Bureaucrats in Brussels have cooked up a bitter pill for Britain to swallow in the negotiations over Brexit. But Britain really does hold all the cards – if it stirs a brew of its own. Plan B is the tax reform that would enable Britain to walk away from the EU and expand its home market by much more than it would lose if all trade with Europe ceased.
Archive | UK Economy
Britain needs Plan B: Beyond Brexit
THE EU’s Brexit negotiators will try to squeeze the UK into a dangerous corner, when Prime Minister Theresa May invokes Article 50 in March. Talks on the terms for withdrawing from the European Union will not go smoothly. There is no goodwill within the EU for a member that blazes the exit trail: too many people across the continent want their countries to embark on a similar course. So the UK must be damaged: relationships between the two must be rendered painful, no matter what the cost to Europe’s struggling economy.
EU referendum 1: The Risks of Remaining a Member
Prime Minister David Cameron claims that Britain would be “safer, stronger and better off” inside the European Union. This is a false prospectus which should be exposed before people vote in their referendum on June 23. Let’s look at one argument in favour of quitting a union that wants to become a political super-state. The […]
Osborne’s Legacy: The Ladder of Despair
George Osborne is selling the Conservative Party as saviour of the British economy. And yet, his swansong as Chancellor of the Exchequer was a catalogue of disasters that smooth the way for the Crash of 2019. In his budget speech on March 18, Osborne made sweeping claims. Every one of them will be falsified over […]
The World War has Begun
In a speech in Buenos Aires last May I warned that we were heading for a world war. Fanciful? Alarmist? According to Andrew Haldane, a top director at the Bank of England, world war had already begun. He told the BBC on December 3 that the British economy had endured a battering that was “as […]
We’re All Taken for a Ride
Heaven forbid that I should excuse bankers who corruptly exploited the property boom, but let’s get the whole bizarre story in perspective. Bailing-out the banks is no different from bailing-out the people who are excluded from their rightful access to employment. Such bail-outs are the price that our pathological culture – the one we inherited […]
Who Runs the Asylum?
Four years into a depression and the politicians and their advisors are still running in circles. The Financial Times complains that there has been no satisfactory inquest into the way the West locked itself into the crisis from which governments are unable to escape. But now, in Britain at least, the knives are out… The […]
Who Are the Predators?
The leader of Britain’s political opposition, Ed Miliband, now talks of the conflict between “predators” and “producers”. At a press conference he was repeatedly challenged to elaborate on the meaning of those words. He failed to give definitions: an example of why government policy-making is in chaos – not just in the UK, but in […]
Lying – or Just Gobbledy-gook?
Nick Clegg is an honest man. We can accept that he believes what he says. But that does not mean he knows what he’s talking about. His strictures on the British economy are pure gobbledy-gook. But he might as well be lying, because the outcome is the same: people are deceived and the nation suffers. […]
Don’t Call it a Conspiracy!
All is not what it seems. Sometimes that’s because the powers-that-be conspire to withhold information. Rarely does a Wikileaks come along to spill the beans. But then there are those cases which are very much like a conspiracy, but need to be treated as if they were conspiracies. The depression in the western economy is […]