I have been asked to comment on the Speaker’s ruling on Wednesday. I will do so when I have heard the Speaker’s further consideration, which he promised to Jacob Rees Mogg and Iain Duncan Smith who raised important questions at the time. At issue is the question of whether a Business motion tabled by government should be amendable, and what putting a motion forthwith means as this is often referred to in Standing Orders.

There is a lot of confusion and deliberate misinformation about trading under the WTO. Here are some facts that might help.

1. All our current trade is under the WTO, as the EU is a member. The UK will become a full member with vote and voice as soon as we leave the EU, as we never surrendered our membership when we joined the EU.
2. There is no WTO schedule of tariffs that automatically comes in. Each member of the WTO files its own tariff schedule and trades with anyone under that who wish to trade. The WTO requires a member to trade with any other member on the same terms, unless there is an approved Free Trade Agreement that exempts the countries from the common tariff of the Schedules. A country is always free unilaterally to cut or remove tariffs.
3. If a country’s trading terms are disputed by another member there is a dispute resolution procedure. A dispute does not stop trading under the published terms whilst the dispute is being resolved.
4. The EU does not have Free Trade Agreements with the USA, China, Brazil etc so we trade successfully with them at the moment under WTO rules and under the tariff schedule set by the EU. Once out we can sign Free Trade deals with these countries removing these tariffs, or could cut some of the tariffs unilaterally any time we wanted to make imports cheaper.
5. The so called side deals the EU has with these countries are mainly unimportant or unrelated to trade. Some are multilateral agreements that the UK has signed anyway.
6.The one agreement we currently have through the EU that may be important, the General Procurement Agreement, gives us access to public procurement opportunities in signatory states, and gives them the same access to the UK. The WTO has now agreed the UK will be a member of that Agreement in our own right on departure from the EU.
7. The EU has free trade agreements with a number of mainly smaller countries. The top five, Switzerland, Canada, Korea, Norway and Turkey account for three quarters of the exports involved. Switzerland, for example, has agreed to continue all current preferences with the UK as well as with the rest of the EU on our exit. No country with an FTA with the EU has indicated any wish to terminate the agreement with the UK once we leave. Transferring the current deal to both the remaining EU and to the UK is a relatively straightforward process.
8. The WTO does not require us to impose new checks at borders or delay imports into the UK. They recommend risk based checks. As the risks of EU product will not go up the day we leave the EU there is no requirement to impose new difficult checks.
9. If the UK and the EU agree to negotiate a free trade agreement once the UK has left the EU on March 29 this year, we could agree to impose no tariffs on each other and would get WTO consent to not impose them pending the negotiation of a full free trade agreement.

Peter Lilley has published a good pamphlet with Global Britain and Labour Leave setting out more detail called “30 Truths about leaving on WTO terms”

I watched this C4 film on Monday evening. It was a typical Remain influenced take on the referendum, and a missed opportunity to say something new about the campaigns.

The whole film was skewed to exploring the Leave campaign rather than the Remain campaign. I mainly watched it to see more of the background to Remain but was disappointed. The movie did not even include George Osborne in it, yet he was arguably the most influential Remain campaigner. Remain went mainly on Treasury matters and used endless amounts of UK Treasury and international finance materials. Peter Mandelson was only referred to in passing in the film though he too seemed to have a big role. There was no exploration of why the punishment budget did not work or how they came to run such irresponsibly false forecasts as they did for the short term period after a Leave vote.

There was no discussion of Project Fear or of why people did not believe the wildly wrong forecasts of a worse future. The Remain campaign was seen as the work of just one man, Craig Oliver. I don’t know whether he will like his representation or whether the most revealing scenes of him and the campaign even happened.

We saw him inspecting the Remain headquarters at set up time and telling them if they did not meet his requirements he could run it out of Number 10. There was no discussion of whether this was appropriate or legal. We did not see them planning to send a leaflet at taxpayers expense just before the campaign proper began, seeking to use the power of government and the idea that this propaganda sheet was in some way the truth as a means of closing down debate.

