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.
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 […]
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. […]