Steve Baker, the MP and former minister at DEXEU until he resigned in July along with David Davis, has written a piece for The Telegraph (HERE) this week rubbishing the Norway option now being touted by his colleague Nick Boles, among others. He says a Norway style Brexit would be a "terrible result that would sell our county short".
Notwithstanding that it isn't actually on offer for a variety of reasons anyway, not least because Norway doesn't want us in EFTA and the EU doesn't want us in the EEA, he was a minister when the confidential Cross Whitehall briefing was circulated showing this was actually the least damaging Brexit option which only reduced our GDP by between 0.6% and 2.6% (see page 16 HERE).
The option he prefers, a Canada style free trade agreement, reduced GDP by between 3.1% and 6.6%. Remember on a £2 Trillion economy, each 1% is £20 billion off GDP and about £7 off tax revenues so dropping £62 - £132 billion from national output and £21.7 - £46.2 billion from the tax take.
He actually wants to pursue what his own government thinks is almost the most damaging option of them all, only WTO terms being worse. Far from being a terrible result it would be the least worst. He no doubt dismisses the Treasury as a cabal of remainers and puts his trust in his own limited knowledge and clearly flawed judgement as we can see below.
Bakers' Wikipedia entry (HERE) tells us a lot. He was an RAF engineering officer until 1999 when he left to work in software development at a company now called Corefiling Ltd which presently has a net worth of -£2.8 million (that's minus £2.8 million). Afterwards, he joined BASDA, a software developers Association and not really a commercial enterprise.
He is also listed as the head of Ambriel Consulting Ltd from 2001, based at a farm in Cornwall. It was dissolved in 2015 and now has a net worth of -£419 (minus £419). He seems to specialise in companies that have a negative net worth.
Then in a rather unfortunate career move he joined Lehman Brothers in 2006 where he was described as "the chief architect of global financing and asset service platforms". Lehman's collapsed two years later as we know, sparking a world-wide crash, although this may have been down to the sub-prime US mortgage market rather than Baker but who knows?
After Lehman Brothers he became a Tory candidate for High Wycombe and by 2010 was an MP having almost no experience of a successful business in any meaningful way. In fact the companies he was associated with had a rather regrettable tendency to suffer what might generously be described as some difficulties.
And his views on the EU are quite frightening, according to Wikipedia:
Baker was in favour of Brexit prior to the 2016 referendum. He stated at a meeting of the Libertarian Alliance taking place in 2010 that he "think[s] the European Union needs to be wholly torn down", considering it "an obstacle to" "free trade and peace among all the nations of Europe as well as the world".
Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, Donald Trump, Global warming, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, The Yemen, etc are all fine apparently in Bakerworld - it's the EU that is the threat. Is it any wonder that remainers have a sneaking suspicion Russia is behind Brexit and the Brexiteers?
With these qualifications and extraordinary off-the-wall views he was made a junior minister at DEXEU in 2017 only to resign in 2018. What a strange career.
