Ideas on Europe Blog

If the EU referendum had been run with the same rules as Scotland’s first referendum on devolution, the Leave vote would still have won – but Brexit would not now be happening.

That’s because in Scotland’s first referendum on devolution in 1979, our Parliament passed an amendment to the Scotland Act 1978, which set a minimum threshold before such a significant change could take place.

The amendment stipulated that a minimum of 40% of the total electorate in Scotland would need to vote for the country to have its own assembly before it could happen.

As it turned out, 52% of those who voted ticked ‘Yes’ for power to be devolved to Scotland, with 48% ticking ‘No’ – ironically, exactly the same percentages as our UK-wide EU referendum of 2016, which was 52%-48% in favour of Britain leaving the EU.

But here’s the difference.

Since the percentage of those voting ‘Yes’ for devolution was only 33% of registered voters, Scotland on that occasion didn’t get its own assembly, because Parliament had set a threshold of at least 40% of the electorate voting ‘Yes’ before it could happen.

The then Labour government accepted that the Act’s requirements had not been met in the referendum, and that devolution would therefore not be introduced for Scotland.

Setting a minimum threshold for constitutional change is normal practice among democracies across the world that use referendums. For example, a threshold of higher than 50% of the total electorate, or a two-thirds majority of those voting, before a country’s constitution can be changed.

This makes sense, since if the majority of a country’s electorate doesn’t positively agree to change – whether they vote or not – it means that a minority is making the decision without the express wishes of the majority.

Well, that’s precisely what happened in the EU referendum.

Unfortunately, Parliament on that occasion didn’t set a threshold requiring 40% of the total electorate to vote for ‘Leave’ before it could happen.

That’s no doubt because, unlike the Scottish referendum in 1979, the EU referendum of 2016 was advisory only. However, since only a minority of the electorate voted for Leave, it would have been plausible for Parliament to say that an insufficient percentage of voters had voted for Leave.

In the EU referendum, only 37% of the total electorate voted for Leave.

If Parliament had set a minimum threshold of at least 40%, as it did for Scotland’s first referendum on devolution, it would mean that Brexit wouldn’t now be going ahead.

If such a threshold had been in place, it would have avoided the constitutional crisis that has now engulfed the United Kingdom, involving a minority of the electorate permanently changing the country, without the express consent of the majority.

Some readers (Brexiters) may ask what does it matter? The referendum has happened, according to the rules agreed by Parliament, and we can’t turn back the clock.

That, of course, is true.

However, there were so many flaws in the EU referendum that I believe it’s necessary to expose the plebiscite for what it was: a sham involving a democratic deficit on a grand and shocking scale.

If we dismantle the referendum, brick by brick, we can see that the country is being changed without a bona fide mandate to do so.

Consider just some of the key shortfalls and defects in the referendum:

• It’s just been announced that Cambridge Analytica, the company at the heart of the Facebook scandal, boasted of having “vast amounts of data” that could sway the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union. A 10-page document written by Cambridge Analytica, headed “Big Data Solutions for the EU Referendum”, claimed it could single out Brexiters among voters, donors, politicians and even journalists.

MPs have called for a wider investigation into the firm, which has been accused of obtaining 50 million people’s private details harvested from Facebook, amid questions over the role it may have played in the referendum.

• During the referendum campaign, the country was lied to by the Leave campaign on a scale never seen before in a modern UK poll. Millions of voters opted for Leave on the basis of promises about Brexit that can never be fulfilled, and misleading information about the EU that was demonstrably wrong. Without such dishonesty, it’s almost certain that Leave could not have won.

• Nobody during the referendum campaign knew what the Leave vote meant. We knew what Remain meant, as we’d had it for over 40 years. But there was no clear vision or manifesto or plan for leaving the EU that the voters could consider, let alone understand. We still don’t know what Leave means.

• In 2015 the Conservatives made a manifesto pledge to scrap the rule preventing Britons from voting who had lived abroad for more than 15 years. However, the Conservative government stated that it could not implement this promise in time for the referendum.

In addition, many British voters abroad who were eligible to vote, complained that they had not received their postal ballots in time to cast their votes. Without this debacle, it’s quite likely that Leave would not have won the referendum.

• Citizens from over 70 countries (mostly Britain’s former colonies) with ‘leave to remain’ in the UK were allowed to vote in the EU referendum, but most citizens from the rest of the EU living and working in the UK were denied a vote, even though the referendum result directly affected them.

This represented a serious democratic deficit. (After all, citizens from the EU living in Scotland were allowed to vote in Scotland’s referendum on independence).

• The House of Lords put forward an amendment that 16 and 17 year olds should be allowed to vote in the EU referendum, in the same way that they were allowed to vote in Scotland’s referendum on independence.

But the Commons rejected this amendment, “Because it would involve a charge on public funds”. So younger people, who will have to live with the referendum decision for the longest, were denied a vote simply on the grounds of cost. (The cost of Brexit will be much higher).

• As previously discussed, only 37% of the total electorate voted for Leave, meaning that a minority of registered voters are to permanently change the country’s direction, without the express consent of the majority.

• Older voters are responsible for Leave winning, in particular the over 70s, who swung the vote for Brexit with their 1.28 million Leave votes. In contrast, younger people voted predominantly for Remain, by 75% to 25%.

As older Leave voters die, and younger Remain supporting youngsters come of age, it means that if the Referendum had been held just a bit later, Remain would have won.

(This simply shows how tenuous was the Leave vote – it wasn’t a landslide, in just very slightly different circumstances, Brexit would not now be happening.)

• The referendum, by act of Parliament, was not legally binding, but simply an advisory exercise. The Supreme Court ruled that only an act of Parliament could result in Britain leaving the EU. But no such act has been passed by Parliament.

The government wrongly advised Parliament that the decision to leave the EU had been made in the referendum, and that Parliament only needed to vote to give the Prime Minister permission to give notice to the EU that the UK was leaving.

However, many leading lawyers are now saying this was incorrect. The referendum, being advisory, could not give an instruction on leaving the EU. Consequently, it’s claimed that Theresa May’s letter to the EU under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty was invalid. This is currently the subject of a legal challenge.

These are just some of the key reasons why the EU referendum was flawed, leading to the biggest constitutional crisis for Britain in modern times.

The EU referendum, like all referendums, was nothing more than a lottery. And unfortunately, this time, we are all the losers.

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So, for all the worrying, it looks like tomorrow’s Art.50 European Council will be a procession. The draft Withdrawal Agreement is 75% green, transition agreements are all in place and the events in Salisbury have reminded everyone that there are good external reasons to get on with each other.

Of course, it’s not nearly that simple.

The Irish dimension remains no nearer to securing a non-Option C outcome and there are important gaps on dispute resolution. But for boosters, there’s a lot to be happy about.

And one marker of that, and of the more general buy-in to the agreement, is the proliferation of fig-leaves.

By that I mean symbolic elements that do not challenge the basic outlines of the deal, but suggest steely resolve and not letting ‘them’ get the better of ‘us’.

To be clear, these are not un-important elements, especially for those directly involved, but in the wider scheme of things they are largely marginal.

I’ll hesitate to call the ‘new passports to be made in the Netherlands‘ story such a fig-leaf, although it is a classic bit of misdirection (and an education on what free trade actually involves).

However, the furore over fishing in the UK is a fig-leaf: with several MPs threatening to vote down the Article 50 deal if the Common Fisheries Policy continues through to the end of transition, and more stunts on the Thames yesterday, it is clear there is much heat around this issue.

However, heat is not light, and it not clear that those MPs can secure Labour support, especially when the government has said that rejecting the deal means leaving without one at all: the former get to stand up for their constituents, while the government gets to keep its deal with the EU27.

Even if there were to be a concession on CFP, it would be a very small economic effect and one likely to flounder (sorry) on the lack of alternative fisheries management arrangements that could come into effect in March 2019.

It is tempting to see the Gibraltar issue in a similar light on the EU’s side. Spain has been reported to be blocking agreement tomorrow until the status of the territory is addressed. However, the mood in Brussels seems to be that this can be pushed into bilateral discussions between London and Madrid and needn’t jeopardise the rest of the progress.

Important as Gibraltar is as a symbol of Spanish politics – especially in a period of territorial uncertainty – it is also an important part of the southern Spanish regional economy, so the extent to which the country will want to endanger that – and be seen as responsible for the compromising of relations with the UK – must be under question.

In sum, the momentum that has built up in Article 50 is now quite considerable and is making it harder for any one to step away from it all. While the calls heard this week for a final text by June look hubristic, it is evident that much ground has been covered and that people will be working hard to cover the rest.

Which brings once again to the elephant in the room.

The Irish dimension is now approaching a difficult phase. Option C is drawn up and agreed in principle as a backstop, but the UK has said it really doesn’t want it. The question now is whether Options A or B can also be developed enough to replace C. Certainly that’s part of the logic in pushing the framework for the future relationship as far and as fast as possible and for the efforts being made to develop technological solutions for specific border issues.

But time is running low and the game of chicken hasn’t got much road left. The talk that the UK might be given only until June to work out alternatives before Option C gets locked in is not definitive, but if the European Council does approve that, then more difficulties will ensue.

A possible option is agreeing that work will continue through past March 2019 and into transition, as part of the future relationship talks: things would be fine in the interim, as transition extends everything, and it would mean more time to ‘do it right’. The fear – especially in Dublin – is that such kicking into the long grass might mean a loss of concentrated minds and support for following through.

If Ireland is never going to become a fig-leaf, because of its scale and its knock-on effects, then we should also keep in mind that Article 50 is – more generally speaking – still not a done deal.

Fig-leaves there may be, but recent history tells us to be cautious about making assumptions: political calculations can change and individuals can have very different perceptions of costs and benefits to the rest of us.

A final salutary thought then: when Article 50 has previously made progress, that has been followed by new impasses. Don’t be surprised to see the same once again.

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Sometimes someone says something that will be remembered forever and quoted in history books as the phrase that summed it all up.

That moment came today when Britain’s former international trade chief compared Brexit to giving up a three-course meal for a packet of crisps.

Sir Martin Donnelly, until last year the top civil servant in Liam Fox’s Department of International Trade, warned that Britain faced a direct threat to its status as a leading service economy if it did not agree to close alignment with EU Single Market rules.

