Brexit Party and the Faragists know exactly what they're doing when it comes to propaganda. Make as many false-promises to as many people as possible in the hope that they're dumb enough to believe that they'll actually follow through on any of it.
Their position on British Steel is absolutely extraordinary. They've proposed a John Lewis style workers' partnership to save the institution from insolvency, but they also propose reducing UK tariffs on almost all imports to zero, meaning the UK would be absolutely flooded with cheap imports, meaning the inevitable ruination of the British Steel industry, workers' partnership or not.
But besides the fact that their stated aims are mutually contradictory nonsense, it gets even worse. The candidate they're standing in the Peterborough by-election is a guy called Mike Greene who works for a private investment fund called Greybull Capital LLP.
These are the owners who have driven British Steel into insolvency, which is just one of the numerous company collapses they've overseen in recent years.
They were behind the collapse of Monarch Airlines that collapsed owing £500 million to suppliers and creditors, and leaving 110,000 stranded tourists across Europe who needed repatriating at a cost of £60 million to the British taxpayer.
Then there was the subsequent collapse of the spun-off Monarch Aircraft Engineering the following year with the loss of 408 jobs.
Snooker and pool fans will remember the collapse of Rileys in 2012, which was then acquired by Greybull who then flogged off half the chain's sites before ditching the lot in 2014. Rileys was destroyed, but Greybull made a 10% profit on their dealings so hooray for them eh?
They were involved in the Comet buyout before the electrical retailer collapsed into insolvency in 2013 triggering the loss of 7,000 jobs. This bankruptcy resulted in a £25 million loss to the public purse in unpaid VAT.
Then there was the collapse of My Local in 2016 with the loss of 1,200 jobs, with Greene intimately involved in that particular Greybull insolvency.
And now in 2019 we've got Greybull driving British Steel into administration too, with 5,000 jobs at risk, and another 2,000 through supply chains.
And Brexit Party are gleefully fielding one of Greybull's senior figures as their parliamentary candidate in the Peterborough by-election.
And herein lies the great deceit of the Faragists.
They appeal to people's patriotism and pretend that it's the prideful British thing to do to vote for the most militant form of Brexit possible, but then their first candidate ever for parliament is a guy who works for a faceless vulture fund that's driven loads of British businesses into insolvency, destroyed literally thousands of British jobs, and left the UK taxpayer footing the bill time and time again.
They're not pushing a "no deal" Brexit because they think it'll be good for Britain, they're pushing it because they know that they can make vast amounts of money by betting against Britain, the Pound, and British companies as they push the UK economy over an avoidable cliff.
Then they can make even more by flooding their ill-gotten gains back into the UK to buy up £billions in distressed British assets on the cheap in the resulting chaos.
They want to do to Britain what Mike and his Greybull mates have been doing to British companies like Monarch, Rileys, My Local, Comet, and British Steel.
"No deal" Brexit is a deeply unpatriotic national asset stripping strategy being sold to the gullible as the patriotic thing to support, but the fact that the Brexit Party's first ever parliamentary candidate is a key player in the Greybull asset-stripping operation tells you all you need to know.
But then the bookies have Greene and Brexit Party as favourites to win in Peterborough, so none of the opposition parties are being clear enough in highlighting this guy's insolvency-strewn CV.
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.
Both sides of the EU debate have put forward some completely inept and downright misleading arguments in favour of their positions, but the appalling opportunism and incoherence of the Brexit camp is really beginning to get on my nerves. It doesn't matter what the news story these days, there's always a pack of Brexiters ready to pounce on it and reshape it into an anti-EU diatribe, using all manner of tortured logic, fantastical thinking and downright misleading rhetoric in the process.
The purpose of this article is not to persuade you to vote one way or another, I actually believe there are good arguments to be found in favour of both sides of the debate if you're prepared to actually look for them.
The purpose is to show the shameless political opportunism and logical incoherence that elements of the Brexit camp are ever willing to present in order to dupe gullible people into supporting their cause.
Once you've read this article you'll be able to keep an eye out for people jumping into political debates about serious issues with the sole objective of piggybacking their personal political agenda onto the debate by any means possible (including the complete abandonment of logic, reason and basic common sense).
Steel
When the EU tried to intervene in the steel market by imposing import tariffs on artificially cheap "dumped" Chinese steel, UKIP actively voted against the measures then the Tory party successfully vetoed the deal.
