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One of us did some research – and it ain’t him

The UK fails to join the WTO and heads for limbo

No. A phone call to the relevant people produced this some months back:

To insist, meanwhile, that we must raise tariffs on the imports we desire is to misunderstand the WTO system. As a source in Geneva explains, Britain is a WTO member in its own right and will still be so even after Brexit happens.

So, therefore, no.

An attempt to get fast track entry by copying and pasting the EU’s terms of membership, through which we have WTO access now, failed. The result is that we will be in limbo for years.

What has happened is that some countries – Russia, amusingly enough, among them – have objected to the method of apportioning some portion of the EU’s quotas to a newly liberated United Kingdom. The UK is still a WTO member, still has MFN status.

The usual justification for the universities – the non-undergraduate teaching part of them – is that we need publicly supported people to go do that research that the private market unadorned won’t produce. The thing is, I’m in the private market and I’ve done that very research, the Professor hasn’t. So, do we get to close the universities down then for being not fit for purpose?

11 thoughts on “One of us did some research – and it ain’t him”

  1. Best thing the UK could do regarding quotas is say “We won’t have any”, which no one is going to object to, and leave the EU to renegotiate all of theirs, which they will want to reduce but everyone will object.

    UK sits back and enjoys the show.

  2. “I am used to supposed experts telling me I am wrong. Trouble is, I very rarely am. And I am not on this.”

    In one of his comments yesterday. Says it all really doesn’t it.

  3. So, do we get to close the universities down then for being not fit for purpose?

    For all that you’re being jocular, ‘we’ don’t much go for closing things down. The drop in enrolment should do the necessary when school-leavers with improbably inflated A-level grades decide that three years at poly and a degree in candid studies isn’t going to land them a job.

  4. [b]Philip Scott Thomas[/b]: Can you explain it to my pre-teenage niece? She’s against fracking in Lancashire, but I went past to laugh at the activists.

  5. [b]Philip Scott Thomas[/b]: Can you explain it to my pre-teenage niece? She’s against fracking in Lancashire, but I went past to laugh at the activists.

    Shouldn’t that be inactivists? (In all senses of the word)

  6. Only one of many reasons to shut down the universities. Not fit for purpose doesnt begin to cover it.

  7. The Meissen Bison said:
    “‘we’ don’t much go for closing things down”

    No, but ‘we’ are very much in favour of removing government funding (including soft non-recourse student loans).

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