Published on 16th May 2025
Daily Express article published on 11th May 2025
The week of 5th May was a big one in the Brexit debate and a big win for the Leavers, in the form of trade deals struck with two of the world’s largest economies, the USA and India.
Of course there will be the suspicion that Starmer and his gang of incompetents will, in their desperation to drum up some good economic news, have given too much away. At the very least they have tried to take 100% of the credit for something that was only 2% of their own doing, the remaining 98% being attributable 90% to the freedoms conferred on us by Brexit and 8% to the lacklustre string of Tory Remainers and Brexiteers-in-name-only who have occupied the seats of power since 2016.
If there are deficiencies in these agreements, the Tories share the blame for them with the no-hopers who are now at the helm.
It may that the UK has to wait four years for someone else to take the controls who can leverage the agreements, make best use of them, and negotiate improvements. Looked at over a longer timeframe these agreements, when added to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (or CPTPP), give UK exporters such a wide geographical area to sell into that, if they fail, then they probably couldn’t sell their way out of a paper bag.
The risks for the UK are all in the short term – until the next General Election in 2029. Starmer and Reeves could still squander the opportunities by their interventions. Were they now to do nothing at all, the UK’s businesses and people could get on with making a success of it. But that is not the way of the ‘active and strategic’ state espoused by Starmer and Reeves, in which left-leaning luminaries decide everything.
Starmer’s EU Reset – now superfluous for the UK economy – could yet undermine the progress made with the rest of the world.
We sit now in a far better position as regards long-term potential. Without Brexit the UK would have been sucked further into the vortex of the euro. Trump’s analysis is fundamentally correct, that the EU – and still more the Eurozone – is a protectionist regime, with high prices and high entry barriers, created by rules and regulations directed by the state and drafted by major EU suppliers. It is not a free market, it is inward-looking, stagnating and drowning in debt.
Why would the UK want to emulate that, or allow its rules and practices to seep any further into what we do here? We already have a trade agreement with the EU and neither side applies tariffs. While Andrew Bailey goes on about the necessity of increasing goods trade with the EU, he conceals that (according to the Labour-loving Resolution Foundation) ‘services industries already account for more than two-thirds of British exports by value added’. The sensible course would be to leave well alone for the time being, but Starmer, not knowing anything about this subject along with almost all other subjects, wants something to wave at his Remoaner back-benchers.
While Starmer concentrates on inflicting financial damage on the UK internationally, Reeves continues to inflict it domestically. The higher Minimum Wage and higher Employer National Insurance Contributions have now kicked in, and we await the first indications of whether these measures have started to close the yawning (and widening) gap between revenues and day-to-day costs, or have driven the private sector of the UK economy further into the dust.
It really would be a tragedy if, just at the moment when a wealth of riches comes tantalisingly within reach, we turn out to have put Sooty and Sweep in charge of our economic and financial management.