Brexit

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Eighteen months on, it’s this same insight – to follow the data – that is the key to unlocking what really happened behind the scenes of the Leave campaign. On the surface, the two main campaigns, Leave.EU and Vote Leave, hated one other. Their leading lights, Farage and Boris Johnson, were sworn enemies for the duration of the referendum. The two campaigns bitterly refused even to share a platform. But the Observer has seen a confidential document that provides clear evidence of a link between the two campaigns. More precisely, evidence of a close working relationship between the two data analytics firms employed by the campaigns – AggregateIQ, which Vote Leave hired, and Cambridge Analytica, retained by Leave.EU. British electoral law is founded on the principle of a level playing field and controlling campaign spending is the key plank of that. The law states that different campaigns must not work together unless they declare their expenditure jointly. This controls spending limits so that no side can effectively “buy” an election. But this signed legal document – a document that was never meant to be made public and was leaked by a concerned source – connects both Vote Leave and Leave.EU’s data firms directly to Robert Mercer, the American billionaire who bankrolled Donald Trump.

Follow the data: does a legal document link Brexit campaigns to US billionaire? | Technology | The Guardian

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Furthermore, the EU documents contain no surprises. The equivalent of dotting the Is and crossing the Ts, they are a reminder the EU has had 11 months to get ready for Brexit. That is almost one year to assemble squadrons of specialists to pore over EU treaties and legal tomes to map the way ahead. The 10-page paper on the bill does not put a price on the divorce, but sets out in painstaking detail all EU bodies with a vested interest in the spoils – 40 agencies, eight joint projects on new technologies and a panoply of funds agreed by all countries, from aid for refugees in Turkey to supporting peace in Colombia. No detail is too small. Britain is even on the hook for funding teachers at the elite European schools that educate EU civil servants’ children. On citizens’ rights, the EU spells out in greater detail the protections it wants to secure for nearly 5 million people on the wrong side of Brexit – 3.5 million EU nationals in the UK and 1.2 million Britons on the continent.

Painstaking detail of Brexit process revealed in EU documents | Politics | The Guardian

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British businesses have rejected claims by leading Brexiters that trade with the rest of the world can replace free access to European markets, arguing that quitting the single market and customs union without a trade deal with the EU will harm their growth prospects.
In a report by the former shadow chancellor Ed Balls and Peter Sands, senior fellows at Harvard University’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, UK businesses owners warned that a bad deal, or no deal, on Brexit would be disastrous for British jobs, investment and growth.

Bad EU trade deal 'disastrous' for UK jobs, investment and growth | Business | The Guardian

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Watching Brexit unfold is such a pleasure. One year on from the referendum of 23 June 2016, it is now clear that what we predicted is coming true: leaving the European Union is exceptionally difficult (assuming it is even possible), carries an undeniable cost, and plays havoc with the politics of the country attempting it – as the fiasco of Britain’s snap election, on 8 June, amply demonstrates. That’s why I was in favour of a victory for leave: it would mean all the Europhobes and Eurosceptics of the union would see their dreams shatter on the brick wall of reality.

Thank you, Britain – Brexit has vaccinated Europe against populism | Jean Quatremer | Opinion | The Guardian

Yet more than nine years after the slump of 2008 began, wages – the yardstick by which most people judge whether the economy is doing well or not – have not recovered. In fact, according to the Office for National Statistics, they have gone backwards. The average basic weekly wage, adjusted for movements in prices, now stands at £458. This is a quite staggering performance, which breaks all sorts of records for all the wrong reasons. There has been nothing like the current squeeze on real wages in living memory. The Resolution Foundation, a thinktank that concentrates on the living standards of those on middle and low incomes, says the 2010s are on course to be the worst decade for wage growth since the one that included the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

UK pay squeeze breaks all sorts of records for all the wrong reasons | Larry Elliott | Business | The Guardian

All the frontrunners in the nascent Conservative leadership election would make voters less likely to back their party if they became leader, according to a new poll. The finding comes as a survey by Survation, the most accurate pollster of the general election, gives Labour a six-point lead over the Tories in their first poll after the election. But supplementary questions asked by the pollster in the same survey show that Boris Johnson, David Davis, Michael Gove, Amber Rudd and Philip Hammond would all make people less likely to vote Tory.

Main candidates to replace Theresa May would all make Tories less popular, poll suggests | The Independent

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To understand the sensational outcome of the British election, one must ask a basic question. What happens when phony populism collides with the real thing? Last year’s triumph for Brexit has often been paired with the rise of Donald Trump as evidence of a populist surge. But most of those joining in with the ecstasies of English nationalist self-assertion were imposters. Brexit is an elite project dressed up in rough attire. When its Oxbridge-educated champions coined the appealing slogan “Take back control,” they cleverly neglected to add that they really meant control by and for the elite.

The problem is that, as the elections showed, too many voters thought the control should belong to themselves. Theresa May is a classic phony Brexiter. She didn’t support it in last year’s referendum and there is no reason to think that, in private, she has ever changed her mind. But she saw that the path to power led toward the cliff edge, from which Britain will take its leap into an unknown future entirely outside the European Union. Her strategy was one of appeasement—of the nationalist zealots in her own party, of the voters who had backed the hard-right UK Independence Party (UKIP), and of the hysterically jingoistic Tory press, especially The Daily Mail.

The actual result of the referendum last year was narrow and ambiguous. Fifty-two percent of voters backed Brexit but we know that many of them did so because they were reassured by Boris Johnson’s promise that, when it came to Europe, Britain could “have its cake and eat it.” It could both leave the EU and continue to enjoy all the benefits of membership. Britons could still trade freely with the EU and would be free to live, work, and study in any EU country just as before.

This is, of course, a childish fantasy, and it is unlikely that Johnson himself really believed a word of it. It was just part of the game, a smart line that might win a debate at the Oxford Union.   But what do you do when your crowd-pleasing applause lines have to become public policy? The twenty-seven remaining member states of the EU have to try to extract a rational outcome from an essentially irrational process. They have to ask the simple question: What do you Brits actually want? And the answer is that the Brits want what they can’t possibly have. They want everything to change and everything to go as before. They want an end to immigration—except for all the immigrants they need to run their economy and health service. They want it to be 1900, when Britain was a superpower and didn’t have to make messy compromises with foreigners.

Britain: The End of a Fantasy | by Fintan O’Toole | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

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A British reset — and it probably falls on Philip Hammond, the chancellor, to persuade the prime minister — should start with the recognition that the previously imagined hard Brexit is impossible as well as undesirable. A distasteful electoral pact with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist party makes no difference. The government does not have the numbers to legislate for a clean break. Nor does it have the time or administrative capacity to negotiate a bespoke arrangement.

The answer is a two-stage process. In the first, lasting perhaps five years beyond 2019, Britain would remain in the customs union and the single market through an arrangement within the European Economic Area — similar though not identical to that enjoyed by Norway. This pause, perhaps including a two-year notice clause if either side wished to withdraw, would allow for talks on a subsequent permanent association pact, embracing security and foreign policy as well as trade.

It goes without saying that such a deal would disadvantage Britain relative to today. It would be swapping a significant voice and influence in the shaping of European affairs for a small measure of autonomy. But this is in the nature of the Brexit decision. The choice is not one between “good” and “bad”, but one between less and more damaging.

A path that would avoid Brexit calamity

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Farms have been hit with a shortage of the migrant workers that Britain relies on to bring in the fruit and vegetable harvests, according to a series of new reports. There was a 17% shortfall in May, leaving some farms critically short of pickers, according to a new National Farmers Union (NFU) survey. The decline is blamed on Brexit, with the vote to depart the EU leaving the UK seen as “xenophobic” and “racist” by overseas workers, according to the director of a major agricultural recruitment company.

Farms hit by labour shortage as migrant workers shun 'racist' UK | Environment | The Guardian

U.K. consumer spending fell for the first time since 2013 last month, dropping 0.8 percent compared with a year earlier, an index by Visa and IHS Markit shows. The gauge illustrates how faster inflation and weak wage growth are taking their toll on U.K. household demand. Uncertainty around the outcome of Brexit and concern about the economy are likely to keep expenditure weaker in the months ahead, according to Annabel Fiddes, an economist at IHS Markit.

British Spending Falls for First Time in Years: Chart - Bloomberg

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One third of non-British workers are considering leaving the UK, with highly skilled workers from the EU most likely to go, according to new research into the impact of Brexit on the jobs market. The consultancy firm Deloitte found 47% of highly skilled workers from the EU were considering leaving the UK in the next five years. In a report on Tuesday, it warns of serious implications for employers, raising the pressure on ministers to come up with sensible immigration plans and to find ways to improve the skills of UK workers and make better use of robots in the workplace.

Almost half of highly skilled EU workers 'could leave UK within five years' | Politics | The Guardian

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British factories were left out of a demand-driven surge in activity across much of Asia and Europe in June, as weakness in sterling failed to translate into export growth, surveys showed. Factories in the euro zone rounded off the first half of 2017 by ramping up at the fastest rate for over six years while Asia's tech-manufacturing economies were helped by growing global demand for electronics products. But British manufacturing grew more slowly than anyone polled by Reuters expected as consumers faced the double-hit of accelerating inflation - caused in large part by the fall in the pound since last year's vote to leave the EU - and slowing wage growth. Monday's survey suggested the supposed silver lining of a weakened pound - more competitive exports - is proving elusive and could make Bank of England officials think twice about raising interest rates. The Markit/CIPS UK Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) fell to 54.3 from a downwardly-revised 56.3 in May, a three-month low and below all forecasts in a Reuters poll of economists that pointed to a reading of 56.5. A reading above 50 indicates growth.

Britain misses out as global manufacturing surges

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UK manufacturing firms could begin cutting investment and jobs within months unless the Government radically clarifies its aims for the Brexit deal, an industry body has said. Terry Scuoler, chief executive of EEF, which represents the UK’s manufacturers, is addressing the President of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, in Strasbourg on Tuesday. He will say that British firms face a “tipping point” well before March 2019 when the negotiations are supposed to be complete and must make decisions on investment and jobs within months.

Brexit: Manufacturers face ‘tipping point’ unless Government urgently clarifies strategy, says industry body | The Independent

The cost faced by UK banks of restructuring operations because of Brexit could be as high as €15bn (£13.1bn) and is likely to put a “material strain” on those institutions' earnings over the coming years, according to a new study. Research commissioned by the Association for Financial Markets in Europe and conducted by Boston Consulting Group and Clifford Chance, argues that lenders operating with UK bank licences will most likely have to create subsidiaries within the remaining countries of the EU in order to keep operating as they have done up until now in the aftermath of the split..

Brexit: UK banks could face £13bn restructuring bill after EU split | The Independent

Investment in the UK car industry has fallen to just £322m in the first half of 2017, in a sign that companies are delaying or cancelling spending ahead of the UK leaving the EU. Last year £1.66bn was invested in the auto sector, more than 30 per cent down from £2.5bn in 2015, as carmakers and their suppliers delayed non-essential investment following the EU referendum in June 2016. But investment looks to have fallen even further in the first six months of this year, according to figures compiled by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, an industry body. If the same levels of investment are seen in the second half of the year, it would bring total annual spend on the UK car industry to just £644m — nearly one-quarter of the amount invested two years ago and a sharper fall than many in the industry had expected.

Investment in UK car industry plummets amid Brexit uncertainty