During the Covid-19 lockdown, online exercise and dance classes became a staple part of many people’s lives. As well as keeping us physically fit and healthy, they helped provide social interaction which supported mental wellbeing. Unable to offer face-to-face classes, exercise and dance instructors had needed to embrace online platforms such as Zoom or MS […]
Liz Truss, the cheese obsessive who counts rollover trade deals as the sign of the dawn of a new era for ‘global Britain’ and crows about flogging a few stiltons to the famously-lactose intolerant Japanese has hit diplomacy for six with her gleeful appointment of Brexit-fanatic Botham as trade envoy to Australia. Ennobled for his […]
Our eye was caught by this thread on Twitter which we are reproducing with the author’s kind permission. It prompted some further research into costs and an interview with a carpenter with a business in renovation and conversion projects in Devon. More from him below. Conversation with the dads at my son’s footie training yesterday […]
You may have already seen the story that Plants Galore in Newton Abbot, Plymouth and Exeter will be giving away £100,000 worth of stock because of Brexit. WCB had also been sent a press release from the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA) about a recent visit by Brexit-backing MP for South East Cornwall, Sheryll Murray, to […]
Madam, David Love is quite right to call for a pay rise for NHS staff: Why can’t we give nurses a fair pay rise? Letter to the editor BUT it isn’t just NHS staff that are suffering: (almost) all of us are. TUC research shows that about 58 to 61 per cent of national income […]
So now we know that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has drawn the short straw for building the Prime Minister’s latest vanity project. The good news is that, notwithstanding the regular damning reports of its performance, Defence Equipment and Support does know a bit about acquisition and programme management. There are no other departments that […]
It was claimed in the Guardian yesterday that Rishi Sunak had written to the prime minister to ask for a relaxation in Covid travel regulations. He had. The populist in No 11 was trying to out-popularise the populist in No 10. You could not make up the scale of Covid recklessness on display when debate should be […]
Shop workers go unnoticed by much of society. They toil away mostly unseen in the background so that the rest of us can get our groceries, ready meals, beers or clothing in well-stocked, pristine-looking stores. They work for some of the big, long-established companies in the UK – Sainsbury’s, Asda, Next, M&S, John Lewis, WH […]
Somerset residents have been warned by Somerset Waste Partnership that continued staff shortages will mean delays and interruptions to rubbish collection services across the county. The contractor, Suez, is struggling to cope with a lack of staff to drive their bin lorries and has called on people to be patient while they attempt to recruit […]
Blessed are the cheesemakers, for they will inherit Liz Truss’s vision of the earth. Trade secretary Liz Truss is famous for her obsession with cheese. Unfortunately this zeal does not translate into recognition of the damage done to the UK’s cheese businesses by Brexit. Instead, it manifests itself in maniacal enthusiasm for miniscule trade deals […]
We still do not know the final details of the Australia trade deal signed off by cabinet last week – but what we do know is the ‘shape of the deal’. Australia is to obtain tariff and quota free access to the UK market in agricultural goods – with domestic farmers protected by having this […]
Let me start by saying that I am not a farmer, and I voted to remain in the EU. Until last year, when I got involved with the Save British Farming campaign, I bought into the general idea that the vast majority of farmers had voted to leave. I wasn’t a big fan of the […]
On 17 May reports began to emerge of a split in Cabinet. In one corner, Liz Truss and David Frost advocate throwing British farming under the big red bus of lies by signing a 0-per-cent tariff/quota deal with Australia. This is a deal that will only yield 0.01 to 0.02 per cent of our 2018 […]
It would be fair to say that businesses in Somerset are now really starting to feel the effects of Brexit and our new trade deals with the EU and the rest of the world. From all the businesses I have spoken to so far the effects have ranged from bureaucratic nightmares with unnecessary paperwork and […]
Somerset Green New Deal Economy Forum: Social Justice and a New Economy. Taunton and West Somerset Build Back Better Campaigns (Green New Deal) are committed to a post COVID-19 recovery that embeds social justice and health and wellbeing in all its manifestations – including philosophy, politics and practical actions. The forum will be held on […]
