American cartoonist Scott Bateman tries to make sense of the state of affairs involving Brexit and prepared a handy flowchart to help people outside the UK understand the various options. Unfortunately, they all seem to lead to the same final result.
“The UK leaves the EU … with a deal in place | This would be slightly better, as it would delay the worst effects” is a statement that depends greatly on what this hypothetical deal contains, and overlooks a unique drawback: graduated withdrawal in the EU probably means the UK is still beholden to the payments required of all member states for the duration of the withdrawal, despite losing any decision / voting power it has. Again, depending on the nature of this hypothetical deal.
And considering the impossibility of there being any deal that can garner the votes required to be enacted…
The truly baffling thing to me is that the method of vote counting put the leave and remain vote totals as a percentage of those that voted. Surely a far better method, when considering a drastic and nation-wide change, would be to put the ‘do something / enact change’ tally as a percentage of the pool of all eligible voters, i.e. people voting ‘do nothing’ plus those that forget to vote.
Because a quick glance at the brexit vote tally shows that the leave vote was only 37.4% of all registered voters, or 33.9% of all people of voting age. A major change should never be instigated at the behest of a minority of the voting population.
Major omission — there’s no mention of the Ireland border problem in any of these cases.
Otherwise, the flowchart is highly oversimplified, with each starting condition leading directly to the endpoint with no branching cases. Nobody could write working software based on this chart.
Yeah, I know, it’s mostly just a joke and all that, but you’d think they could at least have included the possibility that the EU agrees to a delay… not that the end point is much different in that case.
I understand that British exporters would have to pay tariffs to sell stuff in the EU, but couldn’t Britain drop tariffs on stuff it imports from the EU?
colinday, you are confused. Tariffs are taxes on imported goods; they are paid by the importer, not the exporter.
Currently there are no tariffs either way, since the UK is a member of EU and the common market. Nothing to drop.
After Brexit, WTO rules will apply, because the UK will be treated as any other country outside the union.
That is pretty much exactly the plan: Temporary tariff regime for no deal Brexit published.
So, the bit in the chart that says “The next day, the UK is forced to pay tariffs on all EU goods” is totally incorrect.
@5
It’s not that simple. We could of course decide not to impose tariffs on goods imported into the UK from the EU. However under WTO rules that would mean we aren’t allowed to impose tariffs for those goods on anyone else in the world either. And if we impose no tariffs but the EU does, that puts our own manufacturers at a disadvantage.
You can see in your link that some of the goods for which they are planning to have tariffs are political hot topics with highly visible local producers.
Would that otherwise light tariff regime be sustainable? Who knows, but they do clearly say that it’s temporary and intended to be reviewed after 12 months. (It might not last that long if things go badly…)
@6: Yeah. sure. I don’t think it’s entirely co-incidental that a party full of extremist free-trade zealots has managed to back us into a corner where we’re on the verge of implementing a radical reform of tariff policy almost by “accident”… And I don’t think they give the least stuff whether it puts our own manufacturers at a disadvantage.
It’s worse than that. The architects of Brexit are in the main independently wealthy speculators who would be in a position to benefit personally if our manufacturing was disadvantaged. The vast majority of people who voted for Brexit are either too ill-informed, blinkered or just plain dumb to understand this -- that they’re enabling a tiny minority of poshos to make their (the voters’) lives materially worse. And for what? Immigration/sovereignty/control/whatever. Unicorn shit.
There’s an option missing from that flowchart -- just rescinding article 50 altogether, cancelling Brexit and admitting it’s a fucking stupid idea that should never have been put to the vote.
Here’s the thing -- every single person who voted Remain wants the same thing -- i.e. for nothing to change. It is now clear that every single person who voted Leave wants something different from everyone else. There is simply no way to deliver the Brexit 17 million people voted for, because it isn’t a single thing.
Some just wanted the (imaginary) money for the NHS. Some just wanted to “take back control” (control we already have). Some just wanted to get rid of pesky EU regulation (most of it drafted by the UK and most of it to the UK’s advantage). And some just wanted to stop Turkey joining the EU (over which the UK had a veto in any case) and stop immigration (which the Tories have demonstrated they’re incapable of delivering, even if they wanted to, which I suspect they don’t because even they realise we need it). Not very many voted for the pound to tank. Not very many voted for masses of manufacturing and service industry jobs to relocate overseas. But that’s what we’re already seeing happening, and it’s only getting worse from here… unless and until someone has the enormous brass balls to pull the plug on the whole sorry mess and say to the British public “well, we did try, but it can’t be done. Now shut up and go back to watching Love Island.”