In this year’s Reith lectures the BBC lecturer stylishly follows every trope and statement of the global elite without a single criticism or original negative thought about them. We are treated to yet another repetitious re statement of climate change, Build Back better, and conventional anti Covid ideology. There was no examination of the populist critiques to see if they had anything useful to tell us.

Dr Carney did admit that in the UK at least official guidance on the wearing of face masks changed during the course of the pandemic. Official scientific advice and government rules spent the first period of lockdown telling us masks had little or no value and were not recommended. They then switched to saying masks might have benefits and were required in many locations. Dr Carney turned this into an example of how expert opinion can evolve and reflect changing research. This rare example of error corrected did not alter all the central tenets of globalism where everything else was firm, obvious and not to change. “The science is settled”!

It is such a pity there was no exploration of this example – one amongst many – of expert advice and policy changing substantially. For if he had paused to ask why and how, he could have explored the paradox of the advice in the early weeks of the pandemic. At the very same time they told the public masks would not help, they went on a frantic buying spree to secure more and better masks for the workers in the NHS and elsewhere most exposed to the dangers of the virus. Why should this be if masks were of little or no use?

You do not need to be a doctoral scientist to see and feel that wearing a mask does capture a lot of the moisture on your breath when breathing out, and would also stop some of the water vapour in the atmosphere around you getting into your nose. Whilst doubtless most masks of loose weave do not filter all examples of a tiny virus they are barriers for some amounts of the water vapour that may be carrying more of it. You will also see that to be able to breathe a lot of your air needs to be expelled somehow from the mask. The mask also clearly reduces the force of your breath, directing it away from anyone you may be looking at. Of course we all saw the priority need to give NHS workers bravely tackling virus attacks the best possible barriers to prevent virus getting into their lungs or eyes or mouths. So why the odd advice that masks were not helpful for the rest of us?

One good explanation would be that the officials wanted to ensure all available masks were provided to the NHS and then Care homes, so they needed to reduce the demands of everyone else. Were that true it would have been better to say that, and to have banned or reduced most individual purchases whilst they stocked up for the priority cases. It was not such a good idea to say the science tells us masks are not much use, when their actions implied they thought the opposite.

This is just one small recent example of how the official line can lose force with some of the public because it not only changes but it seems at times to be self contradictory.

Dr Carney did not of course wish to talk in his Reith lectures about all the items where some of us have been critical of the economic forecasts and actions of the Bank of England both before he led it and during his tenure. I have often written about the failures of their ERM policy, their wildly pessimistic Brexit forecasts and his strategy of forward guidance which usually gave markets the wrong answer.

What we need from our recently retired senior officials is some honest analysis of what they got right and what went wrong, to keep up their claim to have better insights and wisdom than the rest of us. It would also be refreshing to hear that in everything from science and medicine to economics and behavioural sciences there remain doubts. Mistakes do need to be corrected, and there should be big debates going on to improve our knowledge.

One of the worst features of the global consensus is its smug belief that it has all the answers and they are not going to change. They imply anyone who disagrees is just stupid. One of the best features of much needed expertise is the professional disagreements which if properly acknowledged can lead to better understandings.

Father Christmas always has to spend a lot of time planning all those presents and deliveries. It requires enormous skill and teamwork to get all the right presents to everyone on Christmas night, even though of course he is helped by the way the world spins on its axis, extending the night time around the world to a 24 hour period. It does mean a superhuman effort by him and his reindeers, famed for their speed and navigating skills.

             In 2020 his helpers came to him and said he did need to do some homework  for his  deliveries as there were so many new rules applying to all the people he was going to visit. There was a nasty virus spreading its way around the globe, so countries required limited social contact and proper sanitising of goods. The world was so much keener now on green policies, so many of his global family would expect him to watch his carbon output. Anyone  buying things today did want to know more about where they came from, who had made them and whether they were socially aware and well governed. Santa above all others must show he is a leader of these movements for the good. 

               Over the summer Father Christmas was advised that  he took some training courses so he was ready for the new management regime. They wanted him to do a general course  on Money Laundering. Then there was fraud and bribery to study, to be followed by cyber crime. He should gain  a grounding in socially aware present giving, environmentally benign gifts and a course on governance of the parcels business. He needed to ensure he did not  fall foul of the ever higher standards for animal welfare for the reindeers, so he needed a module on advanced Reindeer husbandry.  He should ask about any new restrictions on fast moving sleighs. Then of course owing to the pandemic everything he did this year has to be Covid compliant. How was he on all the differing rules around the world on social distancing, mask wearing and digital alternatives? He also had to get up to speed with the green necessities, ensuring all gifts were zero carbon and his sleigh ride did not generate too much carbon dioxide from himself and the animals. He needed to be more socially aware, so each gift would need a certificate to prove it had been made in good conditions for the staff, and he would need himself an approval certificate that he had achieved high standards of governance. Then he should answer the stroppy email from the EU pointing out that giving lots of goods away was an infringement of single market rules. As it was a form of state aids or unfair competition he would need to apply  two months in advance for an exemption certificate, explaining why he should get away with undercutting properly regulated and taxed suppliers.  

            Father Christmas is a bit of a traditionalist, and was not sure he wanted to spend his summer slaving over all these worldly topics that might take the fun out of Noel. So he compromised with his advisers and agreed to a conference with  experts to see what if anything  was relevant to him.  At the meeting the Diversity Adviser started asking lots of very personal questions about the elves. What was their background and how did they reflect differing attitudes towards society and the family? The Trade Union adviser warned him  that his workers even on Christmas night would need decent breaks. Was their a written guarantee that none of them were on zero hours contracts or were going to be sacked immediately after the public holiday? The anti Money Laundering Officer told him he could no longer get away with refusing to disclose who paid for all the presents he was dropping off. The Data Protection Officer said he was in possession of vital individual information which was both personal and commercially valuable. All those wish lists for present needed to  be better filed and password protected, preferably with a duo system and complex codes. The criminal lawyer told him he was especially vulnerable to suspicion of bribes, so he needed to keep a register of any mince pies, glasses of wine or tips he was offered during his work. The EU Adviser told him he should expect anti CV 19 controls at entry points to the single market and customs union which would take time to clear. He would need a CV 19 test result with him at all times.

         The cyber expert told him that as many children now sent in text messages, emails or social media posts with all their details, he needed much better cyber protection. He also needed reliable and secure systems of ordering the gifts.  A Christmas Grinch could so easily crash his systems, wrecking the only day of the year when he could provide his service. Indeed, on  reflection there was a good case for him straddling Christmas over more days to lessen the risk. The Covid compliance officer told him he must wear a face mask in any house he visited, would have to self isolate for fourteen days before his journey, and should either use disposable gloves at each house or take plenty of hand gel. They thought he could probably argue his journey was necessary for work, but leaving the present on the doorstep was much safer. The Animal Welfare expert told him he could no longer rely on just one team of reindeers as the work was too great, so he should train and station relief teams around the world. The Green Adviser proposed a fully automated electric sleigh as a better option. The Social Awareness analyst said he could help supply print outs on the suitability of various gift suppliers which would need to be appended to each present. The Governance Adviser said he would need to be certificated himself as someone who had done a good job organising and leading the delivery service. 

           Father Christmas was well aware that everything had to go like magic to fit it all into a single night. He was nervous about accepting too many changes to the tried and tested methods he used to deliver the lot. Nor did he welcome too many questions on the detail of how it was managed, as the whole point was its seemingly effortless magic that delivered. No-one must be let down and go without a present. He asked the Green adviser how would the electric sleigh work? Might it need recharging on what is a very long journey, and if so how long would that take? The lack of certainty about this led him to conclude he preferred his old sleigh. He said his reindeer had always managed before and knew the routine to perfection. If a vet certified they were fit  before and gave them a check over on return wouldn’t that suffice? He couldn’t see the point of all the financial requirements. It was after all a free service he offered, and part of the wonder  was not knowing how it was all paid for. As to him receiving bribes it was laughable. No-one left him  cash or large gifts. They were just being friendly with their mince pies. Given his weight problem it was not something he asked for or wanted.

