JOBS RUSH TO IRELAND

The Irish Times (HERE) carries a report that Stephen Kelly, chief executive of campaigning organisation Manufacturing Northern Ireland, has told a House of Commons committee that UK companies were registering in Ireland as hedges “against worst-case scenarios, if they develop”.

He claims 100,000 UK companies have registered entities in Ireland since the Brexit vote, some beginning at 8:00 am on the 24th June. This is not jobs but companies. How many jobs might be lost is anybody's guess.

Prosper like never before!

IRISH UNIFICATION AS PART OF BREXIT?

The Irish PM Enda Kenny has proposed that Irish unification be considered as part of any Brexit negotiation (HERE). How the DUP, who funded the leave campaign are taking this I don't know but it adds to the complexity of the negotiations and will obviously be the beginning of a break-up of the UK.

No doubt some of the Brexiteers will welcome getting shut of the troubled province but I would be very sad to see it go.

THE TELEGRAPH'S ROSE TINTED SPECS

The Telegraph (HERE) has a piece this week claiming the UK economy is firing on all cylinders as signs of more balanced growth emerge. It's true the economy has held up well over the past few months but inflation is creeping up and labour shortages are appearing. I am certain it is just a matter of time before it all begins to go south. 

When it does I'll remind The Telegraph what it said.

POST BREXIT PENSION ISSUES

A report in The Telegraph (HERE) claims that the pension age will have to be increased to the perhaps 75 to cope with the effects of brexit on immigration. Because there will be fewer people of working age it follows there will be a higher proportion of people in retirement. The government will be faced with the choice of increasing taxes, reducing the amount of the state pension or increasing the retirement age.

All those leavers who are mid fifties now will no doubt think it's all a bit of scaremongering. That's of course if they think at all.

The effects are already being felt in the labour market according to this report in The Independent (HERE) which says a drop in EU workers is contributing to shortages in filling both skilled and unskilled jobs. Others think that Brexit will result in a vanishingly small reduction in EU workers (HERE) and this is the governments dilemma. Cut immigration too much and the economy is badly hit, too little and leavers will not be pleased.

Personally, I've always thought that Brexit will be a vast expense to stop about 50,000 people a year coming here - that's about 0.007% of the population.

AND NOW THE BILLS START TO COME IN

Michel Barnier, the EU's chief negotiator is set to present the UK with a bill for 49 billion euros as our contribution to commitments entered into during membership (HERE). In other reports he is said to have a formula rather than an actual figure but I assume this is the figure his formula produces at the moment.

It is also claimed that this sum must be negotiated and agreed before talks can begin on our future relationship with the EU. There will be enormous pressure on David Davis from Brexiteers to pay nothing and from industry to pay whatever is needed to secure tariff free access for as much of our exports as possible.

FALSE £350 MILLION PER WEEK CLAIM WON THE REFERENDUM

Dominic Cummins, one of the "masterminds" behind the leave campaign has written a piece for The Independent (HERE) where he claims the £350m a week figure swung the result in their favour. This doesn't surprise me but it has many people up in arms.

It is shocking that a claim which leave insisted was accurate although all mention of it is now forgotten and Nigel Farage has admitted he thought it was a mistake is now said to have been decisive in winning the referendum. 

WITHDRAWAL BILL PASSES FIRST HURDLE

The EU (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill 2017 looks very likely to pass through the HoC today without any modifications (HERE) and will soon go to The Lords.  I have written to many of the Lords to ask that they try to amend the bill to give parliament more control at the end.

Mrs May wants to trigger Article 50 by March 9th at a European Summit and it seems she may well achieve this aim.  I do not expect the Lords to stop the bill altogether since this would likely bring on a general election and probably spark the demise of the upper chamber in double quick time.

However, I hope they may be able to delay matters. The economic impacts are beginning to be felt and I think if we can string things out a bit some of the lies put about by the leave campaign will be seen for what they were.

ARTICLE 127 LEGAL CHALLENGE FAILS

The legal challenge to the government's plan to pull us out of the single market (HERE) has failed at the first hurdle, being thrown out by the High Court (HERE).

I assume that is the end of that. What a pity.

WHITE PAPER PUBLISHED

The white paper promised by Theresa May has been published. The final version was signed off at 4:17 am on Thursday morning so all the signs of a rush job and apparently still containing typos and errors. You can see the document HERE for what it's worth. It really doesn't tell us anything new.

ANOTHER RIDICULOUS REASON FOR VOTING LEAVE

This article (HERE) demonstrates the massive variation in the reasoning behind the leave vote. The writer, a third generation immigrant from India, wants to cut immigration from Europe but increase it from the rest of the world, presumably from India. I am not sure how this would be received in some parts of the country that voted to leave to reduce immigration.

There is an almighty row coming up between those who voted leave to "control" immigration and those wanting to "reduce" immigration. For control read the same numbers but from different parts of the world. However, this is not the reason the article caught my eye. The final sentence is incredible to me. The writer claims Brexit is about making a Britain that is fair on immigration, trades globally and is outward looking. What on earth does she think we are at the moment?

We can take as many immigrants from outside the EU as we wish. We already trade globally but not as much as Germany does from inside the EU. And surely we are one of, if not the most outward looking country I know. So, we are already or could become all the things she dreams of inside the EU. She has voted for the most divisive, costly and damaging break up with decades of problems ahead to achieve the status quo!

