"There are swaths of England where the same faith is bestowed on “Boris” – more mascot than man: redeemer of the people’s mood with powers of jollification that transcend boring politics. That tune doesn’t carry in Scotland. Posh Anglo-Tory insouciance strikes all the wrong cultural notes. Sturgeon has mastered the less showy brand of charisma that seduces its audience into believing it is coolly rational and has not been swept up in a charismatic movement at all."
Anti-charisma equals charisma in a Scottish context.
Mr. Password, that's a fair point, but also one that applies not only to Cameron but the political class more widely. Nonsense like Blair giving away half the rebate for nothing and Brown scuttling along to sign Lisbon, contrary to a manifesto pledge for a referendum, didn't exactly cement the feeling that British politicians were other than nodding dogs who would sacrifice the national interest for the EU.
Some reasonable suggestions, however, it takes two to tango. The EU has proved over the last month or so it isn't a reliable ally. From the disgraceful China deal to their embarrassing dalliance in Moscow the EU is showing it can't be trusted to be a reliable ally. So I agree that certain things can be done to fix the existing deal but the overall sentiment needs to be one of continued detachment and shifting of priorities away from the EU.
I think the US is seeing it's worst fears come to pass, that an EU without the UK is no longer an automatic ally in foreign affairs. Both the UK and US are going to need to work with it on a much more transactional basis than before. The bottom line is always going to be "can Siemens sell more dishwashers" from now on.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
We are certainly not going to go over Dave's Deal again now suffice to say it was an excellent one which maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership.
But I also agree that the level of denial is such that it suits people such as yourself to say it was a "bad deal" because that makes it easier to dismiss it and feel ok about it.
Saying it was a bad deal is illogical and you are many things, Philip, but illogical is not one of them.
"Maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership"? That was the status quo.
We already had all of that before Cameron started talking! If you're seeking reform then coming back and saying "we have achieved reform: we have maintained everything as it was" is not reform!
Reform is actually changing thing. Changes with teeth and legally enforceable not warm words. None of the changes I was looking for, like the UK being protected from being outvoted QMV by the Eurozone acting as a bloc, ever arrived.
Under his deal we could have deemed anything we didn't like "ever closer union" and gone on our way untroubled by it all. Best of both worlds. Selling to the US? Tonga? The Pitcairn Islands? All could have happened.
And we didn't really want to reform it. Why would we? Let them pursue their ever closer union while we could cherry-pick the best stuff.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
Of course we could have. But we wouldn't have. Cameron and Osborne wouldn't, David Milliband wouldn't. But there wasn't a referendum on replacing the supine political class wholesale with one that would defend Britain's interests fiercely, there was a referendum on Brexit.
Cameron could have negotiated a very comfortable associate membership had he so desired. We could never have got rid of FOM, but he could have packaged it in enough benefits restrictions (that were within his powers anyway) to please most people. He didn't want to do that.
"He" (as with Gordon Brown's Lisbon hokey-cokey) = democratically-elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
So it was a wholly democratic decision. And as mentioned to @Philip_Thompson, his (Dave's) deal was a good 'un.
Decisions are wholly democratic when they're reversible. The only way to reverse Browns mendacity in signing Lisbon was either serious reform within the EU or Brexit.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
We are certainly not going to go over Dave's Deal again now suffice to say it was an excellent one which maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership.
But I also agree that the level of denial is such that it suits people such as yourself to say it was a "bad deal" because that makes it easier to dismiss it and feel ok about it.
Saying it was a bad deal is illogical and you are many things, Philip, but illogical is not one of them.
"Maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership"? That was the status quo.
We already had all of that before Cameron started talking! If you're seeking reform then coming back and saying "we have achieved reform: we have maintained everything as it was" is not reform!
Reform is actually changing thing. Changes with teeth and legally enforceable not warm words. None of the changes I was looking for, like the UK being protected from being outvoted QMV by the Eurozone acting as a bloc, ever arrived.
Under his deal we could have deemed anything we didn't like "ever closer union" and gone on our way untroubled by it all. Best of both worlds. Selling to the US? Tonga? The Pitcairn Islands? All could have happened.
Bollocks. That's ridiculous.
What teeth were there to enforce us being able to do that? And who would judge and enforce that?
As it happens, the law firm DLA Piper hosted a virtual event with Lord Mandelson yesterday, which covered some of the same ground and was very interesting indeed. Unfortunately I don't think a recording of it will be made available to the public. Much of what he said was very much along the same lines as I've proposed, in particular about not seeking to rejoin the EU in the foreseeable future. He made the very good point that if we were ever to try to rejoin, we shouldn't do so as a supplicant; we must concentrate now on building up our economic and international strength as a non-EU member.
He also had some very interesting things to say about how the government's laudable aim of attracting businesses to 'Global Britain' risks being undermined by some of their other proposals. In particular he was scathing about the proposal to make company directors liable for audit failures, and also about the proposed legislation to give the government draconian powers to intervene in company takeovers even up to five years afterwards. Those aren't issues which have received much attention, but they deserve more. We're trying to attract businesses with one hand, and pushing them away with the other.
Tony Blair has been noteably good on a few suggestions eg single jab and international vaccine passports.
It's not a surprise to hear similar from Lord Mandelbrot.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
It was Cameron that didn't take the renegotiation seriously, as shown by his failure to use the powers he already had, that are already used by other EU member states, to restrict freedom of movement.
It doesn't matter.
The simple fact is that was our one credible chance of getting real reform and it failed. Doesn't matter why it failed (and indeed Cameron does deserve some of the blame) the simple fact of the matter is it did.
It's not all Cameron's fault though. It is hard to reform any institution let alone one as scelerotic as Europe with then 28 very different sets of interests to account for each with a veto on reform.
The choice was ultimately stay in an unreformable Europe, or leave and control our own destiny.
It matters because it's about correctly identifying the source of the problem.
In my analysis the source of the problem is a general lack of seriousness from the political class generally. Cameron didn't take the risk that he might lose the referendum seriously enough to take the necessary action to head it off. We didn't take the risk to the GFA seriously enough to vote to Remain. There's a lack of seriousness in HMG's response to the trade barriers it has erected. And so on.
The header is as I read it, above all else, a plea for seriousness. Which is why it starts with an appeal to reject fantasy.
It is your personal fantasy that anything that goes wrong is solely the fault of the EU's failings.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
Of course we could have. But we wouldn't have. Cameron and Osborne wouldn't, David Milliband wouldn't. But there wasn't a referendum on replacing the supine political class wholesale with one that would defend Britain's interests fiercely, there was a referendum on Brexit.
Cameron could have negotiated a very comfortable associate membership had he so desired. We could never have got rid of FOM, but he could have packaged it in enough benefits restrictions (that were within his powers anyway) to please most people. He didn't want to do that.
"He" (as with Gordon Brown's Lisbon hokey-cokey) = democratically-elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
So it was a wholly democratic decision. And as mentioned to @Philip_Thompson, his (Dave's) deal was a good 'un.
It wasn't, but leaving that to one side, you are far too aware of the issues to know how and why wholesale political change is not practically possible within the timeframe that Brexit was offered. You seem to be seriously suggesting that people should have rejected the ability to register their protest via Brexit, in favour of starting an undisclosed political movement to win power at an undisclosed time in the future. That's not how people work, or how democracy works.
In general, your arguments on this issue have tended to stretch words like 'sovereignty' and 'democratically elected' to breaking point, and I never know quite who they are meant to convince.
Hmmm, based on data over the vaccination growth rates over the last 3 week I estimate that in 9 weeks time Scotland will be doing more vaccinations per day than England.
Now, some might question why Scotland will be doing 1.2 million vaccinations per day but that's not for me to say, I just report the numbers.
After a further 9 week Scotland will be delivering 6 covid vaccines per day to every person in Scotland. England, needless to say will be lagging behind not even able to vacciante everyone in the country in a single day.
Cold hard facts.
At the moment the vaccination rate is limited by supply. Scotland built up a stockpile of vaccines as it was below the rate of England and that is what they are able to use now to pick up the speed of vaccinations. If England had unlimited supply I can guarantee they would be vaccinating a long more people.
Having said that, I fully expect Scotland to overtake England. This is due to the significantly more diverse population and the unfortunate comparative lack of vaccine uptake in BAME communities.
I agree with Richard's package. I think it's difficult for anyone who favoured Remain to propose it (Starmer or anyone else) because it will be framed as both Remoanerism and a distraction from the pandemic. I hate to say it, but in trade terms it probably needs to be more obviously problematic before public opinion, currently understandably obsessed by the pandemic, will swing into "OK, something must be done" mode about post-Brexit arrangements. This seems to be happening in Northern Ireland - the rest of the UK is largely oblivious to the issue.
I think you can see that on this site. @RochdalePioneers, myself and others point out that the issues we are experiencing are real but @Philip_Thompson just brushes them off as minor short term inconveniences.
And it's the experts / industry who are complaining while the general public can't see the issues.
All the things that anyone who had any experience of trading inside the single market and customs union knew would happen are happening. We are also beginning to see companies relocate at least some of their operations to within the EU in order to avoid the barriers that the UK government has created. They will not close here, but opportunities that would have been created for British citizens and residents - and the tax revenues they would have generated - will now be created in other countries. I am not sure what the government can do about that.
It's worse than that - government departments are actively touting relocation to the EU (at least of some administration) to companies as a solution to the problems the government itself has put in their way.
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, has been speaking to MEPs about the EU's vaccine rollout at the start of a debate on the bloc's vaccination strategy.
"We’re going to work as hard as we possibly can to reach our objective so that by the end of the summer at least 70% of the population will be vaccinated," she says.
But Von der Leyen admits that right now “we’re still not where we want to be".
"We were late to authorise. We were too optimistic when it came to massive production, and perhaps too confident that what we ordered would actually be delivered on time.
"We need to ask ourselves why that is the case and what lessons we can draw.”
------
We all know the answer will be more EU in an ever closer union.
Pretty much what she should have said a cpuple of weeks ago. However, the first question should be how much do we need to spend to put it right quickly - the inquest is not the priority now.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
It was Cameron that didn't take the renegotiation seriously, as shown by his failure to use the powers he already had, that are already used by other EU member states, to restrict freedom of movement.
It doesn't matter.
The simple fact is that was our one credible chance of getting real reform and it failed. Doesn't matter why it failed (and indeed Cameron does deserve some of the blame) the simple fact of the matter is it did.
It's not all Cameron's fault though. It is hard to reform any institution let alone one as scelerotic as Europe with then 28 very different sets of interests to account for each with a veto on reform.
The choice was ultimately stay in an unreformable Europe, or leave and control our own destiny.
It matters because it's about correctly identifying the source of the problem.
In my analysis the source of the problem is a general lack of seriousness from the political class generally. Cameron didn't take the risk that he might lose the referendum seriously enough to take the necessary action to head it off. We didn't take the risk to the GFA seriously enough to vote to Remain. There's a lack of seriousness in HMG's response to the trade barriers it has erected. And so on.
The header is as I read it, above all else, a plea for seriousness. Which is why it starts with an appeal to reject fantasy.
It is your personal fantasy that anything that goes wrong is solely the fault of the EU's failings.
I don't view anything that goes wrong as solely the fault of the EU's failing. Quite the opposite!
Everybody fails. Europe, the UK, even me. The difference though is that if the British government fails, like Brown did, then we can kick the buggers out.
If you think Boris is failing you can kick him out.
There is no opportunity to kick out the Eurocrats. That matters.
If someone is going to fail I'd rather it be someone we chose that we can eject than some apparatchiks that are so divorced from the electorate that nothing ever changes.
Zeshan, a Labour Party activist from Manchester, asks what is the government doing to ensure the vaccine is safe for everyone - especially among BAME communities.
I presume this attitude is widespread among some demographics and why the low uptake. The "its not safe" for our kind of people rhetoric.
As it happens, the law firm DLA Piper hosted a virtual event with Lord Mandelson yesterday, which covered some of the same ground and was very interesting indeed. Unfortunately I don't think a recording of it will be made available to the public. Much of what he said was very much along the same lines as I've proposed, in particular about not seeking to rejoin the EU in the foreseeable future. He made the very good point that if we were ever to try to rejoin, we shouldn't do so as a supplicant; we must concentrate now on building up our economic and international strength as a non-EU member.
He also had some very interesting things to say about how the government's laudable aim of attracting businesses to 'Global Britain' risks being undermined by some of their other proposals. In particular he was scathing about the proposal to make company directors liable for audit failures, and also about the proposed legislation to give the government draconian powers to intervene in company takeovers even up to five years afterwards. Those aren't issues which have received much attention, but they deserve more. We're trying to attract businesses with one hand, and pushing them away with the other.
Wait what ? Company directors are already responsible for company finances ?!
Thanks for an interesting article actually trying to move things on. One or two comments:
The Swiss comparison is useful but limited. They are in EFTA and there is FoM.
One has to ask why SPS is so difficult given that we started off with full recognition - obviously. I think this must have been a degree of EU obstruction or am I wrong?
