Parliament returns today for a two week sitting before the party conference recess.
One of the first pieces of business will be a report from Theresa May on the G20. If she's honest the report will be clear and simple: she should say the message from the rest of the world is that they don't like Brexit, they think it will cost the UK, that they are sure it reduces the UK's international standing, and some of them have the means to ensure that is the case.
Well, you might say, they would say that, wouldn't they? After all, the essence of the G20 is the maintenance of the global financial power structure, and the Brexit vote is a rejection of that. It may be in their interests to make it look unappealing, but reticent as I am about that global financial power sructure I do not have to work hard to believe they are right to express concern.
Looking purely at the UK's domestic situation it is staggering how ill prepared we are for what is to come. The best parallel might be 1939, when another crisis happened with far too little preparation. We then had a phoney war for six or so months and the full consequences of our unpreparedness hit us. Only our isolation and some luck saved us then. There is no guarantee the trick can be repeated.
But in the meantime all the effort of government will inevitably shift to the consequences of Brexit: everything else will be sidelined. Parliament has returned not to really partake in a legislative programme because that is a mere sideline. It will instead be left watching a process where the government seeks to withdraw from Europe without any obvious plan as to what it wants to achieve from from the immediate task of doing so and without any understanding of the long term goal for the relationships that must be built to replace those with the EU.
And that's why our prospects are so much worse than in 1939/40. Then we knew the end goal. In the meantime it was survival by working with any reasonable ally we could find, and there weren't many to pick from. There is no such clarity now.
Theresa May has inherited a mess that is at least partly of her own creation: she has served at senior level in the government that created this situation. I suspect she has not a clue what to really do next. And we are all going to suffer for that. We don't even have an Opposition to hold her to account. The prospects for the coming parliamentary year are not good.
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I wonder if history will record BREXIT as the UK voting to leave Europe and then everyone just seemed to go on holiday immediately after – particularly to Europe itself if my recent visit to Manchester airport is anything to go by!
My view is that we achieve BREXIT – leave – and then let the economic woe that might ensue create an argument to get us back in again – as well it might.
I would also try to do that on a reforming agenda for the EU. The EU needs to be improved.
Many folk are going to have to see and feel the possible negative consequences of what they voted for in order to change their minds I’m afraid.
Also, I bet that the Tories will ensure the well-off are insulated from any consequences and the average man and woman will pick up the bill.
On this topic, given the impact of the vote to leave the EU, was it really appropriate for parliament to shut up shop for so long?
What would they have done?
And actually, there has to be a holiday sometime and they can’t all go together so a month is a minimum
Do you think that there could be some positives that could be taken from the Brexit vote if we had excellent statesmen? I am thinking of the neoliberal treaties which limit government spending and choices in re nationalisation and competition law, and the tendency to austerity within the EU. Perhaps some reform of the corporate lobbied EC Commission? Some reforms could be exacted from a renegotiation. I often feel that the passionate remainers maybe look only at the good points and not the bad.
I suspect there is very little right now
I am not seeing the likely wins at present
Regain *some* sense of proportion please, Richard. Even a little would help.
Analogy drawn with 1939! The war that ensued cost – what was it? 20 million lives…?
Anyone reading your jeremiad who didn’t know better would think that being in the EU was second-best only to being in an earthly paradise.
Time to stop licking (imaginary) wounds – or the odd cut and bruise, maybe – and start looking for the fresh opportunities which this decisive break with the recent, rather dismal, past the nation has been undergoing presents us with.
I think you have lost the sense of proprtion
I agree with Bill Keegan, this is the biggest crisis of my economic life time
You appear to equate an “economic lifetime” with lifetime itself.
Which might explain why you are apparently unable to appreciate that equating in significance an event which led eventually to the loss of twenty million human lives with the (merely economic) assumed cost of a readjustment in Britain’s trade relations displays a lack of a sense of proportion.
