what appears to be true.

Which explains the circulation figures of the Express, the Daily Wail, the Sun and the Telegraph...

Starmer comes in for a lot of stick on here based on very little actual knowledge. His failure to condemn all the ills of Brexit shows what a difficult position he is in. But the reasons are simple enough. He knows he needs to win back the "Red Wall" seats who voted tory to "get Brexit Done" or whatever. So he can hardly campaign from a start point of "Are you lot thick or what...?" or similar.

It will be interesting to see what develops after two years of recession...

 

[P.K.]

More facts from someone who has all the pertinent information available to them:

Brexit a major cause of UK’s return to austerity, says senior economist

Former Bank of England policymaker Michael Saunders says leaving EU has ‘permanently damaged’ economy

“The UK economy as a whole has been permanently damaged by Brexit,” Michael Saunders, who was an external member of the central bank’s monetary policy committee, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV.

“It’s reduced the economy’s potential output significantly, eroded business investment,” he said, adding: “If we hadn’t had Brexit, we probably wouldn’t be talking about an austerity budget this week.”

“The need for tax rises, spending cuts wouldn’t be there, if Brexit hadn’t reduced the economy’s potential output so much.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/nov/14/brexit-a-major-cause-of-uks-return-to-austerity-says-senior-economist

The Bloomberg interview - https://youtu.be/MLRRjEOA_Y4 

[HeliX]

https://news.sky.com/story/poll-reveals-public-support-for-brexit-at-all-time-low-12749439

[prism10]

5 hours ago, HeliX said:

https://news.sky.com/story/poll-reveals-public-support-for-brexit-at-all-time-low-12749439

A bit late for buyers remorse.