Anthony was a sales engineer, now retired and living in North Yorkshire after a long career representing several European manufacturers in the UK. Seeing first hand how continental companies work and how they strive to become world-class businesses makes him fear for Britain's post-Brexit future. He is interested in politics, although not as an active party member, and enjoys reading, gardening and diy.
The DHSC bypassed normal tendering processes to place a series of single-bidder contracts for PPE with a variety of suppliers, citing “genuine reasons for extreme urgency” caused by “unforeseeable” events …
After revealing two extraordinary £108m contracts placed by the government for personal protective equipment (PPE) with companies that have no apparent experience or history of supplying such items, Jolyon Maughan QC seems to have uncovered two more. Providing PPE is becoming the new Klondike and the scandal appears to be getting dangerously close to the […]
The Northern Ireland protocol is like a ship drifting slowly & silently onto the rocks while the passengers & crew are engaged in a weird meta-physical debate among themselves about what the vessel actually means in reality
We have not yet reached the specification phase, let alone issued tender documents or started detailed design work. It makes the government’s deadline (now set in stone) look extremely challenging.
Barnier sends uncompromising and blunt warning to London’s financial institutions – a stark ‘pack your bags’ message to start moving operations into a member state if firms want to continue to provide services inside the EU.
The letter that Mark Francois sent to Michel Barnier on Friday (see below) looks like a spoof but turns out to be genuine – though it’s difficult to read and keep a straight face at the same time. He describes it as “a missive from a free country.” It was sent just four days before […]
Last week’s virtual session of the future relationship select committee has sparked quite a lot of comment after it was revealed that Britain lacked a system or even a plan to handle trucks arriving at Dover. The amazing revelation came from Tim Reardon, head of EU exit at the port of Dover. He told Barry […]
In what can only be described as a bizarre reversal of leadership, Boris Johnson this week essentially called on the British people to set an example to his most senior adviser Dominic Cummings on how to properly observe government guidance. He told reporters that it was crucial we “get this right” and appealed to the […]
A former vice-president of Cigna, an American health insurance company based in Bloomfield, Connecticut, has launched a stinging attack on the US private healthcare system, comparing its dire performance during the pandemic with that of Canada’s mainly publicly funded and universally available arrangements known as Medicare. Using Twitter, Wendell Potter has admitted that his company previously […]
Michel Barnier gave an interview yesterday to the European Policy Centre (EPC), a Brussels-based think tank, which has Herman Von Rompuy as its president. Some commentators seemed to think Barnier hinted at more flexibility on fishing so it may be that some progress is being made on the substantive matters. The whole 55 minute interview […]
During a visit to the USA in 2018, the former Brexit secretary told a seminar held by the Washington International Trade Association, “If the US and UK can agree a free trade agreement that pulls the UK out of the EU’s regulatory orbit, then this will be enormously beneficial to America’s farmers, businesses and consumers.” […]
Let me begin by saying the United States is our friend and ally. The fact they elected a Trump as president in 2016 shouldn’t blind us to that fact. For all their faults the world would be a very different place if Russia or China had been the dominant post-war super power. We should be […]
The Food and Drink Federation is the latest to come up with a have-cake-and-eat-it plan, this time on rules of origin. They want the EU to change things for this former member, in order to help maintain trade so that British and EU customers can enjoy the same choice and quality as before, as if […]
This week the EU parliament debated and voted on a motion approving a 137-page report setting out their “Recommendations on the negotiations for a new partnership with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”. The vote took place yesterday and the motion was given what the EU are calling “unwavering support”, with 572 […]
A week before the fourth anniversary of the referendum, with the arguments about what Brexit actually means having raged across the media virtually every day since 2016, you might think every British company would know all about the the narrowing options rushing up to meet us in just six months’ time. If so, you would […]
