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The Positive Brexit Thread

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4 minutes ago, SwindonCanary said:

They have very little money but still spend it on all sorts of projects 

Are they spending £200m on a Royal yacht too?

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Today is the 5th anniversary of the day some idiots in this country voted to impose sanctions on everyone else.

In the 5 years since they've made the country worse off.

It's the new April fools day! 😀

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1 hour ago, horsefly said:

Are they spending £200m on a Royal yacht too?

The re- commissioning of the Royal yacht is a great thing,  and will boost our standing around the world. When the old one was taken, it's the only time I've seen the queen cry.

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30 minutes ago, SwindonCanary said:

The re- commissioning of the Royal yacht is a great thing,  and will boost our standing around the world. When the old one was taken, it's the only time I've seen the queen cry.

Indeed far better than seeing children cry through hunger when they are not provided with free meals in the school holidays, or maybe not.

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42 minutes ago, SwindonCanary said:

The re- commissioning of the Royal yacht is a great thing,  and will boost our standing around the world. When the old one was taken, it's the only time I've seen the queen cry.

Rule, Britannia,

Britannia waives the rules.

 

 

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55 minutes ago, SwindonCanary said:

The re- commissioning of the Royal yacht is a great thing,  and will boost our standing around the world. When the old one was taken, it's the only time I've seen the queen cry.

Tears of joy that the bloody thing was scrapped. I take it you haven't considered the fact that the queen refuses to let the boat be named after her late husband (A fabulous swipe at Boris's pathetic attempt to curry favour). 

This is an extraordinarily stupid folly at a time of record debt. Give the money back to the international aid budget which not only does good for impoverished people, but also does wonders for the country's reputation

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Today a truce is expected to be agreed in the ongoing sausage wars.

 

The Wurst is behind us😉🇬🇧

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1 hour ago, SwindonCanary said:

The re- commissioning of the Royal yacht is a great thing,  and will boost our standing around the world. When the old one was taken, it's the only time I've seen the queen cry.

Like all major projects the government undertakes , The Boris Boat will be delivered ( if at all ) years behind schedule and vastly over the estimated cost. Sadly Her Maj will be long dead by then.

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4 minutes ago, MooreMarriot said:

Like all major projects the government undertakes , The Boris Boat will be delivered ( if at all ) years behind schedule and vastly over the estimated cost. Sadly Her Maj will be long dead by then.

It will still be a boost to our standing throughout the world no matter who's on it. Maybe king Charles !  

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1 hour ago, SwindonCanary said:

It will still be a boost to our standing throughout the world no matter who's on it. Maybe king Charles !  

Not at all, it will not boost the UK's standing with anyone. Instead it rather paints the country as desparate and a little pathetic. Its only purpose is a £200 million boost to the fragile egos of Brexiteers.

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The old ROYAL YACHT was known thought-out the world, I believe the new one will do the same. It was used as base for any dignitary's  when abroad, they had official function's on it.   

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It won't be a royal boat. The Queen doesn't want anything to do with it. 

My only hope is that Johnson does a Maxwell with it. 

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Oddly I think the 'boat' saga is very informative of the Brexiteer mentality.

As we've now effectively relegated ourselves from the top economic tables of power (China, USA, EU etc.) where any diplomatic visits will now be just sidelines in the respective international press when somebody visits (rather like as in our press Orban's visit to the UK) of little public interest - then yes perhaps a Disney Land twee boat would generate some interest.

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7 hours ago, SwindonCanary said:

They have very little money but still spend it on all sorts of projects 

Indeed 1.8 billion doses of Pfizer which they will also manufacture.

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12 hours ago, horsefly said:

I ought to be astonished by your willingness to embarrass yourself by repeatedly displaying chronic levels of ignorance, but then I remind myself that you show not the slightest compunction in posting racist, misogynist, and homophobic rants, or abusing the victims of paedophiles.

Are you really so foolish that you don't realise people can see through your laughably transparent attempt to impute to me nonsensical views I have never espoused? Or is it the case that your understanding of the English language is so poor that you can't grasp the meaning of a simple conditional statement. Either way, being a charitable individual, I will try one last time to explain to you something a primary school child has no problem grasping.

