Britain to grant full diplomatic status to EU's ambassador after Brussels said refusal had an 'unhealthy, chilling effect' on talks
João Vale de Almeida became the European Union's first ambassador to the UK in February last year after Brexit was confirmed, but was not given the same status as other ambassadors.
The UK and Norway have failed to reach a fishing deal for this year, with the industry warning that hundreds of crew members will be left out of work.
It means UK fleets will have no access to Norway's sub-Arctic waters, known for their cod catches.
The government said its "fair offer" had been rejected in talks.
The firm UK Fisheries called it a "disgrace", saying fishermen in Hull would be particularly badly affected by the lack of progress.
In 2018, UK fleets landed fish worth £32m in Norwegian waters, according to the government.
UK Fisheries chief executive Jane Sandell complained that the UK government had failed "even to maintain the rights we have had to fish in Norwegian waters for decades".
She added: "In consequence, there will be no British-caught Arctic cod sold through chippies for our national dish.
"It will all be imported from the Norwegians, who will continue to sell their fish products to the UK tariff-free, while we are excluded from these waters. Quite simply, this is a disgrace and a national embarrassment."
Thousands of EU bar and café workers reject old UK jobs: Hospitality sector in crisis as 15% of furloughed staff refuse to return after staying in home nation or taking better-paid roles
EXCLUSIVE: Restaurant bosses in the UK have faced an exodus of foreign workers, with EU staff now making up 39 per cent of the UK hospitality workforce - down from 43 per cent in 2019
Promise broken It's striking that such a big change in Britain's economy isn't playing a bigger part in the election campaigns across the UK.
It's possible, if not probable, that voters are fed up talking about Brexit. But reports from the council battlefields of south-west England include fishing communities which feel they were misled about the benefits of Brexit.
European boats are still allowed to fish close to the Cornish coastline, and seafood export businesses face a similar set of problems to those in Scotland.
In Northern Ireland, there are a number of reasons why Arlene Foster was deposed by the Democratic Unionists, but the trade border in the Irish Sea - which she was promised by the Prime Minister would not happen - has been a big part of the dissatisfaction.
It seems a little unlikely that the process of selecting her replacement will reduce the tensions.
The economic and perhaps the political fallout from Brexit has only just begun.
Brexit nightmare as EU companies threaten to abandon UK - 'Won't know what's hit them'
The UK Government has delayed implementation of inspections of EU food entering Britain until autumn this year in a bid to avoid any food shortages. Representatives from the food sector have warned about the "nightmare" situation of new paperwork and rules which have come into effect under the trade deal.
Karin Goodburn, director-general of the Chilled Food Association, warned EU food manufacturers are threatening to abandon the UK after British companies struggle with the new regulations.
She told the UK Trade and Business Commission: "When we start applying these types of things on the import checks coming into Great Britain, I don't think our continental cousins are going to know what's hit them.
"I've already been told by a Belgian association that a couple of their major members aren't going to try to send food here anymore."
James Withers, chief executive of Scotland Food and Drink, said they are facing "no gain and a world of pain".
Brexit’s Mr Pooter may not survive his dispute with Cummings
Before he moved on to lower things, Boris Johnson lived in our neighbourhood, just off the Holloway Road in London’s Islington. Another famous Islingtonian who lived off the Holloway Road was the fictional Mr Pooter, protagonist of the Victorian classic Diary of a Nobody.
Mr Pooter’s wife was called Carrie, and his close neighbour went by the name of Cummings, of whom on one occasion Pooter writes: “Cummings and I have a little misunderstanding.”
Well, in the great book – which I recommend to anyone who is tired of “streaming” and, indeed, of this government – Carrie’s husband and his friend Cummings manage to get over their misunderstanding. However, if there is one thing certain about the fallout between the Brexiters of Downing Street, it is that **** hath no fury like a Cummings scorned. It is obvious that this episode is going to end in tears; and, as a betting man, I would not put money on Johnson’s long-term survival – not least on account of the way the forensic skills of our underestimated leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, seem to be coming into their own.
However, there is enough elsewhere on the subject of sleaze inquiries and the stink of corruption that permeates this government. Johnson and Cummings may have fallen out, and David Cameron may be up to his neck in his own sleaze inquiries, but the focus should not be taken off the immense damage the three of them have done to the British economy, and to the viability of what is still called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Cameron started the rot, not just by bowing to the resistable pressure for a referendum from what Edward Heath used to call, in a delightfully venomous tone, Euroseptics; Cameron also woefully mishandled the referendum campaign. The former president of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, recently revealed in an interview that, knowing how distorted the British view of “Europe” had become as a result of a largely Eurosceptical press, he had offered to explain to the public the advantages of the EU and how it really worked.
It may seem like poetic justice that Johnson and Cummings have fallen out, but the awful truth is that they won the battle to diminish this country
Cameron evidently turned this offer down flat, saying he himself could handle everything to produce a safe result, with the result that, in Juncker’s words, “no one told the British public what we agreed on, say, the free movement of workers” in Cameron’s pre-referendum negotiations. I agree with Juncker that too many members of the British public were “brainwashed” into voting Leave – not of course by Cameron, but by the unholy alliance of those two former friends, Johnson and Cummings.
We know what that result was, and we are trying to live with it. A once great nation, whose foreign policy was geared to improving our overseas trade, voluntarily signed up for a hard Brexit, which is having the reverse effect and hitting exports badly. From the referendum result onwards, the British economy’s performance was inferior to that of the rest of the EU, and, now that we have left, things are going from bad to worse, as all reputable surveys show.
Obviously there is an economic recovery from the impact of successive lockdowns on output, and the government is making the most of that fact. But business investment has been feeble and the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe expects Brexit will in time outweigh the pandemic in its inhibiting impact on growth.
For the moment the obvious casualty is Northern Ireland, whose government, led by the Democratic Unionist party (DUP), was – sorry, I cannot resist this – DUP-ed by Johnson.
As the EU’s ambassador to the UK said in an interview with the Institute of Government last week, the Northern Ireland protocol is not the problem; “the problem is Brexit”.
But it was not just the DUP who were duped. Too many English people were duped too. It may seem like poetic justice that Johnson and Cummings have fallen out, but the awful truth is that they actually won the battle to diminish this country – with knock-on effects for the EU itself, whose leaders know they benefited from our membership.
Fear not: we are told that this is the most dramatic recovery since 1948 – or is it 1066? Not difficult after the biggest collapse for 200 years. Moreover, as Robert Chote, former director of the Office for Budget Responsibility, points out, although there is a feeling that the government should be devoting a greater share of spending to public services, notably health and social care, “the government is currently pencilling in lower departmental spending than it did pre-crisis”.
The 17:44 guy was vile. Exactly the sort of person who is stopping this country moving on. Ah, all Brexiteers are stupid and arrogant-says the man who refuses to believe a democratic vote.
Blame the winning side for telling lies. Don't blame the losing side for not caring enough to state their case.
The benefits of Brexit just keep rolling in – or is it the opposite?
The Brexit benefits just keep not rolling in. The government’s failure (or refusal?) to agree a deal with Norway to allow the UK fleet access to its fishing grounds shows just how weak and feeble Global Britain is.
Until we know the terms of the “fair offer”, which supposedly we put on the table, it would appear that the “no deal is better than any deal” mentality still reigns in government.
Betrayal of the only sector that could reasonably have expected a net benefit from the UK’s leaving the EU isn’t even the half of it. This is incompetence and incapability beyond belief, where the only measure of success is that we have yet again cut off our nose to spite our face.
‘Tory quarrels and betrayals’ determined UK’s post-Brexit future, says Barnier
Britain’s post-Brexit future was determined by “the quarrels, low blows, multiple betrayals and thwarted ambitions of a certain number of Tory MPs”, the EU’s chief negotiator has said in his long-awaited diaries.
The UK’s early problem, writes Michel Barnier in The Great Illusion, his 500-page account, was that they began by “talking to themselves. And they underestimate the legal complexity of this divorce, and many of its its consequences.”
Soon, however, the talking turned to Conservative party infighting, and by the end it had become “political piracy … They will go to any length. The current team in Downing St is not up to the challenges of Brexit nor to the responsibility that is theirs for having wanted Brexit. Simply, I no longer trust them.”
Published in France on Thursday and in English translation in October, The Great Illusion is a blow-by-blow account of the four years Barnier, a former French cabinet minister and European commissioner who has said he expects to “play a role” in the country’s next presidential election, spent as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator.
In the image of its author, it is mostly courteous, measured and precise: a sober, matter-of-fact – and, to those who followed Brexit’s twists and turns, broadly familiar – account. But that makes its asides and rare outbursts all the more forceful.
At the start of the process, Barnier writes, he promised himself to “pay attention to my words, stick to facts, figures, legal fundamentals – in short, to allow little room for emotion and feeling, to the benefit of objectivity”.
He does not always manage it.
David Davis, he writes, was “warm, truculent, and very self-assured”, Dominic Raab “almost messianic”. Theresa May was “direct, determined … and rather rigid, in her figure and in her attitudes”; Boris Johnson simply “baroque”.
He confesses to being frankly “stupefied” by the Lancaster House speech in which May laid out the early UK’s red lines. “The number of doors she shut, one after the other,” he marvels on 17 January 2017. “I am astonished at the way she has revealed her cards … before we have even started negotiating.”
Ending the jurisdiction of the European court of justice, halting free movement, leaving the single market and customs union, ending EU budget payments: “Have the consequences of these decisions been thought through, measured, discussed? Does she realise this rules out almost all forms of cooperation we have with our partners?”
May’s proposed timetable – undoing a 44-year partnership via article 50 and agreeing a future relationship, all within two years – also seemed “ambitious to say the least, when it took seven years of intense work to negotiate a simple FTA with Canada”.
Barnier is admiring of Britain’s civil servants, Olly Robbins in particular, praising them as “dignified, competent and lucid”. But he does not envy them, he writes, as talks finally get under way that summer after May’s disastrous early election gamble.
They have above them a political class who, in part, simply refuse to acknowledge today the direct upshot of the positions they adopted a year ago.” And he is wary throughout of Britain’s strategy, which seems to him to amount mainly to “offering little and taking a lot”, procrastinating, and cherrypicking.
His sympathy does extend to May, “a courageous, tenacious woman surrounded by a lot of men busy putting their personal interests before those of their country”. In the end, Barnier writes, the prime minister “exhausted herself, in a permanent battle with her own ministers and with her parliamentary majority”.
He never saw the point of Brexit, he confesses, and, visiting a capital a week in a marathon effort to forge and maintain EU27 unity, gives the notion of “Global Britain” short shrift. “I do wonder what, until now, has prevented the UK from becoming ‘Global Britain’, other than its own lack of competitiveness,” he writes. “Germany has become ‘Global Germany’ while being firmly inside the EU and the euro zone.”
Brexiters in general and Nigel Farage and his Ukip followers in particular, Barnier writes, had simply behaved “irresponsibly, with regard to the national interests of their own country. How else could they call on people to make such a serious choice without explaining or detailing to them its consequences?”
