The way our government is acting, it does seem like they really don't give two shits about preserving the current service industry. It feels like too many people would be happy if all the office jobs in the country vanished, so many people think "Britain needs to reinvent itself" and "We don't need to focus on keeping current businesses, we can build new ones". Which for a post-industrial-ish service economy is like McDonalds declaring they'll be abandoning the fast food business to reinvent themselves as focused on their really important business: uncomfortable chairs.
The amount of renegotiation of contracts the company I work at will have to do with customers, since we deal with a lot of customer data (financial and such), which is protected under EU regulation and we're free to host anywhere in the EU. If/when we leave, even if we keep the current data protection guarantees of the EU, we're still legally exporting data outside the EU. Which is against the current contracts. So either they have to agree to export the data to the UK from the EU, we have to move to the EU, or there are safe-harbour laws where EU data is regarded as under EU regulations. Even if all the data is stored in the EU, the mere detail of us being in control of it as a UK-based company can cause problems.
And if the UK ever weakens our data protection laws compared to the EU ones (very likely, considering they keep trying to), that could cause major problems for business in the digital sector in the UK who deal with personal/financial information from outside sources. Best case is we can lock-step with or ideally actually provide stronger rights and guarantees than the EU, but given our governments historically...spotty relationship with digital rights (When there are people in power in 2016 in a diplomacy who still want to ban encryption you know something is wrong).
So the UK really needs to be promising things like that they'll seek safe-harbour laws, because at the moment if I was a business in the UK I'd be really hoping Scotland does stay in the EU just so we can convince people to move to the new head offices in Edinburgh, just because that'd be an easier sell than "move to Paris/Berlin/Dublin"
Because it's starting to look like it'll be easier for a services company to do business in the UK from the outside than from the inside. Which, considering the global-serving digital sector is a big corner of our economy (it basically emerged unscathed from the recession) and really benefits from the EU membership even when dealing with non-EU countries (since it guarantees them EU-quality digital rights and data protection on our end). And is quite alarming, since previously the UK was a great place to grow from by doing business inside the UK at first, and then expanding to outside the UK.
But losing the EU regulations, and potentially the single market access, basically cutting ourselves off from that easy access to the single largest market of developed and developing countries in the world (aka. the kind of market a digital service industry dreams of)...yeeeeah. Worrying.
Maybe if there was some plan to build an EU-style trading bloc without the "outstripped it's purpose" (and aside from a few prominent EU people wanting an EU army and immediately getting shot down by the rest of the prominent people, which is just a thing that happens in any democratic structure, I'm not sure how it has in any way that isn't just the natural development of any trading bloc).
Though I don't actually have a problem with the EU growing in scope, I actually *want that*, if anything I actually am more annoyed because I don't think it actually *is* doing that anywhere near the extent it should be to be truly effective. Which it may actually do without the UK, we've been holding it back a lot by vetoing and sabotaging a lot of the bills. Which now hurts us in the negotiations since that's a lot of EU members where we've been sabotaging their attempts to curb tax dodging and whatnot, not exactly predisposing them to giving us too much of a way back in if we want out.
I do think that eventually Europe, and eventually eventually the world, will become a set of federal states under a single democratically elected government. So I do expect to inevitably see a Federal States of Europe appear someday in the future (well, maybe I won't see it. But at some point in the future I fully expect it to happen). Either that or we eventually nuke ourselves out of existence or at least back a few millennia. But that's more long term thing.
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Topic: Brexit! Conversation Continued (Read 192573 times)