Franglais:
Failing to reach agreement on the Irish border wouldn’t STOP Brexit would it? It does mean though that it’d be a “crash out” rather than an orderly exit with favourable trade deals in place.
I’m sure that some would see that as a price worth paying. I certainly don’t. (No surprise there!)
The most natural solution, if the UK is not going to have a customs union with the EU, would be “special status” as demanded by Sinn Fein, but it is still tantamount to a border in the Irish Sea, about which the unionists would be quite rightly outraged and it basically amounts to the UK having an internal border.
The bottom line I think is that the idea won’t fly. There are simply no trade deals available that justify the upset. If there was even the faintest hope of a trade deal to replace the EU, the potential would be getting trumpeted already.
The Brexiteers may as well accept that, whatever form Brexit takes, it won’t be one that involves the absence of a customs union with the EU, and it definitely won’t be one that involves any lessening of basic standards set by the EU.
We simply have to live within our own means, and accept that improvements for ordinary people will come from better economic management and a fairer distribution of the wealth we have (in favour of workers and earners), not from some sort of international free trade coup.
The NHS is not going to be rescued by free trade fantasies - it will be rescued by wringing out all the extra market bureaucracy introduced since 1979 and by people paying a fraction of extra tax to fund it properly. It’s that simple.
If the Labour government does something serious about housing, most earners will feel substantially better off simply because their rents and mortgage debts will fall. Even if you’re a homeowner already and won’t benefit directly, it will still mean your kids paying lower rents, both at university and when they start their own families.
And once these unearned incomes for landlords and banks are cleaned off (remember it is the bank that collects most of the profit from inflated property prices), which claims a third or more of some people’s earned incomes, the idea of expecting them to pay an extra 1 or 2% in tax for decent public services and properly maintained roads will seem like a heavenly deal.
So too, getting idle rentiers out to work and producing, instead of letting them mostly sit back and collect unearned incomes, will improve the amount of skilled labour available to the economy and make it clear that the British economy is for earners not for wealthy idlers.
Forcing capital out of housing speculation will also reduce the cost of capital and allow further economic investment in productivity to be made much more cheaply.
A dose of moderately higher inflation, so long as wages are supported to increase in step, will also do a great deal of good in diminishing the value of existing debts and overpriced assets gradually and allowing the debt market to return to much tighter control (rather than forcing a sudden write-off).