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Joined March 2011
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Simon Medhurst retweeted
BBC still too timid on the prospective UK-EU trade deal on food, drink, lifting phytosanitary checks. Exposes bogus Global Britain rhetoric and empty Truss trade deals, underlines imperative of friction-free trade with nearest neighbours and opportunity for growth. So this is an economic as much as a political story!
Simon Medhurst retweeted
£4.7bn on border checks we neither wanted nor needed, thanks to the Boris-Frost Hard Brexit Deal, designed to keep Boris in power & Steve Baker & his Spartan ERG happy. Our version of Trump’s tariffs & his Iran war.
Billions wasted on post-Brexit checks that will be scrapped
@thetimes puts a very negative spin on this key reform of costly checks that were *never used. Billions wasted on the Boris-Frost Brexit, the team that gave us the Boriswave.
thetimes.com/article/095664a…
Simon Medhurst retweeted
‘Staggering’ cost of Brexit red tape for UK businesses revealed
Cost of trading with the EU tops £7bn in just four years, with M&S forced to rent a warehouse just to store paperwork
independent.co.uk/news/uk/po…
Simon Medhurst retweeted
What a laugh 😹
David Frost accusing Labour of “giving away the farm” takes some nerve.
He helped negotiate the Brexit deal that erected trade barriers between British farmers and their biggest neighbouring market.
Before Brexit, Britain helped write EU rules. Afterwards, we lost our vote but still had to follow those rules to export there.
Now he complains about becoming a rule-taker!
That’s precisely what Brexit made us.
An SPS agreement repairs some of the damage. It doesn’t restore our influence.
The answer is to rejoin the Single Market, not defend the economic vandalism that made this agreement necessary.
Simon Medhurst retweeted
‼️Bernard Jenkin calls the evidence on Brexit’s economic costs “invented narratives”, then offers simple growth comparisons between the UK, France and Germany as proof Brexit has worked.
These figures don’t tell us what would have happened had Britain stayed in the EU 👉exactly why economists use counterfactual analysis.
Calling estimates conjecture doesn’t make his own selective comparisons evidence.
So this is the "economics doesn't apply to the UK-EU relationship" school of argument, which goes neatly alongside the "geography doesn't exist" variant.
Complete nonsense and denial of reality. And notable that it is still taken seriously by some.
politics.co.uk/2026/11/burnh…
Simon Medhurst retweeted
Brexit had 'very significant impact' on UK's ability to control migration'
Read more 🔗 trib.al/0Qgf3Zk
Simon Medhurst retweeted
Oh dear, yet more ignorance on how SPS surveillance works in the food supply chain.
Its better to catch this at the farm level than risk it reaching a border...
Your #Brexit allowed the UK to become a dumping ground for low quality produce not fit for the single market...
Simon Medhurst retweeted
After the referendum, the BBC chief Lord Hall ordered the BBC to treat Brexit as a done deal, a decision which all but wholly excluded Remainer opinion from the BBC for over 2 years, thus grossly biasing the debate. It was a grotesque abuse of democracy.
radiotimes.com/tv/current-af…
Brexit was won by the worst abuses of democracy in modern British history. This was just one of them.
#BBB Brexit Betrays Britain – at Brighton, England
Simon Medhurst retweeted
🤦♀️ WATCH: @JamesCleverly who hopes to be London Mayor where 67% want to rejoin the EU 🤡
His extraordinary argument? Britain can’t rejoin the world’s largest trading bloc, with an estimated potential 6% boost to GDP, because we might have to leave a trade deal on the other side of the world worth about 0.08%.
That’s a 75-fold difference.
Why should Britain rule out a far bigger opportunity to protect one of Brexit’s tiniest claimed gains?
Simon Medhurst retweeted
The Brexit referendum was rigged in favour of Leave. Three of the most affected groups were denied a vote. 16-17 year olds were excluded to placate the Tory right. EU27 citizens in the UK were denied a vote while Commonwealth citizens, who were far less affected, were allowed to vote. Britons abroad for 15+ years were denied the vote that the Tories had promised them.
If, as in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the vote had been granted to 16-17 year olds and EU27 nationals, Remain would have won.
Leave won the referendum not because of a fair democratic vote, but because the electorate had been gerrymandered to exclude the most affected groups.
Brexit was won by the worst abuses of democracy in modern history. The gerrymandering of the electorate was just one of those abuses. – at Brighton, England
Simon Medhurst retweeted
🇪🇺 🇬🇧 This is what Brexit’s promised freedom looks like in practice:
Paperwork, certificates, inspections, fees and delays imposed on trade with our nearest and biggest market.
The draft SPS deal could remove many of those barriers and reopen EU markets to British sausages, burgers, shellfish and seed potatoes. For farmers and food businesses, that’s significant and long overdue.
The price is dynamic alignment with EU standards.
The why on earth did we ever chose regulatory divergence over easier trade in the first place?
Britain is finally beginning to face the cost of that choice.
Simon Medhurst retweeted
Can’t we put Hancock in the dock & ask him how known, reputable PPE suppliers were passed over for his mate who owned a pub. Gove could tell us what experience Michelle Mone had in the industry.
A TOY company and two GIN distillers amongst companies referred for providing Covid PPE via the "VIP" lane...
No wonder the Tory govt didn't want to release this information!
@i_pinkwolfie @feistywomankent @AndrewW66619812 @RaveCozensHardy
Simon Medhurst retweeted
As you say, the UK Gov abandoned the notion of ever enforcing UKCA after many "delays" since 1/1/21. UK businesses prefer to produce to 1 set of rules, regulations & harmonised standards (the whole idea of the Single Market)
All Brexit has done is make UK businesses less competitive in the market they want to sell into. Without making them any more competitive elsewhere. Brexit has added 31 (proving market standards at) regulatory borders to sell across to those it had already with rest of world. It has levelled down UK trade.
@Trexxl @Riggs_martin
Simon Medhurst retweeted
It’s my view - and I don’t feel the slightest pessimism about it. I’m deeply optimistic about Europe as a whole and as a team.
The morose framing is your own. I’ve never subscribed to this notion that being a member of the EU is some sort of victimhood. Especially for a hugely influential country like ours. For many countries, joining the EU was their liberation from tyranny- and now east to west we’re seeing over two dozen countries work together day in day out on shared issues - with their citizens and small business empowered by extra freedoms to work, trade, live across borders with ease.
As a scientist I’ve seen the shared European structures at their best - liberating scientists all over the continent (and world now) to work together… and pooling resource to support science at vast scale to crack problems that need scale.
Brexit was framed as a liberation from oppression. It has been anything but. In the vain search for a purist form of “liberty” from the straw man monster of our neighbourhood friends, we have ripped liberties and powers away from our own citizens and businesses- hemming them in and telling them to themselves find the benefits of blowing off our foot. That’s no freedom.
Look, I’m a scientist so I can’t begrudge experimentation. What I do object to is this new religion of reflexively slagging off everything European… and so a determination to do our own continent down in the vain hope that this will validate restrictions we imposed on ourselves. Without reassessing where we are. With the US, Russia & China in aggressive flux, I see huge opportunities for the UK and Europe and CANZUK all together as a team. A lot is going to happen over the next decade(s) and I want us with the right team (Europe & Commonwealth) at the juncture of it all. Despite all the dangers lurking in the world at this time, my view is fundamentally very, very optimistic of what we can be.
Believing Britain's future lies within the European Union is a hugely pessimistic view.
It's a view that says Britain can't hack it setting its own tariffs, regulating its own goods and services, setting its own taxes, controlling its own border, and eventually managing its own currency.
It's a miserable acceptance that Britain is defeated - and consequently must be subsumed into a larger political entity, under a higher political authority.
Simon Medhurst retweeted
Britain’s food security problem goes further back than Brexit to 1964.
