UK & EU Agree Post-Brexit Trade Deal

[jfman]

Makes the count interesting for the states that will count on the day ballots first.

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by Hugh

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/1...-states-431363

Polls mean nothing.

That has been proven several times over the last 5 years.

Could still go either way.

[jfman]

Originally Posted by Pierre

Polls mean nothing.

That has been proven several times over the last 5 years.

Could still go either way.

Popular myth.

https://ig.ft.com/sites/brexit-polling/

Plenty of polls on Brexit had leave winning, and almost all within the statistical margin of error from April onwards.

Exit polling can also be very good - so much people will bet hundreds of millions on it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...beat-the-crash

[Pierre]

Not really a “Myth“

From the link you provided. 173 polls for remain and 113 for leave.

Still over, the poll of polls, Of near 300 polls, Remain was still near 40% ahead.

So, I think, it is still safe to say, they cannot be trusted........unless you think 40% is a close call?

[jfman]

You might have a point if opinion was fixed. However it isn't - that's the point of political campaigning.

There's no real reason to suspect that - of the near 300 polls - those further back weren't genuine representations (subject to margin of error) of public opinion at that point in time.

I'm not sure how you arrive at the 40% figure or what relevance it has. No polls show it 70-30 that I can see on the chart. However you are aggregating the figures without weighting them merely increases the margin of error.

The polling around Brexit is clearly a success as it goes down the final stretch - both outcomes winning and losing within the margin of error. A perfect representation of a 52-48 result.

Originally Posted by Pierre

Polls mean nothing.

That has been proven several times over the last 5 years.

Could still go either way.

They weren’t polls, they were early votes cast.

But Democrats have dominated voting by mail and on Thursday held a historic lead in total pre-Election Day ballots cast of 463,000, or 10 percentage points, according to the state’s Division of Elections

https://electproject.github.io/Early...20G/index.html

Anyhoo, this stuff belongs in the US Election thread - back on topic, please.

[jfman]

You started it!

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by jfman

You started it!

Only the US stuff, you can still reply as to why you think a 40% lead in polls saying Remain would win, somehow negates the argument that polls are unreliable?

[jfman]

Originally Posted by Pierre

Only the US stuff, you can still reply as to why you think a 40% lead in polls saying Remain would win, somehow negates the argument that polls are unreliable?

Post 4370 addressed this.

[1andrew1]

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

We already trade with the US on WTO terms. I can't see the big deal here for us plus, as others have said, getting one is not likely to be quicke unless we cave.

Remember also that Boris has a cabinet, MPs and a party to convince, never mind the country.

I've no idea whether or not Boris is being wisely advised, but the country will be very angry if the EU talks fail because of Boris wants to know the US election result first. I'd forecast that his position would become rapidly untenable.

I believe we are at the point now where only demonstrable EU intransigence can lead to an "acceptable" failure of talks.

There are several bolt-on deals to WTO terms that the UK currently enjoys with the USA courtesy of its former EU membership and latterly the Withdrawal Agreement. We will lose these next year as matters currently stand.
The main trade barriers with the US tend to be non-tariff eg not being allowed to own majority stakes in US airlines, port facilities etc.
BoJo needs a deal with the EU and I'll sure he'll get one of sorts.

[Mr K]

Interesting comment piece in the Torygraph today. The paper is going cool on Brexit. Reality strikes. (Why can i still read it all for free ? Very entertaining mind ... )
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business...itains-future/

Business people tend to be natural optimists and pragmatists. Where there is a problem, the job is to fix it, move on and seize the opportunities that lie ahead. Yet even the most positively minded of bosses are struggling to maintain that mindset against the backdrop of today’s multi-faceted array of challenges.

Rarely if ever have I seen them quite as gloomy and downbeat.

At the very moment that as a nation we have chosen to cast aside the moorings of the European Union and head for the high seas of the world beyond, we face a perfect storm of negatives, with virtually everything that could go wrong having already done so or threatening to at any moment.

Business representatives on a conference call with Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Michael Gove, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, last week were invited to get ready for the opportunities of Brexit, which Mr Gove compared to the process of moving house to one with a different view.

It’s all very well, one attendee told me, if you are trading up from the old vicarage to the manor house, but when its a grotty little bungalow built some distance off on a floodplain, moving house doesn’t look quite so appealing.

Neither Government representative could say what those opportunities are supposed to be, for other than making trade with our nearest neighbours more difficult, Brexit has for the moment changed very little else.

Rather than become more business friendly, the economic and commercial environment is to the contrary getting ever more hostile - debt is now higher than GDP, for instance.

This trend was of course observable even before Covid came along. With its new “Red Wall” constituencies to answer to, the Government seemed already to be shifting decidedly Leftwards. That shift has been turbo-charged by the pandemic, putting a rocket under the idea that the state will always provide.

One of the most powerful arguments for Brexit was that the UK economy, after years of lacklustre performance and stagnant living standards, needs the shock therapy of departure from the EU to restructure and rebalance for the 21st century.

There has been very little appreciation in Europe of the sort of economic dynamism we are seeing in other parts of the world; to properly plug into it, and rejuvenate the economy accordingly, we needed to cast off.

It’s no-one’s fault in particular, but unfortunately we could scarcely have chosen a worse moment for doing so. At a time when as a nation we need to be reducing the tax and regulatory burden, and finally ridding ourselves of the debilitating dependency culture of recent decades, Covid has conspired to put us on an entirely different path, with much of the economy now seemingly dependent on state handouts.

It’s all just temporary, insists Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, but with the best will in the world, it’s going to be hard to reverse, even if, by some miracle, vaccines and treatments largely bring the infection to heel by the middle of next year.

