Brexit: Now What? Part II

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Airfix said:
Catsmate, manufacturing accounts for the majority of Britain's exports, from JCBs to wind turbines and the majority of Britain's exports do not go to the EU.
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The UK has a significant trade surplus in services, a much larger deficit in "goods" (which includes manufacturing but also raw materials, agricultural products and so on).

We're consistently outperformed on the global stage by EU colleagues so the EU isn't the issue. Please bear in mind that the likes of Bamford and Dyson want to make it cheaper to import goods manufactured overseas to the UK not to export to the rest of the world.



Airfix said:
The idea that exports are all going to stop is false. The idea that we should look only inwardly to the EU when there is a whole world out there is short sighted.
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You're probably the only one suggesting that "exports are all going to stop" - yet another strawman from you, this really is getting tiresome - but the idea that we cannot compete globally while in the EU is debunked by the fact that the proportion of exports outside the EU has increased over the last few years whilst we've been members of the EU.:boggled:

OTOH making it harder to trade with our single largest trading partner, the EU does seem like a pretty silly thing to do.

Airfix said:
Of course there is uncertainty at the moment, no deal has yet been done or can be done until article 50 is declared, but there will be a deal.
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Of course there will be a deal with the EU, the question is "how bad a deal ?". Paris, Frankfurt and Dublin are eyeing up our financial services business in the EU as a starter.

Airfix said:
Our government will be grown up about this and will be respectful.
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The squabbling, infighting and empire building being done by BoJo, Davis and Fox doesn't give me a great deal of confidence in this.

Airfix said:
Both sides will have to be prepared to compromise.
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Who compromises the most depends on who has the most to lose and who has the most skilled negotiators. Again, the UK has the most to lose and the less experienced negotiators, not confidence inspiring.
 
The Don said:
The idea that we cannot compete globally while in the EU is debunked by the fact that the proportion of exports outside the EU has increased over the last few years whilst we've been members of the EU.:boggled:
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I never said we couldn't compete globally while in the EU, the point is that we don't need to be in the EU to do that.

I strongly doubt that we'll get a bad deal.
There's a reason for that:
If we get a bad deal the EU gets a bad deal.
They want tariff free access to our market just as much as we want access to theirs.
We account for 16% of the EU's exports.

There will be mutual backscratching, but we will be exempt from EU laws such as these:
Article 207 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:12008E207:en:HTML

Article 218 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:12008E218

And by coming out of that, we are free to negotiate free trade deals with any country or bloc. Switzerland has more free trade agreements than the EU. We can too.

We can transparently and openly negotiate deals and keep the public informed of the details, instead of having secretive panic causing TTIP style discussions behind closed doors.
 
Airfix said:
I never said we couldn't compete globally while in the EU, the point is that we don't need to be in the EU to do that.
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One of the key arguments (apart from keeping IMMIGRANTS OUT !!) of teh Leave campaign was that being a member of the EU undermined our ability to do business outside the EU. That we've manged to grow our exports to non-EU countries puts a lie to that.

Instead we're now in a position where we have no idea what the future holds but we know that for our largest single trading partner the terms will not be better and are likely to be worse.

Airfix said:
I strongly doubt that we'll get a bad deal.
There's a reason for that:
If we get a bad deal the EU gets a bad deal.
They want tariff free access to our market just as much as we want access to theirs.
We account for 16% of the EU's exports.
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And they account for close to 50% of ours. I'd expect a deal in which the trade in goods (in which the EU enjoys a large trade surplus) continues on a tariff-free basis but the cost of restricting the movement of people is that, like the putative Canada deal, services (in which we have a large surplus) is excluded.

We need the EU more than the EU needs us....


Airfix said:
There will be mutual backscratching, but we will be exempt from EU laws such as these:
Article 207 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:12008E207:en:HTML

Article 218 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:12008E218
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More "magical thinking" from the Leave campaign :rolleyes:

Airfix said:
And by coming out of that, we are free to negotiate free trade deals with any country or bloc. Switzerland has more free trade agreements than the EU. We can too.
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There's no guarantee of this...

Airfix said:
We can transparently and openly negotiate deals and keep the public informed of the details, instead of having secretive panic causing TTIP style discussions behind closed doors.
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What baloney ! Trade deals are always carried out behind closed doors in order to preserve the confidentiality of those deals.
 
