The Future's Bright
by Ed Hall on 01/02/19
I head into 2019 more excited and optimistic about the
future of my country than I have ever felt before. If we do, as I fervently hope we do, leave
the EU on 29 March it will be one of the most exciting days of my life.
When there is so much dreary negative ranting about leaving the
EU, I wanted to share with you why I am so positive, and almost as excited about
Brexit now as I used to be about Father Christmas when I was five or six years’
old.
My childhood was unusual, in that my parents were much older
than those of most of the friends I had at school. There’s a 1970s photograph of the family standing
(rather bizarrely) in front of our new bright blue garage door. The photograph is notable because it is so
out of its time: there is nothing of the 1970s in that photograph, just hats,
and sensible coats, and all the men are wearing ties. It looks like the 1950s.
All of my adult male relatives, including my father, served
in the Second World War, they were a generation older than others at the school
gate, and I listened to their stories of D-Day, of fighting across Europe, and
of the peace that followed, at first hand throughout my childhood. My Uncle Lionel landed in a glider on D-Day,
my father was in the Signals in Normandy and fought his way to Germany, my
Uncle Billy fought from June 1944 until the end of the war. My father talked to me once about the liberation
of a concentration camp, which I can only assume from the dates was probably
Belsen.
They all died when I was still young, but I probably
remember the war stories I heard, or more often overheard, better than any other
part of my time with them. And after
they were gone, I grew up in the shadow of an anticipated nuclear war, spending
leisure time at school speculating about hidden nuclear shelters under the
school, where we would escape to if the sirens sounded, and watching apocalyptic
films, cartoons and documentaries about the end of the world. We mostly believed, I think, that nuclear war
was just over the horizon, and programmes about CND marches and the unmasking
of Soviet KGB spies were as real and as anticipated as Strictly or Get Me Out of
Here.
What an extraordinary childhood we had, and perhaps it’s not
that surprising that I joined the navy after leaving school, where I learned
the reality of how vulnerable Europe was to Soviet land invasion, and I then crossed
the Atlantic on a warship in 1987, followed by a fake Russian trawler. I remember meeting an East German guy who became
a good friend in London in the early 1990s and realising that we had each served
in our armed forces at the same time, learning, as we used to laugh about, to
kill each other.
If there is a reason to remember the past, it is surely to
listen to it, and find the echoes of lessons that we were intended to
find? The lessons I learned in the 1970s
and 1980s formed my character, and much of my political thinking: I learned
that democracy denied is the end of freedom; I learned that millions of men and
women died to keep the candle of freedom burning. The first time I remember shedding tears watching
the news was when Lech Walesa, the shipyard worker from Gdansk rode in an open
landau up the Great Drive at Windsor to meet the Queen.
He became the first free Polish president for decades,
ending years of Soviet control, and restoring nation state democracy to
Poland. Poland, our great friend and
ally for years, and whose young pilots flew Spitfires in the Battle of Britain,
was free again, and it was Britain that made immediate promises to support
newly-free Poland, and the UK that led NATO in offering the nations of Eastern
Europe the security they needed then, and still need to this day.
I believe that nations of free people, able to chose their
own destiny by majority, with accountable politics, rule of law, a free press,
and a stable financial system are the bedrock of social development, wealth
creation, opportunity and a fairer society.
The more accountable our governments and politicians, the better the
outcomes will be, and the faster our societies will improve. In my lifetime, the UK managed perfectly well
to ban capital punishment, decriminalise homosexuality, introduce equal pay for
women, pass race discrimination laws, devolve power to the nations that make up
the UK, have women priests, reduce the hereditary element in our parliament,
introduce welfare benefits and extend formal education to 18, not one of which
had the faintest thing to do with the EU, and many of those social improvements
are yet to even appear on the horizon in much of the EU. I have lobbied on social issues in the UK,
and I am extremely optimistic that social developments and the progress towards
a fairer society will continue perfectly well without the intervention of
Romanian or Bulgarian judges.
Go try and get gay-married in Romania, become a woman priest
in Greece, or find decent work as new immigrant in Italy or Germany, and let me
know how you get on. The EU is not the
source of fairness and equality for our future, we are ourselves when we vote and lobby
and organise.
