Theresa May knows exactly what she's doing

A few months ago a despicably dishonest Independent article misrepresenting Jeremy Corbyn's  speech to the EFF (the British manufacturing lobby) went mega-viral on Twitter as tens of thousands of anti-Corbyn ranters gleefully spread it around because that pack of lies, distortions and ludicrously misrepresented selective quotations confirmed their biases.

Today Theresa May has given an utterly risible speech to the CBI (the British business lobby) in which she whitewashed the Tories' ruinous track record in government, casually ignored her own appalling track record at the Home Office, and spread dog-whistle anti-European xenophobia in the hope of appealing to the fickle extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kip demographic who are apparently deserting her party in droves.

Theresa May whitewashed the devastating impact of ideologically driven Tory austerity dogma for the last eight years, she championed the tax-dodging, job-destroying Corporate behemoths like Amazon who are wrecking high streets up and down the country by using their artificial tax advantage to undercut tax-paying businesses, she praised the gig economy, she misrepresented the Tories' despicable track record of imposing the longest sustained decline in workers wages since records began, and she openly bragged about cutting the deficit by 80% in 8 years when they had originally bragged that they'd have completely eliminated it in less than five years.

But the most despicable and duplicitous aspects of her speech came near the beginning where she whitewashed her disgraceful personal record at the Home Office, spread ludicrous fairy stories about the kind of immigration system the UK will supposedly have if her hard-right shambles of a Brixit deal somehow avoids failing at the first hurdle, and uttered a desperately cynical anti-European sound bite designed to whip up hatred against Europeans in general, and most specifically Europeans who have come to the UK under their European Freedom of Movement rights.

When Theresa May publicly accuses EU citizens who have come to live and work in the UK of "jumping the queue" she knows exactly what she's doing. She's deliberately appealing to the basest instincts of the extreme-right ultranationalist Blue-kip mob who were instrumental in allowing her and her horrible Tory mates to cling onto power by their fingertips in 2017.

Theresa May and her advisers know that the Blue-kippers are abandoning the Tory party in droves because Theresa May's hard-right job-destroying power grab of a Brexit deal is nowhere near bonkers or destructive enough for their tastes, so she's attempting to woo them back with crude hate-mongering caricatures of European migrants as a queue-jumping job-nicking threat (rather than people who are on average far more likely to be hard-working net contributors to the UK economy than the British-born)!

When she creates the narrative that "unskilled" EU citizens are unfairly queue-jumping ahead of skilled workers from elsewhere, she's completely ignoring the fact that £millions worth of crops have already been rotting in the fields because of the hostile environment she's created towards EU workers is driving them away before Brexit has even happened, and because neither British workers, nor skilled workers from outside the EU want to do that kind of back-breaking low paid seasonal work.

And by creating this crude 'job-nicking' caricature she's ignoring the fact that aside from agriculture, other hugely significant sectors of the UK economy like manufacturing, health care, and the leisure industry rely heavily on EU workers too, meaning her Brexit shambles would be a disaster for these sectors too.

By painting EU workers as 'queue-jumpers' who have cheated their way into Britain, she's once again distracting from her own appalling track record by inviting the blue-kip mob to focus their hate on the 3 million EU citizens living in Britain.

Additionally Theresa May has created a bizarre fantasy of what immigration would look like under her Brexit deal. She claims that "instead of a system based on where a person is from, we will have one that is built around the talents and skills a person has to offer".

But her track record in the Home Office paints a very different picture. Take the way Theresa May made it her personal mission to chase foreign students out of Britain when all the economic and academic experts tried to warn her that it was a damaging mistake. Take the way she fixated on cutting immigration to below 100,000 regardless of the skills and talents of the people in question. Take the way she introduced draconian and discriminatory new immigration thresholds to block entry of non-EU spouses of British citizens regardless of their skills, talents, or earning potential. And take the way she massively expanded "Golden Visa" schemes to allow mega-rich immigrants (Russian oligarchs, corrupt Chinese officials, the families of African dictators, Middle Eastern oil barons) to buy British residency regardless of where they sourced the £millions they've been buying their way in with.

The only way anyone could possibly believe that Theresa May is motivated by a desire to make the UK immigration system fairer is by ignoring her hate-mongering rhetoric, and mindlessly taking her at her word that she wants to make the system fairer rather than examining her proven track record of making the UK immigration system way more unfair, corrupt, and illogical than it ever was before!

So have the Twitterati reacted with fury to Theresa May's vainglorious, deceptive, and downright despicable speech in the way they reacted to the pack of lies and deceptions they gleefully spread about Jeremy Corbyn's industrial policy speech a few months ago?

Of course they haven't.

Many of them are too busy desperately trying to save Theresa May's skin by attacking Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party to give the slightest damn about Theresa May's dangerous hate-mongering rhetoric against the 3 million EU citizens in the UK, about her transparently ridiculous false promises of fairer immigration system, or about her brazen whitewashing of her own track record at the Home Office.

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OR

Why Brexiters should pick fruit and veg

The National Farmers Union (the only right-wing pro-Tory union) has joined the chorus of complaints about the fact that the Brexit vote has chased away thousands of seasonal migrant workers, and left food rotting in the fields across Britian.

Hundreds of tons of Apples in Worcestershire, blueberries in Scotland, raspberries in Kent and various other crops like broccoli, cauliflower and pumpkins have been left to rot because there's simply not enough workers to pick them after the Brexit vote.

The NFU's monthly Land Labour Survey found a 29% labour shortage in September, up from 17% in 2016, which raises the question of how much worse these labour shortages will get after Brexit goes ahead, especially if the hard-right Tory fringe get the ruinous "no deal" cliff edge Brexit they're pining for.

These agricultural labour shortages also raise the question of how the Tory transport minister Chris Grayling thinks the solution to post-Brexit import tariffs should be for UK farmers to just "grow more food", when Brexit and the subsequent collapse in the value of the pound is already causing huge agricultural labour shortages, and massive financial losses as perfectly good food is left to rot in the fields.

One potential solution to the crisis of food rotting in fields is for the people who actually voted in favour of the absolute madness of allowing a bunch of inept and disgustingly self-serving Tories to pursue a shambolic "make it up as we go along" Brexit to get off their lazy arses and go and pick the fruit and veg themselves before it all goes rotten.

It's hardly surprising that Brexiters (and British people in general) don't want to do the poorly-paid backbreaking physical labour that seasonal migrant workers do. It's bloody hard work, and it's really poorly paid.

Of course Brexiters in particular would object to doing backbreaking physical labour for the minimum wage, because they're the kind of people who wanted to "take back control" and "get our country back" just by making a mark on a piece of paper, then going home and letting someone else do all the actual work.

What is surprising is that so many Brexiters failed to realise that the wealth and prosperity that they enjoy (which includes the abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables on our supermarket shelves) is the result of the labour of the working poor, including an awful lot of poorly paid seasonal migrant workers.

Now it's obvious that not all Brexiters were motivated by xenophobia, but plenty enough of them were to swing the referendum in favour of Brexit. A post referendum ICM poll found that 23% of Brexit voters supported the proposition that EU citizens in the UK, and UK citizens in the EU should be forcibly repatriated to their countries of origin.

Extrapolate that result and some 4 million of the 17.4 million Brexit voters actually want the fields cleared of all EU seasonal migrant workers, as well as a mass purge of EU workers from our universities, NHS, emergency services, high-tech industries, and all other sectors of the economy. And in return they want the forced repatriation of some 300,000 UK pensioners from Spain, as well as another 900,000 British people who have used their EU right to free movement to make their lives overseas, and who might just be somewhat peeved at being forced to return to Blighty.

Of course something as insane as this is unlikely to happen, no matter how much this extreme but significant minority of Brexiters pine for it, because ethnic cleansing, nationalist discrimination and forced repatriation are the kinds of overtly fascist policies that most of Europe left behind in the 20th Century with the adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights (liberal British values bestowed on post-war Europe by the determination of Clement Attlee of the Labour Party and Winston Churchill of the Tories).

The sad truth is that the significant minority of extremist Brexit voters didn't just want this agricultural crisis to be happening, they actually want it to be much worse, with all EU workers expelled, and even more perfectly good food left rotting in the fields.

And what is worse is that these people who have inflicted this damage on the UK agricultural sector because of their xenophobic whims won't even volunteer to do the work that needs doing now that they're becoming aware of the problem they've created. They'll just sit idly by and expect others to clear up their mess.

So if you're one of the significant minority of Brexiters who voted the way you did because you wanted the foreigners expelled, go and pick the fruit and veg before it rots in the fields.

