BREXIT. Just about everything you might have read or heard or seen on TV about the dire consequences of a British exit from the European Union has been sheer and utter rubbish.
This is especially true of the comments — hysterical ravings would be more accurate — from the global intelligentsia, led by who can only be called the idiot-in-chief, Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, the International Monetary Fund.
Her interventions and those of the IMF more broadly have ranged from the patronising — how she had “always admired the UK for its openness to other nationalities and foreign cultures”; to predictions of utter calamity — that Brexit would trigger a collapse in the stockmarket and house prices and send the UK into recession.
Coming from the head of the IMF, which has distinguished itself by uninterrupted incompetence into, through and after the Global Financial Crisis, that is passing rich.
Coming as it does from a typical Gallic bureau-politico hack, who has waxed rich her entire life, floating between highly paid perk-laden positions in and around French politics and the French, European and global bureaucratic circuits, sucking endlessly on some taxpayer teat, that is one monumental surprise I, well, don’t think.
Goodness, gracious me, if enough countries decided to walk away from paying out the billions to tens of thousands of Brussels bureaucrats, who knows where that might end? Who knows which teat might run dry next?
In days gone past, you might have concluded that if enough people like Lagarde said something, or took a position, it might have had some credence and clout. Not any longer: global warming hysteria has demonstrated all too clearly how (supposedly) very clever people can say (unqualifiedly) very stupid things.
There are two levels to the Brexit stupidity. The first is the way it would supposedly devastate the UK and particularly England; the second is the way it would supposedly wreak havoc across global markets and the world economy.
Now, there’s one truth in the latter. If enough people believe something, and then act on that belief, by moving money in and out of various markets, that belief can be turned into reality. If enough people scream ‘the sky is falling’, in markets, eventually, it falls.
But, only up to a point and then almost certainly only temporarily — if there really isn’t any foundation for the fear. The reality then becomes the substantial buying opportunities which will have been created in the opposite direction in those various markets.
Let’s just take one example: London property, which has become so attractive to foreign buyers from the uber-rich like Russian oligarchs and billionaire Chinese communists to the global merely rich.
The UK votes for Brexit and the pound plummets. Do you seriously think those people won’t want to own London property now that it’s suddenly got, say 20 per cent cheaper in their own currencies? Indeed, the price cut aside, it will be even more attractive. It will be so, precisely because the UK — and London — was no longer locked into Europe’s huge range of insoluble problems and dysfunctionalities.
Of course, if Europe chose to deliberately hurt British industry by deliberately hurting itself, Brexit could ‘trigger’ a disaster. But that would be like China suddenly refusing to buy any more iron ore from us because it got its collective nose in a snit over something or other.
Why do you think London is a global financial centre? Just because it’s inside Europe? If so, how come, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai manage to survive, far less already haven’t shrivelled away, outside Europe?
People go to London for money because it delivers. It delivered before the UK was in Europe; it will deliver after it’s left (if of course, it does) — and indeed, arguably deliver even better precisely because of leaving.
President Obama, in his usual mindless and tactless intervention, mouthed the globalist pieties of the plagues that would be unleashed by a Brexit. But if being part of Europe is such a positive, why hasn’t Obama spent the eight years of his presidency, clamouring for the US to join?
The basic point in all this is that Britain is quite simply, frankly, too small to matter. Unlike the US in 2008, even if all the most ludicrously exaggerated claims of disaster came to pass, the impact on either global financial markets and even more so the global economy, would be a mere ripple. And, as I said, the bigger the actual initial reaction to a Brexit, the bigger the buying opportunity that would be created.
That opportunity would be leveraged by the fact that exiting Europe would in substance be hugely beneficial economically and financially for the UK and especially England — freed from the oppressive overlay of not just bureaucratic Brussels, but the extortion racket that the Euro is for Germany.
The bigger point is not financial. It is the fundamental one of national and individual sovereignty — to have your individual and shared destinies decided by yourselves under law, not by foreign unelected bureaucrats and foreign governments elected by others and in some case, by themselves.
In essence the “stay argument” comes down to just a sterile, mathematical argument against the national version of an ordinary human divorce. That, by definition, a couple splitting ‘has to cost themselves’, because two can’t live as cheaply as one.
Apart from the fact that it is just simply factually untrue in relation to Brexit, clearly even if a divorce is going to ‘cost’ a couple, and they know it, couples still often just have to divorce anyway.
And that further, while the short term might be costly, divorce might still be the necessary, indeed, the only, path to be taken for one or both to ultimately improve their position — whether that’s emotionally and psychologically or financially, or in some other way.
In the case of Brexit it would be only one of the parties — the UK. It would emerge clearly better off; that will not be the case for Europe, which will continue to sink in its own dysfunctionalities and pusillanimity.
Here’s a final point, with a down under resonance. It is or should be blindingly clear that exiting the EU is the only way the UK is going to regain control of its borders — to determine who and how many come to it not only from outside Europe but inside Europe as well.
Just as the Abbott government took the fundamental decision to regain ultimate control of our national sovereignty and indeed survival from the people smugglers in Asia, the British have to seize back their sovereignty from the people smugglers in Brussels and Berlin.
, even meagrer today (I know that's not a real word so don't send me off the the grammar thread 
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