Author: johnredwood

How many unemployed young people in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy will it take to get the left to condemn Euro area policies?

How many general unemployed throughout the whole EU will it take to get the left on the streets in protest against EU policies?

Where are the UK left voices against the deep recession the European Exchange Rate mechanism inflicted on the UK, and against the banking and credit policies on the continent which damaged our own economy in the crash of 2008 and the Euro crisis of 2011?

Why does the left support the European semester, the policy which demands tight control of budgets and annual reporting to the EU to try to get all countries to conform to a one size fits all budget deficit regime?

In the UK it appears that any cut, tax rise or anti jobs imposition that comes from the EU is just fine, but any that is made in the UK is immediately blamed for all the  evils in our society. The left rightly condemns any evidence of unemployment or low wages at home, yet seems to accept them or turns a blind eye when the damage comes from the EU.

Where is the left’s solidarity with the unemployed youth of Spain , or all those made redundant in Greece by the austerity cuts, or with those who have had to accept actual pay cuts in Euro countries?

Where are the cries of anger over the walls and fences the EU is creating to keep migrants out, to balance the anger about Mr Trump’s Mexican wall rhetoric?

It appears that many on the left apply a double standard. They condemn anything done or said in the US and UK, that they sign up to and even welcome if it is done in the name of the EU.

Tomorrow at 6.30 pm I am speaking at the OMFIF debate at the Institute of Civil Engineers in Westminster.

On Thursday I am speaking at a Thames Valley business breakfast at Bearwood Lakes at 8 am, and at a public debate in the Willink School Burghfield, at 7pm.

I have recently spoken at the PLSA, Thomson Reuters, Politeia,  and Variety Club debates. I have also given pro Brexit speeches in Wokingham Town Hall, in Shinfield, and in Henley Town Hall.

Vote Leave has consistently said it wish to spend more of our own money on the NHS, when we get our net contributions back from the EU. Today they have added the wish to abolish VAT on domestic fuel. This is similar to the post Brexit draft budget I launched under the Conservatives for Britain banner earlier this year, which I reproduce for ease of reference below.

Conservatives for Britain continues the serialisation of its Brexit Manifesto by showing how a future Conservative government could use the £10bn we send to the EU which we don’t get back to end austerity.

The UK currently hands over £19 billion to the EU every year. We get £9 billion back in services and the rebate which means when we Vote Leave we will be able to guarantee all the funding to farmers, universities and regional grants that currently come from the EU and still have £10 billion more to spend on our priorities like the NHS.

The Conservatives for Britain spending suggestions for the first post-Brexit budget include:

£1.1 billion for disability benefits to avoid controversial cuts
£800 million to train an extra 60,000 nurses a year to deal with shortages and excess agency staff
£250 million a year to provide an additional 10,000 doctors a year to deal with doctor shortages and to staff the seven day NHS well
£750 million a year on social care to offering better support for people in their own homes, and for more care home and respite care places.
£200 million to cancel hospital car parking charges
£400 million for dearer medical treatments not currently licensed by NICE, for example cancer treatments such as Proton Beam therapy and Meningitis vaccines
£1.9 billion to abolish VAT on domestic energy, energy saving materials, on converting existing dwellings and on carry cots, children’s car seats and safety seats
£1.5 billion to keep Council Tax down by offering councils the money to pay for a discount on bills they issue
£900 million to remove Stamp Duty on the £125,000 to £250,000 band of home purchase
£500 million should be allocated to a local road fund to support local schemes to improve junction safety and flows, and to provide additional capacity and bypasses on busy roads in congested areas

Commenting, John Redwood said:

‘The UK currently hands over £19 billion to the EU every year. That’s £350 million a week. If we Vote Leave we will be able to spend our money on our priorities like the NHS. We would have an extra £10 billion to spend allowing us to recruit thousands of new nurses and doctors.

‘We would be able to provide the latest cancer treatments that the NHS currently can not afford and provide extra money for people who are frail and need long term care. We would no longer need to make controversial cuts to disability benefits and we could scrap the tampon tax and the EU’s VAT increases on green goods like solar panels.

‘Instead of sending billions abroad each year we should spend that money on improving our NHS and helping families by cutting unfair EU taxes. That’s why the safer choice in this referendum is to Vote Leave.’