Did we ever learn why the ridiculous outcome for music/arts was reached and why the EU wants its artists to face difficulties coming to the UK?
I am not clear what being grown up about trade offs might mean. Your example of seed potatoes is simply fundamental to the EU protection of its borders form infection and is part of the open border with RoI. Could your follow up look at this?
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
We are certainly not going to go over Dave's Deal again now suffice to say it was an excellent one which maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership.
But I also agree that the level of denial is such that it suits people such as yourself to say it was a "bad deal" because that makes it easier to dismiss it and feel ok about it.
Saying it was a bad deal is illogical and you are many things, Philip, but illogical is not one of them.
"Maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership"? That was the status quo.
We already had all of that before Cameron started talking! If you're seeking reform then coming back and saying "we have achieved reform: we have maintained everything as it was" is not reform!
Reform is actually changing thing. Changes with teeth and legally enforceable not warm words. None of the changes I was looking for, like the UK being protected from being outvoted QMV by the Eurozone acting as a bloc, ever arrived.
Under his deal we could have deemed anything we didn't like "ever closer union" and gone on our way untroubled by it all. Best of both worlds. Selling to the US? Tonga? The Pitcairn Islands? All could have happened.
Bollocks. That's ridiculous.
What teeth were there to enforce us being able to do that? And who would judge and enforce that?
We just wouldn't have done it. cf The Fiscal Compact.
You (and others on here) seem more scared/worried/critical of our own (democratically-elected) leaders than the EU.
In all seriousness this will, in about 5 years at least, have a significant impact on domestic electoral politics as these (quite possibly pro-EU) residents begin to become naturalised and vote.
I doubt it. Many may never become citizens - very few Brits abroad do it. Those who do will split pretty evenly between left and right. People are pretty similar the world over.
This is anecdata, but the of the recipients of the OxAZ vaccine that I know, only the men had a bad reaction - always on the 2nd day after the injection. Is this a feature of the vaccine?
"The government is also considering legislating to bring in new environmental and social reporting rules for companies, according to the person." Hah !
& the general additional brexit administration too
As it happens, the law firm DLA Piper hosted a virtual event with Lord Mandelson yesterday, which covered some of the same ground and was very interesting indeed. Unfortunately I don't think a recording of it will be made available to the public. Much of what he said was very much along the same lines as I've proposed, in particular about not seeking to rejoin the EU in the foreseeable future. He made the very good point that if we were ever to try to rejoin, we shouldn't do so as a supplicant; we must concentrate now on building up our economic and international strength as a non-EU member.
He also had some very interesting things to say about how the government's laudable aim of attracting businesses to 'Global Britain' risks being undermined by some of their other proposals. In particular he was scathing about the proposal to make company directors liable for audit failures, and also about the proposed legislation to give the government draconian powers to intervene in company takeovers even up to five years afterwards. Those aren't issues which have received much attention, but they deserve more. We're trying to attract businesses with one hand, and pushing them away with the other.
Tony Blair has been noteably good on a few suggestions eg single jab and international vaccine passports.
It's not a surprise to hear similar from Lord Mandelbrot.
Self similarity is characteristic of the Mandelbrot set.
The best way to sort out the mess with Brexit us to make things 10x more difficult for the EU, especially the perfidious French. They won't like it up em Capt Mannerism!
The best way to sort out the mess with Brexit us to make things 10x more difficult for the EU, especially the perfidious French. They won't like it up em Capt Mannerism!
MANNERING, Damned predictive text.
When you said Capt. Mannerism I assumed you meant Keir Starmer!
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
Of course we could have. But we wouldn't have. Cameron and Osborne wouldn't, David Milliband wouldn't. But there wasn't a referendum on replacing the supine political class wholesale with one that would defend Britain's interests fiercely, there was a referendum on Brexit.
Cameron could have negotiated a very comfortable associate membership had he so desired. We could never have got rid of FOM, but he could have packaged it in enough benefits restrictions (that were within his powers anyway) to please most people. He didn't want to do that.
"He" (as with Gordon Brown's Lisbon hokey-cokey) = democratically-elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
So it was a wholly democratic decision. And as mentioned to @Philip_Thompson, his (Dave's) deal was a good 'un.
It wasn't, but leaving that to one side, you are far too aware of the issues to know how and why wholesale political change is not practically possible within the timeframe that Brexit was offered. You seem to be seriously suggesting that people should have rejected the ability to register their protest via Brexit, in favour of starting an undisclosed political movement to win power at an undisclosed time in the future. That's not how people work, or how democracy works.
In general, your arguments on this issue have tended to stretch words like 'sovereignty' and 'democratically elected' to breaking point, and I never know quite who they are meant to convince.
It was throwing the baby out with the bath water. There was, and is plenty wrong with the EU. But net net we were far better inside than out.
And none other than Nigel Farage saw the merits of starting an undisclosed political movement to win power (or rather to change things dramatically and achieve his aim) at an undisclosed time in the future. That, although difficult to swallow in a 24-hr news culture, is how politics works.
And it is in that context that I use the words "sovereignty" and "democratically elected".
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
We are certainly not going to go over Dave's Deal again now suffice to say it was an excellent one which maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership.
But I also agree that the level of denial is such that it suits people such as yourself to say it was a "bad deal" because that makes it easier to dismiss it and feel ok about it.
Saying it was a bad deal is illogical and you are many things, Philip, but illogical is not one of them.
"Maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership"? That was the status quo.
We already had all of that before Cameron started talking! If you're seeking reform then coming back and saying "we have achieved reform: we have maintained everything as it was" is not reform!
Reform is actually changing thing. Changes with teeth and legally enforceable not warm words. None of the changes I was looking for, like the UK being protected from being outvoted QMV by the Eurozone acting as a bloc, ever arrived.
Under his deal we could have deemed anything we didn't like "ever closer union" and gone on our way untroubled by it all. Best of both worlds. Selling to the US? Tonga? The Pitcairn Islands? All could have happened.
Bollocks. That's ridiculous.
What teeth were there to enforce us being able to do that? And who would judge and enforce that?
We just wouldn't have done it. cf The Fiscal Compact.
You (and others on here) seem more scared/worried/critical of our own (democratically-elected) leaders than the EU.
We couldn't do it. There was nothing legally enforceable in the deal and the ECJ remained the supreme arbiter. The reforms failed.
Anything that was QMV post Lisbon remained QMV post Dave's deal. Nothing was changed.
As it happens, the law firm DLA Piper hosted a virtual event with Lord Mandelson yesterday, which covered some of the same ground and was very interesting indeed. Unfortunately I don't think a recording of it will be made available to the public. Much of what he said was very much along the same lines as I've proposed, in particular about not seeking to rejoin the EU in the foreseeable future. He made the very good point that if we were ever to try to rejoin, we shouldn't do so as a supplicant; we must concentrate now on building up our economic and international strength as a non-EU member.
He also had some very interesting things to say about how the government's laudable aim of attracting businesses to 'Global Britain' risks being undermined by some of their other proposals. In particular he was scathing about the proposal to make company directors liable for audit failures, and also about the proposed legislation to give the government draconian powers to intervene in company takeovers even up to five years afterwards. Those aren't issues which have received much attention, but they deserve more. We're trying to attract businesses with one hand, and pushing them away with the other.
Tony Blair has been noteably good on a few suggestions eg single jab and international vaccine passports.
It's not a surprise to hear similar from Lord Mandelbrot.
Self similarity is characteristic of the Mandelbrot set.
This is anecdata, but the of the recipients of the OxAZ vaccine that I know, only the men had a bad reaction - always on the 2nd day after the injection. Is this a feature of the vaccine?
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
'The EU' isn't a monolith, though is it? The structures could do with reforming; what might have been appropriate in the evolution from the Coal and Steel Community aren't so any more and a lot more democratic control is required, but that might well have happened already, had the relevant bodies not been involved in the British posturing and preening.
There's an awful lot of "ooh look what you made me do" this morning, which is less attractive when it isn't Taylor Swift singing it.
But we are where we are, and the EU isn't going anywhere. The other side of "no fantasy" includes putting to bed the Dan Hannan idea that Ireland, Sweden, the Netherlands et al are going to join the UK in making for the exit. It probably also means junking the idea that EU-UK negotiations are between equals; the UK is significant and does some things very well. It punches above its weight. But the idea that a nation of 70 million people should have an equal say to an organisation of 500 million people... what would the posters on parispolitiques.fr make of that?
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
Of course we could have. But we wouldn't have. Cameron and Osborne wouldn't, David Milliband wouldn't. But there wasn't a referendum on replacing the supine political class wholesale with one that would defend Britain's interests fiercely, there was a referendum on Brexit.
Cameron could have negotiated a very comfortable associate membership had he so desired. We could never have got rid of FOM, but he could have packaged it in enough benefits restrictions (that were within his powers anyway) to please most people. He didn't want to do that.
"He" (as with Gordon Brown's Lisbon hokey-cokey) = democratically-elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
So it was a wholly democratic decision. And as mentioned to @Philip_Thompson, his (Dave's) deal was a good 'un.
It wasn't, but leaving that to one side, you are far too aware of the issues to know how and why wholesale political change is not practically possible within the timeframe that Brexit was offered. You seem to be seriously suggesting that people should have rejected the ability to register their protest via Brexit, in favour of starting an undisclosed political movement to win power at an undisclosed time in the future. That's not how people work, or how democracy works.
In general, your arguments on this issue have tended to stretch words like 'sovereignty' and 'democratically elected' to breaking point, and I never know quite who they are meant to convince.
It was throwing the baby out with the bath water. There was, and is plenty wrong with the EU. But net net we were far better inside than out.
And none other than Nigel Farage saw the merits of starting an undisclosed political movement to win power (or rather to change things dramatically and achieve his aim) at an undisclosed time in the future. That, although difficult to swallow in a 24-hr news culture, is how politics works.
And it is in that context that I use the words "sovereignty" and "democratically elected".
That is your opinion. Others disagreed and thought that with reform the EU could be worth staying in.
Sadly Dave's reforms were an abject failure. Leaving us exactly where we started is not a successful reform.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
We are certainly not going to go over Dave's Deal again now suffice to say it was an excellent one which maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership.
But I also agree that the level of denial is such that it suits people such as yourself to say it was a "bad deal" because that makes it easier to dismiss it and feel ok about it.
Saying it was a bad deal is illogical and you are many things, Philip, but illogical is not one of them.
"Maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership"? That was the status quo.
We already had all of that before Cameron started talking! If you're seeking reform then coming back and saying "we have achieved reform: we have maintained everything as it was" is not reform!
Reform is actually changing thing. Changes with teeth and legally enforceable not warm words. None of the changes I was looking for, like the UK being protected from being outvoted QMV by the Eurozone acting as a bloc, ever arrived.
Under his deal we could have deemed anything we didn't like "ever closer union" and gone on our way untroubled by it all. Best of both worlds. Selling to the US? Tonga? The Pitcairn Islands? All could have happened.
Bollocks. That's ridiculous.
What teeth were there to enforce us being able to do that? And who would judge and enforce that?
We just wouldn't have done it. cf The Fiscal Compact.
You (and others on here) seem more scared/worried/critical of our own (democratically-elected) leaders than the EU.
We couldn't do it. There was nothing legally enforceable in the deal and the ECJ remained the supreme arbiter. The reforms failed.
Anything that was QMV post Lisbon remained QMV post Dave's deal. Nothing was changed.
Blimey Phil such little confidence in the UK. I mean we just left the whole organisation and you're saying we would have been forced to do something we didn't want to do? Can't see it.
We didn't sign the Fiscal Compact. And for very good reasons. What was the comeback on that?
As it happens, the law firm DLA Piper hosted a virtual event with Lord Mandelson yesterday, which covered some of the same ground and was very interesting indeed. Unfortunately I don't think a recording of it will be made available to the public. Much of what he said was very much along the same lines as I've proposed, in particular about not seeking to rejoin the EU in the foreseeable future. He made the very good point that if we were ever to try to rejoin, we shouldn't do so as a supplicant; we must concentrate now on building up our economic and international strength as a non-EU member.
He also had some very interesting things to say about how the government's laudable aim of attracting businesses to 'Global Britain' risks being undermined by some of their other proposals. In particular he was scathing about the proposal to make company directors liable for audit failures, and also about the proposed legislation to give the government draconian powers to intervene in company takeovers even up to five years afterwards. Those aren't issues which have received much attention, but they deserve more. We're trying to attract businesses with one hand, and pushing them away with the other.
Tony Blair has been noteably good on a few suggestions eg single jab and international vaccine passports.
It's not a surprise to hear similar from Lord Mandelbrot.
Self similarity is characteristic of the Mandelbrot set.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
'The EU' isn't a monolith, though is it? The structures could do with reforming; what might have been appropriate in the evolution from the Coal and Steel Community aren't so any more and a lot more democratic control is required, but that might well have happened already, had the relevant bodies not been involved in the British posturing and preening.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
'The EU' isn't a monolith, though is it? The structures could do with reforming; what might have been appropriate in the evolution from the Coal and Steel Community aren't so any more and a lot more democratic control is required, but that might well have happened already, had the relevant bodies not been involved in the British posturing and preening.
