 This is Mises Weekends with your host, Jeff Dice. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Once again, it's Mises Weekends and we're joined for the second time. We're so pleased to have him back. Godfrey Bloom speaking to us from the UK, a former MEP from Yorkshire and also a UKIP member at one time. And Godfrey, are you missing your time in Brussels? Are you happy to just be at home these days? Well, I'm very glad to be out of it, to be brutally honest. It's an awful place. I don't like the city. I don't like the people and ghastly. And I'm very glad to be out of it, especially as we've won. Well, let me ask you this. Just recently, the past couple of days, Theresa May signed the formal letter that was delivered to the European Council President that the UK will be going ahead and triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Tree. Are you at all surprised by her steadfastness, by some of her strong comments since the Brexit vote? Are you pleasantly surprised by Theresa May's response to Brexit? Well, sadly, no. But that's probably now because I've been in the Brexit fight for over 25 years and I've seen betrayal after betrayal after betrayal. I've heard politicians talk a good story and then collapse when it comes to the actual doing thing. When it comes to the action, they talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk. And I've just become very cynical, I'm afraid, about this procedure as I get older. Well, I've got to tell you, though. I'm reading that it sounds like there's a significant difference between the sentiment surrounding Brexit in the UK and the sentiment surrounding Trump in the US. In other words, it sounds like, at least from our vantage point, that members of parliament are accepting of Brexit and willing to vote for it, that the general public has become more accepting of Brexit. It sounds like the remain office is just some tiny office. Now, whereas in the US, the anti-Trump forces, both left and right, are invigorated. They're fighting him. They're talking about impeachment. They're talking about impeding it at every step. There's no Trump acceptance movement over here. But it sounds like Brexit is something that the people of the United Kingdom may become more comfortable with. Yes, the people, most certainly, but we have a big problem like you have. I think you call it deep state over there. We don't have that expression really here, but the point is the same. You have to bear in mind that the prime minister, Theresa May, campaign for remain, although not particularly enthusiastically, the chance of the exchequer, who's number two on the brane, as it were. He's number two, is a staunch remainder. The home secretary is a remainder. That's probably number three or four on the brane. The foreign office is completely devoted to the European Union project. So every single senior civil servant is devoted. You couldn't get promoted in the civil service unless you were committed to the EU project. It just wasn't on. So there's a whole generation now of very senior civil servants who don't want Brexit to work. We have a public service broadcasting, the BBC, and Channel 4 over here, which are owned and monitored and run by the state, and the senior appointments are state appointees, and they are committed quite deeply to the European Union project. So while the people, this has always been about the people against the establishment, and the people are committed to Brexit, ordinary working people, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, the cabbie, the hairdresser, are all committed to Brexit. But the establishment, the ruling classes, are not. And that's what gives me cause for concern. Yeah, well, certainly same situation here. We definitely have a deep cadre of civil servants who are diametrically opposed to anything that Trump suggests. And they've been there a long time. They have federal government unions. And they will survive long beyond Trump. I want to talk a little bit about this. What I'm reading, this seemingly is endless negotiations. We have until March 2019 for the ratification of Brexit. Talk about what is this vote that the European Parliament has to take to permit Brexit? I mean, why does the European Parliament have to allow you to leave this union? Well, the whole thing, of course, is completely and totally absurd. The whole structure of Article 50, the whole structure of the Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty designed to let people leave the European Union, had been put together specifically to make it difficult for people to leave. You know, all these civil servants and European civil servants regard Brexit as being absolute catastrophe. So they're not going to make it easy with that in mind. And of course, we know, we Mises Institute supporters and members, we know that politicians and civil servants don't understand trade and economics. They don't understand it. And why would they? They go from university into politics directly or into the civil service. So here we have a situation where every politician and every civil servant actually believes genuinely believes you need politicians and civil servants to negotiate trade. And of course, we know that it's about manufacturers, people who want to sell goods to us and the consumer. That's what it's about, not about civil servants. If you leave your golf cup, for example, Jeff, you don't call in your lawyer and advisory civil servants to negotiate leaving the golf club. You just write a nice letter and say, thank you, it's been great and you go. What on earth we're going to negotiate for two years and it is utterly beyond me. What are they going to talk about? Well, I'm even reading in the Wall Street Journal that there's talk about a payment to exit the block. They're talking about maybe 50 billion euro as a penalty of sorts to pay for some of the agreements that it was presumed Britain would continue to be a part of. So you might get hit with an exit penalty. Well, yes, of course, of which there is no legal basis, but that doesn't matter. This is opening the batting for negotiation. So you have this rather bizarre, almost sitcom type of arrangement where they are threatening, they are threatening to finance 50 billion pounds or 50 billion euros. Otherwise they won't sell us their Mercedes, Volkswagen's, BMW's, Peugeot's and French wine. It reminds me of your younger listeners might not remember blazing saddles. When the guy, the sheriff puts a gun to his own head and says one pace forward and I'll pull the trigger, which is, of course, it's exactly what the European Union are doing. If we don't behave, they'll shoot their own heads off. I mean, you couldn't invent all this. It's totally ridiculous. Well, if anybody's listening who's, let's say, under 30 and you haven't seen blazing saddles, shame on you. You need to ret that this weekend. Let's talk a little bit more about globalism. That's really the underlying tension that's at work. Obviously, from our perspective, Mises saw globalism as about trade and travel and open communications, but he also saw globalism as resting on the differences between nations. In other words, comparative advantage among trading partners, whereas our friends on the left progressives and a lot of left libertarians as well are what I would call universalists. In other words, they see globalism based on our similarities rather than our trading differences. Do you think there's still an existential fight in the British people or have they, you think they've just swallowed this? Well, it's very difficult because we have this rather extraordinary situation where globalism, we're regard to globalism. We talk about globalism over here, but people don't talk about globalism as it is seen by Mises supporters. They talk about, of course, and the Americans started it, shame on you, the term liberal, the term liberal has been brought into disrepute. People who are liberal and our liberal Democrat party here and your reference to liberals in the United States, of course, is fascism. And I don't use that word as a pejorative term. I use it as a system of government fascism, which is broadly control, an alliance, an unholy alliance between big business and politicians. So we talk about failure of capitalism, but we don't have capitalism. Do we have mercantilism? But of course, everybody who comes out of a state university these days is steeped in Keynesian theory. So we have people who don't really understand their own subjects. And so they constantly use the wrong phrases all the time. Well, what strikes me as the fly in the ointment is something that Theresa May brought up the other day. Even if Brexit goes smoothly. Thank God you've got the pound sterling, of course. But you're still a member of the UN Security Council and you're still a member of NATO. So that seems to me the ultimate entanglement that impedes Brexit in a certain sense. In other words, how can you truly become a sovereign UK when you're still committed both militarily and financially to the, in theory, the military defense of Europe as a whole? Well, of course, that is a big problem and I think it comes in two stages and you're quite right to flag that up. Firstly, you're not a sovereign nation unless your final court of appeal legally is in your own country. You cannot subcontract your final court of appeal, which is what we've done for the last 40 odd years to the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights. That means you're not a sovereign nation. You must make your own laws. Your own parliament must be the final arbiter of your laws and our House of Lords is an amending chamber. If you don't have those two things, you're not a sovereign nation. And there's a question mark even now whether we will go the whole hog when it comes to our legal system taking precedence, the precedence of common law, which of course started in this country with Alfred the Great. It's well over a thousand years old. It's sort of 1400 years old, that concept of law which has been subsumed by the Napoleonic Code. But of course the trouble is with