Bremoaners and Brexiteers shooting each other in the foot.

Going back to that BRC letter...

Falling back on to WTO rules would also increase the cost of sourcing from beyond the EU. The import cost of women’s clothing from Bangladesh would be 12% higher, while Chilean wine would be 14% dearer for importers.

Yes, we would expect the UK to remain a member of the WTO which is an advisory/co-ordinating body rather than a supra-national quasi-government. The obvious point is that the WTO has no rule stipulating minimum or default tariffs.

(Nobody questioned why the BRC specifically mentioned Bangladeshi clothes or Chilean wine. It turns out that they were cherry picking:

Bangladesh has been a WTO member since 1995 and, as a least developed country, benefits from the EU's "Everything but Arms" arrangement, which grants duty free, quota free access for all exports, except arms and ammunition.

The EU and Chile concluded an Association Agreement in 2002, which included a comprehensive Free Trade Agreement that entered into force in February 2003. The EU-Chile Free Trade Agreement is broad and comprehensive and covers all the areas of EU-Chile trade relations.)

Daniel Hannan, who is good on principles but useless on facts fell for it, as gleefully reported by The Daily Mirror, and tweeted thusly:

This is idiotic. Chilean wine 14% more expensive? It's currently subject to a 32% EU tariff, which we can now scrap.

Haha! cry the Bremoaners, he didn't know that there was an EU-Chile FTA! Others pointed out that the EU default tarrif on wine is 8p per bottle (although some official sources did incorrectly give the figure as 32%, which is about par for the course for EU tariffs on food, so a forgivable mistake on Hannan's part). So, they argue, Hannan's lack of grasp of finer detail undermines his general point! No it doesn't. His general point was and is sound.

And so bloody what? The BRC were clearly cherry picking examples, thus making their whole letter questionable, and they still haven't explained where it says that WTO members must impose a minimum tariff of 14% on imported wine. Because it simply doesn't, I've checked.

The final point is the general principle of continuity of international treaties, so if the UK leaves the EU, we are then almost automatically in a UK-Bangladesh FTA and a UK-Chile FTA on the same terms and conditions as the EU-Bangladesh FTA or the EU-Chile FTA, and so on, until and unless one party abrogates it.

Daniel Hannan on top form, but he still doesn't quite get it...

Daniel Hannan MEP in The Daily Mail:

Democracy is not simply a periodic right to mark a cross on a ballot paper. It requires what the political philosophers of Ancient Greece called a ‘demos’, a unit with which we the people can identify.

Take away the demos and you are left only with the ‘kratos’ - a state that must compel by force of law what it cannot ask in the name of patriotism. In the absence of a demos, governments are even likelier than usual to purchase votes through public works schemes and sinecures. Lacking any natural loyalty, they have to buy the support of their electorates...

One way to think of the EU is as a massive vehicle for the redistribution of wealth - though not in a way that many of us would consider fair or beneficial.

Taxpayers in all the states contribute money to Brussels through their national taxes. The bureaucrats then use this huge revenue to purchase the allegiance of consultants, contractors, big landowners, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), corporations, charities and municipalities.

In other words, all the articulate and powerful groups they rely on to keep themselves in employment.

[He missed "bankers" off the list, but let's assume that they were included under "big landowners" or "corporations" by implication.]

From where I'm sitting, we can say exactly the same about the UK government (or most other governments, for that matter), all you have to do is remember that most voters are being bribed with their own money. The majority is being robbed of half their earned income in taxes (real money), and then those taxes are being used to prop up house prices (illusory paper gains), so they don't seem to care, and Hannan doesn't appear to be aware of the irony of his own stance.

Things which are not surprising at all and are not really proof of anything one way or another

The TPA are wailing on about the council pensions timebomb again:

The TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) can today reveal for the first time a substantial rise in the number of former council staff drawing pensions compared to the number in work and paying into the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS).

That's excellent news, it means that in future, there will be fewer ex-council employees claiming pensions than are claiming now. So these pensions will become more affordable for the taxpayer.

Previous TPA research has found that the equivalent of £1 of every £5 of Council Tax goes on pensions...

So what? Pensions are just a kind of deferred salary. If it turned out that councils were spending nearly all their income on salaries, that is in itself neither good nor bad; it all depends on what its employees are doing. If they're all teachers, coppers, lollipop ladies, dustbin men, social workers etc, then great. If they're all five-a-day climate change awareness group directors on six-figure salaries, then hiss boo.

And given the level of pension they are promised compared to their salaries, we would expect councils to be spending about a quarter as much on pensions or pension contributions as they do on salaries. So this "£1 in every £5" figure is also meaningless; as we'd have to know how much of the other £4 goes on salaries and much more importantly than that, what the council's employees are actually doing.
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Dan Hannan asks

What will William Hague's audit [of the costs and benefits of EU membership] show? That depends partly on who conducts it, obviously...

That's the problem, isn't it? I try to be as objective as possible as most things and I am quite convinced that the disadvantages of full EU membership outweigh the advantages. So if I did the audit, the result would probably support this. And people would say "Ah yes, but you're against EU membership, you were going to say that anyway."

You can be part of a free market in Europe without being a full member of the customs union. It's true that you then 'have no say' over how the regulations of the single market are set, but this doesn't bother the Swiss, whose exports to the EU, in per capita terms, are 450 per cent of ours.

He's used that 450 per cent figure before to say "Look how successful the Swiss are outside the EU, they export far more to the EU than we do; therefore we should leave as we'd export more to the EU than now!" but the statistic is arrant nonsense and doesn't support any such conclusion.

The point is, the smaller the unit (i.e. a country) you are looking at, the higher are imports and exports as a share of that unit's GDP. If Eastbourne became an independent state, we'd find that its imports and exports from "rest of EU" would be far higher as a share of Eastbourne's GDP, or per capita for Eastbourne residents than they are for Switzerland.

That is not an argument for the newly created state of Eastbourne to leave the EU and more than it is to create that state in the first place.

THAT grin

Dan Hannan Part 2: The European Investment Bank