It doesn't matter if you're retired, picking fruit and veg slowly and inefficiently is better than leaving it to rot. 

And it doesn't matter if you already have a job. Fruit and veg picked at weekends and on Bank Holidays is better than produce left to spoil because there's nobody to pick it at all.

And if you're one of the Brexiters who voted without really thinking about the consequences of your actions for the agricultural sector, maybe you should lend a hand too, because it's highly unlikely that the four million odd seething xenophobes you sided with are going to take any responsibility for their actions at all isn't it?

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John Redwood is spewing delusional Brexiteer gibberish again

The Tory MP and Brexit fanatic John Redwood has written a ludicrous article for The S*n in which he outlines his argument that Theresa May should address her spectacularly failing Brexit negotiations by escalating her threats to do an extreme "no deal" strop away from the negotiating table.

In this article I'm going to critique Redwood's article line by line to demonstrate how billionaire propaganda barons like Rupert Murdoch are providing fanatical Brexiteers like Redwood public platforms to peddle an absolute crock of misrepresentations, contradictions, shallow nationalist rhetoric, and outright lies in order to make incredibly reckless brinkmanship look like a good idea.

Critique

"Next week there is a big European Council meeting which is likely to tell the UK they are not willing to talk about trade without us paying a shedload of money that we don’t owe."

The idea that we don't owe anything to the EU is pure fantasy. Just take the example of all the pensions of the British MEPs and civil servants who have worked for the EU over the last four decades. Of course the UK should cover the cost of these pensions, and all of the other financial obligations the country signed up to, otherwise who on earth would ever sign a trade deal or treaty with the UK again in the knowledge that the British government has a track record of reneging on their financial commitments whenever it suits them?

"Theresa May can and should turn the tables on the unhelpful EU at next week’s meeting. She can tell them the UK is preparing to leave the EU on March 29, 2019, with no deal."

Theresa May has been spewing her reckless "no deal is better than a bad deal" rhetoric for months, but it doesn't work. The EU27 are unified and they're not going to budge because her "no deal" threats are completely delusional. It's like threatening your neighbours that you'll burn down your own house in the hope that they suffer some disruption and smoke damage.

"She can say this will mean we will trade with them all on World Trade Organisation terms. That will be just fine for the UK. It’s how we do our trade with the rest of the world today."

This is an outright lie. The UK does the vast majority of its trade with the rest of the world through treaties negotiated though our membership of the EU. A "no deal" cliff edge Brexit would mean Britain doesn't just end up outside the Single Market and Customs Union, but also outside every single trade deal we've entered with the rest of the world over the last four decades too.

"Just leaving brings us lots of advantages. It means we don’t have to pay them another penny once we are out."

You'd have to be as mad as a bucket of frogs to imagine that the few £billion in net savings from no longer paying our (significantly rebated) EU membership fee is not going to be absolutely dwarfed by the costs of economic meltdown that would be triggered by a ruinous "no deal" strop away from the negotiations.

"We don’t owe them anything beyond our contributions up to the date we go."

As I pointed out before, we do owe them for the cost of stuff like the pensions of British EU employees, the costs of ongoing infrastructure projects the UK has signed up to, and a range of other things. Just saying we don't owe it, isn't the same as not owing it.

"We can spend that money on our ­priorities. It means we can get rid of VAT on things which the EU makes us charge, where we disagree. That includes insulation, better boiler controls and other energy-saving ­measures, and female hygiene products."

Another hazy promise from a Brexiter that isn't worth the (toilet) paper it's written on. Even if we believe the absurd fantasy that leaping off the "no deal" Brexit cliff edge would result in a net economic gain for the UK, who on earth would be naive enough to imagine that a Tory government would spend it on stuff like environmental measures and alleviating period poverty, rather than distributing it to their £billionaire backers in tax cuts for corporations and the mega-rich?

"It means we can decide how many people to welcome into our country."

In 2010 Theresa May (who was Home Secretary at the time) promised to reduce net migration to below 100,000. What she actually did was oversee the biggest migration inflow in UK history peaking at 336,000 in 2015. Even if the UK commits a massive act of economic self-harm by banning all migration from the EU, the rate of non-EU migration is still well over 100,000, and quitting the EU won't have any effect whatever on that.

"We can police our borders as we wish, to make the country safer." 

