The UK is to start historic talks today on leaving the EU while still mourning the victims of a devastating fire and reeling from an election that has badly weakened the government.
British Secretary of State for Exiting the EU David Davis is to travel to Brussels to meet Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, to initiate hugely complex withdrawal negotiations that are expected to last less than two years.
Worried by immigration and loss of sovereignty, Britain last year voted to end its decades-old membership of the 28-nation bloc — the first nation ever to do so — in a shock referendum result.
The government has developed a strategy of “hard Brexit” to cut the numbers of immigrants arriving from the EU at the expense of Britain’s membership of the European single market and customs union.
However that entire approach has come under question following a general election earlier this month in which British Prime Minister Theresa May lost the Conservative Party’s parliamentary majority.
Ordinary Britons are also beginning to feel the cost of Brexit because of higher import prices caused by a plunge in the pound and businesses are increasingly worried about losing trade access.
May has clung on to power since the election but has so far failed to strike an agreement with Northern Ireland’s ultra-conservative Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) that would allow her to govern.
The Conservatives now only have 317 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons and need the support of the DUP’s 10 members of parliament for a razor-thin majority.
The government is due to present its program on Wednesday at the opening of parliament, which is to be followed by a key confidence vote days later.
Adding to what Queen Elizabeth II called the “somber national mood” have been three terrorist attacks in three months and a fire in a London tower block in which 58 people are presumed dead.
SOFTENING
The government’s current weakness has helped fuel criticism of its approach to Brexit, although pro-EU campaigners’ hopes that it could rethink the decision to leave the EU have come to nothing.
British Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond has led calls for a softer strategy on Brexit, prioritizing the economy.
“We should be protecting jobs, protecting economic growth and protecting prosperity,” he said in Luxembourg last week.
Other members of May’s Conservatives have called for a more inclusive approach on Brexit strategy that would include the voices of opposition parties, as well as the views of Scotland and Northern Ireland, which both voted to stay in the EU.
Scottish Conservative Party Leader Ruth Davidson, who is newly influential after winning 13 seats in Scotland, has said Britain should prioritize “freedom to trade and our economic growth.”
CONSENSUS
Today’s negotiations are to open at 11am in Brussels with 90 minutes of talks between Barnier and Davis, followed by a working lunch between the pair and a press conference.
Working groups will be set up to focus on three key areas — the status of EU citizens living in Britain and British citizens living in the EU; the divorce bill for Britain; and the future of the Northern Irish border with EU member Ireland.
Britain and the EU are already at odds over the order of the talks, with London insisting future trade ties should be discussed at the same time as the divorce, which Brussels has so far refused to do.
The negotiations have been billed as the most complex in Britain’s history, as the nation unravels 44 years of membership and its threat to walk out with no deal in place has worried European capitals.
The government on Saturday said parliament would hold a special two-year session starting this week, sitting for double the normal time to allow it to overhaul EU legislation.
“We will build the broadest possible consensus for our Brexit plans and that means giving parliament the maximum amount of time to scrutinize these bills by holding a two-year session of parliament,” the government said in a statement.
Former New Zealand vice minister for international and foreign affairs Crawford Falconer was also appointed the UK’s new chief trade negotiation adviser last week to search for new free-trade partnerships outside the EU.
UK International Trade Minister Liam Fox is to travel to Washington today to explore new trade ties — although no formal negotiations are possible until Britain has actually left the bloc.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS