I'm saying it's interesting that Stalin used similar rhetoric to May in her 'citizens of nowhere' speech. It's thankfully a line she hasn't continued with a great deal since then, but it was an interesting precedent.
Current Affairs EU In or Out
- Thread starter micknick
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I'm saying it's interesting that Stalin used similar rhetoric to May in her 'citizens of nowhere' speech. It's thankfully a line she hasn't continued with a great deal since then, but it was an interesting precedent.
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
UK drops bid for instant return of fisheries control – sources | Politics
Plans to take back control of UK fisheries the moment Britain leaves the EU appear to have been abandoned in the face of united EU opposition, dealing a significant blow to the ambitions of the environment secretary, Michael Gove.
Gove put repatriating control of fisheries at the heart of his post-Brexit strategy. But as the negotiations to secure the terms of a transition deal go to the wire in Brussels, the UK has backed down.
However, sources say there have been concessions on both sides. The EU is prepared to allow the UK a say in the negotiations on setting the allowable catch for the EU fleet even after the formal departure date of 29 March 2019.
The crucial meeting of EU heads of government intended to sign off the withdrawal agreement starts on Thursday, and people familiar with the negotiations say they are still talking.
Gove, one of the leaders of the Brexit campaign, made regaining the right to set quotas and manage UK fisheries one of the central commitments of the Leave pitch. Forced to accept some stability during a transition, he has demanded a shorter transition period for fishing of just nine or 10 months.
Last week he teamed up with Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, to underline their joint determination to repatriate controls immediately.
“We want the UK to become an independent coastal state, negotiating access annually with our neighbours,” they said. “During the implementation period, we will ensure that British fishermen’s interests are properly safeguarded.”
Gove raised his concerns with fellow cabinet ministers last week, ahead of a Brexitsubcommittee meeting.
But the EU has made access to UK waters on existing terms throughout the transition period a red line of its own. France in particular has threatened that any attempt to curtail access would be met with limits to British access to EU markets in other sectors.
The annual fisheries council, where ministers from across the EU meet to wrangle an agreement on fishing, takes place in December each year. The UK will still be a member in December 2018, and able to influence decisions. But the following year, Britain will be out. Gove will struggle to present a role in agreeing the allowable catch as a victory when he had been demanding total control.
Although fishing is only 0.05% of UK GDP, it has huge emotional significance. The common fisheries policy has led to the laying up of most of the British fishing fleet over the past 40 years. Gove has blamed the CFP for destroying his father’s fish processing firm.
Sources close to the cabinet minister accept that the issue cannot be allowed to derail the deal on transition, which is part of the withdrawal agreement due to be signed off at the end of the week. Ministers recognise the need for certainty for business and the economy.
But accepting the EU position on fisheries appears to be another significant concession by the Brexit secretary, David Davis. He has already acknowledged that he can live with the EU’s preferred date for the end of the transition period, in December 2020, rather than running on until March 2021 as Theresa May proposed in her Florence speech last year.
The biggest and most difficult obstacle to a deal on the principles of the transition is still the question of the Irish border. A cross-party committee of MPs concluded last week that there was no technical solution in operation that could prevent the reintroduction of a hard border if there was no deal on EU trade. Yesterday, a majority report from the Brexit select committee recommended that the transition period should be extended if necessary.
The committee chair, Hilary Benn, said that based on the evidence his committee had seen, “a no deal scenario is a significant danger to the UK”.
Plans to take back control of UK fisheries the moment Britain leaves the EU appear to have been abandoned in the face of united EU opposition, dealing a significant blow to the ambitions of the environment secretary, Michael Gove.
Gove put repatriating control of fisheries at the heart of his post-Brexit strategy. But as the negotiations to secure the terms of a transition deal go to the wire in Brussels, the UK has backed down.
However, sources say there have been concessions on both sides. The EU is prepared to allow the UK a say in the negotiations on setting the allowable catch for the EU fleet even after the formal departure date of 29 March 2019.
The crucial meeting of EU heads of government intended to sign off the withdrawal agreement starts on Thursday, and people familiar with the negotiations say they are still talking.
Gove, one of the leaders of the Brexit campaign, made regaining the right to set quotas and manage UK fisheries one of the central commitments of the Leave pitch. Forced to accept some stability during a transition, he has demanded a shorter transition period for fishing of just nine or 10 months.
