BEST FOR BRITAIN'S

WEEKEND WIRE

Dear John,

This week, the President came to the UK, the former Prime Minister went to the US, and the IMF reaffirmed their membership in the Anti-Growth Coalition.

Happy Good Friday, Joe

This Monday marked the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. As part of the commemoration of the landmark peace agreement, Best for Britain highlighted the pivotal role of international cooperation in brokering the deal and celebrated the EU's commitment to Northern Ireland’s healing process, not least through the hundreds of millions of euros it has provided to community centres and engagement programmes through four iterations of its PEACE programme.

Joe Biden’s visit to Belfast and the Republic went off mostly without a hitch, barring Arlene Foster and a few right-wing columnists claiming he despises the UK and secretly works to help the EU achieve dominion over it.

Over the weekend, in a Guardian op-ed heralding the GFA’s longevity, former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Peter Hain hailed the role of the UK Trade and Business Commission, which is organsied by B4B, in advocating for practical economic solutions in Northern Ireland.

The time is right to bin nativist nonsense

As the political world toasted the conciliatory dialogue that brokered the Good Friday Agreement, the Government continued its long tradition of failing to understand historical parallels and claimed it remained committed to passing the Retained EU Law Bill.

With behind-the-scenes reports about the Government’s alleged plans to scrap the Bill ahead of local elections swirling, Peter Hain, Best for Britain chair Kim Darroch, and Best for Britain CEO Naomi Smith called on the Government to follow in the footsteps of the Good Friday Agreement’s architects and bin the Bill for good.

Hailing the internationalism at the heart of the Good Friday Agreement, Hain said the Bill “put[s] these principles at risk”, while Darroch echoed that leaving the Bill behind would represent “a return” to the tradition of British diplomatic prowess that brokered the Agreement.

£1300 worse off

The uplands will be sunlit, and not lit by pricey artificial bulbs, because a report this week from the Centre for European Reform revealed that Brexit is costing the average worker £1300 per year.

Amid the Government’s bullishness about their accession to the CPTPP, the Centre’s director threw cold water on their boasting, citing Brexit’s hit to productivity as the EU withdrawal hampers the UK’s exports and GDP growth.

Luckily, the Vote Leave campaign promised that food would be cheaper and our patriotic British pounds would stretch further, and that we definitely wouldn’t be paying £200 more per year for food and have crops rotting in fields because there are no workers to pick them.

Pronouns 1, Truss -£45bn

According to Liz Truss, Joe Biden’s daily schedule for a mercifully brief period of September-October 2022 looked something like this: wake up, commit malarkey, mispronounce a political ally’s name, …destroy Liz Truss?

Speaking in Washington to one of the only audiences still willing to listen to her, the child labour-loving think tank The Heritage Foundation, Truss continued her non-apology tour, claiming her market-crashing, pound-freefalling economic agenda would have worked had everyone not been out to get her from the start and install “social democracy by the back door”.

This cast of imagined dastardly characters includes Biden, the IMF, Emmanuel Macron, Ursula von der Leyen, “woke culture”, the Conservative Party, and British corporations, to start. Apparently these produce-loving wokerati were in cahoots with the world’s stock markets and forced Truss to slash taxes for the 1% and hope money magically appeared somewhere.

Readers, remember you can display your official membership of the Anti-Growth Coalition with our merch.

Interminable Monumental Failure

Good news, everyone! The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has released its spring forecasts, and things aren’t quite as doom and gloom for the UK as it predicted in January.

Sure, the UK is still projected to be the worst-performing major economy in the world. Sure, our economy is going to shrink this year. Sure, the UK is expected to perform even worse than Russia this year. But! The contraction projected has shrunk to 0.3%! We can all rejoice, especially given that the IMF is the domain of the wokerati and the anti-growth, graduate elite who like to finger-wag and regulate away the dreams of plucky Old Oxonian Prime Ministers.

Best for Britain CEO Naomi Smith said Brexit was the “undeniable difference” holding the UK economy back.

ESA goes beyond the asteroid belt

The European Space Agency this week embarked on one of its longest-awaited missions to search for signs of life on the moons of Jupiter this week.

After lightning forced a cancellation of the launch on Thursday, the rocket took to the sky on Friday afternoon as planned. The spacecraft will reach Jupiter in 2031, where it will orbit the largest planet in the solar system.

On Jupiter’s icy moons, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa, the spacecraft will look beneath the frozen surface to see if there could be life deep in the depths, as there is at the bottom of Earth’s oceans.

Sadly, no members of the UK Cabinet have volunteered to be blasted into space.

Home Sec rebuke

Suella Braverman’s gutter-scraping rhetoric has finally met significant pushback within the Tory Party–all it took was smearing an entire nationality as potential criminals and then publicly suggesting racist caricatured dolls should not be taken off public display within the space of one week.

Former Party Chair Sayeeda Warsi lambasted Braverman’s series of provocative statements in an op-ed on Wednesday, calling out the Home Secretary as “not fit to hold high office” and putting the onus on the Prime Minister to correct the dangerous nativism brewing in his Cabinet.

This opened the floodgates for more criticism, although in typical Tory fashion much of it came anonymously. One Conservative former minister branded Braverman a “real racist bigot” while Defence Select Committee Chair Tobias Ellwood was more tepid on the record, saying her Enoch Powell-esque ranting doesn’t “sit well” with the Prime Minister’s supposed grown-up approach to governing.

While you look up at the sky this weekend, take comfort in the knowledge that enterprising scientists in Europe are searching for signs of life in the stars. Just don’t look up too long, lest you come face-to-face with an open pipe dumping raw sewage.

Best wishes,

Tommy Gillespie
Press Officer, Best for Britain