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
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 on culture
and the arts Thursday.
Furnish was among seven witnesses
from the UK’s creative industries who shared 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, and you can listen to the UKTBC’s post-session Twitter spaces 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 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 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 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 before the Government offered up its
standard spin.
Zahawi insists photos of him fleeing
Treasury with overflowing sacks labelled “££” nothing
nefarious
Overly-pampered
horses 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, reports of even more shady financial
dealings emerged this week.
The latest revelations concern
£30m in loans mysteriously surfacing in the coffers of a
property company registered to his wife, Lana Saib, from 2017-21.
Alongside a report from HMRC that he’d not simply made a multimillion-pound
oopsie-daisy and a looming investigation
ordered by the reportedly-fuming
Prime Minister, the news has (say it with me) a growing wave of fellow Tory MPs 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 Boris Johnson, clinging on until his
fingernails pop off.
EU students ditch
UK
The Desolation of Suella continues as pyrrhic-victorious cackling was reportedly
heard from the Home Office Friday morning, when the Higher Education
Statistics Agency reported 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…
Hunting for economic
competence
Jeremy Hunt hit the pavement 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.
With all the harried enthusiasm of
the cruise director on a ship whose toilets have all backed
up, 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 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 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 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 to The Irish Times to The Atlantic.
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.”
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
