Category: Conservative Party

Boris Johnson, Brexit, British Government, Brussels, Conservative Party, NI Protocol, Northern Ireland, UK Labour Party

UK will need a new generation of politicians without #Brexit Wars baggage before UK-EU relations find a new harmony

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

I stopped writing a weekly comment on Brexit when Brexit was done. Brexit is done. The UK is no longer a member of the European Union. There can be no argument about that fact.

But some will say, Brexit is not done. Look at the ongoing dispute about the Northern Ireland Protocol. Look at the issues surrounding visas for, say, British musicians to tour Europe, or the uncertainties surrounding short-term business trips and whether visas or work permits are required for such trips. The UK has still to impose border controls on goods coming from the EU into the UK. UK scientists are shut out of the €80bn Horizon research program.

When people say “Brexit is not finished, it is not done” what they are really talking about, it seems to me, are “post-Brexit” politics in the UK which touch on two things: Continue reading →

Boris Johnson, Brexit, British Government, Conservative Party, Customs Union, Irish border, Negotiating, Northern Ireland, Single Market

International Law… what’s that, says the dead cat

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

Boris deadcat.png

Last week was some Brexit week, a week in which the UK government introduced legislation, the internal market bill, which a government minister admitted in the Commons would break international law, but only in a “specific and limited way”.

The minister, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Brandon Lewis MP, was talking about the powers the government proposed to take which would allow them to override provisions in the Withdrawal Act signed with the EU in 2019 when it comes to the movement of goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The UK, according to the minister, was deliberately and consciously going to break an international treaty that it had only recently signed.

The international treaty, the Withdrawal Agreement, provides that Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom, will remain in the EU’s customs union and single market for goods to avoid rebuilding a hard border on the island of Ireland between Northern Ireland and Ireland, a continuing member of the EU.

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Brexit, British Government, Brussels, Conservative Party, Negotiating

Can there be a deal with no transition extension?

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

It is perhaps appropriate that, in these far from normal times, that this BEERG Brexit Briefing is longer and more detailed than normal. The reason relates directly to the complexity of the question which I pose and then attempt to answer as comprehensively as possible: if there is no Brexit transition phase then can there be a deal? 

GettyImages_1197807471.0 

Introduction:

There will be no request from the UK to extend transition beyond the end of 2020. Nor will a deal be in place by then on the future relationship between the EU and the UK. On December 31 next, the UK will leave the EU’s single market, customs union, and associated agreements and protocols. It will be a “third country” outside the EU’s legal order. The fallout will not be pleasant. The politics will be ugly.

This is where the logic of Brexit leads and “Hard Brexit” politicians are now dominant in the UK.

Brexiteers believe that the UK, no matter what the circumstances, will always be better off out of the EU than in. For them, quite simply, the EU has nothing to offer the UK. Only this disdain for all things European can explain the failure of the UK to join the EU program scheme to bulk-buy PPE earlier this year  . The “my dog ate the email” excuse (and others) proffered by ministers simply fails to stand up.

December 31 next cannot come quickly enough for Brexiteers, the economic disruption from Covid-19 notwithstanding. They want to be able to wake up on January 1, 2021 and say: “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we’re free at last”.

  Continue reading →

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Boris Johnson, Brexit, British Government, Conservative Party, Jeremy Corbyn, UK Labour Party

UK #GE2019: @BorisJohnson’s Conservative party wins big

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

GE2019 Result BBC
Chart via https://twitter.com/bbcelection 

This could be a bitter-sweet victory for Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party.

Johnson’s gamble has paid off and the Conservatives have decisively won the UK general election . He looks like having a clear overall majority of 80. Labour has put in its worst performance since 1935, winning just over 200 seats. Corbyn and “Corbynomics” turned out not to be such a vote winner after all.

Sweet though such a victory is for Johnson, the bitterness comes with the results in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In Scotland, the pro-independence, anti-Brexit Scottish Nationalists (SNP) swept the boards. The final results were SNP: 48 (+13) Conservatives: 6 (-7) Lib Dem: 4 (-) Labour: 1 (-6). Ten years ago, Labour had over 40 seats in Scotland.

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Boris Johnson, Brexit, British Government, Conservative Party, Jeremy Corbyn, UK Labour Party

Some thoughts on Brexit as UK has another election

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

This blogpost was written on Sat, November 2nd, 2019. The next BEERG Brexit blogpost will be in mid-December, after the results of the UK general election are known 

flags-and-big-ben.jpg

The granting of an extension by the EU until January 31 next and the calling of a UK general election has put the Brexit process on hold for now. How Brexit proceeds, if indeed it does, will be decided on December 12, the day the UK votes in its third general election in four years.

At the time of writing the outcome is impossible to predict. Election campaigns are strange events. The unexpected can happen during the next six weeks, and probably will. Trying to predict the outcome of this election based on what happened in 2017 is a fool´s game.

This Briefing has always been about Brexit and what Brexit means for businesses and their employees, whether based in the UK or elsewhere in the EU. We do not see it as our role to comment on UK politics more widely or to express particular political preferences.

For that reason, we are pausing this Briefing for the duration of the general election campaign.

Once the results of the general election are known, we will start writing again about the Brexit process which, as we suggest elsewhere in this Briefing, will never end. Writing about Brexit is a labour of Sisyphus.