There's an awful lot of "ooh look what you made me do" this morning, which is less attractive when it isn't Taylor Swift singing it.
But we are where we are, and the EU isn't going anywhere. The other side of "no fantasy" includes putting to bed the Dan Hannan idea that Ireland, Sweden, the Netherlands et al are going to join the UK in making for the exit. It probably also means junking the idea that EU-UK negotiations are between equals; the UK is significant and does some things very well. It punches above its weight. But the idea that a nation of 70 million people should have an equal say to an organisation of 500 million people... what would the posters on parispolitiques.fr make of that?
I couldn't give a flying duck what the posters of parispolitiques.fr think.
The talks are between sovereign equals. Bigger doesn't mean better or more important; it is rather tragic that even post vaccine debacle you're still clinging to the idea that size matters.
This is anecdata, but the of the recipients of the OxAZ vaccine that I know, only the men had a bad reaction - always on the 2nd day after the injection. Is this a feature of the vaccine?
Covid man flu effect?
Yes indeed, but could gender engender a real effect?
If it is true that the arts/music EU nonsense is all because the UK didn't want it, then a bit of political pressure from celebs with voter friendly faces should sort it. Has the EU said it wants to change this bit?
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
We are certainly not going to go over Dave's Deal again now suffice to say it was an excellent one which maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership.
But I also agree that the level of denial is such that it suits people such as yourself to say it was a "bad deal" because that makes it easier to dismiss it and feel ok about it.
Saying it was a bad deal is illogical and you are many things, Philip, but illogical is not one of them.
"Maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership"? That was the status quo.
We already had all of that before Cameron started talking! If you're seeking reform then coming back and saying "we have achieved reform: we have maintained everything as it was" is not reform!
Reform is actually changing thing. Changes with teeth and legally enforceable not warm words. None of the changes I was looking for, like the UK being protected from being outvoted QMV by the Eurozone acting as a bloc, ever arrived.
Under his deal we could have deemed anything we didn't like "ever closer union" and gone on our way untroubled by it all. Best of both worlds. Selling to the US? Tonga? The Pitcairn Islands? All could have happened.
Bollocks. That's ridiculous.
What teeth were there to enforce us being able to do that? And who would judge and enforce that?
We just wouldn't have done it. cf The Fiscal Compact.
You (and others on here) seem more scared/worried/critical of our own (democratically-elected) leaders than the EU.
We couldn't do it. There was nothing legally enforceable in the deal and the ECJ remained the supreme arbiter. The reforms failed.
Anything that was QMV post Lisbon remained QMV post Dave's deal. Nothing was changed.
Blimey Phil such little confidence in the UK. I mean we just left the whole organisation and you're saying we would have been forced to do something we didn't want to do? Can't see it.
We didn't sign the Fiscal Compact. And for very good reasons. What was the comeback on that?
The Fiscal Compact wasn't able to be passed by QMV. Post Lisbon almost anything else could be.
Name one thing passable by QMV post Lisbon that Cameron's reforms actually changed please.
You're an intelligent guy, why do you take such pleasure in feigning ignorance. You must know it won't convince anyone.
This is anecdata, but the of the recipients of the OxAZ vaccine that I know, only the men had a bad reaction - always on the 2nd day after the injection. Is this a feature of the vaccine?
My 72yo mother with a weakened immume system had the OxAZ jab on Monday. She had the shivers and shakes that evening and had a headache and temperature all of yesterday. She just has the headache now.
My 78yo father had a slight headache and my 84yo father-in-law had no side effects.
So it is not quite so gender-specific. On the other hand as men are more vulnerable to Covid you might logically expect them to have on-average more side effects from the vaccine.
"The government is also considering legislating to bring in new environmental and social reporting rules for companies, according to the person." Hah !
& the general additional brexit administration too
An interesting trend - the EU is considering adding environmental tariffs to Australian imports.
I do wonder when the lightbulb will go off on the left about *social* tariffs on imports - proven chain of ingredients/materials etc. So if your tat is made with slave labour, stick 50% on it etc...
Terrific header. Just 2 minor quibbles: (i) Getting away from Remainer v Leaver. In theory, great, but in practice a pipedream. These are established sociopolitical identities now. (ii) No-one voted Leave because they wanted foreign travel (including for musicians) to be as hard as possible? Hmm. Not so sure about that. PB threads say otherwise.
As much as I love Matt, and I do, I think this is missing the mark. They are jailed for lying about holidays, not the holiday itself. Probably me being a bit poo faced but I am fecked off with everyone who twists and bends the rules, all through the pandemic. Including, tbh my parents and sisters family.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
Of course we could have. But we wouldn't have. Cameron and Osborne wouldn't, David Milliband wouldn't. But there wasn't a referendum on replacing the supine political class wholesale with one that would defend Britain's interests fiercely, there was a referendum on Brexit.
Cameron could have negotiated a very comfortable associate membership had he so desired. We could never have got rid of FOM, but he could have packaged it in enough benefits restrictions (that were within his powers anyway) to please most people. He didn't want to do that.
"He" (as with Gordon Brown's Lisbon hokey-cokey) = democratically-elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
So it was a wholly democratic decision. And as mentioned to @Philip_Thompson, his (Dave's) deal was a good 'un.
Decisions are wholly democratic when they're reversible. The only way to reverse Browns mendacity in signing Lisbon was either serious reform within the EU or Brexit.
Dave attempted reform. It failed.
That only left Brexit.
I do wonder if every day in the Cameron house starts with Dave rising with a happy smile, his mood then darkening as he remembers who the PM is, followed by throwing the papers in the bin so he never has to see the word "Brexit" ever again, before kicking the cat on the way to the shepherd's hut, where he spends the day brooding about what could have been.....
This is anecdata, but the of the recipients of the OxAZ vaccine that I know, only the men had a bad reaction - always on the 2nd day after the injection. Is this a feature of the vaccine?
My 72yo mother with a weakened immume system had the OxAZ jab on Monday. She had the shivers and shakes that evening and had a headache and temperature all of yesterday. She just has the headache now.
My 78yo father had a slight headache and my 84yo father-in-law had no side effects.
So it is not quite so gender-specific. On the other hand as men are more vulnerable to Covid you might logically expect them to have on-average more side effects from the vaccine.
I (77) had flu-like symptoms incl raised temperature on the 2nd day and had to cancel a dental appt. It lasted 24hrs.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
We are certainly not going to go over Dave's Deal again now suffice to say it was an excellent one which maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership.
But I also agree that the level of denial is such that it suits people such as yourself to say it was a "bad deal" because that makes it easier to dismiss it and feel ok about it.
Saying it was a bad deal is illogical and you are many things, Philip, but illogical is not one of them.
"Maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership"? That was the status quo.
We already had all of that before Cameron started talking! If you're seeking reform then coming back and saying "we have achieved reform: we have maintained everything as it was" is not reform!
Reform is actually changing thing. Changes with teeth and legally enforceable not warm words. None of the changes I was looking for, like the UK being protected from being outvoted QMV by the Eurozone acting as a bloc, ever arrived.
Under his deal we could have deemed anything we didn't like "ever closer union" and gone on our way untroubled by it all. Best of both worlds. Selling to the US? Tonga? The Pitcairn Islands? All could have happened.
Bollocks. That's ridiculous.
What teeth were there to enforce us being able to do that? And who would judge and enforce that?
We just wouldn't have done it. cf The Fiscal Compact.
You (and others on here) seem more scared/worried/critical of our own (democratically-elected) leaders than the EU.
We couldn't do it. There was nothing legally enforceable in the deal and the ECJ remained the supreme arbiter. The reforms failed.
Anything that was QMV post Lisbon remained QMV post Dave's deal. Nothing was changed.
Blimey Phil such little confidence in the UK. I mean we just left the whole organisation and you're saying we would have been forced to do something we didn't want to do? Can't see it.
We didn't sign the Fiscal Compact. And for very good reasons. What was the comeback on that?
The Fiscal Compact wasn't able to be passed by QMV. Post Lisbon almost anything else could be.
Name one thing passable by QMV post Lisbon that Cameron's reforms actually changed please.
You're an intelligent guy, why do you take such pleasure in feigning ignorance. You must know it won't convince anyone.
Hence Dave's Deal. We would have termed a post-Lisbon Fiscal Compact "ever closer union" and, as Dave's deal said: "“…the references to ever closer union do not apply to the UK”.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
Of course we could have. But we wouldn't have. Cameron and Osborne wouldn't, David Milliband wouldn't. But there wasn't a referendum on replacing the supine political class wholesale with one that would defend Britain's interests fiercely, there was a referendum on Brexit.
Cameron could have negotiated a very comfortable associate membership had he so desired. We could never have got rid of FOM, but he could have packaged it in enough benefits restrictions (that were within his powers anyway) to please most people. He didn't want to do that.
"He" (as with Gordon Brown's Lisbon hokey-cokey) = democratically-elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
So it was a wholly democratic decision. And as mentioned to @Philip_Thompson, his (Dave's) deal was a good 'un.
Decisions are wholly democratic when they're reversible. The only way to reverse Browns mendacity in signing Lisbon was either serious reform within the EU or Brexit.
Dave attempted reform. It failed.
That only left Brexit.
I do wonder if every day in the Cameron house starts with Dave rising with a happy smile, his mood then darkening as he remembers who the PM is, followed by throwing the papers in the bin so he never has to see the word "Brexit" ever again, before kicking the cat on the way to the shepherd's hut, where he spends the day brooding about what could have been.....
Lets hope he doesn't try and turn this frustration into another terribly written book.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
Of course we could have. But we wouldn't have. Cameron and Osborne wouldn't, David Milliband wouldn't. But there wasn't a referendum on replacing the supine political class wholesale with one that would defend Britain's interests fiercely, there was a referendum on Brexit.
Cameron could have negotiated a very comfortable associate membership had he so desired. We could never have got rid of FOM, but he could have packaged it in enough benefits restrictions (that were within his powers anyway) to please most people. He didn't want to do that.
"He" (as with Gordon Brown's Lisbon hokey-cokey) = democratically-elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
So it was a wholly democratic decision. And as mentioned to @Philip_Thompson, his (Dave's) deal was a good 'un.
Decisions are wholly democratic when they're reversible. The only way to reverse Browns mendacity in signing Lisbon was either serious reform within the EU or Brexit.
Dave attempted reform. It failed.
That only left Brexit.
I do wonder if every day in the Cameron house starts with Dave rising with a happy smile, his mood then darkening as he remembers who the PM is, followed by throwing the papers in the bin so he never has to see the word "Brexit" ever again, before kicking the cat on the way to the shepherd's hut, where he spends the day brooding about what could have been.....
I wonder how Cameron and May felt on 2019 GE exit poll.
"This is what you could have won" had they taken the issue seriously.
This is anecdata, but the of the recipients of the OxAZ vaccine that I know, only the men had a bad reaction - always on the 2nd day after the injection. Is this a feature of the vaccine?
My 72yo mother with a weakened immume system had the OxAZ jab on Monday. She had the shivers and shakes that evening and had a headache and temperature all of yesterday. She just has the headache now.
My 78yo father had a slight headache and my 84yo father-in-law had no side effects.
So it is not quite so gender-specific. On the other hand as men are more vulnerable to Covid you might logically expect them to have on-average more side effects from the vaccine.
I (77) had flu-like symptoms incl raised temperature on the 2nd day and had to cancel a dental appt. It lasted 24hrs.
I'm about to head off to get my first jab: will report back on any symptoms.
Does anybody know what the cost of travel insurance is looking like in a Covid world? And would they fail to pay out if you broke any travel laws in the countries travelled to/from?
I'm thinking unless you are utterly wreckless and prepared to risk having to sell up everything you own to pay foreign hospital bills, foreign travel is not on the cards until insurance gets happy with a post-Covid world. Or is insurance there - just horribly expensive?
Zeshan, a Labour Party activist from Manchester, asks what is the government doing to ensure the vaccine is safe for everyone - especially among BAME communities.
I presume this attitude is widespread among some demographics and why the low uptake. The "its not safe" for our kind of people rhetoric.
I find the moral agency issue... interesting.
For the majority.....
- If I do something wrong/stupid, it is my responsibility. - If I do something right/sensible, it is my responsibility.
What some people are trying to fashion, for some groups....
- If I do something wrong/stupid, it is the fault of someone else - If I do something right/sensible, it is my responsibility.
The words paternalism & condescension come to mind
Does anybody know what the cost of travel insurance is looking like in a Covid world? And would they fail to pay out if you broke any travel laws in the countries travelled to/from?
I'm thinking unless you are utterly wreckless and prepared to risk having to sell up everything you own to pay foreign hospital bills, foreign travel is not on the cards until insurance gets happy with a post-Covid world. Or is insurance there - just horribly expensive?
Good question. You wouldn't want your life wrecked by recklessness.
Those who think Dave's EU Renegotiation was just fine seem to have forgotten that it was deemed so toxic, the Remain campaign itself demanded it be airbrushed from history. No mention of it was to be allowed.
