Prime Minister emerges from under his bushel

I have only one recommendation today - to watch the Prime Minister's Greenwich speech in full. This was not the painstakingly careful cautious Boris of the December hustings, the Boris protecting himself with a stuttering duffer act, but a keystone speech by a Statesman of undoubted intellectual grasp and vision. He damned the mercantilists and protectionists both, and spent half-an-hour championing the great freedom of trade, Smith and Ricardo. It will make uncomfortable viewing for the EU. He set out Britain's new place in the world as a newly independent State, deprecated the actions of both the EU and the US in blocking free trade and committed his government to catalysing trade against the sclerotic myopia that blinds both to its benefits. 

After half a century of travelling the wrong path, the UK is back on course (my underlining) -

.. we will always co-operate with our European friends in foreign and defence policy whenever our interests converge – as they often, if not always, will – this will not in my view necessarily require any new treaty or institutions because we will not need them for the simple reason that the UK is not a European power by treaty or by law but by irrevocable facts of history and geography and language and culture and instinct and sentiment.

And I say to our European friends – many of whom I’m delighted to see in this room – we are here as ever, as we have been for decades, for centuries, to support and to help as we always have done for the last hundred years or more and the reason I stress this need for full legal autonomy, the reason we do not seek membership or part membership of the customs union or alignment of any kind, is at least partly that I want this country to be an independent actor and catalyst for free trade across the world.

He also blasted the jejune slurs of the dysfunctional left for the pathetic untruths that they are. Our social and environmental protections exceed the EU's - he quoted chapter and verse, available for all to reference within the full text of the speech. Neither would we be selling the NHS to the US. And neither would M. Barnier get any rights at all over the UK's EEZ waters -

We are ready to consider an agreement on fisheries, but it must reflect the fact that the UK will be an independent coastal state at the end of this year 2020, controlling our own waters.

And under such an agreement, there would be annual negotiations with the EU, using the latest scientific data, ensuring that British fishing grounds are first and foremost for British boats.

The reality is that our own fishing industry has been run down for half a century, ever since Grocer Heath gave it away. That capacity won't come back overnight - not just boats and crews, but boatyards and slips, piers and moorings, processing and freezing plants, markets, transport infrastructure and the entire tail of the nascent industry. For as many years as it takes to rebuild UK capacity, we will licence EU vessels to catch fish in our waters. Those catch totals will only diminish - never grow - but how quickly or slowly depends in great part on the speed with which we will rebuild.

This will not always be easy. This is a yard I knew well in Newhaven that built fishing boats under 20m - it is still there (at least on Google maps) but many more are not, replaced by ubiquitous jerry-built waterside apartments with galvanised balconettes and through-colour renders.

  
The Prime Minister helped scotch fears that his team was about to trade away British waters for the commercial gents in the City. It seems the commercial gents are supremely relaxed about EU threats anyway - and only Globalist mouthpieces such as the CBI are raising this as an issue. As Roger Bootle writes in the Telegraph

The fishing industry will, I think, be the litmus test. Apparently, Brussels is going to try to secure continued full access to British waters by trading this off against access to EU markets for the UK's financial services industry. The fishing industry may be pretty insignificant economically - and especially in comparison to financial services - yet it has enormous political importance.

It was sold out by Edward Heath, the then prime minister at the last moment during the negotiations that took Britain into the EU in 1973. And fishing is of particular significance in Scotland. The SNP wants to keep Scotland in the EU. If we sell out the fishing industry again this will be seen as a massive betrayal, especially in Scotland.

As for the financial services industry, that is a different kettle of fish - as it were. The EU needs the City of London as much, if not more, than the City needs the EU. If the EU makes things difficult for British financial services firms then it will be cutting off its nose to spite its face. Meanwhile, the City will thrive, as it always has done, selling services, including new ones based on fintech, around the world.

Guido carries a full video of the speech. Sit back, clutch drink of choice and enjoy!
Prime Minister - Greenwich - 3rd February 2020 

The future after Brexit

It is really time that the EU realised that we are leaving, and not on the terms of their Satrap 'treaty' that would enchain us and castrate our sovereignty. They have attempted to humiliate a proud and capable nation, and have failed. There has been absolutely nothing in the EU's conduct over the past three years that now deserves the hand of friendship. Boris' nuanced verbal description of them as our 'friends' carries exactly the right balance of contempt and malice.

However, the nations of Europe now have it in their hands to prevent Britain turning its face from the mainland. The crazed and unstable fanatics of the EU are personally cushioned against the disruption they will cause by refusing to negotiate. The EU will drain the last Euro of wealth from France, Italy, Spain and Denmark to preserve the power and privileges of the Berlaymont énarques. But the disruption of not concluding a win-win deal with the UK will go far beyond trade.

The last of the BAOR are now headed back for Tidworth, and our NATO training and deployment is now directed largely at the old eastern nations - the Balts, Poland, Hungary, Czecho. A bad-tempered Brexit will turn Britain, as it did the last time we were excommunicated by the European Empire, over the oceans and across the equator. Our face will turn Westwards - maybe for fifty years, some say. This will be as much Europe's loss as it was the last time. 

