Everyone knows
Nestling on the shores of Lake Geneva the World Trade Association is quietly getting on with its work, despite the worst efforts of Donald Trump.
Its research is first rate and people still pay attention to that, or at least they should. Because it has found the secret to the UK’s miserable economic performance.
Its latest finding is that the contribution that trade makes to UK growth has “stagnated” because of persistent underperformance and that the UK’s exports are 17% below where they were before Covid.
The government admits that it shares that assessment, including the bit about how the UK must boost trade to improve growth.
But at the same time it is cutting trade promotion staff and the Chancellor is trying to finalise a Gulf Trade deal.
Well, the answer is a bit closer to home, it is 22 miles from Dover, as the WTO makes clear Brexit is the major cause of this appallingly damaging slump in UK trade and investment and growth.
Unfortunately the UK’s trade minister claims that although the UK will do all it can to improve trade with the EU, that has to be done within its own “red lines”, which includes never joining the Single Market.
And that is it really.
Everyone can tell you exactly what the UK’s problems are and the obvious solution, the government knows only too well what is wrong and the solution and remember Brexit was sold to us all with the lie that we could remain in the Single Market.
And still we can do nothing about it.
No serious government, with the best interests of its citizens and country at heart can continue like this. The lost growth, prosperity and revenue are bad enough but deliberately pushing a policy that is and must fail and which you know must fail is madness.
This Labour government, nor any other government can solve the country’s problems with policies that it knows full well are destroying its potential to grow.
Unless this doom loop can be broken, we and every government of whatever hue is screwed.
And everyone knows it.
From Jonty Bloom Media Ltd
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
Indeed. Many of us knew we should not leave. Many of us know we should not have left. Many of us know we should have rejoined at the earliest opportunity, and still should. To pretend otherwise is madness.
Sorry to have to repeat this, but for as long there are politicians and public who do as news media editors and proprietors direct, there will be no way out of it.
It's deluded to pretend that politicians aren't terrified of what the news media say, and how they frame everything. Even the slightest whisper that the UK might rejoin the EU Single Market will provoke hysterical news headlines about "betrayal", and "the will of the people" being ignored.
It will only end when the madness of the UK's self-appointed, unelected "voice of the people" is confronted and held accountable.
Anyone remember Lord Leveson?
If I may paraphrase Karl Popper:
"Unlimited freedom leads to its opposite because it allows the strong to enslave the weak".
In real life in the UK, the almost unrestrained freedom of the press is enslaving the public.