31 January 2019
Diary of a Corbynista
Labour Brexit imminent
by Don Urquhart
24 January
Two of the 5 panellists on tonight’s Question Time were Tory no deal Brexiteers. Nevertheless James Dyson came in for some criticism and some panellists mentioned the plans of Airbus, P&O and others to relocate their operations to the EU. Nick Ferrari started into a list of companies who had expressed enthusiasm for Brexit including JCB, a major Tory donor which has just signed up David Davis for 20 hours work at £3,000 per hour and recently paid Boris Johnson £10,000 for reasons unknown.
25 January
I am indebted to journalist Peter Stefanovic for the observation:
Theresa May’s “record high employment figure” includes 8 million workers living in poverty, zero hours contracts, people working just 1 hour a week & unpaid family work!
26 January
When I voted for Brexit I was accused of being a racist by erstwhile friends.
Mark Francois makes it hard to be a Brexiteer. Referring to a statement by Tom Enders the German CEO of Airbus UK the Tory MP said:
My father, Reginald Francois, was a D Day veteran. He never submitted to bullying by any German and neither will his son.
It seems that the pro-Brexit narrative is increasingly dominated by aggressive nationalism. It’s not a brush I want to be tarred with.
On Any Questions last night David Gauke brought back Venezuela in addition to Hamas and Hezbollah. Just like old times!
27 January
Sophy Ridge on Sky News visited Watton to elicit current views on Brexit. The town had voted Leave in 2016. The local MP George Freeman was in the studio and given free rein for a Tory party political broadcast. He mentioned Cranswick Country Foods where 900 of the 1200 employees are from the EU. On his Twitter feed Mr Freeman explains why the firm has so many foreign employees:
The biggest business employer in my constituency is the Cranswick pork plant at Watton. (Europe’s largest pork processing plant). It employs 1200 people of whom 900 are Eastern Europeans. Why? Because no-one in East Anglia wants to work in a pork factory. Or can work that hard.
It doesn’t seem to worry him that the company has been hiring people from Eastern Europe because they will accept lower pay and worse working conditions than the local people.
Here are some comments from Cranswick employees. Whether they are fair or not, I get tired of people telling me that I voted Brexit for some trumped up reasons like taking back control of money, laws and borders. I was motivated primarily by stories of companies which exploit cheap staff and the fact that George Freeman and his parliamentary colleagues promote this business model.
28 January
On Sophy Ridge George Freeman also expressed the opinion that Her Majesty’s Opposition was a “hard left” operation. This is an often repeated statement but in my view there is no evidence to back it up. Let’s take one of the Labour Party’s policies, the elimination of tuition fees. Now this would simply bring the UK into line with 11 other countries in the EU, including France and Germany. I don’t think you could describe Chancellor Merkel or President Macron as “hard left”.
Labour’s income tax proposals were dealt with by Patrick Collinson in a Guardian article 2 years ago:
Labour’s plan to tax incomes over £80,000 more heavily is a “massive tax hike for the middle classes” that will “take Britain back to the misery of the 1970s”, according to rightwing newspapers. But are British households that heavily taxed?
A comparison of personal tax rates across Europe, Australia and the US by Guardian Money reveals how average earners in Britain on salaries of £25,000, or “middle-class” individuals on £40,000, enjoy among the lowest personal tax rates of the advanced countries, while high earners on £100,000 see less of their income taken in tax than almost anywhere else in Europe.
Rail nationalisation is also not a Marxist innovation. In France the Government owns 100% of the SNCF. The Deutsche Bundesbahn is state-owned as is the Irish rail network and RENFE in Spain.
Labour is criticised for being business-unfriendly because they would increase Corporation Tax. Currently the UK rate is 19%, due to go down to 17% in 2020. That will make us joint second lowest in Europe, with only Ireland having a lower rate. Germany and France both charge businesses over 30%.
29 January
Theresa May and others have a standard set of “achievements” they trot out to demonstrate what a fine job they are doing.
Front and central is the claim that more people than ever are in work. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) confirms this. But the ONS definition of “employment” covers just about anyone who gets out of bed once a week:
The number of people in employment in the UK is measured by the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and consists of people aged 16 and over who did one hour or more of paid work per week (as an employee or self-employed), those who had a job that they were temporarily away from, those on government-supported training and employment programmes, and those working in family businesses who benefit from the profits of those businesses but who do not receive a formal wage or salary.
And if you are “employed” by whatever definition it is no guarantee of a decent living standard.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation last month published a report on poverty in the UK. You will not see it quoted by government ministers and supporters because its key findings are:
In our society, child poverty has been rising since 2011/12. 4.1 million children now live in poverty, a rise of 500,000 in the last five years. The vast majority of this rise has taken place in working families. We now live in a country where four million workers are in poverty – a rise of more than half a million over five years. Strikingly, in-work poverty has been rising even faster than employment, driven almost entirely by increasing poverty among working parents.
30 January
The reason a lot of people on my side of the argument were willing to, as it were, give our negotiators the benefit of the doubt is that we know we have the opportunity to have another vote.
Boris Johnson’s response on Newsnight to the passing of the Brady Amendment empowering the Prime Minister to agree with the EU alternative arrangements to the Backstop.
So the can is kicked further down the road.
Meanwhile Corbyn agreed to discuss solutions with May on the basis of the success of Dame Caroline Spelman’s amendment which indicated parliament’s opposition to a no deal Brexit. I will be very surprised if his first PMQ today is not:
Have you taken no-deal off the table?
If Corbyn and May sit down to discuss Brexit in a constructive manner it cannot be long before the notion of a customs union comes up and it could be that in the next few weeks Labour’s policy is acknowledged as the only game in town.
Incidentally, Mrs May threw in Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRA. What has Venezuela done wrong?
