[Discussion] Brexit means Brexit

Discuss the political fallout and other issues around Britain's exit, Brexit for short, from the EU.

For the sake of clarity, I'm including the full text of Article 50.

Article 50 wrote:

1. Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.

2. A Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention. In the light of the guidelines provided by the European Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. That agreement shall be negotiated in accordance with Article 218(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It shall be concluded on behalf of the Union by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament.

3. The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.

4. For the purposes of paragraphs 2 and 3, the member of the European Council or of the Council representing the withdrawing Member State shall not participate in the discussions of the European Council or Council or in decisions concerning it.

A qualified majority shall be defined in accordance with Article 238(3)(b) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

5. If a State which has withdrawn from the Union asks to rejoin, its request shall be subject to the procedure referred to in Article 49.

JC wrote:

I wonder how many businesses will move to the EU and the impact that job migration is going to have on the overall employment rate of the UK. Will it be a strict 1:1 ratio- 1 job removed from the EU and created in another country, or will it be fractional since other countries already have those jobs and aren't in need of them?

Directly, that'll depend on whether or not the administrative jobs (the finance people etc) move with them. However for a lot of these business there will be supply chain and supporting business that are reliant on them staying in the UK. The knock on impact to them will be the things that makes it much worse on the UK side of the fence.

Right now Covid is covering all of this in the UK and pushing it away from the front line news. I don't think that'll be the case for much longer

Concave wrote:

Feels really good to know I voted against this s**t but it's happening anyway. /s

Best real-world definition of Schadenfreude I've seen in decades...

I have GOT to stop being surprised by this shit, but I still cannot believe they're going with actually, Brexit is the fault of everyone who didn't want Brexit.

Prederick wrote:

I have GOT to stop being surprised by this shit, but I still cannot believe they're going with actually, Brexit is the fault of everyone who didn't want Brexit.

Man this really seems to be the go to “defense” for idiots. This is the same crap Republicans are pulling over here with the insurrection. It was the Democrats fault.

What is it with people having such a hard time accepting responsibility and/or admitting they were wrong?

Because being wrong means you're weak, and being weak means you don't deserve to be a leader.

Malor wrote:

Because being wrong means you're weak, and being weak means you don't deserve to be a leader.

Also, Never Play Defense.

All articles about people unhappy with brexit consequences should state what they voted, so I know if I should feel pity or anger.

When the pain comes regardless of your vote, the policy is probably badly made.

Funny how, even after "taking back control", anything bad is still the EU's fault and anything's good is still due to the UK - sorry, the English - being awesomesauce.

The citizens want their team to be right so badly that they'll suffer through anything before admitting that they made a mistake, or holding their politicians accountable.

I wonder how much suffering has been caused in human history because people refuse to admit a decision they made earlier was wrong in the face of new evidence or new understanding.

Malor wrote:

The citizens want their team to be right so badly that they'll suffer through anything before admitting that they made a mistake, or holding their politicians accountable.

There was a YouGov poll yesterday that asked two questions:

1. If there was a Brexit vote today how would you vote:

Remain: 49%
Leave: 37%

2. If there was a vote today on rejoining the EU:

Rejoin: 42%
Stay out: 40%

Says it all really.

DudleySmith wrote:

I wonder how much suffering has been caused in human history because people refuse to admit a decision they made earlier was wrong in the face of new evidence or new understanding.

X minus natural disasters = how much.

Sorbicol wrote:
Malor wrote:

The citizens want their team to be right so badly that they'll suffer through anything before admitting that they made a mistake, or holding their politicians accountable.

There was a YouGov poll yesterday that asked two questions:

1. If there was a Brexit vote today how would you vote:

Remain: 49%
Leave: 37%

2. If there was a vote today on rejoining the EU:

Rejoin: 42%
Stay out: 40%

Says it all really.

I can imagine them thinking that 'since we've had all this pain anyway, might as well see it through', perhaps not realizing that there's only more pain ahead.

That's the Sunk Cost fallacy that gets gamblers into so much trouble...

I am one of the Remain voters that if there was a rejoin referendum tomorrow, I’m not sure I would vote to rejoin the EU. Rejoin the Single Market and Customs Union definitely but I want the EU to succeed and there is no upside to having the U.K. in the EU while the U.K. doesn’t believe it needs to be there.

Actually more specifically if the Rejoin referendum required a 70% approval to pass on an 80% turnout, then I would vote Rejoin.

