Category - Brexit

Story #1 – The Bank of England has cut interest rates to 0.25%. This is the first cut since 2009 (during the major recession) and the lowest ever rate. The Bank has also said rates could go lower still if the economy worsens.

Remember that lower interest rates are all right if you owe money, but not if you are saving it. It means that a typical mortgage might be £25 cheaper per month, but the annual interest on saving of £10,000 would be £25 less. The theoretical purpose of the rate cut is that since saving money is not advantageous, people go out and spend it, thus stimulating the economy.

The GBP was immediately affected by this announcement, and fell 1.5% on the day (and it’s already a further 1% down the day after that).

Story #2 – A Survey has shown that recruitment was hit in July as a direct result of Brexit.

Job placements in July fell more sharply than at any time since 2009. I’ll remind you again that 2009 was in the middle of the great recession. Those who took part in the data gathering exercise stated Brexit was to blame.

The Bank of England has already said it expects unemployment to rise to 5.5% over the next two years. It currently stands at 4.9%, and for all practical purposes has been falling each year since 2012.

Story #3 – Nissan says it is “reasonably optimistic” that things will be all right as a result of Brexit. This is roughly the same as being “reasonably optimistic” that you’re going to win the lottery this week. The hopeful lotto winner will have invested £2 on his or her numbers, and it would be foolish not to be optimistic, otherwise they may just as well have thrown that two quid in the river. Nissan, in comparison, has invested billions in Sunderland. So you can see the parallel – it is hardly going to openly flush that kind of money down the toilet. The CEO has virtually contradicted himself by warning:

…[further] Investment [in Sunderland] depends on the outcome of UK-EU talks on Brexit

You see, Sunderland is a European plant which happens to be based in the UK. Most of its exports are to Europe. And he added that:

…there was “no doubt” that prices for Renaults, and other cars made in Europe and sold in the UK, will rise due to falling value of sterling.

Of course, report after report makes it clear that Brexit has screwed up the GBP, and what the Nissan CEO is really wondering is how the hell he is going to keep on explaining the UK’s death spiral as a reason to keep manufacturing in Sunderland.

I should also point out that they’re not very bright in Sunderland. They were the first vote in on referendum day and they voted to leave the EU by a large margin. I don’t think “irony” would be the right word to describe the situation if Nissan upped tents, particularly when you consider the existing unemployment situation in the North East.

But don’t worry, everyone. The Nissan guy is “optimistic” and I’m sure a multi-billion pound manufacturing plant and the associated multi-multi-billion pound bill Nissan would have if they needed to move it is completely irrelevant  as a source of his optimism. It more likely comes from the same source as that guy at the soup kitchen in Blackpool, who thinks that foreigners are preventing him from getting a job.

More “excellent” news resulting from the EU Referendum. Foxtons, a high-profile London estate agent, has announced a 43% fall in profits. It blames this on Brexit.

Of course, as any Brexiter knows full well, it simply is not possible for anything bad to come out of the vote to leave the EU, and the fact that Foxtons has seen its profits fall by 30% since the result must be down to some other reason. Possibly immigrants. Or Donald Trump.

The result of the referendum to leave Europe is likely to lead to a prolonged period of further uncertainty and we do not expect London residential property sales markets to show signs of recovery before the end of the year [said Foxtons CEO, Nic Budden]

…the UK’s biggest building society, the Nationwide, said that the Brexit effect on the property market and house prices could take months to become clear.

But remember. Britain may collapse economically. The pound may end up being worth less than a dollar. Unemployment may rise. Inflation may also rise. Fuel prices may rise. House prices may rise, or the markets fall. The evidence suggests these things are happening, and experts suggest that they will.

But everything will be all right. That guy from the soup kitchen in Blackpool said so.

Mind you, the swings are fifty feet high, whereas you need a magnifying glass to spot the roundabouts.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s news that GSK is investing £275m in itself to expand in the UK (note that GSK is worth over £80 billion – the investment is about 0.3% of that), and the Brexiters’ fanfares declaring how right they were all along about leaving the EU, the pendulum swung back the other way today as Lloyds Bank announced job losses and branch closures – citing the effects of Brexit as one of the reasons.

Lloyds was already in the middle of cutting 9,000 jobs and closing 200 branches, but it has announced a further 3,000 job cuts and a further 200 branch closures. Brexiters can only see Lloyds’ pre-tax profits, which were up 101% on last year, and their army of Internet trolls is consequently out in force against Lloyds. In reality, Lloyds’ underlying profits fell by 5%, and their CEO foresees a “deceleration of growth” as a result of Brexit.

