Breaking the Brexit taboo

FAR from blazing a path to new heights the British economy is well and truly in the doldrums with little sign of a fair wind whipping up to fan things back into life. Like Earth's climate it is on the edge of an avoidable catastrophe.

According to Will Hutton, economic journalist and commentator, the current British economic debate is therefore all the more bewildering, marooned as it is in a discourse in which one of the pivotal economic facts of 2022 is largely ignored.

Writing in The Observer newspaper (3 July 2022), he says the Chancellor and Governor of the Bank of England talk about the dangers of inflation, of the risk of a wage price spiral and the need for pay restraint – but never about the escalating sterling crisis and what lies behind it.

“But Brexit is not going away and it cannot be avoided,” he asserts, while reminding us that last week we learned that in the first three months of 2022 Britain’s current account deficit was the worst since records began in 1955.

It stood at a stunning 8.3 percent of GDP – the kind of deficit recorded by “banana republics before they collapse into slump, banking crises and hyperinflation”.

Hutton says the figures are so “terrifyingly bad” that even a shaken Office for National Statistics cautions that it is uncertain about the quality of its own data. 

“But the core reality cannot be dodged and revisions will impact only at the margins rather than reverse the story: real export volumes over the period are down 4.4 percent and import volumes up a gigantic 10.4 percent.”

Apologists point to exploding energy costs, statistical vagaries, the ongoing distortions of Covid, weak world markets and supply chain effects - all of which are playing their part.

“But what cannot be mentioned is Brexit and the obvious depressive impact it is having on UK exports and inward investment flows,” he writes.

"Britain is entering dangerous territory – the economy is falling into recession, investment is flat, while inflation, high across the industrialised world because of the fallout from the war in Ukraine, is highest in the UK largely because of the weak pound, which has no support from any quarter.

"The refusal of the Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, even to acknowledge what is happening and why is beginning to be a source of lack of market confidence in itself.

“Without full access to the EU single market and customs union – the UK’s largest market – there is no possibility of an export recovery, nor a recovery in inward investment, nor a lifting of economic confidence,” says Hutton.

“As the Bank of America warns, Britain faces an existential sterling crisis, made worse because of the refusal of the government and many economic commentators to look the truth in the eye.”

Hutton cites the 1976 sterling crisis, triggered by the conviction of the foreign exchange markets that already very high inflation was certain to get out of hand, as an eerie parallel.

"There was nothing to prop up a falling pound, given the current account deficit was running at what seemed an unimaginable four precent of GDP – half today’s deficit," he says.

But one of the big differences between now and the 1970s is that back then the UK was embedded in a network of strong trading relationships. Having recently joined the Common Market, it could trade its way back to international creditworthiness with North Sea oil about to reinforce the impetus.

Hutton believes that Britain needs to be in the single market and customs union to have any prospect of price stability and growth. “It needs to be within the political architecture of Europe for its own security, given the dark menace of Russia,” he says.

“The British economic and political ship is foundering, damaged by the rock of Brexit; its captains need to be called out for their errant seamanship. A fundamental change of course is an imperative. The future political stars in both the Labour and Conservative parties are those with the courage to say so.”

Hutton also derided the Labour opposition for its “vows of silence”, a situation which Sir Keir Starmer began to remedy this week in the first of several speeches outlining future Labour policies.

Starmer’s Brexit 'policy' - essentially to “Make Brexit Work” by being more cooperative and less antagonistic towards Europe - is hardly brave or inspiring but it reflects a harsh political reality.

With a lawyer’s forensic mind, he knows the remotest hint about rejoining the single market or customs union would be a huge gift to the Tories and their right-wing media clients, who’d love nothing more than to fight the next election on Brexit once again.

The hard Brexit tide maybe turning in the minds of the public but, much to the chagrin of many ‘remainers’, Starmer has to play it cool for now at least.

Editor’s note: Will Hutton is a British journalist and was formerly editor-in-chief for The Observer, for which he now writes a regular column. He co-chairs the Purposeful Company, and is the president-designate of the Academy of Social Sciences. The full article, on which this commentary is based, is on this link
 

Cabinet shuffle

Gulf News

 

THE international stock of UK prime minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is becoming diminished by the week and taking with it the last shreds of moral and political authority that Britain once had.

