Scrutable

shpalman wrote: ↑

Sat May 21, 2022 7:42 am

UK scientists cannot hold leadership roles because the UK’s membership of the flagship £80bn Horizon Europe (HE) funding network has not been ratified.

Seasonal worker shortages of up to 75 per cent have been reported in some parts of the UK, sparking fears there will not be enough labour available to pick crops this year, according to The Grocer .

The Mail also picked up on the story and wrote: “The impacts of Brexit, with a large number of seasonal crop pickers traditionally coming from the EU, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and delays in issuing temporary visas have been blamed.”

Martin Y wrote: ↑

Tue May 24, 2022 7:59 am

Perhaps there's still a way to get British people to pick veg, if we can develop a method of paying them in gas.

Cabinet Office minister Jacob Rees-Mogg wrote to colleagues urging them to send a “clear message” to the civil service about returning, and Mr Zahawi told MPs he expected “office use to return to normality pre the pandemic”.

Following the intervention, staff were summoned to a virtual meeting, Schools Week reports. The department’s top civil servant, permanent secretary Susan Acland-Hood, was joined by ministers to tell officials to work 80 per cent of their week in the office.

However, even before the pandemic the DfE only had an occupancy rate of 60 to 70 per cent because of the department’s flexible working policy.

FlammableFlower wrote: ↑

Wed May 25, 2022 9:36 am

Not exactly a poor Brexit outcome, but it's Rees-Mogg and Zahawi and their spectacular ability to believe that whatever they want is perfectly sensible and should happen even if reality doesn't agree, which to my mind sums up Brexit...:

Forcing civil servants not to work from home has unintended consequences...

UK Risks Car Collapse as Jaguar Land Rover Looks Elsewhere for Batteries
Britain’s biggest auto manufacturer is in talks with two suppliers about a range of EVs it may assemble in Slovakia.

Daniel Hannan wrote:Staying in the Single Market ... would have saved us a lot of trouble.

Brightonian wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 05, 2022 8:39 pm

Daniel Hannan wrote:Staying in the Single Market ... would have saved us a lot of trouble.

https://twitter.com/tconnellyRTE/status ... 8440887296

Frost said the deal he negotiated while in Johnson’s government would have run smoothly only if it had never been fully applied by the EU.

shpalman wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 06, 2022 7:38 am

So much for "we hold all the cards."

Boris Johnson’s former Brexit negotiator David Frost has said the “weakness” of the UK’s position shaped the negotiations for the Northern Ireland protocol

Frost said the deal he negotiated while in Johnson’s government would have run smoothly only if it had never been fully applied by the EU.

business investment, seen by Johnson and Sunak as the panacea to a poor growth rate, trails other industrialised countries, in spite of lavish Treasury tax breaks to try to drive it up. Next year, according to the OECD think-tank, the UK will have the lowest growth in the G20, apart from sanctioned Russia.

The Office for Budget Responsibility, the official British forecaster, has seen no reason to change its prediction, first made in March 2020, that Brexit would ultimately reduce productivity and UK gross domestic product by 4 per cent compared with a world where the country remained inside the EU. It says that a little over half of that damage has yet to occur.

That level of decline, worth about £100bn a year in lost output, would result in lost revenues for the Treasury of roughly £40bn a year. That is £40bn that might have been available to the beleaguered Johnson for the radical tax cuts demanded by the Tory right — the equivalent of 6p off the 20p in the pound basic rate of income tax.

[...]

In the first quarter of 2022, real business investment was 9.4 per cent lower than in the second quarter of 2016. That fall was mostly due to Covid, but it had flatlined since the referendum, ending a period of growth since 2010 and falling well short of the performance of other G7 countries.

Weak investment is a particular worry for Sunak, who sees business investment as the route to greater prosperity. Before departing the BoE in 2020, Carney told a House of Lords Committee that Brexit uncertainty was holding back business investment. Worse, he said, business planning for various Brexit scenarios was taking up a lot of management effort. “Time spent on contingency planning is time not spent on strategic initiatives,” he said.

Since then, negative perceptions of the UK have continued among business with the chancellor finding he had little bang for his £25bn buck of super deductions in corporation tax to encourage capital spending. As Bailey told MPs last month, the super-deductor was “not at the moment having the impact that was expected”.

While the UK was still in the EU and during the Brexit “transition phase”, there were no significant effects on trade flows. But this has changed since stricter border controls were introduced at the start of 2021, imposing no tariffs, but significant checks and controls at the formerly frictionless border.
Economists have used this point in time to contrast how the UK’s trade performance compares with those of other countries before and after the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement’s imposition. The results have been increasingly ugly, especially for small companies trading with Europe.

Red tape caused a “steep decline” in the number of trading relationships after January 2021, according to a study by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. The number of buyer-seller relationships fell by almost one-third, it found.

The same group found food prices had risen as a result of Brexit. Comparing the prices of imported food such as pork, tomatoes and jam, which predominantly came from the EU, with those that came from further afield such as tuna and pineapples, it found a substantial Brexit effect. “Brexit increased average food prices by about 6 per cent over 2020 and 2021,” according to the research.

Summing up the effects on trade in which imports from the EU have fallen while exports have not risen, Adam Posen, head of the Peterson Institute of International Economics, says “everybody else sees a recovery in trade following Covid and the UK sits flat”.

Woodchopper wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 22, 2022 8:23 am

Some commentary from the FT. Can be summed up in graphs:

UK Business investment.jpg

The UK’s trade performance this year fell to its worst level since records began, heaping more pressure on sterling in international currency markets.

The country’s current account deficit was calculated at 8.3 per cent of gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2022, a deterioration from an average of 2.6 per cent across all of 2021.

It was the worst figure on record since quarterly balance of payments data was first published in 1955.

The weak performance of UK exports and a surge in imports highlight the economic effects of Brexit. The figures tally with academic studies that show a decline in exports since 2021, when the UK left the EU single market and new border controls were introduced.

The Office for National Statistics warned that the figures for the first quarter of 2022 were “subject to higher levels of uncertainty than normal”. It added that it had developed a new system based on customs records to increase accuracy.

Even when relatively volatile goods such as gold and other precious metals were excluded, the current account deficit still rose from an average of 2.4 per cent of GDP in 2021 to 7.1 per cent in the first quarter of this year.

The gaping current account deficit largely reflects a record imbalance of imports and exports. However, there were also deficits in investment income and transfers of money between countries.

The ONS said it was investigating a big rise in imports that it had recorded along with foreign direct investment and advised caution on interpreting the quality of the data.

Paul Dales, chief economist at Capital Economics, said the most noteworthy element in the figures was a 4.4 per cent fall in real exports and a 10.4 per cent leap in real imports.

“At the start of this year, the ONS started to measure imports between the UK and the EU in a slightly different way.” This resulted in a “large step change upwards”, he said, adding that the figures were “really hard to interpret”.

Samuel Tombs, chief UK economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said a surge in energy prices was the main cause of the country’s difficulties.

He echoed former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, who warned repeatedly after the Brexit referendum that the value of the pound depended on the “kindness of strangers”.

“The adverse consequences of the UK dependence on external finance that stems from the large current account deficit have been clear over the past month, with sterling depreciating sharply as global investors have collectively shunned risky assets,” said Tombs.

The pound, which was stable in currency markets on Thursday morning, has lost more than 10 per cent of its value against the US dollar over the past year, while remaining broadly stable against the euro.

As Adam Posen, the president of the influential Peterson Institute for International Economics, says, this is the “first time in world history when a nation has declared a trade war on itself”

shpalman wrote: ↑

Sat Jul 02, 2022 4:25 pm

Roaming charges coming back

Beaker wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 22, 2022 9:46 am

Apparently it’s busy on the roads round Dover. Project Fear predicted this would happen, but clearly it’s the fault of the French for not putting in enough capacity to do their bureaucratic checks

Beaker wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 22, 2022 9:46 am

Apparently it’s busy on the roads round Dover. Project Fear predicted this would happen, but clearly it’s the fault of the French for not putting in enough capacity to do their bureaucratic checks