Brexit No-deal: Always Johnson’s Intention, or too Lazy to Read his own Oven-ready Deal?

He fought the election on three words — Get Brexit Done. He said his Brexit deal was oven ready, a done deal in all but name and the country gave him an 80 seat majority to do so. Now, as we’ve come to expect of Boris Johnson’s leadership, he’s screwed it up. Or has he?

During his leadership campaign and indeed before that with the Vote Leave campaign, Boris Johnson had been heavily financed by hedge funds, companies who make money by gambling on particular outcomes, they ‘hedge their bets’ as the old saying goes and aim to make a killing out of it. In fact on the very day Johnson became leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, it was revealed that of the just over £655K in donations Johnson had received for his leadership campaign, just over £432K came from hedge funds and city traders. Now the thing with donations from the very rich is that they didn’t become very rich by giving money away. When they shell out for something, they expect something back.

Back in 2016, many of these companies were hedging bets on the outcome of the Brexit referendum. Crispin Odey, who you may have heard of made £220m that night betting on the outcome and he is indeed one of the Hedge Funders who helped fund Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign, a campaign he ended up overspending on, by receiving much of his funding late — Johnson had over £300K reported so late it didn’t come to light until after he’d won! Much of that late money came from Hedge Funds and Vote Leave campaign donors.

Now we were supposed to leave the EU fully last October, but of course Johnson was running a minority government and was losing votes all over the place. Remember Johnson telling us he’d rather die in a ditch than ask for an extension? Well it brings us back to those hedge funds and what they want in return. They backed Johnson heavily to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds and naturally, since they made a killing on the referendum, they saw an opportunity here too. Deal or no deal. Many of the hedge funds have placed bets on what they call short positions, on the value of stuff going down. Short positions have been taken out by hedge funds with direct connections to Johnson and his Vote Leave advisor and unsackable, rule-breaking, castle-visiting, eye-testing chief of staff Dominic Cummings (you might’ve guessed he’d fit into the picture somewhere) to the tune of £8.3bn — yes, that’s £8.3BILLION on a no deal scenario. That is a preposterously huge sum and although of course it would be impossible to say and indeed libellous to imply that these hedge funds have inside track information prompting them to stake such a vast sum, given where we are at this point in time, with no-deal rumoured to be announced before the week is out and Johnson looking set to wriggle out of aspects of the withdrawal agreement he himself signed earlier this year, the signs are that the hedge funds who backed Johnson are set for a massive windfall — how much bigger a conflict of interest can there possibly exist?

The former chair of Goldman Sachs, Sir Jim O’Neill has said no deal is a “free lunch” for the hedge funds and that “deliberately promoting the no-deal Brexit risk” was allowing traders to benefit. Former Tory Chancellor Phil Hammond has said that Johnson’s backers are likely to make a killing too.

So what of that withdrawal agreement? The Financial Times dropped the bombshell on this last night. By intent, or just as likely because he was too lazy to ever read it properly, Johnson is tabling legislation to undermine an agreement he signed earlier this year. Never mind the man’s word being worthless, it seems his signature is too. The problems stem from the Northern Irish issues that compounded much of May’s attempts to get a withdrawal agreement agreed.

On Wednesday, sections of a bill coming to parliament, the internal market bill, is expected to have clauses in it which over-ride parts of the withdrawal agreement relating to Northern Ireland. It is expected to undermine things like no need for a hard border between the Republic of Ireland & Northern Ireland and issues of state aid. These clauses will completely destroy any trust between the UK and the EU, who are our biggest trading partners and would remain so even after we fully leave. With the bill setting up UK law in direct conflict with the obligations we have under the signed withdrawal agreement, such trade is placed in total jeopardy. If they can’t trust us to even sign something in good faith, why would they want anything to do with us? Poisoning our relationship with the EU utterly, with mere months to go until we leave and only just over a month in reality to agree a deal before the year’s end, it again adds more weight to what many commentators are saying that this has always been Johnson’s plan.

The man doesn’t care how many lies he has to tell, or who to, he will do and say exactly what benefits him personally, even at the expense of the entire country. It truly is horrifying to comprehend.

We’re looking at hard borders back in Northern Ireland, a logistical nightmare to implement, but legally we’ll have to and we needn’t expect any support from the EU to assist in this, since our relationship with them will be so poor. There will be checks, hitting the island of Ireland throughout economically, as well as customs queues at all of our ports, including parts of Kent ending up as a lorry park. Above all else in Northern Ireland, the open border was a key development to the peace process there and the risk of a return to The Troubles goes up. We will be facing food shortages, medicine shortages since we import nearly three quarters of all our medicines, fresh produce will go down since we import much of that too. There will be staff shortages in key areas, notably health where we have shortages already and these will only become worse, leading to delays in diagnosis and treatment for patients. A collapsing NHS could be the excuse the Tories need to finally sign the death warrant of the NHS and sell it for the sake of having a health service that remains operational. Our agricultural industry will collapse since exports form such a large part of that sector. Herds will be culled as they are no longer profitable, farmers going bankrupt, especially those who deal in beef and lamb. Welcome to the world of hormone injected beef and chlorinated chicken as we find ourselves less able to provide our own, desperate for a deal with someone and what British meat produce is about will become far more expensive as all food will in fact. That said, the US have said any threat to the Good Friday Agreement, as the internal market bill clauses may indirectly bring about mean even US meat may be off our menus. We’ll have a fuel crisis as refineries shut due to disruption in supply and availability. The elderly, the infirm, the disabled, the long-term sick will be the hardest hit by all of this.

There will be widespread job losses, strikes and protests will become commonplace and all on top of the unemployment we’re about to face with the furlough scheme being ended just mere months before this potentially unfolds. But at least the hedge fund donors of Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings will make billions.
It’ll also, without a shadow of a doubt in my mind herald the start of the break-up of the Union, with Scotland departing as fast as it can.

So what have the opposition parties been saying in the face of all this. Has Keir Starmer finally decided he has to oppose this? Silence. He hasn’t commented on Brexit in 8 months. The man who stood up on stage and changed Labour’s Brexit position taking us to thunderous defeat, a defeat pinned on Corbyn of course, has said nothing. Ed Davey the new leader of the Lib Dems has popped up though, the party of remain has decided…to not fight for remain anymore. You’d have thought the vociferous FBPE talking heads, Follow Back Pro EU who constantly attacked Corbyn for not moving to a remain stance would be apoplectic with rage across social media right now, but they’re silent too…almost as if it was more about Corbyn than Brexit!

Boris Johnson back in September said “I’ve looked carefully at no deal. That outcome would be a failure of statecraft”

He won an election based on the fact he said he had an oven-ready deal, ready to go. If he does now back no-deal, he’s conned every person who voted for him, not so much putting the word con into Conservative as much as burning it in and his position as PM would be utterly untenable, based as it is on a broken promise. He’s playing Russian roulette with people’s lives as his backers are set to enjoy a record-breaking payday. A failure in statecraft means he’s no statesman and he would simply have to go with immediate effect.

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