This report comes from Finance.co.uk and appears reliable, being confirmed in other media:
On Wednesday, MPs were informed that a ‘no deal' Brexit would see the United Kingdom without a fully functioning customs system for at most two years.
In a sobering warning, senior officials from the HM Revenue & Customs informed the Treasury committee that the moment to start planning for the collapse of the negotiations already passed months ago.
MPs were told that the United Kingdom would find it hard to properly collect tariffs, while the potential for traffic chaos at various ports was a “known unknown.”
Jim Harra, an HMRC official, informed the Treasury committee: “We would start off with a functioning but clearly sub-optimal customs border.”
He continued: “I think we are looking at a minimum of two years from the no deal to get to a point where you can say we have a steady-state system where we are comfortable that we can manage all the fiscal risks in a way we would like and trade can flow in the way we would like.”
What is extraordinary about this is that the UK has not even got the option of crashing out of the EU whilst keeping any pretence of having a functioning government, if the ability to enforce the law and collect tax owing is indication of that, on which I think most would agree.
In that case parliament has an absolute duty to avoid a no deal Brexit.
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Good negotiators rarely bluff. These Tories are so used to doing it and getting way with it they can’t help themselves. Material like this is known to the other side and they must know what they are dealing with. I doubt we are even prepared for the so-called deal version. What’s really going to happen on fishing? We lack sufficient inshore Navy to keep anyone out. Zero content on exclusions and some blather on environment. Don’t buy that trawler yet! In the meantime bluff about making our inshore fish British. The bluffs are largely about vagueness, inactivity and sloganising. They don’t seem to realise you only go ad hoc after a plan fails.
In the case of the fishing “problem” – the Uk has two or three vessels – not so long ago two were out of commission.
My guess wrt tory bluffing is that the European Commission no longer cares – it would much prefer if the UK did not leave, if it did leave an orderly exit would be good – if it crashes out – well….. “the lights are going out in Ingerland and will not come on again in our lifetime” – a view from mainland Europe.
As for May… stubborn and cruel – witness the recent gov review of forcing 300 highly skilled migrants to leave Britain under an immigration rule designed primarily to tackle terrorists. Person responsible – the home Sec – step forward one T May. So no – I don’t think that May has a cunning plan – Tories don’t do “cunning plans” they do stupid – which has been the underling reality for the last 8 years (& doesn’t time fly when the tories are in charge).
Dead right.
Has this so-called government of ours actually done anything, at all, in the past couple of years since the referendum ?
They best they seem to be offering is a choice between following them up a blind alley in the dark, or over a cliff edge.
It barely even qualifies as damage limitation.
This is because Theresa May has been working very hard to ensure we do not leave the EU. I am nearly certain she has deliberately set out right from the start to create this exact impasse where the only acceptable option is to not leave. The EU negotiators have assisted her in this process.
I suspected this for a long time but this confirms it: no honest actor would fail to prepare fully and well in advance for no deal. It’s 100% obvious this is necessary to establish a strong negotiating position. Fact she hasn’t done this is all the evidence I need to confirm my beliefs.
Rather than the incompetent fool she’s been cast as TM is a tough, calm and calculating strategist who is on the verge of delivering remainers from the very nightmare they have been castigating her for creating.
I still think we should leave but not via any of the now available options so I will, begrudgingly, have to vote remain in any forthcoming referendum. I hope there is an alternative that allows us to leave in a reasonable fashion but I just don’t see that being possible despite Corbyn’s claims to the contrary.
I keep on thinking that there must be more to May’s approach than meets the eye – that she has wearied her opponents by dragging them through this painful process so that at some point she can administer a dramatic coupe de grace – although to what end I am unsure (there was a battle like this where one side had to charge through boggy ground before being defeated- Culloden maybe?).
As ever the simple explanation is the most likely – they are simply clueless!
