\u2018Tantric yoga guru arrested in Thailand,\u2019 runs a story on page nine of today\u2019s\u00a0Times, the tale of British woman Maria Shchetinina, arrested in the south-east Asian country after a violation of her visa.<\/p>\n
Shchetinina\u2019s paperwork allowed her to work as a customs relation manager for a residential property company, but attracted the attention of the Thai authorities who noticed her posters advertising \u201csacred sexuality\u201d lessons (\u201can invitation to be held by a professional water therapist into loving presence \u2013 no nudity\u201d). She is now likely to be heading home rather sooner than anticipated.<\/p>\n
And yet, spectacularly, Shchetinina is not the silliest self-styled \u201cguru\u201d in the pages of Britain\u2019s newspapers today. That honour goes to somebody called Shanker Singham, who appears in the\u00a0Daily Express\u00a0under the headline \u201cBrexit guru warns getting closer to EU will kill growth\u2019. In it, Singham warns that \u201cBritain\u2019s economic stagnation should not be blamed on the historic decision to break free from the European Union\u201d and says the UK \u201chas the chance to boost GDP per capita by nearly 8% if it diverges from the EU rule book and embraces \u2018pro-competitive regulations\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
One could be forgiven for wondering how somebody who is apparently a \u201cguru\u201d in an area of public policy which dominated political discourse for well over half a decade could be someone so obscure as to not warrant their own Wikipedia page, but happily the\u00a0Express\u00a0was able to lay out his credentials. Singham is \u201cthe chairman of the Growth Commission \u2013 whose international advisory board includes former UK prime minister Liz Truss\u201d it reported breathlessly, the equivalent of boasting someone is the chairman of the Smiles and Cleanliness Commission, whose international advisory board includes Oscar the Grouch from\u00a0Sesame Street.<\/p>\n
Singham\u2019s view is that \u201ccloser alignment with the EU result could see GDP per capita fall by almost 4%\u201d, an eccentric view, given that just two weeks ago government sources told the\u00a0Financial Times\u00a0that the Office for Budget Responsibility\u2019s long-standing prediction of a 4% hit to GDP from leaving the EU might have been a bit generous. The UK\u2019s economy has underperformed relative to countries in the euro since 2016: GDP per capita growth of 3.9% compared with 10.5%.<\/p>\n
To be fair to Singham, he does very generously concede that that leaving the EU has resulted in \u201csome additional trade friction between the UK and the EU post-Brexit\u201d but argues that the \u201ccost of that can be eradicated numerous times over by taking advantage of the freedom to make the UK\u2019s regulatory system more pro-competitive than the EU\u2019s and enjoying the economic dividends that will flow as a result\u201d. In plain English: a Dominic Cummings-style, race-to-the-bottom slashing of regulations.<\/p>\n
Singham is a generally eccentric guy. The joint UK-US citizen has been a loud cheerleader of Donald Trump\u2019s policy of imposing arbitrary tariffs on everyone and everything, tying himself in knots to explain how, actually, it is \u201cimportant to see the tariff policy as a tool to lower barriers\u201d.<\/p>\n
And his guru status has been questioned before. When, during the torturous Brexit negotiations the former director of economic policy at the hard right Legatum Institute was advising Tory hardliners as to how to pursue the hardest version imaginable, his expertise and experience was questioned.<\/p>\n
He told\u00a0Buzzfeed News\u00a0at the time: \u201cEither I\u2019m a deluded Walter Mitty fantasist or I\u2019m meaningfully influencing the government\u2019s thinking at the very highest levels. Pick one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fair enough. If we have to get economic advice from any self-styled guru, we\u2019ll settle for the one with an invitation to be held by a professional water therapist into loving presence over the one proven consistently wrong on every metric imaginable. No nudity, obviously.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018Tantric yoga guru arrested in Thailand,\u2019 runs a story on page nine of today\u2019s\u00a0Times, the tale of British…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":553467,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,1700,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,2452,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-553466","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-economy","11":"tag-eu","12":"tag-europe","13":"tag-european","14":"tag-european-union","15":"tag-great-britain","16":"tag-media","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115504270827256623","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=553466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/553467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=553466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}