121–130 of 339 posts
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Wut? There are certain benefits you get by being a member of this club. I am leaving your club. Then you no longer get the benefits that members of the club get. YOU ARE UNFAIRLY PUNISHING ME!!!!
It makes no sense for relations between countries to be structured as an exclusive "club". This just retards progress and leads to stagnation when it becomes impossible to get all the members of the "club" to agree.
Large Multinationals like Unilever, even for incremental decisions - like changing the type of light bulb, takes years to execute. This is why a large change in their business is so difficult and you need a very good CEO ( ask Marissa Mayer ) The decision UK made to leave the EU is akin for Unilever to switch from selling shampoos to selling software - and we are not talking about a multinational with 100,000 employe…
What some leavers don't realise is that the entire world had gotten used to dealing with the EU as a whole and that the world probably doesn't care that much about what Britain (or England/Wales) thinks about tariffs, terrorism, refugees, wars, human rights, etc.
Britain will have to follow the EU on many issues if it wants access to the common market.
Britain is going from having a very strong voice in a very powerful organisation that the world has to deal with to being a rather small country the world can largely ignore.
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It makes no sense for relations between countries to be structured as an exclusive "club". This just retards progress and leads to stagnation when it becomes impossible to get all the members of the "club" to agree.
It makes every bit of sense. When governments differ, the laws differ, and the free exchange of research money is slowed. When you're in the same "club" you can be assured of how things will go. When a country decides that it wants to leave the club because they want to have their own rules that are different, and that they don't want to share finances, then that makes agreements take longer.
The EU is failing because its blind, ideological insistence on connecting lots of unrelated things together to make an artificial club (really: the beginnings of a new country). The EU's petulant "retaliation" is treated by far too many as a given, when in reality it is a policy choice driven by a quasi-religious devotion to an abstract vision.
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Well, for example all the bad stuff TTIP will bring the rest of Europe? Everybody here is pissed about TTIP. Now the Brits vote to get into a position to do something about such undemocratic bs and suddenly they are the bad guys? I see the pro-EU marketing campaign in which all the smart, rich and famous people that you should want to be like, say pro EU things, is working well. Even among the intellectual HN crowd.…
People keep talking about how the UK will be able to negotiate its own market access deals after brexit. What that means in practice is that if TTIP goes ahead it will be the only route to US trade deals. Also TTIP is the kind of think I can see a Conservative government signing up to immediately. The UK is far more "free market" than the rest of Europe.
That's just not true [0] [1].
There's been a lot of movement relating to countries being open to global free trade [2].
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/06/29/...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/11/brexit-is-a...
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/08/business-min...
This sounds more like political retaliatory BS than actual financial concerns. End the project when you lose funding, not in anticipation of losing funding at some point in the future.
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The EU doesn't "fund" anything, the UK funds the EU by paying in more than it gets back out. It's literally the UK's own money being recycled through Brussels, except with extra rules and exchange rate risks thrown in. Whether or not research funding is cut is an entirely open question right now. Maybe it will be: the EU has effectively been overriding the austerity policies everyone else in the economy has had to de…
We all know this. The UK has been funding a bureaucracy in the EU that in turn funds projects in impoverished areas of the UK (amongst others). It will need to replace that bureaucracy; the transaction and planning costs on everything on the drawing board to in progress right now, will not be cheap, quite apart from the direct funding costs. The replacement bureaucracy probably won't be cheaper either, since it will…
The EU regional development funds are notoriously wasteful, I wouldn't ascribe any value to scale or institutional experience.
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Every conversation we've had about the EU for the last five years or so. The entire world has been talking about the relative lack of wisdom of trying to hold the entire EU to one currency for a long time, financial mismanagement, Germany strong-arming Greece into plans not good for them while Greece holds the threat of leaving over the entire EU to get better deals, and all sorts of such financial issues for a long…
The UK isn't in the Eurozone.
I have to say that the analysis of Brexit has been some of the worst "justifying a predetermined conclusion by hyper-local rationalizations" I've ever seen in politics, and that is saying something. You can tell something is a rationalization when it feels really satisfying, but if you try to take the rationalization out into the rest of the world it either makes no sense, or even outright contradicts the thing being rationalized. Whether Brexit is good or bad, it's going to have little to do with what I've heard from either side.
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You can't deny there will be less funding, given the amount of funding we receive from the EU. Though hopefully the new PM will prioritise investment in research and hopefully given the strong technology sector in the UK CompSci will get a reasonable share of it. But that's still to be seen and given May's attitude toward technology experts and level of knowledge during the discussions around the Snoopers Charter I'm…
The EU doesn't "fund" anything, the UK funds the EU by paying in more than it gets back out. It's literally the UK's own money being recycled through Brussels, except with extra rules and exchange rate risks thrown in. Whether or not research funding is cut is an entirely open question right now. Maybe it will be: the EU has effectively been overriding the austerity policies everyone else in the economy has had to de…
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Except for...revenues are not going to stay the same. For example, George Osborne has just proposed to slash the corp. tax rate from 20% to 15%, in order reduce (not eliminate) the almost certain reduction in UK investment. Last year, CT net receipts were £ 42 billion[1]. At the current 20% rate. At 15%, that would be £ 31.5 billion, for a reduction of £ 10.5 billion. Let's divide that by 52 weeks and you get £ 200 m…
It isn't that simple. There isn't a linear relationship between the tax % and the revenue to the treasury. Lower taxes encourage more companies to set up in the UK. We saw this recently in the UK when the top rate of income tax was raised to 50% and the income to the treasury actually fell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
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"More than enough money" (and certainly the figures I've seen people bandying about) assumes that the cost of accessing the EU market (which I think we will have to pay) would be zero. I think it will be a significant proportion of the amount we were paying (net) to the EU, and in addition there will be other costs which people are just starting to cotton onto as well. The main thing is that at the moment, we really…
WTO max tariffs (worst case scenario) are 4%. But the currency has weaked by about 8%. So even if max tariffs are applied tomorrow, UK goods are still cheaper to buy in the EU than before! In practice, if the EU doesn't strike a deal with the UK (which it won't) then I think it will suffer more exits. Because the EU has spent years trying to sign free trade deals with America, Canada and other places. If it turns aro…