Re: Benefits of Brexit for Britain
Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2022 1:19 pm
Fortunately you're on a forum where you're welcome to provide an evidence based response to what is a fairly measured article with a number of salient points.Little waster wrote: ↑Tue Nov 08, 2022 8:24 amLarry the Lexiteer finally breaks cover to tackle the consensus.
Tl;dr version: by every metric the UK economy is doing badly but if you wave your hands around a lot you can claim this isn't due to Brexit, it might be just the indirect consequence of having a government made up of the sort of fuckwits who thought Brexit would be a good idea ... which is TOTALLY different! Also COVID is just like a bad flu innit.
Sadly some technical glitch* at Guardian Towers meant the second part of the article where he actually pointed to a single solid Brexit benefit accidentally got deleted.
Well I'm convinced.
*Presumably the same glitch which blocks anybody commenting on Larry's little pearls of wisdom meaning the Gradgrinds readers are robbed of any chance to express their admiration and gratitude and back up his claims with the evidence he failed to provide.
FTFYplodder wrote: ↑Tue Nov 08, 2022 3:00 pmFortunately you're on a forum where you're welcome to provide an evidence based response to what is a fairly measured one-sided half of an article with a number of salient points cherry-picked PRATTs.Little waster wrote: ↑Tue Nov 08, 2022 8:24 amLarry the Lexiteer finally breaks cover to tackle the consensus.
Tl;dr version: by every metric the UK economy is doing badly but if you wave your hands around a lot you can claim this isn't due to Brexit, it might be just the indirect consequence of having a government made up of the sort of fuckwits who thought Brexit would be a good idea ... which is TOTALLY different! Also COVID is just like a bad flu innit.
Sadly some technical glitch* at Guardian Towers meant the second part of the article where he actually pointed to a single solid Brexit benefit accidentally got deleted.
Well I'm convinced.
*Presumably the same glitch which blocks anybody commenting on Larry's little pearls of wisdom meaning the Gradgrinds readers are robbed of any chance to express their admiration and gratitude and back up his claims with the evidence he failed to provide.
I read the article with interest. I was struck by a point which I thought was rhetorical rather than salient (and is present in other parts of the article).plodder wrote: ↑Tue Nov 08, 2022 3:00 pmFortunately you're on a forum where you're welcome to provide an evidence based response to what is a fairly measured article with a number of salient points.Little waster wrote: ↑Tue Nov 08, 2022 8:24 amLarry the Lexiteer finally breaks cover to tackle the consensus.
Tl;dr version: by every metric the UK economy is doing badly but if you wave your hands around a lot you can claim this isn't due to Brexit, it might be just the indirect consequence of having a government made up of the sort of fuckwits who thought Brexit would be a good idea ... which is TOTALLY different! Also COVID is just like a bad flu innit.
Sadly some technical glitch* at Guardian Towers meant the second part of the article where he actually pointed to a single solid Brexit benefit accidentally got deleted.
Well I'm convinced.
*Presumably the same glitch which blocks anybody commenting on Larry's little pearls of wisdom meaning the Gradgrinds readers are robbed of any chance to express their admiration and gratitude and back up his claims with the evidence he failed to provide.
This implies : (1) The anti-Brexit camp stated that "Brexit will crash the economy". (2) The economy has not crashed. (3) therefore the anti-Brexit camp was wrong.Over the years, the argument from the anti-Brexit camp has changed. Where once it was “Brexit will crash the economy” it now is “the economy would be performing better were it not for Brexit”
It's like an incredibly long, very slow-motion car crash. At some point we will eventually reach a point where they can say:dyqik wrote: ↑Tue Nov 08, 2022 11:12 pmSince Brexit didn't actually start until it overlapped with the pandemic and massive government intervention in the economy, it's really hard to show that it did or did not crash the economy.
Likewise, recent economic troubles are part of the Brexit that is still ongoing, with divergence from EU law still not fully happening. Plus the Brexit effect of boosting of the current Tory party that was elected to get Brexit done is still crashing the economy.
You can't yet say that Brexit did or did not crash the economy, because it's still going on.
Douglas Adams wrote:And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed, and a long sullen silence settled over a billion worlds, disturbed only by the pen scratchings of scholars as they laboured into the night over smug little treaties on the value of a planned political economy.
The forecasts of crashes were on the basis of a very hard, sudden, near-term Brexit, and then the prior effect of the market knowing that coming. In practice, the market correctly believed that a sudden, hard, near-term Brexit wasn't a likely scenario, and so didn't create the prior crash that was predicated on them believing that.nekomatic wrote: ↑Tue Nov 08, 2022 10:19 pmTo be absolutely fair I think there was a fair proportion of people predicting Brexit would crash the economy, but that was in the context of what David Cameron had announced he would do in the event of a leave result which was to immediately invoke article 50 and stay in office to deal with the consequences. Of course he did neither of those things and so the effects were delayed rather than immediate.
The writer of the article references this report which unfortunately is hosted on a website with a big union jack on it which I'm sure will be a huge issue for many of you. However it includes lots of numbers and statistics that suggest that Brexit has so far been meh at most. By all means feel free to engage with the detail if you insist on having strong opinions on all this stuff.There is no dispute that the UK has some serious economic problems – including a chronic trade deficit and a poor record for investment – but they predate the Brexit vote in 2016. Britain has not run a surplus on trade in goods since the early 1980s, and wages adjusted for inflation have barely grown since the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. Had the economy been firing on all cylinders in 2016, it seems unlikely more than 17 million people would have voted to leave the EU.
Britain is not the only country facing labour shortages. The German government said earlier this year it was cutting red tape to make it easier to recruit workers from Turkey, and its big industrial sector trade union, IG Metall, has put in a claim for an 8% increase. France reported 300,000 unfilled vacancies in its hospitality, with a similar picture in Spain. According to the Office for National Statistics, at the time of the 2016 referendum there were 2,335,000 people born in other EU countries employed in the UK. At the latest count, this total stood at 2,389,000. The number is down slightly on the peak of 2,508,000 in early 2020 but there has been no mass exodus of EU workers.
Nor is the UK alone in facing cost of living pressures. The annual inflation rate for the 19-nation eurozone currently stands at 10.7%, higher than the UK’s 10.1%. US inflation peaked at just over 9% in the summer.
The European Central Bank is pushing up interest rates because it is worried that tight labour markets will lead to a wage-price spiral; so is the Federal Reserve in the US. The upward pressures on inflation are caused by the pandemic, the supply-chain bottlenecks that followed the pandemic, and by the failure of central banks to act quickly enough when problems first started to emerge. The whole of Europe is facing recession this winter, with Germany in particular paying a heavy price for its dependence on Russian gas.
Well it does if your point is "I'm just going to shuffle these goalposts around a bit because reasons, but trust me, it's bound to be bad".dyqik wrote: ↑Wed Nov 09, 2022 11:21 amThat's not really contradicting the point I am making. Brexit is economically a big problem, but it's been spread out over time enough that it overlapped with the pandemic, which is a once a century economic disruption.
The pandemic and subsequent economic effects are a really big deal, largely unimaginable at the time the descriptions of Brexit as an economic disaster were being made. That doesn't make the quantitative analysis wrong, but it does change the qualitative language a bit.
I'll be sure to explain that to my CEO this afternoon when we are meeting to discuss how we handle the collapse in our sales to the Eurozone and our ongoing difficulties recruiting skilled staff to replace all the Europeans who have left.
Sorry, I'm not following you. You don't seem to actually be saying anything here.plodder wrote: ↑Wed Nov 09, 2022 11:41 amWell it does if your point is "I'm just going to shuffle these goalposts around a bit because reasons, but trust me, it's bound to be bad".dyqik wrote: ↑Wed Nov 09, 2022 11:21 amThat's not really contradicting the point I am making. Brexit is economically a big problem, but it's been spread out over time enough that it overlapped with the pandemic, which is a once a century economic disruption.
The pandemic and subsequent economic effects are a really big deal, largely unimaginable at the time the descriptions of Brexit as an economic disaster were being made. That doesn't make the quantitative analysis wrong, but it does change the qualitative language a bit.
Frankly neither do you. You say that economically Brexit is a "big problem" but there's evidence to suggest it isn't.dyqik wrote: ↑Wed Nov 09, 2022 12:10 pmSorry, I'm not following you. You don't seem to actually be saying anything here.plodder wrote: ↑Wed Nov 09, 2022 11:41 amWell it does if your point is "I'm just going to shuffle these goalposts around a bit because reasons, but trust me, it's bound to be bad".dyqik wrote: ↑Wed Nov 09, 2022 11:21 amThat's not really contradicting the point I am making. Brexit is economically a big problem, but it's been spread out over time enough that it overlapped with the pandemic, which is a once a century economic disruption.
The pandemic and subsequent economic effects are a really big deal, largely unimaginable at the time the descriptions of Brexit as an economic disaster were being made. That doesn't make the quantitative analysis wrong, but it does change the qualitative language a bit.
My point is that you haven't said what you mean by "big" when you say there's evidence that Brexit isn't a big problem.
mate I was quoting *you*. I've stopped having strong opinions on this rubbish because it's all becoming increasingly murky. However I do expect people with strong opinions to be able to back up what they're saying in the face of evidence to the contrary. If that newspaper article or flag shagger's report is bollocks (and essentially you and others are claiming it is) then explain why or pipe down.dyqik wrote: ↑Wed Nov 09, 2022 12:43 pm
My point is that you haven't said what you mean by "big" when you say there's evidence that Brexit isn't a big problem.
Is it as big a problem as CoVID on a three year time scale? No, probably not. Is it a big problem on a twenty year time scale? Probably yes.
I was specifically making a relative judgement of scale, which you removed the context from when quoting. I've explained why I think it's too murky to conclude that Brexit was not a problem on the scale predicted for a rapid Brexit in 2015/16. Firstly because a rapid Brexit didn't happen, and then because the Brexit that did happen coincided with a massive unforeseen change in the economic environment. My other point is that that massive unforeseen change in the global economy moved the goalposts for what is now considered a "big" problem.plodder wrote: ↑Wed Nov 09, 2022 4:09 pmmate I was quoting *you*. I've stopped having strong opinions on this rubbish because it's all becoming increasingly murky. However I do expect people with strong opinions to be able to back up what they're saying in the face of evidence to the contrary. If that newspaper article or flag shagger's report is bollocks (and essentially you and others are claiming it is) then explain why or pipe down.dyqik wrote: ↑Wed Nov 09, 2022 12:43 pm
My point is that you haven't said what you mean by "big" when you say there's evidence that Brexit isn't a big problem.
Is it as big a problem as CoVID on a three year time scale? No, probably not. Is it a big problem on a twenty year time scale? Probably yes.