No Free Lunches…..

Brexit: Warning on migration if Britain stays in EU single market.

EU migration will not fall sharply if the UK stays in the single market, a pressure group has said. If the UK kept market membership after Brexit, net migration from the EU was unlikely to drop below 155,000 a year in the medium term, compared to 189,000 now, Migration Watch said. Market membership and migration control were incompatible, it claimed. The government has not yet set out its negotiating objectives ahead of official Brexit talks. Trade and migration are likely to be key sticking points when talks begin - expected to be in the spring. Prime Minister Theresa May has indicated she wants limits on existing freedom of movement rules as part of the final deal. This, ministers believe, would help the government in its broader objective of reducing net migration - the difference between the number of people settling in the UK and those leaving - to below 100,000 a year. Overall net migration has been consistently higher than 300,000 in the last 18 months, hitting 335,000 in the year to June 2016, according to the latest figures published. During that period, a record number of EU citizens - 284,000 in total - came to live in Britain as net EU migration totalled 189,000.

Brexit and population increase 'to change UK radically' by 2030.

Life in the UK will undergo "radical" change in the 2020s due to Brexit, population changes and jobs being taken by robots, a think tank has predicted. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said there would be a Brexit "aftershock" and that the UK's exit from the EU would be "the firing gun on a decade of disruption". It identified wide-ranging factors that would "reshape how we live and work". The government has promised to "forge a new role" for the UK in the world. In its report, the IPPR, a centre-left think tank, said Brexit would be one of the major "disruptive forces" in the years ahead, saying the vote had delivered a "profound shock" to the UK's political and economic order which was likely to set the country on a path of permanently lower growth and living standards. It also anticipated a "demographic tipping point" with a population boom and the number of people aged 65 and over predicted to rise by a third by the end of the next decade. The report said this would impose new strains on the state with the funding gap for adult social care expected to hit £13bn by 2030-31. This would lead to an increase in the UK's deficit - the gap between income and spending - it said.

Brexit: Theresa May urged to rule out interim deal.

Theresa May has been urged to rule out a transitional Brexit deal and ensure the UK's full exit from the EU within two years of negotiations beginning. Campaign group Leave Means Leave said a "clean, swift" exit should be among the PM's red lines for upcoming talks. It also said the UK must withdraw from the single market, customs union and common farming and fisheries policies. On Thursday, a former top EU lawyer warned of a "catastrophe" for the UK if no interim trade accord was struck. Jean-Claude Piris, head of the EU Council's legal service from 1988 to 2010, said there was no way the UK could negotiate a new free trade deal with the rest of the EU in the two years set aside for determining the UK's exit - warning it would take at least five years and probably more. He told the Financial Times that the UK must avoid falling into the "WTO gap" - whereby its trading arrangements with the rest of the EU reverted to World Trade Organisation rules with likely tariffs and border checks - and this would require some form of stop-gap agreement. But Leave Means Leave said there could be no interim arrangement that required the UK to remain in the single market or customs union.

UK's ambassador to the EU Sir Ivan Rogers resigns.

The UK's ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers, has resigned. Sir Ivan, appointed to the job by David Cameron in 2013, had been expected to play a key role in Brexit talks expected to start within months. The government said Sir Ivan had quit early so a successor could be in place before negotiations start. Last month the BBC revealed he had privately told ministers a UK-EU trade deal might take 10 years to finalise, sparking criticism from some MPs. Ministers have said a deal can be done within two years. Labour said Sir Ivan's departure was "deeply worrying" and Prime Minister Theresa May must be prepared to listen to "difficult truths" about the likely complexity of the Brexit process. The diplomat was due to leave his post in November. Sir Ivan is a veteran civil servant whose previous roles include private secretary to ex-chancellor Ken Clarke, principal private secretary to ex-PM Tony Blair and Mr Cameron's Europe adviser. He was criticised in some quarters for "pessimism" over Brexit after his advice to ministers - which he said reflected what the 27 member states were saying - was reported. Pro-EU figures raised concern about the impact of Sir Ivan's departure, while Brexit campaigners welcomed his decision. Former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, who once worked for Sir Ivan in Brussels, described his resignation as a "body blow to the government's Brexit plans". He added: "If the reports are true that he has been hounded out by hostile Brexiteers in government, it counts as a spectacular own goal."

Post-Brexit trade deals 'to create 400,000 jobs'.

