Category Archives: Brexit

EU export ban would delay UK Covid vaccine drive by two months

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Exclusive: Halting distribution would hit Britain badly but not significantly help EU, analysis finds

Britain’s Covid vaccine programme faces a two-month delay in the event of an EU export ban, derailing the government’s plans to reopen the economy this summer, an analysis for the Guardian reveals.

A ban, due to be debated by leaders of the 27 EU member states on Thursday, would badly stall the UK vaccination effort, and would be likely to force the government to extend restrictions on people’s lives.

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Raab and Johnson show two faces of UK’s vaccine diplomacy

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Analysis: Foreign secretary’s robust response to the EU contrasted with the PM’s emollience towards India

Boris Johnson went out of his way this week not to blame Delhi for the later-than-expected arrival of 5m doses of the Oxford vaccine from India, which is contributing to a significant dip in supplies in April.

“No, no, no,” he said, when asked by a reporter whether Delhi had blocked the export of the vaccines, as the country battles a resurgence in Covid cases.

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Threat of no-deal Brexit remains, peers say, as EU relations sour

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Exclusive: Lords committee chair highlights concern EU parliament may delay trade deal ratification

The Brexit deal signed in December has been thrown into jeopardy because of the recent breakdown of relations with the EU, an influential House of Lords committee is warning.

The European Union committee says “the threat of no deal remains”, with the European parliament now declining to set a date for its vote on the trade agreement sealed on Christmas Eve.

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Dominic Raab ‘totally misunderstands’ Northern Ireland Brexit terms, warns EU

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European vice-president Maroš Šefčovič says claim about Brussels trying to erect barrier down Irish Sea undermines UK’s reputation

Britain’s foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, has been accused by Brussels of displaying a “total misunderstanding” of the Brexit deal after claiming the EU was trying to erect a barrier between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

Maroš Šefčovič, the European commission’s vice-president, said Raab’s comments raised major questions, and warned that Britain was tarnishing its global reputation by ignoring the terms of its agreements with Brussels.

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Biden urges UK and EU to preserve Northern Irish peace amid Brexit row

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Remarks follow EU formally launching legal action over protocol arrangements in the region

The White House has urged London and Brussels to work together to preserve the peace in Northern Ireland, after the EU formally launched legal action against the UK over Brexit arrangements in the region.

Joe Biden’s spokesperson said: “We continue to encourage both the EU and the UK government to prioritise pragmatic solutions to safeguard and advance the hard-won peace in Northern Ireland.”

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Why Britain is tilting to the Indo-Pacific region

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Critics warn of imperial fantasy but the economic and political forces pulling the UK back to the region are real

Some will call it a tilt, others a rebalancing and yet others a pivot but, either way, the new big idea due to emerge from the government’s foreign and defence policy review on Tuesday will be the importance of the Indo-Pacific region – a British return east of Suez more than 50 years after the then defence secretary Denis Healey announced the UK’s cash-strapped retreat in 1968.

Boris Johnson and his admirals are billing the focus on a zone stretching through some of the world’s most vital seaways east from India to Japan and south from China to Australia as Britain stepping out in the world after 47 years locked in the EU’s protectionist cupboard. Others warn Johnson is indulging a hubristic and militarily dangerous imperial fantasy.

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Brexit: trade survey finds 74% of British firms hit by delays with EU markets

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Brexit red tape and disruption to global trade from pandemic leaves businesses ‘severely strained’

Three-quarters of British manufacturers are struggling to cope with delays in moving goods in and out of the EU amid continuing disruption caused by Brexit and the Covid pandemic, industry figures said.

Two months after the UK left the EU on trade terms agreed by Boris Johnson’s government, research from the manufacturing trade group Make UK has shown that 74% of firms in a survey of more than 200 leading industrial companies are facing delays with EU imports and exports.

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Food scarcity fears prompt plan to ease post-Brexit checks on EU imports

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Ministers considering ‘lighter touch’ regime to avoid disruption to supplies from bloc

Ministers are preparing to relax post-Brexit plans for border checks on food and other imports from the European Union because of fears that they will further damage trade and could lead to severe shortages in UK supermarkets.

The Observer has been told by multiple industry sources that Boris Johnson’s new Brexit minister, Lord Frost, is considering allowing “lighter touch” controls on imports from 1 April than are currently planned, and scaling back plans for full customs checks, including physical inspections, which are due to begin on 1 July.

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Brexit: EU to launch legal proceedings against UK ‘very soon’

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Threat of action follows UK moves to unilaterally delay implementation of part of deal relating to Northern Ireland

Brussels has warned it will launch legal action “very soon” following a move by the UK to unilaterally delay implementation of part of the Brexit deal relating to Northern Ireland.

The European commission vice-president, Maroš Šefčovič, said the announcement by the government on Wednesday had come as a “very negative surprise”.

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Brexit: Northern Ireland loyalist groups renounce Good Friday agreement

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Loyalist Communities Council warns of ‘strength of feeling’ over border checks but says protests should stay peaceful

A body that claims to represent loyalist paramilitary organisations has told Boris Johnson the outlawed groups are withdrawing support for Northern Ireland’s historic peace agreement.

The Loyalist Communities Council (LCC) said the groups were temporarily withdrawing their backing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement amid mounting concerns about the contentious Northern Ireland Protocol governing Irish Sea trade post-Brexit.

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City firms made plans in Brexit run-up to move assets worth £100bn to EU – survey

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Data from EY highlights last-minute transfers in order to hold on to European business

City firms revealed in the final months of 2020 that they planned to shift nearly £100bn in assets to the EU, taking the total value of assets lost to the bloc since the Brexit vote to £1.3 trillion, according to a new survey.

The data from consulting group EY pointed to a last-minute push by firms before 31 December after the UK-EU trade deal did not offer concessions for the UK’s dominant financial services sector. It forced companies to move staff and assets to the continent in order to continue serving EU customers.

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Brexiters buy KGB artefacts for ‘museum of communist terror’

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Portrait of Lenin and spy tools among items snapped up at auction by group planning UK exhibition

It depicts the Russian revolutionary leader in characteristically serious mood, staring across Red Square, perhaps, and rendered with more than a touch of kitsch.

But while a Soviet-era oil painting of Vladimir Lenin, which sold for nearly $2,000 at auction in the US, might capture the man as many know him, its buyers are not exactly Bolsheviks.

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Old-school Stellantis car factories gear up for the shock of electric

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Vauxhall’s Ellesmere Port plant is one of many whose future lies in the hands of the merged auto giant

Carlos Tavares is an unashamed petrolhead, with a rally-racing hobby that harks back to an earlier automotive age. Yet carmakers like Stellantis, which he leads, and its rivals have had to set aside affection for roaring internal combustion engines as environmental rules set the limits for the industry.

Stellantis was formed in January in a €50bn (£43bn) merger between France’s Peugeot and Italian-American Fiat Chrysler, in one of the clearest responses to the Tesla-driven electric revolution: the merger will allow them to share expensive investments in battery technology.

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‘Lying is no longer a sin’: former French ambassador on Brexit and Boris Johnson

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Exclusive: Sylvie Bermann, who has written book in attempt to understand Brexit, says question of Britain’s identity was key

When Sylvie Bermann arrived in August 2014 as France’s new ambassador, London was, she says, a city of “extraordinary dynamism and optimism”.

French cabinet ministers were queuing up to visit, she said, one after the other, all searching for “Britain’s recipe for success. It was an an astonishing place.”

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Boris Johnson ‘a liar’ who will blame Brexit costs on Covid, says diplomat

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Sylvie Bermann, former French ambassador, puts PM’s handling of pandemic alongside Donald Trump’s

Boris Johnson is “an unrepentant and inveterate liar” who feels he is not subject to the same rules as others, Sylvie Bermann, the former French ambassador to the UK during the Brexit vote, says in a new book.

She also claims some Brexiters are consumed with hatred for Germany and gripped by a myth that they liberated Europe on their own, describing Brexit as a triumph of emotion over reason, won by a campaign full of lies in which negative attitudes to migration were exploited by figures such as Johnson and Michael Gove.

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Thousands of UK language students left in limbo as Brexit hits travel plans

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Universities say they have received inadequate guidance on red tape and costs for academic years abroad

Thousands of UK students hoping to spend the year abroad are caught in limbo after facing major disruption to their travel plans due to post-Brexit red tape and costs, in respect of which universities say they received inadequate guidance from the government.

Coordinators of academic years abroad who spoke to the Guardian said there had been limited information from the Foreign Office ahead of Brexit on the onerous requirements that the shift in their status would incur in EU countries.

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DUP leadership starts legal challenge against Northern Ireland protocol

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Arlene Foster and senior MPs want new post-Brexit trade arrangements to stop disruption at Irish Sea ports

The leader of the Democratic Unionist party, Arlene Foster, and senior DUP MPs are launching a legal action challenging the Brexit deal’s Northern Ireland protocol.

They will be joining other unionists from across the UK in judicial review proceedings unless alternative post-Brexit trade arrangements are put in place that secure their consent.

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Ports feel the chill as trade re-routes around Brexit Britain

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In Holyhead, traffic has fallen 50% as hauliers stymied by Brexit find their way from Ireland to France without entering the UK

Perched on the shores of Anglesey, the island linked by road bridges to the north-west coast of Wales, Holyhead’s geography has given it a leading role in British-Irish trade since the early 19th century.

About 50 miles directly across the Irish Sea from Dublin, a journey of just three-and-a-quarter hours by ferry, Holyhead was until December the second busiest roll-on roll-off port in the UK after Dover. About 450,000 trucks rumbled through each year on their way to Dublin, with cargoes of meat and agricultural produce, secondhand cars and items destined for the shelves of Irish supermarkets.

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Northern Ireland firms optimistic Brexit barriers will be eased

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Business leaders buoyed by meeting with Michael Gove and EU counterpart on protocol glitches

Business leaders in Northern Ireland are optimistic that Brexit barriers preventing parcels, pets, potatoes and plants getting to the region from Britain will be eased after a meeting between Michael Gove and his EU counterpart, Maroš Šefčovič, on Thursday.

They said the UK and the EU had a legitimate reason to remove or ease the barriers because they were having an impact on daily lives, in breach of a pledge in the Northern Ireland protocol that states the “application of this protocol should impact as little as possible on the everyday life of communities in both Ireland and Northern Ireland”.

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Brexit forces Northern Ireland buyers to cancel orders for 100,000 trees

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Exclusive: Ban on plants being moved across Irish Sea is major setback for tree-planting programmes in region

Orders for almost 100,000 trees have been cancelled by Northern Ireland buyers because of a post-Brexit ban on the plants being moved from Britain, the Guardian can reveal.

Leaders in the business say it is a major setback for tree-planting programmes in Belfast and elsewhere in the region.

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