A box of your least worst cornflakes, please.

Can you imagine going into your local supermarket and looking for the least worse box of cornflakes?  Or the least worse cut of meat?  Or the least worse cheese?   No, of course you can’t.  Its ludicrous to even think like that.

People will try to sell you their product on how good it is and why it is better than all the others.  That’s why businesses spend millions on advertising campaigns.  To try and persuade you that they are better.    

VW were particularly good at it in their "it sounds like a Golf " adverts.   

So can you tell me why Theresa May's aim seems to be to prove her deal is least worst option?   

Well, of course, we know it’s not her deal, it’s a deal the EU have allowed her to have, but let’s put that aside for a moment.   But as Laura Kuenssberg ponders this morning, “When does determination become delusion?”

The Blame Game.

“Who is to blame for the current situation in Parliament?” asked a young man on BBC Question Time on Thursday night.  While blame shouldn’t be the name of the game, it was interesting to hear people blame Mrs May.   

Well, I think we can agree that Mrs May has not been a leader.  But to blame for everything?  I think not.   

It goes back to John Major who signed the Maastricht Treaty, the treaty that led to political union the EU now has become.  If he hadn’t done that, and remember he did it without a vote of the people of the UK, we wouldn’t be where we are today.   

And what of David Cameron?  If it is true that he deliberately stopped the Civil Service from preparing for the possibility of a Leave vote while the EU were already preparing not for us to leave but also for no Withdrawal Agreement, that is not just immoral, surely it’s criminal. 

Who is in control?

The only difference between what the MPs have done and a military coup is that they used parliamentary procedure rather than guns.  The result is the same.   A government with a democratic mandate tested at the ballot box has, in effect, been removed from power.   

The coup MPs have no democratic legitimacy.

Angela Merkel’s party successor is calling for an EU aircraft carrier.

I wonder where Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, a career politician like many who sit on the green benches of the House of Commons, will get that from?   

Well, let me give you a clue.  If you explore Mrs May’s Withdrawal Agreement that she is desperate to push through the House of Commons, you will get an idea exactly where from.  Her WA does quite the opposite of Withdrawing.  It actually integrates even more. On just about every area of public policy you could think of.

On defence it integrates the current EU thinking that EU defence integration and EU security affiliation should all accelerate.   Mrs Mays WA means we will financially, structurally, industrially, and institutionally, be part of the EUs march towards the EUs longstanding aspiration of a “common defence” policy.   

Indeed, Mrs Mays WA seeks an affiliation, (read this very carefully) as close “as is possible under EU law” (not, note UK law) and, incredibly, UK defence and security would be tied, powerless, under the direction of EU foreign and security policy.   

Mrs Mays deal is not withdrawal and it should be rejected by every single Member of Parliament on defence of the Realm alone.  After all, as Mrs May said in the House of Commons on 20^th April 2016 when she was still Home Secretary, “The first priority of government is the safety and security of its citizens.”   

And current Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said on 25^th January 2018, “Protecting the United Kingdom and our people remains our first priority and responsibility.”   

You can’t do that if you don’t control your own aircraft carrier.

No democrats here.

“Brexit march: Tens of Millions didn’t join Brexit protest, organisers say”.  So proclaimed the BBC on its web site tonight.   

Devoting a staggering amount of photos and words that are way beyond the usual length of an article they went on to describe in detail how 65 million people didn’t go to London to march today.     

Oh, wait a minute; I’ve got that all wrong.  The BBC article was actually proclaiming that apparently 1m Remainers that can’t stomach losing a democratic vote and were on the streets complaining and demanding they get another vote.  

Really, if you wanted evidence of BBC being off the rails, this article just confirmed it.

Ready? Aye Ready!

“Ready or not, here I come”.  How often did we shout these words as a child in our wonderful free creative world as a child?  Hide and seek was a great game.

The BBC played that game last night.  On the news.  With a room of business people in Cardiff.  One of their business reporters was allowed to ask those who were prepared for 'No Deal' to raise their hands.  The BBC reported that not one person did.  Well.  That’s it.  Businesses are not prepared.   

But wait a minute.  Was the sample scientific?  Balanced?   When you dig only a teensy bit deeper you realise there is something rather wrong here.  Why do I say that?  Well, because it bears no reality to the data from a wider survey which showed that “Around 80pc of British businesses believe they are ready for a no deal Brexit as the Bank of England revealed that the economy is accelerating ahead of the UK's scheduled departure from the EU”.   