Think of the economy as a wildlife 🦁 park. After the war, Britain put fences around strategically important food production. We understood that farmers needed to remain viable because the country needed to eat.
Then in 1964 we increasingly embraced the idea that removing the fences and exposing everything to ever fiercer competition would make everything cheaper.
EU membership subsequently kept some substantial fences around agriculture through the CAP, common standards, market protections and a huge neighbouring market.
But Brexit removed many of those fences.
And now we’re feeding more and more of the wildlife park to the lions 👉the corporations and enormous pools of capital with the scale to survive conditions that smaller businesses cannot.
But eventually the lions run out of things to eat.
The independent shops disappear.
The family businesses disappear.
The farms and farmers disappear.
Ownership concentrates.
Competition diminishes.
Communities hollow out.
Eventually you have created a desert.
A resilient economy is an ecosystem.
If policy allows its most powerful inhabitants to consume everything else, eventually there is very little life left to sustain it.
🚨 🚩 The Brexit earthquake didn’t begin in 2016, it began in 1964.
That year, Britain 🇬🇧 scrapped Resale Price Maintenance. A huge political earthquake that everyone has forgotten about.
It was sold as giving consumers lower prices. What it actually did was shift power dramatically from manufacturers and small producers to giant retailers.
Tesco and the supermarkets won big. Independent shops, high streets, and primary producers (including farmers) began a long, slow decline.
This was the moment we started prioritising cheap imports and corporate scale over domestic production and resilience. The foundations of today’s broken food system, where farmers are squeezed and we rely on fragile global supply chains were laid then.
Brexit was the latest tremor in a 60-year earthquake.
The end of high streets and the hollowing out of British industry didn’t start with Brexit or EU membership, it began in 1964 when Resale Price Maintenance was scrapped.
That decision empowered giant retailers to undercut everyone else, shifted power away from producers, and encouraged reliance on cheap imports. We lost the ability to protect and nurture our own manufacturing and farming base.
This resulted in a consumer economy that worked while we were rich but left us vulnerable when times got harder. We don’t make enough, we can’t afford to make enough, and food security is now at risk.
Simon Medhurst retweeted
Any fool country can unilaterally drop its pants to more imports (the other's exports)..
Cutting (low EU level) tariffs (import standards & especially border controls) is only necessary because the UK has to now import across the much more costly regulatory (SPS) & customs borders it has against the whole world (it added 31 of the former & 28 of the latter by leaving the EU)..
Simon Medhurst retweeted
The Brexit supporters lied and lied and lied.
There were no benefits to Brexit, except for the super rich tax avoiders.
It’s time to rejoin the European Union urgently.
Simon Medhurst retweeted
Thanks Clive...
More here if anybody interested. Threads
This report fails to tell truth this because GB no longer part of same single market under mutually recognised legal authority. Instead GB now needs border controls it hasn't got the extra capacity for. "How Britain became dumping ground for illegal meat"
telegraph.co.uk/business/202…
Simon Medhurst retweeted
A point Mike has been making for years. It’s a big deal. I suspect few understand (I only do because I follow him) & none of those will be Brexit fans who live in a fantasy.
Actually, come to think of it, @vivamjm has taught me more than anyone else on this platform. He’s threatened to give up more than once. I’m glad he hasn’t. And grateful.
I wonder how many realise the Brexit import checks were never done and never will be. ..? It'd be too much (Mogg's words) "self harm".
thus from Brexit date 1/1/21, the unilateral advantaging of the EU (their exporters over UK counterparts)... & smugglers ...will continue.
The only solutions are rejoining the EU (SM & CU),
or (the incumbent Govt's apparent plan) extending the Windsor Framework to the whole UK.
This latter *will* level up the playing field for GB producers & remove the worst of the GB/NI border controls, but also make the whole UK a genuine vassal state to the EU, which the Brexiters always lied we were when an EU/ECJ member, with full representation
bbc.com/news/business-612598…