How casually the lie came out. The prime minister told the world at his press conference yesterday he only learned about Marcus Rashford’s campaign to get free school meals extended through the summer, earlier in the day. If true he must have been the only person in Britain who didn’t know and I assume therefore that […]
The government is facing legal action over an extraordinary £108m PPE contract awarded to small pest control company with assets of under £20,000 without a formal tendering process and with no competition. Pestfix of Littlehampton were awarded the contract on 10 April this year when the government was under pressure to supply PPE equipment for […]
This weekend the EU parliament officially published the report that was partly leaked to The Guardian recently. It backs Michel Barnier and the EU mandate to the hilt, increasing the pressure on Boris Johnson on the eve of his teleconference today with the three EU presidents. The 137-page report has been drafted by MEPs and […]
As the government tries to “distance itself” from the political declaration and “fix the defects” in the Withdrawal Agreement (WA), Johnson’s next oven-ready deal has all the signs of turning out to be another turkey. The reason the WA is not quite right apparently is that they didn’t have enough time last year, according to […]
A new report suggests British consumers post-Brexit could be exposed to larger amounts of more toxic chemicals at the same time as farmers here face a double whammy of low-cost imports produced to a lower standard and the loss of access to the lucrative EU single market. The Pesticides Action Network UK, a charity campaigning […]
As calls for an independent inquiry into the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic grow, is Boris Johnson beginning to acquire that haunted look? At his press conference on Wednesday he looked particularly uncomfortable being asked about Britain’s appalling mortality rate compared with other countries and only offered the weak line that it was too early […]
How many people have heard of Tim Montgomerie? Not that many I suspect but he is known as one of the most influential Tories outside the cabinet. He founded the website Conservative Home and co-founded, along with Ian Duncan Smith, the Centre for Social Justice. The dry-as-a-bone Tory Brexiter has launched a devastating broadside at Boris […]
The EU is about to become our biggest competitor, make no mistake. Michel Barnier gave a speech to the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) plenary session yesterday, reported in typically hysterical and erroneous fashion by the Daily Express as Michel Barnier CAVES: EU now ready to offer ‘compromise’ after UK threats of no deal. […]
The simmering row between road hauliers and the government burst into the open yesterday when the chief executive of the Cold Chain Federation told Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove, “don’t patronise us.” Shane Brennan had just become aware of Gove’s comments in front of the future relationship select committee on 27 May. He tweeted his […]
Peter Foster, public policy editor at the Financial Times has been to Dover to find out how prepared they are for leaving the single market and the customs union at the end of the year. His article is “Dover-Calais post-Brexit trade plagued by uncertainty.” The government apparently promised to publish a plan in March, entitled […]
On the Irish border issue the government failed to reconcile three irreconcilable positions, one of which was always mutually exclusive to the other two. Leaving the customs union without establishing a hard land border, or a sea border, was always trying to square an impossible circle, as they finally had to admit. This is why […]
The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee met last Friday by video conference and took evidence from Andrew Opie of the British Retail Consortium (BRC) as part of their inquiry into panic buying in supermarkets in March this year during the covid-19 crisis.
The fourth round of future relationship negotiations, which took place by a series of video calls, ended yesterday lunchtime. At his press conference Michel Barnier made his now familiar announcement that once again there was “no substantial progress.”
The Northern Ireland Assembly’s agriculture committee has heard evidence from the chief vet Robert Huey that in order to secure approvals for border check processes by the end of the transition period, the application needs to be completed by 24 June 2020 – just three weeks away.
The man once known in Westminster as the ‘Brexiteers’ brain’ has told the Financial Times that if we are going to insist on stringent animal welfare and environmental standards for imported food, we “should never have left the EU.”
