Latest post of the previous page:
Theresa May delays ‘meaningful vote’ on Brexit deal until 12th March at the latest: Brexit News for Monday 25 Februaryhttps://brexitcentral.com/today/brexit- ... -february/
Latest post of the previous page:
Theresa May delays ‘meaningful vote’ on Brexit deal until 12th March at the latest: Brexit News for Monday 25 FebruaryDo you know what game she's playing, coffee?coffee wrote:Theresa May delays ‘meaningful vote’ on Brexit deal until 12th March at the latest: Brexit News for Monday 25 February
https://brexitcentral.com/today/brexit- ... -february/
Great that democracy still exists, isn't it, coffee?coffee wrote:Jeremy Corbyn U-turns and signals Labour backing for a second Brexit referendum: Brexit News for Tuesday 26 February
https://brexitcentral.com/today/brexit- ... -february/
Why are contingency plans needed at all, coffee?coffee wrote:EU putting forward plan to unilaterally guarantee social security rights after No Deal Brexit.
There are also contingency plans for financial services, customs, road connectivity, air travel and more.
Not exactly a ‘cliff edge’ after all then?
https://twitter.com/Michael_Heaver/stat ... 8577470465
Summary
All forms of Brexit are bad for health, but some are worse than others. This paper builds on our 2017 analysis using the WHO health system building blocks framework to assess the likely effects of Brexit on the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. We consider four possible scenarios as follows: a No-Deal Brexit under which the UK leaves the EU on March 29, 2019, without any formal agreement on the terms of withdrawal; a Withdrawal Agreement, as negotiated between the UK and EU and awaiting (possible) formal agreement, which provides a transition period until the end of December, 2020; the Northern Ireland Protocol's backstop coming into effect after the end of that period; or the Political Declaration on the Future Relationship between the UK and EU. Our analysis shows that a No-Deal Brexit is substantially worse for the NHS than a future involving the Withdrawal Agreement, which provides certainty and continuity in legal relations while the Political Declaration on the Future Relationship is negotiated and put into legal form. The Northern Ireland backstop has varying effects, with continuity in some areas, such as health products, but no continuity in others. The Political Declaration on the Future Relationship envisages a relationship that is centred around a free-trade agreement, in which wider health-related issues are largely absent. All forms of Brexit, however, involve negative consequences for the UK's leadership and governance of health, in both Europe and globally, with questions about the ability of parliament and other stakeholders to scrutinise and oversee government actions.
Leaving the European Union would cost British consumers 9 billion pounds ($13.2 billion) in annual additional import tariffs, World Trade Organization chief Roberto Azevedo said in an interview published by the Financial Times on Wednesday.
Britain’s exports would be also burdened with 5.5 billion pounds of new tariffs in overseas markets, the paper said, and leaving the EU would require a full reboot of Britain’s trade relations, akin to joining the WTO from scratch.
That would mean renegotiating the terms of trade with 161 WTO members, and losing the low-tariff or tariff-free access to 58 countries covered by 36 EU trade agreements.
I really wish the Tories had kept their little internal squabble to themselves and not let it spill out and create such a massive divide in the country. Do you agree, coffee?coffee wrote:Junior minister George Eustice resigns over Theresa May’s ‘undignified Brexit retreats’ amidst threat of ‘final humiliation’ by Brussels: Brexit News for Friday 01 March
https://brexitcentral.com/today/brexit- ... -01-march/
The reports came in one after the other. First from the National Audit Office. Then from the High Court. Then from notifications about out-of-court settlements. They cover the full range of policy portfolios, from the Ministry of Justice to the Department of Transport. And in each case they say only one thing: That this government's lack of basic moral decency competes only with its functional inadequacy.
The probation report came first. Chris Grayling had been warned, back in 2013, exactly what his attempts to privatise the service would do.
