Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[PJL]

I'm sticking to my theory that a number of voters will vote with their heads/wallets rather than their hearts come the day 

What I am dreading is a brexit lead which is overturned by the postal votes, that would lead to severe problems in my view.

It's far more likely there'll be a Remain lead which is overturned by the postal vote which has strongly favoured Leave apparently.

[Agelastus]

I'm sticking to my theory that a number of voters will vote with their heads/wallets rather than their hearts come the day 

What I am dreading is a brexit lead which is overturned by the postal votes, that would lead to severe problems in my view.

It's far more likely there'll be a Remain lead which is overturned by the postal vote which has strongly favoured Leave apparently.

Can you direct me to an article, please? What I've seen and heard is more in line with Richard's opinion, that postal will heavily favour remain (as best one can tell anyway since the votes can't be legally opened until the vote.)

[PJL]

I'm sticking to my theory that a number of voters will vote with their heads/wallets rather than their hearts come the day 

What I am dreading is a brexit lead which is overturned by the postal votes, that would lead to severe problems in my view.

It's far more likely there'll be a Remain lead which is overturned by the postal vote which has strongly favoured Leave apparently.

Can you direct me to an article, please? What I've seen and heard is more in line with Richard's opinion, that postal will heavily favour remain (as best one can tell anyway since the votes can't be legally opened until the vote.)

Can't actually give an article, but there's been anecdotal evidence that canvassers have been getting 70-30 in favour of Leave from people who say they have already voted by post.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Minsky mentioned euro-clearing earlier. It seems that the eurozone tried to grab that business a while back (it is done in London atm) but the UK took it up with the ECJ which ruled in our favour :

http://openeurope.org.uk/today/blog/uk-secures-important-victory-ecj-preserve-single-market/


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36581659

That only counts if we are in the single market of course. So we will definitely lose a nice bit of business that currently keeps several thousand workers in the financial sector in employment. Pity the poor but honest bankers 

[The Minsky Moment]

Yes it seems odd that Euro-clearing should be dominated by a city in the sterling zone, but the single market non-discrimination laws prevent the EuroZone countries from doing anything about it.  Little chance that anomaly would be allowed to continue after exit.

[Sheilbh]

The builders of the new London Golden Sacks campus have a load of Leave signs out

[Zanza]

I think the "long term" means 2030 when discussing those projections, it usually does. So the negative figures need to be lopped off from whatever the standard growth is estimated to be in the period 2016-30. So, eg, according to the LSE growth would only be 20% instead of 28%.

I'd say that the projections are close to valueless.

The potential is certainly there to misread them but I wouldn't say they're valueless at all. When all predictions point to a recession looming and long term growth suffering, considering all that investment that won't come into the UK, and even the facts in the here and now show that whenever leave polls well things go iffy....
How big the economic blow will be is quite up in there but it seems pretty much certain there will be one.

I'm slightly annoyed, because I can't now find an article I found a couple of years ago.

There's two aspects to the EU accounts signing off - whether they are reliable (ie. all the transactions etc. are there) and whether or not all the transactions could be confirmed as being legal and regular.

Up until 2006 neither side was signed off fully.

From 2007 the budget's been signed off as reliable (everything spent has been recorded within the standard or error allowed) but not signed off as to being legal and regular (this is where the British press consistently get the "not signed off" from.)

The EU's budget probably could have been signed off as reliable before 2007 if they hadn't set themselves too high a standard following the expansion of the competency of the Court of Auditors at Maastricht. In 2006 a British comptroller told the Commons Select Committee involved that if he had to follow the EU's rules he couldn't have signed off the British government's accounts despite only finding 13 of 500+ accounts to have had material errors.

And here's where I am annoyed - a couple of years ago I found an article that linked me to an EU site that mentioned that they'd relaxed this standard for 2007 onwards (allowing a higher percentage error rate for the reliability measure.) I can't find this now, only information that 2007 was the first year the Accounts had moved completely to an accruals system from a cash accounting system. 

So unless I can find that information again you'd better take my comment about changing the rules with a pinch of salt.

---------------------

The "legal and regular" aspect's error rate has always been above the level considered acceptable (4.4% in the last audit , 2.4% above the acceptable level.) This is considered to be mainly due to error rather than fraud.

Here's something on it:

https://fullfact.org/europe/did-auditors-sign-eu-budget/

Not heard of them changing the rules. But I wouldn't see it as such a terrible thing that they changed the rules because they were too overly strict.

The problem with the whole argument is whether the EU is even able to ever fix it. The EU - despite moaning about EU bureaucrats - has a tiny apparatus. Virtually all EU money is disbursed by national, regional or local bureaucracies in the member countries. Not all of them apply the EU rules correctly, which leads to these findings every year.

[Admiral Yi]

The builders of the new London Golden Sacks campus have a load of Leave signs out

Priceless.

[Josquius]

I'm sticking to my theory that a number of voters will vote with their heads/wallets rather than their hearts come the day 

What I am dreading is a brexit lead which is overturned by the postal votes, that would lead to severe problems in my view.

It's far more likely there'll be a Remain lead which is overturned by the postal vote which has strongly favoured Leave apparently.

Can you direct me to an article, please? What I've seen and heard is more in line with Richard's opinion, that postal will heavily favour remain (as best one can tell anyway since the votes can't be legally opened until the vote.)

Can't actually give an article, but there's been anecdotal evidence that canvassers have been getting 70-30 in favour of Leave from people who say they have already voted by post.

