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Crisis Management: EU-style – politicalbetting.com
Crisis Management: EU-style – politicalbetting.com
The EU Commission has given us a quite astonishing master-class in the last few days of how not to deal with a problem: panic, untrue or incomplete public statements, trying to negotiate in public, invitations sounding like threats, displays of wounded amour propre, petulant complaining, shrill demands, recourse to legal arguments, followed by peremptory action taken without proper consultation with those affected, only to be withdrawn – somewhat humiliatingly – shortly thereafter.
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Bizarre incompetence from the EU. It's not just compared to us, many others are doing much better as well. And when things have gone awry, other countries (or would-be countries) haven't tried to blame vaccine manufacturers.
So, UK has had to eat price and liability, while EU has had to eat speed of regulatory approval, speed of delivery and investment in local manufacturing.
UK gave AZ a nine-figure cheque up front for investment, EU contract demands payments some number of days after delivery.
Guess which is the better place to be in right now?
On a separate topic I hope famile Cyclefree are on the mend.
Even the design / creation of a mould for a widget has a development lead time yet it still seems to be the case that the EU believes that lead times don't exist.
@Sandpit I'm actually surprised that AZN actually decided to manufacture anything for the EU as it seems to be that the contract is all risk and zero reward for them even before the EU started to pin the blame for their incompetency on AZN.
I think the EU should be thankful that I'm not sat anywhere near AZN's board level as I would be seeking some rapid improvements to the terms and conditions following their breach of contract.
As a sceptical Brexiteer, IMO it looks like the EU didn't understand that it needed to invest in manufacturing, that it needed to actually place orders - they just thought the vaccine manufacturers would come running to them trying to sell deliveries, because they're the EU.
Amazon wins because it has everything in place (hassle free quick delivery, reasonable prices and world class customer support).
My hope is that all this will be remembered as a moment of madness and that very soon all the new vaccines, old vaccines etc. will be produced in such vast numbers that we needn't worry about production.
Longer term - the world needs the ability to go from new disease to billions of vaccinations even faster.
I hope that your husband is improving and truely hope our vaccination progress gives your family a ray of hope.
You all so deserve it
I do wonder, however, if it is just possible that those who were so convinced that the EU were the adults, the reasonable ones whose views and positions should be given unstinting respect and deference through the long and tedious Brexit saga are taking the opportunity to reflect. It turns out that the EU is not an institution of laws after all. It is a bureaucratic mess, slow and incompetent, with a massive democratic deficit who cannot be relied upon to respect the views of its members (in this case Ireland and Art 16).
Thank the lord we are out of it. Now let's move on together and make the best of our own path.
I wonder how AZ have levered public defamation and breach of contract, though again not the core issue.
My favourite quote so far (that famous twitter feed aside) has been from DAG:
"I am not a Belgian lawyer".
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/flies.png
Hahahahahahaha!
Ummm, I'm a big fan of Kwasi, but Valneva isn't going to be ready until the last quarter of 2021, so I'm not entirely sure why we're doing this.
Some of the responses are quite funny as well. "Can't you import wine from elsewhere?" No - it doesn't exist. ROW doesn't produce anywhere near enough wine to replace EU volume. Err, "they need our customs. can't the frogs tell Macron to change his rules?" No, these are our rules. Insisted on by the UK government.
https://twitter.com/DanielLambert29/status/1355437505642975233
2. Because it leaves the possibility of a company with undelivered vaccines re-developing in response to mutations.
3. Because we want to vaccinate the world
4. Because f*** the EU, who still aren't talking constructively to anyone with vaccines for sale?
And we also want to ensure that there is a guaranteed market for another UK based manufacturer of vaccines. If there isn't a variant we can use them in our aid efforts. We are building a new industry here on the back of this crisis. It has considerable potential.
What is the downside? By all accounts, even excluding ongoing requirements for regular vaccinations, the world will still be undergoing the first wave of vaccinations until 2023. It's not like there's serious danger of oversupply at the moment. And it's all a part of building up manufacturing capacity in this country.
My comment is a little speculative, but here is a commentary on inactivated flu vaccines:
https://vk.ovg.ox.ac.uk/vk/inactivated-flu-vaccine
We are not going back so business will have to adapt
Doesn't he literally tell you why in his tweet: we may need another round of vaccination in winter 2021/22 as the immunity wanes. No one knows yet.