This claim is a sick joke from a member of the ruling party who let the Manchester bomber come back through the UK border from hanging out with his terrorist mates in Libya and Syria, then didn't even bother to keep him under surveillance despite numerous warnings from the Manchester Muslim community and a tip-off from the US intelligence services that he was actively planning a terrorist attack against the EU. 

Additionally, a "no deal" Brexit would mean the UK bailing out of all of the policing, security and intelligence sharing agreements with the EU, which would obviously make the UK an awful lot less safe.

"It means we can pass the laws we want."

The Tories are currently using Brexit as an excuse to launch an audacious anti-democratic power grab that would allow them to rewrite thousands of existing laws with no parliamentary scrutiny. There's a huge difference between the kind of stuff that Tory politicians might want to write into UK law without any democratic scrutiny, and what "we" the British public, would actually want.

"We can amend and improve the EU laws we are inheriting. It means we do not have to accept any more EU ­regulations unless we like them."

You'd have to have a significant level of contempt for the concept of parliamentary democracy to believe that the process of "amending" and "improving" the EU laws we've signed up to over the years should be done in secret by Tory ministers with no democratic scrutiny whatever.

"The problem for the EU states is they export a lot of food to us." 

That the UK has a vast trade deficit with the EU is not a problem for the EU, it's a problem for us.

"Food is the only area under World Trade Organisation rules where tariffs are high, designed to keep out imports. Danish bacon, French dairy products, Dutch flowers and vegetables, Irish beef will all be subject to tax penalties if they go for a no trade deal. It is ­massively in the EU’s interest to keep their tariff-free access to the UK. They sell us much more than we sell them across the board."

This summer I have been making sure I can buy non-EU food and drink at my local supermarket. The English tomatoes and vegetables have been good so I didn’t need the Dutch ones. English, Australian and New Zealand wines are great, so no need to buy French or Spanish. Scottish beef and English lamb are tasty, UK dairy products fine and English fruit touches the right parts. When Europe is in winter we can buy from the southern hemisphere or from our farmers’ heated greenhouses."

An estimated 70% of the UK's food imports come from EU countries, and the vast majority of the rest comes from countries with which the UK has trade deals that have been negotiated through the EU. A ruinous "no deal" Brexit would mean new or increased tariffs on 97% of the food we import.  

The idea that trade with the rest of the world wouldn't be disrupted by tearing up all of our EU negotiated trade agreements is utterly delusional, and you'd have to be a total idiot to be placated by a fluffy personal anecdote about how John bloody Redwood has been "buying British at the supermarket"!

"Some say we could not do this. After all, it will be our customers who have to pay the higher prices of EU food with tariffs on while we wait for UK farmers to increase their output to serve more of our needs."

Just like his fellow Brexit fantasist Chris Grayling, Redwood completely fails to explain how UK farmers are going to dramatically increase their output when Brexit drives away the EU seasonal migrant workers that the British agricultural sector relies on so heavily. Who is going to do the backbreaking agricultural work? Pensioners? Disabled people? unpaid Workfare slaves?

"They don’t understand the cards in our hands as the EU’s main customer."

Back to the shit Brexiteer poker analogies. 

Everyone in the world can see that Theresa May has got a handful of duff cards and she's resorted to bluffing. There's no other way to explain her lunatic "give us what we want or we'll blow up a massive economic bomb under ourselves in the hope that you get injured by the shockwaves" approach to the negotiations. 

"The Government will be able to give us all a tax cut out of the tariff ­revenue it collects, so we need not be worse off."

Ah ha ha ha. We'll all have to pay the cost of tariffs on our supermarket shopping, and we're to trust the Tories to redistribute that wealth back to us, rather than distribute it to their billionaire backers in tax cuts for corporations and the mega-rich. 

If you believe that, you'll believe anything! 

"We can also cut the tariffs we have to impose on food from outside the EU to balance things up a bit. Why should we put a tariff on South African oranges to help the Spanish industry when we grow none for ­ourselves?"

This is just delusional. We'll have to put WTO tariffs on produce from all over the world because we'll be bailing out of all of our trade agreements if we do a "no deal" tantrum. Maybe we could sign up to new low-tariff trade agreements with minor trade partners like South Africa eventually, but there are several things to consider.  

1. Trade deals take years to negotiate, and we don't have anything like the civil service capacity to negotiate scores of replacement trade deals all at once, so the WTO tariffs on non-EU produce will be in effect for years, if not decades. 

