One of the most persistent considerations of Brexit has been:-
"JOBS"
I noticed this common and recurring theme in Pete North's blogs and his considerations and general feeling about Brexit post Referendum.
Yes, Brexit is a mess. So what?
"Just this morning I noted Theresa May announcing that the Swansea Bay tidal barrage "is part of our plan to deliver an economy that works for everyone and will mean £1.3bn of investment and 9,000 jobs". They haven't learned anything.
We are not a country that can piss money away on eco-vanity projects any more. We stopped being that country in 2008. The politics of binge and splurge to keep the plebs in make-work jobs is dead in the water. We want the fundamentals addressed."
"With Hinkley Point, the eye watering strike price is much the same as the Renewable Obligation Certificate scheme. An incentive to make a bad idea attractive to business. Rather than being direct taxation it effectively grants corporates a licence to raid our wallets through our energy bills.
Politicians love it because it notionally creates jobs - but that is a result of government spending, not foreign investment."
"And who does this keep in jobs exactly? Middle class engineering graduates. People who vote Tory/Blair. Effectively, since 1997 the UK national grid has been an elaborate corporate welfare scheme whereby the mug punters are obliged to fund the vanity schemes of politicians peddling their eco credentials."
"Finally I would add how little I care. When I look at Nissan and Airbus I mainly see massive job creation schemes which have a history of taking big government money - largely as part of an industrial strategy to keep jobs in the regions. Though valuable they are a sticking plaster masking a more deep rooted economic decay."
"For a while I have has the impression that we are in a period of stagnation. For all the government's boasting of boosted numbers in jobs, there is an air of unreality to it all as people are shunted into insecure work and increasingly pushed into "self-employment". The fundamentals are not sound. The middle class is being propped up by massive government spending on defence and energy and soon HS2."
Considering I've only just tipped over 200 blogs, whereas this blogger has blasted past a huge number, it's one way to consider things from someone who has honestly put a lot of their energy, attention and time forming their work in this subject. Not only that, the great meme of the Remain campaign was for so long based on "3 million jobs!" (which itself has an interesting and mutating history).
Sorry Civitas, it's not ok to walk away
"We anticipated the usual remainer lie that three million jobs would be lost should we leave the EU. Our argument was that these jobs depended on trade, not political union. It was therefore necessary to show that we could end political union while maintaining favourable trading conditions."
'FLEXIBLE' + 'CONTINUOUS' + 'EXIT'
One of the core arguments in FLEXCIT was to anticipate the counter-argument based on FUD: Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt. A spectre of dread to so many people. Strangely enough this spectre looms over all the news broadcasts and all the agitation of people anxious about the outcome of the withdrawal process. Why?
Dr. RAE North's latest blog points out a summary of why: Brexit: back to darkness
"This (albeit limited) intelligence comes in a briefing from Alex Pienaar, head of EU exit policy for HMRC. He says that, "any form of customs controls will increase the costs to businesses and consumers of imported and exported products", adding that these costs "can be both financial and measured in time/delays".
What we have here is the first official acknowledgement of problems to come. And, in a separate piece, we also see recognition that: "the situation would be particularly onerous for those exporting food and other agricultural products into the EU with delays of up to a week for meat tested at official laboratories".
"As its worst, a botched Brexit could rival the Great Depression in its effects on the UK economy, returning darkness to the land. At its height, the 1929 depression cost the US some 30 percent of its GDP.
Destroying our external trade is as good a way as any to trigger an economic depression. Our Brexiteers seem determined that we should have one. Our government seems happy to give them one."
In FLEXCIT, this is precisely the scenario stipulated as first of all avoiding in our planning and secondly in our communication of such planning to people to vote upon.
To vote upon, via our politics. We've come full circle, in effect from prediction to fulfillment. All the while talking about the effect of our decisions on our jobs. A quick summary of the various sectors Dr. RAE North has been writing about tirelessly and assiduously demonstrates the shattering detail of this statement:-
- Customs
- WTO
- Formula 1
- Global Fraud
- CETA & Meat
- Duration of Trade Negotiations
- Automotive Sector
- Cosmetics & Standards
- Border Inspection
- Maritime Surveilance
- Tariffs, REACH & NTBs/TBT
- Elevator Business
- Geographical Indications Standards (GI)
- Digital Single Market
- Medicines & pharmaceuticals
- Fishing Policy
- Hazard Equipment Market
- ........... [ list continues counting] ............................................
"At that point, he [David Davies] said, they were looking in detail at over 50 sectors and cross-cutting regulatory issues, a statement he was to modify on 2 February this year, when he claimed that the number of sectors covered had grown to 58.
On this blog, though, we've recently looked at 20 sectors and can see hundreds more that need to be considered, if the department for the UK's exit from the EU is only covering 58, then we're in serious trouble. One of those sectors which Secretary of State might have missed is the growing market for the very specialist equipment used in potentially explosive atmospheres, the so-called "hazardous area equipment" market."
There's in reality a lot of jobs involved by a lot of people within all these sectors. But what dominates so many people/voters attention is:-
It doesn't matter who wins the US election. The decadent West is in terminal decline ~ Christopher Booker
However, this spectre is an image, with a human semblance only seemingly ushering in to millions tremulous emotions. Much much more terrible in it's "titanic" true form in it's irresistible and implacable force and almost impossible to understand effect on turning people into "tiny cogs within a huge machine" (Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" in other words) and where people spend so much of their lives' finite time: Fuelling our economies:-
One of the very interesting things right at the start of FLEXCIT:-
