Audi Man

What's it with Chuka Umunna and Audis. In the last episode of BBC Question Time (30/11/17), Umunna must have mentioned his preference for Audis half a dozen times. Anything less than an Audi was just not good enough for this Labour MP.

Go back 50 years and Labour MPs had other priorities. Harold Wilson, for instance, felt his challenge was the Balance of Trade. Maximising our exports and reducing our imports was key to economic success in the 1960s. But then came Thatcher and the survival of British Industry was no longer a priority. Indeed the Tories and the neo-Tories seemed to make the destruction of UK industry a priority. The mines, steel, cars, nuclear energy, the UK went from being world leaders to abdicating power to overseas producers. The Tories, for instance, stopped ordering new trains for British Railways three full years before privatisation, putting every UK owned locomotive manufacturer out of business. Now the only manufacturer of trains in the UK is Canadian owned.

Forty four years after Ted Heath took us into the EU, the UK now has a massive trade deficit with the EU27. £90 billion for the last year alone. A whole generation, Chuka Umunna amongst them has forgotten that to import Audis the country needs money. That is why public and private debt is at an historic high. That is why so many UK manufacturers have been sold to foreign companies, using our historic capital to fund revenue expenditure. As any accountant will tell you, using your capital to fund day to day revenue expenditure is a recipe for disaster.

We need Brexit to bring some sanity back into our Balance of Trade. We need to protect and develop UK industry. The new industries of driver less cars and robots need to be built for UK consumers in the UK. Because there are now few items of family silver left to flog off (as former Tory PM Harold Macmillan so famously described privatisation) to pay for our consumerism. We have little credit left to borrow any more money. And we need to jettison politicians like Chuka Umunna, whose primary consideration seems to be the comfort of his backside in his imported car.

Democratic Deficits in both the EU and the UK

As an active campaigner during the 2016 referendum I argued passionately for the UK to leave the EU. I campaigned not from the right, but as a member of Green Leaves, the Leave campaign supporting Green Party policies. Until the recent volte-face by the leadership, the Green Party had long been a Euro-sceptic party, its policies reflecting the Party's unease at the undemocratic nature of the EU.

Indeed the number one issue I discussed with voters on the doorstep and in meetings during the referendum was not immigration, but the lack of democracy in the EU.

As the former European Commission president José Manuel Barroso (now employed by big EU lobbyists Goldwin Sachs) said in 2007: “. . . I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organisation of empire. We have the dimension of empire.”

The European Commission is the most powerful pillar of a complicated EU structure. According to the Economist magazine it is "it is the guardian of the treaties, the originator of almost all legislation and the sole executor of the EU’s budget." But its members are appointed rather than elected. From Brexit to CETA it is always the Commission that represents the EU.

The parliament is made up of elected MEPs from across Europe, but it is a weak parliament, with no real power over legislation. Indeed the majority of the legislation drafted by the Commission is not discussed in detail in the EU Parliament before it is enacted. From there it goes directly into domestic UK law. Even arch remainer Nick Clegg admitted that: "probably half of all new legislation now enacted in the UK begins in Brussels."

Meanwhile, EU citizens are led to believe they are voting for true representation in Brussels, when in fact they are voting for a weak Parliament unable to fundamentally change EU policy set by the Commission. Realisation of this has led to disillusionment amongst EU voters. Less than half the EU electorate bothered to vote in the last European Parliament elections. Indeed, many national parliaments have cast doubt on the European Parliament’s democratic credentials, as has the German constitutional court.

The real power in the EU lies with the undemocratically appointed Commission. To put it another way, power is vested in an unelected and unaccountable elite who make laws to preserve the status of their paymasters in large multinationals. Multinationals achieve this preferential status by spending enormous sums of money on lobbying. With over 30,000 corporate lobbyists in Brussels, they are estimated to influence 75% of European legislation. Large numbers of former Commission staff (like José Manuel Barroso) end up employed by these large corporations.

A classic example of this was CETA, the Canadian/ EU trade agreement, which not even MEPs were allowed to scrutinise before its final draft. One of the strongest arguments against CETA and TTIP (the US/EU agreement abandoned by Trump), made by Green Party leader Caroline Lucas and others, was that the structure of dispute resolution, in the form of the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) system, was biased in favour of multinational companies. It allowed corporate lawyers to be the final arbiters in disputes between business and governments, usually upholding the right of business to make a profit in all circumstances. Other criticisms of the system are that it’s secret, that it’s dominated by unaccountable big-firm lawyers, and that global corporations use it to change sovereign laws and undermine regulations.

Both Labour and Green Party leaders appear to be ignoring the fact that any new trade deal between the EU and the UK would also have to have a dispute settlement arrangement. It has been shown that ISDS has increasingly become a way for rich investors to make money by speculating on lawsuits, winning huge awards and forcing taxpayers to foot the bill. All of which is a long way from the democratic will of the people.

The democratic deficit in the EU is indisputable, but to be consistent we must also address the democratic deficit within the UK.

Two thirds of the votes cast in the last general election were wasted, in that they made no difference to the outcome of the election.

In the UK's undemocratic "first past the post" electoral system, most constituency MPs are voted in by a minority of the electorate and often more people vote for opposition candidates than for the winner.

The democratic case for Brexit has no legitimacy without electoral reform of the UK parliament to ensure it accurately represents the British people, something this appalling minority Tory government clearly fails to do.

Power should rest not with Parliament, but with the British people. That means not only respecting the outcome of the EU referendum, but also ensuring that Parliament properly represents the electorate in direct proportion to citizens' political opinions. True Democracy depends upon proportional representation (PR).

I cannot agree with the Tory Brexiteer who said that the British people fought in two world wars to uphold the supremacy of the House of Commons. They fought for democracy, which was why the most reforming British government in the 20th century immediately followed World War 2.

The time is right for a new reforming Government, elected by PR and using the limitless possibilities given by Brexit to truly reflect the hopes and aspirations of the British people.

The Green and Economically Successful Solution to the UK Trade Deficit

It is one of the great ironies of this world that the most successful capitalist country of recent times is the communist controlled Peoples' Republic of China. The reason for this is not difficult to see. As Irwin Stelzer said in the Sunday Times (19/11/17), "subsidised Chinese Companies have an immense competitive advantage".

As Jeremy Clarkson was so fond of telling us, China has been making knock off copies of European cars for years. How many people realise that the new MG cars now being sold are made by a Chinese company in China? If a foreign company wants to sell cars in China, they must manufacture them there with a Chinese partner, or pay a 25% duty on imported cars.

And yet China has been a member of the World Trade Organisation since 2001, so presumably what it does is within WTO rules?

It is one of the great mysteries to me that the UK does not do the same thing. A 25% import duty on cars would reduce the number of imports and encourage manufacturers to make the cars in the UK. With all parties committed to facilitate the switch from petrol and diesel to electric cars, now seems an ideal time to introduce the measure and ensure the new factories are built in the UK to service our 60 million+ consumers.

Of course, such a tariff is contrary to EU rules, which are designed to help the multi-national companies to source their goods from low wage economies. With 30,000 lobbyists in Brussels, the multi-nationals have ensured that their economic growth is enshrined in EU law. But the UK has voted to leave the EU, which brings forth a multitude of opportunities to have much greener policies. And there is nothing greener than reducing the number of vehicles and the miles they have to travel to get to the customer.

LIFE AFTER BREXIT - AN ALTERNATIVE TO MOLLY SCOTT CATO MEP's TALE OF DESPAIR

The Sunday of the recent Green Party conference witnessed a further resurgence of "Project Fear" now being resurrected by EU vested interests. In this case it was a speech by Green MEP Molly Scott Cato, who outlined a dystopian future for the UK after Brexit without providing a shred of evidence for her predictions.

So, with the evidence of history behind me, I would like to propose a different view of the UK in the year 2030, an alternative to the doom and gloom predicted by Molly, using the same examples she used, but with a completely different outcome.

The Japanese companies that provided nearly a million jobs since the Tories trashed our manufacturing sector in the 1980s, embraced with open arms the opportunity to work with the National Investment Bank and help manufacture goods and services in the UK after Brexit, rather than import them from low wage economies. Indeed, the "site here to sell here" policy introduced by the Progressive Coalition Government (elected by proportional representation) has meant that the majority of the new electric vehicles sold in the UK are now manufactured in the UK, rather than imported and the number of British manufacturers, particularly of components for renewable energy, has increased. (Vast savings were also made by cancelling the foreign owned Hinkley Point nuclear power station and state investment in offshore wind farms and tidal barrages).

