The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Good luck with that, Philip. We are concerned precisely because we understand exactly what the realpolitik consequences will be of the UK having negotiated an international agreement in bad faith. Unlike you, we understand that we need them a whole lot more than they need us.
That's the same lie you lot have been sharing for five years and like a vampire at sunrise its turned to dust now.
The USA doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they just don't want violence in Northern Ireland that's all they care about. Australia doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they have bigger fish to fry. Japan and the rest of the world don't care either. Its none of their business.
Brussels care but they're a party to the dispute and we hold all the cards. They can't force us to implement it the way they want, and we can implement Article 16, so they're desperate for a resolution.
Yep, you have no notion of realpolitik. You think that the UK can do whatever it wants but that the EU can't. Good luck with that.
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The problem is that the UK hasn't and isn't engaging properly, or in good faith, to the big detriment of the people of Northern Ireland. You can also criticise the EU , but it's motes and beams frankly.
No, the problem is that the UK government's insistence on removing the CJEU's remit in Northern Ireland demonstrates that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and never had any intention of honouring it. That essentially means we are back to the kind of No Deal scenario that will have consequences for all of us.
Time limited role for ECJ =/= permanent role for ECJ
It’s a negotiation. Get over it.
We don't all have your privilege, Charles. Some of us have to live with the consequences of the UK government's lies.
So just a restatement of your position plus a personal attack.
I’m guessing you don’t have any actually facts or arguments to back your statement up then?
The fact is the international treaty the UK signed. Another fact is that you do not have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith. Pointing this out is not a personal attack.
You chose to highlight my background as if that was done kind of killer point
But the government is exercising the rights set out in the protocol
Your background is a fact of life, Charles. You do not have to live with the consequences of Brexit. You have an escape route.
It is utterly irrelevant to the discussion
I suspect that you have more options than most following the sale of your business. But I don’t bring it up because it’s irrelevant.
Oops.
I do not have the ability to fly to the US tomorrow and live there. Neither do any of my children.
Neither do I.
My daughter, however, is an American citizen. Not relevant to this discussion.
Apologies - I understood your wife is a US citizen.
She is. But I only get 90 days without an immigration application (which I have a high probability of getting approval for)
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Oh goody, Phil's up early and on fire this beautiful autumnal Sunday morning.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Good luck with that, Philip. We are concerned precisely because we understand exactly what the realpolitik consequences will be of the UK having negotiated an international agreement in bad faith. Unlike you, we understand that we need them a whole lot more than they need us.
That's the same lie you lot have been sharing for five years and like a vampire at sunrise its turned to dust now.
The USA doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they just don't want violence in Northern Ireland that's all they care about. Australia doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they have bigger fish to fry. Japan and the rest of the world don't care either. Its none of their business.
Brussels care but they're a party to the dispute and we hold all the cards. They can't force us to implement it the way they want, and we can implement Article 16, so they're desperate for a resolution.
Yep, you have no notion of realpolitik. You think that the UK can do whatever it wants but that the EU can't. Good luck with that.
They can do whatever they like, that they have the power to do.
What they don't have the power to do is to compel the UK to implement the Protocol in the way they wanted.
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
@BlancheLivermore point was about the exercise of Article 16 by the EU
That’s a demonstration that they saw Article 16 as a tactical weapon and used it in bad faith (see earlier definition I provided). Vaccines were just the proximate trigger.
And the red tops rallied to her cause. They loved the whole war thing: riding out like Britannia to beat up some errant natives on an island no-one had ever heard of before and never knew we 'owned'.
That's Boris Johnson's greatest card. He will almost certainly have the tabloids rallying to his triumphalist nationalist bullshit.
You shouldn't project your own woeful knowledge of geography onto others.
Especially not here. I suspect there isn't a country on the planet at least one of our contributors hasn't visited....
No one had ever heard of the Falklands. *
And I bet I've travelled more and lived more widely than the majority of posters on here, including Leon.
* Obviously this is hyperbole but most people ran for their atlases when the news broke, so there's no need for you to be personally obdurate.
I was six years old and knew where the Falklands were. I find it hard to believe that the majority of people didn't know where they were.
The girl I was going out with at the time in University asked me, in all seriousness, whether the Falklands were next to Orkney and what on earth were the Argentinians doing there? The relationship did not last.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Good luck with that, Philip. We are concerned precisely because we understand exactly what the realpolitik consequences will be of the UK having negotiated an international agreement in bad faith. Unlike you, we understand that we need them a whole lot more than they need us.
That's the same lie you lot have been sharing for five years and like a vampire at sunrise its turned to dust now.
The USA doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they just don't want violence in Northern Ireland that's all they care about. Australia doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they have bigger fish to fry. Japan and the rest of the world don't care either. Its none of their business.
Brussels care but they're a party to the dispute and we hold all the cards. They can't force us to implement it the way they want, and we can implement Article 16, so they're desperate for a resolution.
Yep, you have no notion of realpolitik. You think that the UK can do whatever it wants but that the EU can't. Good luck with that.
They can do whatever they like, that they have the power to do.
What they don't have the power to do is to compel the UK to implement the Protocol in the way they wanted.
Oh well. What a shame.
They absolutely don't have that power. But they do have the power to create consequences for not implementing it. Welcome to realpolitik, Phil.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The problem is that the UK hasn't and isn't engaging properly, or in good faith, to the big detriment of the people of Northern Ireland. You can also criticise the EU , but it's motes and beams frankly.
No, the problem is that the UK government's insistence on removing the CJEU's remit in Northern Ireland demonstrates that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and never had any intention of honouring it. That essentially means we are back to the kind of No Deal scenario that will have consequences for all of us.
Time limited role for ECJ =/= permanent role for ECJ
It’s a negotiation. Get over it.
We don't all have your privilege, Charles. Some of us have to live with the consequences of the UK government's lies.
So just a restatement of your position plus a personal attack.
I’m guessing you don’t have any actually facts or arguments to back your statement up then?
The fact is the international treaty the UK signed. Another fact is that you do not have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith. Pointing this out is not a personal attack.
You chose to highlight my background as if that was done kind of killer point
But the government is exercising the rights set out in the protocol
Your background is a fact of life, Charles. You do not have to live with the consequences of Brexit. You have an escape route.
It is utterly irrelevant to the discussion
I suspect that you have more options than most following the sale of your business. But I don’t bring it up because it’s irrelevant.
Oops.
I do not have the ability to fly to the US tomorrow and live there. Neither do any of my children.
Neither do I.
My daughter, however, is an American citizen. Not relevant to this discussion.
Apologies - I understood your wife is a US citizen.
She is. But I only get 90 days without an immigration application (which I have a high probability of getting approval for)
Yep, so essentially you can go to live in the US tomorrow.
Good morning from the security queue at Aberdeen airport. Which is so long that it goes out the doors of the terminal and you have to dodge round it to get to the queue for check-in desks which was also long.
I hate flying. Not the might we crash thing (we almost certainly won't). It's the endless tedium of queueing and queuing and then being confined in a seat.
To win a landslide and win a majority in England Labour probably do win another charismatic and centrist Blair like leader. The Blair and Brown: the New Labour Revolution which started last Monday and continues tomorrow on BBC2 at 9pm is good on showing how ruthless Blair was in changing Labour's image and policies to appeal to Middle England.
However while Labour has near zero chance of winning a majority at the next general election, Starmer has significantly higher chance of getting a hung parliament and becoming PM with SNP and LD support.
Remember the last leader to take Labour into power before Blair, Harold Wilson in February 1974 and 1964, lost in England to Home and Heath respectively. Wilson won those elections by a majority of just 4 in 1964 and by winning most seats in a hung parliament in February 1974 thanks to Labour winning a majority of seats in Scotland and Wales. So again it could be Scottish and Welsh MPs who could put Labour into power again, only this time the Scottish MPs would be SNP not Labour
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
Good morning from the security queue at Aberdeen airport. Which is so long that it goes out the doors of the terminal and you have to dodge round it to get to the queue for check-in desks which was also long.
I hate flying. Not the might we crash thing (we almost certainly won't). It's the endless tedium of queueing and queuing and then being confined in a seat.
Something we are in complete agreement about. Flying has gone from something of an adventure to utter tedium harassed by jobsworths and ridiculous and petty rules and regulations. I no longer fly unless there is really no practical choice.
And the red tops rallied to her cause. They loved the whole war thing: riding out like Britannia to beat up some errant natives on an island no-one had ever heard of before and never knew we 'owned'.
That's Boris Johnson's greatest card. He will almost certainly have the tabloids rallying to his triumphalist nationalist bullshit.
You shouldn't project your own woeful knowledge of geography onto others.
Especially not here. I suspect there isn't a country on the planet at least one of our contributors hasn't visited....
No one had ever heard of the Falklands. *
And I bet I've travelled more and lived more widely than the majority of posters on here, including Leon.
* Obviously this is hyperbole but most people ran for their atlases when the news broke, so there's no need for you to be personally obdurate.
I was twelve at the time and I knew where and what the Falklands were.
Jeremy Clarkson is not what I would call a reliable source; he is a living definition of hyperbole.
I don’t think the readership on this site is typical. Remember that in surveys of public knowledge of Geography you see far more shocking results than people not knowing where the Falklands are. Quite recently I remember a survey showing a small minority able to locate Ukraine on a map. And on Atlantic islands, during the debates on taxing multinationals a survey showed most people placing Bermuda in the middle of the Caribbean.
So on the obscure countries not already listed here’s my contribution:
Ukraine Armenia Algeria Saudi
Was due to go to Mauritania last November which would have been the obscurest yet but Covid put paid to that.
This piece has some interesting nuggets in it. For instance, I didn't realise that cabinet ministers other than the PM were allowed only short speeches and not from the main stage. That is extraordinary, isn't it?
Good morning from the security queue at Aberdeen airport. Which is so long that it goes out the doors of the terminal and you have to dodge round it to get to the queue for check-in desks which was also long.
I hate flying. Not the might we crash thing (we almost certainly won't). It's the endless tedium of queueing and queuing and then being confined in a seat.
Perhaps it’s a ploy to get us all to fly less and so cut down our carbon footprints?
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I went to Berlin in '82, and through Checkpoint Charlie into the East for a few hours. Don't remember much as I was very young.
The only other place I've been that feels quite a rare one would be the Turks and Caicos Islands, where I went while reading a Fred Forsyth book where the main character goes there. Felt quite eerily surreal to coincidentally read a description of the tiny beach bar I was sitting in reading..
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I don't have a strong hand in this game but I can claim Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan when they were still a part of the Soviet Union.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The problem is that the UK hasn't and isn't engaging properly, or in good faith, to the big detriment of the people of Northern Ireland. You can also criticise the EU , but it's motes and beams frankly.
So David Frost in a Twitter argument with Simon Coveney. He doesn't seem to understand the purpose of a treaty is to get the other side to make commitments they ordinarily would not make. He is acting in bad faith now, as he did when he negotiated the Withdrawal Agreement.
. I prefer not to do negotiations by twitter, but since @simoncoveney has begun the process...
...the issue of governance & the CJEU is not new. We set out our concerns three months ago in our 21 July Command Paper.
The problem is that too few people seem to have listened.
Coveney claimed that Frost was creating a “new issue” in relation to the EU proposals.
Frost refuted that claim and said it had been clear in the July proposals from the UK
Please explain the bad faith.
The bad faith is renouncing a key and entirely unambiguous tenet of an international treaty that you signed and then presented to the electorate as a triumph. As with making it harder to vote, banning public protests, eroding Parliamentary scrutiny and putting the executive beyond judicial scrutiny, this is something that right-wing Brexiteers who used to deliver high falutin' lectures on the importance of democracy, sovereignty and the rule of law are now perfectly happy to countenance - because it's their side that is doing it.
The protocol was predicated on it being temporary and being replaced by a trusted trader scheme. In addition there was a provision that it could be cancelled if it was causing undue stress in the community
The EU has not been willing to engage on the trusted trader scheme. So the UK has said “if we don’t solve this we will need to terminate it”
The UK is following the process set out in their agreement
This is wrong on the facts. There is no termination clause in the Northern Ireland Protocol. Even the Consent Mechanism, if triggered after four years, only disapplies part of it. Trusted Trader scheme has nothing to do with the EUCJ and is not mentioned in the Protocol.
In any case there is a Trusted Trader scheme in place and presumably Sefcovic's proposals go further.
Article 16 allows for unilateral termination based on “serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist” (Wiki)
Is there an agreed TT scheme? I may have missed it over the summer but my understanding was the EU objected to the UK proposal because it covered too many companies
Article 16 doesn't allow termination. It allows temporary and limited remedies in order to get the Protocol back on track.
There is trusted trader scheme covering supermarkets. Supermarkets seems to have been a UK priority. As I say, not part of the treaty.
You’re right.
Article 16 allows the UK to suspend implementation until the EU agrees to a comprehensive TT scheme
Distinction without a difference
On this we're partly agreed. Article 16 in practice, if not on the actual terms, allows a party acting in bad faith to breach the treaty without everyone having to reach for their copy of the Vienna Conventions.
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
That doesn't make the good faith reappear from behind our ear.
I’ve been to Hartlepool. Can many PBers claim the same?
Yep. Saw a fat lass with tattooed feet pissing in a gutter at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon. A substantial portion of it seemed to be boarded up and deserted as if it had been depopulated by an enhanced radiation weapon. It actually resembled the worst parts of East Germany more than England.
All the signs that Brexit was a terrible idea were there. Anything that Putin, Trump, Farage, Galloway and 70% of the population of Hartlepool are in favour of just has to be fucked.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Good luck with that, Philip. We are concerned precisely because we understand exactly what the realpolitik consequences will be of the UK having negotiated an international agreement in bad faith. Unlike you, we understand that we need them a whole lot more than they need us.
That's the same lie you lot have been sharing for five years and like a vampire at sunrise its turned to dust now.
The USA doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they just don't want violence in Northern Ireland that's all they care about. Australia doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they have bigger fish to fry. Japan and the rest of the world don't care either. Its none of their business.
Brussels care but they're a party to the dispute and we hold all the cards. They can't force us to implement it the way they want, and we can implement Article 16, so they're desperate for a resolution.
Yep, you have no notion of realpolitik. You think that the UK can do whatever it wants but that the EU can't. Good luck with that.
In this case realpolitik is that no one wants to be blamed for implementing a hard border between RoI and NI
Article 16 allows the UK the ability to force the EU to choose between (a) implementing a harder border between RoI/NI; (b) not having a hard border despite their concerns about protecting their EU-wide customs zone; and (c) reaching a deal with the Uk
Given that (a) and (b) are unpalatable for the EU they need to achieve (c) which means that the UK has a strong negotiating position
I don’t see another alternative to (a), (b) or (c). I am working on the assumption that (d) terminating the whole deal is not legal as Article 16 is part of the protocol and will be justifiably be seen by others as an overreaction
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I went to Berlin in '82, and through Checkpoint Charlie into the East for a few hours. Don't remember much as I was very young.
The only other place I've been that feels quite a rare one would be the Turks and Caicos Islands, where I went while reading a Fred Forsyth book where the main character goes there. Felt quite eerily surreal to coincidentally read a description of the tiny beach bar I was sitting in reading..
Turks and Caicos is a weird place. Provo is very developed and feels like the Bahamas, but Grand Turk feels like the end of the earth, despite being the administrative capital.
While the adulation of the activists who cheered his speech looked genuine, many of the MPs present were faking it. They still think of themselves as representatives of the Conservative party, not devotees of the Johnson Church of Borisology. The typical Tory MP came into politics believing in low taxes, restrained public spending, free markets, a stable society and a modest state. They are disoriented, when they are not horrified, to find that they are members of a government that is presiding over chaos, raising taxes, bashing business and encouraging wage inflation while having no serious plan for mitigating the disruption, nurturing economic growth or improving productivity.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The problem is that the UK hasn't and isn't engaging properly, or in good faith, to the big detriment of the people of Northern Ireland. You can also criticise the EU , but it's motes and beams frankly.
No, the problem is that the UK government's insistence on removing the CJEU's remit in Northern Ireland demonstrates that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and never had any intention of honouring it. That essentially means we are back to the kind of No Deal scenario that will have consequences for all of us.
Time limited role for ECJ =/= permanent role for ECJ
It’s a negotiation. Get over it.
We don't all have your privilege, Charles. Some of us have to live with the consequences of the UK government's lies.
So just a restatement of your position plus a personal attack.
I’m guessing you don’t have any actually facts or arguments to back your statement up then?
The fact is the international treaty the UK signed. Another fact is that you do not have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith. Pointing this out is not a personal attack.
You chose to highlight my background as if that was done kind of killer point
But the government is exercising the rights set out in the protocol
Your background is a fact of life, Charles. You do not have to live with the consequences of Brexit. You have an escape route.
It is utterly irrelevant to the discussion
I suspect that you have more options than most following the sale of your business. But I don’t bring it up because it’s irrelevant.
Oops.
I do not have the ability to fly to the US tomorrow and live there. Neither do any of my children.
Neither do I.
My daughter, however, is an American citizen. Not relevant to this discussion.
Apologies - I understood your wife is a US citizen.
She is. But I only get 90 days without an immigration application (which I have a high probability of getting approval for)
Yep, so essentially you can go to live in the US tomorrow.
No I can go as a tourist, as you can (subject to the presidential proclamation which is just a temporary situation)
Mr. Sandpit, thanks. Not sure it's great, but his performance throughout qualifying was impressive and Verstappen seemed further back than usual.
We'll see if the tyres are as crumbly as anticipated. Pirelli apparently fear they've gone too aggressive. If so, that will help Hamilton significantly.
I'm backing Verstappen for this race.
Bottas will cede the lead by the first lap and the Dutch shunt will disappear into the horizon.
I’m hoping Valtteri “takes one for the team” at the first corner, if only to see Christian Horner go completely nuts.
The key battle in the race will be between Perez and Hamilton, and can the second Red Bull hold up the championship leader for long enough. I suspect that Mercedes will put their two cars on very different strategies, to force RB into deciding either to race Lewis or race for the win.
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I went to Berlin in '82, and through Checkpoint Charlie into the East for a few hours. Don't remember much as I was very young.
The only other place I've been that feels quite a rare one would be the Turks and Caicos Islands, where I went while reading a Fred Forsyth book where the main character goes there. Felt quite eerily surreal to coincidentally read a description of the tiny beach bar I was sitting in reading..
My visit to Berlin was to meet up with a couple of friends to go Interailing with them. I had to be at a certain cafe in West Berlin at a particular time for the meeting to work, something no one would rely on these days. Having the East German police come onto the train as it headed for Berlin and go down each carriage questioning everyone made it feel like a bad spy film…
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The problem is that the UK hasn't and isn't engaging properly, or in good faith, to the big detriment of the people of Northern Ireland. You can also criticise the EU , but it's motes and beams frankly.
So David Frost in a Twitter argument with Simon Coveney. He doesn't seem to understand the purpose of a treaty is to get the other side to make commitments they ordinarily would not make. He is acting in bad faith now, as he did when he negotiated the Withdrawal Agreement.
. I prefer not to do negotiations by twitter, but since @simoncoveney has begun the process...
...the issue of governance & the CJEU is not new. We set out our concerns three months ago in our 21 July Command Paper.
The problem is that too few people seem to have listened.
Coveney claimed that Frost was creating a “new issue” in relation to the EU proposals.
Frost refuted that claim and said it had been clear in the July proposals from the UK
Please explain the bad faith.
The bad faith is renouncing a key and entirely unambiguous tenet of an international treaty that you signed and then presented to the electorate as a triumph. As with making it harder to vote, banning public protests, eroding Parliamentary scrutiny and putting the executive beyond judicial scrutiny, this is something that right-wing Brexiteers who used to deliver high falutin' lectures on the importance of democracy, sovereignty and the rule of law are now perfectly happy to countenance - because it's their side that is doing it.
The protocol was predicated on it being temporary and being replaced by a trusted trader scheme. In addition there was a provision that it could be cancelled if it was causing undue stress in the community
The EU has not been willing to engage on the trusted trader scheme. So the UK has said “if we don’t solve this we will need to terminate it”
The UK is following the process set out in their agreement
This is wrong on the facts. There is no termination clause in the Northern Ireland Protocol. Even the Consent Mechanism, if triggered after four years, only disapplies part of it. Trusted Trader scheme has nothing to do with the EUCJ and is not mentioned in the Protocol.
