Catherine McBride OBE

When @realDonaldTrump was told about the EU’s 'Trade Bazooka', I imagine him repeating Clint Eastwood’s famous line from Dirty Harry: ‘Go ahead, make my day.’ The US is the EU’s largest market, its exports to the US were worth $618 Billion in 2024 while its US imports were only $371 billion, and a fifth of this was fuel – LNG and oil. For more about how the EU's mythical Trade Bazooka could backfire and why Trump's New Trade Rules make more sense than the WTO's Most Favoured Nation principle in the modern world, read my substack. open.substack.com/pub/catherinem…

ps. an even better example here (hat tip @richardmarcj )... x.com/julianHjessop/…

Good to see John Curtice note that support for rejoining the EU shrinks when the trade-offs are exposed! Labour's push is more about party politics than the economics, but this could easily backfire too (especially if the EU continues to play hardball). bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@NatalieFleetMP @WiltsAnnabelle

While London may want to rejoin, areas like mine that voted 70% to leave definitely do not. In an increasingly divided world, the last thing we need is to divide the country all over again by restarting this debate.

🚨 BREAKING: Tower Hamlets Pension Fund is in breach of regulations The shocking revelations come from the Council’s 2 March Pension Board meeting. There were FIFTEEN documented risks to the pension fund, including: ❌ Failure to appoint a senior officer ❌ Failure to publish an investment strategy ❌ Failure to comply with governance requirements This isn’t a minor oversight, this is basic governance failing on multiple fronts. And at the same time, the Council is trying to push through changes to the pension fund. Given the Council’s track record of bypassed procurement rules, missing contracts, and repeated audit issues - this should worry every resident. Because if they can’t get the basics right… What confidence should anyone have in how the pension fund is being managed?

THE PIE MAN COMETH: Offord Derangement Syndrome "Known as ODS, it should be pronounced 'O-di-ous' to reflect the harm it can bring to victims. The syndrome's already taken hold of some Labour and Tory politicians I've met" My latest for @TheScotReformer bit.ly/4uBHZdJ

These folks are building solar where the sun doesn't shine. 🤷‍♂️

Not even arctic Canada is as deprived of sunlight as northern Britain. No wonder the world bank concluded we were the second least suitable country for solar power after Ireland.

Gulf states have the funds and access to the latest technology to rebuild quickly. Iran does not. This isn't a game Iran should play.

TOMORROW at 7pm: We fact check the claim of Rachel Reeves & others that Brexit shrunk the economy by up to 8% @RafHM brings together two economists (@julianHjessop & @cricketwyvern) to examine the data Their conclusion is clear: Brexit has NOT done "great damage" TRAILER:👇

@JChimirie66677 Who in their right mind with ethics would want this

Brexit Was Managed, Not Delivered Rachel Reeves stood at Bayes Business School on Tuesday and said that diverging from EU rules should be the exception, not the norm. She opened the door to ceding power to Brussels across chemicals, cars and industrial goods, called it the prize of closer alignment, and insisted she was not taking Britain back into the single market or customs union. That last assurance should be read carefully, because it is doing a great deal of work while meaning very little. What Reeves was describing is the conversion of a halfway house into something functionally indistinguishable from membership, pursued sector by sector, without a vote and without telling the public what is being decided. To understand why, you have to understand what the halfway house is and how it came to exist. Britain left the EU institutions in 2020. Nobody disputes that. But the people who designed the departure were largely the same people who opposed it, and the settlement they produced tells you everything about their intentions. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement keeps Britain tied to large parts of the EU's regulatory framework through the so-called level playing field provisions. Labour law, environmental rules and state aid policy remain tethered to EU standards because diverging too far triggers tariffs and restrictions. The freedom to diverge exists on paper. The penalties attached to using it ensure most businesses never do. British companies exporting to Europe still comply with EU product standards and certification rules because that is the price of selling into the single market. The difference is that Britain no longer has a vote in shaping those rules. We became, exactly as critics warned, rule-takers rather than rule-makers. Then there is Northern Ireland, where EU law still applies to goods, creating a regulatory boundary inside the United Kingdom itself. Leave voters did not vote for that. They were never asked about it. The permanent state, the civil service, the Treasury, the legal establishment and much of the political class, never intended to implement the full verdict of 2016. They could not reverse it openly, so they diluted it quietly, producing a settlement close enough to membership to blunt the purpose of leaving while technically satisfying the legal requirement to do so. That is what institutional resistance looks like when it collides with a democratic result it does not accept. Reeves is not departing from that settlement. She is completing it. To justify doing so, she cited Brexit's deep damage, quoting independent studies putting the GDP cost as high as 8 per cent. That figure requires scrutiny. The OBR's own long-run estimate is 4 per cent, a projection of where the economy might be in fifteen years, not a measurement of damage already sustained. Reeves chose the higher outlier figure. A Chancellor who cites OBR forecasts in Parliament knows how to read economic modelling. The 8 per cent is not an honest reckoning with the evidence. It is a number selected to justify a conclusion already reached. And the economy she is blaming Brexit for is substantially her own government's creation. The OBR's Spring Statement forecasts are dismal: stagnating household incomes, rising unemployment, inflation still running high. She is not turning to Brussels because the data demands it. She is turning to Brussels because she has no other idea, and Brexit gives her a villain to blame for conditions that predate it, outlast it, and owe more to a decade of policy failure than to the decision taken in 2016. The con did not begin with Reeves. It began the moment those charged with implementing the referendum result decided to implement it in name only. Reeves is not an aberration. She is the latest executor of a project whose purpose has always been to ensure that whatever the public voted for, the destination would remain the same. Brexit was managed, not delivered. And the management continues.

