Brexit Penny Dropping?

[manxman1980]

@The Voice of Reason @woolley

I trust you heard/read about this.. 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/national-conservatism-downplaying-holocaust-b2339878.html

[HeliX]

1 hour ago, manxman1980 said:

@The Voice of Reason @woolley

I trust you heard/read about this.. 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/national-conservatism-downplaying-holocaust-b2339878.html

"There was nothing wrong with nationalism in Britain."

Errrr.... Oswald Mosley?

[code99]

The revolution like Brexit devours its own children...again. "A month ahead of the seventh anniversary of the 2016 vote that took Britain out of the European Union, Farage said three words of striking simplicity and truth: Brexit has failed.” It took seven long arduous years from the intimation of a sh*t show to the assessment of damages!

I agree with Jonathan Freedland's "But what comes next may be very dark indeed".

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/19/brexit-failed-blame-remoaner-elite-refugees 

[Ringy Rose]

On 5/19/2023 at 12:48 PM, woolley said:

Whatever you think of UK government policy, it's the most ethnically and sexually diverse cabinet there has ever been, headed by an Asian PM, for goodness sake. I don't think they'd be advocating Nazism in any form, do you?

Can people with brown skin not be extreme nationalists bordering on the fascististic? Narendra Modi says hello.

23 hours ago, The Voice of Reason said:

Most of this focus is on, (what may be considered legitimate concerns), as to what impact the arrival of a relatively large number of people arriving in small communities will have on the local infrastructure. Schools, doctors, hospitals etc

Small communities like, er, London and Manchester. Bradford’s population is over half a million. Hardly some bucolic little village.

But yes, legitimate concerns.

Where they are being put in other areas, such as in various abandoned RAF bases, it is as a result of Government policy to stick them all in a camp somewhere.

On 5/19/2023 at 3:20 PM, woolley said:

The Albanians who form a considerable percentage of the boat arrivals are not fleeing anything and are not forced to come to the UK at all. They are simply economic migrants ducking the system. Why they are put up in hotels and not flown straight back to Tirana is anyone's guess

Because Braverman and Patel before her screwed up the asylum system so badly it’s taking years for the Home Office to make a decision.

As for “economic migration”, here’s the thing: close off all legal forms of migration (except for hyper-rich “entrepreneurs” of dubious provenance, naturally), and you end up with people migrating in other ways, and not being on the radar when they do arrive. So you don’t get to vet them in advance and they don’t pay tax when they get here. Seems a rather stupid thing to do, but what do I know.

And what’s wrong with economic migration anyway? “We’re full” isn’t an answer.

Edited May 20, 2023 by Ringy Rose

[The Voice of Reason]

I can post articles supporting my position too !

174

The export boom Brexit naysayers want you to overlo

A weaker pound is making Britain more attractive on the world stage

ByEir Nolsøe20 May 2023 • 2:00pm

As he railed against Brexit last week, Guy Hands was scathing about the challenges facing Britain.

“People are going to Lisbon, they’re going to Paris, they’re going to Amsterdam,” the multi-millionaire private equity investor told Bloomberg TV.

“As that expertise leaves you eventually reach a tipping point where the reason to be in London disappears.”

Such talk is not unusual across the City, as rival countries vie to lure away bankers and consternation builds over companies shifting from the London Stock Exchange to New York.

Trade experts are also quick to point out a sharp decline in our goods exports, which fell more than 9pc below their pre-pandemic average in the last three months of 2022 – the worst performance in the G7 and a drop described by Sophie Hale, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, as a “disaster”.

However, Hale also points to an often-overlooked fact. In services, the biggest driver of the domestic economy, there has been a boom in exports that was not predicted by any mainstream forecaster.

Services exports grew by 17.8pc in real terms from 2016 to 2022 – the strongest growth in the G7, according to Telegraph analysis of OECD data, and far more than in neighbouring countries such as Italy, Germany and France. 

This also vastly trumps the performance of Japan and the US, which both suffered declines in their services exports over the same time. Only Canada achieved a boost of a near-similar magnitude to the UK.

Overall, British service exports surpassed previous records in 2022, rising to £397bn.

