Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Amid confusion for lorry drivers in Kent, logistics firms call for greater transparency to help lessen disruption
Ministers are facing demands for more honesty and transparency over any logjams at the UK border in the wake of Britain’s exit from the EU, amid concerns that waves of disruption will last for six months.
Several lorry drivers are understood to have been turned away at Dover for not having the right paperwork following the end of the Brexit transition period last week. It has caused concern among logistics and manufacturing companies that more severe problems could occur as trade flows increase later this month.
Agreement in principle will allow territory to join the Schengen free movement area
Spain will have the last word on who can enter Gibraltar under the terms of the preliminary post-Brexit deal announced this week, Spain’s foreign minister has said, in an assertion that was swiftly challenged by Gibraltar’s chief minister.
The agreement in principle – struck just hours before Gibraltar was poised to become the only frontier marked by a hard Brexit – will allow the British overseas territory to join the Schengen free movement area with Spain acting as a guarantor.
As first ferries arrive under new trade rules, Simon Coveney warns of disruption to come
Brexit is “not something to celebrate”, Ireland’s foreign minister Simon Coveney declared after the UK formally severed ties with the EU, as he warned of trading disruptions due to fresh red tape.
As Brexit’s tangible effects kick in, we look at the impact the EU’s most far-reaching project has had on British society
Historians of the future will judge the politics of the half century before the Brexit transition ended on 1 January 2021. What, though, of social and cultural historians, those who study how we live?
Perhaps the most symbolic cultural artefacts of the last 50 years will turn out not to be a blue flag but a bottle of Blue Nun, a block of mozzarella, a Ryanair boarding printout or a ticket to a Bayern Munich v Manchester City football game.
Boris Johnson largely ignores Brexit in new year message to focus on toll of Covid and ‘the grimness of 2020’
Four years, 27 weeks and two days after a referendum that split the country almost down the middle, the UK left the EU’s orbit on Thursday night in a departure that was notably low key, and marked by warnings of likely disruption to come.
In a sometimes sombre new year message, Boris Johnson largely ignored Brexit, an outcome he arguably shaped more than any other politician, to focus instead on the toll of Covid-19 and what he called “the grimness of 2020”.
British overseas territory had been left out of deal announced on Christmas Eve
A last-minute deal between the UK and Spain – agreed just hours before Gibraltar was poised to become the only frontier marked by a hard Brexit – will allow for free movement between the British overseas territory and much of the EU.
“Today is a day for hope,” Spain’s foreign minister, Arancha González Laya, said on Thursday as she announced that an agreement in principle had been reached. “In the long history of our relations with the UK, related to Gibraltar, today we’re facing a turning point.”
European commentators weigh in on what Britain’s departure from the EU means
Britain faces an uncertain future as it finally pulls clear of the EU’s orbit, continental commentators have predicted, its reputation for pragmatism and probity shredded by a Brexit process most see as profoundly populist and dangerously dishonest.
“For us, the UK has always been seen as like-minded: economically progressive, politically stable, respect for the rule of law – a beacon of western liberal democracy,” said Rem Korteweg, of the Clingendael Institute thinktank in the Netherlands.
Backing of EU27 paves way for new arrangements between UK and EU to come into force on 1 January
The post-Brexit trade and security deal has been unanimously backed by EU member states, paving the way for the new arrangements to come into force on 1 January.
At a meeting of ambassadors in Brussels, the 27 member states gave their support for the 1,246-page treaty to be “provisionally applied” at the end of the year. The decision will be formally completed by written procedure at 3pm central European time (1400 GMT) on Tuesday.
Chancellor aims to firm up agreements that would allow institutions to trade as if still in EU
Rishi Sunak has offered financial services firms the prospect of closer access to EU markets than outlined in the Brexit trade deal, after Boris Johnson conceded that this aspect of the agreement fell short of UK hopes.
With MPs and experts still poring over the 1,246-page details of the agreement ahead of votes in the Commons and Lords on Wednesday, increasing focus has fallen on the relative lack of provision for the service sector, which makes up about 80% of the UK economy.
“The great strategic prize of the 21st century is the full economic, political and social empowerment of women,” said William Hague, when he was foreign secretary. “There are still large parts of the world who are undervaluing, under-utilising, under-developing half their population.” That was five years ago, and there is still a long way to go. I am speaking out now, because we are about to go into reverse.
Parliament’s women and equalities committee, which I chair, isn’t afraid to take the prime minister to task when his policies fall short in providing for the marginalised and under-represented. We’ve held the government’s feet to the fire on the domestic abuse bill, the role of women in the response to Covid-19 and the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on BAME communities. But the need to level up society doesn’t stop at our borders, and many of the world’s poorest countries are also the most unequal.
‘UK caved in on fish to win a wider treaty’, industry bodies say, while leading Brexiter David Davis says one-day debate is ‘too fast’
Senior Conservative MPs late on Saturday expressed alarm at plans to rush the historic UK-EU trade deal through parliament in just one day, as fishermen’s leaders accused Boris Johnson of “caving in” at the 11th hour to clinch agreement on Christmas Eve.
