Radical as far as radical goes

Councils in England will be able to keep the proceeds from business rates raised in their area under plans unveiled by Chancellor George Osborne. Councils will also be able to cut the rate and some will be able to raise it. Mr Osborne said councils would hold on to £26bn, calling it the "biggest transfer of power" in recent history. They currently keep up to 50% of the rates - the rest goes to Westminster. The Local Government Association (LGA) said the move was "good news". But Labour warned it could start a "race to the bottom" with councils competing to cut their rates the most.

This move is actually extremely good news. It does mark a transfer of power of a sort. But since councils are still overly large regional development agencies running to a very tight set of proscribed parameters, usually from way up in the chain, it merely marks a transfer of power of execution rather than self rule and freedom to innovate. It still cannot be considered devolution. For sure it's radical as far as radical goes within the current paradigm of governance, but we have no greater say in what it gets spent on. 

The Labour notion that it could lead to a race to the bottom is an amusing thought though. The notion that councils could ever contain their rampant greed is comical. But they say it could happen as though that were a bad thing. I can't think of a better means of regenerating the North and taking pressure off London than incentivising businesses to leave the capital. I have been saying this should happen for many years along with giving councils complete control over corporation tax too - but that can only happen on the proviso that we see an inversion of the power triangle where councils maintain central government rather than the other way around.

Ultimately it is the top down nature of government that stifles real democracy and while this is a move to be celebrated I doubt that we will see many councils exercising their powers because they still have statutory obligations set by Whitehall on behalf of the EU and global entities. Until we have freedom in that regard - and freedom from the EU, I suspect this move is largely symbolic. The gesture is right but there are no moves to improve accountability.

The British political debate on the EU is an empty charade

Unintentionally I'm acquiring a reputation as having some expertise on international trade and global regulation. I've been getting technical enquiries via direct messages on Facebook at Twitter. At this point I confess to having precisely zero expertise on any of it. I just have an apparent expertise when contrasted with the majority of those involved in public discourse just by way of acknowledging it exists and having a basic idea of what it does. I'm only just sliding off the other side of "Mount Stupid".

Just the mechanistic interactions in one industry sector between the WTO and the EU regarding subsidies is something that would take two lifetimes to acquire expertise in. On that alone I only have a passing familiarity with the terminology.

Knowing how little I now know about so much, I find myself unable to comment on whether somesuch regulation is good or bad. I can only pass comment on roughly where it came from and the mechanisms by which it became law. The only immediately apparent thing about it is how little democracy is involved.

We may have had a national conversation at one point about plastic bag charging, and the debate that rages this week is largely shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. It didn't matter what you thought of it then and it matters even less now. It was decided at the international level by way of global accords and passed to the EU inside a block of regulations which automatically become law regardless of whether there is an act of parliament.

There might have been a vote in the European parliament, but by this stage, the technical standards are already decided and agreed upon thus the parliament can only stall or delay by voting such measures down. They are often bundled into a raft of measures like the US Stimulus Bill that no individual or deliberative body could ever have given it the proper scrutiny. There is no possible way this process could be described as democracy.

I often speak of journalists not having the intellectual architecture to comment on EU matters, but it's not some gift from the gods. All you need is an inherent sense of curiosity. When it comes to regulations and rights supposedly coming from the EU, I start off with the assumption that the EU lacks any such competence, largely because I know roughly what the EU is made up of.

Beyond that I look for the international body most likely responsible and search their own databases. Nine times out of ten I find most of what the EU does in relation to the so called single market begins life elsewhere. It is assumed by most in the media and in the house of commons that these bodies are merely advisory, but their productions are usually transposed into law verbatim because corporates, NGOs and governments have agreed to them at the very top tables.

In this process we have no independent right of veto by way of being in the EU and must always vote for the common EU position - where we are structurally outnumbered.  

Meanwhile, it's astonishing how few people know what the WTO is and what it does. All of these threats as to what the EU will supposedly do to us if we leave look increasingly implausible when you look at the international law by which the EU is bound. If the EU does want to play dirty tricks we can give the WTO a century of casework just by looking at French agriculture alone.

The EU doesn't so much have skeletons in the closet as neon skeletons hanging outside the front door with giant arrows pointing to them. It will get a crash course it just how little of its own law is attributable to Brussels and that if we can be held to account, so can they.

Once you are aware of such interrelations and how the EU is bound by WTO rules, where we actually find that the basis of even the EUs own internal single market is governed by the WTO, virtually all politicos and hacks pontificating on the subject look like they're on another planet. If I know little then these people know nothing.

If you've been following any of my work over the last few months then you are now somewhat familiar with the rich tapestry of international agencies that govern everything from banking rules to plastic bags - and yet we still have party conferences to decide on what governmental policy is supposedly going to be. Given the latitude available to them, all they can really do is design their reactions to various problems bad international law creates - and even then, only within a narrow set of parameters, assuming these ignoramuses are even capable of understanding the source of the problems.

Throughout the refugee crisis, there has been barely a mention of the Geneva Convention on Refugees, just as during the debate on zero hours contracts made no mention of the Agency Workers Directive - which itself is a product of the International Labour Organisation.

Consequently if you get the vibe that British politics seems like an empty sham it's because it is exactly that. There is a long regulatory chain that operates as if in secrecy. You could call it a conspiracy except they publish their findings and intentions in full on their own websites only nobody bothers to look. Both the europhiles and the sceptics have little clue as to what's going on thus the Brexit debate between the self appointed campaign organisations on both sides is an empty charade also.

Consequently if you find my contempt is spread equally among Ukip, the Tories, Labour and the media then it's because they are all equally worthless in terms of their contribution to public discourse and politics in general - and because of the vast egos involved in perpetuating this circus, were our betters in the SW1 bubble made aware of how little they know and how little influence they have, they would move heaven and earth through the media vessels they control to conceal it. But while our media is as lamentable as it is, they have no possible cause to.

The task at hand...

The face of the real enemy

When I migrated to this blog it was with the intention of breaking with persistent attacks on Ukip. I think this blog has achieved that. After all, it is now unfair to single out Ukip when the entire eurosceptic edifice is woefully underperforming.

More to the point, the election is over and Ukip has ceased to be important. Some have asked why I do not attack Labour now that Labour are manifestly worse than Ukip. Put simply, I don't need to. I never had any expectations or demand of Labour. I never wanted them to perform better because they have never represented a proposition I support.