So, in the space of a couple of days, we have an “investment” which may generate a few dozen jobs (ironically, most of them up in Scotland), and a much more significant loss of 3000 jobs at Lloyds.

And still the Brexiters think they were right.

All the little Brexiters are fawning over this story. Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) is apparently investing in the UK “despite Brexit”. The part they conveniently play down is this:

There is also the benefit of a cheaper pound when producing products bound for foreign markets.

There’s the rub, you see. GSK already has several manufacturing sites in the UK, so it’s not as if it has chosen to come to the UK ahead of anywhere else. I used to work in this industry and I know how much it would cost to shift pharmaceutical production to another site, especially if it was one in another country – the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) would make it nigh on impossible, and it would raise regulatory issues for long-standing products that had hitherto been “overlooked”.

A decision like this, reportedly worth £275 million, is not something you scrape together in a few weeks – it’ll have been years in the planning. The only outwardly visible signs for the UK economy will be a few dozen extra jobs for high-flying graduates, and if GSK are even remotely similar to the outfit I used to work for, they’ll try and keep that to a minimum anyway in order to maximise the benefit to themselves. A large part of that £275 million will pay for the internal arseing about that will be required. Basically, GSK is investing in itself.

The majority of GSK’s UK-manufactured goods are exported, and the collapse of the GBP following Brexit means selling GBP products on a USD market is highly beneficial to whoever is doing it. As long as the UK doesn’t physically fall into the sea, and as long as the GBP remains weak, GSK will coin it.

Don’t get me wrong, GSK are not doing anything that any other company wouldn’t (hell, they even offered me a job once). But they’re not doing it to save the UK. It’s for the short- to medium term benefit of their shareholders.

Just as I suspected. The day after I wrote this, I see that the toilet paper version of the Daily Mail – another right-wing, pro-Brexit misinformation machine – is trumpeting that £275m is being invested “in Britain”. It isn’t. It’s being invested by GSK, in GSK. Britain will get a few dozen new jobs out of it.

Yet another story demonstrating how wrong the EU referendum result was.

Make no mistake about it – the main reason many Brexiters voted to leave was down to their deep hatred of foreigners. The referendum result released the flood gates, and Brexiters immediately began showing their true colours.

The Crown Prosecution Service is currently processing “a record number of hate crimes”.

Amber Rudd, the new Home Secretary, laughably says:

…[hatred has] no place whatsoever in a 21st Century Great Britain.

Actually, Amber, your party’s idiotic decision to hold a referendum on EU membership has created a f___ing huge place for it. The vote to leave the EU has pushed us back into the mid-20th Century economically and socially, so don’t try and act all surprised at the venom people are belching up. In fact, in places where the “Leave” vote was high, and where this kind of thing was always on the back burner, they’ve moved back to the Stone Age. She adds:

We are Great Britain because we are united by values such as democracy, free speech, mutual respect and opportunity for all.

No we’re not. We’re “Great Britain” – especially in the minds of most Brexiters – because of all the foreigners we conquered during the time of The Empire. The reality is that we are a small island which has just cut its ties with mainland Europe at least a hundred years after most of Europe became strong enough to give us a punch in the mouth if we got uppity with them again.

The only way of reversing this tide of hatred (and that of financial collapse) is to stop Brexit before it happens. There should never have been a referendum, and anyone with an IQ greater than that of snot knows it.

Not a day goes by without some new piece of negative financial or political fallout from the EU Referendum result. The side of the scales which contain the negative stuff is overflowing – the GBP has plummeted, and continues to do so; ALL the market experts predict uncertainty and negativity; science and technology is already seeing work dry up; and so on.

All that appears on the plus side is deliberate misinformation from the media (remember my recent article on The Sun’s statement that the GBP had “recovered”), and nauseating articles involving interviews with people who voted to leave, and who are now trying to justify what was clearly the wrong decision – like this latest one from the BBC.

Let’s take a look at some of the idiotic comments from people who are simply too stupid to be allowed out unsupervised, and yet who acted all grown up and went to vote last month.

Olivia Prickett, fashion design intern at high couturier Zeynep Kartal, said: “I don’t think we’re broken. It’s turbulent, but it’s salvageable.”

I wonder if Ms Prickett ever realised that we weren’t broken in the first place, and that there was no turbulence from which we needed to salvage anything? So what, precisely, has voting to leave achieved?

The reporter comments:

All the people I met here who voted Out told me they are very happy with the decision. One man even sang for me of his happiness.

Her journalistic skills obviously don’t stretch to wondering why such a person was allowed to vote, that his opinion might be flawed, or that a month down the line his schadenfreude at being on the winning side might not be worth wasting typography on.

David Briers, 43, whom I met at a soup kitchen in Blackpool, also spoke positively. The new prime minister appealed directly to people like David when she said she was determined to make us one nation after the referendum. David supported the out vote because “it will bring more jobs to Blackpool”. Of Theresa May he said: “I think she might be pretty good.”

Here’s another one whose vote clearly had a similar material value to dried-on bird shit. He’s out of work, apparently uses a soup kitchen, and voted to leave the EU because “it will bring more jobs to Blackpool”. Once again, in the absence of any real journalism, one can only guess at his reasoning behind this amazing statement – but it doesn’t take that much effort to imagine that this sudden increase in available work will happen immediately after we deport all the immigrants who are taking jobs away from such honest people. And what about that deep analysis of Theresa May? “I think she might be pretty good”. Jeez.

There is one comment at the end of the article:

We won’t know for years what Britain will be like, post-Brexit.

Stupid, stupid bastards! You voted “out” because your tiny minds told you that come tea time the next day, all the foreigners would be on ships back to continental Europe, that we’d have installed cannon(s) along the south coast to repel any passing Armadas which might try to bring them back, and from now on no one who wasn’t British (and don’t get me started on your warped idea of what “British” means in terms of skin colour) would ever be allowed in again.

A month down the line – apart from the fact that you’re all desperately hoping the EU lets us keep everything we had before, but without having to pay for it – you’re all admitting that the damage you’ve done will take “years” – indeed, whole generations – to put right?

The country wasn’t broken. Now it is, and it’s going to take decades to crawl back up to the position it held pre-Brexit, still with the pro-Remain argument that – on our own – we might never manage that. But hey! Just chant the mantra “it’ll be all right” and stick your head back in the sand.

Katie Razzall is listed as a “special correspondent” on the BBC website. I am guessing that “special” in this sense means “unqualified”, because I can’t believe that someone who was qualified could have missed so many questions in her blatant and naïve attempts to  side-line the opinions of 48.1% of the population.

Australia has approached Britain for post-Brexit free trade deal talks. As you might imagine, all the little Brexiters have taken time off from nailing Union Jacks to their houses and learning naughty new words to say to immigrants, and added their input.

Reality check:

• Australia is the 12th/13th largest economy in the world
• its GDP is half that of the UK
• more than 60% of its exports currently go to non-EU (and non-UK) countries
• Australia could already export to Britain if it wanted to
• Britain could already import from Australia if it wanted to
• both of the above already happen
• a free trade deal created explicitly as a result of Brexit would require lower import duties to be applied to make it worthwhile, which would cost the UK economy money
• well, it would cost the economy money if we were likely to import anything like enough of anything we actually wanted from Australia
• all the stuff we really need is either in the EU, or in countries who trade heavily with the EU
• the UK doesn’t produce anything which other countries can’t get cheaper from elsewhere (except for kitsch like Cornish pasties and Devon Toffee)
• the EU is a little over 20 miles away from the UK, and is connected by road/rail – it takes about half an hour to get there, and costs a few hundred GBP in fuel per lorry at the most
• Australia is almost 9,500 miles away – it takes at least a full day to get there by air (at a fuel cost of about £5,000-£10,000 per hour), or a month by sea (using thousands of gallons of low grade diesel per hour, and emitting more pollution than several million cars)
• the average Brexiter probably needs it explaining to them that these costs to the UK of importing stuff apply equally to the Aussies if they import from us (notwithstanding the plummeting value of the GBP)

No disrespect to Australia, but a trade deal with them would have a symbolic meaning only. It would be a “Brexit deal”. And let’s not forget the old saying about all your eggs in one basket – if we started to rely on Aussie imports, they’d be calling the shots against a country only a few per cent of its exports went to.

Cutting loose economically from Europe and turning to Australia would be about the same as cutting off your leg, sending it to Sydney, and expecting to still be able to play football!

You have to remember that the EU Referendum result to leave was apparently… D.E.M.O.C.R.A.T.I.C. This is seen as adequate justification for not holding a 2nd referendum, or annulling the first on the grounds that it is wrong and stupid.

Now, for those who don’t know – and that pretty much includes all 51.8% of the population who voted to leave – the definition of the word “democracy” is as follows:

government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.

While we’re on that subject, it’s worth noting that Theresa May recently became Prime Minister by default. She was not elected – either by her party, or by the people. She was simply the last one standing after all the other runners had effectively succumbed to various doping scandals and political assassinations by their competitors.

