Brexit discussion thread XIV (Please read OP before posting)

yagan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122958017#Comment_122958017

I think it's entirely understandable, the EU gets to benefit from the uks most ambitious who want to work in a much bigger economy.

CelticRambler

There are a huge number of young Europeans who want to work and gain experience in an English language environment. I know of one personally, who tried for a year to find someone in the UK to take her, but consistently fell foul of the minimum salary requirement for a visa. In the end, she decided to take her chances in the less dynamic but more accessible Irish version.

Right now, that's really the only option for anyone who wants to stay close to home; otherwise, it's head off to the US, Canada or Australia. Whatever about the last two, I can see how "the EU" would prefer our youth to spend their early professional years in a part of Anglosaxophonia that's been heavily influenced by European norms and traditions rather than being indoctrinated in the US version. Ireland is just too small to offer all the necessary placements.

Moreover, if I understand the proposal correctly, the mobility part is coupled with mutual recognition of qualifications. That's something that fixes a huge problem for those of us who lost access to the annual crop of UK graduates in a field that produces relatively few well-qualified individuals per year.

Gerry T

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122958017#Comment_122958017

I think for the EU it was never a competition, more about working together to better everyone. Free movement of youth benefits EU and UK residents, that's a win for the EU. It all goes back to Barnier's simple but brilliant step ladder. If the UK wants to get closer relationships in areas, they know what has to give. I don't think that has changed.

A divided Europe damages both the UK and EU economies, a UK decision on its own, the rest of us are collateral damage. The cynical person might think the brains of Britain might prefer moving to the EU.

reslfj

There are a huge number of young Europeans who want to work and gain experience in an English language environment.

"…ay there's the rub"

It's a huge benefit for the UK too having English as the primary common language in all of EU - the "lingua franca"

Lars 😀

reslfj

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122958548#Comment_122958548

Note that the "Barnier's simple but brilliant step ladder" shows what existing deals cannot be a model for a Brexit deal due to the TM's/UK's red lines.

Not what can or may happen.

A Swiss arrangement is e.g. hated by the EU for being much to complicated and expensive to negotiate and maintain. Such a deal will never be repeated by the EU.

The urgent need to let more countries into the EU, has also made the EU and the EU members less willing to embark in negotiate about any bespoke deal with the UK.

The UK's acceptance of the full Copenhagen Criteria is the likely name of the game.

Lars 😀

Gerry T

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122959150#Comment_122959150

I agree totally re Switzerland, the eu wont want to go down that road again. I should have elaborated, what barniers steps drove home to the uk, was the fact the uk is now a 3rd country and its exceptionalist expectations wont be entertained. It drove home a simple but very clear message. If you want x then you have to conceed y. Im not sure that message has fully sunk in, yet.

The hard pill for the uk will be the euro currency and schengen, will they ever accept that !

Sam Russell

The UK needs to accept not only the Euro, and Schengen, but also a national ID card.

We also need to introduce one - it makes life for everyone so much easier. We already have the PPS number.

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122958032#Comment_122958032

Plus EU youth get to immerse themselves in the English language, they can't all come here!

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122959075#Comment_122959075

The 2004 entrants had Russian as a lingua franca… 😮 for anyone who was in school before 1989!

Given that Sweden is still swerving the Euro quite legitimately, it's hard to see a future Brejoining UK adopting it - unless it really wants to of course.

Denmark is to all intents and purposes in the Euro, it just doesn't use Euro specie! It maintains its own currency but is in an effective currency union with the Euro. Until 1999 the krone was pegged to the Deutschmark, so it's really all a question of optics.

Whether a Sterling peg is workable or not depends on UK economic policy and the level they go in at. Thatcher was no fan of ERM but entered it in a desperate attempt to prop up the value of sterling at a level it didn't warrant. 2.95 DM to the £ was madness. She should have been told to get lost but politics intervened. The 1992 sterling crash was inevitable.

The UK has historically had an odd attachment to the nominal value of their currency, often choosing to handicap their economy to prop up the currency.[*] They spent most of the 1960s trying to peg sterling at an unsustainable level vs. the US dollar and hurt their economy with high interest rates to do so. It inevitably failed of course and Harold Wilson had to make his "the pound in your pocket" speech.

UK commentators often like to remind us of the loan they gave us in our financial crisis (which they made a profit on, and refused to let us pay off early) but they're very quiet about when they had to go cap in hand to the IMF in 1975.

[*] Surely the role of the currency is to help the economy, rather than the economy being forced to help the currency. Devaluation often results in an economic boost - as happened here in the early 1990s.

yagan

The 1992 devaluation of the GBP and break from the ERM may have been domestically popular at the time but in the long run it spared the UK economy from competing in the new single market.

Hotblack Desiato

The UK was one of the main forces behind the single market!

yagan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122960209#Comment_122960209

Exactly,the minute they got a level playing field they had pushed for they couldn't stay competitive in it and so became reliant on currency devaluation.

reslfj

The 2004 entrants had Russian as a lingua franca… 😮 for anyone who was in school before 1989!