I know I’ll be mocked for this as conspiracy theory nonsense but I can’t selfishly enjoy reading this sort of stuff on the internet without occasionally contributing my own crazy theories…
1) Strong and Stable (doubly ironic because really she is so it’s a double bluff) Theresa May deliberately weakens Tory majority at shambolic 2017 snap election which sees Brexiteer MPs fare particularly badly
2) keeping her remaining enemies closer TM appoints backstabbing Brexiteers to lead negotiations but hobbles them whenever they fail to adequately shoot themselves in their own and each others’ feet
3) formerly hard brexit supporting papers quitely change their tune under new editorial control
4) remainer Tories loudly and publicly attack TM to provide cover for her from suspicious Brexiteers (she was Cameron’s home secretary for 6+ years for Christ’s sake! How out of step can she possibly be with Osbourne et al?)
5) TM and EU run down the clock with suitably stubborn and terminally boring negotiations that leave everyone in the world desperate for the whole thing to just go away
6) by the time Brexiteers wake up to the fact they’ve lost it’s too late, time has run out, no-one wants to be left holding the Brexit grenade as it’s about to blow, TM’s government have conveniently failed to prepare for hard brexit, JC’s New Old Labour are too hideous a prospect to risk anything that might result in a GE when the Tories fared so badly last time and since then hundreds of thousands of old conservative voting folk have sadly passed on…
…and then, when TM is on the home straight she quietly slips in the fact there are now THREE options available: her deal, no-deal OR not leaving at all.
“Hold on what?!”
Brexiteers cry. Up to this point she’s stuck to “Brexit means brexit” and the binary choice of “no deal is better than a bad deal”. But now she knows she’s victorious she can tell the truth. Just like there was once going to be “no snap election” there was, until shortly, going to be “no second referendum”.
I’ve never voted Tory in my entire life and have no intention of ever doing so but fair play to Theresa May – it was a tough and thankless task but someone had to do it. She’s a true hero – fighting the good fight even though she knows no-one will ever publicly thank her for it and the history books will be relentlessly unkind to her.
In reality I think she’s continuing the job Cameron started: facing down the Eurosceptic Conservative Right once and for all. Let’s not forget Cameron’s own politics tutor from Oxford stated shortly after the referendum that “the only way out for a conservative prime minister will be a second referendum”.
I didn’t see it at the time but in hindsight it was clearly a relay race from the start. Cameron only completed the warm-up while TM has had to run nearly the entire race by herself and will quite possibly have to hand over the baton yards from the finish line. Like I said – true hero.
You remainers will be giving her a standing ovation if it all works out as planned 😉
Even as a left leaning brexiter I can respect what she’s doing and if it works I’ll be thankful for her lancing the boil of right-wing populism and extreme free market libertarianism before it could grow too large. Fingers crossed.
Adam Sawyer says:
“I know I’ll be mocked for this as conspiracy theory nonsense but ….”
I’ve entertained similar thoughts intermittently. And my ears certainly did prick-up when suddenly there was the third option in May’s recent comments. I more inclined to believe that’s just an idle threat to bring the Brexit mad dogs in from the brink….or rather to isolate them as the extreme ‘No Deal’ minority they are and bring everybody else in, to support what seems to be a very poor deal
We’ll see. I can’t quite buy May as master strategist, when I’ve had her so firmly cast as opportunistic firefighter. If this was the
long game, it isn’t May’s doing unless she’s a tremendous actress (and bear in mind we’ve seen her dancing 🙂 )
Andy,
Last week TM spoke with the public in a phone in. It’s the first stage in her attempt to persuade us all directly. But why is she appealing direct to the public when it’s parliament that’ll shoot down her deal?
Possibly because she knows there’s going to be a second referendum that’s going to include her deal among the options.
And what is it she wants the great British public to know about her deal? That it will be “different to being in the EU…”
That’s in response to a direct question: “will your deal be better than staying in EU?”
Say no more Theresa, we get it 😉
Brexit seems to me to be a typically amateurish British cock-up. Sure there are problems with the thinking in both the UK and EU especially the failure to understand medium of exchange (money) creation and running alongside that how money manipulation has resulted in unfair out-sourcing and global trading unfairness.
On the key issues of economic migration into the UK, the UK’s right to nationalise monopolistic or quasi-monopolistic enterprises, and whether the UK has to comply with EU mandated fiscal collars neither of the two main parties Conservative and Labour have done much to explain in any detail why it’s essential to leave the EU. Both parties immediately plunged into ratifying Article 50. Ask any voter whether they are absolutely clear economic migration, nationalisation and fiscal collar issues can only be dealt with by leaving the EU and there is a lack of clear understanding this is necessary. This really is national bumbling of unprecedented stupidity!
