Amsel_ wrote:@
Dolan Thank you for spending so much time on a reply. If you did so out of desire to have a discussion with me then I am very flattered.
No probs, I am very interested in this subject, I've been following Brexit and UK politics very closely for a few years already. So I could talk about this for days. And it wouldn't be time wasted, because I understood so much about politics and economics by just following this subject.
When I blamed the EU for causing these changes, I meant the dependency as a whole. But if I'm not mistaken the EU handles all external trade deals on behalf of its members, and the UK isn't allowed to make them on its own; so if this sell-off of British industry happened after the UK joined the EU then it seems fair to point out that the EU wasn't as protective of manufacturing as the UK might have been. Here in the U.S., for instance, the government can veto foreign acquisitions of companies they deem strategic. If Britain wasn't allowed to block that acquisition because of the EU then the EU is to blame. If Britain was allowed to block it, but didn't do so on its own initiative, then that is a fault of their government, and not related to the topic at hand.
That's true, the fact that the EU negotiates trade deals for the whole union is a double edged sword, it has its trade-offs. On one hand, you are represented by a huge bloc that has a lot more negotiation leverage than one single member, but on the other hand, you don't get deals which are customised to your very specific economic needs. So the EU would surely try to protect your interests too while negotiating a deal (they're forced to do that, because the EU is actually run by its members, not by some aliens teleported from outer space), but in the end, there would be a compromise between them and another trading partner and that compromise may not match your economic interests perfectly.
Because, for example, if the EU negotiated a big quota for exports of cars to South America, in exchange for letting them have a big quota on European markets for exporting beef, then you as an EU country that doesn't produce cars but has a significant beef production sector, you get increased competition from their cheaper products without gaining anything. That's pretty much the worst case scenario for having such an arrangement. On the other hand, other quotas might come in your favour and so compensate you for your potential loss from competition on the beef market. Such as a substantial export quota for steel products.
It's probably similar in the US, where the federal government has a monopoly on closing trade agreements that may not perfectly match each state's economic interests, because they're going for an arrangement that strikes the optimal compromise for the whole federation.
On the question of blocking strategic acquisitions, as far as I know, the EU does not have any rules that make its members unable to block capital from outside the union from controlling huge strategic chunks of their economy. The EU only has rules concerning internal competition on its common market. It's up to each national state to protect their strategic interests in the face of hostile acquisitions coming from outside capital.
I know that recently this topic has become prominent on the EU's agenda, as they have been talking about adopting a framework within which each state would report how they plan to screen or block foreign capital from making strategic acquisitions in their countries. (See:
https://globalcompliancenews.com/eu-con ... -20170920/) Under such a framework, the EU wouldn't be able to block companies from making such acquisitions, but it would create a forum in which member states could discuss with each other the implications of one country blocking certain acquisitions.
So, I really doubt that the EU could have had any say in what happened in the UK. I think the UK was free to protect their strategic sectors in any way they saw necessary.
On the topic of agriculture: I see no reason for the UK to not simply provide subsidies, so that its own citizens can earn a living wage doing honest work in a now stable agricultural sector. There's nothing shameful in outdoors work, and it's unfortunate that the West has adopted a bourgeois view of labor wherein financial services need to be protected from harm, while farm-work is so déclassé that only virtual slave-laborers can do it.
Yeah, I agree, a country definitely needs to encourage more people to get involved more in agriculture and physical jobs. It's a pathetic situation when a country pays its agri producers to simply not produce anything, because it's cheaper for them to subsidise non-production. On the flipside, this happens also because if you subsidise production to a significant degree, it becomes profitable to just produce as much as you can (and get more subsidies), even if that leads to overproduction and having to basically throw away a huge quantity of products for which there simply is no demand. So that's why this subject of agriculture is such a touchy one in the EU and elsewhere and why it enjoys a protected status. Lots of jobs are involved, food security is involved and overproduction and massive strikes can lead to some serious social unrest. So governments have simply preferred to buy their producers' silence with handouts.
I also don't know how much arable land the UK has, so if it is unsatisfactory then consumers may well have to deal with increased prices. It would be up to the government to make up for that. From the perspective of sectoral balances, they should be able to do so, because of the "increase" in foreign sector profits enabling/necessitating further public sector deficits.
I'm no expert in the UK agri sector, but I know that the country has a high population density and most of its GDP is generated in services. Also, I know that they are unable to secure their food necessities from internal production. So they import a lot of agri products from Ireland (dairy, beef), Spain (fruits and vegetables), Italy (cheese) etc. And this kind of dependency won't be changed overnight. The only food sector from the UK that has been truly negatively impacted by EU rules is the fishing sector. They haven't been allowed to fish coastal waters as much they wished, because of environmental concerns of protecting the fish stock. And that has led to economic decline on UK coastal areas and British fishermen holding a long-lasting grudge against the EU for that. But then, again, other economic sectors have thrived thanks to being able to do business on the huge Common market (like financials). Win some, lose some.