Category Archives: European Union

Britain, European Union, Government, Ireland, Politics

Johnson says No 10 hasn’t even tried to solve Irish issue

BREXIT: IRISH BORDER

BORIS JOHNSON has ignited a fresh Brexit row after claiming Theresa May has “not even tried” to solve the Irish border problem.

The former Foreign Secretary said elements in the Government had “ingeniously manipulated” the issue to keep Britain locked closely to the EU and “stop a proper Brexit”.

But supporters of the prime minister said there were “no new ideas” in Mr Johnson’s latest intervention.

Earlier this week, Mr Johnson wrote in his Daily Telegraph column that the Irish border problem was “fixable”, adding: “The scandal is not that we have failed, but that we have not even tried.”

In a scathing attack on Mrs May’s Chequers plan, he branded it a “fix” that will lead to victory for the EU and said that in the negotiations the UK was “lying flat on the canvas”.

He added the Irish government had initially offered pragmatic solutions to the issue, only to withdraw them when the British Government showed no interest. Those in favour of the Chequers plan say that a simple trade deal could not resolve the problems around the Irish border.

A source close to No. 10, said: “The basic premise of the Brexiteers is that there is a free trade deal on the table we can just pick up.

“There is, but it is a Great Britain only deal – we would be walking off the pitch in Northern Ireland. It would mean Northern Ireland staying in the customs union, a customs border down the Irish Sea and a step towards the break-up of the UK. It is not acceptable.”

Brexiteers argue that a Canada-style free trade deal is achievable and that with the right pressure, the EU would accept a technological solution on the Irish border.

Responding to the row, the source insists the country needs “serious leadership with a serious plan” which the prime minister is providing.

The spokesperson added: “The Government’s Brexit White Paper was ‘the only credible and negotiable plan which has been put forward’.”

Boris Johnson resigned from the Government following the Chequers agreement.

ANALYSIS

The 310-mile border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland has been one of the most intractable issues in the Brexit negotiations. There are more than 300 crossing points across which goods and people can move freely. But one of the crunch and unresolved issues is what will happen after Brexit, when Northern Ireland – along with the rest of the UK – leaves the EU.

Relatively, there is little trade that exchanges between the north and south of Ireland. Brexiteers point out that trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic makes up 5 per cent of the province’s economy. The figure the other way is just 1.6 per cent.

However, Northern Ireland and the Republic’s trading relationship with Great Britain is much more significant. Trade with Great Britain is some 21 per cent of Northern Irish GDP, and around 12 per cent of all Irish exports go to the UK mainland.

In short, the problem to resolve is how to preserve an open border with different customs regimes and regulations for goods either side of the line. All sides appear to agree there must be no “hard” border – meaning physical barriers and border guards. These were dismantled as part of the peace process and secured by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Northern Ireland’s chief constable has said that any “significant physical infrastructure” would become a target for dissident Republicans.

 

THE EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier says Northern Ireland must stay in the customs union and single market to preserve the open border with the Republic and remove the need for any customs or regulatory checks. The EU has also said that there should be a customs and regulatory border at sea ports on either side of the Irish Sea.

Theresa May finds such a “sea border” unacceptable and this would be a symbolic sign of division between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The prime minister has also been adamant this would be a threat to the “constitutional integrity” of the UK and says, “no UK prime minister could ever agree to it”. Northern Ireland would become – to a large extent – an annexe of the EU, following EU rules. To Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party – on which Mrs May relies for her Commons majority – this is a non-starter.

Mrs May’s answer to the impasse is Chequers. This proposes to keep the whole of the UK in the single market for goods, which deals directly with the problem of different regulatory standards. On customs, she proposes a “facilitated customs arrangement”, with a common customs border. Importers would pay different tariffs demanding on where goods were destined, and that the UK would collect tariffs for the EU. In theory, this would allow the UK to negotiate trade deals with third countries and by cutting tariffs.

 

BORIS JOHNSON insists that the Northern Ireland issue has been “ingeniously manipulated” both by Brussels and No 10 “so as to keep Britain effectively in the customs union and single market”. The Irish border problem is “flexible”, he argues.

Mr Johnson also believes there is a technological solution and that no hard border is necessary. Checks would take place in warehouses or away from the border. There are only 50 large companies that trade across the border, and small traders would be exempted entirely. Other Brexiteers point to highly automated ports such as Felixstowe as providing the likely solutions. The former Foreign Secretary said the Irish government began working on these answers, but the UK Government was “not really interested”.

 

SOME in Ireland have argued a technological solution is possible, including former Irish prime ministers Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny. The tone, though, has changed under Leo Varadkar, who took office in June last year. Since then the Irish have been in lock step with Mr Barnie, and the border has become the central issue of the Brexit talks.

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Banking, Economic, European Union, Greece

The Greek bailout: Athens is still being betrayed by the EU

ESSAY

AFTER several years in which Greece was kept afloat by the munificence of the eurozone countries, Athens was trumpeted by many media outlets this week as being free at last from an EU bailout programme worth 61.9billion euros (£55billion) in emergency loans. That was part of an eight-year rescue package worth £258billion.

Despite the reports of economic privation and the dark clouds over Greece finally lifting, the reality is that Greece is far from saved from pecuniary disaster. The harsh economic medicine forced on the country by the EU and Germany in particular as conditions of the bailout has resulted in death by a thousand cuts.

The country’s once elegant capital has become one of the most depressing and untidiest cities in Western Europe, a city that is now in terrible decay. Shops on once booming boulevards are shuttered, while heavy machines and cranes stand idle over the shells of unfinished buildings. Much of Athens is covered in ugly graffiti. Even the awnings around Greece’s most revered ancient site the Parthenon, on the Athenian Acropolis, is covered in unsightly painted drawings.

The hardships and deprivations are everywhere – all the more heart-breaking in that this downward spiral had been caused by European leaders who were masquerading as people bearing gifts. Most Athenians are struggling to make ends meet.

 

HOSPITAL doctors, for example, have seen their monthly pay cut to just over a thousand pounds a month. It is only through social conscience and the love of their country that has kept some of them in Athens.

Some 70,000 highly skilled professionals including doctors, dentists and pharmacists have left the country as part of a broader Grexodus of 500,000 people.

The best way for any country to emerge from financial crisis is to increase its national income so that tax revenues rise and global debts can be paid off. But during the last eight years, Greece has moved in precisely the opposite direction. National output has slumped by an astonishing 25 per cent. The result is adult unemployment of 20 per cent. Even more shocking and socially disruptive, some 40 per cent of 18 to 25-year olds are out of work.

Without any income for the young, it is now commonplace for three generations of the same family to be forced to live cheek by jowl in the same crowded apartments. The fact is that the austerity imposed by the eurocrats has ruined Greece and done nothing to relive it of its monstrous level of debt.

It has snuffed out entrepreneurship, as well as created a poisonous political legacy where a far-Left Marxist party headed by Alexis Tsipras rules with the support of fanatical politicians on the populist Right.

The end of the EU’s bailout programme may technically mean that Greece can return to the international markets to borrow again, but any notion that the world’s commercial bankers and financiers will be queuing at Athens’ overcrowded and dilapidated airport to lend – and pour good money after bad – is a fantasy.

After all, the country is still sitting on a debt pile of 289billion euros (£258billion) which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) puts at 191 per cent, or almost twice the nation’s total annual output.

To place that in context, it is more than two times the ratio of Britain’s national debt to output, which after a decade of UK cuts to public services and surging tax incomes as the economy has grown is now, thankfully, on a downward path.

Not only that, Greece’s stricken financial system is currently being kept afloat by short-term cash assistance of some 40billion euros (£35.6billion) per month from the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank. Without this help, which is akin to that provided by the Bank of England to the British banks at the height of the financial crisis a decade ago, the four biggest Greek lenders would be effectively bankrupt.

Together the bad loans on the books of these banks – Piraeus, Alpha, Euro Bank and National Bank of Greece – amount to 101billion euros (£90billion) or 50 per cent of the total, the highest level of any country in the European Union. Indeed the banks, the lifeblood of any Western economy, are so indebted that they cannot lend any more.

 

WHICH means the small and medium-sized enterprises that are the country’s business bedrock cannot get the finance they need to carry on and invest. Nor do ordinary consumers find it possible to obtain credit.

This desolate financial scenario is a direct result of the austerity conditions demanded by Brussels eurocrats and German central bankers. Over the last eight years successive Greek governments have been forced to attend no fewer than 95 meetings at which the most stringent measures have been imposed on them.

The results for the Greek people have been nothing short of catastrophic.

Yet in their determination to preserve the greater political project of the eurozone and the EU, and to keep Greece as their client state, Brussels and German politicians have been utterly ruthless.

In spite of personal appeals from the IMF’s euro-supporting managing-director Christine Lagarde to forgive Greece its debt burden and allow the country to be given a fresh start, the eurofanatics have been unrelenting in their determination to keep the debt anvil hanging around its neck.

Greece is in an armlock it cannot escape because of a combination of its debt burden and the fact that its membership of the eurozone means it can longer devalue its currency. And the EU and Germans are determined to keep it that way to save their precious euro.

So, despite the joyous and uplifting media reports about the bailout this week, be in no doubt that this Greek tragedy is very far from being over.

 

GREECE should ditch the euro as it emerges from eight years of austerity caused by punishing EU bailouts.

The country also should have been afforded the right to have gone bankrupt at the height of the eurozone crisis instead of having been forced into a strict rescue package dictated by Brussels and Germany.

The EU pushed the country into accepting massive loans to save German and French banks from collapse. Greece’s creditors effectively turned the country into a dead colony that had been left devastated by fiscal austerity, with citizens having endured years of pain and misery.

Greece has now existed the final stage of an eight-year, £258billion bailout programme, which has left Athens crippled by soaring unemployment.

On the face of it, what has really changed? Greece’s state debts have not become lower, but higher still. The state is still destitute, private citizens have become poorer, companies are liquidating at an unprecedented rate, and its gross national product has decreased by 25 per cent.

