UKIP Ashford

The deal that will come before Parliament next week represents a devastating failure of British statecraft. It would keep most of the costs of EU membership while junking most of the benefits. It would require Britain to cede part of its territory to foreign jurisdiction. It would allow Brussels to control our commerce with non-EU states even after we leave.

MPs who believe in parliamentary sovereignty should vote against it. MPs who believe in the Union should vote against it. MPs who believe in free trade should vote against it. MPs who believe that there is such a thing as national honour, and who recognise that we are being treated in a calculatedly vindictive way, should toss it out with especial force.

They should do so even if the alternative is a delay to Brexit. They should do so, indeed, even though a such a delay might allow the Mandelsons and Blairs to step up their campaign for a second referendum. A postponement, undesirable as it is, is less damaging than accepting permanently disadvantageous terms.

As Lord King, the former Bank of England Governor, put it: “There are arguments for remaining in the EU and arguments for leaving. But there is no case whatever for giving up the benefits of remaining without obtaining the benefits of leaving.”

We keep being told that unreasonable Eurosceptics are their own worst enemies and that, if Brexit is now thwarted, it will somehow be their fault. But it is hard to think of a more unreasonable proposition than that all that matters is coming back with something that can technically be termed Brexit. Even after 30 months, Leavers are still being subtly patronised. It is assumed that the dim-witted oafs cannot possibly have weighed the costs and benefits before voting, and that all that the government needs to do is to show them something that has BREXIT written on it in bright, shiny letters.

In fact, Leave voters understand that some forms of Brexit are better than others. They understand, too, that some are so bad that they would be worse than either staying or leaving. The EU, of course, has understood this from the start. As Michel Barnier put it in 2016, “I’ll have done my job if, in the end, the exit terms are so bad that the British would rather stay in the EU”. Such an attitude on the part of Brussels was to be expected. The readiness of our negotiators to go along with it was not.

Far from being uncompromising, the supposed hardliners in the ERG have accepted a series of concessions, including a continuing role for the European Court of Justice after we leave, 21 months of non-voting membership, an absurdly one-sided arbitration mechanism and a £39 billion financial settlement that no international arbitrator would uphold. They have accepted all these things despite the conspicuous absence of the trade deal that was supposed to be the quid pro quo.

Eurosceptic Tories have dug in on only one point, namely the backstop, and with good reason. No self-respecting country would allow the regulatory annexation of part of its territory in exchange for... well, for nothing at all, really, since the promised trade deal hasn’t materialised. At least EU membership, unlike the backstop, comes with an exit mechanism. We are thus being asked to replace a temporary arrangement with a permanent one. That alone is reason enough to refuse.

If the EU wanted, it could easily fix the problem, either by inserting a standard break clause into the backstop, or by allowing that, as with other international treaties, either party could withdraw after a year’s notice or, indeed, by setting a time limit. Its refusal to do so is telling. The EU wants to keep Britain in the customs union forever, a captive market for its exporters.

The President of the Irish Farmers’ Association, Joe Healy, spelt it out with a bluntness that EU leaders generally avoid: “It is very important that the UK in any deal wouldn’t be able to go off and do their own trade deals with other countries,” he said this week. The backstop had to be permanent, because EU exporters “couldn’t compete” with global producers.

Faced with such intransigence, how did we respond? Did we prepare for a no-deal outcome while leaving the offer of a deal sansbackstop on the table? No. In a perfect demonstration of what it has got wrong since the talks began, the government set out, not to change the substance of the deal, but to give MPs an excuse to back down. The formula our negotiators have settled on, I understand from numerous Brussels sources, is a declaration to the effect that Britain could pull out of the backstop if talks on our future status had irretrievably broken down, or if one side were negotiating in bad faith.

This is meaningless, as everyone involved is aware. We know perfectly well what the EU sees as the way out of the backstop: a permanent customs union. It can continue forever to negotiate “in good faith” for that outcome, batting away any alternatives. The customs union will be permanent in practice; but the Attorney General will be able to claim that it is theoretically finite.

Since no one will actually believe that such a clause makes any difference, what is the purpose of the whole exercise? Well, government strategists believe that the DUP is looking for an excuse to climb down and that, if it does so, the ERG will follow – or, at least, enough Eurosceptics will follow to allow the deal to be pushed through with some rebel Labour votes.

Why should the DUP back down? After all, the party has been clear throughout that it has only one red line, namely that Northern Ireland should not be treated differently from Great Britain. The backstop erases that red line in a quite aggressive way. It has been reported that the EU’s Anglophobic chief official, Martin Selmayr, calls Northern Ireland the “price” Britain must pay for Brexit. Whether or not he spoke those exact words, the reality is clear: Ulster will have its economy largely regulated from Brussels, where it will have no representation – though, naturally, Dublin is offering it vicarious representation.

Could any Ulster Unionist accept such a settlement? Don’t underestimate the canny, materialistic aspect of Unionism. Some businesses and agricultural interests in the Province see the backstop as an investment opportunity. They believe that firms might relocate to Northern Ireland in order to have privileged access to both British and European markets.

Would the DUP, of all parties, put such calculations above the Union? It’s hard to say. But don’t make the common English mistake of thinking that Ulstermen live more in the seventeenth century than the twenty-first. Unionism has always been a partly financial proposition. I sometimes tease my Ulster friends by asking them if they can tell me how the 1912 Ulster Covenant, the founding charter of Unionism, begins. You’d think it would start with a declaration of loyalty to the Crown, or perhaps with a commitment to religious liberty. You’d be wrong. The opening words are “Being convinced in our consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster…”

The government hopes that the DUP, under pressure from Northern Irish corporates, will back down, and that Tory Eurosceptics will then grit their teeth and accept the deal rather than risk a delay. And so it may come to pass. But is a terrible Brexit in 2019 really worse than a successful one in 2020? Isn’t there at least an argument for replacing 21 months of non-voting membership, when we’d have no veto and so be in the weakest possible position to negotiate a final settlement, with a new deal whereby we moved straight to the final settlement, with no need for a transition?

To be clear, I’d prefer to leave on time. But if the choice is between deferral and surrender there is surely a case for, as we Old Brussels Hands say, reculer pour mieux sauter. A new prime minister could start again with a better approach. It is hard, after all, to imagine a worse approach than that we have pursued since October 2016. If you had told me before the referendum that we’d end up quitting the single market but keeping the customs union – the worst of all worlds – I’d have laughed.

It’s worth stressing, though, that rejecting the deal might not lead to a deferral. There are several parliamentary hoops that need to be jumped to secure an extension, and it takes just one EU state to veto it.

At the very moment that Parliament is having a nervous breakdown about no-deal, the contours of a no-deal settlement are coming into view, with stand-still agreements or other technical arrangements on aviation, financial services, the Irish energy grid, road haulage and so on. Parliament’s terror of leaving without the EU’s permission – which what no deal really means – has never looked more misplaced.

One thing, at any rate, ought to be beyond dispute. Britain should not sign a permanent treaty under duress. The Withdrawal Agreement has been proposed in a vengeful spirit, and the biggest surprise in Brussels has been Theresa May’s readiness to accept it.

Eurocrats have understandably concluded that we have no bottom line, that the British are negotiating, as Herman Van Rompuy, the former Commission President, put it this week, “with their backs against the wall, the abyss in front of their eyes and a knife on their throat. We are nearly there.”

There was a time when that attitude would have been enough to convince us politely to decline the EU’s terms and forge our own way. Are we still the nation we used to be?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Answers: In wartime, you hang them - as was done with the traitor William Joyce (Lord Haw-haw) after the second world war.

In peacetime, and if they are politicians, take them out of public life by never voting for them again.

So, never Vote for any Tory MP who has supported May's traitorous Withdrawal Agreement - designed to make us into an EU vassal state.

Never Vote for any Labour MP who supports Corbyn's traitorous call for a second Referendum - designed to keep us in the EU's empire.

This is the People's defence. Never forget those who betrayed you. And never forgive.

PS What can Remainer MPs say in their next election Manifesto that voters can believe?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A WTO-based Brexit could yield the UK £80 billion per year

Post Segments

Over recent weeks, there have been renewed efforts to claim that the UK leaving the EU on WTO terms will result in economic catastrophe. The general approach has been to claim huge downsides while ignoring or minimising possible upsides. We have argued repeatedly that claims that UK trade and GDP will collapse in case of a move to trading with the EU on WTO terms are hugely exaggerated, being based on wildly unrealistic assumptions about productivity shifts and other factors.

Trade barriers will rise and bilateral trade volumes between the UK and EU will decline, to some extent, in a WTO scenario. But some of what will also happen is that UK exports will be diverted to the home market and other destinations, and EU imports will be displaced by UK production and imports from third countries (weaker sterling will also help this shift). Because of these offsetting shifts in sales patterns, the net effect on UK GDP of a WTO Brexit will be a small fraction of the effect on UK-EU trade. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman estimates for the US that even a 70% fall in trade would only cut GDP by 2%. Using the same approach, we estimate the likely effect on UK GDP from rising UK-EU trade barriers at just 0.5% of UK GDP. Distinguished economist Ashoka Mody suggests a similar figure, which would amount to £10.5bn. This is ten to fifteen times smaller than the effects the Treasury and Bank of England are claiming.

Meanwhile, there are a range of potential positives from a WTO-based Brexit that could outweigh these losses:

Fishing

the UK fishing industry could potentially double in size after Brexit, as the UK takes full control of a natural resource which currently is mostly harvested by EU boats. Estimates by Napier (2018) and others suggest a rise in catch of up to £700-800mn per year which with positive supply chain effects could see a total boost to output of around £3bn per year – already offsetting a third of the possible trade losses.

Ending budgetary payments to the EU

over the last three years net contributions to the EU have totalled £10 billion per year, or around 0.5% of UK GDP. Ending these payments alone essentially cancels out the possible trade-related losses.

Abolishing the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)

The CAP costs British taxpayers twice over – once through subsidies paid to farmers and twice by keeping food prices artificially high. OECD data suggests EU farm prices are around 5% above world prices and our estimates based on this data suggest UK consumers pay around £2billion per year in higher prices due to the CAP.

Cutting EU tariffs

The EU imposes high tariffs on foodstuffs and also some other areas including clothing and textiles, where applied tariffs on third-country imports are 6-8%. UK tariff revenue from these items totals about £1bn per year but gains to consumers from the abolition of tariffs on these items could be much larger than that as domestic prices for clothing and textile products generally (not just the imported items) would likely fall. With textile and clothing spending at £82bn per year even a 3% price fall would boost consumer incomes (and potentially spending) by £2.5bn.

More broadly, the IFS has estimated that the abolition of all EU tariffs would cut consumer prices by up to 1.2%. With UK consumer spending at £1.3tn in 2017, this implies gains for consumers of up to £15bn (note tariff cuts discussed here would reduce budgetary gains by £1-3.5bn depending on how broad they were).

Reducing benefit payments to EU immigrants

A targeted immigration policy could keep the fiscal benefits accruing to the UK from high-skilled immigrants while cutting the burden associated with the lower-skilled. The Migration Advisory Committee suggests the fiscal ‘break-even’ point for EEA immigrants is a salary of around £30,000 per year while government figures suggest benefit payments to EEA nationals of around £1.6bn per year. This latter figure could be reduced to near-zero by appropriate immigration rules.

Striking trade deals with third countries

An EU assessment of the benefits of striking free trade deals with a range of third countries including the US and Asian economies suggested these could boost EU GDP by 1.2% and by up to 2% if productivity effects are allowed. For the UK alone this would represent an annual gain in GDP of £25-£40bn. But the figures could easily be higher for the UK due to the UK’s bigger trade with non-EU countries.

Increased restrictions on trade with the EU could lead to some negative effects on UK productivity, though these tend to be greatly exaggerated. But the net productivity effect if the UK opened up trade with the rest of the world would be likely to be positive given the rest of the world’s greater dynamism and higher productivity levels in e.g. North America. A recent study by the Minnesota Fed suggested reducing trade and investment barriers with the rest of the world by 5% would raise UK welfare by £25-30 billion per year even with increased restrictions on trade and investment with the EU.

Reducing regulatory burdens

The cost of EU regulations is hard to calculate but the EU’s own estimates suggest the cost to business is large, as much as 4-6% of GDP. Removing all of this is unrealistic, but even reducing the burden by 25% would potentially yield savings of 1-1.5% of UK GDP or £20-£30bn per year in business costs. And the positive impact on GDP could be bigger than this: The UK better regulation taskforce in 2005 reported a Danish government estimate implying that for every £1 decline in the administrative burden of regulation, GDP could rise by £2.70. Importantly, we are not talking about a regulatory ‘race to the bottom’ here – just smarter regulation better targeted at the interests of the UK economy.

brexit financial economy

Adding all these upsides together (with appropriate netting on the budgetary side), we can easily come to a figure for net gains of around £80bn or nearly 4% of GDP, far outweighing the potential trade costs mentioned earlier of £10.6bn or 0.5% of GDP.

Now it is quite likely that not all the upsides would materialise, and also that trade costs might be higher. But even more pessimistic – but still realistic – takes on trade costs such as in the German IFO study of 2017, CEP (2017) , Gudgin, Coutts et al (2017) or Ciuriak et al (2018) suggest costs of only around 1.5-2.5% of GDP. The midpoint of these estimates is still only half of the potential upsides we have identified.

A smart WTO Brexit with well-designed trade, immigration, agricultural, fishing and regulatory policies would, far from being a ‘disaster’, have an excellent chance of delivering substantial long-term net benefits.

Dr Graham Gudgin, Judge Business School, Cambridge

Dr Ruth Lea CBE, economist

Sir Paul Marshall, chairman of Marshall Wace

Professor David Blake, Chair of Finance and Director of the Pensions Institute, Cass Business School, City University of London

John Mills, entrepreneur and economist, chairman of JML.

