BEST FOR BRITAIN'S
WEEKEND WIRE
Dear John,
January is finally coming to an end, but the most depressing month (in the author’s view) has at least provided us with a hefty amount of material to chew on. Let’s see what went down in its last full week.
Brexit smashing UK’s guitars, Furnish tells UKTBC <[link removed]>
The next generation’s Beatles will have to hone their sound in Hull instead of Hamburg, with Rocket Entertainment Group CEO David Furnish warning that Brexit is shutting British musicians out of opportunities to tour Europe and develop as artists early in their careers at the UK Trade and Business Commission’s live evidence session <[link removed]> on culture and the arts Thursday.
Furnish was among seven witnesses from the UK’s creative industries who shared <[link removed]> all-too-familiar tales of visa headaches, Brexit red tape, and lost EU creative networks bogging down UK artists, actors, musicians, and filmmakers. University of Kent lecturer and Actors Touring Company trustee Dr Margherita Laera warned that many UK theatre companies have pulled out of Europe altogether, and vice versa.
The full session can be found here <[link removed]>, and you can listen to the UKTBC’s post-session Twitter spaces <[link removed]> with Dr Laera and session chair and Independent Society of Musicians chief Deborah Annetts.
Arts sector in €200m Brexit black hole
Doesn’t it feel good to set €184m alight and take back control with £7m worth of Great British Cash? Well, not for the UK's arts sector, because, as revealed <[link removed]> in exclusive UKTBC research published in the Independent Wednesday, Brexit caused the UK to miss out on hundreds of millions in arts funding from the EU’s flagship cultural development programme.
To top the whole farce off, Creative Europe is not limited to EU members, and the Government rejected <[link removed]> an offer to remain part of the scheme. The UK was subsequently shut out of the programme’s 2021-27 cycle, meaning we miss out on our slice of a budget increase of nearly €1bn.
The only crumb the Government has offered up to replace this money, the Global Screen Fund, doled out just £7m <[link removed]> in its first year. Reports were that Jacob Rees-Mogg was on standby to make another tone deaf intervention about how much Brexit will benefit artists in 50 years <[link removed]> before the Government offered up its standard spin.
Zahawi insists photos of him fleeing Treasury with overflowing sacks labelled “££” nothing nefarious
Overly-pampered horses <[link removed]> everywhere shuddered when, hot on the heels of news that Tory chairman Nadhim Zahawi had settled some back-tax shenanigans related to his shares in YouGov to the tune of £5m last week <[link removed]>, reports of even more shady financial dealings emerged this week.
The latest revelations concern £30m in loans <[link removed]> mysteriously surfacing in the coffers of a property company registered to his wife, Lana Saib, from 2017-21. Alongside a report <[link removed]> from HMRC that he’d not simply made a multimillion-pound oopsie-daisy and a looming investigation <[link removed]> ordered by the reportedly-fuming <[link removed]> Prime Minister, the news has (say it with me) a growing wave <[link removed]> of fellow Tory MPs <[link removed]> now publicly and privately declaring Zahawi’s position untenable.
As of Friday, Zahawi remained a minister, continuing in the time-honoured tradition of his friend and belated endorsee <[link removed]> Boris Johnson, clinging on until his fingernails pop off.
EU students ditch UK
The Desolation of Suella <[link removed]>continues aspyrrhic-victorious cackling was reportedly heard from the Home Office Friday morning, when the Higher Education Statistics Agency reported <[link removed]> that the number of EU students enrolling in UK universities has dropped by more than half. The drop at the undergraduate level was even steeper–down to just 13,000 starting courses in 2021 from 37,000 in 2020.
Shockingly, quadrupling fees, shutting access to maintenance loans, and surrendering the government to nativist loons has discouraged EU students from looking to the UK as a place to expand their minds and train for careers. UK students can look forward to less diverse classrooms and fewer opportunities to travel abroad. At least we’ve still got the Turing scheme, right? Oh, yeah, about that <[link removed]>…
Hunting for economic competence
Jeremy Hunt hit the pavement <[link removed]> in the City of London Friday morning to big up the UK’s economic fortunes, announcing plans to build ‘mini-Canary Wharfs’ all around the country and trying desperately to shift the conversation away from the Tories’ real passion: tax avoidance <[link removed]>.
With all the harried enthusiasm of the cruise director on a ship whose toilets have all backed up <[link removed]>, Hunt ruled out cutting taxes, in a sabre-rattle aimed at right-wing Tories. Instead, he blamed Britain’s economic woes on a supposed spirit of declinism tamping down the UK’s financial alacrity. Amazingly, a “spirit of declinism” is also what this author accuses his friends of when they try to leave him at a nightclub when the clock strikes 3am.
Pointing to his four priorities for the economy and perhaps running out of ideas, Hunt invoked <[link removed]> the sceptre of Geoffrey Howe as a model for how he wanted his chancellorship to be remembered.
Clearly, he hasn’t read our CEO Naomi Smith’s Guardian op-ed <[link removed]> from November, which unspooled the myth of past Tory chancellors’ supposed competence. Give it a read!
Home Office benefits blunder
Turns out ‘bank error in your favour’ isn’t as fun as they make it seem in Monopoly. This week, PoliticsHome reported <[link removed]> that a Home Office cock-up incorrectly awarded benefits to potentially tens of thousands of EU citizens applying for settled status in the UK. Now they’re trying to get the money back.
In the years leading up to the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, millions of EU citizens applied for settled status. Of the hundreds of thousands that were refused, a large proportion of them were incorrectly awarded benefits by the Home Office due to a systems error. So, in addition to being forced to uproot their lives, thousands of people now have the UK government knocking to reclaim the funds they’d doled out of pure incompetence.
New York Times: Be less like Britain
The UK’s political and economic perma-crisis has provided commentators the world over the opportunity to pontificate on how our national self-immolation can teach their leaders how not to operate a post-industrial economy, from The Wall Street Journal <[link removed]> to The Irish Times <[link removed]> to The Atlantic <[link removed]>.
On Thursday, the New York Times joined in on the pile-on with David Wallace-Wells’s op-ed entitled “Britain’s Cautionary Tale of Self-Destruction <[link removed]>.” Examining the state of the NHS and Britain’s wider economy with the clear-eyed horror of an outsider, Wallace-Wells positions the past six years of post-Brexit chaos as merely an acceleration of 13 years of economic ruin wrought by Tory austerity and mismanagement.
As has become standard with this type of piece, reading it from the POV of B4B is a heady brew of vindication, trying not to scream, and fascination/horror at how we got here.
While we can’t promise things will get better, and in fact would advise you not to bank on it, we at least have some warmer weather on the horizon, so that’s something. See you soon!
Best wishes,
Tommy Gillespie
Press Officer, Best for Britain
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Best For Britain - United Kingdom
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