Author: johnredwood

Under the last Labour government the pound collapsed within the EU – far more than the latest ridiculous Treasury forecasts of possible future falls.
In July 2008 the pound bought $2. By January 2009 it was under $1.40, a fall of 30%.
In July 2007 the pound bought 250 yen. By January 2009 that was down to just 122. It had halved.

Better stewardship of the UK economy and events elsewhere since has brought the pound back up to $1.45 and to 160 yen.
I do not recall the Treasury forecasting the huge falls in sterling we experienced towards the end of the last decade.
If they were unable to forecast the pound accurately then when such a big change was about to happen, why should we believe their latest forecast?

The Remainians want it every which way. If economic figures disappoint, they claim that is the result of Brexit fears. If the numbers fail to disappoint, they claim that is because people think Remain will win!

Their most consistent claim is the pound will go down if we leave. It’s as good a guess as any. You have a fifty fifty chance of being right. The pound has often gone down whilst we have been in the EU. With a colossal balance of payments current account deficit we are currently running thanks to our lop sided trade with the EU and all those EU contributions we have to send abroad, it is quite possible it will go down again. Just to make it more likely the Chancellor has weighted the dice. He has imposed higher taxes on foreigners buying property in the UK. He has just toughened the anti money laundering rules to deter dubious foreign cash from continuing to come. He has toughened the rules against tax avoidance, to put people off using once normal offshore schemes into London from abroad. That ought to lower the pound.

It is therefore curious that since the end of February, as the referendum campaign has come to prominence, the pound has gone up a bit against the dollar. It serves to remind anyone interested in the truth rather than the mindless and often misleading slogans that the pound is part of a much larger currency turmoil where the dollar has been slipping at last against the other main currencies of the world , unlike last year which was a year of dollar strength.

This year has also brought the surprise that the yen and the euro have strengthened a bit despite the large amounts of these currencies being created as part of their exotic money policies. Both the Euro area and the yen area are running large current account surpluses, so helping to underpin the currency values.

The Chancellor also forecasts that Brexit will slash house prices. Many see this as a good thing, so it might backfire as a political trick. However, the Chancellor should be reminded that he wants to get house prices down so they are more affordable. That is why he set more penal Stamp duties at the top end against foreign purchases, and why he has sought to stop some foreigners buying by new rules and regulations. So many house prices in Central London have already fallen, no thanks to Brexit, but thanks to a deliberate policy of trying to get them down set out by the government itself.

Recent retail sales figures have been strong, undermining the government’s view that fears of Brexit are damaging the economy. The main investors in the UK motor industry have all said they are staying and will continue to invest if we leave, and HSBC has completed its review and decided to stay in London before knowing the result of the Brexit vote. There is simply not enough bad news around to underpin the government’s pathetic wish to talk us down and to force us to stay for fear of worse, when out of the EU we will be better off. We will spend our own money on our own priorities, which brings a modest 0.5% boost to our National Income once we do it.

The Conservative Manifesto in 2015 could not have been clearer. It said we will “reclaim power from Brussels on your behalf and safeguard British interests in the single market”. It went on to say “No to ever closer union. No to a constant flow of power to Brussels. No to unnecessary interference”. I agreed with all that.

I now seek to implement it. It means not voting for Directives and regulations, as each one of those transfers more power to Brussels. It means opposing judgements of the European Court, like the one that will force us to put VAT up on green products. It means opposing the anticipated Treaty of Political Union in its entirety.

Because Mr Cameron’s renegotiation succeeded in getting no important power back from Brussels, surely it also means voting to leave the EU. I don’t see how voting to stay is compatible with the clear statement that we must get powers back and stop unnecessary interference. Mr Cameron did not even wrestle back the power to choose our own welfare policies, let alone the power to control our own borders and implement our crucial pledge on migration numbers.

I and a good number of my colleagues have stayed true to our Manifesto, by opposing a succession of EU measures. We will continue to do so all the time we remain in the EU. We do now need to leave the EU to do the democratic job properly which we promised at the last election.

