Brexit discussion thread XIV (Please read OP before posting)

Enzokk

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118036261#Comment_118036261

If you are going to assert that posters have these views then you will need to post the quotes. I can remember the regulars saying it will be death by a thousand cuts rather than a sudden backwater, Mad Max style decline. This is maybe what you think people said, but it is most certainly no the mainstream view on this thread. You have been here long enough to know this so please stop posting as if this is true.

RobMc59

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118037876#Comment_118037876

If you call having the 2nd largest economy in Europe and having Brussels on the backfoot over the NI protocol `death by a thousand cuts`I`d have to disagree with you.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118038228#Comment_118038228

Banned.

kowloon

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118038228#Comment_118038228

This raises a question: What is the best way of judging relative wealth? If you go by something like GDP per capita the UK would rank 15th and dropping. But I don't know much about economics and I've heard it said that GDP doesn't work as a metric with the way economies work now. Someone enlighten me.

yagan

For national outlook I keep thinking of Argentina and it's downward trajectory from 5th wealthiest nation after WWII. It was gripped by a populism that believed that the world needed Argentinian beef more than it needed the products of the world.

It embarked on an industrial protectionism that overlooked that countries that had its products shut out of Argentina would retaliate with tariffs on beef!

Once their doctrine of self importance collapsed the country descended into reactionary juntas, but even today there's a belief amongst many that Argentina would be wealthy again if it weren't for the non believers.

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118039251#Comment_118039251

We fell into this trap ourselves in the 1930s with the Anglo-Irish Trade War. Whilst it could be said that Ireland won the argument 'politically', the country was impoverished, unemployment was high and emigration remained high. Historians have argued that Ireland's poverty and hardship of the 1940s and 1950s were a direct result of the trade war (a twenty year hangover in other words).

Protectionism, trade barriers and trade wars are always bad news.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118038913#Comment_118038913

GDP is the total market value of all goods and services produced by a country in a defined time period (nearly always a year).

It's generally a useful metric for comparing the size of different economies, but there are some cases where it's considered to be misleading. Ireland, as it happens, is one of these cases - the presence of a large number of multinationals in Ireland, who are routing transactions that take place throughout the world through their Irish subsidiaries means that, using conventional statistics-gathering methods, a lot of goods are services that are not, in fact, produced in Ireland are turning up in Ireland's GDP. To address this problem the Central Bank has come up with a measure called GNI* (pronounced "GNI star") that more accurately measures the value of goods and services produced in Ireland.

But in the present context this doesn't matter greatly. For comparing the UK with most other national economies, GDP works fine.

But note that it only measures the overall size of a country's economy. It's not a measure of growth, or prosperity, or standard of living. It tells you nothing about, e.g., how wealth is distributed within a country. It's not even much of a measure of overall economic health; the Soviet Union was the largest economy in Europe by GDP right up until the year it disintegrated. Among developed countries, the single biggest factor in determining GDP size is population. As Rob pointed out, the UK is currently the second largest economy in Europe (after Germany), but the main reason for this is that it has the second largest population in Europe (after Germany). If you rank countries by productivity (value of goods and services produced by each worker) or household income (goods and services consumed - a measure of standard of living) or income distribution (how equally or unequally are the benefits of the economy shared?) the UK's position tends to look a bit less enviable.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118039641#Comment_118039641

I don't think we fell into the trap that Yagan points to ("they need us more than we need them") at all. We were perfectly aware of our dependence on exports to the UK.

The root cause of the Economic War was quite different. It was partly political - de Valera was offended at the idea that Irish people should be compelled to pay the UK government for the return of Irish land; refusing to do so was for him an exercise in nation-building. And it was partly the local manifestation of the international debt crisis of the 1930s, which saw many debtor nations defaulting on their obligations - de Valera argued that the financial burden of the land annuity payments, per capita, exceeded the burden of the war reparations imposed on Germany, and that it was an unrealistic in a time of global depression to demand that these should be paid. He also pointed out that, under the 1925 London Agreement, the Free State was supposed to be relieved from its obligation to pay any part of the UK's public debt, and the land bonds issued by the UK government were part of its public debt.

