Many of us who v0ted for Brexit stressed that we wished to be friends with the continent, to trade with our neighbours using most favoured nation terms under the WTO, and to do many things  with them by mutual agreement in sport, culture, defence, foreign affairs and the rest . What we voted to end was EU control over us, EU law making, a relationship driven by immutable Treaties and by a foreign court.

None of us doubt that our past has been  very interwoven with our European neighbours, and none of us doubt our future will also contain many European engagements and links. What does annoy many Brexiteers is a false economic and historical narrative from Remain politicians that our links with Europe have always been positive and EU style laws and controls are essential for our peace, prosperity and freedom. Any normal reading of history will show how one sided that view is. Today the EU seeks to resolve tensions by legal argument, but not so long ago Europe fought over these matters.

The latest trade figures show that contrary to Remain forecasts our trade in goods and services combined has risen with the EU since we left. It has risen more with non EU, as it was doing in our later years as EU members. Non EU now accounts for 58% of our trade, though both EU and non EU are welcome.

The UK has a global destiny and has had a global role for several  centuries. That came to me from my reading of much European and world  history. That also taught me that too many times  our intense involvement with the continental European countries   forced us into wars that  were often as damaging to them as well as to us. We got involved in the struggles for domination by the great continental powers, and were often helping smaller countries to resist them. I am going to write some pieces to explore more of this theme over the weeks ahead. Today let us start by remembering that the UK often suffered pre 1945 from invasion, from raids and occupations by European powers, from annexation of our lands and from systems of slavery and feudal exploitation that came from the continent.

The Roman invasion led to seizure of lands and wealth, to a slave based society with inferior jobs and opportunities for most of the British who were unable or unwilling to join the Roman governing elite. The Viking raiders plundered, burned, and assaulted in their many raids and wars. The Norman French comprehensively chronicled their robbery of the lands and wealth of the kingdom for their own settlers, and placed a feudal yoke upon many British inhabitants of these islands. The Spanish attempted conquest in 1588, the French tried under Napoleon and the Germans under  Hitler amongst the more serious attempts at violent overthrow of our governments. Had any of those succeeded we would have lost our freedoms and right to self government.

The UK’s involvement in European  wars has been too frequent and damaging, leading to too much loss of life and diversion of effort from more productive peace time uses. Today it is welcome that the EU seeks to resolve the tensions between EU states by legal and political process. There are also dangers from the rise of European nationalism that the EU itself will get into disputes with its neighbours. Currently the war in Ukraine reminds us how damaging European wars can be.

The UK should be careful not to seek to express strong  views about how the continent is governed, and should be reluctant to be drawn into continental conflicts and arguments. The UK cannot and should not seek to  impose a  view about all the border disputes, religious struggles, policy rows and neighbourly disagreements that still beset the many nations that have land borders with each other on a continent packed with many states. They need to resolve those themselves through peaceful means .

The Germans who have a big influence on EU policy direction used to argue with me to relent my opposition to the UK joining the Euro. They used to think the clincher argument was that the UK would have no influence  over it if we were not in it. They refused to grasp I had no  more wish for a say in the future of the Euro than in the yen or the rupee. The UK should take a global view based on a good mixture of our national interest and the best way forward for freedom, democracy and free enterprise worldwide.

I awoke yesterday to the R4 Today programme reporting I had called for the Bank to cut its interest rate. I had done no such thing. It is all there for them to read on my website if they now wish to report my views. There is a short form on twitter if they want the headlines. Why do they not read or check before reporting?

The BBC has singularly  failed  to hold the Bank of England to account. It has lamely repeated the nonsense that our inflation could not be foreseen and arose from the war in Ukraine. They ignored the difficult questions  I put – Why was UK inflation three times target before the invasion? Why did inflation in Switzerland, Japan and China stay down if global energy prices were to blame?   They failed to report my study of five Central banks showing how the Central banks  that avoided extra bond buying and money creation did better on inflation.

The Bank of England is independent when it comes to setting the base rate. I have avoided calling for changes. It is not independent on bond sales and purchases, where I have been critical and called for fewer bond purchases and now for no more sales in the market.

I have  called for greater diversity of thought on the MPC with a new approach to recruitment and remuneration. I have also campaigned to get the Bank to amend its models as its inflation  forecasting has been so poor. If the Bank cannot forecast inflation reasonably accurately it has no basis for fixing money policy sensibly.

