Tag: Eurozone

European-Union, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

Brexit-Watch: Friday 22 May 2020

No extensions to Brexit transition. The deadline must stay.

Note: this article was originally published at The Conservative Woman on Thursday 21 May 2020

Choosing four recent Brexit-relevant press articles which, while not necessarily meriting a full-length article, nevertheless warrant two or three paragraphs of comment, rather than merely a couple of lines.

NB: (£) denotes article behind paywall

 

The country cannot afford to extend the Brexit deadline – Centre for Brexit Policy

In its full paper to which the headline piece is a summary and introduction, the CfBP shows that extending the Transition period for 2 years would cost the UK economy £380 billion.

At any time, this represents a penalty which no democratic government should impose on its people unnecessarily and in effect in defiance of the mandate given to it by the people when asked. 

But this is not ‘any time’.  We are starting to emerge, painfully and hesitantly, from a Government-imposed COVID-19 lockdown of the economy which may not even have been necessary, which has seen the State intervene in the economy to a massive degree, and which will already burden the taxpayers with the costs of servicing and repaying at least £300 billion of additional borrowing.

On both economic and democratic grounds, there is scant, if any, justification for extending Transition and thus delaying full Brexit still further, even if that means, in the light of the EU’s continuing intransigence over a future trade deal, exiting to WTO terms.

 

Shameless arch-Remainers launch shock Brexit plot and urge Barnier to act – Express

It comes no surprise that the instigators of the latest plea to Barnier and the Brussels Eurocrats, intended to delay or preferably stop Brexit using COVID-19 as a transparently disingenuous excuse, comprise the usual suspects from the arch-Remainer, anti-democratic, minority parties of the ‘Liberal’, State-Socialist and Green Left.

Davey, Blackford, Savile Roberts, Lucas comp

The plotters’ claims of ‘significant opposition to the UK Government’s refusal to consider extending the timetable’ are tenuous at best.  Recent polling shows a majority in favour of ending Transition by 31 December or even earlier, particularly in the blue-collar electorate Red Wall constituencies which deserted Labour at last December’s election. Nowhere other than London is an extension favoured.

Moreover, the supplicants’ reference to the alleged backing for an extension from the (both Remainer and Socialist) Scottish and Welsh governments is irrelevant.  As both Brexit and trade negotiations are competences reserved to the UK’s national government, and thus indisputably outside the scope of devolved matters, the regional administrations in Edinburgh and Cardiff have no political equivalent of locus standi in them.  They, and their Westminster MP mouthpieces, should be ignored.

 

UK tells EU it will take ‘any measures necessary’ to protect fishing waters – Telegraph (£)

This welcome, if long overdue, pledge was included in the negotiating documents released by the Government last Tuesday, 19 May.  Given the considerable political significance notwithstanding the fishing industry’s marginal economic importance, of the UK regaining ultimate control of fishing rights applying in its own territorial waters as part of any trade talks, any retreat from such a robust promise should carry dire political consequences.

What ‘any measures necessary’ means, however, is left vague; the phrase will carry weight in negotiations only if it is made clear from the outset that it excludes undesirable concessions as a trade-off in other areas which are less politically visible.

Also welcome is the news of impending tariff reductions on up to 60 per cent of global imports, holding out the possibility of both food and household appliances being cheaper to consumers under new trade arrangements.

Finally, the opportunity appears to have at last been taken to reject the EU’s persistent negotiating intransigence, in which it has shamefully been supported by the die-hard Continuity-Remainer rump in the Whitehall, Westminster and media Establishments. Frost’s letter to Barnier embedded below is the letter which should have been written and sent 3 years ago.

 

In a crisis EU centralisation accelerates; Britain must not get left with the bill – Global Vision

Former Director of Special Projects for the successful Vote Leave campaign, Dr Lee Rotherham, locates the current drive for pan-European strategies on healthcare, ‘climate-change’ and taxation in response to COVID-19, being promoted assiduously by the Merkel-Macron, Franco-German axis, firmly within the EU’s history of exploiting international crises to increase integration and accrete unaccountable centralised power to itself at the expense of sovereign democratic nation-states.

