The EU debate - Part III

Don't you think it is better that we help all the children even if the occasional adult slips through?

 

It's Tubby's idea of humour!...

 

Of course not. While we are at it let's stop 10,000 incredibly hardworking Eastern Europeans from doing jobs which are available with no Brits to do them because it would also mean one scary ATM thief.

 

it's easy enough to check if somebody is significantly older so why not check?

 

But its not the odd adult is it, more like 30-40%.

But Let them in, check age and keep the kids and deport the adults

 

But more than one, you need to get out your safe space and see whats really happening.

 

How many times have you been mugged at an ATM by a Romanian?

 

Australia confirm it would be illegal to enter trade talks before UK have left EU
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/australia-rules-out-talks-until-britain-has-left-eu-k7t6z3n60

 

Says the man who said he wouldn't live anywhere that wasn't predominantly white anglo saxon

 

What facts have you based that assertion on? A Daily Mail headline?

 

Probably because you've got most of the posters on here on ignore, you docile bigot

 

It wouldn't cross the ****ing idiot's mind!...

 

Is it? How?

 

Cut them in half and count the rings.

 

Mind you ... the mad bastards at the home office might think you're onto something!

 

Surely it's sensible to take your time rather than rushing in?

 

An interesting piece here on our position in relation to WTO tariffs should a deal with the EU not be done before the 2 year deadline, it's not great reading....

Fox slip up at WTO shows he has no Brexit plan

Made in the UK: Britain has lots of preparation to do before it can fall onto WTO rules

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By Ian DuntTuesday, 27 September 2016 2:26 PM 142


The speech Liam Fox made at the WTO today is mostly waffle, but there is one section on Brexit towards the end which is worth paying particular attention to. It suggests that Fox does not understand the basic rules of the international trading system Britain may soon be falling into if it can’t secure a deal with the EU before the end of the Article 50 process.

“The UK is a full and founding member of the WTO,” the international trade secretary said. This part is true.

“We have our own schedules that we currently share with the rest of the EU. These set out our national commitments in the international trading system.” This part is not true.

“The UK will continue to uphold these commitments when we leave the European Union.” This part is potentially revealing.

“There will be no legal vacuum.” This part is false.

Let’s take them in turn.

“The UK is a full and founding member of the WTO.”

Fox is right about this. Some Remainers insist that technically the UK is not a member of the WTO on the basis that it does not currently have it's own schedules (we’ll get to those in a second). There’s a minority of legal opinion backing this up, but it’s unlikely anyone is going to question Britain’s membership itself. We were a founding member of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt), the WTO’s predecessor, and we’re a founding member of the WTO.

“We have our own schedules that we currently share with the rest of the EU.”

Schedules are descriptions of a country’s tariff and subsidy arrangements with other countries in the WTO. They’re really long and very boring but a typical one would tell you what the country's tariffs are for wheat, say, or chicken. Sometimes that’s a set rate - like ten per cent on cars. Sometimes it varies. So you might have a tariff of four per cent on the first ten thousand tonnes of chickens you import and 15% on anything over that. That’s called a tariff rate quota.

Britain does not have its own schedules. We have EU schedules. Fox can say we have our own if he likes, but officials and lawyers at the WTO will disagree. We need to extract our schedules from the EU schedule, which is actually a horrifically difficult problem.

It’s not hard with tariffs, we can just replicate what the EU does there. But the tariff rate quotas are a nightmare, because they’re quantitative. The level set at one rate - the ten thousand tonnes of chicken - is shared across Europe. So we need to figure out how much of that chicken applies to us.

That’s something the EU and the UK need to figure out together. If we just unilaterally say it’s X amount, the EU, which is a member of the WTO in its own right, can trigger a dispute.

And that’s not all. Any WTO member state can trigger a dispute with us on the provisional schedule we lay down, if they feel their access to our market has been restricted or that they are on worse terms than they were when they made the original trading decisions. The WTO is minefield for British trade interests which will need a very experienced, very intelligent, very sensitive negotiating team to navigate. Fox’s speech does not suggest these things will be forthcoming.

“The UK will continue to uphold these commitments when we leave the European Union.”

This is potentially revealing. I say potentially because it's possible Fox simply has no idea what he's talking about and everything he says must be discounted.

The quickest and easiest way for us to write up some provisional schedules is to exactly replicate all the arrangements we have under the EU. That means that tariffs stay the same, the tariff rate quotas are worked out on the basis of the last three years’ trade flows and subsidies stay the same. This is invariably what we’ll do, because it’s the only way not to get into all sorts of complex wrangling with all the other member states.

But note what that means: Nothing changes. All that talk of taking back control during the referendum was illusionary. We will keep things exactly as they are, because that’s the only way to make the journey from the single market to WTO rules even vaguely doable. We're not taking back control. We are desperately trying to make a massive and perilous change in our economic arrangements without triggering huge job losses. And that means that we will copy whatever our EU arrangements were and paste them onto the WTO schedules.

But even that approach, which betrays all the rhetoric of the Brexit campaign, doesn't solve all the problems. Take rules against steel dumping, which protect our workers from competition from China. We’re obviously going to want to maintain those but the Chinese aren’t going to be having any of it. They’ll fight us on it, demanding that we demonstrate domestic injury and unfair trade. And at the moment we can’t fight back, because we don’t have an investigating authority capable of dealing with trade remedy measures. So even in this cheeriest of all possible worlds, we’ve got some major problems on our hands.

“There will be no legal vacuum.”

Fox is wrong here. It’s not that there’ll be a legal vacuum in the future. There’s a legal vacuum now. There are no WTO rules on what we’d be doing if we revert to their system.

There are rules on becoming a member, but we already are. There are rules on modifying a schedule, but we don’t have one. That’s why the WTO’s lawyers are bickering over what our status is and how to proceed.

The fact Fox makes these errors isn't really what's concerning about his speech. We’re used to that. This is a man who did his job as international trade secretary for a month before realising it was a legally and logically meaningless position to have been given.

What’s concerning is that Britain needs negotiators at the WTO doing the leg work now in order to prepare just in case we can’t get an EU deal and have to fall back on this system. We need relaxed informal talks with the Chinese and the Brazilians and everyone else to try to answer their initial concerns. That means that if we ever do have to put down provisional schedules, we’ll know where the problem areas are and can hopefully address them before it turns into a problem.

We urgently need smart ministers, clear-thinking and an army of trade experts and negotiators. Instead what we have is the international trade secretary talking nonsense".

Countries are always trying to get an advantage over other countries for their own economic advantage. EU countries will try and gain an advantage over the UK for many products. Likewise, the UK will try the same. The UK always attempts to buy 'friends' with its aid budget for instances like this and, of course, when push comes to shove the UK can have its own trade disputes with other countries.

 

I don't think he's capable of rushing in! Waddle, maybe.,..

 

Fox is a preening peacock, full off his own self importance. He's also a ****ing idiot, which is not good news for the UK!...

 

Was Pete doing the books for them?

Treasury faces £16bn financial black hole, leaked document reveals

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-document-john-mcdonnell-labour-a7378891.html