Skip to main content

What would a united United Kingdom do differently?

Britain is a deeply divided nation. 48% voted to continue to compete amongst the nations of the EU, 52% believed we can compete better outside it. Part of the Brexit argument is that Britain can win more business by developing its own trade agreements (we have none currently), and that if the Pound does devalue (which it has since the referendum and may continue to slide when we leave in 2019), then our exports will be more competitively priced. Without covering old ground about the pluses and minuses of EU membership, the problem we now face is that whether we like to think of it this way or not, we will become a competitor of the EU. So why would the EU27 agree to anything other than the maximum damage in their power to inflict on a competitor to prevent us winning anything at their members' expense?

As the old expression says, you're either for 'em or agin 'em. Brexit means agin the EU. And it doesn't matter how chummy smiley Davis and May try to portray us, make no mistake, the EU will be competing with the UK, just as they compete today with China, America, Russia and anyone else outside the club.

The perplexing difficulty is that we're making it easy for them to win. All they have to do is sit back and watch us destroy ourselves from within. One Brit seeing disaster looming ever more apparently and more horribly than the 'scaremongers' predicted, and the other blaming the remoaners for the lack of cohesion causing any economic woes that may befall us.

But even if all remoaners wake up tomorrow and decide "to get on with it" as we're being exhorted to do (just like the banks are getting on with it by decamping to somewhere safer perhaps), then we still don't have a new global message that will appeal to the EU or any other nation as far as I can work out. What is the message of an 'independent' UK? How will we appear more attractive for business, science, education, arts or anything else by claiming 'independence' from the EU? I know the 'collapse of the Euro' and impending doom facing Euroland worries many Brexiteers, but last time I looked, the UK economy was the worst performer in the EU and the Euro is currently the currency to back.

I blame the politicians who believed a referendum was a sensible idea to unite the country, even if the 2m British most affected by the decision were not allowed to vote - ex-pats. WHY? Is there a legal case to give them an opportunity now? It will be interesting to see whether legal action to give these people a democratic voice will achieve anything.

So assuming that we will crash out without any agreement (with anyone, EU included), what is going to make Britain greater than it was within the world's largest club of nations? Simon Cowell? What does the world need that an independent Britain could offer?

And if there is a vision for that UK, what is it about EU membership that is preventing us from achieving it today?

Comments

  1. You're right. All businesses I know are already trying to do business everywhere they possibly can. How can being independent from a trading block give us an advantage that being part of one can't?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks for taking an interest.

Popular posts from this blog

Phillips screws - yes I'm angry about them too

Don't get me wrong. They're a brilliant invention to assist automation and prevent screwdrivers from slipping off screw heads - damaging furniture, paintwork and fingers in the process. Interestingly they weren't invented by Mr Phillips at all, but by a John P Thompson who sold Mr P the idea after failing to commercialise it. Mr P, on the otherhand, quickly succeeded where Mr T had failed. Incredible isn't it. You don't just need a good idea, you need a great salesman and, more importantly, perfect timing to make a success out of something new. Actually, it would seem, he did two clever things (apart from buying the rights). He gave the invention to GM to trial. No-brainer #1. After it was adopted by the great GM, instead of trying to become their sole supplier of Phillips screws, he sold licenses to every other screw manufacturer in the world. A little of a lot is worth a great deal more than a lot of a little + vulnerability (watch out Apple!). My gromble is abo

Would we pay more for their stuff?

I'm confused. Brexiters argue the Germans, Italians and French will still want to sell us their cars, so continued free trade with the UK is in their best interests. But we'll have to negotiate this (with an EU unwilling to make leaving easy) by threatening to make their cars more expensive for British people to buy. We'll do this because WE need to make imports more expensive to try to restore our balance of payments. Are Brits prepared to pay more for their Audis, Fiats and Renaults in order to make British cars more appealing, or do Brexiters want to pay more in order to punish them for taxing our insurance and banking products? Either way, imports will cost more. While in the EU, we buy their cars because we like the choice and don't want our own government to tax them. Indeed it would be better for British car manufacturing if we went back to the good old days of being encouraged to buy cheaper British cars (made by foreign owned factories). Is that what Brexite

Addictions. Porn, Drugs, Alcohol and Sex. Don't prevent it, make it safer.

In 1926 New York, during Prohibition, 1,200 people were poisoned by whiskey containing small quantities of wood alcohol (methanol). Around 400 died, the rest were blinded. The methanol they drank was in the moonshine they had bought illegally. In fact it had been added by law to industrial ethanol in order to make it undrinkable. Prohibition existed to protect everyone from the 'evils of the demon drink'. However, people still wanted to enjoy alcohol. So bootleggers bought cheap industrial alcohol and attempted to distill it to remove the impurities the state had added, but the process wasn't regulated. The state was inadvertently responsible for the suffering - although it was easy for them to blame the bootleggers and to justify escalating the war. This didn't stop the bootleggers. In fact it forced them to become more violent to protect their operations, and even less cautious about their production standards. Volumes of illicit alcohol, and therefore proportionat