English: William Hague at the U.S. Deptartment of State (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As Dr. Alf knows, William Hague did not always talk this way, he was in favour of keeping the pound and was semi Euro-skeptic.

Now he tells us a different story, based on our trade links with Europe and the costs.

Apart from our nett budget contributions of £12 billion GBP, we also pay £16 billion GBP in foreign aid much of which is stolen by corrupt African dictators and foreign despots, never reaching the intended recipients. Much of that money is allocated under strictures from the EU, which under German tutelage sees itself as a sovereign state.

In terms of trade, we do very little with the EU and the bulk of that is with the Irish Republic which we had to bail out at great cost after the engineered banking crisis. That does produce some foreign exchange but we lose more than comes in by dint of too many firms basing themselves for tax purposes in the Dublin Financial District.

Some of these firms like HSBC PLC and BT PLC(I visited both buildings in 2013) plus State Street, which administers the Government’s new workplace pension scheme, should be in the UK tax net and could be compelled to do so because the Government has shares in the case of BT PLC, awarded the contract, in the case of State Street and is the regulator in the case of BT PLC and HSBC PLC in this country.

The EU trades with us mostly via Germany which sells us engineered goods and luxury cars and this amounts to £10 GBP in imports versus £1 GBP in exports offset by Corporation Tax losses via Dublin.

Thus, the UK gets no economic benefits from the EU at all and it gets economic disbenefits.

These disbenefits are:

1)Increased housing and infrastructure costs through net EU migration of 300,000 people a year,current NI figures are fiddled by the Government to make the figure appear less than it really is.
2)The costs of EU regulation plus Whitehall gold plating
3)Higher energy costs due to the forced closure of coal-fired power stations and their replacement with nuclear power stations courtesy of the Chinese and the French Government /EDF
4)Costs for bailing out Greece and future unquantified costs of future bailouts of that and other poorly performing EU countries.

People would “not come here anyway” if the NHS was to reduce the dropout rate of nurses and doctors in training and if schools would reintroduce discipline so that indigenous teachers remained in the profession. Action to raise UK worker productivity coupled with threats to automate if they failed to raise their game plus a ban on strikes in essential public services would be a start.

Tough action against malingerers and hypochondriacs in doctors surgeries would reduce demand on the NHS lessening the need for foreign doctors and an uncompromising approach to obesity and sugar and salt content in food plus gastric band treatment and stomach stapling for the worst cases would reduce it further.

People here would find these measures uncomfortable but they would be needed to compliment an “Australian-style points system” that William Hague says will not do the job.

Export performance in this country has been abysmal for years so BREXIT would be the starting gun and the bunsen burner applied to the posteriors of Britain’s complacent senior executives who by and large are lazy,risk averse,complacent,featherbedded and unwilling to get out from behind their desks and get onto planes and sell things that people want and are willing to pay for.

What these people need are a shock to galvanise them and their workforces and the 2 year transition period under which we would leave the EU under Brexit would be the time to read them the “Riot Act” and impose necessary change.
These executives are also unwilling to invest or acquire overseas unlike the Chinese and Temasek plus other foreign competitors.

The tax system can be changed so that there are accelerated writing down allowances for expansion and automation/robotics and there is an American device which fits into one’s ear the size of an oxo cube which enables 2 people to speak to each other in different languages but hears only their own.

Export income could be taxed at a lower level and domestically derived income taxed at a higher level with safeguards and new accounting rules to prevent fiddling.

John Gelmini