Three quick thoughts.
First, it has to be concluded the EU obsession is over. UKIP has gone.
Second, this vote has to be seen as a rejection of hard Brexit.
Third, the night must be a vote for the Single Market.
If there is anything to say tonight it is that if any EU consensus might be built between the parties at this moment it would have to be around a Norwegian style agreement with us out of membership but working closely with the EU within the Single Market. I can't see another plausible platform right now.
I did not imagine writing that this morning.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Yes, yes, yes. We need real leadership – and compromise.
Spot on Richard – agreed, agreed, agreed. Right now we need a Prime Minister who will LEAD us as the country we are , not as a handful of vested interests would like us to be. I think a Norwegian style deal could work very well for us.
I agree with you.
But the Tories may now behave like a Tasmanian devil with its back to the wall.
I do not expect them to be that reasonable. They are unfit for office.
They will push for another vote , with a new leader elected by the City – by being hard to work with and then telling the country that the other parties involved want to sell us down the river.
It isn’t going to be pretty.
But I could be wrong? And I hope that I am.
But look at the Tories – they are only good at one thing and that is orchestrating decline. And yet they have all that funding.
You are being unfair to the Tasmanian Devil.
Cripes – please forgive me Marco.
Shame on me.
Join the EEA? The big prize is membership of the single market and the customs union, but the cost: Fax democracy, with the EU sending us regulations to implement without the UK having any input into making them. Us still making financial contributions. The EFTA Court rather than the ECJ. Free movement of workers (Norway is in Schengen too).
Look, I’d rather we “remain” than “leave”, and the EEA would be perhaps the least worst option if we do leave, but I can’t see many “leave” voters being happy with that package. It is not exactly “taking back control”.
Hard Brexit has gone
The General Election result is no more a vote against Hard Brexit than the referendum result was a vote for Hard Brexit. That said, in terms of practical politics, you are probably right.
We’d have to follow those regulations regardless if we wanted to continue selling goods and services in the EU (which I believe all but the most rabid Europhobes actually want)
That’s one of the many elephants in the room about Brexit that has been dodged by the Tories and the MSM constantly, that unless we decide we don’t want to sell to the EU member states, whatever happens our businesses will be required to stay abreast of and adhere to the regulations of the EU, since having two sets of regulations (for EU and non-EU sales) is overly bureaucratic!
Even before the single market if you wanted to sell to say Germany you still had to meet German specifications. And French ones. And Dutch ones etc. The only difference is that they weren’t harmonised so in the electrical business you had to get VDE approval for Germany and NF for France and Kema for Holland etc etc.
Harmonisation has been a huge unseen benefit for manufacturing so that a common standard is accepted and by being part of it we have an input into what those specifications are.
By leaving we go back to have to just accept what those specifications are but we will still have to comply if we want to sell into those markets. The ignoramuses who claim EU regulations cost us money clearly have never exported anything.
my fantasy is we have a ‘deal’-Norwegian, Swiss or whatever- and then a referendum on the deal or to remain (hoping that Europe would allow that-but it would be in their interest).
Most important thing about the end of UKIP is what it means for the group they most represent, the hard-right swivel-eyed loon section of the Tory backbenches. Clearly this group no longer wields the power it did. The Brexit referendum itself only took place as a sop to them to stop them destroying the Conservative Party as a whole. Now they are diminished, politically speaking at least, there’s no longer any need to back Brexit. Time to backpedal, I’d say 🙂 I suppose we must now look forward to endless articles from the MSM telling us leaving was a bad idea all along and extolling the virtues of staying.
Meanwhile, have I got time for my May joke? Apparently, May likes it strong in the stables #50shadesofmay I’ll apologise to Pilgrim in advance 🙂
Richard,
I agree that ‘UKIP is gone’. I think that was always going to be the case. Farage tipped us off when he resigned as leader saying that he had fulfilled his ambition. Post-Brexit they had lost purpose.
I wouldn’t agree that their past success was entirely due to an EU obsession. There are some disadvantaged people that have genuine concerns about overpopulation and multinational capital.
With many of them being less privileged and thus less informed, their focus is on the symptoms: Housing shortage, displacement, gentrification and the poor pay and conditions that come with a continuous oversupply of labour.
