Government could face judicial review if it does not reinstate its spending commitment, advice adds
The government will be in clear breach of the law and exposed to a judicial review if it presses ahead with a multibillion-pound cut in the UK’s foreign aid programme, according to legal advice given to Tory backbenchers.
Advice issued by the QC and peer Ken Macdonald said No 10 had acted outside the law when it abandoned its commitment to spend 0.7% of national income on aid.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...The value of British cultural capital in China makes the souring of relations all the more painful
When it is fully open later this year, the Londoner Macao hotel will be a kitsch recreation of tourist Britain, with a facade modelled on the Houses of Parliament, actors in bearskin hats performing the changing of the guard, and an English fried breakfast served at a restaurant called Churchill’s Table.
The new casino resort in China is one of the more tacky examples of the country’s fondness for British culture. Alongside the US and the Gulf, China is a crucial overseas market for English Premier League football broadcast rights. Britain’s heritage attractions, private schools and designer brands are immensely popular with China’s elite. The UK is also a favoured destination for higher education: numbers of Chinese students at UK universities soared by 56% from 2015 to 2019.
Continue reading...Latest updates: PM says UK’s greatest ally will be US as he makes statement to MPs on defence review
In his Sky News interview Tobias Ellwood, the Conservative chair of the Commons defence committee, said the security and defence review said that the UK could use nuclear weapons to respond to an attack with chemical or biological weapons. That was a “big change” in policy, he said.
He was referring to this passage on page 77 of the document (pdf).
The UK will not use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons 1968 (NPT). This assurance does not apply to any state in material breach of those non-proliferation obligations. However, we reserve the right to review this assurance if the future threat of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical and biological capabilities, or emerging technologies that could have a comparable impact, makes it necessary.
Here is the Scottish government’s summary of the latest plans for easing lockdown restrictions in Scotland. And here is a graphic summarising what it says.
Scotland’s indicative route out of lockdown. If we all stick with it and get the virus more under control as the vaccines do their work, there is hope for a much better summer on the horizon ☀️ pic.twitter.com/gTKHtJTNn5
Continue reading...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.”
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...Lawyer for British-Iranian dual national held since 2016 ‘very hopeful’ she will be acquitted
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian dual national detained since 2016, faced a second set of charges on Sunday in Iran’s revolutionary court in Tehran.
She was freed from house arrest last Sunday at the end of a five-year prison sentence, but because she had been summoned to court again on the other charge, she has not been allowed to leave the country to return to her family.
Continue reading...Boris Johnson tells Hassan Rouhani the British-Iranian dual national must be allowed home immediately
Boris Johnson has told Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, in a phone call that the British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe must be allowed to return home to be with her family.
“The prime minister raised the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other British-Iranian dual nationals detained in Iran and demanded their immediate release,” a statement from Johnson’s office said on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Denying MPs their say could head off Tory rebellion but potentially open government to legal action
A planned reduction in aid spending may not go to a vote in the Commons, Downing Street has indicated, which would head off a likely rebellion by Conservative MPs but could expose the government to legal action.
Pressed repeatedly on whether the cut in the aid budget from 0.7% of national income – which is set out in law under the 2015 International Development Act – would be subject to a Commons vote or a new act, Boris Johnson’s spokesperson declined to confirm this.
Continue reading...Exclusive: former DfID secretary Mark Lowcock shocked by decision of Johnson’s government to cut aid
Ministers have decided to “balance the books on the backs of the starving people of Yemen” in an act that will see tens of thousands die and damage the UK’s global influence, the head of the UN’s Office for Humanitarian Affairs has said.
Speaking with rare bluntness after the UK more than halved its funds to help Yemen, the former permanent secretary at the Department for International Development Mark Lowcock said he was shocked by the decision. It is understood he was given no chance to appeal to the UK to rethink.
Continue reading...Internal reports show projected cuts including 59% in South Sudan, 60% in Somalia and 67% in Syria
Some of the poorest and most conflict-ridden countries in the world will have their UK aid programmes cut by more than half, according to a leaked report of discussions held in the last three weeks among Foreign Office officials.
The cuts include slashing the aid programme to Somalia by 60% and to South Sudan by 59%. The planned cut for Syria is reported at 67% and for Libya it is 63%. Nigeria’s aid programme would be cut by 58%.
Continue reading...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”.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.”
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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”.
Continue reading...Western foreign ministers to discuss response to Iranian plan to ban snap intrusive inspections
The future of the Iran nuclear deal is hanging in the balance as the west prepares its response to Iranian plans to increase pressure on Washington by banning snap intrusive inspections of its nuclear sites.
The German, French and British foreign ministers are to confer urgently with the US secretary of state, Tony Blinken, on how to respond to Iran’s plans, which it is expected to implement on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Foreign secretary talks up global growth opportunities and says Brussels ‘imposing obstacles’ to trade
Potential losses in UK trade with the EU because of Brexit will be more than made up by more opportunities in developing markets, Dominic Raab has claimed, saying people should take a “10-year view” of the current troubles faced by companies.
Questioned about warnings from a number of firms that bureaucracy and duties means they will go out of business, or have to relocate operations inside the EU, the foreign secretary also appeared to blame Brussels, saying it was “imposing” obstacles to trade.
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