Wait a minute 
: what happened to “they need use more”, “take back control” and all the other three-word-phrases? How can RS actually give in to the democratic vote of the UK to cut all ties with the EU and rejoin an EU-based-programme? This must be a mistake! It is about something that contains “EU”…
Oh for gawd sake follow the conversation that post of mine followed on from a conversation that was initiated from this article I posted:
It is not as if ministers have been unwilling to abort or mitigate green policies when they have proved problematic in other areas. New proposals to rip up so-called “nutrient neutrality” rules, a hangover of Britain’s EU membership, may well unblock the building of 100,000 homes.
These rules require construction projects to show that they will not release nutrients such as nitrates and phosphates into water bodies before building can begin. They have been a considerable burden and led to many councils blocking projects. Their replacement is clearly to be welcomed.
Predictably, green critics are out in force. Lib Dem environment spokesman Tim Farron has described the change as a “disgraceful act”, and the RSPB warned it could lead to “total ecological collapse” for some rivers.
Yet as written, the rules are an expensive way to achieve little. The construction industry estimates that less than 5 per cent of the water pollution targeted is accounted for by homes and buildings. The value of construction halted is vast. At the price of a £280 million investment in mitigation, the Government says it is now poised to unblock £18 billion in economic activity.
It was remainers who said that the EU would never agree to the UK rejoining Horizon.
The UK is rejoining the European Union’s £85 billion scientific research programme, Horizon Europe. Something that remainers claimed would be impossible outside the EU. Rishi Sunak announced the “bespoke” new deal this morning, which also includes an association with Copernicus – the EU’s Earth observation programme. Under the agreement, the government won’t pay anything for the years it’s been excluded from the programme. There is also a clawback clause, which will provide compensation should British scientists receive proportionally less funding. The Prime Minister said:
> “We have delivered a deal that enables UK scientists to confidently take part in the world’s largest research collaboration programme – Horizon Europe. We have worked with our EU partners to make sure that this is right deal for the UK, unlocking unparalleled research opportunities, and also the right deal for British taxpayers.”
Following the Windsor Framework, it’s yet further evidence of Rishi using an improved relationship with Brussels to return the UK into EU deals that are in our mutual interests. Guido won’t be surprised to see a rational solution to scheduled automative sector tariffs found…
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You’re just so wrong about that. History proves the relationships, trade deals, agreements and attitudes between all countries are very fluid. Nothing is set in stone …ever. Time passes and the bad feelings that even full-blown killing wars cause are overcome. If that’s possible, then you can never say never for any situation. Not even the one under discussion here.
Edit: typo
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This is very true. It also shows that the EU have maintained a mature mindset throughout the various stages of dialogue - much more so than the Tory government (let alone the idiotic behaviour of the Brexit party). Their empty sabre rattling about a no deal exit was frankly embarrassing. And some of the anti-EU language has been appalling. It seems to appeal to a base set of right of centre voters but should not be used in a global stage. Let’s hope it is binned along with many who said such thing.
The big issue to come will be whether the UK confirms that they will continue with food production standards to enable the removal of additional checks. Thus we begin the slow crawl back to normalised, beneficial relations with the rest of Europe. But we need change from a government that always defers to blaming others for the problems that are of their own making.
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Hi
I voted Leave, I still would.
I have absolutely no problem with the Common Market, Free Travel and jobs in the member states etc etc.
My concern was the direction of travel, compulsory Euro and further integration.
I had dealt with the EU Civil Servants for decades and knew what a bunch of power mad people they are.
Our Politicians where too idle to deal with them.
It really was as simple as that.
I still want to be friends with the EU, have mutual interests and would have been very happy with a Norway or Switzerland type deal.
It saddens me that our politicians went for something very different.
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The sequence of events that led to the “something different” was:
Before the referendum was confirmed the Euro-sceptics gained a key concession - that the question would be a simple stay / leave vote. This was key because it meant the leave campaign need not determine exactly what sort of leave, what sort of relationship and what sort of deal would be established. The remain side had to defend all the details of the current EU set up, regulations, rules, budgets. The leave side had no details to defend, lots of things to criticise and no need to commit to any specific promise. The battle field was not level.