Pound for pound

Domestic and global factors have helped lift the sale of services abroad ever further, despite heightened trade barriers and a global wave of protectionism.  

Gregory Thwaites, an associate professor in economics at the University of Nottingham, says that the devaluation of the pound following Brexit has helped services exports. 

Sterling remains around 15pc lower against the dollar than in the weeks before the EU referendum, making anything Britain sells much cheaper to foreigners.

Thwaites says it fell because markets judged that Brexit would harm the economy, for example by restricting goods exports to the EU. 

“You can actually have a situation where Brexit kind of boosts services trade by harming another sector more,” he says. 

It means that – somewhat counterintuitively – the flipside to the much-highlighted weakness in goods is an improvement in services. 

The intangible nature of services – which include everything from filming Game of Thrones in Northern Ireland to enrolling foreign students at British universities and designing buildings for other countries – also means they are less sensitive to changing trade terms, as selling a service is often simpler than selling a good. 

“Some services are highly regulated like banking, but banking was in any case shrinking as a share of UK exports and has been for some time,” Thwaites says.

“Other kinds of services – for example creative industries – aren’t regulated so much.

“Therefore when you get a change in regulation like Brexit, the volumes of services don’t change very much.”

This also means that as the world’s superpowers race to re-shore their supply chains and ramp up protectionism – as with the US’s $369bn Inflation Reduction Act – services mostly fly under the radar. 

Cross-border alignments

Services trade benefits from aligned regulatory frameworks and countries recognising each other’s professional certificates – for example, allowing architects or lawyers to work in different jurisdictions.

So far, there has been little divergence there between the UK and the EU. And in any case, the EU only accounts for just over a third of British services exports, in contrast to nearly half for goods. 

Companies are also starting to seek out other markets outside the bloc, reflecting a readjustment after Brexit. 

Hale, of the Resolution Foundation, says that the rapid growth in services exports has come even as companies sell less to the EU. 

Removing volatile components like travel and transport, which have been distorted by Covid and restrictions, reveals “a gradual decline in the EU share of services”, she says. 

“It does look like there is a change in the focus of UK exporters in terms of focusing more on non-EU markets,” Hale adds.

Hale says that while there have been some changes to how services exports are measured, which could distort the figures, the improvement over the past decade or so holds up even when adjusting for factors like changing global demand for specific products.

The UK is the world’s second-largest exporter of services after the US. They account for around half of what the UK sells to other countries, which is far higher than for any other G7 nation which ranges from 18pc to 31pc.

It is a long-standing strength, which economists say was already evident more than 40 years ago in 1980 when Britain was still not fully deindustrialised.

It also helps to explain why this part of our economy has proved so resilient through multiple shocks over the past years. 

Brexit opponent Guy Hands says there could be a tipping point where 'the reason for being in London disappears' CREDIT: Jason Alden/Bloomberg

Thomas Sampson, an associate professor at the London School of Economics, says the rapid growth reflects a comparative advantage – meaning Britain can produce the services that it sells with a lower opportunity cost than its trading partners.

“What the UK economy tends to do well is high-skilled services – in particular things like financial services, professional services, that kind of full range of business services,” he says.

“As the UK has become increasingly specialised in those industries, we have seen it reflected in strong export performance for the services. For goods, we’ve seen over many decades the gradual decline of the UK’s manufacturing base and that obviously places a drag on such exports.”

London’s strength

The character of services exports means that London is behind much of the country’s strength, contributing 63pc of the trade surplus in this area in 2018.

While Britons have outperformed foreign competitors in selling services, the UK has also benefitted from a tide that has improved living standards globally and expanded the middle classes. 

“As China, India and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa get richer they’re going to want to spend more on TV and education and so on, having satisfied their needs for food and cars,” Thwaites says. 

“So development is a story of moving towards services.”   

All of these factors mean that services could soon go from making up around half of exports to overtaking goods.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see that over the next decade or two we move to a position where services account for the majority of the UK’s exports,” Mr Sampson says. 

Such a shift would be a reflection of the UK’s strengths – and a repudiation of Hands’ warning over national decline. 

[manxman1980]

@The Voice of Reason what is the source of the article you posted?  

