Tag: Europe

Article 50, Brexit, British Government, UK Labour Party

While #Brexit is a big thing, it’s the little #Brexit things that will add up and hurt…

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog
This bog was written on Friday Feb 8, 2019

ehiccard

It was a week of Brexit big things:

  • Nissan announcing that new models would not be manufactured in Sunderland after all.
  • Theresa May turning up in Northern Ireland and Brussels to tell people that she had a problem, but no solutions.
  • The Labour party setting out proposals which would see the UK as an equal partner with the EU in a “mini customs unions and single market”. But without the stuff the Jeremy doesn’t like.

Big things.

Yet it is the little things in the great scheme of things that people going about their daily lives generally care about. For the most part, few of us bother with politics. Politics are something that happens somewhere else as we just get on with organising the kids for school, driving to the job, doing the shopping, getting home, cooking dinner, falling asleep in front of the television. Life is just everyday ordinariness.

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Article 50, Brexit, British Government, Theresa May

#Brexit Will Not End Well… or…Brits need to realise: the #EU is just not that into you

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

This blog was written on June 12th 2018

Lemass DeGaulle
Lemass with De Gaulle in 1962

In the blizzard of policy statements, position papers, press conferences and parliamentary debates it is crucial to keep one fact in mind: the UK is leaving the EU on March 29th, 2019, unless the UK parliament votes to withdraw the Article 50 notice. Given the views expressed by the Conservative government and the opposition Labour Party this seems unlikely to happen. But never say never.

 

As matters stand, on March 29th, 2019, the UK will become a “third country”, outside of the EU institutions and legal framework. That there may be a transition period until the end of December 2020, with the UK de facto following all EU laws but without a voice in the EU governance structures, does not change the fact that on March 30th, 2019, the UK will have left the EU. Everything else is nothing more than dealing with the consequences of that exit. Damage limitation at best.

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Article 50, Brexit, Conservative Party, Theresa May

On #Brexit: You can have the politics or the economics; but you can’t have both

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

This blogpost was written on May 14th 2018

thatcher-Delors
Margaret Thatcher and Jacques Delors, London 1989

It is increasingly difficult to see any way in which Brexit ends well. The reason is simple: The UK wants what it can’t have. It asks for two incompatible things.

  • It wants to be leave the EU and take back control over its money, borders, laws and trade policy so as to be able to say that it is a completely sovereign country, beholden to no one.
  • But it also wants to continue to trade with the EU in the frictionless manner that it does today so that it will suffer no economic damage as a result of leaving.

As we have repeatedly noted in this Briefing, it wants all the benefits of the customs union and the single market, but without the obligations and restraints that come with those benefits.

Throughout the process the position of the EU has been clear. In accordance with Article 50 of the Treaty it says the UK is free to leave the EU. The very fact that a country can leave the EU shows that sovereignty was never lost. Only a sovereign country can quit an organisation like the EU. Is California or Arizona free to leave the United States? A civil war says no.

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Brexit, British Government, David Davis, Irish border, Michel Barnier, Negotiating, Theresa May

#Brexit and the Ideology of Angloism

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

This blog was written on Monday April 30th, 2018

Hammond BoJoYou can only understand Brexit if you understand that Brexit is not a rational economic calculation but is instead an ideology.

An ideology that can best be described, for want of a more elegant word, as “Angloism”. Angloism is a deep-seated set of beliefs with three main threads.

First, it holds that in joining the old Common Market the UK lost its sovereignty, the ability to take its own political decisions. This loss to the EU is seen by many Brexiteers as a betrayal of centuries of English tradition, of government through the “Crown in Parliament”. “Taking back Control” was about returning to this perceived happy state of affairs.

Secondly, it argues that the UK in general, but England in particular, is fundamentally different from mainland Europe. Its legal system is based on the common law, not the Napoleonic Code. Its economy is liberal and individualist, not corporatist and collectivist. And, not to be underestimated, its religions values are Protestant, not Catholic. Continue reading →

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Article 50, Brexit, British Government, Irish border, Northern Ireland, Theresa May

May: I Am Where I Am Because I Put Me Where I Am #Brexit

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

This Blogpost was written on Sat March 3rd, 2018

may snowIn the cold light of a snowy Saturday morning, UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s Mansion House speech yesterday can be read as an anguished plea to the European Union to help her out of the impossible position she has put herself in.