In the lead up to the referendum the leave campaign had two key arguments (doesn’t matter whether they were true or not, and of course there were other arguments). First, there would be massive opportunities available once out of the EU that would benefit product costs, exports and growth. Second, leaving the EU would not stop trade & relations with the EU and in fact the impact would be minimal. These were key re-assurances to counter the project fear being promoted by Osborne and Cameron on the remain side.
Surprisingly for many, leave won the vote. Even on the leave side many doubted that they would win the referendum. But now that had won, and won with no commitment to any sort of future, the hawks in the leave side realised that they had a once in a lifetime opportunity. They swung rapidly to the worst sort of prediction - a no deal exit. This moved the dialogue and thinking. Even a bad deal would be better than the economic crippling of a no deal.
So after much thrashing out we got the shoddy deal of Frost and Johnson. A very limited number of lobbyists, donors, influencers and politicians crafted the run of play to get the worst sort of deal. But one that suited their vested interests. All made possible by the simple stay / leave vote. A swindle of a referendum that barely comes close to democracy.
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Yep Swimmy, there are a lot of idle people about, the argument seems to be about how much folks are paid for being idle’
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Hi
The benefits of leaving are already here.
The real power in the EU is the Commission.
Tens of thousands of unelected bureaucrats.
How do I know this?
Well I used to be an unelected Public Employee here in the UK.
Public Health and Public Safety.
I had to Caution every one, had no powers of arrest, but after the Caution, the you do not have to say anything stuff, I then went on to say that in this instance it is a Criminal Offence not to say anything, but anything you do say cannot be mentioned or used against you.
Everything I did was subject to the Scrutiny of of the Courts and you had to prove everything.
Some of you may not like it but it worked.
The EU are not pragmatic, they are paperwork mad with no exceptions.
The Paris Bombers got away because Belgium made it an offence to raid a private house before 5 in the morning.
If we had stayed in we would have been subject to this lot.
This is just one of a whole bunch of new stuff from the EU.
The technical point that I am making means that your Enforcement Agencies would have been banned from taking immediate action to protect you.
I am so glad we are out, but disgusted in the idiotic way we left.
So Belgium passed a law itself about what happens in its own country. That looks like demonstrating its sovereignty. Not something imposed by the EU. I think you need to find a better example - or was your post simply “here’s why I don’t European countries”?
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Hi
I have repeatedly said that we should have better relations with the EU and that I have no problems at all with the Common Market or Free Movement.
The Paris Terrorists killed 130 innocents.
Your support for the Human Rights of these Terrorists is noted.
That is a strange conclusion to reach from my post. It is a massive leap of assumption and imagination to determine that from what I wrote. Your creativity does you great credit but your judgement does not. The result is unpleasant, is it not?
Any other thoughts or words you want to wrongly attribute to me? And can I put words in your mouth by way of reply?
So what did I tell you? I remember that in 2016 we were all having a lively debate about what would happen if we left the EU.
There were some people who were specifically worried about the risk to UK participation in Horizon — an EU-sponsored scientific collaboration.
Brexit would be a disaster, they said, for scientific exchange. No more EU-funded conferences in lovely European cities; no more joint papers with boffins from other European universities; no more British participation in joint European breakthroughs.
I must say that I was a bit sceptical about all this — and said so at the time. It did not seem to me that the domain of scientific endeavour and research was confined to the EU. Of the top ten universities in Europe, seven are in the UK, one is in Switzerland — and only two are in the EU. Scientific partnerships are as global and instant as the internet.
In any case, I simply couldn’t understand why leaving the EU would mean leaving projects like Horizon, assuming we wanted to stay in. Horizon wasn’t political. It wasn’t part of a great legislative project to create a United States of Europe. To be part of Horizon, you didn’t need to be a member of the EU single market or customs union, or to sign up to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. The UK was a massive financial contributor to the project. Our research was world-class.
