Calais Children - My Mistake

Looking at the joyful BBC footage, it appears that most of the "children" look surprisingly well-developed for their age.  Presumably, then, they will be straight into employment and looking after themselves without becoming a further burden on our hard-pressed social services?

Who Wins with WTO Tariffs?

The fifth column of Remainers never seem to lose an opportunity to point out the importance of concluding a deal with the “single market” and warn of the danger of otherwise having to rely on World Trade Organisation rules for the conduct of our trade.

In 2015, according to the ONS, 44% of the UK’s goods and services were exported to the EU whilst 53% of our imports came to the UK from the EU.  The value of UK exports to the EU was £223.3 billion whilst the value of imports from the EU was £291.1 billion.

Assuming no single market deal and, for example, a uniform tariff of 6% levied on everything coming in together with the same tariff being charged on everything we sell, our imports would yield revenue of £17.466 billion whilst we would have to pay the EU £13.398 billion on our exports.

So, relying on uniform WTO rules, UK would be 17.466 – 13.398 = £4.068 billion each year to the good on the trading account with the EU.

That is £4.068 billion per year that we would not have to borrow from overseas investors who, for the time being, are keeping UK in business by financing our huge current account deficit.

Surely, even the Wallonian Parliament could do the math?

PS, as John Redwood points out in his Blog on 20 October -

"They still seem unable to grasp that there is no such thing as the Single Market detached from the full panoply of EU laws and policies which a state can belong to, nor that the debate is only about access to each other’s markets which should be relatively straightforward"

Calais Children

Children from the Calais migrant camp will begin arriving in the UK next week. Apparently, all these children have relatives in the UK.

In England we already have a lot of “looked after children.”  A child is “looked after” by a local authority if a court has granted a care order to place a child in care, or a council's children's services department has cared for the child for more than 24 hours.

The number of “looked after children” has risen steadily over the years - on 31 March 2016, in England, there were 70,440.  This figure showed a 1% increase over the previous year (5% since 2012) and included 1470 new unaccompanied asylum seeking children compared to a rise of 970 in all looked after children.  You may agree that these figures are shocking, both in social and economic terms?

It is to be hoped that the new arrivals from Calais will be quickly integrated with their relatives here and will not add to the disturbing numbers of children already without a proper home.