At least someone knows what they are talking about, Mrs May.

Most people don't read the Financial Times.  I don’t normally.  But this letter in today’s edition requires wide dissemination:   This is what the letter says.

"We are a 95 per cent export manufacturer of high tech instrumentation, so we have a lot of experience in overseas trade.  On May 24 the head of HM Revenue & Customs estimated that post-Brexit, import-export may cost industry £20bn extra at UK borders. With £10m of exports, 75 per cent outside the EU, and £1.5m of imports, 85% non-EU, we are in a good position to give a realistic figure for these costs.  

All imports enter under Inward Processing Relief, and no taxes are paid at the border.  Goods may remain in the UK for up to nine months free of duty and value added tax. Duty and VAT become payable if the goods are sold within the EU, but not if they are exported outside. When we sell our equipment to a Japanese company, we invoice free of VAT as an export.  It collects ex-works and delivers worldwide, sometimes direct to a customer within the EU.  It will invoice without VAT as, being based in Japan, it is not VAT registered.  It is that company’s customer who must record and pay VAT, on the basis that it is an import even though the goods may have crossed no frontiers.   

Our VAT and tax returns are made on a monthly and quarterly basis, with payment by direct debit. Every two to three years, HMRC audits our record-keeping.  Maintaining this system requires a skilled person for one or two days a week — at a £50 hourly rate for 500 hours per year, the annual cost is £25,000. We also employ shipping agents at a £70,000 annual cost, of which over 90 per cent is transport charges. Our cost for import-export paperwork is about £32,000.   

Our largest tax is the 20 per cent VAT charged on importing goods from the EU, just as from the US or Japan.  This will not change after Brexit, although there may be a 3-5 per cent duty if no deal is done.  The cost in additional paperwork will therefore be no more than 10 per cent of the present £32,000.  We will incur an average 4 per cent duty on our £225,000 of EU imports, but will recover 95 per cent of this on exporting, so duties will cost the company about £500.  Assuming we do business with the EU on terms no worse than the rest of the world, the cost will be around £3,700, or 0.04 per cent of our £10m turnover.  Compared to currency exposure where rates can change by 1 per cent daily, this is a negligible figure, so Brexit on any terms will not change our business.   

Jeremy Good   
Director, Cryogenic Ltd, London W3, UK "  

When someone so knowledgeable can put it in such a simple easy logical to follow way, what doesn’t Number 10 understand?  Business knows what it is doing.  The prime minister, who has never run a business, should listen and learn.

#DespiteBrexit

It really has been a terrible week for the UK.  All this disaster of leaving the EU and how it is damaging our economy.  No one wants to invest here.  It is all going so badly.

I mean, it must be fake news, the U.S. Marine Corps surely can't have awarded BAE Systems a $198 million contract to deliver an initial 30 Amphibious Combat Vehicles (ACV), with options for a total of 204 vehicles which could be worth up to $1.2 billion.  Really?  

New Amphibious Combat Vehicles (ACV),

Then there was JCB.  Them of the big buckets and diggers. Yip, JCB is investing more than £50m in a new plant which will create more than 200 jobs by 2022.   The construction equipment giant is building the new factory next to two existing JCB plants.  It will build cabs to go on its machines and will be able to produce 100,000 cabs a year, double its current production. Ha, who made that one up!   

The new JCB new site in Uttoxeter will open in the summer of 2019

Or BAE Systems again.  Their Land UK business has announced it is investing £10m to build a new 12.7mm production line at its Radway Green facility in Crewe, UK.   Aye, right.     

And news just in from our dear friends in Australia, possibly the biggest #DespiteBrexit yet.  BAE Systems has won the tender to design and manage the construction of nine anti-submarine warships. The deal represents the biggest peacetime building programme in Australian naval history and is worth $35 billion, or £20 billion.  No, that can't be true either.  Britain is in a mess.  It must all be fake news....

Increasing taxation increases austerity for normal people.

Ending austerity?  Well it appears more and more that increasing taxation is the way to stop austerity.  Yes, tax everyone to allow the government to have more money.  Austerity on the government purse will end.    

But hang on a moment, if you take money away from Mr or Mrs Average, that will mean they will actually be poorer.  So the government may have less austerity.  But the people who pay for it will be poorer, hence living in greater austerity.  Funny old world isn’t it.

We already have a deal on the table. It's called WTO.

James McGrory from pressure group Open Britain, said there should be "a choice between leaving with the deal that the government negotiates, or staying in the European Union". 