In all the political conflicts of pandemic mis-management and Brexit elitism, it seems that, in the mind of the British PM, what matters most is the pursuit of power. He has always been single-minded to this end and does all he can to resist constraints on that power.

Johnson, who is widely regarded by those who know or have worked with him, to have the attention span of a nat, is not interested in policy, let alone policy detail. He waivers constantly, in tune with nothing more than the shifting wind of opinion, and has no convictions about things that really matter such as Brexit, climate change, levelling up, culture wars or tackling poverty.

Apart from himself, all he cares about is how policy plays with the Tory Party, its supporters and the voters, many of whom he has hoodwinked into thinking he is something much more than he is.

All this helps to explain some of the sackings in this week’s cabinet reshuffle, because ministers whose stock has fallen with the venerable Party become vulnerable, regardless of their abilities.

The prime duty of Johnson’s replacements this week is hardly to deliver a particular agenda, but to keep themselves, and the Party, popular in readiness for the next election.

At the risk of re-stating what is now becoming patently obvious, the key things driving the Johnson government are riches for the already super wealthy, Party and Tory donor management, all aligned with increasing control of Parliament, the courts and the media.

From Johnson’s myopic perspective the cabinet reshuffle was intended to portray energy (working tirelessly, getting on with the job) and renewal. But, in the real world, all that happened was the removal of the least popular members of his team, which was also a non-damaging way to shift people who should have been sacked for incompetence and breaking rules long ago.

It was also a way for Johnson to ensure he is surrounded by an increasingly sycophantic protection ring.

This then folks is the guy that is leading the UK to a populist, ideological disaster, a nightmare world that will make a few dangerous people very wealthy and all too powerful.

Johnson's satellite gamble

SHOULD the UK government be spending hundreds of millions of pounds on the part-purchase of bankrupt US satellite firm OneWeb, which it hopes to lever as a replacement for departing the EU’s Galileo system as a result of Brexit?

OneWeb, which has already had around $3 billion of investment from SoftBank, is the kind of high risk space company that has to spend vast amounts of money before being able to make any income and in an entirely new field against stiff competition.

Cash flow is a fact of life for such companies where potential returns are many years down the line. This spring OneWeb’s on-going problems, combined with the arrival of Covid-19, created a perfect storm and it was forced it to file for bankruptcy in the United States.

Since then it has been desperately hunting for a buyer with, among other groups from France and China, rival Amazon thought to have expressed interest. Intense lobbying by its officials is understood to have included the British government and its advisers.

So the UK government's plan is to invest £500 million to help rescue OneWeb as part of a wider private-sector consortium bid that would potentially see the British public holding a 20 percent stake in the company.

Under such a deal the UK would likely need OneWeb to transfer its manufacturing base from the United States to Britain. And, crucially, it would also be required to add an innovative new global positioning technology (possibly developed by the UK's 'Satellite Applications Catapult' to each of the thousands of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites.

The government believes this would be cheaper than investing around £4 billion, as previously mooted, in developing a rival satellite navigation system to the EU's Galileo.

It should be emphasised that the UK is only unable to access the restricted, military secure areas of the EU’s Galileo satellites and this is not because of Brexit (Norway has full operational access under its Co-operation Agreement) but because the UK government has chosen not to withdraw cooperation on Galileo for ideological political reasons. The OneWeb bid is therefore couched in politics

To date all major global positioning systems – America’s GPS, Russia’s Glonass, China’s BeiDou, and Europe’s Galileo (an EU-led project that the UK helped design and build) is in a medium Earth orbit at a height of approximately 20,000 km. OneWeb’s satellites, 74 of which have already been launched, are in a low Earth orbit, just 1,200 km high.

OneWeb is working on basically the same idea as Elon Musk’s Starlink - a mega-constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit, which are used to connect people on the ground to the internet.

According to Dr Bleddyn Bowen, a space policy expert at the University of Leicester, replacing GPS for military-grade GPS systems (which need encrypted, secure signals that are precise to centimetres) is not necessarily possible on small LEO satellites like those developed by OneWeb.

He suggests that rather than being selected for the technical quality of the offering, the investment is more in line with “a nationalist agenda”.

One might argue the scheme has all the hallmarks and parallels to the triumphant exceptionalism of the hugely expensive and so far failed UK government plan during the Covid-19 crisis to go it alone and develop its own Track & Trace App, despite other technologies already existing.

