BREXIT! BREXIT! BREXIT!

[JimC]

It's fairly clear that Britain will become more insular than before...

[Scot Dutchy]

Massive drop in UK trade shows extent of Boris Johnson's Brexit own goal

Analysis: trade could be a drag on recovery for years to come rather than the high-octane propellent the government promised

While most UK consumers found a way to weather the third lockdown, manufacturers were not so lucky after the government’s last-minute deal with the EU plunged British ports into chaos and sent trade plummeting by 40%.

Without a smooth route across the Channel, the manufacturing sector was always going to struggle. That trade dropped by the most in more than 20 years illustrates how dependent on trade the UK is and has always been.

As an act of self-sabotage, Boris Johnson’s willingness to negotiate the thinnest of Brexit deals was always going to rank alongside the major economic debacles of the past century. Up and down the country, businesses report edging towards the brink of collapse as hold-ups at the border prevent their goods making it to customers in the EU.

Brexiteers are laughing all the way to their offshore accounts.

[Brian Peacock]

A balanced analysis from voxpoliticalonline.com...

Since Brexit the UK has lost 68% of exports to its biggest market – because Gove ignored the experts


Michael Gove says the UK has had enough of experts: it seems his Chelsea scarf has cut off the supply of blood to his brain.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2021/02/ ... e-experts/

[Scot Dutchy]

One thing is certain the Chums wont have lost any money probably the reverse is true which is why they are keeping stum.

[Scot Dutchy]

The UK government is making so many U turns that they dont know which sheet they are on:

Eight major government U-turns on post-Brexit controls

The timetable for the major new controls that have already been imposed and those that have been delayed

The UK government has made eight major U-turns on its adopted timetable for customs controls on trade with the EU.

In early March, ministers prompted a row with Brussels after unilaterally delaying two sets of controls on goods entering Northern Ireland from Britain. On Thursday, after warnings that controls on imports from the EU could lead to empty supermarket shelves in July, the government delayed a further six measures, a tally by the Guardian shows. Ministers set back to January 2022 the opening of a network of more than 30 customs posts, which had been scheduled for 1 July.

Deadlines for controls on incoming animals, plants and certain food products were also pushed back to 2022.

The decision to delay imposing yet more Brexit red tape on businesses already hamstrung by EU customs checks came a day before official figures on Friday revealed that exports from Britain to the EU crashed by 40% in January, highlighting the impact of leaving the single market, coupled with the pandemic.

The forecasted chaos is here in force.

[Scot Dutchy]

The Observer view on the grim effects of Brexit being impossible to hide

Johnson sold Britain a botched EU deal and no amount of spin or downright lies can conceal that it is falling apart

When the British people narrowly voted to leave the EU in 2016, they did not give the government a mandate to wreck our economic and political relationship with Europe. When Boris Johnson won the general election in 2019, he was expected to forge workable new arrangements with the UK’s largest trading partner, not allow exporters to be strangled by red tape and ruinous extra costs. Nor was he given a green light to break legally binding promises.

When Johnson and his rightwing Leave campaign pals claimed to have “got Brexit done” on 31 January last year, they failed to say the patchwork agreement they signed had more holes in it than a Cumbrian coal mine. Johnson did not admit he had fudged crucial issues such as Northern Ireland’s borders, and sold out Britain’s fisheries, in order to claim a bogus victory.

Yet truth will out. Day by bleak day, the epic damage caused by this execrable deception, this shameful Conservative con, becomes ever more evident. No amount of Michael Gove spin can hide the facts. No amount of distortion of official statistics can conceal the harm. Feeble claims by David Frost, Brexit booster-in-chief, that Covid and EU hostility are to blame will not wash. It’s clear where responsibility lies. And “lies” is the operative word.

Johnson and his team cannot dissemble away alarming figures showing UK exports of goods to the EU plunged by 40.7% in January, caused in large part by Brexit bureaucracy, incompetence and delays. That’s a £5.6bn loss when the economy can least afford it. Exports of food and live animals were particularly badly hit, down by 63.6%. Producers of fish and shellfish, who Johnson personally pledged to protect, saw their exports collapse by 83% year on year.

Where are those "sunlit uplands" now. When is the UK going to reapply for membership? It has gone pear shaped even faster than Brexiteers expected.

[pErvinalia]

Fairy data.

[Brian Peacock]

They're blaming the pandemic.

[Scot Dutchy]

Threat of no-deal Brexit remains, peers say, as EU relations sour

Exclusive: Lords committee chair highlights concern EU parliament may delay trade deal ratification

The Brexit deal signed in December has been thrown into jeopardy because of the recent breakdown of relations with the EU, an influential House of Lords committee is warning.

The European Union committee says “the threat of no deal remains”, with the European parliament now declining to set a date for its vote on the trade agreement sealed on Christmas Eve.

Its chairman, Lord Kinnoull, said there were “noises” coming out of the EU that it might delay ratification beyond the current target of 30 April, risking a further escalation of the row over the deal signed less than three months ago.

