Brief comment on this. From a #stateaid perspective, this will not be aid if it is investment on market terms. The involvement of commercial partners supports the view that it is, as long as they are investing on the same or basically similar (“pari passu” in the jargon) terms.
But even if it isn’t State aid, it’s fair to wonder what audit or governance process it went through. After all, there are real risks that big spending becomes a substitute for more effective action.
Also risks of groupthink:
And it is critical to be able to prove to the outside world that public money has been spent effectively.
It may well be that the Govt can explain clearly what the benefit of this spending is. It may well also have gone through processes that mitigate the dangers of groupthink and allow awkward dissenting challenges. But those are questions that are fair to ask.
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The 🐘 in the room that it fails to confront (though sometimes hints at): that companies operate in a world where the public expects them to uphold standards in conduct and recruitment and they will suffer *commercially* if they don’t.
An example is the hand-wringing discussion of the growth of ESG funds that simply fails to explain why they’ve grown (the obvious answer being the inconvenient one that they respond to public demand).
Others - see eg - have dealt with the “no big negative impact” claim here (and it isn’t “assume”: it’s looking at the evidence and applying standard analysis). But a couple of points on “and so little use has been made of the opportunities [Brexit] offers”
The current government has taken - in rafts of legislation since 2019 - enormous powers to change EU regulatory rules. That was so even before the Retained EU Law Act (REULA) gave them even greater powers to do so, largely without needing to involve Parliament.
Have they used them? Despite the huge political pressure on them, and every incentive on individual ministers, to find “Brexit opportunities”, hardly at all.
The concerns set out by @GeorgeMonbiot here have powerful and authoritative backing from the 2022 @CMAgovUK report into children’s care. Its conclusion:
Since then, the inability of the children in care system to deal adequately with children in care with complex needs has led to an explosion in “Deprivation of Liberty Orders” (DOLs) - so many that there is now a special court to deal with them. judiciary.uk/launch-of-nati…
Some brief comments on the European Commission’s proposal to get a mandate to negotiate a youth mobility agreement with the UK. ec.europa.eu/commission/pre…
1. The EU is not there yet. The mandate has to be agreed by the Council of Ministers: probably by qualified majority. And it isn’t clear whether a final agreement would need to be ratified by all Member States as well as the EU itself.
2. If the EU does agree a mandate, that is likely to slam the door on any attempt by the UK to negotiate youth mobility agreements with individual Member States (because they have a duty of sincere cooperation). So any agreement would have to cover (say) 🇧🇬 as well as (say) 🇫🇷.
1. No plan to “stop the boats” (chase them into French waters, destroy them on (French?) shores) or to send refugees who do land here to other countries (safe, because otherwise UK public opinion, let alone law, won’t wear it) works without cooperation of those countries. Esp. 🇫🇷
2. Those countries won’t do deals or cooperate just because it suits the UK. And France is (and French voters are) well aware that France takes many more refugees than we do.