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The article on Brexit to end it all

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/11/crash-pound-delusion-brexit-britain-flourish

Title: The crash in the pound punctures the delusion that Brexit Britain will flourish

Subtitle: There’ll be no boom outside the EU. With a paltry manufacturing industry, we can’t pay our way.

Highlights:

"What he’s describing is delusional thinking: the red-faced insistence on one’s beliefs despite the mountains of evidence that prove them wrong. Delusional thinking helped tip Britain out of the European Union [...]

So let’s have some ugly facts. First of all, the crash in the pound is a reminder of one overriding danger that some of us have been warning about for years: Britain does not pay its way in the world. It buys far more goods and services from other countries than it sells to them.

[...]

Ah, we’re told: but all this currency weakness is just brilliant for British exporters. It makes their goods so much cheaper to sell abroad. True, but that is to overestimate the bag of bones that is the British manufacturing sector 30 years after the Thatcher revolution.

Germany has its BMWs and Boschs, its Mercedes and Mieles. Britain? GEC, ICI and the rest were all broken up and sold off years ago. That leaves Rolls-Royce as the only large, world-class, hi-tech company making a complex finished product in this country.

Other manufacturers still work in Britain – but typically they assemble components made elsewhere. That is true of our car industry, and it is true of JCB, the company David Cameron used to love touting in India and China. In 1979, 96% of a JCB digger was made here. By 2010, that had dropped to 36%.

[...]

What the pound’s weakness will chiefly achieve is to stop Britons buying as much. The middle classes will swap the wonders of the Alhambra for a week in Anglesey. The working classes will find Zara 15% more expensive.[...]

Think about those figures: a Britain that doesn’t make things, that can’t pay its way in the world and where two generations have been brought up believing that what your wages won’t pay, your credit will buy. As the promises for Brexit are broken and people get poorer; as the consumerist model breaks down, who do you think will pay the price? [...]

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I don't understand the title of the thread. What is this Guardian article supposed to be ending once and for all? The concept of balanced unbiased journalism?
Original post by Reality Check
I don't understand the title of the thread. What is this Guardian article supposed to be ending once and for all? The concept of balanced unbiased journalism?


Look at all the facts in it and see how it utterly destroys your unbalanced, biased narrative :smile: No wonder you're commenting on the thread title and not its content...
Original post by TitanicTeutonicPhil
Look at all the facts in it and see how it utterly destroys your unbalanced, biased narrative :smile: No wonder you're commenting on the thread title and not its content...


I think the one things the Brexit 'debate' taught us all is how fluid 'facts' are. One man's facts are another man's propaganda.
Original post by Reality Check
I think the one things the Brexit 'debate' taught us all is how fluid 'facts' are. One man's facts are another man's propaganda.

Oh and don't you Brexiters know all about that?

Lel.
Original post by Reality Check
I think the one things the Brexit 'debate' taught us all is how fluid 'facts' are. One man's facts are another man's propaganda.


I'll have to disagree. Most 'facts' brought forward by Brexiteers turned out to be blatant lies (apart from being disgustingly xenophobic or nationalist). What is said in the article is backward-looking and indisputable. The conclusions and predictions the authors draws from them might be less indisputable, but you will find that virtually all independent international institutions and experts agree.
Original post by yudothis
Oh and don't you Brexiters know all about that?

Lel.


1. When did I say I was a Brexiteer?

2. When did I endorse the 'Leave' campaign

Don't assume to know.
Original post by TitanicTeutonicPhil
I'll have to disagree. Most 'facts' brought forward by Brexiteers turned out to be blatant lies (apart from being disgustingly xenophobic or nationalist). What is said in the article is backward-looking and indisputable. The conclusions and predictions the authors draws from them might be less indisputable, but you will find that virtually all independent international institutions and experts agree.


Another thing we learnt during the Brexit 'debate' was that the population has had quite enough of 'experts'. Like the experts who predicted that the day after Brexit the Channel would boil with sulphurous fumes and we would be smitten with pestilence and a plague of locusts...
Original post by Reality Check
Another thing we learnt during the Brexit 'debate' was that the population has had quite enough of 'experts'.


Maybe it shouldn't though.

I still cannot fathom how people of very, umm, varying degrees of intelligence, education and economic insight can think they know better than an overwhelming majorities of respected experts - let alone IMF, World Bank, etc.

Original post by Reality Check
Like the experts who predicted that the day after Brexit the Channel would boil with sulphurous fumes and we would be smitten with pestilence and a plague of locusts...


I don't follow. I only know you HAVE been smitten with a few waves of severe devaluation of your currency and your biggest industry mulling plans to move out, indicating nothing good for when Brexit actually happens.
Original post by TitanicTeutonicPhil
Maybe it shouldn't though.