Whether you find these arguments convincing or not is irrelevant. The point is that they have nothing to do with an arrogant belief that the UK could not survive without Irish beef. There was nobody in Ireland in 1932 advancing the equivalent of the arguments that Brexiters offered (and that some still offer) to the effect that no deal would be painless, that trading with the EU on WTO terms would be painless, or that the UK can repudiate the NI Protocol and it will be painless.

20silkcut

He also demanded of the British a return of all tax collected in Ireland between 1800 and 1922.

We are still waiting.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118040051#Comment_118040051

No, not of all tax, just of the excess tax - i.e. the excess of tax collected in Ireland over government expenditure in Ireland. Throughout the nineteenth century Ireland, although the poorest part of the UK, was a net contributor to the UK exchequer, subsidising government expenditure in much richer Great Britain.

Dev did demand that back, but the demand is not outstanding. It was rolled up in the agreements that settled the Economic War.

yagan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118039641#Comment_118039641

That is no way comparable. The country had endured centuries of asset stripping and the ground rent stance was entirely justified. It was basis for building capital rather than continuing to be sucked by offshore landlords.

Sam Russell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118040932#Comment_118040932

It was not ground rent - it was land annuities. Land annuities were mortgages that allowed farm tenants to buy out the landlord, covered by the Gov - British at the time but Dev claimed the Irish Gov was the true owner of these annuities.

Ground rents still pertain in Ireland, but can be bought out a high cost by the ground tenant but the buy out cannot be forced by the ground landlord - an oversight in the law. If I as a ground landlord (which I am not) own a hundred ground leases each of £15 per annum which are not currently being paid, I could recoup about €100,000 if I could get them all sold, but under current arrangements, I cannot. Nor can I force the tenant to pay as the cost of court action would exceed the benefit - so the ground landlord can only wait for the clock to tick out on the lease - perhaps 99 years, or 999 years.

landofthetree

https://www.farminguk.com/news/average-value-of-farmland-hits-levels-not-seen-since-2017_59163.html

So much for the predictions farmland falling 20%.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/07/brexit-end-boom-in-farmland-prices-forecasts-say

ancapailldorcha

In other news, the Daily Mail conducted a poll of their readers asking how they'd vote on Brexit today. They didn't get the result they wanted and have tried to bury it as a result:

https://twitter.com/ChrisWChrysalis/status/1449776414685794305?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1449776414685794305%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thelondoneconomic.com%2Fnews%2Fdaily-mail-buries-poll-showing-voters-have-turned-against-brexit-295935%2F

Shocking stuff. Daily Mail readers as well.

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/daily-mail-buries-poll-showing-voters-have-turned-against-brexit-295935/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=sfeu&fbclid=IwAR0MXZ-SzW8xdSYKvcYuPnIqy1rzNNjyRHRoAqltuZGMqXY_kKar1hbXvXQ

Sam Russell

With the likes of Clarkson and Dyson and many more buying up agricultural land with their fortunes, no wonder the price is rising.

If I had a spare few million, I would be out there buying - you cannot lose in the long term.

yagan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118041172#Comment_118041172

Property prices only ever goes up!

When have I heard that before.

As they say if you can see the bandwagon you're already too late.

Leroy42

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118041172#Comment_118041172

I am misreading the article, it is saying that farmland prices are falling.

Now, of course there is an argument that the EU subsidies were artificially keeping farming profitable, but that was never part of the Brexit argument.

No doubt if prices continue to fall the Brexiteer argument will be that it was always part of the plan and they were actually always against the price of land increasing and this is about giving land back to the people!

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118041272#Comment_118041272

It's 2 different articles. It's the newer top one says prices are rising and the lower one a 2 year old prediction of falling prices.

Confused me at first too

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118041159#Comment_118041159

Not sure how reliable a Daily Mail poll is compared to the big polling companies but there are quite a few of these floating around that seem to get ignored by people pushing the idea that labour are still moving the wrong way in polls.

Also I do love polls that can't trust us to do our own subtraction

28064212

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118041083#Comment_118041083

It's still down nearly £2,000/hectare from it's price immediately before the Brexit referendum. Coincidentally (or maybe not), this rise in prices is occurring in the immediate aftermath of a sustained period of historically low supply due to Covid restrictions - 2020 had the lowest number of acres put up for sale on record, and 2021 only had a small increase on that. When the pent-up demand is satisfied over the next 2 quarters or so, a much more accurate picture will be available. I can't say I'd be betting on the current upswing being sustained

Igotadose

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118041172#Comment_118041172

Don't know about Dyson (the vacuum cleaner guy?) but Clarkson appears to have bought his farm on a (very) expensive lark and has been doing a show about his misadventures as a farmer. The farmer that works with him, Caleb, regularly laments the plight of farmers in that to get a decent sized farm would cost millions. Worldwide I think the wealthy are rumored to be buying farmland.