Notwithstanding the setback handed to both the EU’s latest power-grab and the ECB bond-buying programme by the German Constitutional Court, the latest drives towards integration carry the inevitable connotation of higher contributions from member-states. The UK is already exposed through its European Investment Bank liabilities, and any extension to the Transition period would involve fresh UK contributions into the next multi-annual budgetary planning system.

Another reason – as if one were even needed – for refusing any extension and exiting Transition on time.

 

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Brexit-Watch: Saturday 09 May 2020

Note: this article was originally published at The Conservative Woman on Thursday 07 May 2020

Choosing five recent key Brexit-relevant story headlines which, while not necessarily meriting a full-length article, nevertheless warrant two or three paragraphs of comment, rather than merely a couple of lines.

NB: (£) denotes article behind paywall

 

UK bans PPE exports to countries outside the EU, unless on humanitarian grounds – Daily Telegraph (£)

The ban is, reportedly, solely because of rule drawn up in Brussels.  So, disregarding the fact that the EU is increasingly in no position to control what its member-states do anyway, after so many of them have by-passed it in unilaterally taking anti-COVID19 action at individual nation-state level, it sheds an interesting light on Brussels’ much-trumpeted ‘European values’ that ‘humanitarian grounds’ are apparently enough to justify an exemption from its ban on PPE exports outside the EU, while Italy’s earlier requests for face marks and medical gear were met with a stony silence.

Far from being ‘left with no choice’, the UK government could, and should, be ignoring it.  After all, France and Germany ignore EU rules on state aid with impunity, so what sanctions could the EU bring to bear against a UK which did the same?  Become intransigent in trade talks?  It already is, and always has been.  Abandon those talks and end the Brexit Transition early?  Bring it on.

Inasmuch as it applies to Britain, this particular Brussels ban feels more symbolic than real. Ever since the 2016 EU Referendum, Brussels has tried to limit, if not veto outright, Britain’s ability to strike non-EU trade deals until it was entirely outside the bloc, and this latest development should be seen as a mere continuation of that process. 

 

Brussels’ ‘Level Playing Field’: A Strategy of Entanglement – Briefings for Britain

Despite the Continuity-Remainer claim, that conceding an ongoing close alignment with EU regulations is only a reasonable condition for getting a trade deal, this approach has long been regarded as just a backdoor means of keeping Britain entangled in the EU.

Just how un-separated from Brussels control that would leave the UK is revealed in this concise but comprehensive briefing note from the former Head of International Trade Policy at the Department of Trade and Industry.  Far from being restricted to trade,  it would cover a swathe of policy areas, from employment law, to mandatory pooling of pension funds, to domestic tax rates.

Writing recently for Global Vision, former Vote Leave campaign director Daniel Hodson suggested that, such are the repeated failures of understanding on the part of the EU machine and its UK Establishment cheerleaders that just one more Brussels negotiating blunder could see Transition end, on schedule, with a clean, WTO-based, Brexit.  The briefing note on how enmeshed in Brussels’ red-tape signing up to the so-called ‘level playing field’ would leave us can only heighten the advantages of that WTO clean-break option. 

 

Firms in EU tax havens cannot be denied Covid bailouts – EU Observer

Considering how vehemently the EU rails against even those so-called ‘tax havens’ – or more accurately, ‘competitively low-taxed international financial centres’ – lying within its own borders, it has so far sadly proved impossible for your humble scribe to stifle a certain degree of schadenfreude on reading this.

At one level, it provides a good example of the perverse contradictions inherent in much of the EU’s attachment to one-size-fits-all regulation: in this case where the free movement of capital comes up against the prohibition (frequently and openly flouted by individual member-states’ national governments) on state-aid.

At a second, it shows why Merkel’s latest initiative, for a Financial Transactions (‘Tobin’) Tax as part of a drive for accelerated pan-EU fiscal harmonisation during Germany’s tenure of the rotating EU Council presidency, is almost certainly doomed to fail, even discounting the innate flaws of the tax itself, which Sweden tried, only to abandon it.

 

UK-US trade talks begin, as COVID19 casts its shadow – Global Britain

And not before time, either.  Given that Frost and Barnier, after recovering from their own initial bouts of COVID19, were able to resume and continue UK-EU trade-talks via video-link, it remains something of a mystery why the UK-US negotiations on a post-Brexit trade deal were ever curtailed at all.

