Interesting in various ways:

1. Implicitly admits UK is not a “normal third country” and has leverage to negotiate special deals
2. ⁠EU takes an initiative to pursue integration with U.K. rather than saying “ball is in London’s court”.

https://twitter.com/stevepeers/status/1780904058334650743

3. ⁠Shows they expect new U.K. govt soon and trying to anticipate quick potential deals. Especially those that can be signed prior to the German elections Sept 2025.

I have a new report out for @Peace_Rep_,'Market economics in an all-out-war? Assessing economic and political risks to the Ukrainian war effort'. It offers an unfortunately negative assessment of Ukrainian govt economic policy in its war of resistance 🧵/1
peacerep.org/publication/ma… Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure strike at where Ukraine is weakest - on the home front - due to the severe economic downturn. About 1 in 2 Ukrainians require emergency financial assistance to meet basic needs (IOM data) and unemployment is around 28% /2

I assume this wasn’t the vibe the leader of the opposition was going for but felt I had to point out the parallels between the Starmer pamphlet and Xi Jinping Thought. A “spot the difference” thread... “The road ahead will be long. The journey will not always be simple. But the choices are clear and the prizes at the end great.”

“There is a bright future for our country, but reaching it will not be easy. We cannot accomplish our goal with one single effort...”

Viktor Orbán will be repeatedly referred to as a 'populist' in the UK media today. This description is not technically wrong, but on it's own it's misleading. His populism is simply an adjunct of his racism, authoritarianism and ethnic nationalism.

So who is he? A thread He's anti-Semitic. His govt have led a high profile hate campaign against George Soros. Eg see his speech in 2018 election: "We must speak frankly and unequivocally about the future that is intended for us in... in the alchemical workshop of George Soros." miniszterelnok.hu/prime-minister…

I've written a new report on the Brexit deal for @Another_Europe, picked up in today's Observer with a nice plug from the awesome @NadiaWhittomeMP.

Here's a 🧵 with some of the deets /1
theguardian.com/politics/2021/… The movement of regulatory powers to the UK is mostly pointless because outside of agriculture (where change has been signalled) and immigration (where change is substantial) in most areas the UK isn't intending to use its new 'powers'. /2 anothereurope.org/reformEUdeal.p…

The Scottish LP seem to think it’s sensible to hammer the SNP for voting against a deal they don’t agree with. And their voters oppose.

The grounds? The “threat” of no deal. It suits some ppl to present the vote in Parliament as a deal versus no deal choice but it’s not true /1 With the U.K. and EU agreeing a deal, the only way to get to a “no deal” would be to replace the U.K. govt with one committed to it.

Why? Parliament has extremely limited power in relation to trade deals and international treaties more broadly /2

If you’re a neoliberal the benefits of leaving single market in financial services, losing passport rights etc, outweigh downsides. London banks have already relocated staff to EU to handle s/market trade. And the direction of EU is towards more democratic regulation of finance. If you're looking at this as a big financial investor, I think you'll have a very different view of the deal compared to, say, a Japanese car maker. How can the UK guarantee it will continue to have tariff free access to EU single market in goods? UK can't really offer this.

THREAD: How did Boris Johnson win the general election? Prob not the Q on everyone’s lips right now but hey. In true academic style, ie ten months later, I’ve published a piece with @ChristabelCoops in @po_qu

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/14… We argue that key to Johnson’s successful manoeuvre was prorogation and the no deal fantasy. It was a performative gesture that crucially didn’t require taking the country close to a no deal scenario.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/14…

Happy to be corrected but I can’t see how negative interest rates will do anything other than compound the problem of chronic asset price inflation, especially in the housing market. House prices now on the up again but share of homes purchased by first time buyers falling. Any thoughts from @AnnPettifor @meadwaj @garyseconomics appreciated!