My claim is:

 "For legal purposes a treaty is treated as a contract"

Let's break that down for you if it will help, as clearly you struggle with a whole sentence:

First clause: "FOR LEGAL PURPOSES". This clause restricts the context of application of the complete sentence to legal contexts. In other words, it does not claim that what follows in the next clause has any application beyond a legal context. So no, the words "treaty" and "contract" are not being treated as synonyms across all contexts.  Quite simple really, if you just concentrate on the meanings of the words being used. 

Second clause: "a treaty is treated as a contract". Following from the first clause this makes the claim that in legal contexts the obligations agreed to in a treaty are treated as contractual obligations that can be prosecuted in a court of law. If you have followed the dispute over the NI protocol then you would have to be ignorant beyond redemption not to realise that the EU has precisely threatened just such legal action if the UK does not fulfil its obligations.

Really not difficult stuff to understand if you're not blinded by extreme right wing hatred. Neither is it very difficult to google the issue in order to confirm this rather mundane legal point. You could also look up the links I posted explaining the treatment of treaties as contracts. But somehow experience suggests you won't let a mortifying display of the most embarrassing levels of ignorance get in the way of an opportunity to vent hatred and bile.

As you're struggling a little bit here, let me help you with the difference between a treaty and a contract. From this you will discover they are not the same thing.

 

A treaty is (international law) a binding agreement concluded by subjects of international law, namely states and international organizations while contract is an agreement between two or more parties, to perform a specific job or work order, often temporary or of fixed duration and usually governed by a written agreement.

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On 22/06/2021 at 10:48, nevermind, neoliberalism has had it said:

Another deluded Dido supporter who wants to get rid of immigrant doctors and nurses in the NHS. She says that we can rid ourselves of immigrant staff in the NHS in two years, another wrecking ball thrown into the air. These 10%/130.000 staff in the NHS she wants rid off have worked their collective guts off to serve this country through a pandemic and before and she is nothing but an errant incompetent failure/money grabber who would like to help to privatise the rest of the NHS to the creeps who are slowly buying up GP surgeries on the sly and other US health care companies.

 

Of course we need to populate the NHS with British staff. Not because of some racist meme but because the NHS is a key service that has to be self-sustaining. I see lots of posts complaining about the sell-off of key industries to foreign companies such as Huawei or the French power generators with the argument that we should not sell off key industries. You make the argument for not selling off the NHS to the Americans, yet if we outsource our medical expertise to foreigners then we run the risk of having no national expertise if for some reason those people leave the UK and take their knowledge with them. It isn't an anti-foreigner point, it is having a sensible, long-term, sustainable model of creating, training and holding onto personnel in key positions.

There is also a moral argument to be made. Again, I'm often told that the history of this country involved the transfer of wealth from colonies to the mother nation. That is exactly what happens when the NHS trawls developing countries for the wealth of knowledge to transfer it back to the UK. You may well say how wonderful it is to be treated by a Philippina nurse, but you are denying the people of the Philippines the chance to be treated with the same level of care.

Then there is the argument that British people are not interested in taking up those vacant positions. The solution is then to make it financially interesting so that people will be encouraged to apply for these jobs. I would have thought the left would jump at the chance to support anything that benefits the working population by increasing their skillsets and salary levels, but there is as much silence on the issue from the opposition as there is from the government. 

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14 minutes ago, Rock The Boat said:

The solution is then to make it financially interesting so that people will be encouraged to apply for these jobs.

No, the solution is to invest in the required education and training. The UK used to provide bursaries for those wanting to train as nurses for example, but this was cut by the Tories who thought it would be a good idea to CHARGE trainee nurese £27k for the privilege.

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1 hour ago, Rock The Boat said:

As you're struggling a little bit here, let me help you with the difference between a treaty and a contract. From this you will discover they are not the same thing.