I still cannot fathom how people of very, umm, varying degrees of intelligence, education and economic insight can think they know better than an overwhelming majorities of respected experts - let alone IMF, World Bank, etc.



I don't follow. I only know you HAVE been smitten with a few waves of severe devaluation of your currency and your biggest industry mulling plans to move out, indicating nothing good for when Brexit actually happens.


It's kind of you to be so solicitously enquiring of our health in Blighty but we're quite fine, thank you.

I should have thought you'd be more worried about more domestic matters such as your forthcoming elections, Angela Merkel's CDU facing a trouncing by AfD and what exactly you're going to do about all those terrorists you welcomed into Germany with gay abandon and now don't know where they've ended up or what they're plotting. And that's before we've even started to think about Deutsche Bank -special favours during an EU stress test indeed! Was that test carried out by an 'expert'?
(edited 7 years ago)
Original post by Reality Check
It's kind of you to be so solicitously enquiring of our health in Blighty but we're quite fine, thank you.


It's quite obvious -to Europe, the world, and maybe now even to Brexiters- that you are not.

Original post by Reality Check
Angela Merkel's CDU facing a trouncing by AfD


A 'trouncing'? Do you actually know the poll numbers, or do you just blindly believe the Daily Mail? Country-wide, the CDU (for which I am not even voting) is polling at almost three times of the AfD numbers. Another grand coalition would EASILY have a majority while AfD stands isolated. Do your homework.

Original post by Reality Check
and what exactly you're going to do about all those terrorists you welcomed into Germany with gay abandon and now don't know where they've ended up or what they're plotting.


Ah, we'd rather have a few terrorists than be inhumane, smug egomaniacs neglecting their humanitarian duty to help people in need. Yeah, we're better people, really. Do your homework.

Original post by Reality Check
And that's before we've even started to think about Deutsche Bank -special favours during an EU stress test indeed!


Deutsche Bank passed the stress test fair and square and would do so again, easily. It's facing yet more litigation cost, but it will just be fine, thank you very much. Do your homework.
It sounds like the beginning of the end.

Britain is no longer the big powerful country it used to be. Being in the EU gave us a lot of leverage, but now I fear that we will be left behind. Plus, I don't trust the incompetent government to make the right decisions and steer us in the right direction.
Original post by TitanicTeutonicPhil
It's quite obvious -to Europe, the world, and maybe now even to Brexiters- that you are not.



A 'trouncing'? Do you actually know the poll numbers, or do you just blindly believe the Daily Mail? Country-wide, the CDU (for which I am not even voting) is polling at almost three times of the AfD numbers. Another grand coalition would EASILY have a majority while AfD stands isolated. Do your homework.



Ah, we'd rather have a few terrorists than be inhumane, smug egomaniacs neglecting their humanitarian duty to help people in need. Yeah, we're better people, really. Do your homework.



Deutsche Bank passed the stress test fair and square and would do so again, easily. It's facing yet more litigation cost, but it will just be fine, thank you very much. Do your homework.


Repeating the phrase 'do your homework' doesn't lend your posts any further credibility, nor does it make you an 'expert'.

As for 'neglecting your humanitarian duty to help people in need', a less charitable person could say 'better late than never' for Germany. Lecturing others on being inhumane is, frankly, faintly ridiculous.

As for Deutsche Bank, I suggest it is you who needs to do your homework. Read and digest the folllowing:

https://www.ft.com/content/44768ea8-8c71-11e6-8aa5-f79f5696c731

OR

https://news.google.com/news/story?ncl=d9WaYsd8yhE82KMnGsWtweWyjhH8M&q=deutsche+bank+eu+stress+test&lr=English&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjKs6_lyNLPAhUJIcAKHZixDF0QqgIIKDAA

and chose any of the news articles: FT/New York Times, etc


Unfortunately for you, the FT is the mouthpiece of those very 'Experts' of whom you've previously said you're so respectful. So which is wrong, the Brexit Experts or the FT experts (=Brexit Experts) regarding Deutsche Bank....
(edited 7 years ago)
Original post by Reality Check
Repeating the phrase 'do your homework' doesn't lend your posts any further credibility, nor does it make you an 'expert'.


No, but it emphasizes how unfounded and downright wrong your claims are - in case anyone didn't see that immediately.

Original post by Reality Check
As for 'neglecting your humanitarian duty to help people in need', a less charitable person could say 'better late than never' for Germany. Lecturing others on being inhumane is, frankly, faintly ridiculous.