Culloden only lasted an hour. My clan had the sense to be at Bannockburn and not to be anywhere near Culloden. I might sign up for the battle now to avoid any more Brexit.
archytas says:
“Culloden only lasted an hour.”
Ah !…..
Did somebody tell you it finished ?
I’ve got to say Andy that I think you deserve one of Richard’s ‘smileys’ for that one!!
Very well observed.
They’re not as common as a 10 from Craig Revell Hallwood (if I have spelt that right) you know…..
Archytas wrote: “My clan had the sense to be at Bannockburn and not to be anywhere near Culloden. I might sign up for the battle now to avoid any more Brexit.
If the road signage around Stirling is to be believed the battle is still going on! The signs give directions not to the site of the battle but to “The Battle of Bannockburn” itself. Hurry Archytas, you could still take part and, who knows meet some of your distant ancestors!
🙂
On the day the referendum result was announced I was attending a meeting in an HMRC office as I was employed by them at that time.
We were all shocked at the result as we knew what issues there would be for HMRC.
HMRC’s plans at that time were to close as many tax offices as possible. Reducing them to 13(!) sites across the whole of the UK.
As far as I am aware those plans have not changed.
Utter madness.
It is utter madness
And they are introducing Making Tax Digital in April to add to the folly
“And they are introducing Making Tax Digital in April to add to the folly”
On the first of April would be highly appropriate.
It’ll top off Brexit nicely.
My view remains that the Leave vote is nothing more than the population voting against its own domestic Government. But they just do not realise it.
Such people have had a enough of austerity, perceive that freedom of movement as a threat to what livelihood they have and think that the wider EU economy is dragging us down.
The truth of the matter is that the Leaver’s own Government (this Tory administration) bear much of the responsibility for the contracted UK economy and are aligned with much of what the ECB did on the EU mainland (cutting expenditure in the wake of the 2008 collapse). The Tories are too thick to see this or hide behind the proxy enemy – the EU treaty.
The only difference is about immigration which the Tories have used to make themselves popular but also puts them onto a crash course with the EU.
This is why I think that after we come out (deal or not) we will at some stage go back in, in the long run. It might very well be that we bounce back, but on what terms?
And after any economic shock things are not the same afterwards – people are more likely to be worse off given that such shocks lead to more cost cutting and result in more use of technology to try to make services more sustainable which means less jobs and therefore real money in the economy.
We are going to have to leave to realise this to learn the lesson. But also the EU is going to have to learn some harsh lessons too if the growth of the new hard right is to be abated.
Customs duties are about £3bn per year. A very small part of the tax take
So?
Here are some papers that help shed some light on the reasons for Brexit:-
Austerity Cuts:-
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/381-2018_fetzer.pdf
Global Trading Disfunction:-
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2870313
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2904105
https://www.peri.umass.edu/component/k2/item/1096-globalization-checkmated-political-and-geopolitical-contradictions-coming-home-to-roost
Cultural Tightness:-
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/6df109_a5da34d6a9ae4114be82ccf4b024a2b2.pdf
Thank you Schofield for the links.
The Warwick paper seems to support what I have said before – the Leave campaign is actually an unconscious vote against this Tory Government and its austerity polices – not really against the EU (although I say again that the EU is made up of Governments all with similar outlooks).
The ‘tight and loose’ paper has got me worried. As it dawns on us that the Earths’ resources are not infinite, the need to recognise the value of interdependence between nations is under threat from the hard right.
