Brussels to offer substantial package of proposals to improve post-Brexit arrangements
The EU will seek to sweeten its package of proposals over the post-Brexit arrangements for Northern Ireland by lifting a prohibition on sausages made in Britain.
The EU’s Brexit commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, will table four papers on Wednesday as to how the Northern Ireland protocol can be improved.
Continue reading...Tech titans came to Ireland for its tax lures – but may now stay despite Dublin’s agreement to raise its rates
Ireland has dropped its low-tax policy after months of wrangling over the fine print of an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) agreement to operate a 15% minimum tax rate in more than 130 countries.
Why was Ireland key to a deal on taxing multinationals?
Continue reading...Country takes big step towards ‘legal Polexit’ against backdrop of rows between ruling nationalists and Brussels
Poland’s constitutional tribunal has ruled that some EU laws are in conflict with the country’s constitution, taking a major step towards a “legal Polexit” with far-reaching consequences for Warsaw’s funding and future relations with the bloc.
The tribunal, whose legitimacy is contested after multiple appointments of judges loyal to the ruling nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, said some provisions of EU treaties and EU court rulings clashed with Poland’s highest law, adding that EU institutions “act beyond the scope of their competences”.
Continue reading...Low-tax policy of past 18 years had attracted multinationals such as Google and Facebook to Dublin
Ireland has dropped its cornerstone low-tax policy of the past 18 years, which helped persuade some of the world’s biggest companies, including Google and Facebook, to site their European headquarters in Dublin.
The decision comes after months of wrangling over the fine print of an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) agreement to operate a 15% minimum tax rate in more than 130 countries.
Continue reading...French government pushing EU to take stronger stance in dispute over access to Channel waters
The EU could hit Britain and Jersey’s energy supply over the UK’s failure to provide sufficient fishing licences to French fishers, France’s EU affairs minister has said.
Clément Beaune, who is a close ally of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said action would be decided on within days and discussions were already in motion.
Continue reading...MEPs call for EU ban on all outsourced labour after Guardian investigation finds unequal pay and terms
The EU is facing calls to ban outsourcing in the meat industry, after a Guardian investigation revealed how agency workers were exploited by companies that took no responsibility for pay and conditions.
Katrin Langensiepen, vice-chair of the European parliament’s employment and social affairs committee, said the EU should ban subcontracting across all economic sectors to ensure workers receive the same pay and conditions for the same work.
Continue reading...Brexit minister says he expects Brussels response to UK demand to renegotiate protocol within 10 days
The UK will react in a “robust” manner if the EU launches a retaliatory trade war in the event of Brexit talks on Northern Ireland breaking down, the government has warned.
The Brexit minister, David Frost, said he expected the EU to issue its formal response to the UK’s demand for renegotiation of the Northern Ireland protocol within the next 10 days, as he outlined fresh detail on the timeline for talks.
Continue reading...Brexit minister David Frost threatens EU with use of emergency brake
The UK Brexit minister, David Frost, has stepped up demands on the EU to renegotiate the Northern Ireland protocol, a linchpin of Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal. At a speech to the Conservative party conference, Frost said “tinkering around the edges” of the protocol would not be enough. “We cannot wait for ever. Without an agreed solution soon, we will need to act, using the article 16 safeguard mechanism, to address the impact the protocol is having on Northern Ireland.”
Continue reading...US and European media give their verdict on the fuel, food and labour crisis they say is caused by Brexit
Government ministers may insist it is “wrong” to blame Brexit for Britain’s fuel, food and labour shortages, but for the rest of Europe – and beyond – there is only one reason why the UK’s crisis is so very much worse than everywhere else’s.
“One is tempted to tell the British: ‘You have only yourselves to blame,’” said Gabi Kostorz on ARD’s Tagesthemen, a leading German news show. “We tried to talk you out of it, but you decided otherwise. Now you have to face the consequences.”
Continue reading...Behind a seemingly minor dispute, the long unresolved enmity with Serbia simmers
At an abandoned petrol station, half a mile from Kosovo’s Jarinje border checkpoint with Serbia, a giant Serbian flag had been laid out on the roof. In the former forecourt, a group of young people sat on upturned beer crates, sharing bottles of water and homemade rakija in small plastic cups. “This is our squad, our special forces,” one joked, as four tall, muscular men walked over to join them.