Thanks for an interesting article actually trying to move things on. One or two comments:
The Swiss comparison is useful but limited. They are in EFTA and there is FoM.
One has to ask why SPS is so difficult given that we started off with full recognition - obviously. I think this must have been a degree of EU obstruction or am I wrong?
Did we ever learn why the ridiculous outcome for music/arts was reached and why the EU wants its artists to face difficulties coming to the UK?
I am not clear what being grown up about trade offs might mean. Your example of seed potatoes is simply fundamental to the EU protection of its borders form infection and is part of the open border with RoI. Could your follow up look at this?
The musicians issue is because work visas are not an EU competence, so each country has its own rules for non-EU work immigration. It’s an issue for a lot of smaller and amateur bands and orchestras, because they are faced with a lot paperwork for a short European tour, and don’t have the resources (human and financial) to manage it.
The same issues will manifest with sports people, journalists and other travelling performative workers - as opposed to people simply travelling for business meetings, who can get a Schengen tourist visa on arrival.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
We are certainly not going to go over Dave's Deal again now suffice to say it was an excellent one which maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership.
But I also agree that the level of denial is such that it suits people such as yourself to say it was a "bad deal" because that makes it easier to dismiss it and feel ok about it.
Saying it was a bad deal is illogical and you are many things, Philip, but illogical is not one of them.
"Maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership"? That was the status quo.
We already had all of that before Cameron started talking! If you're seeking reform then coming back and saying "we have achieved reform: we have maintained everything as it was" is not reform!
Reform is actually changing thing. Changes with teeth and legally enforceable not warm words. None of the changes I was looking for, like the UK being protected from being outvoted QMV by the Eurozone acting as a bloc, ever arrived.
Under his deal we could have deemed anything we didn't like "ever closer union" and gone on our way untroubled by it all. Best of both worlds. Selling to the US? Tonga? The Pitcairn Islands? All could have happened.
Bollocks. That's ridiculous.
What teeth were there to enforce us being able to do that? And who would judge and enforce that?
We just wouldn't have done it. cf The Fiscal Compact.
You (and others on here) seem more scared/worried/critical of our own (democratically-elected) leaders than the EU.
We couldn't do it. There was nothing legally enforceable in the deal and the ECJ remained the supreme arbiter. The reforms failed.
Anything that was QMV post Lisbon remained QMV post Dave's deal. Nothing was changed.
Blimey Phil such little confidence in the UK. I mean we just left the whole organisation and you're saying we would have been forced to do something we didn't want to do? Can't see it.
We didn't sign the Fiscal Compact. And for very good reasons. What was the comeback on that?
The Fiscal Compact wasn't able to be passed by QMV. Post Lisbon almost anything else could be.
Name one thing passable by QMV post Lisbon that Cameron's reforms actually changed please.
You're an intelligent guy, why do you take such pleasure in feigning ignorance. You must know it won't convince anyone.
Hence Dave's Deal. We would have termed a post-Lisbon Fiscal Compact "ever closer union" and, as Dave's deal said: "“…the references to ever closer union do not apply to the UK”.
No we could not since the references to ever closer union were a meaningless preamble. No laws were ever passed by that preamble in the first place anyway so changing that changed precisely nothing. Any laws passable by QMV pre deal were still passable by QMV post deal.
QMV laws were the real meat of the issue. That is where the power lies.
Cameron spoke in 2014 about protection for Euro Ins and Euro Outs, as the Eurozone nations would inevitably integrate further and caucus further. Under QMV the Eurozone caucus could unilaterally pass any laws it wanted to and veto any laws it wanted to, the UK was powerless under QMV.
Hence talk of eg a double majority QMV. If a Eurozone QMV only was reached then it would apply to the Eurozone only, to apply to non Eurozone members would require a QMV of non Eurozone members too.
That would have been a serious and meaningful reform. It was rejected.
Does anybody know what the cost of travel insurance is looking like in a Covid world? And would they fail to pay out if you broke any travel laws in the countries travelled to/from?
I'm thinking unless you are utterly wreckless and prepared to risk having to sell up everything you own to pay foreign hospital bills, foreign travel is not on the cards until insurance gets happy with a post-Covid world. Or is insurance there - just horribly expensive?
I recently had a renewal quote for an annual policy, which was about the same as last year. It would have covered medical bills for Covid-related illness abroad, and also cancellation if you had to self-isolate or got infected here before the trip. I don't think they'd pay if you were breaking the law or ignoring official Foreign Office guidance, though.
I didn't renew. Given that no-one has been travelling much for a year, and that's not going to change for some months, I was rather expecting a huge reduction in the annual premium.
Does anybody know what the cost of travel insurance is looking like in a Covid world? And would they fail to pay out if you broke any travel laws in the countries travelled to/from?
I'm thinking unless you are utterly wreckless and prepared to risk having to sell up everything you own to pay foreign hospital bills, foreign travel is not on the cards until insurance gets happy with a post-Covid world. Or is insurance there - just horribly expensive?
Good question. You wouldn't want your life wrecked by recklessness.
Does anybody know what the cost of travel insurance is looking like in a Covid world? And would they fail to pay out if you broke any travel laws in the countries travelled to/from?
I'm thinking unless you are utterly wreckless and prepared to risk having to sell up everything you own to pay foreign hospital bills, foreign travel is not on the cards until insurance gets happy with a post-Covid world. Or is insurance there - just horribly expensive?
Pre-COVID travel insurance isn't valid if you travel against government advice - which includes the "all but essential travel" category - so effectively travelling now is travelling "at your own risk", entirely.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
We are certainly not going to go over Dave's Deal again now suffice to say it was an excellent one which maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership.
But I also agree that the level of denial is such that it suits people such as yourself to say it was a "bad deal" because that makes it easier to dismiss it and feel ok about it.
Saying it was a bad deal is illogical and you are many things, Philip, but illogical is not one of them.
"Maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership"? That was the status quo.
We already had all of that before Cameron started talking! If you're seeking reform then coming back and saying "we have achieved reform: we have maintained everything as it was" is not reform!
Reform is actually changing thing. Changes with teeth and legally enforceable not warm words. None of the changes I was looking for, like the UK being protected from being outvoted QMV by the Eurozone acting as a bloc, ever arrived.
Under his deal we could have deemed anything we didn't like "ever closer union" and gone on our way untroubled by it all. Best of both worlds. Selling to the US? Tonga? The Pitcairn Islands? All could have happened.
Bollocks. That's ridiculous.
What teeth were there to enforce us being able to do that? And who would judge and enforce that?
We just wouldn't have done it. cf The Fiscal Compact.
You (and others on here) seem more scared/worried/critical of our own (democratically-elected) leaders than the EU.
We couldn't do it. There was nothing legally enforceable in the deal and the ECJ remained the supreme arbiter. The reforms failed.
Anything that was QMV post Lisbon remained QMV post Dave's deal. Nothing was changed.
Blimey Phil such little confidence in the UK. I mean we just left the whole organisation and you're saying we would have been forced to do something we didn't want to do? Can't see it.
We didn't sign the Fiscal Compact. And for very good reasons. What was the comeback on that?
The Fiscal Compact wasn't able to be passed by QMV. Post Lisbon almost anything else could be.
Name one thing passable by QMV post Lisbon that Cameron's reforms actually changed please.
You're an intelligent guy, why do you take such pleasure in feigning ignorance. You must know it won't convince anyone.
Hence Dave's Deal. We would have termed a post-Lisbon Fiscal Compact "ever closer union" and, as Dave's deal said: "“…the references to ever closer union do not apply to the UK”.
No we could not since the references to ever closer union were a meaningless preamble. No laws were ever passed by that preamble in the first place anyway so changing that changed precisely nothing. Any laws passable by QMV pre deal were still passable by QMV post deal.
QMV laws were the real meat of the issue. That is where the power lies.
Cameron spoke in 2014 about protection for Euro Ins and Euro Outs, as the Eurozone nations would inevitably integrate further and caucus further. Under QMV the Eurozone caucus could unilaterally pass any laws it wanted to and veto any laws it wanted to, the UK was powerless under QMV.
Hence talk of eg a double majority QMV. If a Eurozone QMV only was reached then it would apply to the Eurozone only, to apply to non Eurozone members would require a QMV of non Eurozone members too.
That would have been a serious and meaningful reform. It was rejected.
A lot of waffle to cover up the fact that in Dave's Deal we had an ever closer union opt out which we could and would have used.
It suits your argument to ignore this of course it does, but it was there in the agreement. How enforceable was the agreement? I think we are seeing now how literally the EU takes its agreements and if they had tried to go back on it? Guess what - we'd have left.
Does anybody know what the cost of travel insurance is looking like in a Covid world? And would they fail to pay out if you broke any travel laws in the countries travelled to/from?
I'm thinking unless you are utterly wreckless and prepared to risk having to sell up everything you own to pay foreign hospital bills, foreign travel is not on the cards until insurance gets happy with a post-Covid world. Or is insurance there - just horribly expensive?
I still have freebie travel insurance as part of my current account but there is an exclusion on claims related to the pandemic, and I would have thought a general exclusion related to breaking laws.
I don't know what the position is with the EHIC, or charges for Covid-related treatment in different countries, but I expect that many people would be prepared to travel in ignorance of these issues.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
Of course we could have. But we wouldn't have. Cameron and Osborne wouldn't, David Milliband wouldn't. But there wasn't a referendum on replacing the supine political class wholesale with one that would defend Britain's interests fiercely, there was a referendum on Brexit.
Cameron could have negotiated a very comfortable associate membership had he so desired. We could never have got rid of FOM, but he could have packaged it in enough benefits restrictions (that were within his powers anyway) to please most people. He didn't want to do that.
"He" (as with Gordon Brown's Lisbon hokey-cokey) = democratically-elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
So it was a wholly democratic decision. And as mentioned to @Philip_Thompson, his (Dave's) deal was a good 'un.
Decisions are wholly democratic when they're reversible. The only way to reverse Browns mendacity in signing Lisbon was either serious reform within the EU or Brexit.
Dave attempted reform. It failed.
That only left Brexit.
I do wonder if every day in the Cameron house starts with Dave rising with a happy smile, his mood then darkening as he remembers who the PM is, followed by throwing the papers in the bin so he never has to see the word "Brexit" ever again, before kicking the cat on the way to the shepherd's hut, where he spends the day brooding about what could have been.....
Lets hope he doesn't try and turn this frustration into another terribly written book.
At least he limited it to one unlike the the current incumbent.
1. Too slow to implement. 2. Not broad enough 3. Too expensive 4. 10 years in jail? Why? No one will ever serve this - it is presumably just to make up for point 1
At the weekend the govt was saying we are not looking at vaccine passports. Today they say we are looking at them. Id give it about a week before we are not again, within a month we will probably have u-turned a couple of times more. They are inevitable, we should be ahead of the curve and planning how to implement them sensibly and on time. Instead we will panic too late and come up with something ineffective.
Does anybody know what the cost of travel insurance is looking like in a Covid world? And would they fail to pay out if you broke any travel laws in the countries travelled to/from?
I'm thinking unless you are utterly wreckless and prepared to risk having to sell up everything you own to pay foreign hospital bills, foreign travel is not on the cards until insurance gets happy with a post-Covid world. Or is insurance there - just horribly expensive?
I recently had a renewal quote for an annual policy, which was about the same as last year. It would have covered medical bills for Covid-related illness abroad, and also cancellation if you had to self-isolate or got infected here before the trip. I don't think they'd pay if you were breaking the law or ignoring official Foreign Office guidance, though.
I didn't renew. Given that no-one has been travelling much for a year, and that's not going to change for some months, I was rather expecting a huge reduction in the annual premium.
It's bonkers isn't it. Had a renewal quote from Churchill for my car. The first 10 quotes on Moneysupermarket were £200 cheaper.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
'The EU' isn't a monolith, though is it? The structures could do with reforming; what might have been appropriate in the evolution from the Coal and Steel Community aren't so any more and a lot more democratic control is required, but that might well have happened already, had the relevant bodies not been involved in the British posturing and preening.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
'The EU' isn't a monolith, though is it? The structures could do with reforming; what might have been appropriate in the evolution from the Coal and Steel Community aren't so any more and a lot more democratic control is required, but that might well have happened already, had the relevant bodies not been involved in the British posturing and preening.
There's an awful lot of "ooh look what you made me do" this morning, which is less attractive when it isn't Taylor Swift singing it.
But we are where we are, and the EU isn't going anywhere. The other side of "no fantasy" includes putting to bed the Dan Hannan idea that Ireland, Sweden, the Netherlands et al are going to join the UK in making for the exit. It probably also means junking the idea that EU-UK negotiations are between equals; the UK is significant and does some things very well. It punches above its weight. But the idea that a nation of 70 million people should have an equal say to an organisation of 500 million people... what would the posters on parispolitiques.fr make of that?
I couldn't give a flying duck what the posters of parispolitiques.fr think.
The talks are between sovereign equals. Bigger doesn't mean better or more important; it is rather tragic that even post vaccine debacle you're still clinging to the idea that size matters.
Phil- normally I don't bother replying to you. I've learnt that it's not worth it when you confidently tell me things about areas that I know really well that I know are wrong. But this is really important, so I'm making an exception.
Whatever you think of them, the evidence seems to be that most people in the EU are reasonably happy with its workings and direction. Yes, they dropped the ball on vaccines, they're not perfect. If there were a market for Brit-style Euroscepticism, someone would fill it. But short of a handful of fairly nasty people, they haven't.
Now Britain has chosen to run its affairs differently. That's a choice we were entitled to make. And the EU are entitled to say "fine, but that means trade barriers, because that's how we roll." If the governments of EU nations, or MEPs wanted to say "no you fools, we must let the UK have its cake and eat it", they could. They don't, presumably because they don't think that's what their voters want.
It's not about "better" or "more important"- that's your projection. It is about the idea that if fewer people say "yes" and more people say "no", then in a democracy something doesn't happen. It's why Norway and Switzerland hardly ever (if at all?) use their notional freedoms to diverge from new EU rules. "Talks between sovereign equals" carries the sense that both parties in the talks should have an equally reasonable expectation of having their ideas in the final agreement. Imagine a parliament with two constituencies- one with 70 voters, the other with 540. I think we can agree that would be a democratic outrage.
And if you're not interested in the views of other people- even as a thought experiment- you really should be.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
We are certainly not going to go over Dave's Deal again now suffice to say it was an excellent one which maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership.
But I also agree that the level of denial is such that it suits people such as yourself to say it was a "bad deal" because that makes it easier to dismiss it and feel ok about it.
Saying it was a bad deal is illogical and you are many things, Philip, but illogical is not one of them.
"Maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership"? That was the status quo.
We already had all of that before Cameron started talking! If you're seeking reform then coming back and saying "we have achieved reform: we have maintained everything as it was" is not reform!
Reform is actually changing thing. Changes with teeth and legally enforceable not warm words. None of the changes I was looking for, like the UK being protected from being outvoted QMV by the Eurozone acting as a bloc, ever arrived.
Under his deal we could have deemed anything we didn't like "ever closer union" and gone on our way untroubled by it all. Best of both worlds. Selling to the US? Tonga? The Pitcairn Islands? All could have happened.
Bollocks. That's ridiculous.
What teeth were there to enforce us being able to do that? And who would judge and enforce that?
We just wouldn't have done it. cf The Fiscal Compact.
You (and others on here) seem more scared/worried/critical of our own (democratically-elected) leaders than the EU.
We couldn't do it. There was nothing legally enforceable in the deal and the ECJ remained the supreme arbiter. The reforms failed.
Anything that was QMV post Lisbon remained QMV post Dave's deal. Nothing was changed.
Blimey Phil such little confidence in the UK. I mean we just left the whole organisation and you're saying we would have been forced to do something we didn't want to do? Can't see it.
We didn't sign the Fiscal Compact. And for very good reasons. What was the comeback on that?
The Fiscal Compact wasn't able to be passed by QMV. Post Lisbon almost anything else could be.
Name one thing passable by QMV post Lisbon that Cameron's reforms actually changed please.
You're an intelligent guy, why do you take such pleasure in feigning ignorance. You must know it won't convince anyone.
Hence Dave's Deal. We would have termed a post-Lisbon Fiscal Compact "ever closer union" and, as Dave's deal said: "“…the references to ever closer union do not apply to the UK”.
No we could not since the references to ever closer union were a meaningless preamble. No laws were ever passed by that preamble in the first place anyway so changing that changed precisely nothing. Any laws passable by QMV pre deal were still passable by QMV post deal.
QMV laws were the real meat of the issue. That is where the power lies.
Cameron spoke in 2014 about protection for Euro Ins and Euro Outs, as the Eurozone nations would inevitably integrate further and caucus further. Under QMV the Eurozone caucus could unilaterally pass any laws it wanted to and veto any laws it wanted to, the UK was powerless under QMV.
Hence talk of eg a double majority QMV. If a Eurozone QMV only was reached then it would apply to the Eurozone only, to apply to non Eurozone members would require a QMV of non Eurozone members too.
That would have been a serious and meaningful reform. It was rejected.
A lot of waffle to cover up the fact that in Dave's Deal we had an ever closer union opt out which we could and would have used.
It suits your argument to ignore this of course it does, but it was there in the agreement. How enforceable was the agreement? I think we are seeing now how literally the EU takes its agreements and if they had tried to go back on it? Guess what - we'd have left.
An ever closer union opt out changes nothing. Literally nothing. It is meaningless, irrelevant fluff.
Laws aren't passed by "ever closer union" they are passed by QMV or unanimity voting. If the voting powers aren't changed then quite literally nothing has changed.
Does anybody know what the cost of travel insurance is looking like in a Covid world? And would they fail to pay out if you broke any travel laws in the countries travelled to/from?
I'm thinking unless you are utterly wreckless and prepared to risk having to sell up everything you own to pay foreign hospital bills, foreign travel is not on the cards until insurance gets happy with a post-Covid world. Or is insurance there - just horribly expensive?
I recently had a renewal quote for an annual policy, which was about the same as last year. It would have covered medical bills for Covid-related illness abroad, and also cancellation if you had to self-isolate or got infected here before the trip. I don't think they'd pay if you were breaking the law or ignoring official Foreign Office guidance, though.
I didn't renew. Given that no-one has been travelling much for a year, and that's not going to change for some months, I was rather expecting a huge reduction in the annual premium.
It's bonkers isn't it. Had a renewal quote from Churchill for my car. The first 10 quotes on Moneysupermarket were £200 cheaper.
Isn't that kind of thing typical every single year?
Those who think Dave's EU Renegotiation was just fine seem to have forgotten that it was deemed so toxic, the Remain campaign itself demanded it be airbrushed from history. No mention of it was to be allowed.
The issue was his earlier Bloomberg speech had already outlined what a favourable outcome from the negotiations looked like - and it looked nothing at all like what actually came back.
One of the key findings is the Pfizer vaccine is having just as big an impact in over-80s as in under-65s. The only difference is that protection starts after 15 days in younger age groups, but it takes three weeks for it to work in older people.
That's very interesting. It looks consistent with the data coming out of Israel, and also with the fact that as yet we're seeing only tentative evidence of the over-85s being well protected.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
We are certainly not going to go over Dave's Deal again now suffice to say it was an excellent one which maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership.
But I also agree that the level of denial is such that it suits people such as yourself to say it was a "bad deal" because that makes it easier to dismiss it and feel ok about it.
Saying it was a bad deal is illogical and you are many things, Philip, but illogical is not one of them.
"Maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership"? That was the status quo.
We already had all of that before Cameron started talking! If you're seeking reform then coming back and saying "we have achieved reform: we have maintained everything as it was" is not reform!
Reform is actually changing thing. Changes with teeth and legally enforceable not warm words. None of the changes I was looking for, like the UK being protected from being outvoted QMV by the Eurozone acting as a bloc, ever arrived.
Under his deal we could have deemed anything we didn't like "ever closer union" and gone on our way untroubled by it all. Best of both worlds. Selling to the US? Tonga? The Pitcairn Islands? All could have happened.
Bollocks. That's ridiculous.
What teeth were there to enforce us being able to do that? And who would judge and enforce that?
We just wouldn't have done it. cf The Fiscal Compact.
You (and others on here) seem more scared/worried/critical of our own (democratically-elected) leaders than the EU.
We couldn't do it. There was nothing legally enforceable in the deal and the ECJ remained the supreme arbiter. The reforms failed.
Anything that was QMV post Lisbon remained QMV post Dave's deal. Nothing was changed.
Blimey Phil such little confidence in the UK. I mean we just left the whole organisation and you're saying we would have been forced to do something we didn't want to do? Can't see it.
We didn't sign the Fiscal Compact. And for very good reasons. What was the comeback on that?
The Fiscal Compact wasn't able to be passed by QMV. Post Lisbon almost anything else could be.
Name one thing passable by QMV post Lisbon that Cameron's reforms actually changed please.
You're an intelligent guy, why do you take such pleasure in feigning ignorance. You must know it won't convince anyone.
Hence Dave's Deal. We would have termed a post-Lisbon Fiscal Compact "ever closer union" and, as Dave's deal said: "“…the references to ever closer union do not apply to the UK”.
No we could not since the references to ever closer union were a meaningless preamble. No laws were ever passed by that preamble in the first place anyway so changing that changed precisely nothing. Any laws passable by QMV pre deal were still passable by QMV post deal.
QMV laws were the real meat of the issue. That is where the power lies.
Cameron spoke in 2014 about protection for Euro Ins and Euro Outs, as the Eurozone nations would inevitably integrate further and caucus further. Under QMV the Eurozone caucus could unilaterally pass any laws it wanted to and veto any laws it wanted to, the UK was powerless under QMV.
Hence talk of eg a double majority QMV. If a Eurozone QMV only was reached then it would apply to the Eurozone only, to apply to non Eurozone members would require a QMV of non Eurozone members too.
That would have been a serious and meaningful reform. It was rejected.
A lot of waffle to cover up the fact that in Dave's Deal we had an ever closer union opt out which we could and would have used.
It suits your argument to ignore this of course it does, but it was there in the agreement. How enforceable was the agreement? I think we are seeing now how literally the EU takes its agreements and if they had tried to go back on it? Guess what - we'd have left.
An ever closer union opt out changes nothing. Literally nothing. It is meaningless, irrelevant fluff.
Laws aren't passed by "ever closer union" they are passed by QMV or unanimity voting. If the voting powers aren't changed then quite literally nothing has changed.
It would mean, as it did with the Fiscal Compact, that we would not have participated in the thing we didn't want to participate in.
Those who think Dave's EU Renegotiation was just fine seem to have forgotten that it was deemed so toxic, the Remain campaign itself demanded it be airbrushed from history. No mention of it was to be allowed.
I think Remain were concerned about it not standing up to scrutiny during the campaign. But I also think that what worried them is it not living up to expectations in the event that Remain won. I suspect Osborne would have been smart enough to see the problems that would have been caused by any suggestion that the EU had reneged on any of Dave's deal.
1. Too slow to implement. 2. Not broad enough 3. Too expensive 4. 10 years in jail? Why? No one will ever serve this - it is presumably just to make up for point 1
At the weekend the govt was saying we are not looking at vaccine passports. Today they say we are looking at them. Id give it about a week before we are not again, within a month we will probably have u-turned a couple of times more. They are inevitable, we should be ahead of the curve and planning how to implement them sensibly and on time. Instead we will panic too late and come up with something ineffective.
The ten years in jail is for perjury when completing the arrival forms. Same idea as Chris Huhne and the speeding ticket.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
'The EU' isn't a monolith, though is it? The structures could do with reforming; what might have been appropriate in the evolution from the Coal and Steel Community aren't so any more and a lot more democratic control is required, but that might well have happened already, had the relevant bodies not been involved in the British posturing and preening.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
'The EU' isn't a monolith, though is it? The structures could do with reforming; what might have been appropriate in the evolution from the Coal and Steel Community aren't so any more and a lot more democratic control is required, but that might well have happened already, had the relevant bodies not been involved in the British posturing and preening.
There's an awful lot of "ooh look what you made me do" this morning, which is less attractive when it isn't Taylor Swift singing it.
But we are where we are, and the EU isn't going anywhere. The other side of "no fantasy" includes putting to bed the Dan Hannan idea that Ireland, Sweden, the Netherlands et al are going to join the UK in making for the exit. It probably also means junking the idea that EU-UK negotiations are between equals; the UK is significant and does some things very well. It punches above its weight. But the idea that a nation of 70 million people should have an equal say to an organisation of 500 million people... what would the posters on parispolitiques.fr make of that?
I couldn't give a flying duck what the posters of parispolitiques.fr think.
The talks are between sovereign equals. Bigger doesn't mean better or more important; it is rather tragic that even post vaccine debacle you're still clinging to the idea that size matters.
Phil- normally I don't bother replying to you. I've learnt that it's not worth it when you confidently tell me things about areas that I know really well that I know are wrong. But this is really important, so I'm making an exception.
Whatever you think of them, the evidence seems to be that most people in the EU are reasonably happy with its workings and direction. Yes, they dropped the ball on vaccines, they're not perfect. If there were a market for Brit-style Euroscepticism, someone would fill it. But short of a handful of fairly nasty people, they haven't.
Now Britain has chosen to run its affairs differently. That's a choice we were entitled to make. And the EU are entitled to say "fine, but that means trade barriers, because that's how we roll." If the governments of EU nations, or MEPs wanted to say "no you fools, we must let the UK have its cake and eat it", they could. They don't, presumably because they don't think that's what their voters want.
It's not about "better" or "more important"- that's your projection. It is about the idea that if fewer people say "yes" and more people say "no", then in a democracy something doesn't happen. It's why Norway and Switzerland hardly ever (if at all?) use their notional freedoms to diverge from new EU rules. "Talks between sovereign equals" carries the sense that both parties in the talks should have an equally reasonable expectation of having their ideas in the final agreement. Imagine a parliament with two constituencies- one with 70 voters, the other with 540. I think we can agree that would be a democratic outrage.
