A Work in Progress?

David Davis on Brexit: UK's plan still being worked on.

The government's plan for Brexit negotiations will not be published until February [2017] at the earliest. Brexit Secretary David Davis told MPs there was a lot of research and policy work to be done before it was ready. Mr Davis said he wanted to be "as open as we can be" without undermining the UK's negotiating position. The minister also said if no agreement was reached with the EU a transitional Brexit deal could be struck "if it is necessary and only if it is necessary". The government has said it will notify the EU of its intention to leave - beginning the two year process of talks on its exit - by the end of March at the latest. In response to pressure from Labour and some Tory MPs, ministers agreed last week to give more detail of their negotiating aims before starting the exit negotiations. Appearing before the Commons Select Brexit committee for the first time, Mr Davis said the "broad outline" of the UK's objectives were known but the detail had to be filled in. Asked by its chair, Labour MP Hilary Benn, when the plan would be released, Mr Davis would not be drawn on a specific date but ruled out it happening in January.

Call for 'unilateral' Brexit guarantee for EU citizens.

The UK has a "moral" duty to guarantee the status of EU nationals living in the country ahead of negotiations over its exit, a group of peers has said. A Lords EU committee has called for an immediate "unilateral undertaking" that EU nationals can continue to live, work and study in the UK after Brexit. It said failure to do this would have a severe impact on migrants' rights. Ministers say they expect this to happen but need equivalent guarantees for UK citizens on the Continent. The question of what will happen to the estimated 2.9 million citizens of other EU countries who have made their home in the UK in recent years is one of the most controversial arising from the UK's vote to leave the EU in June's referendum. The government has said it expects an early resolution of the issue once official talks on the terms of the UK's separation from the EU begin next spring. But it has refrained from giving any guarantees on their future status - saying this is impossible without similar safeguards for the estimated 1.2 million Britons living in Spain, France, Italy and other EU countries. But the Lords EU Justice sub-committee said the UK should not wait to hear from other EU countries and that making a binding commitment now was "morally the right thing to do".

Brexit trade deal could take 10 years, says UK's ambassador.

A post-Brexit UK-EU trade deal might take 10 years to finalise and still fail, the UK's top diplomat in Brussels has privately told the government. The BBC understands Sir Ivan Rogers warned ministers that the European consensus was that a deal might not be done until the early to mid-2020s. He also cautioned that an agreement could be rejected ultimately by other EU members' national parliaments. PM Theresa May said she wanted Brexit to be "smooth and orderly". In October, Sir Ivan, who conducted David Cameron's negotiation over the UK's relationship with the EU, advised ministers that the view of the 27 other countries was that a free trade agreement could take as long as a decade. He said that even once concluded, the deal might not survive the process of ratification, which involves every country having to approve the deal in its own parliament. It is also understood he suggested that the expectation among European leaders was that a free trade deal, rather than continued membership of the single market, was the likely option for the UK after Brexit. Sir Ivan's private advice contrasts with ministers publicly insisting a deal can be done in the two years allowed by the triggering of Article 50 - the formal start of the process of leaving the EU. Downing Street said he was relaying other EU members' views, rather than his own or the British government's. A spokesman said: "It is wrong to suggest this was advice from our ambassador to the EU. Like all ambassadors, part of his role is to report the views of others."

Brexit: Warning firms could leave City over uncertainty.

Financial services firms could quit the City unless a transitional Brexit deal is secured, ministers have been warned. A cross-party group of peers said Britain's financial sector must be offered a Brexit "bridge" to prevent firms moving to rival locations such as New York, Dublin, Frankfurt or Paris. It urged the government to act to stop business tumbling off a "cliff edge". It comes as Prime Minister Theresa May prepares to meet other EU leaders at a summit meeting in Brussels. Mrs May will take part in EU-wide discussions on defence, foreign affairs, migration and the economy as well as holding bilateral meetings with the leaders of Latvia and Lithuania and the president of the European Parliament. However, she will not be present for a dinner on Thursday evening - at which the EU's remaining 27 leaders are expected to discuss their approach to Brexit.

