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Comment by sievebrain | Hacker News Reader

WTO max tariffs (worst case scenario) are 4%. But the currency has weaked by about 8%. So even if max tariffs are applied tomorrow, UK goods are still cheaper to buy in the EU than before!

In practice, if the EU doesn't strike a deal with the UK (which it won't) then I think it will suffer more exits. Because the EU has spent years trying to sign free trade deals with America, Canada and other places. If it turns around and says "we will give those countries tariff-free access to our markets but not the UK" this will send a powerful message to all EU citizens that this is not an organisation with their best interests at heart.

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UK goods may be cheaper to buy than before, but there's many problems with this.

First, we're all significantly poorer. As individuals. Fuel, goods, foreign travel, etc. are all significantly more expensive.

Second, what goods? We don't actually export much stuff so the benefits of being able to sell stuff cheaper isn't terribly attractive. Even if this did stimulate e.g. UK manufacturing in the long term, we're starting from a poor position and...

Third, the stuff we do sell tends to be services or of the value-added variety -- all of which depends on imports, so much of any extra money we make will be swallowed up by increased costs.

Fourth, even if we did sell more stuff, the money we made from it would be worth 8% less.

I've read many of your comments here and I'm not convinced you have a good understanding of how the EU works. [1] is a committee meeting that tries to establish how we could disentangle ourselves from the EU. It's very long but it's full of great info how the exit could work, and as a side-effect full of info how the EU itself works.

Making a case from an uninformed POV is not convincing me. If you back up your statements with data and pointers I'll pay more attention!

[1] http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/cb083c53-3998-4f3a-...

What specifically do you have in mind? You've said I'm wrong but not given any examples.

I tend to not argue from the basis of how the EU is supposed to work, because it tends to put its long-range vision ahead of following specific rules. See how the deficit rules are working out: France is allowed to break the rules "because it's France" (Juncker's words).

To predict the behaviour of such an institution it's better to listen to what the leaders are saying and how they've acted before rather than trying to read the fine print.

E.g. "in practice, if the EU doesn't strike a deal with the UK (which it won't) then I think it will suffer more exits."

That is quite a bold statement that needs a lot of statements from people who can make these decisions to back it up. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

Is it an extraordinary claim?

The people who run the Commission have been saying explicitly they don't even want to start talking about a free trade deal with the UK until after the UK is fully out. There's no reason for this, they could easily run the talks in parallel, but they have no desire to do so.

Now consider the extreme difficulty the EU faces in signing deals even when it wants to (will TTIP pass? won't it? I wouldn't bet on it either way), and adding these two things together makes any kind of TTIP or CETA like deal between EU and UK very unlikely.

Will the EU suffer more exits? Well, anti-EU politicians (or at least very eurosceptic politicians) have been rising throughout Europe for some time now and some countries are quite exposed to mandatory tariffs on UK trade (the Netherlands, France, Germany). Once the UK stabilises and the fact that trade barriers cut in both directions sink in, there will be a lot of people asking why the EU is dragging its feet over a deal.

To say there's no chance of further exits does not seem less extreme than saying there will be.

> The people who run the Commission have been saying explicitly they don't even want to start talking about a free trade deal with the UK until after the UK is fully out.

This is incorrect. They are saying there will be no negotiation until Article 50 invoked, after which there will be two years of negotiations before complete exit.

I'm afraid it is correct:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36682735

The EU's Trade Commissioner, Cecilia Malmstrom, says the UK cannot begin negotiating trade terms with the bloc until after it has left. "First you exit then you negotiate," she told BBC Newsnight.

Now how much power does Ms Malmstrom have over EU trade policy? I would assume quite a lot. It may be that she still ends up being wrong, but my statement was correct and your rebuttal was not.

If they do give a deal to the UK wouldn't that trigger more exits? If countries see they can leave the EU and still get a trade deal they'd be more likely to leave than if they saw the UK get shafted (so to speak).

Yes, that's why the EU is doomed and will be gone within a decade no matter what they do now.

It is a fundamentally unattractive entity. The people who run it have never even tried to combat rising anti-EU feeling across the continent, as they believe the EU is inevitable and unstoppable, so why bother trying to make it more popular.

Now it's probably too late: they've become so gripped by groupthink they can't reform quickly enough even if they wanted to, hence the focus is now 100% on trying to make leaving as scary as possible vs trying to make staying in as attractive as possible.

In the long run this is a failing strategy. The EU is unresponsive and so makes mistakes that upset local populations. In the UK it was migration policy. The latest was telling Spain and Portugal they'd be punished for breaking rules that France and Germany also break punishment free. That's not going down well.

The combination of a retention policy based on fear rather than respect + a succession of local gaffes do not bode well for the future of the union.

  Yes, that's why the EU is doomed and will be gone within a decade no matter what they do now.

"I give the Bolsheviks a year, two at most". Quote from a famous Czech movie [1] about the ill-fated Prague Spring, 1968 :-)

But in fact, communism survived for more than another twenty years...

My point: these things take longer than one would expect. Unlike logic, where a proven theorem takes its "logical effect" immediately, the politic process has massive inertia. The time gap between "result obvious and unavoidable" and "result effective" can be decades.

I second your sentiment, but I'm afraid it will take much longer for the EU to fall apart. Just like with communism before (and about as "reformable"). I personally think it will take a generation, starting now -- especially in parts of the west that have to tread this glorious neo-marxist path for the first time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDEsj5QEWwY

I agree it will take longer than anyone thinks, and wanted to add that the EU has been struggling for awhile now. Greece, Italy, and Spain are the real tests.

> It is a fundamentally unattractive entity.

This presumably explains why 28 countries have joined and there are still more waiting to join.

> The people who run it (...) believe the EU is inevitable and unstoppable

The people who run it are for the most part the elected leaders of the member states, who are no strangers to euro-skepticism, since they never fail to exploit it when it suits them (e.g. to deflect criticism of unpopular legislation by claiming that "Brussels" requires it).

That dynamic is exactly why it is unattractive - rather than having a single government responsible for running the country, you get organisations that resort to passing the buck whenever anything bad happens. In the US and Germany, this was eventually solved by putting all the power in the Federal government, but this is fundamentally impossible in the EU, because there is no agreement on how government shoukd work between the different cultures in Europe. The EU should have remained a customs union, in a better world.

Wait, the research program of the EU is doomed and unattractive?

I thought discussion here was under the assumption that the UK wants to participate in exactly those research projects...

> In the UK it was migration policy.

It was the UK governments migration policy.

> Yes, that's why the EU is doomed and will be gone within a decade no matter what they do now.

Serious question: would that make you happy? Would you maybe prefer a replacement for the EU?

I'd prefer the EU to change, setting up such a thing is a lot of work. But it's shown it won't do that. So I'd like to see a replacement, yes.

> If it turns around and says "we will give those countries tariff-free access to our markets but not the UK" this will send a powerful message to all EU citizens that this is not an organisation with their best interests at heart.

I think that you wanted to say that "this is not an organisation with UK best interests at heart.

UK government has little sympathy in the rest of the EU

Didn't the EU's approach to Greece already send a message that the EU doesn't have EU citizen's best interests at heart?

Greece is a country where the population were 'sacrificed' to bail out French and German bankers (if you look where the bailout funds actually went most never hit Greece)

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