           The advisers then changed their tone and said how delighted they were to get to meet him in person at last. In  order to save the postage they had brought their own family lists with them as that might help in his great task. “So” said Santa, “when it comes to your family you do not seem to have the same worries about CV 19,  bribes or how green is my transport. Can I suggest that you and your Regulators turn a blind eye to how I do my job on this unique occasion each year? I doubt you would be happy if I told you that on reflection on all  your points it was just too difficult to do this on one special night, so the service was cancelled”

              So it transpired that the worried advisers thought this could after all be a rare  exception to all the rules.  Isn’t it good to know Father Christmas is Covid compliant after all? Happy Christmas everyone.  

I was proud to learn when young that I had been born into a freedom loving country. Our nation’s story was told as a long progress to one person, one vote. We had pioneered the Mother of Parliaments and had established equal freedoms under the law from Magna Carta onwards. Our country held a distinguished record of defending the rights of smaller nations in Europe to self determination. England had become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, after seeing off the aggressive tyranny of imperial Spain. Together we had turned the tide of the Napoleonic conquests and military rule of much of Europe. In the twentieth century in coalition with allies we defeated German belligerence twice .

As a teenager I found the defeatism of a new establishment generation surprising. I was advised as a student to emigrate, as people were so gloomy about the prospects of Labour’s Britain in the run up to their forced visit to the IMF for bail out. I watched in sadness as a City analyst as our first decade in the European Common market produced the widespread destruction of industry, with closure after closure of mines, steel works, foundries, textile mills and car plants. Many senior managers had lost the will or ability to manage, and many Union leaders were willing to press companies toward bankruptcy by their strike ridden actions. Tariff free product from Germany, France and Italy displaced home production.

In the 1980s I advised Margaret Thatcher on how she could implement a vision of a dynamic enterprising UK, with wider ownership for the many, more small businesses and self employment, higher standards of education and training and better management and Unions working more often for a common good. Towards the end of her time in office I became a Minister in the DTI or Business Department. As Single market Minister given the task of helping the EU “complete” the single market by 1992 I grew to understand just how damaging the EU project was for UK enterprise and small business. Far from being a liberating wealth and income generating project, it was a massive legislative programme to put so many aspects of commercial and personal life under EU control. It was a one way ratchet to more laws we could not hope to repeal or even at times to improve against the wishes of the Commission. So often the laws set out a blueprint for how you had to make or do things based on continental multinational company procedures.

EU power advanced under successive Treaties agreed by the Conservatives at Maastricht and then far faster and deeper through Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon under Labour to the full Treaty of European Union. I resigned from the Cabinet under John Major when he refused to rule out abolishing the pound at Maastricht and took the case to the country.

I worked with my party in Opposition to vote against and to highlight the damage the successive integration Treaties Labour signed us up to did to UK Parliamentary democracy. I worked with a few colleagues to make a referendum Conservative policy, finally persuading David Cameron when we approached a majority of Conservative MPs demanding one. When we finally got a referendum in 2016 the majority agreed that continued membership of the EU was incompatible with a flourishing UK democracy based on Parliament and the ability of people to sack incompetent or unpopular governments in regular General elections.

Today it is most important that we make a decisive move to accountable democracy by the way we handle our exit from the EU. Leave voters did not vote to have an Agreement with the EU that recreates the legal ties and obligations of membership. You do not have to accept EU laws to trade with them, as the USA, many smaller independent countries and China can affirm.
This week’s news with France closing her borders against a fellow member of the single market reminds us of various past occasions when strike action closed the French Channel ports disrupting U.K. supply chains. Taking back control must herald a drive for more U.K. self reliance as we had before our membership of the EEC/EU. Later blogs will examine the other battles we need to win to re establish our lost freedoms.

When we held the debate and vote at the beginning of the month on the restrictions placed on business and social contacts, we were told to look forward to a review in mid December when areas might be taken down from Tiers 2 and 3 into Tiers 1 and 2. The government was allowing people to believe that the restrictions would bear early fruit resulting in gradual relaxation.