Edmond Truell, co-founder, the Pension Superfund

Professor David Paton, Chair of Industrial Economics at Nottingham University Business School, and Co-Editor of the International Journal of the Economics of Business

Alexander Darwall, Jupiter Fund Management.

Professor Philip B. Whyman, Director, Lancashire Institute for Economic and Business Research, Lancashire School of Business and Enterprise, University of Central Lancashire

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Project Fear has failed and the people have voted to leave the EU. So what do the desperate Remainers do now?

"Let's see if we can talk the country down economically by taking no actions and publicising only bad news. Markets will believe the UK is slipping and we can point to the negatives as reasons to hold another referendum before disaster overtakes us."

Remainers like the BBC are thus deliberately quiet on the good news. Like, for instance, that the USA, China, EFTA states (including Norway and Switzerland), all our major Commonwealth trading partners (including India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ghana...), South Korea, Mexico and... yes... Germany have signalled they wish to enter into free trade deals with the UK. It's definitely a case of burying good news.

Meanwhile the "Get them to vote again until they get it right" campaign continues. Labour peer Oona King claims that people did not know what they were voting for when they backed the campaign for the UK to leave the European Union. She argues that it will be “only fair and democratic” that a second referendum should be held on the final negotiated Brexit deal. But the British people are too smart for that one. They've seen what happens in countries like Ireland, France and The Netherlands when they rejected EU proposals. They will not fall for it.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Quoting Francis Bacon, Franklin D Roosevelt said at his first presidential speech in 1933:

He was speaking, of course, about the depression and the prospect of turning the U.S. economy around. Today, he could be talking about the debate on our EU membership. Those who want to stay in, regardless of the outcome of any negotiations, are playing the Fear card at every opportunity. As happened in the Scottish referendum on UK membership, they believe that Project Fear will persuade voters to choose the status quo. So we can expect more of these fearful arguments:

“Our economy will suffer as we will be denied access to the EU free trade area.”

“We will lose influence in the world, unable to benefit from EU global trade negotiations.”

“The EU has kept the peace in Europe since 1945. Leaving the EU would increase the prospects of war.”

And my personal favourite: "English football would suffer as we could not import top foreign players."

Before looking at the alternative to the fear merchants, let’s see if their arguments stand up.

There will be no migrant camps in Kent. This disgraceful claim was made by David Cameron himself, even though he knew it was false. The 2004 border deal, known as the Le Touquet treaty, means passport checks are carried out in France rather than Britain. It is a UK- French deal not affected by the EU. Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister, said that ending the border arrangements would result in a "humanitarian disaster" and is not a responsible solution. "It is a foolhardy path, and one the government will not pursue."

A source at France's Interior Ministry confirmed that his statement remains the official position and that there are "no plans" to reform the agreement.

There will be no job losses. The ‘losses’ claim is based on a a 2004 paper by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) which estimated that up to 3.2 million UK jobs “are now associated directly with exports of goods and services to other EU countries”. It went on to say that:

“there is no a priori reason to suppose that many of these [jobs], if any, would be lost permanently if Britain were to leave the EU.”

They recognized that jobs depend on exports and these will not suddenly stop when we leave the EU. The simple reason is that, for example, six million German jobs are linked to their exports to the UK. There is no way they would jeopardize this trade. As many business people recognize: “we will have a free trade agreement with the EU within 24 hours of leaving it”.

What is also never mentioned is that 28 million UK jobs are not linked to the EU in any way but are adversely affected by its huge and costly regulations. After Brexit, we can free up these businesses, allowing them to become more efficient and dynamic.

· Foreign investment will continue. Businesses locate where they can best do business. This means they look for cost and productivity advantages, a skilled labour force, easy access to their markets and favorable tax regimes. As the UK will maintain a free trade agreement with the EU, and has lower overall costs than many of the continental countries, manufacturers will continue to invest in the UK. Toyota recently confirmed this by stating whether the UK stayed in the EU or not, they will continue their operations in this country. As will the other global companies.

· We will gain influence in the world. Freed from the shackles of the EU, which forbids us to make our own trade deals, we would be able to make trade agreements with other countries. We would, for example, be able to make a trade deal with the world’s fastest growing economy, China. The EU has still not got around to doing this yet bars us from trying. It does this by operating trade policies designed to support Germany's export trade in engineering products. This is of little help to the UK whose trade is increasingly based on services.

We will increase trade with the rest of the world.Rather than helping us economically, the EU has made us poorer by preventing trade. As Civitas, the Institute for the Study of Civil Society has calculated, we have lost out on trillions of pounds of trade because of our EU membership.

· British farmers will continue to be supported. Farming is vitally important to this country and, as in the past before the EU, will get the support it needs to survive and prosper. What country would be stupid enough to let the sector fade away and die? The difference will be that the rules governing farming will be made by a British government to suit British farmers and not the inefficient farmers of France and Germany.

· We are big enough to stand on our own two feet. The UK economy is estimated to be worth $2,828bn (£1,818bn) in total, £1bn bigger than the French. This makes us currently the fifth largest economy in the world with only China, USA, Japan and Germany above us at the top of the world rankings. How much bigger would we have to be to satisfy the faint hearts who make this ridiculous claim?

It's also interesting to explore the underlying idea that you have to be big to succeed. Is it true? The best way of measuring 'richness' is to compare a country's Gross Domestic Product per head of population, taking Purchasing Power Parity into account. The following figures come from the International Monetary Fund estimates for 2014:

Although it's clear that oil has played a significant part in making the people of some countries richer than others, oil does not account for the success of countries such as Luxembourg, San Marino, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Ireland or the Netherlands. Despite being rather small, they have made their people rich by concentrating on aspects where they have particular strengths - such as banking and trade. The UK is in an excellent position to do the same.

In a recent TV interview, Damian Green claimed that the European Arrest Warrant makes us safer from criminals and terrorists as we can extradite them quicker. He failed to mention that EU law means that we have to accept them in the first place! Anyone holding an EU passport can travel to any other EU country like ours and we are powerless to deny them access. Germany, among others, is expected to issue passports to more than a million migrants from North Africa and Afghanistan some of whom are undoubtedly latent terrorists. Does that make you feel safer?

NATO has kept the peace in Europe since 1949. The EU was only formed in 1993 and still has no military resources (although it now wants to have its own army). It is a deliberate lie to claim that the EU had anything to do with peacekeeping prior to that date or since.

This was underlined recently when the EU had to ask NATO to patrol the Mediterranean in the fight against people smugglers because the EU can do nothing about it.

Now David Cameron argues that we have to stay in the EU to tackle ISIS and North Korea. What weapons will the EU use - Directives or Regulations?

English football would not suffer. This idiot claim ignores the fact that outside the EU, we would be free to set our own policies on migration, visas, and work permits to suit our economy and the national game. I can only assume that the people who make this claim have been under the EU for so long they do not understand how a free country operates. After Brexit, the UK government and the F.A. would decide who we let in rather than unelected head-in-the-clouds bureaucrats in Brussels. Which would you prefer?

Having disposed of the Fear arguments, let’s move on to look at some of the messages of

· We will become an independent and democratic nation state again. Currently, the EU dictates at least 70% of our laws and regulations. These are compiled by appointed bureaucrats in the European Commission who have no business experience and over whom we have no control. The Commission is the only organisation allowed to propose Regulations and Directives. The EU Parliament is not allowed to – they can only agree (which they do in 99% of cases) or disagree – which they hardly ever do. So we are effectively ruled by people we didn’t vote in and can’t vote out. All that will change when the UK Parliament once again becomes our real government.

As As for our "influence" in the EU, only one of the 28 EU Commissioners is British. He is Lord Jonathan Hill an ineffective ex-PR man put there by his old friend David Cameron. He has "no clue about the key issues of the day" and is routinely ignored and out-voted by the other 27, most of whom are passionate EU supporters. Does that fill you with confidence?

I believe that young people, in particular, will be invigorated by the challenges of an out-going and dynamic society freed from the dead hands of the bureaucrats above. There are exciting times ahead

· We will control immigration. The EU requires us to accept all and every EU citizen who wants to live here, without question or questions. In today’s world of cross-border terrorism this is madness. Germany has just accepted a million immigrants from North Africa and Afghanistan with no questions asked about their background. How many are terrorists? We simply don’t know but even if it’s only one in a thousand that means a thousand terrorists who will soon get an EU passport and can then come here with no questions asked.

Once we leave the EU we can adopt an Australian-style points system so that only the people we want will be able to come and stay here. Once again, we will be able to control our borders in the interests of our own people, ensuring safety and preventing the downward spiral in wages which has acted to reduce the real incomes of working Brits. We would also let in the top football players we want!

· We will trade freely with the rest of the world. The EU is in relative decline. Owing to its slow growth, the percentage of gross world product is decreasing because of the emergence of economic powers such as China, India and Brazil. In line with this trend, the UK’s exports to the EU are falling steadily and are now significantly less than half. Once freed of the EU’s restraints on trade we can trade more with the fast-growing economies of Asia, South America and the Commonwealth making us, and them, richer. By contrast, the EU population will see steady erosion in their relative standard of living as growth stagnates around 1% a year compared with 3 to 7% for the fast-developing countries.

