Author: johnredwood

John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con):
I support the main measures in the Budget, and the thrust of the Budget statement. I strongly welcome the tax reductions. I am very pleased that the Chancellor is making progress in implementing our promises to take more people out of income tax altogether, and to take people out of 40% tax when they are on relatively modest incomes in comparison with the costs of housing and living in many parts of the country. The more progress we can make in that regard, the better.

I am delighted that I, and others, made representations on behalf of the North Sea oil industry, that those representations have been well heard, and that substantial changes have been made. It is important for us to do all that we can to give that industry, which has been hit by the very low oil price, some momentum and some hope for the future. I am also very pleased about the capital gains tax changes, because I have campaigned for them for some time. I think we will find that they bring in more revenue, not less.

It is interesting to read the forecast in the Red Book that, by 2019-20, there will be a substantial increase in revenues from CGT at the lower rate, but there will be a period of no increases for two or three years. I find that a surprising profile, and I think it draws attention to an underlying problem. I do not think that the economic models and the tax forecasting system used by the Office for Budget Responsibility are fit for purpose. The OBR was obviously very wrong about the impact of the reduction in the 50p rate to 45p: there was a big surge in revenues which was not in the original forecast figures.

This is the background against which we meet today. Many of the changes that the Chancellor has had to make are simply a result of the OBR changing its mind over the very short period between the autumn statement and today, and deciding that the economic outlook is not as good as it thought it was at the end of last year. We have to ask why it has reached that conclusion.

John Pugh (Southport) (LD): Does the right hon. Gentleman think that the OBR has been any better at predicting the economy than the Treasury was before?

John Redwood: I do not think that there is very much difference. All economic forecasters experience difficulties in getting their forecasts right, but some of us are more humble about our expectations than these official forecasters. I think that the danger of having an official forecast is that too much credibility is given to it, and big decisions are then made on the back of it. When official forecasters are zinging the forecasts around every three or four months, it becomes difficult for any Chancellor to run a stable medium-term policy involving, for example, important spending items that matter a great deal to our constituents.
I urge the Chancellor to be a little more sceptical about the wisdom and virtue of the OBR forecasts. The one thing of which we can be sure is that, over the period during which we have had the OBR, it has always been wrong, but what is stunning is the degree of the error. The OBR itself kindly points that out to us on page 234 of its very readable book, saying that, on average, it has revised the underlying borrowing forecast by £46 billion for the review period in question on each occasion. Given that the figure is an average, it is clear that the forecast revision has been considerably higher. The OBR tends to make its biggest revisions in autumn statements, but it has given us quite a whopper on this occasion. When a Chancellor must face a £46 billion revision every time he has to do the sums, it makes the task of stable economic management much more difficult. This is one of those instances in which an idea that was intended to produce more stability has proved to be destabilising.

The same can be said, I am afraid, of the current Governor of the Bank of England. The Governor of the Bank of England is meant to provide stability and wisdom, but we have now heard four different mantras from this Governor about when interest rates are going to rise. That is a very important statistic, which informs the forecasts of the OBR.

First of all, the Governor said that interest rates would probably go up when unemployment fell below 7%. When it tumbled rapidly below 7%, the Governor changed his mind. I am glad that he did, but the fact remains that he changed his mind. He then said that when real wages started to go up, interest rates would probably go up as well, and I am pleased to say that almost as soon as he had said it, they started to go up. Then he changed his mind, in that he had apparently not meant what he said.

The Governor then said that the turn of the year, 2015-16, would be a witching hour, when interest rates might have to go up. Well, we roared through the end of the year and the beginning of the new year, and they did not go up. Again, I was pleased about that, because I think it might have been unhelpful if they had. However, that shows that people and institutions who should be good at providing stability can be very destabilising and very misleading, and it is all noise that the Chancellor has to deal with.

The one good thing about all this is that when these ridiculous forecasts are made by the OBR and the Governor of the Bank of England that we would be worse off if we left the European Union, we can completely ignore them. We know that those people are always wrong about the things in which they are meant to specialise, so why should we believe what they say about something that is more important?

Graham Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab): Will the right hon. Gentleman illuminate us on the section of the Chancellor’s speech that dealt with the European Union? Will he share his thoughts with us?