The EU is after your money. Look at this decision of the European Parliament’s committee:

“to table corporate tax measuresECON Press release – Economic and monetary affairs − 01-12-2015 – 11:14 

Proper identification of taxpayers is essential to effective exchange of information between tax administrations. The creation of European Taxpayer Identification Number (EU TIN) would provide the best means for this identification. It would allow any third party to quickly, easily and correctly identify and record TINs in cross-border relations and serve as a basis for effective automatic exchange of information between member states tax administrations.”

How is the promised VAT reform coming on, to give the UK some right to choose more lower rates?

The latest statement from the EU is from their expert panel on the proposed VAT reforms which I have already shown here do not mention the UK renegotiation. They say

“Any such unco-ordinated standalone measures adopted by member states would shift focus from  the overriding objective of putting in place a definitive regime at the earliest opportunity. It would create additional distortions within the single market and thereby also increase opportunities for fraud”

So that’s that then. NO VAT reform as promised in the so called renegotiation.

We are on a wild ride to political union. Political union will be expensive. It will mean more EU taxes on UK taxpayers, with our government continuing to protest we are  not in the Union that is taxing us!

There seem to be ten main points to Remain’s pitch

1. Some of the member states of the EU are so nasty they might say unpleasant things about us if we leave
2. Germany might want to put barriers in the way of selling us cars and France might want to make it more difficult for us to buy their cheese and farm products, to the extent that the WTO would allow
3. We should want to show solidarity with the failing Eurozone and send our money to spend in their countries rather than spending it at home on our priorities
4. We should be willing to be a main provider of jobs for those fleeing the unemployment and poverty of large areas of the Eurozone. The Euro seems to stand for European Unemployment and Recession Organisation
5. Leaving might put up wages for the lower paid(Lord Rose)
6. Leaving might make house prices a bit more affordable for young people to buy(Treasury forecast)
7. Leaving might mean some U.S. Investment banks made a bit less money
8. The IMF, World Bank, UK treasury and the Bank of England think we might grow a bit less out than in. These were the organisations who recommended the European Exhange Rate Mechanism which plunged us into recession, who presided over the banking crash of 2008, and who thought the Euro a good idea despite it bringing mass youth unemployment, recession and slow growth to most of the EU
9. EU banking, capital markets, energy, social, foreign policy and political union is a good idea which the UK needs to participate in
10. The EU’s policy of eastern expansion and security and association agreements with Ukraine and other countries bordering Russia makes us more secure, as we saw with the troubles in Crimea

Remain has made a wicked presentation of dodgy forecasts, implying we will be worse off out. Their unlikely estimates all show that over the period up to 2030 we will be better off, whether out or in, than  we are today.What we are arguing about is not a cut in our  income but how big a pay rise we get.

Its my view we can earn a bigger pay rise out than in. Here’s why.

1. Out of the EU we can spend the £10bn net contribution we send to Brussels on our own priorities. that means more better paid jobs created here at home for UK’s citizens. it means an immediate and continuing boost to our economy, an end to austerity.
2. Out of the EU we will be able to cut the flow of EU migrants taking low paid jobs and keeping wages down. Pay will go up a bit more when we control migration.
3. Out of the EU our trade will not be at risk. The rest of the EU sells us so much more than we sell them. They  are not planning new trade barriers as they would damage them more. Anyway we and they belong to the World Trade Organisation which stops higher tariffs on most  things.
4. Out of the EU the UK can get on with negotiating free trade deals with the large countries like the USA, China, India and Brazil that the EU has no trade deals with. Where the EU does have trade deals with some smaller countries the UK will continue with those in its own right, as will the rest of the EU, when we leave.Under international law where the signatories split all can continue with the treaties until all sides want a change.
5. Out of the EU we can fit our regulations and laws on goods and services to our needs and the needs of the rest of the world customers for the bulk of our business which is not export to the EU. In the EU we have to apply EU laws and rules to everything.
6. Out of the EU we will not have to contribute to the growing costs of the failing Eurozone.

The UK did not grow faster in  the EU than before we joined, nor faster than many countries outside the EU. Many countries outside the EU have grown their trade with the EU faster than we have been able to from within.

