"And we have secured the most comprehensive deal that the EU has ever agreed to in its history."
Er, no. That would be their EU membership offering.
Our own trade deal with them is a mouse fart in a hurricane by comparison.
Let's take a random lie as an example: "Within the EU, the UK would not have been able to cut VAT on the installations of solar panels, heat pumps and insulation to zero"
Yes, they're really claiming that the non-implementation of a very very very very stupid idea (UKCA) is somehow a benefit that will "reduce burdens" for businesses.
No, it just won't introduce new ones, you oxygen thieves!
The EU also resolved its dispute over steel and aluminium. The US also lifted the ban on EU meat.
We would have been in EXACTLY the same position had we still been an EU member.
"The UK has signed Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) with seven US states with a combined GDP of £3.4 trillion, similar to the GDP of Germany"
That's like counting a "deal" to buy a chocolate bar from Tesco as potentially worth £20 billion because that's its market cap.
The EU's deal with NZ (agreed since we left) doesn't surrender the EU farming sector as it preserves tight quotas.
Ours risks destroying British lamb, beef and dairy farmers in the long term by removing all quotas on imports from NZ over time.
Italy is in the EU.
So whatever fluff lies behind this claim, we could have done as an EU member.
Hang on. Do they really not realise that UK consumers ultimately pay the tariffs in the form of higher prices?
This travesty of a document ends with a laundry list of company investments, absolutely none of which were driven by Brexit.
(In other words, none of the companies in question went "Aha! Brexit. I must invest more in the UK." Very much a "despite Brexit" situation.)
Just so we're clear, that was a 20,000ft pass, not a deep dive. Life's too short.
• • •
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In case you missed it, today we've had the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Express all soiling themselves with glee at a report showing that trade since Brexit has been going well.
Only snag is, the report (by murky Tufton Street outfit the IEA) was quite literally a pack of lies...
How did they pull their stupid stunt off? Quite simply.
1) They compared two different types of data (inflation-adjusted for the pre-Brexit period, unadjusted for the post-Brexit period) to draw false conclusions.
2) They got Kemi Badenoch to swallow the lot and talk about it.
Here's more info about the holes in the original IEA report the size of the Grand Canyon...
Over the course of their reign of error, the Tories have grown the national debt from £1 trillion to £2.5 trillion.
In the same 13-year period, we have witnessed crumbling schools and hospitals, increasingly leaky water pipes and sewers, and other widespread structural failures.
There have been no big infrastructure projects to point to and say "ah, that's where the money went..."
So from the beginning of time until 2010, the nation debt grew to £1 trillion.
From 2010 until 2023, it grew by an additional £1.5 trillion to £2.5 trillion.
And yet if you look around, you can't really see where most of the money has gone.
Tory cronies must be sleeping on beds made of gold.
Have so few ever stolen so much in so short a time before? The only thing I can think of that might compare was the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. Not exactly a great bedfellow.
In a way, it's a bit like the thefts at the British Museum. Nobody noticed anything much, then once they started looking properly they saw that thousands of priceless items had been looted over an extended period.
The same goes for the Tories. The focus is always on individual scandals which blow up then quickly fade away. But when you take a big step back and look at their actions as a whole over their entire 13-year term, you'll find our own museum is standing empty.
And they're going to get away with it.
Correction: they got away with it.
Only in fantasy mirror world will a successor government investigate its predecessor.
In the real world, Labour know that would signal an unending tit-for-tat war. So they'll poke around a bit, and done.
Reminder: thanks to Brexit, you can no longer watch Now TV, iPlayer etc. in the EU. We no longer benefit from the EU roaming law applicable to streaming services.
Apologies. Several people have reminded me that iPlayer is different.
You used to be able to watch PAID streaming services across the EU before
Brexit. You can't any more.
Ok. Deep breath.
I got one thing wrong in my original tweet, which I corrected in my second tweet of the thread, above.
But maybe it's still not clear enough so I will try and explain better.
The relevant EU law applies to PAID services (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify and so on) but not to free ones.
That was my mistake in my initial tweet.
The EU law means that EU users are supposed to be able to access EXACTLY THE SAME content all over the EU as they can in their home EU country. By that, I mean if you're for example an Austrian Netflix user and you go to France, you should have access to every Austrian Netflix program. (But you won't have access to Netflix France programs, because those are for subscribers who ordinarily live in France.) It's done based on the home country of the subscriber.
But for example if you have a UK Netflix account you can't see all UK Netflix programming outside of the UK, but only a courtesy subset Netflix chooses to show you as a "traveller". Same applies to Prime. (Amazon even displays a message to warn you that not all the content's available. See screenshot, which I took after connecting to my UK Prime via a French VPN to pretend I was in France.)
Relevant explainer from the UK government...
Relevant EU law on "cross-border portability of online content services in the internal market"...
And finally, when I said "roaming" in my first tweet, I didn't mean it in the narrow sense of mobile roaming (had I meant the latter I would have said "mobile roaming". I definitely know the difference.) I just meant "roaming" in the sense of going all over the place.
1. Brexit means Brexit. But what does Brexit mean? Or Brexit?
2. Put 3 Brexiters in a room, and they will emerge with 4 versions of Brexit.
3. The BBC news team will find a way to interview both sides of a Möbius strip.
4. "Will of the People" is like QED at the end of a scientific proof.
5. The taunt "Coming over here, picking all our fruit" doesn't have quite the ring you thought it would.
6. 17.4 million people equal a majority of an electorate of 46,500,001, and a population of 67 million.
7. All the following conspire to block the One True Brexit: Remainers, judges, Labour, most Tories, other MPs, Lords, mass media, experts, economists, ECHR, the woke, business leaders, foreign firms, lawyers, facts, stats, the EU, did I mention the EU?, oh and the EU of course!