Tag Archive for Brexit

Ireland needs a backstop agreement with the EU, not the UK

August 1, 2019 Federal Europe, Northern Ireland No comments

Throughout the sham Brexit negotiations the issue of the Northern Irish border has been the main focus with the hated “backstop” proving to be a particular sticking point. But in actual fact it is not the UK/Irish border that is the problem, it’s the EU/Irish border that is.

The idea that the border between Ireland and the UK should remain open and largely uncontrolled for both people and goods is perfectly sensible. Ireland is a large market for the UK, the UK’s only land border is with Ireland, there are lots of cross-border communities and of course the UK is Ireland’s largest trading partner. We’ve had a common travel area covering the whole of the British Isles since 1923 and it was updated as recently as 2014 to allow Indian and Chinese nationals to travel throughout the British Isles on a single visa.

To make a common travel area work the participating states need to be in control of their borders and trade policy. Each participating state relies on the others to apply a common level of control over their borders so that only people and goods permitted to move between them are able to do so. You can travel between the UK and Ireland by sea without a passport if you are a UK or Irish citizen because the Irish government trusts the UK to ensure only British and Irish citizens are allowed onto ferries without a passport and vice versa. Travel across the land border between the UK and Ireland is uncontrolled because there are adequate controls in place at our external frontiers.

The common travel area can remain in place after Brexit as long as every participating state can continue to control its external frontier and carry out adequate customs duties. Outside of the EU the UK can control its borders. We can ensure that the only people and goods entering the UK and subsequently travelling from the UK to Ireland are authorised to do so. Ireland, on the other hand, will have to allow all EU or EEA citizens and goods enter the country whence they will be able to travel into the UK whether authorised or not.

The problem is therefore with Ireland and its inability to control its border with the EU. The Irish can either have free movement of people and goods with the EU or with the UK, they can’t have both. While the EU sets Ireland’s trade tariffs and controls its borders they will be unable to facilitate free movement of people and goods with the UK. This is a decision for the Irish to make, it is not the UK’s problem to solve.

Ireland needs a backstop agreement with the EU, not the UK.

It’s been a while

July 23, 2019 Come the revolution, Federal Europe, Health, Propaganda, Transport 2 comments

I really don’t have time for blogging any more, what with the reality of work, kids and a new partner but I’m sat here on a train in Euston station waiting for one of Richard Branson’s minions to find a driver who can get us home and some things have been annoying me recently. So, time to unload.

Image result for flipping tables

Nurses

There is a shortage of about 40,000 nurses in England according to the Royal College of Nursing. The British government’s response is to launch recruitment campaigns in countries where they spend lots of money training nurses who would love to come and work in England for the paltry amount we pay. But that’s really not the right answer, is it?

A nurse in England can expect to earn about £23k a year on average. They make life or death decisions every day. They might start the day watching a baby die and end it disposing of a bowl full of shit. Be under no illusions, it’s a tough job and they do it for little financial reward.

So, a few years back the British government decided that nurses in England must have a degree. Merely learning how to care for patients, dispense medication, perform medical procedures and save lives isn’t good enough, they must also be able to write thousands of words on a variety of subjects that nobody will ever read again after it’s been marked. And the British government abolished the bursary for nursing degrees in 2016 so to pursue their £23k a year career nurses in England are expected to pay between £18,500 and £37,000 in tuition fees (depending on whether they stop at two years or complete the optional third and fourth years) plus tens of thousands in living costs whilst they study. For a job that has an average wage so low that most nurses won’t ever reach the threshold for loan repayments. Is it any wonder NHS England can’t recruit enough nurses?

HS2

Where do you start with something so utterly and fundamentally flawed as HS2? It was supposed to cost £56bn when it was first announced – a figure that was already ruinously expensive – and just a few days ago the chairman of HS2 told the British government that estimated costs have now risen to £86bn. This time last year they had already burnt through £4bn without laying a single mile of track, who knows what it is by now. This is money that could be spent on electrifying and increasing capacity on existing lines, investing in electric vehicle infrastructure (including busses) and increasing capacity on motorways. The M6 toll road could have been nationalised twice over with the money HS2 had spent not building HS2 up to last year.

Of course, a big chunk of the cost of HS2 isn’t actually related to building HS2 at all but comes from Barnett Consequentials. Which leads me nicely on to …

The Barnett Formula

How is the Barnett Formula still a thing? It genuinely astounds me that any politician or civil servant can justify the continued existence of a funding formula that is in no way based on need, is predicated entirely on the redistribution of English taxes and enshrines the principle that any money spent in England must also result in money being spent in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.

For those who don’t know what the Barnett Formula is, it was a formula created in 1978 by Labour MP Joel Barnett to calculate how much the British Treasury should spend in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It was a temporary measure whilst civil servants came up with a more appropriate way of working out who should get what share of taxes after the Scottish devolution settlement that was expected the following year. It allocates whatever is spent per head in England plus a percentage extra for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland multiplied by the nominal population of the country in question. It is inherently unfair and unjust, a view shared by its creator now Lord Barnett who has called for its abolition many times.

Whilst the whole basis for the Barnett Formula is wrong, it is the Barnett Consequentials that really hurt. Barnett Consequentials are one-off increases in funding to the other member states of the UK given to them whenever the British government spends money on capital projects in England. The £30bn increase in the estimated cost of HS2 will result in as much as £5bn extra in Scotland’s block grant from the British government. They don’t need it, it’s just money they will get because the British government are spending money on a capital project in England. The same happened with the British Olympics in London – the British government spent money on capital projects so their Olympic games could take place and Scotland, Wales and NI all got extra money. It pushes up the cost of any capital project in England, eating into the already inadequate budget the British allocate to England.

Brexit

Finally, Brexit. It’s been three years since we told the British government to get us out of the EU. It was the biggest turnout in British electoral history and against all the odds the Leave vote was secured. There was state interference in the referendum, the state broadcaster beamed 24 hour propaganda into every home, nearly £10m of our taxes were spent posting a booklet full of what have been shown to be outrageous lies through every letterbox in the UK, every government website carried adverts promoting a Remain vote, taxpayer-funded universities and quangos campaigned against a Leave vote, EU-funded organisations promoted their paymaster and the Remain campaign outspent the Leave campaign by many millions of pounds. Yet despite the referendum being very much rigged in favour of Remain, 17.4m people voted to Leave. And we still haven’t.

The sheer hypocrisy of the so-called People’s Vote campaign is beyond parody. Not satisfied with the result of the people’s vote to leave the EU they now insist we have another people’s vote to give us an opportunity to vote the right way and if we’re all still awful racists and vote to leave again they’ll definitely respect the decision. Just like they said they would before and after the referendum three years ago. It is, they say, undemocratic to respect the result of the referendum because we didn’t know what we were voting for. Only Remainers knew what they were voting for – things like the EU army that Nick Clegg described as “a dangerous fantasy” or removing the veto on tax policy and handing over control of tax raising powers to the EU which they said would never happen.

The insistence by EU nationalist politicians and campaigners that we must accept a deal from the EU before we can leave is nonsense. There was no mention of having a deal on the ballot paper, it was a vote for what is now being referred to as “no deal Brexit” (in reality, a whole raft of bilateral deals rather than no deal at all). Nothing the EU will offer us will be to our benefit. EU negotiators openly gloat about how they are out to punish us for leaving and send a message to other EU member states about what happens to anyone who tries to leave. It is a national insult and my hope is that one of the first things Boris Johnson does is cancels all negotiations with the EU, only agreeing to reopen channels a fortnight before 31st October to consider the EU’s final offer and pass any necessary legislation but with the default position being that we leave on WTO terms.

Project Fear says butter and cheese will be luxury items after Brexit

July 20, 2018 Bullshit No comments

Try not to laugh but the Independent have run a headline today claiming that cheese and butter will be luxury items after Brexit because (they claim) dairy products will be more expensive to import from the EU.

