Perfidious Albion wants to make its own champagne

Signs today that the Brexit negotiators really know how to brass off Johnny Foreigner with this

 The UK government has renewed its attempt to reopen the chapter of the Brexit divorce treaty protecting specialty food and drink, such as Parma ham, roquefort cheese and champagne, in a move that left the EU chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, “a little bit flabbergasted”.

Makes a chnage form intolerably smug and complacent. Those dastardly Brits!

The UK government has renewed its attempt to reopen the chapter of the Brexit divorce treaty protecting specialty food and drink, such as Parma ham, roquefort cheese and champagne, in a move that left the EU chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, “a little bit flabbergasted”.

 Bit of balance

The government disputes the EU description of its proposal and argues Barnier is making unprecedented demands to tie Britain to European standards – demands, it says, not made on other trade partners such as Canada or Japan.

A UK government official said the British proposal on specialty foods was “in line with the withdrawal agreement” and would provide protection for existing and future GIs  [geogrpahical indicator -- EC term for labelling produce with place namsde]or both sides “as is standard” across the EU’s free-trade agreements. “The UK proposal would allow existing EU GIs that meet the requirements of the UK’s new domestic regime to be protected in the UK,” the official said.

 However, J Foreinger seems piqued:

One EU diplomat, who had not seen the text, said it was “not very useful because it focused mainly on offensive issues for the UK”, meaning issues where the government is seeking an advantage.

Offensive in every sense,possibly

'Europe' might finally get it?

The Owl of Minerva finally takes to the air over Europe, via an EU press handout faithfully printed in the Guradnia  :

EU officials now believe the UK government is prepared to risk a no-deal exit when the transition period comes to an end on 31 December, and will try to pin the blame on Brussels if talks fail...A UK document leaked to the Sun on Sunday, warning of public disorder, shortages and price hikes in the event of a no-deal Brexit, was perceived in Brussels as a sign of the government’s seriousness about leaving the EU single market and customs union with no agreement.

And as a tat for some tit:

Germany has scrapped plans to discuss Brexit at a high-level diplomatic meeting next week because there has not been “any tangible progress” in talk...Dropping Brexit from next week’s diplomatic agenda is a sign of deepening pessimism in Brussels. “People underestimate how bleak the mood is in the EU negotiation team,” said an EU official who added that time was running out [has the clock stopped ticking?] to negotiate a complex legal treaty expected to exceed 400 pages.

Well yes -- 400 pages and no doubt yards of explanatory notes. We will need to extend the transition period no doubt. There is some comfort in noting that 'EU sources are increasingly frustrated with the UK chief negotiator, David Frost' So much more stubborn than the patsy Olllie Robbins (remember him?).

Hilariously:

“More and more people have come to the conclusion that Brexit ideology trumps Brexit pragmatism in the UK government,” the diplomat [Barnier?] said. “If the UK really wanted to jump off the Brexit cliff for ideological reasons, there would be no way for the EU to stop this.” If the UK’s negotiating stance became “more pragmatic and realistic”, there was still a chance to save the talks, they added.

Even the Grun notes that:

For the EU, “pragmatism” means accepting that tariff-free access to the single market necessitates common standards on environment, state aid, worker and consumer protection – a position rejected by the UK.

And in the name of balance (and probably because there was another convenient press release)

British officials hit back, accusing the EU of slowing progress by insisting that all difficult issues had to be resolved in parallel. “The EU’s insistence that nothing can now progress until we have accepted EU positions on fisheries and state aid policy is a recipe for holding up the whole negotiation at a moment when time is short for both sides,” said a UK source close to negotiations...“We are also faced with the EU’s frustrating insistence on parallelism, meaning that they will not progress areas apart from these ‘difficult’ ones until we have moved towards their position on them. That’s a sure way to hold up the negotiations.

 The Graun editorial personalises as ever:

[Johnson]...deals in grand ambitions, not plans for their realisation. When things go wrong he shifts the blame... He operates one day at a time, stumbling from one problem to the next, with no sense of a strategic horizon.

