Bart Simpson and regional development
My favourite Simpsons episode is the one where Homer is headhunted by a James Bond master criminal to work at his nuclear power plant.
Bart, falling behind at the new school is put in the remedial class where he comments “So we are going to catch up with the rest of the school by learning more slowly?”
Cut to the new British regional development funds to “level up” the regions, which involve less money than they received from the EU.
This is strange because the UK government has all those billions that it used to send to the EU to spend on this sort of thing, but seems to be having problems finding the cash. Who knew?
Still these are the places that voted for Brexit, just like the fishermen and farmers did.
It has broken its promises and pledges to all of them, it doesn’t need them anymore.
If it did, it would find the money for regional development, protect farmers and increase their funding and revive the fishing industry.
But it doesn’t.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
How were the promises ever to be kept in the event of a virtually certain economic deficit?
If the UK as a result of it's EU participation gained £10 for every £1 of EU budget contribution, as I believe the CBI once estimated, what did voters think would be the result of ceasing participation and paying £0 contribution.
What kind of basic economics do people study in the UK, if any?
Where did the British get the idea that the budget contribution was a gift, or a membership fee with no quid pro quo?
And it's not just "Leave" voters who have a problem with this. The whole NHS vs EU budget contribution proposition was always transparent nonsense, yet otherwise intelligent people engaged in debates and disputes about whether the rebate was included and what the actual contribution was... as if any of it were relevant to the fact that ceasing to be a member of the EU would create a massive financial deficit. The UK's news media by and large ignored the economics of it in favour of stirring up a pointless, irrelevant argument.
I know how people like to illustrate what good value the EU budget contribution was (as if it were a membership fee) by dividing it up per capita. But surely the actual per capita cost of the EU budget contribution was always £0, since EU membership was basically self-funding.