In other Brexit developments:

The Lib Dems say the UK's promise to leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice would endanger vital cooperation against crime

The European Parliament could start parallel negotiations with the UK unless it is given more of a say by EU leaders, a leading MEP says

The Foreign Affairs Committee urges ministers to reconsider their reluctance to share their thinking on the risks of no deal being reached

The UK is expected to begin official negotiations on the terms of its exit this Spring following the Leave vote in June's referendum. Businesses are pushing for an interim arrangement to safeguard the interests of companies, investors and customers during the period between the UK's departure and when post-Brexit trading and regulatory arrangements are settled. In the latest of a series of Lords Committee reports on Brexit, its EU financial affairs sub-committee said firms could decide to remove their operations from London because of uncertainty about what kind of agreement would be negotiated for cross-border trade.

All details above from BBC News website.

[According to Teresa May’s Easter address to the huddled masses she detects a ‘sense of people coming together’ over Brexit. That’s certainly news to me. The people I talk to – on both sides of the divide – haven’t, as far as I can tell, changed their opinion in the least. Personally I still think this is the worst (and most stupid) decision this country has made in at least the last century – and believe me we’ve made some pretty stupid decisions in the last 100 years – unless I’m provided with some seriously convincing evidence to the contrary. Watch this space!]

Cartoon Time.

Mystery of why shoelaces come undone unravelled by science.

From The BBC

12 April 2017

You put on your shoes, tie them as firmly as possible, but soon after the laces come undone. Now scientists think they know what causes one of life's knotty problems. They found the force of a foot striking the ground stretches and then relaxes the knot, while a second force caused by the leg swinging acts on the ends of the laces, like an invisible hand. The researchers say an understanding of shoelaces can be applied to other structures, such as DNA. Using a slow-motion camera and a series of experiments, mechanical engineers at University California Berkeley found "shoelace knot failure" happens in a matter of seconds, triggered by a complex interaction of forces. Lead researcher Christopher Daily-Diamond said: "When you talk about knotted structures, if you can start to understand the shoelace, then you can apply it to other things, like DNA or microstructures, that fail under dynamic forces. This is the first step toward understanding why certain knots are better than others, which no one has really done."

The study began with co-author and graduate student Christine Gregg lacing up a pair of running shoes and jogging on a treadmill while a colleague filmed what happened next. They found that when running, your foot strikes the ground at seven times the force of gravity. Responding to that force, the knot stretches and then relaxes. As the knot loosens, the swinging leg applies an inertial force on the free ends of the laces, leading to rapid unravelling in as little as two strides. Ms Gregg said: "To untie my knots, I pull on the free end of a bow tie and it comes undone. The shoelace knot comes untied due to the same sort of motion. The forces that cause this are not from a person pulling on the free end but from the inertial forces of the leg swinging back and forth while the knot is loosened from the shoe repeatedly striking the ground."

Scientists conducted tests with a variety of different laces. But while some laces might be better than others for tying knots, they all suffered from the same fundamental cause of knot failure, the study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A, found. Ms Gregg added: "The interesting thing about this mechanism is that your laces can be fine for a really long time and it's not until you get one little bit of motion to cause loosening that starts this avalanche effect leading to knot failure."

[Two things immediately spring to mind: First that it’s good to know that scientific research continues to push back the boundaries of our ignorance and second that it’s really nice to know that the fact my shoelaces come loose on an infuriatingly regular basis isn’t just down to be being simply incompetent in tying them. That’s good to know, damned good…..]

Just Finished Reading: Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (FP: 1933)

After much haranguing of a much put-upon father a young Vera Brittain is finally allowed to try for a place at Oxford. Seen by many as an indulgent waste of money (after all what good is a University education without a degree to show for it to a woman who will be getting married soon enough) Vera must work hard to overcome both prejudice and a barely adequate education up to that point. Against all expectations she is offered a place at Somerville College, Oxford and starts her new life in the final months of 1914. Weeks after she enrols the country is at war with the Central Powers and her brother, his school friends and the man she is beginning to fall in love with join the Army for a host of reasons. Not wanting to sit out her time in the educational isolation of Oxford Vera volunteers as a nurse in order to ‘do something useful’ for the war effort. Expecting a short sharp war, like many others, she had no idea that she would be spending the next four years dressing wounds, emptying bed pans and watching soldiers from both sides die in front of her.

As the war grinds on and the casualty’s mount Vera volunteers for overseas service now that she has completed her basic training in London. Burdened by the deaths of her friends and especially her lover she managed to recover somewhat during a year in Malta treating the wounded from the Middle Eastern campaigns. Returning to London to look after her ailing mother she returns to nursing and finally is posted to France working in a casualty clearing station not far from the front lines. Thankful that her brother is posted to the quieter Italian Front just as the 1918 massive German assault smashes against the Allied lines in France she is never busier or more exhausted when her mother calls her home again. Torn between duty and family she chooses family and has a black mark put against her military nursing career and will never work abroad again. Whilst at home the much feared telegram arrives: ‘Regret to inform you that…..’ her brother is dead – killed by a sniper in the Italian Alps. Numb from so much personal tragedy she somehow carries on until the Armistice and leaves nursing behind to continue her education – not in English but in History to try to discover how the world could have walked into such a catastrophe and to find a way of stopping it happening again. This, she determines, will be her life’s work from now on.

This is one of the classic biographies of WW1 and has been continually in print since its first publication in 1933. Filmed as a BBC series in 1979 with Cheryl Campbell as Vera and as a movie in 2014 starring Alicia Vikander as the author. Part cathartic exercise, part testimony, part polemic against the culture that produced the war in the first place and then steadfastly refused to learn from their obvious mistakes this is an interesting look at the home front in WW1 and how the fighting (and dying) had effects on the personal lives of those left behind. The constant fear of a ‘push’, the wait for a letter (or the much worse unexpected telegram), the reading of the lengthening casualty lists in the newspapers and the worsening conditions brought on by rationing, the U-Boat blockade and zeppelin raids all made life back home difficult at best. It’s no surprise that after the war Vera worked hard for the much maligned League of Nations to stop future wars from happening – of course somewhat ironically her memoir/biography was published in the same year that Hitler came to power in Germany. Running in parallel was her concerns over the conditions of the poor (yet oddly there’s little in here apart from a few paragraphs regarding unemployment during the Great Depression) and the growing struggle for women’s rights in all areas. As an early Feminist this biography became a rallying cry to all women of her generation and beyond to grasp their place in the sun.

Although I certainly found this interesting enough and I was glad that I had finally read this deservedly classic work I did have more than a little trouble actually liking the author. I most certainly sympathised with her losses and deeply admired her commitment to the nursing profession but there was something about her attitude that grated all the way through the book. I think it was, as she admits herself, the fact that she never really threw off her Victorian upbringing with all that implies. I couldn’t help but find her something of a snob and despite agreeing with much of her thought never really warmed to her. But maybe that says more about me than her. After all it was a very, very different age back then and no doubt she would be deeply shocked at the world today – if she could cope with it for 10 minutes without simply passing out in horror! This is most definitely a valuable document and a must read for anyone interesting in WW1 or the early days of European Feminism.

So ends my double-headed (Fact & Fiction) books into movies series. It’s been a very interesting experience and there will be more fiction into films to come. But now back to normal (and interrupted) programming!

"And at last I had come to believe that, although men did change slowly, and left the evidence of their progressive modifications in statutes and treaties, no change would come soon enough to save the next generation from the grief and ruin that had engulfed my own so long as the world I knew endured - the world of haves and have-nots; of owners and owned; of rich and poor; of Great Powers and little nations, always at the mercy of the wealthy and strong; of influential persons whose interests were served by war, and who had sufficient authority to compel politicians to precipitate on behalf of a few the wholesale destruction of millions."

Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, 1933

Cartoon Time.