The resumption of UK-US trade talks  is essential for two principal reasons.  First, the USA is Britain’s largest trading partner in terms of export sales, despite the disingenuous practice of anti-Brexiteers trying to pretend otherwise by recording the EU as if it were one country by aggregating our exports to its 27 members.

Secondly, for as long as the UK-EU talks last, it is crucial to demonstrate clearly to Brussels that Britain considers itself an independent sovereign nation with the power to conclude trade deals with whomsoever it chooses across the globe, notwithstanding the EU’s attempt to restrict it in doing so until wholly outside its influence.

 

Northern Ireland tensions threaten to derail long-term EU-UK deal – Financial Times (£)

On the face of it, just why the staunchly pro-EU and anti-Brexit FT should choose now to revive the spectre of Northern Ireland’s status, once Britain has wholly left the EU, potentially wrecking the UK-EU negotiations isn’t immediately apparent.  Until, that is, one remembers that the EU last week not only repeated its demand to retain an official post-Brexit presence in the Province, but also launched what was seen in some quarters as an attempted power grab over the Province’s fishing industry.

The FT appears to assume that the prospect of Britain exiting Transition without an agreement is unthinkable.  But, as other links cited elsewhere in this article suggest, the likelihood of a satisfactory deal is receding, due primarily to Brussels’ inflexibility and intransigence, while the prospect of a clean-break WTO exit from Transition is growing.

Note, incidentally, the FT‘s description of Northern Ireland as ‘British-ruled‘’, as if it was merely the temporarily occupied territory of another country, instead of that part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland sovereign territory which chose to remain so rather than follow the rest of the island of Ireland in seceding from what was formerly the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.  Is the Continuity-Remainer FT now so anti-Brexit and pro-EU as to embrace irredentist Irish Nationalist Republicanism, even though the Republic’s claim to sovereignty over the Six Counties was dropped as part of the Good Friday Agreement?

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Brexit-Watch: Thursday 23 April 2020

Note: this article was originally published at The Conservative Woman on Tuesday 21 April 2020

Choosing five recent key Brexit-relevant story headlines which, while not necessarily meriting a full-length article, nevertheless warrant two or three paragraphs of comment, rather than merely a couple of lines.

(NB: (£) denotes article behind paywall.)

 

Frost and Barnier agree UK-EU FTA Timetable – Guido Fawkes

Far from acquiescing to the persistent, disingenuous pleas of the Continuity-Remain lobby for the suspension of negotiations with Brussels and the deferment of Brexit via an extension to the Transition period, the Number 10 team appears to be both ramping them up and tightening the schedule.  Perhaps it was lucky that our chief negotiator had his brush with coronavirus early on during the outbreak, rather than now.

It’s also maybe no coincidence that this happened during the week that the PM’s top adviser/chief of staff Dominic Cummings returned to Downing Street after his own bout of COVID-19, and almost immediately upped the pressure on Brussels by not only categorically ruling out an extension but also gearing up preparations for a No Deal Brexit on 31 December.

 

Government rejects IMF advice to extend Brexit transition period – Telegraph (£)

‘We will not ask to extend the transition period, and if the EU asks, we will say no.’

How gratifying it was to read such an unequivocal response from Number 10 to the unsolicited ‘advice’ of the same IMF which, in 2016 when headed by the Christine Lagarde now spooking the financial markets by failing as head of the ECB to deal adequately with the burgeoning euro crisis, participated enthusiastically in George Osborne’s anti-Brexit Project Fear, and endorsed his Treasury’s wildly inaccurate forecasts of the economic Armageddon which it claimed would surely ensue from merely a vote to leave.

The IMF has no formal relationship to the EU, and certainly has no, in effect, locus standi in UK-EU negotiations.  In addition, the present incumbent, Bulgaria’s Kristalina Georgieva, being a former both Eurocrat and Vice-President of the unelected EU Commission presided over by the invariably well-refreshed Jean-Claude Juncker might suggest that its ‘advice’ was not entirely impartial, and had more to do with pro-Brussels politicking than a concern for trade uncertainty.

Even if this were not the case, the IMF itself is much diminished and discredited; it has been ever since its own watchdog revealed in 2016 the extent to which its management had played down the structural flaws and unemployment effects of the Euro because of its ideological commitment to the EU Project, and allowed European Union insiders to exploit the Fund’s resources to rescue their own deficient currency union and banking system.

 

A Brexit Tutorial – Briefings for Britain

Amid the demands for an extension of the Brexit Transition period from unreconciled Remainers/Rejoiners shamelessly seizing on the coronavirus outbreak as an excuse to at least defer, but preferably halt, Britain’s full and final exit from the EU, comes a timely reminder of why the millions of people who voted for it, but whose opinions are under-represented in the political, media, cultural, business and academic environments where EU-philes cluster, did so.

Despite the vote for Brexit having been dismissed by its opponents as a somehow democratically illegitimate expression of insular ignorance and prejudice, the serious psephological and sociological analysis that now exists shows it to have been the predictable consequence of major social and political changes, occurring over a long period, which disproportionately benefited a minority metropolitan elite and managerial overclass.

As the political beneficiary of the ballot-box revolt against that overclass, the current government should be aware that to accede to its current demands to halt Brexit would be the first step on the road to political defeat.

 

Europe apologises to Italy: von der Leyen – Ansa English edition

‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.‘

With –

  1. the UK’s resolve that, come what may, there will be no extended Transition period showing that Brexit is not going according to Brussels’ preferred script;
  1. the EU’s centralised authority in pieces as its member countries’ governments unilaterally decide their individual coronavirus response policies to protect their citizens at nation-state level without even consulting it; and
  1. the Eurozone facing imminent crisis as its more fiscally-precarious economies struggle to cope with the effects of their COVID-19 lockdowns,

von der Leyen could well have contemplated the inherent truth of Claudius’ words in Shakespeare’s Hamlet as she felt the need to apologise in the EU Parliament for its cavalier treatment of Italy during the early stages of the outbreak.

Yet her patently untrue, arguably even semi-deluded, assertion that ‘Europe has become the world’s beating heart of solidarity‘ suggested that, even in the present circumstances, a supranationalist, integrationist pan-Europeanism still dominates her Commission’s thinking.  Britain should not hesitate to emphasise to the Brussels negotiators that concluding a fast-track trade agreement with us will let the EU cross off Brexit as a subject and concentrate on addressing its internal troubles.

 

Four reasons why leaving the EU will help us recover from the lockdown quicker – Telegraph (£)

The UK Government’s lockdown is deliberately inducing a severe recession; but already some of the support for small businesses announced by the Chancellor in his package of measures is reportedly being prevented by EU rules on state aid from reaching their intended beneficiaries, needlessly exacerbating their difficulties.  Furthermore, for as long as we remain in Transition, we remain subject to EU single-market regulations, when we might conceivably want to eliminate tariffs to counter a rise in food prices caused by falling production.

As if those factors weren’t enough, if Transition is extended, we remain liable for continuing financial contributions to the EU as a matter of routine, before any additional contribution to an EU bailout of the struggling economies on its southern fringe, as well as a rescue of the Eurozone itself.  If we are to have the least worst option of a V-shaped recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, we can ill afford to be committing funds to an institution trying to make it as difficult as possible for us to complete our exit and to disadvantage us in the process.  There is every reason, not to delay our final departure, but to accelerate it.

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Brexit-Watch: Tuesday 14 April 2020

Note: article originally published at The Conservative Woman on Tuesday 14 April 2020

Choosing four recent key Brexit-relevant story headlines which, while not necessarily meriting a full-length article, nevertheless warrant two or three paragraphs of comment, rather than merely a couple of lines.

(NB: (£) denotes article behind paywall.)

 

Brexit breakthrough: How Boris Johnson will force Brussels to agree brilliant trade deal – Daily Express, 12th April

Well, maybe.  But even when Johnson is eventually discharged from hospital, he is likely to be hors de combat for at least a month in post-recovery convalescence after his attack of coronavirus. In his absence, his de facto stand-in Dominic Raab, albeit for understandable quasi-constitutional reasons, would probably be reluctant to adopt such a hard line with the Brussels negotiators, justified though it would be.

On the other hand, we’re only just approaching the peak of the coronavirus epidemic, so Johnson may well be back in the saddle by the time they resume in earnest with political involvement, although they wisely continue at negotiator level, despite cynical calls from Continuity-Remainers to call them off using COVID-19 as an excuse.

