Matthew Goodwin says there are five big advantages to having left the EU. Unsurprisingly, they are all rubbish. Here’s my breakdown of why every one of them falls apart under inspection Debunking the latest round of Brexiter myths can get tiring. That’s the whole point of what the Brexiters do, in fact - spout rubbish in order to wear people like me down, sending another avalanche of dreary bullshit that has to be shown up for the tissue of nonsense that it is, hoping one day that the only people still complaining about Brexit will be the Brexiters themselves.
VG as ever. Not exactly to do with Brexit but when you talked about "strengthening our democracy" I couldn't but think of a couple of recent news items - 1)that an MP and former Tory leader thinks that it's OK to incite criminal damage (against ULEZ cameras) and that no action has been taken against him - compare and contrast the treatment of climate protesters, whatever you might think fo the merits of their case and 2)the way that the Right came out against the principle of free speech, which they profess to hold so dear, in wanting to suppress the display of EU flags at the Last Night of Proms and/or censor the TV images thereof.
It strikes me, as with NT's demolition of Goodwin, that the hard Right know that they have lost the arguments and are basically resorting to Franco-style suppression and the evisceration of democratic processes
In fact, as far as Brexit is concerned, it is the hard left who are now taking up much of the running. "Spiked" are now more vocal in Brexit justification/appeasement than the entire ERG, and Larry Elliot was sounding off in the Guardian again this week.
Matthew Goodwin is regularly posting on YouTube as part of a campaign attempting to put an intellectual spin on his very right wing socially conservative views, such as:
The replacement theory. Border controls on migrants being insufficient. A roundabout way of saying that native UK people are being replaced from the workforce too rapidly and people don't like it, or are justified in not liking it.
Goodwin does not temper these views by examining the practical aspect of finding more native UK workers to fill vacancies, or what it would take to raise the birth rate and educate and train millions more and how long that might take, i.e. 25 years. It might be tweaked at the edges but is basically not going to change in this ageing society . Still less why migrants are somehow an inferior method of filling vacancies? They are actually not. They broaden our horizons and have hugely improved our food on offer. Thank god for that. British cuisine was destroyed by 2 world wars, shortages and rationing and now the migrant and fusion cuisine has put it back on the map. Music too has benefited hugely.
For a long time we were told by these nationalists that migrants were keeping wages down. Yet in the recent years when 1.3m EU workers returned to the continent causing shortages of workers in most sectors, real wages have been falling behind CPI inflation by record amounts since the mid 19th Century and RPI by more. The Tories who told us they wanted a high wage economy, kept public sector wages down even lower. To the civil servants who worked around them and implemented their policy they provided a 1.8% rise at a time when food was rising at 18%.
Goodwin blathers on about trade deals and taking back control. The irrelevant CPTPT pacific deal involves secretive courts making decisions that Britain would have no hand in. We had inputs into the EU at every level and still had to pass laws through the UK parliament. Parliament no longer debates trade deals. This Pacific deal also makes it effectively impossible for the UK to take private business in public ownership. So much for sovereignty.
The Aus deal was so one sided that the perpetrators took to their TV airwaves to gloat about how they had pulled fast one over Britain and so couldn't believe it that they contacted Truss ( Foreign Sec.) to ask for even more and got given it immediately!
Prof Matt Goodwin contrived to claim that the new establishment are lefties running Uni’s, public sector & arts related business such as publishing, out of line with ordinary people. They have a limited influence but are not the real establishment. The real establishment are royalty, lords, MPs, Tory donors, Corporate boards, newspapers owners (mostly foreigners/overseas), Russian oligarchs, property magnates, finance/investors exporting billions with fake patriotic pretence (Mogg & Redwood MPs) . These people have the real power. Tories take your taxes and cut your services, then cover for themselves by trying to blame penniless refugees fleeing oppression, protected by International law set up by Winston Churchill and British lawyers after WW2.
What Goodwin has done is to attract every racist xenophobe and give them acres of YouTube comments to exchange their vile views in a forum with a veneer of respectability and academia, with no skin heads, salutes or mock uniforms in sight.
Unlike Goodwin, at least the skinheads who used to throw bricks at me walking home from Grammar school in a national front stronghold of Debden, Loughton, Essex in the late 70’s were at least sincere in their vileness.
Point 5 is particularly interesting - and indeed risible. I believe it dates back to the economically illiterate Vote Leave assertion that since the emerging markets are growing quicker than the mature markets of Europe, we must somehow hitch/align to the emerging markets - while dumping the lucrative, reliable, high value market on our doorstep. This is still regularly repeated by all varieties of Brexit supporters - all the more so now that growth seem to have disappeared from the UK economic picture for the foreseeable future. Of course, the rational holes in this thinking are gaping : Firstly, they are simply finessing a statistical red herring- since the decline in Europe's share of global GDP is an inevitable mathematical function of the incredible rise of China to economic super power during the past thirty years. If you look at the history of emerging markets, it is much more complicated picture, and the rise of China is very much a unique phenomenon in modern economic history. In any case, we could trade with China and other emerging markets via the S Market - as has Germany with astounding success. Which brings us onto the flip side of emerging markets - which historically have been vulnerable to economic shocks, currency fluctuations and periods of instability. Indeed, the current Chinese problems are a key factor in Germany's technical recession (which the Express and Mail love to crow about).
The other central point is that you cant "align" with countries or somehow mimic their growth just by trading with them ! There are a whole list of reasons why this should be obvious - and the evidence is the 0.08% average anticipated benefit from CPTPP.
Germany has had a drop of 1-2% in GDP as a result of Merkel foolishly betting on Russian gas while dropping nuclear, but they were 20% ahead of the UK on GDP and far less unequal including with no poor Federal regions, even including the ex communist eastern Germany.
Indeed. Since we've included the subject of Germany, the relevant point is that a German technical recession has nowhere near the same effect as a typical UK recession - due to their much higher savings and lower debt ratios. The bigger picture is that the German advanced manufacturing/export economic model has been much more successful than the UK consumer/debt/financial model - but by leaving the S Market we have just made ourselves even more reliant on low value/low growth retail, construction, financial services sectors. This will increasingly be reflected in our economic numbers as the various distortions are eliminated.
I totally agree Mark. Germany has a very successful active industrial strategy that supports training, infrastructure, energy, R&D, trade shows and even staffing levels during recession. I have done business there for many years. It works, although they took a wrong turn over Russian energy.
And of course this is point. The reason for Germany's success in exporting to China and other emerging markets is that they already had the infrastructure, technology and skills to target the valuable element of that growth - principally in high tech engineering and instrumentation. It's not trade per say that matters so much as the valuable elements of trade.
Regarding representative democracy we could consider it a Brexit benefit that it has shown how limited, fragile and underdeveloped it is.
Like Johnson proroguing parliament at a critical time of the Leave process.
Or that May's government wanting to trigger Article 50 without any parliamentary oversight or approval would have gone unchallenged if private individuals hadn't taken the case to the Supreme Court.
Or the idea that ministers could remove or rewrite any EU derived law again without any parliamentary oversight or approval as proposed by the retained EU law bill. Which was only watered down, not outright dismissed as it should have.
Brexit has made the extreme wing of the Conservatives over confident and they no longer felt the need to hide their ambition to dismantle British democracy.
This realisation and public unmasking might be the only thing that history will record as a benefit of Brexit
Going on about immigration as a Brexit benefit is always rubbish.
Immigration has always been a national competency. Or in the case of the UK apparently an national incompetency.
Anyone who had even a cursory look at how immigration is handled across EU members would have seen the differences and thus realized that this must be due to national decisions.
For example the UK had rules for citizens of ex-colonies, especially Commonwealth countries, not shared with any other EU member.
Germany has lower thresholds for immigration eligibility than many (it not all) of its neighbours due to its larger industrial employment needs.
The UK could have had a points based system any time a government wanted to.
The countries also have different approaches on how they implement and enforce their policies.
Most have realized that point-of-entry checks are the least important mechanism because so many more people arrive on visa-waiver or visa-free agreements than on actual visa.
Therefore any effective control system needs to be aware of the status of people within the country.
Part of the perceived immigration control issues in the UK are down to the lack of such means.
It doesn't matter how strict or tough or points-based your policies are if you can't properly implement and enforce them.
Again something the UK could have addressed any time during its EU membership.
What puzzles me most is that it is one thing to be ignorant about immigration handling in EU countries but a whole different thing to claim improvement due to Brexit when in fact their own metric (net immigration numbers) shows the very opposite.
I always thought that professorships were awarded for qualities such as competence, insight, and intellectual rigour. Since when has Goodwin ever displayed a trace of any of these qualities? Were the Uni of Kent suffering a shortage of professors at the time, and decided anyone would do?
One thing that should be a matter of concern is the continuing bashing of freedom of movement of people despite the EU variant having already ended.
Because at this point any making the loss of FOM look like something positive can only really be targeted at the UK's internal variant between its own union members.
Not sure how far away we are from "English jobs/houses/schools for English people"
VG as ever. Not exactly to do with Brexit but when you talked about "strengthening our democracy" I couldn't but think of a couple of recent news items - 1)that an MP and former Tory leader thinks that it's OK to incite criminal damage (against ULEZ cameras) and that no action has been taken against him - compare and contrast the treatment of climate protesters, whatever you might think fo the merits of their case and 2)the way that the Right came out against the principle of free speech, which they profess to hold so dear, in wanting to suppress the display of EU flags at the Last Night of Proms and/or censor the TV images thereof.
It strikes me, as with NT's demolition of Goodwin, that the hard Right know that they have lost the arguments and are basically resorting to Franco-style suppression and the evisceration of democratic processes
In fact, as far as Brexit is concerned, it is the hard left who are now taking up much of the running. "Spiked" are now more vocal in Brexit justification/appeasement than the entire ERG, and Larry Elliot was sounding off in the Guardian again this week.
Matthew Goodwin is regularly posting on YouTube as part of a campaign attempting to put an intellectual spin on his very right wing socially conservative views, such as:
The replacement theory. Border controls on migrants being insufficient. A roundabout way of saying that native UK people are being replaced from the workforce too rapidly and people don't like it, or are justified in not liking it.
Goodwin does not temper these views by examining the practical aspect of finding more native UK workers to fill vacancies, or what it would take to raise the birth rate and educate and train millions more and how long that might take, i.e. 25 years. It might be tweaked at the edges but is basically not going to change in this ageing society . Still less why migrants are somehow an inferior method of filling vacancies? They are actually not. They broaden our horizons and have hugely improved our food on offer. Thank god for that. British cuisine was destroyed by 2 world wars, shortages and rationing and now the migrant and fusion cuisine has put it back on the map. Music too has benefited hugely.
For a long time we were told by these nationalists that migrants were keeping wages down. Yet in the recent years when 1.3m EU workers returned to the continent causing shortages of workers in most sectors, real wages have been falling behind CPI inflation by record amounts since the mid 19th Century and RPI by more. The Tories who told us they wanted a high wage economy, kept public sector wages down even lower. To the civil servants who worked around them and implemented their policy they provided a 1.8% rise at a time when food was rising at 18%.
Goodwin blathers on about trade deals and taking back control. The irrelevant CPTPT pacific deal involves secretive courts making decisions that Britain would have no hand in. We had inputs into the EU at every level and still had to pass laws through the UK parliament. Parliament no longer debates trade deals. This Pacific deal also makes it effectively impossible for the UK to take private business in public ownership. So much for sovereignty.
The Aus deal was so one sided that the perpetrators took to their TV airwaves to gloat about how they had pulled fast one over Britain and so couldn't believe it that they contacted Truss ( Foreign Sec.) to ask for even more and got given it immediately!
Prof Matt Goodwin contrived to claim that the new establishment are lefties running Uni’s, public sector & arts related business such as publishing, out of line with ordinary people. They have a limited influence but are not the real establishment. The real establishment are royalty, lords, MPs, Tory donors, Corporate boards, newspapers owners (mostly foreigners/overseas), Russian oligarchs, property magnates, finance/investors exporting billions with fake patriotic pretence (Mogg & Redwood MPs) . These people have the real power. Tories take your taxes and cut your services, then cover for themselves by trying to blame penniless refugees fleeing oppression, protected by International law set up by Winston Churchill and British lawyers after WW2.
What Goodwin has done is to attract every racist xenophobe and give them acres of YouTube comments to exchange their vile views in a forum with a veneer of respectability and academia, with no skin heads, salutes or mock uniforms in sight.
Unlike Goodwin, at least the skinheads who used to throw bricks at me walking home from Grammar school in a national front stronghold of Debden, Loughton, Essex in the late 70’s were at least sincere in their vileness.
Point 5 is particularly interesting - and indeed risible. I believe it dates back to the economically illiterate Vote Leave assertion that since the emerging markets are growing quicker than the mature markets of Europe, we must somehow hitch/align to the emerging markets - while dumping the lucrative, reliable, high value market on our doorstep. This is still regularly repeated by all varieties of Brexit supporters - all the more so now that growth seem to have disappeared from the UK economic picture for the foreseeable future. Of course, the rational holes in this thinking are gaping : Firstly, they are simply finessing a statistical red herring- since the decline in Europe's share of global GDP is an inevitable mathematical function of the incredible rise of China to economic super power during the past thirty years. If you look at the history of emerging markets, it is much more complicated picture, and the rise of China is very much a unique phenomenon in modern economic history. In any case, we could trade with China and other emerging markets via the S Market - as has Germany with astounding success. Which brings us onto the flip side of emerging markets - which historically have been vulnerable to economic shocks, currency fluctuations and periods of instability. Indeed, the current Chinese problems are a key factor in Germany's technical recession (which the Express and Mail love to crow about).
The other central point is that you cant "align" with countries or somehow mimic their growth just by trading with them ! There are a whole list of reasons why this should be obvious - and the evidence is the 0.08% average anticipated benefit from CPTPP.
Germany has had a drop of 1-2% in GDP as a result of Merkel foolishly betting on Russian gas while dropping nuclear, but they were 20% ahead of the UK on GDP and far less unequal including with no poor Federal regions, even including the ex communist eastern Germany.
Indeed. Since we've included the subject of Germany, the relevant point is that a German technical recession has nowhere near the same effect as a typical UK recession - due to their much higher savings and lower debt ratios. The bigger picture is that the German advanced manufacturing/export economic model has been much more successful than the UK consumer/debt/financial model - but by leaving the S Market we have just made ourselves even more reliant on low value/low growth retail, construction, financial services sectors. This will increasingly be reflected in our economic numbers as the various distortions are eliminated.
I totally agree Mark. Germany has a very successful active industrial strategy that supports training, infrastructure, energy, R&D, trade shows and even staffing levels during recession. I have done business there for many years. It works, although they took a wrong turn over Russian energy.
And of course this is point. The reason for Germany's success in exporting to China and other emerging markets is that they already had the infrastructure, technology and skills to target the valuable element of that growth - principally in high tech engineering and instrumentation. It's not trade per say that matters so much as the valuable elements of trade.
Regarding representative democracy we could consider it a Brexit benefit that it has shown how limited, fragile and underdeveloped it is.
Like Johnson proroguing parliament at a critical time of the Leave process.
Or that May's government wanting to trigger Article 50 without any parliamentary oversight or approval would have gone unchallenged if private individuals hadn't taken the case to the Supreme Court.
Or the idea that ministers could remove or rewrite any EU derived law again without any parliamentary oversight or approval as proposed by the retained EU law bill. Which was only watered down, not outright dismissed as it should have.
Brexit has made the extreme wing of the Conservatives over confident and they no longer felt the need to hide their ambition to dismantle British democracy.
This realisation and public unmasking might be the only thing that history will record as a benefit of Brexit
Going on about immigration as a Brexit benefit is always rubbish.
Immigration has always been a national competency. Or in the case of the UK apparently an national incompetency.
Anyone who had even a cursory look at how immigration is handled across EU members would have seen the differences and thus realized that this must be due to national decisions.
For example the UK had rules for citizens of ex-colonies, especially Commonwealth countries, not shared with any other EU member.
Germany has lower thresholds for immigration eligibility than many (it not all) of its neighbours due to its larger industrial employment needs.
The UK could have had a points based system any time a government wanted to.
The countries also have different approaches on how they implement and enforce their policies.
Most have realized that point-of-entry checks are the least important mechanism because so many more people arrive on visa-waiver or visa-free agreements than on actual visa.
Therefore any effective control system needs to be aware of the status of people within the country.
Part of the perceived immigration control issues in the UK are down to the lack of such means.
It doesn't matter how strict or tough or points-based your policies are if you can't properly implement and enforce them.
Again something the UK could have addressed any time during its EU membership.
What puzzles me most is that it is one thing to be ignorant about immigration handling in EU countries but a whole different thing to claim improvement due to Brexit when in fact their own metric (net immigration numbers) shows the very opposite.
I always thought that professorships were awarded for qualities such as competence, insight, and intellectual rigour. Since when has Goodwin ever displayed a trace of any of these qualities? Were the Uni of Kent suffering a shortage of professors at the time, and decided anyone would do?
I was just thinking the same thing. What does it take to become a professor these days ?
Thank you for these 'debunks'. As you rightly say, the 'benefits' are so thin and transparent as to be invisible
One thing that should be a matter of concern is the continuing bashing of freedom of movement of people despite the EU variant having already ended.
Because at this point any making the loss of FOM look like something positive can only really be targeted at the UK's internal variant between its own union members.
Not sure how far away we are from "English jobs/houses/schools for English people"