When in a hole CBI, stop digging.

Remember Carolyn Fairbairn? Only a few months ago the Director General of the Confederation of British Industry announced that only 4% of her Membership were ready for the so called no deal BREXIT.  Three years to prepare yet 96% are not ready.  What an admission.   

Considering the Bank of England reckoned that 80% of UK businesses are ready to leave with the WTO alternative, she sounded a bit out of tune.  

But one thing you have to admire her for is perseverance.  Yesterday it was reported that she sent a letter to all MPs standing for the Conservative Party leadership outlining her views that a no-deal scenario would do "severe" damage to businesses.   And they are her views as not all Members of the CBI agree with them. 

She warned them that smaller companies cannot afford the necessary preparations for leaving without a plan.  

Three points.  One, CBI don’t represent smaller businesses.  Try the FSB for that, the clue is in the name.   

And second, as Mark Carney admitted earlier this year, 80% of business are ready to leave on WTO rules.   

That leads to the third point, and that is the implication that the CBI seem to be unable to grasp is there is no such thing as a cliff edge, just an alternative to the deal the EU are forcing upon us.  

When the biggest manufacture of hole diggers, JCB, decided to up sticks (or should that be digger buckets) and leave the CBI 'over its Brexit stance, Ms Fairbairn never understood the irony of JCB leaving and the the old adage, when in a hole, stop digging.

What's a porkie pie between friends?

Did Ms Sturgeon tell one in 2014?  Is it right to tell the people one thing one year and think it is ok to say the opposite two years later?  That's for you, dear reader, to decide.  

However, if we look at President of the European Commission, Mr Jean-Claude Juncker, a man that Ms Sturgeon seems to be in enthral to, has never hidden his view that the compromises and deals being worked out in EU meetings or leaders or ministers need be protected from public scrutiny, by lies if necessary. 

"When it becomes serious, you have to lie" he said .    

On another occasion he said of the euro's introduction.: "We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.". 

Welcome to the European Union.

Define a generation.

I seem to remember Ms Sturgeon saying that the September 2014 referendum in Scotland was a "once in a generation event". "This probably is a once in a life time opportunity for Scotland".   

Yet only two years later on 13 October 2016 she announced that an Independence Referendum Bill would be published for consultation the following week.   

So did she tell a lie saying it was once in a generation event?  Or was she thinking in terms of the generation of a hamster, not a human?

On which side of the fence is the Chancellor?

One does sometimes wonder about Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Who’s side is he really on?     

The other day he talked about how he might find it difficult support a future Conservative prime minster that opted to leave the EU on an alternative deal to the one the EU have offered us.   

Some candidates have taken the balanced approach and suggested that if the EU chooses not agree to a deal that is less bad than leaving with WTO, then WTO it should be.  That is logical, though hysterical Remainers don’t seem to understand that.   

Anyway, not that everyone thinks that WTO is bad.  Far from it.  But the really odd thing is, Mr Hammond is apparently willing to put aside all logic and vote for something that would visit an even greater economic catastrophe on our nation.

Bizarrely Mr Hammond has refused to rule out voting against his own party in a confidence vote.   

Just think that through for a nano-second.  Our Chancellor, a man who is supposed to know all about finances, is in effect saying that leaving on WTO terms would be more damaging to the economy than a government led by Jeremy Corbyn.   

Is he having a laugh or what?  Or just being a scaremonger like he was at the referendum.  And all his scare stories then were, in the following months, proved to be utterly fanciful.

What this is really all about. A protectionist EU.

Amidst all the stuff about Deal and No Deal, those who don’t accept the democratic process like the Lib Dems are actually very cleverly shifting the narrative.  It’s all about confirmatory votes now.   So soft and cuddly.   

So perhaps we should actually remind ourselves what this is all about.  Why we wanted out of the costly, failing, protectionist bloc that is the EU.    

Austin Mitchell was Labour MP for Great Grimsby between 1977 and 2015.  In an article for BrexitCentral he spelt it out, clear and simple.    

As Mr Mitchell reminds us, once we joined, and particularly after John Major signed the Maastricht Treaty, there was no escape.  We couldn’t trade with other economies, get food on the cheaper world market or give state aid to failing industries and redistribute growth by an effective regional policy.   

Instead we were forced to trade in a protectionist bloc weighted against us, accept whatever cheap labour came in from Eastern Europe and all without help from the EU whose grants are our own money back with their costs taken out.   

