UK - Politika i društvo

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon indicated her party would oppose an election: “Johnson appears to be saying to MPs ‘If you vote for an election, I’ll bring back my bad Brexit bill and try to drag us out of the EU before we go to the polls’.
“Elections should be exercises in letting voters decide, not devices for charlatans to get their own way.”
And Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson said: “Boris Johnson is trying to distract from his government’s failure. He has missed his do-or-die deadline and is now demanding that parliament give him a general election and the time to ram through his Bill without proper scrutiny.
“The Liberal Democrats will not support any election until it is clear that we can avoid crashing out with no deal, and that needs an extension from the EU.”

Štand Maroka je iste veličine kao i štand Arhiva Srbije. Arhiv Srbije je riznica koja čuva kulturu, istoriju, pamćenje, identitet Srbije. Kada DJB bude odlučivao u ime građana, Arhiv Srbije će imati najveći štand. Ako sami ne vodimo računa o sebi, ostaćemo lak plen. pic.twitter.com/f2vOOWXMrP

— Saša Radulović (@SasaRadulovich) October 24, 2019

The EU will delay its decision on the length of the next Brexit extension until next Monday or Tuesday to take into account the results of a vote on Boris Johnson’s demand for a Christmas general election.
...
It is understood that the French government alone stood in the way of the EU granting the three month extension that Johnson sought in his letter on Saturday evening.

An EU source said the bloc’s offer would now be made on Monday or Tuesday – just 48 hours before the UK is set to leave the EU on 31 October – but that the president of the European council, Donald Tusk, had “no intention” of calling a special summit.

The EU’s delay leaves Jeremy Corbyn with a difficult decision to make. He had said Labour would only vote in favour of a general election if the EU confirmed on Friday that it would grant an extension to 31 January, taking a no deal Brexit “off the table”.

“There was full agreement on the need for an extension,” an EU source said of the meeting of EU27 ambassadors in Brussels. “There was full agreement to reach a unanimous, consensual EU27 decision. And there was full agreement to aim to take the decision by written procedure … Work will continue over the weekend.”

The diplomatic source added that EU27 diplomats “expected to meet early next week to finalise an agreement”.

...

Those terms were due to be signed off on Friday but ran into trouble. “There is one country standing in the way – France”, said a diplomat. “Everyone is very frustrated. They were told that a short extension ran the risk of an accidental no deal Brexit.”

“It is the French, always the French,” said a second senior diplomat.

Sources suggested that France’s president Emmanuel Macron was keen to appear helpful to Downing Street and keep the pressure on MPs.

On Thursday, France’s EU minister, Amélie de Montchalin, had told RTL radio that clarity over the next steps in London was needed for decisions to be made in “the next hours and days”.
...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/25/michel-barnier-eu-brexit-extension-boris-johnson-election

“Taiwan-on-Thames” is probably about right: diplomatically marginalised island democracy, dependent on US support, with a business elite whose wealth derives from the large market next door, and politicians who mainly argue about whether to have closer cross-Channel relations. https://t.co/vmL0iWAKSi

— Peter Thal Larsen (@peter_tl) October 27, 2019

Fears rise over post-Brexit workers’ rights and regulations

UK considers diverging on rules despite ‘level playing field’ promises to EU


The British government is planning to diverge from the EU on regulation and workers’ rights after Brexit, despite its pledge to maintain a “level playing field” in prime minister Boris Johnson’s deal, according to an official paper shared by ministers this week. 

The government paper drafted by Dexeu, the Brexit department, with input from Downing Street stated that the UK was open to significant divergence, even though Brussels is insisting on comparable regulatory provisions. 

The issue will come to a head when the UK begins the next phase of talks with the EU to forge a new trade deal. However, the UK in effect still faces the prospect of a no-deal Brexit next week unless EU states agree a new extension date for when the UK will leave the bloc. France was on Friday pushing for a shorter extension date than the one Mr Johnson has requested.

In a passage that could alarm Labour MPs who have backed the Brexit bill, the leaked government document also said the drafting of workers’ rights and environmental protection commitments “leaves room for interpretation”.

The paper, titled “Update to EPSG on level playing field negotiations”, appears to contradict comments made by Mr Johnson on Wednesday when he said the UK was committed to “the highest possible standards” for workers’ rights and environmental standards.

The document said the UK’s and EU’s “interpretation of these [level playing field] commitments will be very different” and that the text represented a “much more open starting point for future relationship negotiations”. It added that London believed that binding arbitration would be “inappropriate”.

The document boasts that “UK negotiators successfully resisted the inclusion of all UK-wide LPF rules” in the previous Theresa May deal.

