Brexit and Future of UK : Discussions

Yeah, that's obviously going to happen. But I was referring to a political union. What do you think about that?
It could happen to a certain degree but I don't think it would look anything like the EU if it did, there'd be far less interference with national policies and it would more take the form of maybe bloc trade deal negotiations (when beneficial and not when not beneficial) and maybe a defensive pact and joint military projects. Nothing like the Lisbon Treaty shambles though, or the EU Parliament. More about mutually beneficial cooperation where appropriate and less about forcing square pegs into round holes and OCD legislation.
 
It could happen to a certain degree but I don't think it would look anything like the EU if it did, there'd be far less interference with national policies and it would more take the form of maybe bloc trade deal negotiations (when beneficial and not when not beneficial) and maybe a defensive pact and joint military projects. Nothing like the Lisbon Treaty shambles though, or the EU Parliament. More about mutually beneficial cooperation where appropriate and less about forcing square pegs into round holes and OCD legislation.

What's interesting is the possibility that the 4 countries can actually become a proper political union with shared foreign policy goals and even a common defence plan. Dunno about Canada, but I think Aus and NZ can look at such an outcome positively.
 
What's interesting is the possibility that the 4 countries can actually become a proper political union with shared foreign policy goals and even a common defence plan. Dunno about Canada, but I think Aus and NZ can look at such an outcome positively.
It's possible in the long term that all 5 eyes nations may join in some kind of bloc/pact.
 
Scots Tory leader admits to mistakes in fight for UK unity
Opponents of Scottish independence made a mistake in failing to press the case for UK unity strongly enough after winning the 2014 referendum on this issue, according to the new leader of the Scottish Conservatives. Douglas Ross said he and other supporters of the union had been lulled by assurances by the pro-independence Scottish National party ahead of the 2014 referendum that the vote would be a “once in a generation” event. “Some of us on the No side thought in September 2014 . . . that was it, we had done our job,” Mr Ross said in an interview with the Financial Times.

“There was a mistake not to continue the positive discussions and debates [about] what the union offers. We should have been relentless in our positive arguments for the union.” The elevation of the 37-year-old Mr Ross to Scottish Tory leader this month has made the member of the UK parliament for Moray a central figure in the battle to preserve Scotland’s three century-old union with England.

Brexit has placed fresh strains on UK unity after Scotland voted against leaving the EU in the 2016 referendum. The Scottish National party, then led by Alex Salmond, said ahead of the 2014 referendum that the vote would be a “once in a generation” event © Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images Opinion polls over the past few months suggest the anti-Brexit SNP is on course to win an outright majority in Scottish parliament elections in May, and that for the first time independence enjoys a sustained lead among voters in Scotland. But Mr Ross refused to be drawn on how his pro-Brexit party would respond if the SNP retains power in Edinburgh in May on a manifesto demanding another referendum. He declined to repeat past pledges by UK prime minister Boris Johnson that his Conservative government at Westminster would not approve another referendum, even if pro-independence parties win a majority at Holyrood.

Privately, some Conservatives think such a stance is likely to prove unsustainable, saying it would fuel Scottish grievance and make independence more likely. “If I start my leadership speaking only about [whether the UK government would approve another referendum], then I’ve fallen into the same trap of everyone else in Scottish politics for the last six years,” said Mr Ross. Instead, Mr Ross, who became Scottish Conservative leader after the surprise resignation of his predecessor Jackson Carlaw, said he would focus for the next nine months on the SNP’s record in power. The SNP has suffered a series of policy setbacks in health and education in recent years and Scotland’s Covid-19 death rate is high by international standards.

Recommended Sebastian Payne Scottish Labour’s plight also hurts the cause of the union But Nicola Sturgeon, SNP leader and Scotland’s first minister, remains popular and is widely perceived by voters as having handled the coronavirus pandemic better than Mr Johnson. Polls suggest Mr Johnson is deeply unpopular in Scotland, but Mr Ross said he welcomed visits north of the border by the prime minister and his cabinet. “Individual leaders’ popularity goes up and down, but the important thing is that people see us as the only and positive alternative to the SNP,” he said.