The ferocity of my attacks on Ukip we stepped up toweard the election because it became clear that Ukip was not going to moderate its own behaviour or improve its conduct and so it became a matter of necessity to damage Ukip's prospects. Had they had more MPs, there is a goodly chance they would be taking a much more prominent role in the referendum and that could not be allowed to happen.

That is why I campaigned hard on the internet to furnish anti-Ukip people with all the information they could use. It's interesting now that select anti-Ukip bloggers and Tweeters can offer a better commentary on the inner wrangling of eurosceptics than the so called experts like Matthew Goodwin. I would like to think I had some part in that. I know my little blog caused a many to think twice about Ukip and help set the tone against them and if I am in some way partially responsible for Ukip failing to make a Westminster breakthrough, then I wasn't wasting my time. I know that since the election many Ukip activists have quit the party on the basis of things I have said.

I will admit, some of my posts on the Complete Bastard blog were flying close to the edge and unfairly tarring some good people, but there is a huge difference between the Ukippers you meet in person and the kippers they are when they get anywhere near an internet connection. In that respect, for me, it was open season. The worst elements of Ukip needed to be held aloft as a mirror for those activists who were still under the misapprehension Ukip was a moderate party with a sensible approach. In that regard, I make no apology. I still think anybody wanting to have an active role online in the coming referendum serves the cause best by having no visible links to Ukip.

Now that the Ukip threat is contained, I'm not going to turn my guns on Labour since the entire media machine is focussed on Corbyn and his motley crew and the public will see them for what they are. I have no love of the anti-Ukip mob either. They shouted all the way through the election about Ukip's bigotry, but in the end, these people are also bigots. Show them the truth about the EU and they fall back on the usual hackneyed memes about the EU, persisting in telling a lie they know to be untrue. Many of them are Cornbynites and a Labour government run by Corbyn is every bit as unpalatable as a referendum run by Ukip. But since neither is now going to happen, I'm content to focus on other things.

In this respect, I'm not going to expend too much effort attacking the other campaigns. They are just another obstacle on the battlefield. The witless prattle from eurosceptics will at least keep the opposition campaign busy - but I will be focussing most of my attention on the real enemy in this. David Cameron. Ukippers are keen to point out that we wouldn't have a referendum were it not for Ukip, but in the end we have a referendum because people voted for a Conservative government. I was one of them. Now that we have that referendum it's open season on Cameron and it all hinges on painting Cameron as the dodgy used car salesman selling us a lemon.

They are going to sell us a new relationship with the EU. We must point out that it's exactly the same master-slave relationship with a smaller influence in EU policy. To that end, Business for Elliot, Leave.EU, British Influence, Ukip and Business for New Europe are all completely irrelevant to the battle. Lemming like calls for unity with any of the Leave campaigns must be resisted. I have found that online skirmishes, I have the upper hand by letting people attack the decoy campaigns, and then agreeing with them and taking a line they have no preprepared arguments for. They don't quite know how to handle free thinkers. In that, I welcome any Ukip refugees who want to pitch in fighting the real battle. Your former tribe is now spent and though a hindrance to the effort, only a minor one because they were defeated at the election.

Our success depends on a core of campaigners who won't wait for the main campaign and do not seek leadership. This will be won by a small band of coordinated people working to promote a particular message who do not feel duty bound to uphold the stupidity of our own side. There is no harm in attacking the Brexit main efforts and we'll look more stupid if we don't.

We will have to pick our battles selectively, wasting little time on pointless or unwinnable battles and focus on the main objective. That hinges on undermining the credibility of David "Phantom Veto" Cameron. In that we will find we have many sympathetic ears on the left and right. As much as the Tories won the election, 76% of the public did not vote for them. Thinking of it in those terms, we ought to be embarrassed if we don't win this.

Little Europe is retreating from the world

Our friends British Influence​ are crowing about the EU's creation of a capital markets union. It aims to make create deeper and more integrated capital markets in the EU. Eurosceptics will invent many reasons to hate it just because it comes in EU packaging, but it's actually no bad thing in principle. The removal of technical barriers to investment can never be bad.

That said, as with most initiatives we see from the EU, it is in fact replication of a global effort as a means of assuming ownership of it. What it amounts to is the implementation of a number of policy reviews since 2007. Namely MiFID2. Various financial instruments will be subject to these "new" rules but again are largely Basel 3 and EMIR requirements - the global conventions for banking regulations.

The House of Lords report on the "post-crisis EU financial regulatory framework" – only published in February said it is likely that the UK would have implemented the vast bulk of the financial sector regulatory framework had it acted unilaterally, not least because it was closely engaged in the development of the international standards from which much EU legislation derives.

As with all such developments there is good and bad, and in some cases regulation that supersedes other regulation is actually deregulation in essence. The authors of much of these conventions are in fact the banks themselves and large consultancy firms like KPMG - with consultation all through the chain.

If anything it is the banks who are leading the way because they like regulation, they like standardisation and they like global networks without technical barriers. In many respects they are way ahead of downstream lawmakers like the EU in terms of creating a global single market in banking. But that's never good enough for the EU. The EU always attempts to claim such initiatives as their own. In any other sphere it would be considered plagiarism. It is born of this myopic little Europe mentality, where Europe breaks away from the global effort to focus on its own back yard, further complicating what is already fairly good regulation.

As if the wasn't bad enough, and at a cost to the City, the EU will naturally take many years to implement it, taking into account the foibles of all the EU member states when really London should be forging ahead without waiting on the EU. As it happens, we have far more of need to develop a single market for investment with Canada, Africa, the US and India. When I think of expanding the reach of our global investments, Bulgaria and Romania are not the first nations that leap to mind.

Consequently, by creating a technical barrier to trade with the rest of the world, it means is that the rest of the world will suffer "the Brussels effect" whereby any nation that trades with Europe will adopt the EU standard by default because compliance with the most stringent is usually the cheaper option in the long run and less hassle than running two concurrent regimes. But that's only for the big boys who can afford it. Smaller operations and start-ups will simply ignore Europe and seek investment opportunities with less developed states who use the global default standards. Rather than being free market, once again we see "little Europe" putting its head in the sand and protecting its own internal economy at the expense of doing business with the evolving global markets.