The bailout was intended only for German and French banks who had, against all reasonable logic, loaned vast sums of money to the Greek state and oligarchy. As for the Greek banks and state, they should not have been saved. The country should have been allowed in declaring insolvency, to have suffered the consequences but then being allowed to have picked themselves up and by moving on – something these huge bailouts prohibited.

In a television interview, Yanis Varoufakis, a former minister who served in the Left-wing Syriza government, said: “It was absolutely necessary that the country be prepared to return to its national currency”. Unable to pay its debts, Greece faced a so-called “Grexit” from the eurozone in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. The economy has now returned to modest growth, but one in five Greeks are unemployed, average incomes have dropped by more than a third and taxes have rocketed.

Critics have argued that Greece would have fared better outside the euro, enabling it to carry out a range of measures including devaluing its currency and lowering interest rates to make the economy more competitive.

EU figures have this week tried to paint the bailout programme as a success, with European Council president Donald Tusk saying: “You did it! With huge efforts and European solidarity, you seized the day.”

Rather, the EU put Greece into a permanent coma and prefer to call it stability.

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Britain, Defence, European Union, Government, Politics, Society

The EU is reducing Britain’s defence contribution to a Brexit bargaining chip

BREXIT

Intro: Brussels is threatening to limit our role in a series of programmes and ban UK firms from bidding for contracts. Given the importance of Britain to continental security, this beggars belief

TERROR incidents provide us with a stark reminder of how we remain in the cross hairs of a diverse spectrum of threats by those who challenge our values and wish us harm. It is therefore essential we remain resilient, unified and fully prepared to respond.

The evolving character of conflict, which now extends to terrorism, cyber-attacks, energy manipulation, cash disruption, information warfare and election interference, collectively reflects the constant, aggressive, sub-Article 5 challenges we now face. To compound matters, we are witnessing the start of long-term shifts in the balance of power away from Europe to regions less supportive of the global order we helped to create.

Changes in demographics and technology present further challenges. Africa, soon to be the home to a quarter of the human race, is creating just one fifth of the jobs it needs to fill. In ungoverned spaces, this is a perfect recruitment ground for radicalism. Extreme global weather patterns bring the dangerous consequences of rising sea levels and crop failures are progressively leading to large-scale migratory movements.

5G, the next generation of cellular technology, heralds almost unthinkable implications for digital innovation that will transform all our lives. It will also revolutionise the art of conflict, such as swarm drone warfare. Whichever state (or states) harness 5G first is likely to claim the prize in data ownership and the commensurate leap in defence capabilities. China is in the lead.

The world is changing, and fast. However, none of these challenges is insurmountable and we can be in the driving seat. They require understanding, international leadership and teamwork. It is therefore disconcerting that Britain’s military, intelligence and policing contribution to European security could be drawn into the never-ending vortex of Brexit tit-for-tat. Let the Brexit talks continue apace – but European security should be unconditional.

For those who have said “let us just focus on Nato” must recognise its precise remit. Nato provides hard power, a collective defence based around Article 5 of the Washington Treaty. Security wise, working with the EU provides political and diplomatic leverage (for example, through sanctions) and agencies such as Europol that coordinates national policing and intelligence to help share live data on hostile and illegal activity.

To truly leverage our collective abilities, for the UK cannot deal with all these challenges alone, we must respect the structures through which our collective security is exercised, in tandem with our European partners.

The quid pro quo is a recognition of Britain’s considerable offering. We are Europe’s most formidable defence power, with the largest military budget, with privileged access to the US and one of only two European states possessing “full spectrum” military capabilities, including a nuclear deterrent. Britain has proved its willingness to step forward as a force for good when other nations hesitate. Our overseas aid budget, again the largest in Europe, provides capacity to engage post-conflict or to bring stability or thwart a future conflict.

Alongside our soft and hard power is genuine expertise. Our response to the Novichok attack in Salisbury is a striking example. Thanks to our world-class intelligence services, we not only exposed the agent and its origins but provided compelling evidence to convince more than 20 nations to expel Russian diplomats.

And so it beggars belief that Britain’s ability to contribute to European defence could be reduced to a bargaining chip on the Brexit negotiation table with a threat of limiting our participation in a series of programmes and prohibiting UK businesses from bidding for contracts.

The Galileo positioning navigation project has become the totemic example. Britain pioneered this project and, with our military providing a quarter of Europe’s total defence force, we will arguably utilise its functionality more than any other nation. Yet we are to be demoted to “observer status”. We may now be obliged to go it alone and to build our own system. The Russians must find this all extremely amusing.

. See also The Galileo satellite project

It is only with a united voice that we can influence global events. Look at our hesitation over Syria. Keeping pace with global challenges and evolving threats will require even greater collaboration, not less. We should revisit the security partnership across Europe and not use our pre-eminent military expertise as a pawn in negotiations. Brexit or no Brexit, Britain should be unconditionally committed to the security of Europe – and so should the EU.

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