Who would be so crazy as to kick the UK out of Horizon? Well, it turned out that I underestimated the pettiness of our friends and partners. They temporarily decided to terminate UK membership — even though they wanted and needed us in. Now I am delighted to say that they have relented, and we are back in, and quite right, too.
It’s what we Brexiteers always said would happen, and should happen. We said that you could get the best of both worlds — leave the EU but continue with partnerships and collaboration of all kinds. QED, as they say in the academic world.
- It is fascinating to see how this sensible development, on which I congratulate the Government, has excited the glands of those who always opposed Brexit.*
You see! they are saying. It’s the beginning of the end of this crazed experiment. We are gradually going back in, they say. First it was the Windsor Framework, which locks Northern Ireland into parts of the single market and therefore makes it more difficult (though not impossible) for the rest of the UK to diverge from EU law.
Now we are back in Horizon. It may be relatively trivial, but it’s a signal, they say — a message about the direction of travel, of things to come. Soon, they hope, there will be a Labour government, and Sir Keir Starmer will take us back into the single market and customs union — or at least back into regulatory orbit.
Soon the UK will be back on bended knee, pledging to obey the rules of the club, even if we are not yet full members. I saw that the former chairman of the Remain campaign, the amiable Stuart Rose, was out on the airwaves the other day, prophesying that Britain would rejoin the EU.
Well, I am here to tell you, and Lord Rose, that it isn’t going to happen. Ever. To rejoin the EU would mean — according to EU rules — that we had to scrap the pound, sign up to the euro and abandon national control of monetary and, logically, fiscal policy as well.
That is simply never going to happen. To rejoin the EU would mean paying even more to Brussels than we were before, and signing up to the goal of a federal Europe.
No British government would ever accept it. And rejoining the EU is not, repeat NOT, the solution for any significant problem that the UK currently faces. It will not make the UK more competitive. Rejoining the EU will not solve our productivity problems. It will not help us tackle the skills gap, or fix the housing market, or help us to cut the absurd cost of infrastructure in this country.
On the contrary, it would make things worse, depriving us of regulatory freedom before we have even had a chance to use it.
I said it a few weeks ago, but I will say it again: look at the difference in growth rates between Europe and the United States, economies that used to be roughly equal in size. In the past 15 years the U.S. — with 100 million fewer people — has overtaken the EU so fast that American GDP is now nearly 50 per cent bigger than the whole Eurozone.
Why would we want to reshackle ourselves to a model that is so manifestly failing?
The other day I was in Sao Paulo, where I talked to the governor of the state, Tarcisio de Freitas. He seemed to be highly popular and successful, and he had a dynamic and free-market agenda. He wanted to emulate the UK’s privatisation experiment. He wanted to do a free trade deal with us. Tarcisio told me that he is a big fan of Brexit, and sees massive potential for the UK-Brazil relationship — and he is right.
We need to remember, and this Brexit Government needs to remind the world, what Brexit has already done. Yes, it was because we were out of the EU that the UK felt able to go faster than the European Medicines Agency — so that this was the first country in the world to put a licensed and effective Covid vaccine into someone’s arm.
Yes, it was because we were out of the EU that we were able to risk the wrath of other partners, and do the far-sighted AUKUS defence pact with the United States and Australia.
And yes, it was because we were outside the EU that we were able to take a lead in backing Ukraine with military support — a foreign policy area that we had mysteriously subcontracted, while in the EU, to France and Germany.
It is thanks to the proper Brexit delivered, with such huge effort, by this Conservative Government, that we are now able to do things differently — in fields from finance to bioscience. We have done something brave and remarkable and right — and we need to talk it up, explain it, champion it; not somehow give the impression that we are embarrassed by the decision of the British people.
Time after time our Olympians show the world that we excel in all sorts of sports — cycling, swimming, sprinting, you name it. With a population of only 0.84 per cent of the world, we come behind only America or China in the table of medals.
But there is one sport at which we are currently all-round global champions — and that is running ourselves down.
Of course, we can continue to partner our EU friends in science and all kinds of other things, but we took a decision to leave the EU — and there is no going back. We have it in our hands to make it a triumphant success — so let’s get on with it.
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The truth behind the Qatargate corruption scandal engulfing the European Union “will explode” one day, the former chief investigator has said.
Michel Claise, a Belgian judge who stepped back from the investigation earlier this year, suggested unnamed individuals were attempting to manipulate the truth.
“I never talk about the files I process,” he told RTBF, the Belgian broadcaster. “But I will tell you one thing – everything is in the file. The truth is there. It is not found elsewhere, neither in the television studios nor in certain magazines.
“And the truth will explode one day in the face of those manipulators who try, very simply, to distort it.”
Mr Claise, who writes crime novels in his spare time, became involved in the investigation when the Belgian security services handed him their findings into the corruption and graft scandal that has rocked the EU.
Three MEPs, a former lawmaker and his parliamentary assistant stand accused of accepting bribes from Qatari and Moroccan officials in exchange for political favours.
Police have seized €1.5 million in cash, including a suitcase containing more than €750,000 in a Brussels hotel.
Eva Kaili, a former European Parliament vice-president, was arrested after investigators discovered €150,000 at her property. Francesco Giorgi, her husband, was the parliamentary aide detained as part of the probe.
Ms Kaili, who insists she is innocent of any wrongdoing, has since been released from prison while the investigation continues.
Mr Claise withdrew from the investigation in June, and has refused to reveal whether he did so following death threats or the emergence of his son’s business ties with the son of Maria Arena, a Belgian MEP who is a suspect in the case.
In the interview, he revealed that another judge had been placed in a safe house following threats to their life.
“I am not the only one to be targeted by this,” he added. “And it is extremely dangerous for democracy to consider for a certain moment that the judge must be shot down, when in the end, we should rather spend our time fighting criminal organisations. But I never feared for my integrity.”
MEPs in the parliament are still struggling to come to terms with the cash-for-influence scandal, nine months after it came to light.
They have failed to reach an agreement on a rule that would see them required to disclose assets change, which is designed to close loopholes allegedly exploited by Qatargate suspects.
A report published by Transparency International EU this week revealed that the majority of MEPs fail to declare their outside interests. Of 1,678 activities listed by MEPs, just 12 per cent are for businesses on the EU’s transparency register.
The rule change would lower the level of outside earnings that an MEP must declare to €5,000 a year.
One of France’s biggest banks has told clients to move money out of the eurozone and back Britain.
Investment bank BNP Paribas has told clients to put their money into British stocks, arguing that a cheap pound, an attractive combination of sectors and the better-than-expected performance of the British economy makes the country attractive.
Its analysts recently changed their preferred allocation from the eurozone to the UK, encouraging investors who follow the bank’s advice to shift their money into the largest UK-listed companies.
The endorsement is a shot-in-the-arm for the beleaguered London stock market, which has been confronted by fears it is losing relevance and clout amid an exodus of listed companies.
Viktor Hjort, the head of credit research, said: “The outlook for UK equities is not bad at all. The FTSE is a value market. It has lots of energy and materials and a lot of banks. You can look at the oil price to see where energy is going.”
Oil prices are up by around a quarter since late June and reached 10-month highs this week, as Saudi Arabia and Russia squeeze supply to counteract falling demand. Rising prices are a boost for giants BP and Shell, who together make up around 13pc of the FTSE 100’s value.
Meanwhile, interest rates have risen at the fastest pace since the 1980s in a boost to banks’ profit margins. Financial stocks account for almost a fifth of the FTSE 100 by value.
Companies in growth sectors such as tech are often highly leveraged and so more sensitive to rising interest rates. This means that markets with a higher amount of tech businesses, such as the US, are a riskier bet.
Mr Hjort said: “We think this kind of environment is quite favourable to value investing in general as opposed to growth. The UK is a pretty good example of that.”
Another factor in Britain’s favour is that “valuations are just cheaper”, he said. JP Morgan earlier this summer said that British-listed companies were the cheapest in the world because of “very gloomy” sentiment towards the UK.
Finally, the UK economy was faring better than the eurozone. Economists at BNP Paribas expect Britain to fall into a mild recession in the first half of next year, but said that the economy had proved far more resilient than expected.