SIR IVAN ROGERS

Sir Ivan Rogers has been giving evidence to the European Scrutiny Committee (HERE). One MP Richard Drax (HERE) asked if the EU was genuine and reasonable in asking for 40-60 billion euro as an exit fee. Sir Ivan assured him it was both. He also said lawyers on both sides would come to different conclusions on the amount and implied that this would be probably settled by a political decision - otherwise the ECJ would presumably become involved.

Mr Drax wanted to know why the EU couldn't be reasonable and do what is in the best interests of the hundreds of millions of European citizens. I felt like shouting it was for the same reason the UK voted to leave, because people are not always or even mostly rational.

Kate Hoey asked what would happen if pay it and was told that would end the negotiations and result in no deal but did not seem unduly worried about falling back on WTO rules.

Sir Bill Cash, the chairman, seems not to grasp any details at all and struggled to understand what "access" to the single market meant! He referred several times to "white papers" published before the vote when none were published, just details of the likely result and what alternatives to membership were available. They were not white papers. He complained about documents coming through from the EU that were two inches thick suggesting he just could not be bothered to read any of it to see if it was good or not.

He heard that the Canadian and South Korean trade deals amounted to one and a half thousand pages but we're not as deep and comprehensive as ours are likely to be. I assume he is happy about this because he will not have to write or read it!

In the end it was not Sir Ivan's performance that was rivetting but that of the committee members who looked totally out of their depth, especially the leavers. All of the questions were ones that could and SHOULD have been asked BEFORE the vote. Instead they all urged voters to vote leave without knowing what it actually meant. As for Bill Cash, unless everything is served up in simple writing or pictures it looks like it's way beyond his mental faculties.

What a disaster.

GERMANY - AN ECONOMY TO EMULATE

George Osborne set a target of increasing our exports to £1.0 trillion by 2020, a figure that has been abandoned by the new Department for International Trade (HERE).

Bear in mind we export about £480 bn (2014 figures) compared to Germany which exports about £1.2 trillion. I am not surprised we have given up. Germany produces excellent products that are more often than not the best available. Buyers beat a path to the door of German companies. We have very few equivalent world leading manufacturers.

The Germans have an advantage. They have some of the best minds in engineering but also a huge and extremely loyal home market. Germans buy German. This gives them a good base from which to develop class leading products. It then has the effect of creating a sophisticated market and a virtuous circle. Manufacturers compete fiercely to be the best, leading to more innovative solutions and better products and a more highly developed market, and so on.

This builds up a great deal of interlocking expertise in one place. Years of trade surpluses and long term thinking have given them tremendous investment in automation both in Germany and abroad. Many of the mittelstand own factories in China, North and South America as well as other European countries. For us to match this would take many years - even if we recognised what our problem is. And I see no sign we have even done this yet.

In my experience, UK companies are always keen to source from abroad because home built things are too often not very good either in looks, quality or reliability and sometimes in all three!

TAKING BACK CONTROL - GOD HELP US ALL

Brexiteers bemoan the fact that too many of our laws come from Brussels and shout about taking back control. This is a bit disingenuous, because what they are really saying is let ME have more control. The idea that members of the public will have more control after we leave the EU is faintly ridiculous.

And in any case when we look at what our own politicians are responsible for -roads, railways, the health, education and social care sector it is invariably a mess, some more so than others. Roads are constantly clogged, railways don't run on time or even at all sometimes, the NHS stumbles from crisis to crisis while education produces far too many kids with appallingly low levels of attainment. And social care just keeps on getting worse.  These are all areas where our own leaders have complete control.

Now let us look at the stuff the EU is responsible for. Things like clean rivers and seas that are not polluted by raw sewage. Clean air and cleaner energy. The ability to trade without barriers across an entire continent without restriction and with common standards. Better food hygiene standards and animal welfare. Easy travel throughout the 28 nations that make up the EU. Safer medicines, safer air travel and better consumer rights. The list goes on. Our politicians complain about too may regulations but on the whole they make our lives better. But where UK politicians have control it is almost universally bad.

I have always believed that  it doesn't matter where the laws come from. The only question should be do they contribute to our well being and on that score the EU wins hands down.

WHERE ARE THE LEADERS?

The Brexit secretary, David Davis, speaking in the Withdrawal Bill debate yesterday said that the eyes of the nation were on the chamber and he was right. However, if the people were looking for leadership, I am afraid they didn't find it.

Too many MPs will vote for the bill even though they know it will cause immense damage to this country and future generations. Only Ken Clarke (HERE) on the conservative side said openly he would vote against the bill and in a terrific speech he mocked brexiteers as well as the idea that referendums are a substitute for proper government. Putting incredibly complex issues to the electorate was, he said, rather ridiculous.

Ian Duncan Smith derided the idea that people didn't know what they were voting for in last year's referendum. That he and other brexiteers think this doesn't surprise me. They themselves don't understand the issues. No one of my acquaintance read any part of the government documents setting out the case to remain and as far as I can tell, they all voted on entirely spurious reasons. I think that only a very small number of people really understand the issues, and they are virtually unanimously in favour of remaining.

In the house of commons there is a substantial majority to remain and on the basis that we are unlikely ever to vote for too many irrational people, this is unlikely to change. I hope when the time comes there will be some leaders emerge rather then meekly following the insane brexiteers over the cliff.