 

The UK has a winning hand: let’s not be bluffed out of playing it – CapX, 9th April

The authors correctly make the point that, in contrast to the long-trailed Remainer mantra that ‘the City of London needs to be in the EU’s regulatory framework in order to prosper‘, the boot is now effectively on the other foot, exacerbated by the Eurozone crisis and Germany’s refusal to mutualise EU debt, in defiance of the logic of the Euro’s creation, of which Germany was such an enthusiastic advocate.

With the Brexit-extension lobby currently vocal, it remains a mystery why this advantage is apparently being neither leveraged nor even publicised in response.  That advantage would be maximised if the UK-EU talks were held in parallel with the UK-USA talks, but the latter have just officially been postponed indefinitely.

Clearly, the hiatus in leadership and diversion of Cabinet attention to COVID-19 is a factor in both being allowed to happen; but equally, one can’t discount the possibility of the malign influence of Cabinet Secretary Sit Mark ‘Huawei’ Sedwill.  In a reprise of the worst aspects of Theresa May’s disastrous premiership, Britain possesses a good hand of cards, but is simply refusing to play them. 

 

The coronavirus crisis could blow the EU apart – The Times (£), 9th April

The Eurozone crisis, long simmering on the back burner, is on the verge of boiling over, as Germany resolutely refuses to countenance the fiscal transfers to financially weaker regions of the Eurozone quasi-polity which the currency’s economic logic always demanded, but which political imperatives always precluded.

As author Iain Martin observes, Germany in particular wants for itself all the national, competitive, advantages of the one-size-fits-all Euro, but not the obligations, inherent in a multi-state currency bloc, to support its weaker members.  With the precarious Southern Europe economies, especially Italy, likely to go over the edge from the horrendous direct costs and lost output caused by their own COVID-19 outbreaks, the already dysfunctional European banking system, overhung with debt, might not be far behind.

Britain will not escape the economic fallout from a Eurozone collapse in any event, but the imminent prospect of one ought to put even farther beyond contemplation the idea of a Brexit extension which could see us on the hook for hundreds of billions in Euro bank-bailouts.

 

Italy’s Conte threatens to derail EU summit over Coronabonds – Politico Europe, 12th April

‘European solidarity’ has always seemed a combination of convenient myth for British Europhiles and comfort blanket for their Continental counterparts, but seldom has it seemed more incongruous. Notwithstanding the Eurozone’s latest purported rescue package, the divisions between the bloc’s Germanic/Scandinavian north and Latin south on the subject of so-called Coronabonds – with France as ever straddling the two – looks intractable.

With the attention of Brussels Eurocrats grabbed more and more by the developing crisis in, or even potential collapse of, the Eurozone, the EU can ill afford the luxury of a lengthy, intransigence-driven negotiation with a Britain prepared to walk away.

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Brexit-Watch: Saturday 28 March 2020

Note: longer version of article originally published at The Conservative Woman on Saturday 28 March 2020

A weekend update on some recent key Brexit-relevant story headlines, choosing five which, while not necessarily meriting a full-length article, nevertheless warrant two or three paragraphs of comment, rather than merely a couple of lines.

(NB: (£) denotes article behind paywall.)

 

Coronavirus: Welsh Government calls for longer Brexit transition – BBC News 

Despite being content to sit in a Welsh Assembly which owes its existence to a devolution referendum won by a margin of only 0.6 per cent, Welsh-Labour, whose 29 Assembly Members comprise all but 2 of the current 31-member ruling coalition, has never really accepted the decision of the Welsh electorate to leave the EU by a margin ten times greater than that.  The call by current First Minister Mark Drakeford for a Brexit delay needs to be seen in that context.

In any event, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Welsh Government, which, on this issue, arguably does not even reflect the decision of the people of Wales who voted 53:47 in favour of Leave, much less represent them.  UK-wide constitutional matters are totally outwith the devolved competencies of the Welsh Assembly and the Welsh Government.

In all likelihood, either this is a smokescreen for Drakeford trying to deflect attention from the dire state of the Labour-run Welsh NHS, particularly with Gwent being a COVID-19 hotspot matching Italy in infection rates, or Drakeford is adding his voice to those hoping to stop Brexit by using the Coronavirus outbreak as an excuse to demand its deferral.

