In my last column, I suggested that Brexit was the greatest act of self-harm inflicted on the British economy since returning to the gold standard in 1925. Even Brexit archbishop Jacob Rees-Mogg recently acknowledged that the next step in bureaucracy was Brexit. it would be an “act of self-harm.” I didn’t invent that.
As Minister of Brexit Opportunities, he has the Sisyphean task of seeking such opportunities. One of the few he has invented is said to be the possibility of abandoning EU rules on the production of vacuum cleaners, thus making them more powerful and less environmentally friendly. And I don’t invent that.
Why does Lord Snuth’s favorite cartoonist have such problems? The answer is staring at him and British business: Brexit is proving to be an unlimited disaster and has a serious detrimental effect on the economy. This exacerbates the problem of inflation and has such a drastic impact on production and hence on living standards that the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development predicts that the UK will be the worst-performing economy in the G20 next year, apart from , uh, Russia.
Our terrible Prime Minister – still in place at the time of writing – is talking about growth and investment. But the truth is that investment has collapsed under Brexit, a development that is hardly a signal of growth.
As the saying goes, “those whom the gods want to destroy first infuriate them.” When the Conservative chairman of the municipality’s defense committee, Tobias Eloud, recently said that the answer to repairing the economic damage the UK has done, as well as the otherwise intractable problem of the Northern Ireland Protocol, would be to rejoin the single market, he was overwhelmed by his fellow MPs. And the Labor Party is extremely thirsty to refuse to tackle the Brexit problem.
At no point, despite all her disappointment with the EU and her many battles (which she won!), Did Mrs. Thatcher ever want to leave the EU.
The Brexit Brigade and those who fear it must come up with something that Lord (Charles) Powell, Margaret Thatcher’s closest adviser for many years, reminded his audience at last week’s meeting of the Philosophical Society of Wimbledon.
He said that at no stage, despite all her disappointment with the EU and her many battles (which she won!), Thatcher never wanted to leave the EU. Unfortunately, her distant Eurosceptic students did not understand or misrepresent her opposition to the EU’s centrifugal tendencies. They were too naive to judge that after the combination of the work of Thatcher herself and Prime Ministers John Major and Gordon Brown (especially when the latter was Chancellor), the United Kingdom enjoyed, in the words of George Soros, “the best of both.” worlds ”in its EU membership.
Unfortunately, the Brexitists managed, with a lot of joke, to deceive a small majority of those who voted in this fateful referendum to choose to leave.
Now, back to the return to the gold standard in 1925, the economic significance of this was that it involved a gross overvaluation of the pound and had a drastic impact on our exports and production, thus exacerbating the unemployment crisis in the 1920s. . This was a decision that Winston Churchill, Chancellor of the Tories in 1925, regretted for the rest of his life. However, this did not help the fate of Ramsey MacDonald’s 1929-31 Labor government.
But, but, but … it was reversible. Currency market events forced the United Kingdom to drop the gold standard in 1931, below what the national government was then. Labor politician Sydney Webb then said: “Nobody told us we could do this.”
Brexit is also reversible. It is not good for Lord Mandelson to advise the Labor Party that its consequences can be “reduced”; or believing that Labor, if elected, could “make Brexit work”. Brexit is not working and it is not obvious that it can ever work.
Commentators continue to ask: what is the Labor plan? Well, I can suggest a plan: Labor must take the ball and run to an open goal. Every day he has to point out the damage that Brexit is doing to this crazy country and the reasons for that: the conservatives for Brexit! (This damage is manifested, among other things, in the recent decline of the pound. There is a difference between the harmful effects of overvaluing a currency in 1925 and a collapse like the current one, which makes the nation poorer.)
According to Suetonius, Labor’s approach to Brexit seems to be to “hurry slowly” (“festina lente”) towards rapprochement with the EU. In my opinion, it needs to accelerate rapidly, while Johnson’s reputation, like that of Hemingway’s “Sunrise”, is falling apart “in two ways: gradually, then suddenly.”
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