Saturday 2 September 2023

Everybody hates us but we don't care

Lord Frost has joined Sarah Vine in belatedly recognising that the country is a basket case. He writes in The Telegraph: I fear for the future of Britain, a country in danger of just giving up. In post-Brexit Britain, he says, “schools are crumbling, the NHS is failing, and taxes are excessive, but too many people no longer expect anything better.” It has been quite a recent conversion for them both. We should be grateful. A few years ago the blame for it all would have been heaped on Brussels but now they have to look closer to home. 

I certainly can’t remember either of them saying anything remotely like it before Brexit even under the last Labour government and Frost seems to think it’s all gone downhill since Johnson stepped down a little over a year ago: 

“The frustration that so many of us feel with the mainstream political class comes down to a sense that they just don’t get any of this. Boris Johnson, for all his weaknesses, tapped into a spirit of change, a belief that the country could be run in a different way, a voice for the people and places who felt ignored. Few politicians are really offering this now.”

Amazingly, the man who sat at Johnson's fat elbow and advised him during the most crucial period in our recent history and now as the nation sinks into penniless obscurity, doesn’t appear to see himself being in the mainstream political class.

The main thrust appears to be that we couldn't solve our internal problems as a member of the EU and we had to leave, at a massive cost and disruption and with a permanent handicap, but now that we're out we can't use the freedoms to solve our internal problems. 

To see what's happening an article in the FT said the government was scrapping, via the EU Retained Law Bill,  the right of women to receive equal pay with men for doing the same job — even if they work in different locations or for outsourcing companies but would "reinstate the provision using secondary legislation later this year."

Kemi Badenoch has denied it on Twitter but a blog post from employment lawyers Linklaters makes it clear that this is actually true, even if only in a technical/legal sense because as things stand, from the end of 2023, "directly effective rights will no longer be recognised or enforceable."  

Next, this minor announcement about some obscure piece of EU law, The Aviation Statistics Regulations 2023. The government intends to rewrite the same laws, which relate to the collection of aviation statistics by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) "into a single piece of domestic legislation. They remove legally unnecessary provisions to create a shorter set of clearer and more accessible regulations."

These two snippets show what we are going to end up with is laws that look virtually identical to EU laws with only very marginal differences - and where there are changes they will invariably be to the detriment of ordinary workers or the environment - but we'll be able to say they are UK laws and not the same as our continental cousins.

Note also, that there have been repeated calls from inside the Conservative Party for the UK to leave the ECHR, most recently by the Home Secretary herself. This is all in an effort to solve the small boats crisis.

John O'Connell of the Taxpayer's Alliance (Tufton Street) calls for Britain to pull out of the World Health Organisation, tweeted approvingly by John Longworth:

Robert Kimbell is even suggesting Britain could exit the UN:

Meanwhile, Nile Gardiner, a former aide to Margaret Thatcher puts the boot into the 'special relationship' with the USA:

"Rishi Sunak should be standing up to Joe Biden, not caving in to his demands. The Prime Minister needs to demonstrate some backbone and resolve in his dealings with the most anti-British US president of the modern era. He must tell Biden to mind his own business over Brexit and respect British sovereignty and the democratic will of the British people. He should take the case for a US/UK trade deal directly to Capitol Hill, where Members of Congress on both sides of the political aisle are keen to get an agreement settled."

We have never cared much for Russia or China, nor they for us. South America isn't exactly friendly territory over The Falklands question and, despite The Commonwealth, we aren’t all that popular in Africa where China is buying influence with hard cash.

At this rate, we will soon need our own space programme to start looking for an entirely new planet. Britain is rapidly turning into Earth’s equivalent of Millwall supporters, everybody hates us we don’t care.

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