Brexit is a £1 trillion con job

Just over a decade ago the British state conjured up staggering amounts of money in order to save the City of London financial sector from insolvency.

This unprecedented tsunami of cash included £200 billion in liquidity support, £76 billion to bail out RBS and Lloyds, £40 billion to bail out Bradford and Bingley and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, £280 billion in insurance cover for financial sector assets, and £435 billion in quantitative easing.

In 2010 the general public decided to punish Labour for having been in power during the financial sector insolvency crisis by replacing them with a Tory/Lib-Dem coalition (despite the fact that the Tories had been squealing for even more financial sector deregulation even right up until the financial sector meltdown was kicking off!).

The Tories and their despicable Lib-Dem enablers immediately began loading the cost of the bailouts onto ordinary British people via a ruinous programme of austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, devastating public service cuts, deliberate under-investment in infrastructure, and vandalism of the social safety net.

Meanwhile they continually lavished vast tax cuts and extravagant handouts on corporations and the mega-rich, as they raided the infrastructure budgets of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and northern England to further boost spending in already wealthier areas like London and the south east.

The consequences of these policies were absolutely dire. The slowest economic recovery in two Centuries, the longest period of real terms wage depreciation since records began, soaring child poverty and in-work poverty, unprecedented cuts to the education system, unprecedented cuts to local government budgets, catastrophically failing public services like the NHS, police & fire service, tens of thousands driven into early graves, the most unaffordable housing in history ...

And then David Cameron decided to gamble the entire nation's future in order to nick a few thousand UKIP votes at the 2015 General Election.

An environment of collapsing wages, insecure jobs, soaring poverty, failing public services, unaffordable housing, and an annihilated social security system was exactly what the Brexiteers needed in order to push Leave marginally over the winning line in the 2016 referendum.

All they needed to do was blame the consequences of these devastating domestic policies on immigrants and the EU, then watch the votes flood in as the Tories and Lib-Dems outright refused to admit the truth, that it was actually them to blame for the living standards collapse, not immigration or the EU.

The austerity fanatics and their vile austerity-enabling sidekicks couldn't counteract the lie without implicating themselves, so they just sat back allowed the lie to stand, and allowed Leave to win.

Britain has been in a state of constitutional chaos ever since, especially so after Theresa May decided to give the British public the chance to get rid of the Tories who created this Brexit chaos in the first place, and instead of seizing the opportunity we decided to intensify the chaos by keeping them in power but without a majority so that the government was beholden to the Northern Irish DUP sectarians and the ERG Brextemists in the Tory ranks.

Hence huge numbers of financial institutions simply giving up on all the chaos and uncertainty in the UK to seek economic refuge in the safety of the Single Market, taking £1 trillion in assets with them as they flee.

Dublin, Frankfurt, Paris, and Luxemburg being the main beneficiaries so far.

So that's £1 trillion in financial sector bailouts. The British people being forced to cover the cost of these bailouts through Tory/Lib-Dem austerity fanaticism. Then a furious backlash against collapsing living standards resulting in the financial sector pissing off out of Britain taking £1 trillion in assets with them!

The saddest thing of all is that millions of Brits remain absolutely incapable of seeing this con go on right in front of their eyes, and it's not just an inability to synthesise information without allowing the mainstream media propagandists to do their thinking for them that's causing people to completely miss the bigger picture, it's an extraordinary level of political forgetfulness.

Remainers flocking to support the Lib-Dems seem to have completely forgotten* all of the Lib-Dem lies, and their red-handed culpability in laying the groundwork for Brexit by helping the Tories wantonly trash our living standards for five devastating years.

It's just four years since the Coalition ended, yet huge numbers of people have apparently already forgotten how appallingly the Lib-Dems behaved, and we're somehow back to trusting them again, despite all their betrayals, despite their austerity-collusion, despite the fact that their entirely unrepentant leader Vince Cable wilfully served as George Osborne's austerity hatchet man at the treasury for five years, and despite the fact he defrauded the UK taxpayer of hundreds of millions by selling off the Royal Mail property portfolio at a fraction of its true value.

If people can't even remember four years ago, what hope is there of them remembering how the very same financial sector that's scarpering with £1 trillion in assets today were the beneficiaries of £1 trillion in bailouts 11 years ago?

So what are the lessons here? 