Sorry, James, it might have escaped you but that vote has already happened.  No matter the deal, we're leaving the EU. 

Anyhow, as anyone who understands business knows, and this is where Gina Millars involvement in Open Britain surprises me because she does understand, we won’t be leaving without a deal.  WTO is already on the table.   

That is the deal we will leave with if the EU continue to refuse to negotiate in good faith. The only question is, if the EU does come up with a deal, will be the deal be better than what we get already from WTO.  If not, no deal with the EU.  It’s not as if we won’t continue trading with EU nations as Remainers try to assert. We will continue to trade, from day one. They can’t stop us. It will just be on WTO rules which 50% of UK international trade already operates under.  Our businesses are well used to trading globally under WTO.

Airbus

So Airbus threatens to stop dealing with the UK after we leave the EU. Hang on a minute.  Is this the same Airbus that has a factory in the USA and since 1990, has spent some $200 billion dollars with hundreds of U.S. suppliers – $48 billion in the last three years alone.    I don’t recall the USA being in the EU.

Airbus opened its first commercial aircraft production site in the United States in 2015.  The U.S. Manufacturing Facility, in Mobile, Alabama, produces A319s, A320s and A321s.  Not only that, Airbus has identified global sourcing as one of its long-term objectives and aims to source 40% outside Western Europe and the U.S. by 2020. 

So the stories about Brexit are laughable at best, or at worst, deliberate industrial sabotage by Remainers.

Where is your ambition?

You know, the longer it goes on, the more scare stories that are produced, the more utterly ridiculous forecasts that are made, it all leaves me sadly coming to conclusion that the most vocal Remainers are people without talent, who cannot do anything for themselves or others.    

For example they think our laws are better made by people we don’t elect, namely the four arms of the European Empire, that is the European Commission, the European Council, the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice of the European Union.  

As a reminder, the facts are, the European Union makes two thirds of UK law if we count EU regulations which, according to the treaties we have signed over the years, we must implement as part of 'UK law'.While it is true EU direct influence on UK-only laws is about 13%, the reality is there is an additional 52% of laws we have to obey that are EU wide and not UK specific.   

So it’s pretty disconcerting that as much as 13%, or indeed any laws or regulations that are UK only laws, should be set by people we have no power to vote out of office.  That certainly is not democratic.   

As Joshua Rozenberg noted back in 2013, a decision by the Employment Appeal Tribunal shows that EU law will trump laws passed by parliament.  The ruling demonstrates once again that EU law trumps laws passed by parliament. Despite all the attention paid to human rights law, EU law is much more powerful. 

But back to Remainers. They seem to believe we won't, as an independent nation, have the wit nor will nor ambition to improve our standard of living, to improve our environmental standards beyond the EU one size fits all belief, or produce better law.   

Where is their self-motivation?  Why do they believe we have to depend on others?   Why do they seriously believe we will be worse off in the medium long term freed from the EU?  

The EU will go down in history as an empire that lasted barely a few generations.  And like most empires that collapse, the root will be they left the people behind because they, the ones at the top, thought they knew best.

Back in Paris in 1849 in Les Guêpes, the Private Eye of its time, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr remarked, with rather bitter wit, “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”.   How true.

It's Anarchy in the UK.

So, another day, another group of non-democrats.  This time a grassroots group of Jeremy Corbyn supporters and trade unions is to launch a major UK speaking tour, billed as the left-wing campaign to remain in the UK.   The Left Against Brexit tour will attempt to persuade Corbyn and his allies of the left-wing case for a pro-EU position and will argue that the party can reap electoral benefits from a shift.     

Maybe they haven't noticed but the time for people to persuade others has passed.  There was ample time before the referendum.  And even with the resources of Government, the EU, and all the pro EU organisations like the CBI, they still could not persuade the people of the UK of its case.  They tried to persuade a majority of their view.  And they failed.   And they didn’t like the answer the people gave.   

What bit of democracy don't these people get?   

Add to the mix the extremists the other side of the left vs right divide, people like George Soros and Nick Clegg and MPs like Kenneth Clarke and Anna Soubry, and it is quite a cast.   

If these people do get their way, we will have kissed goodbye to democracy.  What is the point in voting if the people who have the power simply ignore the will of the people as given in a democratic vote all sides said they would accept. One could argue that they have already, by their actions, introduced anarchy in the UK.  Want to know what that looks like?