Prices to consumers will drop by up to 8%. The EU protects German manufacturers and French farmers with an added tax that consumers in the EU have to pay. As Professor Patrick Minford of the faculty of Applied Economics of Cardiff Business School says: " By remaining in the EU, Brits have to pay above standard global prices for goods that come from agriculture and manufacturing. But would we continue to put up with these high prices if we left the EU? I don’t think so. We’d stop listening to French farmers and instead the UK would help struggling farmers in our own country stand on their own two feet while protecting our beautiful rural environment in different ways. Prices would fall by up to eight per cent.

Naturally, however, it will be unpopular with powerful industries which currently benefit from protection. Many of these have already been vocal and it is important for us to help these industries adjust if we do decide to leave."

· We will free five million small businesses from regulations that hold them back. The EU is designed to help big business to survive by creating regulations that only organisations with large bureaucracies can handle. A recent example is the complex regulations designed to help Europe’s large pharmaceutical companies by effectively banning health products from their smaller rivals.

Most small businesses in the UK do not export anything to EU countries yet still have to comply with crushing regulations which cost them dearly. After a Brexit, these will be swept away so that creative British companies can start up, grow and enjoy the fruits of their labour.

· We will have British laws for the British people. Laws made by the EU cannot possibly take our needs and wants into account. They have first to satisfy the Germans and French then the other 26 countries. As an island state, with a unique geography, they do not take our needs into account. Take a recent example. The EU Water Directive required us to consider rivers before people. As a result, most river dredging was stopped so that when we experienced heavy rainfall, many parts of the UK were flooded and homes damaged or destroyed. This will not happen when we regain independence.

UKIP’s Diane James points out: “As long as Britain is in the EU, we are Treaty bound to abide by rulings from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. British people should make their own laws and have them interpreted by the British Supreme Court. Otherwise we will continue to be burdened with judgements made by judges that we did not appoint.”

· We will save £55 million a day. We currently send £55 million a day to the EU where it is swallowed up by inefficiency and corruption. EU auditors have refused to sign off the EU accounts for the past 19 years as they are incomprehensible i.e. a giant fraud.

· We will ensure our energy supplies. It’s just been announced that the National Grid plans to build a 15-mile run of huge pylons across Kent to take in electricity from Belgium. Why has this become necessary? The reason is that Brussels regulations require 30% of our UK generating capacity to come from ‘renewables’ by 2020 to meet spurious ‘climate change’ targets. 24 coal-fired power stations, typically of 500 Megawatts capacity are now being closed and the figure could rise to 36 units (18.000 Megawatts) by 2020. These are perfectly good and efficient electricity generators – they just don’t fit the EU’s made dash for unreliable wind and solar power.

Remember: ‘Alternatives’ don’t work unless the wind blows and the sun shines!

We are not allowed to build replacements for our coal and gas-fired power stations so will have to buy our energy from abroad or risk the lights going out across the UK. In the meantime, 12 of our 17 nuclear reactors will reach the end of their working lives, so worsening the problem.

As an independent nation, Britain can build enough gas-fired power plants in just four years to close the current energy gap, compared with the 12 years it will take to build nuclear plants. Thereafter we can meet our energy needs by a mix of environmentally-friendly oil, gas, coal, wind, solar and nuclear generators. But we can only do this when we are free from the EU tyranny.

The Vote Leave campaign recently highlighted Ten Ways Cameron has failed Britain by listing his broken promises.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Life outside the EU could be very good for us says Daniel Hannan writing in The Spectator 22 January 2016

‘So what’s your alternative?’ demand Euro-enthusiasts. ‘D’you want Britain to be like Norway? Or like Switzerland? Making cuckoo clocks? Is that what you want? Is it? Eh?’

The alternative to remaining in a structurally unsafe building is, of course, walking out; but I accept that this won’t quite do as an answer. Although staying in the EU is a greater risk than leaving — the migration and euro crises are deepening, and Britain is being dragged into them — change-aversion is deep in our genome, and we vote accordingly. Europhiles know that most referendums go the way of the status quo, which is why their campaign is based around conjuring inchoate fears of change.

What is the alternative? Well, all the options involve remaining part of the European free-trade zone that stretches from non-EU Iceland to non-EU Turkey. No one in Brussels argues that Britain would leave that common market if it left the EU. Nor, in fairness, do Remainers. Instead, they talk about jobs being ‘dependent on our trade with the EU’, hoping that at least some voters will hear that line as ‘dependent on our membership of the EU’.

So when every non-EU territory from the Isle of Man to Montenegro has access to the European free trade area, which model should we follow? The nations arguably most comparable to Britain, being neither microstates nor ex-communist countries, are Iceland, Norway and Switzerland. All three prefer their current deal to ours: 60 per cent of Icelanders, 79 per cent of Norwegians and 82 per cent of Swiss oppose EU membership. Who can blame them? Norway and Switzerland are the wealthiest and second-wealthiest nations on Earth.

