In Brexit Britain wages are now rising at 2.9% per annum while inflation has fallen to 2.4%. Unemployment has fallen yet again – to 4.2% which is the lowest since 1975 and the employment rate at 75% is the highest since records began in 1971.
The UK Stock market hit a new record high in May, inflation fell for the third month in a row and there was a strong rebound in retail spending of plus 1.6% in April after the bad weather in the first quarter. The April Government budget deficit at £7.8bn was the lowest since 2008 and is now running at £5bn less than the “Office for Budgetary Responsibility” forecast (experts again!) The 2017-18 deficit was the lowest since 2002 at 2% of GDP.
“House prices Weakening” trumpeted the press. They are – in London (down 0.7% in the year to march) where the press and media live but up 4.2% in the UK as a whole, up 6.7% in Scotland, up 5.8% in the East of England. In the poorest part of the UK (the North East where I happen to live!) the housing market has not been so active for 10 years!
Yet another great strength of the UK in the post Brexit world was described by Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph: We are home to some of the world’s leading Artifical Intelligence companies: Swiftkey, Lumo, GTN (new medicines through machine learning), Babylon (medical diagnostic) and the maker of the world’s most intelligent machines Deep Mind, based in London – but, with so many other valuable corporations sold by the corporatist City of London to foreign competitors, this one was sold to Google!
Since 2011 there has been a 252% increase in the number of deals between Silicon Valley and UK companies. In 2017 the year after the Brexit vote, US west coast investment in the UK reached £1.08bn (law firm Penningtons Manche)
IMPERIAL EU STAYS ON THE ATTACK
While no European country has been able to distance itself from the EU more than Iceland, that country nevertheless (like other non EU members in the “European Economic Area” Norway and Liechtenstein) is under constant attack by the EU which demands co-operation, legal obedience and even money in return for fair trade with the EU.
No wonder that recent polling in Norway shows that a majority want to leave the EEA and – like the UK – negotiate a free trade agreement instead. Freenations has long argued that the UK should engage the EEA non EU members in our Brexit negotiations.
UK NEEDS TRUMP – SO MAY ALIENATES HIM
With President Trump rightly demanding an end to unfair trade practices by the EU and holding a lot of aces in trans-Atlantic trade (EU exports of aluminium, steel, cars etc) the UK should be asking the US to use that leverage to stop the EU imposing unreasonable trade restrictions on the UK.
Never have we needed the USA’s support more. Never have we had such close connections to the US President. His mother was Scottish and he owns property and golf courses in the UK and he likes Britain a lot – which is why he will probably avoid that multicultural alienated London when he visits us. But Theresa May has made an enemy of Donald Trump and in any transatlantic conflict she tends to side with the EU – which she says she is determined to leave! Not clever!
FOREIGN OFFICE HOSTS EU EXPANSION SUMMIT!
But even as the UK leaves the EU our joke of a Foreign Office (they gave an MBE to the Norwegian Nazi collaborator Quisling, a Knighthood to the Romanian Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and a special award to President Tudjman of Croatia who once wrote that “genocide is a natural phenomenon commanded by the Almighty”) has been encouraging other States to join the EU. I kid you not!
They hosted a conference in London to promote the expansion of the EU’s Balkan empire! Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia were invited to hear the delights of EU membership – in the capital of the country leaving those delights. Asking “Macedonia” which is not recognised by EU member Greece is needless to say a problem!
Needless to say the FO also invited the old imperial masters of the region and source of the first imperial steps of the First World War and the fascist murderous regimes in the Balkans during the second world war – Austria and Germany!
With foreign policy “experts” like this…………………
MORE DISASTERS FOR THERESA MAY
Theresa May is rapidly making former Prime Minister John Major look competent by comparison. Having trumpeted a farcical customs idea (the customs partnership) she was told by her Brexit Cabinet Committee, by business and by the Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise that it would not work.
Jon Thompson, the Chief Executive of HMRC, has again asserted that no physical infrastructure will be needed at the Irish border. But when he suggested that there would be a cost to business of £20bn for the technology-driven ‘MaxFac’ customs proposal he was immediately contradicted by Professor Patrick Minford who said:
“Jon Thompson’s figures apply to the new paperwork involved for a consignment. However, modern customs procedures are computerised and so when repeated will simply transfer figures on existing paperwork or more likely computer to already existing templates. In other words, Jon Thompson’s figures appear appropriate only for the set-up costs. Ongoing costs of computerised customs procedures will fall to close to zero.”
