EU Referendum


Brexit: necessary but not sufficient


17/06/2018




It's not very often that I actually look at the metrics for EUReferendum.com, and I had settled on the daily reader rate peaking occasionally at around 30,000.

Looking at the statistics yesterday, therefore, I was somewhat surprised to see that visitors recently peaked at well over 100K (before the Financial Times intervention) and we're regularly getting 80-90K, with the average well above 50K. That effectively means that we are seeing in excess of 1.5 million visitors each month.

This, of course, is a testament to our readers and in particular to those who so generously contribute financially to the site, enabling us to keep going. And apart from some very welcome single contributions, our special thanks go to those we have signed up for regular donations. This steady trickle of funding gives me the confidence to continue without having to worry too much about where the next bailiffs are coming from.

The elevated visitor rate also gives us a voice, when otherwise the legacy media and the establishment would have buried us – having done all they could to exclude us from the debate. And I do enjoy the stern ticking-off from the pompous ideologues on Twitter who never miss an opportunity to finger-wag, telling us that, if only we were "nicer" and more conciliatory, people would start listen to us. As I said yesterday, "this isolation is killing us".

What is most ironic of all in this context is that the attention Pete gets on Twitter is usually proportionate to the number of insults he deploys. His serious, well-considered technical posts are studiously ignored by the legions of "mongs" until they feel sufficiently slighted to intervene, repeating that rather unconvincing mantra that they never listen to him because he is so "horrid" – whence his hit-rate soars.

The most interesting development here, though, is readers volunteering new and unusual insults, enabling Pete to keep up the volume without having to repeat himself too often.

Both of us certainly gets to a point when there seems little value in engaging with elements of the self-appointed commentariat, such as Sheila Lawlor, Director at Politeia, "where she directs the economic, education, constitutional, and social policy programmes".

This woman is part of what Pete calls the Brexit blob (pictured), seen recently writing for Conservative Home. There, she asserts that not only could UK-EU trade continue painlessly and with profit to both sides (either under current international trade law without an EU customs union, other arrangements, or association through the EEA) but a "no deal" could also bring the economy a much needed Brexit boost as it reboots after March 2019.

Already, she chirps, "the rules are in place for friction free UK trade with the EU", adding that, "the WTO prohibits members from any discriminatory barriers or action against countries with regulatory convergence" and then that, "most of the world's trade (around 96 per cent) happens under the WTO umbrella with rules that require trade partners to offer most favoured nation (MFN) terms, oblige members to facilitate trade and customs arrangements, and simplify those for land borders".

That she should be writing this sort of tosh, nearly two years after the referendum, allows the inference that the woman is so stupid that it's a wonder she is able to dress herself unaided each morning. Given the sort of stuff I've been writing on the aviation industry and other industrial sectors, this also suggests an alarming degree of insularity – and even arrogance. Of the 100K-plus visitors to this site, Dr Lawlor is quite obviously not one of them.

The sad thing, though, as Booker tells us in his column this week (no paywall), the likes of Lawlor are not alone in their blind complacency that "frictionless" trade is a possibility after Brexit without any special efforts.

Booker has picked this up personally for it was at his behest that I accompanied him to see the "captains of industry" last week, now leading him to write under the headline "Businesses still haven't woken up to the calamity of Theresa May's decision to leave the single market".

If you want a reinforced dose of stupidity, you can also visit the comments on the Telegraph website where there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of "mongs" only too willing to parade their ignorance.

Setting the scene for the less gifted of his readers, Booker notes that there are fewer than two weeks before the European Council at which we were supposed to agree the terms of our EU withdrawal agreement. Yet, he says, while our politicians squabble around in circles without any real clue as to what they are talking about, we still face total deadlock on the Irish border, that original issue on which everything else was meant to depend.

There is some small comfort in the knowledge that "cannier businesses such as Jaguar Land Rover, major pharmaceutical companies and foreign-owned banks have woken up to the implications of Theresa May's decision to exclude ourselves from the regulatory system that allows them to trade in the single market.

Some of those picked up the information early from this blog, getting information that others have spent thousands of pounds in consultancy fees to acquire – later and not in as much detail. But, whatever the source of their information, they are quietly making their dispositions, relocating key parts of their operations to the continent, along with personnel and funding.

But, as Booker and I confirmed last week (adding to indications gained elsewhere), the vast majority of businesses that rely on trade with our largest export market still have no idea of what could soon be hitting them. Booker tells his readers that when we tried to explain the problems to the senior executives of one major company that will be seriously affected, we were airily told, "Oh, this could never happen".

The root of the problem, of course, goes back to the decision by Mrs May, January year last, to extract us from the Single Market. If only she had properly understood what she was letting us in for, Booker says, she could long since instead have applied to join sovereign Norway in the European Free Trade Association and thus remain in the wider European Economic Area.

On the other hand, sectors such as the aerospace industry worth £74 billion a year (EU-wide), including Airbus, may at last be waking up to the devastating consequences of our decision to leave the Single Market.

But, as Booker observes, when the aviation manufacturers' associations, representing 1,000 firms, recently sent an appeal to Michel Barnier, all they could ask for was a special deal to allow them to continue trading with the EU, on terms which Barnier has already made clear the rules could not possibly allow.

What makes all this so terrifying, says Booker, is that 95 percent of this was wholly avoidable. As he has said before, and says again: if only Mrs May had properly understood what she was letting us in for, she could long since instead have applied to join sovereign Norway in the European Free Trade Association and thus remain in the wider European Economic Area (EEA).

Despite those fools who assert that the Efta/EEA option means we haven't properly left the EU, we would be completely outside the political EU and three quarters of its laws; free to make our own trade deals with the rest of the world; and even to exercise selective control over immigration from the EU.

Above all, Booker reminds us, we would have been free to continue trading within the single market much as we do now, and this prospect of an economic catastrophe need never have been bearing down on us.

At least a handful of Labour MPs dimly understood this. But the rest of our politicians, like the chairman of the company we lunched with last week, have remained lost in the wishful thinking that such a disaster "could never happen". As we shall see, it can, and we will have brought it on ourselves.

And that is as far as we get with Booker. As am I, he is acutely aware that the Efta/EEA option is only part of the solution. It is necessary for us to continue trade relations with the EU after Brexit, but it is not sufficient.

EEA participation alone does not solve the regulatory issues in aviation safety, or in a multiplicity of other industries. We will need bolt-on agreements to deal with the other issues, not least VAT cooperation, before we can even start thinking of frictionless trade.

The trouble is that, when people such as Lawlor haven't even mastered the basics, there is not room for discussing the more advanced issues that we are addressing on this blog. The media narrative is permanently locked in at Key Stage One level, a grotesque groundhog day of its own, where the commentariat constantly churn over the same set of factoids, unable to progress to the next stage.

This is where it gets really worrying. The Brexit debate cannot be summed up in a few woolly clichés. The aviation story tells us how complex things really are. If the debate never gets past the soundbites, there is no chance of getting to grips with these complex issues.

Nevertheless, the current level of readership of this blog does give us hope that there is a growing number of people unsatisfied with the fare they are getting from the legacy media and the blob. That legacy media circulation (and web visitors) is declining, while ours increases, tells its own story.