What is of more concern to us is that because the EU intends to reform as a two tier Europe, with the Eurozone states acting as a single financial entity, we will be a second rate influence inside the EU with no outright veto over measures that may harm the City. If that is the cost of being in the EU then we are better off opting out of the European capital markets union and joining the global single market instead - where the banks are driving down barriers years ahead of the Strasbourg talking shop. The subsequent boost to our economy would give us the economic clout to maintain access to the EU market on special terms by way of a mutual recognition agreement.

More than anything though, I don't trust the EU in any such undertaking. The EU's first priority is always the taking of more powers by means of the beneficial crisis doctrine - and its supranational ambitions always take priority over what is in the common good. In a system where we are structurally outvoted, and when the City has the most to lose. At best we'd be looking at a form of economic hibernation and at worst the hollowing out of our main global asset in the square mile - which could be used as a slush fund to prop up the EU's currency of perpetual crisis. And they say it's us Brexiteers who are gambling with Britain's future!

Referendum ruminations

I've wasted some of the morning bickering on Twitter with europhiles. What's striking is that they are so uniformly tedious in spouting the same tired old talking points. It also highlights how pointless any such bickering is. We're not having a referendum on what the EU is now. We're having a referendum on what Mr Cameron expects our relationship with the EU will be, which has yet to be defined.

All we know is that it will probably be something along the lines of associate membership, which changes very little, but formalises our status as a second class nation in the EU, still with no voice at the top table and no independent right of veto. It is that vision we have to define and attack. Generic griping about the EU isn't productive.

To that end, the flurry of activity from TheKnow is not actually constructive campaigning. All Mr Banks's operation is doing is filling the airwaves with incoherent memes, some of which make all the classic mistakes and isn't particularly helpful - and in some cases damaging to the image of the broader campaign. The last thing we want to be doing is banging on about the Commonwealth yet that is exactly what The Know is doing this weekend.

While I have offered some constructive criticism of Bank's campaign, I have held off outright condemnation in that it is early days and Banks has given us assurances that his operation will improve and that he has taken on board what we have said. Sadly, there is no evidence of this and I'm pretty much resigned now to the fact that Leave.EU will run an awful campaign and like Ukip before it will not heed good advice.

Mr Banks has set upon the US strategy of capturing the base by tapping into the Ukip vote - mimicking the crass populism. This is a mistake. Any Leave campaign will automatically "capture the base" and Ukip support by way of it being a leave campaign. By fashioning it after Ukip, it can only head up the same cul-de-sac Ukip went up and rapidly bang its head on the glass ceiling. From that there is no return.

Meanwhile on the other side of the fence, if Business for Elliot does win the nomination we can say with some confidence that there will be no official campaign at all. You see, you need money to run a campaign and if it's all going in sinecures for Elliot's think tank mates and on "data services" run by Elliot's chums, then there's not going to be much in the kitty to do anything useful. For sure we'll see some idiotic billboards and the obligatory leaflet stuffed through letterboxes, but in terms of an effective and coordinated campaign we won't see anything of the kind.

Meanwhile, it's clear that the media can only see this in terms of an SW1 scrap of personalities and the real conversation will be happening without them. The media is as clueless as ever it was and our politicians are lamentably out of their depth. Certainly Barney the Talking Dinosaur knows more about the EU and trade than your average back bencher. If we want to win we will have to condition our own activists to ignore the main campaigns and what the politicians say and do. In this vote, they don't get a say, we do. We have to undermine the credibility of the media, which should be fairly easy on current form.

Anyone who seriously wants to campaign to leave the EU will have to get serious about building their own online constituency and generating original content of their own. Nothing from Banks or Elliot will be reusable or credible and original material will always be more effective in reaching the audience you have. As far as my own Facebook account goes, I now post more independent bloggers than any legacy media articles. For years now the mainstream media has been freezing voices out, squeezing out alternative ideas and more informed sources. We should now turn the tables on them and cut them out of our referendum. It is a conversation over our future, not some tawdry plaything for them to fill airtime with.

This referendum is not going to be about their voices. It will be about ours, talking directly to the people, ignoring the noise and shutting out the parasites who would take it as their own. Between now and the referendum, our task is to build up a stronger understanding of the the issues that goes beyond the typical eurosceptic memes, and producing original content that adds to the debate. More than that, we need to make sure our side knows which battle it is fighting. It won't be a scrap between the Leave and Remain camps. Trading statistics and infographics wins no votes. What matters is that we attack the real target. That will be David Cameron selling us his second class status sell out. In that we cannot rely on Tories in that tribal allegiances and careers always trump principle,  

When it comes to The Know, Business for Elliot and Ukip, I just think to hell with them all. If we wait for them to get their acts together we will be waiting a very long time. That is time we do not have and we cannot afford to let them waste our time. They are best ignored. We are effectively going into this fight without a coherent campaign organisation - we can expect nothing of it except that it will make a lot of noise, waste a lot of money and cause us some embarrassment. We should treat it as a distracting sideshow and focus our attention on winning without them. I don't actually think we need them at all. If what is on offer is the only choice, I would sooner the Electoral Commission just gave us our money back via a tax rebate.

There is no good reason to stay in the EU

It's a Sunday morning and I'm reading "Behavioural Response to Plastic Bag Legislation in Botswana". It is the product of a long chain of international governance measures aimed at tackling plastic pollution. The prattle from the party conferences seems a million miles away. Their fringe meetings serve only as tribal posturings. This document shows that policy is decided elsewhere - far from their reach.

If anything, modern politics is about designing our reaction and policy response to problems created by that layer of invisible top tier of global government. It is wholly reactive. Nobody talks about actually solving the problems because the power is not within their gift.

We could talk about reforming the Geneva Convention on Refugees, but that's not in our power, we could talk about scrapping renewable energy targets and various eco measures, but again that is not within our power. For sure, leaving the EU would be a step in the right direction but as Australia shows, resisting the march of globalisation is no easy task. Political realities mean that very often nations end up giving way in the greater good. Government by consent is almost a thing of the past. We are slaves to the embedded and immovable groupthinks of the global elites.

The prevailing orthodoxies of the "international community" are what dictates just about every strata of law. Cars all look alike these days because they are all built to the same safety specifications, food is largely prepared in the same way and anything that can be standardised and homogenised either has been or is in the process. Much of it is motivated by environmentalism. Cars must be safer and cleaner, we must waste less food, use fewer polluting resources and as a species clean up our act and make things work better.

From legislation from plastic bags, to diesel emissions on cars, these are all global standards aimed at tackling global problems. Soon we will see global accords on how to deal with Uber since every major city runs a taxi system - and global conventions on disability rights means developed nations will always have a regulated requirement for size and type of vehicle and that system must be protected from unregulated threats. In the latest instance we have seen local action by the London Assembly but I don't see that level of subsidiarity surviving.

The problem is that for an increasingly connected world, standardisation is a good thing. It's better if things all work the same way and economies of scale means everybody gets more for less. When global regulation works, it works well and the benefits are many and multifarious. The problem is that they don't happen overnight. The latest regulation on plastic bags is more than ten years in the making - and still only a partial solution. That's a problem.

Many threats to health and wellbeing cannot wait ten years for global accords. Similarly changes in technology that give rise to Uber mean trends and markets and opportunities evolve faster than the regulation can keep up. Bad regulation tends to stay bad for a very long time - and things have to get particularly bad before they are once more addressed by the global matrix of regulatory agencies.

It's not that we need fewer regulations. We need better regulations and a more responsive means of implementing them and where necessary removing them. Nowhere is this more visible than in UK energy policy where global accords translate into policy, which must then go through the EU mill, where they pretend they are in charge, gold plate such accords and them translate them into directives. In that regard, the EU is a forum for making global accords worse and more damaging. A little injection of vanity and hubris can turn bad law into disastrous law.

Moreover, as we have seen with carrier bag regulation in the developing world, such laws from the top tables are implemented well in advance of the European Union. Far from solving environmental problems (assuming such policies are a solution) the EU is a huge block to their implementation. Even if you favour the conclusions and orthodoxies of the international community, it should be apparent that the major stalling factor is the EU. Sometimes conventions are strengthened, other times weakened to the point of redundancy.

Regulations in other areas have also overtaken the EU and so there is a global regulatory single market evolving that is waiting for the EU to catch up. Thus we must ask if we can actually afford the EU. We could be losing out as new global markets emerge. More importantly, the EU does not give us the right to say no. Unlike the international forums, it is not a community of equals and we are structurally outnumbered in any vote.

Given the way that global governance is evolving, that right to say no is essential to defending those things that require our protection. Farming is a good example. Norway does not want the EU because it wants its agricultural protections. Without such protections Norway would simply not have an agricultural sector - which is vital to managing the landscape and vital to food security and defence.

Meanwhile, law made to suit the vast tracts of open prairie in the US or Ukraine is not going to be appropriate for the precious landscapes of Cumbria and Yorkshire. Yes, we must maximise crop yields and pursue optimum land productivity, but there are other concerns that add to our distinctiveness and diversity - and without the right to say no we risk destroying those facets of British life that are sacrosanct.

We have already seen what uniform policy can do to fisheries and as much as we have in the end reached a system that works better for the modern world, much was destroyed along the way - and that pooling of sovereignty we are told is a good thing lead to compromise, delay and vacillation over an unfolding ecological emergency.

Whichever way you look at it, the world has outgrown the need for the EU, it frustrates the process of globalisation while at the same time removing the essential protections we need to make it work for everybody. Time and again it has shown that it cannot respond adequately to emergencies and we have seen industry after industry fold while we wait for Brussels to do something. It's good at gesture politicking but it is short on solutions for the problems it creates. It's an expensive "luxury" we can no longer afford.

Looking to the future we see a global single market emerging and the offer on the table is that there will be a global community of equals with nations like Australia, South Africa, Indonesia, New Zealand, India, Canada and Brazil each having their own voice and their own veto, with a newly minted Eurozone nation sitting at those top tables. Curiously because we are neither in the Euro nor independent of the EU it means we have a voice at none of the top tables.

When Mr Cameron presents the new EU treaty establishing a supreme government for the eurozone and the associate membership as his own reform initiative - he is offering us even less than the status quo. He's offering us the once in a lifetime opportunity to have no regional or global influence with no voice at any of the top tables and for us to be on a leash to the Greater EU.

Cameron is offering us the choice of being a second rate power in choke-hold relationship where our voice is not heard on the international stage. Try as I might, I just don't see what's in it for us when we can be part of a global community of equals, trading freely and choosing our own alliances.

The dream of a united Europe under one flag has long since reached its high water mark. It cannot meet its existing commitments to the latter members, it can do little to advance the Eurozone and the UK is never going to be bounced into becoming part of the new European state. Thus this is a question as to whether we want to be a slave to that entity or a nation in our own right. We are at an historical fork in the road and the fate of the EU is divergent to our own. We can either choose to leave amicably now or be forced by circumstance in the future to do it under less agreeable terms.

In the final analysis, should we vote to remain in the EU, we will be entering a period of national stasis. We will enter a long sleep as the world goes on without us and we will retreat from the international sphere. At some point in the future that will have consequences and we may well be forced out. There is no strategic advantage in this, there is no economic benefit and if we don't leave now, we're only delaying the inevitable at great cost. The bottom line is there is no reason to stay in the EU - and we have much to gain by leaving.

Unexpected item in the bagging area.

The plastic bag charging story is fascinating to me. It exposes all the fault lines of governance local and international. It's interesting because measures like these are usually never domestic in origin. You can trace this particular measure to an amending act to EU Directive 94/62/EC made about this time last year - and though I have not yet traced the origin of the exact measures, they almost certainly begin life in the UNEP.

What's interesting is the zeal with which such measures are adopted - with the Welsh government wasting no time in implementing it, before it even became EU law - with overwhelming public approval. It made me wonder if they know something I probably don't.

Given that the vast majority still watch the telly they are probably exposed to more environmentalist propaganda than me. I tune out of popular culture specifically to avoid it. But carrier bags are a problem, and a big one - and nobody quite knows what to do about it which is why we see such questionable measures.

What's interesting though is how the West is lagging far behind in the rest of the world. These measure have been adopted by Kenya, Tanzania, and China and international standards on thickness pertaining to promoting re-use have been adopted by these countries as well as Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Botswana, India, South Africa and Somalia. As much as it presents huge threats to maritime habitats, the billions of discarded bags blocking gutters and drains in Africa and India cause pooling of stagnant water which is a breeding ground for malaria and is a threat to livestock as well as humans.

You have to laugh out loud that a nation ravaged by war and famine where the writ of government doesn't reach the rural outback and tax collection is virtually non existent has standards on carrier bags. But actually, it's not funny.

What it shows is that on a very micro level, international governance is an unstoppable force for those nations dependent on Western aid. Developing countries are the petridish for the international NGOcracy to test out their agendas since there is no real democratic opposition. It is all waved through under the World Summit on Sustainable Development accords. Developing countries lack the governmental departments to scrutinise any such regulations and lack the bargaining power to reject them. The fact is the standards are decided well in advance of them becoming domestic law - and a full six years before they became an EU directive.

If we wanted to block such standards, we were never going to be able to block them at the EU level since MEPs would vote such measures through in that oh so bovine way, and really if we wanted a veto, we should have been in at the top table many years ago. But the irony there is that we wouldn't have vetoed any such measures since you can bet your ass the authors of such standards would be graduates of Leeds Polytechnic, funded by the EU, working for Oxfam with the full support of DfID.

There are plenty of studies now of how effective such measure s are. I've read three of them this morning. I'm still none the wiser, and it seems without any effective public surveillance of such measures, we cannot say for a fact if they are effective. One recent report has it that consumption of plastic carrier bags in Scotland is down 80%. I don't know if that's true. It sounds like a massive lie to me. What would effective public surveillance even look like?

The most recent measures compel supermarkets to report to local authorities which is halfway effective but still doesn't account for their use in the rest of the economy. It only gives a partial picture. It looks like the inconvenience is just one of those regulatory impositions in the hope that it will trigger either a change of behaviour through public awareness or some other innovation. Regulatory impositions are rather good at prompting human ingenuity in getting round them. Just ask the Securities Exchange Commission.

This is actually a massive area of study that brings little resolution to nearly forty years of forelock tugging and is not likely to be resolved even in my lifetime but the political dimensions to it highlight just how domineering the international regulatory juggernaut is and how little democracy is attached to it. As much as our own parliaments do not have a voice, the EU itself has only a peripheral role and if you want to know where the real power is, the various international bodies and NGOs are where you would look first.

What this shows, once again is the media's complete inability to analyse law and politics and what we are seeing here is a symptom of a global regulatory industry which is not held to account because neither parliaments nor journalists are even aware such exists - and the horizon is obscured by trivial irrelevances such as Westminster and the European Union. It's the unexpected item in the bagging area.

Definitely maybe...

Former chancellor Lord Lawson has announced he will lead a Conservative campaign to leave the EU. The Eurosceptic peer said he has taken the role as president of the Conservatives for Britain and will lead a cross-party exit movement ahead of the EU referendum, "due to take place by the end of next year".

Writing in The Times, he stated "We are setting out the principled case that Britain should definitely maybe leave the EU if the sun is shining, the wind is due east and if Cameron can't secure a bag of Mint Imperials from Mrs Merkel. To settle for less than a full unopened packet would make us look weak. We intend to mount a full and active campaign as soon as we can reach Matthew Elliot to find out why there's only £7.49 left in the campaign account. It keeps diverting to voicemail. The voicemail message assures us "the money is just resting in my account".

Hell freezes over

Never in a billion years did I think I would defend Raheem Kassam of Breitbart but he's getting the same shtick I get about attacking his own side. He's not attacking his own side. This fight over the nomination to lead the referendum campaign is not a rift between eurosceptics. This is a fight between a eurosceptic peoples movement and a small band of (establishment) selfservatives who are trying to steal it from us and take it as their own. This we cannot allow.

If you are amputating a gangrenous leg, yes technically, you are "attacking your own side" but if you don't amputate, the infection will spread and kill the whole body. We don't want these SW1 parasites taking over and we don't want Tory fence sitters. The less we hear from politicians and parties the better - including Ukip.

The Times and the Tory inner circle is pretending Matthew Elliot's outfit will bring an air of moderate respectability to the referendum campaign in a way that the brash and populist Banks campaign, intractably linked to Ukip, cannot - but in the end, Kassam is right. The Tory position is untenable. To win this, we have to attack the Prime Minister, which Tories cannot be relied upon to do with enthusiasm or sincerity - and Elliot's crew cannot be trusted not to run off with the cash.

I stand by my view that Ukip cannot be central to the campaign and it's no secret that I think Bank's operation is thus far lamentable, but at the very least the rabble outside the bubble sincerely want to leave the EU. I'll take that over a bunch of Tory con artists.

That, however, is not an endorsement of Leave.EU. The Referendum Planning Group is meeting soon to put a third option on the table. We cannot hope to match Mr Bank's money, but we have precision guided missiles when all they have is cannon fodder.

We seek to recruit and train more and maybe turn some of this rabble into elite fighters. We will gladly accept Mr Bank's help if offered, and we shall extend our every courtesy to him in any case. If he's smart enough to know that Elliot and the Tory circle jerk shouldn't be in charge, then he's smart enough for me. But we're not waiting around for them to get their act together. 

TheKnow.EU - it's a problem

In web design there is always a gulf between what the customer likes, what the programmer is happy with and what is of use to the visitor. I can see why Mr Banks would be very happy with The Know.EU and I can see from both the presentation and the coding that the programmer is very happy with it. I would be. But I'm not the programmer. I'm a visitor.

First of all, the panel of people moves in bi-directional sweeps which is mildly psychedelic. (trust me on this). Whichever image you click on, it send you to the same donation page. Since there is already an opportunity to donate on the main screen, the widget itself is utterly pointless. Not a good idea for the first thing that grabs your attention to be pointless.

Then there's the poll. What is it for? It's not like it's scientifically valuable data. All it tells us is that the majority of visitors, probably coming in via the Daily Mail/Daily Express/Ukip, are concerned about immigration. This is not news to us, and presumably is not news to Mr Banks either. This conclusion cannot be used to refine the website in that people from this cohort are already catered for. In short, the widget is pointless.

Then we have the "latest news" widget. Click through on this and we see links from mainstream media - namely. The Daily Express, The Daily Mail and the Muslim obsessed Breitbart. Arguably Breitbart is not mainstream media but it is a quasi-racist, pretty far-right rag where the moderation policy (or the lack thereof) means the comments are often filled with utterly vile content that would make the Daily Mail blush. No serious campaign should be linking to this vessel.

Moreover, nobody will come to the campaign website to get what they have already seen on Twitter, Facebook or indeed the host websites. Thus, the widget is again pointless. Moreover, a people's campaign should be promoting the voices of people and their news - not the voices of a press that any good strategy should be keen to attack. I'll leave it to you to decide if the merchandise widget is of value. I wouldn't be in a rush to buy a t-shirt with The Know emblazoned upon it since the referendum question is no longer yes/no.