Mr Ross insisted the pro-union cause had a strong story to tell in Scotland, but needed to devise a more effective narrative. He said the UK government’s spending to support the Scottish economy through the pandemic demonstrated the benefits of the union. Mr Ross, who is a part-time senior football linesman, said he would ask voters to take a fresh look at the Conservatives, pitching himself as a “new young leader” who would listen to a wide range of opinions before deciding the policies on which the party would fight the Scottish parliament elections. The former dairyman, who attended an agricultural college, added he was keen to show what could be achieved without a university education. Douglas Ross is a senior linesman in the Scottish football league.

While Mr Ross said he would focus on how the Scottish government could use its extensive powers better, he dismissed SNP concerns that Mr Johnson’s plans to enforce a post-Brexit UK internal market could allow Westminster to drive down agricultural standards. Mr Ross, who will continue as a Westminster MP while standing for Holyrood, also gave enthusiastic backing to plans by the UK government to control development spending in Scotland that was previously provided through EU funds. Resulting projects should be badged with the union flag as a “reminder that Scotland has two governments”, he said.

In elections in 2016 that saw the Conservatives replace Labour as the second largest party at Holyrood, the then Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson explicitly pitched the party as offering “strong opposition” to the SNP rather than as a potential government. But Mr Ross said that in May he would seek to “get to the very top” — pointing out that before the 2007 elections that saw the SNP win power for the first time, the nationalists had fewer than the 31 seats the Conservatives currently hold at Holyrood. “There’s no point getting into this race now accepting that you are going to be beaten,” he added.
 








@nair @Ashwin @Gautam Can you please merge above fragmented threads in this subjected thread dedicated to Brexit & its affect on UK tracking? Thank you.
 
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@nair @Ashwin @Gautam Can you please merge above fragmented threads in this subjected thread dedicated to Brexit & its affect on UK tracking? Thank you.

Done. Thank you again for reporting.
 
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The Race to Replace the City of London Begins

When economic historian Charles Kindleberger charted the rise of financial centers around the world in 1973, he doubted London could take the top spot in Europe’s growing union of states: “Sterling is too weak, and British savings too little.” Instead, after assessing various cities’ economies of scale and corporate pulling power, he plumped for Brussels.

He was clearly betting on the wrong horse, but Kindleberger’s treatise should still be top of European regulators’ reading list on the eve of a potentially messy end to decades of unfettered free trade with Britain.

His insights into the forces that make or break a financial center resonate in post-Brexit Europe. Over-centralization carries big risks, bringing what he called “diseconomies of scale,” such as information bottlenecks, spiraling overheads and interference by politicians. His work is a challenge to those who scoff at the idea that London could ever face any serious competition.

The U.K. financial capital arguably became too concentrated for its own good. The 2016 Brexit vote showed euro-zone officials were right to warn that it was risky to have a third of all EU capital markets activity and 90% of euro-denominated derivatives clearing in one place.

Back in the 1970s when Kindleberger was writing, the City looked more like a speculative bubble than a real contender, with U.S. banks using London as a revolving door for U.S. dollar-denominated deposits held overseas called eurodollars. Nobody was waxing lyrical about the City’s talent pool, or superior legal system, as so many do today. Its attraction as a conduit for European cash only really took off after the 1980s, helped by light-touch regulation, political stability and its membership in the EU single market.

Those advantages are more vulnerable today than they’ve ever been. With the post-Brexit transition period set to end on Dec. 31, bringing an end to the U.K.’s frictionless market access to the EU, euro-area hubs are dangling the carrot of tax breaks and regulators are waving the stick of forced relocations. Financial firms operating in the U.K. have already shifted about 7,500 staff and more than 1.2 trillion pounds ($1.6 trillion) of assets to the EU.

This isn’t an exodus, and nobody’s saying that Paris or Frankfurt will suddenly replace London. But we’re in a decentralizing phase where many centers can happily coexist. Dublin and Luxembourg’s fund-management hubs have wooed insurers. Amsterdam has attracted trading firms with its fast fiber network. JPMorgan Chase & Co. is moving $230 billion in assets to Germany. And Europlace, an agency promoting Paris as a financial center, estimates 4,000 direct jobs have already been announced in the French capital.


Like the movie “Field of Dreams,” Europeans are also talking up deeper capital markets integration as a way to unlock trillions in household wealth: If the EU builds it, banks will come.

Yet this is the part where Kindleberger’s analysis should send a chill down the spine of continental officials.

The pressure to decentralize also has big downsides: It tends to trigger resistance. We’re seeing banks drag their feet on relocations, with Covid-19 a handy excuse to call for more time as they balk at the cost of creating new cross-border entities.

Obstacles are also apparent in the $74 trillion fight over euro clearing, with Paris and Frankfurt initially at the vanguard of efforts to force the likes of London Stock Exchange Group Plc’s LCH to repatriate activities to the continent. The effort has faced persistent pushback from banks that fear it would mean paying more for a high-volume, low-margin business.

It has exposed confusion within Europe, too. The European Central Bank wants more relocation, markets watchdog ESMA wants more power to oversee clearinghouses based outside the EU, and national supervisors want to avoid losing more power to EU bodies. These tensions, combined with a shift in priorities since Covid-19, have convinced Brussels to let continental firms access London’s dominant clearing-houses as they currently do until mid-2022.

While a genuine continental rival to the City would be a good thing, its emergence is hindered by infighting and sclerosis impeding deeper market integration — potential problems spotted by Kindleberger decades ago. Regulatory turf wars and embarrassing financial scandals point to the scale of the task ahead. A capital markets union has been all talk and no action for many years.

If Europe won’t get serious about integration, wrote Kindleberger, “there will be no single European financial center.”

The EU should heed these warnings from the past. It needs to decide the new terms of trade with a still-dominant London. Some kind of regulatory equivalence would be ideal, allowing for time to develop home-grown hubs while avoiding more market disruption than is necessary. The bloc then needs to overhaul and strengthen EU financial regulation. Given the dire health of a lot of European banks — State Street’s Marija Veitmane described them as “uninvestable” this week — a future capital markets union should go hand in hand with a full banking union and cross-border bank mergers.

The bottom line is that the best-laid plans can go awry. Governments can’t simply will a financial center into being. Accidents — and crises — can happen. If the EU miscalculates, it won’t only be London that wins, but far-flung rivals in the U.S. and Asia. Brussels may have to wait a little longer.
 
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UK: Kent region drowning in feces over Brexit

Unexpected consequence of Brexit to say the least: the English region of Kent could become the “UK toilets”. For several weeks, residents have seen thousands of trucks stopped, waiting for hours to be able to pass border controls between the country and the European Union.

But more than noise pollution or pollution, they complain about seeing the edges of the roads of the county fill little by little with bottles of urine and bags of excrement, thrown by the drivers of trucks waiting.

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“I’m worried that Kent will become England’s toilet, not England’s garden. And we’re all worried it will get worse.”, laments Mike Sole, a Liberal Democrat elected from the city of Canterbury committed to the subject of garbage dumped on the roadsides of the region.

The UK government has promised portable toilets for drivers, but locals fear this is not enough to stem this public health problem. They demand that sustainable infrastructures be installed. But the situation will not change until the Brexit negotiations progress.

Discussions between the United Kingdom and the European Union suffer from several differences. They concern the access of Europeans to British waters for fishing, the guarantees requested by the British on competition or even the way of settling future disputes between the two parties.

Negotiators hope that an agreement on post-Brexit relations between the UK and the EU will be reached within a month. Time is running out because, without it, the British will suddenly leave the EU on January 1, 2021 and the rules of the World Trade Organization would then apply, which both sides absolutely do not want.
 
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Brexit stems from a civil war in capitalism – we are all just collateral damage

George Monbiot


To one sort of capitalist, the insecurity and chaos that Brexit will bring is horrifying. To the other, it is highly profitable

Where there is chaos, the government will multiply it. Where people are pushed to the brink, it will shove them over. Boris Johnson ignored the pleas of businesses and politicians across the UK – especially in Northern Ireland – to extend the Brexit transition process. Never mind the pandemic, never mind unemployment, poverty and insecurity – nothing must prevent our experiment in unassisted flight. We will leap from the white cliffs on 1 January, come what may.

Perhaps, after so much macho bluster, the government will take the last of its last chances and strike a deal this week. If so, with scarcely any time for refinement, the agreement is likely to be rushed and bodged. In any event, pain will follow. Disruption at the border is likely to be felt across the nation.

So it is worth repeating the big question: why are we doing this to ourselves? I believe the answer is that Brexit is the outcome of a civil war within capitalism.

Broadly speaking, there are two dominant forms of capitalist enterprise. The first could be described as housetrained capitalism. It seeks an accommodation with the administrative state, and benefits from stability, predictability and the regulations that exclude dirtier and rougher competitors. It can coexist with a tame and feeble form of democracy.