• Brexit is a chaotic and ongoing economic disaster.

• There's nothing patriotic about supporting the diminishment of your own nation.

• Capitalism has no national loyalties, even to the extent of scarpering just a decade after being lavishly bailed out at the public expense.

• People are apparently so forgetful the bankers' bailouts are ancient history to them, and they're even back to trusting the Lib-Dems again!

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* = Well, either they've forgotten, or they were actually perfectly fine with ruinous austerity fanaticism all along because they were socially and economically insulated from it. So they've either somehow forgotten it all in the space of four years, or they're a bunch of horrible "I'm alright Jack" wankers who simply didn't mind austerity malice at all because the dreadful consequences always fell on other people, meaning they're exactly the kind of insufferably aloof and uncaring metropolitan elitists their opponents always claimed that they were.

The Tory Dementia Tax

Rarely, if ever, has a political party included such a depraved policy in their election manifesto, but in 2017 the Tories decided to cross the Rubicon by announcing a policy of thumping dementia sufferers with a wealth extraction tax to pay for their own social care.

The policy

The new Tory policy is to give the financial services industry the opportunity to administer the asset stripping of elderly people who are unfortunate enough to end up with dementia, physical infirmities or other conditions that require social care.

If the elderly person is deemed to have assets worth over £100,000 (the average house price in the UK is £215,000) then they will be treated as if they are rich and made to pay their own social care costs, even though they payed a lifetime of National Insurance contributions to cover the cost of health and social care in their old age.

The Tories have ever-so-kindly said that the elderly people won't have to sell their homes immediately in order to cover the costs, but that they can get "equity release" products so that the wealth can be extracted from the value of their homes after they die.

Creating a new market

One of the obvious beneficiaries of this policy will be the financial services industry who will get to design and market these "equity release" products.

A consideration of the root cause of the social care problem just goes to show how depraved this is. Here's a simple timeline of events.

• The financial services industry gambles itself into insolvency betting on all kinds of dodgy sub-prime mortgage junk.

• The Labour government steps in to save the banks and avert financial catastrophe by borrowing hundreds of billions to prop up the banks and salvage the nose-diving economy.

• The Tories use this high level of borrowing as an excuse to launch their ideological austerity agenda, and set about slashing government spending.

• One of the worst affected areas is social care which suffers £4.6 billion in Tory cuts (at a time of rising demand). 

• The Tories announce a plan to force pensioners to pay for their own social care by asset stripping the value of their homes.

• The financial services industry are handed a lucrative new "equity release" market to profit from, and the Tory press describe this kind of corporate equity extraction scheme as if it's some kind of wonderful favour to the elderly that they're being allowed to live in their own house as its equity is harvested away by the banks that screwed the economy in the first place!

Warped priorities

It's funny how the Tories can afford to squander £billions in tax revenue by slashing the corporation tax rate from 28% in 2010 to just 17% in 2020, but they're dressing this Dementia Tax up as some kind of necessary evil.

The cost of these corporation tax cuts stacks up to a mind-boggling £70 billion giveaway to corporations between 2015 and 2020, but somehow they're telling us we're so broke that we can't even afford to look after our elderly people when they get ill in their old age.

Don't ever let the Tories try to convince you that social care can't be afforded. It can. They just don't want to pay for it because they see elderly people's houses as rich pickings.

Theft

The pro-Tory mainstream media have worked tirelessly to actually try and dress this depraved policy up as a good thing, but there's no other way of seeing it than as a move to asset strip elderly people for the "crime" of falling ill in their old age.

These elderly people have paid tax and National Insurance their whole lives, while working hard to save and buy their own homes. Now "Theresa May's Team" have decided that they don't actually deserve the health and social care that they paid for through their taxes because the Tories and their chums see their homes as lucrative low-hanging fruit to be harvested in order to fund even more tax breaks for corporations and the super rich.

Making people fund their own social care by asset stripping them is a theft of all of those years of National Insurance contributions.

The workaround

Once upon a time a fresh faced Tory MP called George Osborne appeared on the Daily Politics and advised a caller that it's easy for rich people to get the taxpayer to pay for their social care if they set up tax-dodging scams to hide their assets.

This self-serving Tory mentality has not changed.

Selfish "I'm alright Jack" types will skirt around the Tory Dementia Tax in exactly the way that George Osborne advised, while ordinary people who worked their whole lives to buy their house and wouldn't dream of setting up tax-dodging scams will be the ones to be hit by it.

People who didn't buy their own property won't be hit by it, people who see no moral problem with tax-dodging schemes won't be hit by it. The only people to be hit by Dementia Tax will be the hard-working people who are naive enough to actually behave honestly and play by the rules in Tory Britain.

Conclusion

It's hard to tell if the Tories decided to launch such a depraved policy in the middle of dementia awareness week out of sheer incompetence, or whether it's their sick idea of a joke.

Whatever the case, a plot to allow the financial services industry to asset strip dementia sufferers has to be one of the most inhumane manifesto pledges ever devised.

Still. Millions of people are going to go out and vote Tory because they see the corporate administered asset stripping of dementia sufferers as a price worth paying for whatever (almost certainly imaginary) benefit they think they'd personally get from a Tory government.

What we can do

• Make sure you are registered to vote so that you can vote against this depraved Tory plan to hit dementia sufferers with a wealth extraction tax.

• Spread awareness. If you have elderly parents, grandparents, friends or relatives make sure they understand the depravity of this Tory plan to milk the assets of elderly people in order to fund their tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich. Feel free to share this article on social media, email it, print it off on paper if you think it will help ...

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Theresa May's fantasy of a quickfire EU-UK trade deal lies in ruins

The EU's draft resolution on Brexit negotiations delivers several massive hammer blows to Theresa May's fantasy of a quickfire EU-UK partial free trade deal.

Theresa May's impossible fantasy

When Theresa May outlined her "negotiating tactics" in her January 2017 clown costume speech the hard-right press pack responded with glee at her diplomatically inept threat-based posturing, but anyone with a few brain cells to rub together realised with horror that she was slow-marching the UK towards a catastrophic "no deal" strop.

What she did was outline an ridiculously impossible fantasy of what she expects from the EU and then threatened that if she doesn't get it she'll take the nuclear option of stropping away from the negotiating table with no deal whatever.

A lose-lose situation

For ordinary people this negotiating stance was always going to be a lose-lose situation.

Even if by some miracle the EU caved into Theresa May's ridiculous demands we would be stuck with a situation where major corporate sectors (finance and vehicle manufacturing were mentioned by name) get to retain access to the Single Market, while small businesses, sole traders and individual citizens are locked out of it and hit with import and export tariffs. This would leave the UK economy even more rigged in favour of gigantic multinational corporations than it already is.

Given the fantastical nature of Theresa May's demands the more likely option was always going to be a socially and economically ruinous nuclear Brexit. The London School of Economics has estimated that a retaliatory nuclear Brexit would cost the UK somewhere between 6.3% to 9.5% of GDP, which equates to (£4,200 - £6,400 per household). Anyone who thinks that sounds like an attractive option is clearly bonkers.

The hammer blows

In this section I'm going to outline just five of the most significant hammer blows to Theresa May's wildly over-optimistic fantasy of a quickfire partial free-trade deal with the EU. These are five of the most serious issues, but there are plenty more too. If you want to see more take a look at the draft EU resolution here.

Separation first, trade deal after

In her Article 50 letter Theresa May begged repeatedly for parallel negotiations so that the UK's divorce terms and post-divorce trade deal can be negotiated in unison. The draft resolution shoots this wish down in flames.

The EU have made it absolutely clear that Theresa May won't be getting any kind of quickfire trade deal before the UK has officially quit the EU. The best they're willing to offer is a three year transitional arrangement so the post-divorce trade deal can be negotiated under relatively stable conditions.

A mixed agreement

The EU's lead negotiator Michel Barnier has stated that any post-Brexit trade deal would be classified as a "mixed agreement". This is highly significant because it means that aside from requiring ratification at the European Parliament, the trade deal would also need to be ratified by the national parliaments of all 27 other member states.

Essentially every other country in Europe is going to have a national veto over any EU-UK trade deal, plus, due to the special ratification procedures in Belgium, several of their regional parliaments like Wallonia will also get a veto too.

You'd have to be spectacularly optimistic to think that the likes of Theresa May, David Davis, the disgraced Liam Fox and Boris Johnson would be able to cobble together an agreement that is both acceptable to all of the 27 remaining EU states, and also to the hard-right tabloid propaganda rags that are looking for any excuse whatever to screech for a socially and economically ruinous "no deal" nuclear Brexit.

