If our government brings in legislation then I want them to be accountable to that, and not have the ability to pass the buck.
You may (and quite rightly) say that EU elections are not decided on these issues and particular EU Parliament representatives have been useless and actively undermining the EU, but that's not really the EU's fault.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/automotive/legislation/u...
Losing the ability to affect these European standards is a price to pay, Brexit being one big trade-off after all. But I'm still unclear on what the advantages are that make it worth it.
Plus global standards are now being derived from EU standards.
The wider point here being that of course they don't agree on "basic" matters - neither does everybody within a single country.
Among the discussions I had before the referendum, perhaps the clearest pro-Leave voices were a couple of very highly qualified and experienced economists. Their basic position was simple enough: the EU has not fixed the fundamental vulnerabilities in its economic and political structure that caused the big problems a few years ago, and so they considered it more likely than not that the EU would run into serious problems again in the not-too-distant future.
Between that risk and the general trends in global trade, they felt that on balance it would be healthier to shift our economy and foreign trade to be less dependent on the EU and build stronger trading relationships with the rest of the world. That in turn requires distancing ourselves from the "ever closer union" vision and being free of the constraints that come with belonging to the EU's customs union.
How does imposing high tariffs and onerous non-tariff barriers make dealing with countries outside the EU easier? The advantages of the Customs Union for internal EU trade are clear, but this is the first time I've ever seen someone argue that it's advantageous for external trade as well.
https://fullfact.org/europe/uk-leaving-eu-trade/
" EU’s trade weighted average MFN tariff was 2.3% for non-agricultural products. This is an average figure and tariffs on some individual products are much higher, especially on agricultural goods. The EU tariff on cars, for example, is 10%."
Is 2.3% really worthy of being called "high"? Many of these tariffs are reciprocal anyway.
The customs union allows containers to unload at Rotterdam and perform customs clearance once there, in a giant dedicated facility, before being transshipped to wherever they are destined for.
Perhaps not for most industries, although presumably this is a relative scale and those working with tight margins might disagree. But as you point out yourself, the tariffs do vary significantly by industry and can be much higher in some cases.
One could equally point out that average tariffs under the WTO arrangements are also only a small percentage, which is falling, but can also be significantly higher in some sectors. Apparently quite a few people are concerned that the harder possible varieties of Brexit would cause trade with the EU to suffer severely because of those tariffs.
My personal view is that the tariffs look like a relatively small barrier overall, and while we should be careful about the sectors that could be hit much harder, it's the non-tariff barriers where we should be concentrating most of our attention.
Tariffs are there but that is not unique to the EU, indeed one might point to the USA and metal tariffs... When you say 'non-tariff barriers' do you mean the safety standards or the quality standards? They are both barriers I'm very happy to have.
I'm still rather surprised to see someone write that importing from outside the EU is no harder in terms of admin than importing from within. Surely importing from elsewhere within the EU needs very little admin at all, so if goods crossing the EU border are also not a big deal in practice, why do you think parts of our business community are so concerned about the overheads of trade with the EU post-Brexit if we wind up outside the SM/CU?
Because you loose the systems of the CU that make it so easy! It is easy to import into the customs union because
1) It is worthwhile to other countries to make specific agreements with the EU, because you make them once and they are valid for the EU28. Many countries have these deals with the EU.
2) As another poster mentioned, once goods are cleared for the EU they can shop to any EU country.
3) The common commodity code system means that once you have established what code your goods fall under you can send them to all 28 countries.
4) Outside of the CU we would have to have our own customs agreement with every country in the world. Develop our own systems, commodity codes, standards, IT etc.
5) Outside of the CU we would have to agree Tariffs with every country in the world rather than CCT
6) Outside of the CU our goods will have to clear customs into and out of the EU. Most UK goods currently ship to Calais which is not a customs port and has no facilities for this. I don't see the incentive for France to build them either.
7) Outside of the CU goods attract VAT when they clear customs. Whilst you can claim it back, there is a catastrophic cash-flow impact for importers.
8) None of this is agreed yet with 1 year to go!
