[Politics] Brexit

[cheshunt seagull]

Won't it be fantastic once we've taken back control? Our great British government finally in complete control, free from those boring sensible Europeans... Yeah, that super govt responsible for Southern rail, and... The brilliant way schools are being run... The direction the NHS is heading...
Everything's going to be sweet!

A tale of 2 stories at work yesterday. In one case we were informed by an EC department that we had 2 years of funding focussed on helping certain groups to become economically self sufficient; this comes with set and relevant targets, legacy measures ; follows a very clear bidding process; builds on another successful 4-year project and we can start work soon.
In the other a UK ministry having made vague noises about project funding in a similar area released a call for one year, which bears no relation to what we were led to expect, is unfocussed, contains no means for measuring success and we have less than 3 weeks to prepare it at the worst time of year to get agencies together; basically a minister’s vanity project put together in a rush. It will be hailed as a success but will achieve little of any lasting value.
Guess which one approach allows us to be strategic, economical and effective. God help us if we have to rely on the UK government for all our support.

 

[Eeyore]

With less rights than a UK citizen, or the same?

Should be the same. Well, hopefully. Anyone who arrived 2014 and before has the right to remain anyway under law. It follows that they would have the same facility as UK citizens.

This issue needs to be addressed in a more forthright way. There are too many EU citizens, who've been here a while, who are worrying.

 

[studio150]

Inflation up with more to come as materials and fuel brought bu UK manufacturers up12.9%..
The cost of Brexit sounding more like a bargain by the month.

 

[Two Professors]

Cost of fuel goes up and down like a yo-yo,Brexit or not.Clothing will come down in price enormously when we leave EU tariffs behind-29% on Levis,for example,ludicrous.

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

Clothing will come down in price enormously when we leave EU tariffs behind-29% on Levis,for example,ludicrous.

Does this mean riff-raff will start wearing McQueen?

 

[studio150]

Cost of fuel goes up and down like a yo-yo,Brexit or not.Clothing will come down in price enormously when we leave EU tariffs behind-29% on Levis,for example,ludicrous.

So the lower pound caused by the brexit vote is blameless for these higher imported costs?
I hope you're happy walking around in double denim.

 

[dingodan]

If Brexit doesn't scare you, you don't understand what Brexit is.

It doesn't scare me.

What is it?

 

[nicko31]

Inflation up with more to come as materials and fuel brought bu UK manufacturers up12.9%..
The cost of Brexit sounding more like a bargain by the month.

The word in retail circles is stock up as much as you can before Christmas as there will be lots of supermarket rises in January. Expect 10% on the average annual grocery bill in 2017, less offers and watch out for reduce packaging sizes to avoid headline price increases

But we're just gonna have to live with being a poorer and a bit meaner I'm afraid

 

[CHAPPERS]

Yeah yeah its the Guardian but this is a good piece

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/13/brexit-leave-voters-theresa-may-promise

Hold off the jibes and sighs over how much poorer Brexit Britain will be. Forget about the mendacity and slipperiness of Boris ’n’ Nigel. In the six months since the referendum these have been the clever arguments to make, the ones that fill the sophisticated newspapers and BBC discussions. But none answer the far simpler and much harder question: then what? What happens when 17 million people get the feeling they’ve been cheated?

That will be the most profound question in British politics, not just in 2017 but for many years to come. As the broken promises of Brexit pile up one on top of the other, so that they are visible from Sunderland, from Great Yarmouth, from Newport, what will the leave voters do then?

The pledges I mean aren’t the ones about how £350m will flood each week into the NHS, or those others that came out waving a Pinnochio-sized proboscis. I’m thinking of the promises that went far deeper. The vow to “take back control”. To stop being the human punchline to someone else’s macroeconomic joke. To – as our north of England editor Helen Pidd wrote last week – no longer live on crumbs, while others in London enjoy entire loaves.

The Brexiteers were explicitly offering voters a once-in-a-lifetime shot at changing the status quo. And before embarking on what has otherwise been a stiff-backed, fixed-grin, try-hard few months at No 10, Theresa May got it, promising “people voted for change. And a change is going to come.”

The forecasts are in, and they indicate Britain will suffer its first lost decade since Karl Marx was alive

Except change, in our new prime minister’s dictionary, just means more of the same. Admittedly, it is only six months into Year Zero and Britain is yet to start disentangling itself from Europe. But whatever is promised – hard or soft, red white or blue – it’s clear that the terms of Brexit will be dictated by Donald Tusk, Angela Merkel and the other 27 members of the EU, rather than by our dream team of May, Boris Johnson and David Davis. We can also see much else of what the next few years will bring. The economic plan for the rest of this decade has been laid out by Philip Hammond, and it equals austerity-lite – but for even longer. The forecasts for wages and living standards are in, and they indicate Britain will suffer its first lost decade since Karl Marx was alive.

