You walk into a restaurant and order steak with French fries. When the meal comes, the French fries are cold and instead of steak, you find you’ve got a plate of raw chicken. It smells bad.
What do you do? You send the food back. But the waiter starts to argue that you have to eat what is in front of you, even though it’s not what you ordered and it might even make you sick.
That, in essence, is the dilemma facing British people right now over Brexit, the decision to leave the European Union. Brexit is falling apart not because of the people who oppose it but because of the people who most wanted it, the “Brexit Bunch” of politicians and right-wing activists.
They have proven to be the most incompetent group of so-called leaders in my lifetime. The Brexit Bunch waiters have delivered a meal but it smells bad because it is truly rotten.
In 2016, in the Brexit referendum, the vote narrowly went in favour of Leave, by 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Voters had been promised a series of fantasies. It would be an “easy” Brexit. There would be wonderful trade deals, including being at the head of the queue to secure trade with the United States.
An extra £350 million ($450 million) a week would miraculously find its way to the National Health Service. According to the (now somewhat disgraced) former British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Britain could “have our cake and eat it” with Europe while the British government would hold all the cards in the negotiations. This was, as often with Mr Johnson, political nonsense from never-never land.
The British government has instead been forced to make a series of concessions which has led some of the staunchest Brexit supporters, including Nigel Farage, to claim Brexit has been “betrayed”.
On the other side, those who always wished to Remain are appalled. I share the anger and frustration of millions of British people over the lies, cheating and incompetence which have led us to this mess and that is why I have joined the People's Vote campaign.
The idea is a referendum, not on the principle of whether we should leave the EU, but to accept or reject the final deal we are offered. I strongly believe in democracy. I trust the British people. When voters change their minds or feel cheated, they should be allowed to say so at the ballot box.
The lies about how “easy” it would all be are now obvious to all and they were obvious to many of us at the time of the 2016 vote.
The independent Electoral Commission reported that the Leave campaign cheated in 2016 in the way it spent money. And as for the incompetence – well, here's just a flavour. The British trade secretary is Dr Liam Fox. For two years, he has promised the Brexit Bunch cliches about Britain becoming – at some unspecified date in the future – a trading powerhouse, where everything will be just wonderful. In those two years, Dr Fox has produced no impending trade treaties. His promises sound like Alice in Wonderland, where it's always "jam tomorrow" but never "jam today".
And so Dr Fox, the minister for Jam Tomorrow, the Prime Minister Theresa May and the rest of the government are playing a difficult hand badly. On the political right are rebels who think the government is betraying the Brexit "vision". In the mainstream of the Conservative Party, more realistic types privately (and sometimes publicly) fret that the Brexit deal the government is pushing for will lead to a serious dislocation of the British economy.
If it is rejected, we could end up with no deal and the disaster of food and medicine shortages. The opposition Labour Party is also divided, riven with blood feuds and internal squabbles. Labour and Conservative politicians appear to hate their own colleagues more than their supposed political opponents.
So what can be done? A People’s Vote could cut through the incompetence and political cowardice. It would not be a re-run of the 2016 referendum. The precise wording would be up to MPs but my personal preference would include acceptance or rejection of the government plan and possible alternatives, including crashing out with no deal.
Instead, Mrs May has panicked. She insisted in the technical jargon on invoking Article 50, thereby creating an artificial deadline for leaving the EU by March 2019, without having agreed in Parliament the precise divorce terms she is seeking.
What business leader would do something quite as crazy? Imagine Apple, Volkswagen or Google telling the world they intend to do something very bold by March next year, only they haven’t quite figured out what that very bold thing might be.
The Brexit Bunch argue that a People’s Vote is “not democratic”. But democracy means being free to change your mind and rejecting policies which do you harm. Britain’s Brexit voters opted for steak and fries in June 2016. The Brexit Bunch waiters have delivered salmonella chicken. I’m not swallowing it. Millions of others won’t swallow it either.
Gavin Esler is a journalist, author and television presenter
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
Day 1, Abu Dhabi Test: At a glance
Moment of the day Dimuth Karunaratne had batted with plenty of pluck, and no little skill, in getting to within seven runs of a first-day century. Then, while he ran what he thought was a comfortable single to mid-on, his batting partner Dinesh Chandimal opted to stay at home. The opener was run out by the length of the pitch.
Stat of the day - 1 One six was hit on Day 1. The boundary was only breached 18 times in total over the course of the 90 overs. When it did arrive, the lone six was a thing of beauty, as Niroshan Dickwella effortlessly clipped Mohammed Amir over the square-leg boundary.
The verdict Three wickets down at lunch, on a featherbed wicket having won the toss, and Sri Lanka’s fragile confidence must have been waning. Then Karunaratne and Chandimal's alliance of precisely 100 gave them a foothold in the match. Dickwella’s free-spirited strokeplay meant the Sri Lankans were handily placed at 227 for four at the close.
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
