The 'EU money' we have lost (again)

I suppose I ought to cover these signs of growing nagging in the Remainer camp. There have been a few of them lately.

This one is fairly easy to deal with, beginning with the old myth that the EU gave us money.It also begins with a big scarey headline although the story gets much more complicated for anyone with the stamina to read on:

UK ministers pledged to match EU funds after Brexit. How’s that going?

Delays to new programmes have affected support for vulnerable people, ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’

In recent years, two flagship EU programmes were a lifeline for communities across the UK. The European regional development fund (ERDF) and the European social fund (ESF) poured €10.8bn (£9.26bn) into roads, factories and social inclusion projects including further education colleges and into places such as Wales, north-east England, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly – paying for everything from carpentry workshops for blind people to an upgrade of Hayle harbour in Cornwall to facilitate an offshore windfarm.

The ERDF sank capital into everything from new roads to university facilities, business hubs and sports centres in economically deprived regions, while the ESF skills training, back to work schemes and other projects helped those “furthest” from jobs.

...ministers pledged to match EU funding for the duration of the parliament, setting up the UK shared prosperity fund (UKSPF) last December promising that the government, rather than Brussels, would choose where money was spent – part of the Brexit dividend.

But it hasn’t turned out like that; in Wales, people speak of a cliff edge in funding that has caused “despair” and “disappointment” [Wales and Scotland seem to be the main complainers -- funny that]

Hundreds of voluntary organisations have had to shut up shop or end support programmes for the most vulnerable in society because of government delays in replacing EU funding, it has emerged.

Getting to details, though:

the EU-funded £15m sports centre is still an eye-catching monolith in the former steel town of Ebbw Vale, where 62%, the highest percentage in Wales, voted to leave.[but] They wanted jobs, not sports centres, the town lamented back in 2016. 

The government pledged to keep splashing the cash to replace the EU programmes until 2025 and in December announced £2.6m had been earmarked for its long-awaited replacement scheme, the UKSPF, which would “turbo charge levelling-up” and give “local leaders greater say in how the money is spent”.

But the announcement, welcome as it finally was, was too late for “hundreds of organisations”.... the problem that we have with the UK shared prosperity fund is that all that experience is being lost.”[because] the eight-month delay is crippling projects 

And, right at the end of a fairly long article:

The UK received the equivalent of £1.35bn a year under the old system. ['received back' that should be,of course] December’s announcement accounts for just under £870m on average a year, but the government has pledged to ramp up the UKSPF funding to £1.5bn by 2024-25....The UKSPF was the only fund that explicitly replaces EU funding, but Cornwall, for instance, reckons it is getting the equivalent of EU funding when two other government funds are included....

Analysis of the UKSPF allocations by local authority and nation shows there is money for everywhere, not just the deprived areas.

“Every place in the UK has been allocated a share of the UKSPF, with even the smallest places receiving at least £1m. This recognises that even the most affluent parts of the UK contain pockets of deprivation and need support,” the government said in its prospectus....It added that under the spending plans, “England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are all receiving at least as much as they did before”, while “local councils and local partners will have the opportunity to adapt each plan to reflect new economic priorities over the period to 2025”....The big advantage of the post-Brexit scheme, said Gardner, is that it is the council, not a Brussels deprivation metric, that determines where the money goes.

 

 

Did Brexit cause Megxit? Does anyone care?

 More details in the Times

Although the couple do not talk about Brexit in the Netflix documentary, commentators in the programme make the link between racism and the vote to leave the EU. Harry talked about “unconscious bias” in the royal family and “racist undertones” in media coverage.

The imagery used in the programme includes clips of a Brexit protest and Boris Johnson promising to “take back control of the country”.

The historian and author David Olusoga provides commentary that the pair’s relationship was “embedding itself in a nation having a pretty toxic debate about the European Union”. James Holt, executive director of their Archewell Foundation, called the 2016 referendum a “perfect storm that gave credence to jingoism and nationalism”.