The internet side of a fully developed OneWeb satellite system may also have other more dubious attractions to Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief advisor and chief of the Vote Leave campaign - the potential for surreptitious data harvesting.
                      
Given that OneWeb has arrived at its current destination by spending a very large pile of money already on its core mission, and more will be needed to make it viable, there are still very sizeable financial risks for a public investment.

OneWeb remains an unproven business and is competing against established giants, such as SpaceX, which is about to launch its latest batch of Starlink satellites. Significant technical issues will need to be overcome too, all of which will cost a lot more money.

And, of course, such satellite mega-constellations are already attracting the wrath of astronomers for their potential to hamper astronomical observations (see Traffic lights in the night sky), as well as making an as yet undetermined contribution to the growing problem of orbital debris.

Boris Johnson’s potential participation in a OneWeb bid has been the focus of both  opposition and support from the UK space industry, which had originally pinned its hopes on pursuing a lucrative Galileo-style navigation project.

One deciding factor appears to have been support from US defence officials who do not want the UK to develop a replica of the American GPS or European Galileo systems. In contrast a LEO navigation service would complement the current US system and, according to some, offer extra resilience to US allies.

Certainly, as Brexit and all its down the line ramifications gradually unfold, the government’s latest bid signals a further departure from its previous close and highly successful associations with Europe towards a potentially much more unbalanced and risky trans-Atlantic partnership.

Clive Simpson is a freelance journalist specialising in global space affairs.

Blunderbuss government

STORM clouds gather in the background as the UK government continues to blunder its way through the coronavirus pandemic in a manner than seems bizarrely incompetent at best and sinisterly corrupt at worst. 

If it continues on this track Boris Johnson and his entourage will have pretty much crucified the country and its economy by the end of the year.

The current hapless and increasingly desperate situation is eloquently summed up by an editorial in The Guardian newspaper yesterday (15 March). For the record it is reproduced in full below, and there is a link at the end to the original article.

"When the story of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the verdict on Boris Johnson’s government is likely to be damning. Mr Johnson has made mistake after mistake, for which the country has paid a very high price. The prime minister is right in a sense that he presides over a “world-beating” performance: with 64,000 excess deaths, that is one excess death for every 1,000 people, the UK has recorded the largest global spike in deaths compared with the average yearly death toll; and the country will suffer the deepest depression of any developed economy.

Such a claim can be made because there’s no need to wait until all the facts are known. The gaffes are hiding in plain sight. Britain does not require the crisis to subside to analyse the country’s performance. The distinctive British response to this global challenge is one of missed opportunities and dismal misjudgments.

The UK went into lockdown too late, a decision that the former government modeller Neil Ferguson thinks has cost tens of thousands of lives – because the higher the coronavirus infection rate when restrictions were imposed, the higher the death rate. Then the country shut down its testing regime too soon, leaving it unable to track the speed and spread of the virus. During February and March, opportunities to suppress the spread of infection by introducing travel restrictions and quarantine requirements were missed, allowing the infection to be brought into the UK on at least 1,300 occasions.

Entering the lockdown late cost lives, and leaving it early risks more needless deaths. Britain is opening up before dropping its alert level, because the will to hold out evaporated when Mr Johnson did not sack his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, for breaching lockdown rules. Sacrifice could be borne as long as it was felt to be fair.

What Britain is dealing with is a government that has blundered, and continues to blunder. Which cabinet minister is responsible for the official guidance that instructed hospitals to discharge the elderly to care homes when testing and personal protective equipment was non-existent? Who has signed off on the policy to hand over contracts to private companies without competitive tendering or even a cursory check on whether they are up to the job? Which minister decided that local authorities who regularly manage outbreaks of meningitis and sexually transmitted diseases were not needed for the delayed test-and-trace system?

These are the reflexes of unthinking Conservative politicians, who view trade unions, local government leaders and professional bodies as powerful interest groups and influential lobbies to be thwarted, not listened to. In reality, most were attempting to help the government out of a hole by asking it to stop digging. What Covid-19 has revealed is who really makes society work and the value of public servants prepared to put their lives on the line. What the government does with that knowledge will tell the public about the true nature of those that govern it. It is an insult that foreign NHS staff and carers are still being charged for using the health service, despite the prime minister’s pledge to scrap these fees.

The buck stops at Downing Street, which was responsible for the discredited policy of herd immunity and the late introduction of the lockdown. The quickest way back to normality is by controlling the spread of the virus. The prime minister must recognise that mistakes were made and learn from them. The questions of what happened, why did it happen and what can be done to prevent this from happening again need to be answered. It is bizarre that Mr Johnson has precipitately announced a race review, one condescendingly aimed at ending a sense of victimisation, before confirming a public inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic. There will be real trouble if the prime minister refuses a reckoning with the truth."

Editorial, The Guardian, 15 June 2020

Blue for danger

A COUPLE of weeks on from my ‘Car crash politics’ blog article and, despite any optimism or benefit of the doubt, little seems to have changed - particularly in the fantasy world of Westminister spin.

The Johnson government continues to prove itself a master manipulator of the media agenda and thus continues to mis-inform public opinion, a trait it started long before it ever came to power, if you get my drift.

Yesterday’s tawdry, yet skillful, PR manoeuvres highlight this yet again in an unambiguously sinister way to a still largely unsuspecting and sycophantic public. However, one suspects the tide will eventually have to turn.

Given Johnson’s blatant playing of the media in his previous life, this should come as no surprise to any astute observer of current British politics. He liked to call himself a “journalist” but in reality he was never more than an eagliterian over-inflated columnist. And he got the sack for blatant lying. Now he likes to call himself “prime minister”.

Yesterday’s actions were breath-taking in their craven alacrity because it was the day of all days when the tripmeter of recorded deaths from covid-19 tipped the UK into the worst in Europe category, and second only in the world to the United States.

Unsurprisingly, and true to form on such an auspicious day, Johnson was nowhere to be seen and so the daily Downing Street presser was hosted by the hapless Raab, who shamelessly tried to hide the growing magnitude of the UK death toll by suggesting it wasn’t fair to make country-by-country comparisons at this stage.

Acutely aware that all of this would normally make front-page headlines the next day and be the lead item on television news programmes, the government’s slick PR machine masterminded by Cummins had a devious plan waiting in the wings for such a time as this.

Just as the figures were being “announced” at the presser, a reporter from the Daily 'Torygraph' (aka Daily Telegraph) was receiving a private briefing from a Downing Street insider about a key member of SAGE who had transgressed the golden rules of social distancing some four weeks previously.

The story about the resignation of Neil Ferguson, who had “entertained” his lover, was destined to push the increasingly tragic coronavirus death figures off the front pages and top of the news bulletins. A perfect bit of PR timing and manipulation.

I certainly do understand that Ferguson's actions genuinely upset some. But make no mistake his story shouldn't be on any front page, especially at the expense of the UK's covid-19 death figure.

It does look like - from the dates of when the "trysts" took place - that someone had waited to hand it over to the Telegraph, calculating the best moment to publish it and in the process help bury bad news.

On the BBC, morning bulletins were calling Prof Ferguson's visitor “his married lover”. Not so may days before the same airwaves were gushingly celebrating the birth of Carrie Simon's baby by the prime minister, without a the merest mention of you know what.

Ferguson was obviously wrong to break the lockdown and so probably had to resign. But remember cabinet minister Robert Jenrick’s ‘illegal tryst’ a few weeks back? Unlike Ferguson, he’s actually part of the government that introduced the lockdown rules but he didn’t resign (yet). Double standards or just rank hypocrisy?

It seems that everything about this story and the ensuing flood of right-wing hate on social media for ‘Dr Doom’ screams that this was a deliberate ‘political’ operation mounted by people who seek an early end to the lockdown.

If the UK ends up with the highest death toll in the world relative to population size, this won’t be bad luck or because of the hard work of NHS staff, carers and the like. It will largely be down to the strategy of our government.

There's an almost biblical irony that the Conservatives under Johnson "took back control" of the UK on 31 January when Brexit became a reality and then pretty much lost it again to a microbial life-form exactly 40 days later.

I have no joy in seeing that Britain now has worst figures of any country in Europe. If only it were different. I wish the government had done well and proved of me and all who doubted them wrong. But in this sad and difficult time, negligence and ideology haven taken preference over collective safety and public health. I can only say expect more of the same.

Johnson's land of fake believe

“WHY, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” said Alice in Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland.

And at times in the last three years it has seemed that we too might be living in some kind of political fantasy land. But as we jump from one preposterous situation to another one thing is becoming clear - we are part of a  world that is being rapidly transformed in a period of dizzying transition.

