Dan Denning and the management team are busy learning leadership skills. Or so they say. So it falls to your frequent guest editor to fill you in. Sticking with the day’s theme, this article is all about leadership and who could conduct Britain to Brexit.
The “In Camp” is having a rough time convincing voters to stay in the EU. Lord Rose is in charge of the campaign and managed to predict higher wages if Britain leaves. It’s the perfect own goal because people vote and businesses don’t.
Meanwhile the former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King claimed that Europe’s economic struggles these last few years “happened almost as a deliberate act of policy […].” The only way out of the predicament for countries like Greece is to go back to their own currencies, he reckons. Then there’s our own Charlie Morris’ warnings about what the EU has planned for our banking system. And no it’s not just a transaction tax.
The refugee crisis continues to cause problems too. Calais’ tent city burned. Borders are being closed in Eastern states.
In the midst of all this, staying in the EU must seem like madness on the face of it. That’s why the Swiss have withdrawn their application to the EU. But a better case needs to be made if Brexit is to succeed. Brexit needs a leader.
Farage is too divisive. Tory leaders like Gove are busy arguing about access to documents. And Boris Johnson thinks the referendum is just a negotiation tactic to get a better deal than Cameron managed to. So who will lead the Brexit Camp?
Capital and Conflict can confirm the uncertainty is at an end.
Brexit Camp leader announced
Thanks to a secret off the books project even our HR department didn’t know about, and the absence of the management team till this afternoon, I can announce the Brexit Camp has a leader. Tasked by Dan Denning, Nick O’Connor’s high tech and bio-tech contacts at Exponential Investor have been working away in the cellars of our offices since October. Yesterday’s storm over London gave the team the lightning strike they needed. And so today have the result…
We are bringing Lady Thatcher back from the dead.
And yes, she has agreed to take on Cameron and your three Presidents of the EU, right here in Capital and Conflict in coming months. Make no mistake, this is the most important piece of news for the referendum since they announced there would be no voting booths at the Glastonbury festival.
We should have known what Dan Denning’s secret project was. Back in October Dan channelled Thatcher in Capital and Conflict to answer the Brexit question. He outlined Thatcher’s four principles that would make the EU successful based on her 1988 speech in Bruges:
First, that Europe should be made up of willing and active sovereign states and not a Federal Europe. France should be France, Germany should be Germany, and Britain should be Britain. A union of equal sovereign states would lead to a stronger, safer, and more prosperous Europe.
Second, that the Union should focus on present problems in a practical way. Take border control for example. The current immigration crisis was surely a test of the EU. It will be a test again next summer, when the next wave of migration from the Middle East and North Africa comes again. Yet Germany’s action, as a key member of the EU, was to suspend EU laws and take unilateral action. If the EU can’t solve practical problems like border control, what is it good for?
Third, European Union policies should encourage individual enterprise and initiative and not resort to failed central planning, regulation, and control that don’t work. You wouldn’t think you’d have to repeat something like this today. The fall of the Soviet Empire was real proof that you can’t manage the lives of millions of people at a minute level of detail and create prosperity. All you can do is create a kind of miserable, cowering equality in which the lawmakers and party members live by a different set of rules, enforced with the guns of the secret police.
Her fourth principle was that the European Union should not be a protectionist cartel designed to insulate certain industries from global competition. This is probably the trickiest one for people on both sides of the political spectrum. There is no greater force in the world for lifting people out of poverty than free trade. Yet to protect jobs in industries where labour is cheaper overseas, it is common for every country to impose tariffs on foreign-produced goods and services.
Leading Britain to Brexit
How do you rate the EU’s performance on those four principles? The answer is that it doesn’t matter. Members of the European Parliament don’t care how you do. Because they’ve long since abandoned the idea that the principles are important. Assuming they ever did in the first place.
As Thatcher herself was suspicious of, the monetary union is just a back door into a fiscal union and then a federation based on collectivist ideals. This is the very antithesis of what Europe was supposed to learn from the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Back to Dan’s October Capital and Conflict article:
Behind all four principles is a powerful argument that’s been diluted in the focus group-tested modern political conversation. Free markets and free trade give more people more choices and lower prices. Less regulation and simpler laws promote free societies driven by personal liberty and voluntary trade. The European Union, at least in its current iteration, is dead-set against this philosophy of small government, low taxes, free trade, and sound money.
Of course the world I’m describing doesn’t exist either. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t argue for it on principle. It’s perplexing that since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the European Union has steadily embraced the same economic philosophies which led to so much misery and death for so many in Eastern Europe.
But if all this is the case, why did Thatcher bring us ever closer into the EU with her policies? If you watch her famous anti-EU speeches you’ll discover she made them in response to a grilling from Eurosceptic Tory politicians, not pro EU Labour ones. She assured her party that she wasn’t agreeing to the sorts of deals Cameron wants you to agree to now, and Labour leaders wanted to agree to then.
Back to fix it
Margaret Thatcher made the mistake of taking European leaders at their word – that Britain’s independence on the four principles would be maintained while we integrated into Europe on all the terms we did agree upon. Trade, free movement, peace and cooperation are policies and ideals we must uphold. It seemed like being in the EU to a limited extent would be the best way of going about that. Thatcher also made the mistake that Britain’s future leaders would understand their past prosperity was built on the ideas behind those four principles. Apparently they don’t. They want to give them up in favour of being inside a union.
And so today Thatcher’s four principles are under threat more than ever. The EU plans regulations to ban high power kettles, an affront the most fundamental part of British life. The EU plans to squeeze the City with a transactions tax, compromising a key part of our prosperity. The EU plans to impose the very types of policies that make it struggle economically and leads to the political strife of countries like Greece.
Thatcher’s four principles, are being chiselled down by EU politics. That’s why she is back – to fix it. And she’ll lead Britain to Brexit. You’ll read more about her take here in coming days. But for now, you’ll have to rediscover the Iron Lady for yourself. Here’s what she said about ever closer integration in Europe: “No! No! No!”.
Category: Brexit