Sir Martin told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the UK risked being shut out entirely from its biggest market.

“You’re giving up a three-course meal, the depth and intensity of our trade relationship across the European Union and partners now, for the promise of a packet of crisps in the future, if we manage to do trade deals in the future outside the EU which aren’t going to compensate for what we’re giving up,” he said.

The arithmetic just doesn’t add up, he said.

He added that the EU was “the only functioning market for services in the world” and key to Britain’s prosperity as an advanced service economy.

“We risk losing that level playing field or being shut out entirely and we have got to look at how this really works in practice,” he said.

“The challenge if we choose not to stay in the single market, is can we negotiate equal access in all those areas of services without agreeing to obey the same rules as everybody else?

“I’m afraid I think that’s not a negotiation, that is something for a fairy godmother. It’s not going to happen.”

Sir Martin, a former Treasury adviser, said his advice could not be written off as pessimism from a Europhile mandarin, as ministers have attempted to do in the past.

“We really have to focus on the realities of Brexit and the choices we’ve got ahead of us. If we leave the customs union and the single market, we are taking away the access that we’ve got to 60% of our trade, nearly half with the EU and the other 12% through EU preferential trade deals.”

In a speech scheduled for tonight, and which is bound to overshadow Liam Fox’s earlier speech of today, Sir Martin will say:

“Given the negative consequences of leaving, and the lack of any significant offsetting advantages, I believe it is likely the UK will seek to return to full membership of the EU single market in due course.

“But significant damage to employment, the structure of the economy and the competitiveness of UK firms can be expected in the meantime.”

On the Today programme, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson responded that he strongly dissented with the comments of “my old friend, Sir Martin Donnelly… with some talk of packets of crisps and three-course meals.”

Mr Johnson commented, “If you look at the real growth opportunities in this country they are not in the European Union. Growth markets in the world are outside the EU and we should go for growth.”

He added, “I’ve known Martin for many years and he’s a very, very good man..

“He’s an excellent man but I don’t agree for a moment with what he says. Actually our trade with the EU has been declining rapidly over the last ten years as a share of our total trade. It’s gone from about 55% to well under about 44% in ten years.

“If you look at where the growth is since 2010 the growth rate in our exports to the EU has been about 10% and growth to America is 40%, growth with Saudi Arabia 40%, growth with Japan 60%, growth with Korea up 100%.”

But Boris Johnson was attempting to bamboozle his audience with numbers, as the growth rates he quoted hide the reality.

In 2016, UK exports to the EU were £236 billion (43% of all UK exports). UK imports from the EU were £318 billion (54% of all UK imports).

There may be bigger growth of trade with other countries, but nothing comes anywhere near to the value of our trade with the EU.

Whereas 43% of our exports go to the EU, only 19% goes to the USA (our second largest export market next to the EU). There is no way that our sales to the USA could reach anywhere close to 43%.

Mr Johnson referred to the UK’s growing export market to Saudi Arabia – but most of that growth relates to the sale of weapons of war.

Saudi Arabia is the UK’s largest weapons client and has bought more than £3bn of British arms in the past two years.

Last year campaigners lost a high-profile court case calling for UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia to be stopped over humanitarian concerns.

The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) tried to stop the UK government from granting weapons-export licences to Saudi Arabia because of widespread concerns over the civilian death toll of its two-year bombing campaign in Yemen.

Frankly, it’s quite appalling that the Foreign Secretary has heralded Britain’s growing exports of weapons to Saudi Arabia as anything to be proud about.

UK’s exports to Japan in 2016 were worth £11.6bn, a 10% increase from the year before. But that’s additional trade with Japan that the UK has achieved whilst an EU member; it does not have to be either/or, it can be both.

Mr Johnson also referred to 100% growth in the UK’s exports with South Korea, which indeed did grow from just over £3bn in 2010 to just over £6bn in 2016.

But how can £6 billion of our exports to South Korea compare to our £236 billion of exports to the EU?

And what Mr Johnson failed to mention is that our exports to South Korea only shot up after the EU had sealed a trade agreement with that country, which has been in effect since 2011.

From March next year, Britain will no longer benefit from that EU trade agreement with South Korea, along with EU trade deals with almost 60 other countries across the world.

Once outside the EU and its Single Market or Customs Union, the UK will have to negotiate all those trade agreements again from scratch.

Trade experts say that will take many, many years to achieve, and it’s unlikely that Britain’s new trade agreements with those countries will be anywhere near as good, let alone better, than the agreements we already have now through the EU.

What Mr Johnson also failed to point out is that the EU does not stop us trading with countries across the world.

In the EU, we have the best of both worlds: trade with our closest and most important international export and import market, and trade with countries across the world.

Mr Johnson and Tory Brexit ministers have referred to EU trade agreements as something that are imposed on us.

But as an EU member, the UK fully participates in the negotiating and agreeing of EU trade deals. And as the EU is the world’s biggest exporter and importer, it can negotiate the best deals.

The way Boris Johnson talks, it seems he thinks he is very clever and his audiences are very stupid. But it’s becoming clearer by the day that it’s completely the other way round.

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The post Brexit: Dinner or a packet of crisps? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

At the moment there is a cherry picking debate going on in British politics, about which parts of the UK’s trading relationship with the EU should be kept after Brexit. Theresa May is hoping for a transition period of around two years for the UK to remain in the EU’s customs union and single market after the UK leaves the EU in March 2019, while some Brexiteer Tories in her cabinet want the UK to be completely outside of the EU before then.

On the other hand Jeremy Corbyn would like the UK to remain in the EU’s customs union to ensure free trade with Europe, which would benefit British industry after the UK has left the EU. One of Jeremy Corbyn’s colleagues in the Labour Party, Barry Gardiner, who is Shadow International Trade Secretary was quoted in The Independent as saying, “Labour cannot support single market membership because it would dishonour Brexit vote”.

Even if the UK remained in the EU’s customs union and single market, the British people would no longer be able to send elected representatives to the European Parliament, unless the UK retained its full membership of the EU. The loss of access to the European Parliament for British people would be worse than the loss of a trading relationship with Europe, because sending elected MEPs to the European Parliament represents a cultural and political link with Europe as a whole, as well as giving UK representatives a say in Europe’s economic policies.

If a MEP representing a UK constituency is doing his or her job properly, then that representative should be helping constituents in the UK to connect with those living in other EU member states, in order to support the common interests of EU citizens, which will shape the direction of Europe in the future. This could be done by creating better transport links across the English Channel and North Sea, and for the UK to join the Schengen area. This would help to remind the British that they are also both Europeans and EU citizens. But first of all Brexit must be cancelled.

©Jolyon Gumbrell 2018

Sources

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/corbyn-brexit-speech-live-updates-labour-eu-customs-union-party-policy-theresa-may-a8228496.html

©Jolyon Gumbrell 2018

The post Worse than the loss of trade appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The Good Friday Agreement was a landmark achievement that completely opened all the borders between Ireland and Northern Ireland. This remarkable initiative brought peace at last at the turn of the millennium.

That peace is now threatened by Brexit.

The Tory government is hellbent on a hard Brexit, meaning the UK will leave the EU and its Single Market and customs union.

If that happens, it will be impossible to avoid the return of hard borders on the island of Ireland.

And that will mean undoing years of delicate and intricate work to create the Good Friday Agreement, that ended decades of terrible and intransigent sectarian violence.

There is talk of vague technological solutions to create semi-transparent borders, but nobody has been able to explain exactly how they would work, and nobody with any sense or understanding of the situation has any belief that such fanciful ideas could ever work, let alone be accepted or acceptable.

So hellbent (yes, the word has been used twice on purpose) are some Brexit politicians in their ideological desperation for Brexit, that they have now proposed scrapping the Good Friday agreement, as it is getting in their way.

They can have no idea of the Pandora’s box they are willing to prise open to the detriment of everyone.

Labour is about to announce that it will support staying in the EU customs union, which would allow the open borders between Northern Ireland and Ireland to remain. This weekend an alliance of over 80 senior figures in the Labour Party also called on the party to go one step further, and to support the UK staying in the EU Single Market too.

This is called a ‘soft Brexit’. But a soft Brexit means that we would be, like Norway, a member of the European Union in all but name: yes, enjoying the benefits of membership, but not having any say or vote in the rules, regulations and laws of the EU that we would have to follow.

Absolutely none of this makes sense.

The only rational resolution is for Britain to scrap Brexit and to remain a full member of the European Union. There is no agreement that will be as good as the one we have now, as an EU member.

And the sooner the country realises that, the sooner we can get back to where we were before this madness all started on 23 June 2016.

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Hard Brexit = Hard border

→ Brexit threatens peace – Please shareHARD BREXIT = HARD BORDERThe Good Friday Agreement was a landmark achievement that completely opened all the borders between Ireland and Northern Ireland. This remarkable initiative brought peace at last at the turn of the millennium. That peace is now threatened by Brexit.The Tory government is hellbent on a hard Brexit, meaning the UK will leave the EU and its Single Market and customs union.If that happens, it will be impossible to avoid the return of hard borders on the island of Ireland. And that will mean undoing years of delicate and intricate work to create the Good Friday Agreement, that ended decades of terrible and intransigent sectarian violence. There is talk of vague technological solutions to create semi-transparent borders, but nobody has been able to explain exactly how they would work, and nobody with any sense or understanding of the situation has any belief that such fanciful ideas could ever work, let alone be accepted or acceptable.So hellbent (yes, the word has been used twice on purpose) are some Brexit politicians in their ideological desperation for Brexit, that they have now proposed scrapping the Good Friday agreement, as it is getting in their way. They can have no idea of the Pandora’s box they are willing to prise open to the detriment of everyone.Labour is about to announce that it will support staying in the EU customs union, which would allow the open borders between Northern Ireland and Ireland to remain. This weekend an alliance of over 80 senior figures in the Labour Party also called on the party to go one step further, and to support the UK staying in the EU Single Market too.This is called a ‘soft Brexit’. But a soft Brexit means that we would be, like Norway, a member of the European Union in all but name: yes, enjoying the benefits of membership, but not having any say or vote in the rules, regulations and laws of the EU that we would have to follow.Absolutely none of this makes sense. The only rational resolution is for Britain to scrap Brexit and to remain a full member of the European Union. There is no agreement that will be as good as the one we have now, as an EU member. And the sooner the country realises that, the sooner we can get back to where we were before this madness all started on 23 June 2016.• Words by Jon Danzig. Video by the European Parliament (reproduced with kind permission).• This video is now on YouTube. Please share: youtu.be/ejnljAIbuv8• Please re-Tweet: twitter.com/Reasons2Remain/status/967873784714809344********************************************► Watch Jon Danzig's video on YouTube: 'Can Britain Stop Brexit?' Go to CanBritainStopBrexit.com► Read Jon Danzig's article: 'Why Brexit is madness' jondanzig.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/why-brexit-is-madness.html********************************************• To follow and support Reasons2Remain just ‘like’ the page, and please invite all your friends to like the page. Instructions to ensure you get notifications of all our stories:1. Click on the ‘Following’ button under the Reasons2Remain banner2. Change the ‘Default’ setting by clicking ‘See first’.********************************************• Please rate Reasons2Remain out of 5 stars. Here's the link: facebook.com/Reasons2Remain/reviews/********************************************• Follow Reasons2Remain on Twitter: twitter.com/reasons2remain and Instagram: instagram.com/reasons2remain/********************************************• Explore our unique Reasons2Remain gallery of over 1,000 graphics and articles: reasons2remain.co.uk********************************************• Reasons2Remain is an entirely unfunded community campaign, unaffiliated with any other group or political party, and is run entirely by volunteers. If you'd like to help, please send us a private message.********************************************• © Reasons2Remain 2018. All our articles and graphics are the copyright of Reasons2Remain. We only allow sharing using the Facebook share button. Any other use requires our advance permission in writing.#STOPBREXIT #EXITBREXIT

Posted by Reasons2Remain on Sunday, 25 February 2018

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EU negotiators beware. At least some of those on the other side of the table from you don’t just want Britain to leave the EU. They want to see the end of the EU altogether.

That’s been the aim of prominent Brexit campaigners from the start. And it’s certainly the aim of the guy who started Brexit: UKIP MEP and their former leader, Nigel Farage.

Last September, Mr Farage received a standing ovation at a far-right rally in Berlin when he addressed Germany’s anti-EU party, Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Mr Farage was applauded after urging the AfD to fight for German independence from the EU.

This is nothing new. On the morning of the referendum, with his and his party’s dreams realised, Mr Farage made clear that there was unfinished business with the EU.

“I hope this victory brings down this failed project … let’s get rid of the flag, the anthem, Brussels, and all that has gone wrong,” he said in his 4am victory speech.

On Talk Radio in Spain four years ago, Mr Farage said that he not only wanted Britain to leave the European Union, he also wanted to see “Europe out of the European Union” – in other words, the complete disintegration of the European Single Market.

Some ardent Tory Brexiters also share UKIP’s goal to see the end of the European Union altogether.

Conservative Steve Baker MP, Wycombe, one of Britain’s Brexit negotiators, said in 2010 that he wanted to see the European Union “wholly torn down.”

In a speech to a right-wing think tank he branded the EU as an “obstacle” to world peace and “incompatible” with a free society.

In his 2010 speech Mr Baker also told the cheering audience: “I think UKIP and the ‘Better Off Out’ campaign lack ambition. I think the European Union needs to be wholly torn down.”

In a keynote speech for Vote Leave during the referendum campaign, Michael Gove, MP, then Justice Secretary and now Secretary of State for the Environment, made similar comments about bringing down the EU.

Mr Gove said:

“Britain voting to leave will be the beginning of something potentially even more exciting – the democratic liberation of a whole continent.”

He described Britain’s departure from the EU as “a contagion” that could spread across Europe.

Reporting on Mr Gove’s speech, the BBC stated: “Leaving the EU could also encourage others to follow suit, said Mr Gove.”

Commenting after the speech, a senior aide for the Leave campaign indicated to HeraldScotland that Mr Gove would be, “happy if Britain’s in-out referendum sparked similar polls across Europe.”

The Herald Scotland reporter asked if Brexit would lead to the break-up of the EU as we knew it and the aide replied, “Yes.”

When asked if the Out campaign hoped that it would trigger “the end of the Brussels block” the aide replied, “Certainly.”

In his speech, Mr Gove suggested that far from being the exception if Britain left the EU, it would become the norm as most other EU member states would choose to govern themselves. It was membership of the EU that was the anomaly, argued Mr Gove.

The Guardian headline was:

‘Brexit could spark democratic liberation of continent, says Gove’

The Telegraph headline:

‘Michael Gove urges EU referendum voters to trigger ‘the democratic liberation of a whole continent’

The Express headline:

‘BREXIT WILL BREAK-UP EU: Leave vote to spark domino effect across bloc, says Gove’

The Bloomberg headline:

‘U.K. Brexit Vote Would Be End of EU as We Know It, Gove Says’

The Irish Times headline:

‘Michael Gove says other EU states may leave EU’

Britain’s EU referendum was not just about whether Britain should remain in the European Union. For some leading Brexit campaigners, it was a referendum about whether the European Union itself should continue to exist.

Leading Brexit supporters hope that what happened in Britain on 23 June 2016 could result in the end of the EU. This is no doubt a wake-up call for pro-EU supporters across the continent.

Britain chose not to be one of the founding members of the Union back in 1957 but joined later, in 1973.

Now Britain is destined to be the only member ever to leave the Union, with the open aspiration of at least some ‘Leave’ campaigners that other EU members will also follow Britain in exiting the EU.

EU leaders are no doubt aware, and alarmed, that the downfall of the EU is the aim of at least two of Theresa May’s ministers.

For all of us who cherish the European Union as one of the most successful post-war projects, this is no longer just a battle about Brexit.

This is a campaign to ensure that Brexit politicians don’t succeed in inflicting grievous damage to the EU, with their stated aim to destroy the European Union entirely.

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Many Brexiteers still do not understand the difference between “after the referendum” and “after Brexit”. If there was an increase in British exports as a result of the value of the pound falling following the EU referendum in June 2016, then people need to remember that the UK’s economy at that time was still acting according to its membership of the European Union. Tariff free access to the EU’s customs union and single market will apply until the UK leaves the EU, likewise trade agreements with the rest of the world are already in place, which allow the UK as an EU member state to trade with non EU countries. The negative economic consequences of Brexit will only be fully felt when the UK leaves the EU.

China is in the process of improving its trade links with the EU. On 25th January 2018 an article entitled “Die Seidenstraße endet in Duisburg”, which translates as “The silk road ends in Duisburg” appeared on the website of the German news programme “tagesschau”. The article was about the goods trains, which run on a 10,000 kilometre stretch of railway track between the cities of Duisburg in Germany and Chongqing in China. According to the article 25 trains a week arrive in Duisburg from China, which take around 12 days to reach their destination compared to around 40 days if the freight was sent by sea. Although a freight train cannot compete with a cargo ship on the quantity of goods it can carry – one train can transport a maximum of 60 containers whereas a containership can transport around 10,000 containers – the freight train has the advantage that it brings goods to a central logistics destination in mainland Europe.

The rail link from China through Russia to the European Union could become more significant, after the UK leaves the EU. Once the UK has left the EU’s customs union and single market, then Chinese exporters will be less likely to use British ports, because the UK will no longer have privileged access to the EU’s consumer market of 27 member states. Nobody knows what percentage of tariffs the EU will put on goods arriving from the UK, once the UK becomes a third country. If it takes 49.6 days for a container ship to travel from Shanghai to Felixstowe, and goods cannot easily be distributed from the UK to other parts of Europe, then Chinese exporters will use ports such as Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg as well as Duisburg which will remain in the EU rather than a British port.

Brexiteers often say that the UK does not need the EU, because the UK can export to the rest of the world. On the other hand, is it a good idea for the rest of the world to know, that the UK is voluntarily excluding itself from privileged access to Europe’s consumer market as a result of leaving the EU? Would any other country in the modern world seriously consider leaving an important economic market, because that country dislikes regulations to protect the environment, health and safety, and workers rights?

Sources

http://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/seidenstrasse-107.html

http://ports.com/sea-route/port-of-shanghai,china/port-of-felixstowe,united-kingdom/

https://ec.europa.eu/growth/content/brexit-%E2%80%93-guidance-stakeholders-impact-field-industrial-products_en

©Jolyon Gumbrell 2018

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If you take the wrong job, you can resign. If you choose the wrong partner, you can leave. If you go on the wrong journey, you can turn back.

In our personal lives, second thoughts are allowed.

Thinking again, with the benefit of more information, knowledge and experience, often provides a superior result. As the saying goes, ‘Second thoughts are best’.Why should it be any different in politics?

Britain desperately needs a chance to have second thoughts about Brexit.

After all, nobody gave an informed decision for the UK to leave the EU in the referendum, because we were not adequately informed.

On the contrary, the country was misinformed, in a referendum that was profoundly flawed.

The Leave campaign had to rely entirely on lies, mistruths and false promises to win the referendum.

Furthermore, their win was only by the tiniest of margins.

Many people directly affected by the outcome of the referendum were denied a vote.

And only a minority of registered voters voted for Leave – just 37% of the electorate.

That proportion would not even be sufficient to change the constitution of the Conservative Party, or UKIP.

Nobody knew in the referendum what Brexit meant, and we still don’t know.

Except that we now know just how painful Brexit will be for Britain.

With higher food prices (they are higher already); the loss of a say in the running of our continent; the loss of free movement for Britons across our continent, as well as the loss of free movement for our European neighbours coming here.

Not to mention key industries leaving us, our economy suffering, and years, probably decades, of disruption ahead.

All to get back our country that we never lost; all to gain sovereignty that we always had; and all to reduce migration when we’ll still need just as many migrants as before to do all the jobs we simply don’t have enough Britons to do.

With the benefit of hindsight, many people in Britain can now see and understand that the Brexit decision was wrong.

How often in our own personal lives have we wished we could have reversed a decision with the benefit of hindsight, but alas, it was too late?

But the thing about Brexit is that it isn’t too late. We have not yet left the EU. Britain can #StopBrexit, if that’s what Britain wants.

Increasingly, polls indicate that’s exactly what most Britons now want. A U-turn on Brexit.

Across the country, voters are having second thoughts about Brexit, and it’s time our politicians took notice.
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Tens of thousands of EU citizens have decided to leave Britain since the referendum. The latest figures reveal the highest outflow of EU migrants for a decade, and a huge reduction in the number of EU migrants moving to the UK.

130,000 citizens from the EU decided to leave Britain in the year to September 2017. And around 47,000 fewer migrants from other EU countries moved here compared to the previous year.

The latest figures also show that more British people are emigrating than Britons returning to live here.

It means that net EU migration – the difference between arrivals and departures – was only 90,000, the lowest for five years.

Commented the BBC home affairs correspondent, Danny Shaw:

‘What explanation could there be for the decline in EU migration other than Brexit?’

He added:

‘Whether it’s a feeling that EU citizens aren’t wanted in the UK, uncertainty about their future or the growing relative strength of other EU economies, there has been a notable shift away from Britain’s shores.’

The NHS as a result is at crisis point. NHS England has nearly 100,000 unfilled jobs, a situation described as “dangerously” understaffed. That’s one in 11 posts unfilled, according to the latest figures.

Most EU doctors working for the NHS have indicated that they plan to leave, according to a survey by the British Medical Journal.

Record numbers of nurses from the EU have left the NHS since the Brexit vote, according to the Royal College of Nursing.

Around 10,000 EU health workers have left since the referendum, according to the National Health Executive.

And the number of nurses from the EU registering to work in the UK has dropped by 96% since the EU referendum, according to statistics by the Nursing and Midwifery Council.

We’ve made them feel unwelcome, so who can blame them for leaving us? But believe me, we’ll miss them when they’ve gone.

Who will give us medical treatment in hospital? Who will take care of our parents and grandparents in care homes? Who will do the millions of jobs that we simply don’t have enough Britons to do?

There’s a host of reasons to want citizens here from the rest of the EU to stay, and to want to stay. But the opposite is happening since the Brexit vote.

EU citizens living here are not stupid (far from it; on average, they’re more educated than most of us, and their command of English puts some of us to shame.)

They know that one of the main reasons, if not the number one reason, that people opted for Brexit in the referendum is because they perceived that we have too many EU migrants.

Too many? Oh, heaven help us. If anything, we don’t have enough. We’ll soon see.

Britain has far more vacancies than Britons to fill them. Around 750,000 job vacancies last month alone. We don’t have enough Britons to do the jobs that EU citizens are (or were) happy to do for us.

They’re mostly young, fit, healthy and clever; they took the initiative to come here and they came here for one primary reason. Not to sponge off our welfare system. Not to cause havoc. Not to undermine our democracy or our culture. They came to work.

And that is mostly what they do. Work.

Very few indeed are taking benefits; indeed, they pay far more into the Treasury than they take out. And if there is no work, they mostly either don’t come here, or mostly don’t stay.

Our loss. There are 27 other EU countries willing to not just accept, but to embrace, the concept of free movement of people across our continent, so that their countries can be enriched by mostly young migrants willing to work, pay taxes, and contribute.

Our loss, in more ways than one. Because this isn’t just about Brexit, is it?

This is about what kind of country Britain is going to be.

Are we to become an insular, isolated, xenophobic country that doesn’t like migrants; that makes them feel unwelcome, so that they don’t want to be here anymore?

The governent’s own economic analyses (that they didn’t want us to see) predict that every Brexit scenario will leave the UK economically worse off than it would be if we stayed in the EU.

EU citizens leaving the UK will not solve or help this. (On the contrary).

But now, many are leaving.

Sure, Brexiters will say, they can come back, if we need them.

But the thing is, they got the message; they know we need them. The problem is, they no longer feel we want them.

Is it too late to say, ‘Please don’t go’?

Only if we can stop Brexit. That’s what we have to do.

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Problem-oriented project learning is integral to Roskilde University pedagogical philosophy, which requires students to become researchers already from their first day at the university. Every semester, the students have to come up a new research idea and find fellow students to work with to carry out a project. The project is worth half their ETCS points and it is the only grade, they get in their first year of study. Thus, it is imperative for students to not only find an interesting topic, but also students they can work with.

The semester starts with project group formation, a 3-day process, which begins with brainstorming research ideas and ends with formation of research groups working on specific topics. The aim of the process is to facilitate an inclusive space where all students can exchange ideas and discuss potential research topics. However, the process can be a brutal example of social exclusion and alienation, where weaker students struggle to find groups. Thus, it is crucial to make sure the process is open and inclusive. All research ideas are written on a whiteboard and posters, enabling everyone, including the lecturers, to see which ideas are active (see photo at the end of the text). Moreover, groups are open for new students to join until 1 hour before the deadline.

This semester, a colleague and I facilitated the project group formation for second semester students studying international social sciences. The first day is all about generating ideas, which the students explore in more detail on the second day and the final day is about agreeing on a research topic.

The first day, I introduced the requirements for the project. Afterwards, lecturers presented their research interests, which aimed to inform the students of the supervision topics available. Then students volunteered to give ‘fire-speeches’, i.e. promote their research ideas and convince other to join them. My colleague wrote the research ideas on posters, which we placed across the room, so students interested in an idea could, write their brainstorming down and, if they left, new students could follow the discussion. At the end of the first day, the students had to pick two themes this reduced the number of themes.

The second day, the students had to explore these two ideas further. Supervisors are present during the whole group formation, and they talk to students about their research ideas. This semester, one group wanted to go undercover in a cult, which led to discussions with several supervisors about ethics of undercover research. In the end, the students joined other research topics. At the end of day two, the students had to choose one research theme they wanted to explore in more details the final day.

During the final day, the students developed research topics and wrote short statements, which enabled me to allocate appropriate supervisor to the projects. A few students, who had not been present the previous days, were able to join existing discussions. There were several big groups, which had to find a way of separating into smaller groups (the maximum numbers of students in a group is six). My colleague and I helped these groups to find different perspectives on the same research topic, which enabled them to separate into smaller project groups.

The process often generate clusters of research topics. This semester three groups write about public spaces and borders; two groups write about asylum centres, another two groups about social media and business whilst there are two groups looking at Fiji coups, one group from a domestic and political perspective and the other group from an IR perspective.

Overall, the 111 students have formed 22 project groups with 2 till 6 students in each group. It is now time for the students to formulate their research design, agree on how to collaborate, and make an appointment to see their new supervisor.  Thus, the group work has only just started.

Over the coming semester, I will discuss some of the benefits and challenges of problem-oriented project work, including giving and receiving peer feedback, workshops focusing on how the students can manage their project and group work, and the role of the supervisor.

 

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A good rule of thumb is that when you’re in a hole, you stop digging. Unless, of course, you’re in the tunnelling business.

The British government is very much not in that line of work – such things being outsourced – so the rule would seem to apply in spades.

And yet is spades that the Cabinet appear to be holding in their hands, as the series of speeches on Brexit continues this week.

So what’s going on?

The first observation is that none of the speeches to date – Johnson’s, May’s, Davis’, Gove’s – have really said anything new. They promise bright futures and underline common interests with European friends, but they lack substantive detail on how to get to these sunlit uplands. Read in soundbites, one can find evidence of whatever one likes, as well as whatever one doesn’t.

Given that this cycle of speeches was pitched as a moment of revelation and clarification, the lack of a road map will continue to concern those involved in the Article 50 negotiations, especially as we move towards next month’s European Council, where progress will have to have been achieved on a number of points.

The mutual inconsistency of the speeches – e.g. on state aid, or on deregulation – points to the on-going lack of consensus in Cabinet, which tomorrow’s Chequers meeting is unlikely to resolve.

All of which brings us back to the opening observation on holes.

Prudent politics would suggest that at times of uncertainty, the default option should be to avoid making rash decisions. Better instead to find a holding position and wait for things to change – as they always do – and hopefully become less fraught.

(Clearly, there’s also the maverick school of thought, which pushes for radical action in periods of uncertainty, but this has to be grounded in profound self-confidence, some kind of justifiable pay-off, plus a sense that holding isn’t possible. Neither the first nor the last of these would appear to hold in this case.)

The effect – if not the object – of Cabinet’s indecision has been to create a holding pattern, visible in several places.

Most obviously, the lack of push-back on a stand-still/’full monty’ transition is a particularly pure expression of this. Take the UK out of the EU, but keep everything else in place. Even the mooted intervention from Davis today on a mechanism to indicate displeasure with new regulation during this period is a minor point in comparison to the rest of the package, with the UK becoming a rule-taker.

But it’s also to be seen in the shifting rhetoric of various Cabinet ministers. There is much more talk now of gaining the power to diverge from EU regulation, rather than actually diverging. In this world of alignment, there is a growing assumption that the UK will remain aligned unless it chooses to de-align, rather than implementing a new framework from the get-go. Even the obvious exception to this, agriculture, is set up to stick to CAP rules until the end of 2020, and is a relatively self-contained area of regulation: moving to a UK agricultural policy will not necessarily require similar shifts in other parts of policy.

Again, as I’ve argued before, it might be that for immediate political purposes in the UK, it will suffice that the country leaves the EU in March 2019, and then a new period will begin in which government can work out a long-term plan for its EU policy without quite the same pressure.

Indeed, by pumping out the contradictory messages contained in the speeches of late, it can hold off different factions until there is simply no time to plot another course.

The danger in all this is that it is not a given that present confusion and uncertainty will be replaced by future clarity and security. Rather, trying to keep things the same represents a rather precarious path.

That precarious nature is not so much intrinsic to the EU side – in broad terms, having the UK as a (literally) silent partner looks pretty good – as it is to the UK side. Paying into the budget, taking all the rules, obeying all the ECJ judgements, continuing free movement: each one is a red rag to eurosceptics, who would not struggle to find sympathetic media outlets to spread their message.

Since any agreement on ‘not digging’ is likely to have clauses about the ability of either party to withdraw from that agreement, a new contest risks springing up in the UK about making use of those clauses: most obviously, it would become a key cleavage in the 2022 general election, especially if transition has been extended.

Not making a decision is an often-overlooked option within negotiations. But leaving a decision for now should not be the same as ignoring it for good: there is always a reckoning to be had. To think otherwise is foolish at best, fatally damaging at worst.

The post Nothing has changed appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Next year, the UK will be the only EU member ever to leave. No other countries are leaving. On the contrary, more countries are queuing to join.

In the EU, Britain and Britons have a say and a vote on the running and the future direction of our continent. Every five years, we’ve been able to vote for 73 UK MEPs to represent us in the European Parliament, which debates and democratically passes EU laws.