For now, we are seemingly caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated.

In our 24/7 inter-connected culture what counts as fact is increasingly a view that someone feels to be true. And technology (including social media like Facebook and Twitter, which have become purveyors of ‘news’) has made it very easy for these ‘facts’ to circulate in a cascade of information with a speed and reach that was unimaginable even a decade ago.

Brexit, like the rise of Donald Trump and the accession to the throne of prime minister Boris Johnson in the summer, is partly a symptom of the rise and rise of social media and, at the same time, the mass media’s growing weakness, especially in controlling the limits of what it is acceptable to say.

Trump is a master of articulating ‘truths’ which, quickly circulated on social media, become enough on their own to help him secure winning shares of popular votes. Johnson has done the same.

The pre-Christmas general election campaign also mirrors the so-called ‘promises’ made by those campaigning to leave the EU during the UK referendum of 2016. Even basic scrutiny at the time revealed many to be empty, vacuous and unworkable promises. But they all too easily became accepted as ‘truth’.

For the UK, an unsavoury picture of a post-Brexit world, led by a right-wing Conservative government, is now beginning to emerge: one where the rule of law, due process and even fact itself might easily crumble before the might of the mob, who themselves are directed by the Machiavellian schemes of press barons and wannabe dictators.

It seems that prime minster Boris Johnson appeals to a stereotype that has a deep grip on the English psyche. Buffoonish and commonsensical, he portrays the kind of moral seriousness one might expect from a tricksy, Old Etonian ex-journalist, whilst at the same time displaying that Alice in Wonderland quality I also attributed to Teresa May.

Like May, the public image of Johnson might be described as something akin to "pretense" but in the case of Johnson I would add the word “deceit”.

It is indeed a tribute to the power of cliches and soundbites that we fail to see what is in front of our noses and so few have noticed. Just like Teresa May the main reason Johnson is prime minister is because he put personal ambition before principle.

Despite his interest in ‘the classics’, Johnson has proved himself a very ordinary orator, often bumbling and mostly merely trying to regurgitate pre-prepared soundbites ad nauseam.

Far from ‘taking back control’, Johnson’s leadership to date also demonstrates that Brexit is depriving ordinary people of the ability to take decisions, giving privileges to the special interests the leave campaign claimed it was fighting against, and imposing burdens on the taxpayer far greater than the mythical £350 million a week that Vote Leave claimed was sent to Brussels.

Johnson and his defenders say he is responding to “the absolute will” of the British people but even without the muddy waters of truth versus untruth and confused Brexit strategy at best, a 52-48 vote was hardly the people speaking as one. And opinion has changed since then.

Perhaps, as we approach Chistmas 2019 in this post-referendum, pre-Brexit Britain, we can more easily understand our prime minister by seeing that he is no different to many others when it comes to abandoning beliefs in favour of ‘truths’.

Disappointingly since taking office, he has failed to level with the public and confront them with the hard choices ahead. Rather than speak plainly, he has proffered the notion that Brexit will be painless.

As prime minister of 'pretenses', Johnson ran a government where feelings and ideologies seem to matter more than fact. He pretends the country should leave the EU at all costs, even though he knows deep inside its best interests are as a member of the single market.

He offers the illusion that the people are taking back control, even as the freedom to act is lost (see page 48 of the Conservative manifesto). He cuts deals in secret, in the hope that the public will never realise that his land of make-believe is going to be an expensive and very different place to live.

The political earthquakes of recent times have been tectonic in nature and heralded a significant lurch to the right in both UK and global politics, where false truth and self-interest often trumps rational and reasoned argument.

As election day approaches we have a final opportunity to call a halt to this national decline and deliver a verdict of hope and optimism for the coming new decade.

To paraphrase former prime minister Sir John Major, “Tribal loyalty has its place... but sometimes you need to vote with your head... and this is such a time.”

 
 
 
 
In three years it seems as though politics in Britain has moved backwards not forwards. The above commentary is an update on a piece I wrote in November 2016. Not much has changed except for the names! Here's a link to my original 'Land of make believe'

Brexit election's invisible uncertainty

PERHAPS one of the most remarkable things about the so-called ‘Brexit election' is how little is being actually said about Brexit itself, or, more accurately, how little is being said about life after Brexit if, indeed, the Tories are about to “get Brexit done”.

