India is making about two and a half million cars a year, many for export with companies like Renault and Nissan in the vanguard. India has overtaken South Korea to become the fifth largest car producing nation globally. In the UK Jaguar Land Rover, Indian owned naturally, but still a large supplier of jobs to UK workers has reported that people in Europe suddenly don't want to buy British cars, surprise, surprise.
Theresa May has come out as a hard Brexiteer and Philip Hammond can deal with the economic problems. Yes, the falling, maybe that should be fallen pound has helped our exports and tourism generally in the short term, but the effects of Europe turning its back on us and the effects of much more expensive raw materials take longer to filter through. Or did Brexiteers think we still had coal mines, or that maybe we had our own iron ore, even if we do have the stumbling remains of a steel industry.
Imported food will go up too and can you see the Brits giving up their Mercedes and BMWs, Volkswagens and Audis? I can't, no Jaguar has lost its kudos abroad but German cars won't lose theirs here, or anywhere else, people will just pay more for them in the UK. Small, economical and attractive cars like the Fiat 500 will go up in price too, so it's not just the rich who are affected. Fuel costs will rise too by the way; petrol, diesel and the electricity the French and Chinese will be generating for us because we cannot afford to build for ourselves.
Meanwhile Amber Rudd is grandstanding to the Brexit voters by coming down on overseas workers from non EU countries and foreign students too. Yes, it will be great if we can train and retain more British doctors, but it's not as simple as that. Mr Hunt has seriously harmed the relationship between British doctors and the government so that some at least are looking to Canada and Australia as destinations once qualified. On account of this there is talk of making it a requirement that doctors stay here for four years after qualification, how much better would it be if they actually wanted to stay for life?
Grandstanding to the fifty two percent, many of whom will be dying off soon and some of whom may see the damage when it's too late is a short term unintelligent response to the problems we face. Fact is the Tories are split, the country is split and when Hammond talks about a roller coaster ride for the economy he's not kidding; business hates uncertainty and flourishes in periods of stability, well you won't be seeing that for a while.
As a result the Tory promise of a surplus by 2020 has been lost in the wash, but it wasn't an actual surplus anyway, it was just a surplus for the year. Deficit and surplus are politicians' weasel words, if more comes in through taxation than goes out in spending that's a surplus, but we've been in DEBT for years. We're the second most indebted country on the planet, if there was a small surplus in 2020, which their won't be, it would make a tiny, tiny dent in the debt. A real surplus would be when we're debt free and in the black.
Another little snippet from the Tory conference is the idea from Defence Secretary Michael Fallon that we opt out of parts of the European Convention on Human Rights. This is nothing to do with the EU by the way. He wants to do it to protect British soldiers from prosecution. Don't become a soldier I'd suggest, don't become a tool of the politicians. Be that as it may, what signal does such a move send when we criticise other regimes for abusing human rights. Oops, I forgot, we sell them arms so that's OK then.
Neither the divided Tories nor divided Labour have any answer and we were too stupid to vote for Europe and we're too stupid to vote Liberal too. Lets hope the Americans don't prove to be stupid this November or we can all kiss our tails goodbye!
Malcolm Snook
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