Quite right, Robert, so let’s all jump off the ‘Britexit Cliff’ and follow you to your" promised land of milk & honey".
Things will be so much better there 
(According to the non-experts & Michael Gove)
Martin
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Pots empty, nothing whatsoever to do with being a member of the EU, all down to inept governance. All quite simple to work out. Lack of forward planning, bad spending choice’s, its exactly the same with life.
The French run a similar national debt to the UK, have vastly superior infrastructure, social housing, social care, healthcare, child care and education system. The French borrow and spend on stuff the nation need’s, the English only spend when they really really have to, normally relying on the private sector to bail out the state.
Blame membership of the EU if you wish, but still doesn’t change the fact its all down to inept governance, inept governance that will still continue to be inept way way after the UK has left.
I see Doc Fox is still living in the they need us more than we need them world, won’t be long before we all find out just how much they need us. Paris is awash with Brits looking at property, office space is flying off the shelf, the employment agencies are full of adds for bilingual staff. I personally think that the UK out with no deal with give a tremendous boost to the remaining members of the EU. Multinationals move production to wherever the market is, any restrictions in the movement of goods and services between the UK and mainland Europe will quickly see multinationals shift production, financial services companies will shift staff. I don’t care what people say, once the UK leaves it becomes a third country and no single third country in the world has totally unhindered tariff free trade with its nearest neighbours, so they will be restrictions, there will be extra costs for businesses, extra costs which will be passed on to the consumer. People say its all just speculation at the moment because no one has any idea of what will happen, but its all logical, and logic dictates nearly everything, that is of course until someone does something which is totally illogical.
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https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/cope-divide-europe-2017-background-report.pdf page 7 compares the gap between richest and poorest in different countries. I don’t see how you can blame the EU for the UK having higher income inequality than other EU states that operate under the same EU rules. Will be interesting to see whether this widens after Brexit, I suspect that once the UK is no longer subject to EU social protection rules, it might. It only has to overtake Estonia and the US and it will top the table. But maybe this is what the UK wants, maybe it’s why it’s so keen to get rid of all those restrictive EU regulations that amongst other things, stop it from exploiting people to make maximum profit.
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Most countries set out to raise the standard of living for their people, to make it as high as possible within reason and that is completely different to creating individual wealth. When the government puts the wishes of the affluent rew above the needs of the rest something us wrong. The balancing act between income, taxes and public services is never easy and it’s so easy to get it wrong. Big time wrong.
In the 21st Century the inhabitants of a country in Britain’s position expect or even demand a certain level of the basics; health, education, law and order, transport infrastructure, food supply etc. These things cost money, the money comes from taxes and the taxes are paid as a result of employment. In 2016 Britain was doing OK but no more, more investment was needed to give the population the basic standards they deserved but, as a result of recent political moves, people had got used to paying minimum taxes and were reluctant to contribute more than the minimum required. Higher taxes might provide better health care, educational achievement, law and order and better roads but higher taxes lose votes so the minimum acceptable standards remained. Even so standards had risen significantly since the 1970 because Britain was a member of a large trading block and she could make the most of her strengths without having to suffer too much from her weaknesses. The position suited the country and its population benefited as individuals. Moving into the 20th Century it was no longer just a case of having a roof over your head, a car parked outside, a week in Southend and enough to eat, people’s expectations had risen along with the country’s fortunes. Now a detached private house, a prestige car or two on the drive, several holidays a year in the sun and snow and exotic fruit, veg and wine 365 days a year were considered the basics. A lot of this rise in standards/expectations had come through employment but an awful lot has come as a result of easy credit, the levels of personal debt in the UK is almost unbelieveable.
Now they have Brexit. That’s good because it will allow them to regain their soverignity and keep foreigners out. I don’t understand the former but I do know how much the latter have helped to maintain the standards of health, care and education throughout the UK and also ensured that whole swathes of British farming have stayed afloat.
Foreign workers are leaving the UK and many more will follow. Will this be bad news for health, education and farming or will it play a big part in getting the large indigenous unemployed potential workforce back into jobs? Time will tell.
