Jen4Scot

True to the entirely obvious prediction I made four days ago that the starting gun had been sounded on a campaign to take Britain back into the EU, we now have the details of the treaty to hand to tell us how both Britain and Brussels intend to make this happen. And there's one sentence in particular that Brussels took care to include that functionally hands it control of Britain's trade with the rest of the world, and it wants the Prime Minister to sign it on November 20th. It sits at Point 65 of the draft joint statement for the EU-UK summit, a Council of the EU document dated October 30th and marked for restricted circulation. It opens gently, that both sides will "commit, on the basis of reciprocity, to strive, wherever possible, to limit negative effects on one another" when they act to protect their supply chains. But what Brussels thinks of as "reciprocity" is roughly the same thing as what Rousseau thought of as "freedom", or what a controlling and violently codependent partner thinks of as "love". The section goes on: "The UK would be bound to ensure in its policies and national legal order the same outcomes as regards other international partners as the relevant EU measures." So Britain is 'bound'. Whatever duties, quotas and controls Brussels decides to put on China, America or anyone else, British law would have to produce the same result, and the paragraph names steel, electric vehicles and "critical technologies" as the place to start. In Brussels's own economic security rulebook, the critical technologies at the top of the list are advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum and biotechnology. The point before it commits both sides to coordinate export controls and to counter "technology leakage in critical sectors". So when a British AI or quantum company wants to sell to America, partner with Japan or take money from the Gulf, Brussels can then decide whether that's allowed to happen. Nowhere does the draft say who decides whether our outcomes are the same, or what happens when Brussels decides they aren't. Brussels can decide and be as punitive as it wishes to be; which, we can presume given its hostility to dynamism, independence, and innovation, whatever the sphere, will be VERY punitive. Leaving the EU gave this country a fullness of self-determination in law and trade it had not had for fifty years. The vastness of this opportunity was completely wasted, in large part with acute intent and great mendacity by large sectors of our unelected state who hate the public anyway and began to really, really hate them for voting the country out of Europe to begin with. Point 65 cedes the freedom gained in that vote clause by clause, without a vote and without a seat at the table where the measures are written. And it would do it in the fastest-growing part of the British economy. Last year this country had 10,488 AI companies employing 130,400 people, and their AI revenues rose 41% in a single year to £33.6 billion. The EU's profile in similar sectors is largely a joke relative to the bloc's human capital. They would surely like to ensure that Britain did not gain any margin of advantage as a result of the less maniacally hostile economic policy that governs us. Labour have already shown us, in the startling acts of treachery - and, in places, what nods to outright treason - that have preceded Point 65 in this government that they are intent that Britain shall be bound; stripped of itself; taken apart from the inside. In November, Andy Burnham will have the chance to betray you yet again, and to do so on behalf of a collective organisation I'd bargain he loves far more than he loves this country.