No, it's not. We are being humane, you are being inhumane, xenophobic egomaniacs who don't bear their fair share. Or do you want to talk about the countless inhumane atrocities the British Empire committed, apart from colonialising and exploiting a large part of the world? So yeah, you've really always been inhumane.

Original post by Reality Check
As for Deutsche Bank, I suggest it is you who needs to do your homework. Read and digest the folllowing:

https://www.ft.com/content/44768ea8-8c71-11e6-8aa5-f79f5696c731



Once again, you disqualify yourself and your cause by blatant ignorance.

The facts:
- Only the FT is reporting on this, it's yet to be confirmed
- It's about whether a deal is accounted for in 2015 or 2016. Those 4bn are in the bank, literally
- The deal was footnoted, so not even kept secretly
- There is NO indication that DB would have failed the stress test if this money was accounted for in a different period, which it passed comfortably

So yeah, please do do your homework.
Original post by TitanicTeutonicPhil
No, but it emphasizes how unfounded and downright wrong your claims are - in case anyone didn't see that immediately.



No, it's not. We are being humane, you are being inhumane, xenophobic egomaniacs who don't bear their fair share. Or do you want to talk about the countless inhumane atrocities the British Empire committed, apart from colonialising and exploiting a large part of the world? So yeah, you've really always been inhumane.



Once again, you disqualify yourself and your cause by blatant ignorance.

The facts:
- Only the FT is reporting on this, it's yet to be confirmed
- It's about whether a deal is accounted for in 2015 or 2016. Those 4bn are in the bank, literally
- The deal was footnoted, so not even kept secretly
- There is NO indication that DB would have failed the stress test if this money was accounted for in a different period, which it passed comfortably

So yeah, please do do your homework.


As I've just said, it is reported by Bloomberg, The FT, The New York Times... Take your pick. Oh, and you didn't deal with the problem of 'expert opinion' of which you're so fond of.

As for to trying to score a cheap point about the indiscretions and failings of the British Empire whilst casually forgetting the Holocaust...well. Could you make yourself sound any more ludicrous? More to the point I, and I suspect most British people on this British forum, will absolutely NOT be lectured on humanity by a German citizen who is part of a nation who systematically killed 6 millions jews in living memory. You have no moral authority.

Do your homework. Or at least learn to use Google!
(edited 7 years ago)
Original post by Reality Check
As I've just said, it is reported by Bloomberg, The FT, The New York Times...


No. Bloomberg, The New York Times say that the FT are saying that. The FT are the only ones who have an original story on this. They may be right - but you clearly are wrong.

So shall we talk about AfD again? Or do you just concede that you had absolutely no idea what you were talking about?
Sorry, are you suggesting a vote of 20.8% with the same swing in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is irrelevant? And you're suggesting that it is I who has no idea what I'm talking about :biggrin:
Original post by Reality Check
Sorry, are you suggesting a vote of 20.8% with the same swing in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is irrelevant? And you're suggesting that it is I who has no idea what I'm talking about :biggrin:


Yes, you really have no idea what you're talking about.

Do you know where Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is? The socio-economic situation it is in? The historic voting behavior of its residents?

I never said it was irrelevant.

But you were talking about the elections next year, which are national. And nationally, the AfD polls at a little over a third of the CDU. So very, very far from 'a trouncing'. You were plain wrong and just embarrassed yourself by displaying utter ignorance of German politics.
Original post by TitanicTeutonicPhil
Yes, you really have no idea what you're talking about.

Do you know where Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is? The socio-economic situation it is in? The historic voting behavior of its residents?

I never said it was irrelevant.

But you were talking about the elections next year, which are national. And nationally, the AfD polls at a little over a third of the CDU. So very, very far from 'a trouncing'. You were plain wrong and just embarrassed yourself by displaying utter ignorance of German politics.


At no point did I say that I was talking about the German elections next year - you've just invented that to try to get you out of a hole. I merely said 'forthcoming'. I have not been wrong in any of my posts and neither have I embarrassed myself. Moreover, you haven't addressed any of the questions I've asked you about experts, moral authority and the like. Because you can't answer them.

I think you've made a little bit of a fool out of yourself. Goodbye!
(edited 7 years ago)
Original post by Lord Gaben
It sounds like the beginning of the end.

Britain is no longer the big powerful country it used to be. Being in the EU gave us a lot of leverage, but now I fear that we will be left behind. Plus, I don't trust the incompetent government to make the right decisions and steer us in the right direction.


I trust a British government elected by the British people to get decisions right for the UK over EU politicians any day.

The UK is still influential - we are one of the more important members of NATO & we are also on the United Nations Security Council. We hand out more in Foreign Aid (for better or for worse) than most other developed nations.
In terms of "soft power" the UK is second only to the USA.

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