Leave The EU and join:
UK-Asia trade deal to boost UK economy by 0.08% - BBC NewsUK-Asia trade deal to boost UK economy by 0.08%
The UK has signed a deal to join a trade pact with 11 Asia and Pacific nations, three years after it officially left the European Union.
Joining the group will boost UK exports by cutting tariffs on goods such as cheese, cars, chocolate, machinery, gin and whisky, the government said.
However, the government's own estimates show being in the bloc will only add 0.08% to the size of the UK's economy.
The trade area covers a market of around 500 million people.
The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership - or CPTPP - was established in 2018, and includes Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.
Membership of the CPTPP loosens restrictions on trade between members and reduce tariffs - a form of border tax - on goods.
The government said the agreement was the UK's "biggest trade deal since Brexit".
However, the gains for the UK from joining are expected to be modest. The UK already has free trade deals with all of the members except Brunei and Malaysia, some of which were rolled over from its previous membership of the EU.
So . . . you leave the European trade block to join an Asian trade block . . . what a bunch of friggin idiots . . . will Asians patiently listen to the whiny pro-Brexit wankers whine from day one?
Aaaaah, whe we wuz in da EU, we wuz discermi . . . diksribin . . . discrimintoated . . . . . . vey dinnt' loike us
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That Pacific deal is simply an association of corporate tax evaders joining hands with tyrannous, despotic and corrupt governments in order to chisel profits from exploitation not otherwise available to them while threatening to undermine developed established westerns economies.
It is madness for Britain to join but the Brexit cultists, championed by their high priests, see it as another panacea replacing the earlier chimera of golden unicorns prancing in sun dappled uplands promised for all which now of course has bitten the dust with all the other rancid Brexit lies.
Tax, you really are entering senility if you believe that Telegraph twaddle.
Quitting the unfettered trade that came with our EU membership has cost us 4% of GDP, around £80 billion.
The TPPPTTTWATPACT offers a dividend of……wait for it …….£1.8 billion, around 0.08% of GDP.
The sheer bone aching stupidity of Brexiteers is certainly a wonder to behold.
Frankly, my own somewhat pessimistic view that the world is now fundamentally driven by idiocy is clearly becoming a reality.
Hey, SA, Has the pound collapsed yet?
just asking for a friend.
Still better going it alone, (provided the zero carbon fuckwits see sense and fuck off) than remain in the EU as they continue to nosh the krauts.
The EU is fucked. Its dying a slow death. Strangled by smug regulation. China is king now. Suck it up.
What a bizarre post, are you unwell Tax?
Since 1986 or so, give or take the odd vicissitude, the £ has maintained a median value of around US$1.52. Since 2016 Sterling has been devalued against a range of currencies by 20-25%, today it sits at US$1.23 and 42 baht. That is a collapse, you silly old ninny.
The EU trades with over 60 countries, agreements that the UK have sought to parallel, and offers the Third and Emerging World free access for a range of goods subject to normal health and safety consumer practices followed by most civilised states. Seems fairly unregulated to me.
Your rant is even more bizarre when one considers that before Brexit the UK enjoyed unfettered trade access for its million or so SMEs to EU markets comprising a pool of consumers sharing our cultural values and societal hallmarks totalling 450 millions without any restrictions whatsoever, a trade that represented 49% of our total manufacturing output, but now they are subject to a raft of rules and regulations imposed by HMRC etc which has reduced trade by 4% of our GDP, over £80 billions.
China is a hybrid state that comprises the redundant communist ethic of non-ownership and an artificial stock market that does not function but as a basket case of an economy one cannot ignore the insanity of millions investing in condos that constitute a dozen ghost cities with no prospect of occupation @nd have no value.
China is a function of western capitalism , it is the factory floor for us and is the largest holder of US debt. Like all Asians, they’re full of piss and wind but when it comes to keeping their rice bowls clean and tidy they’ll kowtow to Uncle Sam and the EU.
Tax, you are an oddity, but we all know Brexit was little more than a ship of fools going nowhere except for the rocks that so far has claimed the scalps of four Tory PMs and seen us become the poor man of Europe, yet again, in seven short years, as well as a bit of a laughing stock.
For fuck’s sake, Tax, Truss thinks the TTPPTTTWATPACT is a good idea, doesn’t that tell you something.
Such a shame, really, Tax, and you a dentist too.
Have you had that dementia test yet with your GP?
I keep telling you but you just wont listen, It's not about the immediate trade figures, you cloth eared old loser, it's about the geopolitical dynamic in world trade over the next generation or two. A deal with countries with a trade driven philosophy, not the EU’s rule-heavy and bureaucratic overkill, a nightmare for trade and business.
Open your rheumy eyes. The EU is a crippled dinosaur.
Its a long game. Short termists need not apply.
^ It's all the Brexit Brigade have left...think of the long term strategy...
It presents lots of opportunities for adverse events to occur that can derail the long term plan. We didn't expect this or we didn't expect that...
...the problem is there are no rails, no long term strategy, no plan at all. All there is left is empty promises and a dead end economy going nowhere.
Pride will prevent a return to the EU in the near future, which holds nothing but more doom and gloom. It will take a generation before the UK gets back on track, starting with a return to the EU.
A colossal mistake that will cost the UK untold misery in the short, medium, and long term.
The soma of hope is strong in the deluded, eh Tax.
Look, you silly twit, Asia wants nothing from us that it can’t source itself from its own resources. Bogus M&S fashion, HP sauce, rebadged Burberry Chinese made shit and tour groups to fucking Harrods can only take you so far.
Now, what is it Brexitonia is going to sell to the fucking world that it couldn’t before Brexit, you wooden headed old ninny?
You wankers have fucked up and no amount of Brexitory drivelling rhetoric is going to change that.
You blew 4% of GDP on the mirage of Britannia Redux and xenophobia, the bedrock of UKIP and right wing Tory bigotry, you ain’t getting it back by striking stupid deals with corporate carpetbaggers squirrelling profits away in tax shelters exploiting coons and dinks manipulated by tyrannous and corrupt tinpot juntas.
The markets never lie Tax, the £ is on its arse for a reason. Eat it up you demented, blind old dribblebloop.
Ah . . . so, longer than any of us will be around to witness . . . and what do you base your forecast on? What a sad old man with no argument left to go on.
Yet they're doing far better than the UK . . . trading 0.008% for 4% . . .
Of course it is . . .![]()
He's against just about any form of mitigation against climate change in the UK on the grounds of cost.
His idea of the 'long game' is about as long as a game of snap.
Yet with BREXIT it's all supposedly because the children are our future.
What utter horseshit.
What a bunch of utter incompetent losers . . .
Bonfire of EU laws watered down to just 800 after meeting of Brexit MPs | Brexit | The GuardianBonfire of EU laws watered down to just 800 after meeting of Brexit MPs
Sources confirm government’s climbdown on legislation that originally aimed to scrap 4,000 statutes by end of 2023
The government is to ditch plans to scrap up to 4,000 EU laws by the end of the year after a private meeting with Brexiter MPs.
It now aims to remove 800 statutes and regulations instead of 3,700 laws it had lined up for a bonfire of EU law in December, threatening everything from passenger rights to compensation for cancelled flights, to equality employment law and environmental standards and protections.
It's Brexit wot dunnit, guv.
Imbeciles. Utter incompetent imbeciles.
It never stops providing a facepalm . . .
Etc ad infinitum‘I was in tears’: Briton with valid passport barred from flight over Brexit rules
Experts say it is vital to check you meet EU requirements, or you could risk losing your holiday
Travellers who have not used their passport for a while were this week being urged to dig it out and check it conforms to the post-Brexit rules for entering the EU – because if it doesn’t, you will almost certainly be denied boarding this summer.Despite previous warnings in Guardian Money and some other publicity, UK travellers trying to enter the Schengen zone are being turned away on a daily basis by airline staff at boarding gates – in most cases because their UK passport was issued more than 10 years ago.
Rosi Simpson, a teacher from Brighton, is one of the latest to be caught up in the confusion. She says she was left “mortified and in tears” after easyJet staff refused to allow her to board a flight to Paris to see her son, who is studying there, because her UK passport had been issued 10 years and one day previously.
“I had no idea of the 10-year rule,” she says. “I’d checked the expiry date, and my passport had eight months remaining. What happened at the boarding gate was absolutely awful. I lost the cost of the flight and the accommodation I’d booked – I’d been so looking forward to seeing my son – all because a load of wankers voted for Brexit. What I don’t understand is why this [rule change] hasn’t had more publicity – an information campaign. I wasn’t the only one who this had happened to at the airport that day,” she says.
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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.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...tarmer/673928/
Can someone in Britain at the moment post some photos of tomatoes and lettuce in a British supermarket this week please?
I was there last month and I did not notice any bare shelves in supermarkets but I wasn't looking for salad stuff but I did eat salad stuff in cafes and restaurants.
^ That was the back end of February and I can confirm the shortage was apparent in Cheltenham when I visited in March.
I would expect the shortage to have eased a little now, in May.
Is there anyone that still believes in Brexit? It's been such a disaster that the only sensible route is to return to the EU and adopt the Euro.
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