Brexit: Boris' Big Belgian Bangers
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Not so much concessions, as acknowledging a thing that is present (in some form) in every trade agreement ever: the ability to have an independent body make decisions if one party feels that steps taken (regulation change, employment change, environmental law change etc) provide the other party with unfair trading advantage in particular or general respects.
They had already agreed to non regression, which funnily enough is the bit you'd expect the idiot brexiteers to go nuts about; that stops the UK decimating labour or welfare or H&S or environment laws to gain unfair advantage. This is about evolution, whereby EU says we're going impose stricter laws / regulations on our member nations, thus providing competitive advantage to nations not following them. as EU chief said the other day in a wonderful turn of phrase: "[we would not] require the UK to follow us every time we decide to raise our level of ambition... they would remain free - sovereign if you wish - to decide what they want to do" (emphasis mine) -
A future Labour government could bind them in to changes. They can’t agree to move forward under Labour and then regress when the Tories get back in.
Or if they can regress from that point, what’s the outcome? The Sunday Times was suggesting the Tories want an independent body and the EU would have to prove damages. So the U.K. could undercut the EU then the EU have to come back years later and point to all the business they’ve lost and argue the toss against the Tories about how much of that was down to the initial undercutting. If true the EU would be mad to go for that. -
The alternative is also bad though -unilaterally deciding punitive damages or arbitrarily raising tariffs.
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What? No! Where do you get this stuff from?
We're a sovereign country: which means we can choose to abide by our trade agreements, or otherwise. If we decide not to, then other countries or trade bodies in those agreements can complain to trade bodies. They would then adjudicate. Yes that can take some time but it has repercussions (for all sorts of things, not least future trade deals and trust).
Arbitrarily raising tariffs is something the EU (or UK) can do at any time; it's unlikely to come before various threats and ongoing disputes, and could become a matter of dispute resolution at an independent body.
Parliamentary laws are never binding: you just repeal or update the legislation and do what the fuck (parliament lets) you do - so Labour / Tory doesn't come into it.
If the UK undercut (unfairly!) the EU then that would become a trade dispute, yes - I don't get the "years" thing -
“Years” may be the timeframe the EU would need in order to give tangible proof that some U.K. action has damaged them. Otherwise it’s just them saying ‘this will cause us harm’ which isn’t proof. A German company that’s relocated to Britain isn’t going to do it the next day after a change comes in, making public statements that they only did it for the juicy handouts that the U.K. were providing.
Any Government can bind its successors if it makes agreements with third parties. Labour bound the Tories into building a load of ships in Scotland by agreeing penalty clauses with the contractors that were greater than the outlay for honouring the contract. Many (most? all?) trade deals would do this. Hence Trump saying he’s going to trash NAFTA and not being able to do a thing about it. Labour could agree a new working time directive with the EU that the Tories would then struggle to wriggle out of. So they want the conditions set now where future governments can’t make arrangements with the EU that would bind them back in. -
That's...not how trade disputes work? You don't have to provide "tangible proof of actual harm", you have to show (to the jointly agreed disputes resolution / governance body) that the country you're complaining about is not currently adhering to the agreements made, in this case regarding LPF.
As for governments making bad deals, yeah fair enough - I mean there's plenty of incompetence to go around there. I guess the idea that the UK would be "breaking" the agreement, if the EU introduced costly environmental and labour protections and we didn't because fuck working people and trees and shit, can be transformed into: "they're forcing us to adhere to their regulations for ever". But again that's not true, because we can just say fuck it, we'll pay tariffs on [relevant goods and services] instead of evolving our own regulations in harmony. -
Fished out of the recycling just for you Funk. Yesterday’s Sunday Times.
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I appreciate the effort! But I'm not sure that a "UK source" in the "Sunday Times" is enough to persuade me that the EU are doing anything other than decent negotiating against a singularly incompetent bunch of idiots.
Suddenly, it's not about "being beholden to Europe's rules forever", it's "threshold for what constitutes harm is too low" yeah OK so negotiate fuckers -
Anyone else started to encounter Brexit-related issues yet?
Our new sofa is coming from Copenhagen. Was meant to arrive about three days ago. When it didn’t, the reason we were given was ‘because of Brexit’.
So we asked what they meant. Because surely Brexit doesn’t screw with imports until Jan 1st, right?
