Politics

[Tonge moor green jacket]

2 minutes ago, Mounts Kipper said:

Doesn’t it need to be in place 4th January when business resumes. 

On the face of it aye, perhaps there is more to the summary/main agreement which allows for this. Dunno to be honest, and I'll leave the nitty gritty to the experts.

[Escobarp]

8 minutes ago, Tonge moor green jacket said:

The second sentence in paragraph 59 hopefully sorts that out with the equivalence bit.

A mutual set of rules, a bit like those with standards?

Some thrashing out to do, but it doesn't rule out a fuller agreement which is good.

They can get that sorted in the new year once the turkey and sherry have worn off.

FCA have said that any eu firm which wants to continue to offer financial services in the uk needs to register for a temporary licence before 31st dec. if they don’t then they can still trade to wind down operations. But in reality most should take the offer up and then it’s down the the various regulators to come up with what works and hopefully it resolves the issue. 
 

I firmly believe something will be sorted across the board in due course. But it may take some time. 
 

I clean the cars for the financial services arm of our company 

[Tonge moor green jacket]

Hopefully 👍 

Keep going Lord Frost. 

[Mounts Kipper]

11 minutes ago, Tonge moor green jacket said:

On the face of it aye, perhaps there is more to the summary/main agreement which allows for this. Dunno to be honest, and I'll leave the nitty gritty to the experts.

Read something about a temporary continuation agreement, think it was until end of February so that might give time to get it sorted. 

[Biggish Dave]

I'm told by people close to the FS sector and high up, they ain't worried, just the opposite - they were expecting London to come out of it very well regardless of a deal or not.

Frankfurt can't deal with the FS, its too small of a city and no infrastructure while they don't trust the French enough to move everything over there.

Big US banks have moved staff abroad 'just in case' but many top brass have kids at top British schools/uni's and don't fancy moving them.

The theory might leave questions, but in practice, the yanks expect to expand London operations

[miamiwhite]

Good morning 🙂 

 

 

[birch-chorley]

17 hours ago, Tonge moor green jacket said:

I've downloaded the summary. Its hard going, and I'm only having a quick glance whilst the spuds crisp up- however from what I can see, there aren't restrictions on services. 

Not finished it, not fully understand it yet, but seems to allow trade of services each way without tariffs.

I’d let others look at legal text, this summary in the FT makes out that FS are ‘uncertain’, fuck knows why something as important as FS are left to be uncertain! The current system is completely frictionless, it’s uncertain if the new system will be frictionless or not. This should have been our most important thing, the sector generates more than any other...

https://www.ft.com/content/8e6db389-9e09-4c00-9b49-687a2dafd2ca

4. Financial services

The City of London will exit the EU’s single market for financial services at the end of the Brexit transition period on December 31.

Both sides have said that the new market access arrangements for UK and EU financial services companies should be based on unilateral decisions by Britain and the bloc, rather than be provided for in the trade agreement.

These so-called equivalence decisions involve each side evaluating whether the other’s financial services regulations are as tough as its own.

Banks and traders have acknowledged that the proposed system is more piecemeal than existing arrangements, and less stable. The EU did not announce any fresh equivalence decisions on UK access to the bloc’s markets alongside the trade agreement on Thursday, resulting in uncertainty in key areas including share trading and derivatives. 

The two sides plan to put in place a regulatory dialogue on financial services based on a separate memorandum of understanding.

[ex_midlandwhite]

They are uncertain because as things stand on 1 January they can't do their business in a country unless they've applied to the regulator. Which many haven't done as it's expensive and they never thought they'd actually end up in that position

[Guest]

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/agreements-reached-between-the-united-kingdom-of-great-britain-and-northern-ireland-and-the-european-union

[Mounts Kipper]

https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/eu-uk_trade_and_cooperation_agreement-a_new_relationship_with_big_changes-overview_of_consequences_and_benefits.pdf

[Mounts Kipper]

https://apple.news/AqqsWPcIWQ02VGhmfswsTXw

[Mounts Kipper]

1 hour ago, miamiwhite said:

Good morning 🙂 

 

 

Let’s hope we never have to endure his monotone remain obsessed opinions ever again. 