The post-Chequers resignations of Davis and Johnson in July 2018 prompt the reflection that Johnson had in any event always “treated these negotiations strictly as a domestic matter, and according to the logic of his own Brexit battle”, while their replacements, Raab and Jeremy Hunt, spark little enthusiasm either.
“There is something in his look that surprises me,” writes Barnier of Raab. “He is no doubt fired up by his mission, but I am not sure we will be able to go into the detail of the negotiation with him, take account of facts and realities”.
European “Brexit fatigue” begins to sets in, Barnier writes, in the long months before Theresa May’s decision in May 2019 - following a series of humiliating defeats in the Commons and an inevitable extension to the talks - to step down, and Johnson’s triumphant arrival at No 10 two months later.
“Although his posturing and banter leave him open to it, it would be dangerous to underestimate Johnson,” writes Barnier. But Johnson, too, “advancing like a bulldozer, manifestly trying to muscle his way forwards”, seemed to the negotiator hobbled by the same fundamental British Brexit problem.
When one of Barnier’s 60-member team explains to Britain’s new prime minister the need for customs and quality checks on the Irish border, Barnier writes, it was “my impression that he became aware, in that discussion, of a series of technical and legal issues that had not been so clearly explained to him by his own team”.
As late as May 2020, Barnier records his surprise at the UK’s continued demands for “a simple Canada-type trade deal” while still retaining single market advantages “in innumerable sectors”. There remains “real incomprehension, in Britain, of the objective, sometimes mechanical consequences of its choices”, he writes.
With a backstop-free withdrawal agreement finally secured, Britain’s formal exit from the EU on 31 January 2020 leaves the negotiator “torn between emotions. Sadness, obviously: Brexit is a failure for the EU. It is also a waste, for the UK and for us. I still do not see the need for it, even from the point of view of Britain’s national interest.”
The transition year talks on a future trade deal were a rollercoaster, too, beginning with David Frost’s blunt announcement that London “did not feel bound by the political declaration it had just signed four months ago. That rather set the scene.”
Thereafter came the internal market bill (“a clear breach of international law”) and the UK’s “theatrical”, “almost infantile”, “derisory” threats to walk away over the EU’s level playing field demands, “a psychodrama we could have done without”.
Right up until the end, Barnier writes, the British team kept the Europeans busy, submitting a final legal text on the fraught subject of fisheries on 23 December last year “stuffed with traps, pseudo-compromises and attempts to backtrack”.
In an inauspicious postscript, he warns that while he was “proud to be part of the unity and solidarity of the EU” during the Brexit process, and pleased Britain had left with a functioning deal rather than without one, the bloc must now be vigilant.
British “provocations” over the Irish protocol will continue, he warns, while the UK government, “in an attempt to erase the consequences of the Brexit it provoked, will try to re-enter through the windows the single market whose door it slammed shut. We must be alert to new forms of cherrypicking.”
Nor does he expect London to wait long before “trying to use its new legislative and regulatory autonomy to give itself, sector by sector, a competitive advantage. Will that competition be free and fair? Will regulatory competition … lead to social, economic, fiscal dumping against Europe? We have tools to respond.”
Barnier’s final warning, however, is to the EU itself. “There are lessons to be drawn from Brexit,” he writes. “There are reasons to listen to the popular feeling that expressed itself then, and continues to express itself in many parts of Europe - and to respond to it. That is going to take time, respect and political courage.”
Barnier hits back at ‘childish’ and ‘pathetic’ Brexit strategies of Boris Johnson
EU Brexit negotiators had to act as the “adults in the room” in the face of repeated provocations from Boris Johnson which at times became “pathetic” and “almost childish”, Michel Barnier has said.
In his 500-page account of four and a half years of talks, the EU’s chief negotiator accuses Mr Johnson and his inner circle of “political piracy” and states baldly as negotiations reach their endgame: “I simply no longer trust them.”
At one point, after Mr Johnson threatened to tear up the laboriously negotiated agreement on the Irish border, Mr Barnier wrote that it appeared the UK was pursuing the “madman strategy” of pretending to be ready for a no-deal Brexit in order to force Brussels into concessions.
The Downing Street team were “not up to the challenge of Brexit”, and Mr Johnson himself appeared badly briefed in talks with European Commission presidents, said the Brussels negotiator.
After Mr Johnson took office at No 10 in 2019, Mr Barnier recorded that his team were repeatedly “incredulous” and “stupefied” as the UK sought to go back on agreements it had signed up to, created artificial deadlines and threatened to walk away from talks.
Right up to the last minute, a day before signing the Trade and Cooperation Agreement on Christmas Eve, the Johnson team were seeking advantage, presenting the EU with a legal text which was “peppered with traps, false compromises and backwards steps”, he said.
But his diary of the protracted negotiations records how Brussels had to provide Mr Johnson with a “ladder to climb down” to provide a smokescreen for him to re-enter talks after threatening to walk away.
Mr Barnier said that from the start he felt that the UK’s Brexiters did not understand the consequences of EU withdrawal and recorded he was “stupefied” by Theresa May’s 2017 speech in which she ruled out most forms of future cooperation with the remaining 27-nation bloc.
But he said he was in no doubt that when Mr Johnson succeeded her in July 2019, the new prime minister would be “pragmatic” about reaching a swift deal to neutralise the political threat of the Brexit Party and allow him to win an early election.
He described Mr Johnson as “like a bulldozer” during talks in September 2019, but with “something genuine and mischievous in his expression… a rather nice person”. Despite his jokes, it was important not to underestimate the new prime minister, he noted.
However, despite Mr Johnson’s bullish determination to get rid of the Northern Irish “backstop” negotiated by Ms May, Mr Barnier said the PM appeared during discussions on the issue “to be taking on board a series of practical and legal problems which had not been explained clearly enough to him by his team”.
After reaching a deal which got rid of the backstop by creating a customs border in the Irish Sea, Mr Barnier recorded his surprise to find Mr Johnson fighting that year’s election on the basis that there would be no controls on goods travelling between Northern Ireland and the British mainland, something which he said “does not correspond with the contents of the withdrawal agreement”.
And when close Mr Johnson ally David Frost took over negotiation of the subsequent trade deal, Mr Barnier said it came as “a thunderbolt” to hear him say that the UK did not regard itself as bound by the deal agreed just months earlier.
But it was Mr Johnson’s threat to tear up arrangements for the Irish border with the Internal Market Bill last September that prompted Mr Barnier to say he had lost trust in the PM.
“By acting in this way, the British government is engaging in no more or less than political piracy,” he wrote. “At that moment, I felt this threat like a betrayal of their word. Clearly, they are ready for anything.
“I find that the current team in 10 Downing St is not up to the challenges of Brexit nor to the responsibility that is theirs for having wanted Brexit. I simply no longer trust them.”
After a “glacial” dinner with Mr Frost in London, Mr Barnier wrote: “We could have suspended negotiations immediately, on the grounds that one does not negotiate under duress.
“But suspension of the negotiations for this grave reason - which was probably what the British were hoping for - would have put the blame for failure on us. We do not want to succumb to this provocation… We will make the British government face its responsibilities.”
The following month Mr Johnson dramatically announced that he was preparing for no deal, accusing the EU of failing to make concessions by a deadline which the PM had unilaterally set.
Accused by Mr Frost in a video call of failing to meet the UK’s efforts to find a deal, Mr Barnier recorded that he and his team “looked at one another with incredulity. It was almost childish”.
And he added: “This episode seemed to me to be quite pathetic. We have had many reasons over the course of the past weeks and months, in reaction to one British declaration or posture or the other, to lose our patience and dramatise the talks. But once again we mastered our nerves.”
Discussing the incident, he recorded an aide saying: “We always knew we would reach a crisis. Now we are here, we must do what we always said we would do and be the ‘adults in the room’.”
The “psychodrama orchestrated by London” resolved itself within days after Mr Barnier repeated in a speech a form of words about sovereignty which would allow Mr Johnson to back away from his threat.
But he said that Mr Johnson continued to threaten no deal if Brussels would not make concessions, as if out of “wishful thinking” that “everything would go well, or not too badly”, when in fact it would have very serious consequences for both the EU and UK.
At one point he told Mr Frost directly: “Your negotiating tactics are a masquerade. You are trying to play with us. I won’t put up with it for long. If you want a deal, you will have to move.”
By early December last year, while Mr Johnson was trumpeting the merits of an “Australian-style” no-deal Brexit, Mr Barnier said he believed the PM had in fact begun to take on board the consequences of a crash-out, adding: “I’m sure he wants to avoid it.”
In a crunch meeting with Ursula von der Leyen to seek a final breakthrough, Mr Johnson appeared “not to have taken the time to go through the detail himself with his team in advance”, telling the Commission president that he was ready to be flexible over fishing rights but needed to be able to show that the UK had won back its sovereignty in time for the next general election in three years.
Right up until the sealing of the trade deal on Christmas Eve, Mr Barnier said Mr Johnson and Mr Frost tried to strike side deals and go over his head with appeals to national leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel.
But after the trade deal was signed on a “day of relief, tinged with sadness”, Mr Barnier recorded that he had achieved the EU’s negotiating goals thanks to the “unity and solidarity” of the 27 member states.
Even after the TCA was agreed, he said that “British provocations” continued, with threats to breach the deal over the Northern Ireland border and UK government ministers opening talking about using “social, economic and fiscal dumping” to gain a competitive edge over Europe.
But in a warning to London, he wrote: “We must remain alert against all new kinds of cherry-picking… We have put into the Trade and Cooperation Agreement the tools we need to respond.”
Mr Barnier said that the 2016 Leave campaign was “fuelled by caricatures and untruths” including Mr Johnson’s promise, on the side of his bus, of £350m a week for the NHS. And he said that Nigel Farage’s refugee posters “recalled the excesses of propaganda from another age”.
But he said that the message of Brexit for the EU was the need to “listen to expressions of popular sentiment … and respond to them [with] respect and political courage”.
Explaining the choice of title for his book, La Grande Illusion, Mr Barnier wrote: “The great illusion is to think that you can face the world and its often brutal transformations alone… and to believe in the promise of an identity and a sovereignty based on solitude rather than solidarity.”
- La Grande Illusion (Journal secret du Brexit) is published in French by Gallimard on 6 May and in English in October.
State pensions to be slashed for Britons retiring to the EU
Millions of Britons retiring abroad could have their state pensions dramatically slashed following Brexit.
A change in the way the state pension is calculated will result in lower weekly payouts for many who have lived abroad during their working lives.
All expats who relocate to the European Union and have previously lived in Australia, Canada or New Zealand will be impacted by the change, which has been announced by the Government. This comes as a direct consequence of the UK leaving the EU and will take effect from January 2022.
I’ve not commented on Brexit and the fallout for some time...particularly as like @Essexphil says...it was a democratic vote and we need to move on
However....all those fisherman/farmers who believed the rhetoric and frankly wanted their cake and eat it ( Europe can’t fish in our waters, but please carryon and buying 80+% of the UK catches...please)
My mates a sheep farmer, voted Brexit( had an EU grant that paid his annual rent) , has seen the price of lamb decrease, his EU market disappear and his expectations that the UK market would absorb the lamb even though it was much more expensive than the NZ options....talk about shagginghimself
Comments
João Vale de Almeida became the European Union's first ambassador to the UK in February last year after Brexit was confirmed, but was not given the same status as other ambassadors.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9523241/Britain-grant-diplomatic-status-EUs-ambassador.html
The UK and Norway have failed to reach a fishing deal for this year, with the industry warning that hundreds of crew members will be left out of work.