Led by Government owned banks, like RBS and the National Investment Bank, the expertise of the City of London has ensured that banking employment has increased, again with the help of the "site here to sell here" policy which helped to control and localise finance and abolished the right of commercial banks to create artificial debt (positive money). In addition, the aggressive anti-tax avoidance policies introduced after Brexit has outlawed institutions based in countries that actively encouraged tax avoidance like Luxembourg and Ireland and led to a big increase in tax revenues; (also boosted by the introduction of the Robin Hood tax on unnecessary financial transactions across Europe).

As environmentalist Colin Hines described in his book "Progressive Protectionism - taking back control", the UK has re-introduced tariffs, quotas and capital controls, to curb the power of big business to play countries off against each other and threaten to relocate unless the UK bends the knee to open borders and global competition. Similar tactics to those used by China to become the largest manufacturer of goods in the world.

Naturally, leaving the EU as well as the democratisation of the World Trade Organisation (the WTO) has meant that economic growth is no longer the driving force of the UK, but instead a focus on improving the quality of life of its citizens. So free trade deals, like TTIP, like CETA and indeed like the EU single market, are no longer considered necessary.

A Government subsidy to facilitate a switch to more organic vegetable production in the UK, as well as the ability, now that the UK has left the EU, to support agriculture in the developing countries of Africa, has left the UK awash with fresh, healthy vegetables and fruits. Similarly a big increase in animal welfare legislation, banning the factory farming methods so prevalent in the EU as well as banning the use or import of meat adulterated with unnecessary hormones and antibiotics, has led to a big increase in the quality of meat production.

New localism policies have improved prospects for local firms, such as local dairy farms producing milk under higher welfare standards. As a result the health of the nation has never been higher, especially after the big increase in spending on the NHS, paid for in part by the savings made in not having to pay contributions to the EU budget. (There is still debate as to how much that exactly was!)

The un-enforced environmental health standards of the EU, such as for air quality, have been replaced by legally binding UK environmental standards and a big increase in jobs at the Health and Safety Executive.

The border problem between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland was quickly solved by a unification referendum and the abolition of the border, as Ireland was re-united at last. Indeed relations with all European countries has improved as the UK has stopped stealing staff trained in other countries and instead vastly increased its own investment in training, particularly of doctors, nurses and vocational jobs. With the abolition of tuition fees, universities have once again become centres of learning and not just businesses.

So, no Molly, Brexit does not necessarily mean the Tories continuing in power for the next 13 years. Indeed, we can and should replace the unpatriotic Tories, (whose only concern is to help their foreign paymasters in big business) with a patriotic Government that uses Brexit to put the UK, and its people, first.

