antonspisak.bsky.social
Political economist. Associate Fellow, Centre for European Reform. Geoeconomics, trade, and tech/innovation. Likes long runs, good coffee and the Paris Review.
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I’m not particularly surprised that Die Linke is popular among first-time voters, especially young women. But having a quarter of men under 24 believe that the system has failed them and vote for AfD is really concerning.
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Isn’t their goal in the end just to be seen? To be acknowledged at last? To belong somewhere — in a club of their own, because the world at large rejected them for so long.
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Or is it just to break things for the sake of an act of breaking things? To be part of the Great Disruption Club of a new technocratic elite who believe they figured it out by reading history and Dostoyevsky and watching Youtubes on “systems thinking”?
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But I wonder, does Cummings ever ask: what’s the disruption for? And what’s its cost? And is the answer ever to improve the quality of people’s lives? To make the society more prosperous, to make it more just? To make his country a place in which people want to live and feel proud of?
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Cummings would no doubt argue that, if this is true and his great project failed, it is exactly because the “system” stood in his way and prevented him from a “real” regime change. What you need is more radicalism, more disruption, more breaking of things. Be the disruptor, or be disrupted!
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Cummings had a go at this. He caused chaos with the EU referendum; broke UK political system for a couple of years; and the “regime change” is a weaker government, a declining economy, and a lesser standing for the UK in the world. His only “good” legacy is more cash for UK science and ARIA.
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This will be very, very messy in practice. But: if you're a trade lawyer or consultant, happy days for you.
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This could be a reason for why we see such a drastic fall in goods exports to EU markets as well as non-EU ones.
Connectedness of supply chains is one reason, but another must be the simple fact that, outside the single market, the UK has become a less competitive place for global manufacturing.
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What's most concerning is the big picture here: the UK's openness to trade has fallen since the pandemic and Brexit. Trade as a share of GDP is now 3.5% below pre-Covid levels.
This makes the UK an outlier among G7 countries. The gap with the G7+EU average is 9 ppts. Not exactly a rosy picture!
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On the plus side – yes, there is something – the recovery in UK services exports picked up post-pandemic has partially offset the relative fall in goods trade.
However, this shift is a genuine structural change in the composition of UK trade and its international competitiveness.
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The problem of weak exports isn't attributable to a particular sector. Goods exports have fallen, in relative terms, across nearly every category of products (with the exception of crude materials).
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What's behind this? Exceptionally weak exports of goods – both to EU (a 19% fall relative to levels just before the pandemic) and non-EU markets (21% down). This is really quite unprecedented.
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Ukraine wasn’t, but the promise of Nato membership for Ukraine was there. That promise no longer exists now, I fear.
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European leaders will now discuss how quickly they need to ramp up defence spending and what might be a durable security guarantee to Ukraine. But the damage is done; the oppressor will be rewarded. The question they need to be asking: how can we credibly stop Putin from using the same tactic again?
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We haven't had the legal text yet, but there's a bit more detail on the Commission website:
ec.europa.eu/commission/p...
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This is the new Swiss agreement, which was concluded in December. It addresses all the major problems that the EU has had with the Swiss relationship for a while –– which is why I suggest it is something for the UK to look at very, very carefully.
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Pro-FTA, but not pro-THIS-FTA. Pro-trade, but not pro-free-trade.