No sectoral deals

One of Theresa May's big demands from her clown costume speech was that certain sectors of the UK economy (she mentioned banking and vehicle manufacturing specifically) should be given preferential access to the Single Market.

This fantasy lies in ruins now because the EU have clearly stated that there will be "no sectoral deals" that replicate the benefits of being in the Single Market only for certain sectors of the economy.

The EU have made it absolutely clear that they don't intend to allow Theresa May to cherry-pick special access to the Single Market for favoured corporations (those with the financial power to bribe or coerce the Tory party into representing their interests). Either everyone gets fair access or nobody does.
  No jumping the gun

In her clown costume speech Theresa May naively pinned her hopes on getting a quickfire trade deal with the United States and then soon after she went scuttling off to lick Donald Trump's boots and plead for a special US-UK trade deal in the national humiliation that was her "begging bowl" speech.

The problem here is that the EU have made it explicitly clear that if she tries to jump the gun by negotiating trade deals with other countries before the divorce settlement is finalised, the EU-UK deal is off the table.

Here's exactly what the draft resolution says:

"Should Britain seek to negotiate any free trade deals with other countries while it is still an EU member state, there will be no future discussion of a deal with the union."

If Theresa May tries to jump the gun by negotiating trade deals with other countries (such as the United States) before we've fully left the EU then she'll be completely trashing the possibility of any kind of trade deal with the EU (which accounts for well over 50% of the UK's trade in goods).

No blackmail over terrorism
  The stipulation that neither side should try to use the withdrawal of security and defence cooperation as blackmail is eerily prescient.

It just goes to show how Theresa May is perceived on the continent that the EU would bother to add a clause to prevent her from using the threat of turning a blind eye to terrorism plots as a bargaining chip in the trade negotiations.

To have explicitly ruled out such sickening blackmail tactics they obviously see her as a fanatical and dangerous hard-right extremist who would use literally any kind of threat, no matter how depraved, in order to get her own way.

Astonishingly Theresa May managed to live down to the EU's worst expectations by including the threatened withdrawal of security cooperation in her Article 50 letter.

The right-wing press reacted gleefully to Theresa May's disgusting blackmail tactics, but any Brit with a shred of human decency must surely be horrified that Theresa May is actually threatening to turn a blind eye to terrorism in order to blackmail the EU into caving into her fantastical demands.

Did Theresa May want a "no deal" nuclear Brexit all along?

The sheer incompatibility of Theresa May's fantastical expectations and what the EU have outlined in their draft resolution makes her threat of launching a mutually destructive nuclear Brexit look almost inevitable.

The Tories and the hard-right press have been indoctrinating the public for months with their "no deal is better than a bad deal" rhetoric, but this has left Theresa May no room for manoeuvre whatever. Any concession she makes to the EU will be leapt upon by the hard-Brexiters and the right-wing press as proof that Britain is getting a "bad deal" so that they can demand their favoured "no deal" scenario.

At the absolute best Theresa May's "no deal is better than a bad deal" rhetoric is a catastrophic failure in expectation management, but it actually seems more likely that it's a deliberate ploy to condition the public into actually believing that driving the UK economy off an economic cliff edge is the best course of action!

The quickfire cherry-picking Brexit deal that Theresa May outlined in January is never going to happen. It always was a ludicrous fantasy. The big question of course is whether Theresa May outlined such a ridiculous fantasy because she's totally delusional, or because she knew it was impossible nonsense all along and saw the making of such ludicrously unrealistic demands as part of a Tory ploy to walk away from the negotiations empty handed while pinning the blame for the ensuing social and economic catastrophe on the EU.

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The Tory long-term economic plan

In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher and the Tories set about fundamentally restructuring the UK economy away from manufacturing and towards the service sector, especially financial services in the City of London. Now, with Tory "hard Brexit" they're intent on driving the financial services sector away from London by erecting a huge trade barrier against the rest of Europe.

In this article I'm going to take a look at this extraordinary Tory lunacy in a bit more detail.

Part 1

The two main reasons that the Tories steered the UK economy away from manufacturing and towards financial services were ideology and over-optimism.

