Liam Fox « Dr Alf's Blog



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Read the full official text of how Prime Minister Theresa May set out how the UK will be the strongest friend and partner to the EU after we leave the EU.

Source: PM’s Florence speech: a new era of cooperation and partnership between the UK and the EU – GOV.UK

Although I’m no fan of Theresa May, I quite liked the speech and I’m seriously anti-Brexit. It’s a shame this speech was not made months ago but no doubt Mrs May had differing viewpoints in her own cabinet.

The strategic relationship with the EU on defense is an important offering and should go down well in many parts.

But in the end, the speech was light on detail.

The bottom line – she was trying to appeal over the heads of the bureaucrats to the 27 member countries, with an olive branch. The problem is that the EU doesn’t want the UK to be as well off outside the EU as within. There’s the rub.

We shall have to wait and see the reaction but it won’t all be as foregiving as this blog.

Thoughts?

English: Official logo of the World Economic Forum. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)



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Dr Alf brings us an interesting take on Brexit which misses a number of key points.

The proposed Brexit bill of £50 billion GBP is excessive because the net contributions after rebates are £12 billion GBP a year and factoring in unfunded pension contributions for staff employed by the EU does not come to anything like this amount, especially if the Article 50 discussions last only two years or more likely fail in acrimony. The EU exports ten times as much to the UK as the UK exports to it, mostly luxury German cars and engineered products.

That means we actually have leverage if only May and her three stooges, Johnson, Davis and supine Liam Fox, start to negotiate properly, or until they are replaced by someone like John Redwood, or someone who is both educated and sharp enough not to take any nonsense from Merkel.

The assumption of the WEF and remainers is that the EU will survive in its present form even after another Greek bailout, an Italian bank bailout and reforms to the remaining PIIGS. A split between North and South is quite feasible, which begs the question about whom May will be negotiating if it happens in the next two years.

Then there is the issue of the Dublin Financial District, through which we lose more money in Corporation Tax than we make in foreign exchange from all of our pitiful exports plus the costs of extra infrastructure that increased migration and gross overpopulation creates.

May has dithered when she should have acted and she and her three stooges failed to protect financial services and banking with a nearshoring ALMO solution.

The situation is fixable but the bloated public sector, monarchy, House of Lords and fraud, financial irregularity and waste have to be tackled and fat cat bosses and worker productivity has to be sorted out before we can export a lot more.

May’s record of dithering gives me no confidence so a replacement with real energy will be needed before the UK can become the Switzerland of the world.

John Gelmini