Canvassers would be speaking purely to postal voters in the UK however.
The overseas voter vote....I think that will be far more along the lines of "Please don't directly destroy my life"

[Sheilbh]

Apparently Ruth () and Sadiq () were excellent for Remain in the last debate.

Like the football I didn't see it because I was in work

Did see a bit of Michael Gove moaning that Ministers were stopped from doing things every day because of the EU. It does make me wonder, if we leave what new excuse the civil service will come up with?

[PJL]

I'm sticking to my theory that a number of voters will vote with their heads/wallets rather than their hearts come the day 

What I am dreading is a brexit lead which is overturned by the postal votes, that would lead to severe problems in my view.

It's far more likely there'll be a Remain lead which is overturned by the postal vote which has strongly favoured Leave apparently.

Can you direct me to an article, please? What I've seen and heard is more in line with Richard's opinion, that postal will heavily favour remain (as best one can tell anyway since the votes can't be legally opened until the vote.)

Can't actually give an article, but there's been anecdotal evidence that canvassers have been getting 70-30 in favour of Leave from people who say they have already voted by post.

Canvassers would be speaking purely to postal voters in the UK however.
The overseas voter vote....I think that will be far more along the lines of "Please don't directly destroy my life"

But considering the domestic UK electorate is over 100 times the overseas electorate, this is an non issue.

[Josquius]

In postal votes?

[PJL]

In postal votes?

Even in postal votes, and assuming all overseas voters used a postal vote (not sure about Gibraltar), domestic postal votes would still be over 25 times bigger.

[Sheilbh]

And I think Orban genuinely wants UK to remain. It has soaked up 2-300k dissatisfied Hungarians. The EU in general turned out to be an amazing tool to build his system: they pay insane money on improvement projects that he can steal and use to build a loyal oligarchy, and free movement of workers is an excellent  pressure valve. Everyone who is not fine with being serfs under his guys can just leave.

No-one's doubt his sincerity. Just seeing lots of leavers asking if he's the sort of leader you really want political union with

It is funny, that for the far-right accross Europe, the EU is the symbol of the international left imposing leftist control over everything. while for the far-left, in the UK at least, it is the symbol of preventing leftist control.

Under current EU law for the Eurozone, George Osborne's fiscal policy counts as 'leftist control'. Too right I'm opposed.

I thought that voter fraud conspiracy theories were a Polish (i.e. "young democracy") thing, but it seems to me these days every group that does not win screams voter fraud - from Bernie and Trump voters to Brexiters.

This can't have good long term consequences for democracy, can it?

Apparently 20% of voters think MI5 is working with the government to help Remain. 25% of voters think it will rig the vote.

I suppose it's nice to quantify the number of absolute mentalists in the country

With all due respect, I believe you are mixing up two things. Brexit is even more popular in France than in England, and than in the UK of course. 

The EU, however, has a lower approval rating in France than it does in the UK.

It's very difficult to know when it's you speaking.  I never know if you're one side, the other, both at the same time or none of them. 

Probably both at the same time in this case

This is a real point for me. The leavers love the buzzword corrupt. I've not seen any evidence for the EU being especially corrupt though.

In fairness it is very opaque. The EU recently introduced unprecedented levels of transparency. There's 7,500 organisations now on the (voluntary) register of lobbying groups. 80% of them had absolutely no recorded meetings with EU officials. In fact 95% had fewer than four meeting in a reason.

Of course fewer than 300 EU officials are actually covered by the EU's new transparency measures, so that's maybe to be expected.

I think it's fair to suspect a certain level of corruption with any governmental organisation that is that lacking in transparency.

Ok - that might almost be possible if you assume path dependency, which isn't entirely unreasonable. Still aggressive though.

Agreed. I think RH was right earlier that Remain are being too apocalyptic here. He's also right that they should argue about the two years of negotiations. Apparently David Cameron is showing Tory MP waverers his 'grid' for a Brexit negotiation and telling them to campaign for Remain or get three more years of 'Eurowank'

On the hope that things might be better outside the EU?

Basically this:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/19/progressive-argument-for-leaving-eu-is-not-being-heard-referendum-brexit
The EU right now is a hard right fiscal policy, married to a centre right social policy, developing a Fortress Europe on migration. I still don't think there is a positive left-wing case for remaining.

Plus it is I think way beyond the limits of its legitimacy - democratic or output - and, though I'm not a big fan, I think Tony Benn's questions to people in power work here.

But considering the domestic UK electorate is over 100 times the overseas electorate, this is an non issue.

And there are still double the number of UK expats in New Zealand along than in Spain, far more in Australia.

Glad to see we've all toned down the rhetor...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/20/brexit-make-britain-worlds-most-hated-nation

[The Minsky Moment]

Basically this:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/19/progressive-argument-for-leaving-eu-is-not-being-heard-referendum-brexit
The EU right now is a hard right fiscal policy, married to a centre right social policy, developing a Fortress Europe on migration. I still don't think there is a positive left-wing case for remaining.

There's something to that but not an argument for exit:
+ Fiscal policy - the UK already has an independent fiscal policy and Osbornism is no better
+ Social policy - not sure what this refers to but I doubt the Tory government intends to push this farther left
+ Fortress Europe on migration - again, the supposed aim of the Brexiters is to raise the barriers higher.

The left wing case is to look at the motivations and intentions of the Brexiters and realize the SQ is the safer option