I think having 30m J&J doses for H2 of this year and an additional 40m of these is a good insurance policy should we need to do this all again.
Edit: I'd rather be overprepared than the alternative. If we don't need them then they can be sold/given away.
It's worth doing purely on the grounds that tories won't like it.
The Commission has set back any lingering rejoin hopes in UK by years if not decades in the last week. Sterling work.
https://uk.yahoo.com/news/british-tourists-among-96-foreigners-161639438.html
There are variations even within states in contract interpretation - the standard basic formula for formation of a contract in England & Wales (offer, acceptance, consideration, intention to create legal relations) isn’t the same in Scotland where no consideration is needed. Similarly, in Scots law, a party is entitled as a matter of legal right to an order compelling performance whereas England says that such an order won’t be given if monetary damages are an adequate remedy. Given such differences exist within the UK after 300 years it’s hardly surprising that laws differ across the EU. Most EU Law takes the form of Directives that Member States have to implement into their own legal systems in specific areas in their own way - hence all the handwringing about “gold plating” Directives when we were a member.
Housebound elderly have 'slipped through cracks' in Covid jabs rollout
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/31/housebound-elderly-have-slipped-cracks-covid-jabs-rollout/
It calls for mobile jabbing units. I thought these were already operational?
Win. Win.
"If its word can be trusted."
The EU has made its ways and the way they see us very clear in this last week.
They clearly can't be trusted and we need to move forward accordingly
But if its being paid for out of international development money and shipped to Covax then that's fair enough.
Never say never but frankly there's too much water under the bridge in my eyes for rejoin to ever be plausible. For one thing, even if we were to attempt a Hokey Cokey Brexit I don't think they'd take us back. There is a significant attitude in France especially that Charles de Gaulle was right and it was a mistake to let Britain in. I'm sure an independent Scotland would be welcomed back, but the English? No.
Importing a container with a single product on it not a problem - 1 set of paperwork required.
Start importing different product within a single container and the problems start to occur - as you need 1 set of paperwork per product and any 1 mistake on single form is enough to block the whole container from moving.
Start splitting pallets into smaller orders and real problems begin. Remember 1 mistake blocks the entire container
We've spent 30+ years with paperwork free exports and imports from the EU. The introduction of paperwork (a lot of which HMRC have zero people who understand it) is making things impossible. And Covid is sweeping this under the table.
Now things will get easier - but they will get easier by people reducing the products they import and export - so less paperwork is required and less paperwork is the only way to avoid mistakes occurring.
https://chokkablog.blogspot.com/2021/01/whats-7-billion-between-friends.html?m=1
Perhaps, safely retired, you don't care - but your last sentence is glib and unhelpful.
If people don't want to adjust, especially people with EU flags in their Twitter handle, that's on them not politics.
The idea it is "impossible" to import wines from outside of a customs union would be a strange thought to anyone who likes New World wines.
Sneaky.
Having a sell limit in place on a stock prevents Robinhood from lending out the shares.
Of course we are not going back into the EU, but we are not going to sweep under the carpet thousands of related bankruptcies and far far more lost jobs just to pretend Brexit is wonderful either.
Brexit really is like a divorce and just as we can't go back and expect a blowjob, nor are they pining after us. They're not waiting or eager for us to jump back into the marital bed once more.
No question that the last week has been a fiasco, albeit one where the worst excesses were corrected PDQ.
But every successful political leader has thought that their vision would last forever. Churchill. Attlee. Thatcher. Blair. All of them were mistaken. The bits that worked for the generations persisted, the other bits were quietly or loudly dropped.
The art of democracy is the ability for a nation to change its mind. The art of tyranny is to have one more swing of the pendulum and then freeze it.
As I've said before- the Johnson Government has won the right to try this approach to relationships with our neighbours. If it works- great. If it doesn't, we will need a plan B.
And the issue is mainly the one I've pointed out all month - why should I continue to purchase from you when other options are easier.
Which is why the UK is now (note now not back in 2019 when it made sense to do so) telling companies to set up EU subsidiaries so that the paperwork is hidden away internally and stock is sent direct from a warehouse in the EU.
Edit: What's no clear to me is how much of it willeven survive. Even with the paltry £23m offered by the Johnson regime, for exporters, but for the UK as a whole - ande maximum clainm 100K per firm.