state education in the United Kingdom. We have a whole generation who haven't been traditionally educated. Your average youngster, even at a good university, is woefully and adequately educated by the standards of a chap my age, I'm 67. I don't regard them as having had any form of education at all, frankly. They tick boxes. So we have to have a real think about this. And as to NATO, I'm an ex-soldier. Most old geezers of my age sort of had some military experience. I was in part of Fourth Armoured Division, a very minor cog in the wheel of Fourth Armoured Division in Germany. And in those days, of course, the Soviet Union was a potential threat. It was a huge military power. It was a communist state and it was a threat. Of course, what we have now, and this is all based of course, as all your listeners will know, on the Industrial, Military and Congressional Congress. This is all about budgets. So we're trying to stir up this. We're trying to get another Cold War with Russia. And we're moving Canadian troops. NATO's move Canadian and British troops into Latvia. What an Earth Latvia can possibly have to do with Canadians is totally nuttily beyond me. And you've got to get a map out and have a look. So we do have a problem. NATO is now an anachronism. I would get us out of NATO if I had my way. I'd wind it up and because I think it served its purpose, it was excellent. I was a big supporter, but NATO now is the threat. NATO isn't a shield any longer. It's a very dangerous concept and it's expanding right up to the Russian border. And it worries ordinary people in the pubs and clubs of England a lot. And I know it worries my American friends as well. Well, thankfully we've got the US left wing is now suddenly found a new found obsession with the Soviet Union. Let me talk to you about the economy. There's sort of a much ballet hood hit that was going to take place to the British economy when the Brexit vote happened. The pound did go down. It seems like it's still down to about $1.25 versus the US dollar. Apart from that, do you feel like there are still tremors out there? Do people feel like the economy is stable and that Brexit won't necessarily harm it in the long run? Well, of course, one has to look at the facts and of being an ex-investment manager and a specialist in fixed interest for many years. One has to look at why the pound fell significantly against the dollar on Brexit. And of course people say, oh, it was Brexit but you have to just analyze what happened. When the leave campaign won, Carney, Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England immediately announced that he would create as much quantitative easing as was necessary. It would be limitless. He halved interest rates and the chancellor, Hammond, the chancellor of the Exchequer, said that he would tear up and abandon all fiscal targets to pay off the national debt. Now, that's the reason sterling fell. Well, you would sell sterling. Who wouldn't sell sterling under those circumstances? This was panic at the Bank of England. Nothing to do with Brexit. This is sheer panic on behalf of the Bank of England who deliberately trashed the pound, quite deliberately with those statements. I would have Mark Carney sent back to Canada tomorrow morning. The man's an incompetent buffoon. He has to go. And our chance of the Exchequer is a very sad individual with no experience of anything at all. I wouldn't let him cut my hair. Yeah, it's interesting. We're starting to see in the US as well some people really questioning central bankers in a way that they haven't for many many decades. There was always just presumed expertise and we found out, of course, it's a complete house of cards in 2008. Let me ask you this. From our perspective, we read what we read in the US media. We have to find alternative media online. It kind of feels like UKIP has run out of steam. Does UKIP have a purpose beyond Brexit? It feels like maybe it doesn't. No, I don't think it does. And I say that with heavy heart, Jeff. I say that with heavy heart. I was a founder member, a significant donor. And in the constitution of UKIP, it uses the word libertarian. So once we got Brexit, we fought for Brexit, we got Brexit or we got the referendum, although UKIP wasn't a major player in the referendum, but it was a major player in getting the referendum. And I hoped it would be small state, low tax environment, radical reformist, doing all the things that we all know in the Mises Institute that need to be done with the Western democracies. But it lost its way completely, which is why I left it three years ago. It's now a sort of another center-left party and people are saying, the electorate are saying, we've already got that under Theresa May. We have a center-left party in government very strongly and there's very strong electoral support for it because people haven't been offered anything else. And so people are saying, my wife, for example, who is a fairly typical non-highly political individual, she's just an ordinary professional woman, English woman, and