2. Countries like South Africa will understand that we need trade deals with them an awful lot more than they need trade deals with us. They will be in the driving seat with the power to demand all kinds of favours and concessions from our massively over-stretched, inexperienced, and time-pressurised negotiators.

3. If we do a "no deal" strop, why would anyone want to sign trade deals with us anyway? If you witnessed someone rip off their business partner by unilaterally abandoning the deal they had together, would you rush to sign a business deal with them, or would you keep well away?

"Your shopping basket may change a bit but there is no need to worry. Our farmers will boost their output."

Again. How? How do they boost their output when Brexit has chased away a huge chunk of their labour force?

"The EU negotiators do not seem concerned about the damage they could do to EU exporters. Their overwhelming concern is losing all that cash we pay them each year."

Outright lies. The EU have outlined their three main concerns over and again: Protection of the rights of EU citizens in the UK, a resolution to the Irish border problem, and a financial settlement to cover the UK's ongoing commitments. 

Until these three issues are resolved they're not going to get into trade talks over how much the UK might pay for preferential access to the Single Market. Everyone knows this. David Davis agreed to this sequencing of events in June.

"They have jeopardised an agreement about a good trading relationship in the future to try to wring more money out of the UK after we have left."

No. The agreement over future trading relationships comes after the rights of EU citizens and the Irish border situation are resolved. The ones who are guilty of jeopardising the future trading relationship are the Tories for trying to use the rights of EU citizens as bargaining chips, and failing to make any meaningful progress on the Irish border problem.

"The PM needs to remind them we owe them nothing under the law and their treaty. Why would we pay extra when there is no benefit for us?"

In one paragraph he's accusing the EU of jeopardising the future trading relationship, and in the very next he's demanding that the PM lies to the EU negotiators about the UK not having an obligation to honour the costs of the laws and treaties we signed up to. as if they'll just say "yes, abandon your financial obligations, here have a trade deal that's better than the deal that we give to actual members of our club".

"When we entered the EU — then the EEC — for the first time we inherited a lot of payments the others had agreed to without us. No one said we did not have to pay for things agreed before we got there. So why does anyone think we need to go on paying for things after we leave?"

This is a nonsense argument. It doesn't even make sense. If you sign up to a club, you abide by the membership rules, whether you're a founder member of the club or not. If during your membership you sign up to agreements to cover the cost of certain things, then you can't just quit and refuse to pay what you'd agreed to. Otherwise you end up massively pissing everyone off, and making yourself look like a fundamentally dishonest and unreliable chancer who doesn't stick to their word. 

"The EU is not planning on paying us anything after March 2019, so they save what they used to give us back from the money we send them."

Such backwards logic! Why would the EU pay the UK anything? The UK is causing disruption by quitting the EU, not the other way around. 

"Out of the EU we will end the ­uncertainty." 

A "no deal" strop out of the EU would cause massive uncertainty for millions of workers, businesses, investors, and government agencies. Dressing such a drastic move up as "ending the uncertainty" is a stunning example of "black is white" Orwellian propaganda.

"We will be able to sign trade treaties with countries elsewhere in the world, which we cannot do as a member of the EU."

Yes. But this process will obviously take a lot of time, and the UK's reputation as reliable trading partners would be absolutely devastated by a "no deal" flounce away from our trade agreements with Europe over a refusal to cover the cost of ongoing commitments.

"We will get our fishing grounds back and put in a fishing policy that works for us."

The fishing industry accounts for a tiny fraction of the UK economy, but the subject is a reliable touch-stone for Brexit fanatics, so it's no surprise to see Redwood randomly lobbing it into his article. 

It would take a spectacular amount of optimism to think that a Tory government that is massively over-stretched by their own Brexit mess would somehow make a better job of regulating the UK fishing industry than the status quo. 

What's actually highly likely to happen is that the Tories will use access to UK fishing territories as a bargaining chip in order to win favours for the UK financial services industry (over half of Tory party donations come from the financial sector, virtually none come from fishermen or fleet owners).

"If Theresa May sounds positive about no deal, she greatly increases the ­chances that they will want to offer a trade deal for their own sakes."

Even if we're delusional enough to accept the idea that Theresa May suddenly sounding more positive about the insane "no deal is better than a bad deal" threat she's been making since January will cause the EU27 negotiation team to suddenly fold and give the UK a wonderful deal, this completely contradicts Redwood's previous attempts to argue that "no deal" is a great idea in its own right.

