Today my thoughts are about as reverent as

[Suff]

Derek and Clive's Jump.

Why? Well the EU is setting out its new budget for 2020-2026.

Honestly I can't stop smiling and I'm about 1mm away from killing myself laughing.

That €13bn _net_ sum the UK was calculated to be paying the EU has turned into €15bn _net_ Every Single Year. What a bummer, they have a €105bn black hole in the budget. That is, at current exchange rates, £253m every single week for the entire 7 years of the budget.

Granted they will get some easement from the £39bn we are paying them, but, then, they have to fill the 21 months between Brexit day and their new budget.

Reading the news on this is soooo satisfying. The leading lights who said "get lost sonny" to Cameron are frothing at the mouth about the EU proposals. They told Cameron that there was NO WAY IN HELL they were going to open the CAP to negotiations. And they didn't. Not even now. The Commission just told France and Spain that they'll be getting less money. 5% less money. Suck it up. Oh and whilst you are at it, you'll be paying more money to get less CAP subsidies!

I'm waiting for the "You lied to us" from the other 27. My response to that is "They lied to us too, suck it up or leave!".

The Irony is so thick you couldn't cut it with a chainsaw. Denmark and their "some countries need to realise that they have become a little country", is not really washing now is it? Given that we were paying their bills for them. A bill they, now, can't afford. Who's a little country now then?

Also the EU is tying "compliance to EU 'values' to hand outs", essentially leaving Hungary and Poland with a stark choice. Conform to the EU diktat or pay your own way.

I said it at the beginning and I'm going to keep repeating it. Most of the rest of the EU is going to rue the day that the UK decided to leave the EU. We were one of the 2 countries the EU absolutely could not afford to lose. They just didn't understand it, or refused to believe it.

The commission would never _ever_ have tried this stuff with the UK still in the EU. We'd have vetoed it in a second.

Now here is the best bit of all.

If the "member states" veto the budget and refuse to accept what the commission has proposed, the existing budget continues unchanged. Well unchanged except for one tiny little problem.... The £253 million every single week that they will not be getting from Jan 1 2020. Oh we'll be paying a little pocket change for a while, but it won't make a bigger dent in that €15bn than a pea shooter would to a Tank.

It is at this point that I'm having difficulty typing because I'm laughing too damned hard....

[manxie]

Thanks for that Suff

I will admit that most of the statements about the payments from us to them and them to us went over my head, my mind has never had to think in terms of billions of pounds,lol, more in the region of how much of my monthly pension that I recieve and how to make it stretch for 4 weeks without dipping into the wifes spending money.

I always thought we were paying in much more than than we were ever going to see in return, and were actually propping up their fancy dreams and aspirations.

Dare I say I always was of the opinion it was all a con to take over europe in a different way to the previous attempts that failed.

Maybe I am just too cynical??

I am wondering why the UK government just doesn't say we will be leaving on "x" date and from "y" date we will not pay anything further into the EU pot, leave the union there and then without any dictates from them about trade arrangements that we wish to persue.

Or am I being too naive to think that might happen??

Manxie

[Workingman]

Two sides to every story it all depends on which you have most faith in.

Not that it matters, we are out so the EU's business is the EU's business, suck it up.

However, if the EU goes the way some people want it to and it collapses that will be a right barrel of laughs. We will be splitting our sides laughing as we queue with all the other trading nations and blocs to get our own deals with the former 27 EU members (44% of our exports remember)... once they have sorted out their own deals with each other. We will be rolling in the aisles as the global economy tanks like never before. The mirth and the merriment will be unstoppable.

[Suff]

Ah, yes, we compare the EU Commission press release to the mayhem it is causing within its members. That article is the aspiration. The reality is that virtually no state wants it and if the UK had still been in they would never have even attempted to do it. All those 20, of the 27, who stuck the knife in Cameron are now feeling the pain of the UK not being there to champion their cause (and pay for it).

Not that I think it will collapse and I don't want it to collapse. Although I do understand some do.

This is a significant case of comeuppance. They all thought that we would never leave. They all thought that they could lie about what the UK contributed and we, the stupid sheep, would just vote for more of the same.

Except we didn't. Now the Pigeons are coming home to roost. All they had to do was be reasonable. But they didn't, they thought that strength in numbers would allow them to override the concerns of the UK and we'd just roll over (all over again) and do what they wanted.

Major Ooops time. Perhaps they forgot that we aren't in the Euro so we can walk away without having to re-establish our own currency again. Perhaps they forgot that we do 58% (2% is through the EU so some monitors count it as EU trade), with the rest of the world.

Or, maybe, they just forgot that we didn't lose any of the world wars so we think very differently to the rest of the EU.

Anyway. It's all history now for Brexit. But the pain and suffering for the rest of the EU is only just beginning and they are only just waking up to it. Do I take my merriment from that. Hell, yes, I do. Because I love nothing more than self serving pompous assess getting pinpricked and deflated.

Far, Far, from the world of the UK economy collapsing and the UK crawling back to the EU to rescue it, we now see the UK economy as strong and vibrant. With the EU budget in trouble.

Yes we'll be paying them for a few years yet. This is because the rebates were designed to make it virtually impossible to know how much a state was actually paying. They were calculated on the prior year's GDP, then adjusted with the current years GDP and adjusted again in the following year. With that mess and our commitments to the UK EU MP pensions and also UK Commissioners pensions, we'll be paying for quite a while.

The key fact is this. WE would have, as of 2020, been paying €15bn per year to the EU, Net. A figure we would have been lied to about for decades to come. Now it is clear and impossible to deny. We get that money (from about 2022) and we choose how to spend it. If we don't spend it wisely that is our fault with nobody else to blame.

I, for one, prefer that.

The more interesting thing for me, is that the UK was not the only country not in the Euro and some of those countries, Denamark and Sweden come to mind, are going to get smeared over the new budget. If the UK does its job properly when it leaves and generates a new dynamic in world trace with the UK as the facilitator, then the avenue for exit for Sweden and Denmark becomes wider.

Time will tell. But the old lies are falling around us and the howl of dissent is growing.

About damned time!

[Workingman]

Suff, you seem to think that your view of the EU and UK post Brexit is fact, immutable and all positive for the UK. It is not. The future is crystal ball stuff and there are as many visions as there are viewers and crystal balls.

My take is based on today and how things are going. The global economy is growing - slowly. The EU economy is growing, but not as fast as the global economy. And the UK economy is lagging behind the EU. Our economy is in a strange dynamic of both growing and slipping back at one and the same time. It is not a good position to be in and, yes, it is largely down to Brexit.

We are also in a position with low interest rates that Carney, or whoever takes over, will have little room to manoeuvre when the next hit occurs. History shows us that it is not a case of 'if' but 'when' we get hit, and when we do we could be alone and adrift.

I kind of admire your optimism, but I do not share it. I would like to think that the odds are 50:50, but even that is a bit too glass half-full for me.

[Suff]

I kind of admire your optimism, but I do not share it. I would like to think that the odds are 50:50, but even that is a bit too glass half-full for me.

Well I have noticed that the strength, or lack of it, in the economy, tends to change depending on who is reporting it.

I'm normally glass half empty. But on this one, I see the downsides as so strong that we don't need much of an upside to make it worth it.

What I am highly amused about, right now, is the shock horror story that is going on in the EU. They were told to hang together and it would all be OK. So they told Cameron to go whistle. End result? We vote to leave.

They were told that they had to hang together or the UK would walk all over them in Brexit talks. End result? They are presented with a budget nobody wants but in order to veto it they have to go against the "hang together" stance which they are told will result in a Brexit which is better for the EU than if they allow the UK to divide and conquer.

At a time when the EU is losing an economy the size of the smaller 20, of the remaining 27 states; the EU is proposing to, not only keep, but expand the EU budget beyond where it stood in the last 5 years.

This has many of the smaller states flabbergasted. They shouldn't be because if they had actually checked, they would have found that losing the UK did absolutely nothing to shrink the EU budget. On the contrary, the UK was a net contributor, the UK got not one red cent from the EU that the UK did not pay for first. Brexit is ALL Loss to the EU budget.

Here is the biggest Irony of all. Two of the strongest antagonists of the UK policy of controlled Immigration; Poland and Hungary; have been totally shafted for their slavish toeing of the Commission line.

What do I mean about that Irony? The new EU budget comes with a rider on it. Comply with the EU "values" or get no subsidies. Right now the legal moves in both Hungary and Poland have been decried in Brussels as "against core EU values". In other words, change your laws and rhetoric or we'll take your subsidies and leave you without one of the biggest benefits of being a new member of the "Union".

This is really amusing because if they veto the new budget they lose their subsidies anyway because part of the UK rebate was taken to subsidise the New Expansion states (thank you so much Blair).

This is, to me, utterly hilarious. What goes around comes around. I'm left wondering just how badly shafted they feel for leading the charge to shut Cameron down.

I expect the UK economy to show some more growth in Q2. Our economic balance is much more fragile to weather than most of the EU and it takes time to ramp up again when things have been driven down. It is quite funny in some ways. Carney felt he had to talk the £ down because expectations of a rate rise were driving the £ up above levels he wanted to see. So he did this immediately before the economic data drove the £ down anyway.

I expect him to be talking the £ and the UK economy back up again some time next month. Nothing is going to stop this roller coaster until after we have actually left. So we might as well get used to it. I've decided to be positive and that is my outlook throughout.

The most amusing piece for me is that all the downsides for the EU, that I predicted during and after, the referendum campaigning; are slowly but surely emerging. One after another. Drip, drip, drip, drip.

So I allow myself a bit of dark sardonic amusement...

[cromwell]

The budget reduction will be an opportunity for the EU to cut the funds to the Visegrad nations.

It is what it is. Both sides will initially be poorer after Brexit.

Long term I am convinced that our politicians will try and get us back into the EU. Whether they will succeed or not I don't know.

[Workingman]

Long term I am convinced that our politicians will try and get us back into the EU.

Don't even think about it.

For a start there are no guarantees that they would want the black sheep back in and it would be no surprise if our application was blocked and then blocked some more.

If they did let us in it would be on their terms - join Schengen, the Euro, no rebate and no veto.

No thanks.

[Suff]

If they did let us in it would be on their terms - join Schengen, the Euro, no rebate and no veto.

No thanks.

We have been trending there for a decade. 50 years from now, when every other nation had succumbed to Schengen and the Euro, the showdown would come. But 50 years from now there would be nobody left to know what the difference was.

The EU was stupid in one thing only. They chose to force the issue of UK sovereignty when far more than half of the population knew why we should not give it up.

The high handed way Cameron was treated led reluctant remainers to take a chance on getting out. Mainly because they remember that they have good reason to be offended at the way we were treated.

Now the EU will have to swallow the bitter pill of that mistake.

Make no mistake about this, the EU is desperate to lock the UK into the customs Union so they can determine whether Brexit is a success or not. The reason they are so desperate is that, for them, Brexit cannot succeed. Because, if it does, the EU will start to shrink as other members take the risk.

The whole model of the EU is Hotel California. Because that way "what if" is never an issue they have to deal with.

The EU gambelled with a weak hand and lost. Time will tell whether the UK is also a loser.

[AliasAggers]

I am wondering why the UK government just doesn't say we will be leaving on "x" date and from "y" date we will not pay anything further
into the EU pot, leave the union there and then without any dictates from them about trade arrangements that we wish to persue.

Or am I being too naive to think that might happen??

Manxie

That's what I've been saying all along, Manxie. Perhaps we are both being too naïve.