The BBC will doubtless continue to ignore all this whilst it busily makes up an alternative reality it prefers.

On the twelfth day of Christmas  my true love said to me

Twelve ferries cancelled

Eleven lanes a closed

Ten restriction signs

Nine diggers digging

Eight potholes threatening

Seven bollards blocking

Six cameras flashing

Five closed roads

Four different routes

Three speeding limits

Two red lights

and traffic jams on the motorway

Inflation has fallen a long way and the economy has stalled. That is what you should expect given the intense monetary squeeze administered by the Bank, and the efforts at fiscal tightening by the Treasury.

There hasn’t been a worse collapse in output and jobs because the tax rises and fiscal tightening  started from a loose heavy borrowing position. Many better paid people have extra savings from covid period earnings when their spending was cut by lockdowns. Savers have some increased  interest returns. The public sector has continued to expand job numbers and offer substantial wage increases to settle strikes .

The US economy has also seen a big fall inflation  from tight money  policy. It has had high growth this year from savings overhangs and from a large fiscal boost, with an extra $1trillion of state borrowing.

The UK needs to relax the monetary squeeze a bit. The Bank has had a very bad run of wrong  forecasts and damaging policies, lurching from too easy to too tough. It should stop the sales of bonds in the market  at big losses, which add to  the  shortage of money . The Chancellor is in joint control of  this policy  and pays for all the losses, so he should sort it out with the Governor now.

The Chancellor should use the coming big fall in debt interest costs given the way they calculate and report them from falling inflation. This reduces the costs of indexed bonds considerably. He should announce a growth strategy with cuts to IR35, increases in the VAT business  threshold and reductions in energy taxes at its heart. Cutting energy taxes would also cut inflation  more, reducing spending pressures further. Lower energy taxes could  save more of our industry and reduce imports.

He should impose an immediate freeze on external recruitment by the civil service and other public administration.

I wish you all a happy Christmas.

Feel free to comment on anything you like today. I will catch up tomorrow.

Treasury, Bank and OBR officials organise a Christmas event

Well , said the Chairman of the working group, we need a party to brighten things up after so much talk of austerity. Are there any preliminary issues?

Yes, said the Treasury, we need to make sure it is within the spending rules so we can claim the costs.

Careful, said another, can we call it something other than a party. We do not want anyone outside saying we are having an unfunded party on the taxpayer, do we?

That cannot happen, said another. We have been quite clear in all our statements that the only thing that can be unfunded is a tax cut. We have never allowed any of the spending rises to be categorised as  unfunded.

We do need to be careful about parties after all the fuss over the lockdown ones, said a cautious official who did not  fancy being dragged before some future enquiry if things went wrong.

So how did the pandemic gatherings  work, said a recent joiner?

Well the Cabinet Office usually organised them and sent out the invites. They said they were work events. Treasury signed off on that basis. Then we got the Prime Minister to pop into the odd one telling him he just needed to encourage the officials for a few minutes so if anything went wrong he would be blamed. It worked very well.

So how can we make sure this one  is OK?  

We could theme it as  review of the year and send round a few graphs and charts to make it look more serious. Hardly any of the politicians understand how we do the numbers, and when one starts to probe we change them to make them unintelligible you know.

What if anyone took that bit seriously? It’s a bit of hostage to fortune. Have you seen how badly wrong the Bank was on inflation? It looks as if the Bank had the Mad Hatter’s watch.Their model never seems to tell the inflation right.

Pity they didn’t have a watch like his. His didn’t pretend to tell the time. That was too difficult. It just told the date. More chance of getting that right. Silly idea to try to forecast inflation.

Still didn’t work for the Mad Hatter  though. It got the date wrong anyway. Butter got in the works 

That’s a bit rich said the Bank. We have always made sure our watch does not forecast money  and credit in the way thise mad monetarists want. Far too difficult. Though we call our committee the Monetary Policy Committee we just forecast inflation by looking at expectations. As we manage expectations  by saying inflation will be 2% it should always come back to that.  I thought the OBR had the Mad Hatter’s watch to tell us the borrowing. How many times now have they overdone the gloom and told us it is going to be far bigger than it is?

Well, said the OBR,  the whole idea is to make sure the dreadful politicians never get their tax cut. It’s all in a good cause you know to have models that terrify them. We make the models say what we want them to say. They say there is No Headroom! No headroom! So when the politicians say there is headroom, or put in low spending figures to create headroom, the OBR always has some bad news in store so there is no headroom. 

