The government suggested the cost of No Deal Brexit yesterday. They were estimates, of course. And all estimates are wrong, by definition. But I think they have tried.
A figure of 9% of GDP lost in the long term is a hard one to call: the answer on long term estimates is always 'how can you be sure?' That is certainly true in this case. That there will be a substantial cost I have no doubt. But how much in GDP terms: it may be that much and it may not be.
But, one figure looks more robust. That is that it will cost £13 billion a year for UK business to do Customs paperwork in the case of No Deal.
Let me contextualise that. This is 8% of the NHS budget.
It is £250 million a week.
Do you remember the Brexit bus?
We know that was overstated. It was at last £100 million less. And we could now pay that sum to just get goods in and out if the EU, which we do not do now.
And that is before any other cost is considered.
And quite bizarrely Theresa May thinks that MPs need to vote on the option of doing this in two weeks time.
She is mad.
The world has gone mad.
The idea that Brexit might be of benefit is mad, No Deal or not.
But still it marches on, destroying what little was left of the credibility of UK politics and wrecking any chance of any debate on any issue of importance in this country whilst threatening our universal well being, rights, and our nation in its current form.
No sane person could have believed this might happen.
But it is. And still the Right pursue Brexit as if it is a benefit. And still the electorate are not punishing them.
It is unsurprising that outside the UK most people think our collective sanity is in question.
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With or without the right type of pallet? https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/feb/26/uk-pallet-crisis-no-deal-brexit
These little things we forget to notice…
and our net contribution is only ten billion.
Yet all this is declared irrelevant because we had a vote two and a half years ago.
Where are the journalists challenging ministers on this?
I wish I knew
Actually, all on all sides are clueless as to what might be. But they have to come up with numbers which have the usual effect of confusing all the issues. Especially when they are data and statistics based on past and partial experience. In May 1955 I was on the parade in Germany when the British Army of Occupation marched out and into the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany. This did not turn out quite as expected.
Indeed. I was astounded when the Dover MP Charlie Elphick asked the head of HMRC what he thought of the idea of all outbound freight travelling on ferries and inbound freight through the tunnel to avoid Customs delays, fortunately Jon Thompson gave him short shrift on that !
It takes some considerable stupidity to suggest that. Why run both at what would be 50% capacity?
If the human being is the pinnacle of mammalian development (some say certain cetaceans maybe cleverer) then all I can say is that on the evidence of BREXIT, we carry an awful lot of the common Lemming within our psychological make up.
Simple answer: use the sovereign power to make our own decisions after Brexit to make the decision *NOT* to charge ourselves to import goods.
You do understand WTO rules, do you?
You know we will not exist in the world you describe?
Isn’t familiarising yourself with the rules a good idea before deciding on an issue?
And isn’t supporting UK businesses something you might want to do, or do you not care?
The problem of Brexit has finally shone a seaching light on the advanced decrepitude of the British Constitution.
We have a Prime Minister who has devised, effectively her own eccentric, risible (if it wasn’t quite so serious) and quite obviously disastrous Brexit (notice that in Parliament the PM wanders with calculated but comically absurd ambiguity – as if nobody can see the lacuna – between arguing for “a deal” and “the deal” – when the definite/indefinite artice are both the same thing, her deal; i.e., the same deal two thirds (400+ MPs) have already rejected becuase it is so irremediably and grotesquely bad; and in substance will not, cannot change); combined with a series of fantastic, preposterous, unnegotiable, ‘a priori’ transparently absurd Red Lines that even an ERG dogmatist would only wish to touch with a barge-pole, while wearing goggles, an oxygen mask, a wet suit and industrial strength rubber gloves.
The Prime Minister is not in power, and scarcely even in office (she cannot sack even Cabinet Ministers now; all that ever changes, is her wardrobe); the only viable legacy of her time in office will be to have cornered the market in costume jewellery. Yet the PM is still somehow in charge of ‘managing’ (irony alert) Government in Britain, with no reliable troops and an overwhelmed Civil Service attempting to carry out a role they are not adequately resourced to deliver.
10, Downing Street meanwhile bumbles on, surviving through the esoteric interpretation of Parliamentary rules that scarcely anyone can now justify, confronted with such dereliction of Prime Ministerial responsiblity: even Dicey did not envisage the absolute sovereignty of Parliament could be reduced to a PM shadow boxing with Erskine May, in order to manipulate the production of a majority that scarcely a single MP actually believes in. It is so totally daft we must surely all soon wake up.
Hi Richard, always reading but seldom commenting.
Once upon a time there was a tyrant. The tyrant had a pal he’d appointed called the Lord High Treasurer. No one in the cathedral liked either of them, the first reckoned he ruled the place and the second had far too much power as far as those who wanted the power was concenred.
So they got rid of the tyrant and invited a new bloke in who looked a bit like another tyrant but only on condition that he give up all of his main powers. They also forced the new pretendy tyrant to split that job among several people at the same time. Occasionally thereafter an odd figure would get the whole LHT job, but very rarely, the Cathedral was seldom going to allow it.
The country as whole now had a problem – if things got bad enough, instead of being faced with one tyrant who could be introduced to the noggin removal contraption, they now had 600 odd micro-tyrants in one house and hindred more who didn’t even need elected in another controlling the pretendy tyrant – and it wasn’t at all clear whose noggin they should to remove in order to reset things. Neither was it entirely clear as to who exactly was responsible for the money always ending up in exactly the same places and not getting shared out properly or spent on things which benefited everyone.
And so it had come to pass that democracy was born in England – at least supposedly and soon enough it would be exported to Scotland and eventually Ireland too. How lucky everyone was. But not half as lucky as the micro-tyrants who were now almost invulnerable. Their first pretendy tyrant was just the ticket to go to war with France in order to prevent the creation of European superstate and the perfect excuse to relieve Froggy of as many of his colonies as possible while he was distracted