I don't feel paying for future agriculture support costs or EU civil servant's future pensions is similar to agreeing on building something.

But even then, it is the EU members who would be benefitting from that proverbial building in the future, not UK. So to continue your train of thought, when UK decides to leave the union, can they take a portion of that building with them because they took part in building it?

Does anyone remember any details about these numbers presented in the media in the past about the height of the divorce bill? No? Me neither. And rightly so, because details were completely missing so far and the numbers were mostly made up completely, totally fake numbers so to say.

However, in the mean time some background information about sources of possible costs have been published (see https://ec.europa.eu/commission/publications/draft-eu-position-papers-article-50-negotiations_en and https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/financial-settlement-essential-principles-draft-position-paper_en.pdf from May 29th 2017). There you can see a quite long list of things were the UK may have joined some financial obligation, as diverse as the "Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking" or "Facility for Refugees in Turkey" or "European Banking Authority", ...

And numbers for that won't be available for at least some time, because it all depends on the negotiations, which are not to start before end of June.

That means that in the upcoming General Elections in the UK, people there cannot vote on the outcome of the Brexit negotiations, because there isn't any outcome yet. I wonder how they will decide for whom to vote instead? Anyway, it's not very long until election day. If one could trust recent polls, the gap between Tories and others has narrowed and it might very well be that not much changes, except for a two year prolonged period for the current government, unless a surprise happens.

facts and dry numbers don't matter anyway these days ;)

if anything this might have an impact :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxN1STgQXW8

I do! The EU started out by leaking figures of £60bn (might have been Euros actually), Britain said "Not going to happen", then they said, actually we got our sums wrong, and leaked that it's 100bn, to which Britain said "Did you not hear us last time?" , then added "By the way, you do realise we own at least 1/28th of all the European buildings? That's a hell of a lot of capital, they're really expensive buildings", then the EU said "no idea how these leaks got out, lets discuss this behind closed doors".

Indeed, which I think is the reason the polls are moving. The Tories tried to make this about Brexit, but we've had that vote. Watching the leaders debates right now (minus Mrs May, who chickened out), the questions aren't on Brexit, the questions are on inequality, public spending, and low wages. However it has been suggested that the extra 2 years it might buy the government could be a very useful addition to its Brexit stance, as it means that even after the negotiations, they get another 3 years to change the mood, which means that they will feel less pressure to go with popular but unwise moves in the negotiations.

That's the problem with leaks, they are so non-committal and nobody knows if they should be taken serious or not. I searched for a source and could not find one, everyone seems to just cite each other. That's why I never put any trust in them, especially since there were never any further details given.

We could wait for a final figure of the divorce bill (something that both sides agree on and that actually happens) and then compare with the speculations from the past to get an estimate of how much they were off.

Negotiations are going on now for quite some time. So far, progress seems limited, at least officially not much is known. That is common for many such negotiations where not much happens in the beginning and decisions happen mostly shortly before the end. Interestingly, money seems to be the biggest issue right now. Still there is no official indication of any claimed or admitted payment obligation from either side or any other information, so I guess the 100 billion that the media was circulating during spring time was pure speculation. While I think that with the money issue they will come to an agreement one way or the other, the more difficult to solve issue is rather the Irish border (or how to not have it but still have it in a way). And then there is a question of how long the transitional period should be with Labour now advocating a longer period. Interesting will also be the estimation of the EU in October on the advancement of the negotiations.

The economic situation of Britain puzzles me more. Unemployment is record-low and the economy is growing. But it is growing really slow and there is still a budget deficit and prolonged austerity with social benefits cuts as well as public sector pay caps. Together with a devaluing currency and relatively high inflation this results in real wage losses which will be felt especially among the poor.

Politically, the snap election turned out to be kind of a disaster for Tories. If anything the polls should be ignored from now on with changes of like 10 percentage points over two months in expected results. If voter opinion cannot be measured or is very volatile, nobody should pay attention to ratings and polls anymore.

What does it all mean? We will see.

Employment is one of the easiest figures to fudge by means of government policy. All they need to do is drive "alternative" means of employment and have that employment included in the figures. In the UK, this has been achieved by the government sitting on their hands as the problem of zero-hours contracts has spread like a plague. We haven't been immune from a similar problem here in Germany, as you well know, with the SPD using the "one-euro-jobs" to send unemployment artificially tumbling and the CDU waiting for a long time to regulate widespread abuse in the temping industry (Zeitarbeit).