The rapid approval of the Pfizer vaccine in the UK gave a boost to confidence, with some eventual end in sight to lock downs as people at risk get the protection they need and want. The USA has now also approved this vaccine and I guess the EU will follow, showing that the world professional establishment does not think the UK Regulatory Agency was taking undue risks or coming to a hasty conclusion.

Then we saw a surge in cases of the virus detected by the much more comprehensive testing scheme available compared to last Spring. Official advice hardened in favour of tougher and more prolonged lockdowns. By the time we reached mid December word went out that instead of taking a number of regions or areas down a tier, there would be a substantial net increase in places under the toughest Tier 3 restrictions. Ministers seem to suggest now that restrictions will be with us until next spring, when the arrival of warmer weather and more natural ultra violet light might cause recession in the virus, and when many more people will have opted for the vaccine protection. Then last evening there was a further change with the invention of a new Tier 4 for a quarter of the country and cancellation of most of the Christmas relaxations for the rest of the country. Parliament needs to debate and vote on these measures.

It appears Parliament will have another chance to debate and vote on these controls only later in the new year. I will present a case again to find other methods of protecting the vulnerable and keeping more people safe, whilst allowing the resumption of more business activity. Livelihoods matter as well as lives. The scarring to business life in entertainment, travel, leisure, shop retail, commercial property and some personal services is very pronounced. We run the risk of more bankruptcies, more people deciding to pack up their small businesses, and more people deciding working for themselves is simply too difficult with all the regulations.

I will pursue again the issue of the trials of other drugs that might help treatment, the use of isolation hospitals and the extra Nightingale capacity to ease the situation in District General hospitals, the improvement of ventilation systems in indoor venues to clean the air continuously and other methods to allow more safe business activity to take place. There needs to more strenuous official efforts to find an alternative to these severe controls on economic and personal freedom.

Devolution has provided the devolved administrations of Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland the opportunity to vary the response to the virus in their areas of the UK. Today I would be interested in your comments on how you think the different administrations have fared, and what if anything devolved power has brought to help us in this crisis.

If we start with the data we see that all four parts of the UK have suffered badly. Each had a bad attack in the spring, and each has seen a further flare up in the late autumn after a summer lull. The Scottish government’s slightly tougher approach earlier in the year was designed to eliminate the virus, but it did not do so. Wales taking a modestly tougher approach has ended up with the worst figures for cases and deaths.

Latest figures 17.12.20 from inception of pandemic

Cases by area per 100,000 people

Wales 3633

Northern Ireland 3183

England 2957

Scotland 2000

Certified deaths involving CV 19 per 100,000

Wales 123 (0.123%)

England 115.6 (0.115%)

Scotland 107.4 (0.107%)

Northern Ireland 78.2 (0.078%)

We also see that despite plenty of different rhetoric and some criticism of the UK/English approach by both Scotland and Wales, the policies followed throughout the UK have been remarkably similar. There have been minor differences played up by spinners over the timing and length of some lock down moves, and over the numbers of contacts or hours of opening permitted. These do not seem to have made much difference. The Welsh short circuit breaker was followed by a further surge and more extensive lockdowns. Rural areas seem to fare better than more densely populated urban areas.

There has been no devolved challenge to the general academic and policy framework provided by UK experts, and no attempt to define a very distinctive course to see if a different approach works better. The experts of the devolved administrations seem to have very similar views to the UK national experts.

The First Minister of Scotland has used the crisis to give herself a much greater media exposure on UK as well as Scottish programmes, choosing to front run some of the common working of the UK and devolved governments before the daily UK news conferences which have characterised a lot of this period. She has wanted to argue there is a distinctively Scottish approach which is better, but has found this more difficult to sustain as the Scottish numbers remain high and her country stays in lock downs. Each administration has had its share of embarrassments, with experts and advisers breaking their own rules and now Wales discovering a lot of lost data.

