Watch the UK's Brexit negotiator explain his frank realization that Britain is an island

boing
61

Perhaps I’m a bit slow as I don’t get the point of the snark.

To start: I voted remain, have never understood the Brexit arguments and still don’t.
That said, I think the context of his statement is being extrapolated to suit your own perspective.

Raab made the statement that we are particularly reliant on Dover-Calais, with its port and tunnel, in contrast to the other ~120 ports on the UK coastline. He doesn’t suggest that the UK being an island nation comes as a surprise to him.

Where he is going with his point I don’t really understand; it seems to wander back to the “we want unrestricted borders” view that everyone wants when it suits us (for commercial reasons especially) but with the “keep the nasty foreigners out” provisions that the Brexit sentiment seems to harbour.

I’m all for challenging the elected government for their bullshit but I don’t see how selective snark accomplishes anything.

62

There’s a good chance Theresa May could do what the IRA failed to accomplish, the reunification of Ireland as a single Republic. The Six Counties could very well decide they don’t want to be tossed into the Atlantic tied to the British anchor.

6 Likes
63

Nigel? Is that you?

3 Likes
64

Cue hyperventilation and heart attacks in Orange lodges all over Northern Ireland…

3 Likes
65

I’ll grant you the “We’re an island?!?!?” stuff is hyperbole for satirical effect. Whether that works or is advisable is of course up to everyone to decide for themselves.

Quite how someone in his position could possibly claim he hadn’t previously understood how important the Dover-Calais crossing is for UK trade is the bit which is impossible to understand.

Bear in mind that this is the man who as Planning Minister was involved in trying to sort out the congestion in Kent caused by even the tiniest hold-up at Dover.

How can he possibly think he can get away with claiming that the extent of Dover-Calais trade came as any kind of surprise to him?

If it did come as a surprise then what right does he have to say anything about the merits or otherwise of leaving the EU or about how trade might go afterwards.

8 Likes
66

Yes, I realised that too after reading deeper than the snarky headlines. It was just clumsy phrasing.

Incidentally, Dover is only preeminent for passenger and lorry transport - it’s not even in the top 5 (or even 10?) for containerised freight.

1 Like
67

It is of course true that Dover is mainly lorries and that other ports handle a lot more tonnage.

Last year the Port handled 2,601,162 lorries and that doesn’t include the 1.6 million trucks that go through the Eurotunnel.

Container freight is all very nice but by its nature it tends to be rather different kinds of goods.

In particular it tends to be stuff where it doesn’t matter hugely whether it arrives at 10:55 or 12:55.

The stuff that goes through Dover often has to be shipped with time tolerances of a few minutes given the nature of modern supply chains and how tight profit margins are.

These are all well-known data to anyone with even a very fleeting involvement in traffic or county-level planning for Kent (like for example the former minister for planning, a Mr. D. Raab)

6 Likes
68

Reminds me of this:

The sea, oh the sea is the gradh geal mo croide
Long may it stay between England and me
It’s a sure guarantee that some hour we’ll be free
Oh, thank God we’re surrounded by water.

— Dominic Brehan, “The Sea Around Us (chorus)”

3 Likes
69

Steve Bell’s view:

image
image300×184 41 KB

I mainly watch English news, and honestly the lack of panic baffles me a bit, but I think it is due to the lack of clear messaging from the leaders both major parties.

When Defoe wrote A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain he talked about how important ports like Hull and trading centres like Lincoln were for the future of the country. Had the country followed the path he envisioned you might not be in such trouble.

From one island-inhabitant to another, good luck. If it helps: when hurricanes and tsunamis head towards us, we stock up on spam and toilet paper.

3 Likes
70

I think that, while baldly true, it is unfair on the average English leaver. The extent of lying and propaganda the British have been subject to is breathtaking and normalises an utterly corrupt and contemptuous Tory Oxbridge aristocratic class. The English press conspired to present Cameron as a competent and decent human being and politician rather than the bumbling fool with no ethics that he was. Given that predisposition and his glib persona it’s hard to make the association with monstrosity and monstrous incompetence. There is a history of presenting the Tories as “the grown ups” and the “natural party of government”, the default assumption about conservatives in Britain and around the world. Learning to pay attention and simply see the evidence before your eyes of just how useless, corrupt, venal, incompetent, and ill-informed they really are is quite difficult.

