Pienaar's gloves
Player Valuation: £35m
How do you suppose we overcome some of the issues that he has written about?
Current Affairs EU In or Out
- Thread starter micknick
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How do you suppose we overcome some of the issues that he has written about?
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
17 NOVEMBER 2016
First, when it comes to Brexit, there are the familiar problems. On EU law, the prime minister’s idea is to pass a "Great Repeal Bill" to take effect the day we leave. This will do exactly the opposite of what its title suggests: it will confirm the place of every existing EU law in the UK statute books, at least initially. The idea is that Parliament will then go through and review them all over the coming decades.
Even this supposedly most straightforward of steps is riddled with complexity. EU laws in the form of shared regulations lay down cross-border protections for consumers, as well as technical and legal standards enabling products to circulate without further ado. But then what happens when EU countries decide to amend a regulation a few months or years down the line? Do we meekly accept decisions over which we no longer have any say, like Norway, and change our rules too? Or do we allow our rules to drift away from their continental counterparts, thus making technical standards no longer compatible, nullifying consumer guarantees and progressively shutting us out of the single market on which so much British trade depends?
But while the dangers of quitting not just the EU, but the single market and the European customs union as well, are now widely discussed, there is more that we are yet to consider. Soon, though it will be hard to ignore. Over the years, we’ve taken advantage of the EU framework in many practical ways to help us achieve many national objectives. Unpicking each of those is its own bureaucratic nightmare.
For a start, we save money and administrative headaches by doing tasks jointly rather than duplicating each other's effort many times over. Research is the classic example. There’s simply no point in every single country paying for its own expensive medical research, for instance, when collaboration brings better results faster and far more cheaply. In recent years, this joint approach has made Europe a world leader in science and Britain an internationally recognised centre of excellence. Are we really ready to pay an entire continent’s worth of investment out of our own national coffers, simply to try and keep pace with our neighbours?
Then there are areas where we have world-level international commitments to meet, whether we like it or not. Right now, as an EU member, we often delegate compliance to joint agencies. To take just one example: currently we take care of our international reporting and monitoring obligations on maritime safety through our membership of the European Marine Safety Agency (EMSA), and through shared EU rules on seafarer working conditions. This is how we maintain Britain’s status as a "quality flag state" under international law. If we lose this, we don’t lose our obligations — but we do lose our ability to meet them quickly and easily. Will we set up a separate UK agency for this purpose? Where will we find the necessary expertise, how long will it take and what will it cost?
Similar points apply to a whole host of fields. How will we certify aircraft, their engines and other related products for safety if we leave the European Air Safety Agency? How about approving medicines for sale on the market, currently done through the European Medicines Agency based in London? How about testing and authorising (or banning) potentially hazardous chemicals, currently done jointly through the European Chemicals Agency? Responding to coastal pollution (European Environment Agency)? Protecting British trademarks and patents abroad (European Union Intellectual Property Office and the Patent office and court)? Ensuring that our sat-nav systems work (European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency)?
The list of agencies whose work we would suddenly have to duplicate is very long. And every single case will need its own, bespoke, solutions.
Finally, there are areas where we co-operate because there are things we can’t do alone, as a simple matter of logic. It’s futile to make unilateral attempts to manage local fish stocks, for instance, when fish have the unfortunate habit of swimming from one country’s territory to another’s. We can’t possibly maintain our open skies agreement across Europe, vital to so many UK businesses, without the cooperation of other countries. And the European Arrest Warrant, which has both brought homegrown crooks back to face British justice and allowed us to remove foreign ne’er-do-wells from British soil in days rather than decades, simply could not exist without the shared legal frameworks we’ve developed with our neighbours.
In all these areas and many more, the point is not that pulling out of the EU means throwing in the towel. Quite the opposite. We will still need to find ways to do these things, either because of blatant self-interest or because of our wider commitments to the world. Other non-EU members do them too. But once we’ve lost our EU membership, we will have the worst of both worlds. We’ll incur massive economic and bureaucratic costs – the kind of costs we’ve spent the last fifty years gradually eliminating — at the same time as crippling our effectiveness both domestically and on the world stage. At best, we will have to find new and potentially complex ways to continue the cooperation which, inside the EU, has been straightforward. At worst, we will simply have to duplicate everything.