Meanwhile, the eurozone is facing the prospect of a double dip recession after quarterly growth figures were revised lower last week.
Paul Hollingsworth, chief European economist, said there had been “a lot of pessimism” about the UK, especially after Liz Truss’s premiership.
He said: “There was a lot of caution about UK assets. Things have moved on since then. As we saw, the economy did perform a lot better than people expected.
“When we speak to people they agree that there is some weakness ahead but it’s not going to be a severe downturn, partly because some of that underlying resilience is there.”
BNP Paribas is one of the biggest banks in Europe, with assets of more than €2.5 trillion.
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Ultra-Remainers like nothing better than to denounce Britain as a pariah among Western nations. They condemn the UK as xenophobic and backward. The EU is correspondingly depicted as a pioneer of human rights, benign liberalism and progress. Evidence of this quasi-religious faith in the so-called European ideal has been especially strong in the debate about illegal migration, where the Government’s Rwanda policy has attracted controversy. Only Brexit Britain, they seem to think, would do something so awful as to deport illegal migrants.
How, then, will they greet the news that Rishi Sunak has joined forces with the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, to campaign for an EU-wide crackdown on illegal migration, and that other European countries may wish to enter Rwanda-style deals? While the Brussels elites do their best to pretend nothing has changed, European politics has steadily shifted to the Right, in part because of the migrant crisis. Voters quite correctly expect the authorities to be able to control who comes into their countries. Regrettably, the failure to do this has fuelled the emergence of some extremist parties on the Continent, but it has also boosted more mainstream conservative forces.
Italy, in particular, has had to contend with tens of thousands of people arriving on its shores from North Africa. It has not yet found a policy that is effective, and Ms Meloni is under similar pressure to Mr Sunak to stop the flow of people. The Italian prime minister has previously defended the Rwanda deal, arguing that some of the criticism of the scheme was misplaced. Certainly, it is hard to imagine a sustainable solution to illegal immigration that does not involve the deportation of some illegal arrivals.
The Left has no answer to the migration crisis. It remains committed to old-fashioned doctrines that are being blown apart by the sheer number of people seeking to make often dangerous journeys to Britain or other parts of Europe. It is also likely that the scale of the crisis will increase. Britain is a generous country that has offered sanctuary to the people of Hong Kong, has happily given refuge to tens of thousands of Ukrainians, and has taken in many others fleeing conflicts or authoritarian regimes. But that generosity cannot be unlimited, and nor can the process of accepting people be as disorderly as it is today.
Mr Sunak has tied his political fate to stopping the Channel crossings, and much hinges on the Supreme Court, which later this year is expected to rule on the lawfulness of the Rwanda scheme. But this is about more than short-term politics, or about how one country seeks to protect its borders. It is about how the West will confront one of the defining challenges of this century. Britain is not an outlier in proposing tough action. Nor will our politics necessarily be immune to some of the trends in European politics if illegal immigration isn’t drastically curtailed. Voters are not willing to accept what amount to open borders.
Immigration played a key role in the UK’s decision in 2016 to leave the EU. Opinion polls showed strong support among leave voters for an end to free movement and for Westminster to decide who should be allowed to enter the country for work. That’s what the slogan “take back control” was largely about.
Since the Brexit vote, the mood has changed. There is still a feeling ministers need to do more to stop people in small boats crossing the Channel. But legal immigration has ceased to be such a hot political issue. Other issues – such as the cost of living and rising interest rates – rank as more important.
The more relaxed mood is certainly not the result of Britain pulling up the drawbridge to immigrants in the past seven years. On the contrary, net migration – the number of people arriving less the number leaving – rose to a record 606,000 in 2022.
There were some one-off factors last year – the arrival of refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine, for example – which won’t be repeated in the future. But even ignoring the people fleeing wars and persecution, the number of non-UK nationals either working or looking for a job rose by 257,000 in 2022. As Samuel Tombs, a UK economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, has pointed out, immigration accounted for almost all the 0.9% increase in the size of the workforce in the year to the second quarter of 2023. Foreign-born workers have plugged the gap left by a shortage of domestic candidates and so helped ease supply shortages.
There has been a marked shift in where the new foreign-born workers are coming from. Before Brexit, free movement under the rules of the single market meant the vast majority arrived from EU countries. Under the points-based system, workers can arrive from anywhere in the world, provided they meet certain criteria. These include having a job offer of a certain skill level, that they can speak English and that they will be paid more than £26,200 a year.
The latest data shows that the four countries that secured the most work visas were India, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and the Philippines, with about half plugging gaps in the health and social care sector. Britain’s gain, inevitably, comes at the expense of poorer countries losing some of their brightest and best workers, even if they send a chunk of the money they earn home through remittances.
Some “red wall” Conservative MPs have called for much tougher immigration controls, including raising the minimum salary required for a skilled overseas worker to £38,000. This would certainly give companies a compelling reason to substitute capital for labour but with considerable short-term costs. In a globalised world, companies can easily find skilled people from overseas to fill vacancies, whereas it will take time to recruit and train domestic employees.
Mixed signals are being sent out by the government. Tombs says the decision to raise the minimum salary an overseas citizen must earn to get a skilled workers visa by 2.3% this year – well below the 8%-plus jump in annual private sector earnings – suggests ministers are loosening the immigration rules by stealth.
At the same time, though, the annual fee migrants pay to use the NHS has been raised from £624 to £1,035, and Rishi Sunak is making clear his reluctance to relax immigration rules to secure a bilateral trade deal with India.
That makes the chances of an immediate breakthrough slim. Sunak would love an agreement with the world’s fastest-growing major emerging economy – but not at any price. India has a reputation for fighting its own corner relentlessly in trade negotiations conducted by the World Trade Organization, and its key demand in the bilateral talks – more visas for Indian students and workers – is one that makes life difficult for Sunak
It is a tough call for the prime minister, who needs to show voters that the economy can benefit from better-calibrated migration. There is certainly evidence the geographical shift in immigration is positive for the UK. Data from Oxford University’s migration observatory shows migrants from India and sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to be employed in high-skilled jobs and command higher salaries than those from eastern Europe. In 2020, the average salary for a non-EU-born worker was £31,400 – £3,000 higher than for an EU-born worker.
There have been problems for certain sectors – such as hospitality – which in the past relied heavily on well-educated migrant workers from the EU to fill vacancies. But if the idea was to craft a migration system that would enable the economy to become less dependent on low-skill, low-wage, low-productivity jobs, then the shift to a points-based system makes sense. If the supply of cheap workers is restricted and the cost of employing people rises, firms will have a greater incentive to boost spending on new labour-saving equipment.
There are tentative signs of this happening. Kallum Pickering, a UK economist at Berenberg bank, points out that UK business investment has increased by 35% since the low point reached during the spring 2020 Covid lockdown and is now 6% above its pre-Brexit vote high. In part, this is the result of an end to the uncertainty that deterred investment in the years after 2016 but it is also a case of “needs must”. For the past 30 years, he says, the UK has relied on two things to grow its economy – cheap foreign labour and low-cost imports – both of which are becoming harder to secure.
In other words, the upshot of deglobalisation and a changed immigration system may well be more expensive labour, higher levels of investment and a more self-sufficient economy. All would certainly be welcome.
That’s a lot to take in!
I keep reading suggestions thatb the EU would never allow the UK to re-join.
That makes me laugh, as I am absolutely certain that the EU hierarchy would wet itself, with delight, if we ever tried it.
Imagine them celebrating having made us crawl back.
One upmanship as never before seen.
That would keep others from trying to escape, for ever!
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You do need to check what Guy Verhofstadt says about the UK rejoining. Your attempt to place your prejudice onto EU views is poor thinking. You have no evidence for your claims. Rather, the only thing the EU has made clear is the rejoining would not be a matter of the UK simply stepping back to the unique & enviable position it had gained before leaving. No gloating, no begging, no shaming. That sort of kiddie politics have only ever been played out by idiot elements in the Tory party and the entire Farage troupe of twerps.
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