BRITAIN AWAKES: WEALTH, POWER AND TRADE
Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: John Milton “Areopagitica”
It was Bertrand de Jouvenel who wisely observed that: “A Society of Sheep must in time beget a Government of Wolves”. After decades of sheep like acquiescence to rule by a foreign power and toleration of a decadent internal political class, the British have awoken and asserted their sovereignty. The British have ceased to be sheep, so we will avoid a Government of wolves.
Subservience to a corporatist anti democratic EU has for decades been matched by subservience to a State corporatist authoritarian “local” government in Westminster. Britain’s Governments have oppressed their people with tales of abject decline, economic weakness and political powerlessness for which the only answer was ever higher taxes, State interventions, the sale of our industrial assets and a surrender to a continental imperial power.
But even as the State drowned in debts and wealth creation was strangled, the native enterprise miraculously survived and, once the misallocation of capital, manpower and time is directed towards investment in our own companies and assets and our natural trade relations around the world, the enormous wealth creating genius of the British people will succeed outside the EU straightjacket.
According to the website “Visual Capitalist” the UK is the fourth richest country in the world – ahead of Germany (5th) and France (7th). We have total wealth of $9.9 trillion with China (24.8 Tr) the second richest and the USA (by far the richest with $62.6 trillion).
According to The Heritage Foundation’s 2019 Index of Economic Freedom, the United Kingdom has the world’s 7th freest economy. The other three leading EU economies Germany, France, and Italy are ranked 24th, 71st, and 80th, respectively.
The examples of British enterprise and wealth creation are everywhere:
- Reaction Engines is developing a rocket engine, called Sabre, to be used on high-speed aircraft and spacecraft. At the kind of speeds Reaction is aiming for, Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound) the air coming into the engine can reach temperatures of 1,000C so Reaction has developed a cooling system which can chill the incoming air in a fraction of a second.
“The Sabre is completely unique, there’s nobody else in the world, that we are aware of, that’s developing an air-breathing rocket engine,” says Mark Thomas, chief executive of Reaction Engines which plans to start building the Sabre engine this year and test it in 2021.
2. 43% of the world’s foreign exchange dealings take place in London – twice as many Euros are traded in London as in the whole of the Eurozone. More dollars are traded in London than in the USA. London clears more renminbi than anywhere else outside China – for example 3 trillion between Sept and Nov 2018
3. In September 2019 London overtook New York in leading Fintech investment – 114 investments in the first 8 months of 2019 with a record breaking total of $2bn.
London is the centre of the Fintech (Financial Technology) industry in Europe – with 4 companies in that sector worth over $1 billion. The value of the UK’s top Fintech companies at $18.5 bn is four times the rest of Europe put together!
4. The City of London remains the leading world financial centre – moving further ahead of New York in 2nd place. (The top ranked EU State is 14th). UK banks provide loans equivalent of around 9 per cent of the EU’s entire borrowing. In insurance London is the 4th largest market in the world. In the high value “insurtech” market, where innovative insurance models are being developed, the UK is second only to the USA
5. The UK is the 3rd largest global hub for innovation in the bioscience sector.
6. In September 2019 the UK became the second country in history to have two aircraft carriers at sea at the same time.
7. UK Companies Garison and Deep Secure have invested heavily in a new technology “hardsec” to tackle cybersecurity but using the usual software approach.
The “field programmable gate array” removes parts of complex chips exploited by hackers and instead is locked to a single task and therefore difficult to modify. Encouraged by UK Security Agencies the cost of the chips has fallen a lot. The UK is 2-3 years ahead of US companies.
8. Oxford is rated as the worlds top university and the UK has three universities in the top 10
9. UK exports recently reached a 30 year high. Unemployment is the lowest for 43 years and employment has hit a record high.
10. In 2016 over 650,000 new companies were registered in the UK – a record.
11. Alex Kemp and Linda Stephen of Aberdeen University predicted in October 2018 that a further 17bn barrels of oil and oil equivalent gas are yet to be extracted from the North Sea.
12. London is the world centre for legal services “and dispute resolution in particular”. And we all know what lawyers cost!
13. The UK is the third largest biopharmaceuticals research cluster after the East and West coasts of the USA.
14. Britain produces 25% of all large satellite communications in the world and is a world leader in the smaller satellites producing 40% of them.
15. The UK’s education system (the best of it) is prized throughout the world, educating many of the future leaders of other countries.
OVERSEAS VIEW OF BREXIT UK
1. European Geostrategy, the Security magazine, ranked the UK as a “Global Power” second only to the United States in terms of its international reach.
2. Norway’s $1 trillion wealth fund is looking beyond Brexit and vowing to invest in the U.K. “no matter what”. He plans to plough another $100 billion into UK stock markets. “What we’ve said for three years now is that we are a long-term investor in Great Britain no matter what the outcome,” Yngve Slyngstad, the chief executive officer of Norges Bank Investment Management.
3. Facebook expanded its presence in the UK by 50% when it opened its new London headquarters in 2017. It hired additional employees, including engineers, marketers, project managers and sales staff. “The UK remains one of the best places to be a tech company,” said its London-based executive, Nicola Mendelsohn. “Many of those new roles will be high-skilled engineering jobs as the UK is home to our largest engineering base outside of the US,” said Ms Mendelsohn, who is vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa
4. MERCK: Stefan Oschmann the Chief Executive of the German chemical corporation (global revenues £15bn) has said that the UK is still a world leader in science and “will remain a major player – Brexit will have no influence”.
5. NISSAN: The brave workers of Sunderland who voted so decisively for Brexit despite the warnings of project Fear about the Nissan plant have been vindicated. Nissan plans in the event of EU tariffs being applied to the UK to close its plants in France and Spain and expand their UK sales from Sunderland.
TRADE:
1. The major “Anglo Saxon economies” the USA, the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand account for 34% of world GDP. There will be no difficulty in formalising free trade deals with those economies and we will also join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) which includes, (apart from Australia, Canada and New Zealand) Brunei, Chile, Japan (the 3rd richest country in the world), Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam which together with the Anglo Saxon economies amount to over 40% of world GDP.
2. The Economist Gerard Lyons (ST 4/8/19) noted that one in 12 people in the world is an Indian under 28 and Africa’s working age population is set to rise by twice that of India and China combined over the next 15 years (which is why the biggest investor in Africa today is China!) If there is one country with the historic economic ties to those areas it is the UK.
ONLY GOVERNMENT CAN DESTROY THIS GOLDEN FUTURE
As after the second world war Britain’s victory will be followed by a growth in democratic nation states and democratic capitalism which are the basis of internationalism and free trade.
It was of course never the democratic nation states’ philosophy which led to war but the attempt to establish supranational empires in which dictators could easily rule and big business easily profit. There is no nationalist like a supra-nationalist, as Hitler and Mussolini proved – but there was no shortage of British and American multi-national corporations to appease and profit from them.
The supranational corporatism and supranational power structures which soviet communism, corporatist power in the western economies in general and European Fascism brought to the world in the 1930s inevitably led to war and could do so again unless the example of Britain is emulated.
It is always a dangerous world “out there” but not half as dangerous as the oppressive “comfort” of totalitarian, anti democratic collectives who may start by offering optimism and treats but end in totalitarian and un-reformable oligarchy and elitism with a greed for conquest.