The European Union has been a reforming organisation since its inception in the 1950s. Every single treaty has been fully debated and passed by our Parliament in Westminster.

Not once were any changes to our membership imposed on us, and neither could they be, as the EU is a democracy.

Furthermore, every new member that’s joined the EU has required the unanimous consent of all the Parliaments of every EU country, including the UK.

New members must adhere to strict joining requirements, including a commitment to EU values and principles.

These EU values include, “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.”

Before becoming a member, a country has to demonstrate that it has a stable government guaranteeing, “democracy, the rule of law, human rights, respect for and protection of minorities, the existence of a functioning market economy, and the capacity to cope with competitive pressure and market forces within the Union.”

The EU Council, comprising the elected leaders of every EU country, discusses and democratically agrees the agenda and future direction of the EU.

The European Commission is the servant of the EU, and not its master. The European Parliament elects the Commission President; has to approve each of the Commissioners, and has the democratic power to dismiss the entire Commission.

In the EU, we don’t lose sovereignty, we gain it. In the EU, we not only have a say and vote on the running of our country, but also our continent.

When Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, first applied for Britain to join the European Community back in 1961, he told the country it would involve some ‘pooling of sovereignty’ with other members.

But he eloquently explained that in renouncing some of our sovereignty, we receive in return a share of the sovereignty renounced by other members.

In urging Britain to accept that we will be stronger and more prosperous as a member of the Community, Mr Macmillan asked:

“Are we now to isolate ourselves from Europe, at a time when our own strength is no longer self-sufficient and when the leading European countries are joining together to build a future of peace and progress, instead of wasting themselves in war?”

Sadly, almost 60 years later, the answer is yes. Britain is now planning to isolate itself from the affairs and organisation of the mainland of our continent.

For a good reason? None that anyone has been able to explain or demonstrate.

But it’s not too late for Britain to do a U-turn on Brexit, if that’s what Britain wants. Reasons2Remain is campaigning for a democratic reversal of Brexit.

Please support our efforts by sharing all our videos and articles widely. The link to our portfolio is at Reasons2Remain.co.uk

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Outside the EU, we lose a say and a vote

→ In the EU, we gain sovereignty – Please shareOUTSIDE THE EU, WE LOSE A SAY AND A VOTENext year, the UK will be the only EU member ever to leave. No other countries are leaving. On the contrary, more countries are queuing to join.In the EU, Britain and Britons have a say and a vote on the running and the future direction of our continent. Every five years, we’ve been able to vote for 73 UK MEPs to represent us in the European Parliament, which debates and democratically passes EU laws.The European Union has been a reforming organisation since its inception in the 1950s. Every single treaty has been fully debated and passed by our Parliament in Westminster. Not once were any changes to our membership imposed on us, and neither could they be, as the EU is a democracy.Furthermore, every new member that’s joined the EU has required the unanimous consent of all the Parliaments of every EU country, including the UK. New members must adhere to strict joining requirements, including a commitment to EU values and principles.These EU values include, "respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.”Before becoming a member, a country has to demonstrate that it has a stable government guaranteeing, “democracy, the rule of law, human rights, respect for and protection of minorities, the existence of a functioning market economy, and the capacity to cope with competitive pressure and market forces within the Union.”The EU Council, comprising the elected leaders of every EU country, discusses and democratically agrees the agenda and future direction of the EU. The European Commission is the servant of the EU, and not its master. The European Parliament elects the Commission President; has to approve each of the Commissioners, and has the democratic power to dismiss the entire Commission.Outside the EU, Britain will only be able to look on as EU laws are decided without us, even though those laws will affect us just as much, whether we’re a member or not.In the EU, we don’t lose sovereignty, we gain it. In the EU, we not only have a say and vote on the running of our country, but also our continent. When Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, first applied for Britain to join the European Community back in 1961, he told the country it would involve some ‘pooling of sovereignty’ with other members.But he eloquently explained that in renouncing some of our sovereignty, we receive in return a share of the sovereignty renounced by other members.In urging Britain to accept that we will be stronger and more prosperous as a member of the Community, Mr Macmillan asked:“Are we now to isolate ourselves from Europe, at a time when our own strength is no longer self-sufficient and when the leading European countries are joining together to build a future of peace and progress, instead of wasting themselves in war?”Sadly, almost 60 years later, the answer is yes. Britain is now planning to isolate itself from the affairs and organisation of the mainland of our continent. For a good reason? None that anyone has been able to explain or demonstrate.But it’s not too late for Britain to do a U-turn on Brexit, if that’s what Britain wants. Reasons2Remain is campaigning for a democratic reversal of Brexit. Please support our efforts by sharing all our videos and articles widely. The link to our portfolio is at Reasons2Remain.co.uk.• Words by Jon Danzig• Please re-Tweet: twitter.com/Reasons2Remain/status/966053667462897664• This video is also now on YouTube. Please share: youtu.be/4qRhtF-_5vQ#STOPBREXIT #EXITBREXIT

Posted by Reasons2Remain on Tuesday, 20 February 2018

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Who knows what Boris Johnson really believes, least of all him?

He previously said “what most people in this country want is the single market”, and he would personally vote to remain a member of it.

He told the BBC Andrew Marr Show in 2012: ″We would like a new relationship. And it’s very simple – what most people in this country want is the Single Market, the Common Market.”

In the same year, he told BBC Radio Five Live, “Whether you have an in/out referendum now, I can’t quite see why it would be necessary.”

He added that the prospect of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU would not “appeal”.

Mr Johnson asked, “Suppose Britain voted tomorrow to come out: what would actually happen?”

He continued:

“We’d still have huge numbers of staff trying to monitor what was going on in the community, only we wouldn’t be able to sit in the council of ministers, we wouldn’t have any vote at all. Now I don’t think that’s a prospect that’s likely to appeal.”

In The Telegraph in May 2013, Boris Johnson wrote that if Britain left the EU, “we would have to recognise that most of our problems are not caused by Bwussels” [sic].

In his article, titled ‘Quitting the EU won’t solve our problems, says Boris Johnson,’ he responded that, “the question of EU membership is no longer of key importance to the destiny of this country”.

Mr Johnson added that he supported an EU referendum – but warned that Britain’s problems will not be solved by simply leaving the EU as many of his Conservative colleagues apparently believed.

The then Mayor of London asserted:

“If we left the EU, we would end this sterile debate, and we would have to recognise that most of our problems are not caused by ‘Bwussels’, but by chronic British short-termism, inadequate management, sloth, low skills, a culture of easy gratification and underinvestment in both human and physical capital and infrastructure.”

He added:

“Why are we still, person for person, so much less productive than the Germans? That is now a question more than a century old, and the answer is nothing to do with the EU. In or out of the EU, we must have a clear vision of how we are going to be competitive in a global economy.”

On February 21 2016 – four months before the referendum – Mr Johnson stunned the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, by announcing he was joining the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union.

Winston Churchill’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames, immediately Tweeted: “Whatever my great friend Boris decides to do I know that he is NOT an outer.”

Just two weeks previously, Mr Johnson had written in his Telegraph column:

“It is also true that the single market is of considerable value to many UK companies and consumers, and that leaving would cause at least some business uncertainty, while embroiling the Government for several years in a fiddly process of negotiating new arrangements, so diverting energy from the real problems of this country – low skills, low social mobility, low investment etc – that have nothing to do with Europe.”

Just before deciding to back the Leave campaign, Mr Johnson also penned a pro-Remain column for the Telegraph in which he wrote that Britain’s continued membership of the EU would be a “boon for the world and for Europe”.

Johnson wrote of the EU: “This is a market on our doorstep, ready for further exploitation by British firms. The membership fee seems rather small for all that access. Why are we so determined to turn our back on it?”

But the column was never published, and a few days later Mr Johnson decided instead to back Brexit.

A spokesman for the ‘Remain’ campaign commented at the time, “Everybody in Westminster knows that Boris doesn’t really believe in Out. He’s putting his personal ambition before the national interest.”

Of course, all this might have a simpler explanation. Boris Johnson might have changed his mind.

But if he can change his mind, why won’t he allow the rest of the country to express a change of mind in a new vote?

The latest YouGov polls show that the Leave ship is sinking, with 2,400 Brexiters changing their minds across the UK every day, compared with only about 300 Remainers changing their minds.

Boris, you’re backing the wrong ship. Time to swap sides (again).

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When the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was interviewed in Rome early this week, he refused anything less then a full membership of the European Union. Although this is not the first time either Erdogan or his government’s officials are vociferously rejected a form of privileged partnership with the EU, I believe this is probably the right time for Turks to seriously consider a partnership with the EU, provided the offer still holds.

There are two good reasons for this.

Currently Turkey’s accession negotiations with the EU are on hold or it has been in hold for a while. Most people have lost track of what negotiation Chapter is currently open, if any, and which is closed/closed without completion and for what reason. While the EU’s migration deal of 2015 with Turkey was expected to re-energise the relationship between Turkey and the EU, it rather did not change much in the nature of this ever so complicated relationship. However it has been successful in helping the EU member states in stemming the flow of migrants reaching Europe from Sea. Additionally when the EU required the Turkish authorities to make certain changes in its Counter-Terrorism Law so that the EU could introduce visa free travel for Turkish citizens, something the EU promised Turks before approving the Migration deal, the Turkish government is resisting to take those steps.

As a result there is not a constructive or a friendly dialogue between the EU and Turkey that would, as one hoped, re-energise the relationship in some form. I believe if the Turkish government could agree to begin to talks about a Partnership with the EU, this ever slow progressing and complicated relationship could be given another shot.

Furthermore Turkey’s Syrian policy choices have ended up isolating her from the West and the United States of America at the international stage. Not acting in line with neither the EU member states nor with the Americans, it has been questioned whether Turkish government under Erdogan is cozying up to Russia. By seriously considering the option of privileged partnership, the Turkish government could show to the West that it still wants to be part of Europe or the EU. This does not however mean that the Turks would have to give up on full membership forever. Surely if a member state like the United Kingdom can exit the EU, and then hope to form a deep partnership with the EU, Turkey as a privileged partner of the EU could in the future ask to join the EU as a full member.

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Bigger than it looks

As a child, I used to like watching a TV programme where a bearded Australian would talk about some cartoons that he was going to show, hurriedly sketching a character in some dynamic pose.

Part of the fun was the way he caught the characters’ essence: distilling them into a single image.

Of course, this is a televisual treat now pushed to one side, for various reasons; but the guy’s catchphrase, which heads this post, sprang to mind the other day in a completely different context.

This week marks the end of the first part of the prep for Phase 2 talks in the Article 50 process. Since December’s European Council, both the UK and the EU have been engaged in internal negotiations.

For the EU, that’s meant agreeing the mandate for Phase 2, including yesterday’s proposal on transition.

For the UK, it’s meant getting caught up in questions about releasing impact assessments and starting to consider the preferred end-state of any future UK-EU relationship post-membership.

This last point – manifesting itself in this week’s Cabinet sub-committee meetings – were the prompt for my childhood memory, for they would seem to represent the logical point at which the UK can address the ever-mounting pressure to provide clarity on its intentions.

Swapshop

This demand comes from all quarters: domestic, EU and internationally. Without knowing where the UK might be trying to head, it’s very hard to plan, whether you’re a business, a citizen or a Commission negotiator: no headline goal means no way of building the more detailed things underneath that. My thoughts on this are long-standing and don’t bear repeating here, other than to recall that the UK’s current position is a set of mutually-inconsistent headlines (in the tabloid sense).

But as we move into Phase 2, where very precisely the future destination of this process is under discussion, it might seem logical that now is the moment to bite the bullet.

However, three big objections stand in the way.

The first is a point first suggested to me by @Sime0nStylites the other day, namely that Theresa May might well believe that she has a settled and suitably agreed plan.

Evidence of this comes from a speech given by her former strategy director, Chris Wilkins, to a UK in a Changing Europe event last week. Wilkins argued that May has always tried to place Brexit within a wider frame of the future of the country and the society we are trying to build. Laudable aims, but not obviously executed in practice. Matters of social justice do not map easily on to models of UK-EU relations and even where they do, Number 10 has not tried to make that case. As much as the tone of Wilkin’s speech might be understood through the lens of his former role, the decided lack of criticality suggests that the consistency of the Brexit agenda has not been seriously challenged on its own terms.

At the same time, my unwillingness to ascribe a lack of reflection to someone who has managed to make their way to the office of Prime Minister means that we have to handle this with a degree of caution. Even with her small circle of advisors, May has had more than enough exposure to critiques of the Lancaster House agenda to know that it is not sufficient to carry negotiations through to October. So there must be something more.

The Muppet Show

This leads nicely to the second objection, namely that there will be no detailing of a UK plan because no consensus is possible.

As the previous months has shown so frequently, the Cabinet – and the Conservatives more generally – remain split in their views. There is a significant group pushing for a hard break – up to and including walking away from the table – but there is also a blocking minority that wants a very soft model. Neither can force the other into a defeat, especially with a Labour party that continues to hedge its bets.

Obfuscation is thus a party management tool for May: by not collapsing her ambiguity she is able to offer treats to all, even as she fails to offer succor. As much as she appears to satisfy no-one, equally no-one can be sure of who might come next, so she remains in office. But that doesn’t mean she has freedom to do as she likes, but rather she has to continue to plot a tricky course between the different interests.

Danger Mouse

This domestic barrier is further aided by the nature of Article 50 itself.

There’s no intrinsic need to detail the final end-state within the Article 50 agreement, largely because it can be left to later. The only necessities are the Phase 1 issues, a framework for negotiating the new relationship and a set of transition arrangements. The first is in progress (albeit with some big issues still outstanding), the second is trivial and the last is close to agreement (since neither side wants to pick that fight).

Yes, once you begin the new relationship negotiations in April 2019, then you need an objective, but if you have a ‘full monty‘ transition, then there’s much less of a problem, since you’ve kept in place all the current policy arrangements.

To go one step further, the absence of a British position on the end-state might makes matters simpler, precisely because it precludes the inclusion of any language about the new relationship in the Article 50 text. Everyone can sign up to ‘deep and special’ (or similar language), but that hardly commits anyone to anything.

And to go another step, if May does fancy a softer Brexit, then this all would help to keep the UK closer to the EU, for lack of a viable alternative plan: going ‘full monty’ becomes an imperative to keep options open until a decision is made. The EU would likely not complain about a continuing stream of budget contributions without the costs of having the UK at the Council table.

Time for bed

As well as the cartoon programme, I also used to watch a Japanese show, about a monkey – made human – on some quest. I can honestly say that I never had the faintest clue what was going on and there never seemed to be a resolution, but it was quite a spectacle.

Importantly, Brexit is not a kid’s TV show. But the fog of confusion surrounding the UK government’s preferences on the future relationship with the EU are likely to hang around us from some time yet. How much of a problem that is – for the government’s longevity, for the conclusion of a deal on Article 50, or for the articulation of an idea of a future British society – remains debatable. However, if the UK is to move from crisis management to strategic planning, then that fog will have to lift.

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Just ten days before the EU referendum, I wrote an article for Independent Voices​ with the headline, ‘You won’t get your country back if you vote for Brexit. You’ll give it away to the most right-wing government in recent history.’

And so, it has come about. My article was shared by Independent readers a record 67,000 times, but Brexit went ahead.

Today, I am re-publishing my article from 13 June 2016. Not everything I predicted came true – but too much of it has:

“WE WANT OUR COUNTRY BACK!” is the clarion cry of many who want Britain to leave the European Union.

But whose country do they want back exactly? Your country? My country? Or really, just their country?

Before we leave the European Union and possibly change our country forever, we need to have an idea what country we’d leave behind, and what country we’d get instead, if we vote for Brexit on 23rd June.

Look carefully at those Tories who are running the ‘Leave’ campaign and calling for Britain to completely change direction outside the EU.

What could be their real motive?

Those leading Tories – Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, John Whittingdale, Priti Patel, and others – have in this campaign viciously attacked their own government and Prime Minister.

It’s been a nasty and sustained ‘blue on blue’ offensive.

Do they know what they’re doing?

Presumably, yes. The referendum presents for them a possible once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to win power for their style of right-wing Conservatism.

So when they say, “Let’s take back control”, they really mean, “We want to take control”.

When they say “Bring back power from Brussels”, they really mean, “We want that power”.

And when they say, “We want our country back”, they really mean their country. The true-blue right-wing Tory Britain of the past that they sorely miss.

These Conservatives have taken a calculated but clever risk. They know that if the referendum results in Brexit, it will mean the end of David Cameron’s premiership and those now in government who support his Remain campaign.

Then what?

There would be resignations and a new leader of the Conservative Party would be elected by the party’s membership.

According to YouGov, Boris Johnson would be front-runner by far to become Tory Leader. On Brexit, we could have a new brand of Conservative government, with Boris Johnson as Prime Minister.

Another election would not legally be required until 2020.

The country we’d be “getting back” on Brexit would be run by possibly the most right-wing Tory government anyone of us can remember.

Instead of our current alliances with Europe, we could be back to Rule Britannia with orthodox Tory Eurosceptics as our new political masters. They could have uninterrupted power for almost four years.

Opposition? What opposition? Labour and the Lib Dems are in disarray.

If these Tory hopefuls get “their country back” on Brexit, what could Britain become?

For an answer, take a close look at what these right-wing Tory Brexiteers stand for. Here are some brief examples:

• Iain Duncan-Smith: Long-term Eurosceptic and former Tory leader, he was until recently the Secretary of State for Works and Pensions. The social policies he proposed were described by the European Court of Justice as “unfit for a modern democracy” and “verging on frighteningly authoritarian”.

• Michael Gove: He was last year appointed as Secretary of State for Justice, with a mandate to scrap the Human Rights Act – which might only be possible if Britain leaves the European Union. As Education Secretary, Mr Gove was widely criticised for his heavy-handed education reforms and described as having a “blinkered, almost messianic, self-belief.”

• Boris Johnson: He’s the ‘poster boy’ of the Leave campaign and the likely new Prime Minister if Britain backs Brexit. His buffoonery and gaffes delight some, but horrify others. He once joked that women only go to university to find a husband. He has often dithered on big issues, wavering last year on whether to return to the House of Commons while still London Mayor. Some have criticised him for allegedly joining ‘Leave’ only because of the opportunity to become Prime Minister.

• Priti Patel: She’s the Minister for Employment. In a pro-Brexit speech last month she said, “If we could just halve the burdens of the EU social and employment legislation we could deliver a £4.3 billion boost to our economy and 60,000 new jobs.” TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady responded, “Leave the EU and lose your rights at work – that’s the message that even Leave campaigners like Priti Patel are now giving.”

• Chris Grayling: He’s the Leader of the House of Commons and previously Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice. He provoked the first strike by barristers and solicitors for his cuts to legal aid. He backed reforms to curb the power of the European Court of Human Rights. He caused outrage with his comments that Christian owners of bed and breakfasts should have the right to turn away gay couples (he later apologised).

And waiting in the wings is Ukip leader Nigel Farage who said he puts victory in the referendum above loyalty to his party. Farage also said he would back Boris Johnson to be Prime Minister if Britain votes for Brexit – and could see himself working for Boris’s government.

Imagine our current Tory government morphing into a new government consisting only of right-wing Eurosceptic Tories, with the softer pro-EU Conservatives disbanded because they lost the referendum.

A new Conservative government that wouldn’t be subject to the progressive rules and safeguards of the European Union – such as on workers’ rights, free movement and protection of the environment.

Then imagine that we might not have an opportunity to vote out such a new government until 2020.

If you’re one of those who say “We want our country back”, have a think about what country you’d be getting back if we left the EU, and who’d really be in charge of it. Would they represent you?

Is the EU so bad – and the alternative so good – that we’d want to risk exchanging what we’ve got for what we’d get?

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Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. Image source: Author

Emma Sabzalieva

We live in an era of intense and growing international connections, but also in a world of significant positional differences between localities, states and regions.

In this context, how can the idea of the world-class university be used by states to survive and succeed? What does this idea look like in states that are outside of the European and North American “core”?