It means UK fleets will have no access to Norway's sub-Arctic waters, known for their cod catches.
The government said its "fair offer" had been rejected in talks.
The firm UK Fisheries called it a "disgrace", saying fishermen in Hull would be particularly badly affected by the lack of progress.
In 2018, UK fleets landed fish worth £32m in Norwegian waters, according to the government.
UK Fisheries chief executive Jane Sandell complained that the UK government had failed "even to maintain the rights we have had to fish in Norwegian waters for decades".
She added: "In consequence, there will be no British-caught Arctic cod sold through chippies for our national dish.
"It will all be imported from the Norwegians, who will continue to sell their fish products to the UK tariff-free, while we are excluded from these waters. Quite simply, this is a disgrace and a national embarrassment."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56932551
EXCLUSIVE: Restaurant bosses in the UK have faced an exodus of foreign workers, with EU staff now making up 39 per cent of the UK hospitality workforce - down from 43 per cent in 2019
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9525729/Thousands-EU-bar-caf-workers-reject-old-UK-jobs.html
Promise broken
It's striking that such a big change in Britain's economy isn't playing a bigger part in the election campaigns across the UK.
It's possible, if not probable, that voters are fed up talking about Brexit. But reports from the council battlefields of south-west England include fishing communities which feel they were misled about the benefits of Brexit.
European boats are still allowed to fish close to the Cornish coastline, and seafood export businesses face a similar set of problems to those in Scotland.
In Northern Ireland, there are a number of reasons why Arlene Foster was deposed by the Democratic Unionists, but the trade border in the Irish Sea - which she was promised by the Prime Minister would not happen - has been a big part of the dissatisfaction.
It seems a little unlikely that the process of selecting her replacement will reduce the tensions.
The economic and perhaps the political fallout from Brexit has only just begun.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-56931396
The UK Government has delayed implementation of inspections of EU food entering Britain until autumn this year in a bid to avoid any food shortages. Representatives from the food sector have warned about the "nightmare" situation of new paperwork and rules which have come into effect under the trade deal.
Karin Goodburn, director-general of the Chilled Food Association, warned EU food manufacturers are threatening to abandon the UK after British companies struggle with the new regulations.
She told the UK Trade and Business Commission: "When we start applying these types of things on the import checks coming into Great Britain, I don't think our continental cousins are going to know what's hit them.
"I've already been told by a Belgian association that a couple of their major members aren't going to try to send food here anymore."
James Withers, chief executive of Scotland Food and Drink, said they are facing "no gain and a world of pain".
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/brexit-nightmare-as-eu-companies-threaten-to-abandon-uk-won-t-know-what-s-hit-them/ar-BB1gdaKN?ocid=msedgntp
Before he moved on to lower things, Boris Johnson lived in our neighbourhood, just off the Holloway Road in London’s Islington. Another famous Islingtonian who lived off the Holloway Road was the fictional Mr Pooter, protagonist of the Victorian classic Diary of a Nobody.
Mr Pooter’s wife was called Carrie, and his close neighbour went by the name of Cummings, of whom on one occasion Pooter writes: “Cummings and I have a little misunderstanding.”
Well, in the great book – which I recommend to anyone who is tired of “streaming” and, indeed, of this government – Carrie’s husband and his friend Cummings manage to get over their misunderstanding. However, if there is one thing certain about the fallout between the Brexiters of Downing Street, it is that **** hath no fury like a Cummings scorned. It is obvious that this episode is going to end in tears; and, as a betting man, I would not put money on Johnson’s long-term survival – not least on account of the way the forensic skills of our underestimated leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, seem to be coming into their own.
However, there is enough elsewhere on the subject of sleaze inquiries and the stink of corruption that permeates this government. Johnson and Cummings may have fallen out, and David Cameron may be up to his neck in his own sleaze inquiries, but the focus should not be taken off the immense damage the three of them have done to the British economy, and to the viability of what is still called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Cameron started the rot, not just by bowing to the resistable pressure for a referendum from what Edward Heath used to call, in a delightfully venomous tone, Euroseptics; Cameron also woefully mishandled the referendum campaign. The former president of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, recently revealed in an interview that, knowing how distorted the British view of “Europe” had become as a result of a largely Eurosceptical press, he had offered to explain to the public the advantages of the EU and how it really worked.
It may seem like poetic justice that Johnson and Cummings have fallen out, but the awful truth is that they won the battle to diminish this country
Cameron evidently turned this offer down flat, saying he himself could handle everything to produce a safe result, with the result that, in Juncker’s words, “no one told the British public what we agreed on, say, the free movement of workers” in Cameron’s pre-referendum negotiations. I agree with Juncker that too many members of the British public were “brainwashed” into voting Leave – not of course by Cameron, but by the unholy alliance of those two former friends, Johnson and Cummings.
We know what that result was, and we are trying to live with it. A once great nation, whose foreign policy was geared to improving our overseas trade, voluntarily signed up for a hard Brexit, which is having the reverse effect and hitting exports badly. From the referendum result onwards, the British economy’s performance was inferior to that of the rest of the EU, and, now that we have left, things are going from bad to worse, as all reputable surveys show.
Obviously there is an economic recovery from the impact of successive lockdowns on output, and the government is making the most of that fact. But business investment has been feeble and the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe expects Brexit will in time outweigh the pandemic in its inhibiting impact on growth.
For the moment the obvious casualty is Northern Ireland, whose government, led by the Democratic Unionist party (DUP), was – sorry, I cannot resist this – DUP-ed by Johnson.
As the EU’s ambassador to the UK said in an interview with the Institute of Government last week, the Northern Ireland protocol is not the problem; “the problem is Brexit”.
But it was not just the DUP who were duped. Too many English people were duped too. It may seem like poetic justice that Johnson and Cummings have fallen out, but the awful truth is that they actually won the battle to diminish this country – with knock-on effects for the EU itself, whose leaders know they benefited from our membership.
Fear not: we are told that this is the most dramatic recovery since 1948 – or is it 1066? Not difficult after the biggest collapse for 200 years. Moreover, as Robert Chote, former director of the Office for Budget Responsibility, points out, although there is a feeling that the government should be devoting a greater share of spending to public services, notably health and social care, “the government is currently pencilling in lower departmental spending than it did pre-crisis”.
Levelling up? Pull the other one …
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/brexit-s-mr-pooter-may-not-survive-his-dispute-with-cummings/ar-BB1ggQ9B?ocid=msedgntp
The Brexit benefits just keep not rolling in. The government’s failure (or refusal?) to agree a deal with Norway to allow the UK fleet access to its fishing grounds shows just how weak and feeble Global Britain is.
Until we know the terms of the “fair offer”, which supposedly we put on the table, it would appear that the “no deal is better than any deal” mentality still reigns in government.
Betrayal of the only sector that could reasonably have expected a net benefit from the UK’s leaving the EU isn’t even the half of it. This is incompetence and incapability beyond belief, where the only measure of success is that we have yet again cut off our nose to spite our face.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/the-benefits-of-brexit-just-keep-rolling-in-or-is-it-the-opposite/ar-BB1gg2OW?ocid=msedgntp
Britain’s post-Brexit future was determined by “the quarrels, low blows, multiple betrayals and thwarted ambitions of a certain number of Tory MPs”, the EU’s chief negotiator has said in his long-awaited diaries.
The UK’s early problem, writes Michel Barnier in The Great Illusion, his 500-page account, was that they began by “talking to themselves. And they underestimate the legal complexity of this divorce, and many of its its consequences.”
Soon, however, the talking turned to Conservative party infighting, and by the end it had become “political piracy … They will go to any length. The current team in Downing St is not up to the challenges of Brexit nor to the responsibility that is theirs for having wanted Brexit. Simply, I no longer trust them.”
Published in France on Thursday and in English translation in October, The Great Illusion is a blow-by-blow account of the four years Barnier, a former French cabinet minister and European commissioner who has said he expects to “play a role” in the country’s next presidential election, spent as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator.
In the image of its author, it is mostly courteous, measured and precise: a sober, matter-of-fact – and, to those who followed Brexit’s twists and turns, broadly familiar – account. But that makes its asides and rare outbursts all the more forceful.
At the start of the process, Barnier writes, he promised himself to “pay attention to my words, stick to facts, figures, legal fundamentals – in short, to allow little room for emotion and feeling, to the benefit of objectivity”.
He does not always manage it.
David Davis, he writes, was “warm, truculent, and very self-assured”, Dominic Raab “almost messianic”. Theresa May was “direct, determined … and rather rigid, in her figure and in her attitudes”; Boris Johnson simply “baroque”.
He confesses to being frankly “stupefied” by the Lancaster House speech in which May laid out the early UK’s red lines. “The number of doors she shut, one after the other,” he marvels on 17 January 2017. “I am astonished at the way she has revealed her cards … before we have even started negotiating.”
Ending the jurisdiction of the European court of justice, halting free movement, leaving the single market and customs union, ending EU budget payments: “Have the consequences of these decisions been thought through, measured, discussed? Does she realise this rules out almost all forms of cooperation we have with our partners?”
May’s proposed timetable – undoing a 44-year partnership via article 50 and agreeing a future relationship, all within two years – also seemed “ambitious to say the least, when it took seven years of intense work to negotiate a simple FTA with Canada”.
Barnier is admiring of Britain’s civil servants, Olly Robbins in particular, praising them as “dignified, competent and lucid”. But he does not envy them, he writes, as talks finally get under way that summer after May’s disastrous early election gamble.
They have above them a political class who, in part, simply refuse to acknowledge today the direct upshot of the positions they adopted a year ago.” And he is wary throughout of Britain’s strategy, which seems to him to amount mainly to “offering little and taking a lot”, procrastinating, and cherrypicking.
His sympathy does extend to May, “a courageous, tenacious woman surrounded by a lot of men busy putting their personal interests before those of their country”. In the end, Barnier writes, the prime minister “exhausted herself, in a permanent battle with her own ministers and with her parliamentary majority”.
He never saw the point of Brexit, he confesses, and, visiting a capital a week in a marathon effort to forge and maintain EU27 unity, gives the notion of “Global Britain” short shrift. “I do wonder what, until now, has prevented the UK from becoming ‘Global Britain’, other than its own lack of competitiveness,” he writes. “Germany has become ‘Global Germany’ while being firmly inside the EU and the euro zone.”
Brexiters in general and Nigel Farage and his Ukip followers in particular, Barnier writes, had simply behaved “irresponsibly, with regard to the national interests of their own country. How else could they call on people to make such a serious choice without explaining or detailing to them its consequences?”
The post-Chequers resignations of Davis and Johnson in July 2018 prompt the reflection that Johnson had in any event always “treated these negotiations strictly as a domestic matter, and according to the logic of his own Brexit battle”, while their replacements, Raab and Jeremy Hunt, spark little enthusiasm either.
