Tag: Gina Miller

The UK will be unable to have frictionless, tariff-free trade under World Trade Organization rules for up to seven years in the event of a no-deal Brexit, according to two leading European Union law specialists. The ensuing chaos could double food prices and plunge Britain into a recession that could last up to 30 years, claim the lawyers who acted for Gina Miller in the historic case that forced the government to seek parliament’s approval to leave the EU. It has been claimed that the UK could simply move to WTO terms if there is no deal with the EU. It is impossible to say how long it would go on for. There are two apparently insurmountable hurdles to the UK trading on current WTO tariffs in the event of Britain crashing out in March, said Howard. Firstly, the UK must produce its own schedule covering both services and each of the 5,000-plus product lines covered in the WTO agreement and get it agreed by all the 163 WTO states in the 32 remaining parliamentary sitting days until 29 March 2019. To make it more complicated, there are no “default terms” Britain can crash out on, Howard said, while at the same time, the UK has been blocked by WTO members from simply relying on the EU’s “schedule” – its existing tariffs and tariff-free trade quotas. The government cannot simply cut and paste the 120,000 EU statutes into UK law and then make changes to them gradually, Howard said. “Negotiating and ratifying the international free trade deals with the rest of the world alone could take over seven years,” she said. “The UK will have to start negotiating over 50 free trade agreements from scratch once we leave the EU.

Gina Miller has launched a campaign to end the division and anxiety over Brexit with a new fact-checking website. Launching the campaign in the leave heartland of Dover, Miller said she hoped the End the Chaos website and a series of nationwide events would act as a foil to the false claims and counter-claims that characterised the EU referendum in 2016. Elections watchdog got law wrong on Brexit donations, court rules Read more “If it’s not getting into newspapers and not getting into government conversations it will be on our site and we will push it out very pro-actively,” she said. “We aim to provide a public service, a trusted source of information from which people can decide for themselves what they think and want for themselves and our country.” She criticised the political infighting and other tensions arising from the debate. Having spent the last two months talking to people around the country, she said Brexit was “dividing and disfiguring our national life” and creating a sadness among voters of all political persuasions. “This is not, surely, how it was meant to be? This is not what we want for ourselves or what we wish to bequeath to our children and grandchildren,” she said. A finance industry professional, Miller successfully took the government to the supreme court to challenge its authority to leave the EU without a vote in parliament. She recently ruled out formally going into politics after speculation that she might be interested in running to succeed Vince Cable as the leader of the Liberal Democrats. “Did Dover residents who voted leave realise the outcome of that decision could potentially leave them marooned in their homes for up to three months following our departure from the EU on 29 March next year?” she asked.