 

Out of the frying pan and into the fire

The global legacy of colonialism and imperialism bears a clear imprint on today’s world order. This is highly evident in the politics and policies of contemporary post-Soviet Central Asia, the area I study. Bissenova and Medeuova (2016) have compellingly argued that the Central Asian countries have in effect jumped out of the 20th century “frying pan” of the Marxist-Leninist discourse of development straight into the 21st century “fire” of a globalized capitalist discourse of modernization, in which states outside the West will always be trying to catch up to an ideal they didn’t create.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, public policy in the Central Asian states has looked not just to former centre Russia but globally for influence and ideas. In the sphere of education, all five of the Central Asian states – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – have adopted elements of the European Union’s Bologna Process, and – uniquely so far – Kazakhstan is also a member of the European Higher Education Area.

In my recent article ‘The Policy Challenges of Creating a World-Class University Outside the Global “Core”’ (Sabzalieva 2017), I explored in further depth the public policy challenges and opportunities Kazakhstan faces as it seeks to create a brand new world-class university.

 

The world-class university as public policy tool

The idea of the world-class university has become widespread not only as a seemingly replicable model in higher education, but as a policy pursuit of governments around the world. Public policy in Kazakhstan too has followed this logic.

I believe that the institutionalization of the idea of the world-class university is reinforced by three major dynamics:

 ·         Firstly, the neoliberal logic of efficiency has led to much greater selectivity in the areas that are supported financially by the state, with world-class or excellence policies being one such funding stream;

 ·         Secondly, there is growing convergence around the concept of the knowledge economy, the notion that brain power will bring prosperity and competitiveness to a state. Universities play a key role in this discourse, with the result that governments use policy levers such as world-class university projects to fulfil their objectives;

 ·         Thirdly, despite the impact of intensifying globalising forces that push for greater international engagement with and by higher education, the nation-state persists, using public policy to seek or consolidate national competitive advantage, for example through the creation of world-class universities.

Faced with these dynamics, the rapid spread of the world-class university around the globe can be understood as a policy tool used by states to survive and succeed in the contemporary era.

 

A world-class university for Kazakhstan

In 2006, Kazakhstan’s President Nazarbayev proclaimed that “to establish a unique academic environment in our capital, a prestigious international-standard university needs to be created” (Nazarbayev 2006).

In a stunning feat of planning and construction, that “international-standard university” – now known as Nazarbayev University – has not only been built and populated, but celebrated the graduation of its first cohort of students less than a decade later.

With the opening of Nazarbayev University, opportunities have been created for academically excellent students to pursue high quality programmes and for a strong and highly international faculty to pursue teaching and research, all housed in an extremely well-equipped and generously funded environment. The legally bound commitment to academic freedom and institutional independence gives the university rights and responsibilities in governance that are currently unparalleled in Kazakhstan.

I discuss these three factors of human resources, funding, and governance in more detail in the article. As the Nazarbayev University project is still very new, I also raise a number of policy challenges that warrant further and detailed investigation.

 

Both global and national: a unique example

Global higher education watchers will identify some parallels between the rapid ascent of Nazarbayev University and other institutions also claiming to be world-class, such as Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology or the National University of Singapore.

However, I consider Kazakhstan’s journey to a world-class university to be unique in three respects.

Firstly, in Kazakhstani public policy, the role of higher education in the knowledge economy is a critical element of the country’s strategy to reposition itself in the world system as one of the top 30 (the policy goal was originally to be a top 50 global economy, but this has since been raised to the top 30) global economies. Nazarbayev University was founded to act as a figurehead for the reforms that are expected to be adopted and adapted throughout the tertiary sector in Kazakhstan.

Secondly, although some nation-building ventures in Central Asia have been seen as contrived, the Nazarbayev University project, whilst experimental, is nevertheless a credible demonstration of a commitment towards national consolidation and improvement, substantiated by its ‘role model’ status within the national higher education system.

Thirdly, this dual policy commitment to both the national and the global sets Kazakhstan apart from many of the other states similarly investing in select higher education institutions.

 

Where to from here: adopt, adapt, or invent anew?

There seems to be no question that the notion of the ‘world-class university’ is here to stay for the foreseeable future, and that it currently shows a continuing dominance of what is essentially a Western model of higher education.

This suggests another policy challenge for the states that do choose to develop their own world-class university: should they seek to replicate what they have seen elsewhere, or diversify the idea, thus making it a new one?

My case study of Nazarbayev University offers a worked example of the Kazakh government’s openness to aligning with international “best practices”, wherever these may be found (Tamtik and Sabzalieva forthcoming). This reflects a pragmatic ideology, recognizing that the world-class university model has benefits and seeking to build on these by domesticating the concept for a different context.

Continuing to study Nazarbayev University and the public policies of Kazakhstan will be critical to understanding the scope for states such as Kazakhstan to move beyond “frying pans” and “fires”, and innovate in ways that influence and diversify the positioning of a future world order.

  

Emma Sabzalieva is a doctoral candidate and Vanier Scholar at the Centre for the Study of Canadian and International Higher Education (CIHE), University of Toronto, Canada. Her core research interests are the global politics of higher education, social change, and contemporary Central Asia. Her wider research interests span ideas and knowledge creation, public policy, social institutions, university/community engagement, and the history of universities. Her website is http://emmasabzalieva.com. 

 

References

Bissenova, Alina, and Kulshat Medeuova. 2016. “O problemakh regionalnikh issledovanii v/po Tsentralnoi Azii [Issues of regional research in/on Central Asia].” Antropologicheskii Forum [Forum for Anthropology and Culture] 28:35–39.

Nazarbayev, Nursultan. 2006. “Poslaniye Prezidenta Respubliki Kazakhstan N. A. Nazarbayev Narodu Kazakhstana. Strategiya Vkhozhdeniya Kazakhstana v Chislo 50-Ti Naibolee Konkurentosposobnikh Stran Mira: Kazakhstan Na Poroge Novovo Ryvka Vpered v Svoem Razvitiyi [Address by President of the Republic of Kazakhstan N. A. Nazarbayev to the People of Kazakhstan. A Strategy to Include Kazakhstan in the List of the 50 Most Competitive Countries in the World: Kazakhstan on the Threshold of a New Leap Forward in Its Development].” Official Site of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan. March 1, 2006. http://www.akorda.kz/ru/addresses/addresses_of_president/page_poslanie-prezidenta-respubliki-kazakhstan-n-a-nazarbaeva-narodu-kazakhstana-mart-2006-g_1343986805.

Sabzalieva, Emma. 2017. “The Policy Challenges of Creating a World-Class University Outside the Global ‘core.’” European Journal of Higher Education 7 (4): 424–439. https://doi.org/10.1080/21568235.2017.1292856.

Tamtik, Merli, and Emma Sabzalieva. forthcoming. “Emerging Global Players? Building International Legitimacy in Universities in Estonia and Kazakhstan.” In Comparing Post-Socialist Transformations: Education in Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union, edited by Iveta Silova and Maia Chankseliani. Oxford: Symposium Books.

 

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Five more years: the old and new President of the Czech Republic.

Half of the country satisfied, approximately the same part suffering from a severe hangover. That is, in a nutshell, the main outcome of the Czech presidential elections whose final took place in the last weekend of January. The reason behind this division of Czech society lies in the approximately 3 percentage points that made the difference between the winner, incumbent president Miloš Zeman, and the unlucky loser, Jiří Drahoš. Apart from confirming Miloš Zeman in the office for the next five years, the vote put a stamp on conflicts and differences hidden in the heart of Europe.

The second round of the elections was held two weeks after the first clash, which could be described as ‘an audition for a challenger’. Here’s a brief recall: Mr Zeman almost did not participate in the campaign as he was sure that he would qualify for the run-off. The first round thus had to answer just one question – who would be the challenger for the real battle? Among 8 contenders, Mr Drahoš achieved a clear victory. Even though the difference between him and Mr Zeman was around 10 percentage points, the support for him expressed by a majority of losers gave him a solid chance to turn the run-off into a dramatic event.

Not very sophisticated, but very efficient campaign posters.

The campaign before the second round was surprisingly calm. That applies particularly to Mr Zeman´s camp who was expected to trigger some kind of scandal or personal attack targeting Mr. Drahoš. Billboards with slogan ‘This country is ours! Stop immigrants and Drahoš! Vote for Zeman!’ emerged everywhere, but nothing serious compared to the campaign before the 2013 second round, when Mr Zeman’s rival Mr Schwarzenberg had to face fake allegations that his family were Nazis. Mr Drahoš, instead of increasing his presence on billboards, focused on campaigning in regions. He intended to increase his visibility there and to change his perception as the ‘Prague coffee house candidate’.

The main interest was thus focused on the TV debates. Over the weeks before, Mr Zeman had refused to participate in any such debate, claiming that his views were broadly known. But after the first round´s results were announced, he – as he did in many cases before – changed his mind completely. The reason behind this switch was a tactical and strategic one. Mr Zeman is believed to be a very experienced and swift discussant, perhaps one of the best in Czech politics. On the contrary, Mr Drahoš had already demonstrated in the discussions prior to the first round that a sharp tongue is not among his most dangerous weapons. Hence, Mr Zeman´s team announced that the incumbent president was willing to participate in four debates. Mr Drahoš promptly refused this obvious trap disguised as an offer, agreeing to two debates instead. As a result, there were four debates in the end, but just two of them including both gentlemen. The debates broadcast by the most important commercial TV station TV NOVA and by TV Barandov – a minor station very close to Mr Zeman – were attended just by Mr Zeman, featuring empty chairs prepared for Mr. Drahoš.

TV ‘battles’ involving both candidates were broadcast during the last week prior to the voting. The first show run by TV Prima, another influential commercial TV station, resulted in Mr Zeman’s clear victory. With a totally unprepared and invisible anchorman and the support of an aggressive audience clearly hostile to Mr Drahoš, Mr. Zeman did not miss his chance. Even the screenplay favored him, as the main thematic areas – migration policy or smoking ban in pubs – enabled him to widely use his famous witticisms and half-truths tactic. In such an atmosphere Mr Drahoš – most of the time not allowed to complete a single sentence, being interrupted either by Mr Zeman, or by the audience – looked like a poorly prepared student.

The second and last debate, in this case hosted by Ceska televize, the public service broadcaster, offered a completely different picture. Mr Zeman had to face tough questions, conditions for both participants were the same and there were no interventions from the audience. This led to two interesting outputs. First, the result of the debate was much more balanced than in the first debate even though Mr Drahoš did not manage to go beyond his image of a hypercorrect retired scholar. Second, Mr Zeman adopted a completely different style suppressing his vanity and populism. The prevailing interpretation of the debate – it had been broadcast the very evening before the second round started – was that the chances of both candidates were very close.

This, however, turned out not to be the case. From the start of the counting of votes on Saturday afternoon, Mr Zeman had a comfortable lead of around 12 percentage points. When one third of districts was counted, the difference still remained around 10 percentage points suggesting Mr Zeman’s victory. Numbers from larger urban areas – and particularly from Prague, the main bastion of Mr Drahoš – just narrowed the result. At the end of the day, the outcome was 51.36 % of votes for Mr Zeman and 48.63 % for Mr Drahoš. The turnout reached 66.6 % surpassing interest in the first round by more than 5 percentage points.

The jubilation and cheers heard in the victory camp and the visible disappointment among Mr Drahoš’ supporters point to conflicts and cleavages which have emerged in Czech society over the last couple of years. Mr Zeman was heavily supported by less educated, poorer and often frustrated people, whose motivation can be summarized by the slogan ‘against globalization’. On the contrary, Mr Drahoš collected votes among the elites – the more educated citizens from the cities, open to other cultures. In this sense, Czech society follows the trend that has emerged in many European countries in recent years. The presidential vote confirmed that there are two parallel societies living in the heart of Europe – each of them praising their own values, pursuing their goals and hardly listening to the other any more.

The impact of the vote for the future of the Czech Republic is yet unclear, but there a not many reasons to be optimistic. Mr Zeman, right after the result became official, said that this victory was his final one, after which no defeat would follow, adding that he would like to unite Czech society. But hardly anybody expects that his second term will substantially differ from the first one. Further attempts to increase his power and influence as well as to enforce his and his allies´ goals may thus be expected.

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I think I’ve discovered a new condition. I’m calling it Maioaviophobia, or a fear of Theresa May getting on a plane.

Somehow, it’s taken until now to notice that it’s the flights that seem to produce the most erratic political behaviour from the Prime Minister. Just think back to that walking holiday last Easter, or her jaunt to Florence.

Like some wannabe columnist, it’s taken a third instance to detect a pattern and call it a thing. The comments late yesterday from Beijing on restricting citizens’ rights look like another case of a May misstep.

But is it really? Let’s consider the evidence.

Firstly, some context. This has been a miserable week for the government. The leak of an internal impact analysis reignited the debate about the costs of withdrawal, and sharpened the rift between ministers and civil servants.

Much worse though was the incipient debate about transition, hung around the agreement of the EU27’s mandate for Phase 2. While everyone has their lines ready for arguments about the costs, no one has gotten deeply enough into the issues of transition to know how best to handle it. The upshot was that it took the resurrection of an archaic term by – shock – Jacob Rees-Mogg to set the tone. ‘Vassal state’ is not technically correct, but it captured enough of the prejorative understanding to have stuck for now. Certainly, it seemed to contribute to a hardening of backbench feeling, both on Brexit and on May’s own future as leader.

With that in mind, the leak was probably a blessing for the government, as it shifted the talk back to more comfortable ground.

Which raises the question of why return to the horrors of transition?

This leads us into the substantive matters.

The starting point here has to be that the UK has long argued for the need for a transition, to cover the period between leaving in March 2019 and the entry into force of a new treaty. In the absence of any guidance on what form that transition might take, the EU has followed the path of least resistance and gone full-monty. I’ll not rehearse the arguments here again, suffice to say that London’s lack of immediate pushback on this model over the past months suggested that they were comfortable with it.

Telling, May’s comments yesterday still do not rise to a full rejection of the approach: she has not queried the need to remain bound by the vast majority of the acquis or the structures of governance (including CJEU rulings). Instead, this is a very limited challenge on the rights of those EU nationals moving into the UK during the transition period.

Put differently, it’s very nearly the least that can be done to demonstrate that leaving has meant leaving (to paraphrase), while simultaneously trying not to block progress on the negotiations.

The line here would be that since everything might be changing at the end of transition in any case, it’s not really a problem to dip a toe in the waters of limiting some rights or introducing new registration procedures with this category of people. However, that comes with great uncertainty for those involved and for their employers.

More narrowly, this’ll also be a problem for the European Parliament, who have always put citizens’ rights front and centre of their position on Article 50. Guy Verhofstadt has already indicated that this idea is a real problem for them: past experience should remind everyone that the EP is not a body to be trifled with when it gets a notion into its head, even if member states do try to apply pressure.

In all this we see the clash of approaches.

May has always worked from the need to limit free movement, so it’s natural for her to make this suggestion, especially when her party is openly wondering if it still wants her as leader. But equally naturally, citizens’ rights is central for the EP and its general mandate to represent the – um – citizens of Europe.

Since both get a veto on the final agreement, this is potentially a game of chicken that neither side wants to have to pursue to the logical end-point of a ‘no-deal’ outcome.

The compromise probably lies in allowing something like the introduction of registration for all EU nationals from March, with agreement to discuss the extent of rights in the framework of the new treaty, i.e. there might be a restriction down the line, but maybe there won’t be. That might give everyone room to claim a win.

However, for May the rest of this year promises to be incredibly painful: many more points of concession on the rest of the Article 50 package will be required, even before getting to the ‘meaningful’ vote in Parliament. Whether she can carry her party looks more problematic than before, even if nothing has changed [sic] in the basic situation.

Something to think about on the flight back home, perhaps?

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The Czech Republic is a state whose political system is heavily based upon parliamentary power with government as the main executive body. This tradition, which was firmly set up after the Velvet revolution in 1989, for a long time implied an indirectly elected president with purely symbolic powers. In this way, Václav Havel was twice elected as president, just like his successor Václav Klaus.

However, when Klaus´s second election in 2008 was surrounded by scandals and rumours that some MPs’ votes had been bought, the major political parties discovered in 2012 that the president could also be directly elected by the people. As a result, the system was changed and in 2013, the Czech voters chose their president directly for the first time. Unfortunately, without any changes in the political system, since the presidential competences and powers remained untouched.

Miloš Zeman, the first directly chosen inhabitant of the Prague castle – and one of the most talented ‘power technologist’ in modern Czech history – used his position to go frequently and extensively beyond his formal powers. A couple of months after he became the president, he circumvented the Chamber of Deputies and appointed a government which comfortably ruled almost one year without having parliamentary confidence.

Mr. Zeman also pursued his own foreign policy, much more focusing on the East (Russia and China) than the official governmental position would have been. He and his closest fellows – chancellor Mr. Mynář, advisor Mr. Nejedlý (and, last but not least, spokesperson Mr. Ovčáček) managed to transform the presidential office into an influential and visible actor of the Czech politics. This became even more obvious recently after the last Czech parliamentary elections in October 2017 when Mr. Zeman appointed Mr. Babiš as a prime minister – and enabled him to compose new government – even though Mr. Babiš did not have a chance to obtain parliamentary support.

Mr. Zeman’s controversial style and decisions quite quickly divided the whole society. Whereas some social groups (particularly those of lower socio-economic status) have welcomed both his behaviour – which can be summed up in the word ‘proletarian’ – and concrete actions, other parts of society have firmly rejected it. This division – the latter groups can be found among the more educated voters living in urban areas – has become a stable factor in both Czech political life and discourse. And when Mr. Zeman announced in March 2017 that he would seek re-election in 2018, an ‘audition for a challenger’ started.

The incumbent (left) and the challenger (right).

Particularly during the second half of 2017, candidates for the presidency slowly started to emerge. As the most promising challenger of Mr. Zeman appeared Jiří Drahoš, a 68-year-old physical chemist and former head of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His profile perfectly met the expectations of the second half of Czech society – the ‘anti-Zeman’ part – for the presidential office: non-partisan, pro-European, professionally recognised, and cultivated. However, Mr. Drahoš was not the only one demonstrating these characteristics. The race was joined by the similarly profiled Michal Horáček, inter alia former owner of the betting company Fortuna, who was actively involved in the Velvet revolution in 1989, or Pavel Fischer, a former diplomat and collaborator of Václav Havel. In the latest stage, Mirek Topolánek, the former Czech prime minister who was responsible for the 2009 EU Council Presidency, also submitted a bid. Altogether, there were 9 candidates (including Mr. Zeman) who entered the campaign.

The campaign, at least in its supposedly ‘hot’ phase, was boring. This was due to two major reasons. First, Mr. Zeman officially did not run any campaign. He refused to take part in TV debates and made just a few public appearances. Still, the whole country was plastered by billboards with his photo and slogan ‘Miloš Zeman again!’ This PR line was mostly funded by a group called ‘Miloš Zeman friends’ whose background remains unclear. This, again, led to speculations about possible Russian influence and interest in favouring Mr. Zeman´s re-election. Second, most of the remaining 8 candidates expressed very similar opinions and rather than competing among themselves, they defined themselves against the non-present Mr. Zeman.

The first round of the elections took place on Friday 13 and Saturday 14 January. Voting was marked by a politically motivated attack on Mr. Zeman. When he voted on Friday, he was accosted by a topless woman shouting, ‘Zeman: Putin’s slut’, a reference to the Czech president’s close ties with his Russian counterpart. It was revealed that this woman was involved in the activist movement FEMEN.

The results of the first round, with an attendance rate of 61,92% of eligible voters – brought some surprise. While the victory of Mr. Zeman was expectable, a bigger share of the votes – definitely above 40% – had been predicted. Even the distance between him and the winner of the ‘challenger contest’ – in this case Mr. Drahoš – had been expected to be larger. However, this was not the case. Mr. Drahoš managed to beat the rest of the peloton convincingly. What is probably more important, he immediately secured support from Mr. Fischer, Mr. Horáček and Mr. Hilšer – the latter being probably the biggest surprise in terms of votes gained – for the second round. If all those who supported these candidates come to the second round – which is scheduled for the last weekend of January (29 – 30), he will have a good chance of unseating Mr. Zeman.

On the other hand, Mr. Drahoš may expect some tough final campaign days. Mr. Zeman is not a politician who gives up and his experience is levels above Mr. Drahoš. At his first win 2013, Mr. Zeman received only 24 percent of the vote in the first round of the 2013 election but more than doubled his share in the second round after running what was widely seen as a smear campaign against his opponent. As Mr. Zeman´s and his fellows’ stakes are high, this scenario may well repeat itself…

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