John Redwood: I think that I am doing that now. The Chancellor quoted the OBR, and the one thing that I disagreed with profoundly in a very good Budget was the OBR’s forecast on what would happen with Brexit. [Laughter.] It is not funny. Labour Members might learn something if they listened. They have obviously closed their ears to any idea that an independent Britain could be rich, prosperous and free, but many of us think that we will be more rich, prosperous and free if we leave the EU.

Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

John Redwood: I want to develop the argument a little more. As has already been pointed out, the forecast contains very worrying figures about the balance of payments deficit. And of course, were we to leave the EU, we would immediately have £10 billion at our disposal that we would no longer have to send abroad to be spent in rich countries on the continent. That is the net amount that goes to the continent. So our balance of payments would immediately improve by £10 billion a year if we did not have to make those contributions.

To cheer up Opposition Members even more, and to get them to change their vote, I can tell them that we and they would have the pleasure of spending £10 billion a year more in our own country—[Laughter.] Why is that funny? Why should not British taxpayers who have to pay £10 billion not have the advantage of spending it on things that they want instead of it being spent on new roads in France or Spain? I think my taxpayers want it to be spent here. That £10 billion a year could more than banish the austerity that Opposition Members claim has done some damage to our country. Looking at the figures, we can see that real public spending has gone up all the time under the coalition and the Conservative Government, but not by as much as it went up under previous Governments. If we had that £10 billion back to spend in the United Kingdom, we would have a better profile on public spending and on tax reductions.

Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con): Can my right hon. Friend be sure that any figure he quotes is accurate, given that he has just rubbished the OBR and the Bank of England? Presumably he has a list of other British institutions to which he would give the same treatment.

John Redwood: But of course. I have checked the Government’s very own net contribution figures, and it is very likely that they have got those figures right, because even the Government can count how much they have spent and how much they have had to give away to the rest of the European Union. That is the damage that is being done.

On the balance of payments, I would urge my right hon. Friends on the Front Bench to do more work on getting the balance of payments deficit down. Obviously, they will not all agree with me about taking the quick easy hit of getting our £10 billion back to make a big reduction in the deficit, but we need to understand that that deficit is entirely the result of an adverse goods trade with the rest of the European Union. We are in profit with the rest of the world and we are in profit in services, but we have a colossal manufacturing deficit with the rest of the EU. Some of that relates to the way in which France and Germany get round the EU rules to make sure that they can buy French or German product, whereas we in Britain apply the EU rules extremely fairly and end up buying a lot of foreign product from the continent.

It is also the case that the very dear energy that European policies require and enforce is doing a lot of damage to our steel industry, our ceramics industry and other high energy-using industries. It is a great tragedy that, despite higher domestic demand for steel, we are still unable always to use British steel in British public sector contracts. Surely we ought to have a fix to create more demand for our own domestic industries.

We also import massive amounts of timber, despite having a big state sector involvement in the timber industry in this country. Why cannot more be done to cut more of the timber we already have as a state resource to meet our domestic demand, along with replanting and extending the planting, given that many people would like more forests? Why cannot we have more managed timber, with the state having an influence over it? We could also do more with the tax system to encourage more private forestry. We have rather good growing conditions here, compared with some of the colder Nordic climates from which we import timber at the moment.

We also import energy, but we have no need to do so. We are an island of coal, oil and gas set in a sea of coal, oil and gas. We also have lots of natural renewables, particularly lots of potential water power. Why cannot we create an energy policy in which we do not need to rely on importing timber from Canada, electricity from France and energy from Norway?

I am pleased that the Budget is starting to tackle the issue of the oil industry offshore through tax changes. We need to do other work on that, and we also need to get on with gas extraction onshore. We will probably find further oil resources when we are prospecting for shale gas in the shale sands. We need to start bridging the gap on energy before it becomes even more damaging to our balance of payments.

Mark Prisk (Hertford and Stortford) (Con): On encouraging greater exports, would my right hon. Friend acknowledge that one of the challenges that small and medium-sized firms face is the availability and pricing of mid-sized capital to enable them to pursue longer-term export plans?

John Redwood: I am not sure that the cost of capital is a problem. The Government have already done certain things to try to deal with that through the investment bank and so forth. It is often the case that medium-sized companies probably need equity investment but are reluctant to give away control. That is a cultural issue that we have to deal with. Certainly for bigger companies there is nothing wrong with the long-term cost of borrowing if they have access to the bond market, because we have exceptionally low interest rates at the moment.