Edited December 26, 2020 by Mounts Kipper

[Tonge moor green jacket]

1 hour ago, birch-chorley said:

I’d let others look at legal text, this summary in the FT makes out that FS are ‘uncertain’, fuck knows why something as important as FS are left to be uncertain! The current system is completely frictionless, it’s uncertain if the new system will be frictionless or not. This should have been our most important thing, the sector generates more than any other...

https://www.ft.com/content/8e6db389-9e09-4c00-9b49-687a2dafd2ca

4. Financial services

The City of London will exit the EU’s single market for financial services at the end of the Brexit transition period on December 31.

Both sides have said that the new market access arrangements for UK and EU financial services companies should be based on unilateral decisions by Britain and the bloc, rather than be provided for in the trade agreement.

These so-called equivalence decisions involve each side evaluating whether the other’s financial services regulations are as tough as its own.

Banks and traders have acknowledged that the proposed system is more piecemeal than existing arrangements, and less stable. The EU did not announce any fresh equivalence decisions on UK access to the bloc’s markets alongside the trade agreement on Thursday, resulting in uncertainty in key areas including share trading and derivatives. 

The two sides plan to put in place a regulatory dialogue on financial services based on a separate memorandum of understanding.

We know all about the uncertainty- we've been discussing it above.

However, the fact an agreement has been signed, suggests to me that both parties are confident.

[paulhanley]

 

 

 

From the ever excellent Charles Moore. Especially for the bastions of remoanerdom who would never be exposed to such common sense thoughts.

Boris succeeded where others failed because he accepted the logic of Brexit

EU negotiations are secretive. They dawdle for months, then rush to agreement so fast that no one really knows what has been agreed. All this means that commentators on Boris’s Christmas Eve deal must preface our remarks with a warning. On hearing the announcement on Thursday afternoon, we felt a bit like Bethlehem shepherds abiding in the fields. Angel voices (or rather, spin doctors) had told us about a birth, but we had not yet been allowed to see what was in the manger. Even on Boxing Day, we cannot give an absolutely full report.

So it may yet turn out that the level-playing-field arbitration mechanisms are sneaky forms of Brussels control, or that (apologies for my wildly mixed metaphor) the ban on selling seed potatoes in Northern Ireland will turn out to be a Trojan horse for the break-up of the Union, or that the eight EU coastal nations have devised some cunning way of stealing our mackerel in perpetuity.

 

We all know that EU small print can come, over time, to bulk very large indeed. But, but, but – I think that the Leave cause has now won (or, at least, we will have won once Parliament approves the deal next week). It has not won on everything, nor as swiftly we hoped in 2016. But the victory is real.

You can see this in the reaction of the Remainers. Their crazy rage against Boris Johnson, which goes right back to the referendum itself, had persuaded many of them that he was going for no deal, whatever the cost. In fact, no deal was only his last resort – the backstop necessary for any successful negotiation.

On these trade talks, they have made the same mistake they made last year when they cried that Boris would never achieve a Withdrawal Agreement. He achieved it on January 31. Now that the trade deal has been made – despite Covid, for December 31, as he promised – the wind has dropped from their sails. With tight lips, Remainers call this a “thin deal”. That may sound an odd description of an agreement supported by about 2,000 pages of legal documentation, but in a sense they are right.

The deal they wanted was Britain’s continuing acceptance of the trading and market rules of EU membership. That would have been a fat deal – exactly as fat as all the treaties and acquis communautaire which have accumulated since the Treaty of Rome in 1957. That was what Theresa May meant (possibly without quite knowing it) when she wasted years searching for a “deep and special partnership” with the organisation we had just decided to divorce.

Yes, the deal is quite thin. It is supposed to be. It follows the logic of our original vote to leave whose result was declared exactly four and a half years before this Christmas Eve.

The British people voted to leave the European Union, taking back control of laws, borders, waters and trade. By doing so, we were not saying to the other member states that we wanted nothing more to do with them. We wanted the close, friendly relations which you would normally expect between independent, neighbouring democracies. This deal, with its absence of tariffs and quotas, is a good basis for such relations. There will be blockages at first and numerous frictions for years, but the framework is acceptable for both sides. Some credit must go to the 
 EU itself.

