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  • Originally posted by snapper View Post
    UK exports to the EU January 2020/2021 % change.
    Handy "simple" interpretation found in a German article:

    For foodstuff in general exports from the UK to the EU have fallen to 2004 levels - overall downturn is -63.8% on that.

    Import to the UK is still at 2013 levels, but is expected to go to the same levels as export around October once the UK actually starts border checks on those imports (which the EU does, the other way around).




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    • If I'm reading this right, the entire change amounts to less than a £bil. Hardly life and death struggle for a G7 country. However, this will be a big struggle for a lot of farmers and factories.
      Last edited by Officer of Engineers; 28 Mar 21,, 21:59.
      Chimo

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      • Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
        If I'm reading this right, the entire change amounts to less than a £bil.
        That's just food items.

        Overall trade lost:
        • export to the EU : -5.6 billion pounds (-21.6%)
        • imports from the EU : -6.6 billion pounds (-28.8%)
        Half of all global imports to the UK come from the UK, 36% of British exports go to the EU.

        However, one has to account for the fact that considerable quantities of trade were also handled through EU territory with other countries, and is impacted by new British trade barriers:
        • imports to the UK from non-EU countries : -2.4 billion pounds (-12.7%)
        • exports from the UK to non-EU countries : +0.3 billion pounds (+1.7%)
        The trade deficit of the UK effectively doubled, while the overall economy of the UK contracted by -2.9%.

        https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/natio...de/january2021

        Comment


        • You might want to rephrase this (unless it is re-exports)
          “Half of all global imports to the UK come from the UK,”
          Trust me?
          I'm an economist!

          Comment


          • Originally posted by kato View Post
            That's just food items.

            Overall trade lost:
            • export to the EU : -5.6 billion pounds (-21.6%)
            • imports from the EU : -6.6 billion pounds (-28.8%)
            Half of all global imports to the UK come from the UK, 36% of British exports go to the EU.

            However, one has to account for the fact that considerable quantities of trade were also handled through EU territory with other countries, and is impacted by new British trade barriers:
            • imports to the UK from non-EU countries : -2.4 billion pounds (-12.7%)
            • exports from the UK to non-EU countries : +0.3 billion pounds (+1.7%)
            The trade deficit of the UK effectively doubled, while the overall economy of the UK contracted by -2.9%.

            https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/natio...de/january2021
            How much of this would be the impact of the pandemic?

            EDIT: They have disclaimers in the article you have quoted:

            Trade has not been typical in recent months (no shit!) and, because of the practical challenges and temporary factors outlined in Section 3, we would encourage users to apply caution when making short-term comparisons of trade movements.
            And they have provided pandemic related and other caveats at the end

            ...
            In addition to the changes facing the UK after the transition period ended, the UK went into another national lockdown at the beginning of January 2021.
            ...

            External evidence suggests some of the slower trade for goods in early January 2021 could be attributable to disruption caused by the end of the transition period. In addition, we also need to consider the stronger November and December stockpiling trade figures associated with some commodities and therefore may expect to see an unwinding of stocks from these previous months.
            ...

            Despite the slow start for trade in January 2021, data from the Business insights and impact on the UK economy suggests that importing and exporting began to increase towards the end of January. The proportion of businesses reporting that they were unable to export decreased by 5.4 percentage points between the reporting periods 11 January to 24 January and 25 January to 2 February. Similarly, the proportion of businesses reporting they were unable to import decreased by 3.0 percentage points between the same reporting periods.
            It is too early to say what the actual medium-long term impact of this is going to be. Especially not till the global economy has recovered from the pandemic.
            Last edited by Firestorm; 31 Mar 21,, 03:54.

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            • France and the UK are currently in a standoff around the island of Jersey in the Channel Islands crown dependency.

              The Jersey government, by virtue of not considering themselves British, last friday refused 80% of some 340 applications from French fishermen for trawling around Jersey. French fishermen have decided to assemble a flotilla of about 60 ships (50 by French sources, 80 by British) that sailed into Jersey's harbour today as a civil protest. Minor altercations occured, some flares fired and a freight ship blocked in and so on. Apparently one French and Jerseyite fishing vessel also rammed each other.

              The UK of course couldn't have those foreigners invading (and yes, it's called an invasion in perfidious Albion), and sent in the Navy. The two River class OPVs Tamar and Severn were deployed to intercept the flotilla. The French Navy has responded by deploying the armed Maritime Gendarmerie vessel Athos and the unarmed fast patrol vessel Themis to ensure the safety of its citizens and is "accompanying" the flotilla.