Nearly 400,000 jobs could be created as a result of post-EU trade deals with other countries, pro-Brexit campaign group Change Britain has claimed. By leaving the EU's customs union, it said, the UK would be free to negotiate deals with the US, India, China, Japan, Canada, Korea and trading blocs in South America and South East Asia. This, it said, would bring an estimated £23bn export boost and 387,580 jobs. But the figures were dismissed as flawed and misleading by opponents. Pro-EU campaigners said the statistics were based on the assumption of replicating EU deals with other countries that the UK would no longer be part of. The UK would simply not be able to secure deals of a "comparative depth" to those negotiated by the EU after Brexit. Change Britain, which grew out of the Vote Leave campaign group, is pressing for a so-called "hard Brexit", where the UK pulls out of the single market and the customs union when it leaves the EU. It says this will give it flexibility to negotiate the most beneficial trade arrangements with the rest of the world. Its research is based on 2012 calculations by the European Commission about the boost to exports and jobs in the EU as a whole if trade deals were struck with six leading economies and two major trade blocs, South East Asia's Asean and South America's Mercosur.

All details above from BBC News website.

[It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything the effect of the French Presidential election will be on Brexit. One thing we can say – at least there will probably be an EU to leave in 2 years’ time which might not have been the case if the election had gone the other way. So, Good Going France! The other thing rumbling on in the news presently is the growing spat being Team UK and Team EU about negotiating positions and relative positions in the same (or different) galaxies in the reality stakes. The way that Teresa May came out fighting after everything became public hints that most of the German newspaper report was correct. It looks like it’s going to be a long, HARD two years ahead….. I would NOT want to be on that negotiating team, no way.]

"With great power comes great responsibility - and a HUGE Defence Budget!"

Cartoon Time.

France bans extremely thin models.

From the BBC

6th May 2017

A law in France banning the use of unhealthily thin fashion models has come into effect. Models will need to provide a doctor's certificate attesting to their overall physical health, with special regard to their body mass index (BMI) - a measure of weight in relation to height. The health ministry says the aim is to fight eating disorders and inaccessible ideals of beauty. Digitally altered photos will also have to be labelled from 1 October. Images where a model's appearance has been manipulated will need to be marked photographie retouchée (English: retouched photograph). A previous version of the bill had suggested a minimum BMI for models, prompting protests from modelling agencies in France.

But the final version, backed by MPs 2015, allows doctors to decide whether a model is too thin by taking into account their weight, age, and body shape. Employers breaking the law could face fines of up to 75,000 euros (£63,500; $82,000) and up to six months in jail. "Exposing young people to normative and unrealistic images of bodies leads to a sense of self-depreciation and poor self-esteem that can impact health-related behaviour," said France's Minister of Social Affairs and Health, Marisol Touraine, in a statement on Friday, French media report. France is not the first country to legislate on underweight models - Italy, Spain and Israel have all done so. Anorexia affects between 30,000 to 40,000 people in France, 90% of whom are women.

[Well, I guess that it’s a step (or possibly a cat walk) in the right direction. Fashion models in particular have a huge influence on young women and if living up to the often ridiculous thinness of real models wasn’t bad enough they now have ‘impossible ‘digitally enhanced’ models to compete with. Fashion is, quite honestly, toxic especially where it bends the minds of teens and pre-teens to aspire to a body shape that is at best difficult to obtain (and even more difficult to maintain) and at worse impossibly life threatening. People come in all shapes and sizes. There is no one ideal body shape. Even culturally determined shapes change over time and from place to place. As long as you are healthy and at ease in your own body – whilst not comparing yourself to everyone else around you – who really cares? The Fashion Industry has a LOT to answer for in regard to the steep rise in Anorexia especially amongst young women. At least now, finally, we are starting to see something done about it.]

What a different world *that* would've been.....! (Officially weird picture alert).

Just Finished Reading: The End of Average – How to Succeed in a World that Values Sameness by Todd Rose (FP: 2015)

Odd as it may seems in these ultra-competitive times the idea of being Average was considered an ideal and as something to aim for. The Average Soldier or Average Student was held up as a Platonic Form and any deviation from the Average was viewed as a fault to be corrected. But it wasn’t long (something less than 50 years) that the much more recognisable view of the Average began to hold sway – that the Average was something to rise above with ‘average’ becoming synonymous with ‘mediocre’. It wasn’t long before tests of all kinds came into use that attempted to rank everyone, in every profession or walk of life, exactly where they fell on the below Average/above Average scale. People began being judged on their deviation from the norm, the Average, but in an apparently more positive way. Deviation below the Average required remedial work or punishment, deviation above the Average rated praise, promotion and admiration. It all seems very logical, rational, and scientific even. Unfortunately, according to this interesting and intriguing little book (a mere 191 pages) it’s all nonsense.

