The Brexit referendum thread: potential consequences for GB, EU and the Brits in CH

[bowlie]

	Quote:	HickvonFrick
	Nope - there are 2 lib dem councillors in Manchester and the rest are labour. The MPs are all Labour. Thus, you don't live in Manchester. I imagine (as you aren't in Sale/Altringham) you are probably in Stockport Council? (either Cheadle or Hazel Grove seat) - which has the following composition: Labour 26 Liberal Democrats 26 Conservatives 8 Independent Ratepayers 3 I wonder if your MP is the one who likes to be urinated on?

Actually I don’t think anyone actually cares.

[Urs Max]

	Quote:	st2lemans
	What's the HoC? Tom

Probably House of Commons, the lower and more important of the two chambers of the british parliament.

[baboon]

	Quote:	HickvonFrick
	Nope - there are 2 lib dem councillors in Manchester and the rest are labour. The MPs are all Labour. Thus, you don't live in Manchester. I imagine (as you aren't in Sale/Altringham) you are probably in Stockport Council? (either Cheadle or Hazel Grove seat) - which has the following composition: Labour 26 Liberal Democrats 26 Conservatives 8 Independent Ratepayers 3

9 Conservative MPs in Greater Manchester.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ter_Manchester

[fatmanfilms]

Brits resident in the EU post Brexit to be given extra free movement rights
https://www.politico.eu/article/brit...51L_5RzQljphQY

[Castro]

	Quote:	fatmanfilms
	Brits resident in the EU post Brexit to be given extra free movement rights https://www.politico.eu/article/brit...51L_5RzQljphQY

Do you have a more up-to-date link (than August 2020) because I can't find mention of this anywhere else?

[bowlie]

	Quote:	fatmanfilms
	Brits resident in the EU post Brexit to be given extra free movement rights https://www.politico.eu/article/brit...51L_5RzQljphQY

Article dated August 2020. May be out of date. In any case this likely wouldn’t apply to non-EU countries.

[Castro]

	Quote:	bowlie
	Article dated August 2020. May be out of date. In any case this likely wouldn’t apply to non-EU countries.

The fact is those EU citizens living in the UK now have substantially better rights than their British counterparts living in the EU. They have full leave to remain in the UK with all their pre-existing rights... or they can pick anywhere else to live in the EU.

That's why FMF's link surprised me, because Brits in Europe have been roundly shafted by our government.

[eng_ch]

	Quote:	fatmanfilms
	Brits resident in the EU post Brexit to be given extra free movement rights https://www.politico.eu/article/brit...51L_5RzQljphQY

This is sadly not true. The Politico article gets quoted a lot but they got their facts wrong, as British in Europe keep having to point out. The only clarification was confirmation that UK citizens covered by the Withdrawal Agreement can hold multiple statuses (e.g. as the spouse of an EU citizen) and also maintain and/or acquire other rights available to any other TCN, such as a Blue Card in states that operate the system and the EU long-term residence permit under the same conditions as any other TCN (language requirements, professional qualifications etc.). Politico chose to spin that as extra rights being granted, which is sadly not the case and is causing a lot of unnecessary work for BiE and disappointment for UK citizens who think they've found a silver bullet.

[eng_ch]

	Quote:	Castro
	The fact is those EU citizens living in the UK now have substantially better rights than their British counterparts living in the EU. They have full leave to remain in the UK with all their pre-existing rights... or they can pick anywhere else to live in the EU.

This was always well known, of course. What is less well known and, in my view, more disgraceful in terms of how the British government is (not) defending its own citizens' rights is the fact that Irish citizens in the UK have far greater rights than UK citizens in the UK because they can vote in the UK and still have full EU FoM. They can also move to the UK freely under the CTA. An Irish passport has now become one of the most powerful passports in the world.