Carloyn Fairbairn, director general of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has warned the government that many firms in Britain are not “remotely prepared” for a “chaotic change” in EU trading relations in seven months’ time. Writing in Politico, she says many firms are fighting to keep their heads above water through the present crisis […]
This morning’s BBC report carrying a warning from Nissan’s chief executive, Ashwani Gupta, about the plant being viable only if we secure a tariff-free trade deal with the EU reveals what a huge risk the government is taking by threatening to leave on WTO terms. The EU’s ten per cent tariff would spell the end […]
Dominic Cummings has acquired a reputation as something of an intellectual super-being, his oversized forehead seeming to be growing through his thinning hair and giving him the appearance of possessing a brain so huge it’s trying to burst out of its bony shell. Unfortunately, looks can be very deceptive. The great ‘forecaster’ was recently caught […]
The House of Lords European Union committee yesterday released a blistering report into the government’s shambolic management of the Northern Ireland protocol, part of the Withdrawal Agreement agreed last October by Boris Johnson. In the introduction peers condemn the handling of the implementation process with this claim: “On the Government’s part, there was a series […]
Health Secretary Matt Hancock has been rapped over the knuckles by Sir David Norgrove, chair of the UK Statistics Authority for providing figures on coronavirus testing that “are still far from complete and comprehensible.” In a letter dated 2 June, Sir David said the purpose of providing statistic was firstly to help understand the pandemic […]
Coronavirus is first and foremost a health crisis but it will soon become an economic one – with the cost of Brexit about to be added. The Social Market Foundation (SMF), an independent think tank, yesterday launched a report that lays out the devastating impact of wilfully boosting a natural crisis with a man-made one. […]
A former Tory MEP has called on Boris Johnson to extend the transition period, warning that leaving the EU without a trade deal together with the impact of coronavirus would be “catastrophic” for the economy. Struan Stevenson, writing in the Scottish daily The Herald said it “makes sense” to have longer for the transition talks because […]
The British International Freight Association, has become the latest industry body to warn the government that the UK is falling short of its target to recruit 50,000 ‘form-fillers’ to handle post-Brexit trade with the EU. Industry leaders say the government is misleading the public about its level of preparedness. Shane Brennan, chief executive of the […]
Margaret Thatcher had William Whitelaw, a Tory of the old school to help keep the party together when things got tough; she famously said “every prime minister needs a Willy”. Up to now, in a strange reversal of roles, it seemed Johnson was Cummings’ Willy. The two most powerful men in Britain certainly make an […]
The British government grudgingly published a command paper on the Northern Ireland protocol last week, in response to pressure from the EU to set out the detailed steps the UK is taking to implement the withdrawal agreement signed in January. The paper reveals just how much is still unresolved, with both sides relying on the […]
The Daily Express has for a long time had the reputation as the newspaper for a parallel universe. For several days they have been suggesting that the EU is about to offer huge concessions on fishing rights in order to help reach an agreement on trade with the UK. The headlines have been increasingly jingoistic. The […]
On the day that Dominic Cummings returned to London from Durham, after apparently suffering coronavirus symptoms amidst the government’s crisis management of the global pandemic, he (or someone else) somehow found the time to edit a blog post of his from March 2019. The edit enabled him to say in his press conference yesterday that […]
The only way to make sense of yesterday’s press conference by Dominic Cummings in the Downing Street rose garden is to assume it was a tissue of lies from start to finish. To do otherwise, you would have to think the arrogant ‘mastermind’ Cummings is nothing more than an irrational idiot. The self-proclaimed intellectual giant, […]
The incredible revelations about Cummings and his 500-mile circular lockdown tours of County Durham filled the newspapers and the twittersphere all weekend. The story is symptomatic of Cummings’ arrogance – as well as his coronavirus. He had breached the lockdown rules we learned, not once but twice. More than that, during one apparent breach he […]
The revelations yesterday about Dominic Cummings’ apparent breach of the lockdown rules, travelling 250 miles to his parents’ home in County Durham while experiencing the symptoms of coronavirus, has sparked a flurry of activity on Twitter about the impartiality of the BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg. She has long been seen by some as too […]
Michel Barnier issued a sharp response to the letter sent by UK chief negotiator David Frost on Tuesday with a missive of his own on Wednesday. It is as if the negotiations have burst out into the public realm with Britain abandoning face-to-face talks to try and convince us that the EU is just being […]
The British government is discovering what it is to be a third country. Having published its near 300-page draft legal text yesterday, after the third round of talks ended last week with “very little progress”, our chief negotiator has now written to Michel Barnier complaining the EU is not offering us what we want. David […]
Fake news isn’t only a social media problem. Politicians and the national press are equally good at it (or bad, depending on your point of view) but they’re far more dangerous because they seem more plausible. Yesterday, the Express ran an article that appeared to show a study by a highly respected German institute indicating […]
Ten days after Yorkshire Bylines published a story concerning the flawed computer code used by professor Neil Ferguson at Imperial College to model behavioural strategies for Covid-19, the Telegraph have written their own report: Modelling behind lockdown was an unreliable buggy mess, claim experts – essentially confirming the details. The Telegraph provides more expert evidence […]
Last Wednesday an amendment to the Agriculture Bill came before MPs. It would have prevented the government agreeing any free trade deal that allowed the import of lower-quality agricultural and food products into this country. Amazingly, the amendment was defeated by 328 to 277. Some 19 MPs from the Yorkshire and the Humber region, all […]
The third round of talks on the future relationship closed yesterday with very little progress on the substantive issues but with the first real glimpse of the UK’s true negotiating stance. Our chief negotiator David Frost told reporters afterwards: “The major obstacle to this is the EU’s insistence on including a set of novel and […]
The Financial Times reported this week that Liz Truss at Trade and George Eustice at Defra are involved in a ministerial ‘spat’ over plans to cut tariffs on US food imports. The paper reports that Liz Truss wants to offer “incentives to help seal [a] trade deal” and is said to be drawing up plans […]
For many Brexiters striking, preferential deals under our own trade policy was the whole raison d’être for leaving the EU. Yet paradoxically they seem perfectly happy to trade from next January with what is easily our largest and closest market without any deal at all. It makes no sense does it? Free trade deals are […]
The world moved a step closer to a free-for-all in international trade as Robert Azevedo, World Trade Organisation (WTO) director general, announces he plans to quit with over a year to go on his four-year contract. It’s the latest in a series of crises to hit the organisation in the past year. Reuters describes the […]
Twitter had gone into meltdown this morning after a doctored video of Keir Starmer was retweeted by several leading politicians including Nadine Dorries, MP and Junior Minister at the Department of Health. Her retweet has since been deleted. Unfortunately for her, it was captured and tweeted by plenty of others, including Paul Waugh, political editor […]
EU Legal guru warns UK it’s later than you think In a move calculated to focus minds on both sides of the Channel, a former Director General of the EU’s legal services department has delivered a stark warning, one that will echo particularly strongly in Whitehall. Unless an extension to the transition period is agreed […]
The Telegraph has got hold of a leaked Treasury document warning of a “sovereign debt crisis” unless the economy soon begins to recover from the seven-week coronavirus lock down. On 1 April, a week after the lockdown was announced, Yorkshire Bylines ran an article: Coronavirus and Brexit: double austerity on steroids is coming up which now […]
Daniel Hannan is not a man you would necessarily trust to give you the truth about anything. He is on record in 2016 saying that, “absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market”; since when, he himself never stops telling us that’s precisely what we should do. The former MEP and […]
The UK government is fooling itself if it thinks we will ever be free from the massive gravitational field of the world’s only genuine regulatory superpower. Even Americans don’t realise how much their lives are ruled by the European Union. Brussels has risen to accidental pre-eminence as the global regulator. In 2012, a Finnish-American academic […]
The prime minister’s shocking near death experience filled the front pages last weekend but he may soon find himself facing a second one if the Greek confrontation with the EU in 2015 is anything to go by. Five years ago, the long-running financial crisis was coming to a head and saw Athens squaring up to […]
Explosive allegations have been made by a programming ‘expert’ that the underlying code of the program used by Imperial College in London to model population behaviour in response to different Covid-19 measures, was itself deeply flawed and regularly produced different outputs when given the same inputs. The work at Imperial, done under professor Neil Ferguson […]
Britain is to recruit 50,000 more customs agents, to handle post-Brexit trade according to a report in the Financial Times yesterday, at a cost to industry of at least £1.5 billion a year. The announcement of plans to build an academy in Kent to train the agents was made by Michael Gove. But as Jean […]
There is a growing and increasingly tense row developing between the UK and EU over arrangements for implementing the Northern Ireland protocol in the withdrawal agreement, threatening plans for entry points into the province becoming a de facto EU border. Britain appears to be dragging its feet and going out of its way to be […]
The American Chamber of Commerce to the EU (AmCham-EU) published a cross-sectoral position paper on Tuesday turning the screw on the UK Government’s hard-line negotiating stance. Although it urges both sides to “work to mitigate disruption as much as possible”, the paper deals a devastating blow to Britain’s present strategy. They make no secret that […]
One almost begins to feel sorry for Boris Johnson, a journalist by training but a court jester by inclination. He has spent years climbing his cursus honorum as he calls it, his ladder to success, only to find when he reached the summit things are not as he imagined. Coronavirus has turned his crown of […]
Brexit continues to be the unseen thread that runs through everything happening in this country, even coronavirus. The pandemic has somehow become a proxy for Brexit and for some people it is the continuation of the European campaign by other means. Brexiteers are clearly worried about the impact Covid-19 might have on the government and […]
There is something odd going on in West Hertfordshire NHS. Last Friday someone named John O’Connell tweeted asking @WestHertsNHS if they could confirm a nurse on Twitter @NHS_Susan was actually a creation of the DHSC Communications Team, and not in fact, one of their staff. Here is the tweet with a picture of ‘Susan’ and […]
Alexander Temerko (pictured, above) has been very generous to the Conservative party, donating a not inconsiderable £1.2 million over seven years, after taking British citizenship. In July 2019, a few days before Boris Johnson was elected Tory leader, Reuters carried a special report about his connections to Temerko and the influence Temerko wielded in the […]
The FT on Friday 17 April carried what they called the inside story of the shambles at the heart of government efforts to purchase thousands of ventilators for coronavirus victims. A tweet by reporter Peter Foster says it all: The Government have now issued a detailed rebuttal, believed to be the first time ever for […]
The coronavirus lockdown has brought a strange tranquillity to much of Europe and now, out of the silence comes the sound of the Brexit ante bring upped. Talks on our future relationship, stalled for a few weeks, are getting underway again with the clock ticking ominously. A videoconference was held this week between the lead […]
Coronavirus has challenged healthcare systems around the world. The unique pressure of a global pandemic has overwhelmed many. The way in which different countries responded to the crisis has been thrown into sharp relief. The American private model, to which the NHS is often compared, has in large measure utterly failed. It’s true that our […]
In terms of installations of industrial robots, Britain’s record is woeful compared to every other industrialised economy. In 2012, a group of Tory MPs including Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng co-authored a book: Britannia Unchained, in which British workers were described as “among the worst idlers in the world”. Three of […]
In the middle of this terrible coronavirus pandemic, spare a thought if you can for embattled Health Secretary Matt Hancock, coming in for criticism because of our limited testing facilities. He and Dominic Cummings are blamed, but on this issue, if not on many others, they are almost certainly innocent. Hancock was only carrying out […]
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently warned that the economic shock from the present coronavirus pandemic was already bigger than the financial crash of 2008–09. It means we are almost certain to be looking at another ten years of austerity at least, but this time on steroids. Angel Gurría, OECD secretary general, […]
Before the referendum, figures about the cost or benefit of EU membership were dropped like cluster bombs by both sides until everybody was completely shell shocked and confused. The one that resonated and stuck was the £350 million a week painted on the side of the red bus. It was perhaps the most famous but […]
Brexit was billed as taking back control of our laws but the government has still not published a list of EU laws they want to repeal After the transition period Boris Johnson will be free to tinker as much as he likes with a whole new section of the British constitution, called retained EU law. […]
Nigel Adams told his constituents the EU was responsible for a policy his own government supported and voted for. Adams, Conservative MP for Selby & Ainsty and now Minister of State at the Foreign Office, is the epitome of those MPs able to face several different ways at once, certainly as far as EU law […]