Skip to main content

Andrea Leadsom. Don't tell me to be optimistic!

I've just watched Andrea Leadsom's address to a bunch of (Leave) acolytes. As a Leaver herself, she naturally continues to ply us with the 'better off out' bollocks and her principal call is for the country to unite around being optimistic about the future.

I have no problem with people being optimistic, but optimism is not a state of mind you decide to adopt. It's a state of mind resulting from an assessment about the future. You can't suddenly wake up optimistic if all the evidence tells you that the future is bleak.

Having a positive attitude in the face of adversity is one thing. I am sure it helped encourage all those young men to leap out of their trenches at the Somme. But wouldn't it have been better not to have put them there in the first place? Were they optimistic about their futures. No chance. Were they hopeful they'd survive. You bet.

I will of course make the best of the bad hand she and her deluded chums have dealt me. But I will continue to listen to real experts rather than rabble-rousing power-crazed people who feed off discontent to further personal ambitions rather than use tactics we know that do work to improve people's lives. And in this case, Remain would have meant continuing to build our economic future within a certain world rather than a fool's paradise.

All she and her mates have done is thrown a bomb into the crowd and declared that the survivors need to be cheerful.

I also wanted to hit her when she stated that we will have continued free trade with the EU. What magic wand is she going to use to make this happen, let alone with all the other nations with whom we have trade agreements negotiated through the EU (free or otherwise). We will have to start from scratch and nothing is certain let alone likely. And does she think a Leaver would be welcome at the other side of the negotiating table? She has no way of knowing what we will offered. Let's face it, we didn't do too well negotiating when we were proper members of the EU.

By the way, joining the EEA won't let us control our borders - nor will it cost us less. In fact it will cost us much more because we won't get Maggie's rebate and we won't get all those grants and collaboration deals. Pain is guaranteed by Junkers and co., especially if you or any other Leaver tries talking to them. But we knew this before the vote. And half 'the people' didn't believe it. Blind faith at best, or just reckless naivety.

Personally I did see Brexit coming. #smugbastard. I wasn't persuaded by the polls. I'd heard too many people speaking passionately about their individual lives being affected by immigration. There are a lot of them (not in Scotland, N Ireland or London). I understand why they have issues with this from a point of view of depressing wages (the racists amongst them can go to hell), and there is definitely a problem to be solved. But not by making the UK so unattractive for immigrants that they wouldn't want to come here in the first place. So to prepare for a Brexit vote, I reduced as much exposure to the Pound as I could pre-referendum. Now my Pound wealth has increased (but of course in global terms I've not changed much). Does this make me optimistic about the future? Not a chance. Does this make me take positive steps to make the best of a very bad situation? Of course. Will those decisions be good for the UK? Probably not, because I now think other countries will benefit from our naivety. So I'm betting on them, not the UK - just like the whole world of investors. Who's backing investment in the UK right now?

I hated her naive thinking. I hated her pathetically forced smiles trying to demonstrate 'huge optimism' and nasty 'Britain's best' statements. But most of all, I hated her demand that I become optimistic. I will make that decision for myself based on the evidence and arguments I'm presented with. Hers only made me more pessimistic.

But there's a mischievous little part of me that wants her to receive the poisoned chalice. She got us into this mess, now get us out Andrea. And by the way, you don't start negotiating by telling the other side they're crap. And they're certainly no longer our 'friends' no matter how much you want them to buy our stuff - which they don't much anyway. We buy three times more off them than they buy off us which is why our economy has by far the worst balance of payments out of all 28 EU economies. More cause for optimism?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Phillips screws - yes I'm angry about them too

Don't get me wrong. They're a brilliant invention to assist automation and prevent screwdrivers from slipping off screw heads - damaging furniture, paintwork and fingers in the process. Interestingly they weren't invented by Mr Phillips at all, but by a John P Thompson who sold Mr P the idea after failing to commercialise it. Mr P, on the otherhand, quickly succeeded where Mr T had failed. Incredible isn't it. You don't just need a good idea, you need a great salesman and, more importantly, perfect timing to make a success out of something new. Actually, it would seem, he did two clever things (apart from buying the rights). He gave the invention to GM to trial. No-brainer #1. After it was adopted by the great GM, instead of trying to become their sole supplier of Phillips screws, he sold licenses to every other screw manufacturer in the world. A little of a lot is worth a great deal more than a lot of a little + vulnerability (watch out Apple!). My gromble is abo

Addictions. Porn, Drugs, Alcohol and Sex. Don't prevent it, make it safer.

In 1926 New York, during Prohibition, 1,200 people were poisoned by whiskey containing small quantities of wood alcohol (methanol). Around 400 died, the rest were blinded. The methanol they drank was in the moonshine they had bought illegally. In fact it had been added by law to industrial ethanol in order to make it undrinkable. Prohibition existed to protect everyone from the 'evils of the demon drink'. However, people still wanted to enjoy alcohol. So bootleggers bought cheap industrial alcohol and attempted to distill it to remove the impurities the state had added, but the process wasn't regulated. The state was inadvertently responsible for the suffering - although it was easy for them to blame the bootleggers and to justify escalating the war. This didn't stop the bootleggers. In fact it forced them to become more violent to protect their operations, and even less cautious about their production standards. Volumes of illicit alcohol, and therefore proportionat

The Secrets of Hacker Golf

Social media is awash with professional golfers selling video training courses to help you perfect your swing, gain 50 yards on your drive and cut your handicap. They might help a few desperate souls, but the rest of us hackers already know everything we need to complete a round of golf without worrying the handicap committee or appearing on a competition winner's list. What those pros don't realise is that for us hacking golfers who very occasionally hit shots that if you hadn't seen how they were hit, end up where the pros might have put them, we already know everything we need to know - and more. Unlike pros who know how to time the perfect swing in order to caress a ball 350 yards down the centre of a fairway, we hackers need to assemble a far wider set of skills and know-how to complete 18 holes, about which pros have no comprehension, need, or desire to learn. Here are some of them: Never select your shot until after you've hit it. A variation on this is to alway