Thanks – an interesting range from Herodotus, barge economics and formularised Chinese shock-effects calculus. I used to watch in town centres with a sociologist mate looking at white, male youth shuffling by with thousand yard stares not cultivated in our own military backgrounds. We we’re looking tight-loose and rather around how the lads did ‘extracting dignity’ and what they blamed for the difficulty they had in this. They were proud enough of our absurd British myths, with little idea how these couldn’t help them. None of them knew of EU programs that might until we explained ours. These simply weren’t big enough or concerned types of education they had already been traumatised by and failed. We had them on tape with permission and middle-class language analysts all failed to get a grip on their own bias in interpreting them. I fear ‘we’ have lost the plot on just how “disciplined” and resentful many feel about ‘our’ liberal solutions for their tight culture are.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/h-lead-packed-peoples-brexit-meeting-demands-general-election
But the only way Grace will get what she wants is hard Brexit
And I really don’t think the people of this country would tolerate that for more than two days
Linda
I find much to agree with in terms of the intentions of some of the commentators in the article – I really do.
But the big caveat is that these aims cannot be realised through BREXIT. BREXIT is going to cause problems in the short term – there is no doubt about it because we know that the planning to make it happen smoothly is just not here.
Remember that the result of the ‘referendumb’ was a total shock to many in the establishment and it seems that a leave vote was not considered at all. Cameron and his ilk certainly misunderstood the mood and the Tories still do not understand that this vote was actually a vote against them – not the EU, who are just the fall guy (albeit a fall guy whose hands are very dirty).
Therefore all our stupid Government can do now is react – and react badly on the back foot. Hence the ‘dumb’ I put in above – it is not the people who are dumb in my view – it’s the politicians, anti-Europe entryists (some very rich or with access to funny money) and the media who have got us up to this point.
What I would rather see is these very credible aspirations in your link (reversing privatisation for example in certain sectors of the economy and state assistance) pushed through by the UK as member of the EU. That is what I want and in fact that is what the EU needs if the perceived (and real) neoliberalism within the EU is to be challenged.
So, to the people at the meeting I would say this: You do not win a rugby match by taking the bloody ball home because you do not like the way the game is going. You turn up and you stay on the pitch and you play. And you keep playing until you win – at least in politics – which is not limited to 80 mins.
The main issue I’d ask you and others who think like you to consider Linda (and again I empathise with those aims as I too have problems with the EU – I’m not having a go at you Linda) is that which Richard alludes to: the problems after BREXIT – given that we are so unprepared – might be so severe and chaotic that this may effectively play into the hands of darker political forces that means that we take a different path totally at odds with anything we consider to be progressive. Some of those ideas at the meeting – decent ones – could well be strangled at birth in the chaos immediately after BREXIT.
Or, we get to be so desperate that we go back into the EU but on weaker terms like some recalcitrant. In such a case we’d have very little power to influence change. We’d be isolated, but in. A useless situation in my view if you believe (as you and those at that meeting seem to) in change.
Ideally we want to be in and behaving and talking in a way that gives us credibility. Personally that is how I would have done things as a leader of this country. I would have signed up to the Social Chapter but been more lukewarm about the creeping marketisation issues and the finance disciplines that we agreed to – especially as we did not adopt the Euro. And the creation of an ECB would have had a rough ride from me. And rather than taking on a jingoistic tone with the others on the treaty I would have just kept gently tapping away at my points to win people over.
This as I describe it in the para’ above did not happen because (1) the UK was always ambivalent about the EU – we went in late and lost a lot of credibility and potential influence. And (2) when we did go in we – like many other members – were becoming infatuated with neo-liberal economic ideas. The EU and how it works simple reflects the sovereignty of the neo-liberalism in each member state (or at least it did up to 2008).
The UK can be a beacon to the world about how to re-engage the State with the economy and markets. We created the NHS for goodness sake! But we are too small to do it alone. Far too small. We can only do this by providing leadership by also being in Europe. Anyone who thinks otherwise is in my opinion not thinking it through at all.
Thank you for the link Linda and enabling me to respond to it.
Thank you
@Pilgrim Slight Return
I agree with much of your response to ‘Linda’s Morning Star piece. Lexit is framed within, albeit against, the terms of the orthodox agenda and thus constrained.
I think you’ll find this interesting if you haven’t already seen it. It’s George Lakoff. New to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvidS2vo9Bs&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR14HG21ivHgX6lWzff3-U4bJCNVd8yfZK0amk0xeLHushNDtpL9IHHQnTk
Lakoff is key to understanding political framing
Better Lakoff than Jordon Peterson! Very interesting.
Thanks Andy.