Brexitwatch: make Theresa May come clean on the cost of Brexit

This evening MPs are due to debate an amendment to the Finance Bill requiring the government comes clean on the cost to the UK of Theresa May's proposed 'deal' with the EU. It requires the government publishes 'the full study of the impact of the government's proposed terms of departure compared with the benefits we currently enjoy.'

You might wonder how any MP could possibly oppose the idea that before we take the most important decision this country has faced in decades, we should at least know what we are letting ourselves in for, but the case for Brexit has always relied on lies and deception, so Brexit-supporting MPs, and those who think their careers might be damaged by speaking up, may well vote against.

So it is important you write TODAY to your MP demanding they support this amendment. My MP happens to be Labour's Brexit spokesman, Sir Keir Starmer and this is what I have written to him:

Dear Sir Keir,

I trust you and all your Labour colleagues will be supporting the amendment to the Finance Bill due to be debated this evening requiring the government publish 'the full study of the impact of the government’s proposed terms of departure compared with the benefits we currently enjoy”

The Brexit Tax: how much are you prepared to pay?

Nobody much now believes the biggest lie in British politics: that leaving the EU would produce an extra £350 million a week for the NHS. It is now clear that ANY arrangement that follows us leaving the EU will make us worse off - apart from a few of the hyper-rich non-elite who may be helped to avoid tax.

An assessment that Theresa May tried to keep secret shows that if we get a Norway-type deal of leaving the EU, but staying in the Single Market (the kind Nigel Farage used to favour but now considers insufficiently extreme) we will all be 2 per cent worse off. 

With a Canada-type free trade deal, we will be 5 per cent worse off, and if we go for the no-deal scenario favoured by the Brexit fanatics, which Theresa May is keen not to rule out, we will all be 8 per cent worse off. So instead of being paid, say, £30,000, you will get £27,600.

But it gets worse. Because we will all have less money, the government will get less from taxes to pay for the NHS and other public services. By 2033, the Norway model will leave a Black Hole in the public finances of £20bn or about £300 for every man, woman and child in the country; the shortfall for a Canada arrangement will be £55bn, or about £850 for every man, woman, and child in the country, while having no deal would cost about £80bn, or £1,230 for each of us.

Interestingly surveys on how much people are to pay for Brexit usually come up with the answer: £0.

The cost of pandemics, and how to reduce it

SARS, bird flu, swine flu, Ebola, Zika. It is hard to believe that not too long ago, there was an idea that infectious diseases had been largely conquered, at least in principle. Then along came AIDS, and now with more people on the planet and more travelling, new infections are actually becoming more common.

Ebola has infected almost 30,000 people, killing 11,000, and inflicted an economic cost of more than $2 billion on some of the poorest countries in the world. SARS infected far fewer – 8,000, and killed 800, but because it hit richer places, it cost more than $40 billion. A recent report on global health risks put potential global losses from pandemics at around $60bn a year.

America’s National Academy of Medicine suggests that $4.5bn a year, about 3% of what the rich world spends on development aid, invested in medical research, public health services and better emergency co-ordination could significantly strengthen our defences against disease.

More effective health systems would help fight illnesses such as tuberculosis that costs perhaps $12bn a year, and malaria which probably costs several times that. Better research could help find vaccines to treat diseases that at the moment are mercifully rare, but which could become pandemics, such as Lassa fever and Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever.

The price of glory. What Britain lost from winning World War Two.

That excellent television series, The World at War, has resurfaced as we approach the 75th anniversary of the conflict's end. I have just been watching the last episode, in which the American historian, Stephen Ambrose, muses on the idea that Germany benefited from losing the war much more than the UK did from winning it.

'What did Britain get out of the war?' he asks. 'Not very much. She lost a very great deal. I suppose if you want to look at it positively, she got a moral claim against the world as the nation that stood alone against Hitler for a year, and had provided the moral leadership against the Nazis at a time when everyone else was prepared to cave in to the Nazis.'

While Britain stood alone against Hitler, US President Roosevelt announced that although America would not fight, it would be 'the arsenal of democracy', providing Britain with the weapons it needed.

But it was at a price. Britain, virtually bankrupted by the war effort and with many areas of its cities in ruins, was left at the end with debts of over £1 billion to the US, which were not paid off until 2006. By then the British Empire and Britain's status as a world power had gone - stripped away by the crippling cost of standing alone against Hitler. 

Moral claims do not put any pounds in the bank.