Propaganda works. If you are looking for blame here it would be good to include Murdoch and the other extremist newspaper owners.

7 Likes
71

But you don’t need to do that.(EDIT and to do so would cause a new outbreak of violence). NI could be designated a special economic zone (as countries in Asia do with their areas set up to attract FDI with different rules on tarrifs and all sorts of stuff), it’s complex but NI could make out like bandits. It would no more undermine the Britishness of NI than the fact they don’t allow termination of pregnancies or marriage equality.

Instead they elected the DUP, a bunch of medieval fantasists, and got counter productive fanatacism instead. I blame those moderate unionists who held their noses and voted DUP rather than run the risk of SF getting elected. They elected DUP and hate them.

EDIT
Unrelated but Just In TIme manufacturing doesn’t really mean perishables Dominic, it refers to inventory management and efficiency. It’s why complex production systems such as aircraft manufacture are fucked on leaving the EU.

6 Likes
72

Of course! Thanks - I was overlooking that.

3 Likes
73

Well, at least any BANANAS that arrive will be good gods-honest curvy ones, not them unnatural EU-mandated mutant fruits…

2 Likes
74

There was a chap from the DUP interviewed on the BBC the other day who made a fair stab at a response to those points which was that the latter two areas are matters which according to the British constitution are devolved to the Northern Irish in the same way that Scotland and Wales have areas that are devolved to them - whereas making Northern Ireland alone subject to EU regulations, etc. would be a significant and improper change to the arrangements.

Fanatics they may be but they are showing up what a substandard lot of politicians we English have. That’s not in a moral sense but purely in terms of ‘do they have the skills needed for politics’, i.e. do they have a message? Can they present it clearly? Can they present it persuasively? Can they manage to sound as if they have a clue about anything? Can they wrangle the administrative systems and political alliances to get the results they want?

Can they in short tell their arse from their elbow with the aid of a basic anatomy textbook and a team of SPADs?

The answer for most English politicians appears to be a clear no.

Admittedly, the DUP chap did come a bit unstuck when asked about whether the DUP would accept the outcome if Northern Ireland and Ireland voted to unify and whether they’d go along with that peacefully.

He mumbled something about how one would need to consider the terms of any referendum carefully and how it couldn’t be decided on a simple majority.

The interviewer obviously couldn’t believe their ears and asked the obvious question: “So, for unification you’d need more than a simple majority but we can leave the EU on a simple majority?”

DUP answer was something along the lines of “Well, leaving the EU isn’t a constitutional question.”

Which I suppose is technically arguably true but it is still quite an important question…

3 Likes
75

Yes, but they were devolved to NI in the current sense 20 years ago

Is entirely untrue. It is hugely a constitutional issue, it would be simpler if Britain had a written one so constitutional issues like this would be baldly on the page. As an aside, one could easily argue that referendums don’t have a constitutional status in the UK either… (see House of Lords select committee on the constitution para 76 on is the EU bit https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200910/ldselect/ldconst/99/99.pdf ) put simply if the devolvement of powers to a region of the UK, or reversing that is a constitutional issue then so is the same of devolvement and reversal for the whole of the UK The DUP speaker was talking out of the side of his arse.

4 Likes
76

It looks and smells like sarcasm but I’ve made that mistake before… it’ll all become clear after another cup of coffee.

2 Likes
77

It is only a constitutional question if you think that the various EU treaties had any effect on the UK’s constitution.

That was (is?) certainly a popular thing for law professors to ask students to write essays about (especially as regards the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty) but unfortunately, in my view at least, the answer was always quite simple.

It didn’t. They were expressly “treaties” from which the United Kingdom could withdraw or which it was constitutionally perfectly entitled to ignore completely. There is some debate about how that would need to be done but no real debate that constitutionally it could be done.

The fundamental constitution of the UK was not affected. The Belfast Accords did affect the constitution of course.

