I have always thought that John Redwood was better than he is generally presented by the liberal media. He has seemed - to me - more sensible than the hard core of boneheaded right-wingers who have made the prime ministerial careers of John Major and Theresa May unnecessarily difficult. There was, of course, the extreme embarrassment of him being filmed [as Secretary of State for Wales] trying to move his lower jaw in time to the Welsh National Anthem: and failing utterly. But in general I saw him as a 'trier' who was honest and not lacking in intelligence.
Then I saw a bit of his performance in the House of Commons yesterday: oh dear!
The issue was Brexit. His face was distorted with extreme, vitriolic anger. He was fed up, he declared, with the people who do this country down. The remainers and the soft Brexiteers - from his perspective - belittle this great country. Of course we can stand alone in the world, and triumph economically [with the implication that this task is trivial compared to the glorious achievement of solitary Britain in 1940-42].
It was painful and tragic to see him reduced to such a stupid and irrational argument. In descending to this lack of serious content his speech was about the best argument against his side of the issue that I have yet encountered.
The hard Brexiteers ignore the realities of the economic situation in the world. WTO Rules do not offer a safe basis on which the UK can instantly build a pattern of close trade deals with countries outside the European Economic Area, as has so often been stressed in this blog. Tariffs are not the key issue: regulations and quid-pro-quo deals that get round WTO standards dominate in world trade agreements, and the UK does not have the intellectual resources of trained manpower that would be needed to get even tentative interim deals in place by March 2019; or, indeed, by December 2021.
By declining to vote in the Commons yesterday, on the motion to publish the dossiers on 52 sectors of the economy and the potential impact on them of leaving the EEA, the Conservative Party again displayed that it has lost control of the House. It is almost certain that when these dossiers are released, they will provide a massive stock of ammunition for the remainers and will seriously undermine the sanguine daydreams of the hard Brexiteers.
The resignation on the same day of the highly-regarded Defence Secretary, on grounds that most men [and many women] of his age and origin would think to be spectacularly trivial, indicates to me that Sir Michael Fallon welcomed an excuse to get out from under the bonfire that is being built in the Tory party.
Redwood is - in political terms - dead wood, tinder dry; ready to support a conflagration that could end the two centuries of Conservatism as the dominant political organisation in the United Kingdom. The arch-Brexiteers would [apparently] force the collapse of the May government if their diabolical mission to undermine the economy is defeated. An election before Christmas has become a strong possibility; thought not yet probable.
Corbyn has always regarded the EU as a capitalist club: so he has been against it, even though Labour under his leadership notionally supported the remainers in the 2016 referendum: where millions of old-Labour voters went the other way. I doubt if the Labour leader has a clear view of what the European Economic Area is: and it is problematic whether Keir Starmer can bring him to a sensible stance on that matter. This is the one factor that could loose a December [or February] election for Labour. Politics have suddenly become much more interesting: and more frightening!
Showing posts with label EEA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label EEA. Show all posts
Thursday, 2 November 2017
Monday, 30 October 2017
Budget Lobbies
A British Government Budget is due to be presented to the Commons next month, therefore the lobbying has begun. Besides the usual sectoral claims from welfare interests and business, a whole range of Brexit-related fears and expectations are being pressed for the Chancellor to take note of.
The situation is bedevilled by the Brexit situation - which no-one, inside or outside government has any grip on - and further complicated by the fact that the Chancellor's 'responsible' stance [largely what the business community have demanded: to keep as far in to the European Economic Area as possible, after formal withdrawal from the EU] is under vicious and sustained attack by the headbanging Brexiteers.
Behind all this, lie crucial social and economic facts. There is no doubt that the National Health Service, the schools, the police and the armed forces are grossly underfunded. This is not simply an issue of how many billions of pounds are spent on those services: nobody can deny that aggregate allocations by the government are increasing [though some services, like the police and prisons, are struggling with the effect of previous real-terms cuts]. The essential point is that what the government has allocated is much less that is needed to meet the expectations of the changing population.
