Toby on Tuesday

'Penelopes and Pepperpots' 

In a world of anodyne apparatchiks and faceless fixers, politicians with a spark of character are a breath of fresh air.   And the air doesn’t get much fresher than with our Minister of State for the Armed Forces, the magnificent Penny Mordaunt.   More bracing than a sea breeze the MP for Portsmouth North, named by her parents after the Leander class frigate HMS Penelope, is a Royal Naval Reservist.   Famous for her salty speeches, she was the Spectator magazine’s Parliamentarian of the Year in 2014.   Unsurprisingly, she is a leading light in the “Leave” campaign.   And interviewed recently, she declared “One reason why I decided to Leave is because I think it’s the only route open to us to get the better deal that we need to thrive – but also to try and wake up the EU from what it’s currently sleepwalking into, which is a disaster.   The suffering that it’s putting on certain member states because it can’t get its act together over the Euro, that forced harmonisation, is horrific, and is just the sort of thing that is going to lead to those countries not thriving, but failing.   Take a look at what’s happening on the Continent now.   The tremendous potential for civil unrest.   The tremendous ill-feeling built up in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, because of the forced harmonisation in the Eurozone, the tremendous austerity...So it is fragmenting.   People are taking back control against the EU’s rules to try and get some control over the situation, to try and protect their states’ interests.   So it is fragmenting now.   The dominoes are already tumbling.   And we need to help Europe realise this and get a grip.”

Now the splendid Penny Mordaunt’s warning could not be more timely when Greece’s Euro-crisis is erupting again and will soon reach its end-game.   To summarise, Greece has £3.5 billion of debt to repay in July and, with debt at 200% of GDP and an economy shrunk by a quarter since 2010, the funds for this just do not exist.   Yet Germany’s Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schauble, is insisting on further cuts in Greece’s public spending in order to maintain the myth that the country can achieve a 3.5% “primary surplus” by 2018.   This is the economics of the madhouse, yet Herr Schauble is determined to sacrifice the Greek people on the altar of a fantasy that the Euro is somehow a functioning and stable currency.   The truth is that all that money lent by Germany’s banks to encourage Greek borrowers to buy BMW’s and Volkswagens can never, ever be repaid.   Debt forgiveness plus devaluation is the only way for Greece to recover, but this will be to challenge the ideological purity of the Eurozone.   Whatever the outcome of our Referendum on 23rd June, both the Eurozone and the Schengen zone are heading for implosion and Penny Mordaunt is right to alert us to this, so that we can be prepared.

And in her interview, the magnificent Ms. Mordaunt went on to say, “I think leaving will not just make us safer, more secure and give us what we need to thrive, it will enable Europe to really start to reform.   And without that is it going to end very badly indeed!”   Of course, UKIP has been saying all this for years, but its is refreshing when one of the ablest of the younger Ministers in our Government has the courage to say these things too.   Portsmouth North is incredibly lucky in its MP.   Now the original HMS Penelope was so famous for surviving so many air attacks and shrapnel holes that she was nicknamed HMS Pepperpot.   One day in 1942 she arrived in Gibraltar with yet more damage from near misses and received the signal from Vice-Admiral Malta, “True to your usual form – Congratulations!”   And today we can all echo the same message to her redoubtable namesake Penny Mordaunt – Congratulations!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby