Brexit

[sejintenej]

I’d always hoped that we’d flush Ulster as a medieval aberration on the UK, not end up envying it as it passed to Eire and the EU.

A.C.M Sir Mike Wigston might be unhappy if you make it harder for him to get spares for his Tucanos.

[Avon]

I’d always hoped that we’d flush Ulster as a medieval aberration on the UK, not end up envying it as it passed to Eire and the EU.

A.C.M Sir Mike Wigston might be unhappy if you make it harder for him to get spares for his Tucanos.

Well, he’s a crab so he can stick to giving manly embraces to his RAFSWO (or whatever the new ranks are).

[loringa]

I’d always hoped that we’d flush Ulster as a medieval aberration on the UK, not end up envying it as it passed to Eire and the EU.

A.C.M Sir Mike Wigston might be unhappy if you make it harder for him to get spares for his Tucanos.

Not a problem - the Tucano was retired by the RAF in October 2019 and replaced by the T-6C Texan II.

[AMP]

Shall we torch the NI Protocol today or tomorrow?
It's done its job and lasted 29 days.
And the EU didn't even have to break international law.
Freedom of movement was a pain in the neck anyway.
Luvvin the sovereignty.
Taking back control

[loringa]

Is it just me or have the Brexit enthusiasts gone very quiet of late? I don't just mean on this forum but around the country in general. I mean, 17,410,742 people voted to leave and now they've got what they wanted, why don't we hear more from them?

Perhaps they just don't want to gloat? Presumably the £350 million per week is proving useful for the NHS at this difficult time.

[rockfreak]

Actually Andrew, they haven't entirely gone quiet. It's just that our overwhelmingly right-wing, anti-EU press are not reporting the misgivings. The Fishermen of England (and Scotland) are now complaining that the deal has completely zapped them. As are increasing numbers of small businessmen who find that the extra paperwork at the borders is making them uncompetitive and so they may have to cut their losses and close down, or else relocate to the continent with the consequent redundancies in this country.

The City is seeing enormous leakage to other financial centres but the City is so huge that the possible collapse of its dominance in world finance is not quite yet apparent. Services, which are by far the major part of our GDP, are now not covered by any EU agreement so it's all up in the air as to what the future is there. All for renegotiation. But I suppose you might call that "the phoney war" for the moment. Hostilities with the EU haven't quite started. The air raid wardens are simply telling people to black out the windows and take to the shelters just in case.

As for Nigel Farrago, he's been spotted on social media banging on, not about the hit to our trade, but rather predictably about the EU not playing fair over the vaccines. What did he expect? We're one state against 27 now.

[AMP]

Is it just me or have the Brexit enthusiasts gone very quiet of late? .....
Perhaps they just don't want to gloat? Presumably the £350 million per week is proving useful for the NHS at this difficult time.

Their Short contracts on the UK haven't matured yet.
Once they've cashed in.......er.....don't expect to hear much.

This will come as a great shock and I will try to break it gently.....it was a number on the side of a bus.

Sorry folks.

At least now that we have immigration finally under control, we can stop foreign doctors and nurses just waltzing in and helping the NHS take the strain.

That said, I am not surprised to see the French have completely messed up their vaccine rollout.
They are an awkward and incompetent lot who I have had to work with for most of the last 30 years.
A bit more space is no bad thing.
And I am a francophile, before anyone accuses me of racism...
I have a degree from a french university....not one of those international degrees where everybody pretends to be immersed in a foreign culture (called english or american). Everything was in french.
And I like the french outside of the workplace.

[scrub]

Is it just me or have the Brexit enthusiasts gone very quiet of late?

It'll be sporadic, but they'll pipe up every time they see a "Brexit bonus" or some other chance to say "this is why the EU is evil and must be destroyed".

So while they've been quiet over the reality that "free trade" means tariff-free, not paperwork-free (and that being outside the SM and CU exponentially increases paperwork), they've been very vocal over the UK's reporting of the EU's blundering response to their contract dispute with Astrazeneca.

This will be the pattern for the next, oh, let's say 10 years. At least.

For my reckoning, the next big grumbling will be July when the UK starts to operate its side of the border the way the EU currently does. Right now, the UK treats imports as if it were still in the SM, i.e. no/minimal checks (but also no revenue going to HMRC coffers). There'll be another one when the EU's equivalence decision is made, and again when business travel and tourism start getting back to pre-pandemic levels.

After that, I'd guess that every time a piece of bad domestic news needs to be buried we'll get plenty of column inches about the latest "outrageous EU insult against our brave men/women/boys of the car/fishing/finance/cheese industry".

[AMP]

We are cosying up to the pacific nations but we messed them about when we joined the EU.
Payback time.
Biden doesn't trust us.
Back of a long queue

[scrub]

We are cosying up to the pacific nations but we messed them about when we joined the EU.
Payback time.
Biden doesn't trust us.
Back of a long queue

I don't think it's payback so much as none of the cutting in line or preferential treatment that some people assume is the UK's natural right. When you're used to getting your own way, being told to wait is going to feel like a mortal sleight. Step away from the headline seeking politicians and talking head opinionistas whose job it is to be professionally outraged, you find the people doing the actual work are fairly pragmatic. Deals, agreements, and cooperation are always better to have than not and despite the mindset of some game theory fetishists, they don't have to be a zero sum event.