But I should know by now: you are never mistaken.
Do you think your tone is helpful?
If you wish to be sarcastic I am sure you can find better outlets for your talents
So you don’t think the ever worsening economic depression, the rise of xenophobia and the identification of immigrants and especially muslims as the cause of the problem similar to the 1930’s? Ok, so only the odd 1 or 2 people been killed so far – but it has very ominous historic tones. Add in America’s rising hysteria with Russia and Nato parking itself on Russias’s borders, Turkey becoming increasingly radicalised and if you can’t see the signs of the 3rd world war perhaps you need some new vision. I’m sure it won’t pan out in quite the same way, but your complacency is frightening.
Thank you
Right on AliB!
Those of us who think everything is hunky-dory had better wake up. There is now a lot of uncertainty out there in what was an already uncertain world to begin with.
BREXIT poured oil on a smouldering fire. That is what passes as statesmanship in this badly ran country of ours.
It’s considered “civilisation” and “safe enough” if communities are merely let fall down, rather than being burned down.
Things are indeed worrying
There was a great deal of misinformation before the referendum purveyed by the right wing press: Sun Mail Express and Telegraph for example before the referendum. I was hoping this might improve but if anything it seems to have gotten worse. To call it propaganda might not be the correct word but the Government is to some extent hostage to the right wing media, which has dramatically more circulation than the left wing media. I’m not sure why the right wing media is so vitriolically anti EU. In the past Tory governments in particular were happy to play along as it was a very useful scapegoat.
The English in the past have been very lucky; they are not used to failure. They vastly overestimate both their importance and influence. I can’t see it going well somehow. Popped into the local Irish Centre to get a passport application form for my son this morning.
Stopped for a coffee in a Dublin shopping centre yesterday. Two guys beside me chatting about a topic of professional interest (IT related) so I couldn’t help listening. One was British but eligible for an Irish passport and which he had just obtained. Thinking of moving to Dublin (though he seemed to spend most of his time globetrotting).
Dublin passport office has taken on over 200 new staff to cope with increased demand.
I have promised my sons I will apply for them
According to the Joseph Rowntree Trust analysis of the EU referendum the C and D classes decided the economic regime inflicted on them by an EU “captured” by Neo-Liberal ideologists was an offer they could refuse and they refused to be cowed despite the difficult prospects ahead. Such action can merely be a harbinger of further refusals world-wide. The British have some form in this regard, although motives were mixed at the time, they initially went alone standing up to Hitler.
https://www.jrf.org.uk/brexit-vote-explained-poverty-low-skills-and-lack-opportunities
If a mutually acceptable agreement cannot be reached following the triggering of Article 50 after the two year squabbling phase then our relationship with the EU defaults to what it would have been under WTO rules had UK bevef been an ( EU) member.
UK can live with that.
How do you know that?
An unusually pessimistic post for Richard!
We have to think positive.
We’d could focus on the bare minimum. Something like, say:
No tariffs for cars and no other tariffs of more than 2% (as I understand it most other tariffs are two per cent or less so generally lost in the roundings).
Services passports to remain (though perhaps not for banking!)
Britain to remain on regulating committees on common EU standards.
Regulated immigration both ways.
Another possibility would be for Britain to leave and still pay its subcsription and alter nothing.
This would mean that it would have to be done to rather than do the doing.
It would be dangerous of course, but it would wrongfoot the other 27 and Britain could, if it works, simply demand relevant EU reforms as a condition of still continuing to pay the subscription and then go back to full membership when it had these in place. This is the ‘best’ variation of PSR’s approach. [I’m tempted to say perhaps we could suggest that Greece & Cyprus might become part of the sterling area as Cyprus used to be — just to show we are serious about reform:)]
Agree that some considerable luck saved the day for the UK in 1939-45 but it has to be said that the EU isn’t looking too lucky at the moment is it? There is the obvious immigration problem and then the Southern European electorates in their reduced neoliberal circumstances, are, anecdotally at least, delighted we’ve voted out, even though the lack of free movement may threaten their employment release valve to the UK. The German electorate seems not very happy with the UK leaving, but their elections are in 2017. But that still might get rid of the ultra strict Wolfgang Schaeuble. The French seem to be indifferent but they are too preoccupied with the terrorist threat, their imminent elections and Le Pen.