I am bent double, cringing as I write this. So much going on. The bombast expended on a football super-league by a prime minister who offered to sell Newcastle United off to some Saudi royal as a sweetener in a dodgy deal. The revelations of Johnson offering to fix a billionaire Tory donor’s tax —shocking […]
They say history is written by the victors. But what happens when the victors of the Brexit referendum and the ‘Get Brexit Done’ election go on to preside over a series of unprecedented national calamities and scandals? And how might the history of the last couple of years look if subjected to Johnsonian levels of […]
It has been more than three months since the UK completed the transition period and officially entered into new trading terms with the EU (although grace periods are still in place). The deal which was rushed through at the end of December and implemented on the 1 January has already affected how our local businesses […]
Maybe our shortest article yet! It’s simple. Brexit is bad for business. End of. Oh…and we did this to ourselves. Not the EU’s fault. Alexander Stubb, former prime and finance minister of Finland, spells it out: Write to your MP and explain that we need to get back into the single market and the customs […]
Despite the best efforts of 87 per cent of the mainstream media (by circulation) trying to distract you from the battering Brexit is giving to business up and down the UK, news is at last filtering through. And, bad as this news is, we have yet to see the worst because the Trade and Cooperation […]
Back in January the reality of the UK leaving the EU and trading under the newly-agreed trade deal had come into force. I had spoken to Barry of BJW logistics ltd, a small logistics firm that specialises in transporting goods (particularly antiques and artworks) to and from Europe. Barry, who has decades of experience and […]
You won’t find too many fans of Boris Johnson in France. He is regarded as “a greedy pig who kidnapped our vaccine doses”. My sister-in-law commiserated with those of us in the UK who aren’t fans either, saying “You’ve got fascism. We’re getting it next year with Marine le Pen”. Great. Just what we need… […]
For those who missed the West Country Voices event on 11 Feb 2021, the director Robert Golden has produced an audio record of the proceedings. As it was a recording of a zoom event, the sound can be erratic so please make allowances. The event was a special Q&A session following the release of Robert […]
Globally renowned wine importer, exporter and distributor Daniel Lambert has become something of a hero in our book. He’s one of a handful of people who have been brave enough to stand up and tell the truth about what Brexit has done to his own business and the sector as a whole, and to campaign […]
You may have seen the summary of the catastrophic impact of Brexit on the principal exports of foodstuffs to the EU. Not pretty at all and terrible news for our domestic producers. Good news for the EU’s growers, farmers and fishers, though. (Not the uniquely Scots’ whisky, of course, but maybe the cut in supply […]
Data published 22 March by UK Food & Drink Federation showed exports of food & drink to the EU from the UK dropped by more than 75 per cent in January. There was a 40 per cent decline in exports overall, and business leaders are saying that this is almost entirely due to Brexit. A […]
One of the ways in which the current government remains popular despite clear evidence of corruption and incompetence is by selling comforting illusions to its core supporters. The idea of ‘Global Britain’ is one such fantasy. It paints a picture of a country that ‘punches above its weight’, is a ‘sovereign equal’ of a trading […]
“We were lied to by the UK government implying that we had an FTA but actually giving us a no-deal.” Never mind its obsession with removing our freedom of movement, the Government has driven us into Brexit: a classic car crash! Like so many other areas of economic activity in the UK, particularly SMEs (Small […]
Haven’t most of us, at some time in our lives, been told to stop using bad language? The government even went so far as to tell its ministers not to use the B word – Brexit – that is. It’s been nearly five years. The Deal is done. We should just make a go of […]
We are very grateful to Richard Murphy for allowing us to reproduce his excellent series of threads on important economic issues. Not everyone is on Twitter, so this enables us to get great content to those beyond our bubble. We have just had another week when the media has obsessed about what they call the […]