Covid-19 + Brexit = ?

[TagliatelliMonster]

Talking about timing, right?

Could this Corona crisis have come at an even worse time for the english, I wonder... It's kind of hard to imagine.

Brexit already had quite a few economic setbacks and implications going for it. Now it's only going to be exponentially worse... At a time the economy needed a major boost to be able to handle the backlash from brexit, public life comes to a virtual standstill and the biggest economic crisis since WW2 happens.

What I also have wondered about... what does this mean for brexit negotiations concerning a trade deal? It seems to me that the vast majority of politiciens and european/brittish institutions have bigger things to worry about now. It was already kind of... eum... "ambitious" to think there was going to be a trade deal in just one year. Now I think it's safe to say that it becomes close to impossible.

I hear that brexiteers have already, amidst the worst humanitarian crisis in a century, been pumping their chest and screaming that "corona is not going to make us postpone the deadline!!!!" - almost as if they are happy to have another excuse to still crash out without a deal.

Common sense would dictate that this is not the time for such chest pumping and macho talk, but rather to put the entire brexit thing in the freezer and reasonably conclude that it's not going to happen this year.

I think it's clear that the economic repercussion of just the corona crisis is going to last for years and be much worse then with the financial crisis 10 years ago. Adding Brexit macho's to that, seems to be a recipy for further economic disaster.

So what do you guys think?​

 

[Martin]

The current emergency has made the whole Brexit drama look parochial and irrelevant.
Clearly both UK and European economies are suffering economic damage, including massive additional government borrowing.

 

[ChristineM]

I agree with you completely.

To add...

The greatest crises for 3/4 of a century and parliament is to close a week early for its easter break giving them a month holiday.

A great example to the British public.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

I agree with you completely.

To add...

The greatest crises for 3/4 of a century and parliament is to close a week early for its easter break giving them a month holiday.

A great example to the British public.

Insane, isn't it.....

Meanwhile, I must say that I am rather pleased with how Belgium is handling it.
Especially considering that a few weeks ago, Belgium had the "honor" of having beaten its own world record in amount of time without a proper government... Little over 10 months I believe it was this time around. Our previous record was some 9 months. We stole that record from..... Iraq, of all places, lol.

And now, in the face of crisis, all of that political chest pumping and electoral buzzwords and stupid power seat games have instantly faded into the background. An emergency government was set up in a matter of days and the country is completely united as a single force tackling this corona crisis. What I also absolutely LOVE, is the fact that the daily press conferences are NOT being done by politicians. Nope. It's the scientific / academic leaders of the crisis centre that do that. The only time we see a politician, is for big anouncements or for very specific clarifications left and right. The bulk of information on corona, the numbers, the stats, the status of the lock down etc... all of it is communicated by actual scientists. They also use that daily press conference to tackle fake news and instead give accurate and easy to understand information.

Belgium is a strange country that way.... On the face of it, it looks hopelessly divided and unmanageable. But we manage to shift gears insanely fast and unify in solidarity like no other, to tackle nation wide issues like this one head on.


But I'm now kind of derailing my own thread, haha.
Just thought I'ld mention it.


Anyhow.........................

So that Brexit ey.... I'm curious to see where it will go from here, both in the current world while hijacked by Corona, as well as in a post-Covid19 world.
It seems to me that if the hardliner brexiteers press on, then this is going to hurt big time. Immensly.

 

[ChristineM]

Insane, isn't it.....

Meanwhile, I must say that I am rather pleased with how Belgium is handling it.
Especially considering that a few weeks ago, Belgium had the "honor" of having beaten its own world record in amount of time without a proper government... Little over 10 months I believe it was this time around. Our previous record was some 9 months. We stole that record from..... Iraq, of all places, lol.

And now, in the face of crisis, all of that political chest pumping and electoral buzzwords and stupid power seat games have instantly faded into the background. An emergency government was set up in a matter of days and the country is completely united as a single force tackling this corona crisis. What I also absolutely LOVE, is the fact that the daily press conferences are NOT being done by politicians. Nope. It's the scientific / academic leaders of the crisis centre that do that. The only time we see a politician, is for big anouncements or for very specific clarifications left and right. The bulk of information on corona, the numbers, the stats, the status of the lock down etc... all of it is communicated by actual scientists. They also use that daily press conference to tackle fake news and instead give accurate and easy to understand information.

Belgium is a strange country that way.... On the face of it, it looks hopelessly divided and unmanageable. But we manage to shift gears insanely fast and unify in solidarity like no other, to tackle nation wide issues like this one head on.


But I'm now kind of derailing my own thread, haha.
Just thought I'ld mention it.


Anyhow.........................

So that Brexit ey.... I'm curious to see where it will go from here, both in the current world while hijacked by Corona, as well as in a post-Covid19 world.
It seems to me that if the hardliner brexiteers press on, then this is going to hurt big time. Immensly.

Interesting, something you should be proud of.

I cannot see the post corvid 19 britain succeeding for many years. It will take some time for the world to pick itself up from this and most countries have a reasonably firm footing from where to start. I do not think the UK has that foundation any more so has much further to climb

 

[David1967]

What do I think? I think the Brits are a very tough and resilient people. They will make it through this.

 

[Rival]

I think I wish people would stop confusing British and English.

I think I wish people would stop looking at Brexit as some nutcase alt-right political hemorrhage that's going to crash and burn our country, and instead look in more detail at the reasoning behind it, and why people from all political sides voted for it.

I think I wish we could all just come together and stop squabbling as nations during a worldwide pandemic.

 

[exchemist]

I agree with you completely.

To add...

The greatest crises for 3/4 of a century and parliament is to close a week early for its easter break giving them a month holiday.

A great example to the British public.

I find this unduly cynical.

We are now in a full cvil emergency. Parliament's last act before recessing has been to pass the legislation to enable that - having amended it, by the way, to make sure it has to be renewed every 6 months. The government did not contest that. The silly games have been set aside.

The House of Commons does not have the room to enable MPs to sit while maintaining safe spacing, and there is also the issue of how they would travel.

It seems to me quite sensible to let the executive (and perhaps more importantly, the Civil Service), get on it for a month, now, without having to continually spend time reporting back and dealing with parliamentary questions.

Then we can by all means come up for air and have a proper review and accounting of what they have done.

 

[MNoBody]

the triumph of modern "capitalism" is a monopolized world ripe for the ideology of socialism due to its failed economics
-a single small group of owners has cornered all markets which thus makes it impossible to re-invest their profits (self-defeating in the end)
-the world has become one work-shop with one market and there is no outside market for the products the workers produce but cannot buy, and which their employers own, but cannot consume.
capitalism has been a dominating system, a tool of conquest, at least this is how history reads and is certainly how the dominos are falling right in front of your eyes every day.

 

[exchemist]

the triumph of modern "capitalism" is a monopolized world ripe for the ideology of socialism due to its failed economics
-a single small group of owners has cornered all markets which thus makes it impossible to re-invest their profits (self-defeating in the end)
-the world has become one work-shop with one market and there is no outside market for the products the workers produce but cannot buy, and which their employers own, but cannot consume.
capitalism has been a dominating system, a tool of conquest, at least this is how history reads and is certainly how the dominos are falling right in front of your eyes every day.

.....he intoned, drearily......

I remember this garbage from the 1970s. You can keep it.

 

[Augustus]

Common sense would dictate that this is not the time for such chest pumping and macho talk, but rather to put the entire brexit thing in the freezer and reasonably conclude that it's not going to happen this year.

I think it's clear that the economic repercussion of just the corona crisis is going to last for years and be much worse then with the financial crisis 10 years ago. Adding Brexit macho's to that, seems to be a recipy for further economic disaster.

So what do you guys think?​

I certainly don't want to see any politician dealing with any non-essential activities until the current situation has been resolved.

Something as complex as Brexit should be put on ice just like the Olympics and Euro Championships have: Come back in a year and hopefully things will be alright then.

In general though, hopefully the lesson of Cornavirus will be that our excessively interconnected world is very fragile, and countries need to become more self-reliant. Even within countries, localist economies should be encouraged as much as possible.

This doesn't mean isolationism or autarky of course, but being overly reliant on other countries in times of crisis leaves you very vulnerable.

The modern world is hyper-optimised due to industries becoming condensed into a small number of major players creating systems with minimal in-built redundancy. These are 'optimised' for maximum efficiency which relies on unbroken supply chains that operate under the implicit assumption that the system itself is robust, which of course it is not.

In that sense, whenever it eventually does happen, Brexit is an opportunity for an increased focus on localism, although I am in no way confident that this will actually be the end result as I don't trust the politicians to have any degree of sense.

I don't see this situation as evidence that increasing both scale and centralisation is something we should be thankful for though, very much the opposite.

 

[ChristineM]

I find this unduly cynical.

We are now in a full cvil emergency. Parliament's last act before recessing has been to pass the legislation to enable that - having amended it, by the way, to make sure it has to be renewed every 6 months. The government did not contest that. The silly games have been set aside.

