No, the UK economy is not 4% smaller, the run rate GDP per capita growth is ***forecast*** to be 4% less in 15 years.
That’s a change in runrate from 0.29% annually to 0.27%
It’s fuck all, yet morons keep bleating about it like it’s the end of the world, fuck off already, if you have to compound something for 15 years to get a 4% effect, the effect is fuck all.
Brexit was a lose-lose situation for both UK and EU. It was only russia that took advantages from a new fracture in the western world. BTW…what is Nigel Farage doing lately? He was very instrumental into the Brexit.
No one could have predicted this surely
..will the people in power and the ones that obviously lied about the results of brexit be chwrged for anything? or are we all just deciding that its okay to lie to a whole population to further your own best interests while everyone else suffered?
I have the feeling that we get a new article on Brexit/UK here every day. Sometimes it runs better than expected, sometimes it runs worse than expected. But in the end these articles are almost all the same and without new content/information…
Lol, I came across this risible article earlier today. What a surprise to find it on this sub…
Let me start by saying that I actually quite like David Frum (the author), so it’s painful to have to point out what a godawful piece of shite journalism this is. The whole thing is just littered with outright falsehoods, out of context statistics and weird mistakes. I’ll point out a few.
> If you walked into a British supermarket this past winter, you were likely to see bare shelves in the salad aisle.
Much like the ‘petrol’ shortage in 2021 this lasted a few days in most places and was limited to a couple of items (notably bell peppers and tomatoes). Harumph. But yeah, let’s have a Canadian living in the US tell us about how bare the shelves were.
> Customers might have been limited in purchasing lettuce and tomatoes, if there was any lettuce or tomato to be found in the first place.
Nobody I know ever encountered the rationing suggested here.
> 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.
Aside from the fact that there was never a ‘glut’ of tomatoes in the continent, or the fact that both Ireland and the Netherlands also experienced a shortage of tomatoes and some other veg; the touted ’20 minute border processing’ is utterly irrelevant in the context of the UK’s supply chains which stretch to Spain and Morocco. This had absolutely nothing to do with the shortage, as industry experts routinely pointed out at the time. Shockingly poor journalism.
> British consumers are spending less on new clothes and shoes than they did in 2018 and 2019.
No, they aren’t. In GBP terms British consumers are spending significantly more (in total) on new clothing and footwear, but in volume terms they are buying *slightly* less. This is an abuse of terminology and guess what, I can point to loads of other European countries where less *volumes* of stuff (food, clothing, televisions, furniture, etc…) are being bought than in 2019, but more money is being spent on these things. That’s generally what happens during an inflation/cost of living crisis.
> 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.
Car production (in the UK, Germany and everywhere else) has been falling since 2018 and cratered during 2020. Significantly less cars were made in 2020, 2021 and 2022 than in previous years, hence *everyone* is holding on to their cars for longer – including Americans… clearly Mr Frum didn’t bother to note this rather basic and obvious global development. Additionally, there are other reasons why consumers are replacing their cars less often (people holding off as they wait for electric vehicles to become cheaper).
> 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.
Again, North American ignorance of European affairs on full display. Aside from the fact that many people were still quite risk averse re: Covid in the first half of 2022 and therefore reluctant to travel, there were definitely still travel restrictions in some European countries at that stage (even if the UK had relaxed its own). I remember taking relatively empty flights to Austria in January and March because travelling was still a headache at the time… Nevermind that people who weren’t vaccinated were essentially banned from going abroad.
We don’t actually have the statistics of how overseas travel fared in other countries in 2022 compared with the pre-pandemic level, but I’ll note that in [2021](https://www.statista.com/statistics/214774/number-of-outbound-tourists-from-the-us/) Americans were taking 60% fewer trips abroad and I highly doubt that it fully recovered last year…
I can’t access the rest of the article because it’s behind a paywall (OP there are rules about this sort of thing…), but I managed to view this garbage in its entirety earlier, though I’m not sure how. There are other egregious bits of misinformation.
