Brett Wing

People asking me for my notes from the Inverness Public Meeting today, I probably said a few extra things, but in any case, here they are👇🏻 Inverness notes on SEZs and Freeports March 2024 Zone fever has arrived in the UK What are Freeports and SEZs (Special Economic Zones)? Regular ports deal mostly in freight transshipment. Freight comes into a port area, is stored then processed, before being re-exported. UK Freeports are privately owned tax havens whereas EU ports are publicly owned. A Special Economic Zone is a designated region that can house a Freeport, airport, towns, entire cities, and rural areas under a ‘privately governed authority’. So, think of an SEZ as a room within a room, a state within a state, or even a party within a party. The UK post-Brexit is now like a Russian doll. That’s what Special Economic Zones are. The government claims that UK Freeports and SEZs are zones of prosperity, creating 1000s and 1000s of jobs, are green and environmentally friendly, but that is just to make them sound palatable to the public. They are in fact none of those things. Take for example the claim that Freeports are facilitating offshore energy schemes. Those schemes were never dependent on Freeport status, they already existed anyway. Similar energy schemes are going on in ports in the EU that don’t require Freeport status. Private vs Public. Scottish Ports were privatised in the 1990s by Thatcher but had to comply with EU laws and regulations. Fast forward to today, where Brexit Britain has turbocharged deregulation. UK Freeports are run by a stand-alone corporations with a future scope and incentive to expand into the surrounding SEZ territory. What is the ideology behind Freeports and SEZs? The current ideology embraced by Sunak, Truss, Mogg, Badenoch hails from the US and fuses libertarianism with anarcho-capitalism, their goal is to abolish the centralised state and replace it with countless small states all totally privatised. This has its roots in empire-building and British colonialism. The East India Company in 1600, Hong Kong and Singapore in the mid-1800s, the Brits installed dozens of Freeports in those regions, bringing their own laws, and courts with them, this was known as ‘China’s century of humiliation’. In the 80s Thatcher’s aim was to turn the UK into 1 big tax haven and SEZ, but she came up against the EU. The current Tories have taken that baton of ‘exit’ from Thatcher and several prominent economists and progressive right-wing radicals like Ayn(‘Ine’) Rand, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Antony Fisher. Freeports, SEZs and charter cities have long been the ideal templates to isolate away or ‘exit’ from Big Govt by establishing areas of a country as zones of exception to the host country. Rishi Sunak studied at Stanford University, his mentor was Prof. Paul Romer who lectured on a return to colonialism via SEZs and charter cities. What differentiates UK Freeports and SEZs from those in the EU? UK Freeports and SEZs are being optimized for the deregulated private sector whereas Freeports and SEZs in the EU are publicly owned and strictly regulated to prevent corporations making astronomical profits, extracting resources, and not contributing anything back to local communities. In Jan 2024 a UK Govt report on REUL(Retained EU Law) was published it stated ‘EU ports are publicly owned and are therefore unsuitable for the UK economy. The report stated that +600 pieces of EU/UK law were revoked across 3 main areas, employment, food safety, and the environment, thousands more are for the chop by 2026. The report went on to say that EU ports were publicly owned and incompatible with the UK economy. Sunak’s Freeports will be tax havens, Jeremy Hunt has declared Freeports and SEZs as tax-exempt for 10 years. What do Freeports and SEZs have to do with Brexit? SEZs and Freeports are all about ‘exit strategies’ . Britain + Exit = Brexit. Sunak’s 12 Freeports and 74 SEZs are currently carving out extraterritorial spaces the length and breadth of the UK. This is to perforate holes in the fabric of the nation, to lay waste to councils and public services, the more holes you cut out the more the zones will overlap and eventually privatise the UK. Thatcher tried out SEZs in the 1980s, the reason they failed is because the UK was in the EU and had to abide by EU regulations on State Aid. By reducing Big Govt you reconfigure its powers by reallocating them to