The mountain road next to them, flanked on either side by groups of protesters around tents and smouldering campfires, had been well and truly blocked by the men’s heavily laden trucks.
Continue reading...Warsaw defies critics to extend state of emergency as it seeks to portray migrants as dangerous
Concerns over Poland’s treatment of migrants stranded on its border with Belarus are mounting after Warsaw this week ignored domestic and international criticism to extend a state of emergency and sought to portray them as dangerous deviants.
The European commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, met the Polish interior minister, Mariusz Kamiński, in Warsaw on Thursday night but won no concessions on the bloc’s request for monitors from the EU’s Frontex border force to be allowed into the zone, despite growing fears for the migrants’ safety after the deaths of at least five people.
Continue reading...Denmark has secured decent pay and conditions within the sector. Will other EU countries finally follow suit?
Read more: ‘The whole system is rotten’: life inside Europe’s meat industry
In meat plants, there’s a golden rule: the production line never stops. For 28 years, Frank Vestergaard has worked in Denmark’s meat processing industry. When he started, he says, workers were expected to slaughter 80 pigs an hour on the line; today, that number has rocketed to 432 animals.
He starts work at 6am and deals with animal carcasses. The pigs are first put to sleep with gas, then the workers slit their throats to let the blood drain out. Vestergaard’s job is to remove any injuries from the carcasses, such as broken bones, which the vets on the line identify. If the gallbladder is accidentally punctured, for example, a yellow fluid can seep on to the meat, and Vestergaard has to remove it.
“We have six seconds per pig for one operation, and then there is a new pig. We do the same over and over again. That is how we earn our money.”
There has been a chronic mistreatment of workers in the country’s meat industry, according to unions
Read more: exploitation of meat plant workers rife across UK and Europe
In spring 2018, Alina Serbenco’s husband, Vasile, sat in a fast-food outlet in Dublin and plugged his mobile phone into a socket to recharge. It had been only a few months since he had moved from Romania to take up a job in a car wash, but he was being paid less than half the minimum wage and could not send money home to Alina and their two children. Homeless and living in a car, Vasile urgently needed a new job.
As he scrolled through Facebook, he spotted an advert for a job in a meat factory. It was posted by Irish employment agency AA Euro, a specialist recruitment consultancy working with companies in the agricultural, food processing, construction and mining industries, which has offices across the EU, including in Romania, Poland and the Netherlands. The job offer was up to 70 hours a week of work for just over the minimum wage and a room in a house for about €60 (£51.50) a week. Vasile decided to apply.
Continue reading...Four parties including DUP and Ulster Unionists issue statement warning of ‘grave damage’ under new rules
Four rival unionist parties in Northern Ireland have formed an alliance to fight the Brexit protocol, issuing a joint statement weeks after the Democratic Unionist party threatened to quit Stormont if it was not scrapped.
It is seen as a significant attempt to show that the DUP’s hardline position is not isolated before the expected publication by the EU of fresh proposals to address UK demands to substantially rewrite the protocol.
Continue reading...Thousands of outsourced workers on inferior pay and conditions to fulfil demand for cheap meat, Guardian investigation shows
Read more: ‘The whole system is rotten’: life inside Europe’s meat industry
Meat companies across Europe have been hiring thousands of workers through subcontractors, agencies and bogus co-operatives on inferior pay and conditions, a Guardian investigation has found.
Workers, officials and labour experts have described how Europe’s £190bn meat industry has become a global hotspot for outsourced labour, with a floating cohort of workers, many of whom are migrants, with some earning 40% to 50% less than directly employed staff in the same factories.
The Guardian has uncovered evidence of a two-tier employment system with workers subjected to sub-standard pay and conditions to fulfil the meat industry’s need for a replenishable source of low-paid, hyper-flexible workers.
Olaf Scholz, poised to become next chancellor, wades into row over HGV driver shortage
The centre-left politician in pole position to replace Angela Merkel as German chancellor has pinpointed the decision to end freedom of movement with Europe after Brexit as the reason for Britain’s petrol crisis.