He brings up the infamous (and completely misunderstood) “We’re all worse off” quote from Bank of England member Huw Pill, taking it entirely out of context and utterly failing to realise that the central banker was referring to a terms of trade shock and a real income squeeze – that real income squeeze is happening all over Europe, and indeed even Americans and Canadians (which have not suffered the same energy price crisis as those of us in Europe) have also seen their real incomes fall over the past three years. The phrase “we’re all worse off” as Huw Pill used it, can be applied in exactly the same way to Germany, to Italy, to basically any other country right now.
Reading this drivel one can come to no other conclusion that it’s just a shitpost designed to dump on the UK regardless of the facts – honestly surprised its not the in the NY Times.
All correct of course, but in the end irrelevant, IMO.
What nobody wants to see: the referendum and its result were entirely logical. The UK was never a willing participant in the European project. First it tried to kill the EEC. Then it gave in and joined only because the alternative looked worse – economically. The 70s referendum passed despite opposition from literally half the political establishment. And as soon as Britain’s economy looked up in the 80s, a campaign began to get out. By the 1990s Europe was routinely being blamed for everything that went wrong in the UK. I can remember that. It was incessant and everyone got stuck in. Nobody on any side of politics would dare defend “Brussels”. Ordinary people would whine about the awful imposition of burgundy passports and harmonized number plates, and it was sincere. An EU flag on a public building was just unthinkable in the UK.
Yes, evil billionaires can take some responsibility. As can the recklessly ignorant electorate.
But the fact is that none of this could have happened in any other EU country. In all the other member states there was always at least some shared belief that close European cooperation was necessary and inevitable. In the UK this belief was not just there, for the obvious reasons of history and geography. It’s still not there. The calculation is still always economic, it’s always about outputs and inputs, opt-outs, net budget balances. That’s just not how you approach a political project.
So: bad outcome, nobody gains except dictatorships that hate Europe. But this was always how it was going to end. Maybe how it had to end.
9 comments
Dude you need to chill out with those brexit posts you keep adding with commitment of a maniac. Your mental health will improve.
I don’t think James Cameron and his Eaton friends are worse off.
Absolute bollocks
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=GB-FR-DE-ES-IT-EU&start=2016
Everything in that article is wrong.
No, the UK economy is not 4% smaller, the run rate GDP per capita growth is ***forecast*** to be 4% less in 15 years.
That’s a change in runrate from 0.29% annually to 0.27%
It’s fuck all, yet morons keep bleating about it like it’s the end of the world, fuck off already, if you have to compound something for 15 years to get a 4% effect, the effect is fuck all.
Brexit was a lose-lose situation for both UK and EU. It was only russia that took advantages from a new fracture in the western world. BTW…what is Nigel Farage doing lately? He was very instrumental into the Brexit.
No one could have predicted this surely
..will the people in power and the ones that obviously lied about the results of brexit be chwrged for anything? or are we all just deciding that its okay to lie to a whole population to further your own best interests while everyone else suffered?
I have the feeling that we get a new article on Brexit/UK here every day. Sometimes it runs better than expected, sometimes it runs worse than expected. But in the end these articles are almost all the same and without new content/information…
Lol, I came across this risible article earlier today. What a surprise to find it on this sub…
Let me start by saying that I actually quite like David Frum (the author), so it’s painful to have to point out what a godawful piece of shite journalism this is. The whole thing is just littered with outright falsehoods, out of context statistics and weird mistakes. I’ll point out a few.
> If you walked into a British supermarket this past winter, you were likely to see bare shelves in the salad aisle.
Much like the ‘petrol’ shortage in 2021 this lasted a few days in most places and was limited to a couple of items (notably bell peppers and tomatoes). Harumph. But yeah, let’s have a Canadian living in the US tell us about how bare the shelves were.
> Customers might have been limited in purchasing lettuce and tomatoes, if there was any lettuce or tomato to be found in the first place.
Nobody I know ever encountered the rationing suggested here.
> 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.