The 2016 referendum was pitched as a vote for change, a vote to reject the status quo. Cajoled by big-ticket promises, or in some cases downright lies, people believed that somehow "leaving Europe" would make their lives better.

Three years later it is now almost certain that under a Tory-led Brexit the UK’s terms of trade are going to be inferior, perhaps substantially so, to EU membership - and it will become clear that Brexit is not the panacea that many people were promised.

Despite Boris Johnson's incessant proclamations, a vote for the Tory party will certainly not bring an end to uncertainty. Investment will not be unlocked and businesses will continue to await the development of negotiations.

And even if these are sorted relatively quickly, thus reducing or even ending uncertainty, it does not follow by any means that the economic consequences will be positive.

It is somewhat surprising therefore to hear Brexit commentator Chris Grey, Professor of Organisation Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, asserting that he has never seen a party conduct a general election campaign in such a low-key way.

“As during the party leadership contest, Johnson is scarcely visible - despite his much-vaunted campaigning skills - and has pulled out of several events, including the Channel 4 climate debate, an Andrew Neil BBC interview and even his own constituency hustings,” he says.

“And where is Jacob Rees-Mogg, for the last three years so ubiquitous in radio and TV studios that it sometimes seemed he had his own chair? Perhaps he is judged too toxic, especially following his Grenfell remarks - but it a strange kind of politician who does not come out in public when up for election.

“So, in the absence of both a substantive manifesto and a campaign providing a compelling and inclusive plan to do so, Johnson’s talk of ‘a nation moving forward’ post-Brexit might better be described in Tacitus’s line ubi solititudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

“Johnson and Rees-Mogg, possessed of the classical education that they and sycophantic cap-doffers mistake for intellectual accomplishment, would have no difficulty in translating: they make a desert and they call it peace.”

Chris Grey's Brexit blog - What would getting Brexit done mean?

Peake surprised at Brexit

ESA's first British astronaut Tim Peake during his spacewalk in January.

Britain must ensure that its world class scientific research is not harmed as a result of the country's referendum decision to leave the EU, the astronaut Tim Peake has said.

Speaking ahead of his visit to the Farnborough International Air Show, the former helicopter test pilot, who returned from a six-month mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in June, described the referendum result as “a surprising decision for everybody”.

But he added that it was important for the country to reunite and get on with securing the best future for Britain.

“Though I missed a lot of the campaigning I’m aware now it caused divisiveness and some of it was not done in the most positive fashion,” he told The Guardian newspaper. “We have to put that behind us now and work on unity and moving forwards.”

Peake said the protection of UK scientific research was a priority in the negotiations that lie ahead.

“We have to make sure we don’t harm ourselves in areas where the EU was particularly good for us. I don’t want to see scientists being punished, and this having negative effects on our science. These are important areas for us to focus on now.”

Night-time Britain and France by Tim Peake taken from the ISS in April.

Scientific research is a major contributor to the UK economy but ironically could be one of the biggest losers as a result of Brexit.

UK universities receive 10 per cent of their research funds from the EU and much of the country’s science is supported by grants from Brussels.

After only two weeks there are already signs that UK organisations are being passed over for EU science collaborations because their future involvement cannot be guaranteed.

Peake had barely been back on Earth a week when Britain voted to leave the EU in a marginal referendum that threw the future unity of the UK into doubt and sent the major political parties into crises from which they have yet to recover.

“I have seen some comments on Twitter saying everything was fine until Tim Peake came back to Earth,” he told the Guardian. “That did make me feel rather bad.”

Yesterday  (Wednesday, 13 July) Peake flew into London Heathrow from Houston to be greeted by a welcome poster featuring his own face. He was back in England for the first time in seven months following his six-month trip to the ISS.

To celebrate his mission as ESA’s first British astronaut and to welcome him home to the UK, Heathrow unveiled Tim as one of its iconic welcome posters which will be viewed by 75 million passengers a year.

Photographs of Tim with his arms outstretched in his distinctive blue overalls, will be showcased across all terminals as part of Heathrow’s welcome campaign which has become a well-recognised greeting for passengers arriving at the airport.

Who do we think we are?

Britain is about the decide who it wants to be. Are we so different from others that we cannot play by shared rules? Are we one member in a family of nations, or a country that prefers to keep itself to itself and bolt the door?

