Thursday 20 May 2021

Down the Brexit rabbit hole we go

I think it is now clear, from yesterday’s PMQs, that Johnson will accede to Australian demands and sign the tariff free trade deal that Truss has negotiated. Assurances given to the NFU president by the prime minister about protecting farmers were, as usual, utterly worthless. There may well be quotas to limit the damage but damage there will be to some farmers, otherwise there would be no point in the deal at all.  The Scottish and Welsh governments are opposed and it’s another big boost to the SNP and the cause of independence.

The BBC report the government will pay farmers up to £100,000 to retire from farming and the new agricultural policy in Britain will see others paid a subsidy for land management rather than growing food. Meanwhile, we will be bringing food we could grow here from halfway around the planet. 

Daniel (Lord) Hannan was on Newsnight last night defending the whole thing. When challenged that the government’s own impact assessment (HERE) showed that the deal would increase our exports to Australia by just 7% while their exports to us will increase by 83%, he said that was to look at the issue the wrong way.

It was all about giving British consumers choice and lower prices, not increasing our own exports at all! You could have knocked me down with a feather! For years Brexiteers like Hannan have railed against the EU because we have a huge trade deficit with the 27 and they won’t buy enough of our products.

The whole reason for Brexit we were told was to connect with faster growing economies in Asia. If the objective is simply to increase imports of cheaper things, the rate your supplier is growing hardly matters at all does it? 

There are a couple of people who you would have thought would be agonising over this, one of them being John Redwood who has been pushing for more home grown food, but no, he welcomed the Australia deal!  He must be schizophrenic.  The other is Edwin Poots at the DUP. He supported Brexit and as someone pointed out on Twitter, "Either he wants NI's beef and lamb farmers to be flooded by these cheaper imports from new UK trade deals or, heaven forbid, he wants... NI to diverge from GB?"

I think it becomes clearer by the day that Brexit was just Europhobia, plain and simple. 

But if your head is spinning with those contradictions, consider this one. If we import food produced to a lower standard, using hormones banned here and in Europe for example, the need for SPS checks at the NI sea border can only increase. 

But at this very moment we are trying to convince the EU to reduce the checks and even get some sort of ‘equivalence’ deal in food and veterinary matters. It’s hard to see how a trade deal with Australia will help that.

To show how awkward a spot the government is getting itself into, The Daily Express are reporting that the USA has warned we shouldn’t expect a trade deal with them unless the NI protocol is implemented in full. This is not something unionists will want to hear, certainly not the DUP. The government is simply making things worse in order to knock a few pennies off our weekly shopping bill while paying taxes to subsidise farmers (the ones who are still in business) for growing bluebells. 

The pre-condition for a US-UK trade deal were put forward by Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, chairman of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee so it is not just hot air.

Perhaps it’s me but I honestly can’t see what the Australian deal  achieves for the people of this country.

Having voted for Brexit five years ago and accepted a lot of crazy contradictory arguments we are now well and truly down the rabbit hole and it gets more bizarre as time goes on.

The Times leader yesterday (which makes the same points about the UK spending least on food of almost all developed nations that I’ve made on here before) seemed to be saying that the hard Brexit chosen by Johnson was wrong but since we’ve done it, we’ve got to sign a bad deal with Australia, otherwise there was no point in Brexit!

“If the outcome of Brexit were simply to leave Britain with an inferior trading relationship with the European Union, then what was the point?”

In other words we've made a mistake in substituting a great deal with the EU for an inferior one, why not make things worse by adding a few more inferior deals that increase imports vastly more than our exports?  How are we supposed to pay for these imports?  The City of London's 'golden age' is over according to the chairman of Natwest, damaged by Brexit as companies move personnel and assets into EU member states and we lose EU share trading to Amsterdam while New York gains the lion's share of the derivatives market.

I honestly think we are going mad.

As we embark on the insanity of Brexit, signing trade deals that undermine our farmers and fishermen, the Tory party are quietly reversing another historic mistake by apparently renationalising the Railways. The BBC report it as a proposal to bring Rail services "under unified state control." It looks like creeping renationalisation to me and an admission that the privatisation of the railways was a bit of a dog's breakfast.

Grant Shapps, the transport secretary himself said the changes will end a “complicated and broken system" without actually saying who broke and complicated it.  One can easily imagine, in another 30 years, a future Conservative government quietly applying to rejoin the EU. 

Finally, I noted someone on Twitter posted a screenshot of Johnson lifted from a high-definition TV during his performance yesterday at PMQs. I don't know if it's been doctored in some way but he is starting to look very old. The weight of office tells on all prime ministers eventually but he looks terrible after less than two years. What do you think?

And finally, finally, I have mentioned several times the spectre of inflation and it jumped quite a bit in March but note house prices went up by a massive 10,2% last year:

If inflation does take off and interest rates have to rise to control it, with the mountain of debt we've got it will be another issue, one that will dwarf plenty of others, for the PM to worry about.

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