The EU has become a low growth or no growth area,thanks to the Euro and its legal and bureaucratic burdens. The EU gave us the big recession of the early 1990s thanks to its ill conceived Exchange Rate rigging scheme. It assisted in the creation of the great banking crisis of 2008, along with the UK and U.S. Authorities.

We we will be better off out when we spend our own money, make our own decisions in a fast moving world, and control our own borders. Trying to agree your laws, taxes and policies with 27 other countries leaves you ill equipped to deal with the fast changing conditions we find globally today.

I have taken part in a good many debates now ahead of the referendum. One of the most striking things about the Remain advocates I have faced is how little they like or even understand the modern European Union. None of them have come out defending monetary, political, capital markets, banking, and energy union. None of them have advocated the EU army or defended the EU/Turkey and EU/Ukraine policies. None of them have wanted to discuss open borders and the  migration policy. Several of them have stressed the fact that they dislike much of the bureaucracy. Most stress the way the UK is opted out of the Euro and Schengen.

Most of them wish to live in a 1970s style world where the EU (EEC) is primarily a so called single market, and the only things we need to discuss are trade arrangements. It may be inconvenient to Remain that the EU now sees itself as a  foreign policy force in the world, that its founding principles include the free movement of labour, and the Euro is the most important step to full union it has so far taken. The 5 Presidents Report is not mentioned as a proud Manifesto for future ever closer union, but dismissed as unlikely or remote.

If I believed in a united Europe then I would be telling people how today’s EU is but a stepping stone on route to a more united future. I would be talking about pan European solidarity, about the obligations we owe to the poorer parts of the Union, and about what I wanted the Union to do in the world as its power grows. Where is the UK advocate of the type of European Union most continental governments  wish to help fashion? Why is it just in the UK that the pro EU people are in denial about the current nature and future aims of this binding legal grouping of states?

The future agenda will have to ensure bigger transfers of money around the EU to tackle poverty and unemployment in the badly affected areas. There is a growing  wish for fairer sharing of the migrants coming into southern and eastern Europe. There are demands for much more political integration, to buttress the single currency. The EU has a big agenda to take more control of taxation, to spend more of our money, and to represent us abroad. They are well on the way to controlling fishing, farming, energy, transport and much else.

Far from In being the stable status quo, it will indeed be a wild ride to political union. Do those who wish to remain want to veto, opt out or compromise with the next Treaty?

During the first quarter of 2016,  224,000 EU migrants got jobs in the UK. Just 5000 migrants from elsewhere in the world were added to the UK workforce, whilst 185,000 British people got jobs.

David Davis MP yesterday made an important speech setting out more of the details of these numbers. He said the EU has created a Job transfer mechanism. The UK generates plenty of jobs, but many of them go to people from other EU countries. All the time the Euro austerity scheme keeps unemployment high in large parts of the Eurozone, so there will be people seeking work in the UK and Germany where there are more jobs. Lower wages and worse conditions in some of the eastern parts of the EU also drives more people to come to the UK in search of better paid work.

Over the last year to March 2016 630,000 National Insurance numbers were issued to EU citizens coming to the UK. The government says that some of these people only came for a short stay and so that does not mean there are 630,000 more EU migrants in the year. It is likely to be the case that some stayed here for less than a year, but the government does not know how many or for how long. It does means their official migration figures based on passenger surveys look too low.

The other crucial point is the impact so many people have on public services, wages and homes, even if they do not stay for as long as a year. Whilst here working people need proper housing, access to GPs, school places for their children and a range of other services. We need to expand phone networks, water supply and electricity generation. We need more reliable figures so we can plan provision better.

Out of the EU we could impose sensible controls on EU migration to match controls on non EU migration. On the Out side we don’t want to stop all migration. We want a fair system, that has the same rules for the EU and the rest of the world. It should aim to cut the numbers considerably overall, to relieve pressure on houses, wages and public services. It should welcome people of talent, people with good qualifications, people wanting to invest and build businesses here, and people wishing to study here. Our young people would like better wages and cheaper house prices and rents. The pressure of large scale migration serves to depress lower wages and raise house prices.

Out of the EU we will still be free to travel in Europe , study in any university or College that offers them a place and do business in Europe as we did before we joined and as non EU countries like the USA and Canada can do today from outside the EU.