The author starts with two examples which blows the Average idea completely out of the water. There’s the example of a competition run by an American newspaper to find the Average American Housewife using 10-15 measurements from thousands of women. Prizes where offered and expectations were high. The paper expected that most women would cluster around the Average and that the winner would only triumph by the smallest of margins. To everyone’s surprise not one of the women who entered turned out to be Average in all dimensions. To have a winner they fudged the results and then blamed American women for being unhealthy and failing to work hard enough to meet the ideal Average figure. The second example was more telling: When the US Airforce transitioned from props to jets they discovered that the number of accidents, and deaths skyrocketed. No one knew why. The planes themselves had an expectedly low failure rate and the pilots themselves where top class. Suspicion fell on the cockpit which was designed for the Average pilot in the 1930’s/40’s. Could the Average pilot build have changed in 20 years? After much research they discovered that the Average pilot’s dimensions had hardly changed at all. Then one researcher looked at the problem from the other end of the telescope – and discovered that out of the tens of thousands of pilots measured not one, not one actually fitted fully into the Average cockpit. By designing a cockpit to be used by everyone the Airforce had ended up with a cockpit designed for no one. Their solution? Cockpits that could easily be adjusted to fit the pilot – not the other way around. Accidents and deaths dropped off rather dramatically thereafter.

Using these two examples as his core but salting the book with many more (mostly though not exclusively American) the author makes a very strong case that the Average anyone – pilot, housewife, student, worker – simply does not exist and that institutions designed from the ground up to cater for, to produce or to satisfy the Average person does far more harm than good. Schools designed to produce higher than Average ability student’s end up rejecting far more supposedly ‘below’ Average students than they need to, businesses hire applicants with the best SAT scores or GPA whilst largely ignoring talent that simply didn’t flourish in the artificial environment that produced them. Overall talent is wasted, people remain unfulfilled and society as a whole suffers because of a wrong-headed 19th century idea about the distribution of talents in any population.

Whilst not exactly a world changing book, as some of the blurb seemed to be implying, this is very much a book that will change your views on the use (and abuse) of the concept of Average in the context of human beings. You might find yourself questioning easily assimilated ideas (almost always certainly to be wrong) about any groups ‘Average’ behaviour, attitudes or abilities. You’ll find yourself questioning people when they make any pronouncement about just about anything being above or below Average. I’m starting to find myself thinking (and maybe soon enough actually questioning) ‘Just how did you arrive at that figure’. One thing that can most definitely be said for this book is that you’ll never look on the Average human activity in the same way. If such a thing is even possible it has made me even more sceptical of so-called scientific pronouncements of what you, as an individual ‘should’ be doing (or not doing) by comparing your actual experience to the ‘Average’ person you’re being measured against – in anything from weight/age, getting married by a certain age, how many sex partners you ‘should’ have had by now and, my personal favourite (of course) how many books you read in an ‘Average’ year. A short book, an easy read but full of interesting ideas. Definitely more than the Average book….. Highly recommended.      

Happy Star Wars Day! May the Fourth be With You - Always.

Cartoon Time.

Inevitable I fear.........

...but at least I'm not @ Work.

Counting the days to Article 50 (Old News again).

Deloitte apologises for Brexit memo.

A consultancy firm has apologised to the government for the "disruption" caused by a leaked memo that suggested ministers had no plan for Brexit. Deloitte said it regretted the publication, adding it had proposed a plan "to put this matter behind us". The Times reported this included an agreement not to bid for government contracts for six months. Downing Street dismissed the memo when it was published last month, saying it had been unsolicited. The document claimed "well over 500 projects" were being undertaken by Whitehall departments to implement Brexit, creating the need for up to 30,000 extra civil servants, and highlighted "divisions" within government over the strategy. Its publication in The Times generated a backlash from No 10, which said it "wholeheartedly" rejected the comments it contained, and Deloitte played down the memo's significance. Five weeks on, the company has said: "Deloitte regrets the publication of the two-page note, and has apologised for the unintended disruption it caused government. The note was for internal audiences and was not a Deloitte point of view. We have put forward a plan for working with central government to put this matter behind us." Downing Street did not dispute The Times' report that the agreement involved Deloitte not bidding for government contracts for six months, but the company declined to comment on any withdrawal from such bids.