Indeed, the Bank's survey of businesses found that around two thirds were now implementing contingency plans for a 'No Deal' exit from the EU.    

One very simple question.  Why was the BBC allowed to broadcast such utter nonsense?  

One business leader responded:  “I do business with several EU countries, and it will be completely unaffected.  One bit of paperwork, possibly, but easy-peasy.  But then I'm not a large CBI multi-global with lobbying offices in Brussels, & a multi-billion budget for 'persuading' MEPs to preserve my large business moats and drive off any competition.”   

The BBC is sadly looking more and more like a cheerleader for stopping us leaving the EU.  Perhaps that could be one reason why the quarterly reach of BBC News in the United Kingdom has dropped from 26.17m in Q4 of 2012 down to 16.91m in Q3 of 2108.  People don't trust it any more.

Mrs May fought the law.

What does the Law say?  Well, it’s spelt out pretty clearly in Article 50 that the UK parliament approved.  So, am I the only one who is unclear on whose authority Mr May is speaking in Brussels today?  Parliament voted to enact Article 50.  MPs set the leaving date.  And MPs also voted that there should be no extension.   

So how can she head across the Channel and ask for things that MPs voted the complete opposite of?  And in effect, go against the law of the UK?  Would that not be a criminal offence?

Keep voting till you get it right

Mrs May is an odd fish some times.  I really have lost count of the number of times she has declared at the Despatch Box in the House of Commons that we’ve had a referendum on the EU and it’s not going to be re-run.  And yet…   

And yet here she is saying that there should be a third vote on her “deal” in the Commons.  

In other words, one set of standards when you know that the people have just voted in the biggest turn out in electoral history to vote to Leave the EU.  It wouldn’t be wise to rubbish the democratic vote in public.  

The other set of standards she operates by is using parliament to ram through what is in effect a vote that will see us remaining in the EU we have voted to leave.   

And the classic tactic she is using?  The same one that EU itself uses time and time again.  If you don’t get the vote “right” the first time, do it again.  And again.  Think Ireland being forced to re-run a vote after their rejection of the Lisbon Treaty.  (At least they had the chance to vote, unlike the UK under Gordon Brown).   

Clearly she can’t go out into the country and say “you are all stupid, vote again”.  But by her insistence that parliament has to keep voting to get her desperately flawed proposal through makes her behaviour no better than the EU Commission who clearly have an A+ when it comes to bullying.

MPs must reject bullying at all cost.  Our vote to Leave wasn’t on economics, no matter how much the Remain camp try to frame the debate.  It was and remains all about sovereignty of parliament.  

If MPs vote for Mrs Mays deal, they will be giving it away.  They might as well just give up being an MP.  The UK parliament will have become nothing more than Kenneth Clarke’s wish:  “a Parliament (that) is no more than a council chamber under a greater EU.”

Tempus fugit.

18^th September 2014.   24^th March 2016.  Recall these dates?   

The first one was the date of the legally binding irreversible referendum on Scottish independence.    

The second date is the date the SNP said Scotland would be out of the UK.   

After almost three hundred years of integration, 553 days were all that were needed to un-pick all the trade, parliamentary, legal intricacies of the Act of Union.     

So how depressing of Philip Hammond to announce today that it was now "physically impossible" for the UK to leave the EU on the 29th March.  1,009 days.  Twice as long to leave the EU even though we have been in the EEC / EU for only forty years.   

So what have Mr Hammond and Mrs May been doing if the increasingly hapless Scottish government could do their deal in such short time scale? 

Compromise on what exactly Mrs May? The result of the vote?

Sunday mornings headline on the BBC web site is “Theresa May asks MPs for 'honourable compromise' on Brexit.   Sounds most reasonable.  

But a compromise on what?  Honourable to what?  And what is the need driving a compromise?  

In Today’s Sunday Telegraph she spells it out.  Failure to support her deal would mean "we will not leave the EU for many months, if ever".   

And this is at the heart of the problem.  She seems to be saying we need a compromise of some kind to get her “deal” through, not to honourably deliver what he people of the UK actually voted for, us to leave the EU.   

Should not any agreement revolve around what we voted for?  We voted to leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, the single market and the customs union.  Simple.   

Now, if Mrs May had opened the batting two and a half years ago stating that any withdrawal agreement (let's stop calling it a deal) had to honour these three things the people of the UK had voted for we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in  My goodness, even Ms Gina Miller thinks her “deal” is bad for the UK. 