This means that employment and economic growth are not worthy indicators in and of themselves. Economic growth and employment are simply an indicator of the potential for the country to become more prosperous as a whole. Without the underlying drivers needed to sustain that growth - growth in real wages and consumer purchasing power, sustainable government fiscal policy, stable consumer spending - it's nothing more than a bubble and a sign of an overheating economy.

What the Cameron and May governments have done is akin to the child who is tasked with cleaning up his room and simply crams all the stuff under his bed.

Mark my words: the end of 2017 will see a very sharp drop in consumer spending, resulting in a very sharp drop in tax revenue, and the rest of the dominoes will fall from that point onwards.

Here is the reality about the record high employment rate:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/mar/03/zero-hours-contracts-uk-record-high

In other words, it's not really employment, just on paper and thus statistics.

That might be a bit too pessimistic. I know I'm biased toward predicting doomsday myself that's why I recognize it with others too. I agree that one could argue that really low paid jobs are actually something in between employment and unemployment and real wages growth is a very important indicator but I don't think the British unemployment stats are completely rigged.

What I would like to add is that one often overlooked way of reducing a deficit in increasing revenues instead of cutting expenses. I know this sounds almost socialistic nowadays and I totally agree that increasing taxes on the rich, on corporation profits, or on capital income would be hugely unpopular with the ones affected but still I think this venue should be discussed much more.

Just as a thought: if Britain would have a proportional voting system, Tories and SNP would have much less seats, UKIP, LibDems and Greens much more seats with the consequence that the most probable coalition would be something like Tories and Labour (similar to the "grand coalition" between conservatives and social democrats in Germany in the last years). This might result in a more center oriented politics while with the current voting systems favoring the strongest party and tending to give overwhelming majorities it's only ever either Tories or Labour. Of course the voting system is unlikely to change with the biggest party also benefiting strongly from it (42% of the votes result in 49% of the seats and in 2015 even 37% of the votes resulted in 51% of the seats).

Not much new today. Negotiations going slowly and both sides are somehow still close to their starting positions. The British government seems still to want to cherry pick the parts of EU it likes and EU still seems to want to be paid first. That is not uncommon for political negotiations with often last minute agreements. May gave a speech in Florence and the EU leaders had a meeting but apart from that negotiations will just continue (probably at a slow pace). We will probably not know what will be a real outcome until next year maybe. Also the 100 billion divorce bill that circulated in the media at the beginning of this year are not mentioned at all anymore. The official line is that currently they are going over everything line by line. The outcome is therefore quite open. A transition period of 1-2 years seems to be very likely though. A problem is the border with Ireland because one cannot really have control of its border without checking. Modern technology might help a bit but cannot make the issue go away. Everything else seems to be possible to solve one way or the other.

Also in the news, Q3 GDP growth figures. The UK economy is growing at more or less a slow but steady pace. The whole continent is expanding at a steady pace now already for the last three years. That's good. However with high inflation in the UK it still means a fall in real wages which is especially bad for the poor.

Boris Johnson successfully snatches the attention away from Theresa May by repeating bloody lies that should have been debunked ages ago. Obviously it's something you can do and not get fired for it. But hopefully nobody believes anymore in the 350million pounds a week, because the number is plain wrong. Easy to rectify because the numbers are public.

Now I wouldn't mind if it was just someone, somewhere, but it's one of the most important figures in the government on account of being foreign minister and so it may be a bit embarrassing for the state of democracy in the UK in general to have someone like this in this position and even keep him there.

At least he's not claiming to have had a meeting with officials from a country he just invented :P

I'll meet you with a more recent Zero Hours contact workers are at their lowest level ever article:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/19/number-of-workers-on-zero-hours-contracts-drops-to-three-year-low

And I'll raise you a "If you;re not touching the cards, you must be cheating" article:

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/oct/25/poker-player-phil-ivey-loses-court-battle-over-77m-winnings-from-london-casino

Lowest ever article? Ahem, did you really read the article? Look at Figure 1 in it. ZHC are still very much near the max, although declining somewhat, and still at least four times as high as 2010 or so.

Thank you - just made my day :)
Sadly ZHC is a very real thing here in the UK - I am not affected, but I can see people every day who are.

https://www.theonion.com/u-s-ambassador-to-bulungi-suspected-of-making-country-1819564610

And on a serious note, the other day the POTUS kept referring to the governor the of the US Virgin Islands as the president of the US Virgin Islands, not realizing that HE is the president of the US Virgin Islands.