With Brexit Britain will end up with a worse trading relationship with its best and closest partners. Profit margins will fall and expenses will go up. What I haven’t worked out yet (and no Brexit voter has told me) is what Britain is going to trade with. What does it have that the rest of the world wants? How is it going to fund the prestige cars and pineapples that people expect? The City of London is a possible source of income, but for how long? The banks have already made preparations to move elsewhere taking their work, profits, taxes and skilled workforce with them, to places where profit will win the battle over tradition any day.
None of this has had anything to do with individual wealth, it’s more to do with collective wellbeing and expectations. The hole is being dug as I type but I still can’t see how sovereignty and a few fewer foreigners will not only fill it in but make the land better than it was before.
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I have to say that living in France has radically changed my attitude to paying taxes. I used to have the typical grudging UK attitude, largely I suppose because the whole income tax thing seemed so mysterious and remote and I didn’t have a clue what the government was doing with my money (not that I gave them very much). In France the national budget and all the challenges it poses seems a lot more transparent, it’s always in the media. And it’s odd, or maybe not so odd, but I don’t actually grudge paying taxes nearly as much here. Despite the fact that if you include cotisations I pay far more.
I agree with what you’re saying about individual wealth but people do need a certain level of income and wealth so as to be able to afford a decent standard of living, and also so that they keep the money-go-round going, as in pouvoir d’achat.
The foreigners are already leaving. My daughter is in Cheltenham, she was there last year, place was full of eastern Europeans, she returned to France for several months and has now gone back to Cheltenham, place is devoid of eastern Europeans, there are hardly any.
The UK’s problems have all been caused by lack of regulation with regard to financial services which led to the financial crash, and the totally lapse attitude to immigration. All the tools are in the box to control immigration, but the government in their wisdom chose to use non on them. Then when you chuck in the Iraq war, forced regime change in Libya, the western aided Arab spring, the attempted regime change in Syria and we are where we are. All inept governance, nothing to do with the EU but somehow certain sections of the press and certain members of governance have managed to successfully blame the EU for all of it. At the end of the day, we are all part of the European Union, we all have the right to vote in the election of our representatives, our governments have massive input into the shaping of the EU, the UK has for years been immensely involved in the instigation of various EU regulations. The UK was the chief instigator in the fast tracking of various eastern European countries into the EU, much against the advice of a lot of other member state’s. So, we are where we are purely through inept governance.
Or would you go along with “misguided/short sighted” rather than inept? Because I think the government probably achieved what it wanted, the trouble was that it was blinkered and believed the way to utopia was trade trade trade and loadsa money, It joined the EU for the trading opportunities not for the social programmes, and I think that for a lot of people, the desire to leave has exactly the same motivation.
Forgot to mention the minimum wage, another cause of where we are. Its I agree fair on everyone to have a minimum wage, but it stifles wage competition, there is no incentive to move jobs if there is no increase in salary, employers have no incentive to offer better wages if they are not in competition for your services, farmers have to pay minimum wage regardless of how much fruit and vege you pick, that’s why they won’t employ Brits, Brits faf about for minimum wage, whereas eastern Europeans want to earn money, pick like crazy to earn a bonus. A farmer I know, told me that eastern Europeans earn both him and themselves money whereas Brits lose him money. With minimum wage you can no longer say bloke up the road is offering me more money so I’m leaving if you don’t match it, because the bloke up the road is paying minimum wage just the same as everyone else. Its exactly the same in France and has caused exactly the same problems.
There’s no law against paying above minimum wage though is there. If a company wants to attract a better workforce it can offer a better wage, or alternatively a better overall package - better working conditins, a couple of extra days’ holiday a year, a subsidised staff canteen, a good training programme and a policy of promoting from within, or perks negotiated on a corporate basis with assurance companies etc. It doesn’t have to be all about money. Companies can get themselves a reputation as good to work for without necessarily paying top dollar wages. When I was kneehigh to the proverbial, M&S and Boots had that reputation, lots of my friends who wanted to go into store management, wanted to work for them rather than Currys and Asda etc because they had a name for good staff training and good working conditions. I don’t know whether they actually paid a higher wage but either way, that wasn’t what attracted people.
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Actually it might surprise you to discover that we still make “stuff” - UK manufacturing exports totalled £351 billion in 2016 (source ONS). The top manufacturing sectors were as follows.