I am all in favour of the Government pressing on with large infrastructure projects if they make economic sense. The main ones that we need to reinforce are broadband and extra energy capacity. We are short not only of affordable energy but of energy of any kind. We do not want our economic recovery—which we have rightly been told is the fastest in the advanced world, on the historical and prospective figures—suddenly to come up against the constraint that there is not enough energy available to fuel the recovery.

John Redwood (Con) (Wokingham): I rise to support the Government and to urge the rejection of amendments that would delay getting rid of the subsidies for wind power. Our country desperately needs more electrical power to be available, and I am pleased that the Government are now taking action, with capacity auctions, to try to get some more power available. We need more affordable power. We need to tackle fuel poverty and have power at prices where households can afford to purchase. We also need to have affordable power for extra industry, which is one of the Chancellor’s aims. We need reliable power; we want to know that the power is there whether the wind is blowing or not, and whether the sun is shining or not. People expect continuous power, in order to light and power their homes, and industry needs continuous power for its processes. On all those grounds, wind does not cut the mustard, and I am glad that we now have a Government who recognise that.

When the history of the past 15 or 20 years comes to be written, what the European Union is doing and what the previous Labour Government did on energy policy will go down as one of their catastrophic failures. It will be at least as big as the exchange rate mechanism, which destroyed so much activity, jobs and prosperity in our country. It may not be as big as the disaster of the euro, but it will be one of the big, classic disasters of the European Union that Europe as a whole is becoming an area of too-little energy and very high-cost energy, driving industry out of the European Union area and into Asia and America, where more plentiful and affordable energy is available. Far from sparing the planet extra carbon dioxide, all this mad policy is doing is making sure that the carbon dioxide is produced somewhere else, rather than within the European Union itself.

Germany has much more wind power than we do and many Opposition Members admire it in this respect, but what happens when the wind does not blow? I will tell them what happens: Germany relies on a large number of extremely dirty coal power stations to churn out the electricity, producing more carbon dioxide than it would if it had opted for a fleet of modern gas stations in the first place. On average, that would have been better than this strange mixture of intermittent wind, which is very good on carbon dioxide when the wind blows, and back-up power, which in Germany and elsewhere in Europe is often generated from coal, and is extremely bad on carbon dioxide when the wind does not blow.

David Mowat (Con) (Warrington South): Germany uses coal all the time and the wind power is the intermittent stuff. Germany’s carbon emissions are 30% higher than the UK’s per unit of GDP and per capita just because it uses so much coal and fossil fuels, even though its renewables level is quite high as well.

John Redwood: Yes, but, as my hon. Friend will agree, when the wind does not blow, Germany has to use more coal. When there is no wind energy, the replacement must come from fossil fuel. A wind system with fossil fuel back-up does not even work on its own terms, and he is right that the German merit order is somewhat different.

I was going on to point out that from an economic point of view, we in this country have managed to damage every kind of power generation. If we insist on giving priority to dear, interruptible, intermittent sources such as wind, the more reliable, cheaper sources such as gas become intermittent, as they are switched off every time the wind blows and switched back on every time the wind is not blowing, which in itself is difficult and expensive. That undermines the economics of what would otherwise be good-value power. It means that we cannot run the plants flat out. We have higher operating costs because of the complications of switching on and off and managing the furnaces accordingly, with much less revenue coming in because less power is generated and power cannot continuously be sold to the market.

The ham-fisted interventions—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) does not seem to understand the policy that his party put in place and that the European Union supports. The ham-fisted interventions in our energy market mean that we have less reliable energy, because we deliberately subsidise a lot of intermittent and unreliable energy; that we have dearer energy, because, as is commonly accounted, renewables are considerably dearer; and that we have much dearer energy overall, because of the extra cost, which is not included in the way that the cost of renewables is accounted for, which means that non-renewable power becomes a lot dearer per unit as well.

Jonathan Edwards (PC) (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr): Has the right hon. Gentleman had an opportunity to reflect on the complete U-turn by Energy UK, which now says that the Government need to promote renewables instead of fossil fuels? Indeed, it says that an energy policy based on fossil fuels is a smartphone equivalent of placing all our bets on Nokia as opposed to Apple and Samsung.