              As of right now, the Jersey government has begun negotiating with the protesters. The Royal Navy ships are sitting at the western edge of the island, the French Navy ships a few miles off the east edge, and the fishing flotilla is in the middle right by the port. According to AIS data three further French patrol vessels are sitting ready underway at sea in positions from where they could interfere within two hours, including one of the Flamant OPVs at Cherbourg.

              The European Commission has officially declared to the UK that the Jersey action violates the terms of the post-Brexit EU/UK Trade Deal, and is otherwise calling for calm and restraint. Some French officials have threatened to cut electricity supply to Jersey as a possible retaliatory action in line with the treaty - the island receives 95% of its electricity from France - while fishermen have called for a full blockade of Jersey.

              Comment


              • ‘We’re All Worse Off’
                Britain is now paying the price for its decision to leave the European Union.



                If you walked into a British supermarket this past winter, you were likely to see bare shelves in the salad aisle. Customers might have been limited in purchasing lettuce and tomatoes, if there was any lettuce or tomato to be found in the first place. Ask the grocers, and you’d hear technical explanations for the scarcity. High energy prices raised costs at British greenhouses; imports from warmer countries were curtailed by bad weather in Southern Europe. Behind all of these situational explanations, however, loomed a larger problem.

                From the time a tomato is harvested, every minute counts en route to the purchaser’s table. In March, the BBC reported that Britain’s departure from the European Union has added 10 to 20 minutes of additional paperwork to every truckload of tomatoes shipped from Spain—longer if the truckload mixes different produce varieties. Ten to 20 minutes may not sound like much. But multiply that burden by thousands of trucks, squeeze the trucks through the bottleneck of the single underwater tunnel that connects Britain to freight traffic from Europe, and costs and delays accumulate. The result: winter tomato gluts on the continent, winter tomato shortages in the United Kingdom.

                The temporary disappearance of some fresh fruits and vegetables for a few weeks in winter may be only a nuisance. Yet such nuisances are ramifying throughout the British economy, signals and symptoms of larger, system-wide trouble. British consumers are spending less on new clothes and shoes than they did in 2018 and 2019. The British are holding on to their cars longer: The average age of the vehicles on British roads has reached 8.7 years, a record. The British made about 2 million fewer trips abroad in 2022 than they did in 2018 and 2019, an almost 20 percent decline. Lingering COVID concerns offer a partial explanation. But the UK and most of its European Union neighbors had dropped most travel restrictions in January 2022 and the remainder by March.

                Altogether, Britain is expected to be the worst performing of the world’s 20 biggest economies this year. The British government’s official forecaster predicts that after-inflation household incomes will decline by an average of 7.1 percent over the three years ending in spring 2024. On the present trajectory, Britain will not return to 2019 levels of disposable income until 2027. By 2024, the average British household will likely have a lower living standard than the average household in Slovenia. On present trends, the average British household will be poorer than the average in Poland by 2030.

                The pandemic has not helped, but the slowdown of the British economy cannot be explained by COVID. Italy has suffered more deaths from COVID than any other major European country has, yet its economy had mostly recovered to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2021.

                Britain is now paying the price for its decision to leave the European Union. Britain voted to exit in the summer of 2016. The departure was formalized on December 31, 2020. Since then, new barriers to trade, investment, and movement have risen between Britain and its nearest neighbors. Investment in Britain has tumbled, and the British economy has shrunk. By one authoritative estimate, Britain is 4 percent poorer today than if it had stayed in the EU.

                Many in the British government are reluctant to acknowledge this reality. Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist, lamented in a recent podcast interview, “What we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we’re all worse off.”

                These costs don’t necessarily make Brexit a “mistake.” Brexit was a trade: less prosperity for more sovereignty. Countries reasonably make such trades all the time. My native Canada would dramatically increase its prosperity if it abandoned its sovereignty and merged with the United States. By their continued independence, Canadians implicitly choose otherwise, and nobody criticizes them for “Canxit.” They know the cost, and they accept the cost as worth it.

                But the British were not honestly alerted to the cost of their choice. In 2016, future Prime Minister Boris Johnson campaigned for Brexit in a big red bus carrying a huge printed message: we send the eu £350 million a week. let’s fund our nhs instead.