And if you're not interested in the views of other people- even as a thought experiment- you really should be.
None of that changes what I wrote.
I don't expect the UK outside of the EU to change the EUs inner workings. That's not a matter for us anymore that's a matter for them.
Nor do I expect the EU to change the UKs inner workings. That's not a matter for them anymore that's a matter for us.
That is sovereign equals. We aren't in a Parliament with them anymore.
How we negotiate with them now is bilaterally. It could have been multilaterally between us and the EU nations but they want to negotiate as one - fair enough their choice - but we talk now as sovereign equals.
Size isn't relevant since we aren't voting between ourselves as members of a common Parliament. They decide for themselves as one bloc, we decide for ourselves as another and bilaterally we either reach mutually acceptable agreements or we don't.
Either way though we are sovereign equals. Neither ranks higher than the other, they don't rank higher than us nor do we rank any higher than them. It cuts both ways.
Does anybody know what the cost of travel insurance is looking like in a Covid world? And would they fail to pay out if you broke any travel laws in the countries travelled to/from?
I'm thinking unless you are utterly wreckless and prepared to risk having to sell up everything you own to pay foreign hospital bills, foreign travel is not on the cards until insurance gets happy with a post-Covid world. Or is insurance there - just horribly expensive?
I recently had a renewal quote for an annual policy, which was about the same as last year. It would have covered medical bills for Covid-related illness abroad, and also cancellation if you had to self-isolate or got infected here before the trip. I don't think they'd pay if you were breaking the law or ignoring official Foreign Office guidance, though.
I didn't renew. Given that no-one has been travelling much for a year, and that's not going to change for some months, I was rather expecting a huge reduction in the annual premium.
It's bonkers isn't it. Had a renewal quote from Churchill for my car. The first 10 quotes on Moneysupermarket were £200 cheaper.
Isn't that kind of thing typical every single year?
It is but you would have thought it would be worth the incumbent's while to match or get close to other quotes.
I suppose this shows that, like utility firms, a lot depends on the disinclination of people to save themselves money. It drives eg. Paul Lewis on R4 (that is, btw, a radio station run by the BBC) absolutely mad that people don't switch utility deals at the end of their term.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
We are certainly not going to go over Dave's Deal again now suffice to say it was an excellent one which maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership.
But I also agree that the level of denial is such that it suits people such as yourself to say it was a "bad deal" because that makes it easier to dismiss it and feel ok about it.
Saying it was a bad deal is illogical and you are many things, Philip, but illogical is not one of them.
"Maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership"? That was the status quo.
We already had all of that before Cameron started talking! If you're seeking reform then coming back and saying "we have achieved reform: we have maintained everything as it was" is not reform!
Reform is actually changing thing. Changes with teeth and legally enforceable not warm words. None of the changes I was looking for, like the UK being protected from being outvoted QMV by the Eurozone acting as a bloc, ever arrived.
Under his deal we could have deemed anything we didn't like "ever closer union" and gone on our way untroubled by it all. Best of both worlds. Selling to the US? Tonga? The Pitcairn Islands? All could have happened.
Bollocks. That's ridiculous.
What teeth were there to enforce us being able to do that? And who would judge and enforce that?
We just wouldn't have done it. cf The Fiscal Compact.
You (and others on here) seem more scared/worried/critical of our own (democratically-elected) leaders than the EU.
We couldn't do it. There was nothing legally enforceable in the deal and the ECJ remained the supreme arbiter. The reforms failed.
Anything that was QMV post Lisbon remained QMV post Dave's deal. Nothing was changed.
Blimey Phil such little confidence in the UK. I mean we just left the whole organisation and you're saying we would have been forced to do something we didn't want to do? Can't see it.
We didn't sign the Fiscal Compact. And for very good reasons. What was the comeback on that?
The Fiscal Compact wasn't able to be passed by QMV. Post Lisbon almost anything else could be.
Name one thing passable by QMV post Lisbon that Cameron's reforms actually changed please.
You're an intelligent guy, why do you take such pleasure in feigning ignorance. You must know it won't convince anyone.
Hence Dave's Deal. We would have termed a post-Lisbon Fiscal Compact "ever closer union" and, as Dave's deal said: "“…the references to ever closer union do not apply to the UK”.
No we could not since the references to ever closer union were a meaningless preamble. No laws were ever passed by that preamble in the first place anyway so changing that changed precisely nothing. Any laws passable by QMV pre deal were still passable by QMV post deal.
QMV laws were the real meat of the issue. That is where the power lies.
Cameron spoke in 2014 about protection for Euro Ins and Euro Outs, as the Eurozone nations would inevitably integrate further and caucus further. Under QMV the Eurozone caucus could unilaterally pass any laws it wanted to and veto any laws it wanted to, the UK was powerless under QMV.
Hence talk of eg a double majority QMV. If a Eurozone QMV only was reached then it would apply to the Eurozone only, to apply to non Eurozone members would require a QMV of non Eurozone members too.
That would have been a serious and meaningful reform. It was rejected.
A lot of waffle to cover up the fact that in Dave's Deal we had an ever closer union opt out which we could and would have used.
It suits your argument to ignore this of course it does, but it was there in the agreement. How enforceable was the agreement? I think we are seeing now how literally the EU takes its agreements and if they had tried to go back on it? Guess what - we'd have left.
An ever closer union opt out changes nothing. Literally nothing. It is meaningless, irrelevant fluff.
Laws aren't passed by "ever closer union" they are passed by QMV or unanimity voting. If the voting powers aren't changed then quite literally nothing has changed.
I would be very interested in hearing a defence of how the ECU opt-out would have functioned in practice. I remember seeing it and instinctively coming to the same conclusion as Mr Thompson, and then the realisation that I was going to have to vote Leave, as Cameron had let me down. I wasn't on this site at the time, but could probably still be convinced that it was more than a figleaf.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
We are certainly not going to go over Dave's Deal again now suffice to say it was an excellent one which maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership.
But I also agree that the level of denial is such that it suits people such as yourself to say it was a "bad deal" because that makes it easier to dismiss it and feel ok about it.
Saying it was a bad deal is illogical and you are many things, Philip, but illogical is not one of them.
"Maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership"? That was the status quo.
We already had all of that before Cameron started talking! If you're seeking reform then coming back and saying "we have achieved reform: we have maintained everything as it was" is not reform!
Reform is actually changing thing. Changes with teeth and legally enforceable not warm words. None of the changes I was looking for, like the UK being protected from being outvoted QMV by the Eurozone acting as a bloc, ever arrived.
Under his deal we could have deemed anything we didn't like "ever closer union" and gone on our way untroubled by it all. Best of both worlds. Selling to the US? Tonga? The Pitcairn Islands? All could have happened.
Bollocks. That's ridiculous.
What teeth were there to enforce us being able to do that? And who would judge and enforce that?
We just wouldn't have done it. cf The Fiscal Compact.
You (and others on here) seem more scared/worried/critical of our own (democratically-elected) leaders than the EU.
We couldn't do it. There was nothing legally enforceable in the deal and the ECJ remained the supreme arbiter. The reforms failed.
Anything that was QMV post Lisbon remained QMV post Dave's deal. Nothing was changed.
Blimey Phil such little confidence in the UK. I mean we just left the whole organisation and you're saying we would have been forced to do something we didn't want to do? Can't see it.
We didn't sign the Fiscal Compact. And for very good reasons. What was the comeback on that?
The Fiscal Compact wasn't able to be passed by QMV. Post Lisbon almost anything else could be.
Name one thing passable by QMV post Lisbon that Cameron's reforms actually changed please.
You're an intelligent guy, why do you take such pleasure in feigning ignorance. You must know it won't convince anyone.
Hence Dave's Deal. We would have termed a post-Lisbon Fiscal Compact "ever closer union" and, as Dave's deal said: "“…the references to ever closer union do not apply to the UK”.
No we could not since the references to ever closer union were a meaningless preamble. No laws were ever passed by that preamble in the first place anyway so changing that changed precisely nothing. Any laws passable by QMV pre deal were still passable by QMV post deal.
QMV laws were the real meat of the issue. That is where the power lies.
Cameron spoke in 2014 about protection for Euro Ins and Euro Outs, as the Eurozone nations would inevitably integrate further and caucus further. Under QMV the Eurozone caucus could unilaterally pass any laws it wanted to and veto any laws it wanted to, the UK was powerless under QMV.
Hence talk of eg a double majority QMV. If a Eurozone QMV only was reached then it would apply to the Eurozone only, to apply to non Eurozone members would require a QMV of non Eurozone members too.
That would have been a serious and meaningful reform. It was rejected.
A lot of waffle to cover up the fact that in Dave's Deal we had an ever closer union opt out which we could and would have used.
It suits your argument to ignore this of course it does, but it was there in the agreement. How enforceable was the agreement? I think we are seeing now how literally the EU takes its agreements and if they had tried to go back on it? Guess what - we'd have left.
An ever closer union opt out changes nothing. Literally nothing. It is meaningless, irrelevant fluff.
Laws aren't passed by "ever closer union" they are passed by QMV or unanimity voting. If the voting powers aren't changed then quite literally nothing has changed.
It would mean, as it did with the Fiscal Compact, that we would not have participated in the thing we didn't want to participate in.
The Fiscal Compact had nothing to do with ever closer union. The Fiscal Compact was about it requiring unanimity and the UK retaining a formal, legally enforceable veto.
What formal, legally enforceable vetoes did we gain from Dave's deal? How was it legally enforceable?
1. Too slow to implement. 2. Not broad enough 3. Too expensive 4. 10 years in jail? Why? No one will ever serve this - it is presumably just to make up for point 1
At the weekend the govt was saying we are not looking at vaccine passports. Today they say we are looking at them. Id give it about a week before we are not again, within a month we will probably have u-turned a couple of times more. They are inevitable, we should be ahead of the curve and planning how to implement them sensibly and on time. Instead we will panic too late and come up with something ineffective.
The ten years in jail is for perjury when completing the arrival forms. Same idea as Chris Huhne and the speeding ticket.
Huhne served 2 months which was about right and would be fine in a quarantine perjury case. The culture of pretending jail terms are 10 years when they are actually a couple of months is bizarre to me. I guess no politician ever loses out by promising tougher sentences even when they know its nonsense.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
We are certainly not going to go over Dave's Deal again now suffice to say it was an excellent one which maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership.
But I also agree that the level of denial is such that it suits people such as yourself to say it was a "bad deal" because that makes it easier to dismiss it and feel ok about it.
Saying it was a bad deal is illogical and you are many things, Philip, but illogical is not one of them.
"Maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership"? That was the status quo.
We already had all of that before Cameron started talking! If you're seeking reform then coming back and saying "we have achieved reform: we have maintained everything as it was" is not reform!
Reform is actually changing thing. Changes with teeth and legally enforceable not warm words. None of the changes I was looking for, like the UK being protected from being outvoted QMV by the Eurozone acting as a bloc, ever arrived.
Under his deal we could have deemed anything we didn't like "ever closer union" and gone on our way untroubled by it all. Best of both worlds. Selling to the US? Tonga? The Pitcairn Islands? All could have happened.
Bollocks. That's ridiculous.
What teeth were there to enforce us being able to do that? And who would judge and enforce that?
We just wouldn't have done it. cf The Fiscal Compact.
You (and others on here) seem more scared/worried/critical of our own (democratically-elected) leaders than the EU.
We couldn't do it. There was nothing legally enforceable in the deal and the ECJ remained the supreme arbiter. The reforms failed.
Anything that was QMV post Lisbon remained QMV post Dave's deal. Nothing was changed.
Blimey Phil such little confidence in the UK. I mean we just left the whole organisation and you're saying we would have been forced to do something we didn't want to do? Can't see it.
We didn't sign the Fiscal Compact. And for very good reasons. What was the comeback on that?
The Fiscal Compact wasn't able to be passed by QMV. Post Lisbon almost anything else could be.
Name one thing passable by QMV post Lisbon that Cameron's reforms actually changed please.
You're an intelligent guy, why do you take such pleasure in feigning ignorance. You must know it won't convince anyone.
Hence Dave's Deal. We would have termed a post-Lisbon Fiscal Compact "ever closer union" and, as Dave's deal said: "“…the references to ever closer union do not apply to the UK”.
No we could not since the references to ever closer union were a meaningless preamble. No laws were ever passed by that preamble in the first place anyway so changing that changed precisely nothing. Any laws passable by QMV pre deal were still passable by QMV post deal.
QMV laws were the real meat of the issue. That is where the power lies.
Cameron spoke in 2014 about protection for Euro Ins and Euro Outs, as the Eurozone nations would inevitably integrate further and caucus further. Under QMV the Eurozone caucus could unilaterally pass any laws it wanted to and veto any laws it wanted to, the UK was powerless under QMV.
Hence talk of eg a double majority QMV. If a Eurozone QMV only was reached then it would apply to the Eurozone only, to apply to non Eurozone members would require a QMV of non Eurozone members too.