Have to agree that debating rejoining now is moot. The UK will not get the same terms as before and that alone will take decades for a majority in the UK to accept. If ever.

Axon wrote:

Have to agree that debating rejoining now is moot. The UK will not get the same terms as before and that alone will take decades for a majority in the UK to accept. If ever.

Hard to disagree tbh

Sure. Set your house ablaze, watch it burn to ash, and then regret it so much you try to reconstruct it from the remains.

If Brexit doesn't demonstrate the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the political themes of the Reaganites and Thatcherites, nothing does. The Conservative movement in the West has careened into the weeds of the fringe, and instead of trying to get back onto the road, they've just kept running their car through denser and deeper muddy pastures, while loudly claiming that their highway is the best in the world, as the car slowly falls apart around them.

Axon wrote:

Have to agree that debating rejoining now is moot. The UK will not get the same terms as before and that alone will take decades for a majority in the UK to accept. If ever.

If the current chaos continues then to be honest I don’t think they would - it sort of depends on the circumstances. Nobody is going to mind about the rebate as it’s not really something people ‘see’.

The challenge will be accepting the Euro. That’s the one thing that will stop it happening.

I feel terrible about this, like a close friend is in awful, fatal* trouble and I can't do anything about it. During the crazy-chaos-xenophobia-flames-fanned-by-Russia that struck the entire West in 2016:

  1. The US elected Individual-1: a disaster, but it had a four-year expiration date
  2. France fought off the National Front: dodged a bullet
  3. Germany fought off AfD: dodged a bullet
  4. UK voted for Brexit: there seems to be no way out of this one

* I just hope we can do something --- anything -- about this, because otherwise Scotland will go, Northern Ireland will (probably) go, and Wales might well say why not. There will be no more UK, only the rump England. I never thought I would see it in my lifetime.

Archangel wrote:

There will be no more UK, only the rump England. I never thought I would see it in my lifetime.

But the lords will still be in charge, which is obviously more important than anything else, like the welfare of their citizens.

Sorbicol wrote:

The challenge will be accepting the Euro. That’s the one thing that will stop it happening.

If there is something I dislike about the EU it is the current system of the Euro. At the moment it is only good for export oriented countries. The ECB’s mandate for price stability is in conflict with the lack of growth in most of the EU. The big global advantage of the EU is how attractive the market is and the Euro does very little to help that. Broadly this is the Italian economic question. The ECB has no answer and it does require one.

My assumption is that the U.K. on rejoin would have a future obligation to join the Euro but like Sweden would be waiting for the right conditions to actually join.

The EU is doing things exactly correctly. Export-oriented countries, or ones close to being in balance, should do better, because they are providing wealth to the world. Countries that are in a constant negative import situation, if it's very large, will steadily decline in terms of standard of living, because they are borrowing from everyone else. Money-printing can be used to hide this, but that just changes the nature of the rot, and makes it more subtle and pernicious, it doesn't actually avoid the problem.

What's really supposed to be happening is that the net-negative countries are using those borrowings to build new facilities to increase their manufacturing, energy, or knowledge-generating potential. If they do that, then their living standards will steadily increase, becuase they are investing the wealth instead of consuming.

Down at the individual level, the difference is like using debt to buy tools for work (which should eventually pay for themselves and then spin off steady income from the worker's better productivity), versus buying a big HDTV, which will never pay anything, and is only a millstone around that person's neck until paid off.

The US, with its staggering deficits and ability to endlessly print money, looks like a counter-example, but it's worth pointing out that average earnings of workers over the last fifty years, in real terms, have gone down, and ordinary people have lost any ability whatsoever to make money through savings. They cannot save up and retire, because they can't lend their money to banks to generate an income, as they are competing against endless dollars from the Fed at almost zero interest. The Fed can make them for free, where ordinary people have to work to earn dollars, so of course it's steadily sucking all the actual wealth in the system toward the elites around the money spigot.

America is in a truly terrible fiscal position. Some of the EU countries are as well, although not as badly. The EU's form of money management helps keep the consumption economies from going completely off the rails, where the US has no such oversight. The UK fears that oversight, as well.

Ultimately, even countries have to earn as much as they spend, or there will be dire consequences, long-term.

That's a very mercantilist point of view Malor.

You are correct that the non-export orientated countries should be taking advantage of the low borrowing rates to invest in infrastructure to produce growth. But the Eurozone rules limit borrowing to a ratio of GDP. Even through interest rates for the European consumption countries is low, their rates of growth are lower which means they never get to borrow for capital improvements. You might say that's the public sector why won't private industry invest? Mostly because the EU has freedom of capital and they can get better returns from investing in the Export orientated countries.

Like I said it's the Italian question. How does Italy increase growth, or reduce its debt burden? Italy has run a government surplus (before debt servicing) every year except 2009 but it's gdp growth is less than its interest rate since joining the Euro. So every year the debt grows bigger and the tax base comparatively grows smaller. Across the Eurozone, the ECB is failing to meet it's inflation targets so there is no monetary help coming there. What can a government do? Italian consumption is already reduced and I'm not sure how reducing consumption is supposed to increase Italian prosperity?

Archangel wrote:

I feel terrible about this, like a close friend is in awful, fatal* trouble and I can't do anything about it. During the crazy-chaos-xenophobia-flames-fanned-by-Russia that struck the entire West in 2016:

  1. The US elected Individual-1: a disaster, but it had a four-year expiration date
  2. France fought off the National Front: dodged a bullet
  3. Germany fought off AfD: dodged a bullet
  4. UK voted for Brexit: there seems to be no way out of this one

* I just hope we can do something --- anything -- about this, because otherwise Scotland will go, Northern Ireland will (probably) go, and Wales might well say why not. There will be no more UK, only the rump England. I never thought I would see it in my lifetime.

I've banged on about this over and over but both Germany and France never faced any real chance of AfD gaining any influence or Le Pen becoming President. The US/UK media are terrible at grasping or explaining proportional voting systems to their readers. What made the AfD scare so much more egregious is that the real story is the rise of the Green party in Germany. Same for the European Parliament. The far-right made almost no gains while the Greens did in both. Yet the Greens remain absent from the discussion in the English speaking world.

There is a narrative to be told about European politics but certain aspect of the Anglosphere like to focus on a very narrow part of it. The reasons why I could hazard a guess.

Axon wrote:

I've banged on about this over and over but both Germany and France were never faced any read chance of AfD gaining any influence or Le Pen becoming President.

While I definitely agree about Germany, and EU parliament, since France has a runoff presidential election it does not seem far-fetched Le Pen could become president, even with fairly low actual support? As long as enough people dislike the one alternative even more.

On the other hand, the Danish version of Le Pen managed to keep all other parties in a stranglehold for 20 years, despite never getting more than 10-20% of the vote, and never having been in a government themselves. Even if they finally got shattered (by even more extremist parties stealing their voters...) in our last election, the influence they have had on our politics for two decades is still crazy.
And while Sweden has avoided that, they have also struggled to create majorities when 10-20% of the parliament is not counted.

DoveBrown wrote:

That's a very mercantilist point of view Malor.

You are correct that the non-export orientated countries should be taking advantage of the low borrowing rates to invest in infrastructure to produce growth. But the Eurozone rules limit borrowing to a ratio of GDP. Even through interest rates for the European consumption countries is low, their rates of growth are lower which means they never get to borrow for capital improvements. You might say that's the public sector why won't private industry invest? Mostly because the EU has freedom of capital and they can get better returns from investing in the Export orientated countries.

Like I said it's the Italian question. How does Italy increase growth, or reduce its debt burden? Italy has run a government surplus (before debt servicing) every year except 2009 but it's gdp growth is less than its interest rate since joining the Euro. So every year the debt grows bigger and the tax base comparatively grows smaller. Across the Eurozone, the ECB is failing to meet it's inflation targets so there is no monetary help coming there. What can a government do? Italian consumption is already reduced and I'm not sure how reducing consumption is supposed to increase Italian prosperity?

The problem with the argument that Italy's issues are caused by the euro is that Italy has a trade surplus and is very export oriented. Many in the UK repeat the opposite so I understand why this has become received wisdom. So, following the logic that the euro only favours countries with trade surpluses (which I don't agree), it should suit Italy and it's economy should be performing similar to Northern European countries. But it doesn't. Almost as if we should look at the structural difference of Italy's economy with the countries along its northern border.

Italy's performance is rooted entirely with the successive Italian governments.

And EU borrowing rules are not as strict as some also like to make them out to be. You are more than capable of investing in your country's infrastructure. It is perfectly allowed. What isn't is increasing social spending based on borrowing.

Edit: Not that any of this would change the reality that any mention of the euro would doom the UK joining the EU again. At least for several decades. I'm under no illusion about that.

Edit 2: Good FT article here on the several issues that hamper Italy.