In any case there is a Trusted Trader scheme in place and presumably Sefcovic's proposals go further.
Article 16 allows for unilateral termination based on “serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist” (Wiki)
Is there an agreed TT scheme? I may have missed it over the summer but my understanding was the EU objected to the UK proposal because it covered too many companies
Article 16 doesn't allow termination. It allows temporary and limited remedies in order to get the Protocol back on track.
There is trusted trader scheme covering supermarkets. Supermarkets seems to have been a UK priority. As I say, not part of the treaty.
You’re right.
Article 16 allows the UK to suspend implementation until the EU agrees to a comprehensive TT scheme
Distinction without a difference
On this we're partly agreed. Article 16 in practice, if not on the actual terms, allows a party acting in bad faith to breach the treaty without everyone having to reach for their copy of the Vienna Conventions.
Which is why the EU coming back hard on this.
Except the UK is not acting in bad faith
The unionists are deeply pissed off. The protocol is causing real issues for them.
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
On topic England has always trended Conservative. Until fairly recently Wales and Scotland trended very much more to the left but the collapse of Labour strength in Scotland gives them an extremely difficult task. The change in seats in Wales may well have a similar, if smaller, effect. Blair was able to win a majority of the seats in England without winning the popular vote there but I really think it takes a political master like him for Labour to achieve this. SKS is no such master.
This puts Labour in a very tricky position. Without Scotland and with weaker representation from Wales I struggle to see how they get over 300 seats, let alone 326. They can hope for the Tories to lose their majority and look to work with the other parties but how do they ever get an overall majority again? It's bordering on the impossible. I think that they need at least 30 seats from Scotland and that looks incredibly far off.
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I don't have a strong hand in this game but I can claim Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan when they were still a part of the Soviet Union.
You have reminded me of one I really should have thought of: Leningrad!
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
In addition there is the excess deaths. None of the 3 measures are very far apart in the UK.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I don't have a strong hand in this game but I can claim Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan when they were still a part of the Soviet Union.
You have reminded me of one I really should have thought of: Leningrad!
I’ve been to
- Suomenlinna - Hell* - North Cape - Peterhof - Hekla - Kolga
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
In addition there is the excess deaths. None of the 3 measures are very far apart in the UK.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
I think our deaths measures are pretty honest and consistent across the board. I’m less convinced that all other countries figures are as trustworthy. Interestingly, while drown in daily data, some is not easily forthcoming, the vaccination status of those dying. Seems odd not to publish, even if only weekly, say.
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
In addition there is the excess deaths. None of the 3 measures are very far apart in the UK.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
It is truly remarkable how 100-150 deaths a day have become so normalised and un-newsworthy.
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
In addition there is the excess deaths. None of the 3 measures are very far apart in the UK.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
I think our deaths measures are pretty honest and consistent across the board. I’m less convinced that all other countries figures are as trustworthy. Interestingly, while drown in daily data, some is not easily forthcoming, the vaccination status of those dying. Seems odd not to publish, even if only weekly, say.
You’re ahead of me. I’m convinced the Chinese, Russians and Iranians are lying.
China is doing its usual misinformation campaign as well, for example claiming on Wiki that everyone trusts their figures(!) so they must be covering up something pretty bad.
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
In addition there is the excess deaths. None of the 3 measures are very far apart in the UK.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
It is truly remarkable how 100-150 deaths a day have become so normalised and un-newsworthy.
Although you might ask yourself the total number of deaths each day too. I.e. cancer, heart disease, flu and so on.
And the red tops rallied to her cause. They loved the whole war thing: riding out like Britannia to beat up some errant natives on an island no-one had ever heard of before and never knew we 'owned'.
That's Boris Johnson's greatest card. He will almost certainly have the tabloids rallying to his triumphalist nationalist bullshit.
You shouldn't project your own woeful knowledge of geography onto others.
Especially not here. I suspect there isn't a country on the planet at least one of our contributors hasn't visited....
No one had ever heard of the Falklands. *
And I bet I've travelled more and lived more widely than the majority of posters on here, including Leon.
* Obviously this is hyperbole but most people ran for their atlases when the news broke, so there's no need for you to be personally obdurate.
I was twelve at the time and I knew where and what the Falklands were.
Jeremy Clarkson is not what I would call a reliable source; he is a living definition of hyperbole.
I don’t think the readership on this site is typical. Remember that in surveys of public knowledge of Geography you see far more shocking results than people not knowing where the Falklands are. Quite recently I remember a survey showing a small minority able to locate Ukraine on a map. And on Atlantic islands, during the debates on taxing multinationals a survey showed most people placing Bermuda in the middle of the Caribbean.
So on the obscure countries not already listed here’s my contribution:
Ukraine Armenia Algeria Saudi
Was due to go to Mauritania last November which would have been the obscurest yet but Covid put paid to that.
I started on this then realised it’s no good trying on an iPhone with a normal sized finger. One for a leisurely attempt when at a computer with a mouse.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Good luck with that, Philip. We are concerned precisely because we understand exactly what the realpolitik consequences will be of the UK having negotiated an international agreement in bad faith. Unlike you, we understand that we need them a whole lot more than they need us.
That's the same lie you lot have been sharing for five years and like a vampire at sunrise its turned to dust now.
The USA doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they just don't want violence in Northern Ireland that's all they care about. Australia doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they have bigger fish to fry. Japan and the rest of the world don't care either. Its none of their business.
Brussels care but they're a party to the dispute and we hold all the cards. They can't force us to implement it the way they want, and we can implement Article 16, so they're desperate for a resolution.
Yep, you have no notion of realpolitik. You think that the UK can do whatever it wants but that the EU can't. Good luck with that.
In this case realpolitik is that no one wants to be blamed for implementing a hard border between RoI and NI
Article 16 allows the UK the ability to force the EU to choose between (a) implementing a harder border between RoI/NI; (b) not having a hard border despite their concerns about protecting their EU-wide customs zone; and (c) reaching a deal with the Uk
Given that (a) and (b) are unpalatable for the EU they need to achieve (c) which means that the UK has a strong negotiating position
I don’t see another alternative to (a), (b) or (c). I am working on the assumption that (d) terminating the whole deal is not legal as Article 16 is part of the protocol and will be justifiably be seen by others as an overreaction
(a) would also be unpalatable for UKG if they had an iota of responsibility for a territory they are supposedly in charge of. They are happy to trash part of supposedly their own country for purposes of ideology.
Apart from acting in bad faith, Frost etc don't seem to realise the extent to which the Northern Ireland Protocol is a compromise for all parties in a fragile place.
While the adulation of the activists who cheered his speech looked genuine, many of the MPs present were faking it. They still think of themselves as representatives of the Conservative party, not devotees of the Johnson Church of Borisology. The typical Tory MP came into politics believing in low taxes, restrained public spending, free markets, a stable society and a modest state. They are disoriented, when they are not horrified, to find that they are members of a government that is presiding over chaos, raising taxes, bashing business and encouraging wage inflation while having no serious plan for mitigating the disruption, nurturing economic growth or improving productivity.
Tory MPs seem to be working under the assumption that they are like Wylee Coyote, plunging to earth in a lift - if they just time it right and step out of it a second before it hits the ground they will be fine. I suspect that when Johnsonism finally hits the ground at 200mph many of them will find themselves caught up in the conflagration, which will of course serve them right for being so utterly lacking in principle. Whether this happens before or after the next election is an open question (my money would be on after, still). Johnson himself will walk away unscathed, as he always does.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The problem is that the UK hasn't and isn't engaging properly, or in good faith, to the big detriment of the people of Northern Ireland. You can also criticise the EU , but it's motes and beams frankly.
So David Frost in a Twitter argument with Simon Coveney. He doesn't seem to understand the purpose of a treaty is to get the other side to make commitments they ordinarily would not make. He is acting in bad faith now, as he did when he negotiated the Withdrawal Agreement.
. I prefer not to do negotiations by twitter, but since @simoncoveney has begun the process...
...the issue of governance & the CJEU is not new. We set out our concerns three months ago in our 21 July Command Paper.
The problem is that too few people seem to have listened.
Coveney claimed that Frost was creating a “new issue” in relation to the EU proposals.
Frost refuted that claim and said it had been clear in the July proposals from the UK
Please explain the bad faith.
The bad faith is renouncing a key and entirely unambiguous tenet of an international treaty that you signed and then presented to the electorate as a triumph. As with making it harder to vote, banning public protests, eroding Parliamentary scrutiny and putting the executive beyond judicial scrutiny, this is something that right-wing Brexiteers who used to deliver high falutin' lectures on the importance of democracy, sovereignty and the rule of law are now perfectly happy to countenance - because it's their side that is doing it.
The protocol was predicated on it being temporary and being replaced by a trusted trader scheme. In addition there was a provision that it could be cancelled if it was causing undue stress in the community
The EU has not been willing to engage on the trusted trader scheme. So the UK has said “if we don’t solve this we will need to terminate it”
The UK is following the process set out in their agreement
This is wrong on the facts. There is no termination clause in the Northern Ireland Protocol. Even the Consent Mechanism, if triggered after four years, only disapplies part of it. Trusted Trader scheme has nothing to do with the EUCJ and is not mentioned in the Protocol.
In any case there is a Trusted Trader scheme in place and presumably Sefcovic's proposals go further.
Article 16 allows for unilateral termination based on “serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist” (Wiki)
Is there an agreed TT scheme? I may have missed it over the summer but my understanding was the EU objected to the UK proposal because it covered too many companies
Article 16 doesn't allow termination. It allows temporary and limited remedies in order to get the Protocol back on track.
There is trusted trader scheme covering supermarkets. Supermarkets seems to have been a UK priority. As I say, not part of the treaty.
You’re right.
Article 16 allows the UK to suspend implementation until the EU agrees to a comprehensive TT scheme
Distinction without a difference
On this we're partly agreed. Article 16 in practice, if not on the actual terms, allows a party acting in bad faith to breach the treaty without everyone having to reach for their copy of the Vienna Conventions.
Which is why the EU coming back hard on this.
We really should have used leaving the EU as an opportunity to get rid of Northern Ireland once and for all.