“There is something in his look that surprises me,” writes Barnier of Raab. “He is no doubt fired up by his mission, but I am not sure we will be able to go into the detail of the negotiation with him, take account of facts and realities”.
European “Brexit fatigue” begins to sets in, Barnier writes, in the long months before Theresa May’s decision in May 2019 - following a series of humiliating defeats in the Commons and an inevitable extension to the talks - to step down, and Johnson’s triumphant arrival at No 10 two months later.
“Although his posturing and banter leave him open to it, it would be dangerous to underestimate Johnson,” writes Barnier. But Johnson, too, “advancing like a bulldozer, manifestly trying to muscle his way forwards”, seemed to the negotiator hobbled by the same fundamental British Brexit problem.
When one of Barnier’s 60-member team explains to Britain’s new prime minister the need for customs and quality checks on the Irish border, Barnier writes, it was “my impression that he became aware, in that discussion, of a series of technical and legal issues that had not been so clearly explained to him by his own team”.
As late as May 2020, Barnier records his surprise at the UK’s continued demands for “a simple Canada-type trade deal” while still retaining single market advantages “in innumerable sectors”. There remains “real incomprehension, in Britain, of the objective, sometimes mechanical consequences of its choices”, he writes.
With a backstop-free withdrawal agreement finally secured, Britain’s formal exit from the EU on 31 January 2020 leaves the negotiator “torn between emotions. Sadness, obviously: Brexit is a failure for the EU. It is also a waste, for the UK and for us. I still do not see the need for it, even from the point of view of Britain’s national interest.”
The transition year talks on a future trade deal were a rollercoaster, too, beginning with David Frost’s blunt announcement that London “did not feel bound by the political declaration it had just signed four months ago. That rather set the scene.”
Right up until the end, Barnier writes, the British team kept the Europeans busy, submitting a final legal text on the fraught subject of fisheries on 23 December last year “stuffed with traps, pseudo-compromises and attempts to backtrack”.
In an inauspicious postscript, he warns that while he was “proud to be part of the unity and solidarity of the EU” during the Brexit process, and pleased Britain had left with a functioning deal rather than without one, the bloc must now be vigilant.
British “provocations” over the Irish protocol will continue, he warns, while the UK government, “in an attempt to erase the consequences of the Brexit it provoked, will try to re-enter through the windows the single market whose door it slammed shut. We must be alert to new forms of cherrypicking.”
Nor does he expect London to wait long before “trying to use its new legislative and regulatory autonomy to give itself, sector by sector, a competitive advantage. Will that competition be free and fair? Will regulatory competition … lead to social, economic, fiscal dumping against Europe? We have tools to respond.”
Barnier’s final warning, however, is to the EU itself. “There are lessons to be drawn from Brexit,” he writes. “There are reasons to listen to the popular feeling that expressed itself then, and continues to express itself in many parts of Europe - and to respond to it. That is going to take time, respect and political courage.”
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/brexit/tory-quarrels-and-betrayals-determined-uk-s-post-brexit-future-says-barnier/ar-BB1gnmxy?ocid=msedgntp
EU Brexit negotiators had to act as the “adults in the room” in the face of repeated provocations from Boris Johnson which at times became “pathetic” and “almost childish”, Michel Barnier has said.
In his 500-page account of four and a half years of talks, the EU’s chief negotiator accuses Mr Johnson and his inner circle of “political piracy” and states baldly as negotiations reach their endgame: “I simply no longer trust them.”
At one point, after Mr Johnson threatened to tear up the laboriously negotiated agreement on the Irish border, Mr Barnier wrote that it appeared the UK was pursuing the “madman strategy” of pretending to be ready for a no-deal Brexit in order to force Brussels into concessions.
The Downing Street team were “not up to the challenge of Brexit”, and Mr Johnson himself appeared badly briefed in talks with European Commission presidents, said the Brussels negotiator.
After Mr Johnson took office at No 10 in 2019, Mr Barnier recorded that his team were repeatedly “incredulous” and “stupefied” as the UK sought to go back on agreements it had signed up to, created artificial deadlines and threatened to walk away from talks.
Right up to the last minute, a day before signing the Trade and Cooperation Agreement on Christmas Eve, the Johnson team were seeking advantage, presenting the EU with a legal text which was “peppered with traps, false compromises and backwards steps”, he said.
But his diary of the protracted negotiations records how Brussels had to provide Mr Johnson with a “ladder to climb down” to provide a smokescreen for him to re-enter talks after threatening to walk away.
Mr Barnier said that from the start he felt that the UK’s Brexiters did not understand the consequences of EU withdrawal and recorded he was “stupefied” by Theresa May’s 2017 speech in which she ruled out most forms of future cooperation with the remaining 27-nation bloc.
But he said he was in no doubt that when Mr Johnson succeeded her in July 2019, the new prime minister would be “pragmatic” about reaching a swift deal to neutralise the political threat of the Brexit Party and allow him to win an early election.
He described Mr Johnson as “like a bulldozer” during talks in September 2019, but with “something genuine and mischievous in his expression… a rather nice person”. Despite his jokes, it was important not to underestimate the new prime minister, he noted.
However, despite Mr Johnson’s bullish determination to get rid of the Northern Irish “backstop” negotiated by Ms May, Mr Barnier said the PM appeared during discussions on the issue “to be taking on board a series of practical and legal problems which had not been explained clearly enough to him by his team”.
After reaching a deal which got rid of the backstop by creating a customs border in the Irish Sea, Mr Barnier recorded his surprise to find Mr Johnson fighting that year’s election on the basis that there would be no controls on goods travelling between Northern Ireland and the British mainland, something which he said “does not correspond with the contents of the withdrawal agreement”.
