How many billions has it cost in propping up the economy to avoid us going into a recession? The £70bn programme of quantitative easing was key. Money well spent to mitigate us having just shot ourselves in the face, but we still dropped from the top to the bottom of the international economic growth charts - at a time the world was booming, we were disembowelling the things which, for better or worse, had become fundamentals in our economy.

Isn't it fortunate we're not under the control of the European Central Bank, and can manage our fiscal and monetary policy effectively?

Anyway, the FT reckons consumer spending is what made the most impact: "there is no doubt the resilience of consumers is the biggest reason for the UK economy exceeding expectations", not QE, which of course helped alongside interest rates cuts.

I'm well aware of and have always expected economic risk with Brexi...oh I can't be arrised, I've repeated it so many times.

Do you think that the UK ecconomy is "exceeding expectations" 1.4% over the last 12 months and although there is a loose BoE target of 2-4% for next year, this looks massively optimistic.
The current "buoyancy" in the ecconomy is all due to desperately low interest rates, ironically, something which isn't usually compatible with a strong ecconomy.
Most sensible people take risk from a position of strength when "you can afford to lose" or from a position of desperation when you have" nothing to lose". I wonder which one of these best describes the position of the UK when taking such a risky venture.

Is your point here that the ECB isn’t effective or that it is ‘them’ rather than ‘us’?

If the latter, I think this is where a lot of the disagreement and mutual incomprehension comes from. People define themselves, and by extension ‘us’ in all sorts of different ways. Culture, language, geography, ethnicity, beliefs, preferences, shared interests. To me, the EU is less alien and other than, for example and setting the bar very low, Johnson, Javid, Gove, Raab, Patel, Truss and Rees-Mogg.

Now, you might say that ‘we’ could at least vote them out. But none of my ‘us’ are voting for them in the first place anyway. We’re outnumbered, and that is how democracy works, so fair enough. But it isn’t fortunate for my ‘us’, it is in fact a e state of affairs.

None of which would mean anything if people weren't spending. We've had very low interest rates since 2008 while the economy has been on quite a rollercoaster (one might question the impact they actually have, although I was grateful for REALLY low mortgage payments) and yes of course QE helped. Meanwhile, spending has increased year on year despite the forecasts of doom. And the position, as you know, was "get out of the EU".

Is it performing ahead of expectations? Depends what your expectations are. I'm honest in that I don't expect much around Brexit and we'll most likely see a dip, but I also expect long-term growth to recover and continue, much as it did following the 2008 recession.

Consumer Spending in the UK (millions)

Nice graph but 1.4% actual growth over the last 12 months really is no great shakes and over the last 6 months, just 0.1%, with a "hit" to come.
The economy is gasping for air, absolutely no doubt and ironically, without the influx of people from outside the UK, we would already have an economy in reverse.
I'll lend you my crystal ball if you like ?

"only the immigrants can save us"



Please, spare me.

You scoff but, if you take out the spend of those "millions" of immigrants, we would be under the line.
My point being, not so much the effect on the economy of immigrants but, more to do with the extremely fragile growth that we have and having just about climbed out of the deepest recession since the war, "some" people think it's a good idea to have another try



It's economic lunacy and looking behind the donors for the leave campaign, getting out of The EU , for them, has more to do with the tightening of some of the rules about "hiding" cash, which will become somewhat more difficult under the new EU rules, something that the UK should be applauding and following, rather than helping some less scrupulous businessmen.

You're over-complicating a simple point, which is very simply that our fiscal and monetary destiny is our own to control - we can decide quickly and effectively what we need to do to balance out the good and bad times.

But your last 2 paragraphs do show a difference in our mindsets. Just because 'right now' your preferred political people stand less chance of getting into power, you prefer to align yourself permanently to the EU - whose aim is to weaken the power of the nation state and gradually bring us all to closer union and centralised political, fiscal and military power. I'd rather take the bold plunge of extricating ourselves from the web while it's still possible, with all the risks that holds.

FWIW I certainly don't see Europe and 'them' and 'us'. Very simply, I don't want to be ruled by the EU, and want no part of their long-term goals.

153,000 immigrants work for the nhs

Despite this the nhs has a staffing crisis with 100,000 vacancies

Without them that figure would be 253,000

Hang on, you pro-mass immigration remainers keep telling us it's all relative; that more immigrants means more tax revenues, means public service expansion, means a bigger economy, etc, etc. Are you saying the reverse doesn't work? That if mass immigration had never happened then yes we might have a slightly smaller economy and slightly less spending - but the benchmarks would shift accordingly. It's all relative, remember. You can't have it both ways.

Yes I'm aware the some groups of immigrants [iTEND [/ito contribute (slightly) more - it's not a like-for-like comparison but there we go. But in reality that contribution is quite small, and some groups actually take more than they contribute. They are certainly not propping the economy up.

And? Is any reasonable person saying they should leave? I'm certainly not.

Which is a legitimate POV. I worry about this EU takeover, maybe to the same extent to you worry about the short to medium consequences of withdrawal. There’s a degree of risk, but nobody is sure of the extent and on balance, I think it’d be no big deal.

I’m not a huge fan of the EU, but it is well down my list of priority problems.

Ultimately some issues are best managed locally, some regionally, some nationally and some internationally. Maybe coming out of the ECB is for the best, i don’t know. I doubt it’ll be good news for the UK’s poorer regions. And anyway, our interest rates are set by the BoE and our taxes are determined by Westminster. This new monetary and fiscal freedom won’t be perceptible to most.

Coming out of EMA might be more consequential. I really ought to know what the plan is there. I do hope we have one... I shall check...

It looks like MHRA will step up. Be interesting to see if it is beefed up to cope or just piggy backs on EMA and/or FDA decisions.

You are china and I'll have that freshly printed fiver thanks



As others have said, every second customer at Primark or M&S being eastern european is making the UK look a tad healthier than it is.......once you and express/mail reader buddies have "seen them orf", you'll have to cut your own lawns and pay british sparkies to cack up your electrics...Rule Britannia and all that...wot ho!!

When american laugh at you politics, you really do have an issue

No but, you have said SO many times that the numbers that have come from the EU are too high which, if you had your way, may have meant that these people may not have been here at all

This is a very relevant point which is central to the whole debate about trade.

The reality of any trade arrangement (the EU is basically a very deeply integrated form of trade arrangement) is it involves a trade-off of some national sovereignty in order to facilitate easier trading arrangements.

When laws are aligned it makes commerce easier. We share the same rules and standards in Leeds as we do in London so trade is completely frictionless. If Leeds split off from the rest of the UK somehow and gained the 'sovereignty' to have different regulatory standards from the rest of the UK, it would pay a price in trading costs eg if Leeds permitted p1ss in its bitter, and the rest of the UK did not, then every barrel of bitter exported out of Leeds would be subject to additional checks to make sure it wasn't the stuff with p1ss in it.

So the high level question about trade is what are you willing to trade off in terms of sovereignty over your own rules, and with who. Leeds and London we agree to share sovereignty as we have a long history of being part of the same nation state, its not a problem. Sharing some sovereignty with outside countries becomes more of a problem the more rules you agree to align, but if it's a key market and worth a lot in reduced trade costs then you're willing to accept more than if it's a market you don't trade with. The EU provides much deeper alignment than any other trade block which both carries bigger trading benefits than any other trade deal in the world but also involves transferring more sovereignty away.

In practice though, a lot of peoples' positions on whether they are for or anti the EU are clouded by whether they think rules made at the EU level are more in line with their own preferences than what they think the UK government would do. The whole argument about the EU protecting workers rights is based on this - people think that the UK is more likely to be governed by Conservatives who will remove workers' rights and thus better to have the constraint on them placed at EU level to stop them doing it. It is inherently an antidemocratic argument.

The flipside of this comes when we look at doing the trade deal with the US. Although a trade deal with the US won't nearly involve the same deep integration as EU membership would, the US is very aggressive in making sure countries that sign up to trade deals with it do so on terms that are tightly controlled by the US and in the US favour, and that do constrain national governments. Typically they are very aggressive on rules around patents and intellectual property, on food and environmental standards, product safety and on drug pricing. On the issue of standards they aggressively limit the extent to which countries can introduce regulations that could rule US food/products as unsafe for purchase. They are also aggressive against labelling, they don't like you being able to clearly identify which products are produced in a particular way (that you might think are more dangerous etc).

Now this is also a real compromise on democracy, because if we sign up to a US trade deal it will bind future UK parliaments from being able to introduce safety or environmental standards that would restrict US products from the UK market. In practice the way they do this is through the ISDS (investor-state-dispute-settlement) rules which are external courts (heavily influenced/dominated by the US) through which US firms can sue a foreign government for bringing in regulations that could reduce their profits. This is anti-democratic for the same reasons that I argued before about the working rights: if UK voters elect a government that wants to bring in those safety regulations, they should be able to do it and not be blocked by the US.

Where you see an inconsistency, is where some of the Conservative Eurosceptics will stand very strongly for 'democracy' and 'taking back control' when it comes to repatriating powers from Brussels, but who would be eager to see the UK bound by a US trade deal that restricted the ability of future UK governments to regulate because they see deregulation as a good thing ideologically and would rather a future Labour UK government was constrained from bringing regulations in.

That kind of position makes sense ideologically, but we shouldn't pretend its about taking back control for UK citizens - its about political tactics to try and achieve the ends they want.

If UK politicans are really consistent about taking back control, making sure the UK isn't bound by vassalage to the EU, they will be as strident and willing to 'just walk away and trade on WTO terms' with Trump as they are with the EU.

More zero hour contracts coming up so don't be sick and forget about holidays. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 1576502501

More zero hour contracts coming up so don't be sick and forget about holidays. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 1576502501

I had to laugh at this which I saw today.

Conservative plan to raise minimum hourly rate to £10.50 was ambitious. Labour plan to increase minimum wage to £10 would lose us our jobs and send unemployment soaring.



And we wonder why all those old duffers robotically repeat the line "Labour will bankrupt the country".

Is this called "spin" or boll***S ?

I also note that Boris has indeed removed protection on workers rights, removed a commitment on some refugee children being allowed to come to the UK and interestingly removed Parliament having any say on the final Brexit deal.

It seems that democracy is only important when it suits and scrutiny has all but disappeared.

Corbyn & Co have not only lost the election but, been defeated so heavily that we now have a virtual dictatorship.

They have also removed parliamentary scrutiny of any trade deals so much for sovereignty. I regret that they are taking the vote in the North to mean they have authority to do what they want because they are now the party of the working class. This means that whatever they do, those that voted to get Brexit done are also responsible for all the other bad legislation coming the country’s way.
It easy to say they are for all but regrettably time will show they are not and based on the withdrawal bill this is coming sooner than I thought.

All those labour voters who voted blue deserve whats coming. Sorry, but that is how i feel about them now.

And let us not forget, that since that 'ambitious' promise, they've since downgraded to say that they will raise the NMW - only if "economic conditions allow."

It's just a real shame that we didn't have any empirical evidence of Boris Johnson's prior conduct, to help us work out if he was prone to lying to get what he wanted.

Len McClusky & Unite, plus Squawkbox.... no lying or smearing to see here, move on.