That obviously ignores the practical impact on how the UK was constituted and governed but theory is what constitutional law is all about.

Well, it was perfectly clear before the referendum that it was not intended to be binding at all.

And yes, there is no rule requiring a referendum for consitutional change or specifying what percentage approval any measure has to obtain or anything like that.

Essentially it is entirely within the power of the government of the day to change the UK’s constitutional arrangements. Parliament merely says “Let it be so” and so it is.

6 Likes
78

He has an LLB from Oxford and a Masters from Cambridge.
It’s sophistry to prepare the Gammons for concessions they were told they wouldn’t have to give.

2 Likes
79

Not according to the select committee linked above. The Belfast accords are equally a treaty, and an international treaty at that, which have constitutional impact. Actually they have lesser impact than the various EU treaties and the obligations they impose on the government of the UK. Legislation written in Brussels is directly applicable in the UK with no need for national implementation. To suggest that that is simply definable as not a constitutional issue is absurd. The UK is entitled to ignore them in the same sense that a private individual is entitled to ignore the law, you can do it, but there will be penalties and consequences.

3 Likes
80

In general, people have no idea how complicated these things are, believe me I worked for 10 years on international commerce and I know a bit

Basically, if a client from the EU wants to buy from you in the UK, is a 30 min job. They place the order (usually online) fill the form, make the payment. They give you their VAT number and you don’t apply the 20% surcharge to avoid double taxation (as per EU agreement between members.

The system automatically sends an Sales Order Acknowledgement to the client and your warehouse, the order is picked, packed and moved to dispatch, administration personnel create the Airway Bill that notifies the courier company of the dispatch.

If you do this before 12:30 and you are situated near the M25 in London, a white van will pick the order the same day and move it to heathrow, from there a flight to any european capital every couple of hours, the same day it will arrive to the destination airport, into another van and delivered to the customer next morning. All of this can be done in 24 hours on a good day, 48 on average and 72 on a really shitty week. Job done, money in the bank, client satisfied

Now, if a client from a third country wants to buy something, the end user starts the process by talking to their purchasing department, they talk to their international procurement department… if the company is big enough, then they start asking for documentation, papers, customs declarations, certificates of origin, certificates of provenance, microbiology certificates, MSDS, etc, often hard copies are required, often in triplicated and very often in the local language.

Soon you are talking simultaneously to people in the purchasing department, the finance department, the legal department, customs officials, customs agents, dispatchers, couriers… 10 - 15 people, all of them drawing a salary from your sale in the form of taxes, import tariffs, professional fees.

After 3 weeks, if everything has gone well, you dispatch and cross your fingers that everything goes well. If it does, it could be 2 - 3 weeks to get clearance (it could be less, depends on the country), up to a month in customs and you are ok. After 4 weeks they start charging warehousing and after 3 months the goods are either returned at your expense or destroyed. So you better get it right, because the customs officials are not there to help.

The job of customs officials is NOT to facilitate commerce, is to disrupt it in a controlled manner.

And then we have to talk about the import taxes, which vary from country to country, most extreme case is Brazil, 100% of the declared value, no exception. That is how you end up with nintendo having to decide between selling consoles for 800 USD retail price or not selling them at all (they decided to pull out of the country entirely). That is one of the reasons why is so important to negotiate the INCOTERMS correctly with the customer, if you mess up, the hit can wipe out all the profit of the sale. Just like that, gone, now you are working for the man, and the client is still waiting to receive the goods, and they haven’t even processed the invoice for payment, and payment terms are 120 days, and their government charges 25% taxes to all payments in USD outside the country…

I have seen things you wouldn’t believe. A drinks manufacturing plant in Angola that had to have in storage everything they needed to run the plant for 6 months, from nuts and bolts to soap for the toilets, uniforms, spares, sugar, concentrate… everything except local food for the cafeteria and water.

In our case, many goods destined to the UK are shipped in container ships to the Netherlands and then trucked in, even if they want to ship directly to the UK they can’t because there is no enough capacity in the ports.

Its going to be… interesting

5 Likes