On June 23 this year a whole bunch of people with no real idea what they’re doing will blunder, one way or another, into the most important decision to be made about the UK’s future in a generation (or at least since that Scotxit referendum last year). Anyone who doesn’t find this completely hilarious is clearly lacking a sense of humour and/or adventure.
Coming out one way or the other on the in/out debate is so fraught with apparent peril that the Labour party under Jeremy Corby has unilaterally invented a third option (a ‘middle way’ if you prefer). This is the so-called ‘shake it all about’ option, which has much to recommend it, aside from its a) not appearing on the ballot papers and b) having already been tried, with distinctly mixed results, by Prime Minister Davey Camelot.
Voice an opinion one way or the other and half the country will inevitably take you for some kind of idiot/traitor and quite possibly never speak to you again. It must have been with some trepidation, then, that Insurance Aches editor Emmanuel Kenning put finger to keyboard to bang out an editorial on this topic, provocatively entitled Editor’s letter: June 2016.
“There has been a huge amount of UK press coverage in the run-up to the EU referendum,” Kenny revealed. But, he warned, this “is only likely to increase in the days before the actual vote.” Actual, of course, being the operative word, given the profusion of dummy and/or decoy votes we can expect between now and the actual day of the vote itself.
His comments were essentially a high level gloss on the results of a survey conducted by Aches among European brokers (although why we should care what a bunch of foreigners think, is beyond Bankstone News, and, we dare say, any other right-thinking person or weekly news publication). As such, they clearly reflected the punctilious care Ken took to present a balanced view.
“There were those,” he conceded, “who believed a Brexit would be very bad news for the industry and those who felt that actually the market had succeeded before the EU and would continue to do so outside of it.”
Those of the former persuasion had presumably been duped into it by the laughable doom-mongering of would be Hitlers and Napoleons within so-called “think” tanks or talking shops or whatever like the IMF/IFS or whatever they’re called (foreigners, the lot of them, or the tools and stooges of foreigners and quasi-foreigners like Camelot and Orkspawn).
But those of the latter – and surely correct – view were clearly onto something with their ‘better before’ argument. The idea that the pre-eminent position of great British insurance companies like AXA, Allianz and Aviva could be compromised following a Brexit vote is clearly nonsense.
And surely things were better before we got caught up in all this Euro-Evil-Empire nonsense back in 1973. Back then there were 500 British owned insurance companies flourishing away happily without some garlicky-breathed bureaucrat making them fill out forms or anything. If we can get back just half of those lost firms, imagine how cool that would be!
And as for London losing it’s preeminent role as a global insurance market. Did we need the EU (or whatever it was called) to help us achieve global insurance domination? No, we damned well didn’t. We had a Commonwealth and Colonies and probably even a few bits of Empire left over. And if we weren’t so cringeingly eager to please Herr this or Monsieur that, we could have all that back!
So whatever fence-sitting nonsense the likes of Insurance Aches may choose to peddle, it should be glaringly obvious to anyone with their head at least half-way screwed on that the UK will be hugely better off without the EU, without those unreliable Scots, and indeed without anyone else who doesn’t like it. Great British insurance for Great British people, we say here at Bankstone News.
Although, to be perfectly frank, we’ve no more idea what we’re talking about than any of the other participants in this highly fascinating debate. It could be we’re entirely wrong, that the national economy will crumble into toxic post-industrial dust, and we’ll end up as some unwanted, unloved, and internationally insignificant appendage to one of the handful of superstates whose resident supercorporates can push us around as they please.
Or maybe we’ll become a tax haven, or a residential heritage theme park and golf course, or an offshore wind and solar energy farm, or something.
That’s the whole fun of the thing: we’ll never know unless we try it!
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