The second could be described as warlord capitalism. This sees all restraints on accumulation – including taxes, regulations and the public ownership of essential services – as illegitimate. Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of profit-making. Its justifying ideology was formulated by Friedrich Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty and by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged. These books sweep away social complexity and other people’s interests. They fetishise something they call “liberty”, which turns out to mean total freedom for plutocrats, at society’s expense.

In unguarded moments, the warlords and their supporters go all the way. Hayek, for example, on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile, said he preferred a “liberal dictatorship” to “a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, confessed: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Last month, Mike Lee, senior Republican senator for Utah, claimed that “democracy isn’t the objective” of the US political system, “liberty, peace, and prosperity are”.

Brexit represents an astonishing opportunity for warlord capitalism. It is a chance not just to rip up specific rules, which it overtly aims to do, but also to tear down the uneasy truce between capitalism and democracy under which public protections in general are created and enforced. In Steve Bannon’s words, it enables “the deconstruction of the administrative state”. Chaos is not a threat but an opportunity for money’s warlords. Peter Hargreaves, the billionaire who donated £3.2m to the Leave.EU campaign, explained that after Brexit: “We will get out there and we will become incredibly successful because we will be insecure again. And insecurity is fantastic.”

The chaos it is likely to cause will be used as its own justification: times are tough, so we must slash regulations and liberate business to make us rich again. Johnson’s government will seek to use a no-deal or thin-deal Brexit to destroy at least some of the constraints on the most brutal forms of capitalism.

Housetrained capitalists are horrified by Brexit. Not only does it dampen economic activity in general, but it threatens to destroy the market advantage for businesses that play by the rules. Without regulatory constraints, the warlords would wipe them out. Like other august institutions of capital, the Confederation of British Industry warned that leaving Europe would cause a major economic shock. In response to these concerns, Johnson, while he was foreign secretary, made a remark that might previously have seemed unthinkable, coming from the mouth of a senior Conservative, “*censored* business”.

Johnson’s government is what warlord money buys. It could be seen as the perfect expression of the Pollution Paradox, a concept that I think is essential to understanding our politics. What this means is that the dirtier or more damaging an enterprise is, the more money it must spend on politics to ensure it’s not regulated out of existence. As a result, political funding comes to be dominated by the most harmful companies and oligarchs, which then wield the greatest political influence. They crowd out their more accommodating rivals.

It isn’t just about pollution. Damaging enterprises with an interest in buying political results include banks developing exotic financial instruments; property developers who resent the planning laws; junk food companies; bosses seeking to destroy employment rights; and plutocrats hoping to avoid tax. It’s why we’ll never have a healthy democracy without a radical reform of campaign finance.

Understood in this light, Brexit is scarcely about the UK at all. Oligarchs who have shown great interest in the subject tend to have weak or incomplete ties to this country. According to Andy Wigmore of Leave.EU, the campaign was assisted by the US billionaire Robert Mercer. By far the biggest individual donors to the Brexit party are Christopher Harborne, who is based in Thailand, and Jeremy Hosking, who has businesses listed in Dublin and Delaware. The newspaper owners who went to such lengths to make Brexit happen are domiciled offshore. For people like Rupert Murdoch, I believe, the UK is a beachhead among the richest and most powerful nations. Turning Chile or Indonesia into a giant free port is one thing. The UK is a much bigger prize.

None of this is what we were told we were voting for. I see Nigel Farage and similar blowhards as little more than smoke bombs, creating a camouflaging cloud of xenophobia and culture wars. The persistent trick of modern politics – that appears to fool us repeatedly – is to disguise economic and political interests as cultural movements. Throughout this saga, the media has reported the smokescreen, not the manoeuvres.

This, perhaps, was the remain campaign’s greatest failure. It largely refrained from calling out the oligarchs whose money helped to persuade us to leave the EU. Any such charge would have rebounded on a campaign funded by the likes of David Sainsbury, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. When Dominic Cummings and others in the leave campaign claimed they were fighting “the elites”, they were partly right. In terms of funding, this was a battle between competing elites. So the remainers, fatally compromised by the money they had taken, instead became locked in a culture war they were bound to lose, confronting xenophobia with bromides about the benefits of integration. They failed to strike at the heart of the matter.

Brexit, treading on the heels of the pandemic, is likely to harm the lives and freedoms of millions of people in the UK. But it’s not about us. We are just caught in the crossfire of capitalism’s civil war.