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Comment by nulldereference | Hacker News Reader

The UK with Brexit has signaled that its not interested in trade or immigration. Why would I as a knowledge worker choose to even remotely consider London? Demand falls, ECON 101.

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Wow, for a knowledge worker that's not a very good grasp of nuance.

The UK has signalled it's not interested in unlimited, no questions asked immigration and actually would rather like to keep the trade as much as possible. That is very far from "no trade or immigration at all".

So hey, go ahead and don't consider London because you think it's suddenly a hermit hole. I doubt the country will suffer from missing such insight.

> not interested in trade

Could you elaborate? This statement is very broad and seems unlikely to be true.

I'll elaborate (and take advantage of the fact I'm not the original poster). Britain currently thinks it wants trade, but doesn't really understand what modern trade looks like. This is evident both from talking to people in my street and from reading the latest pronouncements of Brexit ministers. A couple of things that they all seem to be missing:

1. Non-tariff barriers are much more onerous than tariff barriers. 2. If poorer country A enters into a deal that gives richer country B jobs, there's a good chance they might want access to those jobs. 3. Britain principally trading with Canada and Australia is a recipe for ruin. 4. A great deal of the UK's attractiveness to non-EU countries is its membership of the EU.

3, especially, sounds like I'm straw-manning. I'm not.

I should add there are Leavers who appear to get these issues. One is Phil Hammond, but it's unclear he'll win and

5. The EU can walk away from any deal at any time and probably will if we don't offer them something good on their terms.

Point 5 is really significant, there has been a lot of noise from politicians on both sides and the media about the negotiations, in reality we have such a weak hand it looks like the negotiation is going to be rather one sided.

Especially since the EU has every motivation to make sure that they get the much better end of the bargain. If it looks like the UK has 'won' in any way by Brexiting, other countries are more likely to follow suit. Crushing them at the negotiating table likely makes the rest of the EU more stable, and probably wealthier.

Agreed, BMW have said that, much as they don't want to lose Britain as a target market, they value their Europe-wide integrated supply-chain more.

Regarding 5.

From talking to brits, there seems to be this idea that the UK is pulling Europe along. Europe is just a dead weight pulling them back. I shit you not. I think this is why so many brexiters believe that in the negotiations the UK has the upper hand.

Point 1 is unfortunately a symptom of the fact the non-tariff barriers which really are most significant to trade (recognised standards for goods and services, financial/legal passporting) were both co-opted by the Leave campaign to make puerile populist arguments about the evils of the EU ("they make stupid rules about bananas", "they are the wealthy elites")...

That's like saying if Canada doesn't try to join the EU it doesn't understand what trade looks like.

Yeah, actually, you can do trade and do it successfully without tying all treaties together into a political state-building project. Everywhere else in the world manages this pretty successfully.

No, because CETA shows an awareness of these issues:

1) It's got a lot of stuff about non-tariff barriers in it. 2) Doesn't really apply, because Canada is heavily pro-immigration anyway. 3) Remains true 4) Remains true and 5) Is also a problem for CETA.

Bear in mind also that CETA is a _much_ more limited trade deal than we have with the EU.

So, you're right in that there is a theoretical position that the UK could take which was pro-trade and anti-EU, but it would be a light-year away from the briefings of the Three Brexiteers right now.

Hardly: CETA doesn't affect immigration and is pretty similar to the sort of trade deal the UK might want. The "single market" isn't as impressive as people like to make out. It's primarily oriented towards trade in goods i.e. what Germany wants and progress on trade in services i.e. what the UK wants has been very slow and sometimes goes backwards. The EU has made selling software or any digital items over the internet to EU member countries vastly harder than it used to be: it's actually easier to sell into the EU over the internet from outside it, which is madness.

Please don't make the mistake of thinking that everyone in the UK thinks this way. The country is very sharply divided down the middle about open vs closed. In London, the majority want free movement of people, goods and services, and realize that Brexit (even "soft") is going to be a catastrophe.

I would like to believe that, but it doesn't seem to be supported by the data. Voting intention for the Tories seems higher than ever, Tories + UKIP are well over 50%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...

Political parties' opinion polling is probably the least reliable way of gauging this, since the Conservative party is at least notionally very pro-business, was divided on the issue of Brexit and its Leave faction made numerous claims that leaving would benefit trade with the wider world, and (outside Scotland) the major opposition parties have been in total disarray for the last couple of years for unrelated reasons.

More reliable indications would be that 48% of people voted Remain, and a non-trivial percentage of those that voted Leave did so because they believed claims that disengaging from the EU would allow the UK to pursue more free trade arrangements than before.

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