Despite these displays of utter contempt for the UK steel industry, an awful lot of right-wing Brexiters (including UKIP leader Nigel Farage) have opportunistically tried to claim that the only way to save the UK steel industry is for Britain to leave the EU.
Just a few moments thought about what a post-EU Britain would look shatters this absurd fantasy. The Tories (who in late 2015 sacrificed 3,000 jobs in Redcar because they were far too busy sucking up to the Chinese at the time, and then in February 2016 deliberately torpedoed EU measures to protect the European steel industry) would be in sole charge of the UK economy.
Anyone who thinks that post-Brexit Tories would suddenly give up either their fanatically right-wing economic ideology or their pathetic subservience to China just to save a load of mainly Labour voting steel communities really must be imagining some kind of bizarre post-EU fantasy land where the fundamental laws of political nature have been reversed.
NHS
Another of the utterly ridiculous claims from Brexiters is that the quitting the EU is the only way to save the NHS. The same "just think about it" counter argument stands.
A post-EU Britain would be run by the Tories who have spent the last six years wrecking the NHS by deliberately underfunding it (like they promised they wouldn't), carrying out a catastrophically wasteful top-down reorganisation (like they promised they wouldn't), bringing in new rules to make forced closures of NHS services much easier (like they promised they wouldn't), carving the NHS open for privatisation and cherry-picking of profitable services (like they promised they wouldn't) and deliberately picking ideological fights with junior doctors in order to drive them overseas or out of the profession entirely.
The idea that a post-Brexit Tory party emboldened by the fact they're no longer constrained by European rules like the working time directive would suddenly decide to start looking after the NHS rather than continuing their strategy of deliberately running it into the ground, treating NHS employees like shit and privatising all the profitable bits is another example of hopelessly unrealistic utopian fantasising about what a post-Brexit UK would look like.
TTIP
Another tactic of the Brexit crowd is to claim that the only way to beat the TTIP corporate power grab is to quit the EU.
It's worth remembering that the Tory government are so fanatically in favour of the complete corporate over-writing of our democratic and judicial systems that they outright refused to ask for a TTIP exemption for NHS services or demand the removal of the highly controversial ISDS (corporate over-writing of sovereign democracy and judiciary) elements of the plan.
Let's think about this post-Brexit scenario again. Yes, we wouldn't be subject to TTIP (if it even ever goes through), but the Tories would then have free rein to draw up their own corporate power grabs disguised as "trade deals".
However, unlike with the EU where there is a massive and growing resistance to TTIP, it's undoubtable that what the Tories would come up with on their own would be far worse than TTIP, and there would be far less opposition to stand up to it (or at the least force the withdrawal of the most rabidly pro-corporate elements). So once again, despite the Brexiter rhetoric, it would be a case of "out of the frying pan, into the fire".
EU rules
One of the most irritatingly poor Brexiter arguments is that the EU is damaging British businesses with their "pesky rules". The problem with this argument is that an awful lot of Brexiters seem to think they can have their cake and eat it. They either want to stay in the single market (but ditch the single market rule of free movement of labour) or negotiate a single market like trade deal between the UK and the EU.
The EU are not going to allow the UK to just cherry-pick the bits of the single market that they like and ditch the rest, because that would obviously open the door to other member states to begin cherry-picking which rules they want to abide by and which they want to abandon.
Even if the EU does decide to make an exception for the UK and give us continued access to the single market without having to abide by the free movement rules, all of the rules would be drawn up in Brussels, and the UK would have absolutely no say at all in their development.
Additionally, whether Britain gets to stay in the single market or not, if our companies want to continue trading with Europe, then the products they sell within the EU would still have to comply with EU standards. The UK would no longer have any say whatever in what those standards actually are, but we'd still have to abide by their "pesky rules" anyway!
Democracy
One of the central Brexiter criticisms of the EU is that it's undemocratic. I actually agree with them on this. Elements of the EU are extremely undemocratic, especially the European Commission, the European Central Bank (and the way they ganged up with the IMF to impose socially and economically toxic austerity economics on Greece). However a think about what a post-Brexit UK would look like is revealing.
The UK would still have a completely unelected House of Lords; an unelected head of state; an unelected central bank; a deeply unrepresentative and apathy inducing Westminster voting system where a mandate from just 24% of the registered electorate is sufficient to form a majority government; and an utterly bizarre hotch-potch of a constitution where the people of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London get their own proportionally elected parliaments, while all of the non-London English regions have to do without.
The bizarre thing is that the European elections are the actually only proportional elections that the English regions get to participate in, so Brexit (which is much more popular in the English regions than any of the places with their own proportionally elected parliaments) would clearly make the English regions less democratic!
Tax-dodging
After the "Panama Papers" furore and David Cameron's excruciatingly protracted admission that he personally benefited from shares in his fathers' offshore business empire while he was a serving MP (shares that he never registered on the Parliamentary Register of Members' Financial Interests) some Brexiters have even begun mouthing off about how Brexit is necessary in order to clamp down on tax-dodging!
Once again a think about what a post-Brexit UK would look like is revealing. The Tories (who have repeatedly battled and lobbied against EU efforts to clamp down on tax havens) would have an even stronger grip on the UK government, and it's absolutely clear that they they have no honest intention of cracking down on tax-dodging, heavily funded as they are by a bunch of tax-dodgers.
Additionally the Brexit faction of the Tory party would be emboldened, meaning that the likes of John Redwood would be more likely to achieve their ambition of turning the entire UK economy into one gigantic tax-haven.
Conclusion
Whether you've decided which side of the debate you support or not, it's really important that you don't allow yourself to be taken for an idiot.
Few on the "Bremain" side are promising that the EU will suddenly become some kind of fantastical utopia if Britain votes to remain. In fact many of them are prepared to admit that the EU has problems, but their solution is to fix these problems from within, rather than run away.
An awful lot of people on the Brexit side seem to want people to believe in a staggeringly unrealistic post-EU fantasy land, where the Tory government will suddenly start caring about things like the NHS, the steel industry and clamping down on tax-dodging. Even worse than, they they seem to expect people to be gullible enough to believe that the unrestrained Tories wouldn't concoct so-called "trade deals" that are much worse than the TTIP corporate power grab, and that stripping the English regions of their only proportional elections would somehow make Britain more democratic!
It's absolutely fine if you still want Britain to leave the EU, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Just don't let yourself be taken for an idiot, and try to keep an eye out for people opportunistically using the tactic of piggy-backing their own biased political agenda onto topical news items, regardless of whether it is logically justifiable.
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.
It's clear to anyone who understands rudimentary economics that the root cause of the ongoing UK steel industry crisis is the glut of artificially cheap state-subsidised steel flowing out of China.
Given this fact it would be easy to paint the Chinese as the villains, but actually they're not. The Chinese are only actually doing what's in their own national interest. The Tories are the villains because they're blatantly not working towards Britain's national interests.
China's national interest
The Chinese economy has been booming for decades, but in recent years their astonishing rate of economic growth has slowed significantly. Of course annual GDP growth of 6% plus is inconceivable in the UK (2% growth mainly built on the back of mass immigration is enough to get Tories gleefully slapping themselves on the back), but it represents a big slowdown from the 10% they were averaging between the late 1980s and the global financial sector insolvency crisis.
This slowdown means that the largely state-planned Chinese economy has been left with an a much higher steel production capacity than their economy has demand for, which leaves them with a choice. They can either significantly reduce their steel output, or they can subsidise their steel industry then flood the global market with under-priced steel.
To put this choice into perspective it's important to get an idea of the size of Chinese steel production. In the 1960s and '70s the UK steel industry was bigger than China's, but since then Chinese steel production has grown 63 fold to produce almost half of the entire world output of steel (882 million metric tonnes) while UK steel production has gradually declined. The UK steel industry now produces just 1.3% of the steel that China's does.
If the Chinese government were to immediately slow down steel production it would clearly come at the cost of tens of thousands of Chinese jobs, which makes the alternative of continuing production and flooding the global market look like a better option.
An additional benefit to the Chinese is that by over-producing steel and dumping it at below cost price on the global market, they can cripple foreign steel producers in any areas that fail to impose import tariffs out of adherence to radical free-market dogma.
It's obviously in China's best interests to keep their factories churning out steel and actively increasing their dominance in the global steel market by eliminating competition, because once the competition is gone, the Chinese will be able to jack up the price, and the countries that let their steel industries die will just have to pay the price that China dictate.