Norway is a member of the European Economic Area (EEA); Switzerland is in EFTA. The EEA was established in 1992 as a waiting room for the EU. It contains what was originally envisaged as a transitional mechanism for the adoption of EU legislation — the ‘fax democracy’ which Europhiles like to bang on about.

Never mind the archaic metaphor: Little Europeans are nostalgists at heart. The charge is that Norway has no vote in some EU regulations that it later enforces. But this is more a problem in theory than in practice. According to the EFTA Secretariat, the EU generated 52,183 legal instruments between 2000 and 2013, of which Norway adopted 4,724 — 9 per cent. A written answer to a parliamentary question in Iceland found a similar proportion: 6,326 out of 62,809 EU legal acts between 1994 and 2014. Yet rather than use the official statistics, Europhiles have seized on a remark by a Eurofanatical Norwegian minister to the effect that ‘three quarters of our laws’ come from Brussels, and have -solemnly translated that throwaway line into an official-sounding ‘75 per cent’.

In Switzerland, there is no ambiguity: the figure is zero per cent. The Swiss sometimes copy EU regulations for reasons of economy of scale, though more often both Switzerland and the EU are adopting global rules. But though Swiss exporters must meet EU standards when selling to the EU (just as they must meet Japanese standards when selling to Japan), they generally don’t apply those standards to their domestic economy. Britain, by contrast, must apply 100 per cent of EU regulations to 100 per cent of its economy.

Switzerland is not a full participant in the single market in services. This doesn’t mean, obviously, that UBS can’t operate in Frankfurt, but it does mean that Swiss financial institutions are not part of the same regulatory structure as those in the EU. If they want to trade there, they must adopt different rules. The flipside, of course, is that Zurich doesn’t need to worry about the expensive and sometimes downright malicious EU regulations that menace London: the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive, the short-selling ban, the bonus cap, the Financial Transactions Tax.

Now here’s the clinching statistic. The EU takes 64 per cent of Swiss exports, as opposed to 45 per cent of British exports. Europhiles like to claim that ‘around’ half of our exports go to the EU, but that figure has fallen by 10 per cent since 2006. How much lower must it go before we drop the idea that we need to merge our political institutions?

To summarise, then, Norway gets a better deal than Britain currently does, and Switzerland a better deal than Norway. But a post-EU Britain, with 65 million people to Switzerland’s eight million and Norway’s five, should expect something better yet.

The deal on offer is based on free trade and intergovernmental co-operation. We’ll recover our parliamentary sovereignty and, with it, the ability to sign bilateral trade deals with non-EU countries, as Norway and Switzerland do — an increasingly important advantage when every continent in the world is growing except Antarctica and Europe. We’d obviously remain outside Schengen.

Would we have to pay a participation fee? According to Professor Herman Matthijs of the Free University of Brussels, who has produced the only like-with-like comparator, Iceland’s annual per capita contribution is €50, Switzerland’s €68 and Norway’s €107 — largely because Norway insists on opting into lots of EU aid and research projects. Iceland, though it has precisely the same treaty terms, chooses to participate in fewer common activities and so pays less. The United Kingdom’s -current per -capita annual payment, by the same methodology, is €229.

Why should the other member states allow Britain such a deal? Because it would be in everyone’s interest. The UK runs a structural deficit with the EU, only partly offset by its surplus with the rest of the world. On the day we left, we would immediately become the EU’s biggest export market. The idea that either side would wish to jeopardise the flow of cross-Channel trade is bizarre. And, in any case, it is remarkably difficult, under WTO rules, to apply a trade barrier where you previously didn’t have one.

Many European federalists actively campaign for Britain to be given an economics-only relationship — what Jacques Delors calls ‘privileged partnership’ and Guy Verhofstadt ‘associate membership’. It would allow them to push ahead with a European army, a common tax system and so on, while Britain led an outer tier of some 20 European states and territories, part of a common -market but not a common government.

‘Iceland is much better off outside the EU,’ says prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson. ‘Unemployment is minimal, purchasing power has never been higher, and we have control over our own legal framework, currency and natural resources.’

Iceland has 300,000 people. Britain has 65 million, is the fifth largest economy in the world, the fourth military power, a leading member of the G7 and one of five permanent seat-holders on the UN Security Council. I think we might just about scrape by.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Muslim states haven't done well for their ordinary citizens. This is why hundreds of thousands of them emigrate every year. The puzzling thought is that many of them now want to re-create in the West the rotten states they chose to leave. Does that make sense to you - or have they simply forgotten why they came?