Sam Russell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118041955#Comment_118041955

Dyson (the vacuum cleaner guy) is one of the largest (non-aristocratic) landowners in the UK. Clarkson has not a clue about most things - and farming is one of them. CAP provided a large income to large farmers because, despite its name, in the UK, had no cap on subsidies for large holdings. A farm could break even and the CAP payment was the profit. The loss of CAP payments will have a large impact on farmers. Many farmers in the UK are tenants - not owners.

The UK has not equalled the CAP payments despite pledging to do so.

20silkcut

The aristocracy in Britain were one of the big beneficiaries of the CAP. Maybe that’s why the House of Lords was always leaning much more to remain than the House of Commons.

Many farmers in Britain are much less exposed in that they can just walk away from the farm as they don’t own it . Unlike here in this country. May explain why they were so careless about voting for brexit.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118043039#Comment_118043039

The number of hereditary lords is limited to about 90/800 ish, it's mostly packed full of loyal party members.

British farmers do have a lot to lose.

They still have to pay rent whether or not and if they walk away after losses they have nothing to show for it.

20silkcut

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118043952#Comment_118043952

Generally speaking still less to lose than Irish farmers. From the British farmers I follow on you tube it can be startling to see the disparity in infrastructure investment between British and Irish farms. Probably due to a combination of climatic factors a more relaxed regulatory regime and lack of incentive to invest in a property that is not really yours and a likely long term rental increase for any improvements made.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118041083#Comment_118041083

"Farmers accounted for over a third of buyers (39%), compared with the 55% who were either lifestyle purchasers or investors."

You have to remember sterling is down against the dollar. So land is cheap for long haul foreign investors.

As for short haul investors, venture capital has taken over Morrisons and ASDA this year between them a quarter of the UK grocery trade. Tesco who control another quarter of the trade are buying back shares but deny it's to protect against being taken over.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118043952#Comment_118043952

But the total members of the House of Lords is not limited. The UK "constitution" pretty much allows a PM to create new lords on a whim and bypass the Appointments Commission. Wide open to ballot stuffing by appointing compliant lords.

Asquith threatened to create hundreds of Liberal peers to get the Parliament Act through the Lords in 1911 so assume it's in Boris' playbook if it's needed. Because Brexit has been a bait and switch using every trick in the book.

Cookie_Monster

Trade deal with NZ announced today

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/uk-and-new-zealand-agree-to-1bn-free-trade-deal/LN6EYDF6NBPMY6X7EHJB7ZAVDU/

Though I don't see how sending onions from here to the UK is viable or sustainable...

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118051296#Comment_118051296

From memory, NZ is only a tiny trading partner of the UK's : not even in the top 50.

Peregrinus

The UK government's own estimate of the economic impact of the trade deal is negligible; its impact on UK GDP will be in the range of +0.01% to -0.01%. To all intents and purposes, this is zero impact. The NZ estimate is that the deal will boost their GDP by about 0.3%.

Of course, these cows are small, those cows are far away, and New Zealand is both small and far away, so a UK/NZ trade deal was never going to have much economic impact in the UK. What will be interesting about the NZ trade deal, when it is finalised, will be to what extent NZ has been able to cherry-pick the terms agreed for the UK/AUS trade deal. At the time the UK said that the AUS deal was not a precedent for the terms it would offer other countries, while NZ negotiators went into battle saying that it would be unacceptable for NZ to be offered less favourable terms than the terms the UK was willing to offer AUS. So we'll see how that panned out.

And the other interesting thing to look for will be the extent to which environmental commitments and targets are included in the deal.

We don't know either of these things yet - they will have to await the negotiation of the deal. The razzamatazz notwithstanding, all we have at the moment is (a) a press release about (b) an agreement in principle on the parameters of (c) a trade deal that is yet to be negotiated, never mind signed or implemented.