We saw Mr Oliver shouting and swearing down the phone to the BBC, complaining that they were giving equal airtime to Leave when he was fielding “Nobel prize winners” for the news. This scene represented the Remain idea that the establishment had more right to a say and a vote than anyone else, and expressed the huge Remain frustration that the BBC and electorate were not being more deferential to the galaxy of establishment people they had lined up to endorse Remain. We saw no scenes of how all these people were approached and used. It would have been good to have seen how for example the President of the USA was persuaded to say “back of the queue” which became a famous moment.

We saw Mr Oliver completely lose his temper with a focus group when the members of it continued to resist the very clear establishment messages he had been sending out. In an unprofessional moment he broke into the room, took over the conversation and hectored the people present to accept his view of the position. Some of them pushed back hard, showing how Leave voters simply did not believe the establishment dodgy forecasts and resented the hectoring tone Remain adopted throughout.

The message of the film if it had one at all was that clever ways of using digital technology to contact voters won it for Leave. There was no consideration of the possibility that a large number of UK voters voted to take back control because that is exactly what they want to do. The popular wish for a proper democracy and the wish to be independent again somehow escaped the attention of this movie. It was like many other media commentaries patronising about Leave voters.

It had plenty of inaccuracies. It had Sir William Cash on the Vote Leave Board when he was not a member nor at the meeting featured. The representation of Sir Bernard Jenkin was very inaccurate.

There has continued to be a good rate of jobs growth in the UK over the course of 2018, despite the monetary squeeze and the tax hits to cars and some housing. Since the referendum vote more than 700,000 jobs have been added. This contrasts starkly with the 500,000 job losses the Treasury forecast for the first couple of years after the announcement of a Leave vote win. Real incomes are also rising again, and are in the UK usefully above the levels reached prior to the banking crash in 2007, as is GDP per head. In contrast several countries in the Euro area including Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and France are still below the 2007 levels of real GDP per capita. The banking crash and great recession at the end of the last decade did plenty of damage to jobs and real incomes on both sides of the Atlantic and on both sides of Channel.

The US economy has also shown a good pace of jobs growth in the last year, accelerated by the tax cuts and fiscal boost administered by the Trump administration. Real wages have also done well, with people enjoying more spending power as the tax cut benefits flow through to their bank accounts. The statements made by Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board on Friday were important and reassuring. He said he was listening carefully to markets who are concerned about a global downturn. He confirmed there was no need for early rate rises from here and stressed there was no pre determined path for Fed policy. Prior to this markets took as a guide the suggestion that there could be three more rate rises in 2019.

The UK authorities need to reappraise their approach in the light of recent events and in the light of Mr Powell’s welcome statement. We could do with more progress in generating jobs and rising living standards. This has so far been a long lasting recovery from the crash of 2008-9, but also quite a slow one. As Janet Yellen, former Chair of the Fed stated, recoveries do not die of old age. They end when Central Banks make them end. There is no need for them to do so any time soon. Policy has been tighter than it need have been thanks to Quantitative tightening, higher rates and tougher banking guidance. Latest global surveys show more of a problem with orders, not with inflation. Falling commodity prices confirm there is no great inflation threat out there.

Vince Cable and others want to amend the Finance Bill to stop the government being able to collect taxes needed for the NHS and other purposes unless the government do what the Remain MPs tell them to over the EU.

There seem to be no limits to the extreme actions these MPs want to take to thwart the will of UK voters. They remain completely unreconciled to the UK leaving in March as promised. This is a new low for Project Fear.
It is high time they allowed Parliament to complete implementation of the result of the People’s Vote in 2016. The idea we would want a second People’s Vote on the same thing, having ignored the first one, is particularly bizarre.

The Democrats in the USA have two main aims for their majority in the House. They want to damage Mr Trump as much as possible, even hoping for an impeachment. They want to stop him carrying out one of his most advertised campaign pledges, to extend the border wall with Mexico.