Osbornian austerity has been in force for seven years, during which the economy has stagnated. Real terms economic growth, especially in material output from factories and farms, has in most sectors declined. There is now a major milk shortage in western Europe, including the UK, because the supermarkets drove down the price of raw milk so far that hundreds of farmers went out of the business [at huge personal loss, with the slaughter of thousands of specially-bred animals]. More conspicuously, manufacturing output has declined, and productivity in most sectors of industry is at best the same as it was in 2005. Since the population is larger than it was in 2005, including more school-age children and over-seventies, the needs of education, health and welfare are growing: and the state's spending on educational and social services has not kept pace. Meanwhile, the capabilities of the health service improve and extend life have greatly advanced: if only those improving resources and facilities can be afforded, with people trained and available to provide them.
The state should be spending massively more than it is. The Chancellor and his team know this all too well; but they are steeped in the Osbornian dogma that extra spending can only come from extra taxation or extra government borrowing. Extra taxation will reduce the money that people and firms can spend on their items of choice, so 'demand' will decline; so the private sector of the economy will decline in total turnover. Extra borrowing will give the government and taxpayers higher interest bills to pay in the future: so it is an imposition on future generations that would be inexcusable to impose it. So the Treasury team is stuck with the existing austerity mantra.
This is not the whole picture, however. It is unfortunate that the deeply untrustworthy John McDonnell has been the cheerleader for an alternative proposition that really should be implemented.
In the medium term, the only way of paying for increased and improved public services is by getting more tax from the whole economic system because it is growing. A really growing economy can both pay more wages to employed people and yield more taxes for pensions, benefits, hospital, schools, police and the other essentials.
This policy option does require the government to borrow massively more money: earmarked for investment programmes of improved infrastructure [roads, railways, hospitals and housing] that provide economic returns by providing a healthier and happier and less-stressed workforce.But the government should foster much more borrowing and spending for investment in industry, agriculture and offshore activities both around the British isles and around all the UK's overseas territories [which have been wasting assets since they ceased to be needed as coaling stations and watering points for historic commercial shipping]. It is clear that robotics, 3-D printing, artificial intelligence etc are major components of the future pattern of industry; and that Britain is still a major contributor of new ideas. These are both in microprocessors and in new and improved materials that can stand the more extreme demands of the new era. The government should foster at least a dozen of the technologically fruitful universities as hubs around which other universities, research associations and individual firms can gather their work on new things. There will always be depressives who say that you cannot guarantee which ideas will be successful and which not; so you should do nothing. That is not how the great achievements of the past were made. Bold ventures must take bold chances, and expect some failures: while experienced managers can spot cases where the money is running away faster that output is developing. And the state should provide a lot of money [from borrowing] to float the whole thing.
Companies have built up the biggest reserves ever, and have paid large dividends while not investing in new plant or higher productivity in their existing plant, and they have bought-back shares; or they have bought other companies [usually proving the old adage that the sum of the returns from two merged companies is rarely more than half of the combined return before the merger]. They should be taxed on what they hold in reserve, taxed more on what the declare for dividends, and given massive tax relief on genuine material investments. It is all so simple, so obvious!
New and improved plant is the only way to enhance productivity. Enhanced productivity is the only way to get substantive economic growth. Economic growth is the only way to get more taxation painlessly out of an economy. Taxation is the only way for governments to get the money they need to spend. Simple!
The situation is bedevilled by the Brexit situation - which no-one, inside or outside government has any grip on - and further complicated by the fact that the Chancellor's 'responsible' stance [largely what the business community have demanded: to keep as far in to the European Economic Area as possible, after formal withdrawal from the EU] is under vicious and sustained attack by the headbanging Brexiteers.
Behind all this, lie crucial social and economic facts. There is no doubt that the National Health Service, the schools, the police and the armed forces are grossly underfunded. This is not simply an issue of how many billions of pounds are spent on those services: nobody can deny that aggregate allocations by the government are increasing [though some services, like the police and prisons, are struggling with the effect of previous real-terms cuts]. The essential point is that what the government has allocated is much less that is needed to meet the expectations of the changing population.
Osbornian austerity has been in force for seven years, during which the economy has stagnated. Real terms economic growth, especially in material output from factories and farms, has in most sectors declined. There is now a major milk shortage in western Europe, including the UK, because the supermarkets drove down the price of raw milk so far that hundreds of farmers went out of the business [at huge personal loss, with the slaughter of thousands of specially-bred animals]. More conspicuously, manufacturing output has declined, and productivity in most sectors of industry is at best the same as it was in 2005. Since the population is larger than it was in 2005, including more school-age children and over-seventies, the needs of education, health and welfare are growing: and the state's spending on educational and social services has not kept pace. Meanwhile, the capabilities of the health service improve and extend life have greatly advanced: if only those improving resources and facilities can be afforded, with people trained and available to provide them.
The state should be spending massively more than it is. The Chancellor and his team know this all too well; but they are steeped in the Osbornian dogma that extra spending can only come from extra taxation or extra government borrowing. Extra taxation will reduce the money that people and firms can spend on their items of choice, so 'demand' will decline; so the private sector of the economy will decline in total turnover. Extra borrowing will give the government and taxpayers higher interest bills to pay in the future: so it is an imposition on future generations that would be inexcusable to impose it. So the Treasury team is stuck with the existing austerity mantra.
This is not the whole picture, however. It is unfortunate that the deeply untrustworthy John McDonnell has been the cheerleader for an alternative proposition that really should be implemented.
In the medium term, the only way of paying for increased and improved public services is by getting more tax from the whole economic system because it is growing. A really growing economy can both pay more wages to employed people and yield more taxes for pensions, benefits, hospital, schools, police and the other essentials.
This policy option does require the government to borrow massively more money: earmarked for investment programmes of improved infrastructure [roads, railways, hospitals and housing] that provide economic returns by providing a healthier and happier and less-stressed workforce.But the government should foster much more borrowing and spending for investment in industry, agriculture and offshore activities both around the British isles and around all the UK's overseas territories [which have been wasting assets since they ceased to be needed as coaling stations and watering points for historic commercial shipping]. It is clear that robotics, 3-D printing, artificial intelligence etc are major components of the future pattern of industry; and that Britain is still a major contributor of new ideas. These are both in microprocessors and in new and improved materials that can stand the more extreme demands of the new era. The government should foster at least a dozen of the technologically fruitful universities as hubs around which other universities, research associations and individual firms can gather their work on new things. There will always be depressives who say that you cannot guarantee which ideas will be successful and which not; so you should do nothing. That is not how the great achievements of the past were made. Bold ventures must take bold chances, and expect some failures: while experienced managers can spot cases where the money is running away faster that output is developing. And the state should provide a lot of money [from borrowing] to float the whole thing.
Companies have built up the biggest reserves ever, and have paid large dividends while not investing in new plant or higher productivity in their existing plant, and they have bought-back shares; or they have bought other companies [usually proving the old adage that the sum of the returns from two merged companies is rarely more than half of the combined return before the merger]. They should be taxed on what they hold in reserve, taxed more on what the declare for dividends, and given massive tax relief on genuine material investments. It is all so simple, so obvious!
New and improved plant is the only way to enhance productivity. Enhanced productivity is the only way to get substantive economic growth. Economic growth is the only way to get more taxation painlessly out of an economy. Taxation is the only way for governments to get the money they need to spend. Simple!
Wednesday, 27 September 2017
Bombardier Bombarded: A Lesson for Brexiteers
The Canadian aircraft manufacturer, Bombardier, has suffered a huge blow at the hands of the US regulatory system: a tariff of 220% has been imposed on imports of its new aircraft to the USA: one of whose airlines has ordered 75 of the planes, with a further order pending. Both the British and Canadian governments have made grants to the company, to maintain its technological capabilities and to protect employment in Canada and in Northern Ireland; and Boeing, the US aircraft builder has cried 'foul' even though the new planes will not compete directly with any of their products.
Boeing has massive contracts with the US military and with NASA. The prices set on such products are necessarily sufficient to support the research and development that is necessary to design and build the craft and devices: thus giving Boeing a comfortable profit base that exempts the firm from any need openly to seek subsidies for its civil aviation sections. Bombardier - the former Short Brothers in Northern Ireland - now has little demand from the British defence sector, which is so strapped for funds that the national defences have been excessively depleted and the country only manages to present figures showing that it meets the NATO target of 2% of GNP on defence by cooking the books rather brazenly. It is absolutely essential that a country purporting to be any sort of power invests hugely in defence technologies, which are expensive. The more innovative the defences are, the more they are likely to cost: and the more effective they are likely to be. It is a quaint paradox that some of Corbyn's 'loony-left' colleagues are more likely to see this than are Tory Brexiteers, because they can see the linkage between economic development and military might in Russia, China and the USA.
On the same day as the US decision was taken on the new tariff, the British train building section of Bombardier also received very bad news. A long-planned consortium arrangement with Siemens to build a new generation of trains for the world market was abandoned by the German firm in favour of an alliance with the French firm, Alstom. This has, allegedly, been engineered at the behest of President Macron, whose government is reviewing all major sectors of the economy with a view to ensuring that the French presence in each, within a European context, is the best that it can be from a chauvinistic French viewpoint. Brexit Britain can expect many more similar snubs from the Macron regime.
Both these stories teach the lesson that an isolated Britain depending on free trade agreements under WTO rules cannot succeed. WTO rules do not prevent the US paying Boeing top prices for research of incalculable value. WTO rules will not stop President Macron's chauvinistic plans from coming into effect. Cash tariffs are trivial obstacles to trade, compared with regulations on product standards and safety that can be manipulated in to assist favoured products, and the 'needs of national defence'. The naive optimism of 'hard' Brexiteers is a form of idiocy. Unless the UK remains within the European Economic Area, with all its common standards and definitions, British firms and their products will be picked off [by being deemed not to meet standards] one by one, as their European competitors develop their capacity to supply the equivalent of their former exports.
British airlines and train companies are under no pressure to buy British: so the demise of the bombardier plant in Belfast and Derby is threatened. British jobs can be lost, and with them generations of accumulated knowledge: and the dimmer Tories won't even weep into their whiskies. Of course, there are intelligent people of conservative cast of mind: but few of them are content with the present deeply-riven government, and even fewer are comfortable about the prospect of a 'hard Brexit'. Despite his Marxist blinkers, John McDonnell shows some awareness of these issues. As the parties stand at the end of the Labour Conference today, Labour has the best of the bad arguments. I do not expect the Tories to gain any ground when they meet in conference next week.
Boeing has massive contracts with the US military and with NASA. The prices set on such products are necessarily sufficient to support the research and development that is necessary to design and build the craft and devices: thus giving Boeing a comfortable profit base that exempts the firm from any need openly to seek subsidies for its civil aviation sections. Bombardier - the former Short Brothers in Northern Ireland - now has little demand from the British defence sector, which is so strapped for funds that the national defences have been excessively depleted and the country only manages to present figures showing that it meets the NATO target of 2% of GNP on defence by cooking the books rather brazenly. It is absolutely essential that a country purporting to be any sort of power invests hugely in defence technologies, which are expensive. The more innovative the defences are, the more they are likely to cost: and the more effective they are likely to be. It is a quaint paradox that some of Corbyn's 'loony-left' colleagues are more likely to see this than are Tory Brexiteers, because they can see the linkage between economic development and military might in Russia, China and the USA.
On the same day as the US decision was taken on the new tariff, the British train building section of Bombardier also received very bad news. A long-planned consortium arrangement with Siemens to build a new generation of trains for the world market was abandoned by the German firm in favour of an alliance with the French firm, Alstom. This has, allegedly, been engineered at the behest of President Macron, whose government is reviewing all major sectors of the economy with a view to ensuring that the French presence in each, within a European context, is the best that it can be from a chauvinistic French viewpoint. Brexit Britain can expect many more similar snubs from the Macron regime.
