Brexit! What next, when how

I'm not going to listen again to check, but I don't think Redwood put it that way round.

My recollection is that he said he would red-line what he believes was voted for,  which was an end to free movement as we know it, and then go for the assumptive close on free market access, which we would either get, or get less of.  I paraphrase, I wasn't writing it down.

Seems a reasonable framework, simply stated of course.  He certainly wasn't stating the assumption that we can get everything on the menu.

Again simply stated, the difficulty we (and the EU) have to overcome is the clear aim of France and Germany that no country shall be able to benefit by leaving the EU, pour encourager les autres.

That's a challenge for us, obviously.  It's a challenge for Merkel et al for two reasons; one, they can only control agreements made between us and the EU;  two, they have to balance hurting us against how much they hurt themselves. A few of the autres might well be cheering us on.

As you imply, the terms are everything and it doesn't matter much (to me) whether those are called terms for remaining or terms for exiting.

"Border control" (definition TBA) is clearly a big consideration for a lot of people.  A hook, perhaps, on which to hang their views. To some extent, that and the whole Brexit debate became a proxy for a groundswell of feeling that the average person (definition TBA again) is not getting a good deal, while the new establishment (money, not class) is doing better than ever. To some extent that is true - average real earnings are still well below pre-crisis levels, 8 years on. At the same time, it has become apparent that it is increasingly difficult to collect tax from the people who have most of the money.  What we have seen was in part a revolt.

Perhaps it's a truism that almost any form of government can be stable when the mass of people feel they are getting a reasonable deal.   It's a conundrum that full employment does not seem to have facilitated real earnings growth beyond the purchasing power of 2008 (remembering that they have been going up at a steady 1% p.a. or so for decades prior to this), while at the same time property prices have rocketed.  If I was working in a warehouse for £300 a week I might think 'unlimited supply of EU labour that thinks £7 is a fantastic hourly rate, net immigration over 300,000 a year, not enough houses, none I can afford, maybe the EU isn't such a good thing?'.

The respect in which I regret Brexit is that it will absorb a lot of time and resource that could have been put to other uses.  But would the government have tackled these problems anyway?  Maybe a catalyst, or a forced change in the equilibrium, was needed.

What we have undeniably got however is increased risk, or at least volatility.  There is a greater possible magnitude of any downside from here than was the case a year ago.  
Your "avoiding losing stuff" is probably where we are in terms of starting to create the new normal.  The ship must not sink, whatever.  The opportunities that remain (depending on how 'out' we end up) come later. 

What do I want?  For the government to ensure that real wages rise for ordinary people, and to make our relationship with Europe congruent with that.  I'm not daft enough to think that just taking all the money off the rich and sharing it out will fix anything, or that it will ever be easy to tax the people and entitities that accumulate the wealth.  Globalisation is a bugger.

It was a bloody daft question to ask (the referendum) but I hope the result has opened some eyes in government.  I fear not.

Stream of consciousness, sorry, but I have to go out.

I'm sure its me being dense, but I don't get it.

It's a rather forced connection between the creation of Saint Theresa in Rome and the G20 and EU issues. You can see the 'baby' is Bozza, can't you? Not sure who the figures in the background are supposed to be.

I did replay Redwood last night. He may have been unkindly edited, of course, but he does assume there'll be minimal negotiation on the Single Market and none on free movement. And he makes an assumption that the City's own experts disagree with that financial passporting is a given because our regulation is already to EU standards. I stand by 'simplistic'; Gus O'Donnell didn't pretend to be impressed either.

No, I don't believe that.  More that the fall (not stagnation) in real incomes is a contributory factor in the outcome of the vote.  I simply hypothesised a rationale that some of those "uneducated" leave voters might have had in mind.

They have a point.  It is not unreasonable to think that imported cheap labour has exacerbated the drop in real incomes, but that is incidental. It has just speeded up the process;  the workers have come here, instead of the jobs going there, which would have taken rather longer.  At the root of falling incomes are two things - capitalism and globalisation.  There is a whole world of labour that is cheaper still than the pool in Eastern Europe.

Those incomes may never catch up in real terms. I have always been puzzled that, while they have no trouble accepting the laws of gravity, most people seem not to get the first law of capitalism which is that it makes capital richer and labour poorer.  Marx expressed it as "the surplus accrues to capital"; the price of [basic] labour is always determined by what the worker needs to live, labour and generate.  More recently, Thomas Piketty summed it up as "capitalism creates inequality" and has been lauded for stating the bleeding obvious.

Capitalism creates inequality, and globalisation turbocharges the process.

Collective bargaining, minimum wage legislation, labour rights legislation, the state as employer etc can arrest or reverse that (as happened to a huge extent in the post war period) but ultimately only redistribution through taxation can enable labour to benefit fairly and proportionately from improving productivity.

Globalisation has unfortunately also come to bear on taxation.  Capital has been increasingly successful at resisting handing over any of its surpluses.

These are nasty trends for the mass of people.  Whether we are better facing them as a member of the EU or not, I have no idea.  But I didn't see the EU doing much; it has overseen labour protections that might not otherwise have happened in every member state, but arguably it is also reinforcing rather than balancing out market realities with the common currency and its treatment of Greece, Spain, Portugal etc.  Neither did it stop Ireland, Netherlands, Luxembourg etc setting up beggar-thy-neighbour tax regimes (which, incidentally, do not necessarily benefit ordinary people there, but that is another topic).  In fairness it does now seem to have woken up a bit, with the Apple/Ireland thing.

You're absolutely right, incidentally, about the US.  There is a shocking and increasing level of inequality there.

U.S. Household Incomes 1967-2014

One is definitely Obama holding a TTIP document.

I think this week will be pivotal too - a lot will be discussed amongst the G20 countries and this will impact what becomes of leaving the EU. Maybe people will start to realise we can't get everything the leavers want because it needs the agreement of others.

The Japanese PM's document was a bit of a surprise to me. I've long said the likes of Toyota, Nissan and Honda might not bring future investment here if we leave the single market and so the factories will lose out on future models. Yesterday's statements imply they'd leave much earlier. I am sure the cost can be covered by writing off the 'losses' against profits.