There is a lot of additional uncertainty for our European (ex) partners, so I think quitting soonish and putting membership on hold together with radical EU reform requirements has a chance of working. But it will require a courageous UK government! Lets hope the new government and the new PM screw their courage to the sticking place and prove Ken Clarke’s description of the PM being a bloody awkward woman.
Thanks
But you seem about as pessimistic as me….
I didn’t know it showed!
But still think we have to organise ourselves to be of the robust opinion that (rather as ‘Rule Britannia’ was originally pretty much a last ditch artistic attempt to keep the new United Kingdom together) we must, if we have anything about us, end up with a UK strategy of much better quality than those from the thin, limited and disorganised statements of the Brexiteers. As an original resolute Bremainer feel we now have to engage with new circumstances. If I read the new PM correctly she is still to be convinced of any ‘right way’, so I think ideas are key.
I wish I could write opera…
The EU is now, after all, pretty much ossified and unreformable without a major puncture.
And the EU, although the largest trading block in the world, is in a pretty weak state overall. As a (sshh probably bogus) stronger economy we have to do the best to show ourselves to our best advantage.
Perhaps circumstances require the calling in of the advertising agencies? We are at least good at those (when they are not selling sugar to fatties — well, in fact even when they are :)).
The new Parliamentary Session will be overburdened with Brexit but at least there is scope for all sorts of ideas.
I have some sympathy with that, bar the wish to write opera
I think May is governing in the hope that ‘something will turn up’
This is why she does not want an election: she has nothing to say. Everything will be the result of ‘events’
The job now is to create ‘events’
I worry about the Toyota and Nissan plants in the UK (Sunderland and Derbyshire). If access to the EU markets is restricted, the respective companies may pull out. That would be devastating for the two regions. Apparently Japan has been making noises at the G20 about BREXIT with this in mind, perhaps?
All I would add to the post-BREXIT discussion is that I feel that we now just have to sit back and watch. Both sides will make claims about things getting better or worse. The long run will reveal all. It always does.
One of the undercurrents that still bothers me in the economy is the continued decline in wages – less real cash means more debt = more potential instability and hardship in the future. As I’ve said before, people do get back on the wagon and the economy seems to recover – but it seems that even those on the wagon are a lot less well off and there seem to be fewer of them every time there is an ‘adjustment’. It stinks.
We have some friends the husband of which earns more than my partner and I together – so much that his wife does not work.
They recently spent £10K on a 3 week holiday in Canada and the USA. They told us that they’d taken a mortgage ‘holiday’ to pay for it.
Is this normal? It would not occur to me to do something like this at all. Maybe I’m stupid – I don’t know. But what does this tell us about how our economy is being driven? How wide-spread is this?
This sort of behaviour is telling us something – whether it is about the family concerned sure – but what might it be saying about the state of the economy?
PSR
There is no way on earth I would borrow to pay for a holiday: you are entirely sane
And it confirms that our economy is being driven on debt, which advertising fuels whilst wages, as you note, stay low
It’s a recipe for disaster
Richard
It really is a shame that those that advocate a revolution in the way the western world financially ensures capital is retained by the few, we refuse to cease the opportunity, the establishment is nervous, they are well aware brexit was a message from the masses that they have had enough. Instead some choose to do their scaremongering for them. A change in the way the world works financially will hurt the poor in the short term, that’s obvious, the mega rich won’t go down without a fight. Those that want change should be using this incredible opportunity to creative an alternative narrative not standing by those that want to maintain the status quo.