Brexit discussion thread XIV (Please read OP before posting)

England is like the wife of a bank manager who had a nice house and nice car in the 1970's, was invited to all the social events, sat at the front of the church every Sunday etc etc but the hubby has passed on, the pension isn't what she hoped it would be, the house still has carpets, curtains and furniture which is over 25 years old and she sadly don's one of her hats and one remaining "good" coat each Sunday to take her place at the front of the church but increasingly no one knows who she is, people feel a little sorry to see how she's trying to preserve her long lost pride and place in society and are sad that's she's too stubborn to accept meals on wheels even though her pension doesn't provide enough for her to cook full dinners 7 days a week so sometimes tea and biscuits is all she has to eat.

France about to give GB a little starter on what it can expect if a full blown collapse of the TCA results from the NI Protocol.

https://twitter.com/DavidGHFrost/status/1453449084245889032?s=20

I get the feeling the pro-Tory propaganda of the press is a big factor in this. They've absolutely no wish to draw attention to how run down many parts of the UK are, or to highlight that GB living standards are behind many parts of western Europe. Instead, purposely give everyone the misleading impression they are well off and and living in one of the richest countries in the world.

Indeed, tell the plebs how well off they are and how lucky they are to be living in a country like the UK (to do otherwise would mean having to criticise and expose their Tory pals).

GPS isn't encrypted but this means it is vulnerable to 'spoofing' so it is fine for the likes of personal navigation and Internet of things, but you wouldn't want an airliner or military mission to be relying on this as bad actors could jam or spoof the signal pretty easily

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gps-is-easy-to-hack-and-the-u-s-has-no-backup/

One of the main benefits of Galileo is that it has an encrypted version that is more secure and less vulnerable. The other is that global navigation and time keeping are critical infrastructure that you don't want to become locked out of if international relations turn frosty

I don't think there's any danger of this. The UK's withdrawal from Galileo means that the UK will have very limited - or zero - involvement in designing, consructing, owning, operating the Galileo service. But they can use it as a customer just like anyone else.

But . . .

Part of the Galileo service - the encrypted part designed to guide missiles and plan military operations - only offiers limited availability to regular customers; full availability is offered just to the defence, security and emergency response services of member states. Which, of course, no longer includes the UK. The rival service, the US-operated GPS, also has an encrypted part to which the UK only has restricted access.

The UK's response to that was going to be "we'll build our own!". In 2018 they announced that they would develop and implement a free-standing UK " Global Navigation Satellite System" (GNSS). This was seen at the time as "bold and expensive"; the total cost was projected to be between £3 billion and £5 billion. To kick off, they awarded £90 million worth of contracts for studies of the satellite and ground system technologies needed to develop an independent service, and to procure some parts of the system, and spent £400 million buying a 45% stake in the (bankrupt) OneWeb satellite company and its network of low earth orbit satellites.

But it was not to be. Citing pressure on public finances resulting from the Coronavirus Pandemic (and in no way connected with any alleged adverse economic impact of Brexit, no sir, and if you repeat such a suggestion you'll be hearing from my lawyers) the UK Treasury has now regretfully concluded that the GNSS project is now unaffordable. By an amazing and very fortunate coincidence the UK Department of Defence has, at more or less the same time, realised that the UK doesn't really need its own encrypted satellite navigation capacity after all, and they are going to explore "innovative alternatives" to satellite navigation systems for tracking and guiding their ships, planes, submarines and cruise missiles. They are looking at options which could supplement, rather than replace, the limited encrypted service they can get from Galileo and GPS. They have awarded (this time, much more modest) contracts to identify possibilities that seem deserving of investigation.

Tony Benn called the Falklands War "The last kick of a dying empire" but I'd say that description is more aptly applied to Brexit, which Benn didn't live to see.

Case in point, the recent Covid vaccine effort. I thought I saw somewhere that nearly 100 countries were involved

Goodness knows how historians will assess Brexit. Arguably much worse than the Suez Crisis (or the self inflicted Irish financial crash of 2008-12). They've almost certainly voted to hobble themselves and all on the back of something as ridiculous as an advisory referendum of dubious legal standing.