What the Chinese are doing is obviously not good for the UK steel industry, but who can blame the Chinese government for adopting an industrial strategy that is beneficial to China?
Tory treachery
At the back end of 2015 the Tories were busy sucking up to China and bribing them to build our energy infrastructure for us, while the UK steel industry was in crisis. 3,000 jobs were lost in Redcar in the north east, which has been a massive blow to the local community with severely detrimental knock on effects in all kinds of other sectors of the economy too (the supply chain, transport, catering, childcare, the leisure industry ...).
Since then the Tories have only made things worse. In February 2016 the Tories successfully torpedoed an EU plan to increase tariffs on dumped Chinese steel. Now they are flat out refusing to consider nationalisation of the strategically vital UK steel industry (which would cost a fraction of 1% of the cost of the bankers' bailouts).
Even if such an ideological no-nationalisation stance comes at the cost of destroying tens of thousands of British jobs, the Tories are determined to stick to it because they value their radical right-wing ideology way above things like British workers, British communities and having some kind of coherent long-term British industrial strategy.
There are two potential reasons that the Tories are actively working against the interests of the UK steel industry. One is that they are so wedded to their radical right-wing free market dogma that they'll gladly sacrifice the UK steel industry on the altar of Laissez-faire capitalism. The other is even worse: It's the theory that they're so desperate to suck up to the Chinese that they're prepared to allow the ruination of the British steel industry in order to seek favours from the Communist Chinese government (like continued backing for their absurd nuclear price-fixing shenanigans at Hinkley Point C for example)
Adherence to radical free-market dogma at the expense of British industry, or making a sacrifice of the UK steel industry in order to curry favour with the Chinese - whatever the case it's clearly disgustingly treacherous stuff from the Tories.
Protectionism
While the Tories were shooting down EU measures to impose import tariffs on dumped Chinese steel, the Americans have been putting big import tariffs up in order to protect their own steel industry from artificially cheap Chinese imports. A lot of British people tend to think of America as being far more right-wing than the UK, but the Tories really are the most fanatically right-wing bunch of all because they'd rather have the UK steel industry ruined under a tide of cheap Chinese steel than ever consider policies like protectionism or nationalisation.
To the Tories "protectionism" is a dirty word because it conflicts with their radical free-market ideology, but a cursory look at the economic history books reveal that the most successful countries in terms of GDP growth have usually been the most protectionist.
From the early industrial revolution until the mid-19th Century the UK was a deeply protectionist economy and they built the biggest trade empire in the history of the World. From the mid-19th Century to the mid-20th Century the US was deeply protectionist while the UK embraced free-market economics. The Americans rose to become the richest and most powerful nation on Earth while Britain dropped several rungs down the global pecking order. From the late 20th Century to the present China has risen from a backwards agrarian economy to become an economic superpower that is indisputably the workshop of the world. And guess what ... China is currently one of the most protectionist economies in the world.
The idea that protectionism is harmful is one of the most backward bits of right-wing economic dogma of all.
Cameron's payback
Since the Tories took sole power in 2015 it's been one scandal, PR disaster or U-turn after another, but the way Cameron and Osborne's so-called special relationship with the Communist Party of China has unravelled is perhaps the biggest embarrassment of all.
After doing everything in their power to prevent the EU from raising import tariffs on artificially cheap Chinese steel in order to curry favour with their Communist "special partners", the Chinese repaid this Tory loyalty to China's economic interests by ... erm ... imposing a 46% import tariff on Welsh steel just as the UK steel industry crisis was coming to boiling point with the Indian company Tata announcing their decision to abandon all of their UK operations!
If it wasn't such a serious issue with so many tens of thousands of jobs at stake, this sheer level of Tory ineptitude would be laughable.
Conclusion
It's irrational to blame China for acting in their own economic interest. What is completely unacceptable though is that the Tories have allowed this steel industry crisis to go from bad to worse. They sacrificed 3,000 jobs in Redcar in the winter of 2015 and then continued fighting against the interests of the UK steel industry by torpedoing the EU move to increase tariffs on Chinese steel dumping in February 2016.
Even when the entire UK steel industry has gone into meltdown, top Tories had to be shamed into giving up their jollies in Lanzarote and Australia to come back and pretend that they give a damn about the UK steel industry.
Their response is absolutely pathetic, and the 11 million people (24% of registered voters) who voted the Tory party into absolute power in 2015 really should be ashamed of supporting such a bunch of hopeless charlatans.
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.
In the fourth quarter of 2015 the UK recorded it's worst ever current account deficit figures since quarterly recording began in 1955. The gap between wealth flowing in and out of the UK swelled to a £32.7 billion deficit for the quarter, which is equivalent to 7% of GDP.
For the entire year of 2015 the current account deficit was £96.2 billion, which is 5.2% of UK GDP, the worst since annual reporting began in 1948.
The budget deficit
The Tories have spent the last six years trying to convince the public that the size of a government's budget deficit is the single over-riding priority when it comes to economic sustainability. It's undeniable that the Tories have attempted to fixate as much public attention as possible on the size of the budget deficit in order to provide some kind of pseudo-economic justification for their ideological austerity agenda, whilst criminally neglecting the importance of other vital economic indicators like the current account deficit, balance of trade, GDP per capita and productivity.
It doesn't even matter to them that they spectacularly failed to keep their promise to eliminate the budget deficit by 2015, they simply set about repeating the mantra "we've cut the deficit by a third" to re-brand their epic failure as a boastworthy success, then moved the goalposts to elimination of the budget deficit by 2020!
Even though they utterly failed to achieve what they said they were going to achieve, the Tories still want you to think about the budget deficit as if it is the single most important economic indicator, one that massively over-rides every other measure of economic health.
The current account deficit
Stuff like the balance of trade and the current account deficit used to be quite high profile measures of economic success, but since the 1980s they have fallen out of favour, not because they don't tell us anything important about the state of the UK economy, but because both sets of figures have been unrelentingly bad for decades that no governing party in their right minds would ever want to draw public attention to them.
While other countries like Germany, Japan and China have all successfully managed to export more than they import for sustained periods over the last four decades, the UK has almost constantly imported more than it has exported.
Even though their New Labour predecessors oversaw the continued weakening of the UK balance of trade and current account balance, the successive Tory led governments since 2010 have set one record after another for the worst balance of trade on record and have just set the worst current account deficit in history. Even analysis in the rabidly pro-Tory Daily Telegraph admits that the UK current account deficit has widened significantly every single year since 2011.
What the future holds
There are lots of factors to consider when it comes to considering the future, but two issues stand out.
The first has been picked up by much of the mainstream media, which is the fear that "Brexit" would cause a rapid divestment from the UK causing an even worse current account deficit than the current monstrosity. It's hard to take financial market futurology too seriously given that the vast majority of economists completely failed to see the vast 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis coming, but one thing is for sure - financial markets don't tend to react well to uncertainty. It's impossible to say what the long-term effects of "Brexit" would be, but the massive uncertainty over what a post-EU British economy would actually look like would be highly likely to cause some serious short-term financial instability and divestment verging on outright capital flight at the very least.
A second concern that is particularly topical is that David Cameron and the Tories seem determined to sacrifice the UK steel industry as a tribute their "special relationship" with the Chinese*. The further destruction of the UK steel industry would make the UK will be even more heavily reliant upon steel imports, worsening the UK balance of trade even more, and negatively impacting future UK current account deficits.
Conclusion
One of the core Tory propaganda narratives in favour of their ideological austerity agenda has been repetition of "living within our means". Even if George Osborne hadn't completely failed to eliminate the budget deficit by 2015 like he promised to (racking up more new debt than every Labour government in history in the process), it's pretty damned hard to reconcile the development of the biggest ever deficit in wealth flowing out of the UK economy with the endlessly repeated Tory "living within our means" mantra isn't it?
Still, the popularity of the right-wing folk mythology that the Tories are economically competent doesn't look like it will be going away any time soon, despite the overwhelming evidence that it's glaringly counter-factual gibberish. So we'll all have to put up with hearing about what a great job the Tories have been doing, even though there is an ever deepening chasm full of evidence of their record breaking failures.
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.
The UKIP response to the steel industry crisis is staggeringly hypocritical and opportunistic, even by their own woeful standards.
Hypocrisy and lies
Nigel Farage, UKIP and the Brexit crowd have gleefully jumped on the opportunity to use the ongoing steel industry crisis as a stick to beat the EU with, despite the fact that they repeatedly voted against EU measures to protect the European steel industry from dumped Chinese steel.