In the EU I have seen a growing series of developments, plans
and ideas that run completely counter to the idea of nation state democracy,
the worst of which emerged in Lisbon.
The UK won’t have a useful veto over almost any of the major policy
areas as the terms of that treaty come into effect, and it’s the threat or use
of the veto that makes others at the European Council have to listen.
The introduction of almost universal qualified majority
voting means that the EU Commission, which is the only source of legislation in
the EU only needs to persuade, cajole or bribe its way to a qualified majority of
heads of government to pass anything.
That is nothing at all like the EU we joined, or even the one that introduced
the Single Market. I have lobbied in Brussels
on broadcasting and retailing issues, and as anyone who has done so knows, it
is nothing like Westminster. To lobby in
Europe you need professional well-funded access to intelligence and political networks
in the Commission, the parliament and the voting blocs, and in 28 capital
cities. Only the largest and best-funded
voices get heard in Brussels, it’s farcical to suggest that ordinary voices and
ordinary concerns have voice in the EU.
They do not.
The EU is a body that has military power and ambition and is
already the source of rules of engagement for naval forces in the Mediterranean
and off the coast of Somalia. I think
that is wrong, and it concerns me hugely.
I don’t believe anyone who voted in 1975 did so with the idea that the
EEC intended to form a navy and an army and have it led by a retired unelected
ex Italian Communist politician. If that
doesn’t terrify you, then I think you are mistaken, it isn’t how the modern
world was intended to be, and I think its utterly bizarre that British Forces
have been put under their command. Fortunately,
the missions so far have been uncontroversial in nature, but what happens when
the use of force is required? A drunk
ex-Prime Minister of Luxembourg and an Italian communist directing our new
carrier in operations? No thanks.
Those who use such vast powers have to be held to account
directly by the people. In the nation state
those that wield power are accountable to the people they serve, and every member
of our parliament faces regular elections, and even the Prime Minister has to
walk the streets and leaflet her constituency and attend surgeries if she wants
to keep her seat. Throughout his time in
office David Cameron was available to his constituents in Witney and he was a
regular part of the local community. I saw
him more often in the Coop than I did in Downing Street.
The EU Commissioners face no election, and most of us haven’t
the faintest idea who they are. They
come from countries we may never have visited, were appointed in back-room
agreements in trade-offs between member states, and never, not once, not ever,
do they have to leaflet the streets of their home town or face angry citizens
in surgeries. They are, by definition, a
self-selecting elite, one that according to the terms of the proposed transition
agreement, can never in their lives face a tax bill or investigation in the UK. They remind me of the Russian politburo,
unelected and accorded special and extraordinary rights.
The mysterious systems they control to create new European
law are complex, and those systems have been criticised as secretive by the EU itself
and enable only those with access to the participants in what they call trilogue negotiations to influence
policy and law. The political blocs by which
the European Parliament votes never produce manifestos that face a single
voter, they are not political parties, but yet they whip MEPs and they make decisions
that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Europeans. I’m not happy that a group of people I never
voted for, who take the whip from a bloc that never faced a voter, meet in secret
with unelected Commission officials and decide on the laws that run our
country. They may be right and
well-meaning in what they do most of the time, but the system itself is wrong,
undemocratic, and enables those in power to exercise power, and ensures those without
pan-continental power have no effective voice.
And so, to the biggest reason why I voted to leave, the
adoption and subsequent management of the Euro.
The EU was not the source of the global financial crisis, but the actions
it took to protect the Euro have created an almost unfixable situation in which
the disparities between different economies have been swept under a half
trillion Euro carpet, which is the value of the unpaid balances between members
state banks. What was clear from the
Five Presidents’ Report, and is obvious anyway, is that the primary purpose of
every sinew of the European project for the next decade and beyond will be to
protect that currency. It is in our interest
as a trade partner that they succeed, but they have done so up to now by the
open and deliberate setting aside of the decisions made by voters in their
nation states.
62% of Greeks voted to reject the terms of the EU bail-out,
but their wishes were ignored. Italians
voted in a government in 2018 sworn to breach the EU’s deficit limits, but they
are being brought to heel by the technocrats, at least until they call another
election to get an unambiguous mandate.