Oh do stop this. No-one wants to be talking about all this once the event has started. It’s just cover for the invites which could otherwise  be spotted as a frivolous party.

Shouldn’t we just consider this issue of spending versus tax cuts? There is a lot of fuss about it and Ministers do not seem to be very happy.

The thing that works best is Headroom. We keep saying there is no headroom for tax cuts, and they keep repeating it.  So just tell any politicians who wants a tax cut there is no Headroom. The OBR did a great job showing a huge fall in migration which they say means less revenue,  and in saying all the increases in public spending were not real terms rises. 

The best wheeze is getting the politicians  to sign up to making our forecast of the deficit in five years time as the main control said the OBR . No-one can possibly know what it is, so we can make it anything we like. More to the point in five year’s time everyone with any luck will have forgotten what we said so we are never wrong.

But aren’t we meant to tell the truth?

Yes of course, but truth is in the eye of the beholder.

To us it is true that unfunded tax cuts are a  bad idea. We are so much better at spending people’s money than they are.  Some of them have too much money and spend it just on pleasure. That is not right.

It is true that more public spending must be a good idea. After all, we receive the benefits ourselves of the extra spending, and we can say we are helping the poor and needy. We also need to have plenty of money to carry on paying the EU and all those hotels for migrants.

We can always say if we get asked that our forecasts would be  better if we spent more on them and had more people to help. It’s like time with the Mad Hatter. We can make it what we want it to be. 

So how will we pay if there is not enough tax revenue?

Well the Bank found  plenty of money down a money well a few years ago

That gave us £450 billion more to spend. It was great fun while it lasted.

Yes, but we cannot do that again now. The Bank says the money well has dried up.

But why doesn’t the Bank help us out? They  have a direct claim on the Treasury for anything they lose. Just automatic pay outs whenever  they want. Maybe we should ask the Bank to include the event as part of their losses, and say it is part of the costs of the  review into why they have got butter in the works of their inflation model.

Another bright official who was good at finding ways to do things said Why don’t we lose it as debt interest? One of the ways we are scaring the politicians into avoiding  too many tax cuts is to show them a huge debt interest figure. We doubled it by putting in all those non cash items and got away with it. So surely a small item of extra spending could be booked in there as dealing with the debt?

Careful said a senior. We have done so well with the debt interest adjustments , we don’t want a small thing triggering any suspicion by one of the few anoraks out there who insists on looking at it.

The meeting rambled on with everyone saying what they meant some of the time or meaning what they said some of the time. Was this event capital or running costs? Was it a review or a work meeting? How  did they get the drinks in  without causing any worries? 

They remembered that when the Bank was rumbled with too much inflation, they said it was merely transitory. That was such a good word, as some of the politicians did not know what it meant, and others wanted to repeat it because it sounded so grown up and technical. 

They talked so long they missed out on story time. Some missed the nostalgia over finding the money well and getting away with £450 bn from it before things went wrong. They had loved the £350 bn increase in annual public spending in just four years. It was even better they did not have to do anything extra  for all that money and could now work from home for much of the time. 

So they concluded that they could hold an event on the taxpayer. They would argue it was not unfunded. it would be dressed up as a review of the year just gone, accompanied by complex graphs. It would be seen as a one off transitory spend  that could come out of the contingency fund.

 If any Minister queried it, which was extremely unlikely, they would say it was in lieu of recruiting the extra forecasting staff they really needed to get the butter out of the works of their models. Best if a Minister was invited to pop in to launch it. Such a pity, they concluded, that the money well was closed. One day, perhaps in a couple of years time, they would be able to reopen it and live happily ever after.

Some international rules are a good idea. There are rules of war, if only the nasty countries would follow them as well. There is the UN where countries can try to find ways of stilling conflicts. Often Security Council members veto solutions. There are rules of trade through the WTO which help without subjecting the signatories to international government.

There are then rules over migration, civil liberties, green policies  and other contentious issues where the push for more to be determined by international lawyers has led to rows with frustrated democracies as well as with authoritarian states over too much reach and too much interference in domestic decisions and wishes.

One of my would be correspondents writes every day to blame a couple of billionaires who she thinks rule the world. If only, then it would be easier to sort out. The truth is the idea of more global government by international law and international quangos is well embedded in the governing elites of the advanced world. It has been endorsed by Parliaments, Presidents and Prime Ministers. Instead of concentrating on governing their  own countries they spend considerable time flying round the world attending the G7, the G 20, the COP meetings, the UN and others. Each visit usually entails some international spending commitment and may be part of a negotiation for another Treaty or power for an international body.

UK voters were keen to get rid of the regional government level of the EU. It has still left us the global level, where the EU used to represent us but now we can represent ourselves. We now have our own seat back at the WTO. We can make our own decisions at the COP conferences, the WHO and the UN. We should do so in a way which starts to limit their powers instead of giving them more. Where they have valuable expertise and advice we can accept it, but it should be our call. Unfortunately the UN is not able to restore peace in Ukraine or the Middle East, the WHO was not able to stop a pandemic and the COP conferences  are unable to get China and India to cut their CO 2 whilst expecting us to cut ours. Why do we think these bodies with more power could suddenly start to get things right? Why do we accept the lack of accountability of so many international bodies? Why does the media often refuse to criticise them when they get it wrong?

John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con):

Does my hon. Friend share my concern about the lack of accountability? We are having an extensive and public examination of the Government’s response to covid, but there is no comparable examination of the important decisions and advice that the WHO offered to the whole world, and it probably had more influence.

Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con):

My right hon. Friend is, as ever, absolutely right. We should all be concerned about that and concerned that we do not end up falling into the same problems as we have had in the past, being in a position where there is nothing we can do about it and sleepwalking into a disaster.

We are talking about a top-down approach to global public health hardwired into international law. At the top of that top-down approach we have our single source of truth on all things pandemic: the World Health Organisation’s director general, who it appears will have the sole authority to decide when and where these regulations will be deployed. Let us not forget that the director general is appointed by an opaque, non-democratic process—and I think that is being rather generous.

Rather worryingly, in their response to this petition the Government have said they are

“supporting the process of agreeing targeted amendments of the IHR as a means of strengthening preparedness for and response to future health emergencies; including through increasing compliance and implementation of the IHR”.

They have also previously said that they support

“a new legally-binding instrument”

—that certainly sounds like a threat to parliamentary sovereignty to me. Will the Minister commit today to laying those plans before Parliament so they can be properly debated, and if I had my way, robustly rejected?

It is also vital to take a step back and understand what is driving this pandemic preparedness agenda. At a recent meeting of the all-party parliamentary group on pandemic response and recovery, Dr David Bell gave a briefing on how the World Health Organisation, with the backing of the World Bank, says these amendments are the only way to prepare for future pandemics that it says are getting more frequent, and where there is more risk from zoonotic—animal to human—spread. The reality is that the WHO’s figures do not tell the whole story. When we take into account population growth, significant natural pandemics are rare events. We also have to take into account that there has been a huge expansion of tests and genome sequencing over the last few decades. The invention of polymerase chain reaction testing, for example, has had a massive impact on the detection rate of those outbreaks that the World Health Organisation is now using to justify its agenda.

Since the Spanish flu over 100 years ago, we have only had two pandemics above the average yearly seasonal influenza mortality rates, thanks to antibiotics and advances in modern medical care. We hear a lot about disease outbreaks that actually have low mortality burdens when compared to other public health threats: for example, in 2003, SARS-CoV-1—severe acute respiratory syndrome —had the equivalent disease burden of about five hours of tuberculosis. Funnily enough, in its 2019 pandemic influenza recommendations, the World Health Organisation itself could find no evidence that serious zoonotic pandemics were increasing. What is undoubtedly increasing are the eye-watering costs of managing pandemics, with vast sums of taxpayer money being wasted on poorly conceived initiatives, such as locking down the economy for two years.

It seems to me that the World Health Organisation has no need to rush any of this—we have time to reassess and get it right—and it seems I am not the only one to think that. In recent weeks, we have seen signs that some countries, including Estonia, Slovakia and New Zealand, are looking to question the proposals. It is not clear if any member states have submitted formal notices to reject them and opt out, but New Zealand does appear to have lodged a reservation to allow the incoming Government more time to consider whether the amendments are consistent with a national interest test required by New Zealand law. That is entirely sensible, and I would like to see our own Government take a pause to apply some critical thinking to this situation before blindly supporting the World Health Organisation’s installation as our new global public health power.

It is absolutely essential that the Government make a clear and unambiguous promise that they will neither support nor abide by anything that in any way undermines our national sovereignty. We have not spent so many years battling to get out of the frying pan of the EU to jump straight back into the fire with the equally unaccountable, undemocratic and hopeless World Health Organisation.