In recent weeks, the behaviour of President Macron of France has turned erratic. He felt the political need to be hyperactive on behalf of French fishermen and appear tough with the rosbifs. He is a great one for melodrama. During the referendum campaign in 2016, in the relatively humble post of economy minister, Mr Macron even threatened that France would somehow relocate its famous migrant camps to Brexit Britain. I suppose you could say he succeeded in creating a migrant camp for lorries in Kent this week, as he theatrically closed the border over mutant Covid.

In quieter reaches of the EU, however, wiser leaders learnt from last year’s ejection of Mrs May and Boris’s consequent election victory. They understood that Brexit was not a gigantic charade which the British ruling elites should be helped to circumvent, but an irreversible democratic decision. They therefore moved to make peace with it, without sacrificing the integrity of their single market. They sensibly understood that imposing tariffs on us meant imposing tariffs on themselves.

One wonders whether such a wise result could have been achieved, especially after lunch, under the erratic Commission presidency of Jean-Claude Juncker. His successor, Ursula von der Leyen, strikes a dignified balance between quiet sorrow at the parting of ways and practical co-operation about a friendly future. At home, the political effects are profound. Most immediately, they are that Nicola Sturgeon’s efforts to incite secession at the Scottish Parliament elections in May now look more obsessive and pointless. She really was longing for no deal.

More generally, the deal challenges all the parties of the Left (nowadays all the mainland parties in Parliament apart from the Conservatives). They have spent nearly five years fighting Brexit, in vain. If they are sane, they will realise they cannot go on like this. They would quickly dwindle into modern-day Jacobites, gathering for nostalgic dinners and weeping as they sing the Ode to Joy.

The question now is: “What are all these parties for?” Labour, in particular, has almost completely lost the patriotic vote on which Clement Attlee depended and which Tony Blair temporarily revived. Sir Keir Starmer is undoubtedly sane, but he is also one of the most ardent of the most Remainery class of all – London human-rights lawyers. He has a huge amount of ground to make up.

The only dangerous political effect now apparent lies in the continuing ambiguities about Northern Ireland. Expect Dublin, Brussels, Sinn Fein and President Joe Biden (whose secret service codename is Celtic) to try to internationalise the province further and foment trouble in the cause of “peace”. They will exploit Mr Blair’s Good Friday Agreement against Mr Johnson’s Christmas Eve one.

But I come back to what I keep calling the logic of Brexit. Rather like the rise of colonial independence movements in the first half of the 20th century, it represents a desire for liberty to which world leaders should respond. In modern international rhetoric, we never stop talking about democratic rights, but Brexit has shown how international elites – the modern equivalents of imperial powers – can turn nasty when real, live voters assert those rights. If the EU does not learn its lesson, further wars of independence become possible, and the drive towards “more Europe” becomes ever more contentious.

The world needs to recognise that Boris Johnson is succeeding. When – after some havering – he threw in his lot with Leave in 2016, he accepted the Brexit logic. The way in which he has ensured that the logic works itself through over the past 18 months has been, despite his intermittent appearance of chaos, masterly. Early on, he said that failure to reach a deal would be “a failure of statecraft” on both sides. He has proved statecrafty.

Boris has got us out, enormously assisted by enemies in his own party and outside too angry to perceive his skills. We should acknowledge that, in our strange post-modern politics, no one else could have done it.

 

 

 

 

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 615

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, paulhanley said:

 

 

 

From the ever excellent Charles Moore. Especially for the bastions of remoanerdom who would never be exposed to such common sense thoughts.

Boris succeeded where others failed because he accepted the logic of Brexit

EU negotiations are secretive. They dawdle for months, then rush to agreement so fast that no one really knows what has been agreed. All this means that commentators on Boris’s Christmas Eve deal must preface our remarks with a warning. On hearing the announcement on Thursday afternoon, we felt a bit like Bethlehem shepherds abiding in the fields. Angel voices (or rather, spin doctors) had told us about a birth, but we had not yet been allowed to see what was in the manger. Even on Boxing Day, we cannot give an absolutely full report.