So straight off the bat we have a pretty pointless website that's actually pretty ugly, doesn't tell you anything immediate and gives the visitor no obvious reason to return to it. If you wanted a website designed by a committee, it would look a lot like this. I would be interested to see the average loiter time of a visitor and the number of return visits. I bet they're quite small.

More than this, were I to cast an analytical eye on "the facts" section, I would find it riddled with factual and strategic errors with no consistency of message. The user has to go two clicks deep to get to the actual content which is anaemic and of little campaign value. Certainly it gives the online activist no reason to use it as an online headquarters.

At best this website is a placeholder, but there is no defining strategy behind it. No philosophy or ethos. It's just a vanity site. That said, the same can be said of Business For Elliot's websites too.

What's actually needed is something not entirely dissimilar to Ukip's own website. It's not cluttered, it has immediate signs that something new has been added and it is a news source in its own right. Effectively it's a blog site - which is the most effective way to communicate. Where Ukip fails is that it does not update every day, has no editorial strategy and no common themes. It's not building a message and there is no apparent editorial philosophy. That website style though, at the very least, would be an improvement.

What we actually need is a campaign website run pretty much as an e-zine much like Spiked Online only with a guiding philosophy behind it, a team of competent writers each working to an editorial line and an overall set of editorial ground rules to ensure message discipline. In fighting this campaign, the lead website should be an antidote to the media, a rival to it and more to the point, more accurate, up to date and persuasive. Nothing about Leave.EU suggests to me there is a strategy or a philosophy.

In reality any campaign site needs a fully staffed newsroom. What we have here is a site that could be run by a part time administrator with very little knowledge of the subject matter. It adds no value. Possibly a news site could exist as a partner to the main website entity but TheKnow.EU as standalone site, while superficially pretty and ticking all the boxes that a placeholder would need to tick, it's useless. If I were Mr Banks, I would be asking for a refund.

The bottom line is that Banks can boast about all the emails he's harvested and all the Facebook likes until the cows come home, but if you don't have an effective campaign website, you don't have a campaign. Just a very expensive brand name that isn't actually selling anything.

The truth is, there are dozens of flashy PHP template websites that an amateur can install onto personal web-hosting in a matter of minutes and the outcome would look much like this. It wouldn't take much more than a day to populated it and you'd need little in the way of expertise to maintain it. Leave.EU looks very much like one of those efforts. I know it's early days, and there is more flesh to be added to the skeleton, but without a strategy and a philosophy, it's always going to be a mess and will accomplish very little.

Very well, alone.

Deep inside the Westminster bubble, there is a Tory machine at work plotting the referendum campaign. As I understand it, they are largely fence sitter tribalists and those positioning themselves to make a healthy sum for their retirement pots by misdirecting funds. There are jobs to be grabbed and reputations to build. Winning the damn thing is a distant second to any other consideration. The danger of ceding the campaign to them is clear. As I noted in my previous post this battle will require some serious courage of conviction. I doubt they have it. Here's why...

Tonight I was going to post a verbose and long ass rebuttal of this tiresome piece of propaganda attacking the EEA Norway option. It's a classic misrepresentation of the argument. The Norway option is mooted by Owen Paterson (as far as the bubble knows) is mooted as a stepping stone interim measure (a departure lounge). It is not the final destination - just an off the shelf means of achieving single market access in the mid term.

Springford also ignores the meat of the Paterson argument in that the majority of single market rules are not made by the EU. Instead they are Codex, UNECE, UNEF, UNEP, Basel2 and so on. There is so much omitted from this article we can either throw it out as a dismal piece of amateur propaganda or we can just assume Springford is profoundly ignorant.

Readers of this blog will now be well aware of the role of international organisations in regulating the single market and will also be aware that the EEA\Efta option is one we have since approached with caution in light of the new EU treaty.

The Telegraph is running naked propaganda along the lines of repeating a lie often enough. The volume of repetition eventually grinds us down as we tire of writing rebuttals. But were I to write yet another rebuttal of the "fax democracy" meme, I would be falling into the trap. This is what they want us to spend our time arguing the toss over.

This is all irrelevant to the real battle. The real battle will be over whether Cameron's reforms are worth having. It is the view of the Referendum Planning Group that there is no real attempt at renegotiation under way, Cameron is a passenger, and the main concern of the EU is the consolidation of the EU around the Eurozone. They can risk fobbing Britain off with an empty promise because they have Cameron as a salesman. It has worked before with the phantom veto.

As much as we have spoken about the need for a positive message, and a thorough intellectual case, the last weeks of the campaign will require that we are visceral in our attacks on Cameron's credibility. Undermining the character of the Prime Minister is critical. The last thing we need is a main Leave campaign falling into the trap of trading facts and figures over trade deficits and banana regulations, attacking all the decoys, when the real enemy is the PM.

In some respects, the Conservative Home claque uniting behind Matthew Elliot's embezzlement scam referendum campaign are already political failures. They are hasbeens and neverweres - so they can and will attack the PM, but nobody will care what they say. Similarly ex ministers will be accused of holding a grudge and as for the fence sitting wait and see brigade like Steve Baker, these people still have some party aspirations and so will be selective in the battles they pick. Such people are not trustworthy. Arguably, there is nobody inside the political inner circle who can be trusted. I can't even say for certain that Daniel Hannan won't pull a fast one.

Consequently those who really want out must be cautious to ignore the Tory campaign because it will have its own agenda and it will be fighting the wrong battle. This is where Arron Banks could have been the white night, but in being so obviously associated with Ukip and running a depressingly inept message, unless he is willing to take on the expertise then he's another unwelcome player on the field.

The bottom line is that anyone serious about leaving the EU must not wait for leadership and should not be counting on any support from anybody. We are are on our own with nothing but our own personal resources. The clever boys and girls in Westminster will have the money to waste and they will congratulate themselves on their flash websites and glossy leaflets, but the real fighting will be done by me and you.

It will involve targeting local leaders and opinion formers with high quality, concise and clear arguments offering a better alternative than what Cameron can offer and good reasons as to why the PM cannot be trusted and why the "reform" on offer is just the status quo re-bundled. Neither my time or your time is well spent shoving their useless leaflets about the price of groceries through letterboxes. The memes concocted by these self-serving, money grabbing whores and prima donnas are wholly useless and irrelevant to the fight.

As much as we need our core of bloggers, we will need prolific social media users, graphic designers and Tweeters. The big boys can buy their TV adverts and newspaper columns and we cannot match their reach, but with concentrated teamwork and forensic precision, we can target our limited resource and use the machine to our own advantage. The scattergun tactics we have seen deployed thus far are insufficient.

Ultimately if we want a win then we will need a winning mindset. That mindset starts with a few basic rules and assumptions.

1. Forget Ukip - divisive and cannot reach the swing vote
2. Any machine headed by Tories is just Ukip in a better suit
3. Arron Banks and Leave.EU are preaching to the converted
4. This is a people's campaign and politicians of any stripe are not welcome.

As far as we're concerned, there is no Leave campaign. There is a biff bam sideshow the media can speculate over and we can't hold our breath waiting for them to get their act together. We can hope but I don't recommend waiting on the men with the money. In the end, we don't want their material, their input is mostly harmful and anyone who comes waving the flag of their party or tribe should be met with suspicion. It's up to me and you. We are on our own.

In this, there is the elephant in the room. The media will not consult the real people doing the heavy lifting. We will see the Farage's and the other drongos on TV, and the media will report it as though it were an election because they don't know how to do anything else. That is the second major concern after the Tory con job.

While we must wait until the latter days of the campaign to tear holes in the Prime Minister, we have a whole two years to slam the media and question its fitness to represent the arguments. The Telegraph article linked above is published without a counterweight argument and uses wilful omission of crucial arguments without right of reply. It is written by a consultant to an EU funded think tank - and the Telegraph doesn't see fit to tell us this.

We have written at length on the matter of media corruption and the low grade, amateurism that now passes for journalism. Court circulars like the Spectator and the Telegraph must be regularly and routinely humiliated. While they are seemingly eurosceptic, they are ultimately loyal to the Westminster orthodoxy. The Daily Mail isn't eurosceptic and if you wanted to design a false flag news vessel it would look a lot like The Daily Express.

In this battle, even the right wing press is our enemy, the Tory party is our enemy and while we may not doubt Ukip's sincerity, their lack of tactical acumen means they are best neither seen nor heard.

The bottom line - there is no party, newspaper or campaign organisation that can save us. We have no allies, we have no lifeline and in this, the official campaign to stay in is the opponent of the least importance. Even the EU takes a back seat. As much as this is an opportunity to free Britain from the EU, it is also a chance to hit the media hard and shatter its unbreakable influence for good. To win, that's the battle we have to win first.

In that regard, the main campaigns are especially unhelpful in that they are using their money to fight this campaign through the media. They are fighting on their battlefield. We have to ignore the media when we're not attacking it and we need to bypass the politicians and we have to make this a people's campaign. It's about me and you and you decide your own level of involvement. Don't wait for a leader or a uniting banner because I can promise you, that's not coming. If we wait for them, all we'll get is a large bill for the taxpayer, a future inside the EU and a Matthew Elliot laughing all the way to the bank. He gets paid either way. 

Getting off the fence

In Conservative Home today Mark Wallace writes an obsequious piece eulogising his former employer - and his worthiness to run the EU referendum campaign. There are some basic notions that need to be dispensed with. Firstly the notion hat Elliot's campaign is "cross party" is a risible.

He claims "Elliott and Cummings have managed to assemble a broader alliance across the political parties – thus far they have Conservative, Labour, DUP and UKIP MPs signed up (Carswell is working with them rather than with Leave.EU, which presumably explains some of the attacks on him from the Banks camp) and will be announcing others soon. That’s a compelling argument that they have the wider cross-party base at this point by quite a long way."

In other words, Elliot has a rump of Tory MP's a, former Tory MP (with one foot still in the bubble) and a hand full of stragglers few have ever heard of. It is almost uniformly a Tory operation. And there's the problem. The point is that this referendum is not about the EU, per se, but our relationship with the EU. That puts Cameron in the frame, as the man seeking to negotiate a new relationship. Therefore, the referendum must be prepared to mount a strong attack on Cameron, even to the extent of damaging him politically, and thereby damaging the Conservatives electoral chances in 2020. Can we trust Tories to do that? No.

Moreover, the Tory camp consists of the "wait and see" brigade along with Elliot, who appears to have no particular drive to leave the EU and appears to be more concerned with making a quick buck out of it. As to Elliot's competence, as one commenter notes "The AV referendum would have been won if you had put a chimpanzee in charge (there was no contest)".

This debate is less a split between euosceptics as a split between the London establishment and everybody else. Arron Banks has made it quite clear on Twitter this week that he has no particular love of the SW1 claque, and in that he is right - they are entirely self-serving. They are not to be trusted. In that regard, in no way do I question Banks's or Ukip's sincerity in wanting to leave the EU. And in that, like it or not, Ukip and the Banks operation is the most genuine Leave constituency who are both grass roots and cross party in terms of their former voting habits.

For me, the choice comes down to who is most likely to succeed. That will ultimately depend on the strategy and the quality of the intellectual argument. Given that Better Off Out is risible and in terms of intellectual weight there is barely a fag paper's difference between Leave.EU and Business for Britain (and how risible it is), it wouldn't make much material difference if Ukip itself were running the campaign.

So in the end, it's a matter of whether I want an SW1 bubble outfit farming out campaign funds to their business interests, do I want this to be an establishment lead campaign, and do I trust the Tories to put up an honest fight? No, No, No. As with most most things in British politics, one laments the lack of a "none of the above" option. 

The Europe Delusion

If you read this piece and this piece, you will have an idea as to the extent and scope of international conventions, standards and regulations. I'm taking my lead from Philip Alston who is as close to an authority on the subject as you can possibly get. He writes from the perspective of Australia's struggle to balance sovereignty with globalisation. Even twenty years ago, Australia was making all the same arguments eurosceptics make about sovereignty and laws being made elsewhere.

What is noteworthy is that Australians don't complain about the EU making 75% of their laws. They're not members of the EU. So who makes Australia's laws? The same people who make ours. As we have noted sovereignty outside the EU is something of a red herring since the primacy of global conventions and accords govern what nations and blocs alike convert into law.

It is only because of the narrow framing of our national politics, aided and abetted by a juvenile and inept media that the process of globalisation is obscured from view. It's arcane at the best of times but in the UK, we have the EU obscuring it from view completely. I have actually lost count of the number of times I've used the expression "the EU is just a redundant middleman", but it is only in the last few weeks have I realised just how profound and true those words are.