The UKIP excuse for voting against measures to help the steel industry is the same tired old nonsense about how they supposedly always vote against EU rules as a matter of principle, even if they would be good for the UK.
The obvious argument against this kind of petty absolutism is that voting against EU measures that would benefit the UK is a perfect example of "cutting off your nose to spite your face". Voting against British interests is bad enough, but then using troubles in the industry that they explicitly voted against helping in order to crow about how membership of the EU would "spell the end of the steel industry in this country" is shockingly hypocritical.
Another much more compelling criticism of UKIP voting against measures to protect the European steel industry on the grounds that they "always voting against EU rules" is that this justification is an outright lie. In 2014 the UKIP spokesman for energy and industry Roger Helmer voted in favour of the TTIP corporate power grab in the European Parliament.
It turns out that if the purpose of the vote is to protect the European steel industry from dumped Chinese steel UKIP will vote against it on "principle", but if the purpose of the vote is to allow multinational corporations to completely over-write the sovereignty of all of the states in the Europen Union (including the UK), apparently it's perfectly fine for UKIP to vote in favour of it!
Misrepresentations
Various UKIP and Brexit social media pages have seized on the steel industry crisis to begin sharing misleading infographics about how the EU is supposedly preventing the UK from renationalising the UK steel industry. There's an awful lot wrong with this kind of anti-EU propaganda,enough to fill an entire article in fact, but for the sake of brevity I'll stick to a few key bullet points.
- UKIP is an extremely right-wing party led by a guy who describes himself as "keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive". The idea that free market fanatics in the UKIP leadership would nationalise the steel industry if they had the option is absolutely laughable.
- If UKIP do succeed and achieve Brexit, that will simply consolidate Tory power and they've already clearly stated that they'd rather see the UK steel industry die than consider nationalisation. It's clearly the Tories standing in the way of nationalisation, not the EU.
Consequences of Brexit
If we subject Nigel Farage's claim that continued EU membership would "spell the end of the steel industry in this country" to a little bit of scrutiny it becomes completely obvious that it's unrealistic scaremongering rubbish.
If Britain quits the EU, we won't suddenly get a government that gives a damn about the UK steel industry, we'll be stuck with the Tories, who see the UK steel industry as a sacrificial pawn in their efforts to suck up to the Chinese.
Remember when the Redcar plant was shut down costing 3,000 jobs in the industry and causing terrible knock-on effects for the rest of the community too*. What were the Tories up to then? They were busy sucking up to the Chinese and concocting "one of the worst deals ever" to bribe them into building our energy infrastructure for us weren't they?
It's also important to note that the Tory government were actually the ringleaders of the resistance to EU measures to impose import tariffs on artificially cheap Chinese steel.
Just weeks ago the Tory business minister Sajid Javid told parliament that it would be wrong to protect the British steel industry by imposing punitive import tariffs on dumped Chinese steel, and now it turns out that the Chinese have put a 46% import tariff on Welsh steel!
The Tory response to the massive over-production of steel by the 80% state owned Chinese steel industry ruining the UK steel industry, and the Chinese imposition of punitive import tariffs on Welsh steel is to say that nationalisation of the UK steel industry is off the table as an option, and the imposition of punitive import tariffs on Chinese steel would be morally wrong!
What UKIP are arguing for is to hand stewardship of the UK steel industry to the completely unrestrained Tories, who clearly value their budding "special relationship" with China so much more highly than the UK steel industry that they're prepared to sacrifice in order to beg favours from the Chinese.
Conclusion
It's understandable that UKIP want to argue in favour of leaving the EU, it's the entire raison d'etre of their party after all.
The problem isn't that they want the UK to leave the EU, it's the way that they opportunistically use a crisis in the steel industry to fearmonger about the EU, when they voted against EU measures to help the steel industry, and when they know as well as everyone else that the steel industry truly will be doomed under unrestrained Tory stewardship because they're clearly far more concerned with sucking up to the Chinese than they are with protecting a strategically vital British industry and the tens of thousands of jobs it supports.
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.
* It's worth remembering the idle Tory promises to "do everything we can" to help the Redcar plant that soon closed with the loss of 3,000 jobs and contrast that with David Cameron's promise to do ... err ... "everything he can" to support the steelworks at Port Talbot.