[komsomolez]

https://www.economist.com/britain/20...pects-are-grim

A whimper not a bang

Britain’s immediate economic prospects are grim
But the real damage from Brexit will take time to make itself felt

Jan 14th 2021

For the four and a half years since the referendum on European Union membership, firms have been worrying about the impact of Brexit. But Britain’s transition out of the eu, completed on December 31st, did not end with a bang. There were no queues of lorries at Dover. Supermarket shoppers were not starved of green vegetables. And business has had other troubles on its mind.

England’s third national lockdown began on January 5th, shutting much of the hospitality and retail sectors. The government has taken steps to soften the blow. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor of the exchequer, announced a further £4.6bn ($6.2bn) package of grants, worth around 0.2% of pre-crisis gdp, for firms as the lockdown began and signalled that more support may be forthcoming at his next budget, due in early March. The job-retention scheme, under which the state will pay up to 80% of the wages of furloughed employees, has already been extended until the end of April and the Treasury has not ruled out a further continuation.


With many firms now better adapted to home working than they were last year, more retailers offering an online service and more restaurants better set up to handle takeaway business, gdp should not shrink as fast as it did in April 2020 (see chart). But schools have been closed, as they were in the first but not the second lockdown, so many parents are unable to work. Samuel Tombs of Pantheon Macroeconomics, a consultancy, reckons that the impact of the third lockdown will be closer to that of the first than the second.

But although the resurgence of covid-19 has overshadowed Brexit, the latter is causing problems. The hassle of new vat rules has prompted some businesses to halt shipments to Britain entirely. Dutch Bike Bits, an online retailer of bicycle parts, has called the new arrangements “ludicrous” and halted sales to Britain in December.

In the other direction Scottish seafood traders complain that new paperwork is delaying exports, leading to valuable langoustines going to waste. In general traffic seems to have run smoothly on the Dover-Calais route, but advance stockpiling, trucks turned away in Kent and covid-19 restrictions all seem to have eased the transition. The government has warned hauliers that delays are likely to increase as volumes rise and eu enforcement of rules tightens.

Rules-of-origin checks have emerged as a particular bugbear. Many traders were pleased that the eu-uk trade deal promised no tariffs or quotas on goods. Yet to qualify, companies must be able to certify that around 50% of any exported product originates in Britain or the eu. This catches not just Asian t-shirts or dates imported from Israel. Even foodstuffs imported from other eu countries and repackaged for export back into the bloc without significant value-added in Britain can lose certification. That is disrupting distribution hubs.

The need for rules-of-origin checks flows directly from the government’s long-standing red line of quitting the customs union and single market, so bigger companies should have been prepared even if smaller ones were not. Yet detailed new rules for each product (including a temporary derogation for batteries in electric cars) were not known until a week before January 1st. Talks with the eu could produce more derogations or longer grace periods for the toughest checks. But Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank, says Brussels will weaken its rules only to help eu members such as Ireland; it has no interest in softening the impact of Brexit on Britain.

It will care more about Northern Ireland. To avert a hard border on the island of Ireland, the two sides agreed that there should be a border in the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which remains in the customs union. Freight businesses worry that importers have not grasped how this will work. The complexity of the customs procedures has led some to give up trading or to narrow product ranges. Marks & Spencer, a retailer, has dropped several hundred products in its 21 Northern Irish stores, ranging from BrewDog beer to bin-bags. With Northern Irish politicians grumbling about empty shelves, the supermarkets have appealed to the government for help in sustaining the province’s grocery market.

Yet the real hit to the economy from Brexit is likely to come as more of a whimper than a bang. With a last-minute trade deal, Britain and the eu avoided the worst short-term chaos, but economists worry about the return of the post-war “British disease”—hence the Bank of England’s prediction that the economy will be three or four percentage points smaller in ten years’ time than it would be had it stayed in the single market and customs union.

In the three decades after the second world war, Britain’s economy declined relative to its European neighbours. That was not just because they had so much ground to make up after the war; by the 1960s, they were beginning to pull ahead. Britain suffered from confrontational industrial relations, poor management, weak productivity and low investment.

