Much talk this morning of Johnson 'sacking' MPs who don't support his lunatic no-deal Brexit policy. The clown shows himself to be an autocrat using government by threat to get his way. First it's our 'friends and partners' in Europe and now fellow Tory MPs, even including Father of the House Ken Clarke, being publicly browbeaten. No good can come of it. This is to say nothing of the stupendous hypocrisy of eight members of the present cabinet, including Johnson himself, who voted against May's policy when she was PM.
We are in a serious crisis and the weak and ineffectual Boris Johnson, a pliable glove puppet for the psychopath Cummings, is perhaps the worst person to bring us back from the brink. He doesn't care about anybody or anything. The constitution is something to be trashed after a drunken Bullingdon club night out in a china shop. The economy? That's just other people's money, jobs and livelihoods. Nothing is safe in his hands.
No doubt over the coming weeks, starting tomorrow when MPs return to parliament, something will be resolved, but not before he does a lot more damage.
Getting ready for Brexit
But for the moment I want to consider the public information campaign which will begin this week. Brexiteers are always fond of comparing Brexit to the challenges Britain faced in 1940. To continue the wartime analogy therefore it is fitting that government is launching what the newspapers are calling an advertising "blitz" to prepare a slumbering nation for all the tribulations ahead. Perhaps Gove is organising leaflet drops from a bunker deep under Whitehall using a restored Lancaster to get us into the wartime spirit. We'll soon be hearing the wailing sirens across the Vale of York.
The cost of the two month campaign, is said to be £100 million. I hope someone in Whitehall is keeping a note of the costs so if there is ever a judicial review we can get some of the wasted public money back from Johnson and Gove.
The reports give a link to a new government information webpage HERE. I encourage you to have a go with this.
If it's intended to reassure I am not at all convinced it will have the desired effect. The process of "getting ready" begins by you telling the government (anonymously) via a series of questions about your specific circumstances. This includes whether you are a private individual, taking a pet abroad by car, or you are managing Brexit preparations for a company which imports or exports, employs EU nationals, uses copyrighted products, gets EU grants, etc, etc, etc. There is a lot of stuff there. And I mean a LOT.
Once the system has a measure of your personal status you get a list of things you need to consider.
I had a go and chose to be both a person with a pet planning some EU driving and also with a company importing and exporting. Try it yourself. Eventually you will be confronted with a list of things you need to prepare for. Mine looked like this.
Again, it's a long list, with more links to yet more detailed information. A couple of things caught my eye. Firstly, we are all familiar with the CE mark indicating Conformité Européenne - or conformity with whatever harmonised regulation the product is supposed to comply with in order to circulate freely inside the single market. But what about UKCA? Ever heard of that? No, me neither.
But after a no deal Brexit UK manufacturers will have to be prepared to use it as necessary. I bet most companies have no idea about it - with two months to go. This is the sort of thing governments usually allow years to introduce - we have less than 60 days!
Next, how many companies who are supplying "non-harmonised" goods (those without a Directive or Regulation creating a harmonised standard) realise when they sell into the EU they are doing it under the "mutual recognition principle". The new information blitz has this on the website (HERE):
"These goods can in some cases circulate freely around the EU/EEA
under the ‘mutual recognition principle.’ This is the principle of EU
law under which EU countries must allow goods that are legally sold in
another EU country to be sold in their own territory. After the UK
leaves the EU, this principle will no longer apply in the UK".
In other words where you previously were able to sell something (non-harmonised goods remember) anywhere in the EU provided it was legally available in the UK, after a no-deal Brexit - in fact after any kind of Brexit - you will have to comply with up to 27 different standards, assuming you sell in to every EU member state. Since the mainstream press has never mentioned this as far as I'm aware, many companies will not even be aware of it. It will be a nasty surprise waiting on November 1st for some people.
The mysterious Mr Temerko
I have posted about Alexander Temerko several times, the latest one was in July HERE. He is a generous supporter of the Tory party and Tory MPs, including our own Nigel Adams to whom he has donated nearly £34,000. It was therefore interesting to read in The Guardian (HERE) that he is now worried about energy supplies after a no-deal Brexit- the one being relentlessly pursued by the party he has given well over a million pounds to. He stopped supporting Johnson earlier this year when he must have realised what a nutcase he was.
Electricity is another worry for Johnson by the way, since we imported 7% of the power we used in the first quarter of the year from the EU. Temerko now says:
“If we have a no-deal Brexit all existing regulations for the
transmission of electricity will be terminated with immediate effect. I
don’t know how quickly, or how high, the price of electricity would
jump. My expert opinion is that prices could jump by 30%. But there are
no scenarios for this. We are not ready,”
So, not only could we run short of medicine, food and fuel in November, we might also run out of power too.
And it was all going so well, wasn't it?
