Category: UK Labour 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 →

Brexit, British Government, NI Protocol, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Trade Deals, UK Labour Party

Could Labour take the UK Back into the EU?

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

This is the first BEERG Brexit Blog I have posted here since my last “semi-final” one about three months back. As I said in June/July I do not intend to continue with the regular almost weekly briefings, but I may occasionally post some more reflective pieces here, from time to time.   

 

An American friend asked me recently: “Tom, do you think the UK will re-join the EU in the near future?”

My answer was simple. No, not now, and not for a very long time. If ever.  But surely, they said, if Labour gets into government it will start talking to the EU? Its members are pro-EU. Yes, it will, but it will not look to re-join. Quite frankly, Labour does not know what it wants. It has no European policy worth talking of.

It walks in fear in the shadow of Brexit. Brexit has framed the debate

Since the end of WWII, when European integration began to be seriously discussed as a way to avoid further wars between the great nations of the continent, one or other of the two major UK parties, the Conservatives and Labour, at one time or other, was broadly in favour of closer European cooperation. However, even when well disposed, they were generally opposed to the limited pooling of sovereignty that continental Europeans appeared to be considering. 

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Boris Johnson, Brexit, British Government, Trade Deals, UK Labour Party

And so, #BREXIT is ‘Done’- Now for the Really Hard Part

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

GettyImages_1197807471.0.jpg
EU Council staff members remove the UK flag –  livier Hoslet/AFP via Getty Images

And so, Brexit is done. As of midnight, last Friday, January 31, Brussels time, the UK left the European Union. As of today, it is now a “third country”, anchored outside the EU´s legal order, free to go its own way and chart its own course. This will not become evident for another year, because the UK, as part of its Withdrawal Agreement, has accepted to follow all EU laws during 2020 as if it were still an EU member, including any new laws that come into force during the year.

But the UK will no longer have a voice in EU decision making in 2020. No UK EU Commissioner, no members of the European Parliament, no involvement of UK officials in the hundreds of EU meetings that take place every day.

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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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Backstop, Boris Johnson, Brexit, Customs Union, Data transfers, Single Market, Theresa May, UK Labour Party

Can #Brexit be “Made to Work” (Part 1).

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog
Thsi blogpost was written early on Tuesday Sept 10th

stephen-morgan-pic.jpg
Pic via Stephen Morgan (Lab) MP on Twitter

An article in the Times reports that David Frost, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator, told Johnson that there was no hope of agreeing a new deal on the Irish backstop while uncertainty in parliament continues. According to the Times:

In a one-page memo to Mr Johnson and his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, Mr Frost wrote that until there was clarity on the domestic front the European Union would not offer a renewed deal.

“The EU are not under pressure to agree alternative arrangements until they know the process will not be taken over by parliament,” he wrote. “Until then they will listen to us but avoid committing. Talks will only become serious when it’s a choice between deal or no deal.”

Frost’s comment on the opposition in Parliament to the Johnson approach to Brexit reminded me of when I first started thinking and writing about Brexit some two years ago. Then it seemed to me that if the UK was to “make Brexit work” three things were of fundamental importance.

  1. The government needed to develop a consensus in the UK about what Brexit meant, some form of widely-shared vision of what the UK outside the EU should look like.
  2. Resulting from one, negotiate a future deal with the EU that would minimise the impact of withdrawal on the UK economy and provide for a “good neighbour” relationship for the future
  3. Hope that geopolitical developments across the globe would fall favourable for a UK out of the EU, facilitating the conclusion of new trade deals which would open new export markets.

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Brexit, British Government, Irish border, Northern Ireland, UK Labour Party

On #Brexit, things come full circle: the former accusers now stand accused

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

widdecome far from fair

This blogpost was written on July 9th, 2019

At the heart of the original Eurosceptic critique of the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU) was the contention that the people of the UK had never been told the unvarnished truth about what EU membership would involve and the sovereignty they would have to sacrifice. They were “deceived” into backing membership and because they were so deceived the UK’s membership always lacked legitimacy. It was a house of cards built on a foundation of lies, Eurosceptics contended.

The original critique was, in essence, that the UK never voted to be a province of a “country called Europe”. It would be more than happy to be involved in a customs union and single market, an EFTA/EEA business arrangement, stripped of all references to a political journey ending in an “ever closer union”. Trading together as free nations, preferably without any of the “supranational” decision making that was the hallmark of the EU. Preferably under “common sense” British leadership.

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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, British Government, Jeremy Corbyn, UK Labour Party

The nightmare on #Brexit St continues

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog
This blogpost was written on Sunday May 5th, 2019

LE19 UK result

Back in the day in the 1980s, whenever Labour lost an election to Mrs Thatcher’s Tories, the cry would go up from the usual suspects on Labour’s left that the reason the party had lost out, yet again, was because it was not “left wing” or “socialist” enough. It was just too “centrist”. Which is why people voted for Thatcherism instead. If only the raw, red meat of real socialism was on offer, Labour would sweep to victory.

It must have been me, as I never got the logic of the argument that because Labour was not socialist enough people voted for “right wing” policies instead. But then I never had that unique Marxist insight into the hidden dialectics of history, which readers of New Left Review and Living Marxism did, which is probably why I suffered from “false consciousness”.

These remembrances of time past came to mind as I watched reactions on Friday last to the results of England’s local elections as they came in. Bear in mind that not all of England voted on Thursday last, nor did Wales or Scotland.

On the day, the Conservatives lost over 1,300 seats, from a starting position of just over 8,000. Labour, which had expected to make significant gains, was also down by 81. The winners were the Liberal Democrats with plus 695, the Greens up by 194 and “others”, who picked up 662 seats.

The projected national share of the vote, calculated by elections analyst Prof John Curtice for the BBC, put both major parties neck-and-neck on 28% of the vote – both down from 35% a year ago. If that result were replicated in a general election, it would result in another hung parliament.

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Article 50, Backstop, Brexit, UK Labour Party

May’s #Brexit Express is now the little engine that can’t

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog
This blog was written on Sunday April 28th, 2019

Brexit engine

Just over two weeks ago, UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, went to the European Council to ask if the UK’s departure date from the EU could be pushed back again, one more time. We’ll be ready to go by the end of May, she said, though no one was quite sure if she was talking about herself or the month of May. Maybe both.

Reports from the European Council suggest that the French President, Emmanuel Macron, was none too happy with any extension, while others wanted to give the UK another year to agree on what Brexit meant. In the end, an extension to the end of October was offered. There were conditions. The UK would have to hold elections for the European Parliament on May 23rd, and, as a continuing member of the EU, would have to behave itself when it came to EU decision making.

The President of the EU Council, Donald Tusk, warned the UK not to waste the extra time it had been granted. Make the most of it, he said. With that, the UK Parliament went on holidays the week before Easter.

So, nothing has happened in the past two weeks to bring the Brexit process to any sort of conclusion.

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