Brexit & Britain

[AnBr]

[goldenvalley]

Apparently Boris isn't running for PM any more. Looks like former finance minister Rishi Sunak is more likely to move towards that.  He was smart enough to get out when Johnson was still PM and Truss's plan was based on fantasy economics.  Is that like voodoo economics?

[Bact PhD]

Oct 23, 2022 22:11:18 GMT goldenvalley said:

Apparently Boris isn't running for PM any more. Looks like former finance minister Rishi Sunak is more likely to move towards that.  He was smart enough to get out when Johnson was still PM and Truss's plan was based on fantasy economics.  Is that like voodoo economics?

Maybe, since it’s the UK, it’s “ ‘Harry Potter’ economics”?

[LFC]

Oct 24, 2022 17:29:31 GMT Bact PhD said:

Maybe, since it’s the UK, it’s “ ‘Harry Potter’ economics”?

I don't think so. I'm not a Harry Potter fan but I think Harry Potter Economics would be both moral and fairly competent.

[Bact PhD]

Oct 24, 2022 17:33:47 GMT LFC said:

Oct 24, 2022 17:29:31 GMT Bact PhD said:

Maybe, since it’s the UK, it’s “ ‘Harry Potter’ economics”?

I don't think so. I'm not a Harry Potter fan but I think Harry Potter Economics would be both moral and fairly competent.

Hmmm…true. I was going strictly for the wizard reference. Maybe the more accurate moniker would reference Harry’s nemesis, Voldemort…

[andydp]

This was too good to put in humor.

[LFC]

Britain's buyer's remorse.

[LFC]

Conservatives and grift don't just go together here in the U.S.

[LFC]

Brexit is not, as predicted by saner heads, living up to the hype. Many are calling it a disaster for the UK in terms of both economic robustness and international influence. The U.K. gave up real advantages for "FREEDUMB!" Sound familiar?

We seem to have reached the stage of Brexit justification which basically says, yes it’s a catastrophe, but it’s ok because we now must take responsibility for our actions and can’t blame the EU for all our problems. It’s a fascinating slight of hand.

The blaming of the EU for all the UK’s problems was the result of the dishonesty of the Brexiteers in the first place. Instead of admitting the truth, which was that the U.K. had carved out an extraordinarily powerful and beneficial place in the EU….

With access to the single market, control of much of Europe’s financial resources and even its own currency, the Brexiteers created a fiction of Britain being held back and discriminated against. Actually, Britain was on its way to being the dominant power in the EU.

So the idea that the Brexiteers lied repeatedly and without evidence, and it’s good that the U.K. left the EU precisely because of that lie, is probably the weakest argument I’ve seen come out on the subject.

This was one interesting way to look at people's opinions. I suspect the "...get on with delivering" is the part that the the Tories are dreading.

Putin must be laughing his ass off. He got the likes of Johnson and Firage to help him tear the EU apart. The Brexiteers aren't really talking much about Brexit anymore, and when they are they're just hand waving.

[LFC]

Aaahhh, the political double-talk is strong with the Brexiteers.

We seem to have reached the stage of Brexit justification which basically says, yes it’s a catastrophe, but it’s ok because we now must take responsibility for our actions and can’t blame the EU for all our problems. It’s a fascinating slight of hand.

The blaming of the EU for all the UK’s problems was the result of the dishonesty of the Brexiteers in the first place. Instead of admitting the truth, which was that the U.K. had carved out an extraordinarily powerful and beneficial place in the EU….

With access to the single market, control of much of Europe’s financial resources and even its own currency, the Brexiteers created a fiction of Britain being held back and discriminated against. Actually, Britain was on its way to being the dominant power in the EU.

So the idea that the Brexiteers lied repeatedly and without evidence, and it’s good that the U.K. left the EU precisely because of that lie, is probably the weakest argument I’ve seen come out on the subject.

[goldenvalley]

Would the EU accept Britain back into the fold?  

[indy]

It's stunning how easy it was to foresee this train wreck. One of the benefits of being on the outside looking in I guess.

Maybe the EU would take them back but it would probably be on terms Britain couldn't possibly bring themselves to take.

[AnBr]

[LFC]

A look at Boris Johnson's disastrous, short tenure as Prime Minister. It was all of the shitshow you thought it was, and he was as shallow and incompetent as everybody expected. I had no idea how thoroughly horrific and powerful Johnson's chief adviser was, and how much power he willingly ceded to him because he was simply incapable. Much like Donald Trump he wanted to lead just to say he was the leader. He had no idea what to do once he got there.

Sir Anthony Seldon, the famous headteacher, has been writing book-length report cards on British prime ministers for 40 years. The latest, on Boris Johnson, based on the accounts of more than 200 people who witnessed his catastrophic, clown-car time in office first-hand, is a test not only of Seldon’s method, but also his tone. In previous volumes the author has assumed a base level of gravitas in his subjects, and of structure in their government. Though he employs the same quasi-legal model for his inquiry here, gathering careful evidence, weighing judgments, the story he pieces together is often one of venal mayhem; it frequently reads like a considered constitutional appraisal of rats in a sack.

There is a telling coincidence in the fact that the first indelible report of Johnson’s behaviour was also the work of a school master. Martin Hammond’s infamous notes on Johnson at Eton, which recorded his “disgracefully cavalier attitude”, his “gross failure of responsibility” and his deep-seated belief that he “should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else” is the opening source of Seldon’s account. Johnson’s “end was in his beginning”, he argues. Speaking to me about his book last week, Seldon noted that Hammond – who had been the “formidable pipe-smoking” head at Tonbridge school when he started out as a teacher – was a longstanding inspiration, both as an educator and a writer. “Two things,” he says. “One is that his report was typically acute and detailed, like a psychiatrist’s analysis. And second: just how much the character is formed very early on.”

Of the 57 people who have held the highest office, Seldon suggests, Johnson was probably unique in that he came to it with “no sense of any fixed position. No religious faith, no political ideology”. His only discernible ambition, Seldon says, was that “like Roman emperors he wanted monuments in his name”.

“To those many people who say, ‘Of course he believed in Brexit’, the evidence is absolutely clear,” Seldon says. “From the beginning it was striking that he believed that there was a cause far higher than Britain’s economic interests, than Britain’s relationship with Europe, than Britain’s place in the world, than the strength of the union. That cause was his own advancement.”

The eyewitness reports of events in Seldon’s book expose once and for all the great con of the referendum campaign that has so savaged the country and its economy. We learn from many named and unnamed sources that even Johnson was outraged by some of the stunts pulled by Dominic Cummings in the name of Vote Leave. Confronted with the xenophobic – and untrue – scaremongering that Turkey was about to join the EU, one confidant reports that “[Johnson] wanted to come down to London and apparently punch Cummings”. On the morning of the referendum result itself, Seldon writes, Johnson “paced around in a Brazilian football shirt and misfitting shorts looking ashen-faced and distraught. ‘What the hell is happening?’ he kept saying… Soon after, stopping in his tracks, a new thought struck him: ‘Oh shit, we’ve got no plan. We haven’t thought about it. I didn’t think it would happen. Holy crap, what will we do?’”

Johnson’s eventual solution to getting Brexit done as prime minister was to bring in Cummings to do the work that he had no appetite for, in the full knowledge that his chief adviser was a wholly destructive force. That, Seldon, suggests to me, was another first for British political leadership:

“There has never been a prime minister who has been so weak to have ceded so much power to a figure like Cummings. Here was someone who went ahead and removed the chancellor of the exchequer, to replace them with someone more biddable. Who knocked out the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, appointing someone unable to assert himself. Who tried knocking out and appointing his own person as governor of the Bank of England, and as head of MI6. While all the time expressing contempt for Johnson.”

The most dispiriting thing about reading the book is that dawning sense that all your worst imaginings about the conduct of that government were, it seems, played out in real time. Seldon argues that the double act in the oven-ready years of prorogation and Barnard Castle really did deserve each other, even if none of us deserved them.

“I suppose at least Cummings did believe in Brexit, although ultimately, really, did he?” he says. “From everything we heard [for the book] it just seemed Cummings was full of hatred. He probably hates himself; he certainly hates other people. He wants to destroy everything. Johnson in his own way never knew what he stood for, but he shared that contempt for the Tory party, contempt for the cabinet, contempt for the civil service, contempt for the EU, contempt for the army, contempt for business, contempt for intellectuals, contempt for universities.”

I suspect Liz Truss's report card won't be very lengthy.

[goldenvalley]

May 1, 2023 18:33:50 GMT LFC said:

I suspect Liz Truss's report card won't be very lengthy.

She's been an * after Johnson's name.

[LFC]

Buyers' remorse. It was one of Putin's bigger victories in tearing Europe apart, but now he's gone and undone it all except the economic impact to Britain.

If they were to even ask, what do you think the odds of the EU allowing the UK back in with their special status intact, rather than as a full member required to follow all the rules and adopt the Euro? I'm kinda' doubtin' it.

[goldenvalley]

May 5, 2023 19:44:44 GMT LFC said:

If they were to even ask, what do you think the odds of the EU allowing the UK back in with their special status intact, rather than as a full member required to follow all the rules and adopt the Euro? I'm kinda' doubtin' it.

I dunno.  Britain is a good market for stuff the rest of Europe wants to sell.  The extra paperwork needed to export stuff to Britain costs time and money that didn't have to be spent when Britain was in the EU.  That might be an incentive for the EU to let the country back in.

[LFC]

May 5, 2023 20:50:33 GMT goldenvalley said:

I dunno.  Britain is a good market for stuff the rest of Europe wants to sell.  The extra paperwork needed to export stuff to Britain costs time and money that didn't have to be spent when Britain was in the EU.  That might be an incentive for the EU to let the country back in.

I believe they'd let them rejoin, just not under the semi-independent fashion they had before. It would be interesting to see if a demand that they adopt the Euro come along with that. Of course the British Pound ain't quite what it used to be compared to the U.S. Dollar or the Euro.

[AnBr]

May 5, 2023 21:23:01 GMT LFC said:

It would be interesting to see if a demand that they adopt the Euro come along with that. Of course the British Pound ain't quite what it used to be compared to the U.S. Dollar or the Euro.

All of the time and money that goldenvalley mentions would be even less if the UK had to adopt the Euro. No conversion of currency back and forth for their exports.

[LFC]

David Frum on Brexit. It's ugly.

The temporary disappearance of some fresh fruits and vegetables for a few weeks in winter may be only a nuisance. Yet such nuisances are ramifying throughout the British economy, signals and symptoms of larger, system-wide trouble. British consumers are spending less on new clothes and shoes than they did in 2018 and 2019. The British are holding on to their cars longer: The average age of the vehicles on British roads has reached 8.7 years, a record. The British made about 2 million fewer trips abroad in 2022 than they did in 2018 and 2019, an almost 20 percent decline. Lingering COVID concerns offer a partial explanation. But the UK and most of its European Union neighbors had dropped most travel restrictions in January 2022 and the remainder by March.

Altogether, Britain is expected to be the worst performing of the world’s 20 biggest economies this year. The British government’s official forecaster predicts that after-inflation household incomes will decline by an average of 7.1 percent over the three years ending in spring 2024. On the present trajectory, Britain will not return to 2019 levels of disposable income until 2027. By 2024, the average British household will likely have a lower living standard than the average household in Slovenia. On present trends, the average British household will be poorer than the average in Poland by 2030.

The pandemic has not helped, but the slowdown of the British economy cannot be explained by COVID. Italy has suffered more deaths from COVID than any other major European country has, yet its economy had mostly recovered to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2021.

Britain is now paying the price for its decision to leave the European Union. Britain voted to exit in the summer of 2016. The departure was formalized on December 31, 2020. Since then, new barriers to trade, investment, and movement have risen between Britain and its nearest neighbors. Investment in Britain has tumbled, and the British economy has shrunk. By one authoritative estimate, Britain is 4 percent poorer today than if it had stayed in the EU.

The citizens of the UK were sold a bill of goods.

The British were promised that Brexit meant more: more resources for public and private consumption. Instead, Brexit has predictably turned out to mean less, and the British are surprised, baffled, and angry.

They still are being sold a bill of goods.

In a major speech in July 2022, Starmer dismissed criticism of Brexit as “arguments of the past.” He embraced the old Brexit slogan “Take back control” and vowed, “So let me be very clear: With Labour, Britain will not go back into the EU. We will not be joining the single market. We will not be joining a customs union.”

But if Britain can’t vote for a new approach to Europe, how does it meet the costs imposed by its present approach to Europe?

The short answer to that is more of the denial that Pill denounced.

Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the infiltration of the German government are the greatest battles Putin ever won. He should have stuck to this form of warfare.

[goldenvalley]

May 10, 2023 18:52:40 GMT LFC said:

Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the infiltration of the German government are the greatest battles Putin ever won. He should have stuck to this form of warfare.

I want to double up vote this one...Putin was so successful when he operated with dis and misinformation to trick voters into supporting Brexit, Trump, and a number of candidates in Germany.  Probably had some hand in Mariane LePenn's good showing in the French elections.  He sort of had a puppet Ukrainian president for a while but ultimately couldn't hold on to him. A failure there.

But the sorry mess he's created with his Ukrainian misadventures is a stark contrast and puts lie to what was probably his belief ; that he really could control Europe one way or the other.  

[indy]

First off, Russians are and always have been great at this sort of thing.

Second, however, is that the people who run these disinformation operations are not a threat to Putin's power. They aren't culled for their competence or their ability to lead, unlike those in the security services, who also have historically been pretty good at what they do and understand how to wrangle for power. Putin understood those people because he was one of them and he didn't want another one of him coming out of those ranks.

[AnBr]

[indy]

Too late