Olaf Scholz, who is seeking to form a coalition government after the SPD emerged as the biggest party in Germany’s federal elections, said he hoped Boris Johnson would be able to deal with the consequences of the UK’s exit from the EU.
Continue reading...Christopher Johns talks about what conditions are like for drivers in the UK and whether any solutions might be forthcoming
Christopher Johns, 37, from Burwash, Sussex, has been an HGV driver for more than 10 years, and drives long distance in UK and Europe. Here he speaks about what conditions are like for HGV drivers in the UK, and why he feels there may be no quick solution to the current truck driver crisis.
“I’m always staggered by how much truck drivers have been taken for granted in the UK. We work so hard for very little money. Our wages have desperately needed improving for such a long time. A friend’s starting salary at Lidl is the same as that of many trucker friends. I could earn more if I did temp work, like many others do, but I have a wife and three kids, I need job security. I only earn enough now because I do a lot of overseas work, where you get bigger expenses allowances.
Continue reading...It’s Auf Wiedersehen to the chancellor this weekend as Germany goes to the polls. But what has been her impact on politics across Europe and on the global stage?
The filmmaker and gay rights activist Rosa von Praunheim once confessed that he loved Angela Merkel, but hated her Christian Democratic Union party.
This sense of Merkel as a morally attractive, quasi-presidential figure above petty partisanship is widely shared within Germany and abroad: during the Donald Trump years she was lauded as the last defender of the liberal international order; Boris Johnson described her last week as a “titan” of diplomacy; and even Alexis Tsipras, the hapless leftwing Greek prime minister who was forced by Merkel into years of austerity, cannot help but admire her “sincerity”.
Continue reading...Tough controls on immigration, a restricted role for European courts, a new politics of patriotism: why is the EU’s former Brexit chief negotiator, now running for the French presidency, sounding more and more like a Eurosceptic? As his Brexit diaries are published in English, he reveals all
My Secret Brexit Diary, Michel Barnier’s blow-by-blow account of the Brexit negotiations, is at times quite a dry and technical read. But every now and then it offers glorious moments of comic relief. There is, for example, the day that Lord Digby Jones and a jovial bunch of leave-voting businessmen pitch up optimistically at Barnier’s Brussels office, plonking a patriotic gift-basket on his desk. Running his eye over it, the European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator spies some cheddar, wine, tea and jam, a book of Shakespeare’s plays and an essay on Winston Churchill’s life and political philosophy. With a smile, Barnier points out that some of the foodstuffs are processed from European products and protected by EU designations of origin. As for Shakespeare and Churchill, one, he suggests, was a very “continental playwright” and the other a “very European British statesman” who backed a united Europe.
This false start is the prelude to some unsuccessful lobbying by the British delegation on behalf of the City’s financial services industry. When Barnier bats away demands for full post-Brexit access to European markets, he writes that the mood suddenly turns sour: “Digby Jones dares to say to me: ‘Mr Barnier, your position is contrary to the interests of the economy. You are going to make life even more difficult for the worker in the Ruhr, the single woman in Madrid or the unemployed man in Athens.’” The rhetoric and tone, concludes Barnier in his diary entry for 10 January 2018, was “morally outrageous”; the desired bespoke agreement on financial services never materialises.
Continue reading...There are signs that previously struggling social democratic parties are drawing the right lessons from the pandemic
In the wake of the financial crash in 2008, hopes were high on the left that a bona fide crisis of capitalism would significantly shift the political dial in its favour. Isolated victories and movements aside, it didn’t really happen. Instead, in the early 2010s, the bailout of the bankers was followed by the imposition of austerity across Europe and in America as governments sought to balance the books.
Premature predictions on the nature of post-Covid politics in the west are therefore to be avoided. But certain themes do seem to be emerging. Sketching out broadly communitarian territory, they chime with many people’s experience of how the pandemic played out and what it exposed; and there is some evidence that, in northern Europe, they might inform a revival and renewal of centre-left parties and movements.
Continue reading...