I think the overall results have been disappointing. I would have liked to have seen more collaboration from the devolved governments. Alternatively it would have been good to see more intelligent challenge and experiment with a different way of responding so we could learn from the differing approaches, By nature this is an experimental period faced with a new disease where no-one started with the answers. The main breakthrough that can save all the administrations is the vaccine invention by US companies so far, coupled with the foresight of the UK government to licence it quickly and order it in big quantities. No administration has made Test and Trace work well. None has tried isolation hospitals nor used much extra capacity created by the Nightingales. Let us hope UK science soon lands its own vaccines and treatments. UK scientists and medics are to be congratulated on discovering that steroids can cut the death rate from the disease and on their progress with other treatments.

At the end of the last century I wrote a book entitled The Death of Britain? I argued that Tony Blair’s constitutional revolution would damage our democracy and undermine the UK.

I said “Labour’s constitutional blueprint is nothing more than a plan for the destruction of UK democracy. It threatens splits within the Kingdom. It threatens transferring far too much out of democratic control. (to independent quangos as well as to the EU) It gives far too much ground to the federal plans on the continent. “

I always thought if we lost the pound, our independent currency, then there would be no point in pretending there was an easy rescue. If we could save the pound, which I set about campaigning to achieve, we could rescue the rest in due course.

The endless delays over Brexit have shown how Labour’s devolution settlement can be used to disunite our response to the policy and seek to overturn it. The impact of devolution on our exit teems with ironies and contradictions. The Republic of Ireland and the EU are seeking to force a compromise that keeps Northern Ireland partially in the EU’s orbit of their single market, worrying Unionists in Ulster about creeping EU control. Meanwhile Scotland with the SNP in a majority at Edinburgh say they want the Northern Irish arrangements for themselves. The EU must privately worry about the strength of the SNP, as the EU sides with Spain in seeking to resist an independence movement in Catalonia when there is read across from the one to the other.

The Conservative party opposed devolution in Scotland and Wales, and was on the losing side in the referendums that created it. The party has always accepted the result, did not try to delay or derail devolution going through and has faithfully pursued it ever since. If we revisit the arguments that underlay the referendum it is unfortunate that the Conservatives were right about one fundamental issue. Labour always claimed if they granted Scotland a bit of devolution and it would end the nationalist movement. Instead it ended Labour’s dominance as a political force in Scotland. Conservatives argued it would give the nationalists a platform, and they would use the politics of grievance to seek to increase devolved powers, always circling the true objective of independence.

This week devolution has been yet again the subject of SNP interventions, seeking to claim that despite the transfer of more powers to the Scottish Parliament from the ones we repatriate from the EU, Scotland does not get enough power over single market matters in the UK as of course trade policy for example is a reserved matter for the Union.

Brexit has made even more obvious the unfairness of lopsided devolution to England.England voted decisively to leave but has had no voice at the table when the devolved administrations meet Union Ministers to decide how to proceed. We need to look again at the issue of voice for England. Meanwhile both major parties in the Commons have to get better at countering the politics of grievance from the SNP, who seek to turn every debate about our future into recriminations over what Scotland is allowed to do.

I am proud of the decision of the UK Parliament to grant Scotland a referendum to settle the issue of Scottish attachment to the UK for another generation. It contrasts well with the anti democratic approach of Spain and the EU to the demands for a referendum on Catalan independence. It would be good if MPs meant what they said when they say they will implement the results of a referendum on such important matters.

My speech during the debate on the Taxation (Post-transition Period) Bill, 15 December 2020

I rise to support what may be an amendment that we are going to vote on or may be a probing amendment from my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), because I think there has been a deliberate misunderstanding by the EU and its friends over what Brexit is about and what we need to do in order to achieve a proper Brexit. A proper Brexit is taking back control; it is recreating the sovereignty of the people of the United Kingdom through their Parliament.

 My hon. Friend has a distinguished career in this place trying to rebuild that sovereignty and watching, year after year, more and more of our powers taken away by successive treaties, by successive directives and regulations, many of them automatic ones over which the UK had little or no influence, and by court judgments which, again, we had precious little ability to shape. He is right that, as we come to legislate for our new arrangements as a sovereign country from 1 January next year, we need to make quite sure that we have back under the control of people and Parliament all those powers that we need to regulate, to govern and to take wise decisions on behalf of the United Kingdom.