John Redwood: No, I have not had the chance to reflect on that, but it does not seem to be a very interesting observation given the fundamental truth that I have just given him, on which the hon. Gentleman has not reflected at all. The truth of our current energy policy—

Dr Alan Whitehead (Lab) (Southampton Test) rose—

John Redwood: Let me just deal with the hon. Gentleman, and then I will happily deal with the shadow Minister. The truth about our energy policy is that the various interventions have conspired to make less power available at a much higher price and that, unless we start to reverse some of those interventions, we will get those pernicious effects. If he is saying that, yes, the price of energy from fossil fuels is variable, depending on the world market price, that is self-evidently true, but it does not mean that it is a good idea to put in something that is very unreliable and intermittent and is dearer than fossil fuel at more or less any realistic market price that might be commanded in the market by fossil fuel.

Dr Whitehead: Has the right hon. Gentleman had the opportunity to go to the national balancing services centre, which is in his constituency, as it undertakes a great deal of work balancing the system? There are substantial constraints on non-fossil fuel as well as fossil fuel inputs to the system, which cause shortages in power delivery at various stages, whether non-fossil fuel or fossil fuel delivery. Perhaps he could reflect on that in his comments.

John Redwood: Of course, as Member of Parliament for Wokingham, I have visited the centre on several occasions, and met the dedicated group of people there. The last time I visited was quite recently, and they were saying to me how much more difficult it is to manage a system that relies on wind, which is becoming more and more intermittent. That is self-evidently true. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for reinforcing my point, although I am not sure whether that was what he was trying to do.

It used to be much easier when we had baseload power that could be relied upon and that was not interrupted by changes in the weather or the wind, and where the swing factor could be accounted for primarily by the pumped storage systems at Dinorwig. A command could be sent from Wokingham to Dinorwig. The water would come down the hill very quickly, and the kettles could boil in the interval of the big movie or whatever it was that was causing the surge in power demand. It is much more difficult now to call up power if, at the same time, the wind suddenly drops.

That is leading to our having to put in more and more interconnectors with other countries, so we become a net importer of power on a more regular basis, which is not something I value. I want us to have security of energy supply in our own country. We are, after all, an island of coal in a sea of oil and gas, and one would think we could find environmentally acceptable ways of exploiting that and burning it to produce the power we need. As I want an industrial revival in this country, that could well start with us importing less electricity.

Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab): The right hon. Gentleman talks about security. Does he share the concerns that I have and that have been expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) about the operation of the capacity market? That is costing us a great deal of money and it is manifestly failing to bring on new gas, which is its central aim.

John Redwood: As I have been trying to explain, the reason we end up with dear gas is all the other subsidised interventions we have been making. We cannot run gas flat out and get the benefits of running it in the most economical way possible. Yes, I would rather have a much simpler market. The market worked a lot better in the 1980s and 1990s when we first set up a pretty open competitive market and power prices came down a lot. We had roughly a 25% margin of extra supply so that we were secure and we never had to worry that, if there was a cold day with the wind not blowing when industry was doing quite well, we would have to tell industry to switch its machines off. We did not get to such a position under that regime.

Now that we have a grossly intervened regime with all sorts of subsidies and priorities that do not reflect the economics of power production, we get to exactly the point that the hon. Gentleman rightly identifies, when we have to bid quite high to get people to provide gas-based power because we cannot guarantee full access to the market on a continuous basis. Of course, the more interventions there have been over the years of Labour and coalition and now the Conservatives, the more changes are needed in that intervention regime as the Government tinker or try to change it to make it work better, and the higher the prices tend to have to be because people become more suspicious if Government have so much power and if Government keep changing their mind.

So it is quite easy to get from a relatively free, successful market to a badly damaged, rigged, subsidised market. It is quite difficult getting from a badly damaged, subsidised market where the interventions are not very helpful to one that works better, because there is suspicion in the minds of investors, and they need longer contracts, bigger guarantees and higher prices to give them some kind of offset as they fear the Government may tinker unnecessarily.

This debate is about the amendment. I support the Government in their view. I want the Government to get on with removing the subsidies to onshore wind, as we said we would do. I hope the Opposition and the other place will not delay that further. We gave plenty of notice of this, and the sooner we do it the sooner we will get a bit closer to having a less damaged energy market.

We were always told by Labour when signing away our powers of self government in successive treaties that taxation was a red line issue. It would remain a matter for national determination. Recently the UK Parliament was united in wanting to scrap the tax on feminine hygiene products, only to be told under EU law we were not allowed to.

On 4 June last year the European Court of Justice upheld a complaint against UK tax policy brought by the EU Commission. They argued successfully that the UK is not allowed to tax “energy saving materials” at just 5% but has to impose a full 20% VAT on them. A long list of green or energy saving products, including insulation, draught strip, central heating controls, hot water system controls, solar panels, wind and water turbines, ground and air source heat pumps, micro combined heat and power units and biomass boilers are all subject to our reduced rate and were all adjudged illegal.

The government has decided it therefore needs to impose extra VAT on all these goods, bringing in an additional £65 million a year from next year. I for one will be opposing this measure, as I do not wish to see energy conservation taxed in this way and object strongly to the erosion of our taxation powers by the European Court. It will be interesting to see who will vote with us in opposing this needless and undesirable tax increase.

We have not been short of budgets recently. Last year we had a spring one, a summer one, and a full Autumn Statement. We have a pretty good idea of what the Office of Budget Responsibility thinks will happen, and can watch it adjust its forecasts in line with conventional wisdom and market gyrations.

This bugdet takes place against the background of a downswing in fashionable opinion, just as the Autumn Statement took place against the background of a modest upswing in optimism. Last time the Chancellor was told he had money to spend or give away, whilst still hitting his targets in four years time. This time he will be told he has to rein in spending or increase revenue to hit those same targets. One wonders if anything real has changed since December to justify this change fo stance.

The OBR will say they are now pessimistic because they now know China is slowing, stock markets have fallen and Japan has adopted negative interest rates. Yet we knew China had a slow down last year when we last looked at the economy. We knew Japan was continuing with ultra low rates and Quantitative easing, as the economy is not responding well to the medicine. We had an oil price collapse late last year, and now have an oil rally.

The budget revisions are likely to show even lower interest rate costs, to partially offset the forecast of lower tax revenues which will flow from the lower economic growth forecasts we will doubtless be given. Playing around with £4bn spending in 2019 in a budget of £800 bn spawns headlines but is no great event affecting jobs, lives and incomes anytime soon. It would be good instead to look at the big longer term picture.

That tells us all the time the UK continues with its high migration policy of commitment to the EU’s single market with free movement, we are going to need a lot more capacity on our transport networks and in energy. Could this budget please do something more decisive to give us the future capacity we will need?

If we need to raise so much extra tax revenue, can we please this time try and set taxes like high end income tax, CGT and Stamp duties at rates more people will stay to pay? We have seen how cutting the top rate of Income Tax from 50% to 45% brought in an additional £8bn. Lower rates make the rich pay more tax and higher proportion of the tax take.

As we want a march of the makers, can we not only generate much more cheaper power and provide more domestic cheaper energy, but can we also get the UK public sector to buy more things at home for a change? Why can’t our submarines be made from British steel? Why do we need to import technology for nuclear power when we have domestic technologies for generating power in other ways?

As we want to get wages up so people can spend more and enjoy a higher standard of living, why not insist on proper controls on our borders and explain to the EU that we just have to do that for Uk democratic and economic reasons? I see Austria has gone to the extreme of simply putting up a fence to keep people out despite the rules. We don’t need to do that. We just need some clear fair rules which we enforce at our borders.

There are three huge projects lined up for the UK in the years ahead. The first is a public sector financed new high speed railway from Birmingham to London, HS2. The second is a largely privately financed London airport expansion, at Heathrow ( or possibly at Gatwick). The third is a privately financed nuclear power station in Somerset, underwritten by promises that the industry on behalf of and at the expense of customers will buy the electricity at three times current prices once it is producing. All three are subject to delay and/or to uncertainties about their future.

HS2 looks the most secure. It will attract massive sums of public money, and is widely supported by the major political parties in the Commons. I voted against with a modest number of other MPs because I did not like the business case. The 2013 Economic Case for HS2 showed Phase One of HS2, the Birmingham to London line, generating just £13.2bn of revenues against a capital spend and operating cost of £30 billion. The presence of revenues above operating costs relied heavily on a large number of people switching from the current conventional railway to the high speed railway. 69% of the forecast passengers are to come from switches from other rail lines, with HS2 generating an additional 26% of its total passengers by creating new journeys. The small balance is to come from switches from road and air travel. Such massive switching from existing railways would obviously damage revenues on the current railway and could induce bigger fare cuts, lowering HS2 forecast revenues.