All of these questions were always on the ballot in this week’s fateful referendum. But after a campaign that has been nasty, brutish and seemingly endless, the UK will be voting on another question too.

With all the differences and the diversity among all of us who already live on these islands, how are we all going to get along? In the final run-up to polling day this contest has risked descending into a plebiscite on whether immigrants are a good or a bad thing. Consider the dark forces that could so easily become emboldened by a narrow insistence on putting the indigenous first.

The backdrop has been the most unrelenting, unbalanced and sometimes xenophobic press assault in history. Leading political lights of leave have claimed to be pro-immigrant and yet have, at the same time, been ruthlessly fearmongering about Britain being overrun by Turks, after a Turkish accession which they understand perfectly well is not on the cards.

The mood is frenzied, the air thick with indignation, and clouded with untruths. The best starting point for Britain to reach a sound decision on Thursday is to cool the passions of the heart, and listen to the head.

All reason tells us that the great issues of our time have little respect for national borders. The leave side has attempted to turn “expert” into a term of abuse, but one does not need the IMF, the Bank of England or any special knowledge to grasp that these border-busting issues range from corporate power, migration and tax evasion to weapons proliferation, epidemics and climate change.

Not one of them can be properly tackled at the level of the nation state. Impose controls on a multinational corporation and it will move to a softer jurisdiction. Crack down on tax evasion and the evaders will vanish offshore. Cap your own carbon emissions in isolation and some other country will burn with abandon.

In so far as any of these problems can be effectively addressed, it is through cooperation. A better world means working across borders, not sheltering behind them. Cutting yourself off solves nothing. That, fundamentally, is why Britain should vote to remain in the club that represents the most advanced form of cross-border cooperation that the world has ever seen.

There are certainly flaws in the way that Europe is constituted and led. The EU is a union of nations working together, it is not and never will be a United States of Europe, and so its leadership is bound to depend on the imperfect leadership of all these countries.

The single currency has been a flawed project and has set one nation against another, forcing the poor to pay the price for propping up a shonky structure. But Britain is not part of the eurozone, and the EU is not a plot against the nation state. Britain is still robustly herself too, warts and all.

The only argument about the immediate economic effects of Brexit is the depth of the hit that the economy would take, not whether it would take a hit at all.

The political victors would not be those who wish to rebuild politics. They would be rightwing Tories, and ruthless plutocrats who want freedom to reorder Britain and make money as they choose.

They have no interest in fairer taxes on the rich, or higher spending on the NHS. They have spent their so-called Brexit dividend – which in reality is almost certainly a negative number, not the mendacious £350m a week which has earned them an official reprimand – many times over.

A significant group of them are flat-taxers who are whispering about deep cuts to corporation taxes. Facile Brexiter talk of a more buccaneering Britain – presumably a country fit for Sir Philip Green or Fred Goodwin to capture other galleons – offers precisely nothing to assuage the fears of elderly voters who simply want nothing more to change.

It is a fantasy to suppose that, if Britain votes to leave, these victors would want to maintain or extend protections for pensioners or workers. On the contrary. Human rights, equality, health and safety, and aid to refugees would be out of the window.

Those who vote to leave as a protest against the elite will, in truth, be handing the keys to the very worst of that very elite. There would be no ‘taking back control’ for most working-class leave voters, just less control over their diminishing share than ever.

Those who have not yet made up their mind in this campaign should ask themselves this: do you want to live in a Britain in the image of Nigel Farage? Yes or no? For that’s the choice on offer. If the answer is no, then vote remain.

Thursday’s vote has become a turn-in-the-road issue for Britain and Europe alike. Imagine a world without the EU – without the clout to face down Russia over Ukraine, without the ability to put together coherent answers to carbon emissions, to protect standards at work from a race to the bottom.

Like democracy, the EU is an imperfect way of answering the modern world’s unrelenting challenges. But the answer to its imperfections is to reform them, not to walk away – still less to give in to this country’s occasional hooligan instinct in Europe.

Like democracy, whose virtues are in our minds afresh after the violent death of the committed and principled MP Jo Cox, the EU is not just the least bad of the available options. It is also the one that embodies the best of us as a free people in a peaceful Europe.

Vote this week. Vote for a united country that reaches out to the world, and vote against a divided nation that turns inwards. Vote to remain.

Based on an article which first appeared in The Observer newspaper