 

A treaty is (international law) a binding agreement concluded by subjects of international law, namely states and international organizations while contract is an agreement between two or more parties, to perform a specific job or work order, often temporary or of fixed duration and usually governed by a written agreement.

FFS you are so dumb!  Even with a primary school level of explanation you still don't have enough grasp of the English language to understand the fundamentally simple sentence "FOR LEGAL PURPOSES treaties are treated as contracts". That very sentence already implies the basic definition you just quoted thicko! Otherwise it would have indeed been pointless to include the clause "For legal purposes". That clause establishes that it is in the context of law (NOT ALL CONTEXTS) that treaties are treated as contracts. Christ alive! How dense do you have to be not to understand this. 

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Just now, A Load of Squit said:

Can we have separate thread for discussions about treaties and whether they are legally binding contracts? 😉

I'm totally bored with it too.  Indeed it only required a brief google to establish the point. I have no idea why they can't understand. Happy to let the EU prove the point in court.

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I’ve kept away from this thread for the sake of my blood pressure. However, putting to one side the question of whether Brexit had merit or not, after reading this Twitter thread I had to post it to highlight what an utter c0ckup the government is making of it.
 

The creative industries make billions of pounds every year for the UK, but are being let down. Inevitably, people will either move abroad, or move out of the creative industries, significantly reducing the country’s revenue.

 

 

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To add a little weight to the point: “Creative industries contributed more than £111bn to the UK economy in 2018” according to the government. Also according to the government, the fishing industry is worth less than half a billion. Go figure where they spent their time and effort.

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1 hour ago, Nuff Said said:

I’ve kept away from this thread for the sake of my blood pressure. However, putting to one side the question of whether Brexit had merit or not, after reading this Twitter thread I had to post it to highlight what an utter c0ckup the government is making of it.
 

The creative industries make billions of pounds every year for the UK, but are being let down. Inevitably, people will either move abroad, or move out of the creative industries, significantly reducing the country’s revenue.

 

 

Yep, I posted something similar a few weeks ago too about musicians as well as the above story. For a country like ours that arguably is an exemplar when it comes to the creative industries, the emerging stories are a crushing blow to them.

 

I have copied a great summary here too now from yesterday's Independent (copied out because it is behind a pay wall request). It shows in some detail where we are heading / the direction of travel.

The real ‘Brexit dividend’? Minus £800m a week – and counting

 

Analysis: It’s five years since Britain voted to leave the EU – so what number should really have been on the side of the Vote Leave bus? Ben Chu examines the real impact of Brexit on the UK’s economy

Ben_Chu.png?width=137&auto=webp&quality=75
1 day ago
<p>Vote Leave highlighted the cost of the UK’s EU budget contributions – but studies indicate the damage from the Brexit vote had already cost the UK economy between £400m and £800m a week by the end of 2019</p>

Vote Leave highlighted the cost of the UK’s EU budget contributions – but studies indicate the damage from the Brexit vote had already cost the UK economy between £400m and £800m a week by the end of 2019

(Getty/The Independent)

It was a vote famously won, at least in part, on money. “We send the EU £350m a week,” read the message on the side of Vote Leave’s battlebus. “Let’s fund our NHS instead.” The figure referred to an estimate of the UK’s gross contribution to the European Union – in reality there was much more at play in the economics of EU membership, including money Brussels sent back to Britain and trade benefits.

So, five years on from the vote, what has Brexit really meant for the economy?

The UK finally left the EU’s single market and the customs union under the terms of Boris Johnson’s bare bones free trade deal with Brussels on 31 December 2020 – a deal that economists predict will significantly hold back the UK economy over the coming years relative to staying in the bloc.

 

But economists judge that the costs of Brexit first began to be felt virtually from the moment the shock Leave referendum victory emerged on the night of 23 June 2016 when David Cameron was still prime minister.

That night saw the largest daily slump in the value of sterling on record, as financial market traders frantically sold the UK currency in anticipation of a drastic economic divorce between Britain and the rest of the Continent.

Between 23 and 27 June 2016, sterling declined by 11 per cent against the US dollar and 8 per cent against the euro.

