So that was another year over and done with – all depends whether you count solar or lunar cycles as your method for marking the passage of another year which is nonsense as time is time irrespective of which orbit you use . Anyway today marks the first step towards summer. Yippee indeed – unless of course you live south of the equator and well it’s all downhill from here.
Unfortunately before we get there we have to endure a long cold lonely winter. In the end though it will be alright.
Last week when we were en route to the Robert Plant concert I joked that I had my friend’s heavy cold. He wasn’t impressed and quite rightly told me that I couldn’t pick up a cold so soon. Well it has now been 7 days since the concert and guess what – I now have a heavy (ish) cold. It means I feel a little bit like shit (only a little bit) but at least it gives me time to make a few drawings and make a start on my next book.
Boo Hoo to me.
Too cold and slippery under foot at the moment….still in the next few days it is forecast to go up to 11 degrees C – just in time for Christmas…who said there isn’t a god.
There are many who wouldn’t agree with the statement that Laura Kuenssberg is a woman to admire but they would be wrong. You have to be a certain strong willed character to be the leading face of British political journalism – the person who always gets the first question and more often than not will set the tone of how something is reported. She is not perfect – who is? But in this ever polarised world she seems to have the good grace to have a sense of humour whilst coming under some incredible pressure – pressure that I certainly couldn’t take day in day out.
When I was a young man I played an awful lot of the board game Risk. For those of you who don’t know the game the object is to dominate the world by different forms of conflict and conquest. To do this you have to take Risks – hence the name. It has a very imperial view of the world but still had some interesting lessons: one I seem to recall was that the middle east was a very risky place to be but if you managed to control it then you had a great chance of winning the game – sound familiar?
This game was going through my mind when I listened to the latest excellent Inside politics podcast from the Irish Times about Brexit and the pitfalls and opportunities for the Republic of Ireland. It is always important to learn how your country is viewed by other nations and it is fair to say that as far as the Republic of Ireland’s political class is concerned they find the whole Brexit convulsions in Britain baffling (they are not alone in that). It is also clear that Brexit is an all consuming subject for the Irish as it is for the British. One contributor made the point that he doubted that any other European country ran Brexit stories in virtually every section of their national papers as does the Irish Times along with other papers – many Irish versions of British titles.
As the conversation continued it was clear that the Republic of Ireland was going to go through something of an existential crises once Britain leaves the EU as it was clear that they had very much used the size and power of Britain for their own advantage – this will not be available to them very shortly, in truth it no longer is as isn’t Britain a fully participating member of the EU anymore. The crises will really start around about Monday of next week if the expected first phase negotiations are signed off by the EU countries this weekend. Suddenly Ireland’s concerns will be quietly sidelined as the real power brokers ie France and Germany start to make their weight felt. Warm words will be offered to the Irish over the border issues but apart from that I doubt they get much of a look in.
Perhaps the most interesting, and from my perspective most fanciful, was the suggestion that the Republic of Ireland should be able to make common cause with the Dutch and Nordic countries over certain issues and the eastern European countries over other issues as they had in the past. I know that what I am about to say is very Anglo centric, but my suspicion is that the Baltic countries for example were very keen to work with the Irish because, in part, of their close relationship with Britain. That would no longer be there but the Baltic states still want to have a close relationship with Britain because Britain is the only European nation who can and has troops on the ground and fighter aircraft in the air above the Baltic states defending them from too much Russian interference. Whilst this is part of the NATO response it is still something that Britain can offer that Ireland can’t and is very very important. Not one other EU country has the military capabilities that Britain has and this is important to many of the smaller EU countries – especially those bordering on Russia. (To take just one example – in air refueling – there are only two NATO countries that have any meaningful capacity for this Britain and the USA – something that the major EU powers are painfully aware of.)
Brexit is a crazy thing to undertake but that is what we, the British, voted for and so are trying to make the best of it. I suspect the Irish are enjoying the British discomfort and I can’t blame them one little bit for that but I also suspect that they are very quickly going to catch a cold if they think that their voice is going to be heard in the corridors of power in the EU who will always view the Republic of Ireland with a certain amount of suspicion, given their inevitable close, probably best described as intimate relationship with Britain (just one example of this is the loan given by Britain to Ireland during the financial crises).
The promises of the Brexiteers during the referendum campaign are one by one collapsing under the weight of reality but what this does mean is that Britain will end up with a relationship with the EU which will probably suit both sides, close but not too close. It will take several years to sort out but when the dust settles the one country that I fear will be most affected will be the Republic of Ireland. How they try and overcome this is going to place a strain on the country and I have no idea how they will cope because, as I have stated before, the island of Ireland is one of the British Isles and because of this geographical fact will never have the same relationship with the EU as say the Netherlands. The Republic of Ireland may well be very pro EU but is the EU very pro the Republic? Only time will tell. As when playing Risk the more powerful always get more of what they want. Britain is learning that lesson just now – Ireland should be wary of thinking that this is going to all upside for them.
Last night I tried something new – making photos at a rock concert with my iPhone. Given all the circumstances they came out quite well. The main of these ‘ circumstances’ was that Robert Plant and his band the Sensational Space Shifters were to put it mildly brilliant. Plant appeared to be the coolest man I have ever seen – nothing seemed to phase him – even the sound system packing up after the first song. However, it is easy to be cool and collected when you are surround by a group of top top draw musicians along with the occasional appearance of Seth Lakeman for a song or two – he was the warm up act and was again so so good.
