Balthasar van der Ast, Basket of Fruits, 1625 Oil on wood, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Image: WGA
via Scorched Earth
Hope & Glory Martin Hübscher Photography ©19 October 2019
Tag Archives: EU Nationals
The pipe dream that stole 66 million futures
“Brexit is an unachievable pipe-dream that will rob us of our future.”
“Every possible form of Brexit will leave the UK poorer, weaker and more isolated in the world.”
“Rescind Article 50 and concentrate instead on all the important things you highlight in your letter: the NHS, giving children the right start in life, building the homes that people need, tackling burning injustices, and building a forward-looking country that works for everyone.”
“Britain used to have a reputation as an open, friendly, tolerant society. No longer. [Now it is] a narrow-minded, petty regime that is already sending valuable workers fleeing for friendlier climes.”
Edwin Hayward, 25 November, 2018
The New Cosette © MHP 2018
Extracts from Edwin Hayward’s Letter to the Prime Minister 25 November, 2018
At best, the advisory referendum result imposed a duty to try and make Brexit work. …Your Government has spent £4.2 billion on Brexit planning and preparations, money that could have gone to a desperate NHS, to failing schools, to an over-stretched police force.
Instead, you opted to spend it in pursuit of Brexit. Thousands of civil servants have worked on the problem full-time, and an entire new ministry, DExEU, has been devoted to nothing else. (DExEU alone has consumed over £100 million in salaries to date).
Having expended all that money, all that effort, it is now overwhelmingly clear that every possible form of Brexit will leave the UK poorer, weaker and more isolated in the world, at a time when we are beset with dangers on every side. From Russia’s meddling in the democratic process to China flexing its economic muscles, from Donald Trump’s disdain for NATO and the UN to the rise of hard-right governments across the world, this is the worst possible time to retreat behind closed borders. Instead, we should be reaching out to our neighbours – our friends – and clubbing together with them to fend off these and other challenges.
The deal on the table cannot be in the national interest. It locks us into the EU’s structures without giving us any say as to how the EU is run….For so long as the transition period continues, the worst Brexit consequences will be held at bay. But we will be hamstrung in our ability to sign new deals, and we will be forced to stay in lock-step with every rule change introduced by the EU, regardless of whether it advantages or hurts UK interests. We can cut the transition cord, sure, but then we’re immediately back to the no deal scenario which your own Government figures estimate will gouge 8.8% off GDP.
The EU made a strong, generous offer on free movement. You chose to rebuff it, and perpetuate instead a new, more virulent form of the aggressive “hostile environment” you instigated as Home Secretary….
Furthermore, your letter fails to address reciprocity. If we are going to deliberately make life tough for the three million EU citizens who make the UK their home, then the EU27 will logically do the same for the over one million UK citizens who have chosen a life in EU27 countries.
….the full registration process will potentially leave tens of thousands of people at risk of the kind of errors that have so grievously afflicted the Windrush generation.
Britain used to have a reputation as an open, friendly, tolerant society. No longer. That is entirely on you. You chose to rebuff the EU’s overture, and instead pursue a narrow-minded, petty regime that is already sending valuable workers fleeing for friendlier climes.
In your letter, you refer to spending an extra £394 million a week on the NHS after Brexit. But that money has nothing whatsoever to do with Brexit. It is going to come from extra Government borrowing, and from better than expected tax receipts. Indeed, the best estimates to date suggest that the economy is already £500 million a week worse off because of Brexit than if the result of the referendum had been to stay. Conflating the NHS money and Brexit in the same letter must therefore be interpreted as a wilful deceit, an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of a UK population you see as gullible enough to swallow the lie. We deserve better.
… Jobs are moving, investment is drying up, firms are moving assets to the EU27 or redomiciling. The key passporting system that the financial sector relies on to sell its services across the EU has been abandoned somewhere along the Brexit negotiations in favour of a much weaker equivalence regime.
….The financial services sector employs 3.5% of people, so the job losses may be consequential, but it also contributes a vital 11% of all taxes to Government coffers. The loss of even a slice of that tax revenue will leave a gaping hole come Budget time.
…the narrow majority (of voters – not of the entire UK) that came out in favour of Leave during the referendum no longer exists today.
…..The EU is close as well as rich. Only 0.5% of our trade is done by air, the rest goes by sea, so it is impossible to replace trade with our near neighbours with trade with far-flung nations.