her attitude is, why would I bother to walk through the rain to vote for UKIP? What's in the shop window? And the answer is, of course, nothing. And so they've made the biggest mistake they've made is trying to get the Labour Party votes or trying to get fringe Conservative Party votes. All this is a mistake. The big market in the British electorate, the huge market, is people who gave up voting years ago. That's the biggest party. They're the biggest reservoir of voters in this country, people who just don't bother to vote because they don't think it makes any difference. And they're the people that we want and they're the people that came out for Brexit. That was a 70%, so it was the highest turnout England's ever seen. And we voted for Brexit with the highest vote in the history of the United Kingdom. It's awesome because people felt that it would count and they came out and they voted in a referendum. But they're not gonna bother to vote in the general election. Why would they? Well, I noticed the other day, Theresa May was photographed with Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader from Scotland. Do you think leave voters in the Brexit vote have an obligation to support the Scottish independence movement whether they agree with its ultimate aims or not? Shouldn't your average UKIPR support Scottish independence even if Scotland might choose to be more left-wing if it was independent? Yes, well, it's a sort of personal thing. I think most Englishmen have a little bit of Scottish blood. I certainly do. My clan was Bruce. I'm sort of one 16th or something jock. So the Institute of Economic Affairs run by a guy called Mark Littlewood who's your sort of opposite number over here. I'm sure you've met him. Who is a very sound man. He said that if you look at the Scottish philosophers historically and the engineers and the soldiers, it is absurd to suggest that Scotland can't be an independent nation. Of course, Scotland can be an independent nation, but what it needs to do is select politicians who aren't sort of of the Venezuelans socialist ilk. What they need to do is get people who get back to that Presbyterian work ethic that the Scots have which made Scotland punch above its weight for so many decades, so many centuries in point of fact. But of course now they're just whinging welfareists. They vote in the most appalling people. And if they go, if Scotland departs with them at the helm, they'll be on the rocks in no time at all. And that's what I point out. Yes, go Scotland, be independent and very good luck to you. But for goodness sake, change your captain and your navigation officer. Yeah, well, we feel the same about California oftentimes here, my home state sadly. Last question before you Godfrey. Let's talk about France. Neither one of us is an expert on French politics, but in the Western media, France is being portrayed as next front on this globalism versus nationalism war. Obviously, France is a member of the Eurozone. They use the Euro. So if France was to ever consider, if France was to vote in a Marine Le Pen and then that was to trigger a Brexit type movement in France, that seems like a lot heavier lifting when you're talking about an actual member of the Eurozone. Do you think Le Pen has a chance and do you think Fregsit has a chance? Well, yes, I think it does. I had this conversation on email quite a lot with our mutual friend Pat Barron. And we talk about this and he says, what do you think? Well, there was a number of points to bear in mind. The Fifth Republic, which of course going back to I think it was 1958 started by General de Gaulle. And de Gaulle wanted a confederation of sovereign states as a European Union. He didn't want what there is now. So there's a very strong resentment in France about the way this project's gone. We're talking also about Marine Le Pen overtaking the socialists, but if you look at her economic policies, if you leave aside the European Union and currencies, if you look at her policies, she's a socialist. I know her very well. She's very charming. She's a very nice lady, very articulate and I wish her well. But I don't agree with anything that she says from a policy or economic policy or trade policy perspective. However, as I said to my friend Pat Barron, she is the only person that can get France out of this terrible mess. And then France wants reform from outside the European Union. And so I think her job, Marine Le Pen's job, is to take France out. And then we need to see a new French leader come in maybe after three, four, five, six years who can start dragging France into the 21st century. Now, whether that's gonna happen, I don't know, but it can't continue as it is, that's for sure. Well, God forbid, it's a fascinating topic. We could go on. We hope we don't have to wait until March 2019 to talk to you again when Brexit might be fully negotiated and ratified. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend. Subscribe to Mises Weekends via iTunes U, Stitcher and SoundCloud, or listen on Mises.org and YouTube.