Brexit. Why do Brits want Out of the EU?

Tens of millions of doses of the Covid-19 vaccine manufactured in Belgium will be flown to Britain by military aircraft to avoid delays at ports caused by Brexit, under contingency plans being developed by the government.

Both the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and senior sources at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) confirmed to the Observer on Saturday that large consignments would be brought in from 1 January by air if road, rail and sea routes were subject to widely expected delays after that date.

Civil servants from the MoD and military planning staff have recently met officials from the government’s vaccine taskforce to discuss the plans, with priority being given to speedy transfer of the doses. “We will do this if necessary. The plans have been discussed,” said a DHSC source.

The move shows that ministers are ready for severe disruptions at ports and commercial airports whether or not there is a Brexit deal, and are not prepared to allow the vaccine to be held up in any circumstances.

Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, has announced that he and Maroš Šefčovič, the European commission vice president, have reached an agreement in principle on all the outstanding issues relating to the Brexit withdrawal agreement. This means, primarily, the rules governing trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain that will apply from next year under the compromise plan - adopted as an alternative to the backstop - that will leave Northern Ireland in the single market.

These arrangements will apply whether or not a trade deal is negotiated. But the very fact that they have been agreed removes an areas of dispute, and this will be seen as a move that could make a trade deal more probable.

In his announcement Gove has also confirmed that the government is now abandoning the provisions in the internal market bill that would have undermined the withdrawal agreement, as well as plans for related provisions in forthcoming taxation bill.

Any deal will be a tradeoff between wealth and sovereignty – the proportion and timescale are the only considerations

There is one Brexit deal. There has only ever been one. It has been there from the start, although hard to see through the fog. Its outline has been discernible behind plumes of rhetoric and misinformation billowing out from the Westminster political machine. It was there on the horizon the morning after the referendum. It has not moved during the thousands of hours of debate that followed.

The deal was already contained in article 50. It was in every bill in every late-night Commons vote. It was in Theresa May’s backstop and Boris Johnson’s alternative. It is the hard kernel of a soft Brexit and the soft underbelly of a hard one. It is the capital of Norwegian, Canadian and Australian-style Brexits. It is this: the UK will give up wealth in exchange for sovereignty.

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Leavers started from a position of denial that sovereignty had any price at all – that Brexit was all upside. That case rested on two pillars. First was the idea that EU membership was a drag on Britain, an unwanted subscription service that could be cancelled and the money redirected to better causes.

Second was the belief that Europeans would be so sad to lose access to British markets that they would agree to continue something like the old service without charge. Those things were not true, but the Brexiteers believed they could be made true by force of conviction and a more aggressive negotiating stance.

Meanwhile, remainers saw the whole deal as a scam. The price was too high and the sovereignty being bought was worthless. It could not make Britain hefty enough in the world to rival Washington or Beijing. There was more global leverage available from a seat at EU summits in Brussels. The best deal on sovereignty was therefore the one that invested the whole pot in the European project.

But that argument has never had traction with leavers. The claim that Brexit has no value is palpable nonsense to tens of millions of people who, by the act of voting, bestowed it with profound emotional significance. Sovereignty sounds like independence which is something people want for themselves and their country. Many could also think of concrete benefits from autonomy in lawmaking. Often those things were creatures from Eurosceptic mythology – freedom to do things that Brussels had never stopped Britain from doing – but not always. Anyone who wanted a tougher immigration regime, for example, will get one from Brexit. For liberal remainers, that is just another cost.

The two tribes measure the issues on completely different scales, and will continue to do so. Pro-Europeans will be disappointed if they anticipate some definitive moment of vindication, when the bill lands for the hollow monument to sovereignty that Johnson is erecting at vast national expense.

Restricted access to European markets will take a toll in jobs and forgone growth. But there will be foreigners and a pandemic to blame. The political furnaces will fire up, incinerating the evidence presented by economists and pumping out the same polluting cloud of specious argument. A springtime bounce back in GDP – a statistical near-certainty given the depth of the Covid-induced slump – will be cast as a Brexit liberation dividend.

The trickier part will be converting regulatory sovereignty into material payback to leave voters. Johnson’s shiny monument cannot be melted down and minted into coins for people whose jobs have vanished because the supply chain in which they worked has been rerouted via Slovakia. Autonomy from EU rules affords some leeway to subsidise industry, but most Tories are ideologically repelled by the idea of government picking economic winners. The Eurosceptic instinct tends the other way, applying market forces as the remedy to any malaise, cutting taxes and regulation to purge the body politic of state-induced lethargy. Strategists in Downing Street know that such medicine would be poison to voters in former Labour strongholds that make up the prime minister’s new power base.

On the international stage, Johnson’s paddling pool of sovereignty will evaporate in no time. Joe Biden is a friend of the European project and intends to make that the axis for renewal of alliances that Donald Trump despised. Paris and Berlin reciprocate eagerly. One of the unique strengths of British foreign policy used to be serving as the strategic link between Washington and continental Europe. EU membership was the bridge, and now it is burnt. It cannot be rebuilt with the wreckers’ tools. That message has reached No 10, judging by Tuesday’s retreat from plans to repudiate the Brexit withdrawal agreement, but the legal tantrum will not be forgotten quickly

Johnson engages in that kind of brinkmanship because he thinks it shows strength, but it has the opposite effect. Anyone looking from the outside can see the structural weakness of his position regardless of the heroic poses he strikes. Every time he pulls some stunt to demonstrate how serious he is about Brexit for a domestic audience, he advertises the folly of the thing in the international arena. He has borrowed heavily against Britain’s reputation as a level-headed, pragmatic country and reliable ally, just to purchase a few more ounces of sovereignty. It all has to be paid back. But that is the deal. That was always the deal.

Report says delays have left Border Force officials reliant on 26-year-old technology

The Home Office’s failure to deliver a new digital border system to monitor the movement of people and goods into and out of the UK will cost the taxpayer an additional £173m, Whitehall’s spending watchdog has found.

Border force staff will instead have to rely upon 26-year-old technology to decide who is allowed into the UK until the scheduled delivery of the Digital Services at the Border [DSAB] programme in 2022, the National Audit Office said.

Michael Gove [the minister the man in charge of the UK's Brexit policy!!!] is under fire after wrongly claiming key health and education benefits will be saved “for a period” even if there is a no-deal Brexit.

Both free, or very low-cost, medical treatment for travellers to the EU and the Erasmus student exchange programme will be lost if the UK crashes out without a trade agreement.

Even if a deal is struck – with just 22 days left to rescue it – there is no guarantee the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) or Erasmus will be part of it, after the UK set strict conditions for the latter.

But Mr Gove, asked if “free medical treatment” would still be available after a no-deal, replied: “It will be the case that, for a period, yes, there will be appropriate access.”

Similarly, on Erasmus – used by more than 16,000 UK students in 2017 – the Cabinet Office minister told the BBC they would still be able to study in the EU “yes, for a period”.

Ben Bradshaw, a Labour MP demanded that Mr Gove “correct the record” immediately, saying: “Otherwise, why should people believe a single thing any minister says?

For months, supporters of the EHIC and Erasmus have been warning of the harsh impact if the schemes are lost – but there has been no hint that they are a focus of the crisis-dogged talks.

With talks said to be on a ‘precipice’, PM spells out UK position to Ursula von der Leyen at Brussels meeting.
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Flanked by his chief negotiator and senior aides, the prime minister told the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the bloc’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, that he could not accept terms in a treaty that would tie Britain to EU rules.

As he spelled out his position over a three-course meal in the commission’s Berlaymont headquarters, EU sources said the bloc planned to publish its no-deal contingency plans “very soon indeed” in order to keep planes flying and protect borders in the event of talks collapsing irretrievably.

“At the moment we are on the precipice of a no-deal,” Ireland’s taoiseach, Micheál Martin, told the Irish parliament earlier in the day. “It remains to be seen how the principals [Johnson and Von der Leyen] can rescue the situation in their talks this evening.”

The prime minister arrived at the commission’s headquarters just after 8pm local time, where he posed for pictures with Von der Leyen before retreating to a meeting room with their chief negotiators for a half-hour discussion. The two teams, joined by further officials, were then due to sit down to dinner.

As Von der Leyen and Johnson met, the commission president suggested: “Keep [your] distance.” “You run a tight ship here, Ursula, and quite right too,” Johnson responded.