After Brexit, Britain can trade with Lebanon

For the Lebanese, EU is Europe and gives them tonnes of cash and keeps NGOs in business

The EU is big here in Lebanon. No, really. I’m not kidding. It’s huge. It shovels about $230 million of hard-earned euro wongah into the pockets, er sorry, coffers of the Lebanese state which then takes care of the country. Syrian refugees mainly, yes, but other stuff, too.

And the Lebanese love it. But it sort of reminds me of a curious survey which was conducted in European states a few years back which asked your average bloke what he thought about the European Parliament. The results came back that over 60 per cent thought it was a really useful organisation while a further 70 per cent then added that they didn’t really know what it does.

You have to forgive the poor Lebanese for liking the EU. It’s from Europe and it gives us tonnes of cash and keeps 700 NGOs in business. Someone has to give jobs to left wing people, obviously, but if most folk here really knew how corrupt the EU was, they might choke on their manouche.

Although I have an idea that the real reason why Lebanese love the EU is because they have one common trait with Brussels. Both are wildly deluded about themselves and suffer from an identity crisis as a ‘state’.

Here in Lebanon, if your son comes home one day wearing a white jacket and tells everyone at the dinner table that he is a doctor, then he is treated like one from that very second. Indeed, even family members will buy him a stethoscope and photoshop a fake medical degree, such is the banal level of insanity of this culture.

It’s the same with Brussels, a place I lived in for 11 years. What the Dickens has got into EU folk of late? In particular the EU’s foreign policy diva and others in the Belgian capital who are “threatening to punish Britain” for Brexit?

Have you ever heard of anything so ludicrous? Any sane press room waster will tell you that only a maniac on a suicide mission would choose such a course of action: to isolate the UK and to force it to press the HB button (‘hard Brexit).

And that means a bevy of measures which will only harm the EU in a period running up to its own elections — yes, they have their own elections. Oh yes, they do — penciled in for 2019.

If such a vicious state of affairs emerges in March when Mother May unveils her Brexit bombshell, then Britain would have to compensate itself at any cost for lost business in the EU.

In brief that would mean price dumping the country on the international ‘foreign direct investment’ market and making the UK one of the most attractive locations in the world for FDI. It’s already number one in the EU (a fact which irks Brussels, even post Brexit) but how do you draw investors out of the EU block over the English channel? Why offer them tax free periods for their first few years after relocating of course, now that Blighty is no longer obliged to follow such rules which prevent EU countries offering such sweetners in the first place.

What else? Now it starts to get nasty. Why not add that to London announcing that it wants to sell its stake in the EU’s own investment bank, which is worth in today’s money a staggering 40 billion euros. That would force the EU itself to buy the stake; or worse Germany to buy it. In both scenarios, the EU looks weak and desperate and no doubt a run on the currency would ensue. Of course, May’s lawyers could look at the possibilities of selling the stake, to say, Qatar or Turkey, which in itself could create a run on the junk currency otherwise known as the euro.

But wait. Isn’t the EU trying to squeeze even MORE money out of its own members? In one last, desperate bid, apparently it needs a lot more to create its own EU army — a venture akin to your granddaddy buying a Harley and cultivating a pony tail, if ever there was a cry for help to make you reach for the valium.

Jean-Claude Junker, a man I met once in Brussels who makes a pile of damp rags look exciting is apparently cooling off though from his earlier virile charges on Mother England. He needs more cash. Not just for the euro-army — stop laughing — but to pay off German car workers and French wine growers, when his own petulant plan to deny Europe the 100 billion euros of trade that it enjoys with the UK finally is executed. Welcome to Hard Brexit, JC. Yes, the old argument from Nigel Farage, who really should stop using the press to beg for a job (three times now and still nothing), that the EU wouldn’t dare lose the trade with Britain is unfounded. Clearly Jean-Claude Drunker, as he is called by the UK press, is happy to cut his red nose despite his face.

But things are changing here in Beirut. The EU’s new ‘ambassador’ is a glamorous young French heart-breaker who has done away with her predecessor’s practice of treating Lebanese journalists like grovelling street urchins or international hacks who ask difficult questions like criminals who ideally really should be banged up (I’m not making this up — they locked up a German colleague a few years back on trumped up charges in Brussels). Our new lady has tamed her press officer rottweiler and is actually lucid, down to earth and approachable. Jeepers, she’s actually really nice, which is really very annoying. I almost wanted to give her a free hug when I met her recently, but then I remembered that she’s working for a one billion dollar wet dream, which I and my family will pay for, for generations: The EU’s ‘diplomatic service’. You can’t make this stuff up. Can’t wait for Britain to have its own trade deal with Lebanon, which in theory should mean cheaper, everyday household goods — like Aston Martin cars and Perdey shotguns — can be more affordable to all. Even washed up hacks like my goodself. I just hope it won’t mean Tom Fletcher coming back to dazzle us with his Middle East insight, bleached teeth or shrink wife.

Can’t wait for Britain to have its own trade deal with Lebanon, which in theory should mean cheaper, everyday household goods — like Aston Martin cars and Perdey shotguns — can be more affordable to all.