9) UK has land border with Ireland that is totally open and must be so under the Good Friday Agreement (for those that don't know this is a fundamental treaty of the peace process in Northern Ireland), of which the USA and EU are co-guarantors. The Customs Union is what allows this to work. Without it you have to have customs because goods in Ireland are now free to move across the EU. The UK government has already agreed to keep 'regulatory alignment' (a customs union) with NI to allow this to happen in the November deal (which it seems to be pretending didn't happen right now). Under the agreement between the Conservative party and the DUP whatever agreements are made must cover the whole UK or they withdraw co-operation and the government falls.
Interesting how this plays out....I suspect we will have a CU with a different name as a fudge.
RE: Services I would be more concerned than goods. Professional qualifications are currently good for the whole of Europe. Chartered Accountant or Engineer you can practice in all 28 states. Not so after Brexit. If you are selling to consumers then you will have to abide by all of the the same standards and rules as the EU sets, but not get any say in them any more.
So yes it is much simpler to be in the Customs Union.
One theme seems to be that the CU is convenient for those importing to or via multiple EU countries, because you have the same rules to comply with wherever you bring the goods in and then once inside they can go anywhere else inside.
Another seems to be that a UK outside the CU would have to make its own arrangements with trading partners, including the EU at that point, and everyone would have to implement any necessary customs checks at borders, including the Irish border and ports of entry for UK goods into the EU.
Finally, there are a couple of separate issues, in terms of the VAT/cashflow issue and the timescales for figuring all of this out.
Is that a fair summary?
Name them.
[Edit: This was a private discussion at a mutual friend's house, on a controversial subject. I have no idea whether the people in question have expressed their views publicly, and no intention of outing them if they have not, particularly given that their personal views may be at odds with their employers'. In any case, they aren't public figures and it's unlikely anyone here would know them unless they happened to have worked with them. And even then, there is still no good reason anyone needs to know their names unless an ad hominem is about to follow. Downvote all you like, but downvoting isn't an argument.]
Yes, that was essentially their position. The EU when it was smaller was mostly a group of member states in at least broadly equivalent economic situations. As it has grown, there are much wider disparities, and that undermines some of the original assumptions behind the Single Market.
For example, if there is an incentive to have cheap labour move from a relatively poor economy to a relatively wealthy one, you have potential for abuse on the relatively wealthy side, and you also have a risk of a "brain drain" effect that holds back growth in the poorer economy.
Likewise, trying to unify the markets across such widely different EU states is economically unsound. They aren't really one big market, because basic factors like cost of living and household income vary widely from one member state to another. Forcing businesses to treat all member states equally (which subsequent to that discussion the EU actually has been working to legislate) means you usually price the poorer member states out of the market, which is good for neither the potential customers in those states nor the businesses who would have been happy to supply them.
I also don't see how the UK could conceivably be said to be disadvantaged by the EU - given that financial services + co seem to depend upon EU membership.
The EU is mostly a good thing for trade with the EU. But by belonging to the EU, and in particular the Customs Union, the UK gives up the ability to negotiate its own trade agreements with non-EU trading partners. Instead, it is required to impose the EU's standard tariffs and other non-tariff barriers when trading outside the bloc, and the EU is rather protectionist in its stance there.
Put another way, just as EU membership brings well-documented advantages in terms of tariff-free trade and ease of access to the EU market, it also imposes directly analogous disadvantages in terms of forcing tariffs and other barriers when trading with non-EU markets, and the UK has limited ability to change that situation while remaining in the Customs Union because any relevant trade agreements are negotiated via the EU and not the UK itself.
The argument being made at the time was that since our foreign trade has been shifting steadily towards a greater proportion being with non-EU partners, the balance between the benefits on the EU side and the costs on the non-EU side was shifting in the wrong direction. (And if the EU did then suffer further economic troubles, that would reduce the benefits of continued membership significantly, pushing the balance further/faster in that other direction.)
I think the politics side is really where the UK will find the rub, though. The EU isn't going to be pleased with the UK for leaving. There's a great incentive on their side to make it turn out badly for the UK. Which means it's a little bit like if Mexico got on the USA's shitlist, just so they could get better trade deals with Brazil.
It seems clear that the inability of different EU member states to operate their own fiscal policies while tied to the same currency has caused harm (albeit of very different kinds) in recent years to both Greece at one end of the scale and Germany at the other, and to a lesser extent to various other member states. If the EU was a fully federal system, with combined political/legislative leadership to go with the combined economic/currency ties, maybe that wouldn't have happened. However, I doubt we'll see that level of integration any time soon, because it brings too much other baggage. That being the case, while I don't have the knowledge or experience to judge the odds myself, I can see why some economists might be wary of the same effects that caused so much trouble a few years ago doing so again in the future.
As for the EU not being pleased about the UK leaving, that seems inevitable, but I'm hoping that cooler heads will prevail. Poisoning the well won't help either side, and clearly we're still going to be trading and collaborating in many other ways post-Brexit. We can dig in with red lines about this or that, but NI is still going to suffer economically just like Ireland if they mess the border arrangements up. They can make a fuss about blocking City financial services all they like, but it's their own big businesses using those services and they have no credible alternative based within the EU27, and those businesses weren't just spending all that money on those financial services out of charity.
For myself, it saddens me that the whole affair seems to be characterised more by divisive rhetoric and mistrust now than by a constructive, amicable approach. I take the view that if we're going to have Brexit then obviously the UK-EU relationship will change, but it's still in our mutual interests to collaborate in numerous ways, and I think there were also numerous ways that these negotiations could have gone better if most of the political leadership on both sides hadn't been weak and hostile from day one.
I think this is extremely complacent. Financial services aren't an immovable object like a steel press or a coal mine, they're a bunch of people in an office. A lot of financial companies already have all sorts of European presences (either for tax reasons or through acquisitions), and they're already gearing up to move to Europe. E.g. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2018/01/11/payment-tran...
So much of the UK argument seems to be "once we're out of the EU, the rules that apply to countries that are not in the EU won't apply to us because we're special". This is not convincing.
The whole thing reminds me of Greece: "it would be a disaster for our country if the EU followed its pre-agreed rules, so they won't". This was not a convincing reason to bend the rules.
This is the standard argument, but I don't think it's a very strong one.
You can't pick up and move a steel press, but you can build a new one in a new country. Assuming it's a welcome development, that is mostly just a matter of investment money and building time. Hiring local staff to run it is probably relatively straightforward.
Financial services, as you point out yourself, are all about the people. It's an industry built on experience and knowledge. Obviously today many of those people work in the City and live within range of the City. There is also an ecosystem built around the City to support that work.
As far as I can see, nowhere else within the EU currently has anywhere close to that level of capability and established supporting infrastructure. There are only two ways that is going to change: either large numbers of existing staff from the City or maybe other global financial hubs are convinced to relocate to other member states where the new facilities are being set up, or a new generation of staff is developed locally.
Clearly either of those is possible, as is some sort of hybrid. However, I find the most common argument -- that large numbers of City workers will just transplant their entire lives to a whole different country to keep a job -- unlikely. People talk about emigration to the EU a lot since Brexit became an issue, but the reality is that few people have actually done it while we're an EU member state and it is relatively easy, and it could become a much more significant and permanent change after Brexit. That leaves the alternative of building up a local workforce in some new location, but that also means building a new financial centre to challenge the City. At best that is going to take many years, during which presumably access to big finance across the EU27 would be significantly worse than today, and even then it would be a risky endeavour that might never provide the alternative that people were hoping for.
As I said elsewhere, I hope cooler heads will prevail. The alternative to this is that the EU and UK negotiators grow up and realise that continuing relations in this area is hugely in both parties' best interest. If some deal is reached on financial services then the UK financial sector doesn't take a significant hit, and EU27 businesses and governments can continue to rely on the financial services they need with relatively little change or risk. It's hard to see how any plausible alternative isn't much worse than this in the short and probably medium term.
A chunk of them already have moved country: https://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/231364/percentage-o...
Not a majority, no, but it's inherently a very international business and the more money is at stake the more willing people will be to move.
It matters a great deal what the UK immigration regime will be after Brexit. The government has refused to give any clarity on this, and there are warning signs that the Home Office would very much like to start treating EU nationals as illegal immigrants. If no agreement is reached otherwise, it will be illegal for all those EU nationals to be employed, rent a house, or have a bank account.
I'm not saying it will be an overnight collapse, but more likely a slow melting away of new business and gradual movement of e.g. Euroclearing. In the short term it may be as simple as moving the flag which says where the company's HQ is and moving its taxpaying nexus inside the EU.
