UK Politics: Fishing for a deal

[Gorn]

56 minutes ago, mormont said:

I guarantee you no UK worker wants to do fish processing anyway.

That's a... bold claim. There are plenty of jobs that people do despite not particularly wanting to, either because they are well paid, or due to lack of better alternative opportunities.

Also, Norway and Iceland are countries with higher standard of living than the UK, which don't seem to have problems with filling positions in their fishing industries with domestic workers.

[Padraig]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

I’m sure the same comment applies to Macron in that case.

In fairness, Macron is thinking of the current French jobs in fishing.  Not the potential new jobs.

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, Padraig said:

In fairness, Macron is thinking of the current French jobs in fishing.  Not the potential new jobs.

Macron was thinking about his own job, and the potential for French fishermen wearing yellow vests 

[A wilding]

That UK workers won't be found to do fish processing seems plausible to me, since UK workers can't be found to do fruit picking.

One interesting fact about the extremely small UK fishing industry is that much of the current fishing quotas are in the hands of EU companies that have purchased parts of them over the years. See e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/52420116

 

 

 

[SeanF]

Fishing has a symbolic importance, that is way out of proportion to its economic significance.  Neither our government, nor the French, nor the Spanish can be seen to be letting down their fishermen.

[Spockydog]

So, Brexiteers, was it worth it? Did you take back control? Did you? Hmm...

[A wilding]

I guess that we will find out. And one possible disastrous outcome has now been avoided, I am substantially relieved about that.

Easy predictions: negative consequences will be blamed on Covid-19; and the Tory right and other hard Brexiters will call Johnson a sellout and continue to insist that a rainbow unicorn Brexit was possible..

[Heartofice]

52 minutes ago, A wilding said:

I guess that we will find out. And one possible disastrous outcome has now been avoided, I am substantially relieved about that.

Easy predictions: negative consequences will be blamed on Covid-19; and the Tory right and other hard Brexiters will call Johnson a sellout and continue to insist that a rainbow unicorn Brexit was possible..

We'll see, Farage has been on the news, his opinion seems to be that even if the deal isn't totally what he would have wanted, he seems pretty happy, and if he could vote to pass it, he would. 

Anyway, at first glance the signs look good on this deal. I'm pretty happy with what I've seen so far. I think the major sticking point of Level Playing Fields we managed to push the EU back on a number of key points and came away with a result that is fair for both sides and doesn't essentially keep us locked into following them in perpetuity.

It's worth noting all the things that have been said over this past year by pundits, and remainers that have turned out to be completely false, and which should be remembered next time. Only a couple of weeks ago many were deriding Boris for saying this was the easiest deal in history, or inaccurately pulling out his 'oven ready' quote. It was said that doing a trade deal in a year was impossible, people were screaming that we needed to extend the deal because of Covid. It was said that we couldn't complete continuity deals with the rest of the world and we'd be eaten alive. 

None of that has come to pass. It was all total garbage. 

Boris has had an appalling year, his handling of the virus has looked very bad, and the government has looked chaotic and shambolic at times, but when it comes to Brexit he's been spectacular. Just remember where we were before he was Prime Minister. We had the May era, a period of real chaos, where every night on tv was another vote that seemed like a soap opera and felt game changing, infighting was everywhere, nothing was moving and Brexit was a farce. It was no wonder everyone wanted it over. But Boris came in, got a massive majority, passed a withdrawal agreement and a FTA that are much better than anything Theresa May ever aimed for. Honestly I think he needs to be congratulated here because it seems like a job well done, simply for getting it over the line. 

2021 might end up being a good year. Brexit is done, we can stop talking about it, Britain is leading the world in rolling out vaccines and hopefully we can move past that, Trump is gone and we can go back onto Twitter. Something to look forward to at last.

[Spockydog]

Still waiting for the detail, but isn't this basically the same deal as Theresa May's, the one which Boris said no British PM should ever accept, before resigning from the government in protest?

[Heartofice]

3 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Still waiting for the detail, but isn't this basically the same deal as Theresa May's, the one which Boris said no British PM should ever accept, before resigning from the government in protest?

You’re thinking about the withdrawal agreement 

[Spockydog]

24 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

You’re thinking about the withdrawal agreement 

Ah, okay. What's the difference?

ETA: It's okay, was having a senior moment.

 

[Maltaran]

31 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

2021 might end up being a good year. Brexit is done, we can stop talking about it, Britain is leading the world in rolling out vaccines and hopefully we can move past that, Trump is gone and we can go back onto Twitter. Something to look forward to at last.

