EU Trade Talks Thread

[JohnL]

All these facilities for Truckers were meant to be up and running (images on Sky News now).

I wonder what else isn't ready

[Blah Blah]

The problem with the fast track testing the government announced is that they are asking lorry drivers to give up their place in the queue, to drive somewhere else, to get the test, and then rejoin the queue. As usual, government trying to centralise over localising something. Surely the answer is to mobile test drivers, starting from the front of the queue? Isn't that what the army are good at? Field services.

Sky reporting that drivers are staying put, not going anywhere to be tested. So this isn't going to resolve itself quickly.

[Sephiroth]

Let's cast our mind back to summer 2018 - government demanding companies involved in brexit planning sign non-disclosure agreements lest people find out what was going to happen

Source involved in planning "People will shit themselves and THINK they want a new referendum"

Thousands of lorries stuck in Kent for days because France worried about new virus strain found in UK? That's the French being mean to the UK, out of order Frenchies, boo hiss how dare they. It's an outrage! People's lives are affected! Food and medicines are affected!!

Thousands of lorries stuck in Kent for days because Sovrin-T and brexit? Totally worth it - all part of the plan dear boy. We knew what we were voting for etc etc

[malumbu]

BB please avoid ignorant (unaware rather than stupid) posts - phenomenal turn around in Kent involving local and national teams, voluntary sector and the like. It's easy to criticise. Can we save that for the bigger picture of why we are where we are with nine days to the end of transition?

PS disappointing that the Beeb can't make this (Kent) a major story in particular the speed of response and cross agency working.

[JohnL]

Chaos on Sky News now - someone was getting under a lorry

Police can't communicate and there are no translators, no toilets either.

[JohnL]

malumbu Wrote:

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> PS disappointing that the Beeb can't make this

> (Kent) a major story in particular the speed of

> response and cross agency working.

I don't watch BBC News any more - Maybe Sky News are reporting this differently - They're live at Dover.

It's like no-one has thought what to do with those at the head of the queue at Dover.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/army-testing-lorry-drivers-france-ease-travel-ban-b453253.html

[JohnL]

These guys are handing out food etc. on the M20 - but that just makes the official response look worse.

[JohnL]

Anyway these lorry drivers won't be making trips to the UK in future unless they're paid handsomely I guess.

[diable rouge]

Sephiroth Wrote:

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> does anyone apart from TB actually think me and BB

> are one and the same?

I think it was TD just having s dig...

[Sephiroth]

"I think it was TD just having s dig..."

ah - silly me

[diable rouge]

JohnL Wrote:

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> I think Admin can see IP addresses of posters -

> so the games up if they have the same IP all the

> time (of course users then claim they are flat

> mates and share an internet connection).

Isn't there such a thing as an IP blocker?

And isn't it possible to run two accounts, one using wifi, the other 3/4G? Just have to remember which is which.

Very difficult to change a posting style though and keep it up, certainly if you post regularly, old habits die hard, eventually they slip up. There's one multiple poster who makes the same typos, and as Sue mentioned, even the timings of someone's posts can give the game away...

[diable rouge]

Sephiroth Wrote:

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> "I think it was TD just having s dig..."

>

> ah - silly me

I never spotted that this was you, perhaps because you weren't having run-ins with ????...;-)

[JohnL]

Yes (I'm supposed to work in this LOL ).

It takes more organisation than I have keeping a job down as well.

[Sephiroth]

"I never spotted that this was you, perhaps because you weren't having run-ins with ????.."

And since he bailed on twitter and I bailed on Facebook I don't even get to do that anywhere else!

[JohnL]

Also integrity is almost defined by behaving as you say you do - if you don't have it you will be found out eventually.

Those that do it on twitter are assumed to be paid - I remember a previous tory chairman actually mentioned they were setting up and paying a social media unit in about 2017 - I think it rebelled against Theresa May at some point.#

Here's a report mentioning it

https://www.ft.com/content/a61cd0b2-0ba4-11ea-bb52-34c8d9dc6d84

Would they see a local forum as worth bothering with - no idea :)

[diable rouge]

Someone else occasionally posts on Trump's Twitter, either that or he has lucid spells between his narcissistic psychotic episodes...

[JohnL]

LOL - Has to be his wife or daughter

[JohnL]

I'm off to listen to Hancock's Half Hour.

[JohnL]

Well that was depressing.

[TheCat]

So....while the early vaccine approval in the UK (versus the EU) has already been discussed on these pages, and relegated into the 'nice but not really a big deal in the scheme of brexit' basket (by myself as well I might add, so not a pop at remainers). If this assessment (below) from AEP in the Telegraph is in anyway accurate with regards to the timing of delivery of vaccines procured by the EMA (thus potentially delaying the mass inoculation of EU population for a further 6 months (versus the UK))...then it's not only a big deal in terms of public health, but also for potential economic recovery. To be fair, I think we don't really have the full picture yet on timing rollouts in any country, so I'm not posting this article and suggesting its gospel, but if reasonably accurate, it might perhaps even verge on being worthy discussion as (whisper it) a 'real tangible benefit' of brexit?....