You talk of Brexit being settled. That is the biggest deceit of all. Brexit Day is Day Zero of Brexit. It marks the transition between the phoney war of the exit negotiations and the hot war of trade deals and treaties. We are out of all the EU treaties and agreements on Brexit Day, but the impact of leaving them will be cushioned by the transition mechanism. But just because we don’t experience the result of something doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.
Through our EU membership, we enjoy free trade deals with countries covering 60% of all our trade. All those trade deals will need to be replaced just to achieve the status quo we currently enjoy, even before we can start to see any benefits from Brexit. Indeed, Jacob Rees-Mogg believes that it may take half a century for the economic benefits of Brexit to present themselves. …We have at least 78 trade deals to replace (the EU signs new ones every few months, so we are chasing a moving target). On average, countries such as the US, India and China take between 3-5 years to agree one new trade deal. We simply do not have the capacity to negotiate dozens effectively in parallel, so we are going to have to pick and choose and prioritise. It is self-evident that this work will not be complete by the end of transition
…. Instead of sticking to a course that will see our economy founder on the Brexit rocks…. rescind Article 50 and concentrate instead on all the important things you highlight in your letter: the NHS, giving children the right start in life, building the homes that people need, tackling burning injustices, and building a forward-looking country that works for everyone.
None of those things are possible if you persist with Brexit.
….instead consider the true best interests of your constituents and of the UK as a whole.
Hold up the prism of merit to Brexit and see it for what it is: an unachievable pipe-dream that will rob us of our future.
Please make the right choice. Campaign with your heart and soul for a better future for our country, not one dictated by a vote that could never be realised in practice.
Most respectfully,
Edwin Hayward
Link to Full text of Edwin Hayward’s Letter to the Prime Minister
Woman lamenting outside a burning city 1550-55
Jan Swart van Groningen
Pen in black, brush in brown, 360 x 283 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
National identity
After years of division, defeat and self-doubt while being betrayed by the sport of politics, England has re-discovered national identity, born of freedom of movement and diversity, through the Beautiful Game that has broken English hearts for so long.
Whether they win or lose the final goal, the victories of the England football team and the sagacity of Southgate, the redeemed hero, have excited, if not entirely united, the country.
England would not have reached
the World Cup competition without
Freedom of Movement.
“6 of @England’s starting line-up 1st- or 2nd-generation immigrants. Without them, we’d be down to 5 men. And trace back family histories of every England player and you’ll find migration stories….”
Global Citizen
England would not have reached
the World Cup
without
Freedom of Movement
INFORMED CONSENT
“The public…need guarantees on NHS staffing, access to medicines and the safety of the NHS from any US-UK trade deal, before they can be satisfied that… Brexit will do no harm to our NHS and social care.”
These are the warnings shared by ten professional health organisations with all Members of Parliament about the impact of Brexit on the most unifying of our nation’s modern institutions, the one that heals more divides than football coming home, more than the monarchy, more than the Lottery, TV soap operas or Dad’s Army, the only one attending most of us from birth to death, the one that gives health to national identity:
- ending freedom of movement from the EU could deprive the NHS of essential staff
- any new customs checks or barriers for medicines and equipment could have very serious implications for care and push up costs, and
- any economic damage from Brexit would make it difficult to deliver an NHS funding boost
Nine MPs from six parties, including two GPs, a surgeon and two former Health Ministers, have united to ask the Prime Minister asking for urgent action to protect the NHS from Brexit:
“At its 70th birthday, the NHS faces – in Brexit – perhaps the greatest threat to its survival in its history.
I’m an NHS doctor who works in the A&E department. I voted Leave in the EU referendum, but now I’ve joined the campaign for a people’s vote on the final terms of the Brexit deal.
“The consent given by the public for Brexit was not informed consent. In medicine – and surely to any reasonable person – consent which is not informed is considered invalid, and this mandates a vote on the Brexit deal.”
Source: Charles Gallaher The Independent
REMAINER OR LEAVER, YOUR NATION’S HEALTH NEEDS YOU TO DEMAND A PEOPLE’S VOTE ON THE FINAL BREXIT DEAL
Save our NHS and save our nation from self-harming by signing
the petition for a People’s Vote
What, in our house?
More victims of the British government’s “hostile environment” for immigrants:
Officials then decided to put the couple into detention instead.
Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves
Something has gone very wrong in our country, and like a terminally ill person in denial of their mortality, about half the British public aren’t admitting it. Such things don’t happen in Britain, they believe. It’s only other nations that commit atrocities, build concentration camps, persecute innocent people. “It wouldn’t happen here”. It is happening here.