It’s all too easy, as Britain is now discovering, to decide one day to quit the EU. But managing the fallout from that decision is a bureaucratic and costly nightmare, and getting Britain back on its feet post-Brexit will be a Herculean task.
Britain in Europe has led the world in so many areas. It seems likely that only through dismantling that leadership will we realise quite how good we’ve had it up till now. When reality hits home, it will hardly be surprising if we see people asking for a rethink of the Brexit decision.
Richard Corbett is the Labour MEP for Yorkshire & Humberside
Oh dear, a man paid by the EU comes up with a list of all the things we used to do anyway, and many of them we still do, to prove that he should still be employed. I would rather sack our MEP's who do sod all and recruit more well deserving scientists and engineers to do the work on behalf of and for the benefit of the UK. No wonder it was buried...
It does show however just how much national technical competence we have given away, it'll be good to get it all back....
abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
good luck recruiting them with the post-Brexit Pound and the post-Tory public services...
or even keeping the ones you've got
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/life/top-10-countries-people-are-leaving-britain-for-in-2016/
"The UK had the highest rate of professionals leaving the country of all 30 destinations assessed in a new 2015/16 global migration report by MoveHub."
Pienaar's gloves
Player Valuation: £35m
But his point regarding science is that collaboration is far more efficient. Why pay a hell of a lot more money to get people to do something that they were doing anyway?
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
And how much of any of this has anything to do with Brexit.....
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
Employment, skill retention, intellectual property rights, commercialisation, wealth generation........
SNova
Player Valuation: £15m
I keep hearing this from one of my mates. How the UK will have to do this and that again and we'll have to hire loads more civil servants and how awful that will be etc.
That's actually what I voted for.
The bold put me off.
That's life though isn't it Pete? I was just talking to the innovation director at Samsung, and the idea of having all of the expertise you need on the payroll is rather old fashioned, because company's realise it's impossible to do. So, instead they just try and make sure they have access to it through partnerships and being open with others.
Just leave in the WTO again watch the DP show again today - our trade with Europe forecast to drop to a mere 35% quote by a prominent Brexit minister! The EU in negotiations for trade is as slow as a lame Donkey pulling a heavy carriage- saying deals with the USA could be done overnight - even leaving the customs union partially to our advantage is on we just need freedom from the EU - deals can be done in the single market on our terms not theirs!
Italy again raised as the key to the Euro being crashed!
abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
https://www.buzzfeed.com/kellyoakes...ause-of-brexit?utm_term=.ihkbKaawg#.kpWo0eeV4
"When BuzzFeed News first calls Stephen Maher he is in the middle of packing up his lab at the University of Hull, ready for a move back to Trinity College Dublin in his native Ireland. His new job, as a James Ussher assistant professor of translational oncology, could be seen as a sidestep in his career, or even a slight demotion – he’s gone from a permanent job to a tenure-track contract, and will have to prove himself in the next five years to regain the status he had in the UK.
But Maher says he expects the benefits of being in Ireland, and in the EU, will outweigh that. “I’m going to be pulling in EU-based grants from here,” he says. “I feel that having the closer link with European funding and EU-based colleagues just strengthens the science here, it reinforces science in Ireland. I think that Brexit will destabilise science in the UK, not just from brain drain but from [the loss of] opportunities for funding.”
Canceled you Lib dem membership yet Bruce?By writing OUT in big letters
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
Which is what we will no doubt do anyway......
Seems a bit silly to go through all this upheaval to then return to what we had originally? I mean that's the essence of trade really isn't it, to avoid the need to vertically integrate everything. Adam Smith and all that.
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
“I feel that having the closer link with European funding and EU-based colleagues just strengthens the science here, it reinforces science in Ireland."
So why didn't he move back before anyway.......oh yeah, we paid more......
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