Europe?s vaccination fiasco threatens to become the EU's biggest failure

The politicisation by Brussels of Covid vaccines is turning into an economic and political black swan event - with a huge price to pay

AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD

23 December 2020 ? 3:35pm

The EU?s politicisation of Covid vaccines is turning into an economic and political black swan event. There will be a price to pay as the consequences of this profound failure unfold in 2021, and an even higher price as people start to understand why it happened.

Europe?s double-dip recession will be stretched out for another quarter. Recovery will be delayed until the second half of the year.

Thousands more companies will be pushed over the brink, threatening a cascade of defaults and raising the risk of systemic solvency across the banking nexus. Labour scarring will run deeper. Public debt ratios across the Club Med bloc will move closer to the point of no return.

It is by now widely known that the European Medicines Agency wasted two critical weeks after the UK, Canada and even America?s notoriously cautious FDA had approved the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine. The agency would have wasted another week had there not been furious complaints from Berlin.

The Commission?s insistence that all EU states should then launch the vaccine at the same time after Christmas has lost yet more critical days. Germans have been subjected to the surreal spectacle of trial drills by their well-organised vaccination machine when they could have been doing the real thing. They cannot yet receive a jab made by their own start-up group BioNTech.

?Germany has bet on Europe, and lost heavily (krachend verloren),? was the headline across Die Zeit, with a pointed picture of a woman in Cardiff being vaccinated while along with a caption declaring that Germans must wait such deliverance.

The Netherlands has compounded the error by so mishandling its software preparations that it will not start vaccinating until Jan 8. If you think Boris Johnson has had a bad pandemic, take a look at Dutch wunderkind Mark Rutte. Listen to the volcanic exchanges in the Tweede Kamer.

But these delays pale compared to what is coming next year. The European vaccine alliance has failed in its one overriding purpose: it neglected the job of acquiring vaccines. Germany has just 400,000 doses of the BioNTech jab and may not receive more than 3m or 4m by late January, rising to a total of 11m to 13m by the end of March. Berlin has taken matters into its own hands and belatedly ordered more for the future but the damage is done.

A devastating report by investigative journalists at Der Spiegel entitled ?The Planning Disaster? pulls away the curtain on the ineptitude of the European Commission, which drifted through the summer with much self-gratulation but little action.

Other countries ordered early, and ordered wide. Brussels picked a mix of vaccines that mostly will not be ready until the second half of 2021 at the earliest. It failed to lock in a firm order for the BioNTech jab until mid-November, long after it was already clear that this messenger RNA vaccine was a front-runner.

Even then it declined the full offer of 500m doses for the EU27. The Commission ordered just 200m, with an option for 100m more. It also turned down most of the offer from Moderna, the other mRNA front-runner.

According to Der Spiegel there had to be parity with Sanofi?s "French vaccine", which has since gone badly awry and is unlikely to come on stream before the end of 2021. "Buying more from a German company wasn't in the cards,? said one source.

You can interpret this as a case of European ideology and political correctness running amok, but there is an even worse construction: the Commission seems to have intervened in the interests of one commercial company, spending public funds corruptly in violation of its own competition law.

?Dramatic consequences are brewing for the German government,? said Der Spiegel. ?Without being able to vaccinate on a broad scale, the country won?t be able to stop the virus. Which means that the fall and winter of 2021 could be similar to this year, with high infection rates, contact restrictions and lockdowns.?

Analysts at Eurointelligence go even further: ?The combination of a delay of vaccine approval and a procurement policy under suspicion of prioritising producer interest would be a shock from which the EU would struggle to recover. From now onwards, Covid deaths may be EU deaths.?

In my view we are heading into a year where German popular support for the European Project will be stress-tested like never before. Two grave matters will intersect. It will become clear to all that the fundamental health security of the country has been endangered by EU politics. At the same time, monetary union will go through another spasm of tension.

Europe?s leaders have oversold the ?750bn recovery fund as a springboard for Keynesian reflation. It is spread too thinly over five years to move the macroeconomic needle. Almost half of the money is in the form of loans that may never be used - except in extremis - because of the Troika-like conditions attached.

Budget plans in southern Europe suggest that much of the grant component displaces money that would have been spent anyway and therefore adds no net fiscal stimulus. Yet a third wave of Covid and further rolling lockdowns, now unavoidable, means that the overall fiscal package will have to be greater.

There is already talk sotto voce that the recovery fund will need to be much larger to avert lasting economic damage. If so, it means telling German and northern European taxpayers that they will have to dig deeper into their pockets to fund even greater transfers to the South.

The European Central Bank can shut down the price signals in the sovereign debt markets for a while longer by soaking up the bond issuance of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and indeed France, but the longer it does so, the clearer it is that the ECB is conducting fiscal policy and propping up insolvent sovereign states in breach of EU treaty law.