France is now planning to breach the rules too. At its core the EU has to act as one
economic, fiscal and monetary unit if the Euro is to survive. The clear and published ambition is to harmonise
tax policy, which when the tax gap (the difference between the amount of VAT
that should be collected and the amount that actually is) ranges from less than
2% in the UK, to over 35% in Romania, is patently a mammoth task. The EU’s leadership wants to see EU tax officials
and competition offices in every member state, controlled from and by Brussels.
I can understand why, but I absolutely reject
the idea that British monetary and fiscal policy should be determined by
unelected civil servants from other countries, and whose primary intention is
to defend at any cost a currency we are not part of.
Brexit is an amazing opportunity to reject the drift towards
unelected technocratic government by the intellectual elite of our continent,
and to return to a system of government where the people who stuff leaflets in
your letter box, and who hold surgeries in your town or village hall, are properly
accountable for the decisions that they make.
Not since the 1970s has that been as true as it will be after we leave
the EU. There are huge things we need to
address as a country, how we fund health, what we do about social inequality, whether
government is a deliverer or enabler of services, how much tax we should pay,
and a refreshed engaged parliament with voters fired-up and concerned about the
future will be a catalyst for dynamic change.
Voting systems, decisions-making, social spending, the role of the
second chamber in parliament, all these things are going to come back on the
table as we fight politically to agree a future for the UK.
Sometimes the left will win these battles, sometimes the
right will be triumphant, but I know that groups with agendas and campaigns
will be meeting their MPs and lobbying ministers, and marching on Westminster
to advance their causes, and I think that’s the most exciting thing that’s
happened in my lifetime. In 1950 84% of
voters went to the polls in the general election, and in 2005 it was a shade under
60%. I have met so many young people when
I’m out canvassing who say to me that there’s no point in voting, it makes no
difference. Fully a quarter of the
electorate in some places have given up voting, because they see no point in
doing so. I suspect that number will
rocket up now, and that’s exactly the boost democracy needs.
This isn’t just a British phenomenon either, I am constantly
fascinated that those countries which have received most in financial support
from the EU, seem to be those with the largest political movements opposing
it. Polish, Hungarian, Greek and even
German voters are making it increasingly clear that they are not happy with external
government from Brussels. The more
sensitive and difficult the subject, the stronger the feeling. Germany and the EU effectively invited millions
to migrate illegally across the sea to Europe, but then refused to actually
help those migrants cross the continent to get to their new promised new home. Parts of Greece and Italy are overwhelmed
with migrants that Angela Merkel invited to cross the sea, but has now left in migrant
camps or living on the streets across the south and east of Europe. People are very angry about that, and borders
between EU Schengen member states are being put back up, and unpleasant right
wing political movements have been given new life as a direct consequence.
We don’t have a significant history of extreme right-wing
politics in modern Britain, with the miniscule vote for what passed as the extreme
right collapsing in recent decades. By
leaving the EU we are tearing away the last puffs of oxygen from those groups, because
our immigration policies and borders will be solely ours. Britain needs migration, and we provide a
welcome home to millions, which I think is part of the core of being
British. How brilliant is it that we can
have a system that treats a doctor or nurse or researcher from Uganda or India
the same way as it does somebody from Romania or Bulgaria? We want people to come and make their lives
in Britain, but it was clearly absurd that a scientist from Nigeria needed to
arrive at the Embassy with signed and sealed documents from at least five grandparents,
conduct an interview in Latin, and pay thousands for a visa, when an
unqualified criminal can come the UK and live just by getting a bus, if they
happen to be an EU citizen. Nobody sane
thinks that was right.
Tony Blair told us in 2003 that the UK didn’t need transitional
controls because about 50,000 EU migrants would come to Britain. Between 3 and 5 million came, more than the population
of about half the countries in the EU.
Nobody was prepared for that, public services weren’t prepared for that,
schools and doctors’ surgeries weren’t prepared for that. In sleepy Wisbech in Lincolnshire, some formal
council estimates are that half the population is newly-arrived. Londoners with Polish nannies and enjoying
the services of Uber, or Amazon deliveries, or nights out at bars and restaurants
paying their migrant workforce the minimum wage have depressed wages, reduced opportunities
for British workers, and been sucking up the benefits of an effectively infinite
pool of minimum wage migration. I think
that is morally dubious and smacks of the Dubai model of Indian labour.
Wages are already rising as EU migrants have reduced in
number in the uncertain climate, and I find it puzzling that so many of the
people I see posting endlessly about remaining are also those who post about food
banks and low wages and income inequality.
These two things are inextricably linked, and yes, reducing minimum wage
migration will have an inflationary impact, but that’s exactly what people
voted for. It’s also what those who post
about low wages and food banks should have voted for.
I’m absolutely certain that the UK will be able to do exciting
deals with countries right across the world.
Our economy is huge, bigger than India, and our consumers are hungry for
products from across the world. Despite comments
to the contrary I see posted everywhere, the UK has increased in size as a
manufacturer too, climbing the league tables as we recorded a 23-year
industrial output boom in 2017/8. We
have great universities, a legal system that encourages investment, an entrepreneurial
outlook and millions of hungry consumers.
The UK is in great shape to face the world, and whilst it is true that
it lacks the economic weight of the whole EU, it is nonetheless a top ten economy,
and won’t be tied down by the painful decision-making structures of the EU. Free trade with the USA? What a massive boost for the UK economy that
would be.
For me, 2019 is a year that promises excitement and opportunity. I’ve never claimed there won’t be challenges
and problems along the way, only a fool would suggest that a course of action
as dramatic as Brexit won’t have some negative consequences, some inevitable
and some unintended, but at the end of it we will have a newly-invigorated Britain
with the ability to move fast, make quicker decisions, attract investment,
trade with the fastest-growing parts of the world on new terms, and become once
more a global voice on free trade, on social issues, on fairness and on
development. I hope we can do that in
friendly cooperation with our EU neighbours, but contrary to what Mr Juncker
said the other day, it’s absolutely for the EU to say how they would like to
work with us too. The UK is their
biggest customer, and don’t forget, the customer is always right…
I haven’t touched on the political process here, there’s
plenty on that to come, but as we start 2019, I just wanted to say why I am bouncing
into this year filled with hope and excitement, and however you voted in 2016,
I hope some of my enthusiasm can rub off on you too.
Happy New Year!
Brexit Comment on Conservative Home
by Ed Hall on 08/17/18You can see my thoughts on the current Brexit chaos here.
The Coop makes it a good news day for British Farmers
by Ed Hall on 05/03/17
Sad to see the most important story of the weekend get so little coverage...
The Co-op as of yesterday is only using British meat throughout its supply chain. All products, not just fresh meat, are made using produce from British farmers, injecting at least 1.5bn pounds into UK agriculture. If more people shop there as a consequence that could be a bigger number.
As import costs rise in a weaker Sterling world, hang on for stories of British consumers finding ways to support British workers. I am proud to have my Co-op membership card on my key ring, I hope you are too.
Referendum Debate Round Two
by Ed Hall on 06/19/16
After awful events of last week, and the violent murder of a clearly brilliant young woman, I stopped the in/out debate, as we were all asked to do. I'm sure we all feel huge sympathy for her family, friends and colleagues.
So, before anybody starts engaging in the EU referendum debate again, I'd like to make a couple of points based on the various popular posts doing the rounds on social media during the period when campaigning was supposedly suspended.
1. Being sympathetic to the case for Brexit does not make anyone a supporter of murder, attacks on MPs or street violence in France. We need to tone down the anger and bitterness...
2. Contemplating an OUT vote does not mean out voters want to usher in an era of neo-Nazi government in the UK. Nigel Farage standing in front of a poster with refugees on it may well be an unpleasant image, but it hardly makes that buffoonish character the re-incarnation of Josef Goebbels.
3. The case for IN and OUT crosses party lines. Suggestions that the good liberal thing to do is vote IN are not reflected by the voices that are speaking in favour of OUT, but seemingly not being heard by the media. The RMT, the Fire Brigades Union, Labour Leave, are all clear Brexiteers: how Left can you get? That contradiction seems lost in the social media noise.
4. A vote for OUT is not necessarily a vote for racism. I noticed that the industry body for Indian and Bangladeshi restaurants with an incredible 12,000 restaurant members across the UK is of the view that EU policy is racist and discriminatory and supports Brexit. 80 Commonwealth community leaders from diverse communities around the world wrote to David Cameron in February asking for the UK to take back control of its 'discriminatory migration and trade policies' from the EU. There is much ambiguity here too.
5. For many this campaign is not about immigration, it is about the direction of travel of the EU, and fears about democracy and freedom, economic collapse within the Eurozone, and a desire to see our politicians directly accountable to us for the decisions they make. Those are perfectly legitimate concerns and they need to be heard, not drowned out by a metropolitan liberal consensus Twittering memes with fingers in their ears. Go to Greece where I've been doing business this year and make many of the Remain arguments about democracy in Brussels and you'll be laughed out of the country.
6. We have a short period left to debate the issues, I'd like to do so with the substance and range of voices fully heard. There are ethnic minority OUT groups, there are hard Left OUT groups, there are lesbian and gay OUT groups, there are think tanks and community groups and writers from every part of our multi-ethnic society that want to vote OUT. I think we should listen to that debate and hear their reasoning, not try to close it down with social media posts implying an OUT vote is automatically a vote for extremism and Right Wing government.
So from today I am going to engage with the campaign again, I look forward to a spirited debate, with real issues discussed, and I hope fewer pictures with a few words photo-shopped on the front implying that people considering an OUT vote are racist, homophobic, murderous, ignorant psychopaths intent on self-harm.
See you all next Friday!
Saving the Planet one Organic Egg at a Time
by Ed Hall on 05/18/16
There is a Guardian video about global warming doing the rounds, it got me thinking.
This debate is so complex and difficult: what is almost always missing is the importance of the population to this debate. The population of the world has almost DOUBLED in my lifetime. In 1967 there were 3.4 billion humans living on the planet and the concerns about the planet's resources were the theme of the time. Since then another 3 billion people have been added to the human population, and of that growth, most want to live urban lives with jobs, and offices, and cars, and aspiration.
This rapidly growing populations also wants to eat, consume electricity, and have more than one child per couple (even now in China). Just the physical existence of another 3 billion human beings, their energy requirements and the food chain to support them is inevitably driving climate change, and that pressure is increasing, not decreasing and we probably have to take massive steps to change the way the planet operates to respond to this. But the positions put forward by the green movement often seem to me to miss the point.
Wind power is factually inefficient versus nuclear power - although of course there are other strong arguments in its favour. Organic vegetables selfishly use more energy and take longer to grow - although we all like to buy them. Organic meat and milk use up the planet's resources at multiples of the rate of a factory farm or huge indoor dairy - although it seems to me to be the same people posting factory farm horror videos who post about climate change. Being angry about protein production on an industrial scale is all very well when you sit down to eat your egg that was laid by a hen that ran around an actual field. Wouldn't it be lovely if every egg in South East China's industrial axis was laid in a field by a black-legged rare breed hen that only laid 60 or 70 eggs a year, instead of a factory bird in a shared cage laying 180+. Well yes it would, except it is ridiculous to contemplate feeding 8 billion people with outdoor barn-laid eggs.
Most challenging perhaps is that educating people in the developing world and providing health and internet to those populations means billions more people in new cities (there are now more million population cities in Africa than in China) and they are living longer lives - who can argue with that, but what is the impact on use of resources and climate?
Free trade and single markets (a lot of talk about that at the moment) means goods travelling around the world - who the fuck buys an 'organic' bean from South America? It's as 'organic' as a Monsanto pesticide to buy Fair Trade Organic chocolate that has been flown to Waitrose from Madagascar. In any case, the Monsanto GM crops are designed to produce more crops per hectare, and survive better in drought conditions and combat diseases and feed more people with less energy. Isn't that a good thing for climate change?
The whole discussion needs to be refocused away from a debate about lifestyle and re-cycyling domestic waste, where 'green' sort of means kind, and good, and sensitive, to one where providing the maximum output for the least damage is the driving argument. It doesn't really seem to be happening yet. We will have to sell some of our 'green' souls if we want to house feed and clothe a planet with 10, 15 or 20 billion people on it... won't we?