That crash instantly pushed up the price of imported goods.

Analysts at the London School of Economics have estimated that, as a direct result of this record-breaking currency depreciation, UK consumer prices increased by 2.9 percentage points in the two years following the referendum and that this translated into an £870 per year increase in the cost of living for the average UK household.

Our Supporter Programme funds special reports on the issues that matter. Click here to help fund more of our public-interest journalism

The other almost instantaneous impact of the Brexit vote was a slump in business investment, as many firms cancelled their expansion plans amid confusion over the UK’s future trading relations with the Continent.

The deadlock in Parliament after the 2017 general election over what form Brexit should take, if any, ensured that business investment remained extremely weak.

If investment by firms had continued rising at its pre-referendum rate it would have been some 10 per cent higher by the end of 2019.

 

The Brexit vote also seems to have deterred overseas companies from investing in the UK, or from expanding their operations here.

Analysts at the University of Sussex’s UK Trade Policy Observatory in 2018 estimated that the Brexit vote reduced the number of foreign investment projects in the UK by between 16 and 20 per cent.

Business investment contributes to the economy in two ways. First, it boosts aggregate spending, which helps drive income and jobs today. Second, it boosts the long-term productive capacity of the economy, which produces higher incomes and more jobs tomorrow.

Historically, investment by multinational companies – the sort that has been especially weak since 2016 – has proven highly beneficial in the latter respect.

This all means that, by crushing investment, Brexit will have not only have hampered economic growth relative to where it would otherwise have been since 2016, but will also continue to be a drag for many years into the future.

Many economists have sought to quantify these negative impacts. Before the pandemic struck last year, a host of studies examined the impact of Brexit on the overall economy with so called “doppelganger” modelling exercises.

These involved examining how the UK gross domestic product had grown in the wake of the Brexit vote relative to other peer economies (France, Germany, Canada, the US and so on) with whose performance UK growth had historically been reasonably tightly correlated.

Because the UK was the only major country that had voted to rip itself out of a deep economic and regulatory relationship with a vast neighbouring trade bloc, any divergence in performance between the expected UK performance and the actual performance could reasonably be attributed to the Brexit vote.

A number of these studies, using different baskets of comparator economies, showed a gap in the UK’s economic performance opening up after the referendum as a result of lower business investment and the impact of the sterling slump on household spending.

£400-800m

Estimated weekly damage done by Brexit vote to UK economy by end of 2019

And these studies indicated Brexit damage by the end of 2019 of between 1 and 2 per cent of GDP, or between £20bn and £40bn. That, to put it in the terms favoured by the Vote Leave side during the referendum campaign, equates to a loss of between £400m and £800m a week.

Economists at the University of Warwick performed a similar doppelganger modelling exercise, but examining the impact of Brexit on the UK’s regions and districts.

They found a considerable amount of variation, with those UK areas that had relatively large Leave votes in 2016 and significant numbers of low-skilled workers suffering more than others.

The pandemic over the past 12 months has played havoc with those doppelganger exercises using comparator countries because the impact of Covid has been so enormous and varied around the world.

Yet Thiemo Fetzer, one of the Warwick researchers, argues the massive shock of 2020 will not have changed the picture of underlying economic damage to the UK from Brexit.

“Covid is obviously going to confound a lot of these things but I think the trend will be very similar,” he says.

And what of the impact of actually leaving the single market and the customs union since 31 December?

We do not yet have the data to estimate the impact on the overall economy, but there have certainly been problems at the borders for UK firms.

British goods exports to the EU slumped by a record amount in January. They rebounded in February but still remain considerably below where they were in the average of previous years.

The Centre for European Reform think tank has run a doppelganger modelling exercise, examining and comparing other countries’ trade patterns since the start of this year, that suggests Brexit has reduced UK goods exports by 11 per cent, or £7.7bn relative to where they otherwise would have been.

 

How do these near-term estimates of the cost of Brexit fit with the long-term projections of how leaving the EU will ultimately damage the UK economy?