May Christmas message urges unity after Brexit vote.

Theresa May has urged Britain to "unite and move forward" after the Brexit vote in her first Christmas message as PM. In the year that saw the UK vote by 52% to 48% to leave the EU, Mrs May said there was an "historic opportunity" to forge "a bold new role". However, UKIP's Paul Nuttall used his Christmas message to call for faster progress on Brexit in 2017. Labour's Jeremy Corbyn highlighted the plight of the homeless while Lib Dem Tim Farron focused on child refugees. The Green Party urged people to fight for a future based on equality and hope in its Christmas message. The prime minister said there had been much to celebrate in 2016 - with the Queen's 90th birthday and British successes in the Olympics and Paralympics. She added: "As we leave the European Union we must seize an historic opportunity to forge a bold new role for ourselves in the world and to unite our country as we move forward into the future." She pledged to "stand up for the freedom of people of all religions to practise their beliefs in peace and safety" and paid tribute to those who work over Christmas, including health and care workers, emergency services and the armed forces. "Wherever you are this Christmas, I wish you joy and peace in this season of celebration, along with health and happiness in the year ahead," she said.

Pro-Brexit group calls for EU free trade deal.

Campaigners for a "hard" Brexit have asked business groups across Europe to put pressure on their governments for a free trade agreement with Britain. Leave Means Leave has written to the chambers of commerce in all the other 27 EU states, asking them to call for a "sensible agreement regarding the terms of Britain's exit from the EU". The letter warns that trade barriers would have a "detrimental effect". It also calls for uninterrupted trade as well as near-zero tariffs. The letter was written by Leave Means Leave co-chairs Richard Tice and John Longworth, the former British Chambers of Commerce director-general. The group wants to ensure Brexit means the UK is no longer a member of the EU's single market. They said there were "many important elections taking place in EU member states" next year. "Businesses across Europe will want trade with the UK to continue as usual after Brexit and any hint of trade barriers by the European Commission will be rejected," they wrote. "It is vital that these business leaders make representations to their national governments to ensure that the EU is open for business." Mr Longworth told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the UK would prosper outside the EU as it sought free trade agreements with partners around the world. "This word 'access' I find curious - everybody has access to the EU single market; the US and China send billions of stuff to the EU every year," he added. "It doesn't actually matter if we leave the single market and there are tariffs because they are on average 3.5% for manufactured goods, but it's better for everybody if there is a smooth trading relationship."

Brexit: Civil service faces 'bumpy ride' says union leader.

The civil service faces a "bumpy ride" making Brexit happen while dealing with other priorities, the union leader who represents Whitehall staff has warned. Dave Penman, from the FDA union, said more resources were needed or ministers would have to rethink other goals. "Something is going to have to give, and it is not going to be Brexit," he told the Guardian newspaper. The Foreign Office and International Trade department were given extra money in last month's Autumn Statement. The new trade ministry, which is taking over a number of responsibilities from the business department and Foreign Office, is to get an extra £79.4m over the next four years, while the Foreign Office was given extra money to recruit trade policy experts within its diplomatic network. However, other departments face budget cuts at a time when implementing the decision to leave the EU is likely to increase their workload. In the Guardian interview, Mr Penman - general secretary of the First Division Association which has 19,000 members - said the civil service was used to coping in a challenging financial environment but suggested the "unique complexity" of Brexit was likely to put a strain on Whitehall. "The civil service is either going to have to be given more resources to deal with Brexit and its usual work or it will have to change its priorities," he said. "And government doesn't want to admit to either."

All details above from BBC News website.

[So, negotiations are off until after the June election. I guess that makes sense not knowing who’s going to win and what the fallout will be if the Tories don’t win as many seats as they seem to need to overturn the objections clearly coming from inside their own party. I do find it instructive how much the PM is whining on about the need to have more power to enable her to negotiate with the EU from a position of strength – as if having a bigger majority in Parliament with have any influence at all on European leaders! He real message is that she’s not carrying her party or the rest of the Commons with her and wants us, the electorate, to give her a mandate to overrule as many people as she needs to in order to get her agenda through – because as we all know brute power and the destruction of opposition is how Democracy works these days.]