Many Muslims have lived happily here and prospered. They are welcome. There is, however, one proviso. We need them to stand up and defeat the terrorists who purport to maim, torture and kill in their name. We need the 'good guys' to point out the errors in the terrorists' vision and make clear they will not get support from the silent majority.

They might also want to ask the terrorists: "If heaven is so great, why do the imams want to send you there while they cower in their hideouts? Could it be about power and the good life for themselves? Discuss.

The following is taken verbatim from an article in the Independent of 10 December 2015. If this is not a call for action, I don't know what is.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

World leaders are currently meeting in Paris to discuss how to give £1 trillion or more to the 'third world' to 'stop climate change'.

As Douglas Casey, Classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown University, once remarked: "Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries."

It would be funny if it were not so tragic. It's claimed that this latest handout is based on 'science' which must be true - because it's science. But this is to misrepresent the nature of science. It's not about reality but rather a theory (today called a model) which attempts to use observation to explain how things work. For example, we're not able to look inside a nucleus to observe what actually goes on so we have a theory called quantum mechanics which can explain a lot of what we observe. Not everything, of course. Which is why Einstein called the theory 'incomplete'.

A model is only useful when it matches observations and can help us to make good predictions about the future. In this respect, the climate models today are worse than useless. For example, of the world's 'best' 50 models on climate change, 95 per cent predicted that Antarctic Sea ice would decrease over the past 30 years. But it actually increased.

As Katie Hopkins, writing in the Daily Mail observed: "Global-warming alarmists even went on a jolly expedition to prove their point in the Antarctic and ended up trapped in ice they’d said wasn't there. Climate-change scientists have been shivering in their short-sleeved shirts to find excuses for why the earth hasn't warmed as predicted. They hugely exaggerated the impact of climate change. The last IPCC report showed an increase of just 0.05 C per decade, despite CO2 emissions rising."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

During the 1930s, the British establishment believed that if you gave in to Hitler's demands he would be satisfied and not ask for more. They were tragically wrong and indirectly responsible for a world war which left 50 million dead. Many historians believe that if we and the French had opposed Hitler's march into the Rhineland in 1936 he would have lost power in Germany and subsequent events would have been very different. Eventually the penny dropped that Germany was intent on world domination and we were forced to go to war. It was accepted that there would be terrible consequences for Britain with German bombing raids followed by an attempted invasion of these islands. But there was no other choice and, after six years of a global war, the nauseous regime was crushed.

We face a similar situation today with a barbaric state in the Middle East. As in Hitler's Germany, ISIS is intent on world domination and imposing its will by murdering all opponents. Just like Britain in the 1930s, fearful politicians and armchair critics fear attacks at home if we attack ISIS in Syria and Irag. Yes, these will happen. But the alternative is too dreadful to contemplate.

It's been estimated that 10% - 20% of the 2.7 million Muslims in Britain sympathise with ISIS and its goal of world domination. This means that we have in our midst up to half a million supporters of a barbaric regime intent on the destruction of our society and civilisation. Even if these estimates are wrong by a factor of 100, that still leaves five thousand potential attackers in our country. Globally there are some 1.5 billion Muslims or about 23% of the world population. Will the terrorists among them be encouraged by ISIS? Yes, of course.

We have seen how just a handful of terrorists can cause mayhem in Spain, Egypt, Tunis, Beirut, Nigeria, Paris, Mali - and throughout the world. The increasing violence in our streets is a direct result of ISIS successes in the Middle East. It's clear that the policy of appeasement has failed again and we can and must now defeat the terrorists militarily. Criticisms of past Western policies and actions in the Middle East are irrelevant. We have to deal with the situation of today - while simultaneously planning for a better future for all in the region.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ISIS has detailed its goals in its Dabiq magazine, saying it will continue to seize land and take over the entire Earth : “blessed flag…covers all eastern and western extents of the Earth, filling the world with the truth and justice of Islam and putting an end to the falsehood and tyranny of jahiliyyah [state of ignorance], even if American and its coalition despise such.”^[168] According to German journalist Jürgen Todenhöfer, who spent ten days embedded with ISIS in Mosul, the view that he kept hearing was that ISIS wants to “conquer the world” and all who do not believe in the group’s interpretation of the Koran will be killed. Todenhöfer was struck by the ISIS fighters' belief that “all religions who agree with democracy have to die”,^[169] and by their "incredible enthusiasm"—including enthusiasm for killing "hundreds of millions" of people.^[170]

Attempts to explain ISIS successes in the Middle East often refer to fashionable causes such as Western colonialism, wealth inequality, refugees and global warming. These all miss the point.

At the heart of the problem is that two or more different 'tribes' want the same land. In Syria, for example, ISIS are Sunni Muslims fundamentally opposed to Assad's Shia government. Any post-war plan which does not recognise this reality is doomed to failure. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________