A host of these studies have estimated moving from EU membership to a simple free trade deal – as the UK has done – will permanently damage UK GDP by between 4 and 6 per cent in the long run relative to where it otherwise would have been.

This is a result of higher trade barriers with Europe damaging UK industry and holding back our national productivity growth.

Read more special reports from our Supporter Programme

So how much of this economic damage has already been felt and how much is still to come?

It’s impossible to be certain, but the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Treasury’s official forecaster, at the time of the March 2021 Budget estimated that around two-fifths of the total damage had been inflicted so far due to the investment slump.

So if the long-term Brexit cost is assumed to be 4 per cent of GDP (as the OBR projects), that implies 2.4 per cent of GDP damage is yet to be felt, or around £48bn.

To put this in the context of the UK’s 66 million-strong population, the cost of Brexit so far on average is around £480 per person, with a further £720 of pain to go.

 

And this, by the way, is including estimates of the benefits of any new tariff-lowering post-Brexit free-trade deals the UK might conclude with the likes of America or Canada. Even the recently signed Australia trade deal is predicted by the government to boost GDP by only 0.02 per cent over 15 years.

Why do these trade deals not make much difference? Because we do so much of our trade with the EU (around half) that any increased trade with these other countries cannot, arithmetically, compensate for the significant expected foregone trade with Europe.

“Almost all economists expect a further hit to income growth as trade with the EU becomes more costly,” says Thomas Sampson of the London School of Economics.

“Trade models suggest it could take a decade for the economy to fully adjust to Brexit.”

 

The size of the Brexit economic impact cannot, of course, be predicted with any pinpoint accuracy. But all the mainstream analysis is unambiguous in suggesting that it will be negative and large. And that will feed through to our living standards in the form of weaker job creation and slower income growth than otherwise.

But will it be recognised? Politicians, as we’ve seen in recent months, will likely seek to blame other factors, from Covid to a lack of flexibility from the EU in applying their import regulations.

And some Brexit voters might insist they haven’t experienced any economic pain personally if they have managed to keep their jobs or perhaps are retired.

“The problem is you don’t know how the UK would have unfolded if it hadn’t been for that vote,” says Mr Fetzer.

“Brexit is death by a thousand needles, it’s not an earthquake. You don’t hear about each of the **** of the needle.”

 

All quite a sad read.

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The thing about the tweets from the UK Trade and Business Commission that spurred me to post is the repeated evidence, from those in the industry asked to appear and give their experience, of how they have just been ignored by the government, despite asking for help and being clear about what they need. We are not only being made poorer in financial terms, but also culturally, and the government is looking for the other way. Leaving the EU was supposed to offer us new opportunities elsewhere, but Johnson and his cronies are being exposed as seeing it purely as an exercise in gaining and keeping power.

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9 minutes ago, Nuff Said said:

The thing about the tweets from the UK Trade and Business Commission that spurred me to post is the repeated evidence, from those in the industry asked to appear and give their experience, of how they have just been ignored by the government, despite asking for help and being clear about what they need. We are not only being made poorer in financial terms, but also culturally, and the government is looking for the other way. Leaving the EU was supposed to offer us new opportunities elsewhere, but Johnson and his cronies are being exposed as seeing it purely as an exercise in gaining and keeping power.

I think it's to do with money isn't it? Tory donors do not get much involved in the music industry do they? The guy who was running the Womad festival was on BBC news yesterday. He complained (quite fairly actually and without malice) that other 'events' were being given trial status but despite lots of consultations and adherence to the best and latest health advice and protocols he could not get support for it to go ahead. The festival is in jeopardy: (see story below).

https://www.thisiswiltshire.co.uk/news/19396032.womad-2021-brink-collapse-unless-government-steps/

 

I personally think they're a bunch of "stiffs" (😅) and it needs a shake up - will admit my comment is really simply an excuse to post this clip from a favourite film (the jukebox quip I've always thought was an ad lib one because Richard E Grant just couldn't stop himself laughing in saying it). If your blood pressure rises when thinking about Brexit, this will cheer you no end.

 

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