I am very worried about some elements of the withdrawal agreement. I was told, as we were all told, that nothing was agreed until everything was agreed, and that that meant the future relationship as well as the withdrawal agreement. The EU decided for its own convenience to sequence things and say, “You have to sign the withdrawal agreement first and then the future relationship agreement will follow.” A bit of flesh was put on the bones of the future relationship in the so-called political declaration, which one would have thought there was a lot of moral pressure to go along with even if it was not as strictly legally binding as they hoped the withdrawal agreement would be. I now think there has been a lot of bad faith, because, according to both sides, the central feature of the future relationship was always going to be a free trade agreement, and where is the free trade agreement?

 We now discover that the EU wishes to take all sorts of other powers away from us as the price for the free trade agreement, which we have already overpaid for in the withdrawal agreement and which one would have thought, in good faith, the EU would now grant. It is very much in its interests—even more than it is in our interests—given the huge imbalance in trade, and above all in the trade that would attract tariffs if we had no free trade agreement: the trade in food. That is really what we are talking about: are there going to be tariffs on food or not?

We, the United Kingdom, run a colossal £20 billion trade deficit with the EU on food. We have to impose pretty high tariffs on food from the rest of the world—that makes absolutely no sense where we could not grow any of it ourselves; it may have some benefit for some of our farmers some of the time—but we are not allowed to put any similar tariffs on EU-sourced produce where we could produce it ourselves. The EU system is to try to use tariffs to buttress domestic production, but it has not worked for the United Kingdom; it has worked the other way. The tariffs have been taken off in order to benefit the Dutch, Spanish, French or Irish suppliers of our market with food at zero tariffs. The EU already has rather more interest in tariff withdrawal than we do, because we could have a range of tariffs that would probably achieve the aims both of cutting food prices by having a lower average tariff and of having a bit more protection on the things that we really could make and grow for ourselves here, which we are not allowed to protect against continental products at the moment.

 I therefore think that the Bill could be improved by reminding the EU that we will not be pushed around and we will not suffer too much bad faith from those original negotiations or from the withdrawal agreement itself. I think it was a very imperfect agreement. It is pretty ambiguous in places; it is imprecise in places. I have never felt that anything the Government have done, or thought of doing, was in any way illegal. Lawyers could make a perfectly good case under the withdrawal agreement treaty terms themselves, and anyway, we have the protection of my hon. Friend’s section 38, which made it very clear that this Parliament’s acceptance of the withdrawal agreement was conditional. Why else would anyone have put section 38 in the withdrawal agreement Act unless they were making a point?

Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con): Does my right hon. Friend appreciate that it was the Prime Minister who, after an eight-hour meeting I had in No. 10 that day—17 October 2019—insisted that section 38 was necessary and appropriate? If we go back to the previous Administration, just imagine where we would be when we consider the Chequers arrangements, and then imagine what it would have been like if we had not decided to vote against that dreadful withdrawal agreement in its original shape. There were provisions that needed to be rectified, and section 38 provides the mechanism that enables us to do that.

John Redwood: Indeed. I think my hon. Friend has confirmed that under the previous Prime Minister, when those of us who could not vote for her agreement said that we needed a sovereignty escape clause, we were told that that would not be permissible because it would not be effective implementation of the agreement; which was then reassuring to us, not liking the withdrawal agreement very much and realising that it was a provisional agreement and would be completed only were there to be a satisfactory outcome to the total range of talks. It was a totally artificial constraint that the EU invented that it had to be sequenced, when up until that point everybody had always rightly said that nothing was agreed until everything was agreed.

 I would like to hear from the Minister a little more explanation on the detail of the Bill. As I understand it, the Northern Ireland protocol would apply only to goods that are passing from Great Britain to Northern Ireland and then on to the Republic of Ireland, or the reverse—goods coming from the Republic to Northern Ireland and then passing on to Great Britain.

