The idiocy of politicians’ interference with international trade knows no bounds. The Japanese negotiators want to maintain a tariff on cheese imports from the UK. There is no tradition of eating dairy produce in Japan and no significant cheese industry, so what are the negotiators trying to protect? The main victims will be expat Brits who fancy a taste of the home country, and a few local people with odd tastes. But the British negotiators should make it clear they they are acting like idiots but if they insist, they can get on with their stupidity. This spat also demonstrates the pointlessness of so-called free trade agreements. Countries should just remove their own barriers to imports. If the removal is not reciprocated, it’s the other countries’ funeral.
I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.
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