Lord Frost, who was Brexit minister under Johnson, said the link “resurrects the tired old criticism that our decision to leave the EU was driven by racism and even asserts that such attitudes worsened the pressures on their marriage”. He added: “This smear just does not stand up to examination.” He told the Daily Mail the couple were “either ignorant of the real facts or making deliberately incorrect claims for political reasons”.

Elsewhere

Serving as their proxy, Hirsch rejected the established purpose of the modern Commonwealth since its founding in 1949 as “the free association of its independent member nations” to promote good government, education, economic development, environmental policies and human rights. Instead, she offered a malevolent and wholly inaccurate view. The Commonwealth was nothing less than a “privileged club” that she called “Empire 2.0”. She said its purpose was to extract wealth from former colonies and keep them “inter-generationally poor”. It was an astonishing repudiation not only of Charles but the legacy of his late mother.

In the Daily Mail (sorry),Lord Frost is quoted at slightly more length:

'All opinion surveys show that Britain is an unusually welcoming country to people of all backgrounds, has among the lowest levels of racism in Europe, and is most positive about diversity [certainly the EU's own one does -- see Briefings for Brexit or this blog passim]

He went on: 'Polling at the time of the Brexit vote shows that the real reason for the decision to leave was a wish to restore self-government and the sovereignty of our institutions, concepts about which one might have expected members of our thousand-year-old Royal Family to have a greater understanding and empathy.'

Megxit and Brexit

 Among the guests on the Harry'n'Meghan Netflix lovein were Graun stalwarts Afua (call me Afwah, you racist!) Hirsch and D Olusoga. Both have appeared in this specific blog, Hirsch most spectacularly for saying in the run up to the Referendum that one(!) black man she had spoken to had predicted the return of Teddy Boys running through the streets beating up black people .

Olusoga has produed some very good work on the history of slavery in the UK and traced the massive amounts of compensation paid to British families after the trade was stopped. Since then he has been an enthusiastic member of the lobby that sees racism as everywhere, in all sorts of subtle and covert forms, in microaggressions like raised eyebrows, nods, winks, glances and questions like 'Where do you come from?'  It has been developed by Black Lives Matter and its academic wing Critical Race Theory and is currently very popular, strong enough to affect the content of some academic journals in fact. 

The Netflix documentary was apparently awash with that perspective although I didn't watch it. As a supporting act on the Netflix piece, Olusoga's remarks concerned British racism. The Graun misses the specific chance to link the two issues, and the only item I coud find on Hirsch's contribution was a piece by Olusoga in the Graun in 2017) on the phrase 'Empire 2.0' which Hirsch used in the documentary ( but did not invent -- they just take in each other's washing):

 Whitehall officials had described plans for Britain’s post-Brexit trading relationship with the Commonwealth as “Empire 2.0"

The Graun today offers a general review, which follows most of the British press in seeing the 3-hour documentary as overblown, but recommends:

3. David Olusoga and Afua Hirsch should present a show about the British empire

By far the most enjoyable parts of the series have been the bits where Harry and Meghan leave David Olusoga and Afua Hirsch to give us a potted run-through of the British empire. In these parts, the weird reality-show pity-party vibe gives way to something much more meaty. We hear about British slavery, and how much of it was controlled by the royal family. We hear about the Commonwealth, and how it’s really just a last-ditch effort to cling to past glories. We see old colonial relics that line the palaces of the UK. What’s fascinating is that Harry doesn’t seem to be entirely onboard with the notion; there are times where he speaks fondly of “travelling halfway across the Commonwealth” as if he thinks it’s the entire world. But anyway, a whole show like this, unvarnished and contemporary, would be tremendous.

Returning to the missed links with Brexit, according to the Spectator:

Probably the most amusing part of the series is the insinuation that somehow the vote to leave the EU in 2016 was linked to criticism of the couple. A grim-faced Harry says the series is not ‘just about our story’, adding: ‘This has always been much bigger than us’.

Academic David Olusoga then says, unchallenged, that the ‘fairy tale’ of Harry and Meghan was ’embedding itself in a nation that is having a pretty toxic debate about the European Union.’ He continues that ‘immigration was at the absolute centre’ of that debate, and that ‘immigration is very often in this country a cipher for race’, followed by a series of clips of Brits making racist comments.