Am I right in thinking that that is a very small proportion of the total trade? In what ways will the Government ensure that it is properly defined, so that we do not catch up most goods in those more elaborate procedures?  The bulk of the trade will be GB to Northern Ireland and back, or Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland and back, and it should not in any way be caught up in any of these proposals.

I am not sure that we do have a de minimis way of dealing with the so-called things at risk. It is not clear how the system will work for items at risk where we agree that they are at risk—and I hope it is a UK decision about what is a risk, not some other kind of decision with EU inspectors. It would be helpful to me and the wider community interested in this debate to know how a business would proceed if it had such a good at risk, to whom it would answer, and what decisions would be made about such a good in Excise, because it sounds a rather complicated and difficult arrangement, both for the business concerned and for those who are trying to enforce. I am trying to tease out from the Minister, in pursuit of the interests of my hon. Friend the Member for Stone and myself on sovereignty, whether we are really in control if the trade has started off from GB and is going to Northern Ireland.

What kind of external intervention can the EU or the Republic of Ireland engineer—how is that fair, and how will it be determined? I think that is what we are most worried about in this piece of legislation, and we would be more reassured if there were the override that my hon. Friend proposes. I should be grateful for some explanation.

One of the central stumbling blocks of the negotiations between the UK and the EU is said to be the issue of state aids. The EU has this idea that they can define and enforce a so called level playing field, though it usually looks more like a playing field that has been carefully prepared for the EU Home team to have an advantage.

Some seem to think it strange this apparently technical middle order issue has got in the way. They misunderstand just what the EU thinks state aid amounts to, or how far they think the playing field turf extends. The EU has long argued that most policies have a bearing on their single market, and that many policies can therefore be a state aid. Their single market stretches from trade policy to education and training, from employment policy to taxation, from energy to transport, from competition policy to digital policy. The market includes a heavily interventionist agricultural and fishing policy.

Their idea of state aid goes well beyond the payment of grants to businesses to help them be more competitive. It encompasses taxes, both the lower variety to boost something and the higher variety to stop something or keep it out. It includes wages and minimum wage policy, social support, route licencing, farm subsidies, product specifications and much else.

So when the EU says it needs to lock us in to prevent the UK gaining any competitive advantage from choosing better policies, it does so knowing that means wide ranging powers to limit the ability of the UK to govern itself. The EU has implied they might make some sacrifice of their requirement that the UK should accept the need to change its laws in many areas every time the EU does to avoid future undercutting. That would still leave a mighty planoply of powers and policies where the UK would have to observe all EU law at the point of departure.

The whole point of leaving the EU is to levy our own taxes, make our own laws, and create a better background for UK business and consumers. The UK government has said it has no wish nor intent to cut employment or environmental standards, but it should be wanting to change the rules of our fishing and agricultural policies, taking down some EU taxes, and looking at ways to foster more employment at home in making and growing things. This is why it is proving so difficult to negotiate, because the EU wants far more than a Free Trade Agreement. It wants control over our competitiveness and law making.

We waited a long time for an energy policy. The energy paper released yesterday still leaves open how we will expand capacity to allow for an industrial recovery and cut our dependence on imported electricity.

Whilst we read that new nuclear is a good answer in the press, what the paper says is

“No decision has yet been taken to proceed with Sizewell C” and the government is working on ” creating an up to £385 million Advanced Nuclear fund to support the development of small modular reactors”

There is the suggestion the whole of this Parliament will be spent negotiating and planning a possible new nuclear power station with no guarantee it will be built. They also hope for modest grants to companies who might be able to commercialise smaller nuclear generation plants in due course.

The paper suggests a doubling of electricity capacity in total, but this seems to rely on the pledge already made to take offshore wind power up to 40GW. There is no satisfactory account of what the stand by or back up power will be, given the unreliability of wind power and the clear indication there might not be new nuclear after all.

The only new policy which kicks in from 1 January 2021 is a UK Emissions trading system to replace the EU with the promise that it will be tougher, implying dearer power.

We need a greater sense of urgency and some investments soon to secure the extra capacity this country already needs. We also need better policies for cheaper power for industry, in order to win back lost market share in making and growing things. The affordability package is targetted on retail consumers alone.