Whitey Grandad

I think you overestimate the effectiveness of the Internet, especially amongst the elderly. I lost count of the number of people that I spoke to who said that they were confused about the options and that they didn't have enough information to make a decision. I don't consider the BBC to have been biased in any shape or form. Also by giving air time to buffoons like Farage they gave credibility to his arguments.

Gets better as the video progresses. At the beginning it just looked as if he was good at getting saves out of goalkeepers.

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It doesn't stipulate connecting doors???

There was precious little information from either side. The TV treated the referendum the same way as they do a general election with strict rules on not favouring any particular side. Not very long after the vote there was a programme on BBC about 'what Brexit means for us'. Shouldn't we have had these discussions before?

Indeed. So how are we going to sort out what sort of Brexit we can all live with? (Serious question)

True, it might actually be more than that.

You seem to have missed an important point. It is precisely because there isn't a plan, or if there is that nobody has communicated what it involves, that is causing the uncertainty and turbulence at the moment. I'm reminded of that quote from Band of Brothers: “He wasn’t a bad leader because he made bad decisions. He was a bad leader because he made no decisions.”

Britain was actually doing quite well and had prospered relatively well inside the EU. The plan was 'steady as she goes'.

Confidence is a very fragile object. It takes years to build it up yet it cab be shattered in a few moments. I see no signs at the moment that any of this recalcitrance is merely down to negative talk and no amount of talking up is going to persuade businesses to part with their hard-earned money for new ventures in the current climate. This uncertainty could very well pertain for the next five or six years.

Yes, everywhere seems to be very quiet at the moment and has been for a couple of months or so. Eventually it should begin to pick up once inventories are exhausted but any form of discretionary spending is likely to struggle.

And how do they look in Dollar terms?

They can afford to work less and have more leisure time. Their productivity is way beyond ours. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/18/uk-productivity-gap-widens-to-worst-level-since-records-began

Too much money involved. The whole business is one big overhype.

I don't think it's the absence of trade deals that is restricting either deals or trade. There are many other aspects such as contract laws, terms of payment, anti-corruption laws. In dealing with Europe there is a common legal framework which underpins confidence.

Whilst wer'e at it, what is it about our membership of the EU that prevents businesses from 'building closer trade relationships' with China and India that we can't do already? Could it be, perhaps, that one market is on our doorstep and the other is on the opposite side of the world? But this is beside the point. We need as much trade as possible in order to pay our way in the world. To talk about relative percentages is meaningless except to illustrate the relative importance of each sector. We cannot survivce without the customers who live alongside us, me old china (do you see what I did there? )

On the contrary, the conditions were set precisely so that they would never be met. It was a political way of stating that the government was in favour of joining the Euro whilst making sure that we never would.

And so is accesss to the Single Market. What we need to do is to convince the other 27 that Britain, as an offshore crowded island, is a special case and as such requires special considerations. This will not be easy.

A plan so cunning that even Baldrick would be proud of it. There's just one question... ...how do we get this massive increase in exports to the rest of the world, and why aren't we doing it already? (Please don't say that we are being held back by the EU, my poor split sides would never heal up). Of course it's more possible that exports to the EU will fall by tens of billions and we could reach your target of 25% that way, but by that stage we would all be really stony broke and banging on the door begging to be let back in.

Thereby hangs one horn of a dilemma. In the words of the song, 'you can't have one without the other'.

Those figures are for Germany as a whole, nothing about UK-Germany trade.

Perhaps you'd like to check again? £61bn deficit with the whole EU, not just Germany. The figures are distorted somewhat by the 'Rotterdam Effect'. This is because a lot of the imports/exports go through Rotterdam which means the EU.

The Single Market is absolutely essential. Without it there would be trade but nowhere near as freely and easily as now. Where do you get this £100bn figure?

Well at least he won't be saving any rivals from relegation.

I expect he limped and struggled all the way to the bank.