Both these stories teach the lesson that an isolated Britain depending on free trade agreements under WTO rules cannot succeed. WTO rules do not prevent the US paying Boeing top prices for research of incalculable value. WTO rules will not stop President Macron's chauvinistic plans from coming into effect. Cash tariffs are trivial obstacles to trade, compared with regulations on product standards and safety that can be manipulated in to assist favoured products, and the 'needs of national defence'. The naive optimism of 'hard' Brexiteers is a form of idiocy. Unless the UK remains within the European Economic Area, with all its common standards and definitions, British firms and their products will be picked off [by being deemed not to meet standards] one by one, as their European competitors develop their capacity to supply the equivalent of their former exports.
British airlines and train companies are under no pressure to buy British: so the demise of the bombardier plant in Belfast and Derby is threatened. British jobs can be lost, and with them generations of accumulated knowledge: and the dimmer Tories won't even weep into their whiskies. Of course, there are intelligent people of conservative cast of mind: but few of them are content with the present deeply-riven government, and even fewer are comfortable about the prospect of a 'hard Brexit'. Despite his Marxist blinkers, John McDonnell shows some awareness of these issues. As the parties stand at the end of the Labour Conference today, Labour has the best of the bad arguments. I do not expect the Tories to gain any ground when they meet in conference next week.
Thursday, 7 September 2017
More Pathetic Government Papers on Brexit
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the British State does not have the resources that are necessary to arrange for any sort of Brexit. Some commentators [from both sides of the debate] have welcomed this absence of any clear thinking and positive planning as a time during which a consensus can emerge in the wider public, in favour of a 'soft Brexit' based on remaining in the European Economic Area [EEA]. Such commentators argue - persuasively - that Mrs May's government does not possess sufficient brainpower [either in numbers of people or on a basis of their average intelligence] to work out alternative solutions to the tens of thousands of issues that are emerging, within eighteen months.
The EU has now produced two papers [among others] that are unanswerable by the May team within the constraints of time and human resources that apply. One challenges Britain to find a way of carrying forward the European system for designating such products as Cornish pasty, Stilton, Camembert and Parma Ham. The other carries the ultimate challenge: it throws entirely on the British government the initiative in creating open borders in Ireland that is acceptable to the Irish Republic and supported by all 26 other EU member states. England opened the 'Irish Question' when the English Pope Hadrian gave King Henry II an invitation to assume the role of Lord of Ireland, and the Union of England and Scotland has been struggling with the aftermath for at least two hundred years. The chances of it being resolved, other than in the context of the EEA, are negligible. Mrs May depends on the support of the most hardline opponents of concessions to the Irish Republicans for her majority in the House of Commons; thus there is no chance of the Irish Question leading to any new answers.
This blog has also emphasised the simple fact that a 'hard Brexit' could only be implemented at the cost of many billions of pounds of extra state spending on border and customs controls, both to implement the hard border then to maintain it. It would be impossible to continue to implement 'austerity' if such extra costs were being imposed on the state budget. Borrowing to pay for such border controls would make the government's attempt to end state borrowing [that has failed so far] even more ridiculous than it already is. The alternative, to try to pay for the new resources of equipment and manpower by increasing taxes, would result in revolt by business lobbies and the general public. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose department would have to present this scenario to the public [and must, surely, have attempted to warn the Brexiteers in the Cabinet of these facts], has argued for the general acceptance of a transition period in recognition of the fact that none of these issues can be resolved by March 2019: which is deadline set by Mrs May when she formally notified the EU of her interpretation of the referendum result.
The headbanging Brexiteers know that the longer time passes before a resolution is imposed on the country, the chances of a rational solution - withdrawal from the political EU while remaining in the EEA - will rise; and they hate this concept. They will therefore be hell-bent on pushing the weakest Prime Minister since the Second World War to take panicky decisions in a show of uncharacteristic determination that would make her ridiculous, and almost certainly push her to a position where the DUP would refuse to support her and Tory Remainers would be opposed to her.
In all this political maelstrom key facts could get lost; but here the sheer incompetence of the UK government's papers on Brexit are significant. A draft text on immigration, post-Brexit [leaked to the Guardian], assumed that Britain does have the native resources of skilled, fit and willing labour to fill most of the jobs that would be vacant in the period after a 'hard Brexit'. The mass of work that has been done on labour supply and skills shortages in the UK contradicts that naive assumption; unless - and this is a really chilling thought - the authors assume that there would be so big a contraction in the economy that skills shortages would disappear. The absence from the paper of any reference to seasonal labour from the EU, on which much of UK agriculture depends, illustrates the sheer incompetence and inadequacy of the work that is being done in Whitehall.
This all serves to strengthen one's fear that those who have a clear policy, who I call the headbanging Brexiteers, will have too much of the argument for too long; because everybody else is inadequately informed to make judgements on myriad issues that any form of Brexit will throw up.
The EU has now produced two papers [among others] that are unanswerable by the May team within the constraints of time and human resources that apply. One challenges Britain to find a way of carrying forward the European system for designating such products as Cornish pasty, Stilton, Camembert and Parma Ham. The other carries the ultimate challenge: it throws entirely on the British government the initiative in creating open borders in Ireland that is acceptable to the Irish Republic and supported by all 26 other EU member states. England opened the 'Irish Question' when the English Pope Hadrian gave King Henry II an invitation to assume the role of Lord of Ireland, and the Union of England and Scotland has been struggling with the aftermath for at least two hundred years. The chances of it being resolved, other than in the context of the EEA, are negligible. Mrs May depends on the support of the most hardline opponents of concessions to the Irish Republicans for her majority in the House of Commons; thus there is no chance of the Irish Question leading to any new answers.
This blog has also emphasised the simple fact that a 'hard Brexit' could only be implemented at the cost of many billions of pounds of extra state spending on border and customs controls, both to implement the hard border then to maintain it. It would be impossible to continue to implement 'austerity' if such extra costs were being imposed on the state budget. Borrowing to pay for such border controls would make the government's attempt to end state borrowing [that has failed so far] even more ridiculous than it already is. The alternative, to try to pay for the new resources of equipment and manpower by increasing taxes, would result in revolt by business lobbies and the general public. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose department would have to present this scenario to the public [and must, surely, have attempted to warn the Brexiteers in the Cabinet of these facts], has argued for the general acceptance of a transition period in recognition of the fact that none of these issues can be resolved by March 2019: which is deadline set by Mrs May when she formally notified the EU of her interpretation of the referendum result.
The headbanging Brexiteers know that the longer time passes before a resolution is imposed on the country, the chances of a rational solution - withdrawal from the political EU while remaining in the EEA - will rise; and they hate this concept. They will therefore be hell-bent on pushing the weakest Prime Minister since the Second World War to take panicky decisions in a show of uncharacteristic determination that would make her ridiculous, and almost certainly push her to a position where the DUP would refuse to support her and Tory Remainers would be opposed to her.
In all this political maelstrom key facts could get lost; but here the sheer incompetence of the UK government's papers on Brexit are significant. A draft text on immigration, post-Brexit [leaked to the Guardian], assumed that Britain does have the native resources of skilled, fit and willing labour to fill most of the jobs that would be vacant in the period after a 'hard Brexit'. The mass of work that has been done on labour supply and skills shortages in the UK contradicts that naive assumption; unless - and this is a really chilling thought - the authors assume that there would be so big a contraction in the economy that skills shortages would disappear. The absence from the paper of any reference to seasonal labour from the EU, on which much of UK agriculture depends, illustrates the sheer incompetence and inadequacy of the work that is being done in Whitehall.
This all serves to strengthen one's fear that those who have a clear policy, who I call the headbanging Brexiteers, will have too much of the argument for too long; because everybody else is inadequately informed to make judgements on myriad issues that any form of Brexit will throw up.
Tuesday, 11 July 2017
'Free Trade' Deals and Point Protection
Mrs May was apparently very pleased with the offer that President Trump made to her on the side of the recent G20 Meeting, that Britain would have a 'great' free trade agreement with the USA after Brexit. He probably didn't remember that the next day; and even if he did, it does not add up to a string of words. The US Congress, specifically the Senate, has the power to make or to decline to ratify Treaties of all kinds; and Mr Trump has enough hassle with the Congress [even though both houses are controlled by his recently-adopted party] for him to be willing to make a big deal of a mere trade agreement with the UK.
Much more important is the fact that the USA is an instinctively protectionist state. It is the natural reaction of American politicians to set up temporary tariffs or other means of restricting imports, wherever a significant sector of the US economy activates its lobbyists to make Washington aware of any potential existential threat. For post-Brexit Britain - if we ever reach that state - to depend at all on the US as a crucial export market would be even more foolish than it would be to leave the European Economic Area.
British manufacturers' organisations have already issued warnings about the tendency of India, China and other advancing economies to follow the US example. As industries in those countries are developed to be able to offer sophisticated consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, advanced software and the rest of the range of sophisticated products and services, so the tender 'infant industries' can run to their governments for protection against the inroads of alien producers into their markets.
Although the UK has been laggardly in developing the market for inventions that continue to pour from British residents [including immigrants], the potential for the expansion of Britain's global markets continues to be among the best in the world. Shamefully, many innovative British businesses are sold to aliens [and then misrepresented as 'inward investments] simply because their developers have not been able to get development funding. Other brilliant British inventions, that do get adequate investment and build up their markets, are picked off by alien predators before they make anything like the contribution to the balance of payments that they should: and once the ik [the intellectual property] that the companies own has been alienated, the benefit of that ownership goes wherever the alien owners of the business direct it. This depressing pattern has been developed even while the United Kingdom has been within the cocoon of the European Union, and will not be broken by a 'hard Bexit': rather, it will ensure that the economy shrinks drastically.
While the UK is fully within the European Economic Area it will not be subject to point protectionism by Europe. If our government is crazy enough to try to take us out of the EEA, they would expose the country to European point protectionism, whenever a British concept or project caused a scream from EEA firms and interests. That is the way of the world. Lobbies transcend Trade Agreements and set aside solemn international agreements. Ministers seem to be oblivious to this, as to so many other obvious facts. They have no right to cross-party support in the Commons.
Much more important is the fact that the USA is an instinctively protectionist state. It is the natural reaction of American politicians to set up temporary tariffs or other means of restricting imports, wherever a significant sector of the US economy activates its lobbyists to make Washington aware of any potential existential threat. For post-Brexit Britain - if we ever reach that state - to depend at all on the US as a crucial export market would be even more foolish than it would be to leave the European Economic Area.
British manufacturers' organisations have already issued warnings about the tendency of India, China and other advancing economies to follow the US example. As industries in those countries are developed to be able to offer sophisticated consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, advanced software and the rest of the range of sophisticated products and services, so the tender 'infant industries' can run to their governments for protection against the inroads of alien producers into their markets.
Although the UK has been laggardly in developing the market for inventions that continue to pour from British residents [including immigrants], the potential for the expansion of Britain's global markets continues to be among the best in the world. Shamefully, many innovative British businesses are sold to aliens [and then misrepresented as 'inward investments] simply because their developers have not been able to get development funding. Other brilliant British inventions, that do get adequate investment and build up their markets, are picked off by alien predators before they make anything like the contribution to the balance of payments that they should: and once the ik [the intellectual property] that the companies own has been alienated, the benefit of that ownership goes wherever the alien owners of the business direct it. This depressing pattern has been developed even while the United Kingdom has been within the cocoon of the European Union, and will not be broken by a 'hard Bexit': rather, it will ensure that the economy shrinks drastically.
While the UK is fully within the European Economic Area it will not be subject to point protectionism by Europe. If our government is crazy enough to try to take us out of the EEA, they would expose the country to European point protectionism, whenever a British concept or project caused a scream from EEA firms and interests. That is the way of the world. Lobbies transcend Trade Agreements and set aside solemn international agreements. Ministers seem to be oblivious to this, as to so many other obvious facts. They have no right to cross-party support in the Commons.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)