Last week he teamed up with Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, to underline their joint determination to repatriate controls immediately.
“We want the UK to become an independent coastal state, negotiating access annually with our neighbours,” they said. “During the implementation period, we will ensure that British fishermen’s interests are properly safeguarded.”
Gove raised his concerns with fellow cabinet ministers last week, ahead of a Brexitsubcommittee meeting.
But the EU has made access to UK waters on existing terms throughout the transition period a red line of its own. France in particular has threatened that any attempt to curtail access would be met with limits to British access to EU markets in other sectors.
The annual fisheries council, where ministers from across the EU meet to wrangle an agreement on fishing, takes place in December each year. The UK will still be a member in December 2018, and able to influence decisions. But the following year, Britain will be out. Gove will struggle to present a role in agreeing the allowable catch as a victory when he had been demanding total control.
Although fishing is only 0.05% of UK GDP, it has huge emotional significance. The common fisheries policy has led to the laying up of most of the British fishing fleet over the past 40 years. Gove has blamed the CFP for destroying his father’s fish processing firm.
Sources close to the cabinet minister accept that the issue cannot be allowed to derail the deal on transition, which is part of the withdrawal agreement due to be signed off at the end of the week. Ministers recognise the need for certainty for business and the economy.
But accepting the EU position on fisheries appears to be another significant concession by the Brexit secretary, David Davis. He has already acknowledged that he can live with the EU’s preferred date for the end of the transition period, in December 2020, rather than running on until March 2021 as Theresa May proposed in her Florence speech last year.
The biggest and most difficult obstacle to a deal on the principles of the transition is still the question of the Irish border. A cross-party committee of MPs concluded last week that there was no technical solution in operation that could prevent the reintroduction of a hard border if there was no deal on EU trade. Yesterday, a majority report from the Brexit select committee recommended that the transition period should be extended if necessary.
The committee chair, Hilary Benn, said that based on the evidence his committee had seen, “a no deal scenario is a significant danger to the UK”.
Aren't they going to give the fishes a digital id? Fish finger fish only. None of this paella rubbish.
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
Apparently, an undisclosed report stated that even the fish realise the conservatives never conserve and threatened to migrate to eu waters en masse.
In other news, the Con's betray everyone to protect London's financial district. Surely as long as Dacre says we're soverign and the Union flag gets around, voters for Brexit won't notice.
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
The great Brexit irony: leaving will mean more bureaucracy, not less
The ability to cut red tape was a key Brexit prize—but Eurosceptics are in for a nasty shock
by Pawel Swidlicki / March 18, 2018 / Leave a comment
Jacob Rees-Mogg has said that Britain is strangled by EU red tape. Photo: Yui Mok/PA Wire/PA Images
We are almost one year down with one more to go in the Article 50 negotiating window, and the broad contours of the post-Brexit order are slowly coming into focus. Notwithstanding the non-negligible risk of a “no deal” scenario, following Theresa May’s Mansion House speech and the leak of the European Union’s draft negotiating guidelines for the new relationship, we have a good sense as to the likely direction of travel.
One striking feature of this new order is that rather than serving as the launch ramp into a low-tax and deregulatory cornucopia, Brexit is likely to entail an increase in the overall bureaucratic burden. This is no small irony given that hostility to “EU red tape”—both genuine and perceived—has long been a key driver of anti-EU sentiment, particularly among adherents of the Thatcherite tradition. For the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel and Owen Paterson, the best post-Brexit template for the UK is not Norway, Switzerland or even Canada, but rather Singapore, which entails scrapping a swathe of EU rules they believe are holding back British business.
For a variety of reasons however this ambition is likely to be frustrated, at least for the foreseeable future. Firstly, the EU has made the maintenance of the so-called Level Playing Field—a euphemism for the UK not undercutting the EU in areas like social and employment laws, environmental regulations and taxation—a precondition for any form of new preferential trade deal. The UK is simply too big and too close for the EU to be relaxed about it pursuing a radically different economic model, hence the EU’s demands for concrete safeguards of the sort it did not expect of Canada or Japan.