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
In addition there is the excess deaths. None of the 3 measures are very far apart in the UK.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
I think our deaths measures are pretty honest and consistent across the board. I’m less convinced that all other countries figures are as trustworthy. Interestingly, while drown in daily data, some is not easily forthcoming, the vaccination status of those dying. Seems odd not to publish, even if only weekly, say.
I think the trouble with vax status of those dying is a public understanding one. As the proportion vaccinated rises the proportion of deaths that are fully jabbed first reduces (then total jabs remain low) then rises again when the vast majority are vaccinated. Just maths, but easy to misrepresent if you’re an antivaxxer.
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I went to Berlin in '82, and through Checkpoint Charlie into the East for a few hours. Don't remember much as I was very young.
The only other place I've been that feels quite a rare one would be the Turks and Caicos Islands, where I went while reading a Fred Forsyth book where the main character goes there. Felt quite eerily surreal to coincidentally read a description of the tiny beach bar I was sitting in reading..
Turks and Caicos is a weird place. Provo is very developed and feels like the Bahamas, but Grand Turk feels like the end of the earth, despite being the administrative capital.
I only saw Provo. Was a completely unplanned trip. I'd been working in Miami for 6 weeks and my boss called on a Friday to say if I could sort out the flights I could use his villa for a week starting on the Sunday. I had a lovely, relaxing time, but it wasn't all that special (and I don't think I could afford to go back anyway!)
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
In addition there is the excess deaths. None of the 3 measures are very far apart in the UK.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
It is truly remarkable how 100-150 deaths a day have become so normalised and un-newsworthy.
Although you might ask yourself the total number of deaths each day too. I.e. cancer, heart disease, flu and so on.
Its about 1400 from England and Wales so maybe 1550 for all of the UK? So people dying with Covid currently make up something approaching 10% of all deaths. Its pretty significant and we have been stuck at this level for quite a while now.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The problem is that the UK hasn't and isn't engaging properly, or in good faith, to the big detriment of the people of Northern Ireland. You can also criticise the EU , but it's motes and beams frankly.
No, the problem is that the UK government's insistence on removing the CJEU's remit in Northern Ireland demonstrates that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and never had any intention of honouring it. That essentially means we are back to the kind of No Deal scenario that will have consequences for all of us.
Time limited role for ECJ =/= permanent role for ECJ
It’s a negotiation. Get over it.
We don't all have your privilege, Charles. Some of us have to live with the consequences of the UK government's lies.
So just a restatement of your position plus a personal attack.
I’m guessing you don’t have any actually facts or arguments to back your statement up then?
The fact is the international treaty the UK signed. Another fact is that you do not have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith. Pointing this out is not a personal attack.
You chose to highlight my background as if that was done kind of killer point
But the government is exercising the rights set out in the protocol
Your background is a fact of life, Charles. You do not have to live with the consequences of Brexit. You have an escape route.
It is utterly irrelevant to the discussion
I suspect that you have more options than most following the sale of your business. But I don’t bring it up because it’s irrelevant.
Oops.
I do not have the ability to fly to the US tomorrow and live there. Neither do any of my children.
Neither do I.
My daughter, however, is an American citizen. Not relevant to this discussion.
Apologies - I understood your wife is a US citizen.
She is. But I only get 90 days without an immigration application (which I have a high probability of getting approval for)
Yep, so essentially you can go to live in the US tomorrow.
No I can go as a tourist, as you can (subject to the presidential proclamation which is just a temporary situation)
And then you can apply to live there without returning to the UK and be almost 100% certain of acceptance.
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I went to Berlin in '82, and through Checkpoint Charlie into the East for a few hours. Don't remember much as I was very young.
The only other place I've been that feels quite a rare one would be the Turks and Caicos Islands, where I went while reading a Fred Forsyth book where the main character goes there. Felt quite eerily surreal to coincidentally read a description of the tiny beach bar I was sitting in reading..
Turks and Caicos is a weird place. Provo is very developed and feels like the Bahamas, but Grand Turk feels like the end of the earth, despite being the administrative capital.
I only saw Provo. Was a completely unplanned trip. I'd been working in Miami for 6 weeks and my boss called on a Friday to say if I could sort out the flights I could use his villa for a week starting on the Sunday. I had a lovely, relaxing time, but it wasn't all that special (and I don't think I could afford to go back anyway!)
I spent a week once in another Provo: Provo Utah. Extremely odd place and the heartland of Mormonism. No coffee in the offices.
I’ve been to Hartlepool. Can many PBers claim the same?
Yep. Saw a fat lass with tattooed feet pissing in a gutter at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon. A substantial portion of it seemed to be boarded up and deserted as if it had been depopulated by an enhanced radiation weapon. It actually resembled the worst parts of East Germany more than England.
All the signs that Brexit was a terrible idea were there. Anything that Putin, Trump, Farage, Galloway and 70% of the population of Hartlepool are in favour of just has to be fucked.
All of that is true, but Hartlepool was a toilet long before Brexit (and I speak as a Remainer).
Decades of local donkeys wearing red rosettes, masquerading as can-do politicians who unfortunately provided no hope to the people, whilst in some cases indulging in low level corruption, has led us to where we are today.
So when a jolly fat man explaining in his nonsensical, but nonetheless jocular way that things will be so much better if we kick out people who's name ends in a vowel, and if we wave the Union flag vigorously, it is the last hope of the dispossessed.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The problem is that the UK hasn't and isn't engaging properly, or in good faith, to the big detriment of the people of Northern Ireland. You can also criticise the EU , but it's motes and beams frankly.
So David Frost in a Twitter argument with Simon Coveney. He doesn't seem to understand the purpose of a treaty is to get the other side to make commitments they ordinarily would not make. He is acting in bad faith now, as he did when he negotiated the Withdrawal Agreement.
. I prefer not to do negotiations by twitter, but since @simoncoveney has begun the process...
...the issue of governance & the CJEU is not new. We set out our concerns three months ago in our 21 July Command Paper.
The problem is that too few people seem to have listened.
Coveney claimed that Frost was creating a “new issue” in relation to the EU proposals.
Frost refuted that claim and said it had been clear in the July proposals from the UK
Please explain the bad faith.
The bad faith is renouncing a key and entirely unambiguous tenet of an international treaty that you signed and then presented to the electorate as a triumph. As with making it harder to vote, banning public protests, eroding Parliamentary scrutiny and putting the executive beyond judicial scrutiny, this is something that right-wing Brexiteers who used to deliver high falutin' lectures on the importance of democracy, sovereignty and the rule of law are now perfectly happy to countenance - because it's their side that is doing it.
The protocol was predicated on it being temporary and being replaced by a trusted trader scheme. In addition there was a provision that it could be cancelled if it was causing undue stress in the community
The EU has not been willing to engage on the trusted trader scheme. So the UK has said “if we don’t solve this we will need to terminate it”
The UK is following the process set out in their agreement
This is wrong on the facts. There is no termination clause in the Northern Ireland Protocol. Even the Consent Mechanism, if triggered after four years, only disapplies part of it. Trusted Trader scheme has nothing to do with the EUCJ and is not mentioned in the Protocol.
In any case there is a Trusted Trader scheme in place and presumably Sefcovic's proposals go further.
Article 16 allows for unilateral termination based on “serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist” (Wiki)
Is there an agreed TT scheme? I may have missed it over the summer but my understanding was the EU objected to the UK proposal because it covered too many companies
Article 16 doesn't allow termination. It allows temporary and limited remedies in order to get the Protocol back on track.
There is trusted trader scheme covering supermarkets. Supermarkets seems to have been a UK priority. As I say, not part of the treaty.
You’re right.
Article 16 allows the UK to suspend implementation until the EU agrees to a comprehensive TT scheme
Distinction without a difference
On this we're partly agreed. Article 16 in practice, if not on the actual terms, allows a party acting in bad faith to breach the treaty without everyone having to reach for their copy of the Vienna Conventions.
Which is why the EU coming back hard on this.
We really should have used leaving the EU as an opportunity to get rid of Northern Ireland once and for all.
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
In addition there is the excess deaths. None of the 3 measures are very far apart in the UK.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
It is truly remarkable how 100-150 deaths a day have become so normalised and un-newsworthy.
Yes, it's not far off the number we lost during the Second World War. Which was moderately newsworthy at the time IIRC.
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
In addition there is the excess deaths. None of the 3 measures are very far apart in the UK.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
I think our deaths measures are pretty honest and consistent across the board. I’m less convinced that all other countries figures are as trustworthy. Interestingly, while drown in daily data, some is not easily forthcoming, the vaccination status of those dying. Seems odd not to publish, even if only weekly, say.
This was published yesterday looking at the worldwide death toll, which seems to vary by accuracy tremendously.
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I went to Berlin in '82, and through Checkpoint Charlie into the East for a few hours. Don't remember much as I was very young.
The only other place I've been that feels quite a rare one would be the Turks and Caicos Islands, where I went while reading a Fred Forsyth book where the main character goes there. Felt quite eerily surreal to coincidentally read a description of the tiny beach bar I was sitting in reading..
Turks and Caicos is a weird place. Provo is very developed and feels like the Bahamas, but Grand Turk feels like the end of the earth, despite being the administrative capital.
I only saw Provo. Was a completely unplanned trip. I'd been working in Miami for 6 weeks and my boss called on a Friday to say if I could sort out the flights I could use his villa for a week starting on the Sunday. I had a lovely, relaxing time, but it wasn't all that special (and I don't think I could afford to go back anyway!)
Provo is quite anonymous, it's been developed around the aesthetic and needs of the average well heeled American tourist and so all its character has been erased. To be honest it's the sort of place I hate! Grand Turk felt very remote, with herds of wild horses roaming the island. Much more character but not your typical tourist destination.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Good luck with that, Philip. We are concerned precisely because we understand exactly what the realpolitik consequences will be of the UK having negotiated an international agreement in bad faith. Unlike you, we understand that we need them a whole lot more than they need us.
That's the same lie you lot have been sharing for five years and like a vampire at sunrise its turned to dust now.
The USA doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they just don't want violence in Northern Ireland that's all they care about. Australia doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they have bigger fish to fry. Japan and the rest of the world don't care either. Its none of their business.
Brussels care but they're a party to the dispute and we hold all the cards. They can't force us to implement it the way they want, and we can implement Article 16, so they're desperate for a resolution.