You're also underestimating the willingness of those financial businesses which are within the EU to be comfortable with UK competition.
Agreed, and this is an area where the facts seem quite clear and I'm hoping that sanity will prevail by the time the dust settles. In fact, what I'm really hoping is that the whole Brexit mess will force the government to fix our immigration and visa system more generally. It's already insanely slow, complicated and unpredictable for those legitimately visiting or moving here more permanently from outside the EU, and that doesn't really help anyone.
For what it's worth, I have no idea where your characterisation of the desired future treatment of EU nationals as illegal immigrants come from, and I think your predictions here are unlikely to the point of being almost inconceivable. The government might have to pay lip service to immigration controls up to a point, but they've been doing that for years anyway. I can't believe even the current lot are foolish enough to undermine the NHS, the education system, the tech and creative sectors, and so on with the kind of draconian system you seem to be envisaging.
I'm not saying it will be an overnight collapse, but more likely a slow melting away of new business and gradual movement of e.g. Euroclearing.
Perhaps. That's certainly a possible outcome in the longer term. Presumably whatever happens in terms of Brexit, any transition, and then any final deal beyond that, the economies on both sides of the Channel are going to adapt in time.
In the short term it may be as simple as moving the flag which says where the company's HQ is and moving its taxpaying nexus inside the EU.
This I find less likely. Various EU governments, notably including the Germans (albeit under the previous administration), have made it very clear that they don't want to see that sort of "technical" movement. And it's going to be very hard for the financial services firms to play games if the national regulators in their new home state(s) want to cause problems for them.
*You're also underestimating the willingness of those financial businesses which are within the EU to be comfortable with UK competition.
Given the scale we're talking about here, I'm curious to know which financial businesses you classify as being "within the EU" at present.
On the other, what happened to Greece was appalling, and confirmed everybody's worst fears about the EU being an instrument of Capital in overrunning democratic norms.
I don't think it would be so terrible, in any case, if the EU blocked UK financial services (or if the financial services went under anyway, since I think being in the EU was part of the raison-d'etre). The imbalance of the english economy created by an overweight financial sector that employs basically no-one, and has antithetical legislative needs to all the other sectors, is a lot of what's wrong with the UK as a country. We used to make things. Now all we do is flip houses on the back of one bubble or another. The financial sector has created a weird double-country, with a super-rich capital, and basically impoverished provinces.
But this really comes back to what I see as the heart of English dysfunction - and it's English, since the Welsh and Scottish don't seem to share it. The politics are awful. Recruiting half your leadership from one elite boarding school just doesn't work. There's no way you can find enough smart, talented people that way. That's why everything the english state does is always so screwed up. And it's a problem that only gets worse as more power is concentrated in the financial sector.
This is exactly it. To my mind it's the last retreat of the Empire, inwards and inwards. The idea of having a country operating on a fundamentally equitable basis is just not acceptable to these people. So the UK gets set up almost as a set of internal colonies run from Westminster.
> We used to make things.
We still do - with a lot fewer people. Manufacturing is still big economically, it's just a high-value-add industry that employs a smaller number of white collar workers and robots. It also has terrible press coverage because it's not in London, and the papers are unwilling to dispatch foreign correspondents to the Midlands to find it.
Our current political leadership do seem to have a very odd view of the world sometimes, possibly due to most of them (a) being rich and (b) never having worked a normal job outside the politics/media/finance bubble.
It's very frustrating that they seem to have gone into this whole business with such an adversarial stance, particularly when even now they don't really seem to have a clear, consistent vision for what they are trying to achieve. To be fair, several of the key figures on the EU side haven't been any better.
Wasn't that exactly what Cameron negotiated before the referendum.
Firstly, just looking at the negotiated opt-out of the ever closer union principle, how legally binding those negotiations were was never resolved. There appeared to be some doubt about whether they would get past the European Parliament, and the Brexit referendum happened before any definitive position could be established.
Secondly, even if they were binding in theory, how would that have worked in practice? For example, 26 out of 28 EU member states are either in the Eurozone already or in principle required to join in the future. Is it really credible that so many member states would always remain honest and neutral on any policy that might disadvantage the Eurozone just to be fair to those with opt-outs (the UK and Denmark)? Similar arguments apply in other respects, the Schengen Area being maybe the next most obvious case.