While the latest programme of pandemic QE lasts in principle until March 2022, the problems will surface before then. German public opinion and part of the economics professoriate will react once there are first flickers of inflation, which will occur around Easter for mechanical "base-effect" reasons and because of commodity supply constraints. You can dress up QE as an emergency tool for fighting deflation. How do you explain it if prices are rising briskly?

For now attention is on Britain?s particular travails but this is unlikely to last. Scientists working in the UK discovered and tracked the B.1.1.7 mutation because this country has done almost as much genome sequencing of Covid-19 as the rest of the world combined. As Nervtag said in its report, this mutation was particularly hard to sequence.

Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK) makes these sequences available to international science, a big contribution to the global fight against the pandemic that is little appreciated in lay circles. You certainly would not know this from some of the abuse being hurled at Britain.

Italy?s health adviser Walter Ricciardi descended to inexcusable depths in suggesting that the UK knew about the virus in September (it did not not: the sample was collected in September, one of thousands of mutations) and has since engaged in a Wuhanesque cover-up.

It is possible that the mutation came from Italy in the first place for all we know. It might have come from the treatment of an immuno-compromised patient in the UK treated with neutralising antibodies, but we can?t be sure. It is too early to reach any conclusion.

The larger point is that the UK acts as Europe?s viral antennae. There has been more Covid sequencing from Wales than from the whole of France. Once EU states carry out full surveillance of the mutant strain they may discover that it has long been circulating on the Continent, explaining the parabolic surges that have caught so many governments off guard over recent weeks.

The great irony is that only the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will be available soon enough and at a larger enough scale to prevent a disaster for Europe over the next six months. The mutation makes it even more urgent. ?Right now, whether Germany fares well or not hinges on the AstraZeneca vaccine,? says Karl Lauterbach, health chief for the German Social Democrats.

The vaccine will almost certainly be approved in the UK the week after Christmas. The European Medicines Agency will have to decide whether to swallow its pride and accept an accursed product of this apostate island. My guess is that it will drag feet for faux procedural reasons until public opinion and the German Chancellor force the issue.

Whatever happens, it is going to be a very difficult time for Europe. People will notice as the UK conducts several million vaccinations a week all through January in a massive operation that draws on the best of the NHS and the British armed forces. There will be the same images in America, Canada, and elsewhere.

They will ask why the doses are being dribbled out so desperately slowly across the Continent, and when that happens Brussels will struggle to offer a credible answer. If EU elites don?t yet realise that this is going to mushroom into one of the biggest failures in the history of the European Project, they will find out soon enough

[Sephiroth]

rollout of the vaccine is something to watch - right now? who knows. But given AEP's track record I'll pass on the article*

Back on topic - it's looking like deal announcement close with UK caving. Because what else could happen

* that track record can be found here

https://muckrack.com/ambrose-evans-pritchard/articles

some highlights

"We can beat Covid without lockdowns, says top German virologist"

"Markets are counting on a vaccine rescue that is further away than they think"

"America Inc will shake off COVID-19 effects quicker than we think"

"https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/12/brexit-vote-is-about-the-supremacy-of-parliament-and-nothing-els/"

there is a huuuuuge pile of horseshit with his name on it - so of course The Cat loves to stick it's snout in and snuffle around

[JohnL]

If Boris gave way on fishing I'd say that was pragmatic if he got something back as it's a small part of the economy.

The ERM and some others would say treachery and sellout.

[Sephiroth]

Johnson is toast either way - reality and Brexit cannot mix. And anyone making promises on back of Brexit to UK voters will be jettisoned

As I've said, to lose one PM over Brexit is unfortunate... But Cameron, May, Johnson and who's next?

[TheCat]

Sephiroth Wrote:

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> rollout of the vaccine is something to watch -

> right now? who knows. But given AEP's track record

> I'll pass on the article*

>

> Back on topic - it's looking like deal

> announcement close with UK caving. Because what

> else could happen

>

>

> * that track record can be found here

> https://muckrack.com/ambrose-evans-pritchard/artic

> les

>

> some highlights

> "We can beat Covid without lockdowns, says top

> German virologist"

> "Markets are counting on a vaccine rescue that is

> further away than they think"

> "America Inc will shake off COVID-19 effects

> quicker than we think"

> "https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/12/b

> rexit-vote-is-about-the-supremacy-of-parliament-an

> d-nothing-els/"

>

> there is a huuuuuge pile of horseshit with his

> name on it - so of course The Cat loves to stick

> it's snout in and snuffle around

Try and play the ball, not the man, Sephiroth. And I'm referring to AEP's article, not myself.

Also...point of order, Cat's don't have snouts..we prefer the term 'nose leather's...

[Sephiroth]

"Also...point of order, Cat's don't have snouts..we prefer the term 'nose leather's..."

Fair

"Try and play the ball, not the man, Sephiroth. And I'm referring to AEP's article, not myself. "

Nah - once someone is a proven snake oil salesman, it's fair to judge them. "Play the ball not the man" is an overplayed card. There are too many bad actors- they need calling out. Their arguments define them