Brexit: You pays your money and you takes your choice!

Above: The Bank of England’s Financial Stability Report – June 2017.
Most British Gazette readers will be familiar with the saying contained in the title today’s article. Most of you however will need this prompt to consider the logical corollary: “You don’t pays your money and you don’t takes your choice!”
It is a fact that many voters do not perceive a link between what they vote for and what they get in terms of actual policy outcomes “on the ground” so to speak.
Of course there are many issues such as taxation levels, promises/threats of benefit increases/cuts that voters do understand are directly linked to voting for one party or another.
However some issues, even huge ones such as Brexit, have many voters assuming that it will make little actual difference to their lives, that some other people may or may not be affected – like EU migrants – who pick the soft fruit they buy in the supermarkets – but that they themselves will be little affected.
I think we can coin a term for this phenomenon: “voter dissonance”.
Some of the Brexit pigeons are however already coming home to roost.
Of Lloyds Bank’s disappointing share price, one commentator on the London Stock Exchange website laments sarcastically: “Don’t you just love stocks that are the same level as they were 4 years previously. Especially when the company is now making 7-8 billion a year. That really takes some doing!”
GOTO (15 minute share price delay): http://www.lse.co.uk/ShareChat.asp?ShareTicker=LLOY
The reason of course for Lloyds sojourn in the doldrums today is the announcement by Mr Carney that UK banks are going to have to increase their capital reserves to guard against a downturn in the UK economy – as revealed in the above YouTube broadcast.
Declaration of interest: The Editor is a shareholder in Lloyds Bank.