Let’s hope so.
Amen to that.
And see:
@filmstar-en: Good work overall. As to this snip …
Any and every bit of adverse economic fallout from Brexit will be swept into the dustbin labeled “COVID caused it”. As such, Johnson is faced with an almost one-way bet propaganda-wise.
If something good happens economically, it’s due to Brexit’s trading vigor unhampered by the dead hand of the EU. If something bad happens, COVID did it; thank goodness we didn’t also have the dead hand of the EU looming over us to make it worse.
As PR for a particularly PR-obsessed pol, it’s manna from heaven.
Indeed, the pandemic is a ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card for Johnson with respect to finance. The effects of the COVID recession will easily eclipse any damage Brexit will do to the UK economy and it will affect most countries in the world.
How to restore the economy and build a new international trading network is going to be his big challenge. However, it is not looking good with respect to trade deal with the US. Johnson was too eager to curry favour with Trump and Biden and his admistration really do not trust him. He was called a ‘shape-shifting creep’. That goes back to offensive remarks about Obama, Johnson made in 2016, over the US presidents negative attitude towards Brexit. The tables have now turned and Boris Johnson having rejected the EU, he now needs a trade deal with another big economic power like the US. He is regarded as British version of Trump and he will have an uphill battle to change that perception. Boris Johnson may be good a wrangling the Conservative party but he is not good at international diplomacy. Here is a list of his gaffs. This is the last person the UK should have to persuade the rest of the world that the UK is a good country to do business with.
In 2008 we had Gordon Brown who handled the financial crisis very well and came to agreements with other countries to co-ordinate and stabilise the banking system and the global economy. The financial crisis that will come after COVID looks like it is going to be far worse and we have this joker in charge.
Hopefully he will be replaced with someone competent who knows how to manage the UK economy and steer a path through the difficult times ahead.
Both our countries will suffer grievously for having elected dolts trolls who embrace trashing their natural allies, all to the applause of about half their populace.
By both word and deed we have shown our nations to be untrustworthy to their very cores. Electing even the finest of statemen will be ineffectual even over a period of a decade or more. Betrayed countries, governments, and peoples have long memories. And we’re each just one bad election away from slipping right back into mindless selfish trollishness.
It’s going to be an uphill fight for the UK. And an increasingly uphill one for the US.
This week in the Daily Express:
Also this week in the Daily Express:
There was also a story about a UK fishery protection vessel being dispatched to Rockall to enforce the UK 12 mile limit and check on Irish trawlers.
The rights to fishing resources as well as the oil and gas reserves under it are defined by geographic features whose ownership by the states bordering the North Sea and Atlantic are a matter of contention. The ‘Cod wars’ with Iceland in the 1970s had a very big affect on the fishing industry in the UK. In that case Iceland extended its claim to the fishing rights to 50 miles offshore from its coast. There were several incidents, trawler nets were cut by fishery protection vessels and warships fired shots over bows. Sadly the UK pretty much lost that dispute and there followed a scramble for all coastal nations to stake claims over vast areas of sea.
While these disputes were resolved within the EU and by agreements with non-EU states like Norway and Iceland, that all changed when the UK left the EU on 1st Jan.
I daresay there are one or two loose ends left outstanding as a result of the difficult negotiations between the UK and EU.
Sending a few navy patrols out to disputed areas to be seen asserting a claim sends a diplomatic message.
I am surprised the French fishermen have not started protesting, they usually do. I guess they must have been paid off.
The UK-EU trade agreement will be tested in the next weeks and we will see what was missed.
Speaking of which, thousands of websites and email systems, that used the .eu top level domain, stopped working on the 1st Jan.
This was due to domain registry that controls .eu, Euid, suddenly cancelling any eu domain that was not registered in the EU. If was registered to a UK postal address, it was suspended. This has come as quite a shock to many website owners.
I spent some time getting to the bottom of the issue for a distressed client. It took a lot of ISPs by surprise as well.
I don’t think a lot of thought went into this.
Welcome to Brexit. And also pretty much everything else the Johnson government has given us.
When politicians wait to the last minute to finalize far-reaching decisions, it’s hardly surprising the commercial world struggles to adapt instantaneously while avoiding all disruption.
It would not hurt my feelings at all to have a national, and ideally international, binding standard that that no legislation or regulation may take effect sooner than 6 months from the date it is finalized. Clearly there needs to be exceptions for executive actions in emergencies.
It’ll never happen of course, but one can dream.
I’ve been following Brexit religiously since 2016. I expected immediate catastrophe on January 1 when Britain left the single market. I’m surprised that so far, there is only slow-motion disaster.
Covid is having a seriously dampening effect there, I think. Absent it, the shitshow would be way more upfront.
Problems are steadily building up, and will become worse as the weeks go by.
Amid mounting anger among UK firms at cross-border friction they were told would not exist, British manufacturing and trade organisations met Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove in an emergency session on Thursday to discuss problems resulting from the deal struck by Boris Johnson with the EU before Christmas.
The prime minister had hailed what he claimed was a “zero-tariff” and “zero-quotas” deal that would allow free and simple access to the single market. Less than a month on, however, Britain’s EU departure appears to be anything but pain-free.
One leading figure involved in the talks with Gove described the new rule book as a “complete shitshow”. Another said Gove seemed “very concerned” at hearing reports of problems, after a week in which Marks & Spencer was among leading companies to warn that more bureaucracy would increase costs. The source added: “He [Gove] seemed to realise the full gravity of the situation that is unfolding and about to get worse.”
2000 trucks a day using the Dover crossing to France. One in five turned away because of incomplete paperwork. As business returns to normal after the holiday break it normal traffic will be 4-5000 trucks a day and the problems will get worse. A lot of companies have been stock piling supplies in anticipation of a distruption to supply chains.
There is a steady stream of news reports about Brexit related barriers to trade and business. As trade returns to normal levels after the holiday break and stockpiles begin to run down the cracks will begin to show. It will hit the smaller companies. The bigger concerns that have the resources to plan for delays and meet the new bureaucratic requirements will be less affected.
While the news likes to focus on photogenic stories, there financial news is the a large amount of trading in financial products has been transferred from the UK to the EU. Financial services is the golden goose of the UK economy and Boris came away from the UK/EU deal with no agreement on access to the EU market.
Brexit was supposed to do away with all the uneccessary EU bureaucracy that Boris Johnson reported on so eagerly during his time as a journalist in Brussels. In fact UK business now has to deal with import/export checks as a non EU country and runs directly into that wall of regulations that do not apply to members.
The problem is that the UK now has little influence over what the EU decides and has to deal individually with EU countries for anything outiside this very thin deal.
Not what the country needs when it will be trying to stimulate the economy to deal with the recession once the Covid lockdowns are relaxed.
Another thing that seems to have happened is to do with the travel and free mobility of labour, a key element of the EU. The UK now has absolute control over its borders, under the watchful eye of Pritti Patel. If EU nationals want to come to the UK they will need a work visa and the UK only wants the brightest and best qualiified. This will, of course, work in both directions. Care workers and hospitality staff do not earn enough to qualify.
Already the entertainment industry is complaining that touring by musicians and shows is now much more difficult. Entertainment and the hospitality business are services that have been hugely affected by the pandemic.
I guess while the restaurants, theatres and venues are closed because of the pandemic, we will not notice that these businesses depend on people moving between countries with ease. All that has now gone and it is going to take some time to for these businesses to figure our a way to deal with all the new rules and regulations regarding who they can hire and where they can travel.
For now, it can all be blamed on COVID: natural disaster for which the government cannot be held responsible.
No; but it CAN be held responsible for the developing UK outcome of the virus
At every opportunity, from Ambitious rhetoric and appalling reality: the UK government’s response to covid-19 | The BMJ
to
The Disastrous Confusion At The Heart Of The UK Government’s Response To COVID-19 (forbes.com) and beyond,
HMG’s actions have been TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE, resulting in the developing overload situation in the NHS, and the confusion in lockdown regulations in education, the NHS and everywhere else.
No, Johnson and his buddies can’t be blamed for the original development of Covid-19. But they can and should be blamed for the British Covid disaster.
Sorry for the thread diversion.
@filmstar-en: Agree w your overall thrust. As well as @GreenWyvern’s excerpt from the Guardian. In one word Brexit was dumb. As to this:
There are certainly going to be teething pains as everybody learns how to do the paperwork. And there will certainly be incremental costs. Which can be somewhat reduced as more and better automation comes online.
The more interesting issue to me is not that 20% of trucks are having problems today, but what percentage of trucks will be having problems in 6 months? How far back into the UK supply chain will the EU regs end up reaching? Can UK commerce learn to play this new game well or only haltingly?
A funny other thing is that now that Britain has “regained control of their borders” both as to goods and as to people, Britain picked up a huge responsibility to staff and operate a border control force and all the bureaucracy behind the guys w badges. How many thousand additional guards, inspectors, inspection stations, X-ray scanners, computers, etc., will be required to administrate this wonderful new ability Britain has gained? And how large a tax increase will be required to pay for it?
The reason that we need to recruit more border agency staff it mainly down toe the Cameron years of austerity that cut the numbers of staff by a third, which was only part of a whole that cut police by 20% cut prison staff by 30%, cut probation staff by over 30% - privatised it and watched it collapse completely and had to bail it out by over £400million.
Add to the cuts to HMRC which has the responsibility not just for general taxation, but also gathering VAT returns etc where the border changes will have had a significant effect.
Oh, and sorry about the digression - but Brexit was in the pipeline for plenty of time to recruit the staff needed, whilst it is easy to blame Brexit, its actually a failure to plan for it that is the problem at the moment - you can, and probably will blame Brexit for lots of things but those delays could largely have been mitigated.
You pack a whole lot into one sentence there, all of it true.
I swear I’ve never been in talks with Gove 
Gove is clearly trying to disssociate himself, stepping back. It makes me think the wheels are going to come off this deal pretty soon. Brexit was supposed to be about freeing the UK from all the EU Brussels rules, regulation and restoring sovereignty to the UK government. Now it appears that the UK is obliged to conform to EU regulations in order to export to Europe. We do, of course, have the right to impose our own regulations on EU imports. No more of that EU ‘straight banana’ bureacracy nonsense. We will, instead have our own, thoroughly British style of nonsense…to be applied to imports from the EU at a time of the UK governments’ choosing.
The immediate affect is that the UK has to conform to EU rules according to the terms of this new trade agreement. It seems there is rather a lot of them and this is distressing export led businesses, especially in the food sector. Moreover these rules have to be applied between the UK and Northern Ireland.
Boris Johnson made some very grandious predictions, claiming it would be frictionless, no tariffs, no quotas. Reality may have fallen short of the dream. Gove is edging quietly backwards possibly sensing a political opportunity coming soon. Eventually there is going to be big argument with the EU and the deal has left a lot of things subject to further negotiation.
I wonder how many years it will be before these details are finalised? It will be like a slow puncture to the UK economy, restricting trade and discouraging foreign investment. I expect there will be some initiatives. Freeports and tax reductions for multinationals. Steal Irelands lunch as the haven for tyhe lowest corporate taxes? A free batch of COVID vaccine with every trade deal with the UK? Sell Wind Turbine technology to tick the green box?
The UK government is very public relations driven, at least when it is talking to itself and the UK electorate. I can foresee a rebrand coming soon. There is everything to play for. Why only the other day Iian Duncan Smith (IDS) came out was inspire to say:
“I just wish I was 21 again, frankly,” IDS – an arch-Brexiteer – said. “Because my goodness what prospects lie ahead of us for young people now. To be out there buccaneering, trading, dominating the world again…”
So would that be British Empire version 2.0? That might be a bit of hard sell in many parts of the world.
The current leadership of the Conservative Party really need to move over and let some new faces deal with this mess.