                The British were promised that Brexit meant more: more resources for public and private consumption. Instead, Brexit has predictably turned out to mean less, and the British are surprised, baffled, and angry.

                The British health service is now threatened with waves of strikes by nurses and junior doctors. With the country’s finances in a post-pandemic, post-Brexit mess, the British government has squeezed the pay of health-care providers. Between 2010 and 2022, nurses have suffered a nearly 10 percent decline in their pay after adjusting for inflation; junior doctors have lost much more, according to some estimates. Many have emigrated: One in seven U.K.-trained doctors now works abroad, according to a Financial Times analysis.

                Britain is compensating by importing health-care providers from Africa and Asia. Yet this contradicts another central promise of Brexit: less immigration. British immigration numbers are very tangled, partly because Brexit has induced large numbers of EU citizens living in Britain to seek British citizenship. These status changes register in the statistics even if the actual human beings have not moved at all. Still, as best as one can tell, migration into Britain has genuinely accelerated since the end of 2020, driven by asylum seekers from outside Europe and from Ukraine.

                The British will vote in a national election probably sometime in 2024. You would think this coming election would be the appropriate time to assess the country’s choices and consider whether to choose a different path. You’d think wrong.

                Brexit rearranged British politics in surprising ways. Brexit was backed by the Tory right and the Labour left. The Leave vote was highest in the Labour strongholds of the Midlands and northeastern England; Remain was strong in the affluent areas of London and the Tory south of England. The far left of the Labour party had always disliked the European Union as an impediment to schemes to protect and subsidize British industry from foreign competition. Jeremy Corbyn, then the Labour leader, declined to join then-Prime Minister David Cameron on the Remain side. Indeed, Corbyn has been described by one of his closest political allies as a Brexiteer “in his heart of hearts.”

                Corbyn resigned in 2020. His successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer, campaigned against Brexit in 2016. To win the next election, however, Starmer must recover northern English seats lost to the Conservatives in 2019. And so, even as polls show that a big majority of British voters now regard Brexit as a mistake, Starmer has pledged not to reverse course.

                In a major speech in July 2022, Starmer dismissed criticism of Brexit as “arguments of the past.” He embraced the old Brexit slogan “Take back control” and vowed, “So let me be very clear: With Labour, Britain will not go back into the EU. We will not be joining the single market. We will not be joining a customs union.”

                But if Britain can’t vote for a new approach to Europe, how does it meet the costs imposed by its present approach to Europe?

                The short answer to that is more of the denial that Pill denounced.

                In economic terms, Brexit means that British people must work harder and consume less. But Starmer’s 10-point manifesto for 2024 promises more consumption: more spending on health and public services. That would be a difficult-enough promise for today’s Brexit-hobbled British economy. Starmer undertakes to make the future British economy even less efficient than today’s, by joining more spending to more government management of key industries, specifically railways, energy, and public utilities.

                Britain is a society of tremendous capabilities: deep political stability and rule of law, a highly educated and skilled population, a world-spanning language, the planet’s most recognized and admired cultural institutions. The whole world will watch the coronation of King Charles III as carried by the BBC, as styled by British designers, as celebrated by British musicians—and as mocked by British comedians. But developing those assets means accurately assessing Britain’s liabilities, and fearlessly developing plans to overcome them. That assessing and planning will require honest communication with Britain’s voters.

                The next government of Britain will likely be a Labour government led by Keir Starmer. It fell to Starmer’s greatest Labour predecessor, Clement Attlee, to explain to the British people where they stood after the Second World War. Addressed as public-spirited adults, the British people met the challenge, shouldered the burden, and built new prosperity. They can do it again—if led in the same forthright way.
                ________
                “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                Comment


                • They are screwed...

                  Comment


                  • Originally posted by tbm3fan View Post
                    They are screwed...
                    Britain is certainly the poorest Economy in PIIGGS economies. at lease GB would be kicked out from EU..........
                    Originally posted by tbm3fan View Post
                    February 23, 2023

                    PIIGS, the acronym coined by the Anglo-Saxon economic press since 2007, indicated the five European Union’s Member States deemed to be the weakest ones economically, namely Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. Due to precarious public accounts, poor competitiveness of national economies and high unemployment levels, PIIGS were struggling to repay their high sovereign debts and consequently risked exiting the Eurozone and contributing to deepening the international economic crisis that began in 2008. First of all, it is strange to see from where the sermon came: concern was raised about a crisis in the European Union, feared by the very people that exacerbated it with Brexit.

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