Apparently not. There are massive queues, whole lorry parks, at European ports already. Our sofa was in Belgium, waiting for a space to open up in the Netherlands, so it could join a park/queue for customs before it would be allowed to sail for the UK.
And yet there is nothing to be found in the press about these delays caused by pre-Brexit systems changes. Strange.
(Our sofa is now in the Netherlands. No word on when we might get it.) -
Mama div's job is (was see work thread) booking in deliveries to John Lewis main warehouses from suppliers.
Normally they work on a 3 week basis so any bookings requested further than 3 weeks in advance are rejected, but at the start of the month had to extend it to 4 weeks because they were inundated with requests for bookings for the final week of December.
I think everything is at capacity or beyond in an attempt to get goods in before the deadline and anything routine is being held up by that.
Suppliers have also had driver staffing issues throughout Covid. -
And there's the ports being clogged up with empty shipping containers - which i think is more worldwide covid related than brexit specific - but cos the shipping companies are prioritising delivering 'stuff' due to increased demand, no one is returning the empty containers back to asia etc and they're running out of empty containers (as well as English ports not having room to take more deliveries).
*apologies if my 'source' for this is just this thread in recent pages!
"Like i said, context is missing."
http://ssgg.uk -
Had a chat with a friend who runs a kitchen shop yesterday. Despite being the main dealer for a couple of European brands, he can’t get any washing machines from them just now. To complete projects he’s having to order at full rrp from UK-based retailers who have existing stock in the country.
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Ooh, maybe we can get a cyber war to go alongside brexit & covid....
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/18/suspected-russian-cyber-attack-growing-in-scale-microsoft-warns -
Brexit trade talks enter critical 48-hour period
How many times have we read a variation of that headline in the last 24 months? -
GooberTheHat wrote:Brexit trade talks enter critical 48-hour period
How many times have we read a variation of that headline in the last 24 months?
Yeah and the deal will be a long way apart, close, just fishing, just regulations, multiple sticking points, positive from the EU, downplayed by a government source in that time.
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Deals already done. They’re trying to give the ERG the least amount of time to scrutinise it.
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Do you have a government source for that Monkey?
You don't have to say who it is. It could be a flappy lid bin that someone stuck googly eyes to. -
mistercrayon wrote:Why do they care about the erg?
Because they will do to Boris what Boris did to May. -
Nah. A few rumours on Twitter. Only tweet I can remember the source of is this one from Steve Baker (and the one he’s replying to) saying they better not try and pull that move on us.LivDiv wrote:Do you have a government source for that Monkey?
You don't have to say who it is. It could be a flappy lid bin that someone stuck googly eyes to.
https://twitter.com/stevebakerhw/status/1339914359687004162?s=21 -
Sorry Monkey, was making a joke about the press publishing anything and claiming "government spurce"
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Sources says at 4pm Bohnson will announce a 4th tier.
Kind of inevitable given some of the numbers out there. There are huge differences between different regions in Tier 3.
There isnt a lot left to cut, surely has to be schools. -
Ah.LivDiv wrote:Sorry Monkey, was making a joke about the press publishing anything and claiming "government spurce"
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Looking like it will be Tier 4 for London and South East. Christmas mixing cancelled.
Rest of the country Xmas mixing scaled back. To what not sure yet.
6 days before Christmas. 4 days before the 5 day window opens.
Its too late.
Edit: This is all sources and leaks. Announcement at 4pm. -
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Send messageJust remember when we go into another lockdown it is not the fault of everyone who went to do their Christmas shopping, it's the fault of the fucking jackasses in charge for failing to get any kind of grip over this virus for the last 9 months, breaking their own rules, refusing to fund anything properly just dumping sacks of cash on contributed created by their mates, fucking about leaking policy to test public reaction, treating medical advice as something you can negotiate around when considering the restrictions you should put in place, ignoring their own pandemic plan that other countries successfully used to combat the virus.
Truly the shittest government of my entire life."Let me tell you, when yung Rouj had his Senna and Mansell Scalextric, Frank was the goddamn Professor X of F1." -
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Send messageJust realised I replied in the wrong thread to your post in the wrong thread for this."Let me tell you, when yung Rouj had his Senna and Mansell Scalextric, Frank was the goddamn Professor X of F1."
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