Deja vu with Frexit?

 Some Graun worry abut Le Pen and the French elections reveal the operations of the EU in a familiar way. Let me say I have worries about le Pen all of my own, but they are different from the ones highlighted here. For the Graun: 

Many of her concrete policy proposals, however, blatantly contradict the obligations of EU membership....Her “sovereigntist, protectionist, nationalist” agenda would “totally contradict the French commitment to European integration [of other governments] ” and includes “proposals which are in total breach of the treaties to which France has subscribed,” he said....Key to Le Pen’s plans is an early referendum on a proposed law on “citizenship, identity and immigration” that would modify the constitution to allow a “national priority” for French citizens in employment, social security benefits and public housing – a measure incompatible with EU values and free movement rules....The same referendum would establish “the primacy of national law over European law” to allow France “not only to control immigration but, in every other area, reconcile its European engagement with the preservation of its national sovereignty and the defence of its interests”...Le Pen also aims to re-establish border controls on imports and people, violating EU and Schengen rules, and unilaterally cut France’s contribution to the EU budget – when the bloc’s multi-annual financial framework for 2021 to 2027 is already fixed. Further plans to cut taxes on essential goods and fuel would breach EU free market rules.

 

The EU as it exists today, Le Pen said earlier this year, was “neglectful of peoples, and domineering of nations”, an “intrusive and authoritarian” bloc locked into “a globalist, open-border ideology” that was “destroying our identity”.

 

We see the same old problems here though. Even if these policies are popular, even if they get the support of the electorate in France:

 

EU legal experts have pointed out that even so much as holding a referendum on the primacy of national law would be in breach of European treaties....[It would encourage others and this] .. “would be the end of a rule of law, values-based European Union”.

Keep doing the arithmetic until you get the answer you want

 Big scandal in the Graun about levelling up and the promise to replace the EU money for the regions in GB

‘An outrage’: Tories’ post-Brexit fund will not match EU grants until 2025

Well -- not a very long time to wait in the circumstances you might think but fair enough, they did promise, and apparently, the shortfall 'will leave English regions tens of millions of pounds worse off than when Britain was in the EU'

So scandal! No funds for regional development until 2025? Not quite...

The Department for Levelling Up insisted that it was “delivering on the UK government’s commitment to match the average spending of EU structural funds” by matching the EU’s £1.5bn in 2025. It said areas would continue to receive EU funding until the end of 2024..

Then a strange objection by those outraged (the Director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership it seems)  I really do not understand:

However, regional leaders and policy experts accused the government of using “smoke and mirrors” by counting old EU money over the next two years....Henri Murison, the director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said: “We were promised that no nation would be worse off post-Brexit but, when you take out the smoke and mirrors, the data doesn’t lie.

But why would you 'take out' this 'EU money'? Why is it smoke and mirrors? It is still being provided. (NB see the endless argument that this is NOT actually 'EU money' anyway, but GB rebated money). Is there a real cut or is this an accountants' cut using figures projected on estimates of what the Government should have been providing had there been no 'EU money' until 2024 which is what the various 'regional leaders and policy experts' seem to have expected? An expectation that there would be more money after Brexit, which was opposed,  leads to a feeling of being worse off because it is only the same as when we were in Europe?

Neil O’Brien, a levelling up minister, took to Twitter on Thursday to defend the scheme, insisting that the government was “matching in real terms what each place got on average from the [2014-2020] programme”.

 But the outrage shifts ground again:

Whereas EU grants were delivered over seven years, the Shared Prosperity Fund model is for only three years....a “serious blow for levelling up” that would stifle ambitious long-term investment

Whatever the precise pros and cons, we are actually a long way from the simplicity of the headline, of course.

Save the luvvies own channel

Channel 4, like much of the BBC, broke cover as a  result of the great struggles over Brexit and adopted openly partisan positions as the spokespersons of the new petite bourgeoisie. Many specific examples of C4 news coverage of Brexit-related issues  have been provided in this blog. The culture wars have opened on different fronts, of course but are still raging, and, understandably, it looks like the Government has had enough and are proposing to sell it off altogether.

I am not sure I agree with this, which seems like a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but I do think C4 News needs new editors and reporters. They now have the appalling E Wren who used to edit Newsnight, and still feature prominently the pompous and self-righteous callers-out and monologuists C Newman,  K Guru-Murthy and M Frei.

Nevertheless, the proposal has horrified luvvies and we can see the underlying schisms in things like the six pieces in today's Graun opposing the idea of selling off the Channel. Some are quite well-reasoned if a bit tone deaf to the issues of minority tastes: it is common to claim the Channel is popular because its programmes win luvvie awards for example.

Thus for the editorial:'... there are wonderful bright spots – shows such as Russell T Davies’ It’s A Sin, about young British gay men at the start of the Aids crisis, and the comedy We Are Lady Parts, about a Muslim women’s post-punk band'

Exactly the sort of thing we should all be interested in.

D Byrne (former Head of News) defends her former fiefdom by saying C4 News is broadcast for a whole hour and costs a lot of money -- but says nothing about the content being endless complaining and Boris-bating or Brexiteer-bullying in one or two notorious cases, or the waste of money putting C Newman in touch with G Lavrov only to have her ask him if he could sleep at night.

 Unfortunately, I needed to register to access the other 4. They seemed pretty repetitive.

The response to D Byrne's plea was inevitable and came in a letter to the Times today (April 7 2022):

Ms Byrne's myopic inability to acknowledge Channel 4's glaring left-leaning bias is sadly typical of the "nanny-knows-best" group think with which she and so many of her peers are infected that increasingly  divides them from the public, the very audience they are there to serve

Once they opted to nag us all so hard over Brexit they invited this sort of response I am afraid. They can't claim to be 'public service' any more: the veil has dropped.

 

 

Damp squib manages small pop

After all the hysterics about the terminal effects of Brexit on the City, comes this in el Gruno today:

Brexit: more than 7,000 finance jobs have left London for EU, EY finds

[However]  the total is well down on the 12,500 job moves forecast by firms in 2016, when Britain voted to leave the bloc, [but]  more could follow, [and]  new local hires linked to Brexit totalled 2,900 across Europe, and 2,500 in Britain, where just over 1 million people work in the financial services sector.

 

The correct line reinforced by the Graun editor

None of this recent wobbling about Brexit, the EU and the war in Ukraine (see the post below) for the Graun today: 

The Guardian view on Boris Johnson in Brussels: drop the Brexit rhetoric 

It is true that Brexit doesn’t prevent the prime minister taking an active role in supporting Ukraine against Kremlin aggression. British military hardware is appreciated on the frontline. Mr Johnson can be in the loop of western diplomacy without a seat at the EU table. He will also be attending a Nato summit in Brussels on Thursday...[However]the US president recognises something that Mr Johnson denies – the European Council is a place where decisions of consequence are made. The prime minister would serve his country’s interests better from inside the room.

[Still annoyed at the silly analogy] Mr Johnson made a speech last week drawing a grotesque comparison between Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion and the UK’s decision to leave the EU. Both reflected a common appetite for liberty, the prime minister said, mining a depth of crass cynicism to which even staunch critics did not think him capable of sinking.

[Milking gallant little Ukraine's stand]The trivialising thrust of the analogy was made all the more insulting in the context of Ukrainian ambitions to join the very European project that Mr Johnson casts as an imperial aggressor. For Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the EU and Nato are twin pillars of a democratic European order that stands in opposition to the worldview advanced by Vladimir Putin, where the rule of law is meaningless, might is right and borders are erased at a dictator’s whim.

Mr Putin...sees undermining EU solidarity as instrumental to the goal of sabotaging western interests. That is why he backed Brexit.

[So  what exactly is at stake?]EU solidarity, resolute at the start of the war, is under strain. There are differences over the shape and pace of new sanctions against Moscow and how to meet the cost. The Baltic states and Poland, having more experience of Kremlin hostility, are hawkish in wanting to maximise pressure on Moscow. Germany resists embargos that might weaken European economies by limiting energy supplies and stoking prices. This week’s summit is likely to produce only conditional statements of tougher intent, not tougher action, disappointing those who would push harder against the Putin regime.

That is a debate in which Britain would like a say. As one of the continent’s economic and military powers, it also has sway. Mr Johnson can be influential from outside a Brussels summit, but he has forfeited a say over the agenda. He has no one but himself to blame if decisions are made that he would have opposed had he been at the table.

So let me get this right...we should stay in the EU to have had a say over the agenda? Our single vote would have been set against the other participants producing 'only conditional statements of tougher intent'?  Would that actually do anything for the titanic struggle for 'democracy'? Isn't Johnson already actually doing more to assist Ukraine? Did Brexit do any more to 'weaken' the EU than the divisions between Germany and the Baltic States do already, or that Merkel's policy of economic interdependence did?

How much did that annoying analogy do to blind the Graun! Incidentally, I am grateful to the Facebook poster who pointed out that not long ago, gallant little Ukraine was condemned as 'the most corrupt nation in Europe' (Graun  6 Feb 2015)  and 'having a 'neo-Nazi problem' (Reuters March 16 2018) It must be said,of course, that this reported the case before the election of Zelensky.

'Bitter remainer' has a wobble

H Rifkind in yesterday's Times (subscription barrier) picks up the issue that Brexit somehow encouraged Russia to see 'the West' as weak and thus to risk invading Ukraine. This is now pretty much accepted among Remainers, so it is slightly surprising to see a few doubts with Rifkind a self-confessed 'bitter remainer'

He starts by pointing out the weakness of the analogy between the fight for Brexit and the fight for Ukrainian independence as everybody has (including Johnson who suggested it in the first place in a silly moment). The article also has a reader poll where you can vote whether Brexit has made 'the West weaker' -- when I saw it , 71% of 819 said yes, but ,as usual, quite what they mean was not exactly clear,

Apparently, Cameron had once (2014?) said Brexit would make the West weak and encourage Russia but Johnson had said that 'EU muscularity' was the problem, 'pre-echoing' Putin's language says Rifkind. And several other people, of course. Farage and Banks are cited as pro-Putin and pro-Russian . All of these refer to Russia's takeover of Crimea and bits of Ukraine in 2014.

Rifkind suspects Russia of an unnamed hybrid information campaign in British politics and slyly implies Brexit interference -- but 'my view has always been "probably a bit"'.He also suspects  some of the admiration for Putin might be 'homoerotic'. He does think Brexit served Russian interests in some unspecified ways and quotes  an Estonian spokeserson in support. Putin opposed a second referendum, apparently (so did lots of Brits, of course).

However, Rifkind points out that another possible Brexit scenario might have seen the UK more closely allied to a liberal USA and NATO, and Putin could not have ruled that out at the time. As for Brexit making the West weaker -- at least the Ukrainians are grateful for our military aid. 

Most astonishing of all Rifkind thinks Johnson might succeed after all in forming some sort of solidaristic response to the Russian invasion!

Walking dead return to the fray

It is M Hesseltine again, and this time he has some facts and figures, gathered by his own European Movement. The Guardnian finds time to report them in a comment piece:

there was the report in the Times of the latest survey by the British Chambers of Commerce into the views of its members. A thousand companies were asked to assess the results of Brexit for them; 320 complained of the disadvantages compared with only 59 who were positive....the government’s Office for Budget Responsibility has said it expects Brexit to hit the economy twice as hard as the global pandemic.... the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency says that “since the referendum in 2016, 316 companies have chosen the Netherlands because of Brexit”.... the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations says it expects an enormous public relations campaign to portray the deal as a fabulous victory, but that it will inevitably be seen by the fishing industry as a defeat. That the Food and Drink Federation says sales to Europe fell 23.7% in nine months in 2021.

As usual, I would want to see the small print. Are the 'disadvantages' the result of no longer being able to employ low-wage, no-rights migrant workers? * What exactly does the 'hit' mean? Have any companies chosen Britain? What counts as a 'defeat' for the fishing industry? Was the fall in sales in 2021 temporary or permanent, and due to Brexit or all the other factors?Are any of these agencies likely to be at all partisan -- and so on

I suspect the real beef comes in the last bit:

Nothing so reveals the reality of Brexit as the meeting of European leaders in Brussels, in the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine. Our continent faces a threat as severe as anything since the end of the cold war. I am ashamed that the country that in my lifetime saved European democracy has now absented itself as others determine Europe’s response.

There will, Mr Rees-Mogg, be more councils covering the climate crisis, our environment, international crime, control of the internet. In every case we will be absent. That is what Brexit means.

Tunes of glory fading away...I thought it was Brexiteers who were nostalgic for Great Britain.

 

*I have just looked up the survey here. It is a bit vague but most of the complaints seem to concern the ridiculous paperwork, now and in the future, which the EC requires and how this drives up costs for smaller companies. All the time a punitive stance towards the UK persists I can see this as a continuing problem I must say. Long term, I hope alternative trade outlets will overcome the problems but it was an unpleasant and unrecognised consequence of Brexit.