The peers’ warnings, in a report to be published on Monday, come just days after Brussels launched legal action against the UK, and the European commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič accused the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, of displaying a “total misunderstanding” of the Brexit deal.

While the UK has exited the EU, the trade deal is only operational because of an emergency procedure on the EU side, with ratification by the European parliament due by 30 April to make it permanently legally binding.

[Scot Dutchy]

Well Johnson got what he wanted. Just blame the EU for the complete collapse of the UK and turn it into a tax haven. The suspension of Parliament will be next with Chumocracy in full flow.

Even no deal might make more sense than this unstable Brexit agreement

Far from generating goodwill and a better working relationship, the trade and cooperation agreement has done the opposite

“No deal is better than a bad deal.” We were among those who snorted with derision when Theresa May uttered (and repeated ad nauseam) the infamous line. Yet perhaps we were too hasty. Perhaps May indeed had a point. Albeit not the one she was intending to make.

In our (repeated) analyses of no deal, we pointed out that even a relatively “thin” trade deal, such as the one that was eventually agreed, would be less economically damaging than no deal. That was – and is – very clear from the economics. It was in this context that we were sceptical about the notion of no deal being better than a bad deal. Obviously, “worse” is a loaded term, not least as Brexit was judged by different people according to different criteria. While some people prioritised economic issues, others focused on more explicitly political objectives such as “control”.

But we were also making a point not just about what happened on 1 January, but what would happen next. Without a deal, we anticipated that the subsequent recriminations would scar relations between the EU and its member states on one side, and the UK on the other for the foreseeable future. A deal, however – even an objectively “bad” one, from the economic perspective – would, we argued, in itself generate goodwill. All going well, it could serve as a platform that could be improved and supplemented with further agreements, on everything from mutual recognition of regulatory standards to security cooperation.

That judgment now looks wildly optimistic. Far from generating goodwill and the prospect of greater cooperation, the immediate impact has been the opposite. True, the trade and cooperation agreement (TCA) has spared traders on each side of the UK-EU border the need – under most circumstances – to confront tariffs. Yet it has nevertheless already begun to cause significant disruption – which the UK government has been happy to blame on the EU, rather than its own choices.


So what did we mean when we said that May might have been right after all? Not that the TCA (and the withdrawal agreement) is in its legal and economic provisions worse than no deal – it clearly isn’t. But that it risks being an inherently unstable equilibrium, that could have been designed to provoke and exacerbate political and diplomatic conflicts between the EU and the UK. And unstable equilibriums, by their nature, do not endure. In other words, at least given the current political constellation in the UK, no deal may actually be the only deal that works.

[Svartalf]

It's fairly clear that Britain will become more insular than before...

NEVER, you hear?
So long as they don't fill up the chunnel, britain will never be an island again, we won't let them.

[Scot Dutchy]

More challenging figures:



https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... ost-brexit

[pErvinalia]

Fairy data. You'll believe anything.

[Scot Dutchy]

‘Festival of Brexit': first events for divisive £120m project announced

A celebration of British weather and a grow-your-own food initiative will be among the festivities

A celebration of the British weather and the largest grow-your-own food project of modern times will be among the events being staged for a nationwide festival of creativity aimed at bringing the UK together in 2022.

Organisers of the £120m festival, commissioned by Theresa May’s government and supported by Boris Johnson, announced 10 teams who had successfully pitched ideas.

The festival remains a divisive one. In some eyes it is a politically motivated “festival of Brexit”, but its supporters say that is the last thing it will be. Its chief creative officer, Martin Green, said it was about bringing people together and celebrating creativity in events that are “open, original and optimistic”.

Others balk at the cost, while supporters point to the work it brings to creative freelancers ravaged by the pandemic. “Don’t write it off,” argued a Guardian editorial in September.

It has a working title of Festival UK 2022, but that will be replaced with a better name before the year is out.

On Tuesday 10 teams were named, chosen from 30 that had taken part in a three-month paid research and development process. The idea is that the successful teams give a flavour of what their project is about, but the public will have to wait for full details.

[Scot Dutchy]

'We've been sold a dud': small firms suffer decline in post-Brexit exports

Businesses beset by ‘nightmare’ combination of mounting costs and paperwork as well as delivery delays

Small businesses have reported a marked drop in exports to the EU as another company bemoaned the post-Brexit “nightmare” of delivery delays and increased costs.

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), a lobby group, said 35 of the 132 exporters it surveyed had temporarily suspended trade with the EU or stopped it permanently. One in 10 of the exporters surveyed said they were also considering giving up trade with EU customers.

Some smaller business have been badly affected by the overnight change in trade rules on 31 December, with new paperwork and a rush to secure delivery space causing widespread delays and extra costs. UK exports to the EU fell by 41% in January, according to government figures.

“It’s a nightmare,” said Sharon da Costa, the managing director of Fighting Films, a Bristol-based producer of judo movies – including highlights of tournaments held by the International Judo Federation – which also supplies martial arts kit. Half of the company’s business was in Europe before the pandemic and Brexit, but orders for suits for a Belgian customer that previously took two days have taken as long as a month to arrive.

Those shining uplands just dont exist. It is not going to get better.