Margaret Thatcher is often credited with changing the country’s trajectory, but many economists argue that the effect of Britain’s entry to the then European Economic Community (eec—now the eu) in 1973 was at least as important. Nauro Campos and Fabrizio Coricelli of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a network of economists, point to a similar productivity-growth pattern among the three countries—Britain, Denmark and Ireland—that joined the eec in 1973 (see chart). They suggest that Britain’s entry into the Common Market created the conditions for Thatcherism to thrive by offering British entrepreneurs access to a larger, deeper and more innovative market than was previously available to them.


Nicholas Crafts, a leading historian of Britain’s economy, argues that the real cause of the British disease was a lack of competition. The economy was cartelised in the interwar years and sheltered from international competition in the post-war decades. Thatcher, by his reckoning, deserves credit for liberalising markets and deregulating industries, but was helped by the wider exposure of firms to international competitive pressure from entry into the eec and the creation of the European Single Market in the mid-1980s. He reckons that Britain’s failure to join the eec at its creation in 1957 had a substantial cost in terms of lost productivity.

If the effect of leaving the eu is the opposite of joining it, the impact will not be a swift, painful recession, but growth forgone. Britain will be like a boiled frog, not noticing the damage until it is done.

[SponPlague]

	Quote:	bowlie
	Yes, but they need to test the margarine to endure it isn’t butter.

These days, the test is proving the beef isn’t horse

[SponPlague]

	Quote:	JackieH
	Totally agree. BTW do you know how many years it takes to train a doctor? Don't need to go so far btw. Our GP is French and lives in France, but chooses to work in CH where conditions are much better and she can earn the same working 50%. Same for nurses and care staff.

There was a tragic case where a German doctor killed someone in UK because their language skills weren’t up to scratch.

Welcoming doctors to help out when necessary is good, but having language standards is also good...

[amogles]

	Quote:	SponPlague
	There was a tragic case where a German doctor killed someone in UK because their language skills weren’t up to scratch. Welcoming doctors to help out when necessary is good, but having language standards is also good...

You need to go to ze Mecdonalds to become a hamburger, ja?

[JackieH]

	Quote:	SponPlague
	There was a tragic case where a German doctor killed someone in UK because their language skills weren’t up to scratch. Welcoming doctors to help out when necessary is good, but having language standards is also good...

Our GP is French, and works across the border, in French speaking Romandie- we do understand each other very well - sometimes we even speak in English, for fun- and I teach her son and his friends.

But yes, I agree. Even C1 is too low- and then of course there is the ability to understand dialect, and older people who do speak very 'local'- words, expressions, accents.

[eng_ch]

An interesting interview with Switzerland's ambassador to the UK, well worth listening to all 30 minutes of it. If you read between the lines a bit, maybe there's some indication of the ambitions for the future between the UK & CH
https://soundcloud.com/world-radio-s...ador-to-the-uk

[SponPlague]

	Quote:	eng_ch
	An interesting interview with Switzerland's ambassador to the UK, well worth listening to all 30 minutes of it. If you read between the lines a bit, maybe there's some indication of the ambitions for the future between the UK & CH https://soundcloud.com/world-radio-s...ador-to-the-uk

I liked his point near the end: I went to Germany fresh after graduation, and now here I am, decades later, in another German speaking zone..

[eng_ch]

	Quote:	SponPlague
	I liked his point near the end: I went to Germany fresh after graduation, and now here I am, decades later, in another German speaking zone..

I spent a year in Regensburg as part of my degree and it was such an eye-opener and broadened the horizons as intended. My personal gut feel is that this is exactly what the UK govt wanted to stop by pulling out of Erasmus. Broader horizons tend to generate more liberal views, and provide a point of comparison with the home country, and the current government might not stand up to such comparison or scrutiny.
(On a side note, even language exchanges at school were a real eye-opener, to discover that it really and truly is absolutely *everything* that is in another language).