This report concludes - rightly - that unless the EU and UK can reach an agreement on professional services it will do significant harm to the UK economy, and firms that export their services will have to rely on bilateral agreements between the UK and individual member states.
This places the UK service sector at a considerable disadvantage, whereby EU member states in which UK firms can currently freely compete face the mercy of national regulators to decide what level of provision they are able to offer. Some may be lucky, many will not.
Here’s the rub: Johnson decided the most important thing was NOT to extend transition and to have agreement by this Thursday, 15 October. He did this during a global pandemic, when everyone else was dealing with an immediate emergency and not Brexit.
To get a deal of the nature this report rightly says is necessary the Commission wld have to seek additional mandate from each member state to negotiate *on their behalf*. Such an agreement requires sign off from each EU member state parliament AND regional parls. where necessary
This takes time. Time which Johnson himself threw away at the start of this process. There is now no time left, and no option to secure a comprehensive deal for professional services. All because this PM prioritised looking tough ahead of the national interest.
As a result, instead of a comprehensive and sustainable deal, we can now only end up with a threadbare offering which the UK will spend *years* trying to negotiate on top of to undo the mess that’s about to happen.
Classic Dom? Who knows. But this is what short-termism brings.
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“Australia” sounds great with beaches, sun and wallabies but *there is no EU-Aus deal - he is dressing up chaos*
“Canada” is a very basic FTA with terms that might work for a jurisdiction 6,000km from the EU but not for a country next door, where the EU is BY FAR its biggest mkt
The truth is that for all this “we are ready for no deal” the reality is of course we’re not - we’re not even ready for the threadbare deal that’s possible. It’s hard to plan for tariffs but *impossible for all but the very biggest businesses* to plan for quotas.
As a Spad in the NI Office I sat in on a meeting between the SoS and families of the Omagh bombing victims. It’s one of the most moving experiences of my life to date, and it will stay with me always. They were determined that no family should go through what they did.
They didn’t harbour any resentment, hatred or confusion about what had happened. Stopping another atrocity, another unbearable heartache for someone else’s mother, son, brother, sister, daughter - that was their only mission. Peace in Ireland was everything to them.
And they were there when the last bit of devolution was delivered on a very sunny day at Stormont. And I know some in the NIO became lifelong friends with some of them. The GFA was a miracle to communities who’d faced the reality of the “Troubles” day in day out.
The UK could realistically act as a significant back-channel for goods into the EU that do not meet its standards. That is not a realistic threat from Canada, which at nearest point is 3,000km from EU.
This is why the “level playing field” - no race to the bottom - is demanded.
You cannot realistically accept no deal without comprehending the level of disruption that would bring.
There would be an *immediate and significant* increase in checks and barriers for goods impacting many things from food supply to parts, to medicines.
UK has 2 land borders with EU (1 a tunnel) and its goods/ food often arrive via mega ports in EU such as Rotterdam. The Commission has never said UK wld copy Canada agreement - it’s always been clear that there would be additional benefits/ obligations 1/
The share of Canada’s trade with EU is barely 10pc of 🇨🇦 economy - whereas for the UK it’s almost half. In many regions of UK (“e.g. Red Wall”) the dependency on the single market is almost total. Often one large employer which has located in UK b/c of access to EU market. 2/
Given the UK’s proximity to EU, the fact that trade is largely governed by geography despite what we hear about “global Britain”, and the backstop in NI, it would be *unthinkable* for EU to allow there to be a regulatory back channel for companies to undercut standards via UK. 3/
It is a huge honour to have been re-elected alongside @Claude_Moraes.
But this is not a good night for Labour and we have seen brilliant Labour MEPs lose their seats and excellent candidates not take up seats.
Those colleagues who lost their seats did not do so because of their record or their commitment to fight for Britain’s place in the EU.
They lost because our message as a party was not clear. We tried to fudge an issue that voters held paramount in these elections: Brexit.
It is impossible to make a cogent case for election to the European Parliament if we are ambivalent about whether or not we support the institution itself.
We can’t fudge this any longer. We have run out road and run out of options.