AZN have found 9 million doses.....
Sorry did AZN just have them lying around unused...if not those 9 million doses are from what someone else was going to receive unless I am misunderstanding... anyone care to explain?
Brexit - leaving the EU - did not have to bring self-harm to our status as a global trading nation. Our government could have understood both how trade worked and the areas where the rules it blindly insisted would be fine would not be fine. Instead we have this.
"We are not going back so business will have to adapt". In the case of the wine industry it will adapt by closing down. The other story I ready this morning was from major Norniron logistics firm McCulla, reporting in detail how the new rules has brought their industry to its knees. These companies will close without either rapid changes or long-term support. They "will have to adapt" by closing down.
The new rules are unworkable. And this is the false dawn before we stop breaching WTO rules and start imposing them fully. They will either need to be renegotiated or we will see chunks of our economic output simply stop. That isn't an argument to rejoin the EU, its an argument to negotiate a trading deal that works.
Sadly people like Big G never understood the difference between the EU and EEA. It is our departure from the latter which has so broken the food and drink industry.
Leaving the EU inevitably means significant change, but the way it happened was very poor.
This is not the end, it is a new beginning and there will be future chapters. The difference is, if you call Brexit plan B in the first place then the next thing likely to occur will be a plan C, not a reversion back to our membership plan A.
The tories turned hating Europe into the gom jabbar test of being British and fair fucks to them for pulling it off. However, they've transcended the rather mercantile and managerial aspects of the issue to turn into a cultural one. And there's two sides on every culture war. There are now a whole tranche of people who want to rejoin because fucking liches like Rees Mogg and Redwood won't like it.
Plenty of people voted Leave just because it was in opposition to what Cameron wanted but know the rejoiners are the insurrectionists.
They notified in advance an expected reduction in production capacity but if they can fix the issues then their production capacity goes back up and they can produce and distribute more.
There's no great conspiracy here.
Brexit will cost money and jobs and that's just a fact.
I think lawyers will discuss the contract for some time. David Allen Green supports the AZ position, some of his interlocutors disagree, apparently, article and some great comments here including reference to Belgian Law "good faith" provisions.
But I digress. Whatever the legalise of this, the EU totally fucked this. NI in particular after all that we need to respect the GFA stuff.
Idiots.
economic migrantsexpats on the Costas who simply won't be able to buy them any more.There's a clear economic case to join CPTPP. But it's worth doing purely on the grounds that Europhiles won't like it.
Unfair, but funny
Setting up PO Box offices in the EU if it is a solution that works is a good adaptation. Businesses find their way around regulations better than people give them credit for.
So yes, its impossible to replace wine that doesn't exist.
The lawyers I would trust for an opinion that there is nothing in the AZN contract that matches the EU's view of said contract yet you continue to claim that the EU is both right and AZN can magic vaccine up from no where.
Reality is that AZN can't magic up vaccine that doesn't exist and the EU completely screwed up their negotiations by focussing on price rather than delivery speed and then taking 3 months to place the actual order (so delaying things 3 months).
Being honest, I'm actually surprised that AZN have been able to deliver what they have delivered given that additional delay.
They have found 1 million doses. To go round 27 countries. At the cost of shredding the reputation of the body looking out for the interests of those 27 countries. And inward investment into those 27 countries.
Way to go...
Hmm, the husband strikes me as an attention seeking chump. Hope he doesn't manage to irritate the Iranians into coming up with some other fake charges and convict her for another few years. I fear that's what he's risking. Maybe he's addicted to the publicity.
I think that's going to far and too unfair on the EU there, I don't believe its really that sclerotic as to be impossible to deal with - and that's coming from me!
I continue to claim fuck all if you read my post.
Or better still, go read the DAG thread and make a judgement for yourself. Or go train as a contract lawyer in Belgium.
There are elements that support both positions. But as I said that is quite irrelevant as far as I'm concerned.
Instead the Government merely assumed it knew how trade worked, thought that tariffs were what killed trade (nope, hassle and risk kills trade and paperwork is both a hassle and a risk (of it being wrong)) and because of that have made a complete ass of the job.
Because they couldn't believe it would ever get beyond the planning stage, after sixty four committee meetings. Followed by sixty four very good lunches.
Presumably the 400bn quid of borrowing that followed slightly took the steam out of that position.