You and others are going to make it once again impossible to mention King Richard.
So don’t sook when that happens.
Welllll…you did ask for it to be “hid”…
2 Likes
Hidden.
From the Irish Times. Bolded a few bits which are hilarious.
Our neighbours are still struggling to believe that Brexit is a real-world event
Sat, Jul 18, 2020, 06:00
Last autumn, the British government spent £46 million (€50.6m) on its largest propaganda campaign since the second World War. Its aim was to prepare the country for Brexit. In January, the UK National Audit Office reported that “it is not clear that the campaign resulted in the public being significantly better prepared”.
So this week, Boris Johnson’s administration launched a massive advertising blitz to prepare Britain for Brexit.
Might this not suggest that, four years after they voted for it, our neighbours are still struggling to believe that Brexit is a real-world event, and not just a grand gesture. Why, otherwise, does so much effort and money have to be expended on convincing them of its reality?
The slogan for the new campaign is “let’s get going”. That is what you say to children pretending to be sick because they don’t feel like school. Given that Brexit is officially the dawn of a new golden age, why does Johnson’s Vote Leave regime implicitly accept that a reluctant populace has to be chivvied, not even into embracing this glorious future, but merely into accepting that Brexit is actually happening?
A fug of denial hangs over the whole thing. A fortnight ago, the House of Commons select committee on future UK relations with the European Union heard evidence from a man called Tim Reardon, “head of EU exit” at Dover, the most important port for goods passing between Britain (and Ireland) and the continental mainland.
In normal times, 10,000 trucks pass through it every day. It is Reardon’s job to make sure they can still do this after New Year’s Day 2021, when the current transition period ends and, to coin a phrase, Brexit really means Brexit.
On the other side of the English Channel, Dover’s twin port, Calais, has built a system for handling the flow of lorries after January 1st and, as Reardon put it, has “tested its system . . . a couple of times”. So obviously Dover has done the same? Well, explained Reardon, the system at Dover “needs to be built before it can be tested. At the moment, we are still at the stage of making sure that the specification for the system is correct, so that it is built with a fighting chance of doing what it is needed to do.” So the situation is not just that the system has yet to be tested, nor even that it has yet to be built. It is that the specifications for the design of the system have yet to be finalised.
Last weekend, Michael Gove, who is supposedly in charge of such things, announced the construction of a 27-acre holding pen for those 10,000 trucks heading to Dover. It will be in Ashford, Kent. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, Ashford voted 60 per cent for Leave. Yet the shocked local Tory MP, Damian Green, complained that the idea of this vast parking lot has now come “out of the blue”.
Almost everything about Brexit still comes out of the blue for the people who voted for it and their political leaders. On Monday, the Commons Northern Ireland Affairs committee issued a despairing report on preparations for the operation of the Northern Ireland protocol: “Businesses are still in the dark about what they should be preparing for on January 1st, 2021 . . . Those trading across the Irish Sea have been told to prepare without knowing what to prepare for.”
Meanwhile, the London government has published a checklist of things it suggests British subjects may have to consider if they intend to travel to the continental EU from next year on. Their European Health Insurance Cards will become invalid in December, so they will need to buy health insurance. They may need an international driving permit and a “green card” as proof of insurance. Mobile phone roaming charges will apply.
Most terribly of all, EU pet passports will no longer be available to animal-loving Britons. “Before your dog, cat or ferret can travel . . . your pet must have a blood sample taken at least 30 days after its last rabies vaccination”. This sample will then be sent to an “EU-approved laboratory” and the ferret-fancying traveller will then have to “wait three months from the date the successful blood sample was taken before you can travel.” If only the pro-EU side in the 2016 referendum had thought of a bus with “Ferry your ferret freely – Vote Remain”, surely the result would have been different.
It is as if there are two Britains, one in which Brexit is the greatest national project for almost half a century and one in which it is not really happening at all. To get a sense of the latter, go to the website of the UK’s Department of International Trade. It has detailed information for would-be exporters about markets they should consider entering after Brexit.
The site literally says “There are six markets in the western European region” and lists them as Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. Apparently, Spain or Italy or Belgium are not in western Europe anymore. This is just sloppiness, presumably, but it is symptomatic of the strange absent-mindedness I like to call BAADD: Brexit-acquired attention deficit disorder. Anyone who does pay attention to Brexit becomes inured to the complete disjunction between the seriousness of what the UK is doing on the one side and the lack of seriousness about what it means on the other. But as summer drifts towards autumn with no sign of agreement on a trade deal, the idea that obvious things are still coming “out of the blue” becomes ever weirder.
Last week, the EU’s lead Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, had to reply to a letter of complaint from Mark Francois, chairman of the parliamentary group of Brexit ultras, the European Research Group. Barnier had to point out that everything Francois was complaining about is in the political declaration “agreed by your prime minister and voted for by the House of Commons, including yourself.” But pointing this out is hopeless: the Brexiteers will continue to fulminate against the consequences of everything they themselves have done.
