ANDREW MARR - AN OPTIMIST FOR BREXIT

Andrew Marr has written a piece for The New Statesman (HERE) titled An Optimists Guide to Brexit which demonstrates perfectly why journalists should stick to talking about things they know. 

He says we should be optimistic about our future prospects and thinks the government should have a more "direct influence on business and industry generally" something he says "politicians have been talking about since the 1970s, from Harold Wilson to George Osborne, to relatively little effect".

He talks about the "lack of German-style support for industrial manufacturing" and "Some of the measures the left would like to take to support and protect the steel industry, or engineering, or to enhance our growing advantage in robotics, are made impossible not by British Conservatives, but by EU regulations on competitiveness and state funding".

One can only shake one's head at the sheer wrongheadedness of it all. If he thinks Germany's success is all down to government support and that we have a growing advantage in robotics he is truly living on a different planet to the rest of us.  Either he has made it all up which would be bad enough or he's been talking to industrialists who think like that, which would be even worse.  As for the government influencing things - God help us!

BREXIT PROBLEMS COMING

Richard Corbet, a Labour MEP, has written a piece for The Staggers (HERE) about problems arising from brexit that are coming down the line. He calls it the nightmare we will soon be unable to ignore.

The questions he raises are about regulating stuff. He says we rely on all kinds of EU bodies to produce and monitor all sorts of activities and he lists a few of them. European Marine Safety Agency (EMSA), European Air Safety Agency, European Chemicals Agency, European Union Intellectual Property Office and the Patent office and court and the European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency.

He asks if we are going to continue to rely on these agencies (and others) or do we create our own at great expense. And do we copy EU regulation changes or plough our own furrow so that as time goes on we become further and further away from our European friends.  Put in the way Mr Corbet does, it is easy to see the folly of leaving.