And there were growing fears among senior Tories, who will spend the next three days poring over the 2,000-page agreement published on Saturday, that details in the fine print could still allow the EU to impose punitive tariffs on British exports if businesses fail to follow European rules.
PM says he is confident trade deal will withstand ‘ruthless’ scrutiny from Eurosceptics
The EU and the UK government have published the full text of the Brexit trade deal less than a week before it is due to be implemented, as Boris Johnson urged his backbenchers to support the agreement when it reaches parliament next week.
The deal, which comes to more than 1,250 pages, will be voted on in the House of Commons on Wednesday, a day before the Brexit transition period ends.
Parliament should be recalled to deal with the crisis of coronavirus, not just that of leaving the EU
In January 1979, a beleaguered Labour prime minister, James Callaghan, returned from a Caribbean summit to a country that appeared in crisis. A week earlier, truck drivers had gone on strike, cutting off petrol supplies in the “winter of discontent”. When the prime minister arrived at London’s Heathrow airport, he held a press conference in which nothing memorable was said. Instead, in a phrase that has become code for political complacency, Callaghan became for ever associated with the following day’s Sun newspaper headline: “Crisis? What crisis?”
His fate was sealed. Callaghan lost the next general election to Margaret Thatcher. The lesson for politicians is the importance of perception in a crisis. If something feels like a crisis, it is effectively a crisis. Britain now confronts its most serious emergency since the second world war. It faces the unprecedented challenge of coronavirus while adjusting to a new diminished status outside the European Union. The country’s health service is at breaking point, and its future as a unified state is on the line. All this goes unmentioned by Boris Johnson, perhaps because he disingenuously promised that Brexit would save the NHS.
Last-minute agreement assessed as either a welcome economic boost or a bad move in a world that has become dominated by uncertainty
Britain should be congratulated for coming to a Brexit deal with the EU, but be wary of the very different world they are walking into, international analysts have said.
Outside Europe, politicians, experts, and media took a short break from Christmas and the pandemic to welcome the end of Britain’s long and torturous Brexit process, but there was little in the way of celebration.
Boris Johnson is confident he can sell the trade deal to Brexiters, according to the FT (paywall).
Sebastian Payne and George Parker report that Downing Street has been preparing the ground for weeks with the ERG, ensuring that senior backbenchers were aware of the shape of things to come and compromises being made.
Senior members of the group have already welcomed Johnson’s imminent deal as the “Christmas Eve Agreement”, a reference to the 1998 Belfast Good Friday Agreement that secured peace in Northern Ireland.
Indications from senior figures within the ERG suggest that many of its members will accept the compromises negotiated by Johnson and Lord Frost.
If they want help from the party to stay in parliament, then they’ll back the deal.
In case you’re just joining us, the final stage of the negotiations for a post-Brexit trade deal has been delayed after it emerged that the European commission was using out-of-date figures to calculate the reduction in the amount of fish that member states can catch in British waters after 1 January.
A deal was due to be announced early this morning but the announcement had to be postponed when officials noticed a discrepancy between two sets of fishing figures and realised that the numbers used in the negotiation appeared to be out of date.
Some 53 vessels have been waiting offshore for more than four weeks while coal ships from other countries have delivered their loads
More than 50 Australian coal ships are still stranded off China’s coast, held up by a Chinese government import ban, despite the country facing coal shortages and one of its worst power blackouts in years.
China has rejected suggestions that its October ban on Australian coal has contributed to the coal shortage but the ban has been linked to higher domestic prices. Analysts have said that under the current circumstances any incoming coal would help.
Desperate relatives in Britain plead with Home Office for flexibility as paperwork holdups delay family reunions while deadline looms
The Home Office has said it will not allow a group of stranded refugee children to join their families in the UK if their cases do not make it through the Greek asylum system by 31 December when the EU family reunification programme comes to an end.
Around 20 children who are eligible to join their relatives in the UK under the current family reunification scheme are still waiting for their cases to be completed in Greece, before the UK government ends the programme when it leaves the EU on the 31st December.
Britain and Europe still seeking last-minute advantage in final stages of negotiations
A post-Brexit trade and security treaty with the European Union is within “touching distance”, Downing Street said on Wednesday night as Boris Johnson prepared to overcome final disagreements to unveil a hard-fought Christmas Eve deal.
The prime minister is expected to seal the deal following a final call with the European commission president Ursula von der Leyen – but the two sides were battling deep into the night to gain a last-minute advantage.
Exclusive: experts sign letter warning against slashing spending on public-private programmes
Experts fear a push to cut the UK’s aid budget will slash spending on global health research, handicapping international public-private programmes that have helped combat the world’s deadliest diseases over the last decade.
In a letter addressed to the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, last week, prominent parliamentarians sought reassurance that the planned cuts would not lead to “dramatic reductions” in investment for devastating diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, Aids and a clutch of neglected tropical diseases.
Joint Russia and China patrol over the Pacific signals stronger military ties between Moscow and Beijing
Japan and South Korea have scrambled fighter jets to trackRussian and Chinese bombers which flown a joint patrol mission over the western Pacific in a show of increasingly close military ties between Moscow and Beijing.
The Russian military said a pair of its Tu-95 strategic bombers and four Chinese H-6K bombers flew over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea on Tuesday.