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when you don’t make a deal, you keep to the status quo, which would mean staying in the EU, not torching everything built up over decades and ripping it all up in some enormous tantrum.
‘Brexit is the single stupidest thing any country has ever done, apart from the election of Donald Trump as its President’.
The curse of British industry is that it had never anticipated demand. When we came in, we were told there weren’t sufficient inducements to invest. So, we provided the inducements. Then we were told people were scared of balance of payments difficulties leading to stop-go. So, we floated the pound. Then we were told of fears of inflation and now we are dealing with that. And still you aren’t investing enough.
Economic forecasters assume everything, except responsibility.
an economist is a man who, when he finds something that works in practice, wonders if it works in theory.
We have two classes of forecasters: those who don’t know … and those who don’t know they don’t know.
The evidence for this was under the Lord Chancellor’s backside. The Lord Chancellor was supposed to sit on a wool bale known as the Woolsack, a symbol of the wool trade’s importance to the English economy. In 1938, when it was becoming a little uncomfortable to sit on, it was discovered that the Woolsack had most recently been stuffed with horsehair. It was re-stuffed with wool from all over the Commonwealth, apparently ‘as a symbol of unity’.32 It turns out that sheep can live almost anywhere, and wool is gathered in a great many countries. If there was ever a symbol that comparative
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From 1 January 2019, any state that is a member of the EU must start to introduce the EU anti-tax-avoidance directive that was proposed in January 2016.
the Brexit process appears set to diminish the status of the larger British banks, and possibly to usher in an era of the UK being seen as a centre for unregulated financial privateering in future. A situation not unlike that which existed before the empire grew, when England was best known abroad for its pirates.
Where there is a will, and a lack of morals, there is a way.
The British have, since 2010, granted export licences to twenty-two of the thirty countries on the UK government’s own human rights watch list, including Saudi Arabia, Israel and Bahrain.
On 27 October 2017, the US Vice-President, visiting an air base in North Dakota, announced that ‘history attests that the surest path to peace is through American strength … There is no greater force for peace in the world than the US nuclear arsenal.’38 Putin’s second in command might well have replied, ‘Except perhaps the Russian one.’
amazingly, half of the private sector employees on secondment to the new Department for International Trade, created in July 2016 and headed by well-known Brexiteer and former Defence Secretary Liam Fox, were (tellingly) from ‘defence’ industries.
‘When a country decides to invest in arms, rather than in education, housing, the environment and health services for its people, it is depriving a whole generation of the right to prosperity and happiness.’
In 1970, manufacturing accounted for 33 per cent of the economy (including sectors like mining, quarrying, steel making, gas/electricity and water, plus all the parts that went into cars) while services accounted for 55 per cent. As Figure 5.2 above illustrated, by 2014 manufacturing accounted for only 10 per cent of GDP, while services were up to nearly 80 per cent.
Disappearing services will be one indicator of reduced prosperity. They disappear when people have so little money they cut their own hair and have to rely on the state to give them a pauper’s funeral, the numbers of which rose by 50 per cent in the four years to 2017.
‘Once we ruled over an empire / So it feels like some kind of defeat / To comply with rules drawn up by strangers / And measure in metres not feet.’
Britain still has a romantic notion of its spies, but no idea what they actually do.
Golden ages are usually only golden in a very restricted sense, and then usually just for a few.
Britain has not had the reality check that losing a war instils.
A very large part of what Britain is good at was established during the time of empire and would not now be here were it not for that empire; an empire that cannot be replaced or rekindled, but has to be recognised, represented fairly in our histories and relinquished, not constantly re-conjured.
New Zealand, like Britain, welcomes in affluent immigrants who buy up huge amounts of land, while complaining bitterly about poorer immigrants who do so much of the work.
the continued amassing of wealth by the already wealthy is near impossible without the almost total acquiescence of well over 99 per cent of the rest of the population. In short – just how stupid are we?
within the twelve months to June 2018 there was a 75 per cent drop in the number of young women (and a few young men) willing to come from the European mainland to be au pairs for the rich.
In 1893, one magazine, ironically called Truth, described immigrants and foreigners as ‘deceitful, effeminate, irreligious, immoral, unclean and unwholesome. Any one Englishman is a match for any seven of them.’
Both political parties were caught in the contradiction of needing black and Asian immigrant labour in Britain while denigrating their presence.
The British public largely remained clueless about empire, apart from a general understanding that it was a ‘good thing’.
Being hostile to immigrants and black people does not come naturally to human beings; it has to be taught from an early age. Governments and politicians who denigrate and agitate against minorities; parents who have been taught an ethnocentric curriculum emphasising British exceptionalism; teachers who have had little training in how to deal with race hate – all contribute to a perpetuation of stereotypes and unpleasantness towards citizens from minority groups, migrant workers and refugees.
‘Black people mostly come from Africa. They started taking our jobs and making everybody unemployed. I think anyone who even looks black should be deported’;
