Saturday , October 12 2024

Brexit. Democracy under threat

The above graph is taken from the Facts4EU website, a great reference if you want the truth, instead of the Bremoan propaganda of the BBC, the Financial Times and the Economist (link to their site here). The graph is based on proper, statistically valid, opinion polling by the highly respected YouGov organisation. It shows that now project fear has been exposed as a pile of lies (remember Cameron told us that Brexit would start World War 3) even more British people want out of the EU. For the record 68% of the British people is forty three and a half million people who want out. Yet still the Establishment are lying to us, deceiving us and trying every trick they can to not honour what we want. Always remember that, despite what they might say, the vast majority of the Cabinet want to keep us in.

The biggest and most obvious deceit is that Cameron told us that if Brexit won the referendum then he would declare Article 50, to take us out of the EU, immediately. It is now 5 months since we voted out and still Article 50 has not been declared. We cannot, under EU law, start to negotiate our exit until we declare Article 50. And once we have declared it we have 2 years in which to negotiate. So why haven’t we, the British people, got the Article 50 that the government promised us? We really are being treated with contempt.

Another trick they are trying to pull off is to leave the EU in name only, but really to stay in, they are calling this Soft Brexit, pejorative language to make you think it is like a cuddly toy. When really it is a cynical attempt to deceive the British people. These are some of the elements of the EU we want out of, with the reasons why:

The Single Market. Remainiacs want to stay, representing this as, somehow, a good thing. It isn’t. We joined the then European Economic Community (EEC) on 1st January 1973. And in the 43 years we have been members of the EEC and then the EU Great Britain’s share of world trade has approximately halved. We have stagnated whilst the rest of the world has boomed. Not only that, the single market is governed by an immense number of often silly rules. The cost to the British economy of the EU’s 100 most expensive rules is £33bn a year. This is more than £90 million every day of the year, £3.75 million every hour of the year. And you pay for this every time you buy anything or pay tax, it is built into the cost of everything. This is the hugely pernicious effect of the EU that makes countries within it utterly uncompetitive with the rest of the world. (Open Europe website)

The Customs Union. This protects the EU from outside competition, making everything we buy more expensive. For instance the EUs inefficient sugar beet growers are protected from far more efficient sugar cane producers in the rest of the world with duties as high as 50% on goods containing non EU sugar. So everything you buy which contains sugar is far more expensive than it should be. Effectively it means that Britain is forced to mainly trade with the half a billion people inside the EU, whereas by leaving we can trade with the seven and a half billion people in the whole world. Fifteen times the number of customers. Not only that, the customs union only applies to physical goods, which massively favors Germany, and to a lesser extent France. There is no single market for the services which the British economy is based on.

The EU budget. This is the money that British taxpayers give to the EU. In 2015 we paid £13bn in, and the EU spent £4.5bn here. So the UK’s net contribution was £8.5bn. Which is about a million pounds an hour, every hour of the year. Of taxes that come out of your pocket.

The EU Commission. This unelected, undemocratic body was made sovereign over our Parliament by the EEC and EU treaties. They can and they do tell us what we can and what we cannot do. And we have to do what we are told.

So Hard Brexit is the only option. Soft Brexit would result in the EU continuing to do massive harm to our economy.

One of the latest Bremoaner scare tactics (they never learn) is to try and frighten us with the “cliff edge”, that midnight hour when we leave the clutches of the EU and get our independence back. They present this event as somehow cataclysmic. The reality is that it is something to look forward to, to relish. There have been many economic “cliff edges” in history, so this is not new territory:

  • When Great Britain joined the EEC. In fact when any country joined the EEC/EU.
  • When the Soviet Union, on 26 December 1991, became 15 separate independent countries.
  • When Canada, USA and Mexico joined together as one big trading area, NAFTA, on 1 January 1996.
  • General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) of 1947, when 23 countries introduced 45,000 trade concessions.
  • The ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), which was established on 28 January 1992 of 6 (now 10) Asian countries.

If it didn’t bring about the end of the world all those times then the “cliff edge” won’t this time.

Another Bremoaner project fear tactic is to come up with ever more lies. (Some previous lies in this article). The latest set of lies is the OBR figures used for the budget, which the BBC and the rest of the Bremoaner media have pounced upon and misrepresented. Firstly these are worst case figures based on us getting no trade deals, when in reality the world is queuing up to make such deals. Secondly every single economic prediction made by every forecasting organisation in the world about the effects of the referendum has proven to be massively over pessimistic. People, quite rightly, just don’t believe “expert” predictions any more. Thirdly the OBR themselves said that the figures are a huge guess.

Now here is the supreme answer to all the Bremainiac prevarication and equivocation. Canada. The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is a free-trade agreement between Canada and the European Union. Which will eliminate 98% of the tariffs between Canada and the EU. Which we, the British, can now use as a template for our trade deal with the EU. We absolutely don’t need to be in the single market. Not only that, we British can also use CETA as a template for all the bilateral deals that we make with the rest of the world. With China, India, USA, Japan, Australia etc. In other words most of the long, tough negotiation has already been done for us.

And there is always the option for Great Britain to join Canada, USA and Mexico in NAFTA, which would give us an immense non political free trade area. And with Anglophile President Trump this would surely not be difficult to arrange.

Also never forget that the EU needs Great Britain far more than we need them. The City of London is an immense financial resource that EU industry and government depend on. It is impossible to move this into the EU because of the “village” nature of all these financial markets. And remember that more people work in financial services in London than the entire population of Frankfurt. Then there are the 5.8 million EU jobs depend on UK trade, losing these is a price the EU cannot afford to pay. We really do hold the upper hand in our negotiations with the EU.

Do not believe Tony Blair, Bob Geldof, Richard Branson and John Major, they all have utter contempt of democracy and of you, the voter. They very certainly are not working in your interest when they try to keep us in the horrendous EU.

This post was originally published by the author 27 November 2016:  http://www.bruceonpolitics.com/2016/11/27/brexit-democracy-threat/

About Bruce Everiss

Bruce is a political blogger and veteran games industry marketer based in the United Kingdom.

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One comment

  1. Heartsupwards

    Bruce, although you cite CETA as being a template for future use, the underlying parameters of TTIP was a major factor in many who voted to leave the EU. The non-transparency of the TTIP deal concerning food standards and the compromise gift to lower to North American standards rather than they rise to UK/EU standards along with business laws to suit corporations who would run roughshod over our elected governments. I voted to leave the EU because I do not believe we are best governed by corporations. I vote to be governed by those who protect the populace from corporations as a priority. My eye is firmly fixed on who will provide this and who obviously have sold us out.