Yep, you have no notion of realpolitik. You think that the UK can do whatever it wants but that the EU can't. Good luck with that.
In this case realpolitik is that no one wants to be blamed for implementing a hard border between RoI and NI
Article 16 allows the UK the ability to force the EU to choose between (a) implementing a harder border between RoI/NI; (b) not having a hard border despite their concerns about protecting their EU-wide customs zone; and (c) reaching a deal with the Uk
Given that (a) and (b) are unpalatable for the EU they need to achieve (c) which means that the UK has a strong negotiating position
I don’t see another alternative to (a), (b) or (c). I am working on the assumption that (d) terminating the whole deal is not legal as Article 16 is part of the protocol and will be justifiably be seen by others as an overreaction
(a) would also be unpalatable for UKG if they had an iota of responsibility for a territory they were supposed to be in charge of. They are happy to trash part of supposedly their own country for purposes of ideology.
Apart from acting in bad faith, Frost etc don't seem to realise the extent to which the Northern Ireland Protocol is a compromise for all parties in a fragile place.
The UK government doesn’t want (a) either, I agree. But if the only alternative to (a) is (b) I am not sure how the EU would react. I certain, though, that the UK won’t impose a hard border
The protocol was about kicking the can down the road. The EU have tried to force it as a permanent solution. Which it wasn’t designed for and isn’t working. That is where the bad faith is.
All the UK has done is said (a) this isn’t working; (b) we don’t see signs of a willingness on the EU’s part to make it work; therefore we must either (x) renegotiate; or (y) suspend indefinitely under Article 16. That’s not bad faith - it’s a clear statement of position and options
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I went to Berlin in '82, and through Checkpoint Charlie into the East for a few hours. Don't remember much as I was very young.
The only other place I've been that feels quite a rare one would be the Turks and Caicos Islands, where I went while reading a Fred Forsyth book where the main character goes there. Felt quite eerily surreal to coincidentally read a description of the tiny beach bar I was sitting in reading..
My visit to Berlin was to meet up with a couple of friends to go Interailing with them. I had to be at a certain cafe in West Berlin at a particular time for the meeting to work, something no one would rely on these days. Having the East German police come onto the train as it headed for Berlin and go down each carriage questioning everyone made it feel like a bad spy film…
Two things I clearly remember are being told by the British Army on the mid-German border not to stop on the drive to Berlin "even if they start shooting at you". I used to hate car journeys, but that one was exciting.
And I remember seeing soldiers getting out of a lift in a department store in East Berlin. I don't know what nationality they were, but I maintained they were Russians for years after as it backed up one of my first 'jokes' - that they were Rushin' Russians as they marched past us. I thought I was funny.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Good luck with that, Philip. We are concerned precisely because we understand exactly what the realpolitik consequences will be of the UK having negotiated an international agreement in bad faith. Unlike you, we understand that we need them a whole lot more than they need us.
That's the same lie you lot have been sharing for five years and like a vampire at sunrise its turned to dust now.
The USA doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they just don't want violence in Northern Ireland that's all they care about. Australia doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they have bigger fish to fry. Japan and the rest of the world don't care either. Its none of their business.
Brussels care but they're a party to the dispute and we hold all the cards. They can't force us to implement it the way they want, and we can implement Article 16, so they're desperate for a resolution.
Yep, you have no notion of realpolitik. You think that the UK can do whatever it wants but that the EU can't. Good luck with that.
In this case realpolitik is that no one wants to be blamed for implementing a hard border between RoI and NI
Article 16 allows the UK the ability to force the EU to choose between (a) implementing a harder border between RoI/NI; (b) not having a hard border despite their concerns about protecting their EU-wide customs zone; and (c) reaching a deal with the Uk
Given that (a) and (b) are unpalatable for the EU they need to achieve (c) which means that the UK has a strong negotiating position
I don’t see another alternative to (a), (b) or (c). I am working on the assumption that (d) terminating the whole deal is not legal as Article 16 is part of the protocol and will be justifiably be seen by others as an overreaction
(a) would also be unpalatable for UKG if they had an iota of responsibility for a territory they were supposed to be in charge of. They are happy to trash part of supposedly their own country for purposes of ideology.
Apart from acting in bad faith, Frost etc don't seem to realise the extent to which the Northern Ireland Protocol is a compromise for all parties in a fragile place.
The UK government doesn’t want (a) either, I agree. But if the only alternative to (a) is (b) I am not sure how the EU would react. I certain, though, that the UK won’t impose a hard border
The protocol was about kicking the can down the road. The EU have tried to force it as a permanent solution. Which it wasn’t designed for and isn’t working. That is where the bad faith is.
All the UK has done is said (a) this isn’t working; (b) we don’t see signs of a willingness on the EU’s part to make it work; therefore we must either (x) renegotiate; or (y) suspend indefinitely under Article 16. That’s not bad faith - it’s a clear statement of position and options
What happens then is realpolitik kicks in, as you were referring to. The EU can outgun the UK on that.
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
In addition there is the excess deaths. None of the 3 measures are very far apart in the UK.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
It is truly remarkable how 100-150 deaths a day have become so normalised and un-newsworthy.
Every death is an individual tragedy, of course, but 100-150 deaths a day is normal and un-newsworthy. It's ~35,000 - 50,000 deaths over the course of a year - which is about the same as a bad flu season.
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The reason it would have enabled people to commute more easily from Stoke to Manchester is because it would have freed up pathways on the WCML by taking express trains off it. Which wouldn’t have happened if there were no lines in the south to take said express trains.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
The Conservatives starting taking the lead in the polls before the war in The Falklands.
Alliance/SDP voters prefered Thatcher to Foot.
So to blame The Falklands and the Alliance/SDP for Labour's shellacking in 1983 is denialism by the left.
That's not true. Labour had whopping leads tail end of 1991 including one which was a 27% lead!! Britain was rioting and Thatcher's attempted reforms were deeply unpopular, including in her own party and even in her cabinet (the wets and all that).
Look at the incredible shift in the opinion polls from 10% Labour leads to 10% Tory ones through April 1992 (the Falklands)
Plus your figures are incorrect. There were no 10 point Labour leads immediately before the Falklands war. The final poll before it broke out on the 2nd April was Mori on the 31st March - Tory 35, Alliance 33, Labour 30. On the 5th February those figures for the same parties were even 41, 36, 21.
1992 was clearly a typo given the links show 1980s polls.
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
In addition there is the excess deaths. None of the 3 measures are very far apart in the UK.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
It is truly remarkable how 100-150 deaths a day have become so normalised and un-newsworthy.
Every death is an individual tragedy, of course, but 100-150 deaths a day is normal and un-newsworthy. It's ~35,000 - 50,000 deaths over the course of a year - which is about the same as a bad flu season.
Also, aren't the large majority of the dead these days unvaccinated? One doesn't want to use language like "their own f-ng fault" about the recently departed, of course, but still...
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Good luck with that, Philip. We are concerned precisely because we understand exactly what the realpolitik consequences will be of the UK having negotiated an international agreement in bad faith. Unlike you, we understand that we need them a whole lot more than they need us.
That's the same lie you lot have been sharing for five years and like a vampire at sunrise its turned to dust now.
The USA doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they just don't want violence in Northern Ireland that's all they care about. Australia doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they have bigger fish to fry. Japan and the rest of the world don't care either. Its none of their business.
Brussels care but they're a party to the dispute and we hold all the cards. They can't force us to implement it the way they want, and we can implement Article 16, so they're desperate for a resolution.
Yep, you have no notion of realpolitik. You think that the UK can do whatever it wants but that the EU can't. Good luck with that.
They can do whatever they like, that they have the power to do.
What they don't have the power to do is to compel the UK to implement the Protocol in the way they wanted.
Oh well. What a shame.
They absolutely don't have that power. But they do have the power to create consequences for not implementing it. Welcome to realpolitik, Phil.
Ooh this is fun. It is October, time for telling spooky stories of things that go bump in the night.
Come on MJ, be a Thriller and tell me what "consequences" we can expect. 👻
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Good luck with that, Philip. We are concerned precisely because we understand exactly what the realpolitik consequences will be of the UK having negotiated an international agreement in bad faith. Unlike you, we understand that we need them a whole lot more than they need us.
That's the same lie you lot have been sharing for five years and like a vampire at sunrise its turned to dust now.
The USA doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they just don't want violence in Northern Ireland that's all they care about. Australia doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they have bigger fish to fry. Japan and the rest of the world don't care either. Its none of their business.
Brussels care but they're a party to the dispute and we hold all the cards. They can't force us to implement it the way they want, and we can implement Article 16, so they're desperate for a resolution.
Yep, you have no notion of realpolitik. You think that the UK can do whatever it wants but that the EU can't. Good luck with that.
In this case realpolitik is that no one wants to be blamed for implementing a hard border between RoI and NI
Article 16 allows the UK the ability to force the EU to choose between (a) implementing a harder border between RoI/NI; (b) not having a hard border despite their concerns about protecting their EU-wide customs zone; and (c) reaching a deal with the Uk
Given that (a) and (b) are unpalatable for the EU they need to achieve (c) which means that the UK has a strong negotiating position
I don’t see another alternative to (a), (b) or (c). I am working on the assumption that (d) terminating the whole deal is not legal as Article 16 is part of the protocol and will be justifiably be seen by others as an overreaction
(a) would also be unpalatable for UKG if they had an iota of responsibility for a territory they were supposed to be in charge of. They are happy to trash part of supposedly their own country for purposes of ideology.
Apart from acting in bad faith, Frost etc don't seem to realise the extent to which the Northern Ireland Protocol is a compromise for all parties in a fragile place.
The UK government doesn’t want (a) either, I agree. But if the only alternative to (a) is (b) I am not sure how the EU would react. I certain, though, that the UK won’t impose a hard border
The protocol was about kicking the can down the road. The EU have tried to force it as a permanent solution. Which it wasn’t designed for and isn’t working. That is where the bad faith is.
All the UK has done is said (a) this isn’t working; (b) we don’t see signs of a willingness on the EU’s part to make it work; therefore we must either (x) renegotiate; or (y) suspend indefinitely under Article 16. That’s not bad faith - it’s a clear statement of position and options
What happens then is realpolitik kicks in, as you were referring to. The EU can outgun the UK on that.
