The choice we all have to make in June will soon be upon us and today's lunch meeting with local MP Rishi Sunak was interesting and informative. The Saddle Rooms near Middleham played host to a handful of trainers, Nick Rust - Chief Executive of the BHA and Fiona Needham, clerk of the course at Catterick. Rishi has been a geat help to horse racing and he is very supportive of our industry, apart from discussions about staff shortages, new apprentice training initiatives, business rates and broadband (or the lack of it as is the case for most of us) the other popular topic was Brexit. Us trainers might read the Racing Post from cover to cover, but the daily papers with news of the outside world are often pushed aside in favour of the entries section of our trade paper. But we did learn a few startling facts.
The UK pays Europe a total of 20 Billion pounds per year and we get 10 Billion back.
On trade, we spend 60 billion buying from other EU countries, while they spend less than half that figure buying from us.
4% of UK companies sell their products to the EU but 100% of all UK companies pay the price for the cost of such deals with massive amounts of red tape, rules and regualtions that adversely affect us all.
2.7 million people from Europe are working in the Uk (that we know of).
As for racing, if we leave the EU the new levy replacement will go ahead as planned, if we stay in we will have to run it by judges in Brussels to make sure they like it. Enough said.
Show Boat has already found a new home with Jacki Storey in Penrith where he will be re-schooled and re homed, he is a lovely boy who doesn't want to be a racehorse anymore. At home our IT man called in to test broadband speeds following issues with down loading videos for our new website. BT are providing us with 1.92 Megabytes of download speed and only 0.36 of upload speed, but having done some tests using his equipment the good news is that EE gives us 30.44 download speed and 12.26 of megabytes for uploading. Goodbye BT and hello EE. That at least is an easy choice.