In my experience most countries in Europe have long had country-specific payment systems like that, with a few notable exceptions (like the UK) were everything operates on top of VISA or Mastercard.

The problem with those is usually to do payments without the physical card and cross-country payments.

The first problem has been address in the last decade or so with things mobile phone apps that read QR codes and are linked to a card or bank account (such as MBWay in Portugal and iDEAL in The Netherlands).

The second is still a big problem - some cross-country systems have appeared and some national systems interoperate, but that's only a handful of countries each and it's far from a pan-European system, much less something that is accepted anywhere in the World.

Turns out that the golden stuff streaming down ain't Gold ...

Good old Winston Churchill was quite the Genocider back in his day in India...

Again, "strangely" specific.

Britain's Total World trade balance is much worse than in 2016

(Also and on your mentioning of falling EU trade, it's hilarious that you think that "losing more of those clients we've already been losing" is somehow a good thing. Yeah, sure, that makes total business sense mate ... wanna buy this river crossing property I have for sale in a major US city?)

You see, Non-EU Trade was also affected by Brexit due to the loss of all those Trade Treaties that Britain had via the EU and which the country had to try to replace because it left the trade block. Back in the Referedum days we were all told how "sovereign Britain" would be able to negotiate even better trade terms than the EU and here we are, almost a decade later, and Britain failed to negotiate replacement for all those trade treaties, much less get better trade terms in those it did (as expected: the other countries will concede much better trade terms for access to a trade block of 540 million people than for access to a country of 40 million), hence its trade balance with the World has never been this bad.

(Surely, "The Brexit Dividend Is Just Around The Corner And Will Begin At Any Moment Now" just like Brexiters have claimed since 2016)

The CAP stuff is also a hilarious obcession, given that British agricultural products are part of those "goods" where trade balance has worsen steeply, so clearly leaving the EU and the CAP didn't turn out so great for British farmers.

Also, it's been hilarious to watch Britain weaken it's own food safety legislation rules - "overregulation" being the main argument from Brexiters for the CAP being a horrible thing - further shafting the entire Food Production For Export sector in the UK AND weakening the quality and safety of the food that Britons consume thus also shafting everybody living in Britain (all of which, on a personal note, periodically reminds me that leaving Britain after Leave won was one of the best decisions in my life).

Trully an amazing Leave achievement!

Congratulations for shafting British food safety and the trade prospects of the British Food Sector including British Farmers so as to get rid of pesky EU Agricultural Regulations. Brits finally will get to enjoy the pleasure of eating Hormone Beef and Chlorinated Chicken (with its many times higher rates of Salmonella)!

That "strangely" specific metric you quote conveniently forgets the trade balance in goods which more than offsets services so now with a currency which is 24% weaker - which makes everything Britain worth less and supposedly is better for trade - the UK's total trade balance is actually worse than in 2016 (source)

I see that the Brexiter tendency to blindly believe in self-congratulating nationalistic Sun newspaper headlines and not actually googling for easilly available economic figures has remained unchanged in the last decade.

Good old Brexiter cherry-picking is alive and well.

Also it's hilarious that you pretty much parroted my "The Fall Of The British Pound Just Makes Britain More Competitive" charicatural Brexiter line based on actual Leave Campaign bollocks. Our exchange reminds me of the old days!

Sure mate, the Brexit Dividend Is Just Around The Corner And Will Begin At Any Moment Now and The Fall Of The British Pound Just Makes Britain More Competitive.

Meanwhile in the real World back in 2016 you could get 1 EUR for 0.7 GBP and now it costs 0.87 GBP so the World thinks everything Britain is worth 24% - British inflation hasnt been higher than Euro Zone inflation so the fall in the GBP hasn't been offset by an increase in GBP valuations - and my old savings when I lived and worked in Britain (which were transfered out of the GBP just before the Leave Referendum results) are worth 24% more in EUR than they would if they stayed in GBP (purely from betting against the British Pound, not counting actual investment returns since).

Mind you, Europe is fucked. It's just that Britain is even more fucked. It's like most countries in the EU doing some stupid post 2008 Crash shit that fucks them up and Britain going "Hold my beer!"

Actually Britain is doing 6 to 8% worse that the rest of the EU and that's just in reduced Economic Growth.

Its influence in international affairs has also fallen steeply - one thing is to be a mid-sized country with a significant ability to move a block of 540 million people, a whole different thing is to be just another mid-sized country.

