16/10/2020
When the UK Prime Minister stood smirking at his podium and blamed the EU for the failure to negotiate a 'Canada-style' free trade agreement, he was doing what he usually does; lying to the British public, betraying the nation and insulting the position of Prime Minister.
He said we would instead have to adopt an 'Australian-style' arrangement, "based on simple principles of global free trade."
Under a free trade policy, goods and services can be bought and sold across international borders with little or no government tariffs, quotas, subsidies, or prohibitions to inhibit their exchange.
Whilst there are negotiations underway between the EU and Australia, they do not currently have a 'free-trade deal'. The EU and Australia operate predominantly using World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, with significant tariffs on both imports and exports.
It has been suggested that departing the EU without a deal would be better described as an 'Afghanistan-style' arrangement, given the absence of any formal cooperation in that trading relationship. This is because the EU does have some agreements in place with Australia, which it would not have with the UK in the event of a failure of negotiations. For example, there is an agreement on the transfer of EU passenger name records to Australian border authorities, which helps to combat crime and terrorism. There is also an agreement on the mutual recognition of conformity assessments, which means that products tested to EU standards in Australia are recognised as compliant and this eliminates any need for duplicative testing when it is imported.
Johnson's bumbling approach means we will not have such things in 2021, unless they are speedily put in place now. In fact, referring to BoJo's actions as 'bumbling' is far too charitable; he is a charlatan, someone whose own self-interest drives his every move.
We've had some pretty awful Prime Ministers in recent years, and some who were simply out of their depth. Tony Blair was an awful Prime Minister, who took the UK into an illegal war on the back of lies. Gordon Brown was a pretty awful Chancellor, who decimated pension schemes and sold half of the UK's gold reserves at the bottom of the market. Brown was unremarkable as a Prime Minister, as was Teresa May, whilst David Cameron will forever be remembered as the Prime Minister who failed to win the 2016 EU referendum.
Gordon Brown was plotting, with a small group of politicians and advisers, to remove certain tax relief benefits from pensions before Labour won the 1997 general election.
Company pension funds had benefited from a tax break in respect of the investments they made, in that the funds paid no tax on the dividends they received from those investments. Norman Lamont had reduced the tax credit the pension funds claimed on dividend payments slightly in 1993. Brown though, dealt a devastating blow to pension funds by removing the dividend tax credit completely.
Civil Service economists road-tested Brown's proposals and assessed their consequences, before the plan was actually implemented. They identified major issues with the assertions that the impact would be minimal and that pension funds could cope with the move. Four separate papers by experts in the Treasury and the Inland Revenue disagreed with Brown's judgment that the raid on the pension funds would cause little or no long-term harm.
All four papers agreed that the value of pension funds would fall. The research conducted by these experts suggested that, for the shortfall to be made up, employers and employees would need to contribute an extra £10 billion a year in the following ten to 15 years. And this was purely to enable Brown to raise £5billion a year in extra revenue for the Labour government to spend, without being seen to have raised taxes.
In January 2009, the Office of National Statistics calculated that the black hole in Britain's occupational schemes had reached a staggering £194.5 billion.
Brown's attack on the dividend tax relief decimated pension funds and those who suffered the most were those who were unable to increase their pension contributions; such as the lower-paid.
Johnson has undoubtably become the most dishonest Prime Minister in living memory.
We are in a time where there are six living (current and past) Prime Ministers in the UK, something that had last been the case 25 years ago. However, this is (I believe) the only time in history when five past Prime Ministers have all spoken out against the sitting Prime Minister. That is two former Labour Prime Ministers and three former Conservative Prime Ministers all united in their criticism of the sitting Conservative Prime Minister.
The population of the UK is being betrayed.
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