The problem is most extreme in relation to Brexit. Every stage of the UK’s uncoupling from the EU has been mapped out by treaty, including the expiry of transitional arrangements at the end of this year. By then, a free trade deal is supposed to have been negotiated and ratified. That is getting harder with each passing week. The impediment is British reluctance [of course] to recognise what is realistically available, or understand the imbalances of power in negotiations between a lone country and a continental trading bloc.

The UK still demands pristine sovereignty, [imagine!] with no obligation to align its standards with EU markets, plus a right to subsidise domestic industries to a degree not permitted under Brussels rules [the Guardia might finally be getting it too].

The Garun editorial team might be relaying Brussels views with this?

A report that Tony Abbott, a former Australian prime minister, might take on a senior trade advisory role is a case in point. Setting aside Mr Abbott’s notoriously rebarbative character, the appointment would be consistent with the myth, common among Brexit supporters, that trade deals are conjured into being by swaggering personalities....The reality is that good outcomes in a trade deal are achieved by the application of time, attention to detail, experienced negotiators and a rational appraisal of the other side’s interests.

Only nice people cosmopolitan, cultured, European, one might say, should negotiate then. More KitKat anyone?

 

 

End of the world --blue passports arrive

Poor Z Williams. As if covid wasn't enough, now the final insult of having to carry a blue passport. This is one of the many important symbolic issues that have puzzled me. Why is it so important to the new petitie bourgeoisie (UrbanJournalist Faction)?

My blue passport has arrived – and with it a crushing new sense of our Brexit nightmare

We definitely are not in the EU any more. No stars, just a lion, a unicorn and a peculiar illustration of the UK. Yet that’s not even the worst thing about this document

a peculiar and bereft [?] illustration of the UK, with Northern Ireland a floating blob, the rest of the landmass etched out like Trotsky’s face. I don’t know why I should find this so disappointing. Obviously on some subconscious level, I thought it was all a dream, or a joke.

The colour, meanwhile, is not the nostalgia kick you might have hoped for, if that was your thing, since it genuinely is blue, while the pre-EU ones looked more like black. This somehow says it all about the Brexit project, that it would fight to the death over a principle that was trivial and wrong. [Well yes -- but isn't that you Remainers?] Three flowers and a shamrock are embossed on the back, for poetry I suppose, except the daffodil could be any flower, and the overall effect is of someone finding free graphics on the internet for a superbly boring PowerPoint presentation.

No taste, these ghastly Brexiteers. The shame! It's far more personal than that though:

Yet by far the worst thing about it was my own photo, as ever, contriving to look meaner and more like Myra Hindley than the last, which was itself the worst picture I had ever taken. Remarkably, and powerfully, this lifted my spirits. Some things never change. Every passport has a worse photo than the last – even, mysteriously, one you lost after only six months. But everything else can change, and who knows, by 2030, the blue years could be over.

Overall --a valiant attempt to fill space in the Silly Season but even more absurd and contradictory than usual. Would her photo have looked better in a pinky/brown cover? 

For me the real story lies in the  background:

In February, I lost my passport in the stupidest way yet. I was not mugged, pickpocketed or burgled (passports one to three), I did not drop it in a pond (passport four), or lose it in a house move (passport five), I just walked through a station in a bit of a daze, and by the time I got to my platform, it was gone

Pretty  unlikely I would say, especially the last one. Bit of a daze? Lost mysteriously after six months? Williams is obviously selling passports to or being targeted by people smugglers. 

 

European values dominate talks on asylum-seekers

Obfuscation  and contempt seem clear in the Grud's news today 

EU rejects British plan for post-Brexit return of asylum seekers 

the UK plan has been described in Brussels as “very unbalanced” and “not good enough”....European diplomats stress that the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, has no power to negotiate a readmission agreement on migrants with the UK. The Frenchman’s negotiating mandate, laid down by 27 governments, makes vague proposals for cooperation and “regular dialogues” on managing the thousands of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa....European nations are unsympathetic to a country on the north-western fringes that receives relatively few asylum applications

It's not just about realpolitk, of course -- there's shroud-waving as well.

Talks on a post-Brexit deal continue this week amid rising tensions between the UK and France following the death of a Sudanese teenager while attempting to cross the Channel in an inflatable dinghy.