Having lived there at the time, I keenly remember how Britain was supposed to become once again an Economic Powerhouse (with Return To Past Greatness implied, rather than openly stated as in the US). Such fanciful bollocks is now well dead and burried.

It has also done the same for lot of people in the rest of the EU who before believed the same far-right populist fables about how great it would be to leave the EU, which is why the far-right in those countries doesn't talk about that anymore.

I lived in a couple of countries in the EU and my impression was that Britain was the best candidate of all in the EU to fall for the whole "We would be better of outside the EU" because they were the ones who looked back to the years before entering the EU and mainly saw a great Great Britain (an image relentlessly beautified and pushed by local media right, which is why even now almost a century after it a "new British film coming out about how Britain pretty much singlehandedly won WWI" is still a regular event and news about international affairs in Britain tend to be either spinning Britain as having great influence in the World or "look at that tupid thing happening in that country, this would never happen in Old Blighty [as we're superior to those foreigners]" news pieces) so it was easy for such Delusions Of National Greatness to be turned into Brexit by outside influences (namely, American - just look up who funded Cambridge Analitica to spread pro-Leave propaganda).

After the subsequent shitshow with the "most likely nation in the EU to fall for Alone We're Stronger bollocks" none of the larger nations left in the EU (which are just mid-sized nations in World terms) have any illusions that leaving would make them better of (plus people there already had fewer delusions of greatness to begin with than Brits), whilst the smaller nations never had any fond memories of time before the EU when they were little more than kicking balls for the bigger nations, to begin with.

All this to say that the country were an EU exit was most easy to leverage by foreign interests has already had that happen and the result stands as an example that further deters the idea of leaving in the few EU countries were the idea that "we were stronger alone" ever had more than a handful of believers.

The US was never anybody's friend.

At best they were partners of convenience and only for as long as it they gained from it.

Remember that even before Trump American interests were pushing for Brexit to weakening the EU, for example by funding Cambridge Analitica to spread pro-Leave propaganda in Facebook.

My only problem with Hungarians is that they keep re-electing Orban, and even then I understand that given his control of the Press over there, most who do it are just being daily brainwashed to do it.

That said, a Hungary Leave might just be the jolt that's needed to change things there (and it would isolate the rest of us from their problems plus would seriously dampen the prospects of any Orban-similar far-right in the rest of Eastern Europe), though there is a risk for Hungarian that the place turns into a hard autocracy controlled by Russia like Belarus and thus can't actually get back to Democracy for at least several decades.

That would be great!

Let's start with ~~kicking out~~ saddly (*sniff *, *sniff*) having to see the departure of Hungary.

I mean, just look at Brexit: one side got seriously fucked up (instant fall of 20% of their currency and slowly dropping further behind economically ever since - the dream of a Economic Powerhouse Britain are gone and burried now: just ask even the most rabid Brexiter to list their Brexit Dividends) whilst the other basically just went over a small speed bump. I'll leave it as an exercise for the readers which side got which consequences.

PS: That said, having seen the consequences of Brexit is exactly why no EU nation is likely to ever take Donald on this - after that shit show the far-right in Europe went really silent really fast on the whole "we must leave the EU" they were so loudly demanding just a few months before.

PPS: Also as a person from a small EU country, lets just say we're very much aware of just how the big boys would fuck us up if we left the safety of the pack - unlike in Delusions Of Grandeur Britain the public opinion in little nations doesn't want a return to the way things were in 70s when they were the "punching bag of the big boys". Meanwhile the larger EU countries - which are all merelly mid-sized in World terms - after having seen what happened to Britain post-Brexit know with absolute certainty they have far greater influence being in the EU than they would outside, which is why even Italy with a well entrenched far-right government hasn't distanced itself an inch away from the EU. Only some totally out of control shit-show of a nation in the thrall of the nuttiest of nutter far-right would even just consider this and, frankly, them leaving the EU would be great for the rest (not least because, as it happenned with Brexit, it would at least temporarilly dampen the far-right in all the other countries)

This government has arresting people for demonstrating against that government's active support of the mass murdering of children in Gaza, so morally speaking, putting bananas ahead of people (even poor Brits who might actually need those free bananas) is nothing in comparison.

Sometimes I suspect that making sure people suffer is their whole point.