Brexit. Success? Too early to judge? Disaster?

[sandymere 8,263]

[sandymere 8,263]

[mC HULL 12,225]

8 hours ago, sandymere said:

i find that funny sandy lol

especially coming from someone who was that bright they fall for a clot shot over a mild cold lol

[Greyman 28,142]

6 hours ago, mC HULL said:

i find that funny sandy lol

especially coming from someone who was that bright they fall for a clot shot over a mild cold lol

The problem is when you think your more intelligent than you actually are and the people you think your belittling are actually laughing there arses off at you, that’s were sandy is he’s a failed brickie that suddenly thinks he has the answers because he’s been blinded by left wing ideology

[sandymere 8,263]

[sandymere 8,263]

[sandymere 8,263]

[Greyman 28,142]

Wow misses didn’t fancy the ride this morning or what

[sandymere 8,263]

 

 

For many years, when asked to speak about the British economy, I used to point out that the influence of technological progress on productivity allowed an average growth rate of 2.25% to 2.5% a year. This meant that living standards could double every 25 years or so. Political battles raged over the sharing of the growth, but on the whole most people gained to some extent.

No longer! Beneath all the fanciful predictions emanating from this tired government come the hard facts from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Resolution Foundation and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. A collapse of investment, with more and more international corporations deciding Britain is no longer the place to invest for a foothold in the European market. And dire forecasts of a 6% fall in living standards in the next two years. Some platform for an election, eh?

 

After growing quite fast in the 10 years to the 2008 financial crisis – assisted not least by the opportunities afforded by our membership of the European single market – and then being hit by a decade of needless and damaging austerity, investment, which is the seedcorn of economic growth, came to a halt. First it was the policy of austerity itself that savaged the public sector investment on which the private sector and higher living standards depend. Then it was Brexit. Productivity? The OBR thinks Brexit has knocked 4% a year off the nation’s productive potential; my old friend Jagjit Chadha, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, says it puts the loss at nearer 5.5%.

Investment has stagnated, and hence growth has also stagnated. We have not been helped by the blow to our terms of trade – the fall in the purchasing power of our exports vis-a-vis imports – caused by the ramifications of the war in Ukraine. But that applies to other countries too. What makes us the poor man of Europe, with a worse economic performance than the rest of the G7 advanced industrial countries, is the blow to our trade from the continuing, and all the while worsening, impact of Brexit.

 

Both major party leaders are in denial about this. True, relations with France and Germany are on a better footing since the egregious Liz Truss’s remark that the jury was out on relations with President Macron. But a return of civilised values and common decency, while welcome, isno compensation for the self-inflicted wounds of Brexit.

Despite all this stuff about how it will take years to reverse that catastrophic referendum decision, my Brussels contacts give me the strong impression that our former partners feel our, and their, pain, and would be relieved if we showed some leadership in the obvious matter of rejoining soon, provided we were serious about it.

Which brings me to a most incisive article written recently in, of all places, the Times newspaper’s Saturday magazine. It was by the football writer Martin Samuel. Amid all this nonsense that Brexit was a good idea but mishandled, the import of Samuel’s message was: “Brexit, like Communism, is failing because it is a rotten idea.” Again, he says: “The last resort is the excuse that your big idea only failed because it wasn’t done right.”

Now: Sunak is a Brexiter; Starmer isn’t – or, rather, wasn’t. But notwithstanding the huge difference in Labour’s favour in the opinion polls, could Sunak upstage Starmer on Brexit? I should like to draw attention yet again to what the prime minister told the Northern Irish people when negotiating his Windsor framework. “If we get the executive up and running, Northern Ireland is in the unbelievably special position … in having privileged access not just to the UK home market, which is the fifth biggest in the world, but also the European Union single market. Nobody else has that. No one.”

But we did! Just how pragmatic is Sunak – whose initial approach to the premiership has undoubtedly been winning plaudits from reluctant sources?

Personally, I think the current Conservative party needs a long spell in the wilderness. Those of us who have known it when it was good at resisting fatuous ideologues were granted a real treat recently when Michael Heseltine was the guest for a regular Financial Times feature, “Lunch with the FT”.

Heseltine, always a man of action, played a crucial role in the revival of Liverpool and London’s Docklands. He was defeated by John Major for the succession to Margaret Thatcher in 1990 but my impression was that the triumvirate of Major, Heseltine and Chancellor Kenneth Clarke did their best for the Anglo-EU cause between 1993 and 1997, before their party descended into the Stygian depths of Euroscepticism.