privately run smaller states, this is known as ‘accumulation through dispossession’. Libertarian exit implements decision-making such as (zoning, exit, land grabbing, taxation, and as Mogg said ‘restructuring sovereignty and the state). Mogg’s father’s book The Sovereign Individual is all about thriving from the engineered collapse of the Welfare State. The dangers that come with deregulated Freeports are money laundering, private banking, stolen art, human trafficking, drugs and arms trade, tax evasion, and onshoring wealth. Today the most lucrative line of business is between corporations and Govt’s, many r/w think tanks have successfully stripped our politicians of any semblance of public representation. Why are there so many Freeports and SEZs being set up across England, Scotland, and Wales? In Scotland, there are currently 2 Freeports and 18 SEZs. So we have The Inverness and Cromarty Firth Green Freeport, and the Firth of Forth Green Freeport, both are not yet operational. These are not just ports, they are SEZs, that are both 45km in diameter, and cover vast areas of towns, cities, and land. Creative Clyde - Glasgow – creative industries Prestwick - South Ayrshire – aerospace West Lothian - Broxburn – food and drink manufacturing West Lothian - Eliburn - Livingston – food and drink manufacturing Dundee Port - Dundee Dundee Claverhouse - Dundee Leith Port - Edinburgh Nigg - Highland Hatston - Orkney Scrabster - Highland Arnish - Western Isles Lyness - Orkney Life Sciences Enterprise Area Irvine - North Ayrshire Forres Enterprise Park - Highland BioQuarter - Edinburgh Inverness Campus - Highland BioCampus - Midlothian BioCity - North Lanarkshire The Govt wants to do away with centralized powers by handing them over to private small states run under corporate governance to further super-concentrate wealth accumulation. Big Govt is being hollowed out by both Cons and Labour to facilitate the transfer of powers to those running the zones. Tax exemption is the cherry on top within these privately protected jurisdictions. Brexit thrives on deregulating laws that used to protect people from malign corporate interests compounded by stealth incursions into the public sector. Once companies have got their tax breaks and extracted whatever resources they can, they will pack up and move to the next available zone. Know that any clean-up bills for pollution in the SEZs will be passed on to taxpayers, just like the water companies have been doing since the UK left the EU. Do UK Freeports and SEZs sabotage rejoining the EU? Brexit means the UK has defaulted to WTO rules, which changes how State Aid public money in the EU is distributed. Under WTO rules State Aid can now be given to companies of the Govt’s choosing, this preferential treatment is expressly forbidden in the EU because it distorts markets creating an unlevel playing field. Each Freeport gets £25m x 12 is £300m, Teesside Freeport has received +£500m so far. Each SEZ gets £80m x 74 is £5.92bn. This is not enough money for long-term sustainability, this is subsidizing corporations for boom-and-bust, it is corporate welfare. Scores of councils are going bankrupt, this is by design, corporations in league with the duopoly will absorb all public services and ultimately privatise the UK. In 2023 Michael Gove included a section in his Levelling Up Bill on Compulsory Purchase Orders that apply to: business owners and occupiers agricultural owners and occupiers residential owners and occupiers Just wait for this to kick in when Sunak's 12 Freeports and 74 SEZs are installed. The duopoly plans to break up the nation into patchworks of corporate sovereignties, subdividing the land for corporate rule. Scotland must become independent and undo the Westminster stranglehold. A corporate coup hatched by a cross-party alliance all sit on Freeports consortia in England, Scotland and Wales, they comprise MPs, councillors, mayors, Baronesses, and Lords (eg Lord Smith of Kelvin whose company Otter Ports is the parent company of Forth Ports and is registered in the Cayman Islands) Scottish land, and Scottish sovereignty is being turned into a commodity for venture capitalists to extract your resources without contributing anything back to communities. Going to end with a quote from George Orwell’s 1984 “You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves” @HunterNorrie @coletteisp @grazzar09 @SalvoFreeports @SSalyers2 @TartantuesdayI @susanchubb @blowhound