Aside from the fact that there was never a ‘glut’ of tomatoes in the continent, or the fact that both Ireland and the Netherlands also experienced a shortage of tomatoes and some other veg; the touted ’20 minute border processing’ is utterly irrelevant in the context of the UK’s supply chains which stretch to Spain and Morocco. This had absolutely nothing to do with the shortage, as industry experts routinely pointed out at the time. Shockingly poor journalism.
> British consumers are spending less on new clothes and shoes than they did in 2018 and 2019.
No, they aren’t. In GBP terms British consumers are spending significantly more (in total) on new clothing and footwear, but in volume terms they are buying *slightly* less. This is an abuse of terminology and guess what, I can point to loads of other European countries where less *volumes* of stuff (food, clothing, televisions, furniture, etc…) are being bought than in 2019, but more money is being spent on these things. That’s generally what happens during an inflation/cost of living crisis.
> 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.
Car production (in the UK, Germany and everywhere else) has been falling since 2018 and cratered during 2020. Significantly less cars were made in 2020, 2021 and 2022 than in previous years, hence *everyone* is holding on to their cars for longer – including Americans… clearly Mr Frum didn’t bother to note this rather basic and obvious global development. Additionally, there are other reasons why consumers are replacing their cars less often (people holding off as they wait for electric vehicles to become cheaper).
> 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.
Again, North American ignorance of European affairs on full display. Aside from the fact that many people were still quite risk averse re: Covid in the first half of 2022 and therefore reluctant to travel, there were definitely still travel restrictions in some European countries at that stage (even if the UK had relaxed its own). I remember taking relatively empty flights to Austria in January and March because travelling was still a headache at the time… Nevermind that people who weren’t vaccinated were essentially banned from going abroad.
We don’t actually have the statistics of how overseas travel fared in other countries in 2022 compared with the pre-pandemic level, but I’ll note that in [2021](https://www.statista.com/statistics/214774/number-of-outbound-tourists-from-the-us/) Americans were taking 60% fewer trips abroad and I highly doubt that it fully recovered last year…
I can’t access the rest of the article because it’s behind a paywall (OP there are rules about this sort of thing…), but I managed to view this garbage in its entirety earlier, though I’m not sure how. There are other egregious bits of misinformation.
He brings up the infamous (and completely misunderstood) “We’re all worse off” quote from Bank of England member Huw Pill, taking it entirely out of context and utterly failing to realise that the central banker was referring to a terms of trade shock and a real income squeeze – that real income squeeze is happening all over Europe, and indeed even Americans and Canadians (which have not suffered the same energy price crisis as those of us in Europe) have also seen their real incomes fall over the past three years. The phrase “we’re all worse off” as Huw Pill used it, can be applied in exactly the same way to Germany, to Italy, to basically any other country right now.
Reading this drivel one can come to no other conclusion that it’s just a shitpost designed to dump on the UK regardless of the facts – honestly surprised its not the in the NY Times.
All correct of course, but in the end irrelevant, IMO.
What nobody wants to see: the referendum and its result were entirely logical. The UK was never a willing participant in the European project. First it tried to kill the EEC. Then it gave in and joined only because the alternative looked worse – economically. The 70s referendum passed despite opposition from literally half the political establishment. And as soon as Britain’s economy looked up in the 80s, a campaign began to get out. By the 1990s Europe was routinely being blamed for everything that went wrong in the UK. I can remember that. It was incessant and everyone got stuck in. Nobody on any side of politics would dare defend “Brussels”. Ordinary people would whine about the awful imposition of burgundy passports and harmonized number plates, and it was sincere. An EU flag on a public building was just unthinkable in the UK.
Yes, evil billionaires can take some responsibility. As can the recklessly ignorant electorate.
But the fact is that none of this could have happened in any other EU country. In all the other member states there was always at least some shared belief that close European cooperation was necessary and inevitable. In the UK this belief was not just there, for the obvious reasons of history and geography. It’s still not there. The calculation is still always economic, it’s always about outputs and inputs, opt-outs, net budget balances. That’s just not how you approach a political project.
So: bad outcome, nobody gains except dictatorships that hate Europe. But this was always how it was going to end. Maybe how it had to end.