So it may yet turn out that the level-playing-field arbitration mechanisms are sneaky forms of Brussels control, or that (apologies for my wildly mixed metaphor) the ban on selling seed potatoes in Northern Ireland will turn out to be a Trojan horse for the break-up of the Union, or that the eight EU coastal nations have devised some cunning way of stealing our mackerel in perpetuity.

 

We all know that EU small print can come, over time, to bulk very large indeed. But, but, but – I think that the Leave cause has now won (or, at least, we will have won once Parliament approves the deal next week). It has not won on everything, nor as swiftly we hoped in 2016. But the victory is real.

You can see this in the reaction of the Remainers. Their crazy rage against Boris Johnson, which goes right back to the referendum itself, had persuaded many of them that he was going for no deal, whatever the cost. In fact, no deal was only his last resort – the backstop necessary for any successful negotiation.

On these trade talks, they have made the same mistake they made last year when they cried that Boris would never achieve a Withdrawal Agreement. He achieved it on January 31. Now that the trade deal has been made – despite Covid, for December 31, as he promised – the wind has dropped from their sails. With tight lips, Remainers call this a “thin deal”. That may sound an odd description of an agreement supported by about 2,000 pages of legal documentation, but in a sense they are right.

The deal they wanted was Britain’s continuing acceptance of the trading and market rules of EU membership. That would have been a fat deal – exactly as fat as all the treaties and acquis communautaire which have accumulated since the Treaty of Rome in 1957. That was what Theresa May meant (possibly without quite knowing it) when she wasted years searching for a “deep and special partnership” with the organisation we had just decided to divorce.

Yes, the deal is quite thin. It is supposed to be. It follows the logic of our original vote to leave whose result was declared exactly four and a half years before this Christmas Eve.

The British people voted to leave the European Union, taking back control of laws, borders, waters and trade. By doing so, we were not saying to the other member states that we wanted nothing more to do with them. We wanted the close, friendly relations which you would normally expect between independent, neighbouring democracies. This deal, with its absence of tariffs and quotas, is a good basis for such relations. There will be blockages at first and numerous frictions for years, but the framework is acceptable for both sides. Some credit must go to the 
 EU itself.

In recent weeks, the behaviour of President Macron of France has turned erratic. He felt the political need to be hyperactive on behalf of French fishermen and appear tough with the rosbifs. He is a great one for melodrama. During the referendum campaign in 2016, in the relatively humble post of economy minister, Mr Macron even threatened that France would somehow relocate its famous migrant camps to Brexit Britain. I suppose you could say he succeeded in creating a migrant camp for lorries in Kent this week, as he theatrically closed the border over mutant Covid.

In quieter reaches of the EU, however, wiser leaders learnt from last year’s ejection of Mrs May and Boris’s consequent election victory. They understood that Brexit was not a gigantic charade which the British ruling elites should be helped to circumvent, but an irreversible democratic decision. They therefore moved to make peace with it, without sacrificing the integrity of their single market. They sensibly understood that imposing tariffs on us meant imposing tariffs on themselves.

One wonders whether such a wise result could have been achieved, especially after lunch, under the erratic Commission presidency of Jean-Claude Juncker. His successor, Ursula von der Leyen, strikes a dignified balance between quiet sorrow at the parting of ways and practical co-operation about a friendly future. At home, the political effects are profound. Most immediately, they are that Nicola Sturgeon’s efforts to incite secession at the Scottish Parliament elections in May now look more obsessive and pointless. She really was longing for no deal.

More generally, the deal challenges all the parties of the Left (nowadays all the mainland parties in Parliament apart from the Conservatives). They have spent nearly five years fighting Brexit, in vain. If they are sane, they will realise they cannot go on like this. They would quickly dwindle into modern-day Jacobites, gathering for nostalgic dinners and weeping as they sing the Ode to Joy.

The question now is: “What are all these parties for?” Labour, in particular, has almost completely lost the patriotic vote on which Clement Attlee depended and which Tony Blair temporarily revived. Sir Keir Starmer is undoubtedly sane, but he is also one of the most ardent of the most Remainery class of all – London human-rights lawyers. He has a huge amount of ground to make up.

