Catherine Bearder on cracking form in the European Parliament.
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4 Comments
This was a great speech and should be shared with all the pro Remain Facebook groups.
Yes it was a good speech but I don’t think Lib Dems should consider the Remain side was blameless either. For example, the warning from Remainers was that the economy would crash and that interest rates would have to rise after a Leave vote. The economy didn’t crash and interest rates actually fell. True, the pound fell by about 10%, but there’s been many of us arguing for years that the pound was too high in any case. You can’t have a low debt economy and a high pound. Someone has to borrow to cover the import bill.
Both sides engaged in what has been termed as “Project fear”. Those of with some intelligence tried to filter out all the nonsense and concentrate on the fundamentals. There were good arguments on either side. We have to assume the electorate did the same. That might be difficult when we listen to some of the reasons why people did vote Leave. My favourite was from a young lady who complained that the Germans and the French never voted for us in the Eurovision Song Contest. But we have to assume her vote was cancelled out by others who might have wrongly assumed that we wouldn’t be allowed to enter the contest anyway if we were out of the EU. In any case, that’s democracy for you.
I suggest you listen to Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, explaining the enormous efforts behind the scenes that the BoE and its equivalents in other countries made in order to prevent chaos on the financial markets. Secondly it takes time for an economy to crash. Big businesses are making plans to relocate overseas. Farmers are facing bankruptcy. Impoverished regions are finding out the financial help they were getting from the EU to regenerate their economies will not be replaced. Thirdly I love the way that according to the Leave camp we are supposed to be glad the pound has plummeted. When I go out to buy something or book a trip abroad and find it has risen in price why should I be glad? Why should manufacturers be glad their raw materials cost more? Why should Brits living overseas on fixed incomes be glad to take a 17% cut in income? And all for what? To take back control that we never lost in the first place.
The flat, minus or low growth we have had since 2016 put the UK at the bottom of the growth league compared to the G7 or EU. This was closer to the Remain campaign mark than the Leave side who just said everything would be great.
But this process has been spun out more than predicted and we don”t leave the EU in any economic reality until January ’21. That is when the real pain starts, to compound with the incompetence of the government’s handling of COVID 19. Again, we have one of the worst results across Europe. All the populists did worst: USA, UK, Brazil and India.
Not only are populists useless at administrative matters and corrupt, but they don’t really understand or believe Science and believe they can bargain with it or go half way to the solutions