Which is it? Is "no deal" a ludicrous and futile we're holding the gun to our own heads so do as we say threat, or is it actually Redwood's preferred endgame? He is trying to have it both ways in the same damned article!

"If she accepts the advice of the Treasury and looks worried about leaving without a deal, she should expect a larger bill and more delay in settling anything."

You'd have to be a unbelievably reckless and sociopathic ideologue to have no worries about the social and economic destruction a "no deal" strop would wreak on the UK, or about the extreme damage to the UK's reputation as a reliable trading partner. 

Additionally we've already established that the delays are stemming from the Tory refusal/inability to guarantee the rights of EU citizens in the UK, and resolve the Irish border problem, not from the EU.

"The best few hundred millions the Treasury will spend this year and next is the money to ensure we are fine without a deal."

The idea that the estimated £250 million the Tories are spending on planning for a "no deal" strop away from the Brexit negotiations would be enough to mitigate even the tiniest fraction of the social and economic fallout of such a reckless act of national self-harm is utterly delusional. 

"That will save us billions that some want us to give to the EU to end up with something like the single market bureaucracy we voted to leave."

A "no deal" tantrum wouldn't "save us billions", it would plunge the economy into chaos and trash what remains of our national reputation.  

Additionally, it's an outright lie to say that "we voted to leave" the Single Market because the Single Market wasn't even mentioned in the referendum question, in fact a load of high profile Brexiters like Nigel Farage, Daniel Hannan, Owen Paterson and Arron Banks argued that we should stay in the Single Market after we quit the EU during the referendum debate.

"It is also money well spent if we do get a deal, because we still need ­borders and customs that work."

This is an utterly bizarre conclusion. We should waste hundreds of millions planning for a "no deal" tantrum in the vain hope that openly planning to try and screw the EU over by exploding an economic bomb under ourselves will cause them to suddenly offer us a wonderful deal!

If we spend our money buying a big gun so we can point it at our own heads, Redwood is arguing, they'll back down because they won't want to get blood splatters on their clothes!

Conclusion

Essentially what John Redwood seems to be arguing (in a shockingly dishonest manner) is that Theresa May should "turn the tables" on the EU by ... errm ... doubling down on her delusional policy of making the reckless threat to do a "no deal" strop the centrepiece of her spectacularly failing negotiating strategy. 

The incredible thing isn't that the propaganda baron Rupert Murdoch provides a platform to fanatical ideologues like John Redwood to promote this kind of delusional and downright dishonest Brexiteer rhetoric, it's that anyone ever took this kind of fanatical hard-right Brexiteer idiocy seriously in the first place.

As a result we're now in the extraordinary situation where the 27 remaining members of the EU are far more united than the UK governing party, which is catastrophically split. 

Theresa May is being pulled in opposite directions by one bunch of Tories who actually want to negotiate sensibly in order to avoid an economically ruinous "no deal" national meltdown, and other Tories like John Redwood who insist that the best approach to the most complex and risky set of negotiations the UK has faced in decades is to play an increasingly hysterical game of brinkmanship.

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OR

We could "grow more food" but who is going to do the work?

The Tory transport minister Chris Grayling has come up with a fantastic solution to the "no deal" Brexit chaos the Tories are actively planning to inflict on the UK economy.

A "no deal" Tory Brexit would mean import and export tariffs on a huge range of items, including food products. This wouldn't just mean taxes on food imported from the EU, it would mean taxes on food from all of the countries the EU has negotiated trade deals with too. This is because the UK would not just be crashing out of the Single Market in a "no deal" scenario, the country would also be crashing out of every trade deal the UK has joined through the EU over the last four decades.

The UK imports almost 45% of the food we eat. Nearly 80% of these food imports come from EU states, and the vast majority of the rest comes from countries that Britain has trade deals with that have been negotiated through the EU.

Chris Grayling's glib and simplistic solution to the problem of import tariffs on food products is "we'll grow more food here".

Aside from the fact that it's impossible to grow a lot of products in the British climate that British consumers now take for granted on their supermarket shelves, and the fact that it would cost £billions in investment in stuff like greenhouses, machinery, polytunnels, etc to increase the productivity of the UK agricultural industry so dramatically, there's also the glaring question of who is going to do the work?

Brexit hasn't even happened yet, but 2017 saw a 20% shortfall in seasonal migrant agricultural labour. Once a ruinous Tory "no deal" Brexit is launched, the shortfall is certain to grow dramatically, as migrant workers from the EU would lose their right to free movement, and end up facing a bureaucratic nightmare as the massively over-stretched Tory government try to cobble together a new set of immigration rules overnight.

In order to massively increase domestic agriculture output at the same time as the agricultural sector is suffering a massive labour shortfall because Brexit is chasing away a huge percentage of seasonal migrant workers, someone else would obviously have to do the work.

So where are the Tories going to find the labour supply to do all of this agricultural work?

Here are a few ideas based on previous Tory policies and proposals by Tory MPs:

One obvious source of agricultural workers would be to force jobless people to go out picking fruit and vegetables in return for no wages (instead of retraining or searching for actual paid employment). The Tories have demonstrated time and again that they believe that the state has the right to confiscate the labour of the individual through their use of numerous exploitative and economically damaging "Workfare" forced labour schemes.

Another solution would be to run with the Tory MP Philip Davies' proposal that disabled people don't deserve to be paid the minimum wage. Of course a workforce of severely sick and disabled people on wages of just a few quid an hour is hardly likely to be the most efficient workforce in the world, what with their physical limitations, their reluctance to work hard for below minimum wage pay, and their increased likelihood of falling ill or dying on the job, but there are millions of sick and disabled people for whom the Tory government have displayed absolute contempt (with their arbitrary disability welfare cuts, their cuts to statutory sick pay, their confiscation of mobility vehicles, their deliberated discrimination against people with mental health conditions, and their dehumanising disability denial factories). Who cares if sick and disabled people would make an inefficient workforce who keep dying on the job? It's not hard to imagine certain Tory ministers seeing the appalling death toll as a cost benefit because more dead disabled people would mean fewer mouths to feed on Brexit Britain's dramatically diminished food supplies.

Another solution would be work with the proposal made by the unelected peer Michael Bichard that pensioners should be forced to work for their pensions in order to avoid being "a negative burden on society". Of course herding elderly people into the fields to do back-breaking agricultural work would have the same problems of inefficiency and a very high labour force death rate, but there would be some element of poetic justice given that the economic chaos of a "no deal" Tory Brexit would have been enabled by millions of pensioners flocking to the polling stations to give the hard-right fringe of the Tory party the green light to just make Brexit up as they go along.

You wouldn't put it beyond the most cruel and compassionless Tories like Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Philip Davies and Priti Patel to force sick, disabled, and elderly people to do backbreaking agricultural labour for little pay, or no wages at all, but in all seriousness, the most likely supply of agricultural labour will come from the wave of unemployment triggered by the "no deal" Brexit meltdown.

"No deal" would mean chaos and mass redundancies in a wide range of industries, especially in the manufacturing, tourism, aviation, the financial sector, and the export/import industries. And without the right to freedom of movement, looking for jobs in the same industries elsewhere in Europe would be out of the question. So Chris Grayling's "no deal" Brexit dream is for Britain do downgrade and deskill down to a more rudimentary agrarian economy, with former pilots, travel agents, production line managers, financial analysts, logistics experts, and the like sent out into the fields to pick cauliflowers for crap pay so that the country doesn't starve.

Still, Brexiteer Tory politicians and the mercenary hacks shilling for hard-right billionaire propaganda barons like Jonathan Harmsworth, Richard Desmond, the Barclay brothers and Rupert Murdoch will still keep pushing as hard as they can for their fantasy of a nuclear "no deal" Brexit, because there's no way they're going to be the ones who are going to end up living in huts in the back end of nowhere and doing backbreaking cabbage-picking work for the glory of Brexit Britain is there? 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Now is the time to vote against the Tories

The Tory justification for introducing the 2010 Fixed Term Parliament Act was that it would prevent politicians from throwing the country into instability by calling General Elections to suit their own party political purposes, but that's exactly what Theresa May has decided to do.

It's only a few weeks since she told Scotland that "now is not the time" for them to decide their political future because the Brexit deal hasn't been finalised and a referendum would cause too much uncertainty, and yet here she is causing uncertainly by calling a General Election within three weeks of triggering Article 50!

