The overreaction of the currency markets and the Bank of England to the latest UK economic figures represent the first 2020 Remain savagery of the British Establishment’s pack of dogs against the little fox called Brexit. Boris is in turn displaying zero sign of a tough attitude to the EU foot-draggers, and the dictatorial arrogance of Brussels has within it a powerful sense of déjà-vu. Yet Brexiteers remain complacently optimistic. Will they never learn?
Some of you may have seen Will Hutton sounding off in The Observer at the weekend about how ghastly Brexit is and what utter disaster awaits us. He went onto Twitter yesterday to affirm his insistence that he and his kind “will never give up” and no matter how long it takes, Britain will return to the EU fold.
I used to know Will quite well. By ‘his kind’, I mean the privately educated socialist metroélite who know nothing of ordinary people beyond the Magnetropolis…and have absolutely no contrition or rethink motivation no matter how many times they are proved wrong.
Will was wrong about the euro in 2004, he was wrong about the reform that would “surely follow” the 2008 banking crisis, wrong about the global economy in 2013, wrong about the election result in 2015, wrong about Trump’s chances, and wrong about the referendum result. He remains, I’m afraid, the archetype of high IQ and zero wisdom.
Unfortunately, he is also a class A for Antidemocrat, not giving a moment’s thought to the fact that both a referendum and now a General Election have made clear that the People want to leave an equally antidemocratic, corrupt, illiberal, financially bankrupt, economically decadent and corporacratically federalist trading area with no sovereignty to back up its commercial incontinence.
Will rightly lambasted the bankers in 2008 (although I predicted what would happen before he did) but fails to see that, in being a Remoanoid ignoramus, he is in bed with the central bankers, all of whom want Brexit to fail. But then, like all Liblefts, cognitive dissonance is his way of life…and it moves in mysterious ways.
Our own central bank – still for a month or two under the scheming control of Mark Carney – is probably the worst of the lot. It seized the chance to grasp with glee one set of data about UK economic output yesterday, as a result of which Sterling slipped below 1.30 to the Dollar….and one by one his acolytes on the monetary committee rentagobbed their way into every medium they could find. Predictably, it was Gloom City.
Carney has form in this area, having rashly raised rates and predicted all kinds of Armageddon after the 2016 vote to Leave. None of it – none of it – came to pass. Now he is overreacting to one month’s data released by the ONS yesterday, which revealed that the economy had contracted ‘by more than expected’ in November. More than expected? Not in this house: it was a month of political tomfoolery and coups d’état that left business reticent – especially in the light of overwhelming evidence from the US that the Trump boom is at best a squib and most likely a myth. Expecting anything more than we got was dumb, period.
The ONS numbers in fact show that output shrank by 0.3% in November, and that economic growth was thus 0.9% year on year. Not great, but here too The Glums need to get a grip. Under May, Britain made an ass of itself with the EU and, thanks to Remainer drivel, became something of a global laughing-stock. Then a bloke of whom we are all wary (and the international neocon media dismissed as a clown) became Prime Minister – only to face a bent Speaker and a bent Judiciary doing everything to tie his shoelaces together. This is not the stuff that produces confident business sectors.
In turn, there are a number of health warnings applicable to the data – which, naturally, have been largely ignored. No real judgement can be made until a full month of post-election data has been collected…..and as that won’t be available until early February, the Bank of England would be sensible (it its own monetarist context) to leave rates unchanged at the January MPC meeting.
But the BoE gnomes clearly aren’t in the mood to be sensible. Last week, two members of the MPC said BoJo’s withdrawal deal was appalling (they’re right, but is public political speculation part of their remit?) and over the weekend two more said a trade deal by December 31st 2020 was impossible.
How would they know that? Their view is based on an untrustworthy bunch of mobsters in Brussels desperate to hang on to Cash Cow Britain for as long as possible. And their assumption is we won’t leave without a deal. One can see yet another narrative being constructed here: by April, Labour fluffies like Yvette Cooper will be insisting that “everyone knows” a deal can’t be done by the end of the year.
But Carney the meddler is determined to have his swansong.
“With the relatively limited space to cut the bank rate, if evidence builds that the weakness in activity could persist, risk management considerations would favour a relatively prompt response,” said Carney – viz, an interest rate cut on January 30th “with perhaps consideration given to further QE”.
It’s just rank bad management. Time to look at the bigger game in play. Again.
The naivety of the Brexiteer Column continues to be by far its biggest weakness. If all we had to fight against was Will Hutton, there would indeed be grounds for confidence. But I must ask all genuine Leavers to pause from their triumphalism and face the facts that have been with us since June 23rd 2016.
The media are overwhelmingly anti-Brexit. The Supreme Court loathes the very idea of it. A majority of MPs would still like to see it go away. The only reason, even today, the Prime Minister is keeping the Tories together is that they see WA2 for what it is: Brino – the softest of soft Brexits, with EIB debt liabilities hidden inside the kid glove.
Whitehall is quickly recovering from its gloom, and working on new ways to miss every possible deadline. Brussels is still dictating the format and content of trade negotiations, openly defying and rubbishing Boris Johnson’s declared timings…..to which he is (highly suspiciously) not responding. The Security Services don’t want anything to weaken NATO – and their top spook Sir Mark Sedwill remains in place, a unique figure in our Constitutional history in that he also runs Whitehall and the Cabinet Office.
The central bankers don’t want anything that gets in the way of their hegemenic wet dreams, the EU is still pouring illegitimate funds (along with their pal George Soros) into the support of any and all Anti-Brexit Fifth Columns in the UK, and the nonstop Blairite organisation of fake fear remains as strong as ever.
The only thing about which Will Hutton has ever been right is that the blocist Remainers will never give up. Neither will the Scots.
Nigel Farage clearly doesn’t want any more political rebirths, an outcome I’d heartily welcome if I believed it. Farage has been an inspiration for freedom from remote control, but as a political strategist he is a serial failure – all promise, no goals, daft forecasts and then kopouts to donors. I really do wish now he’d just piss off and leave the realists to run things.
Yet every day on social media, the Leave optimism seems to be a bottomless ocean. So I’d like now to ask them four consciously aggressive questions:
- Who is on the British trade deal negotiating team? Do you know? I don’t.
- Why is BoJo ignoring the Tsunami of Brussels insistence – already in January – that a trade deal can’t be worked out in the remaining 351 days of 2020?
- Do you know what the EIB is, how much money we’ll be on the line for when the euro goes mammories skywards, and how long our liabilities will last?
- What is the basis, given his behaviour thus far, for your confidence that if push comes to shove, Boris will leave without a deal if necessary?
I think nine out of ten of those yelling from the Twitter rooftops don’t know any of the answers to my little exam.
So why not give Twitter a rest for a day or two, and put those questions into Firefox or DuckDuckGo? (You stand a better chance of getting straight answers there than on Chrome or Yahoo)
And whatever you do, don’t raise the questions on Facebook, or the Zuckerberg goblins will take it down.
Please. People. Wake. Up.
The Slog 