The only dangerous political effect now apparent lies in the continuing ambiguities about Northern Ireland. Expect Dublin, Brussels, Sinn Fein and President Joe Biden (whose secret service codename is Celtic) to try to internationalise the province further and foment trouble in the cause of “peace”. They will exploit Mr Blair’s Good Friday Agreement against Mr Johnson’s Christmas Eve one.

But I come back to what I keep calling the logic of Brexit. Rather like the rise of colonial independence movements in the first half of the 20th century, it represents a desire for liberty to which world leaders should respond. In modern international rhetoric, we never stop talking about democratic rights, but Brexit has shown how international elites – the modern equivalents of imperial powers – can turn nasty when real, live voters assert those rights. If the EU does not learn its lesson, further wars of independence become possible, and the drive towards “more Europe” becomes ever more contentious.

The world needs to recognise that Boris Johnson is succeeding. When – after some havering – he threw in his lot with Leave in 2016, he accepted the Brexit logic. The way in which he has ensured that the logic works itself through over the past 18 months has been, despite his intermittent appearance of chaos, masterly. Early on, he said that failure to reach a deal would be “a failure of statecraft” on both sides. He has proved statecrafty.

Boris has got us out, enormously assisted by enemies in his own party and outside too angry to perceive his skills. We should acknowledge that, in our strange post-modern politics, no one else could have done it.

 

 

 

 

•  
•  
•  
•  

 

 615

Essential bathtime reading

[MickyD]

A precis:

From Charles something or other,  no one else could have done it. 

[masi 51]

16 hours ago, Winchester White said:

Jingoistic bullshit in my opinion however she is entitled to her views.

Allison Pearson is an awful human being.

The clue is in the name, Maybe you should look at the town of Bolton and remember your roots !!

[paulhanley]

16 hours ago, Winchester White said:

Jingoistic bullshit in my opinion however she is entitled to her views.

Allison Pearson is an awful human being.

Anybody who doesn't buy in to the lefty, liberal principles is automatically an awful human being and to be marginalised as repugnant and beyond the pale. Clearly. 

Diversity in everything ... as long as its not opinion.

[Tonge moor green jacket]

6 minutes ago, masi 51 said:

The clue is in the name, Maybe you should look at the town of Bolton and remember your roots !!

Its a common theme. Remain mps from all parties that lost seats were good people.

Anyone pro leave aren't.

Repeat for journalists etc...

[Guest]

CBI proclaiming great future for Brexit Britain.

They’ve quickly seen the light!

[Casino]

Everyones a winner....

Yeah, its a bit like city winning the sherpa van but who cares

It got to the point where it didnt matter if it was a good deal or a bad deal, any deal would do

All we can all do now is hope its been worth it

[Winchester White]

32 minutes ago, masi 51 said:

The clue is in the name, Maybe you should look at the town of Bolton and remember your roots !!

What does that mean?

28 minutes ago, paulhanley said:

Anybody who doesn't buy in to the lefty, liberal principles is automatically an awful human being and to be marginalised as repugnant and beyond the pale. Clearly. 

Diversity in everything ... as long as its not opinion.

I am not a lefty at all, I even did one of those political quiz things and confirmed my central stance.

26 minutes ago, Tonge moor green jacket said:

Its a common theme. Remain mps from all parties that lost seats were good people.

Anyone pro leave aren't.

Repeat for journalists etc...

Not for me, remain or leave, there are good and bad MPs all over the house.

However Allison Pearson is up there with Katie Hopkins, just look at some of her tweets over the last year or so.

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, Casino said:

Everyones a winner....

Yeah, its a bit like city winning the sherpa van but who cares

It got to the point where it didnt matter if it was a good deal or a bad deal, any deal would do

All we can all do now is hope its been worth it

For me, it already has

[masi 51]

2 minutes ago, Winchester White said:

What does that mean?

I am not a lefty at all, I even did one of those political quiz things and confirmed my central stance.

Not for me, remain or leave, there are good and bad MPs all over the house.

However Allison Pearson is up there with Katie Hopkins, just look at some of her tweets over the last year or so.

Dont really care about her views on anything else i dont know anything about her,  but that was a fair, balanced view which i completly agree with her.

 

[jules_darby]

11 minutes ago, boltondiver said:

For me, it already has

Because?