Thirdly, that issue was distinct from membership of other EU-based mechanisms such as the Single Market and the Customs Union. The latter in particular seemed to be a big concern for the people I mentioned, not just because it precludes negotiating future trade agreements independently as widely discussed in Brexit-related forums, but also simply because while it makes trade within the EU nice and easy, it also makes trade with partners outside the EU a lot harder, because all members are required to impose the EU's standard barriers and tariffs on external trade.
Obviously whether or not you think ever closer union within the EU is a good thing is a personal/political view and reasonable people can reach different conclusions, but if you had thought it through and concluded that it wasn't, I don't think Cameron's negotiations would have done much to affect your logic or your final decision on that point.
I always thought that talk of ever closer union was scaremongering just like the threat of an invasion of people from Turkey. Possible in theory but the reality is somewhat different.
Trade outside of the EU isn't impossible, Germany sells three times as much to China as we do. If we were really worried about that we would have done something about it years ago. The reality is even in the modern globalised world most of your external trade is going to be with near neighbours.
Personally I think closer union is a good thing in principle but the fly in the ointment is our lack of fiscal discipline. If we had been in the Euro we would probably have suffered as much as Greece has. Even if the vote had gone for remain there was almost zero possibility of us joining the Euro.
This isn't to say the EU is perfect, there is plenty of room for improvement, I just think on balance we were better in than out and there are severe risks if the whole thing collapses.
The Euro sort of makes EU a pretty permanent thing. Sure it could change (probably very slowly), but isn't that what democracy is about :)
That's the theory, but it's really not true at all in practice.
For one thing, UK MPs are directly elected. If they don't represent their constituents satisfactorily, the constituents can vote them out, personally, next time. In contrast, UK MEPs are elected via a party list system. If they don't represent their constituents satisfactorily, the only way to get rid of the top person on a party's list is for that party not to get enough votes for even a single representative in that region. The personal accountability is lost under this system.
For another thing, UK MPs do tend to communicate meaningfully with their constituents. I have written to my MP on occasion and invariably received at least a sensible reply (and this has been true for several different MPs, not all in the same party). I have visited my MP in person at their surgery and had a face-to-face discussion where I could see they were understanding the issue I was raising. In striking contrast, on the occasions when I have written to my MEPs, I have not received so much as a courtesy acknowledgement from around half, and usually only one or two have replied with any real substance. I have literally never heard (unsolicted) from any MEP representing me other than at election time, I am not aware of any means to meet them face-to-face to discuss an issue, and most of the time I don't even know their names or which parties they represent.
Whatever the pros and cons of the EU in general, the democratic deficit is a legitimate and well-founded criticism.
Personally I think it's more democratic for the government to reflect the will of the people than a local representative to represent the largest minority in an area.
Clearly FPTP is a failure as far as fair representation is concerned. That's not even a subject for intelligent debate, just a mathematical fact. However, it's a different instance of democratic deficit, not the one that people were voting on in this particular case.
EU Parliament doesn't make policy. Therefore the parties have no manifestos worth a damn. You can't "vote for the other guys" if you care about copyright because none of them have any real influence over the Commission which is where all the power truly lies.
If copyright is your main concern, you should look at the Green Party. Julia Reda, linked in this article, is a tireless advocate against copyright overreach.
No, it's not. It's not even a feature of a number of Western representative democracies. (The UK has notably begun in recent years making some steps in the direction of a separation of powers system, but has long been described as having a fusion of powers system.)
In theory, separation of powers puts a brake (but not an absolute barrier) on attempts to convert what is nominally a representative democracy to an autocracy by way of a self-coup by the unitary elected leadership, but it does so directly by making democratic accountability more complex for electors.
Step 1: Make election promise
Step 2: Fail to deliver.
With regard to accountability, the process goes something like:
Step 1: implement unpopular policy
Step 2: lose next election. Don’t go to jail, or otherwise be held accountable. Receive fat government pension.
Step 3: new government doesn’t undo unpopular policy implementation, but blames former government anyway.
There's also been some recent controversy about Juncker's method of assigning one of his close allies as secretary-general of the commission.