The UK economy would be badly hit by having to move to World Trade Organisation rules in March 2019. The EU knows this and has not been afraid of using its leverage to cajole the UK into accepting its position. Back in January 2017, Philip Hammond hinted to the German media that the UK might abandon “mainstream European social and economic thinking,” an exercise in kite-flying that went badly across the EU. Just over a year later, David Davis pledged Brexit would not plunge the UK into a “Mad Max-style dystopia,” and that the UK and EU faced a common competitive challenge from the rest of the world that “will not be met by a reduction in standards… [only] by an increase in quality.”
“The UK is simply too big and too close for the EU to be relaxed about it pursuing a different model”
Doubtless many see the EU’s insistence on “non-regression clauses” as another example of “Brussels bullying,” but it is worth noting the other powerful forces pushing the UK in this direction. First is public opinion—while UK voters may be scornful of specific EU regulations widely covered in the media such as those banning incandescent light bulbs, there is no appetite for a much more fundamental rolling back of regulations in areas like employment law or consumer protection. Indeed, post-referendum Davis said that “The great British industrial working classes voted overwhelmingly for Brexit. I am not at all attracted by the idea of rewarding them by cutting their rights.”
Proposing to rip up employment protections as well paring back environmental standards on clean air and water would constitute a brave move from a government that is neck-and-neck with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in the polls, notwithstanding the fact that it would not be in keeping with May’s natural instincts anyway.
The next powerful force pushing the UK towards broadly maintaining its current regulatory model is lobbying by those businesses which rely on trade with the EU and are worried that regulatory divergence will result in the erection of new non-tariff barriers to trade. This is particularly true of firms in sectors such as food and drink, automotive and aerospace, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and technology, hence the UK government has now changed its position on membership of several key EU regulatory bodies governing those sectors, even though this would mean abiding by their rules. Even if the EU agrees, in several other areas the UK is going to have to establish new national regulators or significantly beef up capacity at existing agencies from the Food Standards Agency to the Financial Conduct Authority, to be funded via new sectoral levies.
It is noteworthy that the chemicals sector wants to maintain regulatory alignment even though it complained bitterly when the EU introduced its Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) regulation in 2006, and it was frequently cited by Brexiteers as a prime example of EU over-regulation that would be scrapped once the UK was free. Some Brexiteers claim that while businesses exporting to the EU will still have to comply with EU rules like REACH, regulations on domestic businesses could be eased. However, a dual regulatory regime would be burdensome and unwieldy in practice, especially for firms that produce for both the UK and EU markets. In any case, such an arrangement would likely not be accepted by Brussels given concerns about ensuring the applicability of EU standards throughout the whole supply chain.
“Desperate to demonstrate divergence, some Brexiteers have begun to talk about exceeding the EU’s standards”
Immigration is another area where Brexit will entail more rather than less bureaucracy. Given the central role of this issue in the campaign, free movement will eventually end. In practice, EU nationals will almost certainly still be able to freely enter the UK, but they will no longer be able to apply for jobs and access public services and the benefits system on virtually the same terms as UK nationals and EU nationals who have secured settled status. The bureaucratic burden of enforcing the new regime is likely to fall disproportionately on businesses, landlords and public-sector bodies such as the NHS. Illegal employment has remained a significant problem even with unrestricted access to EU workers; this will only get worse when the eligible labour pool shrinks considerably.
Simply applying the current onerous Tier 2 visa regime for non-EU nationals to EU nationals post-Brexit would be a disaster from the perspective of UK businesses, though even a relatively liberal and light-touch regime will create new administrative hurdles for employers and migrants. The UK will of course remain an attractive destination for many EU migrants, but for highly skilled and ultra-mobile workers in areas like finance, tech and advanced engineering, it will be less attractive than before the referendum, in part due to the additional red tape. Since the referendum, businesses in these sectors are already complaining that recruitment is getting harder.
Finally, even if the UK signs a post-Brexit free trade agreement (FTA) with the EU which maintains zero tariffs, outside of a new customs union businesses are going to have to comply with bureaucratically onerous rules of origin designed to ensure that only goods covered by that agreement benefit. In practice, this means having to demonstrate that a certain proportion of the overall value of the product was sourced in either the UK or the EU as opposed to ineligible third countries, which given the global span of modern supply chains can be a costly process. There is evidence to suggest that in many cases the costs of complying with rules of origin outweigh the benefits of zero tariffs, meaning that some businesses, particularly SMEs, either just choose to pay the tariffs or forgo exporting opportunities altogether.
