Concrete Achievements

Tag: brexit

  • Thinking sadly that if Eurostar are basically having to squeeze max money out of their…

    Thinking sadly that if Eurostar are basically having to squeeze max money out of their seats and maintain reduced services for years to come, that my work will naturally skew even further away from the UK.

    It’s a logical business decision on their part, just another nail driven in by Brexit. I enjoyed my London day trips for meetings and seeing people but at 400€ a go (Paris: 184€, Amsterdam 62€ for same dates next week) they are going to get a lot less frequent.

    I had hoped it was a temporary Covid recovery thing but from the sounds of the Eurostar letter to Commons transport committee, it’s the new normal.

  • Links from the week of 1 August 2022

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • Regulatory independence (inc on immigration) is the one unqualified benefit of Brexit…

    Regulatory independence (inc on immigration) is the one unqualified benefit of Brexit, bought at a cost in trade, rights and investment. So this might be a good thing. twitter.com/TheScotsman/st…

    The problems are
    (1) does the British state have capacity to make all these judgements consistently better than the better-resourced EU (maybe)
    (2) does the public like the idea of lower regulation on chemicals (doubt it)
    (3) do companies want to have two processes, one for

    the UK market with one range of chemicals and one for the EU market with a different range (almost certainly not, so an EU ban is an effective UK ban, but without a say for the UK.
    I suspect a lot of Brexiteers have in their heads that the UK is just in some hand-wavy way

    better at this than the Europeans, or ready to take a risk that will pay off. There’s certainly not much more democracy in obscure regulatory decisions shifting from Brussels to London.

    So even where Brexit is working as promised, the question is #WasItWorthIt.

  • Links from the week of 18 July 2022

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • I think this is spot on from today’s ⁦@TheEconomist⁩ but the reason this was possible is…

    I think this is spot on from today’s ⁦@TheEconomist⁩ but the reason this was possible is a failed media-political culture that focused on horse race and both-sidesism rather than scrutiny and challenge.

    And scrutiny of policy was replaced by either Paxman-style shouting or breathless court journalism, both of which make politics all about the personality across the table rather than the ideas or policies they are standing for.

    Everyone with five minutes policy experience saw that Brexit could not succeed politically or in policy terms except at a huge price that had never been presented to voters. Where was the challenge? Opinion pages of the FT don’t count.

    There is an enormous reckoning needed in British media and politics and now the fever is starting to pass the UK needs to look at what cultures and process need to be put in place to prevent this sort of system collapse ever happening again.

  • Links from the week of 4 July 2022

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • Brits defending the ECHR are in a tough spot.

    Brits defending the ECHR are in a tough spot. A lot of the distinction-drawing between the EU and ECHR feels to me like “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”. People see the CoE and EU institutions as part of a general European setup.

    In most places the distinction doesn’t matter much. It’s only in the UK where the EU has been declared the enemy that it’s important to draw the distinction – but the same spirit of international collaborative rule making runs through both so they *feel* similar.

    This is why pro-HR Brits are in a tough spot and why – as @Samfr said the other day – if the UK Gov wanted to stoop so low as to run a “kick out foreign judges” campaign the field is well set up for them.

    The answer longer-term has to be getting the UK back to its essential identity as part of that European democratic and liberal community – but it’s going to be a hard road, and will need a big culture shift against exceptionalism.

    Until then, it’ll be constant rearguard actions to defend even the most basic of rights for those in the UK. Labour also needs to start laying the groundwork for that culture shift, which it won’t be able do by pretending there’s a “Better Brexit” out there. @labour4europe

  • I’m getting a bit weary of this sort of thing.

    I’m getting a bit weary of this sort of thing. Are there people in the FR, DE etc political systems who think this? Probably. Is that the official position of any of those countries? No. Are they objectively behaving in pro-Putin ways? No. twitter.com/anders_aslund/…

    A few misquotes out of context (as is pointed out in the replies) don’t mean France is pressuring Ukraine to surrender. Slow action from Germany is not great but not a sign that they want Russia to win (listen to scholz’s speech last night).

    And the country that is actually blocking things – Hungary – never gets a mention. It’s all the bad old Western Europeans. (Or, for Brexiteers, the evil EU undermining heroic British leadership).

    Maybe I’m wrong, maybe stuff is happening behind the scenes that we don’t know about. But I would expect that to be sourced better than a few viral misquotes, unsupported by countries’ actual actions.

  • Great piece by @samfr in by @jburnmurdoch but Brexit didn’t make the UK a more tolerant…

    Great piece by @samfr in thread by @jburnmurdoch but Brexit didn’t make the UK a more tolerant nation, it was already becoming one. If Brexit vote were today it would fail. This is why Cameron’s self-serving narrative about having to call the referendum is nonsense. twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/s…

    He could have held out and attitudes would have shifted. Perhaps not as much, perhaps not as fast, but it was moving in the right direction.

    Admittedly, while Brexit is terrible for the UK and personally very painful, I also think that for European unity, it has not been a universally bad thing. It’s certainly opening up possibilities that UK would have blocked.

  • The Brexiteer wager is that no matter how outrageously they screw up, a combination of…

    The Brexiteer wager is that no matter how outrageously they screw up, a combination of right wing press, TV both-sidesing and basic nationalism will mean British people will just blame the bad EU. So far, it’s working for them.

    The logic of this is that they should be as outrageous as possible, because then the both-sidesing will be dragged even more towards “breaking our own agreements is good, actually”. This is also working for them.

    So, for all the Brexit project has failed and will continue to fail in terms of making anyone’s lives better, it is unfortunately delivering for the nationalist right (prop. V. Putin).