Prophecy fulfilled

How prophetic was Father of the House, Ken Clarke, when in The International Currency Review, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn 1996 he said “I look forward to the day when Parliament is no more than a council chamber under a greater EU.”   

Last night he got his wish.

We can leave with a deal. Just not the Withdrawal Agreement.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes people use misleading terms to cover up the truth of what they are saying?  Mr Blair's 45 minutes would be a good example.  An element of truth in it.  But totally misleading. Mr Trump is another exponent of it.  I’m sure that today you can come up with similar such tactic whereever you find yourself.  People attaching deliberately misleading labels to things and ideas with which they disagree.    

Last night, not for the first time, in the House of Commons such a tactic was used, with remarkable success.  I lost count of how often it was said that a “no deal” Brexit would be a catastrophe for the nation.  And indeed it would be.  You didn’t need a vote to prove that point.  An element of truth in there.  However, the reality is there is no such thing as a "no deal".  It’s just it won’t be a withdrawal deal with the EU.   

So in effect the 312 who voted to reject a no-deal Brexit under any circumstances were people who, to put it mildly, were rather misled. (Just imagine going into a car showroom and stating what you want for your car before the negotiations have even begun.  The sales person will be laughing their head off at your naivety).  

That these MPs are the people we send to parliament to make our laws is rather concerning to say the least given they have been so easily misled.  It means that Remainers have managed to convince the majority of MPs, and much of the country, that leaving the EU without a withdrawal agreement with the EU amounts to some sort of cliff-edge disaster.    

The truth is if we leave the EU without signing a withdrawal agreement, we shall have a series of mini deals to ensure the uninterrupted continuity of road transport, air transport, existing financial contracts, security cooperation, and so on.  

How do I know that?  Because the EU themselves have already put in place these last few days most of the procedures that would be needed if we leave without a withdrawal agreement.

But you know what the saddest thing is?  It’s that the people you and I have sent to represent us in parliament don’t think they are up to the job and want to continue to offshore the making of the laws we thought we were sending them to Westminster to make.  

Economics of the madhouse.

Average council tax bills in England will increase by 4.5% a year from April.  That’s the news this morning.   

So the councils, because they believe they need more money, simply take it out of other people’s pockets.  And the consequence is people will have less disposable income.  What does that mean?   

Well, like when Derek Mackay and his Scottish Budget the other week, it is very easy.  I have £100.  You take off £40 in tax.  That leaves me £60 to spend on mortgage or rent, rates, utilities, food, clothes, travel to work, mobile phone contract, TV licence, holidays, and the whole host of other things that are essential.  If you have set your budget to do all these things and the local authority comes along and takes away another £5, what are you going to have to cut?  You won’t have an alternative.  Simples!

Governments (national and local) are very good at spending other people’s money.  Not always wisely as can been seen all too frequently.   The result of governments taking more of your money will be less money to send in shops.  Shops will have less income.  Staff will be laid off. They will be unemployed and reliant on the tax payer to fund them.   That is how the economy works.  The productive sector pays for the non productive sector to operate (ie, everyone who works in it from nurses, teachers, police, the people who keep our roads running, et al,) and all the things it wishes to spend money on in what the perceive is the pubic good.

This English tax hike announcement comes a few days after the afore mentioned “Scottish chancellor” Derek Mackay suggested Scotland’s £13 billion deficit could be brought under control within a few years of independence.  How would they do that?  The same as above. Use other peoples money.  As Murdo Fraser, Scottish Conservative finance spokesman pointed out, the idea that a £13 billion deficit could be halved within a few years without austerity was “absurd”.   He is right.  There are only three options available in Mr Mackay's armoury.  1.  Unprecedented cuts to public services. 2. Higher taxes.  3.  More borrowing.  Mr Mackay will be good at 2 and 3.  

The blame game.

It is well underway.  But for me, if anyone is to blame for the mess we are in in relation to leaving the EU it is those who have sought to visit upon the people of the UK something they voted against in 2016.     

If we had been voting to join the EU it would have been simple.  We would have been joining the jurisdiction on the ECJ, the single market, the customs union, et al.     

So a vote to leave the EU was a vote to leave all of these.

If Mrs May had come forward with a proposal that simply removed us from these conditions we would be well out by now.   Most nations in the world are very happily trading with the EU without the political shackles.  And its these shackles that we voted to leave.    

“People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both. If we restrict liberty to attain security we will lose them both. Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”  Benjamin Franklin