The Tories wanted to destroy the power of the trade unions. The destruction of the heavy industries that the most powerful unions were based on was a core strategy in the Tory ideological war against worker power. Thus industries like coal mining, steel, ship building, rail industries and HGV manufacturing were left to ruin, or even subjected to deliberate ideological attack.

To put this Tory victory over worker power into perspective, the National Union of Miners had some 170,000 members in the early 1980s. Now there is not one single underground coal mine left in the UK and the once mighty NUM has just 100 odd members left.

Aside from wanting to destroy the power of industrial workers by destroying their jobs (and communities) the other Tory reason for this shift towards a financial sector dominated service-based economy was over-optimism. The 1970s was full of new theories like the post-industrial society, and the Tories thought that they could deliberately accelerate the process of becoming a modern post-industrial society by neglecting and undermining the industrial sectors and putting all of their efforts into turning London into a global financial services hub. They actually thought that they were modernising Britain when what they were actually doing was unforgivable economic vandalism. This delusional modernisation mentality was reflected in all of the slick political propaganda the Tories commissioned from trendy advertising agencies like Saachi and Saachi.

If we look at the UK balance of Trade the appalling consequences of this deliberate process of de-industrialisation becomes clear. Over the years the UK has been importing more and more manufactured goods, but this woeful trade imbalance has been partially offset by the trade surplus in services, mainly financial services.

Contrast with Germany

The contrast with the approach taken by Germany is profound. Instead of fighting damaging ideological wars with the trade unions, Germany actually has a law that requires worker representation on the board of company directors. Instead of taking an antagonistic class-warfare based approach to industrial relations the Germans adopted a more co-operative and conciliatory approach.

The difference in the German approach to industrial strategy is also profound.

Instead of gleefully kicking their core industries into the grave and concentrating on financial services, the Germans supported their manufacturing and heavy industries and encouraged modernisation with the aim of becoming a modern high-tech economy. Their success has been undeniable. While British vehicle, machine and machine tool industries have floundered and died off dramatically, the Germans have thrived.

The Germans don't need a vast over-sized financial services sector to offset their balance of trade deficit because they have a huge trade surplus.

Part 2

After having restructured the UK economy to make it fundamentally reliant on financial services the Tories decided to hold, and then lose a referendum on EU membership. After that they then decided to aim for a Tory "hard Brexit" that involves erecting a huge trade barrier between the UK and continental Europe.

London-based financial institutions are deeply worried that the new Tory trade barriers are going to lose them money, and they're drawing up plans to shift significant swathes of their businesses out of London to keep their access to the European Single Market. Cities like Paris, Frankfurt, Dublin, Madrid and Amsterdam are jostling to entice major financial institutions away from London. 

If the post-Brexit exodus of financial services happens, then the UK is going to be in deep economic trouble. The export of financial services will dwindle and stop partially offsetting the woeful trade deficit in goods, meaning the balance of payments is just going to get even worse than it already is.

The idea that this situation can be rectified quickly is absolute fantasy. Four decades of deliberate industrial neglect can't be undone overnight with a bit of optimistic Tory rhetoric.

If Britain wanted to rebalance towards high-tech industries in order to combat the trade deficit in goods, it needed a comprehensive industrial strategy a decade ago, not just some optimism-heavy but investment-light blibber blabber from Theresa May now.

Brexiter bobbins

The best that Brexiters seem to be able to come up with to justify the massive act of economic self-harm that we're about to do is to hurl the extraordinary accusation that "lefties" should hate banks, therefore they're hypocrites unless they support Brexit and the deliberate expulsion of tens of thousands of banking jobs, and £billions in tax revenue and £billions more in exported services.

The thing that makes this stance so extraordinary is the way that the people adopting it are so desperately willing to overlook the complete Tory U-turns on stuff like free trade (they're busy erecting a huge Brexit trade barrier with the continent) and banking (they've coddled the City of London for decades, but now they're intent on locking them out of the EU in order to please the baying hard Brexit mob).

You don't actually have to be a big fan of banking and hyper-financialisation in order to see the economic damage that Tory Brexit is going to do, you just have to be a pragmatist. It's just not a sane economic policy to spend four decades restructuring your economy towards financial services until you're completely reliant upon them, and then suddenly tell them all to "piss off"!

Part 3

Once the Tories have told the financial services sector to "piss off" what comes next?

What is the Tory plan when London loses tens of thousands of highly-paid jobs to the continent; when the Exchequer loses £billions in tax revenue; when the UK's already woeful trade deficit is made even worse by the exodus of financial services providers?

If the evidence of the last six years is anything to go by, then the prescription will be more austerity for the poor and ordinary, more wage repression, more politically partisan cuts to local government, more destruction of public services, and more tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich.

Conclusion

The long-term Tory economic plan that has played out over the last four decades is beyond belief:

"Let's put all of our eggs in one basket ... and then smash the basket up with a sledge hammer"

Despite the obvious economic lunacy of both parts of this "plan" people still insist on rote learning bizarre counter-factual narratives from the right-wing press about how the Tories are the party of economic competence. And the Tories will continue getting away with socially and economically ruinous incompetence as long as people keep rote learning ridiculous right-wing economic fairy stories from the right-wing press.

 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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Theresa May's partial free trade fantasy

Beside the outright lie about the conduct of the EU referendum debate, the threat to turn the UK into a bargain basement corporate tax haven if she doesn't get her way and the numerous self-contradictory statements, Theresa May's Brexit speech contained something else that the mainstream media chose not to focus much attention on.

After explaining that her radical interpretation of Brexit means that she thinks she's got a mandate to drag the United Kingdom out of the Single Market, Theresa May went on to propose a new free-trade agreement between the UK and the EU. Part of this fantasy deal apparently includes negotiating tariff-free Single Market access for the financial services sector and other major corporations such as the motor industry.

Here's what she said:

"We do not seek membership of the Single Market. Instead we seek the greatest possible access to it through a new Free Trade Agreement.

That Agreement may take in elements of current Single Market arrangements in certain areas - on the export of cars and lorries for example, or the freedom to provide financial services across national borders - as it makes no sense to start again from scratch when Britain and the remaining Member States have adhered to the same rules for so many years."

Essentially what Theresa May is saying is that if the industry has the financial power to either donate vast sums to the Tory party (like the financial services sector) or to hold the UK government to ransom by threatening to up sticks and relocate their factories into the single market zone (the car industry) then Theresa May and her Brexiteers are going to try to negotiate special Single Market access for them. But if, on the other hand, your business doesn't have such financial might (small and medium sized businesses, start ups, independent traders ...) screw you! You're probably going to end up paying tariffs if your business involves importing or exporting goods, materials or services from/to EU countries. 

Even the justification for this haphazard approach is absolutely ridiculous. If Theresa May admits that it makes no sense to tear up the rules for the financial services sector or major corporations like the motor industry, how on earth does it make sense to force Britain's small and medium sized businesses to "start again from scratch"?

The idea of negotiating Single Market access just for powerful corporations with the financial might to either bribe or coerce the Tories into defending their interests, whilst leaving the rest of the economy to suffer the threat of import and export tariffs is utterly appalling. It's yet another example of the Tory party deliberately re-engineering the economy in favour of the largest corporations at the expense of other sectors of the economy.

The idea of Theresa May exempting the bankers and corporate fat cats from the economic self-harm of quitting the Single Market should be appalling to all but the most rabidly right-wing of British people, but it seems unlikely that it will actually ever actually play out that way because the EU are highly unlikely to allow the Tory party to set about picking and choosing which sectors of the British economy get to retain access to the Single Market.

The problem of course is that if the EU say no to this Tory effort to cherry-pick the benefits of Single Market access for favoured sectors of the economy, Theresa May and the Chancellor Philip Hammond have made it pretty damned clear that their alternative plan is to turn the UK into a savagely right-wing corporate tax haven, and point the finger of blame at the "nasty, horrible, evil foreigners at the EU" while they're doing it.

Some of us warned about this kind of outcome all along. As many flaws as the EU has, leaving the exit process in the hands of the fanatical right-wing of the Tory party is absolutely certain to be worse.

Unless something is done to stop Theresa May's madness, the UK is either going to end up as a deeply divided country where only those with sufficient wealth to bribe or coerce the Tory party get to benefit from Single Market access, or even worse, we end up as some kind of isolated and almost universally despised bargain basement tax haven economy intent on stealing the wealth of other countries rather than actually generating our own.

I wonder if this kind of hard-right Tory fanaticism is what most Brexiters had in mind when they decided to vote for Brexit and essentially sign a blank contract with the Tory party to just make it up as they go along?

 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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