 

Coronavirus crisis demands extended Brexit transition – Financial Times (£) 

Oh dear, they’re never going to give up at the irreconcilably Europhile Pink ‘Un, are they?  Tony Barber is the FT’s Europe Editor; a quick glance at his output on the FT Writers’ Page somewhat gives the game away about where he’s coming from.

Parsing the latest article, his clinching argument for claiming an extension to Transition is necessary is that the head of a Brussels-based think-tank [part-funded by the EU] claims that an extension to Transition is necessary.  However, he then somewhat undermines his own argument by stressing how far apart the two sides are on fisheries, financial services, and business-regulation in general, prompting the question that, if they are indeed that far apart, and likely to remain so given the negotiating intransigence Brussels has consistently displayed hitherto, what is the point of an extension anyway?

In his similarly-themed article of 11 March, Barber labelled anything other than an ultra-soft Brexit-in-name-only as ‘the radicalisation of Brexit‘.  Now he refers to opponents of an extension types as ‘Brexit millenarians‘.  It is hard to see this as anything other than yet more evidence that the COVID-19 crisis is being cynically exploited by Continuity-Remainers as an excuse to ‘delay’ Brexit with the ultimate aim, of course, of stopping it entirely.

 

Brexit in Hindsight: Historial Reflections – Briefings for Britain

Another magisterial contribution from Professor Robert Tombs, separating two distinct questions which are often conflated: why, generally, did Britain vote to leave the EU, but also why specifically did it vote to do so in 2016?  Professor Tombs has little hesitation in locating the answer to the first question firmly within the very different experience of Britain compared with Continental Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, having neither succumbed internally to totalitarianism nor been militarily defeated and subsequently occupied by it, and therefore not seeing pan-Europeanism in terms of almost existential survival.

The second he sees as lying within the contrast between the pessimistic, lacking-in-confidence Britain of the 1960s which saw European integration as the remedy for economic decline, and the near-reversal of this perception by the early 2010s, in the face of visible and growing evidence of the bloc’s economic sclerosis and pursuit of political integration at the expense of democratic legitimacy.

What this suggests is that the popular determination among 2016 Leave-voters to leave the EU in fulfilment of the 2016 mandate persists at a deeper, more atavistic, level than the purely transactional considerations which Unreconciled Remainers condescendingly assume to be the main drivers of public opinion.  On this basis, the latters’ siren calls for an extension of the Brexit Transition ‘because of Coronavirus’, in the secret hope that Brexit can somehow thereby be diluted or prevented are destined for failure, making any delay superfluous. We should leave on schedule anyway.

 

EU Coronavirus summit exposes fundamental divisions – Global Vision

As if the EU’s hesitant response to the Europe-wide Coronavirus crisis – posturing but dithering impotently while sovereign nation-states’ democratically elected governments moved swiftly and unilaterally to meet the need to protect their own citizens – wasn’t bad enough, the third EU Coronavirus summit predictably revealed more discord than harmony.

Rather than micro-improvements such as facilitating the easier exchange of medical information or the freeing-up of supply-chains from bureaucracy, the Council instead proposed yet another comprehensive centralisation package, predicated on a common debt instrument, which has created the usual friction between the fiscally more conservative EU countries and its more fragile economies. The crisis is exposing how little nation-states can depend on an EU so often found wanting when it comes to action, despite all the talk of unity.

 

Downgrade warnings raise fears of European bank nationalisations – Telegraph (£)

Moody’s downgrade alert for banks in no fewer than six EU member-states, based on an anticipated slump in profits but a surge in bad debts linked to the Coronavirus-induced recession, comes on top of the burgeoning credit-crunch from the Eurozone’s bank-debt overhang. The author of the article, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. has also been reporting this week on the cracks appearing in the Eurozone’s institutions, now rapidly coming to a head with a stark choice between strengthening monetary union with fiscal union, with all that that would entail, or risking EMU unravelling.

The danger here for the UK is of an extension to the Brexit Transition leaving us still on the hook for a massive contribution if necessary to stave off a Eurozone banking collapse. There are numerous bad reasons for delaying our exit because of the Coronavirus emergency, and few, if any, good ones.

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