She knows the road she has chosen will result in the UK being economically less well off than it otherwise would have been, not to mention the loss of European and wider geopolitical influence.  But she is trapped.

Where Mrs. May finds herself is the consequence of decisions she herself has made. No one else. She now asks the EU to help her evade the consequences of those decisions by tearing up its own rules and laws, asking it to agree that the UK can be, at the same time in and out of the single market and the customs union, allowing it to pick the bits its likes and reject the bits it doesn’t.

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Brexit, Irish border, Michel Barnier, Negotiating, Theresa May

#Brexit: The UK Government’s BATNA Dilemma

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

Koji Tsuruoaka, Japan's ambassador to Britain, speaks outside 10 Downing Street after a meeting between Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May and senior members of Japanese companies, in LondonIt seems to us that a great deal of press and other comments about the supposed disunity within the UK cabinet about Brexit frames it slightly wrong. The cabinet is not split over what it wants from the Brexit discussions. It knows exactly what it wants.

The problem arises over what to do when it doesn’t get what it wants. and it already knows that you can’t always get what you want. The real problem is that the cabinet, in the language of professional negotiators, cannot agree on its BATNA, its Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement.

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Article 50, Brexit, British Government, Brussels, Divorce, Northern Ireland

#Brexit: A Moment of Truth Fast Approaching

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

Written on Sunday Nov 26th.

Brexit4After we wrote our weekly Brexit Briefing last Friday, the news broke that the European Union (EU) had given the UK until Monday, December 4, to table revised and meaningful proposals on the three Article 50 issues, the rights of citizens, the “Irish question” and meeting financial obligations if it wishes the EU27 to agree at their December summit to move the talks to discussing the future relationship between the two parties. As Politico noted:

European Council President Donald Tusk set an “absolute deadline” of December 4 for the U.K. to submit a revised offer on the Brexit bill and a credible solution for the Irish border, telling U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May on Friday that otherwise it would not be possible to move on to the second phase of talks, a senior EU official said.

The official said May had accepted the timeframe, and that Tusk warned her if London misses the deadline, the European Council would not be able to declare “sufficient progress” at its December summit.

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Brexit, British Government, Brussels, Irish border, Northern Ireland

Break, for the Border #Brexit

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

This blogpost was written on Nov 24th, 2017

welcometoniThe week opened with the UK cabinet agreeing that it would offer more money to the EU to settle its financial obligation triggered by its decision to leave but only on condition that the EU would agree to now move to talks about the future relationship and that the money would only be paid over when a trade deal was actually signed. This is an offer that, by Friday, even the ultra-Brexit supporting newspaper, the Telegraph, was admitting would be rejected by the EU.

The week closed with howls of rage from British politicians, often Brexit supporting, when the EU announced that UK cities were to be excluded from consideration from the prized European Capitals of Culture competition for 2023. An example of the EU punishing the UK, Brexiters argued, apparently ignorant of the rules that only cities from EU, EEA or applicant countries can be so nominated. Why would the EU subsidise cultural activities in a city in a country that had left the EU?

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Article 50, Brexit, David Davis, Irish border, Negotiating

#Brexit: “Sometimes it seems like they haven’t thought all this through”

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog

This article was written on 17th Nov 2017

Hammond BoJoAnother week, another seven days that leaves us little wiser as to what happens next. With each passing day it becomes ever clearer that the UK government fundamentally misunderstands the position it has placed itself in as regards exiting the European Union.

This misunderstanding is such that, as of today, there would appear to be only two possibilities open to the UK.

The first is to leave the EU in March 2019 without an agreement as to its future relationship with the EU and, therefore, obliged to conduct trade with the EU within the framework of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules.

The second possibility is to accept a free trade agreement modelled on the agreement the EU has recently signed with Canada. That agreement basically covers trade in goods, resulting in a reduction in tariffs of some 98%, and mutual recognition in regulated professions such as architects, accountants and engineers, and easier transfers of company staff and other professionals between the EU and Canada.

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