Sorry but saying “the Holocaust was legal” is just such a dumb, ignorant and offensive way to make the case for civil disobedience. When the Allies declared their intention in 1943 to criminally prosecute Nazi atrocities they were operating under an existing principle of international law to punish as war criminals those who violate the laws or customs of war heinonline.org/HOL/Page?colle…

Rather than arguing about whether Labour advocated a soft Brexit (hard to see how it did given its rejection of FoM till Sept 2019), it's more useful to think about what arrangement we'd like in the future. Although I would have once said join EEA, don't think that would work now The Tory aim of getting out of EU state aid rules is the right policy pursued for the wrong reasons. As the global economy changes, as deglobalisation takes hold, markets are more dependent on the state. State aid is crucial in this context but can easily become corporate welfare

I haven't read the book Beckett refers to, but I think his well intentioned piece gets a few things wrong about the 'Red Wall'. Primarily it makes the mistake of confusing a small but electorally significant group of swing voters with an entire area

theguardian.com/commentisfree/… It's a common mistake but it's one that we should be aware of in the 'culture war' era. We shouldn't 'essentialize' the ex red wall communiites by confusing a group of electorally significant voters with what remains a complex and variegated whole.

My thoughts on @jemgilbert's fine piece on the Anglo-American left, fwiw. The conclusion on the Green New Deal is surely right; and would point out the US left has had considerable success in getting the 'GND in all but name' into the Democrat manifesto.

opendemocracy.net/en/we-lost-bec… Ok, it doesn't use the language of the GND, but it adopts a lot of the policies, in fact in quite a few places the wording is identical to the Biden-Sanders task force policy recommendations. joebiden.com/wp-content/upl…

The Sage report on UK universities and Coronavirus risk, which raises the prospect of something akin to a national uni lockdown in Nov, completely vindicates the position of UCU. Even at the 11th hour universities and government should commit to regular, systematic campus testing Indeed if you look at the detail of the report, the government’s own advisors argue explicitly in favour of trialling mass testing on university campuses and/or sample testing (‘population case detection’).

So, the union has been proven completely right in its position👇

This is worth reading from the UCL Vice-Provost, a respiratory physician. It’s a pretty brutal blow to the ‘all over by Christmas’ hopes:

“It is my view that a vaccine is unlikely to be successfully developed that leads us to exit the current crisis”
ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/aug/… Hard to read it and not wonder 'what if'. On 25th February there were 80k cases globally and 97% of infections were still in China. If the whole world had shutdown earlier the virus might have been eliminated China-style. sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/c…

Get why people are against a landlord bailout. But it does raise Qs given 47% of individual landlords in the UK only own one property. But financial interventions like QE corporate bond buying (which goes straight into dividend payouts) seem to be much, much less controversial This study on the impact of QE corporate bond buying in the Eurozone for example found that it led to a fourfold increase in dividends and *no* increases in investment.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

I know lots of people have been calling for the lifting of the cap on student numbers but letting the free market rip at a time like this is deeply regressive. The only hope is that it might have been done too late to unleash hyper austerity on half the sector. The initial game plan of UCL et al was to offset the drop off in international students with aggressive home market recruitment. The re-introduction of the cap was a progressive measure to protect the rest of HE from predatory competition for students.

In sympathy with Owen but the high point in Labour’s polling support ran from the 2017 election to April / May 2018 (see graph). I think Corbyn’s response to the Skripal poisoning (March 2018) was very damaging to his personal standing among 2019 Labour to Tory switchers.

https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1291866392820617223

It was also entirely unnecessary. It’s possible to oppose Chinese authoritarianism without backing the US Republican line. It also should be easy to condemn a hideous state assassination by a regime that has waged a brutal war in Syria and backed Trump, Le Pen and Brexit.

Human rights and democracy are powerful ideas and precisely for that reason they can be taken up cynically by people who aren't interested in either. But the belief that they are "Western values" is completely wrong and very damaging if it leads to soft-pedaling authoritarianism See the case @PriyamvadaGopal builds around the legacy of the British empire for today. The resistance of the enslaved and colonised to "oppression underscored the universality of values such as equality, human dignity, tolerance, justice and freedom" theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

The Biden-Sanders agreement looks good, though I admit I’m a bit taken aback that the US does not currently have any federal, statutory right to paid sick or parental leave 🤯 Here's the provision in the Biden-Sanders united front. An impressive document, just a shame the centrists still won't accept universal public health insurance joebiden.com/wp-content/upl…

The decision on whether to proceed with a libel action is not only based on 'am I in the right or wrong', but also would proceeding with the case be publicly damaging to me/the organisation. There is *clearly* no scenario where proceeding with the action benefits the Labour Party It's not really hard to imagine is it? You can get a flavour for what it would be like from the Johnny Depp case. But with the important difference that Depp isn't seeking the support of 14m British voters in five years time.