Over the past number of years, I have been involved, on the management side, in many European-level labour negotiations. But one particularly comes to mind.
The employees’ representatives on the other side had cancelled an agreement that had been in place for close on 20 years. It wasn’t a perfect agreement, it had drawbacks for both parties, but it worked reasonably well in practice.
Further, it was always possible to negotiate small, but important, changes to the agreement as circumstances evolved, old provisions became outdated and new issues and organisational changes needed to be taken into consideration.
In other words, the other side did not need to cancel the agreement but could, instead, have worked on improving it. But they were advised that negotiating a new agreement would be easy and that it would be a lot better than what they then had. Five years on, a replacement is not yet in place.
UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s speech in Florence last Friday was designed to unlock the stalled Brexit negotiations between the European Union (EU) and the UK over an agreement on the departure of the UK from the EU. In her speech May said essentially four things:
UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, is to fly to Florence next week to deliver a speech billed as an “important intervention” on the Brexit negotiations. Why Florence? Why not the European Parliament? Florence, a once great banking centre in Europe, its glory days long behind it. A role model for London, post-Brexit perhaps.
“Repeal and replace” makes for a great political slogan. For Republicans in the US, who minted the phrase, it meant repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). In January of this year, President Trump told ABC news that “he wanted “good coverage at much less cost” and “a much better healthcare plan at much less money.” Over recent months President Trump has found that while “repealing” might possibly be easy, replacing is a lot harder. To date, the Act has been neither repealed nor replaced.
The announcement on Sunday August 27, by way of an article in The Observer, that the Labour Party now backed a transition arrangement for the UK after it leaves the EU in March 2019 changes everything, utterly.
This week, the UK government published details of its Data Protection Bill which will enshrine the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) into UK law (
Another week and we are no clearer as to what is going to happen. Last weekend the UK newspapers were filled with stories that the government had come to a consensus that a “transition” or “implementation” phase would be needed after March 2019, when the UK is scheduled to leave the European Union. The only disagreement between government ministers appears to be over the length of such a transition. Should it be two, three or four years?
Speaking at a Brexit conference in Dublin on Monday, June 26 last, Catherine Day, a former secretary general of the European Commission and now a special adviser to Commission president, Jean- Claude Juncker, said that the UK’s position appeared to be: “we want everything we like and we don’t want anything we don’t like.” She continued:
BEERG Brexit Blog 