And when close Mr Johnson ally David Frost took over negotiation of the subsequent trade deal, Mr Barnier said it came as “a thunderbolt” to hear him say that the UK did not regard itself as bound by the deal agreed just months earlier.
But it was Mr Johnson’s threat to tear up arrangements for the Irish border with the Internal Market Bill last September that prompted Mr Barnier to say he had lost trust in the PM.
“By acting in this way, the British government is engaging in no more or less than political piracy,” he wrote. “At that moment, I felt this threat like a betrayal of their word. Clearly, they are ready for anything.
“I find that the current team in 10 Downing St is not up to the challenges of Brexit nor to the responsibility that is theirs for having wanted Brexit. I simply no longer trust them.”
After a “glacial” dinner with Mr Frost in London, Mr Barnier wrote: “We could have suspended negotiations immediately, on the grounds that one does not negotiate under duress.
“But suspension of the negotiations for this grave reason - which was probably what the British were hoping for - would have put the blame for failure on us. We do not want to succumb to this provocation… We will make the British government face its responsibilities.”
The following month Mr Johnson dramatically announced that he was preparing for no deal, accusing the EU of failing to make concessions by a deadline which the PM had unilaterally set.
Accused by Mr Frost in a video call of failing to meet the UK’s efforts to find a deal, Mr Barnier recorded that he and his team “looked at one another with incredulity. It was almost childish”.
And he added: “This episode seemed to me to be quite pathetic. We have had many reasons over the course of the past weeks and months, in reaction to one British declaration or posture or the other, to lose our patience and dramatise the talks. But once again we mastered our nerves.”
Discussing the incident, he recorded an aide saying: “We always knew we would reach a crisis. Now we are here, we must do what we always said we would do and be the ‘adults in the room’.”
The “psychodrama orchestrated by London” resolved itself within days after Mr Barnier repeated in a speech a form of words about sovereignty which would allow Mr Johnson to back away from his threat.
But he said that Mr Johnson continued to threaten no deal if Brussels would not make concessions, as if out of “wishful thinking” that “everything would go well, or not too badly”, when in fact it would have very serious consequences for both the EU and UK.
At one point he told Mr Frost directly: “Your negotiating tactics are a masquerade. You are trying to play with us. I won’t put up with it for long. If you want a deal, you will have to move.”
In a crunch meeting with Ursula von der Leyen to seek a final breakthrough, Mr Johnson appeared “not to have taken the time to go through the detail himself with his team in advance”, telling the Commission president that he was ready to be flexible over fishing rights but needed to be able to show that the UK had won back its sovereignty in time for the next general election in three years.
Right up until the sealing of the trade deal on Christmas Eve, Mr Barnier said Mr Johnson and Mr Frost tried to strike side deals and go over his head with appeals to national leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel.
But after the trade deal was signed on a “day of relief, tinged with sadness”, Mr Barnier recorded that he had achieved the EU’s negotiating goals thanks to the “unity and solidarity” of the 27 member states.
Even after the TCA was agreed, he said that “British provocations” continued, with threats to breach the deal over the Northern Ireland border and UK government ministers opening talking about using “social, economic and fiscal dumping” to gain a competitive edge over Europe.
But in a warning to London, he wrote: “We must remain alert against all new kinds of cherry-picking… We have put into the Trade and Cooperation Agreement the tools we need to respond.”
Mr Barnier said that the 2016 Leave campaign was “fuelled by caricatures and untruths” including Mr Johnson’s promise, on the side of his bus, of £350m a week for the NHS. And he said that Nigel Farage’s refugee posters “recalled the excesses of propaganda from another age”.
But he said that the message of Brexit for the EU was the need to “listen to expressions of popular sentiment … and respond to them [with] respect and political courage”.
Explaining the choice of title for his book, La Grande Illusion, Mr Barnier wrote: “The great illusion is to think that you can face the world and its often brutal transformations alone… and to believe in the promise of an identity and a sovereignty based on solitude rather than solidarity.”
- La Grande Illusion (Journal secret du Brexit) is published in French by Gallimard on 6 May and in English in October.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/brexit/barnier-hits-back-at-childish-and-pathetic-brexit-strategies-of-boris-johnson/ar-BB1gnW2U?ocid=msedgntp
https://uk.yahoo.com/news/royal-navy-ships-ordered-jersey-190118269.html
Speaking today, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken warned a post-Brexit trade deal with the UK will not be signed any time soon.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/joe-biden-blow-boris-handed-brexit-trade-deal-warning-with-us-may-take-some-time/ar-BB1gpRJM?ocid=msedgntp
Millions of Britons retiring abroad could have their state pensions dramatically slashed following Brexit.
A change in the way the state pension is calculated will result in lower weekly payouts for many who have lived abroad during their working lives.
All expats who relocate to the European Union and have previously lived in Australia, Canada or New Zealand will be impacted by the change, which has been announced by the Government. This comes as a direct consequence of the UK leaving the EU and will take effect from January 2022.
https://uk.yahoo.com/finance/news/state-pensions-slashed-britons-retiring-110831567.html
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-57006283
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-56982383
However....all those fisherman/farmers who believed the rhetoric and frankly wanted their cake and eat it ( Europe can’t fish in our waters, but please carryon and buying 80+% of the UK catches...please)
My mates a sheep farmer, voted Brexit( had an EU grant that paid his annual rent) , has seen the price of lamb decrease, his EU market disappear and his expectations that the UK market would absorb the lamb even though it was much more expensive than the NZ options....talk about shagginghimself