 |
Theresa
May seeks to keep kingdom united after Brexit
PM
will tell Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that her government is
‘ready to listen’ to their Brexit requests.
By FIONA MAXWELL
10/24/16, 1:01 AM CET
Leaders in Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland will have a seat at the table in Brexit
discussions in the U.K., British Prime Minister Theresa May will
announce Monday.
A newly created
forum, chaired by Brexit Secretary David Davis, will be offered to
the three governments to discuss the U.K’s exit from the EU.
The announcement
will be made at Monday’s joint ministerial committee, a meeting of
devolved administration leaders and the prime minister, which last
convened in December 2014. The government will say it “is ready to
listen to proposals put forward by political leaders” on their
Brexit requests.
If the governments
accept the invitation, the first meeting will take place by the end
of November. May is also planning at least one more meeting before
Christmas, as the U.K. finalizes its position before triggering
Article 50 by the end of March to officially kick off divorce
negotiations from the EU.
Wales, Scotland and
Northern Ireland have criticized the U.K.’s lack of coordination on
Brexit talks, with First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon
demanding Scotland be treated as an “equal partner.”
If a “hard Brexit”
outside the single market is pursued by Westminster, Scotland has
threatened it will once again seek independence from the rest of the
U.K.
May is also expected
to offer insight into the government’s strategy on its separation
from the EU at the committee meeting. No final decisions have been
taken, she will say, and the exit plan “will not boil down to a
binary choice.”
Authors:
Fiona Maxwell
|
If
the bankers leave London, it won't just be the City that will suffer
– it'll be the Brexit voters who pushed them out
Even
now, the mischievous internal voice of wishful thinking wonders if
the approaching menace of economic devastation could cause a
sufficiently dramatic shift in public opinion to tempt the PM to
change direction, and soften whatever Brexit it is that she has in
mind
Matthew Norman
After all the
surreal events of recent months, it took one Sunday newspaper article
to remove any lingering doubt that we have slipped into an Alice in
Wonderland parallel universe where all the old ways are inverted.
To be precise, it
wasn’t the British Bankers' Association chief executive Anthony
Browne’s warning that financial institutions are about to leave the
City, that did it. The departure of the banks has been rumoured for a
while. The proof that everything has been flipped upside down came
via the emotional response to the prospect of a banking exodus in the
new year.
Once, the reflex
response to that would have been a yelped “Good riddance to the
parasitic swine” (that’s the censored version, obviously) as an
arm shot out in search of a bottle Moet and a funnel.
Not now. Even the
White Queen, who told Alice she sometimes managed to believe six
impossible things before breakfast, would have struggled to believe
this before Brexit. But the involuntary hand movement induced by
Browne’s doomy piece is to reach out instead for the hemlock.
This is due far more
to instinct than any profound understanding of the financial
implications, though we can all guess at some of those. I have a
hunch, for example, that the flight of the bankers wouldn’t be a
boon for London’s Lamborghini showrooms, or a butcher’s in the
American-banker stronghold of Holland Park where you have to hand
over the mortgage deeds as collateral for a 7lb rolled joint of
sirloin.
Were all the damage
from any banking diaspora confined to the luxury retail market, one
might anticipate it with stoicism, even relish. Many of us would
Uberize ourselves into a cut price fleet to ferry the bankers to the
airport, bidding them farewell with a heartfelt “Hope the landing
gear doesn’t get stuck, guys. Missing you already.”
But it wouldn’t be
only, or primarily, the bespoke tailors, top-end wine dealers and
Knightsbridge estate agents who felt the pain. The people who may
safely be expected to suffer worst, by way of indecently perfect
symmetry, are the same people who suffered worst after the
catastrophic recession the bankers generously helped to bestow in
2008-09: the poor.
No major economy
relies on financial services like Britain’s, where the sector
provides almost a tenth of GDP, but about 30 per cent of all exports.
To give that latter figure some context, the G7’s silver medallist
in this discipline is the United States with barely 15 per cent.
Any shrinkage in GDP
caused by the loss of the banks must affect state spending on such
fripperies as the NHS, education and benefits. As the damage done to
the capital radiated to the provinces, the fall-out would probably be
at its most lethal in the most deprived and determinedly pro-Brexit
areas. If the referendum was much more a vote against smug, wealthy
London than against a remote and abstract Brussels, a diminished City
and the effects of that would offer a peculiarly brutal tutorial
about being careful what you wish for.
It is possible, of
course, that Browne’s warning is at least in part a crude piece of
posturing; an early negotiating position struck to scare the
Government into softening the scope of its Brexit ambitions in order
to safeguard London’s global pre-eminence as a financial centre.
Yet the notion of
retaining free movement in one economic sector while abandoning it in
all the others has no intellectual coherence. On what imaginable
grounds would France and Germany, which have coveted the City’s
dominance for decades on behalf of Paris and Frankfurt, agree to
that?
Brexit negotiators
are 'in cloud cuckoo land', says man who negotiated Britain's EU
rebate
With each week that
passes, the terrain onto which that legitimate expression of the
democratic will propelled us on 23 June feels more and more like
quicksand. Sunny souls may cling to the comfort blanket of a buoyant
stock market if they wish, conveniently ignoring the bleedin’
obvious that cheap shares are attractive for foreign investors
because of sterling’s freefall towards dollar parity. But the
impossible complexity of negotiating trade deals was apparent long
before a long-prepared Canadian deal with the EU collapsed because
the Walloon region of Belgium didn’t fancy it.
With bankers’
hands “quivering over the relocate button”, as Browne vividly put
it, the spectre of a crushing blow to GDP comes into clearer focus.
Even now, the mischievous internal voice of wishful thinking wonders
if the approaching menace of economic devastation could cause a
sufficiently dramatic shift in public opinion to tempt the PM to
change direction, and soften whatever Brexit it is that she has in
mind. For now, with her government frozen by impotent bemusement and
skirmishing between the Chancellor and the Three Stooges of Brexit,
we are drifting towards the iceberg.
Still, there is one
consolation. Theresa May can stop fretting about whether to sanction
the third runway at Heathrow. With a banking exodus imminent and no
good reason why business people will flock to London in future, not
to mention the dismal pound making foreign travel unaffordable, she
might as well get rid of the second runway and have done with it.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário