Bye bye, Britain

[Tellos Athenaios]

In the short term Germany does not have any option but to use the Dutch ports. The short term being in the region of 10 to 50 years, because at the scale differences we are considering you need about 50 or so years to "buy" your way out of your supply issues, quite possibly more. Rotterdam is currently going through a major upgrade that has been in the works for the better part of my life now, to give you an idea of the timetables. Hamburg and Bremen are simply not anywhere near that scale right now -- especially considering that Germany already needs those two today to keep the goods flowing. This goes for both raw bulk materials for industry and finished products (Rotterdam) and foodstuffs (Amsterdam).

However that is not a relevant question or indeed metric by which to gauge whether or not it makes sense for the Netherlands to say bye bye. The flip side is that the Dutch economy is far, far larger than just the relatively small margins made by those two ports. (In fact that is their entire raison d' être: to be cheaper than the Germans and the Belgians.) Agriculture (feeding Germans), industry (producing raw materials for Germany, like diesel and petrol), embedded systems (embedded in German products), banking (making German lifes more miserable) etc. etc. are fairly big slices of pie too.

On the whole the Dutch economy is largely an extension of the German one at this point. Which is why you can take German consumer spending as a proxy for economic growth in the Netherlands. Which is also why it's not such a brilliant idea to artificially impose trading barriers and tariffs and other unnecessary nonsense over some vague notion of being ruled by Germans despite it really being our own local muppets doing the damage.

Much the same applies to Britain, except that British lawyers have lately figured out that things like the ECHR can be quite useful if they are in certain cases defending against overbearing government. Which the UK happens to have a lot of. By the by, the ECHR which other Brits then like to complain about is not a case of the EU imposing anything on anyone. It's 1950's stuff (the EU dates only to 1996), and membership is held by countries outside of the EU as well (such as Russia). In the case of Britain the government happens not to like those human rights very much if they get in the way of imposing more laws, but government is not quite willing to just ignore the ECHR.

Relevant: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/i...-2014011482542

As for the UK, in my opinion they should simply decide whether they want to be "in" or "out". "In" like any other EU country or "out" like any other not-EU country. This half hearted exception-riddled compromise we have now is simply not scalable. If Britain wans the trading benefits but does not want anything to do with EU laws, they could opt to take the Swiss or Norse approach. That is closer to the trading bloc of their addled memories viewed through their rosy tinted glasses they seem to yearn for. It also means to give up their say on quite a large range of law and simply following what the EU decides to do in many cases.