Many did understand Russian well, but a lot of them didn't like to speak Russian at all.

I worked with companies in Hungary and Poland from 1995 until about 2008/2009. English was clearly the favoured language (except with one 55+ person in Hungary, who had German family and friends and spoke perfect German himself).

In the mid 1990's I asked the young people (native Russian speaking) at the reception desk in a Narva hotel in Estonia about visiting Ivangorod in Russia - on the other (east) side of the river (like passport control and 200 m across a bridge).

The answer was like "Why should we go there? There is not much for us to do or to see there. My grandmother lives outside St. Petersburg and earns 1/3 of what I do".

Lars 😀

Hotblack Desiato

They didn't like it but they were forced to learn it in school.

It reminds me of a couple of things 😯

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122958017#Comment_122958017

There are three related, reasons why this matters to the EU.

The first is that it should be easy to acheive, and acheiving it will help to build confidence and momentum — a UK/EU rapprochement will be seen to be possible, and seen to be under way. It should be easy because the UK needs a youth mobility scheme, and the UK government is under continuing pressure from business to deliver one.

The second is as a reality check. At least for public consumption, much of the UK political establishment — including Keir Starmer — resists a youth mobility scheme with the EU on the grounds that "free movement is a red line". A youth mobility scheme is, of course, nothing remotely like free movement. The UK political establishment is well aware of this; the UK already has bilateral youth mobility schemes with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Korea, Iceland and several other countries, and presumably the UK's leaders do not imagine that the UK has "free movement" with these countries.

For obvious reasons the EU is extremely wary of engaging with a UK political establishment that still panders to, and even reinforces, Brexiter-levels of delusion about the world. If the EU is to enter into closer relationships with the UK, it need to know that the UK is honest and open with its own electorate about those relationships — what they mean; what they are; what they are not. The UK rejecting a YMS because "free movement is a red line" is a massive red flag; the UK isn't yet in a mindframe that the EU needs it to be in if there is to be any kind of rapprochement. If the UK can accept a YMS, or even reject one for reasons which are rational rather than delusional, that would send a better signal.

And the third is to forestall cherry-picking. Despite the fact that "free movement is a red line", the UK has in fact approached selected EU countries, including France and Germany, to propose bilateral YMSs. Strictly speaking, a YMS is a national competence — any EU state could make a bilateral YMS with the UK — but the member states have agreed to move on this collectively, because they don't want to encourage the UK to atempt to engage in cherry-picking. But the consensus on this among the member states could break down if the Union does not actively seek a YMS.

yagan

Good summation Peregrinus.

A YMS is the easiest of things to agree on considering the UK already has them with other nations, but to agree on it with the EU would highlight the bargaining benefit of being in a Bloc like the EU, so feet will drag on the matter.

Fr Tod Umptious

Harland and Wolff has been saved, once again.

That iconic east Belfast symbol of loyalist, protestant, unionism is now owned by the Spanish government.

And why I'm posting about it here is that the company that bought it have received significant funding from the European Commission as part of the European Defence Fund.

So the people that have been saved the dole queue for 2025 are the DUP supporting Brexiteers of east Belfast.

It's it ironic.

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2024/1219/1487328-harland-wolff-deal/

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/12/16/brussels-takes-uk-to-court-over-eu-citizens-rights-brexit-deal-free-movement

The four year window to raise case expires at the end of the year. So it's off to the Eu Court of Justice.

CrabRevolution

I'd low expectations of the Labour government regarding their relationship with the EU, but they've failed to even meet those.

They seem to be under the impression that the only reason the EU rejected the previous government's all-the-benefits-but-no-commitments demand was because it was the Conservatives who were doing the demanding.

I don't know why Labour think that just because they have fewer MPs making WW2 references than the Conservatives did that the EU will suddenly yield to the demands they've spent years repeatedly rejecting.

yagan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122978722#Comment_122978722

Labour's number 1 priority is to not reanimate the brexit Frankenstein, so any appearance of reproachment will be downplayed. I can't see this changing until a stand alone Rejoin movement emerges to be the target for the Brexity types.

The only area where the monster seems happy is in discussing military defence where it nurtures a Putin level of geopolitical dismorphoria.

yagan

Interesting developments in Iceland under newly elected government mandate to hold an EU membership vote by 2027. The 2008 crash and Brexit are cited as prime motivations towards the shift from the historical ambivalent relationship with the EU.

It will be interesting to see if and how British media report it.

sandbelter

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122982447#Comment_122982447

I'm not sure it will be that important to them. The bigger issue is going to be the EU's ongoing mishandling of new technology (especially AI), because across the spectrum teh EU is simply is not a legal environment conducive to risk taking (IMHO it's due to the fact EU regulators underestimate the risk of failure and the barriers to success).

Globally the EU is seen globally as making a hash job of incubating new techology (especially) and is increasingly seen as more and more as becoming a technological backwater, a distant third tier after US and China. Worse, it's looking more and more like two regulatory standards are forming globally, EU versus the rest.

