The Runaway Train in Britain Today: The BREXIT Disaster

Dr. Michael Hopkins

CEO at MHCi CSR/Sustainability Research & Advisory Services; Author CSR Books; Founder CSR Intl. Club & Education Courses; ex Prof. Middlesex University, Hon Doc London Met University; Lifetime Award, Delhi University.

As Britain races to falling off its BREXIT cliff the two major parties are failing miserably. Neither is talking about the social and economic disaster awaiting the EU less UK. The winner of the election will be based upon rhetoric, lies, falsehoods aided by an extreme right press with few exceptions.

As Brexit bites the NHS, low wages, unemployment, low benefits are likely to be cut by at least by half. Well, the UK will be smaller and cheaper without Scotland and Northern Ireland. But tax revenue could fall by half as most of the Financial Companies in the City of London leave. The UK will also have difficult access to the largest market for its goods in the world, and its fishing rights severely curtailed.

The special relationship with the USA? Ha Ha. Just ask Comey how much you can trust Trump.

The Commonwealth? A little. They can buy our potatoes since the car industry will be non-existent.

Education? Our Universities used to be among the best in the world, but strong anti-immigration policy has helped the rise of great Universities in China and India. The first signs from the EU is that applications to UK Universities were down by 7% in 2017 from the previous year. Not much? Well there are 108 in England and so 7 will have to close!

Jobs? The era of rapidly increasing employment is over, according to the forecasting group EY Item Club, which predicted the unemployment rate will rise from 4.7% now to 5.4% in 2018 and 5.8% in 2019.[The Guardian May 15 2017].

Banking and Finance? The UK’s wealth, like it or not, is based upon the forces of capital now ensconced in London – around 66bn of taxes paid in a year of which around 30% goes to support the rest of the country. The fall in the pound, the worsening balance of payments because of higher tariffs from our neighbours (previously zero) on both our exports and imports, rising external debt and lower economic growth will add to the pound’s devaluation followed quickly by price inflation.

To curb inflation the Bank of England will raise real interest rates thereby raising the cost of borrowing, including mortgages, and adding to an upward price spiral. Raising interest rates may, of course, help the pound but the running away from operating across Europe tariff free for major financial organisations in the City of London won’t help. Then more decisions on the pound will be taken, not by London, but by institutions in Frankfurt, Milan and Paris...maybe even Dublin down the road. Then unemployment will rise and wages will suffer even more than the past decade. 

The case against Brexit referendum was, and continues to be, poorly made before June 26th 2016 and was confused with a vote on the Government itself. Years of Tory under spending and unnecessary austerity have brought about shortages in hospital beds, little affordable housing, stagnant wages and a declining educational base – the very things for which many Brexiters blamed immigrants. 

So what were the major Brexit untruths? Boris Johnson used the infamous bus, pictured below, to showcase what he thought was a simple truth. The story is, of course, far more complicated. The bus and Johnson elaborated a now famous lie - the EU would continue to cost the UK 350 million pounds per week! But he ignored the rebate that the UK receives from the EU of ￡1 for every ￡1.55 it actually pays – depending on which year one looks at i.e. ￡124 million pounds per week.

Brexit, it was continually shouted and broadcast even by the usually solid BBC, would allow those monies saved to be allocated to the NHS...Johnson and the awful racist Farage and austerity driven Gove have all reneged on that since. So the UK left the EU because of a net cost of ￡124mn a week or ￡6.5bn out of a total annual health budget of 117bn. In other words Johnson convinced the UK electorate to give up free access to a market of 5-600millon people because of the cost of 5.5% of the National Health Service or the cost of two QE class aircraft carriers? Then, for that he gets named Foreign Minister? 

Are there advantages to Brexit? In any decision there are always winners and losers and Brexit is no exception. But will the whole country be winners? Highly unlikely. I can see Northern Ireland and Scotland leaving the previously ‘United Kingdom’ and possibly Wales and London leaving too. Too bad that Nicola Sturgeon is not the PM of the UK. She realised that Brexit would, reluctantly, achieve what two World Wars failed, the break-up of the United Kingdom. I, as many, have also seen in the vote for Brexit shades of the same movement that has thrust the divisive Trump into prominence. One that is basically against immigration and foreigners in general. Like being afraid of the dark, it is the unknown that brings the concern not the dark itself. But that notion led to Brexit and ignored what Gideon Rachman, above, stated ‘The decision to exit the EU leaves Britain much more dependent on the US, just at a time when America has elected an unstable president opposed to most of the central propositions on which UK foreign policy is based.’

Why Britain needs immigrants? My first shock after June 23 was to see how anti-immigration even racist were many of my country men and (to a lesser extent) women. It seems the leave vote came mainly from lesser educated working class people in the North outside London and older white folk in the South. I was born in the South in Bournemouth and I never saw in person a non-white man or woman until I was 18 years of age. Now, year on year hate crimes there are up by 100% over a year. 

Clearly as the UK and Europe age we need younger skilled people and also the less skilled to do the jobs that you and I don’t want to do – digging potatoes or sweeping roads etc. But yes, the question is complicated but UK can accept many more people than at present. 

People from outside the EU who come to our shores to escape horrible lives exacerbated by us – and because of Tony Blair in particular with his foolhardy support for George Bush Jr. for instance – need help. The UK has signed up to many UN agreements that respect refugees and leaving the EU won’t change any of that. 

William Keegan in the Observer wrote ‘However, as the prime minister has made crystal clear at the 2016 Tory party conference, her obsession is with immigration and she is perfectly happy to sacrifice our membership of the single market to appease the anti-immigration lobby. She appears to have bought Davis’s line that Britain can happily negotiate all manner of trade agreements through membership of the World Trade Organisation, blissfully ignoring all the trade experts who point out that this process would take 10 years. After all, they are only experts, and one of the most prominent Brexiters during the campaign, Michael Gove, told us what to think of experts.’ Enough said for now!

Jobs and income are going to change and a return to a romantic period of dirty and tough jobs in coal and steel industries are just not going to come back and, then, who would want them? What is needed is a continual re-structuring with adequate payments to the unemployed plus new skill training. The much vaunted idea of a basic income by many may well eventually be the way ahead as artificial intelligence replaces most jobs including that of this writer! Yet the proponents of a basic income have been cloudy on its financing, and even a modest basic income amount would require a major part of tax revenue to the potential recipients.

What can be done? It is likely the election will be lost to the hard Brexit of the Tories. Can someone kindly ask them what are the industries and services that are going to save UK, or what will be left of it? As now, it looks as if the UK will become, what we all once feared, a poor island off the coast of France.