The frightening thing about this Government is that they may not listen to Conservative economists or political economists since there are non around in Government. In the old days figures like Peter Lilley and Sir Alan Walters had real influence on Downing Street. May seems to have no one of economic competence and we see the catastrophic results every day in tax, trade, State spending, investment and Brexit. Professor Patrick Minford of Economists for Free Trade (and former Bank of England “wise man”) should be appointed as Special Economic Adviser to the Prime Minister at Nr 10. She could hardly object since she repeatedly says she wishes to deliver a clear clean Brexit – and no one wants that more than Patrick!
THE IRISH BORDER MYTHS
Remainers and EU bureaucrats are using myths about the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to sabotage Brexit or make the terms so ridiculous that the British people will reverse their decision to leave the EU.
They are trying to say that the Good Friday Agreement which brought peace to Northern Ireland will be undermined because a “hard border” will need to be constructed between the North (in the UK) and the South (in the EU).
But as we have pointed out on Freenations before, there are already – even under that agreement – great differences in taxes and duties between North and South. The South has a different VAT rate (23% to 20%) and five rates of VAT while the UK has only two.
We have different rates of tax on tobacco, drink and even plastic bags (22 cents in the Irish Republic and 5p in the UK). Petrol and diesel costs are different – and its easy to drive across the “border”. Heating oil also costs far more in the Irish Republic and the South does not take kindly to imports so they check them.
Brexit Central reported how Henry Reilly, an Independent Unionist councillor on Newry, Mourne and Down District Council, and a former Mayor of Newry tweeted to show an Irish customs official just across the border from County Fermanagh checking vehicles for cheap UK red diesel. He also shared a picture of a carload of cigarettes and alcohol intercepted by Republic of Ireland customs after crossing from the UK.
So both countries are happy – under the terms of the good Friday agreement – to have an effective border if not an actual one! The whole stench of hypocrisy of the Irish Government and the EU negotiators is summed up in this brilliant article by Gary Cahalane of the socialist SDLP: (extracts)
If alignment between Ireland North and South is so important to the Dublin Government, why have they long chosen to implement different excise rates to the six counties of Northern Ireland, even though these lead to arrests, detentions and convictions along the border on behalf of the Irish state?
Given that we have these arrests and convictions on the island of Ireland for offences relating to excise duties for fuel and tobacco without outbreaks of terrorist violence, why would the Dublin Government believe it be any different for customs duties, should they ever apply?
Why does the Dublin Government also choose to operate a hard currency peg with the continental European Union, instead of the soft peg with Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK that used to pertain? (nothing makes trade less compatible than currency movements – RA)
When various Dublin governments have spent the last 18 years moving farther away from Northern Ireland on tax, currency, interest rates and excise duties, why has it now been decided that the current level of divergence should be frozen in amber, and that any further divergence is verboten?
Why should the responsibility for avoiding any further divergence between Northern Ireland and the Republic fall exclusively on the United Kingdom?
Why has the Dublin Government swallowed the Provisional Sinn Fein line that any addition to the existing number of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras – however few, and however far removed from the border in either Northern Ireland or the Republic – would somehow create a “hard border”? Why would the next ANPR camera to be installed do so when the last one didn’t?
Another article on Brexit Central by Graham Gudgin points out – embarrassingly for the dim and uninformed Remainers – that modern technology means that physical customs posts, or even cameras, are no longer essential at borders and this case has been made by the EU’s own customs expert, Lars Karlsson, “who envisages the use of mobile phone and GPS technology to track HGVs, together with the computer-based customs clearing which is the norm across much of the world.”
Finally what is the balance of trade between Northern Ireland, the UK, the Irish Republic and the EU? Just as only some 12% of the total UK economy is traded with the EU so only 3% of Northern Ireland’s is. 85% of Northern Ireland’s sales are to the UK and only 5% to the Republic.
But 13.4% of the Republic’s exports and 25% of its imports go to and from the UK – a big potential loss if they frustrate a reasonable trade deal between the UK and the EU.
