137 billion pounds was wiped off the value of the UK
stockmarket in the first nine minutes of trading. That's the equivalent of nine
years EU membership fees.
The falling value of the pound will cause the cost of
imports to rise, making things more expensive on the high street.
The poorer parts of Britain have used the referendum as a
vote on globalisation: they've been shafted by continuous British governments
since 1979, governments who have off-shored their jobs, used immigration to
lower their wages and deregulated banks to provide cheap credit to fund their
consumption.
None of this will change outside of the EU.
The problem always was, is and will be that domestic UK
politicians do not represent the interests of the traditional working class,
they represent international finance. And under Johnson and Gove they still
will.
The UK is an international CAPITALIST economy, it needs
inward investment to pay for its current account deficit (debt), which is
massive. 50% of our inward investment came from the EU in 2015. Low wages - yes
even with George Osborne's supposed 'living wage' - help to attract this
investment. Immigration is a structural part of the UK economy and this is not
going to change any time soon. Even Farage said he would use migrants from the
Commonwealth (lol - that basically ended in 1956 @Suez), rather than the EU.
Immigration will not stop, but our economy will probably
take a huge battering:
The UK economy is 79% services, services are harder to
trade than manufactured goods because of the fact that people are integral to
services, you can't just ship them overseas like a bag of spanners. The UK had
a free 'passport' to trade services in the EU.
The City of London (services) generates 10% of the UK's
total GDP. Roughly a quarter of the UK’s financial sector business involves the
EU's Single Market, equivalent to 2 per cent of gross domestic product. And
balanced on top is a wider array of professional services. (Financial Times).
Plus: developed countries buy more services than
developing countries who are at a different stage in their economic
development. The EU is made up of some of the richest developed countries on
the planet. The entire structural configuration of our economy favours services
sold to developed countries and we just risked putting the kibosh on that.
Smart move.
There's more.
Free trade agreements take years to negotiate, and the UK
will be screaming out for FTAs to ensure trade based on best possible terms,
rather than the default WTO position - yes that's right, even on leaving the EU
there are other international organisations we have to conform to, we call this
the modern world - Under WTO there are 10% import tariffs on automotive
manufacturing, one of the last bastions of manufacturing in the UK. Without an
FTA all UK automotive exports will see a 10% tariff slapped on them. Let that sink
in for a moment. A UK crying out for FTAs will give negotiating partners
leverage, the UK does not have the upperhand here.
And as for an EU-UK FTA, the UK is 5% of global GDP
(2015), the EU 26%, who do you think will have the upperhand in those negotiations?
As for us importing more from the EU than we export, we need those goods, for
our standard of living and for our domestic supply chains. The fact that we
import so much is not automatically something that works in our favour! Trade
is not a zero sum game.
And when all these British citizens fund out that they've
been lied to over the next few years they're going to be absolutely furious.
And who do you think they will vote for then? Angry men with easy answers and
tiny little moustaches maybe? I'm pretty sure it won't be Corbyn with his
mystical magical 1970s timemachine.
This is a genuine clusterfuck. Cameron has risked the
union of the Kingdom - Northern Ireland voted remain 56%, Scotland 62% - and
the wider EU in trying to appease to racists, the angry and the ignorant. This
is not the behaviour of a statesman. It is the behaviour of an opportunist and
a coward. His name will go down in history as the man who accidentally broke up
Britain.
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