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?

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OR

The Tory Brexit squad just announced protecting landowner subsidies as an overriding Brexit priority!

Ten weeks after Brexit Theresa May's Brexit minister David Davis finally gave a speech to parliament to give details on his plan of action. His speech was widely derided as 15 minutes of pointless waffle because it contained far more sound bites, platitudes and vague aspirations than anything resembling a coherent strategy for leaving the EU without causing significant damage to the UK economy.

Jobs for the boys

His speech did contain a few interesting nuggets of information. One of them was that they have already built up an impressive 300 strong "jobs for the boys" force. It's not entirely certain what these hundreds of people have been doing all summer given the paucity of David Davies' speech, but I'm sure these wonderful unelected technocrats will do a great job of freeing us from the tyranny of the EU's evil army of unelected technocrats.

The austerity U-turn

When it comes to actual policy there really wasn't much to go on, but in the part where he spoke about maintaining economic stability there were a couple of interesting things. One of them is that the Tory Brexit squad have secured an agreement from the new chancellor Philip Hammond that structural and investment fund projects signed before Autumn statement would continue to be funded by the UK treasury after Brexit eventually goes ahead.

This is interesting because it's a 180° U-turn on the previous Tory position that austerity creates economic stability. For the last six years they endlessly chanted George Osborne's ridiculous austerity mantra that they have to ruthlessly slash spending on stuff like infrastructure projects, local government, emergency services and public sector wages in order to achieve economic stability. Now Davis is saying the precise opposite, that in order to achieve stability it's vital to not slash funding.

Whichever way you look at it it's an admission that they're wrong. Either Davis was wrong to seek assurances that agreed structural fund projects wouldn't be axed, or he's right that austerity at a time of economic instability is harmful (he is), which is proof that the last six years of Tory austerity has been needlessly destructive ideologically driven nonsense.

If austerity made any economic sense at all (it doesn't) then Davis and his Tory chums would have gleefully withdrawn funding from the structural fund investments. They didn't do it because they know, as they knew all along, that Osborne's austerity agenda was a socially and economically destructive con job.

Landowner subsidies

One of the only other bits of actual policy announcement in the speech was this bit of nonsense:

"Agriculture is a vital part of the economy, and the government will match the current level of annual payments that the sector receives through the direct payment scheme until 2020, providing certainty."

 Agriculture accounts of just 0.62% of the UK economy. It's obviously an important sector that employs several hundred thousands people, but it's utterly absurd that the Tories give landowners a special policy announcement when other sectors like manufacturing, science, education, health, retail, energy and transport get nothing at all to provide them a measure of "certainty" in the entire speech.

The idea that the EU direct payment scheme represents a subsidy for agriculture is a convenient fiction anyway. These payments are nothing more than taxpayer funded handouts to landowners. They come with no obligation to actually produce agricultural outputs at all. The more land you own the bigger the handout, that's just the way it works. Even landowners who leave their land barren and use it for nothing more than grouse shooting get piles of cash showered on them.

This direct payment scheme is just a way of using the tax system to extract wealth from those who have no large tracts of land to subsidise those who do.

It's just a method of further entrenching inequality by making the "have-nots" subsidise the haves, so no wonder the Tories are so fanatically in favour of it that they prioritise landowner subsidies so brazenly above blatantly much more important stuff like the manufacturing sector (no guarantees that they won't have to pay import and export tariffs on trade with the EU for example).

On the face of it it's extraordinary that the protection of such an unjust landowner subsidisation system is considered something that takes such priority over all of the various other sectors of the economy that didn't warrant any kind of reassurance in David Davis' speech, but then the landowner class are probably the most loyal Tory demographic of all so it's understandable if you look at it from the insular self-interested Tory perspective.

The Tories must have been inundated with calls from their wealthy landowner mates worrying about their taxpayer funded handouts coming to an end, so the Tory Brexit squad have decided to throw them a big juicy bone by promising that they'll still be getting their handouts come what may for the rest of us.

Just look at the fact that Paul Dacre (the editor of the rabidly anti-EU Daily Mail) has claimed an astonishing £460,000 in landowner subsidies for his country estates in Sussex and the Scottish Highlands since 2011. If he hadn't had guarantees from his Tory Brexiter chums that these vast handouts were going to continue, do you really think he would have pushed so strongly for Brexit?

