Daily Archives: July 13, 2020

Anger and alarm about China is mounting rapidly in government circles and especially among Tory rightwingers, anxious about national security, unfair trade practices and Hong Kong. Its certainly true that the increasingly aggressive behaviour of President Xi Jinpings authoritarian regime is deeply worrying. Its a pity that the Tory grandees who are making the most noise now did not raise their concerns much earlier, before Britain became dependent on Beijings favours to escape its Brexit mess.

As pressure grows on Boris Johnson to exclude the telecoms company Huawei from the UKs 5G rollout and to review Chinese investment in nuclear, transport and other security-related projects, Iain Duncan Smith and former ministers David Davis, Liam Fox and Owen Paterson are backing an interparliamentary alliance to scrutinise Chinas activities. Separately, Tories in the new China Research Group, modelled on Westminsters pro-Brexit European Research Group, are boldly promising greater vigilance.

China believes it can exploit British economic, financial and political neediness to get its own way

Of immediate concern is Chinas draconian national security law in Hong Kong. Beijings curt dismissal of British protests was followed by threats of unspecified consequences should the UK open its borders to millions of British overseas passport holders in the former colony. This in turn has focused Tory attention on wider problems, including Chinas escalating intimidation of Taiwan and its punitive measures against Australia following Canberras call for an independent inquiry into the pandemic.

In an interview with the Hudson Institute last week, Duncan Smith was rich in hindsight. In a race for trade and investment over the past decade, he said, the free world has marched somewhat blindly into the embrace of [the] Chinese Communist party. Unfortunately, it was now clear that China was intent on complete dominance globally. Speaking to the BBC last month, he went so far as to suggest that revolution was afoot: While China is a great nation, its posing a threat to the natural order.

Leaving aside what Duncan Smith meant by the natural order, all this Tory angst comes a bit late, and sounds a tad hypocritical. Why on earth, if the threat is so great, did these people not speak out when David Cameron and the then chancellor, George Osborne, launched their bogus golden era in UK-China relations, promising ever closer ties? Where were they in 2015 when Dave took Xi down the pub for a pint? Providing the crisps, perhaps.

Even if they had not yet heard of the brutal treatment of Xinjiangs Uighurs, were they truly unaware of Chinas long record of oppression and social engineering in Tibet? Were they themselves among those blind free world decision-makers who wilfully disregarded the anti-democratic nature of Communist rule, Chinas predatory trade and debt practices, its industrial espionage, intellectual property theft and systematic persecution of dissidents, writers, academics, Christians and journalists?

Its hard to imagine that such eminent parliamentarians were oblivious. So why did they not object earlier? One possible explanation is that Duncan Smith, Davis, Fox, Paterson and other new-minted human rights defenders were ardent Brexiters, before and after the 2016 referendum. Their overriding priority was pushing Brexit through and for this the appearance of a friendly relationship with economically powerful China was crucial.

A key argument perhaps the key argument of Brexit ministers and their supporters was that Britain, freed from the EUs shackles, would forge independent, mutually beneficial and respectful trade, business and investment relationships with the worlds leading powers, principally the US and China. Predictions that leaving the EU would, on the contrary, weaken Britains sovereign control and freedom of action were rejected out of hand.

Yet now, six months after Britain formally left the EU and only a few short months away from a calamitous no-deal crash, what is Britains position? It is some way off even a basic trade pact with the EU. Desperate to cut a deal with Washington, its ability to resist unpalatable US demands declines by the day. Donald Trump is even pushing Britain to sign a loyalty oath, giving preference to the US over China. He wants UK backing for his dangerous new cold war narrative. Therein lies another huge trap.

In China itself, meanwhile, Britain faces a vastly more powerful, scornful opponent that lacks respect for its values, believes (with some justice) that it can exploit British economic, financial and political neediness to get its own way, and which does as it likes in Hong Kong as evidenced by last weeks withering tirade from its London ambassador, Liu Xiaoming.

How to understand the contradiction between the hard Tory Brexiters previous positive take on China as a partner for global Britain and their open hostility now? Its not difficult. As international trade secretary, for example, Fox boasted in 2018 of cutting lucrative deals during successive visits to Beijing. This, they said, was the future. In their blind fervour for Brexit at any cost, they did not think things through.

Britain requires balanced, boundaried relationships. Yet thanks to these short sighted Tories, the UK is more limply beholden than ever to not one but two overbearing foreign powers with hegemonistic tendencies and nasty tempers. Too late they realise their mistake.

Read more from the original source:

The Observer view on post-Brexit UK-China relations - The Guardian

The cost of household staples, ranging from meat and cheese to school uniforms and drinking glasses, will substantially increase if there is no Brexit trade deal, British retailers have warned.

With just six months to go before the UK leaves the EU entirely by exiting the single market and the European customs union, retailers fear further damage to a sector already reeling from the coronavirus crisis, with 5,600 job losses announced on Thursday from Boots and John Lewis alone.

In a report on the prospect of a no-deal Brexit, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) said the public should be aware that no deal will mean a hike in the prices of not just luxury goods but ordinary household goods that every consumer has to buy and replenish.

Its not foie gras that were talking about, its mince, its cheese, its oranges, you know, said Aodhn Connolly, the director of the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium in a Brexit press briefing.

It doesnt matter whether its Great Britain, or its Northern Ireland, the people who will suffer most because of these cost rises will be those people who are most economically vulnerable.

The BRC has calculated that beef, which is imported in huge quantities from the Republic of Ireland, will go up in price by 48%, with cheddar cheese, another staple imported from across the Irish Sea, expected to cost 57% more.

Oranges from Spain will cost 12% more, while the price of cucumbers will rise by 16%. Trousers imported from Italy will have a 12% levy slapped on them , porcelain kitchenware will also go up by 12% and drinking glasses made in Poland up 10%.

Connolly said it was a misunderstanding to think that retailers and their suppliers had built up huge Brexit war chests and added that Covid-19 had exposed the fragility of the supply chain.

The ability and bandwidth, both financially and time-wise, of retailers to deal with a no-deal Brexit at the end of this year has been greatly diminished, he said.

About half of all food consumed from restaurants or shops comes from the EU, with 30% of produce in supermarkets from the bloc.

Trade deal talks continued this week in London, with the second face-to-face meeting between negotiators Michel Barnier and David Frost. Little was said to suggest that progress had been made and public pronouncements last week suggested they were a long way from a deal.

Deal or no deal, the UK is facing a new trading regime from 1 January as the country exits the single market and the customs union, forcing customs and food health checks on goods entering the country.

That is going to increase a level of friction that we havent seen since 1972, said the BRC trade expert William Bain.

Continued here:

No-deal Brexit will raise cost of UK household staples, say retailers - The Guardian

Anne Applebaum can look at the wreck of democratic politics and understand it with a completeness few contemporary writers can match. When she asks who sent Britain into the unending Brexit crisis, or inflicted the Trump administration on America, or turned Poland and Hungary into one-party states, she does not need to search press cuttings. Her friends did it, she replies. Or, rather, her former friends. For if they are now embarrassed to have once known her, the feeling is reciprocated.

Applebaums latest book, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends, opens with a scene a novelist could steal. On 31 December 1999, Applebaum and her husband, Radosaw Sikorski, a minister in Polands then centre-right government, threw a party. It was a Millennium Eve housewarming for a manor house in the western Poland they had helped rebuild from ruins. The company of Poles, Brits, Americans and Russians could say that they had rebuilt a ruined world. Unlike the bulk of the left of the age, they had stood up against the Soviet empire and played a part in the fall of a cruel and suffocating tyranny. They had supported free markets, free elections, the rule of law and democracies sticking together in the EU and Nato, because these causes surely were the best ways for nations to help their people lead better lives as they faced Russian and Chinese power, Islamism and climate change.

They were young and happy. Historys winners. At about three in the morning, Applebaum recalls, one of the wackier Polish guests pulled a pistol from her handbag and shot blanks into the air out of sheer exuberance.

Applebaum was at the centre of the overlapping circles of guests. For the Americans, she was a child of the Republican establishment. Her father was a lawyer in Washington DC and she was educated at Yale and Oxford universities. Now her Republican friends are divided between a principled minority, who know that defeating Trump is the only way to save the American constitution, and the rest, who have, to use a word she repeats often, collaborated as surely as the east Europeans she studied as a historian collaborated with the invading Soviet forces after 1945.

Even when she was young, you could see the signs of the inquiring spirit that has made her a great historian. She went to work as a freelance journalist in eastern Europe while it was still under Soviet occupation and too drab and secretive a posting for most young reporters. She then made a standard career move and joined the Economist. But it was too dull for her liking and she moved to the Spectator in the early 1990s. The dilettante style of English conservatism charmed her. These people dont take themselves seriously and could never do serious harm, she thought, as she watched Simon Heffer and his colleagues compete to see who could deliver the best Enoch Powell impersonation. She came to know the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton and Margaret Thatchers speechwriter John OSullivan, figures taken with unwarranted seriousness at the time. They had helped east European dissidents struggling against Soviet power in the 1980s and appeared to believe in democracy. Why would she doubt it? How could she foresee that Scruton and OSullivan would one day accept honours from Viktor Orbn, as he established a dictatorship in Hungary, whose rigged elections and state-controlled judiciary and media are now not so far away from the communists one-party state.

What was life in the English right like then, I asked in a call to her Polish lockdown in that restored manor house in the countryside between Warsaw and the German border. It was fun, she said.

It isnt now.

Her husband knew Boris Johnson. They were both members of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford. She assumed that he was as much a liberal internationalist as Sikorski was. When the couple met Johnson for dinner in 2014, she noted his laziness and all-consuming narcissism, as well as the undoubted charisma that was to seduce and then ruin his country. In those days, Johnson appeared friendly. He was alarmed by the global challenge to democracy, he told them, and wanted to defend the culture of freedom and openness and tolerance. They asked about Europe. No one serious wants to leave the EU, he replied, which was true enough as Johnson was to prove when he came out for Brexit.

As for the Poles at the party, they knew Applebaum as a friend who had co-authored a Polish cookbook, and published histories of communism, which never forgot its victims.

Today she is a heretical figure across the right in Europe and America. Many of her guests would damage their careers if they admitted to their new masters they had once broken bread at her table.

Heretics make the best writers. They understand a movement better than outsiders, and can relate its faults because they have seen them close up. Religions can tolerate pagans. They are mere unbelievers who have never known the way, the truth and the light. The heretic has the advantages of the inside trader. She can use her knowledge to expose and betray the faithful. One question always hangs in the air, however: who is betraying whom? Although Applebaum has left the right, and stopped voting Conservative in Britain in 2015 and Republican in the US in 2008, she can make a convincing case that the right betrayed her.

In person, Applebaum combines intense concentration with an exuberant delight in human folly. You can be in the middle of a deadly serious conversation and suddenly she will break into a grin as the memory of a politicians hypocrisy or an incomprehensible stupidity hits her. As the western crisis has deepened, the intensity has come to dominate her writing as she provides urgently needed insights.

You can read thousands of discussions of the root causes of what we insipidly call populism. The academic studies arent all wrong, although too many are suspiciously partial. The left says austerity and inequality caused Brexit and Trump, proving they had always been right to oppose austerity and inequality. The right blames woke politics and excessive immigration, and again you can hear the self-satisfaction in the explanation.

Applebaum offers an overdue corrective. She knows the personal behind the political. She understands that the nationalist counter-revolution did not just happen. Politicians hungry for office, plutocrats wanting the world to obey their commands, second-rate journalists sniffing a chance of recognition after years of obscurity, and Twitter mob-raisers and fake news fraudsters, who find a sadists pleasure in humiliating their opponents, propelled causes that would satisfy them.