The gig last night at the Symphony Hall, Birmingham was the last of the UK/Ireland leg of the tour which means if you want to see Robert Plant and his band in concert you going to have to cross the Atlantic and believe me if you get the opportunity to do so you won’t be disappointed.
As for the iPhone SE it performed quite well. Of course if you examine the images too closely they lose all sense of reality but as a camera to capture the mood and moment it wasn’t at all bad. The only thing I would not do is used the burst function – the resultant images are really not that good at all.
Still a lot of ice around…time for some more ink drawings me thinks
The first snow of the season ( I hope it is the last but I suspect it is far too early for such wishes). Bit of a head cold so the last thing I needed was to go wading out into the bitterly cold wind and 6 inches of snow but I did it anyway. Once I got back I felt like I had walked to the north pole but a warm house and a box set to binge on soon revived my spirits. Along the way I made this ink drawing of next week’s world star Daisey Ridley.
Tis the season…for Brexit to start to become real. Over the past few days we have seen just how complicated Brexit is going to be with the DUP vetoing the first phase of the negotiations because they object to the Unionist cause being sidelined for a broader advantage. Now it is a legitimate question to ask whether the DUP represent Unionist views in Northern Ireland but that is somewhat missing the point. They have the votes in the House of Commons to defeat any deal should it come to a vote (assuming Labour refuse to vote with the Conservatives to defeat them which given the current Labour leadership seems reasonable). Of course it is a different question whether they will bring the current government down (again given the current Labour leadership). This is just a little taster for the mayhem to come should we get to some form of trade deal with the EU commision whereby we have at least 27 other states who have their own axes to grind over any such deal. What it does show in my view just how unworkable it would be for Britain to stay in the single market and customs union whilst at the same time being outside the European Union.
Over the past few weeks a number of solutions to this conundrum have been suggested. They seem to fall into three categories: The Norway model; the Switzerland model and the Canadian model. Each assumes that that the sort of trading relationship/membership of the the customs union/single market for each of these three countries with the EU may well be applicable as a model for the future EU/GB relationship. Each has so called advantages/disadvantages with some including membership of customs union/single market others less so (this is a gross over simplification but will do for this blog). All assume that there is some economic similarity between each of the countries and Britain. This is far from the truth:
GDP Figures for 2016
| Country | USD | |
| Norway | 370bn | |
| Switzerland | 659.8bn | |
| Canada | 1.53tr | |
| UK | 2.619tr |
Source: Google – Date Accessed: 5th December 2017
Or to put it another way – the combined GDP of the three countries is only 97% of the UK so what might be ok for the much smaller economies of the three countries is going to be a much more complicated with that of UK given its relative size.
GDP as a Percent of EU after UK leaves EU
| EU GDP minus Britain | 15.381tr USD | |
| Percent of EU GDP | ||
| GB/EU | 17 | |
| Can/EU | 10 | |
| Swit/EU | 4 | |
| Nor/EU | 2 |
Source: Google – Date Accessed: 5th December 2017
The UK’s economy is just too big to have an off the shelf relationship with the EU. The same goes for leaving the EU and still being part of the single market/customs union as the UK would have no say as to how each of these entities would work yet would have to comply with whatever arrangements are seen fit by the EU 27 – whether they are in the UK’s interest or not. It may well work for a short time but very quickly the whole thing would fall apart because of the built in contradictions. One example might be the members of the EU would decide that all members of the single market and customs union would have to move over the next 5 years to the Euro as their currency. This is perhaps a bit far fetched given the current uptake of the Euro in the EU but in the future – who knows? How would this work for the UK? I just don’t understand how any of this is going to work out in real time.
Another thing I don’t understand is why people voted to leave the EU. I voted to remain for all the reasons I have recorded in this blog. However, the remain side lost that vote and pretending it didn’t happen gets us know where. Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, claims that those who voted for leave didn’t vote to be poorer. Neither he nor I can say that with any certainty. Nor can remain spokespeople claim that people voted to leave the EU but not the customs union et al. There is no evidence to support this either. Even those on the leave side, such as Daniel Hannan, don’t really know what the vote meant beyond leaving the EU. (Hannan claims that the most important thing was sovereignty rather than immigration control – a claim I doubt for most Leave voters – but what do I know?. ) Given this lack of clarity and the built in destructive contradictions I believe will exists should we try and stay in the customs union/single market we are best to make a clean break and start all over again. At least this way it would give companies at least 12 months to decide what is in their own long term interest and we as a country will have to pick up the pieces afterwards. This, to me, seems the only logical position given the illogical , my view, of voting to leave the EU. Nobody knows how this will work out but this is what we voted for – I think.
One final thought. The photograph is of a new building being built in Leicester. Now if I was an ardent Leave person I would say that this is clear evidence of the British economy’s strength because if the developers feared the worst then they wouldn’t go ahead with the building. However, the site of the new building is also a symbol of the complex relationship of our very long term interaction with the European mainland. During the Roman period a large villa stood on the site whilst during the Anglo Norman period it was the centre of the county/shire administration of Leicestershire. Leicester itself was a centre of proto protestant rebellion during the Lollards/Wycliffe heresy. It seems that Brexit is just the latest in along line of love/hate interactions between England and the major power on the continent of Europe. Continuity and change?
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