BEST
FOR BRITAIN'S
WEEKEND WIRE
Dear John,
It’s our 60th Weekend Wire, summer
is approaching, and we’re excited to see the sights, feel the breeze,
and bask in the sun. In the past, we’d have also been looking forward
to a refreshing dip in the sea, but it’s a bit too sewage-infested for
that now. At least they finally said sorry about it.
One month to Trade
Unlocked
Today marks one month until Trade
Unlocked arrives at the Birmingham NEC, and the largest and
widest-reaching conference of its kind creates an international trade
policy blueprint fit for the 21st century.
As we continue rolling out our
agenda of speakers and panels, we’re also excited to share the first
look inside the conference and at our plenary stage. The conference
will centre around our plenary stage, with three breakout stages and
ten industry zones. The hundreds of businesses in attendance will be
able to learn more about speakers and panels and vote on policy
recommendations with the Trade Unlocked app.
Be sure you’re following Trade
Unlocked on Twitter and LinkedIn,
and keep your eye on the #TU23 hashtag so you don’t miss any updates
from our speakers and partners!
Running out of
road
If Brexit keeps going the way it’s
going, we’ll all be driving Fred Flintstone cars.
This week, a group of major
automakers warned that the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement’s
‘rules of origin’ requirement for electric vehicles to have 45% of
their value sourced from the UK or EU could spell disaster for the
British auto industry, as the UK does not currently possess the
battery manufacturing capacity to meet the requirements.
Stellantis, which owns Peugeot,
Fiat, Vauxhall, and Citroen, was the first to sound the alarm bell this week, and Ford
and Jaguar Land Rover soon joined their call to both delay the implementation
of the rules of origin and to urgently attract new electric car
manufacturers to the UK. An auto industry trade body cautioned that
800,000 UK jobs could be at risk without an improved deal.
Kemi Badenoch, pretending not to
see the Brexit-shaped crack in her Government’s windscreen, denied
that leaving the EU was a factor in the UK car industry’s turmoil, but
the Treasury later in the week offered up a suspiciously-timed £500m subsidy to
Jaguar Land Rover for a battery giga-factory. Keir Starmer, for his
part, responded to the brouhaha by pledging to improve the UK’s Brexit deal and forge better trade links
with the EU.
UK bands stuck at
home
Not only has Brexit wrecked our
economy, but it’s also making us worse at carrying a tune (to Europe,
at least).
New research from Best for Britain
released over the weekend revealed that the number of UK artists booked at EU music festivals this
summer has fallen by a third compared to pre-Brexit numbers. Likewise,
one of the UK’s flagship summer festivals, Glastonbury,reported a 50%
fall in European artists performing this summer compared to pre-Brexit
levels.
Industry sources have cited new
difficulties securing temporary visas and bringing equipment through
customs as the reason for the drop. Best for Britain CEO Naomi Smith
said “talent is now shamefully being starved” of opportunities to
tour Europe, while Independent Society of Musicians Chief Executive
and UK Trade and Business Commission member Deborah Annetts said the
red tape “continues to cost opportunities for emerging
artists”.
Nevertheless,
sovereignty-respecting music lovers can still see the UK’s best and
brightest musical acts performing at next year’s Festival of Brex…oh, wait, nevermind.
If you want to learn more about
post-Brexit challenges facing our creative sector, you can check out
the UK Trade and Business Commission’s arts and culture session from January.
Earth’s mercury to hit
1.5℃
The Earth is set to reach the 1.5℃ warming threshold for the first
time between now and 2027, according to the latest projections by
climate scientists, setting the world on course to reach one of the
highest-profile metrics of the global warming crisis.
The warming will hit the limit set at the 2015 Paris agreement due to the combined
effects of human activity and an unusually strong El Niño, and
scientists said that the effect would likely be temporary and would
not constitute a failure to meet the Paris target. Still, they
cautioned that flirting with this level of warming so soon signalled
that the world is warming far too fast.
However, environmental scientists
and campaigners stressed that the worst effects of warming could be
avoided if countries sharply cut their emissions.
National WHAT
conference?
This week, right-wing politicians
and commentators from around the world gathered in London for the
National Conservatism Conference, and if the name wasn’t enough to
prick up Sigmund Freud’s ears, we can only imagine what he’d make of
what Suella Braverman, Miriam Cates, and Danny Kruger had to
say.
References to the debunked,
antisemitic Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory were a dime a dozen,
Jacob Rees-Mogg savaged his party’s recent childcare incentives for
encouraging women not to be homemakers, and a GB News presenter had a
quite sad realisation that his friends had disinvited him from a
birthday party. Another speaker must have mixed up her notes from a
fear-mongering speech about trans people with her treatises on AI,
because all she managed onstage was a confused rant about “biomedical self-mastery”, which
presumably means she lives in constant terror of being attacked by
fembots.
And that’s barely a drop in the
ocean. Unfortunately, with right-wing loons constantly jockeying to
brandish their credentials to set themselves up for a leadership race
after the Tories are likely routed at the next election, this
self-immolating, paranoid brand of conservatism on display this week
could become a more regular feature of British politics.
Mea caca, say sewage
dumpers
Though Tory MP Damian Green
may protest their attempts to stop a new generation of
children from making idyllic memories of frolicking in seas filled
with sewage, a group of English water companies have judged that
they’d better apologise and commit to a £10bn investment
in the next decade to clean
up England’s waterways.
The head of Water UK said the
public was “right to be upset” about the over 300,000 instances of raw
sewage spills last year and pledged that the new funds would cut the
spills by half this decade, upping the ante on Defra Secretary Therese
Coffey’s plan to maybe do it before the end of the century. The cost for this will eventually filter
down to household bills, presumably after an assessment finds that the
billions in shareholder dividends can’t take the hit.
Tough on dissent, tough on
people who look like they may dissent at some unspecified point in the
future
Following widespread condemnation
of the Met’s actions arresting peaceful protestors (along with a hefty
contingent of people who happened to be standing nearby) at this
month’s coronation, new polling has revealed that the draconian terms
of the Government’s anti-protest laws have already begun working as
they always intended.
An exclusive poll for Adam
Bienkov’s Byline Supplement newsletter found that over 40% of Brits
would not feel safe joining a peaceful protest, fearing arrest by a
newly-emboldened police force. Even more respondents–48%–reported that
they did not trust the Metropolitan Police.
Significantly, women were
significantly less likely to trust police or feel safe at peaceful
protests, after this year’s report of a culture institutional
misogyny, abusive officers allowed to remain on the force, and sexual
assault cases going uninvestigated at the Met.
It bears repeating that the terms
of the Public Order Bill have been harshly condemned by the UN and Amnesty International, who said the UK was becoming a
“negative force for human rights on the world stage” this
year.
This week felt like far more than
1/60th of the usual Tory nonsense, but that’s just the way the lettuce
wilts sometimes. Talk soon!
Best
wishes,
Tommy Gillespie
Press Officer, Best for Britain