Risk is dynamic. His plan to separate out high-risk offenders and leave them with the national service provider, and then medium-and-low-risk offenders and leave them with private companies and voluntary groups, meant that information would not be adequately shared about the likelihood of reoffending. And that meant we would see more crime, more victims of crime, and more criminals back in an already over-stretched prison service.
He was warned, countless times, that a privatised payment-by-results system simply would not function in probation. How could you possibly confirm, in two-year-time-frames, why someone had reoffended, or why they had not, to a commercially-verifiable threshold? How could you prove it was to do with probation services, rather than, say, housing services, or drug addiction support?
All of this was ignored. The criminal justice experts were ignored, the trade unions were ignored and the probation officers were ignored. By the end, even the private service providers were ignored. Today, the NAO found, exactly as Grayling had been told six years ago, that the "new interfaces" between providers were not matching up. The service had fragmented, exactly as warned. Providers could not control for the factors which reduced or increased reoffending.
"More generally," it concluded, "payment by results as a contract mechanism is not well suited to probation services."
The cost to the taxpayer stood at almost £500 million.
Then, at 10am, the ruling broke in a legal case against the Home Office's right-to-rent scheme. This key plank of the Hostile Environment programme, initiated during Theresa May's time at the department, sought to turn landlords into immigration enforcement officers. They would be legally obliged to make sure tenants had a legal right to be in the UK.
Just like Grayling, she was warned. She was told this was a clear incentive for discrimination. It would fall disproportionately on ethnic minority Brits and foreign nationals with a right to rent. And it would be completely ineffective at the thing she was setting it up to do.
In the High Court today, Mr Justice Spencer basically repeated the arguments of a few years ago, but this time as an objective fact about the present, rather than a warning of what would take place in the future. The checks had caused racial discrimination. They had failed to have any effect on encouraging undocumented migrants to leave the country.
"In my judgement," he found, "the evidence, when taken together, strongly showed not only that landlords are discriminating against potential tenants on grounds of nationality and ethnicity but also that they are doing so because of the scheme. It is my view that the scheme introduced by the government does not merely provide the occasion or opportunity for private landlords to discriminate but causes them to do so where otherwise they would not."
We don't know how many British citizens and foreign nationals fell victim to this state-sponsored discrimination.
Just minutes after the right-to-rent ruling, it emerged that the government had settled a lawsuit over ferry contracts in the event of no-deal. This harked back to Grayling's - yes, him again - decision to grant a contract to Seaborne Freight, a firm which had no ships and had never run a ferry contract. It's terms and conditions had been copied and pasted from a fast-food delivery restaurant.
Now things got even worse. It transpired that the contracts had been handed out in a secretive way, thereby denying Eurotunnel the opportunity to bid and breaching public procurement rules. Unlike Seaborne, it had actually run a cross-Channel ferry service - MyFerryLink - until 2015.
The cost to the taxpayer was £33 million.
Just one day in the life of a hopeless government. In every case, the disasters come as a result of reactionary policy aims: To privatise everything that moves, regardless of whether it shows the least suitability. To turn us into a country which spies on one another just in case any immigrants don't have their papers. To break off from the EU and then almost salivate over the prospect of a no-deal severing process. And then they top it all off by trying to do these things in the most consistently hapless manner imaginable.
The government simply has nothing to recommend it. The things it wants to do are immoral. The manner in which it pursues them is inept. And the people it charges with doing it are incompetent. It is a full-spectrum, alpha-and-omega, biblical-level shambles, in organisational form. If there was any justice in the world, the people involved would all lose their jobs. But of course they will not, because they constitute many of the most senior politicians in the country, up to and including the prime minister.
"Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence," Arthur C. Clarke once said. He could not have predicted that we would find ourselves with such an oversupply of both.
I bet you think that gives UK citizens the exact same rights as they currently have?coffee wrote:Confirmed: Spanish Royal Decree guarantees Brits rights, around 400,000 eligible for residency even after No Deal Brexit.
Covers healthcare, pensions/social security and driving licenses.
What a contrast to shameful @Channel4News scaremongering.