Applebaum let out a snort that must have been heard for miles around her Polish home when I mentioned the journalist and author David Goodharts pro-Brexit formulation that we are living through an uprising by the people from somewhere against the people from nowhere a modern variant on the old communist condemnations of rootless cosmopolitans, incidentally. Its a war of one part of the elite against another part of the elite, she says. Brexit was an elite project. The game was to get everyone to go along with it. Were all the southern Tories who voted for it a part of the oppressed masses? And who do you think funded the campaign?

She is as wary of the commonplace view that supporters of Trump, say, are conformists, who have been brainwashed online or by Fox News. They may be now in some part, but brainwashing does not explain how populist movements begin. Their leaders werent from small towns full of abandoned shops and drug-ridden streets. They were metropolitans, with degrees from Oxford in the case of Johnson and Dominic Cummings. The men and women Applebaum knew were not loyal drones but filled with a dark restlessness. They may pose as the tribunes of the common people now but they were members of the intellectual and educated elite willing to launch a war on the rest of the intellectual and educated elite.

Populist activists are outsiders only in that they feel insufficiently rewarded. And their opponents should never underestimate what their self-pitying vanity can make them do.

One of Applebaums closest Polish friends, the godmother of one of her children, and a guest at the 1999 party, provided her with the most striking example. She moved from being a comfortable but obscure figure to become a celebrated Warsaw hostess and a confidante to Polands new rulers. She signalled her break and opened her prospects for advancement with a call to Applebaum within days of the Smolensk air crash of April 2010. She let her know she was adopting a conspiracy theory that would make future friendship impossible.

Outsiders need to take a deep breath before trying to understand it. Among the dead was Lech Kaczyski, the president of Poland, who controlled the rightwing populist party Law and Justice with his twin brother, Jarosaw Kaczyski. The party has grown to dominate Polish politics, and the supposedly independent courts, media and civil service. The flight recorder showed that the pilot had come in too low in thick fog, and that was an end to it. Jarosaw Kaczyski and his underlings insist that the Russians were behind the crash, or that political rivals in Warsaw, including Applebaums husband, allowed the president to fly in a faulty plane, or that it was an assassination. Repeating the lie was the price of admission to Law and Justices ruling circles and the public sector jobs they controlled. As Applebaum noted in the Atlantic magazine: Sometimes the point isnt to make people believe a lie its to make people fear the liar. Acknowledge the liars power, and your career takes off without the need to pass exams or to display an elementary level of competence.

Other friends from the party showed their fealty to the new order by promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories. The darker their fantasies became, the more airtime Polish state broadcasters gave them. They had not suffered or been left behind in any way, Applebaum says. Yet they happily worked for propaganda sites that targeted her family. Because she is married to a political opponent of Law and Justice, and because she writes critical pieces in the international press, Applebaum, who had faced no racism in Poland until Law and Justice came to power, was turned by the regimes creatures into the clandestine Jewish coordinator of anti-Polish activity.

I once believed you should never let politics destroy a friendship. But that maxim depends on politics not turning into a danger to you and those you love. Applebaum could not stay friends with women who would not protest as the state they supported went for her and husband.

The Anglo-Saxon world is not so different from Poland and Hungary. Britain has handled Covid-19 so disastrously because only servile nobodies, willing to pretend that a no-deal Brexit would not harm the country, could gain admittance to Boris Johnsons cabinet. As Johnson politicises the public sector, showing fear of the liar looks like becoming the best way to secure a job in the higher ranks of the civil service as well. American Republicans have had to go along with every lie Trump has told since his birther slur on Barack Obama. As for breaking friendships, British Jews broke theirs when they watched friends in Labour cheer on Jeremy Corbyn and thought: If they ever came for me and my family, you would stand by, wouldnt you?

Careerism is too glib an explanation for selling out, and Applebaum is too good a historian to offer it. Likewise, bigotry and racial prejudice were never enough on their own to move her friends away from liberal democracy. Among Applebaums acquaintances is one of Orbns greatest cheerleaders. She has a gay son, but that has not stopped her espousing the cause of a homophobic regime. Laura Ingraham, a Fox News presenter, became one of the earliest supporters of Trump, despite the fact that she has adopted three immigrant children.

Rather than grab at standard explanations, Applebaum understands that a society based on merit may sound fine if you want to live in a country run by talented people. But what if you are not yourself talented? Since the 1950s, criticisms of meritocracy have become so commonplace they have passed into cliche. Not one I have read or indeed written stops to consider how one-party states represent the anti-meritocratic society in its purest form. Among her friends who became the servants of authoritarian movements, Applebaum sees the consequences of the lust for status among resentful men and women, who believe the old world never gave them their due.

They were privileged by normal standards but nowhere near as privileged as they expected to be. Talking to Applebaum, I imagined a British government abolishing press freedom and the independence of the judiciary and the civil service. I didnt doubt for a moment that there would be thousands of mediocre journalists, broadcasters, lawyers and administrators who would happily work for the new regime if it pandered to their vanity by giving them the jobs they could never have taken on merit. Hannah Arendt wrote of the communists and fascists that they replaced first-rate talents with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity was the best guarantee of their loyalty. She might have been talking about contemporary Poland, Britain and America.

Given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy, Applebaum says, and explains why better than any modern writer I know. To the political consequences of offended vanity Why am I not more important? Why does the BBC never call? a sense of despair is vital. If you believe, like the American right, that godless enemies want to destroy your Christian country, and prove their malice by not giving you the rewards you deserve, or think, like Scruton and the Telegraph crowd of the 1990s, that English culture and history is being thrown in the bin, and you are being chucked away with it, or agree with the supporters of the new tyrants of eastern Europe that a liberal elite is plotting to extinguish your culture by importing Muslim immigrants, and proving its contempt for all that is decent by laughing at you, then any swine will do as long as the swine can stop it. You will pay any price and abandon any principle in the struggle against a demonic enemy.

Shouldnt she have seen it coming, I ask her. Shouldnt she have realised that the world she inhabited included authoritarians, who would turn on her and everything she believed in. Typically, instead of huffing, puffing, and trying to pretend she has never been in the wrong, she laughs and admits that she probably should have asked harder questions sooner of her former friends.

Readers should be glad she bided her time. Applebaum can bring a candle into the darkness of the populist right precisely because she stayed on the right for so long. She does not know whether it can be beaten. Shes a journalist not a soothsayer. But I know that if you want to fight it, her writing is an arsenal that stores the sharpest weapons to hand.

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Anne Applebaum: how my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit - The Guardian

The Scottish Governments latest economic report reveals a no deal Brexit would have significant impact on economic activity in Scotland.The fears are now being raised less than six months before the end of the Brexit transition period when the UK will no longer have to follow EU rules.

The Scottish Government has repeatedly called for the transition period to be extended with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon writing to Boris Johnson warning that "fundamental issues" still remained between the UK and EU negotiators.

Scottish Government sources told Express.co.uk that the economy north of the border was in jeopardy stressing it was a delicate time especially after a deadlock in recent negotiations.

They added there was severe concern especially at the six month mark adding the coronavirus pandemic had already left businesses in a vulnerable state stressing that no deal and no extension to the transition period would make things significantly worse.

The monthly economic report added: As we also move towards formally exiting the EU transition period (31 December 2020) uncertainty regarding future trade arrangements with key markets has the potential to impact already weakened business sectors and have a significant impact on economic activity, particularly if there is no deal.

READ MORE:SNP shamed: Thousands of British Troops to be compensated by Boris

Dr Liz Cameron, chief executive of the Scottish Chambers of Commerce, told Express.co.uk that many businesses still lack clarity as to what the future holds.

Dr Cameron stressed that Scottish businesses required detailed answers on a wide number of issues if they are able to plan properly for the changes that will come when the transition period comes to an end.

She concluded: Our Scottish Chamber Network continues to call upon the UK Government to prioritise flow across the border, not adding costs or bureaucracy to businesses who are already dealing with major trading challenges due to the coronavirus crisis.

Whatever deal is done, Scottish businesses must be able to compete effectively.

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The Scottish Chamber of Commerce is actively involved in talks involving trade with new markets.

The report also revealed Scotlands GDP fell by 2.5 percent in the first quarter of 2020 which was mainly driven by a 5.0 percent fall in output in March as the spread of coronavirus and introduction of lockdowns slowed economic activity.

It continued: COVID-19 has resulted in an economic crisis in Scotland, through the direct impact on the economy but also the secondary impacts on health and society from a weaker economy.

The impact of COVID-19 is not constant, and will be changing over time, depending on the prevalence of the virus and the severity of the restrictions required to protect against it.

Scotland has already felt the impact of the pandemic after figures showed GDP fell 18.9 percent in April, the first full month of lockdown, and around 23 percent over March and April combined.

However, figures for the month of May are due to be published by the Scottish Government next week.

Scottish Finance Secretary Kate Forbes has already spurred into action and asked the Treasury to give Holyrood extra tax powers or 500m in further funding.

She warned there was a 500million hole between the extra cost of the COVID-19 pandemic and the funding given to Scotland from Westminster.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak gave 800m to Scotland through his Summer Mini-Budget however but the MSP dismissed this stressing it didnt meet Scotlands needs specifically.

Ms Sturgeon wrote in her letter to Boris Johnson: "No-one could reproach the UK Government for changing its position in the light of the wholly unforeseeable Covid-19 crisis, particularly as the EU has made it clear it is open to an extension request.

"We therefore call on you to take the final opportunity the next few weeks provide to ask for an extension to the transition period in order to provide a breathing space to complete the negotiations, to implement the outcome, and the opportunity for our businesses to find their feet after the enormous disruption of recent months.

"At the time the Withdrawal Agreement was signed, no-one could have imagined the enormous economic dislocation which the Covid 19 pandemic has caused - in Wales, Scotland, the whole of the UK, in the EU and across the world."

The letter claimed that, at best, there would only be a "bare bones" trade deal in place by December, or a move to a no-deal exit from the EU.

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Scotland TERRIFIED: Fears of Brexit economic chaos as EU talks reach deadlock - Express.co.uk

Opinion

PUBLISHED: 16:47 13 July 2020 | UPDATED: 17:35 13 July 2020

Layla Moran

The government's new Brexit media blitz. Photograph: UK Government/PA.

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Liberal Democrat MP LAYLA MORAN points out the governments information Brexit blitz comes from the same politicians who have spent years spinning and lying about the reality of the UKs withdrawal from the EU.

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Almost four years after its creation The New European goes from strength to strength across print and online, offering a pro-European perspective on Brexit and reporting on the political response to the coronavirus outbreak, climate change and international politics. But we can only continue to grow with your support.

Even by the standards weve come to expect from this government, the latest announcement of a 93 million Brexit publicity campaign is particularly brazen. At a time when the NHS urgently needs more support and people who rely on welfare are struggling to pay the bills, ministers are spending millions of pounds on a self-indulgent advertising blitz. This comes on top of another 705 million being spent on new infrastructure at the border to cope with leaving the EU customs union at the end of the year.

This is a shockingly irresponsible use of taxpayers money at a time we should be focusing our resources on tackling this pandemic. Ministers had to be forced kicking and screaming to spend 120 million on free school meals for deprived children over the summer. Yet when it comes to promoting the supposed benefits of Brexit, it appears that no expense is being spared. The government sadly seems more interested in promoting Brexit propaganda than helping vulnerable families get through this crisis.

The reality is though that no amount of slick marketing can cover for the fact that the governments stubborn pursuit of Brexit is going to cost us all. The new campaign talks about ensuring we are all ready to seize the opportunities that the end of the transition period on 31 December 2020 will bring. But if you look at the detail, the only real opportunities being offered are to pay higher travel insurance and mobile roaming charges when going on holiday to the EU.

Back during the referendum in 2016, the Vote Leave campaign claimed that warnings about Brexit making holidays abroad more expensive was talking Britain down. Now this Vote Leave government is spending millions of pounds telling UK citizens thats exactly whats going to happen. You really couldnt make it up. This is a government led by people who built their careers on spin and lies. Its vital that all progressive parties work together to hold them to account.

First of all, that means continuing to fight to stop a no deal Brexit at the end of the year. I have tabled legislation in Parliament that has received cross-party backing and which would give MPs a vote on extending the transition period. The official deadline to request an extension may now have passed, but as academics have pointed out there are still imaginative solutions that could be found to get round this issue. I am strong believer that in politics, where theres a will theres a way. We must not let the government steamroller us into a damaging no deal Brexit that the majority of the public dont support and that nobody voted for.

Second, we must continue protecting the rights of EU nationals and others from abroad who have made the UK their home, including the thousands working in the NHS and social care. The announcement that care workers will not qualify for the governments new Health and Care visa was a worrying sign of what is to come. It is disgraceful that those risking their lives each day helping vulnerable people during this pandemic are being told theyre not skilled enough to qualify for a visa. Our social care system relies on overseas carers, we should be welcoming them in not shutting them out.

Finally, we must keep up the fight to maintain close ties with our European neighbours, including in securing the medical supplies our NHS needs. On Friday, the Government inexplicably announced it would be walking away from a joint EU vaccination scheme that could have helped drive down costs and secure supplies of a vaccine once one is developed. Its crucial that these decisions are properly scrutinised, and that opposition MPs work together to ensure ministers cannot get away with putting political dogma over public health.

Layla Moran is a Lib Dem MP and a contestant in the partys leadership race.

Almost four years after its creation The New European goes from strength to strength across print and online, offering a pro-European perspective on Brexit and reporting on the political response to the coronavirus outbreak, climate change and international politics. But we can only rebalance the right wing extremes of much of the UK national press with your support. If you value what we are doing, you can help us by making a contribution to the cost of our journalism.

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Layla Moran: Government's costly Brexit media blitz shows 'Project Fear' is becoming reality - The New European

It is possible that Boris Johnson meant it when he said last year that Brexit would not involve checks on goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but only if he did not understand the deal he had signed. His position made sense as dishonesty or ignorance. It was never true.

As Brexit talks continue in London this week, it turns out the government has submitted to the EU its application to put border control posts at Irish Sea ports. That is a necessary act of compliance with the Northern Ireland protocol in the withdrawal agreement.

Since Brussels demands that the single market boundary be policed, and the UK made a commitment not to police it on the island of Ireland, a sea border was inevitable. That did not stop Mr Johnson pretending otherwise. On Wednesday a leaked cabinet letter revealed that the border risks being dysfunctional even after the prime ministers scheme is enacted. The root of these problems is the failure to grasp the importance of the single market to the European project and a refusal to acknowledge the cost of Britains departure from it.

Eurosceptic arguments asserted the primacy of markets elsewhere in the world, in search of which Britain needed release from burdensome Brussels rules. The fact that more than 40% of UK exports go to the EU was dismissed as a relic of membership. The geographical proximity of those markets was belittled as an obsolete 20th-century metric.

But proximity matters to the EU, which sees in Brexit the prospect of commercial rivals trading into the single market from a low-cost entrept on their doorstep. Brussels wants to write guarantees against that scenario into a trade deal. UK negotiators resent conditions that they say are more onerous than those applied to Canada, for example. But Canada is thousands of miles further away.

Setting aside the question of how reasonable the two sides are being (each could yield a little), the essential problem is that distance matters to trade, and a Brexit model that was conceived in denial of that fact puts the UK at a disadvantage in the negotiations. Fantasy still stalks UK trade policy, as evidenced in Downing Streets nomination of Liam Fox as a candidate to be director general of the World Trade Organization. Dr Foxs cabinet record of resignation in disgrace, then rehabilitation through ineffectual jet-setting, will not be taken seriously in the competition.

Mr Johnson defers encounters with reality, but cannot avoid them indefinitely. He will compromise over Brexit, just as he did last year. The only question is whether it happens before or after transitional arrangements end in December. The terms of a deal with Brussels are not so different either side of the deadline, but the cost is higher if it is missed. In either case, Brexit is proving to be a slow and expensive way to teach the prime minister about geography.

See the original post here:

The Guardian view on Brexit and trade: an expensive geography lesson - The Guardian

The UK Government is planning to withhold power from Scotland and Wales when the Brexit transition ends, according to reports.

The Financial Times reports a 'state aid proposal' is expected to appear in a bill this autumn which would give Westminster statutory powers to control policies for the entire UK.

The potential legislation could see state aid policiesfor all evolved nations controlled solely by Westminster.

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Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said this would be 'a full-scale assault on devolution'.

She tweeted on Monday morning: "Make no mistake, this would be a full-scale assault on devolution - a blatant move to erode the powers of the Scottish Parliament in key areas.

"If the Tories want to further boost support for independence, this is the way to do it."

FT reports the legislation would enable Westminster to force both Scotland and Wales to accept whatever new standards regarding food, environment and animal welfare it agrees in future discussions and agreements with other countries.

The transition period ends on December 31, and state aid remains to be one of the most contentious issues in UK negotiations with the EU.

READ MORE:Scottish economy performance worst in the UK in June amid slower reopening from coronavirus pandemic lockdown

The governments in Scotland and Wales have said that this policy should be devolved to them, however, the UK government insists it should be down to them.

Scotland's Constitution Secretary Mike Russell has previously said plans to enshrine a UK "internal market" after Brexit would seriously undermine devolution, describing them as a potential "power grab".

In a letter to Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove, Mr Russell said he is concerned about proposals for an external body that would "test" whether a bill in Holyrood affected the UK's internal market and plans for a "mutual recognition regime", which he said could lower regulatory standards beyond what the Scottish Parliament found acceptable.

In response, Mr Gove accused him of trying to "confect" a political row.

Commenting, SNP Westminster Leader Ian Blackford MP said: "Boris Johnson's outrageous plan for a power grab on the Scottish Parliament is another shameless Tory attack on devolution - and we will resist it every step of the way.

"Yet again, Scotland is being completely ignored by Westminster. If the Tory government goes ahead with this attempt to roll-back devolution they will drive support for independence up even further.

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"Westminster has proved itself to be utterly incapable of acting in Scotland's interests. With the exception of the Scottish Tories, who have completely isolated themselves, the Scottish Parliament is united against moves to erode Scotland's devolution settlement.

"It's time for Jackson Carlaw to come out of hiding, find a backbone, and join the SNP in opposing this completely unacceptable move. Otherwise he will prove the Scottish Tories only exist to do Boris Johnson's bidding - however damaging.

"Scotland has been ignored throughout the Brexit process, shut out of the trade negotiations, and now our interests are being bulldozed for a Tory-Trump deal. It is clearer than ever that the only way to protect Scotland's interests and our place at the heart of Europe is to become an independent country."

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UK Government 'planning to withhold power from Scotland after Brexit transition' - HeraldScotland

File Photo: Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon reacts after delivering a speech on 'Scotland's European future after Brexit', in Brussels, Belgium, February 10, 2020. REUTERS/Yves Herman

(Reuters) - The Scottish government has warned it would defy a proposed UK legislation that will allow Westminster unilaterally to set food and environmental standards, the Financial Times newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The Scottish National Party will challenge in the courts the legislation that will give London unilateral control to police the UK's "internal market", Michael Russell, Scotland's cabinet secretary for constitutional affairs, told the newspaper on.ft.com/3favMWy.

The proposed UK internal market bill is going to give London the powers to force Wales and Scotland to accept whatever new standards were agreed in future trade agreements on environment, animal welfare and food, the report added, citing a source.

Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Christian Schmollinger

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Scotland threatens to defy UK's post-Brexit legislation - FT - Reuters UK