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Faisal Islam Profile picture
@faisalislam
Aug 5, 2019 • 9 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
Matters looking rather ropey in the Brexit negotiations. There’s apparently now nothing substantive planned until Biarritz G7 meeting at end of month. You’d expect the sort of briefings emerging from Brussels tonight, and a pinch of salt required etc BUT...
... sending the message that they have interpreted the new negotiator Frost’s meetings as consistent only with leaving with No Deal and calling a GE.. “they can’t climb down from this”...
They recognise that the UK Government is now trying to isolate and put personal pressure on Irish leader Leo Varadkar. So they purposely sent a message of full support for the Irish at the EU Council debrief... and for the backstop etc.
Understand some key officials rearranged their holidays in anticipation of some sort of proper talks in August - but nothing substantive happening till G7 at least. That’s pretty much 5/14 weeks before Brexit deadline under Johnson administration gone.
No 10 say: “PM wants to meet EU leaders & negotiate a new deal – one that abolishes the anti-democratic backstop. We will throw ourselves into negotiations with the greatest energy & spirit of friendship and we hope EU will rethink its current refusal to make any changes to WA”..
No 10 continued... “The fact is the Withdrawal Agreement has rejected by Parliament three times and will not pass in its current form so – if the EU wants a deal – it needs to change its stance. Until then, we will continue to prepare to leave the EU on 31 October”...
There’s more to say here - but it’s late and I’ll blog about it for tomorrow on the website - so watch this space.
Here is the blog reflecting what I’ve heard on Brexit stand-off...

more than the backstop - diminishing chance of UK level playing field guarantees - social, regulatory, environmental, also undercutting path to a tariff free UK-EU trade deal, they say.

bbc.co.uk/news/business-…
EU side saying that the much-cherished offer of a tariff free, quota free UK-EU trade deal in March 2018 was always conditional on “sufficient guarantees for a level playing field”. That is now in real doubt, after initial conversations with new administration here

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More from @faisalislam

Faisal Islam Profile picture
Jul 23
NAO confirms that HS2 without phase 2 will result in trains with less space between Manchester and Birmingham than current west Coast services, and might require demand management to dissuade passengers… bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…
Non-consensus view, but having sunk the costs of phase 1, and then committed to the hybrid bill for HS2 north… the cost benefit ratio of completing the bit between Manchester airport and Birmingham will be very high… would require political consensus to be re-established though
Who can forget the Perm Sec’s amazing document from last year.. the strategic case on rebalancing Britain “no longer applies”
Read 20 tweets
Faisal Islam Profile picture
Jul 21
Shadow Chancellor Jeremy Hunt acknowledges to @bbclaurak when asked if Conservatives had won whether there would have been tax cuts in Autumn that “we wouldn’t have been able to do it immediately, no”
…
most notable thing re: Chancellor interview with Laura is this unusual Treasury analysis due in next fortnight which will “look at the state of the public services, the state of the public finances…public spending pressures we are under”

Q: why isnt the OBR doing this?
While fiscally eventful, it is not going to be a “fiscal event”… when first announced by Chancellor on her first Monday in office it sounded more like an audit of stalled spending and impact on public services, than an audit of the public finances…
Read 6 tweets
Faisal Islam Profile picture
Jul 9
Reassuringly, @demishassabis tells Blair at the @InstituteGC conference that Artificial Intelligence is only at the IQ level of a cat right now.. [although that is changing rapidly - surely will exceed humans in many tasks in this Parliament] 🐈‍⬛
Interesting to think Blair as PM famously never used his computer, or rarely did so…

Also has the scars, as it were, from that failed NHS IT contract… if only that had succeeded…

Interesting to know if this Govt is conscious of the ghosts of that and of botched PFI deals.
Chancellor’s Mais lecture did have sense of learning from some setbacks during the Blair era … havent seen a good analysis tho of where eg record on PFI and the NHS IT contract [perhaps Horizon too] forms part of this govt’s memory.

Nothing is entirely new in politics, ever.
Read 16 tweets
Faisal Islam Profile picture
Jun 5
Coutinho co-opting the Treasury Permanent Secretary into backing idea that Labour will raise taxes by thousands…

All this arises because the OBR (unlike its equivalent in Ireland, Australia the US, the CBO) is prevented from doing comparable truly independent costings…
This whole “debate” is, for now, rather absurd, as next week we will get the actual policies in manifestos, the parties’ own assumptions and separate truly independent numbers on the implications for tax, spend & borrowing from the likes of the IFS & Niesr.
The Treasury Permanent Secretary who Coutinho deployed this morning to defend the £38bn/ £2k claim wrote to the Opposition to say it “should not be presented as having been produced by civil service”… this could be problematic…
Read 6 tweets
Faisal Islam Profile picture
May 20
Looks like a major “announcement” on energy bills is imminent … another @politicalpics long lens scoop… Big Six have been briefed … something to do with the energy price cap adjustment (cut) from July (coming by Friday), further policy on smart meters (rollout has stalled)
”Note we do not necessarily want their advocacy as consumer trust is so low in suppliers that if a package of this kind is backed by them then consumers will instinctively regard it as not in their best interests” the memo says of the Big Six energy providers
Logically, some sort of announcement that builds on the inflation fall (energy driven) on Wednesday and the further fall in the cap on Friday, to promote the idea that the cost of living crisis is behind us, but something not all the energy companies will back - perhaps rolling back some of the green additions ???
Read 6 tweets
Faisal Islam Profile picture
Mar 8
1 in 4 Scottish adults on anti-depressants doctor just told Amol on @BBCr4today re inactivity…

Can’t find directly comparable England stat … but NHS England business data says there were 8.6m patients prescribed antidepressants in 22/23 (up from 6.8m in 2015)… 19% of adults
Thanks followers - the doc did say 1 in 5, and the fact is here from NHS business data … 8.6m antidepressant prescriptions out of an adult population of 45 million… 5.6m women, 2.9m men. Up from 2015 6.8m prescriptions/ 43m population… (1 in 6)

these numbers seem astonishing. Image
By age
English children on prescribed antidepressants, including a handful of toddlers - big spike up is for teenage girls… Image
Read 5 tweets

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