The Don said:
Trade deals are always carried out behind closed doors in order to preserve the confidentiality of those deals.
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Actually it's the dealing that's kept out of the public eye. I think it was Bismarck who said deals are like sausages : we all like them, but it's best not to watch them being made. Or something like that. :)
 
The EU accounts for less than 44.6% of UK exports, the trade balance between the UK and EU has been in decline since 1999.

It is presently still an important market, I'll give you that, but you over inflate it's importance.

At the very least the proposals present in trade deals should not be secret from MPs of all parties.
The level of secrecy involved with TTIP played a big part in undermining public confidence in the unelected EU Commission.
 
Airfix said:
The EU accounts for less than 44.6% of UK exports, the trade balance between the UK and EU has been in decline since 1999.

It is presently still an important market, I'll give you that, but you over inflate it's importance.
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It's almost as important as all other markets combined. How do you inflate that level of importance exactly?

McHrozni
 
Airfix said:
The EU accounts for less than 44.6% of UK exports, the trade balance between the UK and EU has been in decline since 1999.

It is presently still an important market, I'll give you that, but you over inflate it's importance.
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As McHrozni has pointed out, it's nearly as important as all other markets combined, it's geographically the most accessible and due to it's long-standing rule of law it's an "easy" market to deal with.

I was involved in doing business (I was a small cog in a large corporate machine) in Eastern Europe just after the wall came down. The business practices were dodgy to say the least (e.g. millions of dollars of World Bank money being directed towards a government minister's consulting company in order to secure a contract worth tens of millions of dollars - or World bank money), it was frightening, hard and well beyond my ethical comfort zone. It would have been impossible for a small business to break into that market.

OTOH doing business in the EU is comparatively easy and we're at risk of throwing that away. Heck, trying to set up in the U.S. is far more difficult.

In any case, if the trade with the EU is growing less quickly (you accidentally made it sound like it was in decline) than the trade with the rest of the world then that means that claims that the EU prevents us dealing competitively with the rest of the world are nonsense.


Airfix said:
At the very least the proposals present in trade deals should not be secret from MPs of all parties.
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That's a very naive view. To let opposition MPs know about the intimate details of trade discussions in the early stages could prove fatal to any deal being stuck not least because the other party in the trade discussions most likely would not want these details made public until the deal has been struck.

Certainly individual minor elements could be taken wholly out of context which would result in the deal as a whole being horribly undermined.

Airfix said:
The level of secrecy involved with TTIP played a big part in undermining public confidence in the unelected EU Commission.
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Among whom ? TTIP wasn't a major factor in the Brexit campaign AFAIK. I can see how you, with the settings on your own political compass can draw that conclusion but for the great majority of the UK population their EU "democratic deficit" (which is less than the UK democratic deficit but we'll let that slide for now) related to straight bananas (or bananas being sold in threes), selling apples by the pound, giving prisoners the right to vote, chocolate and sausages having to be re-labelled, paper boys and girls being banned or any other story, real or imagined, whipped into a froth by the right wing tabloids.
 
Airfix said:
The level of secrecy involved with TTIP played a big part in undermining public confidence in the unelected EU Commission.
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In reality, TTIP was one of the most open negotiations on trade in history. Brexit talking point fails again.

We've also covered the 'unelected' EU Commission so many times in this thread I feel comfortable calling you a liar one more time. Can you please stop with at least this particular lie? It's getting repetitive.

McHrozni
 
Airfix said:
Catsmate, manufacturing accounts for the majority of Britain's exports, from JCBs to wind turbines and the majority of Britain's exports do not go to the EU.
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British export in services amounts to $140 billion a year, and this actually excludes travel, transport and banking.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindus...e/bulletins/internationaltradeinservices/2014

Wind turbines amount to 3.2% of UK good exports, a paltry $15 billion. Services are the largest single sector of British exports, followed by machinery.

You may also want to read the second paragraph in the Main points section of the link I cited. Have a tissue ready.

McHrozni
 
Airfix said:
The EU accounts for less than 44.6% of UK exports, the trade balance between the UK and EU has been in decline since 1999.

It is presently still an important market, I'll give you that, but you over inflate it's importance.

At the very least the proposals present in trade deals should not be secret from MPs of all parties.
The level of secrecy involved with TTIP played a big part in undermining public confidence in the unelected EU Commission.
Click to expand...

TTIP is a deal that the present UK Government has promised the US to help ensure its passing. Theresa May is on record defending this particular deal as a good trade approach. So be careful what you wish for as this could easily be a blueprint for any future deal between the larger countries and the U.K.
 
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