Brexit discussion thread XIV (Please read OP before posting)

Yeah, wouldn't you love to know what was in that deal? Must have been really sweet ...

So I've not been paying a lot of attention to the Borders bill, but does anyone have any idea what the end goal here is ?

https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2021/1209/1265709-travel-ireland/

Are they attempting to design in some justification for border checks in NI without strictly breaching the GFA? Or is it merely the usual "Oh, we never really considered Northern Ireland" carelessness of Westminster.

What they're creating is a functionally unenforceable grey area in Ireland. Unless they have PSNI/immigration officers manning 24-hour checkpoints at the border, no foreign resident in Ireland is going to be filling out an online form to go to Belfast for the weekend.

It's nonsense really. To find out who the EU and non-EU people are they would have to check all passports including the Irish from both sides of the border. Every car and train and that's not gonna happen

There can't be many people in the UK who aren't already aware that Johnson is a liar. He was famously a liar long before he ever became party leader and PM. Arguably, he was chosen as party leader precisely because he is a liar — he has the knack of telling people the lies they want to hear and being forgiven for it. The Tory party saw this as something that might be useful in squaring the Brexit circle (which it was).

But his knack may have failed him on this occasion.

Yes, obviously the Turing Scheme will require buy-in from educational institutions in other countries.

But this need not be reciprocal. the UK government will provide up to £100m/year to enable students at UK universities to study or do work placements abroad, at or under the supervision of foreign universities. The carrot for the foreign universities is the £100m; they get paid to take the UK students. If the interaction with UK universities fosters relationships that facilitate traffic the other way, and if the foreign students are keen to study in the UK, and if somebody is willing to pay the UK universities for that, great, but that's not essential to the scheme.

Erasmus worked differently; the host universities received little or no money for hosting students. The carrot for them in return for hosting students was that their students could in turn go to other universities - not necessarily the same universities as were sending students - for relatively little money.

The design of the Erasmus scheme represented a net drain on UK educational finances. The UK has many excellent universities, and lots of students from other countries were interested in studying in the UK partly because of the quality of the universities and partly because they already spoke English, and so living and studying in the UK was easier for them than in some third country whose language they did not speak. But UK university students were (relatively speaking) a parochial and monoglot lot; they were less interested in studying in abroad and they had a marked preference for English-speaking host countries, of whom not many participate in Erasmus. The upshot was the about twice as many foreign students came to the UK under Erasmus (largely at the UK's expense) as UK students went abroad (largely at the expense of other governments). Turing is designed not to replicate this feature of Erasmus; UK will pay for UK students who go abroad, rather than for foreign students who come to the UK.

The UK universities are not keen, obviously, because (a) there's no money in this for them and (b) they miss out on the enriching experience of having foreign students in the mix.

I am sure they did consider it, just as they considered trade. However, the overriding view, and that was touched on with the last question, was that the EU needed the UK more than it needed them and the EU would simply fall apart with the UK and as such the EU would do whatever it could to keep the UK close.

When the UK talked about a close relationship, they never meant from their side, they meant from the EU. My feeling throughout, including Camerons attempt to get special treatment, is that the UK always felt that at some stage the EU would give in and accept that primacy of the UK. The German car manufacturers for example.

So there was never a need to work out a what if scenario such as Galileo, as it was always assumed that it would never come to pass.

If now, the UK haven't really put forward a plan of how to deal with post Brexit trade. There are no long terms plans in place, no ideas on how to attract the best talent from abroad, how they will sell themselves to internaational investors etc. Just a belief that everything will work out, because Britain!

It's hard to know what newspaper a typical Express reader would change to!

It is a remarkable article, however I would read it more as a message to the government for more up socks pulling to go out and sell "Global Britain".

I doubt the Express has changed its mind on the concept of Brexit.

@Leroy42 "So there was never a need to work out a what if scenario such as Galileo, as it was always assumed that it would never come to pass."

And it might not have been if the UK-not-in-EU-but-in-EU-wonderland had come to pass, which is what was being sold pre-referendum. Then there was the handbrake turn in the direction of a hard Brexit and it was too late to discuss the new set of issues it presented. Unless of course there had been another public vote on it but they couldn't countenance that because "democracy".

Anyone I've seen sporting a copy of the Express in England looked bewildered.

Climbdowns as expected. The trade figures don't lie. And we haven't heard a peep out of frost in a while.

More climbdown?

"The UK and Jersey governments have issued further licences to French fishing boats to trawl British waters in an apparent attempt to ease cross-Channel tensions.

The Brussels-imposed deadline of midnight on Friday for solving the post-Brexit fishing row passed without an agreement being announced.

However, the British government has since confirmed that talks on Friday evening between the environment secretary, George Eustice, and Virginijus Sinkevičius, from the European Commission, after “several weeks of intensive technical discussions on licensing”, resulted in more small-boat licences being granted."

Now whether this will be enough to satisfy the French will have to be seen, but the pattern just repeats itself. The UK acts all high and mighty, the EU wins the argument in the end. Rinse and repeat.

The biggest common factor is likely to be age - older people are more likely to have voted for Brexit, and of course they are also dramatically more likely to die of Covid.