I say extend to remind readers that a part of the US/Mexican border already has some wall, thanks to former President Clinton, himself a famous Democrat. Parties can change their views, but this is quite a change with a lot of passion behind it. The Democrats have plenty of supporters this side of the Atlantic from liberal minded people who also dislike the idea of Mr Trump keeping people out through physical barriers designed to prevent illegal migration.

The moral and historical basis of this is not a strong one for many advocating no wall. The Roman empire defended itself with walls, including a long and famous one across the England/Scotland border. China built the longest wall of all which remains a major tourist attraction. More recently a substantial number of countries have built border fences and walls to control illegal migration, keep out drugs and weapons and impede the spread of terrorism. Whilst the USA has been rowing about whether to build any more Mexican border wall, member states in the EU have constructed at least 1000 km of high fence and wall as border protection.Ukraine is currently embarked on the major task of fortifying its whole long frontier with Russia.

In the south Spain has aggressive fences at Ceuta and Melilla, to try to keep out illegal migrants from Africa. Greece has defences against Macedonia and Turkey. The French assisted by the UK use a high fence at Calais. Estonia and Latvia have some protection on parts of their Russian borders. I do not hear many protests about any of these. More contentious has been the long and high fences used by Hungary along her frontiers with Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia, presumably because the EU and many of its member states do not like the government of Mr Oban.

So I am asking readers today do you think walls and fences are necessary to control crime across frontiers, or are they damaging to legitimate migrants? How does Mr Trump’s Mexican proposal differ from many of the walls and fences the EU has already allowed to go up around it borders as member states have decided they need to take action?

In recent weeks there has been a big outbreak of pessimism about the future of the world economy. The US stock market has led the way down, just as it powered the optimism a year ago. Wall Street watchers turned worriers are alarmed at the way the Federal Reserve Board is tightening money in the name of creating a more normal policy. Their money supply growth has slowed noticeably. The Fed has put through a number of interest rate hikes to make borrowing dearer, and has started a big programme of Quantitative tightening, reducing the amount of government bonds it owns. This is double banking the monetary squeeze.

On the other side of the world the Chinese too are busily tightening their money supply. Worried by past build ups of debt and bad debts, they are requiring their banks and other financial institutions to go easy on the new credit and tidy up the old credits that have gone wrong at a faster pace. Money supply growth has fallen by a third as they adjust policy.

The Euro area too is slowly wanting to look a bit more” normal”, so it is cancelling all new money creation to buy bonds under Quantitative easing. Even the Japanese who can be relied on to print and buy bonds until the end of time are easing up on the amount of such bonds they buy and the money they create to do so.

The UK has put through two rate rises, ended all new Quantitative easing and has presided over a large drop in money growth, with credit for car and home purchase affected as we see in the output and transaction figures. These toughening monetary measures have reinforced the negative effects of higher taxes on car sales and some home transactions.

The danger is the pursuit of an old normal, with no QE and base rates above 3%, is not compatible with reasonable growth and is not necessary to contain inflation. The Central banks should be data dependent, and note the cooling of inflationary pressures with oil and commodities weak and plenty of global spare capacity and excess supply of many goods.

It is good news that despite the squeezes the latest UK PMI for manufacturing showed a decent rise and is indicating continued expansion. Demand is increasing, real wages are rising and businesses can expand. Those who wish to see everything through negative I don’t like Brexit glasses say this is just stock building ahead of a possible no deal exit in March. There’s an irony there. If as they think demand will fall on exit, why would anyone wish to increase their stocks ahead of such an event? If demand did fall – which I disagree with – stock levels would automatically be higher as a precautionary measure anyway without buying more stock. It is also interesting to see that the people who say the good PMI is just the result of people preparing for a no deal exit, are usually the same people who tell us no deal is not going to happen.

The only surprise in the latest poll is that 23% support the Withdrawal Agreement. Why on earth would anyone support it? If you want to leave it is the opposite of Brexit, locking us into the EU for an indeterminate period on bad terms with no guarantee of a future deal . If you want to remain you would think it better to stay in on current terms. The People’s vote in 2016 decided to leave,confirmed by the results of the 2017 General Election, so we should do just that.

Mr Gove used to be in favour of Leave. Now we puts out the worst kind of Project Fear nonsense and seeks to prevent us leaving for at least another 2 years and maybe double that.

I have some straightforward questions for him:

1. When will he and Dr Fox publish the UK tariff schedule for March 30 2019 to trade under WTO rules? Our farmers and traders need to know now.
2. Will our tariff schedule set tariffs that are lower and fewer in number than we currently have to impose under EU rules?
3. What is the right balance between cutting tariffs on food to help the consumer, and keeping some tariff protection which will offer some protection against European imports for the first time?
4. What increase in UK market share in temperate foods is he aiming for once we do impose some tariffs on EU competitors?
5. Is he now going to write food production in as a central aim of his White Paper and legislation?
6. Is he going to keep environmental and health and safety and animal welfare levels the same as at present when we decide or is he going to legislate to improve them?
7. When will he announce a fishing policy that takes back control of our fishing grounds and allows our home based industry to expand?

Brexit is huge opportunity to cut food miles, grow more of our own food, to rescue our fishing grounds and land more of our own fish, and to build bigger food processing industries close to good agricultural supply. That requires the Secretary of State to stop trying to delay Brexit and stop trying top scare us, and to get on with making some decisions and putting through legislation that will be good for UK farming and fishing.

The three stark requirements of the Barber Manifesto to solve the housing problems of the UK are to end Council house sales, to impose rent controls and to build more Council houses. Two of these proposals would make the situaiton worse.

The problem of UK housing has been caused by the potential demand outstripping the supply, leading to increases in the costs of buying or renting a property. The big increase in the number of people coming to our country in recent years has added to the demand side, with the addition of more than 250,000 people a year requiring substantial increases in housing provision. We need to ensure decent provision of homes for those coming to join our society, and to avoid letting down people already settled here. The impact in certain areas is clearly much greater, as the number of migrants is more than double the 250,000 net. To the extent that new migrants wish to live in popular parts of the country with high employment it can increase the demand for more homes in the most stressed parts, as in London and the south east, assuming those leaving the country were more widely spread out . The debate about how many people to invite in to our country and who should have a work permit is relevant to the housing issue. I favour sensible levels of inward migration with better controls over numbers seeking low paid employment.

The problem of supply is not improved by the first two measures in the 3 measures Manifesto. Contrary to the view of the left, selling a Council house to its tenant does not reduce the supply of housing or make things more difficult for people on the waiting list. The family will continue to live in the Council house whether rented or owned. The sale of the property can make a direct contribution to boosting supply, if the proceeds from sale are then used to help build more homes in the public sector.

Rent control is an attractive policy for all those who have a secure tenancy in a decent home and wish to carry on living there. Of course tenants would like their rents to stay the same rather than go up as inflation takes place. It is, however, not good news for landlords, developers and investors in rented property. Whilst there will be no tears shed for them on the left or in the fashionable media, they are essential to solving the housing problem. If rent controls are too draconian for owners then owners seek to sell their properties or to take them off the rental market in some other way. Tough rent controls discourage new investment in privately owned property to rent. The paradox of rent control policy is it can only succeed in holding down some rents at the price of making property scarcer and probably dearer for those who do not yet have a rental contract for a home of their own. The recent experiment in Paris with rent control did not solve the housing scarcity in the central districts where it was applied, and eventually was ended by a court case. Cities that have experimented with long term tough rent controls have ended up with less housing than they need.

Of course building more homes will help meet the needs of families and is an important part of the answer. To do that we need to harness private capital as well as public capital. Meeting the aspiration of the many to own their own home should also be central to the policy. Selling social homes to their tenants is part of that, and is a policy that can free resources for more homes to be built.