The biggest “loser” is the one that gets blamed for a hard border in Ireland. That’s easier for the UK to avoid… we just don’t do it.
The EU is spinning hard on how comprehensive their proposal is* but Frost has responded on the ECJ issue. Which - TBF - is one of the most important issues. The logical outcome would be to have the same regime as in the broader deal. But negotiations isn’t about logic.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Frost goes: thank you for these proposals. Don’t go far enough. Please try again.
* I’m sceptical about this, especially given the spin seems to be focused on an exemption for the British sausage. Which suggests that it’s a bunch of crap proposal and some junior SPAD (or whatever the EU equivalent is) thought they could play the British with a meaningless concession.
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The point of HS2 is to increase capacity. The worst crunch point for capacity on the long-distance network is the stretch of the WCML between London and Birmingham. This is also a reasonable distance for high-speed trains to run (in fact, between OOC and BI is kind-of a minimum).
Therefore building the southern stretch first makes oodles of sense. It was then decided - correctly, IMO - that it could be extended to serve cities further north. Hence the Manchester and Sheffield / Leeds branches.
IMO a big mistake was made fifteen or so years ago, when the project was first planned. This was not building the southern stretch first: it was in not properly looking at what the north needed, and how HS2 would fit into an enhanced/upgraded network. This planning is being done at the moment, but rather fundamental decisions rely on it, such as the placement and orientation of the HS2 stations. The plans should have been integrated.
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
In addition there is the excess deaths. None of the 3 measures are very far apart in the UK.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
It is truly remarkable how 100-150 deaths a day have become so normalised and un-newsworthy.
Every death is an individual tragedy, of course, but 100-150 deaths a day is normal and un-newsworthy. It's ~35,000 - 50,000 deaths over the course of a year - which is about the same as a bad flu season.
Especially as there will be overlap between COVID deaths and what would have been normal flu season deaths
The Conservatives starting taking the lead in the polls before the war in The Falklands.
Alliance/SDP voters prefered Thatcher to Foot.
So to blame The Falklands and the Alliance/SDP for Labour's shellacking in 1983 is denialism by the left.
That's not true. Labour had whopping leads tail end of 1991 including one which was a 27% lead!! Britain was rioting and Thatcher's attempted reforms were deeply unpopular, including in her own party and even in her cabinet (the wets and all that).
Look at the incredible shift in the opinion polls from 10% Labour leads to 10% Tory ones through April 1992 (the Falklands)
Plus your figures are incorrect. There were no 10 point Labour leads immediately before the Falklands war. The final poll before it broke out on the 2nd April was Mori on the 31st March - Tory 35, Alliance 33, Labour 30. On the 5th February those figures for the same parties were even 41, 36, 21.
1992 was clearly a typo given the links show 1980s polls.
Well, judging from the claims it was more like the 1990s polls when Major replaced Thatcher. They certainly bore no resemblance to the figures on the links.
Hartlepools (both of them) have rightly been identified as a toilet. But you think that's bad go to various ex pit villages across Durham.
There has been a structural imbalance in the economy since the 1980s and nobody has found a solution for it
Unfortunately Brexit and a Tory government is not the manna from heaven they were hoping for. I suspect voter turnout will drop heavily in that part of the world
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
In addition there is the excess deaths. None of the 3 measures are very far apart in the UK.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
It is truly remarkable how 100-150 deaths a day have become so normalised and un-newsworthy.
Every death is an individual tragedy, of course, but 100-150 deaths a day is normal and un-newsworthy. It's ~35,000 - 50,000 deaths over the course of a year - which is about the same as a bad flu season.
Also, aren't the large majority of the dead these days unvaccinated? One doesn't want to use language like "their own f-ng fault" about the recently departed, of course, but still...
The link posted upthread gave a figure of 38,964 deaths among unvaccinated in the first six months of this year as against 458 fully vaccinated.
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
In addition there is the excess deaths. None of the 3 measures are very far apart in the UK.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
It is truly remarkable how 100-150 deaths a day have become so normalised and un-newsworthy.
Every death is an individual tragedy, of course, but 100-150 deaths a day is normal and un-newsworthy. It's ~35,000 - 50,000 deaths over the course of a year - which is about the same as a bad flu season.
Also, aren't the large majority of the dead these days unvaccinated? One doesn't want to use language like "their own f-ng fault" about the recently departed, of course, but still...
Yes, my understanding is that daily deaths would be in single figures (at most) if we had 100% vaccination. Perhaps the elective nature of the resulting deaths makes them more newsworthy, but in that case the most newsworthy aspect is not receiving the attention it deserves.
Still struggle to see how NZ get out of a zero Covid mindset to learn to live with it in the future.
Uk barely remarks on death numbers now that would have been considered scare mongering a year and a bit ago.
NZ will adjust fine I think. Virtually everyone there is going to get covid after being vaccinated, which is probably the best outcome possible.
Morning everyone. Am I the only person to become increasing annoyed at the definition of deaths due to Covid..... deaths within 28 days of a positive test. I'm sure we've agonised over this before, but it really doesn't, IMV anyway, present a true picture. At one time someone here was able to post figures for the average daily deaths in the four parts of the UK over the past 5 or so years and quite often the figures nowadays were lower.
There's an alternative indicator of death with COVID on the death certificate on the govt website. It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
In addition there is the excess deaths. None of the 3 measures are very far apart in the UK.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
It is truly remarkable how 100-150 deaths a day have become so normalised and un-newsworthy.
Every death is an individual tragedy, of course, but 100-150 deaths a day is normal and un-newsworthy. It's ~35,000 - 50,000 deaths over the course of a year - which is about the same as a bad flu season.
Well that rather depends on how and where they die. If most are dying in hospital beds and many in ICUs this is a new, significant and ongoing pressure on the NHS which will increasingly drive up mortality of other illnesses, such as cancer, which are not being spotted and diagnosed quickly enough for effective treatment. It will, for example, reduce our capacity to cope with a bad flu outbreak.
Our UK government has taken the rather robust view that 100-150 deaths a day are a price worth paying for opening up the economy again. They may be right, I think that they are, but the knock on consequences will be significant, especially if we are still at these sorts of levels come winter.
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The reason it would have enabled people to commute more easily from Stoke to Manchester is because it would have freed up pathways on the WCML by taking express trains off it. Which wouldn’t have happened if there were no lines in the south to take said express trains.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
HS2 expands the London commuter belt and gets a fortune spent on London infrastructure.
It benefits London first and most.
The cunning thing about HS2 is that it has been sold as a benefit to the North when in reality it has always been about benefiting London.
Sadly people like yourself have been the useful idiots for this.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The point of HS2 is to increase capacity. The worst crunch point for capacity on the long-distance network is the stretch of the WCML between London and Birmingham. This is also a reasonable distance for high-speed trains to run (in fact, between OOC and BI is kind-of a minimum).
Therefore building the southern stretch first makes oodles of sense. It was then decided - correctly, IMO - that it could be extended to serve cities further north. Hence the Manchester and Sheffield / Leeds branches.
IMO a big mistake was made fifteen or so years ago, when the project was first planned. This was not building the southern stretch first: it was in not properly looking at what the north needed, and how HS2 would fit into an enhanced/upgraded network. This planning is being done at the moment, but rather fundamental decisions rely on it, such as the placement and orientation of the HS2 stations. The plans should have been integrated.
Agreed. In particular, there should have been an ambition of a high speed rail line linking Newcastle and Liverpool via York, Leeds and Manchester, attached to the HS2 line at the latter two points.
Falklands -- has no-one seen the old war film, The Battle of the River Plate? The one where the tension is not in the battle scenes but the diplomatic ruses first to get the Graf Spee out of Uruguay and then to keep her in while Royal Naval support could gather from, inter alia, Falklands!
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
Digs his heels in and mutters darkly about “bad faith”?
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I went to Berlin in '82, and through Checkpoint Charlie into the East for a few hours. Don't remember much as I was very young.
The only other place I've been that feels quite a rare one would be the Turks and Caicos Islands, where I went while reading a Fred Forsyth book where the main character goes there. Felt quite eerily surreal to coincidentally read a description of the tiny beach bar I was sitting in reading..
Turks and Caicos is a weird place. Provo is very developed and feels like the Bahamas, but Grand Turk feels like the end of the earth, despite being the administrative capital.
I only saw Provo. Was a completely unplanned trip. I'd been working in Miami for 6 weeks and my boss called on a Friday to say if I could sort out the flights I could use his villa for a week starting on the Sunday. I had a lovely, relaxing time, but it wasn't all that special (and I don't think I could afford to go back anyway!)
Provo is quite anonymous, it's been developed around the aesthetic and needs of the average well heeled American tourist and so all its character has been erased. To be honest it's the sort of place I hate! Grand Turk felt very remote, with herds of wild horses roaming the island. Much more character but not your typical tourist destination.
Yeah, the only thing they "produce" is from fishing. I think they used to make salt, but even that now - along with everything else except seafood - has to be imported. It's just a rather dull resort. Was perfect for a week's rest though. I spent most of it in a hammock at the end of the garden/start of the beach (which wasn't private, but was virtually deserted) reading and drinking lime daquiris.
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The reason it would have enabled people to commute more easily from Stoke to Manchester is because it would have freed up pathways on the WCML by taking express trains off it. Which wouldn’t have happened if there were no lines in the south to take said express trains.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
HS2 expands the London commuter belt and gets a fortune spent on London infrastructure.
It benefits London first and most.
The cunning thing about HS2 is that it has been sold as a benefit to the North when in reality it has always been about benefiting London.
Sadly people like yourself have been the useful idiots for this.
If you want to benefit the North then how about starting development in the North first?
How about improving capacity between the Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds etc?
Or how about since wee North folk drive cars you invest in the motorway network instead of trains?
A parallel M62 would do more to aid capacity and productiveness in the North than a new link to London.
I’ve been to Hartlepool. Can many PBers claim the same?
It's a rare migrant bird hotspot. So yes, several times.
I will again relate the story of going for the Orphean Warbler. Several of us were walking around the Headland looking for the bird, with thousands of pounds worth of telescopes and binoculars, when about a dozen youths on bikes raced up towards us.