Leslie Rowe
October 2017

Brexit and the Kindness of Strangers

Once again we have civil servants and politicians telling us we need ten years to negotiate trade deals with the EU before we can have Brexit. This is what Hitler called the big lie, something obviously untrue, but if you keep saying it then people will begin to believe it.
The reality is that we do not need trade deals, as we have our biggest and most profitable trading area right here on our doorstep. It is called the UK.
And the same civil servants and politicians, who oppose Brexit, have spent thirty years actively undermining the UK economy in the name of "free trade". As a result we have an unsustainable trade deficit, which is the biggest challenge facing the UK, not our lack of trade deals.
Earlier in 2016, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, called it "the kindness of strangers". This is the willingness of foreign banks and institutions to finance the UK's massive trade deficit .
A dangerous and insecure foundation for any economy.
Yet throughout the debates about Brexit and the UK's position in the world, the trade deficit has not been something that any of the political parties or civil servants discussed. Not even the Green Party, despite the fact that it is a major factor in the sustainability of the UK economy.
Greens should be asking: are EU economic policies sustainable, or should we be striving for a more self-sufficient society? This is the big question that I believe the Green Party leadership failed to ask itself before the EU referendum. Will we get a more sustainable society inside or outside the European Union?
If it is about anything, Brexit is about the long term future of the UK economy. We should be thinking about what sort of society we want to be living in for the remainder of the 21st century. The Green Party in particular should be campaigning for a society that is sustainable in the long term.
This is not just an issue of phasing out fossil fuels, to try to avoid the Armageddon of global warming. It is about whether we want to continue consuming the world's resources at the current rate; a rate not sustainable by two earths, not just the one we inhabit. We are constantly being told that we are consumers, but should we not be striving to become conservers?
The EU has and always will be an advocate for big business. The number one goal of the current EU trade commissioner is to expand international trade by taking the EU into TTIP.
Indeed it was written into her remit by the President of the EU commission himself. The biggest and most effective lobbyists in Brussels come from the multinationals. But most of all, the very essence of the EU is about economic growth, no matter what the cost.
This is why, despite the relative ease of doing so, the EU or any one of its member states have never taken effective measures to curb wholesale tax avoidance by multinationals. Indeed, some countries actually style themselves as tax avoidance facilitators, like Ireland as it struggled to get out of its debt crisis and Luxembourg (championed by a Prime Minister who was later to become the President of the EU Commission).
That is why the UK Chancellor's stated big ambition is to have the lowest corporation tax in the EU. It should be to build a sustainable country, with a priority of protecting and serving its citizens.
The EU cares little about the balance of trade between EU countries; its priority is the furtherance of trade for the EU as a whole. This is why we have the desperate economy of Greece co-existing with the massive wealth of Germany. It is also why the unsustainable trade deficit of the UK is entirely down to the imports from the rest of the EU being far more than our exports to the EU.
In the first quarter of 2016, the trade deficit of the UK with the EU reached £24bn (the equivalent of £96bn a year ). If the UK economy is to survive, then any responsible government must plug this trade gap, before the "kindness of strangers" runs out, as it did in Greece.
In 1957, the then prime minister Harold Macmillan ordered the first big post war economic re-appraisal of the UK economy and, after the shock of the Suez crisis, of the UK's role in the world. The conclusions were clear, a post imperial Britain had to have a trade surplus to survive. So Macmillan and his immediate successors focused on supporting British industry, to replace the trade lost as the empire disappeared.
This "export or die" support for British business continued until Thatcher and her acolytes (Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, and Clegg) broke the post-Suez consensus around economic sustainability. Blinded by the pseudo-science of the neo-liberal economics sponsored by the multi-nationals, they allowed our domestic economy to stagnate.
Indeed, since Thatcher there has been little economic growth per capita. That means that what economic growth there has been was largely the result of an increased population due to net immigration and price inflation. (Between 2008 and 2014 the economy declined by 0.2% per individual officially resident in the UK).
What there has been is a steadily increasing trade deficit, as UK industries were either deliberately destroyed (like locomotive manufacture, when the Tories refused to buy any new trains for three years before they privatised the railways) or by their transfer to cheaper parts of the world, including other parts of Europe. Thus we had the unedifying sight of British workers (as in Phillips and Cadburys) training their successors before being put out of work.
With the UK part of the EU, economists thought on an EU level. It did not seem to matter that the UK had a massive trade deficit with the rest of the EU. But when the UK voted for Brexit, the economists suddenly had to view the UK as a stand-alone economy. This slap in the face with the reality of the UK's terrible trade deficit is what caused the drop in the pound, not the democratic decision of the British people to leave the EU.
The biggest challenge of Brexit is how to reduce this trade deficit and re-establish the UK as a sustainable economy. What we need is a healthy dose of Keynesian economics, with public and private investment in manufacturing and much needed public services. The Tory and pseudo-Tory government policies of laissez faire of the last thirty years have failed and is time for a UK Government to manage our economy once again, as even the arch-Tory Macmillan realised sixty years ago.
We need a Government that invests in our future, a sustainable future. This means doing away with tax breaks for oil producers and fracking and replacing them with investment in renewable energy, in home and business insulation and community energy schemes. It means public investment in our NHS, cancelling PFI contracts and stopping the leeching of money to private sector providers in the name of market economics.
It means cancelling the dodgy deals to build obsolete nuclear power stations with money supplied by a communist dictatorship and investing instead in reducing our energy consumption.
It means taxing multi-national businesses in the UK on their profits made in the UK and properly policing by HMRC to eliminate fake management, service and commodity charges charged by holding companies in off-shore tax havens.
It means using quantitative easing to invest in our country, instead of increasing the value of bonds held by the richest 5%.
The problem has always been that much of this direct Government involvement in developing UK industries directly contravenes EU directives. Even the purchase of local produce by local authorities has been shown to fall foul of EU competition rules.
But most of all we need to recognise that with 65 million "consumers" the UK is a massive single market on its own. Because every country in the rest of the EU exports far more into the UK than the UK exports into those countries, the UK market is far more valuable to them than the EU market is to the UK. As mentioned £24bn more in the first quarter of 2016 alone.
With Brexit we have two main opportunities, currently not even being discussed by this failed Tory administration nor indeed by the official opposition.
First to reduce our trade deficit by investing in our own economy to reduce and replace the goods and services purchased from the other countries in the EU.
Secondly, to actively engineer our economy away from a throw-away society towards a society based on providing the goods and services that people actually need, like renewable energy and good health and social care. In Sweden for instance, they are giving tax breaks to people who repair goods rather than throw them away.
It is no coincidence that we have not seen a sustainable economy since we abandoned Keynesian economics and replaced it with 'the world's dumbest idea': the economics of Milton Friedman. So I ask everyone who has the best interests of the UK at heart, please stop looking back to challenge Brexit and instead look forward to a resurgent UK investing in itself and its people once again.