I'm not entirely sure how much it's going to benefit the UK, at least in the case of any UK/Oz arrangement. UK farmers aren't going to find a new market there, but Oz ones will be happy to offload whatever's left after they've sold all they can to China. Same goes for NZ. Any tariff-free deal is going to put more pressure on UK farmers and food producers. The things the UK excels in (services, high end auto and aeronautics, pharma, etc) are going to find it really hard getting into those (small) Oz markets without massive subsidies. As someone who spent most of their adult life in Oz, I'm struggling to think of anything that was imported from the UK that would end up with a bigger market share if tariffs were dropped. For example, there's a limited number of people who know what a Linn turntable is, let alone want to buy one, and tariffs haven't bothered them so far. Anyone with the money for a McLaren probably already has one, along with a Lambo on order and a Ferrari or two collecting dust in the garage. I'm sure I've missed a lot of sectors though and this is not my area of expertise, but as a layman, there doesn't seem to be an obvious economic boost. There's obviously a political one though, which is partly why this is being pushed so hard.

[loringa]

No responses required, but FYI another thing for which we should all be grateful (supplied by an oppo who knows about this stuff):

The City of London faces political battle for EU access post-Brexit. The biggest issue facing the industry is equivalence — a legal mechanism whereby foreign rules are recognised as equivalent to local ones. Britain is seeking between 28 and 40 equivalence rulings from the EU depending on how you view the regulation. The most important decisions revolve around Europe’s MIFID II regulation, which covers investment banking activities. The UK granted several equivalence rulings in November, which allowed EU firms in Britain to abide by home state rules. The EU has so far not reciprocated. The bloc granted the UK equivalence in just two areas: central clearing and securities settlement. Both decisions were taken to avoid financial stability issues and were time limited. The failure to grant equivalence forced many businesses to either stop serving clients in the EU or set up new offices in the bloc that could handle their business. The EU has so far held a hardline against firms that failed to relocated staff and asset ahead of the 1 January Brexit deadline. There are fears in the City of London that equivalence could be withheld by the EU to force more business into the single market. Europe has not hidden its desire to “rebalance” business away from London in the wake of Brexit. Last month, the European Commission launched a policy to improve the “strength and resilience of Europe's economic and financial system,” which included discussion of moving EU-denominated clearing activity into the EU. London clearing houses have traditionally been the central hub of the multi-trillion euro derivatives market. Andrew Pilgrim, who leads the UK government and financial services team at EY, said the EU urged finance firms to “make sure they were bringing some of the business out of the UK into the European Union,” when it granted temporary equivalence to UK clearing houses. “We will be looking within the European Union to see how we can move those critical infrastructures within the EU,” Mairead McGuinness, European commissioner for financial services, told Bloomberg last month. Last week the EU granted equivalence to clearing houses in the United States, a move seen by some as part of a broader plan to undermine London. The US equivalence decisions means firms can move business to New York if necessary when the temporary UK equivalence ruling expire in 18 months time — a halfway house towards more lasting change.

Brexit - the gift that keeps on giving; thanks again Dear Brexiteers. Securing our borders against Johnny Foreigner is really paying dividends; we're even keeping his dirty foreign money out!

[AMP]

Most of the MIFID 11 reports sent to the regulator are frigged. But frigging the domicile of a business and trying to get away with it would probably be stretching it, even by the feeble standards of the FSA.

We were kept in the dark during negotiations, but now it's been signed off it's all coming out slowly.

We shunned the EU offer of visa free travel for UK musicians.

[loringa]

Further Brexit benefits illustrated by these January figures:

Brexit difficulties for importers and exporters has triggered a shortfall in trade going to and from Europe, figures from the Channel Tunnel operator showed for the first month since the new EU trade agreement. Figures today from Getlink, the company behind the Le Shuttle, showed freight on its Le Shuttle service was down 38% in January compared with December. It was also down 37% on January last year, with the company blaming Brexit and Covid travel restrictions and requirements. Getlink’s monthly figures are used as a key barometer of Britain’s trading economy. Exporters from small fishermen to big companies such as Marks & Spencer have found the blizzard of new red tape around exporting to the EU “catastrophic” to their exports there. Food has been particularly affected because of the need for health certificates on a multitude of ingredients, but country of origin and other documentation has caused problems for most industries who have grown used to manufacturing goods using products from EU. French newspapers have been highlighting images of empty Marks & Spencer’s food shelves. Getlink, which is owned by French private shareholders, has suffered greatly from companies' inability to understand the complex new rules as shipments have been held up or cancelled altogether. December had been a strong month for its freight traffic because many manufacturers had anticipated the chaos and stockpiled ahead of the trade deal coming into effect. A total of 131,746 trucks passed through the tunnel in December. In January, that fell to just 82,484.

[Pe.A]

We're one state against 27 now.

Exactly. Britain is now going to discover what it is like to be a medium sized fish in a very big and cold pond, with other bigger fish and other big shoals of fish to contend with.

Fingers crossed.

[Pe.A]

We are cosying up to the pacific nations but we messed them about when we joined the EU.
Payback time.
Biden doesn't trust us.
Back of a long queue

Does anyone know what the benefits are of a trade deal with the mighty Pacific Islands?

And it looks like the US won't even consider a trade deal unless we allow free access for their health insurance companies, and their very dodgy food standards.