Something to Sell

How to Make Britain Prosper During and After Brexit

Food and Inflation

An immediate problem that will not go away easily is inflation caused by the rising price of imported food as the value of Sterling falls on the currency markets. This is being blamed on "Brexit" when in fact the real underlying cause is that no British government has actually cared about farming at the top level since Jim Callaghan was Prime Minister back in the seventies. Decades of wilful neglect and gross mismanagement means that domestic food production simply isn't there when the country needs it. The crisis bringing the matter to the fore could have been almost anything apart from Brexit, most especially a war with a major naval power such as Russia. Brexit just happens to be what's happened and remainers would be wise not to make too much of this, because it is behind a smokescreen of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy that the neglect has taken place.

The thing that exemplifies the government's attitude to farming is the fact that for planning purposes, food production has a "nil weight" as a land use. That means that any land use is preferred to growing food. So golf courses will generally get planning permission even where there is already an oversupply of golf course, and since property developers see golf courses as an ideal Trojan horse for building on greenfield sites, just about everywhere in Britain has an oversupply of golf courses. No more are needed, but at a time when every acre still under food production is helping to fight inflation (and we've grown unused to coping with inflation), more golf courses are sure to be built. It's much the same story with solar farms. You can't eat subsidised, daylight only, electricity. There has to be an immediate end to "nil weight" for planning purposes as far as food production is concerned.

Supposedly "green" agricultural policies such as "set aside" serve only to reduce food production in rich parts of the EU, and this is all they were designed to do. Any environmental labels were added later. We need to phase out set aside (swiftly) and consider some more genuinely environmentally friendly agricultural practices. Grants for "improving" upland grazing that involve the blanket removal of trees and scrub above 600M likewise need to go in favour of something that really helps. As it is, the expensive policy just increases the occurrence and severity of flash flooding.

There is a multiplicity of agricultural polices which all need a change of course: they can't all be listed here. What is needed is a change of attitude and emphasis so that all the policies that impact on food production and genuine conservation get amended in the right way without too much fuss and bother as an ongoing process.

NOTE added on 19/10/2016. The Daily Mail is trumpeting the fact that the latest inflation figures don't show any impact from Brexit. This is because the fall in Sterling is recent and the inflation figures do not reflect it yet. But with 30-40% of our food being imported, the fall in the value of sterling cannot help but make imported food more expensive sooner or later. The best way to mitigate the effect on overall inflation is to produce more of our own food and import less. It can be done: in the mid seventies (under the Callaghan government) Britain was a net exporter of food.  Callaghan was a naval officer at a time when Britain nearly starved as so many of the ships carrying imported food were being sunk by German U-Boats and maritime air strikes. He had a positive interest in making sure the country was fed.

Brexit means the end of the EU's Common Fisheries Policy as far as Britain is concerned. God be praised.

What can be done immediately on the end of CFP is an amendment to regulations and fishing net specifications so that fishing boats do not catch (and therefore kill) fish too small to be landed and sold. This is an obvious first step towards sustainable fisheries and it has been so for two decades or more, during which nothing effective has been done towards it. What cannot be done is a sudden expansion of the fishing quota assigned to British fishermen at the expense of those from former EU partner nations. Because all that would happen is a massive reflagging exercise where the Spanish fishing fleet started to fly the British flag, Gibraltar notwithstanding.

What should be done is a modest year by year expansion of the fishing quota for the British fleet, while most of the quotas previously assigned to foreign fleets get assigned to conservation for a finite period of years, allowing a genuine respite for fish stocks. The British quota can be slowly built up, with less chance of hostilities in the fishing grounds, in accordance with a verified increase in fish stocks. It should be noted that even a massive improvement in fish stocks will never duplicate the distribution of fish species before the stocks collapsed in the sixties and seventies: the map will be new and fish stocks will need to be treated gently as a resource for the foreseeable future. Furthermore a fisheries policy of any sort is possible only if the means exist to adequately enforce it.

The food processing industry for both fisheries and agricultural produce needs to be kept on British soil as far as possible. There's no sense in fighting political battles to make fish stocks sustainable if the profit in them is exported. This will require investment in mechanisation and outright automation rather than an habitual reliance on cheap migrant (or involuntary; eg: benefit claimant) labour. For precisely the same reason that the Confederacy lost the American Civil War: innovation wins over exploitation.

Innovation and High Technology

One of the things that is worth studying if one wants to understand what must be done to make Britain viable as an independent trading nation, is what the Prime Minister at the time, Edward Heath, did to make Britain a subservient part of a monolithic trading bloc in the first place. Heath was coldly fanatical about stopping Britain having any future as an independent nation and Margaret Thatcher had too many of Heath's proteges in her cabinet to have any chance of genuinely changing the course that had been set in industrial policy, had she even perceived the need, which she didn't.