I'll give you the second two, but with a 2000 page deal that MPs are clearly going to have to vote on without being able to read the whole of it, I suspect a few juicy news stories will come up in January and February when they find they've agreed to things they don't like.

[A wilding]

34 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

It's worth noting all the things that have been said over this past year by pundits, and remainers that have turned out to be completely false, and which should be remembered next time. Only a couple of weeks ago many were deriding Boris for saying this was the easiest deal in history, or inaccurately pulling out his 'oven ready' quote. It was said that doing a trade deal in a year was impossible, people were screaming that we needed to extend the deal because of Covid. It was said that we couldn't complete continuity deals with the rest of the world and we'd be eaten alive. 

As to the bolded, really? Who said anything about "impossible"?

Pulling out the "easiest deal in history", or the retrospectively gaslighted "oven ready" quotes seem entirely fair to me, seeing that this deal has been agreed at absolutely the last minute, after long negotiations, months or years after the process was started. Delaying exit because of Covid would have been a good idea technically, but I can see it was politically impossible for Johnson. What deals the UK can get from other countries remain to be seen. it depends on the details of this agreement, but if the UK has (sensibly) decided to stay in regulatory harmony wit the EU, scope may be limited - it will hopefully at least curtail the sort of one sided deal with the US that the Tory Right wanted and many of us feared. How the UK now fares outside the EU also remains to be seen.

More generally,, mulling it over, I think we need to see the small print of this agreement before coming to any conclusions.

[Heartofice]

Well I think it’s also worth nothing a couple of the other myths that have been floating about around Brexit.

Firstly that Boris wanted to turn Britain into some deregulated free for all. That won’t happen and was never even the aim, it was simply to not be tied to the EU’s rules and have to follow them line by line. 
 

Secondly that Boris never wanted a deal, and that No Deal was his ultimate goal. It’s amazing the amount of times I’ve heard this, and yet it went against all the evidence. Where the confusion lay was that Boris was less scared of no deal than many pundits, but he didn’t want it. He’s always wanted a deal. 
 

Sure there are bound to be some arguments over the small print but it’s worth noting what he’s achieved. He said he’d get Brexit done, he was voted in to do that and he’s achieved it. We’ve decoupled from the EU, we have control of our borders and immigration, tariff and quota free access, we don’t have to pay into the EU budget, we can do free trade deals with the rest of the world without being burdened with the EUs lengthy agreement processes, we have less contact with the ECJ, our politicians are more accountable to people who elect them.

 

[The Anti-Targ]

All of the progressive commentators I've read / heard have said they think Boris is more likely to want a deal than a no-deal, but they also said he was doing a good job appearing to be in favour of no-deal. They did question Johnson's competence at getting a decent deal and I suppose I'll have to wait for someone else to do some analysis before being able to come to a firm opinion on that. So I'm not sure where the notion comes from that most people "on the left" were sure Boris was a no-deal guy. I thought the opinion was really that Boris was a "Boris does what's good for Boris" guy, which logically means that if Boris wants a shot at staying PM for a while a deal is the better way of doing that than a no-deal. People claiming Boris wanted no-deal is really failing to understand the self-interest / self-preservation motivations that drive Boris.

 

 

[mormont]

7 hours ago, Gorn said:

That's a... bold claim. 

Backed by the facts. Just over half of existing jobs in uk fish processing are done by immigrants.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

41 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

People claiming Boris wanted no-deal is really failing to understand the self-interest / self-preservation motivations that drive Boris.

From afar it appears he wanted to campaign as a tough guy and govern more reasonably, relatively speaking. That's why the Trump comparisons always fell flat. 

Anyways, sounds like this wasn't a complete own goal, so yay? 

[The Anti-Targ]

I wouldn't say his COVID-19 governance was reasonable. Reasonably incompetent perhaps.

[DaveSumm]

54 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

but they also said he was doing a good job appearing to be in favour of no-deal

I’m no negotiator, but that seems like pretty standard tactics doesn’t it? Appearing to not fear the repercussions of walking away? Otherwise what leverage do you have?

Considering the amount of oxygen that’s been used up over Brexit over the past 4 fucking years, I have zero energy left to care about it. Sounds like it wasn’t a total fuck up. Still incredible to think, if you’d told me a year ago that there’d be a news story that would comfortably bury a Brexit deal: “Christmas Cancelled”. Fucking 2020 man. 

[Soylent Brown]

Isn't that the equivalent of someone threatening to shotgun their own bollocks off though?