The EU has tried to enchain us in an anti-American, inefficient, third-rate little Empire. We have refused to be so enchained. That doesn't mean we want to be enchained instead as a satrap of an America getting used to the loss of Unipolar status. Most Brits I think would be happy as an Independent country with clout, a nation that punches above its weight, bridging the world between America and Europe, a locus of anglophone alliance, and as the coin says Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations. It's up to the nations of Europe now to disown the EU's destructive folly and take the proffered hand of friendship.

There's no better reason than this for a Clean Brexit

Well, we've all been expecting it for some time. Now it seems it is upon us.

"Something Biblical is approaching"
2019 has started more calmly after a very volatile year-end in the markets. Focus has been on the trade deal between China and the US and the words of the central bankers, most notably those of Jay Powell. However, this is all just a distraction, a side-show. The market volatility was only the first sign of an approaching global economic crisis, as we warned in December 2017.

As the recent PMI figures across the globe show, a global downturn has started and the world is utterly unprepared for it. The global imbalances that have been growing for years cannot lead to anything else than a global crisis . However, there are different paths the crisis could take.

Here, we present three scenarios that the global economy is likely to follow, when the global downturn morphs into something much more sinister.

We’ll start with the most likely scenario: Global Depression.

That from Zerohedge. And from Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph, 'The next Eurozone crisis has already started'

The numbers coming out of all its main economies, from Germany to France, Italy and Spain, are relentlessly bad. What does that mean? Far from winding up quantitative easing, the European Central Bank will be forced to step in with emergency measures to rescue a failing economy – but it may well prove too little, too late.

It's becoming increasingly clear that May's deal is like nothing more than clutching tightly to a man just about to jump off a bridge, whilst the EU is of course keen to pocket Britain's £39bn as rapidly as possible and ensure we go down in the Brussels Götterdämmerung. 

It would be a short-sighted and foolish government indeed that would want to lock the nation into a restrictive, destructive and harmful treaty at such a time. Britain is better placed by far to weather the coming storm alone and unencumbered, with our resources in the bank and trading on WTO terms. Those global corporates of the CBI and ERT that May is working so hard to please will be critically injured and many may not survive - so why shackle the people of Britain to their failure?

One thing is certain.The world economy that emerges with shredded sails and fractured spars from the storm will not be the same as today. Now is therefore actually the least favourable time for the world's fifth largest economy to seek to lock itself into trade deals. Germany is effectively a monoculture, the entire nation and economy geared to late 20th century metal bashing. It is at great risk from the downturn. 

The fight for a Clean Brexit is a fight to free us to take advantage of the post-crisis world - a world of AI, of managed worldwide migration flows, a world in which Internationalism justly defeats Globalism. With a Clean Brexit, and when the seas are calming after the storm, Britain stands poised to rise from the wind-piled spume around our Isles cleansed and renewed.  

For the nation's good, May's treaty must fall and we must leave the EU on clean terms.

It's got to be NO DEAL

Oliver Burkeman presented a neat little 15 minute programme on radio 4 yesterday - available on podcast - that really is worth a listen. It explains why pushing for a No Deal outcome that sends Europe into chaos and forces each side to take an economic hit may not only be the rational choice, but the beneficial choice. The answer is faith, hope and charity. 

If we accept May's humiliating deal it will leave only the members of the CBI, the FTSE100 and the global corporatists of the European Round Table happy. If GDP hardly changes, she can claim it as a victory. But this will be short lived. And it is a victory for international money, not for the United Kingdom. Both Leavers and Remainers will become even more angry, even more negative, even more disillusioned with politics and the political process. The nation will become polarised, divided and discourse will become violent, vituperative and schismatic. The smug grins on the faces of Barnier and his corrupt cabal at Britain's grovelling humiliation will become unbearable. The EU will try to keep the UK in this permanent state of internal division and rock-bottom morale until the nation is too exhausted to resist further.

A No Deal exit next March on the other hand will cause short-term chaos. The big matters will be swiftly sorted and both the UK and EU will get back to almost normal service on key movements and facilities. A host of lesser matters will remain unresolved, and both we and the EU will take a hit to GDP. Unemployment will increase and manufacturing production will decrease. Most of all it will allow us as a nation to come together and focus on the future - we have shared goals of peace and prosperity, we want cordial and mutually helpful relations with the 27 nations of Europe that are members of the EU, we have great strengths. Most of all we will work together for a new future, a future of hope. It will give us a chance to make changes that allow greater intergenerational equity, deeper local democracy, a more trusted politics, a bigger stake in housing, secure in national defence and with the aid and encouragement of our anglophone cousins from the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and, yes, India. But only the shock, the disruption, the hiatus of a sudden exit and the challenges it brings will achieve this.

So it has to be No Deal. But not a No Deal of hatred, anger and nihilism but a No Deal that is the only way to heal this fractured nation and secure a future for all in the British Isles.