This is not to say there will be no post-Brexit scope for deregulation or flexibility to amend EU rules. However, the great, transformative regulatory liberation envisaged by leading Brexiteers is unlikely to materialise. Since the referendum, a further interesting dynamic has emerged. Given the imperative of demonstrating tangible evidence of divergence, some Brexiteers have begun to talk about exceeding the EU’s standards; Michael Gove has led this particular charge at DEFRA, for example by pledging to ban exports of live animals. There is now talk about “Global Britain” setting the benchmark for global regulatory standards. This is in no doubt a laudable objective, but it is a far cry from the Singapore model.
The ability to cut red tape was a key Brexit prize—but Eurosceptics are in for a nasty shock
by Pawel Swidlicki / March 18, 2018 / Leave a comment
Jacob Rees-Mogg has said that Britain is strangled by EU red tape. Photo: Yui Mok/PA Wire/PA Images
We are almost one year down with one more to go in the Article 50 negotiating window, and the broad contours of the post-Brexit order are slowly coming into focus. Notwithstanding the non-negligible risk of a “no deal” scenario, following Theresa May’s Mansion House speech and the leak of the European Union’s draft negotiating guidelines for the new relationship, we have a good sense as to the likely direction of travel.
One striking feature of this new order is that rather than serving as the launch ramp into a low-tax and deregulatory cornucopia, Brexit is likely to entail an increase in the overall bureaucratic burden. This is no small irony given that hostility to “EU red tape”—both genuine and perceived—has long been a key driver of anti-EU sentiment, particularly among adherents of the Thatcherite tradition. For the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel and Owen Paterson, the best post-Brexit template for the UK is not Norway, Switzerland or even Canada, but rather Singapore, which entails scrapping a swathe of EU rules they believe are holding back British business.
For a variety of reasons however this ambition is likely to be frustrated, at least for the foreseeable future. Firstly, the EU has made the maintenance of the so-called Level Playing Field—a euphemism for the UK not undercutting the EU in areas like social and employment laws, environmental regulations and taxation—a precondition for any form of new preferential trade deal. The UK is simply too big and too close for the EU to be relaxed about it pursuing a radically different economic model, hence the EU’s demands for concrete safeguards of the sort it did not expect of Canada or Japan.
The UK economy would be badly hit by having to move to World Trade Organisation rules in March 2019. The EU knows this and has not been afraid of using its leverage to cajole the UK into accepting its position. Back in January 2017, Philip Hammond hinted to the German media that the UK might abandon “mainstream European social and economic thinking,” an exercise in kite-flying that went badly across the EU. Just over a year later, David Davis pledged Brexit would not plunge the UK into a “Mad Max-style dystopia,” and that the UK and EU faced a common competitive challenge from the rest of the world that “will not be met by a reduction in standards… [only] by an increase in quality.”
“The UK is simply too big and too close for the EU to be relaxed about it pursuing a different model”
Doubtless many see the EU’s insistence on “non-regression clauses” as another example of “Brussels bullying,” but it is worth noting the other powerful forces pushing the UK in this direction. First is public opinion—while UK voters may be scornful of specific EU regulations widely covered in the media such as those banning incandescent light bulbs, there is no appetite for a much more fundamental rolling back of regulations in areas like employment law or consumer protection. Indeed, post-referendum Davis said that “The great British industrial working classes voted overwhelmingly for Brexit. I am not at all attracted by the idea of rewarding them by cutting their rights.”
Proposing to rip up employment protections as well paring back environmental standards on clean air and water would constitute a brave move from a government that is neck-and-neck with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in the polls, notwithstanding the fact that it would not be in keeping with May’s natural instincts anyway.
The next powerful force pushing the UK towards broadly maintaining its current regulatory model is lobbying by those businesses which rely on trade with the EU and are worried that regulatory divergence will result in the erection of new non-tariff barriers to trade. This is particularly true of firms in sectors such as food and drink, automotive and aerospace, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and technology, hence the UK government has now changed its position on membership of several key EU regulatory bodies governing those sectors, even though this would mean abiding by their rules. Even if the EU agrees, in several other areas the UK is going to have to establish new national regulators or significantly beef up capacity at existing agencies from the Food Standards Agency to the Financial Conduct Authority, to be funded via new sectoral levies.
