IVOR TIEFENBRUN
The campaign against Brexit is stupefyingly alarmist.
The bulk of our trade is with countries outwith the protectionist EU trade zone. This trade has been expanding since we joined the EU, and while our trade with the EU has diminished, our trade deficit with the EU has increased enormously, and they now sell twice as much to us as we do to them.
While Britain plays fairly under EU rules, EU countries have contrived to preclude British companies from winning significant projects across the EU. Many British companies can sell successfully in the Americas and the Far East against EU competitors, but strangely they never win contracts in EU member states, and not even from Ireland, our closest neighbour. We have always treated the Irish with incredible honesty and decency since they left our union, yet they are dictating the terms of our leaving the EU on an unreasonable and irrational basis, accompanied by absurd threats of closing their airspace to the UK, despite their dependency on our friendship and support, and access to our airspace, ports and market.
The latest Brexit scaremongering includes the suggestion that we will get more drug resistant sexually transmitted diseases after we leave the EU. Many will look forward to the prospect of increased sex with enthusiasm. Others will find this ridiculous claim as absurd as the threatening pronouncements and discredited forecasts of the Governor of the Bank of England.
The latest anti-democratic attempt to undo the referendum result has prompted the claim that drugs are being stockpiled because their supply will be interrupted by Brexit. It might not occur to most people that the companies who are claiming to be stockpiling drugs are based in the EU, and are stockpiling their medicines in the UK. There are few if any drugs which are manufactured exclusively in the EU, and clearly if there was any interruption to supply, EU drug manufacturers would lose their market share to their competitors based in America, Canada, India, the Far East and elsewhere, and especially to lower cost generic drug manufacturers. There is no conceivable reason why Britain would impede the importation of pharmaceutical drugs from the EU, whatever the terms of Brexit, so people should consider the likely motives for these alarmist pronouncements.
Some things are just too simple for people to understand. Brexit under WTO terms is the most advantageous outcome for the United Kingdom, and the hysterical scaremongering of vested interest groups confirms this to be the case. Let us hope that the desperate EU negotiators, and the confused British government and conflicted Parliament, do not fudge the issue of implementing the result of the democratic referendum. We are far better off trading on WTO terms outside the EU than within it on any restrictive basis that compromises our ability to engage in genuine free trade with the rest of the world, or more importantly undermines our democratic referendum decision, our legal and economic independence or our historic freedoms.
Donald Trump had a recent confrontation over trade tariffs in Montreal, and to the horror of the other G7 members he suggested that the simplest way to resolve their dispute would be to abolish all trade barriers and tariffs. The alarm and instantaneous rejection of this solution makes it clear that the EU, Japan and Canada are more interested in protecting their vested political interests than trading on a free and open competitive basis. Donald Trump is vilified, amongst many other things, for his criticism of rigged and protectionist trade deals, but the examples of New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong make it clear that even the smallest economies can flourish the most when they remove protective tariff barriers and embrace free trade; as opposed to the EU’s protectionist trade policies which work against the interests of the EU public, and indeed people across the world.
Acting rationally in an unpredictable world depends on improving the signal to noise ratio enough to discern what is true and obvious, and be confident that disregarding meaningless noise is the best way to get the right result.
Ivor Tiefenbrun is a Scottish manufacturer.
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