
Labour Leave statement re Channel Four

Time for Labour MPs to Start Embracing a No-Deal Brexit
Time for Labour MPs to Start Embracing a No-Deal Brexit
Professor David Paton, Nottingham University Business School
Long-Standing Member of the Labour Party
The Brexit negotiations have brought an interesting paradox to light: politicians who have opposed the UK leaving the EU without ‘a deal’ have almost certainly made it more likely that we will end up with No Deal.

CAMPAIGNING FOR BREXIT – THE (TRUTHFUL) UNCIVIL WAR
By John Mills,
As the events leading up to the 2016 EU Referendum recede into history, there is clearly a risk that the widely acclaimed film The Uncivil War will be treated not just as a dramatization of events but as an accurate record of what happened. In some important ways, it does fulfil this role but in several other respects there is another and different story to tell. I feel particularly strongly about this because I was Chair of Vote Leave for much of the time covered by the film. While Dominic Cummings, played extremely effectively by Benedict Cumberbatch, is portrayed as a flawed but highly effective genius, I am given a bit part with two or three short scenes portraying me as an incompetent and disloyal figurehead. I don’t think that this is a balanced view – an opinion evidently shared by people such as Brian Monteith who said in a review of the film for City AM that “the portrayal of John Mills – a highly successful businessman and Labour’s largest private donor – as an out-of-touch dinosaur was hugely unfair.”
Let me give you my side of the story and you can then judge for yourself.

Jeremy Corbyn does not need to be behind Theresa May in the polls
According to YouGov, Jeremy Corbyn is currently two points behind both Theresa May and Boris Johnson. But why? During a period of extensive uncertainty within the government, and a political direction which satisfies almost nobody - how can this be the case?

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ON THE UK’S AND LABOUR’S BREXIT POLICY OPTIONS
Where are we now?
Negotiations between the UK and the EU over Brexit could hardly have been handled worse. Preparations by the government or anyone else for a Leave outcome from the 2016 EU referendum were woefully inadequate, providing endless scope for undermining the relatively robust position advanced by the Prime Minister in her earlier Brexit speeches. It was a fatal mistake for the UK to agree to discussing the border in Ireland, citizenship and money before trade.

Behind the Mask – why the “Best for Britain” campaign is anything but…
By David Price
Ah yes, that old trick. You’re in the car showroom, eyeing up a bewildering array of shiny new models, and a sharp-suited salesman comes up to you and says – as if he’s an old friend who’s known you all your life – “this is the car for you!” It’s amazing, he’s so helpful – he’s an expert and he can instantly pinpoint the best for you. What could possibly go wrong?

Why Labour is right to commit to ending membership of the EU internal market
After the transition period Labour is committed to the UK ending its membership of the EU single market. Some very talented, thoughtful, intelligent and well respected MPs along with many other leading figures in our party and wider movement would like to overturn this, but on balance we think they are mistaken in pursuing that course - for reasons we will outline here.

LABOUR AND THE BREXIT NEGOTIATIONS
How are the Brexit negotiations going?
The UK’s negotiations with the EU27 over Brexit are clearly at a difficult stage. As of May 2018, there is no agreement in sight about how to deal with the border between Northern Ireland and Eire. While the government’s policy is that the UK should leave both the Customs Union and the Single Market, it is crucial that there should be a majority in the House of Commons to reverse the Lords’ recommendation that the UK should consider remaining in at least the Customs Union, despite the fact that the Labour leadership is now committed to staying in “a” if not “the” Customs Union.

What makes economies grow?
By John Mills
'This article originally appeared in the June 2018 edition of Standpoint'
The 14th April 2018 UK edition of The Economist contained an article whose title read “Economists understand little about the causes of growth”. The body copy which followed amplified this theme.
Prospect devoted a substantial part of its May 2018 issue to “The case for a new economics”, advocating “Rip it up and start again”, but with barely a mention of economic growth anywhere in the revised agenda which readers were asked to consider.

OUR BIGGEST ECONOMIC CHALLENGES
By John Mills,
Our biggest current political and economic challenge is not Brexit. It is that our growth rate has slowed to a crawl.

Why the UK economy could perform much better than it does at present
By John Mills,
The table below summarises the balance of payments data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on 29th March 2017. Despite some improvement in the UK’s foreign payments outturn for 2017, no doubt largely due to sterling devaluation post the Brexit vote, the overall position remains very unbalanced.

The Commonwealth
By John Mills
When at the start of 1973 we joined what was then the European Economic Community – otherwise known then as the Common Market – we severed a lot of links and trading preferences with the Commonwealth countries. Understandably, old friends such as Australia and New Zealand were upset both emotionally as well as economically as we raised tariff barriers against them and lowered them with our continental neighbours. Now, with Brexit, the situation is beginning to reverse itself again. What is the future likely to hold?

Where is Brexit heading?
By John Mills
Where is Brexit heading? How do current developments look to those of us who voted Leave in 2016 – and what do we think the Labour Party should now be doing?

TRADE WITH EUROPE
By John Mills
How much difference will Brexit make to the UK’s trade with the EU27? Most likely there will be some change but not nearly as much as some people fear.

Trading with Europe
By John Mills,
How much difference will Brexit make to the UK’s trade with the EU27? Most likely there will be some change but not nearly as much as some people fear.

John Mills, Chair of Labour Leave and Chair ofJML explaisn why manufacturing will increase after we leave the EU
When we joined the Common Market in 1973, about one third of our national income came from manufacturing. Now the ratio is less than 10%. Is there a connection here? There is, although it is not that straightforward and the links need a bit of untangling.

Paul Embery, National Organiser for Trade Unions Against the EU calls on the TUC to listen to its grassroots
The TUC is in danger of rendering the trade union movement completely irrelevant to the lives of the very people it exists to represent. It has called Brexit wrong from the outset. So cynical was it about the ability of the working-class to defend itself against a Tory government outside the EU that it threw its lot in with the ranks of the Establishment – big business, the banking industry and all – in an attempt to keep us hitched to an explicitly anti-socialist and anti-democratic institution, and one which has at its core an agenda of austerity, privatisation and the rule of market forces.

Why we should realise that sterling has been, and still is, much too strong
Below is a graph, based on data supplied by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), showing real relative exchange rate movements between sterling and the Chinese currency, the yuan or renminbi, over the past 40 years.

Why are the Brexit negotiations looking so difficult?
By John Mills
Why are the Brexit negotiations looking so difficult? The fundamental answer is that the people who run the country – the political elite – have never fully accepted the result of the June 2016 EU referendum.

Would a competitive exchange rate policy be effective? If it would be, is it possible?
By John Mills
Would it be effective?
The case for the UK moving to a much more competitive exchange rate - roughly parity between the pound sterling and the dollar - is as follows: