> Unions from both sides of the Atlantic accuse Boris Johnson’s government of failing to grasp importance of labour rights
They may be wrong. Presumably, they do understand the importance of workers’ rights, which is why they will do their best to ignore them while negotiating these hypothetical deals.
It was part of the Brexit promise, no? As a general rule, leaving the EU to “set our own rules” only makes sense if you’re going to set those rules *lower* because EU rules are almost always minimum standards (i.e. you can always have higher standards as a member). Presumably, the objective of a sizeable chunk of the Conservative party is fiscal, environmental and *social* deregulation, and the potential blow back from their own supporters the only thing holding them back. Hence, it makes perfect sense to use trade deals to de facto lower regulations and then argue that you need to “level the playing field” (downward) for British firms to compete.
Note that even on economic terms, ignoring the social facet, a deregulation strategy is unlikely to work. If you lower standards, you won’t be able to export to the EU regardless of how much lower your costs and wages are, and at the same time you can never lower standards enough to be able to compete on price with the likes of India, China or even the USA without risking severe public discontent. The most likely outcome is still that the UK will remain to operate on comparatively high standards, if different ones from its major export partners, causing a structural drain on trade efficiency for no real reason. The only exception may be deregulation of the financial industry, where the UK may try to compensate from the loss of EU trade by going all in on accommodating foreign actors who want to evade tax and scrutiny on their wealth. That too has, of course, negative political, economic and diplomatic consequences.
I was going to say: the irony of the US lecturing the UK about labour rights…
Then remembered yeah we’ve been going down that hole for at least 50 years now. Is it too late to get a Scottish passport? 🤣
😂 good luck with that you lawbreaking infantile turds:
We can’t do a trade deal with the US. It would cost us our precious sovereignty.
As a foreign observer (Canada) I think a big problem with Brexit was the lack of consensus building pre-referendum. Ideally a plan should have been formulated by the government between the leave-remain factions before a referendum was even held to make the transition in the event of Brexit as smooth and as painless as possible.
The problem was basically that Cameron believed that he could just use referendums to politically neuter his opponents (the Scottish independence referendum and Brexit) without much of a danger of actually losing them, but when Brexit passed and he lost his government, he basically set the country up for years (if not decades) of political and economic turmoil because there was still no clear consensus on what exactly Brexit was or how to carry in out.
Even with Brexit happening, a clear evidence driven plan would reduce economic uncertainty and make a return to socio-economic normalcy much easier to achieve.
It depends a lot more on the UK fucking up the Good Friday Agreement and Northern Ireland.
6 comments
> Unions from both sides of the Atlantic accuse Boris Johnson’s government of failing to grasp importance of labour rights
They may be wrong. Presumably, they do understand the importance of workers’ rights, which is why they will do their best to ignore them while negotiating these hypothetical deals.
It was part of the Brexit promise, no? As a general rule, leaving the EU to “set our own rules” only makes sense if you’re going to set those rules *lower* because EU rules are almost always minimum standards (i.e. you can always have higher standards as a member). Presumably, the objective of a sizeable chunk of the Conservative party is fiscal, environmental and *social* deregulation, and the potential blow back from their own supporters the only thing holding them back. Hence, it makes perfect sense to use trade deals to de facto lower regulations and then argue that you need to “level the playing field” (downward) for British firms to compete.
Note that even on economic terms, ignoring the social facet, a deregulation strategy is unlikely to work. If you lower standards, you won’t be able to export to the EU regardless of how much lower your costs and wages are, and at the same time you can never lower standards enough to be able to compete on price with the likes of India, China or even the USA without risking severe public discontent. The most likely outcome is still that the UK will remain to operate on comparatively high standards, if different ones from its major export partners, causing a structural drain on trade efficiency for no real reason. The only exception may be deregulation of the financial industry, where the UK may try to compensate from the loss of EU trade by going all in on accommodating foreign actors who want to evade tax and scrutiny on their wealth. That too has, of course, negative political, economic and diplomatic consequences.
I was going to say: the irony of the US lecturing the UK about labour rights…
Then remembered yeah we’ve been going down that hole for at least 50 years now. Is it too late to get a Scottish passport? 🤣
😂 good luck with that you lawbreaking infantile turds:
https://www.ft.com/content/58a94b1d-d1f5-4e97-9c51-a83b5bd2b050
We can’t do a trade deal with the US. It would cost us our precious sovereignty.
As a foreign observer (Canada) I think a big problem with Brexit was the lack of consensus building pre-referendum. Ideally a plan should have been formulated by the government between the leave-remain factions before a referendum was even held to make the transition in the event of Brexit as smooth and as painless as possible.
The problem was basically that Cameron believed that he could just use referendums to politically neuter his opponents (the Scottish independence referendum and Brexit) without much of a danger of actually losing them, but when Brexit passed and he lost his government, he basically set the country up for years (if not decades) of political and economic turmoil because there was still no clear consensus on what exactly Brexit was or how to carry in out.
Even with Brexit happening, a clear evidence driven plan would reduce economic uncertainty and make a return to socio-economic normalcy much easier to achieve.
It depends a lot more on the UK fucking up the Good Friday Agreement and Northern Ireland.