That would have been a serious and meaningful reform. It was rejected.
A lot of waffle to cover up the fact that in Dave's Deal we had an ever closer union opt out which we could and would have used.
It suits your argument to ignore this of course it does, but it was there in the agreement. How enforceable was the agreement? I think we are seeing now how literally the EU takes its agreements and if they had tried to go back on it? Guess what - we'd have left.
An ever closer union opt out changes nothing. Literally nothing. It is meaningless, irrelevant fluff.
Laws aren't passed by "ever closer union" they are passed by QMV or unanimity voting. If the voting powers aren't changed then quite literally nothing has changed.
It would mean, as it did with the Fiscal Compact, that we would not have participated in the thing we didn't want to participate in.
The Fiscal Compact had nothing to do with ever closer union. The Fiscal Compact was about it requiring unanimity and the UK retaining a formal, legally enforceable veto.
What formal, legally enforceable vetoes did we gain from Dave's deal? How was it legally enforceable?
The Fiscal Compact had nothing to do with ever closer union? Are you mad? It was a plan to submit national fiscal plans to the ECB (IIRC). It doesn't get more ever closer union than that.
We didn't want to do that. So we didn't. Did everyone else? Absolutely no idea perhaps they did. We couldn't veto them from doing so I agree. But we didn't comply with the new law or regulation. Because we didn't want to. And that was before Dave's Deal.
1. Too slow to implement. 2. Not broad enough 3. Too expensive 4. 10 years in jail? Why? No one will ever serve this - it is presumably just to make up for point 1
At the weekend the govt was saying we are not looking at vaccine passports. Today they say we are looking at them. Id give it about a week before we are not again, within a month we will probably have u-turned a couple of times more. They are inevitable, we should be ahead of the curve and planning how to implement them sensibly and on time. Instead we will panic too late and come up with something ineffective.
The ten years in jail is for perjury when completing the arrival forms. Same idea as Chris Huhne and the speeding ticket.
Huhne served 2 months which was about right and would be fine in a quarantine perjury case. The culture of pretending jail terms are 10 years when they are actually a couple of months is bizarre to me. I guess no politician ever loses out by promising tougher sentences even when they know its nonsense.
The culture is rotten from top to bottom.
The problem is if the law says ten years, they get a nine month sentence, then released after three.
If the law said three months in the first place we all know nobody would serve three months, they likely would serve no time at all.
1. Too slow to implement. 2. Not broad enough 3. Too expensive 4. 10 years in jail? Why? No one will ever serve this - it is presumably just to make up for point 1
At the weekend the govt was saying we are not looking at vaccine passports. Today they say we are looking at them. Id give it about a week before we are not again, within a month we will probably have u-turned a couple of times more. They are inevitable, we should be ahead of the curve and planning how to implement them sensibly and on time. Instead we will panic too late and come up with something ineffective.
The ten years in jail is for perjury when completing the arrival forms. Same idea as Chris Huhne and the speeding ticket.
Huhne served 2 months which was about right and would be fine in a quarantine perjury case. The culture of pretending jail terms are 10 years when they are actually a couple of months is bizarre to me. I guess no politician ever loses out by promising tougher sentences even when they know its nonsense.
The culture is rotten from top to bottom.
The problem is if the law says ten years, they get a nine month sentence, then released after three.
If the law said three months in the first place we all know nobody would serve three months, they likely would serve no time at all.
I'm curious if anyone has a clue how to fix that?
Set sensible sentences that reflect the time people spend in jail.
There is nothing I disagree with in the header. Clearly written by a Remainer, as it talks about damage limitation. Leavers voted for Brexit for reasons that make sense to them, but it wasn't to make life worse for people than it needs to be. You can't limit damage unless you accept the damage is there.
My only bone of contention is that friendly relations work both ways. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the EU towards the UK has been reckless and appalling, including, insulting the AZN vaccine, sledging the UK, unilaterally triggering Article 16, insecure and thinly-veiled threats, and putting us in the same category as Russia (only weeks after doing a craven deal with China).
There's a quid pro quo for it. And it starts with respect, and ending their obsession with trying to stiff the UK.
The situation we want to get to is one where there is mutual respect. The part that is under our control is showing respect.
Insisting that they show us the requisite respect first would not be a good start.
They've treated us with none, and like dirt under their shoe, because of their own insecurities at being shown up with our vaccine success. They see us as a bigger threat than Russia or China to their "Project".
That should tell all of us - Leavers and Remainers - that the EU is far from the omnipotent superpower some seem to think it is, and is actually weak and rather fragile. It suffers from its own creation myths and delusions of grandeur.
And new round of negotiations needs to keep that in mind - it will be a negotiation of equals, and the UK will not be a supplicant.
"Weak and fragile". And yet you didn't even think we could hold our own with it while a member and hence bottled it by leaving.
I don't just think that, David Cameron demonstrated it.
His failed renegotiation was one of the factors that pushed me over the edge, it showed the EU was incapable of serious reform. His suggested reforms were excellent but what he came back with was a plaster not real reform.
Had the EU taken Cameron seriously then we wouldn't have left.
We are certainly not going to go over Dave's Deal again now suffice to say it was an excellent one which maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership.
But I also agree that the level of denial is such that it suits people such as yourself to say it was a "bad deal" because that makes it easier to dismiss it and feel ok about it.
Saying it was a bad deal is illogical and you are many things, Philip, but illogical is not one of them.
"Maintained our separate status and opt outs while allowing us to benefit from EU membership"? That was the status quo.
We already had all of that before Cameron started talking! If you're seeking reform then coming back and saying "we have achieved reform: we have maintained everything as it was" is not reform!
Reform is actually changing thing. Changes with teeth and legally enforceable not warm words. None of the changes I was looking for, like the UK being protected from being outvoted QMV by the Eurozone acting as a bloc, ever arrived.
Under his deal we could have deemed anything we didn't like "ever closer union" and gone on our way untroubled by it all. Best of both worlds. Selling to the US? Tonga? The Pitcairn Islands? All could have happened.
Bollocks. That's ridiculous.
What teeth were there to enforce us being able to do that? And who would judge and enforce that?
We just wouldn't have done it. cf The Fiscal Compact.
You (and others on here) seem more scared/worried/critical of our own (democratically-elected) leaders than the EU.
We couldn't do it. There was nothing legally enforceable in the deal and the ECJ remained the supreme arbiter. The reforms failed.
Anything that was QMV post Lisbon remained QMV post Dave's deal. Nothing was changed.
Blimey Phil such little confidence in the UK. I mean we just left the whole organisation and you're saying we would have been forced to do something we didn't want to do? Can't see it.
We didn't sign the Fiscal Compact. And for very good reasons. What was the comeback on that?
The Fiscal Compact wasn't able to be passed by QMV. Post Lisbon almost anything else could be.
Name one thing passable by QMV post Lisbon that Cameron's reforms actually changed please.
You're an intelligent guy, why do you take such pleasure in feigning ignorance. You must know it won't convince anyone.
Hence Dave's Deal. We would have termed a post-Lisbon Fiscal Compact "ever closer union" and, as Dave's deal said: "“…the references to ever closer union do not apply to the UK”.
No we could not since the references to ever closer union were a meaningless preamble. No laws were ever passed by that preamble in the first place anyway so changing that changed precisely nothing. Any laws passable by QMV pre deal were still passable by QMV post deal.
QMV laws were the real meat of the issue. That is where the power lies.
Cameron spoke in 2014 about protection for Euro Ins and Euro Outs, as the Eurozone nations would inevitably integrate further and caucus further. Under QMV the Eurozone caucus could unilaterally pass any laws it wanted to and veto any laws it wanted to, the UK was powerless under QMV.
Hence talk of eg a double majority QMV. If a Eurozone QMV only was reached then it would apply to the Eurozone only, to apply to non Eurozone members would require a QMV of non Eurozone members too.
That would have been a serious and meaningful reform. It was rejected.
A lot of waffle to cover up the fact that in Dave's Deal we had an ever closer union opt out which we could and would have used.
It suits your argument to ignore this of course it does, but it was there in the agreement. How enforceable was the agreement? I think we are seeing now how literally the EU takes its agreements and if they had tried to go back on it? Guess what - we'd have left.
An ever closer union opt out changes nothing. Literally nothing. It is meaningless, irrelevant fluff.
Laws aren't passed by "ever closer union" they are passed by QMV or unanimity voting. If the voting powers aren't changed then quite literally nothing has changed.
It would mean, as it did with the Fiscal Compact, that we would not have participated in the thing we didn't want to participate in.
The Fiscal Compact had nothing to do with ever closer union. The Fiscal Compact was about it requiring unanimity and the UK retaining a formal, legally enforceable veto.
What formal, legally enforceable vetoes did we gain from Dave's deal? How was it legally enforceable?
The Fiscal Compact had nothing to do with ever closer union? Are you mad? It was a plan to submit national fiscal plans to the ECB (IIRC). It doesn't get more ever closer union than that.
We didn't want to do that. So we didn't. Did everyone else? Absolutely no idea perhaps they did. We couldn't veto them from doing so I agree. But we didn't comply with the new law or regulation. Because we didn't want to. And that was before Dave's Deal.
No I'm not mad. There was no ever closer union vote on that.
We didn't want to do that so we didn't under preexisting rules. Because we had a veto. It had nothing at all to do with an ECU opt out it was solely because we had a veto.
No veto, had it been a QMV decision, then we would have been compelled to do it. ECU be damned since there's no such thing as an ECU vote there is only unanimity or QMV.
Does anybody know what the cost of travel insurance is looking like in a Covid world? And would they fail to pay out if you broke any travel laws in the countries travelled to/from?
I'm thinking unless you are utterly wreckless and prepared to risk having to sell up everything you own to pay foreign hospital bills, foreign travel is not on the cards until insurance gets happy with a post-Covid world. Or is insurance there - just horribly expensive?
I recently had a renewal quote for an annual policy, which was about the same as last year. It would have covered medical bills for Covid-related illness abroad, and also cancellation if you had to self-isolate or got infected here before the trip. I don't think they'd pay if you were breaking the law or ignoring official Foreign Office guidance, though.
I didn't renew. Given that no-one has been travelling much for a year, and that's not going to change for some months, I was rather expecting a huge reduction in the annual premium.
It's bonkers isn't it. Had a renewal quote from Churchill for my car. The first 10 quotes on Moneysupermarket were £200 cheaper.
Isn't that kind of thing typical every single year?
It is but you would have thought it would be worth the incumbent's while to match or get close to other quotes.
I suppose this shows that, like utility firms, a lot depends on the disinclination of people to save themselves money. It drives eg. Paul Lewis on R4 (that is, btw, a radio station run by the BBC) absolutely mad that people don't switch utility deals at the end of their term.
The so-called "loyalty penalty" (or "shoppers reward", as a talk I went to last year put it).
The FCA has been looking at this for retail insurance for some time now. There aren't really any obvious solutions - it's just the case that (like in many areas) it's in the interests of the insurers to allow time-poor/uninformed/plain lazy customers to subsidise those of us who have the time, knowledge and inclination to shop around.
The current proposal is to force providers to charge renewal prices equivalent to what a new customer would be charged (ie, ban new customer discounts). The consultation period finished in January and we're waiting to hear the outcome. It's expected to lower prices on average, although those who used to shop around will likely end up paying more. https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-sets-out-proposals-tackle-concerns-about-general-insurance-pricing
On a side note, insurance isn't really (or at least shouldn't be) a commoditisable product; firms should be able to distinguish themselves via customer service, additional product features etc. The fact that the FCA seems so heavily focused on price as the sole means of customer decision making is, in my opinion, not healthy.
Before the usual suspects hiss, if progress is to be made, it is necessary to understand the other side's perspective.
Off now for a fair bit. Other fish to fry.
But also worth pointing out that some EU politicians also believe the EU is behaving unreasonably and making stuff up over some of the restrictions. Including the chairman of the EU Parliament's Committee on Fisheries.
1. Too slow to implement. 2. Not broad enough 3. Too expensive 4. 10 years in jail? Why? No one will ever serve this - it is presumably just to make up for point 1
At the weekend the govt was saying we are not looking at vaccine passports. Today they say we are looking at them. Id give it about a week before we are not again, within a month we will probably have u-turned a couple of times more. They are inevitable, we should be ahead of the curve and planning how to implement them sensibly and on time. Instead we will panic too late and come up with something ineffective.
The ten years in jail is for perjury when completing the arrival forms. Same idea as Chris Huhne and the speeding ticket.
Huhne served 2 months which was about right and would be fine in a quarantine perjury case. The culture of pretending jail terms are 10 years when they are actually a couple of months is bizarre to me. I guess no politician ever loses out by promising tougher sentences even when they know its nonsense.
Yes, The actual sentence is of course at the discretion of the sentencing judge.
There will be a range of offences from someone miscounting 13 or 14 days, to those blantantly ignoring the rules by going from SA to Morocco to France, then taking a one-way into the U.K. and saying they’d been to France for a few days. The most egregious example would probably be someone chartering a plane from a banned country, with a stop in a ‘good’ country en-route, then denying they were ever where they shouldn’t have been.
