The Future of the UK

@blossom‘ wrote:

I think the future of the UK does depend on the EU .. and unfortunately it’s going to be quite bleak, in my opinion.
Ooops…. it already is bleak, but it’s going to get worse :(

I agree entirely.

We can speculate about whether things will get better or worse, but we cannot cut ourselves off from Europe.

People talk about globalisation but in truth the real thrust for foreign and economic policy is increasing regionisation, where countries work very closely with their neighbours to compete with other regional blocks. The US sides with the rest of American. Australia cuddles up to New Zealand and South East Asia.

There is no choice. All we do by staying semi-detached from Europe is that we allow them to shape the EU without us.

The Americans aren’t that keen on the Mexicans and Venezuelans, the Aussies don’t necessarily rate the Samoans or the Japanese but they do care how the money flows.

Don’t matter if we like em or not, Europe is our future for better or worse.

Somehow we stumble on in this fantasy that we are world players.

We have at best a medium sized economy and people in the rest of the world only take us seriously because we are a leading member of a large trade block – the EU. The ones who take us seriously on our own, do so because they still remember history – the one where we conquered their countries, imprisoned, bombed or slaughtered their people and stole their natural resources. Let’s not count on them as friends then.

The USA will not upset her trading partners to come to a special deal with us. No-one will be interested in courting us on our own, because we just don’t offer a big enough market to matter.

The only potential route to success we have outside the EU is to compete on wages with the rest of Europe and the third world. If we can just get our workers paid less than the Chinese, they will invest here to make their products for the European market. Our wages just have to be low enough to allow for the extra duty imposed on us if we were outside the EU.

Great strategy – if we can make ourselves poor enough and our workers badly paid enough, we can compete on our own in a global market.

I’m sure all the rich capitalists in the Conservative Party would love that. Some of them have advocated the need for people to earn a fraction of the minimum wage to make Britain rich again.

But rich for who? Rich for the ones who are already rich while the majority live in Victorian poverty? A large part of the Victorian population even thought that was wrong.

Serves the right wing moneyed classes right if they get it. Most of our banking business is with Europe. As part of the EU, we are welcomed, but with Barclays bank disgraced, our other major banks owned by the state (HSBC is mainly an overseas bank), and the loss of EU protections, business will go straight to Frankfurt. Then even the rich will suffer.

This sounding more and more like traditional class warfare. The ones with money think everyone else is a scrounger and advocate actions which will benefit them and hurt others (if they work at all).

In the south of our own continent (and part of our sphere of influence for hundreds of years) a democracy is falling apart, the rule of law breaking down and fascism gradually taking over, with eerie parallels with the 1930s.

It seems at the very time we need the organisation that has maintained European peace for over 65 years the most, the EU is struggling and we want to pull out.

How far we have come.

In the words of the Manic Street Preachers – “if you tolerate this then your children will be next”. In the words of Gaz “wakey wakey”.

:roll:

@terry wrote:

@momentaryloss wrote:

The only potential route to success we have outside the EU is to compete on wages with the rest of Europe

Our trade with the EU leaves us with a yearly deficit of £60 billion.
Please explain the potential route to success of that stategy.

please explain why you ignore answers to this point, and make it as though it’s a simple truism.

Lies, damned lies, and UKIP/Tory Right’s economic statistics

@terry wrote:

@momentaryloss wrote:

The only potential route to success we have outside the EU is to compete on wages with the rest of Europe

Our trade with the EU leaves us with a yearly deficit of £60 billion.
Please explain the potential route to success of that stategy.

On top of trade in goods however we have a surplus in services.

The fact that we currently have a deficit in goods cannot be taken as an indication that if we leave the EU we will have a surplus. Something else would have to radically change. There are tariffs and other barriers to UK exports in place in most of the world’s regional economic blocks and many individual states, either by design of because of the nature of their economies. They would not magically disappear if we left the EU.

On top of that we would have to pay tariffs to trade with the EU which would harm our exports and we would still suck in imports, if not from the EU, then from other countries.

In a world full of tariffs with no great sympathy for a newly “independent” UK, we could only compete by further driving down wages, as we have no other natural advantage for which other countries would pay a premium, except in services (which rely on the EU, although to a lesser extent).

Of course we could do better by having a more skilled workforce, increasing the productivity of labour by dealing in higher technologies and resuscitating our manufacturing base. All these things would improve our trading position within Europe.

Leaving the EU therefore would not on its own tackle our trade issues, and tackling them would negate the reason you quote for leaving the EU.

It therefore comes down to ideology and whether we believe the rest of the world wishes to give us some kind of special status if we are no longer tarred with the EU brush. That is possible. I just don’t think it is very likely.