I didn't stay up for the first presidential debate last night between Trump and Biden but from reports and clips this morning it was far from presidential. The BBC describe it as bitter and chaotic and it certainly sounded like it. Biden didn't apparently wilt under the near constant attacks from Trump and I suppose that's all he had to do. If Trump wins in November, Lord help us all. He's way behind in the polls and I don't think he improved his standing last night but we'll wait to see what the latest polls say.
Back here MPs passed the UKIM bill with an amendment to give MPs a vote on whether to break international law or not. Many legal commentators and the EU think we have broken the WA already simply by trying to get the law onto the statute book. I suppose all the 340 MPs who voted for it are now complicit. We are certainly going down a very bad road.
This morning news is coming out of the BBC with Faisal Islam having seen a letter from David Frost, our chief negotiator, to the car industry:
Full Story on Frost letter to car industry, seen by us, EU has rejected “in any circumstances” allowing 3rd country parts from eg Turkey/ Japan to count towards qualification thresholds for free trade deal, so tariffs risked on some exports even in a dealhttps://t.co/zHXYueSKYU— Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) September 30, 2020
This is about something we (the British side) have been calling diagonal cumulation where intermediate parts not just from the EU, but from countries with whom the EU have trade deals can be considered as British made when calculating the percentage content made in the UK. Apparently we wanted parts made in Japan and Turkey (the irony) to be considered British.
Frost now tells the UK car industry this has been rejected by the EU under "any circumstances." It means some manufacturers are going to find it very difficult to meet the Rules of Origin requirement to avoid tariffs. Frost wrote on 7 September:
"The commission has made clear that it will not agree third-country cumulation in any circumstances, which we regret, but obviously cannot insist upon,"
Islam says this is a blow to the car industry because, "Much UK manufacturing is below the required threshold, although the reverse is not the case for the European Union. The problem is particularly acute for electric vehicles where an even larger proportion of the value of the car is contained in the battery."
So, it looks like another win for the EU. They will be able to export to the UK tariff free while we increase our prices by ten per cent. Another 'benefit' of Brexit.
Frost now tells the UK car industry this has been rejected by the EU under "any circumstances." It means some manufacturers are going to find it very difficult to meet the Rules of Origin requirement to avoid tariffs. Frost wrote on 7 September:
"The commission has made clear that it will not agree third-country cumulation in any circumstances, which we regret, but obviously cannot insist upon,"
Islam says this is a blow to the car industry because, "Much UK manufacturing is below the required threshold, although the reverse is not the case for the European Union. The problem is particularly acute for electric vehicles where an even larger proportion of the value of the car is contained in the battery."
So, it looks like another win for the EU. They will be able to export to the UK tariff free while we increase our prices by ten per cent. Another 'benefit' of Brexit.
I read elsewhere a very astute blog post by Brendan Donnelly, a former Member of the European Parliament and now Director of The Federal Trust for Education and Research. Read it HERE.
I argue in my new blog that the government’s inadequate preparations for the end of transition reflect the underlying flaws in the whole Brexit project. See https://t.co/mJWvnHgX8G— Brendan Donnelly (@Brendandonn) September 29, 2020
He forecasts that the worst is yet to come and I'm afraid that he's probably right. Most of the post is a rehearsal of all the contradictions of Brexit but part of it was about the way we are governed, this captures the whole thing:
"It is not fanciful to see in both Covid-19 and the Brexit negotiations a parallel diminution of state capacity for the UK, in which the balance between political decision-making and objective advice from the civil service has been abandoned for ever. As the civil service has lost over the past ten years of economic austerity in numbers, in authority and in prestige, so mediocre politicians and their over-confident advisers have rushed in to fill the vacuum. British political culture has become less rational, less tolerant and less productive as a result."
Normally, ministers are making choices between policy options put to them by civil servants. But in Brexit we have a policy objective that did not come out of any civil service analysis of a problem Britain faced and ministers are making it all up on the hoof as they go along - and doing it against the clock.
Normally, such a huge undertaking would have been the subject of a Royal Commission at least with years of discussion and white papers setting out the possible options all of which would have been sensible. Instead, as Donnelly points out, we had a weakened civil service completely side-lined combined with a House of Commons with perhaps the worst cohort of MPs, intellectually speaking, in our history.
Now we have a prime minister who is vying to the worst leader ever, with a totally crazy, off-the-wall adviser and a cabinet hand-picked out of the bottom quarter of the House of Commons. No wonder it is all going wrong - and the worst is certainly still to come.