Why shouldn’t they? Consequences are boring details. And the problem with details is not just that it takes some work – and, more problematic in the case of Francois, a stim of wit – to grasp them. It is that they are innately unheroic: port control systems, giant lorry parks, passports for ferrets. Brexit is drama, and these minutiae are like the dreary bits of Game of Thrones when someone has to explain about the lineage of the House Targaryen instead of getting on with sex, violence and dragons.
For the Brexiteers, the particularities are too, too tedious – get on with the glorious act of liberation. And there are only two ways in which the outcome of the current negotiations can be sufficiently dramatic: either the EU capitulates to all Britain’s demands, or Britain tears up the withdrawal agreement and stomps off into international outlawry.
There is no rational universe in which either of these outcomes makes sense, but this is not a rational universe. It is a twilight zone in which the Daily Telegraph still runs opinion pieces from Tory MPs with headlines like: “Frictionless trade with the EU is there for the asking”. The delusion that the EU will, in the end, give the UK all the benefits of the single market, even though it has left the single market, is very much alive. When the EU capitulates, there will be no need for border controls at Dover or passports for ferrets – so why plan for them?
But, in this binary mindset, the refusal of the EU to give the UK all of these benefits is proof of the EU’s bad faith – and Britain should retaliate by tearing up everything it has already agreed. The former Brexit secretary David Davis tweeted this week that: “In the event that the EU is not offering a deal, we should certainly consider John Longworth’s suggestion of reviewing the Withdrawal Agreement.” Longworth is a former Tory MEP who now heads a pro-Brexit think-tank, the Centre for Brexit Policy, chaired by the former Northern Ireland secretary Owen Paterson. (Its directors include the DUP’s Sammy Wilson.) Longworth’s “suggestion”, published on the Politico website, is yet more of the never-ending mania about the second World War: “It is outrageous that Germany – a country that had its national debt written off after World War II . . . – should now seek what amounts to reparations from the UK for having the audacity to want to break free of the Teutonic chains . . . So toxic is the [withdrawal] agreement that it would be quite legitimate in international law to repudiate the treaty, and that is exactly what the UK government should do if the EU refuses to adjust its implications.”
Should we take this stuff seriously? Probably not in any literal sense, though in the fever of this derangement no proposition, however extreme, can be discounted. But the danger is that these fantastical binaries – complete triumph or utter repudiation – continue to crowd out the urgent necessity to come to terms with the reality of Brexit. Anyone who thinks that the approach of a real danger will force Johnson’s administration to get a grip must pause to ask: how did that work out with the pandemic? The capacity of some people for delusion, denial and distraction has just caused about 20,000 avoidable British deaths. If they are willing to pay that price rather than face reality, the costs of a chaotic Brexit scarcely count.
3 Likes
The letter referred to, sent by the head of the ERG to the lead negotiator for the EU.
How, after all these years, do Brexiters not understand how the single market works??? The EU isn’t going to allow them in unless you follow its rules.
2 Likes
WTO rules can accomodate interim FTAs - Article XXIV of GATT 1947 and subsequent legal elaborations.
Time limited Waivers are also possible , but would need WTO member approval.
EU is holding most of the cards- so much for those Brexiteers claiming a return to British sovereignty.
1 Like
This is how politics in 2020 works, in the UK, in the USA, or here. It’s not about making good policy, it’s the art of blaming someone else for the consequences of your own bad policy.
6 Likes
The EU is slowly herding Britain to satellite status
Matthew Parris
Friday July 24 2020, 5.00pm BST
It was a familiar rural scene I saw last week: a farmer gathering up his sheep. Tailgate open, ramp and side-barriers in place, his lorry waited at the field’s gate, the only way out. His border collie did the work. It took a while. There were stragglers and breakaways and at one point they all ran off in the wrong direction. But this was a process with only one outcome possible. One herd, one field, one exit, one ramp, one lorry — and a sheepdog. The ending was already plain, inescapable, from the beginning.
Some four years ago on this page I wrote that Brexit would have only two possible outcomes: a clean and total break with the European Union and all its rules as we launched ourselves into a world of bilateral trade deals around the planet, or a new status as an economic satellite to the EU but excluded from its decision-making. I said that if you believed there was any point at all in Brexit, you must favour the clean break option. Satellite status was only a damage-limitation exercise.
We are now heading for damage-limitation. Do read yesterday’s Times Brexit Briefing, and the report from our Europe correspondent, Bruno Waterfield. The latest analysis suggests that a free trade agreement (FTA) with Europe is likely by the end of the year. I myself think it may be delayed a little longer, but at least there’s progress.
Such an FTA would leave us still able to enjoy relatively frictionless trade with our former EU partners, so long as we essentially copy the EU’s “level playing field” rules; but doing so “voluntarily” as a “sovereign” nation. Boris Johnson could burble more or less truthfully that we are no longer “bound” by Brussels’s rules because we could always walk away (or “diverge” or “regress”) and take the consequences. Destiny, that sheepdog of our doings, knows already that since we realise which side our bread is buttered on, we shall not in fact diverge. But, hey, we could.
Thus, almost without audible hiss, the air escapes in a four-year-long deflation of the Brexit dream; and in their hearts the Brexiteers know it. Talk about a slow puncture. Like old soldiers, dud dreams do not die, they simply fade away.
Four ideas sat at the core of the case for Brexit. The first was that EU red tape was strangling the British economy (indeed, according to some, the British way of life). Straight bananas, threats to the British sausage, lawnmower-noise directives . . . that sort of stuff.
The second idea was that Europe would be so desperate to keep British trade that we’d easily secure a frictionless trade agreement with the EU. We could deploy Project Fear against them. They would buckle.
The third was that we could keep EU immigrants out. The fourth was that there existed a world out there beyond the EU, waiting to do more business with us British once we’d untangled ourselves from European regulation and struck new, bilateral trade deals with other countries. Brexiteers were confident of the potential for these, and so moved to pull the lever of Project Fear, confident they could scare Brussels into giving us a good post-Brexit deal, for fear of losing our business.
Our chief negotiator, David Frost, has not been wholly unsuccessful. Brussels, in the form of Michel Barnier, has backed down on the continued jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ): something Britain won’t accept. So where disagreements arise, other mechanisms will be devised to arbitrate, though of course the ECJ will be there in the background, essentially defining the EU’s own position and red lines. This victory for Britain may have more theoretical than practical value.
The UK has undoubtedly succeeded in gaining the power to keep European immigrants out. The EU has not brought this into negotiations, seeing it (as do I) as an act of self-harm. We either damage our economy, or we bring in more immigrants from countries outside Europe. I’m not sure that’s what the Brexit campaign’s message was meant to convey.
But it’s the failure of the “new global deals” idea that has brought the whole project down. The deals are simply not there. America was the great hope, the linchpin of this hoped-for opening-up. You can forget Australia and New Zealand: antipodean trade was falling as a share of the total even before we entered the EU; their share now is tiny. The US, though, is different: our second-biggest trading partner (15 per cent) after the EU (47 per cent). It has emerged this week that hopes of reaching any trade deal this year have all but vanished.
The sticking points (food standards being notorious) are well known, and have not unstuck. The Department for International Trade has started insisting that all’s well and there’s no deadline, but few outside Westminster see much hope that President Trump (even if he wanted to) is in any position to secure his friend, our PM, a special deal; and Trump may not be there for much longer. Even if or when we get this deal with Washington, leaked government forecasts, says one report, suggest a trade deal with the US could benefit UK economic output by about 0.2 per cent in the long term.
There had been hopes of a superior FTA with Japan, but the EU sealed a deal there last year and it would be eccentric to suppose we can get a better one. With India we’re stuck on the visa question. And as for earlier talk of a better deal with China, enough said.
The fading of these hopes means this: we stick for the foreseeable future with our level-playing-field-based FTA with Europe. We may manage a few deals that don’t undermine the European standards we’ll undertake to stick to but the last thing we’ll want is big new rows that threaten the trade deal with Brussels. Thus, slowly but with a horrible inevitability, and after four years of bleating and barking and running hither and thither, are the Brexit sheep herded through the only gate left: economic satellite status to the EU. It won’t be a disaster and we’ll remain free (as Mr Johnson will trumpet) to depart the playing field whenever we choose. And we won’t.
Sooner or later some bright spark will pipe up with the thought that we really ought to get ourselves a place at the European table where these matters are decided. But that’s another field, another gate, another lorry; and there’s no hurry. The sheep are safely gathered in.
Fintan O’Toole: best journalist in Ireland and a notorious leftie to boot.
The Irish Times is the way the Age used to be when David Syme & co. was still independent. Pity the Irish Times has recently put itself behind a paywall.
3 Likes
At the end of the day, don’t look after the residents who spend and keep the economy going, the pollies and elites can’t eat money. They’ll wake up when its too late.
Too many meetings and too much talking, not enough action soon enough.
Dreams of a lost Empire, including by those who could make something of themselves in the colonies financially and in terms of status - denied to them at home by the British class system.
And did none of them realise that British influence could be wielded through its power as a major player in the EU as an alternative to the lost Empire , which was acknowledged in the Atlantic Charter signed between Churchill and Roosevelt off the coast of Newfoundland during WW2.,?
EU and USA make trade agreement!
How is the UK version going? 
Abbott gunna fixit
1 Like
2 Likes
Sort of Brexit related. The U.K. has employed former Australia PM Tony Abbott to be a special advisor on post Brexit trade negotiations.
No expert on Abbott myself but many u happy due to record on climate denial, homophobia, misogyny etc.
Politicians defending all this purely by saying ‘that’s none my business, he’s an expert on trade’
Is this guy as much of a ■■■■ as it seems?
Well, from my point of view if there’s anything Tony Abbot is an expert on, he’s yet to demonstrate his expertise in public life in any way.
More of an issue for me with his current gig is that he’s an ex-Australian PM who is going to be sitting across the table, helping a foreign nation get the best out of a deal with Australia.
2 Likes
Yeah, that second part was something that confused me a lot too, especially with trance negotiations ongoing between the UK/Aus