This is how Brexit dies spectator.com/article/this-i…

VOTERS DO NOT SUPPORT EU RESET Recent polling showed overwhelmingly that British voters want the UK Parliament *alone* to decide on the laws that govern them. The very notion of the EU Reset is wholly at odds with the views of the British people.

Reform and the Tories should state unequivocally that they will not accept any agreement Labour make with EU and will unpick it.

Not convinced by Reeves' defence of EU rule taking! 👇 These three principles are for the birds once the UK signs up for "dynamic alignment", as we would be stuck with whatever the EU decides. It is also odd to insist that regulatory autonomy should be the "exception, not the norm" right after admitting it might be right for sectors which are "strategically important". Hopefully this will apply widely, including to life sciences and the digital economy, as well as financial services. Otherwise the UK can forget about "the immense potential in the industries of the future". But which sectors are so unimportant that we are happy for them to be run by the EU? 🤔

📰DON'T LET THESE STORIES DISAPPEAR📰 The sudden shift into war in Iran and the geopolitics that naturally flows from it, has given Keir Starmer a reprieve from the massive stack of stories that have not been answered and should have ended his premiership. Don't let them be forgotten! Make sure you share this list far and wide! 1. Why was it fine for the Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves to break the law, what happened to lawbreakers cannot be lawmakers? 2. Why was it fine for the Labour Deputy PM David Lammy to mislead Parliament over violent foreign offenders being accidentally released from prison at an alarming rate? 3. Why was it fine for the Labour Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, to appoint a Labour and personal donor into a position of power? 4. Why did the electoral commission choose to not investigate further over them being misled on £750k donations to Labour Together? 5. Why did three Ukrainian male models firebomb Keir Starmer's house? 6. Why was Labour Chief Whip Nick Brown suspended in September 2022 with no explanation at all? 7. Why was the Chinese spy case allowed to be dropped when there was sufficient evidence to proceed? 8. Why was Starmer able to avoid tax on his parent's donkey sanctuary land? 9. Why did China think they were given illegal assurances that their mega-embassy would be built? 10. Why the government seemed performatively upset about the Israeli football fan ban when they were told about it over a week in advance? 11. Why was was fine for Covid rules to be regularly breached for Starmer to have in-person vocal coaching? 12. Why was it fine for Starmer and family to move to Lord Alli's flat during Covid lockdowns, without any claims for the benefit? 13. Why are the assailants of the police at Manchester airport *still* free? 14. Why the Labour government continue give away the Chagos islands, when there was and is no legal case for doing so? 15. Why the Labour government gave away £12 Billion worth of fishing access to the EU, for merely the promise to negotiate further concessions in the future? 16. Why the Labour government are not held to account for the lie of the £22bn black hole, when the OBR stated very clearly at the time that such a hole did not exist? 17. Who knew what about links to Jeffrey Epstein when Peter Mandelson was appointed to his role in the US? 18. Why hasn’t the Grooming Gang Inquiry been set up yet? 19. Did Sadiq Khan cover up the existence of grooming gangs in London?

It is total unutterable rubbish that Brexit has caused 8% GDP damage to the economy - even remain economists would admit that is silly, Reeves should be ashamed to spread this nonsense, it makes her look economically illiterate and doesn't inspire market confidence

So if Reeves’s claim that Brexit cost us 8% of GDP is correct it would mean we’d have grown four times more than Japan/Germany and almost twice France/Italy. Up there with Canada/US. If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you. In reality, even with Brexit, we were fastest growing European economy in G7. Just a tad more than France (with no Frexit).

This was the part of the speech where I cringed. 8% is not credible. GBP devaluation, investment flatlining and trade frictions since 2016 can get you to 2%-3% - but 8% would suggest that the other, simultaneous anti-growth measures (rationing of land, energy and capital) had next to no impact vs US. If you believe that, I also have a bridge....