Image result for milk me i dare you

We’re something like the 10th largest producer of dairy products in the world but because we export such a lot we have the second largest dairy trade deficit in the world. As a consequence, the UK is one of the world’s most valuable dairy markets and around 20% of EU dairy exports go to the UK. Where the UK buys its milk and cheese makes or breaks a country’s dairy industry and the EU as usual stands to lose most by punitive restrictions on trade with the UK. The overnight withdrawal of the average 36% tariffs on dairy imports from outside the EU will certainly see buyers looking outside the EU for their butter and cheese on independence day and there is no shortage of countries on our doorstep producing dairy at relatively low cost who will no longer be priced out of the market by EU tariffs.

Dairy production in the UK has decreased over the last couple of decades because it is unprofitable on anything but an industrial scale thanks to supermarkets paying below cost price for their milk. If the cost of importing dairy products from the EU does go up (and it’s a big if) then that will make imports less economically viable for large retailers and domestically produced products more profitable for them. They will buy more UK produced dairy which will grow the domestic industry and drive up exports as we have already seen with the manufacturing sector following the drop in the value of the pound.

It was the threat of importing cheap Polish milk that helped Tesco break the dairy farmers when they played hardball over wholesale milk prices a few years ago. If Polish milk becomes more expensive to import then that leverage disappears and UK dairy farmers could end up turning a profit on their dairy produce. The supermarkets of course tell us that paying a fair price for milk will drive up prices for consumers but it is in reality an investment in the dairy industry that will allow producers to benefit from economy of scale and reduce costs.

Leaving the EU isn’t going to result in a shortage of cheese and butter, nor is it likely to make it more expensive to the consumer. This is just more ridiculous Remainer scaremongering.

Theresa May’s Brexit Betrayal

July 9, 2018 Come the revolution No comments

Theresa May took her majority Remain-supporting cabinet to Chequers at the weekend and would you believe, they agreed to support a Brexit position paper that keeps us as members of the EU in all but name.

I know. Shocker, right?

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This paper sets out Theresa May’s opening offer to the EU on our future relationship with them and represents complete capitulation. It proposes to keep the jurisdiction of the EU courts, the adoption of every EU present and future law on trade and maintains privileged immigration rules for EU citizens.

This proposal is just the opening gambit which the EU will reject and as we get closer to what should have been independence day will use as the basis for a much worse deal. The bulk of MPs have already ruled out a no-deal Brexit and will vote for whatever last minute deal is offered. And it will be a bad deal. Much worse than what is being proposed now.

There have been several resignations over the Brexit betrayal starting last night with the Brexit Secretary, David Davis. His resignation was quickly followed by Steve Baker and Suella Braverman who were junior ministers in the same department. Today Boris Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary and Chris Green has resigned as private secretary to the Department for Transport. It is believed that the 1922 Committee that is responsible for leadership elections in the Conservative Party has received 42 of the required 48 signatures to call a vote of no confidence in Theresa May. A meeting of the committee was held this evening with conflicting stories emerging about what actually happened in there. Theresa May has survived this meeting but the publishing of the paper has been delayed by a week following it which would suggest she has been given an ultimatum by her backbenchers. She may survive the week after all but she is still on borrowed time.

There is only one good deal and that is no deal. Nothing the EU offers us will be in our national interest. The EU’s negotiators are petty, vindictive and have delusions of adequacy. They would rather the UK leaves with no deal which would be seriously damaging to the EU economy than come to a mutually beneficial agreement. With a no-deal Brexit forecast to provide a big boost to the UK economy we should have the strongest negotiating position but we are being led by a Remainer Prime Minister who has willingly given all that advantage away.

Theresa May has to go and sadly the future of Brexit is in the hands of 320 Tory MPs, most of whom are Remainers. It’s looking pretty bleak.

JLR job losses are not caused by Brexit

April 14, 2018 Transport No comments

Jaguar Land Rover has announced it is cutting 1,000 temporary jobs at JLR plants in Halewood and Solihull.

Jaguar iPace

Remainers are, of course, blaming the job losses on Brexit but the blame is being put (partially) on the uncertainty around Brexit not the fact we are leaving the EU. In fact, every time you see a headline in a newspaper or on the BBC website saying Company X is cutting jobs/losing money/issuing a warning because of Brexit you will find that they cite the uncertainty around Brexit. It is the weakness of Theresa May and her largely talentless cabinet full of Remainers in dealing with the EU that is causing businesses angst.

The UK is the world’s 5th largest economy and was the fastest growing developed economy in the world last year. We do just 4½% of our trade with the EU and that figure is declining. Over 80% of our trade is domestic and will be largely unaffected by the outcome of Brexit negotiations. The fact that we are leaving the EU is really of little concern to the majority of businesses in the UK, it is the risk that is associated with not knowing what our relationship with the EU is going to be when we finally do leave that is a problem.

Our trade deficit with the EU in 2016 was an eye-watering £60bn. That’s the difference between what we export to the EU and what they export to us. Of that £60bn extra that we spend buying stuff from the EU, about £26bn is what we buy from Germany. The EU’s largest economy and most powerful member state has the most to lose from a drop in UK/EU trade. We hold all the cards but Theresa may is a rubbish poker player so she has dithered and grovelled and bent over backwards to accommodate every unreasonable demand that the EU has made. It’s embarrassing.

The British government should dispense with the ridiculous notion of a “transition period” during which we will blindly follow every rule the EU makes without a veto and without any input. We have a leaving date of 29th March 2019 and that is the date at which EU rule in the UK should end. The default position should be to assume that we will leave the EU with no special deal and will trade with the EU under WTO terms as most of the world does. If the EU comes back to the negotiating table with a sensible offer that is mutually beneficial in time then that is a bonus but it should be assumed that pigs will not be seen flying over Brussels any time soon.

This will allow businesses to plan for Brexit with some certainty and work out what risk that poses to their business. Some of those companies will decide that it’s not going to work for them and will either shift operations abroad or restructure to allow them to continue to be suffocated by the Brussels red tape factory and that’s fine. Every major change in industry regulation or taxation sees companies reevaluate their business and adjust their plans to make the best of it and sometimes that means cutting their losses. Brexit will be no different in that respect.

After that lengthy digression, let’s quickly come back to JLR and what they have actually said. Well, strangely they haven’t blamed Brexit. JLR have blamed “continuing headwinds” in the car industry for the job losses and the BBC have turned to a Professor of Industry in Birmingham to turn those two words into something that can be blamed on those bastard Tories. But he’s a professor of industry so he probably knows what he’s talking about so let’s see what he says:

With the big turn against diesel engines, Jaguar Land Rover is particularly exposed as more than 90% of its UK sales are diesels.

So that’s him pointing the finger at the war on diesel engines for a starter. It was widely publicised during the EU referendum campaign that JLR were being forced to cease production of the iconic Land Rover Defender because of EU regulations and of course the current all out assault on diesel engines has come from the EU.

JLR has just revealed its full-electric i-Pace model and have indicated offering all-electric or hybrid variants of all their models by around 2021, but they have been far too slow compared with Tesla and BMW.

Now it’s JLR’s late entry into the electric car market letting their competitors in the emerging high end electric car market steal a march. It pains me to big up either BMW or hybrids but the BMW i8 a not just a thing of beauty, it is an engineering masterpiece and despite being unable to fulfil customer orders for years and some pretty shocking build quality stories, Teslas have the cult status of the equally shoddy iPhone. The iPace has some impressive statistics but JLR are on the back foot.

It’s hard to say how long this production uncertainty will continue around Brexit negotiations, because it’s still unclear what the trading relationship will be between the UK and EU with regards to tariffs.

And there is the line that provides the anti-Brexit headlines. It doesn’t matter that he says quite clearly it is uncertainty about Brexit or that he goes further and specifically mentions not knowing what tariffs will be in place. The word Brexit is in there, it is all Brexit’s fault.

When we finally leave the EU – and I mean actually leave, not doing the Brexit hokey cokey with one leg in and one leg out – then I may accept some events being attributed to Brexit but misquoting someone entirely unrelated to JLR giving an opinion based on two words at least a year before we actually leave just doesn’t cut if for me.