Tags

, ,

 

(Twenty-minute read)

We all know or at least most of us accept that we will be the first chapter in a world that is going to need universal cooperation to battle climate change.

We all know that the world economy is dominated by Global capitalism that is running out of cheap resources and energy becoming more and more protective of its market share.

So just how bad will severing ties with the EU be?

Look at the small print.

We all have come across people who have next to no understanding of world events – but- talk with the utmost confidence and convection. So in this post lets look at the shallowness of their existing knowledge when it comes to Brexit.The EU has warned a no-deal departure from the bloc [File: Isabel Infantes/AFP]

At the moment, there’s still a ton of confusion.

We now have political arguments all basis on false premises with minimal understanding of the issues at hand.

What is completely overlooked is that the United Kingdom’s narrow vote to exit the European Union was as a result of a referendum that was not actually legally binding.

The government could have simply decided to ignore the result.

Instead, it activating Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty making the process irreversible unless it is revoked.

So what are the true facts around a no- deal?

A no- deal Brexit means there will be no 21-month transition period. It doesn’t stop the UK leaving but it means there is absolutely no clarity about what happens.

A nodeal means while Britain would no longer be bound by EU rules, it will have to face the EU’s external tariffs with WTO.

A no- deal means the UK would be free to set its own controls on immigration by EU nationals and the bloc could do the same for Britons.

A no- deal means Britain would no longer have to adhere to the rulings of the European Court of Justice but it would be bound to the European Court of Human Rights, a non-EU body.

A no- deal means England would not have to pay the annual £13 billion contributions to the EU budget. However, Britain would lose out on some EU subsidies – the Common Agricultural Policy gives £3 billion to farmers.

A no- deal means the issue of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic would remain unresolved. Northern Ireland is even at risk of blackouts because no deal would undermine the legal basis of the all-island electricity market it shares with the Irish Republic.

A no- deal means Britain could implement trade deals whenever the fine print is ready. But deals take years, not months or weeks, to broker. Therefore the UK is not going to gaining anything by having no transition period in this instance.

A no- deal means an emergency cut in interest rates to combat inflation.

A no- deal means Britain’s supermarkets, will simply pass on the cost to the farmers who in the short term to stay in business, won’t be able to do so without subsidies.

A no- deal means EU research and development funding could dry up.

A no-deal will chill investment in the UK, hitting jobs, and that manufacturers will abandon Britain for the continent.

A no- deal will throw the fishing industry into disarray. It is no exaggeration to say that the UK has done relatively poorly out of is membership of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP).

A no- deal means no matter from what angle England approached trade the lack of resources to renegotiate the dozens of deals already signed between the EU and third countries. It is a total fallacy to think England can copycat present EU trade deals. 50 at a time.

A no- deal means that that the EU may not be willing to renegotiate its rules of origin agreements with other countries for British benefit, especially because its own exporters might be able to take market share from British ones in countries outside Europe.

A no- deal means that all WTO trade deals include a “most favoured nation” (MFN) clause, which mean that if one partner signs a better trade deal with another country, all previous trade partners are entitled to the same upgrade.

A no- deal the UK cannot conclude binding agreements until it has left the EU, since it is still bound by the EU’s exclusive right to strike trade deals.

A no- deal means Britain would lose deeper access to services, as it would no longer participate in the 14 services agreements struck by the EU. (England currently has free trade agreements with EU’s 70 international trade deals, countries because of its EU membership.) You couldn’t get a bigger a contrast between the opportunities of EU membership and the emptiness of Brexit: the EU has reached a historic trade agreement with key emerging markets in Latin America while Tory leadership contenders brag about their plans for a no-deal Brexit.

Last Friday, the EU finally achieved a trade deal that has been 20 years in the making.

A no- deal means that the price of a trade deal with the USA will be so hight as to be unworkable.

A no- deal means there won’t be any money for farmers or anyone else if England crashes out because all the Treasury’s reserves will be needed to plug the hole left by Brexit in tax revenues.

A no- deal means wrecking the biggest trade deal England have already.

Most of the UK’s trade is with the EU or countries the EU has trade agreements with—about 57% of our exports and 66% of our imports. Countries aren’t exactly queueing up to do deals.

A no- deal means England can not set different rules for foreign and domestic products under WTO. The big exception is if countries have negotiated their own customs union or free trade area

A no- deal might lead to the break up of the United Kingdom with civil strife.

A no-deal could cut UK access to EU criminal databases.

A no- deal will empower the far right, with long-term implications for Britain’s democracy. Exacerbating populist pressures.

A no- deal means a Reality check for the EU.

A no- deal will inflict significant economic pain across Europe, no more so than on the Irish Economy.

A no- deal means the EU could be looking at a tax haven.

A no- deal means the EU budget will be reduced.

A no- deal means large EU subsidies to the Irish economy.

So where are we?

A free trade agreement will still have many negative consequences for both sides.

First, the devolved politics of Brexit are immensely complex and may turn out to be crucially important to what actually happens.

However ever as a matter of law, neither Scotland nor any of the UK’s other constituent nations can stop Brexit from happening. Because the UK Parliament is sovereign and can do as it wishes, the absence of consent from the Scottish Parliament would not legally disable Westminster from enacting Brexit legislation.

This is so because the “requirement” for consent is not a legal requirement at all: it is, ultimately, no more than a political expectation that the UK Parliament will respect the constitutional position of the Scottish Parliament by not riding roughshod over it in certain circumstances.

For present purposes, the Scottish Parliament’s powers are limited by EU law. And the argument is that if Brexit legislation enacted by the UK removes those limits — freeing the Scottish Parliament to make Scottish laws that breach EU law — then that alters the Scottish Parliament’s powers, so triggering the requirement to get its consent under the Sewel Convention.

There is no legal constitutional route for the devolved administrations to stall Brexit.

The only route is political rather than legal.

If Northern Ireland opted for reunification it would have the ability to rejoin the EU as part of the Republic of Ireland. Scotland would have to join the queue.

Where that leaves us?

It is all too easy to lose track of the amount of cash already poured into the British economy. So, goes the obvious question, where has all the money gone?

In some senses, the answer is relatively simple. Much of that cash has gone

into repairing a broken financial system.

So here, for any of you who might have forgotten, is a quick reminder: some £76bn from the Treasury to buy shares in RBS and Lloyds Banking Group ; £200bn worth of lender-of-last-resort liquidity support provided by the Bank of England to stricken banks at the height of the crisis; £250bn of wholesale lending guaranteed by the Bank through the credit guarantee scheme; £185bn of loans to banks through the Special Liquidity Scheme; £40bn of loans and other funding to Bradford & Bingley and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Then, deep breath, there is the £200bn of liabilities taken on board from the Asset Protection Scheme, and the £200bn of cash poured into the economy through quantitative easing.

It is a stark reminder of why hopes of a quick recovery from the recession or a no deal are forlorn, and why both financial crises will cast a shadow over growth for years.

Add the cost of a no deal to the above and the list of consequences is not just long but beyond the pale.

If England wants the full reassertion of sovereignty, then that is going to mean setting new standards for things, and that is going to be economically damaging.

We are now witnessing a Conservative Party undemocratically electing a new leader who will defacto become Prime Minister with both remaining candidates insistent on Brexiting overturn decades of law giving Northern Ireland and Scotland (both of which voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU) local control over their affair.

The leadership contest is only complicated Britain’s withdrawal from the EU by adding more uncertainty to the state of affairs.

Unless they call an election, the Conservatives are safely in power until 2020, and calling an election to get Brexit overturned would not just risk a Labour victory, it would probably only work if Labour won.

Scotland is already planning to hold another independence referendum, and seeing devolution curtailed would make its success much more likely. Northern Irish republicans would be emboldened to call for unification with the Republic of Ireland, which could occur, or they could just reignite the Troubles after decades of peace.

The cost of not listening to them would be to split the UK.

More than 2 million have signed a petition calling for a second referendum which at this stage will achieve nothing other than more division.

The Conservatives do not want another election, especially since they have yet to actually split. If they don’t split, their leader will probably be Johnson, who supports Brexit and whose election would not exactly be a mandate to overturn the referendum result.

If bye the end of October a no deal has been reached, the UK automatically exits the European Union without any special deal letting it retain trade preferences or other benefits.

The Brexit vote is proof that when emotions battle reason in a voting booth, emotions can win. Brexit had a very powerful emotion on its side — fear of outsider and loss of identity.

However, the anti-immigrant sentiment is itself somewhat irrational in a world where cultural integration is more common than ever before in human history. In prehistoric times, this is what kept us safe. In the modern age, it’s what nudges us toward bigotry. In recent years, politicians have gotten more effective at painting immigrants as dangerous outsiders. Look no further than Donald Trump. Or his UK counterpart, Nigel Farage, the politician who has stoked fears by asserting thing like Muslims “don’t want to become part of our culture.”

You can fight anecdotes with anecdotes we’re not doomed to succumb to them.

Trumpism or the Brexit is not “the ultimate manifestation of something that evolution has programmed England to do.

Britain can have an economically decent outcome from a Brexit vote or a democratically decent one, but it can’t get both.

The EU, on the other hand, could do something drastic like expel England for breach of the Lisbon treaty. This would be a nightmare divorce, where one partner decides to walk away with no idea of what they will move on to.

In short:

If the UK wants an exit from the EU to cause as little economic damage as possible, it has two choices.

Either to revocate Articular 50 and effect the reforms needed within the EU or be like Norway.

To do this England must first encourage receptiveness of simple facts that nationalism and isolation do not exist in the modern world which is now threatened by climate change that requires immediate collective worldwide action, which is a given if we want to see a living planet, not an immigration planet.

Politicians must make the case for more liberal policy not just on economic grounds but on future aspirations of a peaceful Europe.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

 

Advertisement