BBC Lying on UK News

THE BBC ARE LYING TO THE BRITISH PEOPLE ON THEIR NEWS BROADCASTS IN SUPPORT OF THE REMAIN CAMPAIGN. The BBC News at 10 last night (Monday 20th June 2016) gave the "Remain" propaganda message that imports from the rest of the EU were roughly the same as UK exports to the rest of the EU. THIS IS A BLATANT LIE!

They also gave the Remain statistic that only 6% of EU exports came to the UK. That is also a blatant lie.

THE BBC ARE LYING TO YOU IN THEIR "NEWS" BROADCASTS AND I WILL PROVE IT.

The balance of payments deficit with the rest of the EU in 2014 was £104 billion. In 2015 it was £106 billion. The balance of payments is made up of the balance of trade and then other payments out to the EU, such as dividends from assets sold to them by Tory privatisations etc., such as the railways, now mainly owned by other EU governments.

So in 2015, the total trade in goods and services showed exports from the UK to the EU (from the UK Office of National statistics) of £223 billion. Imports from the rest of the EU were £291 billion. So the net trade deficit (not including dividends etc) with the EU in 2015 was £68 billion (in 2014 it was £59 billion). That is over 30% more than the UK exports to the EU. Not the same as the BBC reported. 30% more.

According to Wikipedia, the last figures we have for EU exports to the rest of the world were $2259 billion (£1526 billion). But of those, £280 billion were UK exports to the rest of the world, so the remaining EU exported just £1246 billion. If we add the exports to the UK of £291 billion, that makes total remaining EU exports to UK and the rest of the world of £1537 billion.
The UK proportion (£291bn) of the total (£1537 bn) is 19% of all the exports from the rest of the EU, not 6% as reported by the BBC. The BBC are just regurgitating the Remain propaganda without checking their facts.

And remember this is a percentage of a much larger figure than the percentage of UK exports that go to the EU, so comparing these percentages as the BBC did is misleading.

The fact is that the rest of the EU exports far more to the UK than the UK exports to the rest of the EU. Import Tariffs would be much more disadvantageous to the rest of the EU than to the UK.
By leaving the EU we could focus on boosting UK trade worldwide, including the EU, without any fear (falsely engineered by the BBC and their Remain friends) of punitive tariffs from the EU. The same threat was made to Norway when it had a referendum in 1994 and proved just as false.

WE WILL BE SAFER AND STRONGER IF WE LEAVE THE EU AND PUT THE UK FIRST!

PLEASE PASS ON THIS MESSAGE TO YOUR FRIENDS AND COMPLAIN TO THE BBC ABOUT THEIR BLATANTLY BIASED REPORTING. http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/