 

Hutton wants to tell everyone 'Told you so', except Tony Blair

W Hutton is finally getting sensible again in the Observer today.

If the Tories truly want to reshape the country, they should help to buy Arm

Arm is a 'tech giant' which Hutton has written about before: 

Weeks after the referendum vote [sign of a link to come] , Britain lost its biggest and best technology company – Arm – to the predatory charms of the megalomaniac Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank. Son, who this year compared himself to Jesus, paid $32bn (£24bn), the highest price ever for a European hi-tech company....venal City shareholders, ignorant of what they owned, were only too ready to pocket handsome profits....[Son] is now trying to sell Arm, which has languished under his ownership. It is available for no more than what he paid for it and presents a heaven-sent opportunity to reverse what never should have happened.

 By 2016, [Arm] had become as important in its world as a Google or Apple – and British. The genius is that it is a kind of public-interest commercial company: licensing state-of-the art instruction sets that can be implemented in silicon architecture by everyone. It was in nobody’s pocket. Its business, as its chief founder, Tudor Brown, acknowledges, relied on it never betraying its neutrality. 

Sounds a bit like the image the Graundina has of itself, but fair enough. He has venal  and ignorant City shareholders, megalomaniac robber-baron capitalists, short-termism, and an example of a better business model.

A future owner could almost trash Arm in the pursuit of its own commercial ends....Nvidia, reported to be in advanced talks with Son, is just such a possible owner..... Once it owns Arm it will withdraw its licensing agreements from its competitors, notably Intel and Huawei, and after July next year take the rump of Arm to Silicon Valley, just as Google has done with the British AI company DeepMind. Arm, and Britain’s hopes to be a player in hi-tech, will be dead.

Stil a bit odd for such a European that a hi tech giant stands for Britain and that its values are somehow obviously British, but still OK. Hutton wants the UK Government to intervene:

Britain could act. The government could offer a foundational investment of, say, £3bn-£5bn and invite other investors – some industrial, some sovereign wealth funds, some commercial asset managers – to join it in a coalition to buy Arm and run it as an independent quoted company, serving the worldwide tech industry

Only ideology gets in the way of seeing the obvious sense of this proposal:

The problem is that the Tories are so starstruck by the notion that anything private is always best – hence the succession of scandals, from Chris Grayling’s deal with a ferry company with no ferries to buying £150m of inoperable masks from a dodgy “entrepreneur” – that they don’t understand the need for public action on this scale and ambition. Equally, there is a powerful strain in the Labour party whose instinctive solution is to nationalise.

If only there was some sort of 'Third Way'? Some Prime Minister interested in the Third Way, some statesman wanting to rise above mere party ideology...

Anyway, all that is over, so what's the lesson for we deluded Leavers?

Theresa May and Philip Hammond, joined with Nigel Farage to prove their pro-Brexit credentials [May and Hammond?] by hymning, nonsensically, the [Son] deal as showing Britain was “open for business” (code for being asset-stripped)...The open question is whether Brexit Tories, forced by reality, might change. This kind of audacious deal could appeal to Johnson and Cummings, a statement of intent to match China in our commitment to a decisive presence in 21st-century hi-tech. Brexit was meant to give Britain the freedom to make this kind of move [and is this claim valid in these circumstances?]. So Brexiters, show us the money. I am not holding my breath.

 

Silly season at hte Graun

The Guardian has guessed right about Brexit all along, so we can trust this editorial

 The Guardian view on Brexit bureaucracy: tied up in red tape

Always one to oppose red tape, the Guardian

As the clock runs down [!] to the end of the transition period on 31 December, ministers are no longer bothering to offer the false hope of a relatively frictionless trade agreement with the EU. Even a Canada-style free trade deal will mean a vast infrastructure of compliance and checks: permits for lorry drivers to enter Kent, huge customs clearance centres and tracking apps are all in the mix. The government estimates that, from 2021, there will be over 400m extra customs checks a year on goods going to and from the EU.

