Brexit

The Japan trade deal shows how desperate we are for investment

A small cheer for Liz Truss’s treaty with Japan. It is, says the official press release, ‘the UK’s first major trade deal as an independent trading nation’ — and we must hope, the harbinger of much bigger deals to come. Even on the government’s own analysis, this one claims to deliver just £1.5 billion to the UK economy and an increase in UK workers’ wages of ‘£800 million in the long run’, whatever that means. What it highlights, I’m afraid, is the imbalance between the range of goods and services that the post-industrial UK is actually able to offer foreign partners — and how much more we need from them,

Joe Biden weighs in on the Brexit stand-off

Today has not been a good day for the government. The government’s decision last week to be so explicit that the Northern Ireland clauses of its Internal Market Bill would break international law in a ‘specific and limited way’ has caused all sorts of problems. First, it created a Tory backbench rebellion on the issue. A chunk of Tory MPs felt that the government’s position meant that they just could not support the legislation as proposed. The government has today pacified this rebellion by agreeing to table an amendment ensuring that the Commons would get a vote before these clauses are used. It is not a massive climbdown — the

Full text: UK and EU Brexit negotiators debate over Twitter

Below is the full text of UK Brexit negotiator David Frost’s twitter thread in response to his EU counterpart Michel Barnier: ‘I would like to make a few comments and state a few facts, in my capacity as the PM’s negotiator in the current and last autumn’s talks. On the Protocol, we indeed negotiated a careful balance in order to preserve peace and the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement. It is precisely to ensure this balance can be preserved in all circumstances that the government needs powers in reserve to avoid it being disrupted. On third country listings: the EU knows perfectly well all the details of our food standards rules because we

What on earth has happened to Simon Schama: The Romantics and Us reviewed

‘You may think our modern world was born yesterday,’ said Simon Schama at the beginning of The Romantics and Us. If you do, though, I can only imagine that you’ve never seen any history documentaries on television — where, as a rule, the modern world is born in whatever period the documentary happens to be about, from Ancient Rome to the 1980s. After all, how can the past possibly be interesting if we can’t see ourselves reflected in it? As the title indicates, Schama’s choice, this time, of an era important enough to lead to us was the romantic movement. But as it soon turned out, the ‘us’ he had

Martin Vander Weyer

Wrecking the Brexit talks won’t help our fishermen

‘Every country has a political problem with its fishermen,’ wrote Peter Walker, the Conservative minister who negotiated the first effective EU-UK fishing deal in 1983. ‘Everyone sympathises with the tough life they lead. They all want to take as much fish as they can.’ And here’s Michel Barnier, still speaking as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator in Dublin last week despite rumours he’s about to be sidelined: ‘Without a long-term, fair and sustainable solution on fisheries, there will simply be no new economic partnership with the UK.’ Those quotes encapsulate the bizarre fact that an industry which contributes just £1.4 billion to UK GDP stands, alongside the Northern Ireland border

Who would risk being a government adviser?

Poor Tony Abbott. It would seem being prime minister of Australia doesn’t bring you to the attention of the British media. To come into its sights you must be put forward for a role as UK trade adviser. Then they will discover your existence and aim to destroy whatever reputation they didn’t know you had with the usual modern British charge-sheet. This time the charge was led by Kay Burley. The latest advertisements for her Sky television show boast that Burley is ‘always formidable, rigorous, fair, honest and searching’, among much else. Perhaps Burley hadn’t seen the advert. Certainly she displayed no such qualities when she discovered the existence of

The biggest obstacle to a Brexit deal

Downing Street now thinks that the chances of a Brexit deal are down to 30 or 40 per cent, I say in The Times today. The sticking point is, rather surprisingly, state aid. Since Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, the UK has been sniffy about the idea of government ‘picking winners’. It doesn’t use much state aid (less than half the EU average, according to the Commission’s figures), but the Johnson government doesn’t want to commit itself to something similar to the EU’s regime – it wants to use the power of the state to develop what it sees as the industries of the future. One figure with intimate knowledge of the

The trouble with ‘taking back control’

I sympathised with Leave voters who yearned to ‘take back control’ of British borders. After all, if being a country means anything, it surely entails first and foremost a clear understanding of who comes under that country’s protection — and who doesn’t. Otherwise a country is just a patch on a map. Yet I’ve always found Leavers’ high hopes for reduced immigration heartbreaking. Cutting ties with the EU was never going to limit the migrants apt to put the greatest pressure on British borders this century: immigrants from outside the EU, especially from high-birth-rate countries in Africa and the Middle East — who, absent an unlikely new agreement by the

Has Downing Street calculated the real cost of quarantine?

Doing the math, as the Americans say, became this column’s theme after I abandoned another planned trip to France. Seven days in the Dordogne (where last week’s Covid infection rate was just 2.9 cases per 100,000) would have cost me 14 days lockup on return, so I spent the weekend doing arithmetic instead. As I tried to calculate the real cost of what I have called ‘kneejerk quarantine rules driven by focus-group fear’, my notebook began to resemble a rogue Ofqual algorithm — but here’s the simplified version. Let’s start with the 600,000 Britons reportedly caught by the quarantine returning from Spain last month and the 150,000-plus in France who

Keir Starmer’s potential Brexit playbook

Throughout the last four years, you could be forgiven for thinking that everyone in Britain has been extremely passionate about Brexit one way or another. The truth is, most people are sick to death of the whole debate. This was the reason ‘Get Brexit Done’ was such an effective slogan; most voters wanted the topic laid to rest. It is this general apathy that I believe is informing Keir Starmer’s approach to Brexit as Labour leader, combined with the knowledge that while most people are sick of Brexit, we are about to enter a whole new phase of it that can’t be ignored. Passionate Remainers complain that Starmer hasn’t been

Portrait of the week: Local lockdowns, busy beaches and an explosion in Beirut

Home Some 2.7 million people in Greater Manchester and parts of Lancashire and West Yorkshire, where many Muslims live, were put under tighter restrictions on the eve of Eid al-Adha. Wedding receptions, gambling in casinos and eyebrow-threading continued to be banned when the government decided to ‘squeeze the brake pedal’ to control coronavirus, in the words of Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister. Aberdeen was put back into lockdown. People would have to wear masks in church from 8 August. The sudden actions came after new cases rose from a probable 2,800 to 4,200 a day, according to a survey by the Office for National Statistics, based on 116,026 swab tests

Keir Starmer is right to stay quiet on Brexit

Ever since Keir Starmer became Labour leader, there have been calls for him to publicly embrace Brexit to win back seats in the ‘Red Wall’. Starmer has stayed quiet on Europe since his victory, to the consternation of many Remainers who wanted him to push the importance of extending the transition period, before that opportunity passed. This silence has been wise on Starmer’s part – and he should continue to stay silent on the European question for the time being. The calls for Starmer to announce that he’s converted to Brexit misunderstand several things, including: the nature of the electoral coalition Starmer needs to build, why Red Wall seats fell

New fault lines are appearing in the EU

Anyone who imagined that the departure of Britain would make for more harmonious EU summits in future will have been disabused of this belief by the four days of meetings to establish an EU coronavirus recovery fund, which came within an hour of being the longest on record. Agreement was reached on a €750 billion package — just over half of which will be made up of grants and the rest loans — but not before the French President, Emmanuel Macron, had reportedly thumped the table and accused a group of countries of putting the entire European project at risk through their refusal to sign for an even higher sum.

Coronavirus has exposed the EU’s greatest flaw

Politics begins and ends with sovereignty: the duty and right to make the legitimate final decision. We have seen this clearly during the pandemic. In every country, people have come to depend on their governments, whose authority rests on acknowledged sovereignty. This is as true, or even truer, in democracies: while monarchs and aristocrats could dispute sovereignty – and, where it suited them, divide up the cake amongst themselves – in a democracy there can only be one ultimate sovereign: the people. No sovereignty, no democracy. For years we have been told the illusion, if not a fraud, that sovereignty can be ‘pooled’. Who takes the final decision when sovereignty

This ‘revolution’ isn’t what it looks like

America is not in the middle of a revolution — it is a reactionary putsch. About four years ago, the sort of people who had acquired position and influence as a result of globalisation were turfed out of power for the first time in decades. They watched in horror as voters across the world chose Brexit, Donald Trump and other populist and conservative-nationalist options. This deposition explains the storm of unrest battering American cities from coast to coast and making waves in Europe as well. The storm’s ferocity — the looting, the mobs, the mass lawlessness, the zealous iconoclasm, the deranged slogans like #DefundPolice — terrifies ordinary Americans. Many conservatives,

Is a Brexit deal within reach?

Trade talks between the UK and the EU are in a better place than they have been at any point since they started back in March. Now, in one way this is not impressive — the diplomatic equivalent of being the tallest mountain in Holland. For the first three months of these negotiation both sides were bullish, restating their maximalist positions, and coronavirus forced the negotiations online, making diplomacy and quiet compromise trickier. But now an intensive series of talks have been agreed, some of which will be face to face. Both sides appear to be in earnest about trying to break the deadlock. The British side is, privately, far

‘Global Britain’ should learn from New Zealand’s mistakes

One of the greatest prizes from Brexit is the opportunity to make the Global Britain aspiration a reality. Included is a leadership role at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) where the UK, the fifth biggest economy in the world, could help drive much-needed progress to facilitate global trade. Leadership, however, requires respect to back it up. In trade terms, that means walking the talk of trade liberalisation at home. Once free of the EU, the UK knows that its thriving farming sector will therefore require access to global markets. But the trade agreements to deliver that access must be consistent with WTO rules. Recent talk of the UK adopting a

An 11-year-old’s birthday party was hijacked by Brexit

Saturday night we ate outside next to the floodlit rock face. Four adult guests came puffing up the path and one child, George, celebrating his 11th birthday. A string of low-wattage coloured bulbs hung above our heads. Chicken curry. Dahl. Pink wine. Yellow champagne. Little brass oil lamps on the table. John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers — trite lyrics, sublime guitar — for the birthday playlist. A cream-filled birthday cake in the fridge awaited the right moment. Dominic Cummings was all the rage that day and every one of our adult guests was an ardent Remainer. As passionately tribal in their globalist philosophy as football fans, they’d gone into confinement

Inside the final act of the Brexit drama

The fourth round of official Brexit negotiations resumed on Tuesday, screen-to-screen. They will determine whether the stalemate can be broken and a trade deal sealed by the end of the transition date of 31 December. By mid-June, a high-level ‘stock-take’ between Boris Johnson and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will assess whether sufficient progress has been made to continue negotiations.  Such is not the case thus far, according to recent public utterances from Michel Barnier and David Frost, who has claimed ‘very little progress’. Just like in Endgame, Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy, a sense of hopelessness pervades the final scene of the drama. In the play – as with Brexit – the

The lethal combination of Brexit and Covid

The combination of Covid-19 and Brexit is a double whammy. The first was a haymaker that hit Britain from nowhere. The follow up will come when Britain, quite deliberately and with malice aforethought, winds up its fist and punches itself in the face. The economic impact of the virus will be accentuated by the UK leaving the EU without a deal or with a meagre free-trade agreement, warns a grim report, sponsored by the Best for Britain think tank. Business leaders do not generally get much sympathy. Watch any thriller made in the last two decades and as soon as the corporate executive appears on screen you can guess with