At all events, Lord Heseltine, when asked by the FT whether we could re-enter the EU in his lifetime – he recently celebrated his 90th birthday – said: “I think the answer is yes.”

I hope so!

At this rate, Sunak may even repent of Brexit before Starmer does | William Keegan | The Guardian

WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM

---

The blight on living standards makes the case for rejoining stronger every day – and this PM is nothing if not pragmatic

[mC HULL 12,225]

i can’t see many listening to you sandy not after how wrong you got it with the covid vaccine gormless brexiteers we’re telling you for a year what was happening and you still got the vaccine and was even going to let kids have it 

you listened to the same government your lamblasting  

shit your pants and rolled up the sleeve ten times lol

 

you reputation is similar to diane abbots lol

Edited April 2, 2023 by mC HULL

[kanny 20,438]

38 minutes ago, sandymere said:

 

 

For many years, when asked to speak about the British economy, I used to point out that the influence of technological progress on productivity allowed an average growth rate of 2.25% to 2.5% a year. This meant that living standards could double every 25 years or so. Political battles raged over the sharing of the growth, but on the whole most people gained to some extent.

No longer! Beneath all the fanciful predictions emanating from this tired government come the hard facts from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Resolution Foundation and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. A collapse of investment, with more and more international corporations deciding Britain is no longer the place to invest for a foothold in the European market. And dire forecasts of a 6% fall in living standards in the next two years. Some platform for an election, eh?

 

After growing quite fast in the 10 years to the 2008 financial crisis – assisted not least by the opportunities afforded by our membership of the European single market – and then being hit by a decade of needless and damaging austerity, investment, which is the seedcorn of economic growth, came to a halt. First it was the policy of austerity itself that savaged the public sector investment on which the private sector and higher living standards depend. Then it was Brexit. Productivity? The OBR thinks Brexit has knocked 4% a year off the nation’s productive potential; my old friend Jagjit Chadha, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, says it puts the loss at nearer 5.5%.

Investment has stagnated, and hence growth has also stagnated. We have not been helped by the blow to our terms of trade – the fall in the purchasing power of our exports vis-a-vis imports – caused by the ramifications of the war in Ukraine. But that applies to other countries too. What makes us the poor man of Europe, with a worse economic performance than the rest of the G7 advanced industrial countries, is the blow to our trade from the continuing, and all the while worsening, impact of Brexit.

 

Both major party leaders are in denial about this. True, relations with France and Germany are on a better footing since the egregious Liz Truss’s remark that the jury was out on relations with President Macron. But a return of civilised values and common decency, while welcome, isno compensation for the self-inflicted wounds of Brexit.

Despite all this stuff about how it will take years to reverse that catastrophic referendum decision, my Brussels contacts give me the strong impression that our former partners feel our, and their, pain, and would be relieved if we showed some leadership in the obvious matter of rejoining soon, provided we were serious about it.

Which brings me to a most incisive article written recently in, of all places, the Times newspaper’s Saturday magazine. It was by the football writer Martin Samuel. Amid all this nonsense that Brexit was a good idea but mishandled, the import of Samuel’s message was: “Brexit, like Communism, is failing because it is a rotten idea.” Again, he says: “The last resort is the excuse that your big idea only failed because it wasn’t done right.”

Now: Sunak is a Brexiter; Starmer isn’t – or, rather, wasn’t. But notwithstanding the huge difference in Labour’s favour in the opinion polls, could Sunak upstage Starmer on Brexit? I should like to draw attention yet again to what the prime minister told the Northern Irish people when negotiating his Windsor framework. “If we get the executive up and running, Northern Ireland is in the unbelievably special position … in having privileged access not just to the UK home market, which is the fifth biggest in the world, but also the European Union single market. Nobody else has that. No one.”

But we did! Just how pragmatic is Sunak – whose initial approach to the premiership has undoubtedly been winning plaudits from reluctant sources?

Personally, I think the current Conservative party needs a long spell in the wilderness. Those of us who have known it when it was good at resisting fatuous ideologues were granted a real treat recently when Michael Heseltine was the guest for a regular Financial Times feature, “Lunch with the FT”.

Heseltine, always a man of action, played a crucial role in the revival of Liverpool and London’s Docklands. He was defeated by John Major for the succession to Margaret Thatcher in 1990 but my impression was that the triumvirate of Major, Heseltine and Chancellor Kenneth Clarke did their best for the Anglo-EU cause between 1993 and 1997, before their party descended into the Stygian depths of Euroscepticism.

At all events, Lord Heseltine, when asked by the FT whether we could re-enter the EU in his lifetime – he recently celebrated his 90th birthday – said: “I think the answer is yes.”

I hope so!

At this rate, Sunak may even repent of Brexit before Starmer does | William Keegan | The Guardian

WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM

---

The blight on living standards makes the case for rejoining stronger every day – and this PM is nothing if not pragmatic

Our  accession to the cptpp prevents us from ever rejoining the the EU...its over, dry your eyes mate. 

[sandymere 8,263]

[sandymere 8,263]

How this for taking back control.......................................

 

 

Here’s another message for the red wall: in those countries over which many Brits feel superiority – France, Italy, Luxembourg, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Austria, Belgium – they all have a higher standard of living than we do.

Brexit has widened the gap.

We have more poverty, more food banks, more obesity, and one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world. One in four 16-year-old English boys have the reading level of a child of eleven. Education standards are lower now that they were during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Students at English universities pay fees of around £9,000 a year. University education is free or there is a token charge across Scandinavia, in Germany, France, Poland, Greece, the Czech Republic and Iceland. The UK followed the US model and turned education into a commodity. The richer you are, the more you pay, the better schools and schooling your kids get. 

As for the other 93% of state school children, they are considered no more than cannon fodder, zero-hour contract fodder, ‘the great unwashed,’ as aristocrats like to say, children who don’t matter who grow up to become adults who don’t matter. 

Mrs Thatcher said there is no such thing as society. Her malevolent offspring Boris Johnson, his charmless female version Liz Truss and the new richer than God Premier Rushi Sunak have ripped apart the last threads of the social fabric weaved together to create the NHS and welfare state in 1948 by the men and women who came home from the Second World War and wanted to build a better society for all.

I hope red wall pensioners are sitting down as we compare weekly pensions:http://cliffordthurlow.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/alternative-1-e1649517007726.jpg

• United Kingdom: £125 – £165
• France: £304
• Germany: £507
• Spain: £513

 

MESSAGE FOR THE RED WALL | Clifford Thurlow

CLIFFORDTHURLOW.COM

---

This is a message for the red wall voters who chose Brexit and Boris: you’ve been lied to. You have not taken back control. You lost what little control you had

 

[Francie, 2,150]

13 minutes ago, sandymere said:

How this for taking back control.......................................

 

 

Here’s another message for the red wall: in those countries over which many Brits feel superiority – France, Italy, Luxembourg, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Austria, Belgium – they all have a higher standard of living than we do.

Brexit has widened the gap.

We have more poverty, more food banks, more obesity, and one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world. One in four 16-year-old English boys have the reading level of a child of eleven. Education standards are lower now that they were during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Students at English universities pay fees of around £9,000 a year. University education is free or there is a token charge across Scandinavia, in Germany, France, Poland, Greece, the Czech Republic and Iceland. The UK followed the US model and turned education into a commodity. The richer you are, the more you pay, the better schools and schooling your kids get. 

As for the other 93% of state school children, they are considered no more than cannon fodder, zero-hour contract fodder, ‘the great unwashed,’ as aristocrats like to say, children who don’t matter who grow up to become adults who don’t matter. 

Mrs Thatcher said there is no such thing as society. Her malevolent offspring Boris Johnson, his charmless female version Liz Truss and the new richer than God Premier Rushi Sunak have ripped apart the last threads of the social fabric weaved together to create the NHS and welfare state in 1948 by the men and women who came home from the Second World War and wanted to build a better society for all.

I hope red wall pensioners are sitting down as we compare weekly pensions:http://cliffordthurlow.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/alternative-1-e1649517007726.jpg

• United Kingdom: £125 – £165
• France: £304
• Germany: £507
• Spain: £513

 

MESSAGE FOR THE RED WALL | Clifford Thurlow

CLIFFORDTHURLOW.COM

---

This is a message for the red wall voters who chose Brexit and Boris: you’ve been lied to. You have not taken back control. You lost what little control you had

 

Why are you fixated with brexit,things might not be so good at the minute tho they will get better,an do you think dianne abbot as chancellor of the exchequer would do a better job,she cant even put the same pair of shoes on in the morning lol

[tillylamp 1,830]

6 hours ago, kanny said:

Our  accession to the cptpp prevents us from ever rejoining the the EU...its over, dry your eyes mate. 

is this cptpp deal, the deal with Australia......i heard a brief snippet about it, what does it do for the UK.....

if this deal stops the UK from ever rejoining the EU...I'm assuming brexit should get sorted out a lot quicker now.....would that be right......