The Graun is left only with its final fallback:

 As the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has acknowledged, re-litigating Brexit is a pointless exercise. But given the immediate context, the folly of not extending the transition period becomes more apparent with each passing week...As one senior figure in the pharmaceutical industry put it recently, there is a desperate need for “a bit of breathing space” as companies face an unprecedented set of variables and unknowns. But even at a time of national crisis, the theological demands of Brexit continue to trump all practical considerations.

The link goes to a lengthy list of worries in the Pharmaceutical Journal -- the Graun's fiercely independent and talented editorial staff have largely filleted that and added their own bit about how they told us so, and how we must extend transition. I assume all the staff are on holiday.

 

 

 

 

Luvvies leave for Europe?

Another old friend in the Observer today as all intelligent and right-mindedfolk get ready to leave the narrow and racist post-Brexit UK and re-establish in Europe:

Brexit fuels brain drain as skilled Britons head to the EU

The study says that migration from the UK to EU countries has increased by about 30% compared to pre-Brexit numbers. Britons living in other EU countries who decided to obtain EU member state passports as well as their UK ones had increased by more than 500% overall, and by 2,000% in Germany....Dr Daniel Auer, a co-author of the report, said: “These increases in numbers are of a magnitude that you would expect when a country is hit by a major economic or political crisis.”

And Europe knows a bit about major crises. What sort of real numbers are we talking about though?

There are now about 1.2 million British citizens living in the EU, between 120,000 and 150,000 of which are in Germany [bit vague]. In the four years since the Brexit referendum [bit naughty because the figures only go up to 2019?] , 31,600 Brits have been granted dual British/German citizenship: 2019 saw 14,600 naturalisations compared to 622 in 2015

So far, peanuts, but the Observer spots a trend: 

Brexit has begun a steady drain of the most talented and productive people to the continent....A British academic in his 40s, who is married with a young family – and who migrated in July 2016 [!] – told researchers: “The referendum happened and we immediately changed our minds about buying a house in Bristol. Our whole emigration decision hung on the referendum result.”..

That, and the date of the findings (2019) might give us pause -- that was when there was all the uncertainty and panic, and no covid-19. I wonder what the 2020 figures will be. And how many EU people came the other way? This week's Briefings for Britain also deconstructs the story

There is not always greener grass,of course:

Some struggled to find a job. “I have still not found work, which is not what I expected […] The cost of the move in personal and financial terms is always difficult to foresee, and I’m starting to wonder if I underestimated the risk involved,” said a British IT worker

 Meanwhile, J Rayner ( 'the Observer’s restaurant critic and a feature writer') er... writes:

this first report from the National Food Strategy...was received across the world of food production and policy [who they? See below for a clue] with at best eye-rolling and at worst exasperation. It is the product of grubby politics, includes worrying proposals on post-Brexit trade policy, muddled thinking on the causes of poverty and risks wasting a golden opportunity to answer one of the most important challenges of the 21st century: how we feed ourselves.

Gove had just the person [to lead the Strategy]: his close friend Henry Dimbleby. He started out as a journalist, then moved into management consultancy, before founding the healthier fast food chain Leon. In 2013, when Gove was education secretary, Dimbleby had published a review into school food provision. But, for all his diligent work in the sector, he has no qualifications in food policy... [not like Rayner then?]...Dimbleby spent the night of the 2016 Brexit referendum at Gove’s house and had voted Leave [definitely not like Rayner]

He acknowledges the impact of poverty and proposes short-term fixes such as extending free school meals, he fails to recognise that systematic inequality is caused by a failure of long-term government economic policy. [does the Observer?] But then that would be to criticise Downing Street. Likewise, he regularly refers to the “freedoms” offered by leaving the EU, without considering whether the Brexit he voted for will blight the lives of the impoverished children he clearly cares about so deeply....it is the section on post-Brexit trade policy that is most troubling. It reads as if he has taken dictation direct from government. He robustly defends the government’s recent vote against the amendment to the agriculture bill, introduced by MP Neil Parish, which would have prevented the ratification of any trade agreements allowing the importation of food not produced to standards of production and welfare equivalent to those in the UK.

Last week, Defra officials were quietly telling interested parties [ah!] not to waste too much energy on Dimbleby’s findings and to focus instead on lobbying over the contents of the white paper.