The government claims HS2 passes its economic tests for such a project easily, as its evaluation shows substantial benefits from saved time for travellers and from possible extra growth generated by the investment. 42% of the claimed user benefits to passengers accrue to the London area. A substantial improvement in the existing railway could be achieved for this scale of investment, with more capacity on lines and in places where capacity is already under more pressure than it is on the mainlines from London to the north as well as improvements in capacity and performance on the existing northern routes.

There does need to be more London air capacity, and most of the cost can be carried by the private sector. The delay has been caused by strong environmental and planning objections to the Heathrow project. These have been made worse by NATs altering routes into and out of Heathrow to anger a lot more people about noise. They did this without consultation, and Heathrow itself has been caught in the crossfire, as they did not respond strongly against the NATs changes and have not so far been helpful to their local communities in putting things back as they were. The government has put back a decision, arguing it needs more time to sift the evidence. It is also going to find it hard to get the majority it needs if it wishes to back Heathrow, with more angry MPs unhappy about the bad neighbour aspects of the airport, and possible votes against from opposition parties.

The nuclear power station – or some other energy capacity – is sorely needed. The French and UK governments are keen to go ahead for all sorts of strategic reasons. Unfortunately for them the French company planning to build and finance the project is worried about the risks and costs that will be on its balance sheet, and is reviewing how to do it. The problem for the UK is not the capital costs or build risks, but the long term cost of the energy. If energy prices stay low and competitor sources remain cheaper, this investment will prove to be very burdensome for UK business and domestic customers.

As I look at these projects, I see the need for market assessment of the risks and viabilities of the schemes. We need faster decisions, less recourse to the taxpayer, and more manageable risks. In energy we could get this with a new fleet of gas powered stations. In railways, the state needs to take a closer look at potential passenger demand and how much people are prepared to pay for tickets.Saying a project is economically sound on the basis of notional financial gains will not pay the interest on the debt or the salaries of those running the railway. Only fare revenue can do that.

The EU lacks a credible migration policy. Mrs Merkel hijacked the EU/Turkey summit in a desperate attempt to find an answer to her immediate political problem, the arrival of too many migrants in the EU wishing to move to Germany. She is under pressure to show progress in reducing numbers, with three state elections coming up where this is now a big issue. Her idea that the EU should return all migrants to Turkey who come from there without proper papers, is to be balanced by the EU agreeing to take an equal number of Syrians from within Turkey itself to balance the Syrians it has returned to Turkey.

It would be difficult to come up with a more difficult or undesirable policy than this one. How are the authorities going to get the Syrian arrivals in Greece to comply with the wish to send them back to Turkey? Are they going to use force if the migrants refuse to comply? Is it legal to refuse to consider their asylum applications, if they do decide to claim asylum on arrival? What can be done if migrants from other places arrive in Greece from Turkey, only to claim they are Syrian and to say they have lost their papers? Could it be a perverse incentive to some in Turkey to increases the numbers of Syrians who do turn up in Greece, as that will increase the number of Syrians the EU has to take from Turkey through the approved means?

Ironically at a time when most European politicians are united in condemning Mr Trump for his wish to build a wall across the south of the USA to keep Mexican migrants out, some EU countries are busy building their own walls or barbed wire fences to close their frontiers. They clearly have flexible morals when it comes to the morality of border controls. It is also an irony that those same fences and barriers which polite opinion rejects are serving to reduce some of the immediate pressures on Germany herself, as borders to the south on routes to Germany are progressively closed by smaller states fed up with the migrant routes through their territories.

Meanwhile we are debating can the UK have her own borders policy, freed from EU membership. The UK government wishes to argue in two contradictory ways. It claims we are out of Schengen so we are not troubled in the way full EU members are. It also wishes to argue that out of the EU we would still need to take large numbers of EU migrants.So in the EU they say we are fine, but out of it we would still have to accept large numbers of migrants which suddenly in their view become more of a problem.