However, our decision to sign off until mid-December, presents us with an opportunity to offer some thoughts on Brexit and the Brexit process and the light they have shone on the UK over the past three years. Continue reading →

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Brexit, Conservative Party, Customs Union, Negotiating, Northern Ireland, Single Market, UK Labour Party

Britain and Europe Plus ça change

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog
This blogpost was written on July 1, 2019

marr hunt

You know a country is in deep trouble when one of its major political party appears to lose touch with social decency and economic reality. Yesterday, we had Jeremy Hunt telling a Sunday TV show that he would willingly tell people whose companies went bust after a no-deal Brexit that their sacrifice had been necessary, saying:

“At the beginning of October, if there is no prospect of a deal that can get through parliament, then I will leave at the end of October because that is our democratic promise to the British people.”

Asked whether, under such a policy, he would be willing to look owners of family businesses in the eye and say they should be prepared to see their companies go bust to ensure a no-deal Brexit, Hunt said: “I would do so but I’d do it with a heavy heart precisely because of the risks.”

As Nick Cohen, recalled in his Observer column:  “At no time and in no circumstances should a communist place his personal interests first,” said Chairman Mao.” As if anticipating Hunt’s later remarks, Cohen commented: “In the Conservative and Unionist party, as in the Chinese Communist party, personal interests are discarded if they threaten the purity of the Brexit cause.”

Truly, greater love for Brexit hath no politician than this that he would willingly lay down your job for his career (and votes from the 150,000 Tory selectorate who will choose the party’s new leader and potential prime minister).

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Article 50, Backstop, Boris Johnson, Brexit, Conservative Party, Theresa May

3 years after #Brexit vote: EU is more united and Brexit is less clear

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog
This blogpost was written on Sunday June 16th, 2019

AACSCdX

Next Sunday will be June 23rd. It will be three years on from the date the UK voted to leave the European Union. Or, to be more accurate, the date a majority of those who voted in England and Wales so voted, while a majority in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to stay.

History may well decide that June 23, 2016 was not only the date on which the UK voted to leave the E.U. but that it was also the date the United Kingdom began to crack. The date on which the United Kingdom became disunited.

With just a week to go to the third anniversary of the vote to leave we still have no idea what leave means and when it will happen. If, indeed, it will happen. Never has a project of such constitutional and economic importance been so ill-conceived, ill-prepared and ill-managed.

Continue reading →

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Backstop, Boris Johnson, Brexit, Conservative Party, Northern Ireland

Boris Leaves #Brexit Wriggle Room

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog
This blogpost was written on Sunday morning, June 9th, 2019

theresa-may-boris-johnson

It’s as if the past three years never happened. Airbrush Theresa May and her Brexit negotiations out of history. It’s back to the morning after the referendum and the UK “holds all the cards”.

Well, that seems to be the way Boris Johnson, favourite to become the next Tory leader and Prime Minister, sees it. Or, at least, wants us to see it. Maybe it is all smoke and mirrors.

In an interview in the Sunday Times, Johnson says that, if elected his government would:

  • Hold on to the £39bn Brexit divorce payment until Brussels agreed more favourable terms
  • Scrap the Northern Ireland Backstop and settle the Irish border issue only when the EU was ready to agree a future relationship
  • Guarantee the rights of the 3.2m EU citizens living in the UK
  • Step up preparations for no-deal and prepare for “disruption”.

If there is no deal with the EU on these terms, he would then take the UK out on October 31st next with no deal. Raw, red meat for the Brexit ultras, it would seem.

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Backstop, Brexit, British Government, Conservative Party, Data Protection, Negotiating

There’s no #EP2019 #Brexit domino effect. UK is on its own

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog
This Blogpost was written on Tuesday May 28th, 2019

Election night at the European Parliament in Brussels

Tuesday, May 28, 2019. Two days after the European Parliament elections and the political landscape becomes a little clearer.

There has been no “right-wing/populist” surge of the sort that many commentators were predicting some months back. True, the hold on the parliament that has been exercised by the centre-right EPP and centre-left S&D, working together, has been broken. That’s no bad thing. But it has been broken by the very pro-EU Liberals and Greens and not by the extreme right of France’s le Pen and Italy’s Salvini.

Even in the UK, “hard-core” remain parties such as the Liberal Democrats and Greens polled 40% against 35% for the Brexit Party and the now defunct UKIP. With the Tories and Labour on a combined 23%, the numbers suggest that there is now a narrow majority in the UK in favour of remaining in the EU.

Inside the European Parliament it is the parties based on civilised and democratic values, who between them hold around 70% of the seats, that will determine the future of the EU and have a critical say in deciding who will be the next president of the European Commission and other top jobs in Brussels.

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Brexit, British Government, Conservative Party, Customs Union, Single Market

3 years after the impossible promise of #Brexit: all you get is ‘True Britism’

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog
This blogpost was written on Monday May 13th:

Brexit cartoon

Over the past week, as nothing much has been happening in the Brexit process, we have seen several outbreaks of a somewhat virulent disease known as “True Britism”. It is one of those viruses which can lie dormant for a long time, though there can be the occasional flareup. But it really becomes rampant when a Tory leadership election is in the offing. Once this happens, the political and environmental conditions are ideal for the virus to go, well, viral.

Once you are aware of the existence of this disease, it is easy to spot the sufferers. For a start, it is restricted to a particular demographic: Brexiteers, mostly of the “Hard Brexit” variety. The symptoms generally consist of a constant repetition of clichés such as: “we hold all the cards”; “we have all the money”; and the latest “we could have held Ireland hostage”.

For example, just last week the Tory MP, Chris Blunt, tweeted:

UK side had the money, the people, the huge trade deficit, amongst other advantages, including a hostage, the RoI, if EU behaved like this. We capitulated. Olly Robbins reported application for Belgian citizenship when it’s over helps explain the mindset of our negotiators.

“True Britism”, at its core, is a belief that if only a “True Brit” with “True Grit” had been in charge of the negotiations, the EU would have crumbled at first contact.

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