£62bn has been paid out through the Government’s main coronavirus lending programmes

Once an economy has got used to income support, it becomes virtually impossible to take it away again without making matters worse still.

British exceptionalism, you would think, might allow us to adopt a rather different approach to the disease than that of our European neighbours, but there seems little chance of that. The UK Government is already too heavily invested in lockdown strategies to easily change course, and after last week’s shenanigans, has only doubled down afresh.

The collective psychology of the nation is, I fear, going in exactly the wrong direction to meet challenges as big as those of Brexit, or to exploit its supposed “opportunities”. The great irony is that despite our imminent divorce, we look more like France every day. Singapore on Thames, Tyne, Mersey or wherever, is most assuredly not the direction of travel.

Meanwhile, virtually all the alternative markets that we once had high hopes for are becoming more difficult and less appetising.

Our biggest and nearest opportunity, the Gulf, is struggling under the impact of low oil prices and a seminal shift away from hydrocarbons.

Covid no doubt had something to do with it, but as if to prove the point that the region is no longer as interested as it was in closer ties, Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, has casually cancelled without explanation scheduled meetings with both the UK Foreign Secretary and Defence Secretary.

Elsewhere, a Biden victory in US presidential elections threatens to make a meaningful US trade deal very much more difficult than it perhaps would be under Trump, who as we know has a soft spot for Brexit Britain and seemed willing to cut some slack in reaching a satisfactory arrangement.

Putting a brave face on matters, the Department for International Trade denies this. In recent months, there has been a big push to court both the Biden camp and key Democrats in Congress.

But whereas logically there shouldn’t be any difference between Biden and Trump in so far as a UK trade deal goes, in practice, you kind of know there would be.

Biden’s appetite for one is demonstrably smaller than Trump’s. He’s also said there can be no question of a deal if the Withdrawal Agreement is breached in a manner that threatens the Good Friday Agreement.

One potential positive here not often mentioned is that Biden would be more inclined than Trump to throw his lot in with the Trans Pacific Partnership, a free trade area of Pacific nations established as a foil to growing Chinese domination of the region’s trade.

Britain too has ambitions to join the TPP. If both nations joined, it might provide a somewhat easier way of achieving freer trade with each other than a straight bilateral deal, with all its accompanying controversies over food standards and animal welfare. But all this is somewhat clutching at straws.

As for China itself, a potentially vast internal market and the only major economy in the world to have returned to decent levels of growth, could there ever have been less appropriate time to declare the place persona non grata?

China’s output recovery has continued at a strong pace

The speed with which Britain’s approach to China has changed, transitioning from a supposed “golden era” of relations to one of standoff hostility and condemnation in little more than a year, has been quite astonishing.

Whatever its rights and wrongs, the timing could scarcely have been more unfortunate.

Nobody could have foreseen today’s terrifying confluence of negatives, or indeed how spectacularly badly it would be handled.

But it is small wonder business leaders are in a state of such high alarm. On multiple fronts, we are taking huge risks with our future. In so doing, we disobey one of the first rules of battle; never fight on more than one front at a time.

I’m reminded of Edward Lear’s poem, The Jumblies. “They went to sea in a sieve they did, in a sieve they went to sea, in spite of all their friends could say, on a winter’s morn, on a stormy day, in a sieve they went to sea!”

[jfman]

Did he just declare herd immunity the siamese twin of a successful no-deal Brexit?

British exceptionalism, you would think, might allow us to adopt a rather different approach to the disease than that of our European neighbours, but there seems little chance of that. The UK Government is already too heavily invested in lockdown strategies to easily change course, and after last week’s shenanigans, has only doubled down afresh.

See I don't think British exceptionalism would give us any chance of success. Because we are truly not exceptional.

[1andrew1]

Originally Posted by Mr K

Interesting comment piece in the Torygraph today. The paper is going cool on Brexit. Reality strikes. (Why can i still read it all for free ? Very entertaining mind ... )
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business...itains-future/

Well done on posting that article, Mr K. I rather thought you'd be beaten to by one of the forum's many subscribing Daily Telegraph readers but you beat them to it!

Interesting to see the assessment of the TPP as "clutching at straws". Exactly the phrase that wiser forum members here would have used to describe it.

---------- Post added at 22:25 ---------- Previous post was at 22:14 ----------

Originally Posted by jfman

See I don't think British exceptionalism would give us any chance of success. Because we are truly not exceptional.

Our made-in-Poland blue passports will keep the virus at bay, we've not got enough in circulation yet to provide herd immunity but the Poles are working on it.

[1andrew1]

Another sector - this time aerospace - pleads for the government to pull its finger out on a deal to help protect the 375,000 well paid jobs in the UK.

Ministers’ failure to prioritise agreement on aircraft certification standards in Brexit negotiations is threatening the future of the UK’s £34bn-a-year aerospace sector, according to the head of an industry trade body.

“We are now at that critical point where political decisions on the negotiating priorities with Europe need to be made,” said Tony Wood, president of British trade association ADS and chief executive of aerospace supplier Meggitt.

Aerospace executives are frustrated that the government has focused on fishing rights in Brexit negotiations, hindering a wider trade agreement that would help protect the industry’s more than £30bn in exports.

Mr Wood said there appeared to be “higher political priorities in other industries”.

Currently, responsibility for certification lies with the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, which has mutual recognition agreements with regulators around the world. If there is no deal, however, all UK-designed parts, components and systems for aircraft will become invalid in the EU on January 1...

Big companies such as Rolls-Royce have already shifted design functions out of the UK to the EU to avoid the extra cost. But smaller companies in the supply chain do not have the resources to set up EU-based design offices.

https://www.ft.com/content/4e0d5c6d-...0-d0fe904a36a6