These symptoms can be addressed through industry policy, tax and investment rules. But there is something else that is long overdue: a sustainable population policy – and no one thus far has shown an interest in taking that on.
In the absence of a population policy UKIP, and others like them, will always have potential. Not only that but important environmental imperative will continue to be ignored.
It can’t be ignored forever. Labour and the Greens will eventually need to address the population issue. The sooner they start,the better.
Marco
You speak of a policy that dare not speak its name.
My belief is that Tory cuts to benefits are aimed at ‘nudging’ people rather callously into not having children.
A fairer way of doing this is to make known plans for curtailing child benefit and others benefits and break people into it gently over a period of time rather than just getting elected and imposing it straight away. OK – so you might get a spike in births before the new policy might come in – but it would drop thereafter and there would be less suffering as there has been.
But do we really have to do this in England at all Marco? Seriously? I am surprised you raised this.
I think that Richard has dealt with the wider context of this issue in the Courageous State.
His call for economic thinking that puts people first rather than money is the key in my view.
Allow me to come at this from a property development point of view which is my current background.
Presently we have too much of what I would call clumsily the ‘asset-isation’ of resources in the world. The value of resources for financial gain is too prominent.
So, take the example of a huge ex LMS railway warehouse that lies in a town not far from me, gently rotting away but worth x millions of pounds to the owner who hangs onto it as an asset to fund their borrowing perhaps or is waiting for the value to go up so he can make a huge profit.
That warehouse could be converted into flats or knocked down to build affordable houses for those on a housing list that grows all of the time. Yet its asset status means that its use to society is not realised or delayed – for a long time.
It is this mal-management of resources that leads one in my view to bring Malthusian thinking into play. And wrongly.
So what I am saying is – let us deal with the resource problem first and then deal with the population issues next. This country is not like Brazil or South Africa – yet!
There is so much unused land in our towns that it is not true. Yet Brownfield site development will grind to a halt this year as the Tories end their grant system for remediation/clean up funds. And yet, we still are trying to enable our countryside to be dug up and lost forever for high value private homes that deliver nice profits for investors in house building companies.
We also have a decline in city centres which means that shops could end up becoming homes as internet retailing takes a firmer hold. This may even happen to the out of town shopping centres. But it will not happen if the resource’s social use value is put after its investment/asset value because the land will have an asset value once again to be used as a store of wealth for other financial purposes instead of practical ones like giving people an affordable place to live.
Perhaps – sooner or later – we will have to bite the bullet on population control but the misallocation of resources does not give me confidence that population is the problem here. It is what the population does that is. And that is related to resource allocation.
For example – Richard has spoken about full employment – something that I agree with. Are we less Malthusian when everybody has something to do? I think so. If we re-industrialised (something ignored by Malthus) our concerns about population might be less important because output will sustain population.
Why is it that the poor might produce more children? Might it be because they are spreading risk? That just like the turtle who produces so many eggs, some of those kids don’t make it but statistically others from the same brood might?
A way to boost income that is not available from unavailable economic activity perhaps?
Another example is that in Britain the rules for getting the Council Housing register as a priority were filed down to a narrow band that included women with children (1996 Housing Act). So what did we see? We saw people playing that system. Getting pregnant – having a kid and then applying. Behavioural psychologists like management guru John Seddon would say it was the bad system that caused this behaviour – not bad people.
So, the Right wing press has a field day laying into single mothers and their being too many people and the Left holds its head in its hands tutting disapprovingly at the people it says it wants to help!
But all we are doing is blaming the girl with the kid and not blaming the real culprit – the law which made the resource of affordable housing much more difficult to obtain in the first place by making one of the conditions that an applicant must have a child! It is bad law brought about to mal-manage an asset (quality housing) that should be more widely available to everyone (it is but if you are not prioritised you can wait for years to get affordable housing under the current system). And it was the expensive private landlords who were to profit from it. Great!
And the supply of that affordable housing (an asset that is a public, human good) has not kept up with demand nor the way it has been sold under Right To Buy).
Additionally there is evidence to suggest that a society that shares wealth better is prone to lower birth rates because there are less risks to people’s offspring.
So in conclusion I do not think it relevant for Corbyn of the Greens to head off UKIP on this issue with such policies. Instead their policies need to be about getting rid of this reserve of cheap labour that seems to create the perception that there are too many people here.
But if this were India however Marco, I might think differently.