spiderland

INDEPENDENCE DAY ROUNDUP

Our first day of independence has gone just swimmingly:

1. Nigel Farage went on the tele and retracted the (false) claim that we send £350 million per week to the EU that would now be re-directed to the NHS and said Vote Leave should never have made that commitment to voters in the first place. Yesterday, this commitment was on the side of Vote Leave busses across the country. Exit polling indicates additional funding for the NHS was cited as a reason for leaving by nearly 80% of leave voters.
2. Daniel Hannan MEP retracted the (false) claim that leaving the EU will lead to drastically reduced immigration into Britain. Exit polling indicates this was the second most cited reason voters gave for leaving the EU. Would have been nice if Vote Leave had bothered to be honest with voters about both of these matters before today.
3. S&P, the only rating agency still giving the UK a AAA credit rating, confirms it has placed that rating under review for downgrade. It appears a downgrade is much more likely than not. Borrowing costs to fund Britain’s large deficit are set to increase markedly.
4. Sterling collapsed to its lowest level against the USD in three decades, the biggest single day drop in the history of the currency. It is the third biggest single day drop in any currency ever. It is currently $1.36, down an incredible 13 cents against the dollar in less than 24 hours from a high of $1.49 yesterday.
5. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, has said a second independence referendum is “highly likely”. Scots will likely vote on dismembering the United Kingdom in the next few years, which will fuel uncertainty and economic turmoil.
6. Sinn Fein and various others in Northern Ireland call for a border poll on reunification.
7. Spain calls for co-sovereignty over Gibraltar.
8. More than £1.5 trillion in wealth was wiped out across global markets in just a few hours this morning, the single greatest wealth destroying event in stock market history. That's 187 years’ worth of British contributions to the EU. Seems worth it to get that money back from Brussels though.
9. The FTSE 100 (largely multinationals) fell more than 8% and the FTSE 250 (which reflects mostly British firms rather than multinationals) fell more than 12%. Both steadied after Mark Carney declared that the Bank of England would not hesitate to intervene to instil stability, the same sort of intervention that Mario Draghi had to make to save the Euro during the Greek crisis and that the G7 had to make to save the global economy after the collapse of Lehman. Brexit is an event that ranks alongside those crises in terms of effects on global markets.
10. Ultimately, the FTSE 100 finished down 3% and the FTSE 250 down 7%. Hundreds of billions of pounds has been wiped off people’s ISAs and pension funds. Banks in particular have been hammered.
11. David Cameron resigned without mapping out any plan for implementing the results of the referendum. Boris Johnson is odds on favourite to be our next Prime Minister. In October.
12. Labour MPs have moved for a vote of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn which will be considered by the party on Monday.
13. The presidents of the European Council, Commission and Parliament told us to invoke Article 50 and leave as soon as possible and the settlement negotiated by David Cameron earlier this year is now void.
14. Nigel Farage, who earlier claimed that independence was achieved "without a single bullet being fired", just called for UK gun laws to be relaxed, one week after Jo Cox was murdered on the street in broad daylight. With a gun.
15. Numerous reports of immigrants, and native Britons who happen to be brown, being told to “go back home” in the street and on the Tube, the vote to leave apparently having been taken by some as an indication that most of the country now thinks this sort of thing is acceptable, rather than profoundly un-British and utterly awful.