More to the point, it’s not clear what May’s initial promises of a fresh start were worth. She steeled herself to call off the expensive disaster of Hinkley C – then meekly waved it through. She vowed to install workers on company boards – then the idea didn’t even make it on to a green paper. She promised to stick up for “just about managing” families, then allowed her chancellor instead to carry on slashing taxes for multinationals.

And then there’s foreign ownership of Britain’s infrastructure. Remember how May promised to scrutinise any proposed takeovers of such strategic assets as water, energy and transport? Well, last week, while the rightwing commentators were diligently huffing and puffing over Gina Miller at the supreme court, another kind of sovereignty was being covered on the City pages. The National Grid announced it would sell a majority of its gas pipelines to a consortium of largely overseas investors, including China and Qatar, and led by an Australian investment bank, Macquarie.

You may never have heard of Macquarie, but my guess is you’ve probably been one of its customers. The bank is known as the “millionaires’ factory” or the “vampire kangaroo” – and it owns a lot of the most prosaic parts of British life. You’ve been Macquaried if you’ve left your car in a National Car Park, or flown out of Glasgow, Southampton or Aberdeen or if you’re among its 14 million customers in Thames Water. And as of next spring, it will lead an international group with a 61% share in our biggest gas distribution network: that’s 82,000 miles of pipe, serving 11m homes and businesses across eastern England, the north-west and the West Midlands.

I have come across Macquarie before, through its handling of Thames Water, which some analysts cite as being among the greatest debacles in all of Britain’s history of privatisation. Just as with National Grid, it led a consortium to buy Thames. Two academics at the Open University examined the accounts between 2007 and 2012 and found that in four out of those five years, Macquarie and its fellow investors took out more money from the company than it made in post-tax profits. They crippled the firm with billions in debt, while Thames customers paid ever more in water bills and got among the worst service offered by any water company.

When I put these findings to Thames, its response was the email equivalent of a shrug: “Some years dividends exceed the years’ profits, sometimes they are less.” This was even while the company successfully managed to offload much of the cost and the risk for the Thames Tideway tunnel on to ordinary households.

The National Grid gas pipelines aren’t the only things Macquarie is set to get its hands on. Even while May was at her party conference at Birmingham talking about a country working for all, journalists were being briefed that the state-owned green investment bank would soon be flogged off to … you guessed it, Macquarie.


One of the canards about the referendum is that the decisive swing came from working-class voters furious at high immigration, and that therefore the primary issue that needs to be resolved in the next few years is who gets to stay in Britain and how. Whenever I hear that, I think of the voters I spoke to in south Wales just before the vote. True, all the leavers volunteered immigration as their main justification. But the longer we talked, in this area that remains almost exclusively white, the more it became clear that they were angry at something else – not the invisible refugees, nor far-off Brussels. One, Gareth Meek, told me: “I’m angry at the British government. They sold the country out. There’s nothing we own any more.” A multitude of frustrations, pushed through a binary vote.

What happens when Meek and his fellow voters realise that their vote for change – however loosely defined – means more of the same? When that call to take back control ends up with them playing the same old captive market, there to be ripped off by multinational capital. Who will take the blame then?

 

[CHAPPERS]

Cost of fuel goes up and down like a yo-yo,Brexit or not.Clothing will come down in price enormously when we leave EU tariffs behind-29% on Levis,for example,ludicrous.

Sweet! I've bought one pair of Levis in 35 years. I feel richer already.

 

[JC Footy Genius]

Employers across the UK have shrugged off economic uncertainty from the Brexit vote, reporting the most optimistic outlook on hiring plans in three years.

Manpower, one of the top recruitment companies in the UK, said companies had returned to a “business as usual” approach to hiring after a pause in plans after the EU referendum. Its survey found that jobseekers will head into the new year in “high spirits” after its net employment outlook for the UK rose to 7 per cent, up two percentage points from the previous quarter.

“It has surprised us,” Mark Cahill, managing director of Manpower, said of the latest survey. “When you look back at the Brexit vote, there was an awful lot of uncertainty before and after. But I think people are looking at 2017 and thinking, ‘We have got all our plans and budgets ahead of us and we just need to get on with it. There is no point hanging around thinking what is going to happen.’”

The upbeat news on hiring plans is in contrast to a report last month from the Bank of England’s regional agents which said employment was expected to be broadly flat over the next six months. It also provides a good start to an important week for determining how the UK economy is faring in the final three months of the year. The official reading for consumer price inflation today is expected to show a rise in the headline rate from 0.9 per cent to 1.1 per cent in November as the weaker pound pushes up the price of imports.

