Speaking of walls

If you want our bunch of filthy-rich super-criminals to relocate in Paris or Frankfurt, then you're welcome to them AFAIC. Sadly, however, I don't think there's any inducement you could conceivably offer that would tempt them to leave London. I only wish it could be otherwise.

Yes, the EU is choc full of hundreds of millions of citizens; a market much larger than the UK. Trouble is, Bill, most EU citizens can't afford a pot to piss in, let alone a new car. Spain, Italy, Ireland and Portugal are still on the bones of their arses from the 2007/08 crash; France is barely any better and as for eastern europe - forget it! Your grand european project is a failed experiment, Bill. It's a busted flush. It's falling apart. If the NF get in in France next year, as seems likely, then Frexit will swiftly follow and the whole rotten thing will be OVER.

Most of whom haven't a pot to piss in. No loss there, then.

Ha! That would be wonderful, but sadly I can't see it happening.

As opposed to the *disadvantages* of membership, which have been thoroughly and unquestionably quantified over a ruinously expensive 45 year period.

Not by someone of your limited abilities it isn't.

Reading seems to be difficult.

You may keep them, the are yours. You may thank Maggie for this. It is not the EUs fault.

Europe does not want and never wanted your useless gamblers. But London always blocked any regulations that would limit this gambling.

To stop them would be easy and hopefully will now happen without London blocking it. Just put appropriate regulations in place that will limit or stop this gambling. Since the UK alone is to small a place to suck off they would otherwise try to come to Europe.

Thatcher was in power for 14 of those years. You can't blame the damage she did on the EU.

The UK's main problem is a persistent and unhelpful class structure. Interg enerational mobility is almost as bad in the UK as it is in the US.

Bright lower class kids don't get as much education as they could use, and UK managers often get to be managers because they are seen as more upper-cl ass than the other candidates, rather than more competent. There were excep tions, but I ran into far too many upper-class twits, some of them too dumb to let their secretaries run things for them.

The EU wasn't doing a thing to change that, and leaving the EU won't either .

Ganging up against someone for leaving your club has something to do with capitalism? It's hard to see how. That's just good old-fashioned coercion.

There is absolutely nothing that compels new tariffs where previously there were none.

You have many friends, not including this president, but most surely-- and always--America.

On the matter of trade, you're an advanced nation able to produce all sorts of goods. There are other nations who want those goods, and who produce yet other items your citizens value and would like to buy.

So just do it. Ain't no thang.

Cheers, James Arthur

I think you've just described the EU, where the members most certainly do

Besides, what on earth is the cost of signing a paper saying you won't tax another country's goods? Zero.

:-)

That's all well and good, but doesn't begin to require the EU to accomplish.

You guys are encountering the same problems the U.S. addressed when our (independent) states came together to form one nation. We decided to create a very limited federal government responsible for a few functions only, and leave the rest to the individual states.

It worked pretty well while we stuck to it.

Cheers, James Arthur

You set up a common market to minimise trading costs. Somebody who backs ou t has to is going to be stuck with higher trading costs. The coercion is ju st the mirror images of the costs and benefits of joining the common market in the first place.

There were tariffs before the common market was set up, re-imposing them is just restoring the status quo ante.

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Some of the "trading" that occurred during that thousand-year history didn' t do much for the people being trade with - or, in case of the slave trade, the people being traded.

With friends like America, you don't need enemies.

What James Arthur neglects to mention - and may not be aware of - is that t he unit cost of producing goods tends to be a function of the number you ha ve tooled up to produce. Generally, if you can tool up to produce ten times the volume, you can make a profit while selling at half the unit price a l ower volume producer needs.

The EC was a market with 500 million individual buyers. People in the UK di d tool up to manufacture on a scale that would satisfy the EU market, rathe r than the UK domestic market, confident that nobody was going to frivolous ly set up a tariff barrier that would stop them selling into that market.

I worked for a while at Chessel Recorders, part of the Eurotherm Group, tha t did exactly that. Chessell is still around.

Thatcher wasn't that enthusiastic about manufacturing, so relatively few UK manufacturers did that, and a lot of the rest got put out of business by E uropean competitors who had been able and willing to raise the capital requ ired to tool up for larger volumes. At that time the default washing machin e in the UK was an Italian-made Indesit - not wonderful, but about half the price of the local equivalent because it was being made to sell right acro ss Europe.

Having a large and reliable domestic market has helped American manufacture rs no end, and the EC was seen as way of trumping that advantage.

Brexit throws away that advantage.

James Arthur takes the large domestic market for granted. Citizens of small er countries mostly know better - not Cursitor Doom, who thinks he still li ves in a empire on which the sun never sets.

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That's a problem in every federation. The more successful Australian and US states support the less successful ones. The UK was never a very high yiel ding cow within the EU.

Actually, the cost is what you could have got by taxing the other countries goods. It's not zero.

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Complex regulations tend to reflect a long history of people trying to get around them. There's always a lot of pressure to simplify complex regulatio ns, and a lot of resistance from people who are coping with the regulations and see them as a convenient anti-competitive device. The international na me for this is "non-tariff barriers to trade" and the US Underwriter's Labo ratory system is the text-book example.

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I'm less confident about that. The EU does encourage national governments t o cooperate, and has a enough clout to persuade non-EU members to play alon g.

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There's nothing subtle about US protectionism.

It might have worked pretty well while you could stick to it. The world has changed a lot since 1788, and the US Constitution rather less so.

The Canadians and the Australians chose rather different constitutions for their federations, and the 1948 German federal constitution is different ag ain.

Cursitor Doom sees communists under every bed. He hasn't noticed that the s pecies is extinct.

There's nothing remotely communist in suggesting that politicians will try to find the least damaging way of getting out of an awkward situation.

Cursitor Doom is clueless enough to think that Britain will do better outsi de the EU than it has been doing inside since 1973. He's sufficiently clued up to realise that the the UK hasn't done all that well since 1973, but to o dumb to realise that the problem is the UK, not the EU.

Few politicians are unrealistic enough to share his delusions, and those th at get into power do get educated by their civil servants.

high level view of all this

excess bureaucracy weakens the civilization to the point that the barbarians can take over

then the cycle starts all over again.

The EU is much more than just free trading. It's free traveling without the need for a passport. As a EU citizen I can work in every member state without having to apply for a work permit. And much more. It's seamless moving of goods because of common rules. We have a lot of Brits working in Germany and Germans working in the UK. Why should Germany or any other EU member state grant all these advantages to a non-member. The EU does this with Norway and in part for Switzerland, but they have to pay their price without having much influence what is decided.

Imagine you would have to apply for a permit when you want to settle and/or work in your neighbor state. Not so long ago this was the case in Europe. I myself remember having to present my passport when entering into France or Austria. This would never become a reality if it had to be negotiated between each pair of states (28 member states would mean 378 treaties).

Without it, it would quite surely never have happened.

I won't talk about the US because I know it only from the outside. My impression is (from the outside) that is a very radicalized, divided country where each side is systematically blocking anything the other is doing instead of trying to find compromises for the better of all. And I think this is not limited to federal government. This division and radicalization has led to the worst possible candidates for the presidency. Worst for the US an since the US by its size has influence on most of the world, also the worst possible candidates for the world.

In the EU it is quite often the case that cowardly politicians are trying to blame the EU for their own decisions or not-decisions. In reality nearly no decision of the EU is done without consent of each member states government. The member states are just not controlled by the EU. Local politicians and some idiotic nationalists just spread this FUD.

Sometimes you have to decide things that are not popular but necessary (I never get that spelling right). But then they should have the balls to do it and stand for it instead of blaming Brussels for it. This is one reason the EU has become unpopular without real reason.

That might be the Tea Party weakening the Republican Party until they couldn't put up a presidential candidate who was less repulsive than Trump, but that wasn't bureaucracy, but rather a demented belief system.

Modern civilisations have much cheaper and more useful bureaucracies than primitive civilisations could manage.

Syllabic alphabets and Arabic numbers made the difference. Since then the barbarians haven't had a chance.

There is the problem of barbarians inside the civilisation - the Tea Party in the US and the National Socialists in Germany - but that's not the fault of the bureaucracy.

Unless they fear that brexit will be wildly successful and put them at a big disadvantage.

What's anti-British about thinking that the UK would be better off it it st ayed in the EU? You don't think that it is a good idea, but that's just one more of your fatuous delusions. Great Britain will be at greater risk of s plitting up if it leaves the EU - both Scotland and Norther Ireland wanted to stay in - so if anybody is being anti-British here it's you.

The UK already looks distinctly third world on a number of measures. It's g ot income inequality at near US levels, rotten intergenerational mobility, and poor productivity levels.

What's Marxist about the EU? The USSR was a Marxist federation, and nobody is going to be silly enough to re-run that experiment.

Cursitor Doom is probably right. Even Britain's third-world politicians are likely to have enough sense to avoid actually leaving the EU. How they wil l dress up their evasion of satisfying the wishes of some of the people is hard to predict, but that they will contrive to avoid it is rather more pre dictable.

Personally I wouldn't worry about a troll too much.

Whether or not they can avoid it remains to be seen, of course. Given that the labour party will probably cease to exist at the next election[1], the Tory party's civil war will be of key importance - and who knows how that will pan out.

are likely to have enough sense to avoid actually leaving the EU. How they will dress up their evasion of satisfying the wishes of some of the people is hard to predict, but that they will contrive to avoid it is rather more predictable.

The Labour Party survived Michael Foot, and they will probably survive Jere my Corbyn.

The Guardian thinks that Corbyn will survive the current challenge from wit hin the Labour Party, which is to say that the Labour moderates are going t o have to find a more charismatic challenger, preferably a Kinnock rather t han a Blair.