The truth is very simple. Out of the EU the UK can decide what controls to place on inward migration. It can police its own borders, thanks to the island location. The government has sought to argue that out of the EU the French will renounce their agreement with us over the Calais border. This is most unlikely. This is a bilateral treaty, not an EU matter. France wanted it for good reasons, which will still be true if we leave. France does not want an open border in the north with a green light to all migrants, as that would make France a big migration corridor with all the policing and social issues that raises. Were France to do the unlikely thing of rejecting a treaty that is in their interests, the UK could place restrictions on ferry and cross Channel train companies, as we do with airlines, so they do not to accept any passanger without the appropriate papers.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Who would have thought that a German led Euro area would decide to print Euro 80 billion a month to buy up corporate as well as government bonds from around the Eurozone? And who would have predicted that same German led Euro area would offer free money to commercial banks to lend on, or even offer banks a payment for borrowing money to lend to others? All those words about prudence, all that commentary about the need for a well run and disciplined currency have gone out of the window. The Euro authorities try to offer some hope to the many unemployed of the zone, and the Central Bank struggles almost alone to salvage some growth after years of recession and disappointing performance.

As strange is the wish to have some inflation. The zone has been more than successful at getting inflation down and keeping it down, something it shares with the rest of the advanced world. We have low inflation in most places today as a result of three mighty trends. The first is the large migrations, bring willing people from low wage and no wage societies to richer countries where they are prepared to take relatively low wages by the standards of their host country. The second is the creative destruction of the internet, slashing the costs of various business activities and giving so many more people cheap and easy access to the world market through a webpage. The third is the result of massive investment in commodity and energy capacity in past years, which has produced a state of oversupply in the main energy and commodity markets. China for example produces too much steel with knock on effects to the rest of the world’s steel industry. These pressures are being fought with monetary means. There is a desperate rush to the bottom as major currencies are deliberately expanded to try to devalue more than the next one. Each tries to steal a competitive edge and to trigger some domestic inflation from higher import prices.

There is of course an irony or contradiction in EU policy towards inflation and growth. The authorities are demanding each commercial bank holds more cash and capital for their current level of loans. That slows down loan and credit growth. The zone limits each country to borrowing no more than 3% extra of its GDP in any given year. This rules out further fiscal stimulus from the state making payments and investing money which it could currently borrow at very attractive rates. Yesterday the ECB hinted that it would like member states to spend and borrow more, but said this should only be done by those within the current targets. Germany is the country with most scope to expand her spending. Traditionally Germany is reluctant to do so, though she will need to spend a bit more on the migrants now arriving. It also said that member states at or near the 3% limit should nonetheless rejig their spending and borrowing to provide a better direct stimulus to growth from the spending they do do. The ECB wants an infrastructure led recovery.

The ECB should study Japan. Japan has had several phases of state led stimulus through extra spending and borrowing, with many large infrastructure programmes. Japan has gone through more phases of money creation and bond buying than the rest of the world, and has negative interest rates. Japan did succeed in devaluing the yen in recent years, but has now encountered upwards pressure on its currency despite the unorthodox monetary policy. The change of approach by the Chinese authorities to their currency, the yuan, and revised estimates of delays in increasing US interest rates have at least temporarily pushed the yen up. Japan’s monetary stimulus and fiscal stimulus combined have not been sufficient to push the Japanese economy into decent sustainable growth. The falling population makes this more difficult, and the numbers do look better on a per head basis. Much of the Euro area has the same problem of a falling population reducing demand directly, and an ageing population often leading to a more savings oriented culture. Japan has ended up with the biggest state debt relative to its output of any advanced country but without the growth that was meant to bring. It is only possible to sustain such a colossal debt by buying it up with newly created money, and keeping interest rates low or negative.

The ECB has done what it can. Its measures yesterday exceeded most people’s expectations. Any sensible person wishes them well, as the world would be a better place if the Euro area could grow at a decent pace and make bigger inroads into the high levels of unemployment. The problems remain that many people and businesses do not want to borrow, even at low rates, and banks still have balance sheet constraints limiting how much use they can make of this very generous offer of free money to lend to others. Some people and businesses already have debts enough, but others do not. They lack confidence or the income to be willing to borrow to invest or spend.Meanwhile the European dream is a nightmare for the younger people of the currency zone, with too many out of work and without hope of owning a home of their own. The older savers are not best pleased either.

Migration Observatory have confirmed the Lord Rose view that there will be fewer migrants taking low paid jobs after Brexit, so pay will go up and more UK citizens will get jobs. Apparently according to the Remain brigade this is bad news! Most normal people see more employment and more pay for UK citizens as a good idea.