Fire them!

Don’t know about you but I’m fed up with people saying we need more time for businesses to get ready for the end the year when we will finally have left the EU and all its controls.  What have these business leaders been doing for the last four and half years?     

A writer to the Letters Page of the Daily Telegraph hit it on the head.   

“SIR – I am the CEO of a small-to-medium enterprise that trades almost entirely in Europe.  A hard Brexit holds no fears for us.  Indeed, our market share in Europe continues to expand month by month.  So I was astounded by the insipid helplessness of other CEOs (“What would a no-deal Brexit mean for business?”, telegraph.co.uk, December 11).    

Here’s my advice to shareholders. 

Fire your CEO and the board if they haven’t already configured the business for a hard Brexit.    

Fire them if they only offer products and services that are so unremarkable that they can’t withstand ordinary World Trade Organisation tariffs.   

Fire them if they haven’t already developed plans for new markets and found new and better sources of materials to import.   

Fire them if they can’t run a business except in a heavily protected market.    

Fire them for still whinging four years after the vote to leave the EU.”   

I couldn’t agree with John Palmer of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire more.   

Are businesses ready to leave the European Union?   You bet they are.   To see an example of a sensible company, have a look at what I wrote about one last year on Monday 12^th of August 2019.  

Kick down the doors.

After Wednesday evenings dinner in Brussels, the agenda for which would have been an insult to any other nations elected leader, with the UK being told that they would have to follow EU law even though they have left the Community (such a non-threatening word is it not), one wonders if a different tactic is required.   

Perhaps it would be more productive if UK pro EU business leaders, politicians and much of mainstream media that have disgracefully and actively sought to undermine the democratic wishes of the people of the United Kingdom for 5 years, rather than ramping up Project Fear again, went and kicked down the doors of the European Commission and demand that they respect the UK as a sovereign nation?  

Think that will happen?  Me neither.

Doc Martin. Right diagnosis. Wrong solution. Just like for Covid-19.

Remember the series?  Or in particular do you remember the episode when Louisa went for interview for the head teacher post.  She was already a teacher in the school.   (Spoiler, she got it).     

There is an outbreak of a highly contagious skin infection at the school and Martin is initially confounded, until his brilliant diagnostic skills uncover the source.  And his solution?  Apart from the medical treatment, lockdown.  At the interview Louisa was accused of not following Doc Martins advice which was to stop the children coming to school.  She was encouraging people to break the lockdown as it were.  You can watch the whole episode here.    

I could not help thinking that this programme, recorded in 2005, should have been essential viewing for the prime minister, the Scottish first minister et al  before they took the mad decision to virtually bankrupt the UK by going into lockdown.   

Doc Martin (think of him as the current SAGE advisors to the government) said it had to be lockdown.     

Louisa, (think of her as the kind of people the establishment regard as a bit of a loose cannon), argued that half the children had their parents working, and they needed to work to put bread on the table.    

The establishment, (read that as most people working in the taxpayer funded public sector with the notable exception of those on the real front line: nurses, doctors, and all the other essential hospital staff), sniffed at that as an excuse to allow the children into the school to be taught when they really knew better as the establishment that the childen should be in lockdown.  

We ended up with an incandescent Louisa telling the interview panel that she wasn’t going to let her pupils suffer and had ensured that each child who was infected was securely isolated in the school and, in that isolation, continued to be taught.  It was quite a performance.    

So why, when it was obvious to a humble primary school teacher in a soap opera set in beautiful Cornwall in 2005 that lockdown of everyone is the wrong answer, have we arrived at the insane situation of billions of pounds being wasted and lives and businesses (yip, the ones that paid the taxes that pays for the public sector) ruined by doing the complete opposite to what Louisa did?