That’s the problem. Our political elite likes it as a bigger stage on which to strut. The vested interests want to keep their cosy status quo and business lacks the guts to seize an opportunity. Yet the Brexit vote was largely triggered by the effects of austerity and slower growth on our people. Staying in an unchanged EU would do nothing about either. It seems more likely to increase the alienation which caused the vote in the first place.

Negotiations about what exactly?

Lots of politicians don’t want us to leave the EU without a deal.  Fair point.  I think everyone would prefer a deal.  But a deal about what?   

There are two sides to this.   

The political.  There is really nothing to talk about as far as a deal goes.  The people voted to leave the EU. The EU is a political construct.  Leaving, as Remainers kindly reminded everyone, we would be leaving the Political arm of the EU including the ECJ.  That is what John Major signed us up to in the Maastricht Treaty.  Political union.  So we will become just like any other nation that trades with the EU.  Japan, Australia, Brazil, et al.  None of them allow the EU to dictate law to them.  So why should we if we leave the EU?  So what will any deal be about?   

Well, trade.  Now when we get into trading, no one in their right mind tells the people they are negotiating with what their own fall-back position would be.  If they did, guess what would happen?  Yes, the fall back would be the new starting point for your opposition.  No one in their right mind would do that.  And yet we hear cries from people demanding that we must not leave without a deal and saying what we must agree to.  Well, if you were on the other side of the negations, what would you do?  

Answers on a post card….

Just a reminder what the Lib Dems believed under Paddy Ashdown.

590,947 votes

That’s how many votes the SNP garnered in the EU elections this week.  A snapshot.  And yes, they did indeed get the most votes in Scotland.   

But statistics are an odd thing.  The SNP's total haul in the EU election is still half the number that voted Leave in the EU referendum.   I know, I'm juggling numbers.

Mind you, Ms Sturgeon is pretty useful at juggling numbers herself.  She keeps telling us Scotland voted to stay in the EU.  Well, on closer inspection it turns out not quite the whole of Scotland voted Remain.  Indeed, 38% of Scotland voted Leave. That is quite a chunk of the electorate that voted.  That was a total of 1,018,322 souls who voted to Leave the EU.  Hardly “Scotland voted to Leave”.

So, what of the last General Election?  Well, only 977,569 voted for Nicola and her SNP.   And yes, you are sharp eyed and you’ve noticed that her polling at the General Election was also less than the number of people who voted to Leave the EU in Scotland.  

You can't swing both ways Nicola. As Paddy said, "you either believe in democracy or you do not".

Simple.

It really was simple.   Mrs May had a mandate for the UK to leave the EU.  

She also knew what people had voted for because Cameron, Brown, Clegg and Osborne told us when we were voting what exactly we were voting for.  They told us if we voted Leave we would leave the single market, the customs union, the rule of the ECJ.   

So if Remainers were telling us that, we knew that is exactly what was being voted for.   Yet Mrs May contrived to lose it all and surrender all to the EU.   

Any new leader needs to go back to the mandate the people gave parliament.   

Leave does indeed mean leave.

Gallant? Not Junker.

Thanks, Mr Junker, for sticking the knife into Mrs May and her clearly stated love of her country. 

Not the most gallant thing to do was it?  No wonder we want to leave with people like that at the EU’s helm.

Propaganda. Pure and simple.

So there we have it, almost 3 years after the people of the UK voted to leave the European Union, we’re still in it.  Why?  Well, from where I’m sitting, there are a number of reasons.  But as I think it is becoming increasingly obvious the real reason is Mrs May never wanted us to leave.  Why else would she be trying to construct a deal that keeps us in the EU.   BRexit In Name Only.  BRINO.   

And it has meant we have arrived at the farcical stage where we are going to have to go through the charade of having elections to the European Parliament.  How ludicrous is that?   And it’s all because people have not accepted that we voted to Leave the European Union.  The simple question on the ballot paper.  

So it was interesting to take a look at what the European Union are doing as we fail to do anything.   Their PR unit is working flat out with their message of what they think the EU is.  At least they are consistent. This quite remarkable video is one of the products from their legendary and fearsome PR unit.  All soft and fluffy masking the true cold calculating nature of the EU.  With this kind for propaganda from the EU brainwashing us and our children, what chance have we got?  Its nasty implication that if you disagree with their project, you are destroying the future of children.  If you disagree you are climate change deniers.  Worse, you are a terrorist.  It's all there in the video.  Very subtly, but it's there.

What wicked tactics the EU are descending to.