Europhiles often claim we would be an isolated "rogue nation" outside the EU but Alston demonstrates in his book that Australia outside of the EU struggles to withstand the tides of globalised regulation and couldn't be a rogue state even if it wanted to be one. Far from being isolated, it has a Mutual Recognition Agreement with the EU for recognition of quality standards and regulations. That wasn't all that difficult to achieve in many sectors because the rules and regulations come from the same international law making shops.

This dynamic kinda knackers both sides of the Brexit debate. On the one hand we have Ukip and the likes making grand pronouncements about sovereignty, which is not even halfway realisable - and on the other hand we have europhiles saying that we wouldn't have all these protections, rights and conveniences were it not for the EU. The fact is, if the EU didn't exist today, as things stand in terms of the global trading rules, nobody would bother to invent it. The ground is covered.

That actually makes it all the more important to finally resolve the EU question and get out of the EU, because the debate has moved on from the ideas of the last century. In many respects, Australia is twenty years ahead of us in that it at least understands where the real threats and opportunities are. We are still in a state of collective myopia, barely aware of where our laws come from and barking up the wrong tree. As it happens, the EU debate doesn't even begin to address the issues and so long as we remain inside it, we will continue to fumble under a blanket of ignorance.

If at this point you're not hooked on this tantilising subject I would actually say that you're not really that interested in politics. When you look at the giants in the global playground, and contrast it with whatever utterances of Jeremy Corbyn make it as far as the local SW1 "news" papers, you realise just how insignificant Westminster village hall really is and how little comparative impact it has on our lives. By that measure, even the European Parliament looks like an adult crèche.

And if our politics is all but irrelevant, then so is our media. I've always had a visceral contempt for British media, but now such contempt is misplaced. Our news media is in fact another branch of the entertainment industry and the news columns of the press are no less irrelevant than the celeb gossip sidebar. They are one and the same. I've learned to ignore it in the same way I would the celebrity gossip - and I'm no worse off for it. They are not in the business of reporting news. If anything they exist only to prop up the illusion that any of our elected officials are in control.

Debunking rubbish

Like Ukip, Leave.EU is going to spend the entire campaign making work for Brexit campaigners, robbing us of time better spent on other things. But since this post is infinitely reusable it's worth doing. The above meme is doing the rounds and it's worth debunking claim by claim.

The first claim that freedom of movement is at risk is untrue. There is no practical possibility that we could disengage from the single market. Politically, we couldn't even if we wanted to. That consequently means freedom of movement stays. The EU wouldn't allow it any other way. And or would business.

The claim that millions of jobs rely entirely on EU membership is the oldest and most boring meme in the book. the jobs depend on trade - and as per the previous point, our membership of the single market is not affected by leaving the EU.

The peace in Europe meme is also a myth. If anything has kept the peace it is NATO, largely propped up by the USA. The EU's meddling in Ukraine is certainly a contributory factor to the low grade civil war happening there now, and the EU's failure to deal with the asylum crisis may reignite tensions in the Balkans.

Claim four is completely out there. As we have discussed on this blog at length, regulation is not written by the EU. It's made by Codex, ILO, UNECE, UNEF, WHO and a whole host of other bodies, largely influenced by corporates and alliances such as the Cairns Group. The EU talking shop does little more than rubber stamp regulations and by the time they reach the middleman there is little hope of editing them - and when we are structurally outnumbered, there is no chance of unilaterally vetoing them. What that means is that we cannot refuse a regulation which could wipe out entire industry sectors, much like small slaughterhouses in the 1990's. That's why the EU is not a democracy.

The fifth claim that the EU promotes tough environmental regulation is an interesting one. Again, the EU is not the author of such regulation and these are mainly the concern of the UNEP, WHO and various climate accords that are made internationally. If anything, the EU is a means of watering them down. That said, it is not a given that the promotion of tough environmental regulation is necessarily a good thing. There are many examples of bad and counter productive environmental regulations that could have been averted had we had a veto at the top table.

The claim that all member states abide by the same rules again ignores where most of the rules come from. Australia complies with the same rules for a number of industries, yet they are not obliged to surrender their veto at the top table like Britain has. Regulatory convergence is central to the concept of a single market, but the EU is not the single market. The single market of uniform regulations actually depends on which industry to which you are referring. The single market in automotive regulations extends far beyond the EU's own internal market and is set to go global in the next decade - with other industries to follow.

As to farming subsidies helping agriculture, indeed they do. But we are the second largest contributor to the EU budget and by leaving the EU we would repatriate what we pay in subsidy and pay it directly, possibly reducing some red tape in the process. We would maintain subsidies and there is no rational case that suggest we would not. Moreover, running our own subsidy system means a withdrawal of the CAP, which even the most hardened europhile will admit has a pretty damning history in terms of environmental protections and food production.

The claim that Brexit will lead to big business leaving Britain is a nonsense. It's a wholly empty threat. We know this because Brexit would not involve trade tariffs since the WTO rules out discriminatory tariffs and we would remain members of the EEA single market anyway. It's a non issue and it doesn't affect business. Both Airbus and Vauxhall have said they would stay n the EU. Some notable ones have hinted they might, but have made no definite declarations. All we see is idle threats, mostly from companies who depend entirely upon corporate welfare.

The suggestion that we would be a maverick state is somewhat peculiar. By not being in the EU is Norway an isolated rogue state? Australia even? No? It's absurd. And since we're not going to leave the single market, isolation is so risible it's not even worth another sentence.

Finally, the employment legislation is largely the product of the International Labour Organisation. We would keep most, if not all of it - and we would still adopt ILO conventions in the future. Australia does and so does Canada. Where extradition is concerned, it's always best if our own courts have the final say - though there is no objection in principle to reciprocal agreements. Most of this is detailed in our comprehensive Brexit plan.

We are used to seeing this kind of low grade tat and if it didn't come from Leave.EU it would likely be produced elsewhere. We're seen similar before and thoroughly debunked it. The irritation here is that it takes less than ten minutes for the Remains to concoct a nasty piece of propaganda like the above, but we have to de-construct the entire edifice of EU lies from the last forty years and explain to people the reality of the power structures. It takes more than a cheapshot tweet to get to the core of the issue. Just as well the final battle is not whether we're right or they are. The final question is whether we trust the word of a Tory PM. I sure as hell don't and I have no idea why SLATUKIP would either.