Brexit. Why do Brits want Out of the EU?

The Pound has stayed fairly level since its slight drop after the Brexit vote.

Thirdly, Britain and the US are thick as thieves; The LIBOR scandal will show that, if anyone's interested in looking.

Walter, the gloom & doom scenario is not taking place.

They think about an "Inner Circle" (Australia, Canada, Denmark [sic!], New Zealand, Norway [sic!], United Kingdom and Dependencies)

I think calling the roughly 9% drop in the Pound relative to the euro a "downfall" implies a bit more than is actually involved here

The value of the Euro is propped up in major part by the German economy and its very strong trade surplus (with a large fraction of its exports going to its EU partners

The effective devaluation of the Pound will likely ease the UK's continuing trade with other EU nations,

[What I have thought (and written) is that no-one seems to have known (and still doesn't) what 'Brexit' means.

Both Europe and the EU will survive, ...

It seems very improbable to me that the British might reverse their earlier decision, however stranger things have occurred.

The emergence, or rather re-emergence, of England and Englishness continues apace.The Brexit vote was in part inspired by UKIP (a sort of English national party), and supported most decisively by England (53.4 per cent to 46.6 per cent). 72 per cent of those who think of themselves as English voted out compared with 43 per cent of those whose primary identity is British.

But first a word of warning. Englishness is not sweeping all before it in the way that Scottishness (alone in the United Kingdom) has become the overwhelmingly dominant identity in Scotland. About three-quarters of people in England still describe themselves as a combination of British and English and this figure has not changed in 20 years.

It is nevertheless true that when people are forced to choose which identity they are more attached to, Englishness has gained ground over Britishness. The British Social Attitudes Surveys show that in both Scotland and England, ‘small nation’ identities gained substantial ground over Britishness between 1992 and 1999. In 1992 over 60 per cent of English people selected British as their most important national identity against just 30 per cent for English. The ratio of British to English then declined steadily across four survey waves, from over 2:1 in favour of British in 1992 to 1:1 by 1999. But this ratio has not altered in any clear way since, despite increased Scottish political assertiveness.

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Bargain-hunting tourists are flocking to the UK to exploit the plunging pound but Britons are burning money on their summer holiday in Europe

The dramatic slide in sterling since the Brexit vote has given British holidaymakers enough pain already. But there was a further shock in store this week after some airports offered less than €1 to £1 at two major airports.

At Stansted and Luton, travellers found they could not even exchange £1 for €1, which at least prepared them for the financial squeeze at their destinations. Those holidaying in Europe are finding that meals, coffees, drinks and other items are typically at least 22% more expensive than a year ago.

There has, however, been a benefit for the British economy. On Thursday, official data showed that retail sales leapt 1.4% in July following a drop in June – apparently helped by an influx of big-spending overseas tourists from the likes of the US, China and Hong Kong.
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However, Ryanair’s biggest increase in business has come from Americans and Chinese flying to Europe and then using its network to come to Britain and shop. “We are carrying 20% more Americans this summer, and have seen a 10% increase in the number of Chinese coming into places such as Rome and Berlin, then using Ryanair to get around Europe. It is absolutely linked to the weakness of sterling.”
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The weak pound has added hundreds of pounds to the cost of many people’s summer holidays. According to M&S Bank, the typical cost of a one-week overseas summer holiday for a family of four, including flights, accommodation, meals and spending money, had risen by £429 compared to last year due to the fall in sterling.
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“You are still getting a pint of lager for £1 in parts of Spain and Portugal, while you’ll struggle to find it anywhere under £2.50 in Britain,” said Jacobs at Ryanair. “When people like Nigel Farage say that Brexit will encourage Brits to holiday at home, he’s talking absolute nonsense. Since Brexit we’ve not seen any drop-off in business. If money is tight next year, people won’t stop going on holiday abroad – they will more likely drop down from a four-star hotel to a three-star.”
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Northern Ireland, which voted to stay in the EU, has at least benefited from the post-Brexit plunge in the pound. At the Quays shopping centre in Newry, just four miles from the border with the Republic, the fall in the pound is a huge relief following several tough years after the Irish economy tanked. This week, a sizeable proportion of the vehicles in its car park belonged to bargain-hunting shoppers up from the south.

Crazy how you people let the media tell you what to think.

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Some caveats are in order. It is still early days. Hard data is scant. Survey evidence is still consistent with a slowdown in the economy in the second half of 2016. Brexit may be a slow burn, with the impact only becoming apparent in the months and years to come.
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So instead of telling the public how hard life was going to be outside the EU, ministers and officials sought to reassure, to administer large doses of soothing balm, to insist that the UK could cope just fine on its own.
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Project Everything’s OK has worked well so far. Again, this is understandable. There were millions who thought Project Fear was well over the top, which it was, or didn’t think life could become much tougher. The remain camp was ill-advised to rely so heavily on its warnings of economic Armageddon, when only two regions of the country – London and the south-east – had seen GDP per head rise above the level before the 2008-9 recession. After weighing up the pros and cons, plenty of voters didn’t think they were risking all that much.

As far as it is possible to tell, there was a collective sharp intake of breath in the aftermath of the vote, but then consumers carried on regardless. The latest monthly health-check of household sentiment found a sharp drop in optimism in July followed by a rapid recovery in August. John Lewis and Next – two bellwethers of activity in the high street – say trading has not been affected by Brexit.

This doesn’t mean everything is fine. Britain has deep structural economic problems that would have to be addressed inside or outside the EU. Investment has been weak, productivity has flatlined since the recession, earnings growth is running at half its 4-5% pre-financial crisis level and, except in times of war, the balance of payments deficit has never been higher. ...

But in other respects, Brexit has been a help. It has forced the government to take a long, hard look at the British economy – something that would not have happened without the shock administered by the referendum. It’s brought home the fact that most of Britain feels disconnected from the economic story peddled by successive governments.

For decades, there’s been a tendency for businesses to meet rising demand by employing cheap labour rather than by investing in modern equipment. Large chunks of the economy are characterised by low skills, low wages, and low productivity. As the Resolution Foundation noted this week, companies that rely on the ability to import low-cost employees from the EU are going to have to rethink their business models. This is not necessarily a bad thing. ...

The government has responded to Brexit by soft-pedalling on austerity, by contemplating spending more on infrastructure and by committing itself to an industrial strategy. A degree of scepticism is warranted here. The referendum has made change possible: it doesn’t guarantee it will happen. It remains to be seen how many new roads and railways get built, or whether the industrial strategy amounts to anything more than a new name for Whitehall’s business department.
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