Comments
I think the US is seeing it's worst fears come to pass, that an EU without the UK is no longer an automatic ally in foreign affairs. Both the UK and US are going to need to work with it on a much more transactional basis than before. The bottom line is always going to be "can Siemens sell more dishwashers" from now on.
And we didn't really want to reform it. Why would we? Let them pursue their ever closer union while we could cherry-pick the best stuff.
Dave attempted reform. It failed.
That only left Brexit.
What teeth were there to enforce us being able to do that? And who would judge and enforce that?
It's not a surprise to hear similar from Lord Mandelbrot.
In my analysis the source of the problem is a general lack of seriousness from the political class generally. Cameron didn't take the risk that he might lose the referendum seriously enough to take the necessary action to head it off. We didn't take the risk to the GFA seriously enough to vote to Remain. There's a lack of seriousness in HMG's response to the trade barriers it has erected. And so on.
The header is as I read it, above all else, a plea for seriousness. Which is why it starts with an appeal to reject fantasy.
It is your personal fantasy that anything that goes wrong is solely the fault of the EU's failings.
In general, your arguments on this issue have tended to stretch words like 'sovereignty' and 'democratically elected' to breaking point, and I never know quite who they are meant to convince.
Having said that, I fully expect Scotland to overtake England. This is due to the significantly more diverse population and the unfortunate comparative lack of vaccine uptake in BAME communities.
Everybody fails. Europe, the UK, even me. The difference though is that if the British government fails, like Brown did, then we can kick the buggers out.
If you think Boris is failing you can kick him out.
There is no opportunity to kick out the Eurocrats. That matters.
If someone is going to fail I'd rather it be someone we chose that we can eject than some apparatchiks that are so divorced from the electorate that nothing ever changes.
Zeshan, a Labour Party activist from Manchester, asks what is the government doing to ensure the vaccine is safe for everyone - especially among BAME communities.
I presume this attitude is widespread among some demographics and why the low uptake. The "its not safe" for our kind of people rhetoric.
https://twitter.com/fact_covid/status/1359447810173792259?s=20
In this case, the Mail's lack of nuance may be helpful.....
The Swiss comparison is useful but limited. They are in EFTA and there is FoM.
One has to ask why SPS is so difficult given that we started off with full recognition - obviously. I think this must have been a degree of EU obstruction or am I wrong?
Did we ever learn why the ridiculous outcome for music/arts was reached and why the EU wants its artists to face difficulties coming to the UK?
I am not clear what being grown up about trade offs might mean. Your example of seed potatoes is simply fundamental to the EU protection of its borders form infection and is part of the open border with RoI. Could your follow up look at this?
You (and others on here) seem more scared/worried/critical of our own (democratically-elected) leaders than the EU.
& the general additional brexit administration too
CDU/CSU and FDP are both up.
Social Democrats and The Left are down by more than the Greens are up.
Why would you assume right equals AFD?
And none other than Nigel Farage saw the merits of starting an undisclosed political movement to win power (or rather to change things dramatically and achieve his aim) at an undisclosed time in the future. That, although difficult to swallow in a 24-hr news culture, is how politics works.
And it is in that context that I use the words "sovereignty" and "democratically elected".
Anything that was QMV post Lisbon remained QMV post Dave's deal. Nothing was changed.
There's an awful lot of "ooh look what you made me do" this morning, which is less attractive when it isn't Taylor Swift singing it.
But we are where we are, and the EU isn't going anywhere. The other side of "no fantasy" includes putting to bed the Dan Hannan idea that Ireland, Sweden, the Netherlands et al are going to join the UK in making for the exit. It probably also means junking the idea that EU-UK negotiations are between equals; the UK is significant and does some things very well. It punches above its weight. But the idea that a nation of 70 million people should have an equal say to an organisation of 500 million people... what would the posters on parispolitiques.fr make of that?
Sadly Dave's reforms were an abject failure. Leaving us exactly where we started is not a successful reform.
We didn't sign the Fiscal Compact. And for very good reasons. What was the comeback on that?
The talks are between sovereign equals. Bigger doesn't mean better or more important; it is rather tragic that even post vaccine debacle you're still clinging to the idea that size matters.
Fine turn of phrase by Dura Ace.
It's not easy to describe an entire ideology (Leavers) in five words.
If you're not you should have been a copywriter.
Name one thing passable by QMV post Lisbon that Cameron's reforms actually changed please.
You're an intelligent guy, why do you take such pleasure in feigning ignorance. You must know it won't convince anyone.
My 78yo father had a slight headache and my 84yo father-in-law had no side effects.
So it is not quite so gender-specific. On the other hand as men are more vulnerable to Covid you might logically expect them to have on-average more side effects from the vaccine.
I do wonder when the lightbulb will go off on the left about *social* tariffs on imports - proven chain of ingredients/materials etc. So if your tat is made with slave labour, stick 50% on it etc...
(i) Getting away from Remainer v Leaver. In theory, great, but in practice a pipedream. These are established sociopolitical identities now.
(ii) No-one voted Leave because they wanted foreign travel (including for musicians) to be as hard as possible? Hmm. Not so sure about that. PB threads say otherwise.
https://twitter.com/TomMcTague/status/1359453803372806144?s=20
https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1359455447674142724?s=20
It's bizarrely phrased but no reason to assume he means AFD.
"This is what you could have won" had they taken the issue seriously.
I'm thinking unless you are utterly wreckless and prepared to risk having to sell up everything you own to pay foreign hospital bills, foreign travel is not on the cards until insurance gets happy with a post-Covid world. Or is insurance there - just horribly expensive?
For the majority.....
- If I do something wrong/stupid, it is my responsibility.
- If I do something right/sensible, it is my responsibility.
What some people are trying to fashion, for some groups....
- If I do something wrong/stupid, it is the fault of someone else
- If I do something right/sensible, it is my responsibility.
The words paternalism & condescension come to mind
You wouldn't want your life wrecked by recklessness.
https://twitter.com/PeterHorby/status/1359456436191903748?s=20
The same issues will manifest with sports people, journalists and other travelling performative workers - as opposed to people simply travelling for business meetings, who can get a Schengen tourist visa on arrival.
QMV laws were the real meat of the issue. That is where the power lies.
Cameron spoke in 2014 about protection for Euro Ins and Euro Outs, as the Eurozone nations would inevitably integrate further and caucus further. Under QMV the Eurozone caucus could unilaterally pass any laws it wanted to and veto any laws it wanted to, the UK was powerless under QMV.
Hence talk of eg a double majority QMV. If a Eurozone QMV only was reached then it would apply to the Eurozone only, to apply to non Eurozone members would require a QMV of non Eurozone members too.
That would have been a serious and meaningful reform. It was rejected.
I didn't renew. Given that no-one has been travelling much for a year, and that's not going to change for some months, I was rather expecting a huge reduction in the annual premium.
It suits your argument to ignore this of course it does, but it was there in the agreement. How enforceable was the agreement? I think we are seeing now how literally the EU takes its agreements and if they had tried to go back on it? Guess what - we'd have left.
I don't know what the position is with the EHIC, or charges for Covid-related treatment in different countries, but I expect that many people would be prepared to travel in ignorance of these issues.
1. Too slow to implement.
2. Not broad enough
3. Too expensive
4. 10 years in jail? Why? No one will ever serve this - it is presumably just to make up for point 1
At the weekend the govt was saying we are not looking at vaccine passports. Today they say we are looking at them. Id give it about a week before we are not again, within a month we will probably have u-turned a couple of times more. They are inevitable, we should be ahead of the curve and planning how to implement them sensibly and on time. Instead we will panic too late and come up with something ineffective.
Whatever you think of them, the evidence seems to be that most people in the EU are reasonably happy with its workings and direction. Yes, they dropped the ball on vaccines, they're not perfect. If there were a market for Brit-style Euroscepticism, someone would fill it. But short of a handful of fairly nasty people, they haven't.
Now Britain has chosen to run its affairs differently. That's a choice we were entitled to make. And the EU are entitled to say "fine, but that means trade barriers, because that's how we roll." If the governments of EU nations, or MEPs wanted to say "no you fools, we must let the UK have its cake and eat it", they could. They don't, presumably because they don't think that's what their voters want.
It's not about "better" or "more important"- that's your projection. It is about the idea that if fewer people say "yes" and more people say "no", then in a democracy something doesn't happen. It's why Norway and Switzerland hardly ever (if at all?) use their notional freedoms to diverge from new EU rules. "Talks between sovereign equals" carries the sense that both parties in the talks should have an equally reasonable expectation of having their ideas in the final agreement. Imagine a parliament with two constituencies- one with 70 voters, the other with 540. I think we can agree that would be a democratic outrage.
And if you're not interested in the views of other people- even as a thought experiment- you really should be.
Laws aren't passed by "ever closer union" they are passed by QMV or unanimity voting. If the voting powers aren't changed then quite literally nothing has changed.
Van-Tam urges 'caution' about leaked report about performance of single dose of Pfizer vaccine
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2021/feb/10/uk-covid-news-shapps-summer-holidays-abroad-travel-coronavirus-vaccine-live-latest-updates?page=with:block-6023b8498f08037ff55e57c5#block-6023b8498f08037ff55e57c5
In peer reviewed, published scientific papers, with well sourced data, we trust. All others bring... nothing worth having.
One of the key findings is the Pfizer vaccine is having just as big an impact in over-80s as in under-65s. The only difference is that protection starts after 15 days in younger age groups, but it takes three weeks for it to work in older people.
That's very interesting. It looks consistent with the data coming out of Israel, and also with the fact that as yet we're seeing only tentative evidence of the over-85s being well protected.
I don't expect the UK outside of the EU to change the EUs inner workings. That's not a matter for us anymore that's a matter for them.
Nor do I expect the EU to change the UKs inner workings. That's not a matter for them anymore that's a matter for us.
That is sovereign equals. We aren't in a Parliament with them anymore.
How we negotiate with them now is bilaterally. It could have been multilaterally between us and the EU nations but they want to negotiate as one - fair enough their choice - but we talk now as sovereign equals.
Size isn't relevant since we aren't voting between ourselves as members of a common Parliament. They decide for themselves as one bloc, we decide for ourselves as another and bilaterally we either reach mutually acceptable agreements or we don't.
Either way though we are sovereign equals. Neither ranks higher than the other, they don't rank higher than us nor do we rank any higher than them. It cuts both ways.
I suppose this shows that, like utility firms, a lot depends on the disinclination of people to save themselves money. It drives eg. Paul Lewis on R4 (that is, btw, a radio station run by the BBC) absolutely mad that people don't switch utility deals at the end of their term.
Relevant to this is the attached which gives an EU perspective on this - https://twitter.com/nickgutteridge/status/1359250841362964482?s=21.
Before the usual suspects hiss, if progress is to be made, it is necessary to understand the other side's perspective.
Off now for a fair bit. Other fish to fry.
What formal, legally enforceable vetoes did we gain from Dave's deal? How was it legally enforceable?
We didn't want to do that. So we didn't. Did everyone else? Absolutely no idea perhaps they did. We couldn't veto them from doing so I agree. But we didn't comply with the new law or regulation. Because we didn't want to. And that was before Dave's Deal.
The problem is if the law says ten years, they get a nine month sentence, then released after three.
If the law said three months in the first place we all know nobody would serve three months, they likely would serve no time at all.
I'm curious if anyone has a clue how to fix that?
We didn't want to do that so we didn't under preexisting rules. Because we had a veto. It had nothing at all to do with an ECU opt out it was solely because we had a veto.
No veto, had it been a QMV decision, then we would have been compelled to do it. ECU be damned since there's no such thing as an ECU vote there is only unanimity or QMV.
The FCA has been looking at this for retail insurance for some time now. There aren't really any obvious solutions - it's just the case that (like in many areas) it's in the interests of the insurers to allow time-poor/uninformed/plain lazy customers to subsidise those of us who have the time, knowledge and inclination to shop around.
The current proposal is to force providers to charge renewal prices equivalent to what a new customer would be charged (ie, ban new customer discounts). The consultation period finished in January and we're waiting to hear the outcome. It's expected to lower prices on average, although those who used to shop around will likely end up paying more.
https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-sets-out-proposals-tackle-concerns-about-general-insurance-pricing
On a side note, insurance isn't really (or at least shouldn't be) a commoditisable product; firms should be able to distinguish themselves via customer service, additional product features etc. The fact that the FCA seems so heavily focused on price as the sole means of customer decision making is, in my opinion, not healthy.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/ursula-von-der-leyen-eu-block-shellfish-exports-b919126.html
There will be a range of offences from someone miscounting 13 or 14 days, to those blantantly ignoring the rules by going from SA to Morocco to France, then taking a one-way into the U.K. and saying they’d been to France for a few days. The most egregious example would probably be someone chartering a plane from a banned country, with a stop in a ‘good’ country en-route, then denying they were ever where they shouldn’t have been.
https://twitter.com/marceldirsus/status/1359449415895941123?s=21