Brexit and logistics

Thanks, but no worries on my account.  One or two do enjoy their brusque (if not sometimes outright rude) commenting style, but it's water off a duck's back, and most posters here do manage to keep it civil.  

Perhaps surprisingly, I don't have particularly strong leanings one way or the other*, have always seen arguments for both, and I very much appreciate the factual posts, such as adrianc 's outlining the proportionate national spend vs. EU membership cost, for example.  It's unfortunate that very little of this factual, rational debate entered the mainstream media back in 2016, so that people were fully and properly informed.  I remember hunting around at the time and it was difficult to sort the good from the scaremongering.  That's why I like to challenge scaremongering now, if I think I detect it.  

*I didn't even get a vote in the referendum!  Mrs Dolt & I moved house in March 2016 and lost our votes because our new local authority was remiss with their paperwork.  When I see the debate still raging, I'm sometimes grateful we were enforced fence-sitters...   

Except you forget one minor detail.

UK goods and services have now become unilaterally more expensive to EU27 buyers than ones from rivals, because of those costs. So if we still want to make those sales, we have to absorb those costs.

But, since the net UK membership is the relevant cost, and that's about £9bn/year, even the £7.5bn figure shows how ridiculously expensive mitigating the downsides of brexit are compared to the costs...

And, yes, there are also plenty of intangible benefits - and, from the Brexiteer angle, disbenefits - of membership... But I'm sure we can agree that presenting brexit as a cost-benefit, and saying the saving is a benefit of leaving, is at best inaccurate and at worst massively disingenuous, right...?

We have friends in the village who are staunchly brexity, despite their daughter living and working in Germany and being married to a German. The argument they always trot out as being the killer "never-mind-all-that-how-can-you-possibly-argue-against-THIS?"...? The cost of moving the EU parliament between Strasbourg and Brussels. £100m/year, split across the entire EU... Which means the UK's share is about £12m, allocated by population. 18p/head/year.

Does that movement make sense? No.
Does that movement predate the UK joining, by two decades? Yes. 
Is the cost utterly trivial in the grand scheme of things...? Yes.

I think the tone of the debate here, at least recently, has been pretty good. Overwhelming evidence in one direction doesn't mean it isn't a fair discussion, just as you won't find many people here who disagree that 2+2 = 4. 

I think with it actually having technically happened, much of the real sting has been lost to the debate. One of the worst aspects to the last 4 years has been the uncertainty of whether it was even going to happen at all. There's now more resignation and a genuine desire to know what the H is going to happen now than a will to fight. 

As the Government would no doubt prefer, the vast majority of people are very keen to just move on and totally ignore it as far as is possible. I think that's a good thing, as hopefully the passage of time will improve the social fabric from this appalling episode.

The problem of course becomes if there are very real tangible problems that occur that are quite patently because of Brexit in the coming months/years. From the recent tone of rags like the DT (as with the article mentioned last night) I'm not quite so convinced that they'll be as staunchly supportive. 

I think it's proving quite a difficult balancing act for such media outlets to simultaneously portray BJ + chums as utter reckless incompetents in dealing with a pandemic, unable to negotiate even within their own country, whilst simultaneously being robust and intelligent with the EU.

Especially given that there's almost nothing to trumpet at all - some Japanese cheese purchases? Keeping the Ivory Coast onside? Difficult sells..

Yes, resigned acceptance...

The UK actually left the UK at the end of March. We cannot go back on that without going through the full rejoining procedure - including just one member being able to veto us. We seem to be determined to maximise the number of likely candidates for that...

The negotiation of a deal is in the hands of the government, and nobody outside can influence it. The unilateral extension deadline passed at the end of June. Extension now would also require unilateral agreement amongst the 27 members.

We are where we are - and there is only one person alive who can change that.

I wish I shared that optimism.

This will replace "Thatcher" as the major political bogeyman for decades.

They will be portrayed as being Everybody Else's Fault.
Sabotaging Remainers.
Intransigent Europeans.
Internal Fifth Columnists.

And, when I say, "they will be", I mean of course "they already are and have been for years".

BJ Piffle has already squandered his internal political capital. He is a dead man walking. Surely even he must realise this...

You (finally) make a valid point when you say £7.5bn is the right figure to compare to the EU membership fee. Still £7.5bn is just for businesses, it doesn't include other red tape costs for the government. And it's definitely no "small fry" compared to EU membership like you initially suggested.

Yet somehow you keep saying the FT "reigned back to half the figure" despite acknowledging the two figures mean different things, and call "scaremongering" official data from the British tax authority.

I never dismissed £7.5bn as small fry!  I dismissed one company's £500 monthly contribution towards that as small fry, at face value.  That qualifier shouldn't be ignored, but I accept it was an inappropriate comment. 

We're looking here at the worst case scenario, no deal exit, post-temporary easements.  Feel free to shoot me down, but I imagine in the months to follow, and once the system is bedded-in, there would be a great deal of emphasis on reducing the level of red tape and the associated costs, with surely both trading partners having something to gain from that?  Neither side will want their trade being impacted, so both would have a vested interest in finding shortcuts, economies of scale, etc, to pare back this burden as far as possible, no? 

Incidentally, it seems some academics/economists don't accept HMRC's estimates, arguing they overestimate by up to 10-fold.  A couple of years old, but I'm not qualified to assess how valid it remains today. 

I guess time will tell.