- Machinery including computers: US$60.3 billion (14.7% of total exports)
- Vehicles : $51.7 billion (12.6%)
- Pharmaceuticals: $32.6 billion (8%)
- Gems, precious metals: $27.5 billion (6.7%)
- Electrical machinery, equipment: $27.1 billion (6.6%)
- Mineral fuels including oil: $26.2 billion (6.4%)
- Aircraft, spacecraft: $20.7 billion (5.1%)
- Optical, technical, medical apparatus: $17.2 billion (4.2%)
- Plastics, plastic articles: $11.2 billion (2.7%)
- Organic chemicals: $10.8 billion (2.6%)
The figures don’t necessarily tally with the £350B total as they are from a different source.
Total GDP is £2.7 trillion
So we obviously do produce some stuff that the EU and the world want - about 44% of our exports go to Europe though this is a falling percentage - it was 54% in 2005. About 53% of our imports come from the EU and that percentage is rising.
The astute will notice that £350 billion is about 13% of our total GDP - the service sector provides a whopping 80% of our GDP.
I think it is primarily this fact that the Brexit crowd fail to grasp - we have been successful primarily as a provider of services, and that means we trade on reputation - if that goes we have nothing and we might just have thrown the lot (or a very substantial part of it) into the bin. Certainly the “kamikaze Brexit” scenario will damage us enormously.
I have also never understood the “they need us more than we need them” argument. 50% of our trade is with the EU - while it is true that they sell us more than we sell them and that we are (or are almost) their largest trading partner only about 16% of the EU exports come our way. If we fall out with the EU they loose 1/6th of their export market and we loose 1/2 - who needs whom the most?
I am hoping sanity prevails and we walk away with enough of our economy intact but we are staking a huge amount on the very questionable gains that we will get from Brexit.
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It’s a worrying time because Britain’s reputation could take a big hit. The British economy is not bad but it is still punching above its weight and that reputation and membership of the EU have both done a lot to maintain its position. The service sector is vulnerable and the banking and insurance industries are too easy to relocate with a minimum of disruption if the markets made that desirable. Too many of the manufacturing industries rely on foreign investment and entry into the EU marketplace and until any trade deals are set up it is impossible to guess what might become of those. It wouldn’t take too much persuasion, for example, to move the whole of the Mini production to another EU location where not only would labour and facilities be cheaper but the construction cycle that requires components to be moved to and from various plants during the manufacturing process would be simpler, quicker and tariff free as well. Avaiation and aerospace suffer from similar problems as recent news items have highlighted. It is not inconceiveable to believe that Land Rover and Jaguar vehicles might all be being built with electric motors in Asia before too long either.
With a perfect exit deal and a lot of luck Britain might stand a chance of succeeding after Brexit but I’ve yet to see anything that suggests that they will be better outside of the EU than they would have been if they had stayed within it. In my opinion that’s a huge price to pay for the risks involved in taking back control.
(only this morning I was listening to a podcast about the East India Company and it’s hard to believe the power and influence that tiny countries like the Netherlands and Portugal had in terms of world trade. It’s vital to remember that that was then and now is now. However much the Brexit supporters want to rely on tradition and the past they must accept that life is not that simple, expert economic forecasts make a more accurate crystal ball than history books and, despite what other posters believe, it is all about the money)
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The bulk of the UK’s exports to other members of the EU are services, not hard good’s. A lot of the UK’s hard goods exports involve European companies who have based parts of their company in the UK. We buy more from them than they buy from us is irrelevant in the big picture, what’s far more relevant is what we actually buy. An awful lot of stuff sourced in the EU is used in goods produced in the UK which are then exported all over the world. Many many years ago, the components were sourced in the UK, but as the UK can no longer compete in certain sectors they are sourced from within the EU or somewhere else in the world. The UK has a 2.5 trillion GDP purely through its internal market. The British just like the Americans are major consumers of everything and anything, don’t care where it comes from as long as its cheap. I remember the old buy British campaign years ago, nobody took any notice of that, and nobody would take any notice of it now.
And yes Anne, you can indeed pay whatever wage you like over and above the minimum wage, problem is most employers choose not to do so.
I listened to a Farming Today episode on BBC Radio 4 recently which started by the reporter joking and saying to the farmer, ‘So now we’re going to meet the workforce that you’re exploiting by paying them minimum wage’.
It was obviously a setup as the farmer went on to explain that the labour involved was demanding and to get workers of the quality needed he had to offer nearly two times the minimum wage. Mind you even at that rate he’d had no applications from British workers.
The minimum wage protects workers, it is not a tool to keep wages low.
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I have no idea what type of work the farmer was talking about but with field work its normally minimum wage and a bonus once you have picked a certain amount of produce, most good eastern European pickers knock up around £100 a day. It wasn’t a major problem getting labour when it was all piecework, but the change over to minimum wage is what forced most labour intensive farms to look to eastern Europe for labour. Farming companies set up employment agency’s in eastern European country’s, they can have staff in the fields within 24 hour’s. Same in southern Spain, British farming companies own large farms which produce and ship food to British supermarkets, they bus in labour from eastern Europe. Most people who voted leave in the referendum are totally oblivious as to how it all work’s, have no idea what the UK actually imports from the rest of Europe, have no idea what the UK export’s, they all seem to simply accept whatever Farage, Boris and the rest of the brexitaires tell them as fact. I love all the predictions from various leave voting economist’s, and various businessmen like Dyson and the pub chap. Dyson said tariffs and WTO wouldn’t affect his business because its based in the far east and he already has WTO tariffs charged on his Hoover’s. The pub landlord is hoping to import more beer cheaper from the far east. Old Patrick Minford expects the near annihilation of the British manufacturing and farming industries, but apparently it will be worth it because Britain will become a high wage earning centre for technology, research, pharmaceutical product’s, financial services and a tariff free low tax trading hub. Sort of European Asian tiger cross.
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The farmer quite simply pointed out that minimum wage would not get him the workforce to do the job. I’m sorry if it spoils your theory but that was what he said and, with respect, he probably knows more about the situation than you do.
If you really want to find out what he said start wading through some podcasts, it wasn’t that long ago.
Actually that isn’t corrrect I’m afraid. The source you quoted states that “the service sector accounted for 80% of economic output”, which is not the same thing as saying that it accounted for 80% of GDP.
GDP is calculated as follows: GDP = consumption + investment + government spending + (exports − imports)
By far the largest part of the GDP figure is created by domestic consumption within the UK, and as you will see from both that and the other elements in the above equation, the effect on the final equation product of any change in the value of exports in any given year is a relatively low percentage.
Incidentally, there is also a problem with saying that “about 44% of our exports go to Europe” as that figure takes no account of what is known as the ‘Antwerp Effect’ where goods being exported to a non EU country are first shipped to Antwerp (or any other EU shipping hub) and are thus classed as being exports to the EU rather than being counted as being exported to the non EU country of final destination.
Unfortunately it’s a data collection problem caused by the figures only taking note of the location of the first place the goods are shipped to, rather than the country of final destination.
The mysterious Antwerp affect that no one can put a figure on. All the figures are just figures without a proper breakdown, and percentages are even worse. You can make incredible statements using percentages, Boris is very good at that.
With farming, as I already said, I have no idea what type of work the farmer on the radio was talking about, but I do know how the fruit and vege picking system work’s. No incentive, no picky.
Err… the infinitive is in the wage offered. There are a huge number of people who are prepared to do a honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. As I said, I’m sorry if it flies in the face of your opinion but that’s the odd thing about facts, they trump opinion.
Agreed they certainly do, but fruit and vege pickers are paid a minimum wage plus so much a kilo after they have picked so many kilo’s, its obviously not the same working on a packing line, operating complicated agricultural machinery or looking after a herd of animals. Its obviously not rocket science, you can’t pay a fruit picker a good hourly rate hoping he or she will pick enough fruit for you the farmer to show a profit, exactly the same as you can’t pay a fruit picker minimum wage hoping the fruit picker will pick enough to cover his wage and make you a profit. But what this all has to do with a no deal scenario ive absolutely no idea.
Apologies for the incorrect figures - the danger of allowing minutes to compose a post rather than the longer time it really deserves. However - since I was trying to make the point that our economy is services heavy a government document which points out that 80% of our economic output is services based would seem to do the job nicely.
Looking through some of the ONS figures services exports look to be more like 40% than 80% but it is still a fair chunk.
I am aware of the Rotterdam-Antwerp effect discussed in this document. The size of the effect is claimed to over-estimate UK exports to the EU by 6-11%. The 44% figure takes the Rotterdam-Antwerp effect into account, the raw figure being just over 50%.