Brexit and moving London forward

We need fast and fierce action to nip the rising tide of racist attacks in the bud. Windows of shops with 'foreign' owners/managers are smashed in Lewisham; there are people in Hackney who haven't dared go out for several days because they are immediately subjected to racist abuse on the streets. It is everywhere.

You are continuing with the line that London can be separate from the UK. I wish people would forget this line and give us here suggestions that work for the UK as a whole after Brexit. Do you mean after the Bombings in '39 etc or the bombings by the IRA. The War bombings were received patriotically by the Media and population at that time and everyone responded with a positive attitude, by the time of the IRA terrorists the British media had changed and was not so patriotic against this enemy, and therefor did not promote a common attitude to the population. Then more recently the Muslim bombers at Kings Cross,
great emphasis was put on the mixed ethnicity of the killed and injured as if that was the most important thing about those bombings. Where was the 'Community', there isn't One!
Only selfish perceived interests for London. Don't keep on about London being different, it is as the Capital and the Largest city in Europe, not because there are many non Brits here. This pushing of ethnicity by the Mass Media and many writers here does not help with good ideas to keep London ahead of others Financial Centres. London needs to be Efficient and show our traditional British/ English culture which as been respected all over the world, unfortunately the over emphasis on its Multicultural life does detract from that image. Keep London's reputation as a city which brings together the best brains of Britain and don't get side tracked with fighting against a positive future for Brexit.

However, we exist in a globally competitive world in which labour costs are a significant factor in the costs of products we export.

Where there is external competition for the product, raising the costs inside Britain merely makes it more difficult in those markets. Britain doesn't exist in isolation, we cannot compel customers to buy our goods at elevated prices where substitutes exist.

The housing market is a symptom of increasing automation, it absorbs a large quantity of labour. Maintaining the return on housing and hence stimulating a healthy market keeps a lot of people in employment. It is a political and economic necessity that the market should not soften because of the employment implications. Additionally some figures suggest that the financing of property contributes significantly to our GDP (possibly by as much as a third of GDP is property finance related)

The ONS report that prior to large scale immigration, the 'indigent' British population is actually falling. A falling population indicates a reducing market, which would create a fall in the demand for many goods. A fall in demand results in more people going out of work. If you subscribe to the economic theory that one has to continually expand one's business it follows that we need a continuously expanding internal market to absorb the over-capacity present in many industries in the UK.

So, correcting the property market and reducing the growth of the internal population both place significant negative stresses on the economy. In 'the good old days' to which many of the Leave Voters apparently affectionately look back, the solution to an internal market unable to support full employment ( and that means the operation of factories at full capacity and the ability of the internal market to buy goods as well as personal occupation) the solution was to export the surplus goods. Today many of the emerging markets are in direct competition to produce those goods and would welcome any attempt by the UK to raise its costs of production, because they know that the average memebr of the British public will buy entirely on cost; raising the costs of British goods merely makes Britain a target for someone else's exports.

Of course, it may offer a solution in that the reduction in wages occasioned by a recession may well see the inclination and attractiveness of the UK fall as a destination of choice, but I'm not sure that entering a full blown recession, at the time the rest of the world has concerns about the volatility caused by Brexit will be beneficial.

The problem is not the level of wages in the Uk but the fact that wages are a substantial part of the cost of any goods. One cannot in isolation set a higher level of wage in the UK than the competitive price of goods available in any market.

if it costs £x to manufacture a brick in the UK and £x-y to import a brick from abroad, then house builders will buy bricks from abroad, and British brick manufacturers will go bust. In the same way, it by automating the process one can increase productivity, then one either has to sell a lot more bricks or reduce the work force. If everyone can buy the automated brick manufacturing system, then employment here and abroad will fall.

If you have a socially responsible society, then taxes will go up in order to provide 'welfare' for those unemployed,and the price of bricks will rise until they are marginally uncompetitive on the world market and the price of housing will go up accordingly. to the point of unaffordability.

"Would you not agree that seriously restricting immigration from everywhere, whilst we try to catch up with our infrastructure, is a good idea?"

Britain has a manufacturing capacity far in excess of the needs of the productive population, we laud ourselves on advances in productivity over the last century. Unfortunately this means that we hhave to have a bigger market in which to sell those goods. That market will either be internal, ie within the boundaries of Britain or be an export market, outside the boundaries.

Unfortunately most of the developed nations also produce and wish to sell their own surplus capacity, which means that the export markets lie in undeveloped or emerging countries. However in order to sell our over capacity, the export markets have to be able to afford our goods. In many cases they aren't, and what is needed is an enrichment of those people in order that they can buy our goods. This means that Britain has to enable the people of a countryt to get richer so they can buy from us. This is what the US did at the end of WW2, when they used the Marshall Plan to enable Europe to become rich enough to buy mainly US goods and thus avoid a second Depression like the one following WW1. Elsewhere it is known as Vendor Finance.

In part this is done through the International Development Fund, though this is acknowledged to have limited success because of the dificulty of ensuring that the money spent goes to the most effective destinations.

Another method of ensuring speedy enrichment of a people is to allow migration to a rich country, where the migrants will create a ready market for local goods and by sending money home to the extended family create an ability and, hopefully, a desire to buy
goods exported from Britain. However to do this effectively demands large scale immigration.

So, from an economic standpoint there are advantages from having large imigrant populations, especially if they are primarily transient.

There are problems too. Politicians have to balance the desired result of politics, the enrichment and therefore support of their voters with the costs and expenditures of creating the export ability. At one level this may appear to be the underfunding of certain 'free' services like education, health and so on, while creating abroad the society that will bring riches to the voting society through exports.

"The NHS is definitely sinking under the weight of a population increasing at the rate it is."
The NHS is not sinking under the weight of population, the NHS is sinking under the weight of expectation.

At a certain level of sophistication, improvements in any technical solution may bring results that generate benefits in excess of the cost of creating those benefits. This isn't just in Health but as widely diversified as military engineering. Some years ago the Department of Defence costs noted that any improvement in weapon systems or platforms increased the cost of that system by greater than the rate of inflation or the cost of manufacture. In simple terms, to quote a recent programme on Jutland, the combined cost of Beatty's fleet at Jutland equates to £2 billion today and included 10 capital ships ( 6 battlecruisers and 4 Super-Dreadnaughts).The construction of just two capital ships, the Queen Elizabeth class Aircraft Carriers, is already 3 times greater (£6.2 billion) yet it is doubtful that they would be three times as effective (ie: would deter three fleets of enemy ships from an equivalent power).

As medicine becomes ever more capable, the cost and expectation of performance grows far in excess of inflation. Even if we limited the population only to the immediately healthy, we would expect diagnosis and treatment of ever more complex conditions, such as the reversal of aging and firms would provide treatments to stretch the budget to sinking point.

" You defend cheap labour (you obviously aren't in that category) and yet I believe that the greater social cost out weighs the financial gain."

We may be about to discover that the social costs of impoverishing our export markets may far outweigh the temporary financial gain of pricing ourselves out of the market. The slowdown in China has left the world with an overcapacity in producing a great many goods. Causing our migrant markets to become less able to purchase goods is not a recipe for greater growth, and protectionism as an economic strategy for enrichment is long past its sell-by date.

We are able to fight against TTIP clauses that are bad while we are in the EU. It will be impossible to fight against them from outside it, whether they come with EEA etc trade deals or whether the same removal of sovereignty clauses come in trade agreements with US, China etc separately. Especially now that we will have far-right Tories in power, who will not even tell the UK population what deals they are signing up to. It was a measure of combine EU people-power that we got the info on TTIP and the campaigning against it.

The truth is that the whole country voted. Just because the majority ( which could only be 3 %,,). Of certain parts voted against brexit is neither here or there. It was a vote out. The media and some politicians are the cause if " divisions". Do we hold another general election because the voters may have been misled?
Let's leave the u government but remain in reasonable terms with Europe.
We may not get the best terms but we will trade with Europe and the rest of the world. There us not enough space or time to discuss everything but everyone who voted out knew it was not going to be an easy ride.