We are led by a liar, a swot, a disgraced former minister and a character from “Dad’s Army”.
The swot: There is nothing wrong with being able to memorise and recall swathes of information but if what is learned isn’t internalised into joined up thinking, the result is robotic repeating by rote against whatever question is asked. Programming is like that; the computer is taught to do one thing and it does it well, it doesn’t care how many times it repeats, it never gets bored.
The liar: Proven and taken to court, sacked from a newspaper the liar cannot help himself. He simply can’t.
When he was wiff-Waffing about before the referendum trying to decide which side to support he must have read up on some of his old Telegraph and Times articles one of which stated: (paraphrased)
‘If you want to win a referendum make sure that the incumbent party is supporting the status quo.
That way the populace will want to give them a good kicking and the other side will win.’
This is unfortunately exactly what happened.
The disgraced former Defence secretary:
This chap had to step down from office because he was a security risk. He allowed a close friend without clearance to attend sensitive government meetings.
Can a Leopard change it’s spots?
Well only if you spray paint it, varnish over the cracks and wheel it out into poor light so people can’t see the mess.
Where do you start with dad’s Army? Private Godfrey. What more needs saying.
Standing in the wings, ready to take charge are two more characters. An eighteenth century politician who wants to turn the clock back to when serfs (you and me) were ordered about, poorly paid (if at all) and totally replaceable.
The Chameleon: What an act!! This one can switch so rapidly between positions that one cannot even glimpse the change. One moment ‘Kill all the Bees’ next ‘Save the environment’
A whirlwind of indecision, cuddling up to dogs as if they’d only just been discovered. Stating the “Blue Planet ll” opened his eyes to pollution. WHAT! As environment minister did he not have a full grasp of the subject before David Attenborough’s seminal series? Apparently not.
There are too many bit players to go into, pretty much as bad as each other, I’ll spare you.
The foreign Secretary (and yes he is foreign, look him up.) says the EU is based on the overarching plan to unify politically and financially the whole of Europe, and this is a bad thing.
Not to create trade and prosperity.
Which would lead to all member states losing their sovereignty.
Oh dear, Oh dear.
The thing about the European Economic Community as it was first called, is that the founders (cajoled and pushed by non other than Winston Churchill) could see that by forming a level playing field for all it’s members, removing barriers to movement and creating one set of rules which all member states could vote on would lead to increased trade between the member states and lift millions of folk out of poverty and free them from despotic rulers.
They had vision, a bold plan, a carefully crafted set of objectives by which to achieve this.
Bye and large they have succeeded.
The Foreign Secretary says that freed from the shackles of the EU we can grandly go out swash buckling round the world and create trade deals with over two hundred countries!
Forgetting the 60 odd deals we already have as members, negotiated with skill by a block of some 500,000000 people. Quite some muscle.
This was probably OK when Sir Frances Drake went out to discover the world and bring back potatoes, because he didn’t know what was out there. (Did he even do that? Fake News)
We know a bit more now.
Money is called ‘currency’ because it flows. It works just like water. Flowing from a high point to a low point until it finds it’s own level. As an example look at East and West Germany when the wall came down.
Lot’s of money flowed from west to east. Luckily the West German economy was in good shape and withstood the flow and eventually through investment in infrastructure and people they were and are in a position, largely through work ethic and efficiency to survive and prosper.
This is the way that trade deals work. They benefit the weaker currency. I can’t think of a nation that we could strike new trade deals with that has a stronger currency than ours.
America? No the GBP is worth more than the Dollar. The same with Australia, China, India etc.
This will happen. We strike trade deals, let’s even say Tarif free. Our goods (if we made any which we don’t) would be too expensive for the other country to buy but their goods would be cheaper than we could produce them. Net result imports up exports down.
Once the balance of payments gets totally out of kilter we would have to devalue the GBP. We would then get inflation as imports rose in price and interest rates would rise. We would be back to the nineteen nineties when interest rates hit record highs of near 20%, mass bankruptcy's followed, high unemployment and low tax receipts became a consequence.
THE EU: Not perfect, what is.
Look at it this way: If you are a house owner you will pay house insurance.
The majority of householders do not make claims on the insurance and as a consequence become nett contributors to the insurance company. Their payments allow the insurance company to pay out for those that claim. The EU is no different.
We pay in, we claim a certain amount back in redistributed grants and we get the use of the member states facilities. We use their roads, police, armies in time of need, hospitals when we are abroad and injured or sick, we share scientific adventures and help to level the playing field by investing some of our money into nation states within the union that still have weaker economies. We do this so that eventually people in places like Poland will have a country they want to live in, people we can trade with on a more equal footing.
We cannot expect not to pay in yet receive benefits. If you stopped paying house insurance the insurance company quite rightly would say "You are not our problem".
It’s not rocket science, just plain common sense.
The problem is that governments of all kinds have underinvested in our services, hospitals, housing, police. You name it. We lost our manufacturing industries through lack of timely investment and are in consequence a service industry based economy.
Now underinvestment has a new name. For years it was allowed to happen behind closed doors but now it’s out of the closet and called “Austerity”
Yes, it’s now official. Governments will legally be obliged to underinvest until this country become deregulated, a tax haven while jobs are hit by inflationary pressures and we have a proper Labour party again because we will need it!
The Labour opposition is just waiting to be needed again and if we leave the successful trading block that made us the fifth largest economy in the world (already down to sixth and falling) they will be needed. Trade unions are already springing up to protect workers from predating employers.
A notable quote made by the Foreign Secretary before he lost the plot in one of his editorials (probably first said by somebody else) was
‘Bigotry and racism is best described as sewerage. We all capable of it but it’s what we do with it that counts’
In other words do we go back to the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries and wallow in it, (because that is where the present government wishes us to go) or do we through sharing the load, leveling the playing field and helping each other to prosper and lead fulfilling lives put it where it belongs.
It has often been said that having morals is easy for the well off. If that is the case (and although rather tongue in cheek) then helping each other, investing in deprived areas, creating real prosperity will change the dynamic of racial tension by giving everyone hope now and in the future.
We need to get back what we are in danger of losing before it is too late.
This fiasco reads like a 'who done it'. What we need to do as Sherlock Holmes’s is ask “Who benefits from this crime?”
Because it is a crime make no mistake.
Anyone who has significant resources (money, property, printing presses, title) and strangely the Labour Party. If you wonder why the leader of the opposition is keeping quiet think about where this country will be going. Deregulation, lower wages, strife. Yes the Labour Party would be back in demand with a need for true left wing policies.
So unfortunately we won’t have the LP riding to the rescue so cannot rely on them to halt the political Luddites in the Tory right
Lib Dem’s?
Unfortunately no-one gets worked up by being in the middle, this is the prerogative of the extremes
In the words of Private Frazer “We’re all doomed!”
Thanks for reading.