The House of Commons does not have the room to enable MPs to sit while maintaining safe spacing, and there is also the issue of how they would travel.

It seems to me quite sensible to let the executive (and perhaps more importantly, the Civil Service), get on it for a month, now, without having to continually spend time reporting back and dealing with parliamentary questions.

Then we can by all means come up for air and have a proper review and accounting of what they have done.

Cynical, an extra weeks holiday in the midst of a major crisis. You are f course welcome to your opinion, my opinion is that such action is disgusting and cowardly?

 

[exchemist]

Cynical, an extra weeks holiday in the midst of a major crisis. You are f course welcome to your opinion, my opinion is that such action is disgusting and cowardly?

Holiday? The whole country is having a "holiday", if you want to call it that. But for us Londoners, it doesn't feel at all like one, I assure you.

 

[Shad]

Talking about timing, right?

Could this Corona crisis have come at an even worse time for the english, I wonder... It's kind of hard to imagine.

Brexit already had quite a few economic setbacks and implications going for it. Now it's only going to be exponentially worse... At a time the economy needed a major boost to be able to handle the backlash from brexit, public life comes to a virtual standstill and the biggest economic crisis since WW2 happens.

What I also have wondered about... what does this mean for brexit negotiations concerning a trade deal? It seems to me that the vast majority of politiciens and european/brittish institutions have bigger things to worry about now. It was already kind of... eum... "ambitious" to think there was going to be a trade deal in just one year. Now I think it's safe to say that it becomes close to impossible.

I hear that brexiteers have already, amidst the worst humanitarian crisis in a century, been pumping their chest and screaming that "corona is not going to make us postpone the deadline!!!!" - almost as if they are happy to have another excuse to still crash out without a deal.

Common sense would dictate that this is not the time for such chest pumping and macho talk, but rather to put the entire brexit thing in the freezer and reasonably conclude that it's not going to happen this year.

I think it's clear that the economic repercussion of just the corona crisis is going to last for years and be much worse then with the financial crisis 10 years ago. Adding Brexit macho's to that, seems to be a recipy for further economic disaster.

So what do you guys think?​

In my view negotiations need to be conservative in pace and toned down lest events render any deal impossible for any party involved. Yes it is an easy "told you so" moment. However a bad deal at time like this foolish.

 

[sun rise]

I'll bet they agree to "kick the can" further down the road.

 

[ChristineM]

Holiday? The whole country is having a "holiday", if you want to call it that. But for us Londoners, it doesn't feel at all like one, I assure you.

And that is the problem. This is not a holiday, it is a national (and international) emergency. Yet they are taking their Easter holiday plus an extra week.

 

[exchemist]

And that is the problem. This is not a holiday, it is a national (and international) emergency. Yet they are taking their Easter holiday plus an extra week.

They are locked down like the rest of us Christine, because it is unsafe from them to be in Parliament and there is little they can achieve when the normal business of House is set aside during this emergency. A lot of the support staff will be off sick or self-isolating and the rest have to come to work on the Underground, risking their health. Furthermore, MPs have plenty of constituency work to do, during parliamentary recesses. Almost all office-based businesses in the capital have shut their doors or are on bare-bones life-support operations. The House of Commons is following the same procedure.

They have not just given themselves a holiday.

 

[ChristineM]

They are locked down like the rest of us Christine, because it is unsafe from them to be in Parliament and there is little they can achieve when the normal business of House is set aside during this emergency. A lot of the support staff will be off sick or self-isolating and the rest have to come to work on the Underground, risking their health. Furthermore, MPs have plenty of constituency work to do, during parliamentary recesses. Almost all office-based businesses in the capital have shut their doors or are on bare-bones life-support operations. The House of Commons is the following the same procedure.

They have not just given themselves a holiday.

Yes they have given themselves a holiday and and call it a holiday, actually the Easter break

Many people are working from home via the internet. The government have advised that where possible it is the favoured option. Are you saying that is not an option for running business of a country???

 

[exchemist]

Yes they have given themselves a holiday and and call it a holiday, actually the Easter break

Many people are working from home via the internet. The government have advised that where possible it is the favoured option. Are you saying that is not an option for running business of a country???

Parliament does not "run the business of the country". The government does that.

 

[ChristineM]

Parliament does not "run the business of the country". The government does that.

And what is the government made up of

 

[exchemist]

And what is the government made up of

Bozo and his ministers, and the Civil Service departments they control.