The recklessness of this move is absolutely astounding. The UK is going into the most complex and risky set of diplomatic negotiations in its history, and Theresa May has decided to create a massive distraction for the next two months, just when her and her Brexit ministers should be concentrating all of their efforts on trying to secure the best possible exit deal for the UK.

Brexit only came about because David Cameron decided to gamble the entire economic future of the UK in order to win a bit of short-term party political advantage at the 2015 General Election, and now Theresa May has decided to put the interest of the Tory party above the interests of the nation again by attempting to increase her parliamentary majority instead of focusing on the vitally important Brexit negotiations.

The General Election does however present an opportunity for progressives to try to prevent the socially and economically ruinous "no deal" cliff-edge Brexit that Theresa May has been steering us towards.

Her appalling threat-based "negotiating strategy" and her decision to use the lives of EU citizens in the UK as Brexit bargaining chips have only succeeded in unifying the other 27 member states against her demands, making a catastrophic "no deal" Tory strop ever more likely.

Only the most extreme hardline Brexiter wants to see the UK flounce away from the Brexit negotiating table with nothing, because such a move would cause devastation across the UK economy, but especially in areas like manufacturing, the NHS and social care, agriculture and the services industry.

The Tories have also made it clear that their "no deal" strop scenario would involve turning the UK into a tax-haven and stripping back the welfare system (the NHS, social care, education, in-work benefits, disability benefits, pensions ...) in order to pay for these corporate bribes.

A General Election on June 8th will offer the public the opportunity to reject Theresa May's self-serving and hypocritical gambling with the nation's future, and avert the threat of a extremist Tory "no deal" cliff edge Brexit.

Now is the time to elect politicians who would take a more pragmatic approach to the Brexit negotiations and a more democratic approach to the implementation of Brexit in the UK.

Now is the time to vote in favour of politicians who strongly oppose the appalling Tory threat of turning the UK into a hard-right, low wage, low welfare corporate tax haven, and tearing down what remains of the social welfare system to pay for it.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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UKIP's economic spokesman says Single Market access is a "critical priority"!

Mark Reckless and Douglas Carswell were two of two of the most influential politicians in delivering Brexit. It was their defections to UKIP that spooked David Cameron into offering an EU referendum manifesto pledge in order to prevent even more Tory politicians and voters abandoning the party for UKIP.

Of course David Cameron's short-term EU referendum gamble failed. His gamble did deliver an unexpected Tory majority at the 2015 General Election, but within a little over a year Cameron was resigning in disgrace after throwing the entire economic future of the UK into uncertainty.

Cameron and his cabinet were so full of hubris that they didn't even bother to develop any kind of contingency plan for what to do if the public ignored his pitiful fearmongering and voted for Brexit, so after the Brexit vote the Tories spent the next seven months desperately trying to cobble together some kind of Brexit strategy whilst fobbing the public off with utterly inane drivel like "Brexit means Brexit".

When Theresa May finally got around to announcing her Brexit strategy in her woeful January 2017 clown costume speech it turned out that all they had come up with was the diplomatic equivalent of a toddler tantrum; "give us what we want or we'll blow up an economic bomb by quitting the EU without any kind of trade agreement"!

It's clear that with their diplomatic ineptitude the Tories are slow-marching the UK towards a catastrophic nuclear Brexit with no access to the Single Market, and Mark Reckless is terribly complicit in getting us into this precarious situation.

After losing his Westminster seat at the 2015 General Election Mark Reckless soon resurfaced as a UKIP representative in the Welsh Assembly, where he now heads up the Climate Change, Environment and Rural Affairs Committee. This committee has been looking at the potential impact of Brexit on agriculture, the environment and rural communities, and some of their findings are astounding given who their chairman is.

As chairman of the committee Reckless has stated that there is "access to the Single Market place, continuation of financial support and assurances over migrant labour are critical priorities"! [source]

Given that Reckless and his ilk played such a critical role in taking the UK to the brink of a catastrophic "no deal" Tory nuclear Brexit he has some gall to suddenly start crying that the Single Market and EU migrant labour from are actually critically important for Wales!

In a way it's indicative of what a farcical shambles Brexit is, that one of the leading proponents of quitting the EU is now crying about the damage that Theresa May and the three Brexiteers are about to inflict on Wales by quitting the EU.

If Reckless really cared so much about these critically important issues for Wales, how did he ever think it was appropriate to campaign for Brexit when he knew perfectly well that nobody, not least the Tory government, had an actual plan for how to handle it?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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