Two workers are painstakingly arranging a mosaic of hundreds of tiny Versace-designed grey and white patterned tiles. A welder stands by ready to seal it into the wall of one of hundreds of units the company is constructing for the Dubai-owned Damac tower block in Nine Elms, south-west London. Deba is also proud of having completed no fewer than 1,242 bathrooms for the Battersea power station conversion – “one of our biggest showpieces so far”, Von Gruben says....Elsewhere a shower wall cut out of Thessaloniki Grigio marble is destined for a luxury development next to the Shard, for now the EU’s tallest building, which Deba is kitting out with 290 bathrooms.
There's a rallying cry for any new emotional and patriotic case for Remain -- vote for luxury German bathrooms in posh buildings! The piece ends with a recognition, at last, of the potential damage to the German economy should it all go 'crashing' next month:
€85bn Value of German exports to the UK in 2017
7% Proportion of all German exports that go to the UK
50% Estimate by German Economic Institute of potential fall in UK-German trade after a no-deal Brexit
I hope that concentrates their minds a bit and stops all the arrogant swaggering and hypocritical bleating about the 4 sacred freedoms (which we don't seem to hear much about these days, come to think of it).
As an example of what brinkmanship might achieve, another story reviews the Irish border issue:
An August 2017 paper from the UK pushed the case for keeping Northern Ireland in the single electricity market for starters – “to keep the lights on” – and nodded at the need for regulatory equivalence for agri-food measures to avoid checks on animals and plants. The basis of the single market aspect of the Irish backstop was already there. A political fix, not a technical one...There was also the first concerted stab in a second paper at proposing a technological arrangement for customs. One option was a “highly streamlined customs arrangement” comprising trusted trader schemes with licence plate technology and exemptions for small businesses conducting 80% of cross-border trade in Northern Ireland. A second was a “customs partnership” in which the UK would collect duties on the EU’s behalf for goods destined for the bloc...Alarms bells rang in Dublin. Before they were even presented in the negotiations after the summer break, the ideas were trashed to reporters by EU officials as “magical thinking”. “We hadn’t even had a meeting by then,” a source admitted.
As the deadline approaches, things might be changing:
Today neither EU nor UK officials rule out a technological solution for the border at some point. In order to entice MPs to vote for the withdrawal agreement, it is understood the EU is looking at spelling out how just such a solution might work in the future, and its determination to work on the current problems
However:
Asked how the UK’s fresh groping for technological fixes is being viewed in Brussels, sources point to Weyand’s recent comments. “The [British] negotiators have not been able to explain them to us and that’s not their fault,” she said. “It’s because they don’t exist.”
And never will? Europe -- land of the old technology.
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