IBM is preparing for a UK exit from the EU | Hacker News Reader

IBM is preparing for a UK exit from the EU

ibm.com

46 pointsjboynyc26 comments

Except for the sticky header, this is a surprisingly useable page.

It's funny, how in 2019, it feels strangely unfamiliar to be able to simply read a page without having to fight it and be annoyed by a million dark patterns.

It's not terrible, but it has several unnecessary stylistic decisions that make legibility harder, including

- sticky header as you mention

- an unnecessary 3 column layout

- switch between light / dark background

- FAQ accordion where you have to click to view each answer, which collapses the others. This means to read the entire thing, you have to click >20 times.

Content-wise, there's no TL;DR / summary at top which impacts understanding. I still can't find the part of the text that says IBM is preparing for a UK exit from the EU as the title suggests. It's a lot of 'well we believe these things and there's complexity in this'.

Genuine question: most countries in the world are not part of EU. The US, Japan, China etc are all doing fine and have good trade agreements in place with EU. No company is leaving from these countries because they don't happen to be in EU. What am I missing?

It would involve creating a border between NI and ROI as the UK would otherwise have to be part of the custom's union which most Brexiteers don't want. A few other issues as well.. but that's the main one from what I can see.

Well if you read the page they go through a few possible scenarios. If UK does a so called hard exit very few companies are prepared and there will be a rough transition period. Quoting from the page "As it stands, and if nothing changes, the default position will be for the UK to leave the EU without a withdrawal agreement on 29 March 2019 at 11pm UK time. This would mean there would be no transition period, and EU laws would cease to apply to the UK immediately at that time."

This will obviously have some problematic impact short term

I dont think consensus is being reached on trade agreements so we’d fall back to world trade rules. Cargo will have to be inspected at borders which will cause traffic jams at the borders. It’s also just: change. People have been accustomed to freely interact with the UK in the EU. Here’s for example how our company would suffer: https://transloadit.com/blog/2019/03/changing-our-legal-enti... (we’re leaving before a hard brexit could happen)

You can’t compare these to the UK. The US, Japan and China are all way bigger than the UK and in a different region than the UK. UK to France is 30 mins by train.

A market of 450 million people vs 60 million people. I guess the rest goes without saying; no point in staying in a failing monarchy when you have the free world right next door.

Which of those countries had spent the last 40 years tightly integrating itself and the companies that operate within it into a regulatory framework and then thrown it all out without arranging anything for the future?

The UK has been in the EU or forebears for half a century. All trade deals are EU trade deals, all companies have developed in a situation where freedom of movement of goods and people is guaranteed. That all changes, and no ones particularly sure what will happen.

Imagine Texas leaving the US, all the assumptions it invalidates, on all different levels.

The UK had trade deals with various countries (including those within the EU) as part of being a member of the EU. It has also built up a lot of infrastructure on the facilitated access to the EU this gave. This covers things like: 1. just in time transport of parts for car manufacture (and other things like florests getting flowers from the EU overnight) that are tariff free; 2. just in time transport of food and medicine (including radioactive materials for x-rays); 3. access to the EU air space for flights going to/from the UK; 4. seamless trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (including roads, houses, and farms that span the border).

In addition to this, a large amount of regulation comes from the EU, along with 40-60 years worth of continued integration and interdependence.

We are now ending that overnight. This needs adequate planning and prepration to ensure that things don't fall over. Things like border checks on both sides and agreements to make sure that things such as access to EU air space continue to run smoothly.

It is problematic because of the scale of the task and the lack of information/transparency from the government. So you have things like banks and aerospace companies moving offices to the EU to try and retain access to the EU on which they depend.

There are things like having to store information on EU citizens within the EU. This was fine when the UK was a part of the EU, but with Brexit that changes, so EU citizen data needs to be stored on servers in an EU country like the Republic of Ireland.

Some other thing, a lot of .EU domain names are coming available.

Since the UK is not allowed to own them anymore.

CGP Grey had a good video about this recently: [0].

Basically, the UK is required by treaty with RoI to not impose a border between the RoI (not part of the UK) and Northern Ireland (part of the UK). And the UK wants to erect a border between the UK and the EU. So, do they break the treaty with RoI potentially causing The Troubles [1] to come back? Or does Northern Ireland effectively leave the UK? Or does the UK allow the EU to require that Northern Ireland and the UK by extension to conform to the trade rules the EU made and will make?

They can only pick one, and they don't want to pick any of them.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1Yv24cM2os [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles

Or they pick the third option. They keep the northern Irish open, and simply deport all non Irish without proper documentation.

If course the EU won't allow a backdoor into the common market, so they will be the ones pressuring Ireland for a hard border. Whatever hard border would be imposed solely by the Irish republic, which means the British government abides by the good Friday agreement.

The UK doesn't need a wall -- it could have an open border if it wants to (right?). It's Ireland that would have to enforce a border. Unless there is some other binding agreement at play.

It absolutely could... but a major promise of the Brexit campaign was to "secure their borders" so that's a no-go. Plus it'd result in a hell of a lot of smuggling into the UK, and they'd be sanctioned under WTO rules since they'd be "favouring" Irish products and discriminating against others. For example US apples that came into a British port would have to pay tariffs while Irish apples driven across the border wouldn't, which is a big no-no under WTO rules where the first and foremost rule is that you must treat countries the same using WTO rules. So they'd be forced to either drop checks everywhere, or to erect them at the Irish border, or to do this legally they'd need a separate Trade Deal with Ireland, that is with the EU... which puts them right back at square one.

EU is a group of small countries that otherwise would have very little bargain power. By creating union small countries like the Netherlands or Latvia have a large behemoth representing their best interests and regulating law between members. The oblivious drawback is that you need to surrender some decision power to a group of random people that might have different interests.

It took 7 years to reach CITA deal(EU - Canada). It might take a decade before the UK catch up with trade deals. Even then it would not be as good as EU deals. Companies are already cutting investments and withdrawing from the UK as we speak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_free_trade_agre...

Well, at least somebody has a plan.

Yes. It looks like the UK is headed for a "hard Brexit", having been unable to agree on anything else. Parliament just voted down May's latest proposal. 17 days to go.

An extension requires unanimous consent of the 27 EU countries. The EU leadership has taken the position that they would only consider an extension if the UK got its act together and had a concrete plan that just needed time to implement. Not happening.

The UK can unilaterally retract Article 50.

There is a vote to block a no deal Brexit tomorrow, which is expected to pass.

Because the ERG ("European Research Group", including MPs like Jacob Rees-Mogg) pushed a UK ammendment to include the March 29th leaving date into UK law, MPs will need to revoke that to make it possible to retract Article 50. It is unclear whether the current pariament breakdown would support removing that ammendment.

The key question is how blocking a no deal Brexit will be implemented, given the rejection of the withdrawal agreement (not a deal!) and the reluctance of the EU to extend the Article 50 period without something different such as a general election or people's vote. There is also the upcoming European Parliament elections in 3 months which -- if the UK stays past that point -- the UK would need to participate in if Article 50 was extended past that point.

A general election is also problematic as it will likely result in another hung parlaiment or slim majority and we will be back where we are. This is especially the case given that Scotland is overwhelmingly SNP, and may gain seats over the Conservatives/Tories.

While a people's vote may be a potential way out of the deadlock, the government (and maybe the majority of parliament) are against it. Even if there is a majority for it, there isn't a majority for what to ask in the new vote. There are MPs that don't want remain on the vote, and there are others that don't want no deal on the vote.

Agreed.

I would guess that if a majority of MPs voted against a hard Brexit, that would imply their for an extension. If that were taken off the table it would be logical (ha!) to conclude that they would support an article 50 reset. Of course the rest of the EU also know all this, so they don't really gain much from pushing the UK to that option.

Theresa May can unilaterally prevent a hard Brexit and extend the time for negotiations by resetting the clock and reevaluating the circumstances of Brexit.

What you said is not usually considered "hard Brexit," which is essentially the government's current plan, with respect to the "soft Brexit" where the UK still stay in the customs union. What you're describing is "no-deal Brexit."

Makes sense they have this page and it shows thoughtfulness in identifying specific potential risks. But I think I only counted one plan that was actually disclosed: using EU Standard Clauses in client contracts to ensure data portability. Everything else pretty much says "we have comprehensive plans in place for this possibility".

As they point out, they're not going to be affected by customs issues. Anyone depending on physical imports or exports is faced with preparing for unknown but undoubtedly large delays.

Given today's events of voting down the only deal on offer, the only realistic remaining outcomes are chaotic No Deal or No Brexit.

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