We have a few more days left to explain to more voters just how much power has already gone and why it matters.When I write to constituents and explain that Westminster cannot right wrongs they suffer because we no longer have the power, they often express surprise. All those in government and the media who over the years have refused to talk about the EU and refuse to cover the stories of the huge transfer of powers have left the public debate denuded of important information now needed to help people make up their minds about how they wish to be governed In the future?
It is difficult to understand how Ministers can support the very truncated powers many of them now enjoyl

A number of Conservative MPs tabled an Amendment to the Queen’s speech . This is an unusual but available means to require the government to do something that Parliament wants but the government has omitted from its programme. It could also be used to seek to drop something from the programme.

The amendment Peter Lilley proposed requires the UK government to protect the NHS from the EU’s proposed trade with the USA, the so called TTIP. Many think the present version of the TTIP would allow overseas healthcare companies to come in and compete against the NHS, and many disagree with such a development. The government seeks to assure them that this will not be the case. The Labour opposition and the Conservative MPs moving the amendment point out that if the government has already secured the objective there can be no harm to them in accepting the amendment. It looked as if the government took this line and accepted it, but subsequently it appears the government would prefer the Conservative sponsors to drop it. They are unlikely to do so. Maybe the government wants to resist the amendment because they know it is not in their power to deliver what is asked.

This is a rare and important development. Because Conservatives were prepared to pick up a Labour worry about something from the EU, itself an exceptionally rare event to find a Labour EU disagreement, there is at last some debate about an important matter which is an EU matter and no longer in the power of the UK Parliament. As I pointed out yesterday, the UK has moved from being governed by a fanatically pro EU Labour government for 13 years who rarely disagreed or stood up against EU proposals, to being governed by a grand coalition of Labour, Lib Dems and Conservative Ministers on all matters EU. This grouping has sought to carry on rushing everything the EU wants through the Commons without proper debate or explanation. They have been successful in taking the oxygen of publicity away from those MPs who have regularly turned up and opposed important EU driven matters. Because Eurosceptic Conservatives have rarely had enough votes to threaten the EU consensus, most media and journalists have chosen to ignore what we have been saying.

Now we have united to offer a referendum to voters we are having to compress the missing 18 years of lost debate on all matters EU into a few weeks. Too many voters have no idea of just how much power and sway the EU has over us, because the mainstream parties and much of the media have conspired to tell us little power has passed and the UK can still govern herself. Now people are at last realising that we do not control many of our laws, taxes, budgets, foreign policies and the rest.

Vote leave is always being challenged to set out why Out is better. That is an easy task, and this site has done a lot of that in recent weeks. More difficult is we also have to explain just how undemocratic and unfair things currently are for UK people, and just how much worse they can get if we vote to remain in a thoroughly undemocratic, expensive and often wrong headed organisation.

The UK referendum contains within it a battle between the haves who enjoy the golden privileges of office and access to the corridors of power in Brussels, and the have nots, the rest of us who have to pay the taxes to keep them going and follow their rules, however unpalatable.

In a functioning national democracy public opinion can force changes to policies and decisions that are unpopular. This present government has rightly been required to abate its cuts to disability benefits and to alter its stance on tax credits. It is now coming under pressure to stand up to the EU and big business over some of the undesirable features of the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership which they are negotiating, mainly behind closed doors with too little transparency for the rest of us.

When governments do not listen enough to public opinion, and when they mess up the economy and life chances of the citizens, they get swept from power in an election. Revenge is sweet for the long suffering public, and hope swells as a new team is chosen.

The problem with the EU is it does not respond to public opinion in the same way. Nor can we remove the Commissioners by popular vote. The EU blundered on for far too long with its Exchange Rate Mechanism., causing recession. That meant lost jobs, lost businesses, a house price crash and much other damage.

Then the EU decided to do the same thing all over again to Euro member states. The long deep recessions in Greece, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal were made worse by savage austerity cuts which no sensible democratic state would have embarked on. The election of anti austerity parties and even governments in member countries did not deter them from their chosen course.

The EU is determined to destroy a large amount of EU industry by its very dear energy policies, making so many firms uncompetitive on world markets.

The EU refuses to listen to UK public opinion when we make it clear we want to control our own taxes and spend our own money o n jobs and public services in the UK.

It is high time right and left combined to renounce the EU’s austerity economics, renounce their unwarranted interference in our budgets and taxes, and renounce their harmful fishing, energy, agricultural and other policies that have cost us jobs and lost us businesses.

We want out democracy back. The EU’s bad model is fuelling anger and more extreme parties across the continent in frustration at the way it will not listen, mend its ways and leave more to national democracies to manage and handle.