Over the last three weeks, Britain has gone from being half admired and half hated by the rest of the world, to becoming a laughing stock that the world pities. Our new PM is obviously keeping the momentum going as she announces her new cabinet. Best joke of all has got to be Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary (I also hear that rattlesnakes make good pets, and that black ink is good for removing stains on delicate white fabric). BoJo runs Prince Phillip a close second when it comes to having a mouth that isn’t always fully engaged with the part of his brain which takes other peoples’ feelings into consideration (Prince Phillip’s is never engaged, of course).

The ratio of male and female cabinet members has changed slightly. These days, your sex apparently governs your prowess in politics and pretty much everything else (although if Mother Nature messed up and handed out the wrong hardware, you get double points), so it isn’t too hard to work out which way the scales have tilted.

What is interesting is that only three members of the new cabinet were “leave” campaigners (that’s what makes BoJo as Foreign Secretary such a paradox). All the others campaigned to stay. Immediately after the referendum, everyone was saying that the new cabinet had to be mostly brexiteers. Go figure that one.

It just continues to get better and better. They keep repeating that Brexit was “democratically decided” and we must therefore continue to run to the precipice – which is clearly signposted in front of us – at full speed, and all jump off together. Even those of us with IQs greater than that of frog spawn.

The media continues to report confusingly in its pathetic attempts to remain “unbiased”, this time with a story that Boeing has signed a £3 billion deal for nine aeroplanes to be built in the UK. I don’t think for one moment that the BBC is naive enough to believe that this whole deal was begun and concluded following Brexit voting. But they’re definitely devious enough to know that that’s precisely what its readers will think when they read that story.

The simple fact is that it was too late for Boeing to pull out of the deal, that’s all. And while it is good for British industry (Lossiemouth is in Scotland, so it may not be British for much longer), the deal does not mean that Brexit will lead to more of the same. In fact, the BBC’s glib report refers to £4.6 trillion of new aircraft being needed between now and 2035 – completely overlooking the fact that what has happened during the last two weeks is likely to be chickenfeed compared to what happens over the next 20 years as a result of those two weeks. And that really is naive.

Asia, for example, is not going to go ahead with ordering over 15,000 new aircraft from the UK (or what will be left of it when Scotland leaves) because it will cost them more. I mean, come on. No one is stupid enough to pay 10-20% more to the UK for what they could get from the EU or elsewhere. And then, of course, there will be the extra costs on the UK side now that GBP is worth less.

The BBC is also at its sneaky games with the value of the £. On it’s Business Live page – and in a sub-headline on the main BBC News homepage – it announced that “Sterling Moves Higher”.

Naturally, all the little Brexiters would have been sitting there going “See! Everything’s OK. Let’s go and roast an immigrant for supper!”

In actual fact, this is what the £ did today.

The move was by less than 1 US cent at the time they were rattling on about it (and it’s barely 1 cent even now). Anyone else can see that a) it fell off a cliff when the EU Referendum result was announced, b) it has remained off that cliff, and c) it is slipping lower and lower down the cliff.

Putting some numbers to it, it has risen by about 0.75% in the last two days. Four days ago it fell by 2%. On the day of the referendum result, it fell by 8%. Compared to the pre-referendum result price, it is currently 12.5% lower. And the BBC is trying to make this sound good?

Of course, the referendum result has torn the government apart. But that is completely irrelevant as far as many are concerned, because… FANFARE, followed by the Choir of the Heavenly Host… we will have a WOMAN prime minister.

Actually, Theresa May is merely PM by default – she wasn’t voted in, nor did she win any sort of competition for the leadership. It’s just that various dirty tricks (much of it amplified by the media) ensured that everyone else pretty much had to throw in the towel to avoid some petty scandal or another. Personally, I see it as very bad news, because if Cameron had hung around until later in the year the negative effects of Brexit would have become ever more apparent, making the result of the referendum even more nonsensical than it obviously was in the first place. My worry is that she’ll trigger Article 50 sooner rather than later.

I mentioned in an earlier article how they keep going on about the referendum result being “democratic” – so with a small majority (many of whom don’t work for a living and blame the fact on immigrants) favouring the suicide pact known as Brexit, the rest of us who do work are being expected to have big smiles on our faces as we see our livelihoods cast into the abyss. This is all the more amusing when one considers the almost complete absence of democracy involved in promoting Theresa May to PM (and denigrating the rest), and the refusal by the government (so far) to acknowledge the validity of over 4.1 million signatures asking for a 2nd referendum.