“What, in our house?” enquired Lady Macbeth, on hearing of the murder of King Duncan, which she had just instigated.
Photograph by Window & Grove of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, based on the renowned 1888 production in which the great actress, and artist’s muse, starred with her partner, Henry Irving. Image: Wikipedia.
Britain’s hostile environment exists for all people of foreign birth who have considered this country their home, and paid their taxes, very often married and had children here. The people being threatened with deportation, held in detention, insulted by officials and deprived of urgent medical attention include Commonwealth citizens and EU Nationals, none of whom were told at the time they settled here that their right to remain was temporary.
Brexit means Brexit, and history will call it toxic.
Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves
The nations not so blest as thee
Must, in their turn, to tyrants fall,
While thou shalt flourish great and free:
The dread and envy of them all.
We have fallen to tyrants, because enough people keep electing them; we aren’t going to flourish, if we submit to Brexit; we’re not the dread and envy of anyone; we are despised and pitied.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti An Allegory of Bad Government Fresco 1338 -40. Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Image: WGA
The demonically horned female personification of Tyranny sits in the centre, surrounded by yes-men.
Truth drips slowly, like blood through a transfusion filter.
The Loneliness of Power/The Power of Loneliness
Photo © Martin Hübscher Photography
The photographer is an EU National, married to a British citizen, residing and working in the barely United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and wondering every day if he is going to be deported.
He also love cats.
The cat has Freedom of Movement that no mere human can take away.
#BrexitHostileEnvironment
Global Britain, great and free
- The nations, not so blest as thee,
- Must in their turn, to tyrants fall,
- While thou shalt flourish great and free,
- The dread and envy of them all.
- “Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
- “Britons never will be slaves.”
- From ‘Rule Britannia!’ by James Thomson, 1740.
“Dread and envy” of other nations? Under Brexit? The first, maybe; the second, not so much….
P.S. China’s largest trading partner is…the EU
In the light of a cold winter’s day
“The Treasury’s analysis shows that the UK would be permanently poorer if it left the EU”
Analysis of the long-term economic impact of EU membership and the alternatives has been published by the Treasury.
Details
This document assesses continued UK membership of the EU against the three existing alternative models:
- membership of the European Economic Area (EEA), like Norway
- a negotiated bilateral agreement, such as that between the EU and Switzerland, Turkey or Canada
- World Trade Organisation (WTO) membership without any form of specific agreement with the EU, like Russia or Brazil
The Treasury’s analysis shows that the UK would be permanently poorer if it left the EU and adopted any of these models. Productivity and GDP per person would be lower in all these alternative scenarios, as the costs would substantially outweigh any potential benefit of leaving the EU. The analysis finds that the annual loss of GDP per household under the three alternatives after 15 years would be:
- £2,600 in the case of EEA membership
- £4,300 in the case of a negotiated bilateral agreement
- £5,200 in the case of WTO membership
The negative impact on GDP would also result in substantially weaker tax receipts, significantly outweighing any potential gain from reduced financial contributions to the EU. After 15 years, even with savings from reduced contributions to the EU, receipts would be £20 billion a year lower in the central estimate of the EEA, £36 billion a year lower for the negotiated bilateral agreement and £45 billion a year lower for the WTO alternative.
Extract from GOV.UK website
Vasily Vereshchagin The Road of the War Prisoners, 1878-1879.
Oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum. Image source: Wikipedia
Shame on Britain, shame on all of us if we let it happen
“It is worth your knowing that the proposed agreement [between UK Government and EU] directly affects our family. We now have nowhere our family’s right to stay together and live as as a family is guaranteed.
In the UK, my wife is not, it transpires, eligible for permanent residency, because she didn’t have private health insurance (it’s essential for non-UK EU nationals living in the UK – who knew?) when we had our daughter – and so, in the official view, benefited from NHS support illegitimately (this was not queried at the time, and we were not billed).
As a result of today’s accord, I no longer have the right to live in Italy. It is now discretionary: Italy can make me apply for temporary leave to stay, and reapply for permanent status.
Both I and my wife, despite her native citizenship, would both be subject to systematic criminal checks, and could be deported before appeal. And, worse still, our exercise of free movement to any other EU states is now defined as a “life choice”, not a right. Theresa May has totally caved in on our rights, to save her own face.
It is a shameful day for the Government, and for the UK, for allowing them to get away with it. We were encouraged to be European in our outlook and the practical details of our lives, which we have built around the idea of being citizens of the EU. It will be a bleak day for us all if the European Parliament votes to accept these terms.”
Mark Alexander
SCRATCH POST 