The following is an example of an issue the invented for itself that existing nowhere else:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/opinion/reconciling-privacy-and-innovation-the-path-forward-on-ai-in-the-eu/

Hence, I suspect the UK media will be more focussed on highlighting the technological backwater the EU is becoming…..and they are not alone.

CelticRambler

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122984262#Comment_122984262

Worse, it's looking more and more like two regulatory standards are forming globally, EU versus the rest.

Ehhhh … that's already the case, and has been for quite some time. It's a point that was made (to no great effect) during the Brexit debate: as a manufacturer/exporter if you are compliant with the gold standard EU regulations, you can sell to the whole world; and if you want to trade with the EU, you must be compliant.

There's not a month goes by that we don't see the UK finding itself handicapped by its failure to draft/renew/harmonise regulations that ensure its producers have unfettered access to this massive market.

On the other hand, with equal frequent examples from the other side of the equation - such as China and the US - show us how poorly or un-regulated risk-taking offers little benefit to ordinary people, only opportunities for the rich to get ever richer at the cost of … well, everyone and everything else.

Fortunately, regarless of how the Europhobic UK media might paint the picture, the article you link to presents an alternative vision:

The GDPR was crafted as a principle-based, technology-neutral, forward-looking regulation designed with the foresight that the digital landscape would evolve in ways that may be difficult to predict. This vision reflects a fundamental understanding: innovation and privacy are not incompatible but actually thrive together when supported by a robust and flexible regulatory framework.

…

Evolving the interpretation of GDPR’s principles in a proportionate, risk-based and outcomes-based way can unlock AI’s full potential, enabling the EU to lead on the global stage while safeguarding citizens’ rights.

So yeah, we'll be fine here in our "backwater"

Nody

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122984262#Comment_122984262

If you think EU is harsh against AI you've clearly not worked in the field of implementation (no, I'm not talking about chat GTP etc.). Did you know for example that AI (and far more importantly machine learning in general) is outright banned in China unless it's a Chinese software? Or that implementing any form of AI in the USA in practice in a company environment can easily trigger the need for an yearly bias review report (we're talking six figure cost every year to evaluate that the AI model has not become biased since your AI model will be different than than the default one) in case of lawsuits? I've even had to argue with lawyers on the topic of how can an AI bot be biased when it looks at nothing but the work experience, work title and if they are legally allowed to work in a country (unlike say a human who reads the name, gender, age, nationality etc.) and be told "Yes, but it's an AI so we can be sued for it". Not stating that AI implementation in EU is easy; but outside the flashy implementations you read about it's when you go to the non AI based companies and try to sell it in you'll see the actual barriers and EU has at least provided guidance to follow.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122984262#Comment_122984262

It happens here every so often where someone just pastes some random link and spouts some generic comment about EU regulation.

Dumping a link does not make the EU a "technological backwater".

I'd ask for proof with regards to the EU being seen as backwards but I doubt that that's be forthcoming.

sandbelter

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122985120#Comment_122985120

Oh really, well Brexit and the UK lives rent free in your head, IMHO you need to move on and be able to discuss the EU as if the UK doesn't exist….but here's some stats you never thought I'd publish.

Top 5 innovative courtries in 2024: Switzerland, Sweden (EU member), USA, Singapore then UK:

https://www.voronoiapp.com/innovation/The-Worlds-Most-Innovative-Countries-in-2024--2608

Oh, I'm sure you'll point out that 7-10 are EU members, and you'd be right….but loo who's number 11….China.

I know you're in research, so I'll assume you'll understand the Math underlying the following statement. If IQ is a bell curve then with a number of Chinese with a IQ capable of research will be greater than anywhere else.

So you'd expect them to eclipse everyone else with patents…which funny enough what is happening, China alone generates 47.2% of all new patents:

https://www.wipo.int/web-publications/world-intellectual-property-indicators-2024-highlights/en/patents-highlights.html.

If you add the EPO and Germany…the sum does even pass South Korea!

All this hubris, and just because I'm telling you a truth you don't want to hearit…… doesn't make what I say wrong.

Do you need any more Stat's…….BTW this is not a pro Brexit thing, and I'm not trying justify it, but Europe is increasingly seen as a backwater.

Seth Brundle

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122990237#Comment_122990237

...but Europe is increasingly seen as a backwater.

So despite making the claim twice, can you actually provide any evidence that the EU is being seen as a backwater or is this your perception?

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122990237#Comment_122990237

Thanks for perfectly proving my point. Any time the ridiculous narrative is questioned, the response is moving the goalposts along with snarky comments.

You can repeat nonsense claims all you like but it does not make them any more true.

yagan

Mostly likely Sandblaster read a piece about AI that tickled their antenna and now they see an AI angle in every situation, probably including GAA football rule changes.

roosterman71

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122990583#Comment_122990583

Leave the All Ireland out of this. It has nothing to do with Brexit