Brexit. Why do Brits want Out of the EU?

Hopefully there will be no Brexit.
But that is not the end of the problem
Even if In voters win there still will be enough antiEU people left and the discussions will start in ´some other countries too. There are moderate people who wish we back in the Days Before EU when EU was just Efta, EF, EWG and whatever it was called in the different countries.

1 Reply

@saab,

saab wrote:

Hopefully there will be no Brexit.
But that is not the end of the problem
Even if In voters win there still will be enough antiEU people left and the discussions will start in ´some other countries too. There are moderate people who wish we back in the Days Before EU when EU was just Efta, EF, EWG and whatever it was called in the different countries.

Well, Efta had been founding after the Common Market was going to work (and still is existing).

In the UK, the problem will be ....a still divided population, whatever the result will be.

The "anti-EU"- movements have always been in most countries, at first mainly by those, who didn't get what they wanted; nowadays, the Brexit campaign let come all those to surface, who before just mumbled or talked about it in the pub.

"Moderate people" are have done a lot in the past, not very moderately sometimes.

1 Reply

@Walter Hinteler,

Quote:

Nissan has announced it is taking legal action against the official campaign for Britain to leave the European Union after the group used the Japanese car manufactueres' logo in leaflets calling for voters to back Brexit on June 23.
[...]
On Monday, several carmakers repeated their calls for Britain to remain in the 28-member bloc, with tariff-less access to the single market benefiting major firms.

In a furious letter to Boris Johnson’s Vote Leave campaign, heads of Unilever, Airbus and GE accuse the group of using their names for “propaganda purposes” to imply their support for exit from the European Union

Source

1 Reply

@Walter Hinteler,

Quote:

As Robert Tombs, the Cambridge historian and author of The English and Their History, recently put it: “The campaign seems hardly about Europe at all, but it’s all about us and the English identity.”
[... ... ...]
Looking back at this melancholy story, it is hard to doubt that intelligent Euroscepticism in the true sense has been in too-short supply. De Gaulle offered some, when he spoke of a “Europe des patries”, a close confederation of sovereign states, rather than an impossible “United States of Europe”.

If nothing else, this squalid campaign has surely made Attlee’s and Thatcher’s point about referendums playing into the hands of demagogues. When every possible point has been made against the follies and failures of the EU, that cannot begin to match the Europhobes’ vast edifice of illusion, part of a pattern that stretches back years or centuries. We have long since ceased to be a great power; must we at last cease to be a great country? Or maybe John of Gaunt had it right: “That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”

Source (worth reading completely, I think): Europhobia: a very British problem by Geoffrey Wheatcroft

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I was reading back through some of the initial articles brought that represented Leave issues. Quite valid sentiments.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3530980/Please-sack-Euro-MP-DANIEL-HANNAN-money-perks-gets-Brussels-making-Britons-lives-harder-begging-nation-courage-job.html

1 Reply

@Lash,

I mean, when you've left the Conservative group and joined the right, anti-European parties - you certainly have some valid sentiments for doing so. (Btw: no-one forced this MEP to get elected. He just could resign, if doesn't like it.)

I've read today that leaving the EU is like to writing a blank cheque with no survey, assessment of risks or foundations.
I've always wondered about concrete plans - the best I've read the other day was "If we fail, we just return".

1 Reply

@Walter Hinteler,

I'm wondering if countries (EU or the US for that matter) would just refuse to trade? Or vindictively attach crazy tariffs to British imports.

I hope our voters would raise hell at US moves to punish an independent Britain.

It does seem to be true that Leavers don't have a precise alternative plan of operation, but it's not like they'll be pushed off the edge of the earth.

1 Reply

@Lash,

Lash wrote:

I'm wondering if countries (EU or the US for that matter) would just refuse to trade? Or vindictively attach crazy tariffs to British imports.

I don't know about the USA, but as far as it is known, the UK would have in such a case to start negations about all and everything.

The minimum period after a vote to leave would be two years - and (nota bene!!!) during that period the UK still is a member of the EU, has to continue to follow EU treaties and laws, but can't take part in any decision-making. (Something, not much published these days.)

Another thing not mentioned too often is the European Economic Area (members are the 28 EU member states, as well as three of the four member states of the EFTA (Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway). Switzerland is a quasi-member due to bilateral agreements with the EU).
Will the UK leave that as well?

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U.S. stocks pare gains as Yellen stresses Brexit risk
Published: June 21, 2016 10:52 a.m. ET

http://ei.marketwatch.com//Multimedia/2015/09/24/Photos/ZH/MW-DV025_yellen_20150924123016_ZH.jpg?uuid=89c5de36-62d9-11e5-97c1-0015c588e0f6

Fed chief Janet Yellen is talking to lawmakers.

By
Ellie
Ismailidou
Markets reporter
Victor
Reklaitis
Markets writer

U.S. stocks pared early gains Tuesday after Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen said a victory for the “leave camp” in this week’s U.K. referendum on membership in the European Union would pose a significant risk to the U.S. economy and global financial market stability.

In her testimony to the Senate Banking Committee, Yellen reiterated the cautious approach to raising interest rates that the Federal Open Market Committee signaled last week when it stood pat on U.S. interest rates.

“Our cautious approach…remains appropriate,” Yellen said Tuesday.

Stocks slid at the beginning of her testimony but later recovered some ground, building on the gains from a strong rally on Monday, which was aided by polls showing support swinging back toward the U.K. remaining a member of the European Union.

The S&P 500 SPX, +0.34% was up 3 points, or 0.1%, at 2,086, led by telecom shares, which were up 0.6%. Four of the S&P’s 10 sectors were in negative territory, with materials stocks leading the losses, in part weighed by a drop in crude-oil prices CLN6, -1.60%

The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.28% added 22 points, or 0.1%, to 17,825, led by a 1.4% gain by Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +1.94% and a 0.8% rise by Nike Inc. NKE, +0.93% The blue-chip gauge was weighed down by American Express Co. AXP, -0.34% and McDonald’s Corp. MCD, -0.59% both down 0.8%.

Meanwhile, the Nasdaq Composite COMP, +0.12% was up 2 points, or less than 0.1%, at 4,839.

Even as stocks held on to modest gains, the overall tone of the market was “nervousness and cautiousness,” said Phil Orlando, equity market strategist at Federated Investors.

Investors are “playing defense until [they] get some clarity” on a series of uncertainties looming over the market, most notably this Thursday’s referendum on a potential Brexit, the U.S. elections and the Fed’s next steps on monetary policy. That is partly why telecom, traditionally viewed as a safety play in times of market turmoil, was leading the market, Orlando added.

According to some analysts, Yellen’s testimony on Tuesday did little to offer a clear view on when the central bank could hike U.S. rates again.

“Bottom line, there is nothing new here that is any different than the FOMC statement and press conference last week,” said Peter Boockvar, chief market analyst at The Lindsey Group, in emailed comments.

Though policy makers “would love” to raise interest rates, Boockvar said, “they remain scared about the implications of higher rates on a fragile economy that remains very overindebted and [about] what higher rates will mean for asset prices.”

Meanwhile, investors continued to closely follow the most recent polls from the U.K., the latest of which showed a split vote, with a slight advantage for the “remain” vote, which got 45% of voters, while the “leave” vote got 44%.

While that’s a statistical dead heat, it marked a narrowing of the “remain” camp’s three percentage point lead seen in a poll published Saturday, leading the British pound GBPUSD, -0.1156% to pull back from a five-month high reached overnight.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stock-futures-rise-ahead-of-yellen-speech-2016-06-21?siteid=yhoof2

Financial markets don't like the Brexit, for whatever reason. At least in the short term.

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A big mash-up of Times articles about Brexit.

http://www.nytimes.com/news-event/britain-brexit-european-union

1 Reply

@Lash,

UK's justice secretary, Gove, had likened those claiming that a vote to leave would lead to a recession to scientists paid by Adolf Hitler’s government to come up with the scientific results wanted by the state.

Cameron has accused Michael Gove of having "lost it" over his comparison of economists warning against Brexit to experts in the pay of Nazis.
The prime minister made his strongest attack of the campaign so far today (Wednesday) on the justice secretary, who has long been a very close (political) friend.

2 Replies

@Walter Hinteler,

References to Nazis are particularly bad form in this argument. He could've made the point without that backhand.

1 Reply

@Lash,

Lash wrote:

He could've made the point without that backhand.

It would have been more difficult to call a dozen nobel price winning economists wrong, especially for someone with a 2:1-degree in English.

(Actually,not only the Nazis but more or all all conservatives, including conservative Jews, called Einstein wrong.
"Mein Mann erhält wieder und wieder Schmähbriefe. Die deutschen Juden betrachten ihn als ihren Unheilbringer." - Again and again my husband gets hate letters. The German Jews regard him being their mischief-bringer. (Elsa Einstein on April 11, 1933 in a letter to her friend Antonina Vallentin-Luchaire.]

1 Reply

@Walter Hinteler,

Quote Walter:

Quote:

2:1-degree in English.

???

1 Reply

@Blickers,

The degree classifications in England are:
- First-class honours (1st),
- Second-class honours, upper division (2:1),
- Second-class honours, lower division (2:2),
- Third-class honours (3rd),
- Ordinary degree (pass).

1 Reply

@Walter Hinteler,

You're talking about college, now-the institution you enter after secondary education, correct? So this means that the guy has a bachelor's degree but not a Master's or PhD?

Also, when you say second class honors, you don't mean bottom half of the class, do you? To be worth special honor would entail well above the median line.

1 Reply

@Blickers,

Oxford is a university.
Colleges at Oxford University are different to US-collegesl: see here

I think that he got a B.A. (hon)

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@Walter Hinteler,

Quote:

Michael Gove has apologised for comparing economic experts warning about leaving the European Union with the Nazis who denounced physicist Albert Einstein in the 1930s.
[...]
Apologising for the comments, which he made on LBC radio on Tuesday, Mr Gove said: “Yesterday I was asked a question by Iain Dale [LBC presenter] about the predictions of doom for the economy. I answered, as I often do, with a historical analogy. It was clumsy and inappropriate.
[...]
Just hours before his apology his fellow leading Leave campaigner Boris Johnson backed him, telling BBC Radio 4’s World at One: “Michael Gove has run an absolutely fantastic campaign and he is right in what he says, I think.”

Source

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When do we find out which side won? Do they do election coverage like in the US or do we have to wait a few days?

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Best of luck to the UK, whatever they decide tomorrow.

Best of luck to the rest of Europe too, for that matter.

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Brexit. Why do Brits want Out of the EU?

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