The fact that the Tories see the placation of their land monopolist mates with vast taxpayer handouts as one of their absolutely core priorities in their Brexit "strategy" just goes to show how catastrophically unfit these people are to be negotiating on behalf of the British people.

That they've identified such a ridiculous thing as an overriding priority is compelling evidence that they're going to negotiate the whole thing on behalf of their financial backers (bankers, the landed gentry, corporate fat cats, tax-dodgers and private health corporations) and screw the consequences for the rest of us.

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OR

The 2013 European horse meat scandal

My favourite "horsemeat meme". My only complaint is that cows
are generally more intelligent than the typical reactionary
"blame immigrants for everything" ranter!

In early 2013 the UK food industry was rocked by a huge scandal when tests confirmed that processed foods sold in numerous supermarkets and under the brand name Findus contained up to 100% Romanian horse meat instead of beef, as claimed on the packaging.

As a vegetarian and a person that generally tries to avoid eating processed food I have not been personally effected by the scandal in any way. I do however have my opinions on it.

The first and most obvious point is that it is completely immoral for suppliers to sell horse meat under false pretences. There is absolutely no excuse for making misleading claims on food packaging. If it says beef on the packet, then beef it should contain. Just as a chicken based ready meal should contain only chicken meat and a vegetarian ready meal should contain no meat at all. This scandal hasn't just damaged consumer faith in supposedly beef based ready meals, it has given consumers reason to doubt food packaging in general. If a giant brand name like Findus can get away with selling horse meat as beef for many months, you don't need to be a die-hard cynic to begin wondering whether other processed foods might be contaminated with unstated ingredients.

Another point worth mentioning is that many "beef products", including meat pies and pasties labeled as Halal were found to be contaminated with pig meat too. Perhaps not that much of a concern to most British meat eaters, but to those of the Jewish or Islamic faiths a much more serious issue.

The scandal has lifted the lid on a shady pan European meat trade where shipments of Romanian horse meat passed through several French companies before ending up in Luxembourg where it was processed into ready meals for distribution to the UK, France, Ireland, Sweden, Spain and the Netherlands. This whole shady meat trade seems to be in contravention of French food traceability laws that were introduced as a response to the BSE crisis of the 1990s.If the legislation is being ignored on an industrial scale it is actually worse than nothing, since unscrupulous meat traders can make a tidy profit missielling dodgy meat, whilst honest traders are left to carry the financial burden of compliance with (what I believe to be a reasonably sensible) law.

The French food authorities must come under scrutiny for having allowed this to happen, but so too should the UK Food Standards Agency who allowed the misselling of horse meat to go on for many months, only waking up to the scandal after the Irish Food Safety Authority had done all of the legwork.

Mechanically Separated Chicken; another reason to avoid processed foods

One of the things that interests me as a vegetarian is the differing cultural attitudes to the consumption of different meat types. I've always found it confusing that British people could happily consume parts of a pig or cow carcass but would feel revulsion at the idea of eating dog or cow. On the continent attitudes towards the consumption of horse meat are completely different, with horse meat forming a regular part of French and Italian cuisine.

This European demand for horse meat has led to another element to the horse meat scandal. Since the horse meat scandal broke it has come to light that a small percentage of British slaughtered horse meat bound for European markets (an export market of thousands of horse carcasses a year that very few people had heard of before the horse meat scandal broke) has been found to be contaminated with a drug called phenylbutazone (bute), which is banned for human consumption. Here too, the Food Standards Agency has come in for deserved criticism.

In my opinion, probably the most important issue stemming from the horse meat scandal is that it is further evidence of hidden inflation. The practice of replacing the beef in processed foods with much cheaper horse meat, obtained through a dodgy and opaque pan European meat trading network is a clear example of hidden inflation. The inflation is hidden because the customer is still paying the same price for their ready meal beef lasagna, but the inflation still exists because the value and quality of the product has been debased in order to reduce production costs and increase profits.

I've described plenty more examples of how the true scale of inflation is being hidden through "innovative" industry practices and the misleading way that inflation is measured and reported on my article about

"Hidden Inflation"

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