"Wot yer doin'?" we were brusquely asked. We clutched our optics closer to our chests, expecting to be relieved of them, as I said we had travelled a long way to look for a rare bird that had been seen but had currently vanished. A pause.
"Well, I hope youse all see it - and safe journey home!" - and with that, they were off.
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The reason it would have enabled people to commute more easily from Stoke to Manchester is because it would have freed up pathways on the WCML by taking express trains off it. Which wouldn’t have happened if there were no lines in the south to take said express trains.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
HS2 expands the London commuter belt and gets a fortune spent on London infrastructure.
It benefits London first and most.
The cunning thing about HS2 is that it has been sold as a benefit to the North when in reality it has always been about benefiting London.
Sadly people like yourself have been the useful idiots for this.
It really doesn’t. It expands the capacity of lines in the north and midlands by providing alternative routes for the fast expresses to London. Why do you suppose all the lies you have bought on the subject come from southerners - Joe Rukin, Chris Packham and the Treasury?
It’s an amusing irony though that you accuse me of being a useful idiot when every word you have typed this morning has been wrong and based on anti-HS2 campaigning.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
You proclaimed the protocol a triumph. You now believe it should be abandoned because a minority is threatening violence to override the wishes of the majority.
Falklands -- has no-one seen the old war film, The Battle of the River Plate? The one where the tension is not in the battle scenes but the diplomatic ruses first to get the Graf Spee out of Uruguay and then to keep her in while Royal Naval support could gather from, inter alia, Falklands!
The Cumberland was the only ship in the Falklands at the time of the battle, and I can’t remember whether she had already left port at the time of the battle or left just after and blinded like hell to get to the River Plate (although Exeter was steaming back there for repair). The Renown and Ark Royal groups were coming in from the north and north east.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
Digs his heels in and mutters darkly about “bad faith”?
You seem to believe that a minority should be able to threaten violence in order to override the views of the majority. I don't.
Falklands -- has no-one seen the old war film, The Battle of the River Plate? The one where the tension is not in the battle scenes but the diplomatic ruses first to get the Graf Spee out of Uruguay and then to keep her in while Royal Naval support could gather from, inter alia, Falklands!
There is also a good black and white silent film about the Battle of the Falkland Islands in 1914:
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
Digs his heels in and mutters darkly about “bad faith”?
You seem to believe that a minority should be able to threaten violence in order to override the views of the majority. I don't.
On a point of pedantry, aren’t Unionists the majority in Northern Ireland? If not, problem solved - have that border poll.
I think the heart of the problem is that the British voters are pretty conservative and not very labourish. You could easily tell a convincing story about Thatcher/Major/Cameron/Johnson being weak and/or ridiculous candidates if hadn't won their elections.
I think that’s it - we are quite a conservative nation, in that when we want progressive ideas implemented, we don’t trust lefties to do it
And the red tops rallied to her cause. They loved the whole war thing: riding out like Britannia to beat up some errant natives on an island no-one had ever heard of before and never knew we 'owned'.
That's Boris Johnson's greatest card. He will almost certainly have the tabloids rallying to his triumphalist nationalist bullshit.
You shouldn't project your own woeful knowledge of geography onto others.
Especially not here. I suspect there isn't a country on the planet at least one of our contributors hasn't visited....
No one had ever heard of the Falklands. *
And I bet I've travelled more and lived more widely than the majority of posters on here, including Leon.
* Obviously this is hyperbole but most people ran for their atlases when the news broke, so there's no need for you to be personally obdurate.
As we colour in the pb.com Map Of Places We Have Visited, I'll start us of with the pink crayon:
1. Somalia 2. Tristan da Cunha 3. Guinea Bissau 4. St. Helena 5. Turkmenistan
Didn't you work for one of the world's largest oil companies? That practically ensures you'll be heading off to parts unknown.
Started with Chevron and then BG, then worked for ever smaller companies. Last company specialised in Africa. So not exactly your average holiday destinations.
Although I did once see the Taj Mahal and the Great Pyramid in the same week. Still not sure how I blagged India via Cairo!
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Good luck with that, Philip. We are concerned precisely because we understand exactly what the realpolitik consequences will be of the UK having negotiated an international agreement in bad faith. Unlike you, we understand that we need them a whole lot more than they need us.
That's the same lie you lot have been sharing for five years and like a vampire at sunrise its turned to dust now.
The USA doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they just don't want violence in Northern Ireland that's all they care about. Australia doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they have bigger fish to fry. Japan and the rest of the world don't care either. Its none of their business.
Brussels care but they're a party to the dispute and we hold all the cards. They can't force us to implement it the way they want, and we can implement Article 16, so they're desperate for a resolution.
Yep, you have no notion of realpolitik. You think that the UK can do whatever it wants but that the EU can't. Good luck with that.
They can do whatever they like, that they have the power to do.
What they don't have the power to do is to compel the UK to implement the Protocol in the way they wanted.
Oh well. What a shame.
They absolutely don't have that power. But they do have the power to create consequences for not implementing it. Welcome to realpolitik, Phil.
Ooh this is fun. It is October, time for telling spooky stories of things that go bump in the night.
Come on MJ, be a Thriller and tell me what "consequences" we can expect. 👻
You understand, don't you, that we currently have a free trade agreement with the EU that means no tariffs are levied on UK goods entering the Single Market?
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The reason it would have enabled people to commute more easily from Stoke to Manchester is because it would have freed up pathways on the WCML by taking express trains off it. Which wouldn’t have happened if there were no lines in the south to take said express trains.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
HS2 expands the London commuter belt and gets a fortune spent on London infrastructure.
It benefits London first and most.
The cunning thing about HS2 is that it has been sold as a benefit to the North when in reality it has always been about benefiting London.
Sadly people like yourself have been the useful idiots for this.
It really doesn’t. It expands the capacity of lines in the north and midlands by providing alternative routes for the fast expresses to London. Why do you suppose all the lies you have bought on the subject come from southerners - Joe Rukin, Chris Packham and the Treasury?
It’s an amusing irony though that you accuse me of being a useful idiot when every word you have typed this morning has been wrong and based on anti-HS2 campaigning.
There may well be benefits to the North of England from HS2 - you spend that kind of money you would expect something from it! But the biggest beneficiary is likely to be London. And of course that money could be spent on something else.
Maybe for capacity reasons, improved national infrastructure reasons etc it needs to be built. But attempts to claim it's primarily for the north's benefit are very dubious.
Falklands -- has no-one seen the old war film, The Battle of the River Plate? The one where the tension is not in the battle scenes but the diplomatic ruses first to get the Graf Spee out of Uruguay and then to keep her in while Royal Naval support could gather from, inter alia, Falklands!
The Cumberland was the only ship in the Falklands at the time of the battle, and I can’t remember whether she had already left port at the time of the battle or left just after and blinded like hell to get to the River Plate (although Exeter was steaming back there for repair). The Renown and Ark Royal groups were coming in from the north and north east.
Never mind history! The point is people should have known it from the film. What sort of half-hearted antivax Brexiteer gammons are we if we cannot quote by heart from every 1950s war film?
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
Digs his heels in and mutters darkly about “bad faith”?
You seem to believe that a minority should be able to threaten violence in order to override the views of the majority. I don't.
On a point of pedantry, aren’t Unionists the majority in Northern Ireland? If not, problem solved - have that border poll.
Although that brings us back to Tocqueville…
There are three political groupings in Northern Ireland these days: unionists, nationalists and the non-aligned. The latter two form the majority and support the protocol.
A great bit of air travel bullshit at the gate. "Can I have your quarantine form please" "I don't need one, I'm transit at Schiphol" "Yes you do" hands over form. Ok so it was simple to complete but here's the fun bit.
I do not need to show anything for transit. Dutch government clear that I don't need the form. KLM want it anyways for shits and giggles.
Falklands -- has no-one seen the old war film, The Battle of the River Plate? The one where the tension is not in the battle scenes but the diplomatic ruses first to get the Graf Spee out of Uruguay and then to keep her in while Royal Naval support could gather from, inter alia, Falklands!
There was a Battle of the Falklands in WWI which killed more people in an afternoon than died in the entire Falklands war.
I think the heart of the problem is that the British voters are pretty conservative and not very labourish. You could easily tell a convincing story about Thatcher/Major/Cameron/Johnson being weak and/or ridiculous candidates if hadn't won their elections.
How do you tell the difference between particular leaders winning despite their failings, or because they're better than the alternatives?
I think I'd argue that Britain tilts towards the conservatives now because conservative politicians have been better at winning the debate and political arguments, and the reasons there is something of a contrast with Scotland is because the better politicians in Scotland have been from the SNP.
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I went to Berlin in '82, and through Checkpoint Charlie into the East for a few hours. Don't remember much as I was very young.
The only other place I've been that feels quite a rare one would be the Turks and Caicos Islands, where I went while reading a Fred Forsyth book where the main character goes there. Felt quite eerily surreal to coincidentally read a description of the tiny beach bar I was sitting in reading..
Turks and Caicos is a weird place. Provo is very developed and feels like the Bahamas, but Grand Turk feels like the end of the earth, despite being the administrative capital.
I only saw Provo. Was a completely unplanned trip. I'd been working in Miami for 6 weeks and my boss called on a Friday to say if I could sort out the flights I could use his villa for a week starting on the Sunday. I had a lovely, relaxing time, but it wasn't all that special (and I don't think I could afford to go back anyway!)
Provo is quite anonymous, it's been developed around the aesthetic and needs of the average well heeled American tourist and so all its character has been erased. To be honest it's the sort of place I hate! Grand Turk felt very remote, with herds of wild horses roaming the island. Much more character but not your typical tourist destination.
Yeah, the only thing they "produce" is from fishing. I think they used to make salt, but even that now - along with everything else except seafood - has to be imported. It's just a rather dull resort. Was perfect for a week's rest though. I spent most of it in a hammock at the end of the garden/start of the beach (which wasn't private, but was virtually deserted) reading and drinking lime daquiris.
The situation in the Turks and Caicos was kind of like a microcosm of everything that's wrong with the global economy. Provo "developed" essentially with no local political control. It was a free for all where the needs of global corporations (and presumably a few local landowners) came first. The result was astonishing economic growth which left the locals disenfranchised. Many of the jobs went to Haitian immigrants who worked harder for less money, the locals said. They felt powerless, and as though all the prosperity was passing them by. So the government was trying to develop the other islands in a way that empowered local people. Without much success. Global capitalism basically said, you can develop my way, or not at all. The better educated local people left for jobs elsewhere. I think similar processes are playing out everywhere. Hence Brexit, hence Trump. People want to be richer, but they also want agency over their lives. Right now, the global economy is not delivering that to people. The time I spent on T&C made me feel very depressed about things, to be honest, even if the beaches were beautiful.
A great bit of air travel bullshit at the gate. "Can I have your quarantine form please" "I don't need one, I'm transit at Schiphol" "Yes you do" hands over form. Ok so it was simple to complete but here's the fun bit.
I do not need to show anything for transit. Dutch government clear that I don't need the form. KLM want it anyways for shits and giggles.
I used to fly two or three times a month, mostly for work and occasionally for pleasure. Not been on a plane since January 2020, 20 months ago, and really don’t miss it at all!
Sadly, the Covid theatre isn’t going away, and joins the security theatre on the list of reasons to avoid flying.
Comments
It takes longer to report, but is basically the same as the 28 days, but a bit higher.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
What they don't have the power to do is to compel the UK to implement the Protocol in the way they wanted.
Oh well. What a shame.
That’s a demonstration that they saw Article 16 as a tactical weapon and used it in bad faith (see earlier definition I provided). Vaccines were just the proximate trigger.
I hate flying. Not the might we crash thing (we almost certainly won't). It's the endless tedium of queueing and queuing and then being confined in a seat.
However while Labour has near zero chance of winning a majority at the next general election, Starmer has significantly higher chance of getting a hung parliament and becoming PM with SNP and LD support.
Remember the last leader to take Labour into power before Blair, Harold Wilson in February 1974 and 1964, lost in England to Home and Heath respectively. Wilson won those elections by a majority of just 4 in 1964 and by winning most seats in a hung parliament in February 1974 thanks to Labour winning a majority of seats in Scotland and Wales. So again it could be Scottish and Welsh MPs who could put Labour into power again, only this time the Scottish MPs would be SNP not Labour
https://www.sporcle.com/games/teedslaststand/find-world-countries
This piece has some interesting nuggets in it. For instance, I didn't realise that cabinet ministers other than the PM were allowed only short speeches and not from the main stage. That is extraordinary, isn't it?
The only other place I've been that feels quite a rare one would be the Turks and Caicos Islands, where I went while reading a Fred Forsyth book where the main character goes there. Felt quite eerily surreal to coincidentally read a description of the tiny beach bar I was sitting in reading..
Which is why the EU coming back hard on this.
All the signs that Brexit was a terrible idea were there. Anything that Putin, Trump, Farage, Galloway and 70% of the population of Hartlepool are in favour of just has to be fucked.
Article 16 allows the UK the ability to force the EU to choose between (a) implementing a harder border between RoI/NI; (b) not having a hard border despite their concerns about protecting their EU-wide customs zone; and (c) reaching a deal with the Uk
Given that (a) and (b) are unpalatable for the EU they need to achieve (c) which means that the UK has a strong negotiating position
I don’t see another alternative to (a), (b) or (c). I am working on the assumption that (d) terminating the whole deal is not legal as Article 16 is part of the protocol and will be justifiably be seen by others as an overreaction
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/10/like-all-cults-borisology-is-detached-from-reality-and-destined-to-end-badly
I think if that happens then Hamilton ends up 2nd.
The key battle in the race will be between Perez and Hamilton, and can the second Red Bull hold up the championship leader for long enough. I suspect that Mercedes will put their two cars on very different strategies, to force RB into deciding either to race Lewis or race for the win.
The unionists are deeply pissed off. The protocol is causing real issues for them.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
This puts Labour in a very tricky position. Without Scotland and with weaker representation from Wales I struggle to see how they get over 300 seats, let alone 326. They can hope for the Tories to lose their majority and look to work with the other parties but how do they ever get an overall majority again? It's bordering on the impossible. I think that they need at least 30 seats from Scotland and that looks incredibly far off.
Just because the images of respiratory wards and ICU have gone from the news doesn't mean that they have gone away. They have just become normalised, and "not news" unless there is a dramatic twist.
- Suomenlinna
- Hell*
- North Cape
- Peterhof
- Hekla
- Kolga
* Hell, Norway just be clear
Interestingly, while drown in daily data, some is not easily forthcoming, the vaccination status of those dying. Seems odd not to publish, even if only weekly, say.
China is doing its usual misinformation campaign as well, for example claiming on Wiki that everyone trusts their figures(!) so they must be covering up something pretty bad.
Apart from acting in bad faith, Frost etc don't seem to realise the extent to which the Northern Ireland Protocol is a compromise for all parties in a fragile place.
Whether this happens before or after the next election is an open question (my money would be on after, still). Johnson himself will walk away unscathed, as he always does.
That and Daylight Savings Time.
Decades of local donkeys wearing red rosettes, masquerading as can-do politicians who unfortunately provided no hope to the people, whilst in some cases indulging in low level corruption, has led us to where we are today.
So when a jolly fat man explaining in his nonsensical, but nonetheless jocular way that things will be so much better if we kick out people who's name ends in a vowel, and if we wave the Union flag vigorously, it is the last hope of the dispossessed.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/08/global-covid-death-toll-higher-pandemic
The protocol was about kicking the can down the road. The EU have tried to force it as a permanent solution. Which it wasn’t designed for and isn’t working. That is where the bad faith is.
All the UK has done is said (a) this isn’t working; (b) we don’t see signs of a willingness on the EU’s part to make it work; therefore we must either (x) renegotiate; or (y) suspend indefinitely under Article 16. That’s not bad faith - it’s a clear statement of position and options
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54538639
The government has rejected a proposal for a £300m airport rail link saying it "would not offer value for money".
Doncaster Sheffield Airport would have been joined to the East Coast mainline by 4.5 miles (7.2km) of new track.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-54632396
And I remember seeing soldiers getting out of a lift in a department store in East Berlin. I don't know what nationality they were, but I maintained they were Russians for years after as it backed up one of my first 'jokes' - that they were Rushin' Russians as they marched past us. I thought I was funny.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
Come on MJ, be a Thriller and tell me what "consequences" we can expect. 👻
The EU is spinning hard on how comprehensive their proposal is* but Frost has responded on the ECJ issue. Which - TBF - is one of the most important issues. The logical outcome would be to have the same regime as in the broader deal. But negotiations isn’t about logic.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Frost goes: thank you for these proposals. Don’t go far enough. Please try again.
* I’m sceptical about this, especially given the spin seems to be focused on an exemption for the British sausage. Which suggests that it’s a bunch of crap proposal and some junior SPAD (or whatever the EU equivalent is) thought they could play the British with a meaningless concession.
Therefore building the southern stretch first makes oodles of sense. It was then decided - correctly, IMO - that it could be extended to serve cities further north. Hence the Manchester and Sheffield / Leeds branches.
IMO a big mistake was made fifteen or so years ago, when the project was first planned. This was not building the southern stretch first: it was in not properly looking at what the north needed, and how HS2 would fit into an enhanced/upgraded network. This planning is being done at the moment, but rather fundamental decisions rely on it, such as the placement and orientation of the HS2 stations. The plans should have been integrated.
"there are more checks on goods coming into Northern Ireland than along the EU’s entire eastern frontier."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/10/09/undemocratic-unsustainable-theni-protocol-needs-fundamental/
There has been a structural imbalance in the economy since the 1980s and nobody has found a solution for it
Unfortunately Brexit and a Tory government is not the manna from heaven they were hoping for. I suspect voter turnout will drop heavily in that part of the world
Which is rather a striking difference.
Our UK government has taken the rather robust view that 100-150 deaths a day are a price worth paying for opening up the economy again. They may be right, I think that they are, but the knock on consequences will be significant, especially if we are still at these sorts of levels come winter.
It benefits London first and most.
The cunning thing about HS2 is that it has been sold as a benefit to the North when in reality it has always been about benefiting London.
Sadly people like yourself have been the useful idiots for this.
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
How about improving capacity between the Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds etc?
Or how about since wee North folk drive cars you invest in the motorway network instead of trains?
A parallel M62 would do more to aid capacity and productiveness in the North than a new link to London.
I will again relate the story of going for the Orphean Warbler. Several of us were walking around the Headland looking for the bird, with thousands of pounds worth of telescopes and binoculars, when about a dozen youths on bikes raced up towards us.
"Wot yer doin'?" we were brusquely asked. We clutched our optics closer to our chests, expecting to be relieved of them, as I said we had travelled a long way to look for a rare bird that had been seen but had currently vanished. A pause.
"Well, I hope youse all see it - and safe journey home!" - and with that, they were off.
Soft spot for Hartlepool.
It’s an amusing irony though that you accuse me of being a useful idiot when every word you have typed this morning has been wrong and based on anti-HS2 campaigning.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/09/business/moderna-covid-vaccine.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7dvUsGpaGs
Although that brings us back to Tocqueville…
Although I did once see the Taj Mahal and the Great Pyramid in the same week. Still not sure how I blagged India via Cairo!
Maybe for capacity reasons, improved national infrastructure reasons etc it needs to be built. But attempts to claim it's primarily for the north's benefit are very dubious.
"Can I have your quarantine form please"
"I don't need one, I'm transit at Schiphol"
"Yes you do" hands over form. Ok so it was simple to complete but here's the fun bit.
I do not need to show anything for transit. Dutch government clear that I don't need the form. KLM want it anyways for shits and giggles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Falkland_Islands
Edit: and Von Spee was one of the German casualties.
I think I'd argue that Britain tilts towards the conservatives now because conservative politicians have been better at winning the debate and political arguments, and the reasons there is something of a contrast with Scotland is because the better politicians in Scotland have been from the SNP.
So the government was trying to develop the other islands in a way that empowered local people. Without much success. Global capitalism basically said, you can develop my way, or not at all. The better educated local people left for jobs elsewhere.
I think similar processes are playing out everywhere. Hence Brexit, hence Trump. People want to be richer, but they also want agency over their lives. Right now, the global economy is not delivering that to people. The time I spent on T&C made me feel very depressed about things, to be honest, even if the beaches were beautiful.
Sadly, the Covid theatre isn’t going away, and joins the security theatre on the list of reasons to avoid flying.