Tomorrow will reveal whether the unemployment rate has stayed at an 11-year low of 4.8 per cent in the three months to October. On Thursday official figures will show whether retail sales rose in November, during the crucial Black Friday period, while the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee will announce whether it has decided to keep its base rate at a record low of 0.25 per cent.

Both the Bank and the government use the Manpower employment survey as an indicator of how the economy is performing.

The report said the utility sector was the most buoyant about job growth for the next three months. Manpower attributed this to the government’s transition to smart meters. “In the next two years more than 26 million smart meters will need to be fitted . . . Energy companies will need an army of up to 20,000 skilled engineers and wider support staff to meet this challenge,” Mr Cahill said.

Skills shortages in sectors such as construction remained a key challenge for the economy, the survey reported. This has led to bricklayers being able to command nearly £50,000 a year in regions such as the east of England, where housebuilding has been driven by the “Silicon Fen” cluster of science and technology hubs around Cambridge. Manpower said some employers were looking to hire construction workers from the EU before any curbs to freedom of movement come in.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/b...happy-new-year-for-hiring-new-staff-8jj20kfvm

Hope it's still ok to post something vaguely positive re Brexit. Put away those razor blades/sleeping pills.

Time to retrain as Brickie?

 

[brighton fella]

I'm still not getting the reason we need to leave the EU to be able to repatriate illegal immigrants, or how it will be any easier to do?

Leaving the EU should enable the UK to take control over the quantity of immigrants we wish to receive,, a far more sensible quota.. like getting the figures down to it's tens of thousands as apposed to some ridiculous amount legislated by the EU.. which has taken it's toll on our infrastructure to the point where it can barely cope..

The illegal's....well they are always going to be attracted to the UK all the time it has an open border and a system that continues to give free handouts .., do away with both of these things and you are in with half a chance of getting the problem sorted.

 

[Two Professors]

Does this mean riff-raff will start wearing McQueen?

Nah,I'll stick with Primark-will be even cheaper!

 

[Two Professors]

I'm still not getting the reason we need to leave the EU to be able to repatriate illegal immigrants, or how it will be any easier to do?

We won't have to bother if you 'Moaners are right.There won't be any reason for them to bypass Germany,France,Italy et6c. to get here as the country will have sunk!

 

[Two Professors]

The word in retail circles is stock up as much as you can before Christmas as there will be lots of supermarket rises in January. Expect 10% on the average annual grocery bill in 2017, less offers and watch out for reduce packaging sizes to avoid headline price increases

But we're just gonna have to live with being a poorer and a bit meaner I'm afraid

Swings and roundabouts.As we start ignoring EU tariffs,we can source cheaper food from round the world.Mmmmmm,Mexican strawberries,much nicer than the sour French ones!

 

[El Presidente]

Nah,I'll stick with Primark-will be even cheaper!

Hello ladeez

 

[Baldseagull]

We are in the EU at the moment, has "the sensible boring europeans" made a difference.

Well, apart from cleaner beaches, cleaner air, cleaner rivers, better maternity pay, better employment rights for part time workers, reduction in hours worked by school kids, maximum 48hr working week (one of the things UK government tried to block, but just got a temporary exemption which is about to run out), sustaining agriculture, consumer protection, freedom to work, live and travel in EU, free trade in the EU, not a lot really.

 

[Baldseagull]

Leaving the EU should enable the UK to take control over the quantity of immigrants we wish to receive,, a far more sensible quota.. like getting the figures down to it's tens of thousands as apposed to some ridiculous amount legislated by the EU.. which has taken it's toll on our infrastructure to the point where it can barely cope..

The illegal's....well they are always going to be attracted to the UK all the time it has an open border and a system that continues to give free handouts .., do away with both of these things and you are in with half a chance of getting the problem sorted.

You can cross from Ireland into Britain without showing a passport, this is not an EU arrangement though so it should continue. Not sure we have an open border anywhere else. The only way an illegal immigrant can access benefits is with bogus documents, so unless you think the EU somehow prevents us from policing this, or is issuing the dodgy documents, I still don't get how you think Brexit will help?

 

[Baldseagull]

We won't have to bother if you 'Moaners are right.There won't be any reason for them to bypass Germany,France,Italy et6c. to get here as the country will have sunk!

Maybe you could look up repatriation, but yes, making Britain a poorer country will make us less attractive to migrants.

 

[Deleted member 22389]

Maybe you could look up repatriation, but yes, making Britain a poorer country will make us less attractive to migrants.

But due to more robots taking our jobs in the future means we need less people, so it won't matter. As for cleaner air, just look at the numbers of cars on our roads these days, air quality is worse. What the EU has given us is actually worse and I don't buy any of it.