A government spokesperson said the UK government “has no intention of lowering the standards of workers’ rights or environmental protection after we leave the EU and we already exceed EU minimum standards in areas such as maternity leave, shared parental leave and greenhouse gas targets.”

“UK Level Playing Field commitments will be negotiated in the context of the future UK-EU Free Trade Agreement, where we will achieve a balance of rights and obligations which reflect the scope and depth of the future relationship,” the spokesperson added.

Jenny Chapman, Labour’s shadow Brexit minister, said: “These documents confirm our worst fears. Boris Johnson’s Brexit is a blueprint for a deregulated economy, which will see vital rights and protections torn up.”

Mr Johnson has in the past been a persistent critic of what he sees as unnecessary regulation from Brussels. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour leader, this week pointed out that Mr Johnson had once described employment regulation as “back-breaking”, saying the bill’s provisions offered “no real protection at all”.

But the prime minister vowed to “ensure that whatever the EU comes up with, we can match it and pass it into the law of this country”.

The document gets to the heart of the dilemma between London’s desire to stay within the EU’s regulatory orbit while also seeking to diverge from the EU economic model. Speaking in New York in September, Mr Johnson set out a vision of Britain as a low-tax, lightly regulated economy on the edge of Europe — a vision that alarms some EU leaders.

Mr Johnson’s deal leaves the UK with freedom to set its own regulatory standards from the end of its post-Brexit transition period, which runs to the end of 2022 at the latest. But the EU has warned that Britain’s prospects of getting an ambitious trade deal with Brussels depend on it continuing to uphold robust rules. 

The new deal is very different to Theresa May’s, in which the UK made a legal commitment not to roll back EU regulatory standards in areas such as social and environmental protections as long as her “backstop” plan for preventing a hard Irish border was needed.

This was scrapped by British and EU negotiators because, unlike the backstop, Mr Johnson’s deal does not involve a UK-EU customs union with free movement of goods. 

Under Mr Johnson’s deal, the legally binding “level playing field” provisions that remain in the exit treaty are almost exclusively limited to Northern Ireland. But the non-binding political declaration on future EU-UK relations makes clear that there is a direct link between Britain’s regulatory environment and market access. 

The declaration said both Britain and the EU should continue to uphold “the common high standards” applicable at the end of the post-Brexit transition period in areas such as state-aid policy, social and environmental regulation and tax. 

It also made clear that the ambition of any future trade deal would be linked to Britain’s willingness to stick closely to relevant “union and international standards”. 

Existing EU trade deals, such as those with Japan and Canada, have some provisions on limitations to state aid and respect for international climate and labour market accords, but breaches of the commitments do not lead to punitive tariffs. 

EU officials have been clear, though, that something stronger is needed for the UK, given the risks that regulatory dumping in Britain, combined with extensive market access, could pose to European companies. The declaration stipulates that the level playing field commitments in a future trade deal should be backed by “enforcement and dispute settlement”.

https://www.ft.com/content/5eb0944e-f67c-11e9-9ef3-eca8fc8f2d65

UK (GB), Opinium poll:

CON-ECR: 40% (+3)
LAB-S&D: 24%
LDEM-RE: 15% (-1)
BREXIT-NI: 10% (-2)

+/- vs. 15-17 Oct

Fieldwork: 23-25 October 2019
Sample size: N/A
➤https://t.co/Oc1WEqP3kq#Brexit pic.twitter.com/utXMVieJ8i

— Europe Elects (@EuropeElects) October 26, 2019

At University of York://Students from Hong Kong were ordered to take down a display on the democracy protests at a freshers fair after mainland Chinese students said they found them offensive.//
h/t @stegersaurus
https://t.co/LXiYc8Bz6b

— Yuen Chan (@xinwenxiaojie) October 27, 2019

After negotiations, it was agreed that the display could remain as long as anything in Cantonese or Mandarin was removed.

KinderLad wrote:
svejedno, to su obrisi buducnosti, pogotovu kad si izvan EU moras da se dodvoravas svakojakim autoritarcima. medjutim, tu nastaju problemi. UK je na ivici da dozvoli Huaweiju da postavlja 5G kod njih. Su cim ce pred narandzastog genija onda?

Zuper wrote:Oranzista nece vladati duze od max 5 godina a drug Ksi je tu za vecnost i dominaciju...sta je 5 godina za 5G?

Donald Tusk

@eucopresident
The EU27 has agreed that it will accept the UK's request for a #Brexit flextension until 31 January 2020. The decision is expected to be formalised through a written procedure.

So what's in the Brexit flextension agreement? Key points: pic.twitter.com/tDu5fBuyIQ

— Nikos Chrysoloras (@nchrysoloras) October 28, 2019

Spoiler: