Irish downplay sovereignty!

The Graun finds more objectors. Unsurprisingly, some more once-cocky Celts are unhappy:

Brexit is “not something to celebrate”, Ireland’s foreign minister Simon Coveney declared after the UK formally severed ties with the EU, as he warned of trading disruptions due to fresh red tape...Calling it the end of an era, Coveney said trade across the Irish Sea would be “disrupted by an awful lot more checks and declarations, and bureaucracy and paperwork, and cost and delays”. 

But on Friday, as the first ferries arrived in the Republic of Ireland from Britain under the new post-Brexit trade rules, events appeared to unfold smoothly. In Dublin, Irish Ferries’ ship Ulysses docked at 5.55am with about a dozen trucks on board, after travelling from Holyhead in Wales, and there were no delays as the freight trailers cleared customs checks....Meanwhile, the first ferries also sailed in and out of the port of Dover uneventfully, although it is thought that the real test is yet to come as the New Year is typically quiet and importers had been stockpiling products before the end of the transition period.

We can only hope for chaos in the future, as always. In a move surprisingly indifferent to, even ignorant of his own country's fraught political history, Coveney said

we’re seeing the United Kingdom moving in a different direction on its own, chasing some notion of trying to re-find its sovereignty

Sovereignty! Who would concern themselves with that!

Horror as Brexit chaos erupts -- some red tape and permits

 GUardian summary:

From Friday morning, individuals and businesses both in the UK and beyond face a dizzying new array of red tape, a good deal of it still to be confirmed, covering everything from travel, residency, work and tourism, to the supply of goods and services....Officials are hopeful of a smooth start to the new era but are braced for possible delays next week, with government estimates suggesting that more than half of smaller businesses have not yet prepared for the end of the free movement of goods and services....the end of many previous freedoms for British individuals and businesses, even to the extent of restricting where freight drivers can travel within the UK. [ Kent access permit, or “kermit” for short]

The 'dizzying array' was actually predicted on Dec 4 as part of the last-minute lobbying by the CBI to avoid no deal at any cost and as a reponse to a French 'rehearsal' for Brexit which caused delays 

 

The BBC managed to find a businessman who was expecting serious difficulties because he were still uncertain about how to proceed -- a butterfly products-exporting business in Stratford upon Avon. The horror if our pupae exports crash!

 

Doom was even averted by

 A last-minute agreement between the UK government and Spain will allow Gibraltarians to move freely between the British overseas territory and the EU – but the agreement will only come into force later in the year.

 

A pretty damp squib after the horrors of Project Fear, all things considered,

Insults, sour grapes and the tampon tax

What do the European journos make of Brexit now it is all over? The Graun provides a helpful summary:

 profoundly populist and dangerously dishonest...Brexit is an exercise in emotion, not rationality; in choosing your own facts. And it’s not clear how it will end.”...Brexit … which would never have happened had Conservative politicians not, to a quite unprecedented degree, deceived and lied to their people”....Britain “captured by gambling liars, frivolous clowns and their paid cheerleaders. They have destroyed my Europe, to which the UK belonged as much as France or Germany.”...emotionalisation and over-simplification of highly complex issues... a political vision turned towards yesterday’s world. Ideological. The way the trade deal focused on goods at the expense of services … It’s not the way the world’s going.”

Not much different from 2015 then  really, although then it was impossible for them to believe these populist irrational ideas would ever triumph, of course.

 

Meanwhile, the Graun shows how to turn your own grapes sour (pissing on your own cornflakes? Something like that) before you've even tasted them:

The tampon tax has been abolished after the government honoured its March commitment to remove VAT on women’s sanitary products.

Good news you might think -- a Government promise kept as one of the first things to be done after Brexit. But no...

Laura Coryton, who started the Stop Taxing Periods campaign in May 2014 while a student at Goldsmiths, said the Brexit process had made it less likely that the tampon tax would be abolished throughout Europe...the European parliament had voted unanimously [in 2018] to start the regulatory process to allow any EU country to abolish any tampon tax....“That process has since gone cold, because we then left the EU and we were the ones pushing for it,” said Coryton. “So if anything, actually, Brexit has made it worse, because if we were to have stayed in the EU, then this piece of legislation would have gone through… then any EU member would be able to axe the tax, not just the UK.”

Not only that:

Since 2015 the £15m funds the tampon tax has raised in the UK have been directed to women’s refuges and domestic abuse charities. “The tampon tax has long been a symbol of policymaking based around men’s needs, so removing VAT is symbolically important,”’ said Mary-Ann Stephenson of the Women’s Budget Group. “But the tampon tax money has been an important source of funding for the women’s sector – the government needs to be clear about what will replace it.”

 

 

They still don't get it #94

In one of no doubt several looking back pieces, the GHraun offers this essay by one Tim Adams

we examine the forces that finally pushed the UK and the EU into this momentous break

... emotional brutality of the choice... after all these years of angst and haggling, the UK will finally hear the door slam on its long-time family home and find itself suddenly alone with all its baggage in the chill air outside

In a set of imagined answers to future school questions, Adams suggests as reasons for our departure:

stubborn Euroscepticism that always characterised Britain’s relationship with the union as it inched toward federalism, just as they would note the immediate crises of the Greek financial bailout, and the migrant chaos brought on by the collapse of Syria, and examine how they coincided with long years of stagnant wages and austerity at home.

The marking scheme might look, too, for reference to the geographical inequalities of Britain – the sense that the vote against Brussels was also for many a cathartic “up yours” to London and Westminster. And examiners could also give a tick to mention of the role played by tabloid media, owned by offshore plutocrats with a vested interest in deregulation and a reliably profitable line in raucous jingoism.

The top grades might be reserved for those framing these arguments with introductory paragraphs on the rise of populism fuelled by the unchecked influence of Facebook and fake news – and perhaps the unique combination of a prime minister in David Cameron who was the opposite of a man of the people, and a throwback opposition leader in Jeremy Corbyn, seeking to hide doubts not only about the EU but also Nato, by not showing up.

Which is nearly reasonable for the Graun at first, then a bit obsessive. And, of course:

Nigel Farage, bothering asylum seekers in his union jack loafers and Arthur Daley coat; Dominic Cummings, the self-styled “disruptor” who found new ways to use social media to stoke the oldest prejudices about “foreigners”; and diehards like Bill Cash MP, the emblematic old soldier of the struggle, who spent a political lifetime seeking to “avenge” the death of a brave father killed in the Normandy landings.

There's some generational stuff  and some crap about social media memes, and inarticulacy among Leavers, and trotting out the wise cosmo EU line about sovereignty meaning shared powers. There is still denial:

The strong likelihood, after all the political trauma, is that we are leaving the EU, on terms no one imagined, with a majority of the population much preferring to stay in.

And a consoling joke:

my favourite answer to the question of how we got here came from that caller, named Mark, who contacted Farage’s LBC phone-in show last year, to thank him for everything he had done for Britain.

“I used to be an ardent remainer,” Mark said. “I believed in the European project and that staying in the union was the best thing for us, and then something monumental happened and I completely changed my opinion on all of it.”

“And what,” Farage asked, “was that monumental thing that happened, Mark?”

“I was kicked in the head by a horse.”

 They won't change. They can't change.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 We're out of the European Union. Just how did we get here? | Brexit | The Guardian

Hutton dreams of 2029

 I missed this first time around on one of the Sundays we have endured lately: This is W Hutton in the Observer:

The dream is over. On New Year’s Day, the curtain comes down on Britain’s long engagement with Europe’s noblest and greatest effort at collaboration and liberty. Our freedoms are to be slashed and an immense bureaucracy imposed on us. Next Friday Britons will lose the freedom to live, work, and trade in goods and services as they choose throughout the EU. Once natural [!] rights are to be torched.

Bloody hell! We are not rejoining are we? Hutton thinks actually we are -- in 9 years time (see below) 

Our goods exporters, previously able to treat Europe as their home market, will have their goods painstakingly checked and controlled at EU borders, and VAT and excise duties paid immediately. More than 200m customs declarations will have to be filled in as lorries wait in new vast holding pens disfiguring our land....To sell into the EU a business will have to ensure it complies with that country’s laws. Services, our banks, insurance companies and investment house – great economic strengths – will have to go cap in hand asking permission to trade where once they were welcomed

Compliance with laws is entirely new, of course. Of course, British exporters were welcomed! We did so well compared to EU exporters. I love the idea that we only trade now if we are granted permission. It gets fanciful and worse... 

We will need visas to stay in the EU beyond three months. Fifteen thousand British students a year will lose the right to study with no fees in European universities under the Erasmus programme. Britain is out of the European Investment Bank, which lent billions to the depressed parts of the UK; also out of Euratom, Europol and Eurojust. We are out of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, crucial in the fight against climate change and fundamental to the economics of wind farms and new nuclear power stations alike. We are to lose all automatic [NB] access to EU databases....the capacity of the British government to turn British regulations into EU regulations and, via the EU’s heft, then global regulations, as it has done so cleverly, for example, over specialist chemicals and mobile phone networks, has disappeared. No British company will be able to follow Vodafone to global pre-eminence. Inward investment, which boomed under EU membership, and which has already fallen by four fifths since the referendum, will remain depressed.

our horizons shrink, along with our influence. Cooperation with the EU over defence, foreign policy and external security is to cease at the request of the UK government. Thus, not only is Britain outside the forum where European states construct their alliances, thereby disabling itself from the great European game of balance of power politics it has played so well, it has chosen to make itself a Little Sir Echo in a world of mighty superpowers 

Poor old Hutton still dreams of Empire as so many of them do. Of course, there has to be some balance:

[The deal] goes significantly beyond World Trade Organization terms. Even the EU concedes that this is unprecedented, if very much in its interests...The UK will win some new autonomies. It will be able to approve the use of hi-tech products – from drones to new medicines – faster, which, if used cleverly, will benefit those fast-growing industries. There will be a baby trade deal with the US. But, in the biggest irony of all, if this is to benefit British capitalism it will require a makeover – to become more high investment and stakeholder-oriented, working closely with government. It will have to look… more European.

I see no problems if it adopts those aspects of European policy, but not all the rest of it that comes as a package, of course -- that is the whole point..

Meanwhile, Hutton clearly intends to dream the next 9 years away (why 9? why not 4?)

And when the incoming Labour government of 2029, led by one of the MPs who saw the future and voted against the treaty this week [ah -- Starmer will have to be overthrown first], holds its promised referendum on EU membership [complete with joining the Euro?] , the elderly Europhobe voters will this time be outvoted.

The old P Toynbee policy --wait for the elderly to die. Why wait? Deny us the vote now. And those likely to die before 2029? And anyone suspected of Europhobe irrationalism?

Observer backs fisherfolk and Brexiteers!

Suddenly,  the Observer seems to be on the side of the gallant little fishermen of England. Not long ago, they were piddling little anachronistic hangovers from an earlier age standing in the way of progress and the glorious future of metal window frame manufacturers, a product of Johnsons' nostalgic fantasies. However,. now, it seems, some of them are prepared to find fault with the terms of the deal:

 

fishermen’s leaders accused Boris Johnson of “caving in” at the 11th hour to clinch agreement on Christmas Eve.... promises made by Leavers that they would regain control of all UK fishing waters by voting for Brexit had been broken....we’re still looking for the ‘prodigious amounts of fish’ we were promised, and for us it changes nothing.”

 

The Observer's version of the deal has it that

 

In the Christmas Eve deal the UK government and Brussels agreed that 25% of EU boats’ fishing rights in UK waters will be transferred to this country’s fishing fleet over a period of five-and-a-half years. The UK had originally demanded that the EU’s rights be cut by 80%. The UK did, however, reduce the number of years over which the change will be introduced to well under half of what the EU originally demanded...After this period, the two sides will negotiate over future fishing rights, with the deal allowing for either to impose tariffs on the other’s exports of fish in the event of serious disagreements.

I think the last bit means full (formal) control subject to annual negotiation, not permanant quotas and regulation as the EU wanted but I am no expert. We shall see.

 

A key factor in the Observer's sudden championing of the fishermen might be that:

Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, on Saturday complained that promises made to her country’s fishing sector had been broken, insisting this was “yet another example of Tory governments forcing Scotland in the wrong direction”...

She added that an independent Scotland could be a “bridge-builder between the UK and the EU”.

Talk about fantasy! Scotland at the heart of Europe I believe the SNP slogan is.

 

The rest of the Observer story seems to support the view held by some old Brexiteers that the deal needs further discussion. 

The Tory MP and former Brexit secretary David Davis told the Observer he wanted reassurances that the deal would not allow the EU to impose a wide range of tariffs on UK goods if there were future disagreements over fishing rights....t was premature to think Eurosceptics would give the deal unqualified backing: “It might not be white smoke. It might be black smoke.”

The Observer backing Brexiteers! Anything to avoid any possibility that the cad Johnson might get some credit after all 

Meanwhile, I wondered what the Observer cartoonist would do if a deal was signed. What would happen to the ogre/landlside/yawning chasm of no-deal Brexit? He hasn't much idea yet of what to replace them with yet except words, in a cliched setting for the change of year. What a duffer.

Will the carp cover the egg? Guradina blusters on...

It seems liike the last minute attack of nerves that produced the editorial that shrieked that it was all going to end in no-deal because Johnson was such a cad and liar has left the GHraun with a bit of egg on its face to go with the carp. Never mind, there is still covid -- and no doubt climate change, the death of Gorge Floyd, slavery and lots of other things to fall back on. A bit of repair work on the sutures first:

Britain now confronts its most serious emergency since the second world war. It faces the unprecedented challenge of coronavirus while adjusting to a new diminished status outside the European Union. The country’s health service is at breaking point, and its future as a unified state is on the line. All this goes unmentioned by Boris Johnson, perhaps because he disingenuously promised that Brexit would save the NHS.

MPs will be asked to pass into law a hard Brexit – despite scarcely having had time to read the new treaty, let alone properly consider it. Without shame, Mr Johnson seeks credit for his agreement and the freedom to run our own domestic policy unconstrained by EU law. Gloating will deepen European mistrust and our isolation. It is also insensitive, as most businesses are ill-prepared for the changes.  

Does el Gruno seriously think that Scots nattery is actually more likely now we have left the EU? That the EU will import Scottish seed potatoes again once Scotland is independent?

And residual weaselling while searching for the moral high ground:

Sir Keir is, therefore, right to back the deal, but that will not be enough. To regain trust, he will have to find a narrative that convinces the public he is fighting the next election, not the last one. It would be a rhetorical error for Sir Keir to apologise for Labour’s opposition to Tory Europhobia. Under Mr Johnson, the Conservatives may ignore their own past, but they will never say sorry for it. Britain lacks a responsible government able to construct a coherent compensating policy for either of the twin crises enveloping the country. Under Mr Johnson it is far from clear that we will ever get one.

The Times review of their cartoons of the year also serves to remind us of the imagined horrors that so plagued the luvvie mind. Brexit would mean we had no choice but to obey Trump's agenda, forgetting that he had to be re-elected. If we wanted to eat chlorinated chicken from the USA we would have to agree to impose sanctions on China. Biden, meanwhile would refuse to cooperate with us because of his Irish ancestry. Ireland would be in flames anyway. And the shortages...

For me, there is already a sense of what the fuck was all the fuss about . It seems we have agreed to abide by most of the European standards if we trade with them and to let them fish in our waters for another 5.5 years until they can adjust.We do not have 'free' movement of EU nationals.  We have more paperwork. They have managed to punish us in minor ways like banning the export of Scottish seed potatoes and tampering with haddock repatriation prices. Any arbitration will not involve the ECJ. Did it really take all that time and effort, all that leaking and threatening, all that bluffing and backdoor manouevring to achieve that? 

What a horrbile authoritarian and dogmatic bullying outfit the EC turned out to be.