Eir Nolsøe appears to write for the FT but I can't see this article on there.  Maybe I am looking in the wrong place.

[code99]

Many NHS patients are still wondering where the promised post-Brexit extra £350m a week for the NHS is. Meanwhile, I despair every time I hear claptrap like “Britain’s full” being trotted out by Farage. Our collective human decency and compassion continue to be trumped by the values of few selfish xenophobic Brexit scoundrels. They keep feeding their gullible audience myths about home-grown ‘British’ "HGV drivers, butchers or fruit pickers", carers, hospitality workers, doctors, nurses, etc, etc. However, they obstinately refuse to accept the truth that defines the realities modern Britain faces, e.g., Britain’s population is aging. I would love to see politicians’ sprogs pick fruit and make cuppas in the nursing homes. Unsurprisingly, most of them steer well clear of hard physical work and have preferences for more glamourous careers like running hedge funds, being lawyers, PR consultants and similar.

It must be clear to any rational thinker that the UK and the IOM are not ‘full’ and that we have a shortage of working age people. We simply don’t have enough ‘home-grown’ workers to do all of the required jobs. "Turns out Britain needs migrants – but now they have to come from far away, rather than in reciprocal movement between us and our nearest neighbours". Brexit is (based on a ‘cult of false promises’) morally dubious and will forever remain a cause of British economic underperformance.

When the AI revolution destroys hundreds of thousands of white-collar jobs in service industries, we will have a lot more unemployed young Brits. But will these newly unemployed be willing to drive heavy goods vehicle, picking fruit and veg, etc, etc? AI will completely transform the Britain of today, in numerous unpredictable ways. One thing seems certain though – AI will pressure Britain’s workforce in ways that even hundreds of thousands of European migrants could never have done. Brexit zealots and the current governments have no clear and tangible plans for what AI will bring. 

Edited May 21, 2023 by code99
typo

[The Voice of Reason]

1 hour ago, manxman1980 said:

@The Voice of Reason what is the source of the article you posted?  

Eir Nolsøe appears to write for the FT but I can't see this article on there.  Maybe I am looking in the wrong place.

The Telegraph 

[The Voice of Reason]

3 minutes ago, The Voice of Reason said:

The Telegraph 

Actually thinking about it perhaps not. It may be another source. 
 

I read a lot of this stuff. If I can say definitively I’ll let you know
 

[The Voice of Reason]

1 minute ago, The Voice of Reason said:

Actually thinking about it perhaps not. It may be another source. 
 

I read a lot of this stuff. If I can say definitively I’ll let you know
 

Yes it was the Telegraph 

[manxman1980]

12 hours ago, The Voice of Reason said:

Actually thinking about it perhaps not. It may be another source. 
 

I read a lot of this stuff. If I can say definitively I’ll let you know
 

You know when you read these articles you can copy and paste the link as well.  Saves us questioning the source. 

[The Voice of Reason]

24 minutes ago, manxman1980 said:

You know when you read these articles you can copy and paste the link as well.  Saves us questioning the source. 

I know you can I’m just not practiced in how. 
I’ll try it next time. Thanks

[Ringy Rose]

The Telegraph were telling us all in October than Truss and Kwarteng’s budget was the most amazing thing forever and Britain was going to enter a new golden age of growth. That aged well.

That said, Truss trashing the pound should have helped with exports- it made our stuff cheaper for foreigners to buy. It also made stuff more expensive for us to import- stuff like gas and oil, which is priced in USD- but no biggie. We’re selling “services”.

I’d rather listen to Stellantis.

[The Voice of Reason]

51 minutes ago, Ringy Rose said:

The Telegraph were telling us all in October than Truss and Kwarteng’s budget was the most amazing thing forever and Britain was going to enter a new golden age of growth. That aged well.

That said, Truss trashing the pound should have helped with exports- it made our stuff cheaper for foreigners to buy. It also made stuff more expensive for us to import- stuff like gas and oil, which is priced in USD- but no biggie. We’re selling “services”.

I’d rather listen to Stellantis.

I’d rather listen to The Stone Roses

[manxman1980]

Just for fun...

 

Edited May 24, 2023 by manxman1980