BEST FOR BRITAIN'S 

WEEKEND WIRE

Dear John,

June has arrived, and Parliament is preparing for a long recess, but at Best for Britain, there’s no rest for the intrepid. Here’s what caught our eyes this week.

UKTBC’s magnum opus

This Thursday, the UK Trade and Business Commission published a landmark report of recommendations aimed at breaking down barriers to growth and setting the UK economy up for success in the next decade.

Trading our way to prosperity: A blueprint for policymakers includes 114 recommendations covering all sectors of the economy. They were drawn from 80 hours of live testimony over two years from hundreds of businesses, trade experts, and academics, and written evidence from more than 200 organisations. Among them are calls for the creation of a new, independent UK Board of Trade to scrutinise trade policy, a reformed visa system to allow the labour mobility UK industries need, and for all trade agreements to be subject to full parliamentary scrutiny.

The recommendations will underlie discussion at the upcoming Trade Unlocked conference, where businesses from every sector will be invited to weigh in. The full list of all 114 recommendations can be found here.

Trade Unlocked countdown

Trade Unlocked 2023 is just 17 days away, and our team is busily at work locking down our final preparations for the largest economic and political conference of its kind since the UK’s departure from the EU.

This week, we announced two of our keynote speakers, Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Shadow International Trade Secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds. The UKTBC’s aforementioned report also earned coverage of Trade Unlocked in some of the nation’s most influential media outlets, including Politico and the Financial Times.

Be sure you’re keeping an eye on the Trade Unlocked Twitter and LinkedIn pages and follow the #TU23 hashtag to stay in the know on all our latest updates.

Leave means please stay close to the EU

Last weekend, the results of new MRP polling by Focaldata commissioned by Best for Britain were released, and the verdict was unequivocal: voters want closer ties with the EU.

Roughly two-thirds of the public in England, Wales, and Scotland said Brexit has caused more problems than it has solved, while a majority said the UK should pursue a closer relationship with the EU (53%) and that the UK should maintain EU standards and regulations to ease trade (52%). Every single seat in Great Britain had at least a plurality in favour of closer EU ties

The results were consistent in totemic Leave-voting Red Wall seats like Bolton North East, where 50% wanted to deepen EU ties, compared to 23% favouring the status quo and 15% wanting to further drift apart, and in the seats of key Brexiters like Michael Gove, whose Surrey Heath seat had 54% in favour of a closer relationship with the EU.

The full breakdown of the polling can be found here.

Squeezed Down Under

The UK’s post-Brexit trade deals with Australia and New Zealand, much-extolled by the Government and then later much-maligned by the same Government, officially came into effect at midnight on Tuesday. British consumers can rejoice with promises of cheaper, lower-grade beef, while British farmers have their own beef with the Government for negotiating a trade deal that undercuts them.

Despite promises that the deals will give a historic boost to the economy, the actual benefit to UK GDP will be a measly 0.08% by 2035. Meanwhile, critics, including former Defra Secretary George Eustice, who previously said it was a “good deal” have now seen the light and conceding that “far too much for far too little in return”. 

To get an opposite perspective, you can ask this Australian news crew, who discuss the deal with the glee of 1920s bank robbers who’ve already absconded across a continent with their haul intact.

Best for Britain CEO Naomi Smith said the deals “undercut British industries, trash UK standards and make a mockery of our climate commitments” while “failing to make up for trade we have lost with the EU”.

Burnham calls for fair votes

Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham ventured north of the Scottish borders to make a strong call for fairer elections on Thursday evening.

Burnham, speaking at a Making Labour Work for Scotland event hosted by Gordon and Sarah Brown in Edinburgh, argued in favour of voting reform, saying, “I don’t believe all people in all places will be equally represented in Westminster until every vote matters.”

At the event, West Yorkshire mayor Tracy Brabin said the Government should further devolve powers to local authorities, claiming “power cannot be hoarded in Government departments, whether that’s in Westminster or Holyrood.”

Electoral reform is one of the key goals of Best for Britain’s better democracy campaign. You can learn more about the way our unfair voting system impacts people’s everyday lives in our Can’t Wait campaign, including our new videos.

Zahawi heirs his laundry

With 50 Tory MPs calling for the Prime Minister to scrap the inheritance tax, one unlikely hero has stepped into the spotlight to lead the charge in defence of multi-million pound fortunes everywhere: Nadhim Zahawi.

With all the gusto he put into claiming taxpayer expenses to keep his horses nice and toasty, Zahawi penned an op-ed in The Telegraph this Wednesday likening the tax to “a spectre that haunts us alongside death.” Applying his trademark zeal for proper disclosure and referencing Marx with a sense of irony that certainly doesn’t accomplish what he thinks it does, Zahawi refers to polling conducted by his own company to argue for the tax’s abolition.

Having written all their own jokes for them, Zahawi was swiftly pounced upon by commentators, chief among them John Elledge, whose New Statesman piece pulled no punches: “Inheritance tax is tragically unpopular–but Nadhim Zahawi could be the man to change that.”

Inquiry blues

Ever fudged the truth, only to have your cover blown by the very person you’re covering for?

Well, Rishi Sunak knows exactly how that feels, because Boris Johnson has gone around the Cabinet Office and turned over all of his unredacted WhatsApp messages dating back to May 2021 to the Covid Inquiry after they had previously stonewalled attempts to get access to them. The messages from January 2020 have apparently been lost in the cloud, specifically those relating to several meetings with right-leaning newspaper barons before Johnson declined to impose a second lockdown in September 2020.

With Johnson’s sudden about-face, rumours are swirling around Whitehall that the contents of the relinquished messages could be seriously damaging to the Prime Minister.

Layla Moran, Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus, previously said “The Government must stop obstructing the Covid inquiry” before Johnson decided hand over the messages.

With all the unpleasant images placed into our minds by Nadhim Zahawi’s macabre op-ed, we’re going to spend the weekend trying to forget it. Bye for now!

Best wishes,

Tommy Gillespie 
Press Officer, Best for Britain