Heath set out to eliminate any product or project that gave Britain a technological lead over her new European partners. If everyone is making equivalent products, then competition means a race to the bottom for the lowest price and there are no real winners until someone establishes a monopoly. The EEC/EU is all about establishing monopolies, generally under the control of the "core" countries like Germany and France. If someone has a higher technology than the designated monopoly holder, they can upset the applecart by offering something that gives the customer more for his money without being price-cut to the bone (this is capitalism actually working as it should). You can see the EU still trying to bring about monopolies by the way that new regulations on the testing and licensing of medicines are designed not to work for any company much smaller than the German giant, Bayer.

At the time that Britain was joining the EEC, she had something of a lead over European countries in the matter of space launchers. There was nothing of immediate worry to the Americans, but the Blue Streak missile programme had spun off into the Black Knight satellite launcher and it was working. Geoffery Pardoe stated that for the price of eleven miles of motorway a year, he could keep Britain in the space race. Heath said that he wanted the eleven miles of motorway. The suppression of innovation means the suppression of great and gifted men like Geoffery Pardoe and Heath delighted in suppressing Pardoe. The technology of the Black Knight programme was simply donated to the new European Space Agency and was eventually rebranded as Ariane 1. 

The proposed BAC Three-Eleven airliner was sacrificed for the sake of the nascent Airbus company and the A300. (The British component of Airbus at the time was Hawker Siddley; BAC was a separate enterprise). The Concorde and Jaguar programmes were allowed to continue: both were collaborative programmes involving a significant transfer of technology from Britain to France, especially where the respective engine programmes were concerned. The Jaguar's Adour engine is still in production for the Hawk trainer and is used on the experimental Tanaris ummanned combat aircraft. The Jaguar was a technically highly successful aircraft, but the French government wanted to export Mirages and Super Etendards rather than Jaguars, so the only major export customer was India. After the Jaguar, the British aerospace sector would have to exist on collaborative European programmes like the Tornado and Typhoon, or Anglo-American programmes like the Harrier. British only projects were not counternanced. A not very well publicised MoD study has shown that such multinational projects can be up to 60% more expensive per aircraft than national projects.

The armoured car company Alvis found itself working with a Belgian partner to produce the Spartan range of armoured fighting vehicles, and so it went, right across British industry, but especially where the technology levels were at their highest.

After a brief respite during the Wilson/Callaghan government in the mid seventies, the Thatcher government acted as a wicket keeper, catching and destroying those high technology programmes which had somehow slipped past the Heath government. It's impossible to tell if Mrs Thatcher understood what was being done or not. At least one of these programmes was potentially very important:

The computer company ICL had what in the Heath years was just an idea, for a new form of computer architecture called "Contents Addressable Storage". It wasn't an idea that would have leapt out at Heath and his minions as important, but by the late seventies demonstration hardware had been built and CAS was beginning to attract attention. At a time when the Americans and Japanese were competing to see who could do the biggest number of "megaflops" per second, CAS offered a way of getting computing tasks done for a much smaller number of operations per task, therefore quicker without using bucketloads of electricity and generating lots of waste heat. It was suited to database and datahandling applications, which is where the emphasis in mainstream computing has been ever since the launch of the internet. Had CAS been developed during the eighties the technology would have been nicely mature in time for the internet boom of the nineties and beyond. Server farms would have been less energy hungry places, and database servers would have answered queries much more quickly than they do today, even ten years ago. 

Under the Thatcher government CAS was dropped and ICL disposed of with a sale to the Japanese firm Fujitsu. There has been no obvious innovation from the British arm of Fujitsu since ICL was assimilated. The present day high technology company ARM Holdings has just been sold to the heavily indebted Japanese firm "Soft Bank" and the story seems set to repeat itself. 

The pattern was very clear: innovation which threatened to put Britain ahead in any field was either arbitarily cancelled or made to fail. The purpose was twofold: to give Britain no choice but to be in the EEC/EU, and to make sure that Britain didn't impose the wrong sort of capitalism on the EEC/EU from within. Everything in the EU is destined to be monopoly based in the long run. 

George Osborne's Contribution to the Solution

Mr Osborne is loathed by many Brexiteers for being the main architect of "Project Fear:" the barrage of negative and highly dubious propaganda designed to make the British people afraid to leave the EU. However, throughout all the years of austerity, as Chancellor, he found the money to fund the SABRE engine project intended for hypersonic aircraft and a highly fuel efficient reusable satellite launcher. The sort of project that Edward Heath would have gone all out to kill unless it could be given to the French. Actually, you couldn't give SABRE to the French because they have invested so much money and prestige in the Ariane series of conventional rockets!

This is precisely what we need to do: keep a sharp eye out for the genuinely promising high technology idea and nurture it, and not let it be given away or dropped. We need to do this lots, in every field possible. There is no future trying to compete with equivalent technologies with erstwhile European partners who can just draft in migrant labour and keep dropping the price until we go bust. We need to have technological leads and compete on technology not price. Devaluing Sterling helps us compete on price for a while, but only until markets and our competitors adjust. We need to get ahead in the technology race and stay ahead.