It is noteworthy that the chemicals sector wants to maintain regulatory alignment even though it complained bitterly when the EU introduced its Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) regulation in 2006, and it was frequently cited by Brexiteers as a prime example of EU over-regulation that would be scrapped once the UK was free. Some Brexiteers claim that while businesses exporting to the EU will still have to comply with EU rules like REACH, regulations on domestic businesses could be eased. However, a dual regulatory regime would be burdensome and unwieldy in practice, especially for firms that produce for both the UK and EU markets. In any case, such an arrangement would likely not be accepted by Brussels given concerns about ensuring the applicability of EU standards throughout the whole supply chain.
“Desperate to demonstrate divergence, some Brexiteers have begun to talk about exceeding the EU’s standards”
Immigration is another area where Brexit will entail more rather than less bureaucracy. Given the central role of this issue in the campaign, free movement will eventually end. In practice, EU nationals will almost certainly still be able to freely enter the UK, but they will no longer be able to apply for jobs and access public services and the benefits system on virtually the same terms as UK nationals and EU nationals who have secured settled status. The bureaucratic burden of enforcing the new regime is likely to fall disproportionately on businesses, landlords and public-sector bodies such as the NHS. Illegal employment has remained a significant problem even with unrestricted access to EU workers; this will only get worse when the eligible labour pool shrinks considerably.
Simply applying the current onerous Tier 2 visa regime for non-EU nationals to EU nationals post-Brexit would be a disaster from the perspective of UK businesses, though even a relatively liberal and light-touch regime will create new administrative hurdles for employers and migrants. The UK will of course remain an attractive destination for many EU migrants, but for highly skilled and ultra-mobile workers in areas like finance, tech and advanced engineering, it will be less attractive than before the referendum, in part due to the additional red tape. Since the referendum, businesses in these sectors are already complaining that recruitment is getting harder.
Finally, even if the UK signs a post-Brexit free trade agreement (FTA) with the EU which maintains zero tariffs, outside of a new customs union businesses are going to have to comply with bureaucratically onerous rules of origin designed to ensure that only goods covered by that agreement benefit. In practice, this means having to demonstrate that a certain proportion of the overall value of the product was sourced in either the UK or the EU as opposed to ineligible third countries, which given the global span of modern supply chains can be a costly process. There is evidence to suggest that in many cases the costs of complying with rules of origin outweigh the benefits of zero tariffs, meaning that some businesses, particularly SMEs, either just choose to pay the tariffs or forgo exporting opportunities altogether.
This is not to say there will be no post-Brexit scope for deregulation or flexibility to amend EU rules. However, the great, transformative regulatory liberation envisaged by leading Brexiteers is unlikely to materialise. Since the referendum, a further interesting dynamic has emerged. Given the imperative of demonstrating tangible evidence of divergence, some Brexiteers have begun to talk about exceeding the EU’s standards; Michael Gove has led this particular charge at DEFRA, for example by pledging to ban exports of live animals. There is now talk about “Global Britain” setting the benchmark for global regulatory standards. This is in no doubt a laudable objective, but it is a far cry from the Singapore model.
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
Charlie Sweet
Player Valuation: £35m
Never has there been a truer word said that you can judge an argument simply by the faces lining up on each side.
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
Nothing's going to change Pete, you do know that? We'll either have a nothing agreement and they'll blame the Irish situation for not allowing them to leave (or pass the buck onto a 2nd referendum for the same reason), or there will be some quasi EEA type arrangement set up that keeps things largely as they are but with very little input from the UK on EU affairs.
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
Then surely you must be happy......
Blimey. Never cease to be amazed that people think the biggest danger to their way of life comes from the 4-5% of Muslims that live in the uk. Utterly insane
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
I love the way opponents are up in arms over the draft agreement. That stupid woman in Scotland is saying that Scottish fishermen have been betrayed because we don’t really leave until December 2020, while she herself wants to remain in the EU anyway....and they say comedy is dead......
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