I made a submission on rejoining the EU to Labour's NPF. This article documents both how to, and my words of the submission.
To see what I've said and/or download the text, use the "Read More" button. ...
It is my view that Starmer wants a Swiss style deal with the European Union. The reason I consider the summit to be a draw, albeit a score draw, is that neither of the end goals of rejoining nor staying out with a Swiss style agreement are closed off. But also, neither is the end result of the EU saying we’re too busy to spend this time “dot & comma-ing” with you.
There is no inexorability in rejoining from that agreement as I believe is implied by John Palmer’s Chartist piece. Perhaps, John believes that Trump will drive even Starmer away from NATO but I believe they will try very hard not to make the choice. In fact, I believe the proposal for a defence/security agreement is deliberately made to allow trade-offs against the single market acquis and to try to exclude security which includes border control co-operation from the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the EU Court of Justice’s jurisdiction.
I also believe much of Labour’s defence positioning is designed for internal party combat and learnt from simplistic board games.
However, ihis article, entitled “EU officially retires its ‘no cherry-picking’ Brexit line” may show that the new Commission (and maybe even the Council), are happier with a deal with opt-outs; even then, I am not sure I’d want to start from the withdrawal agreement.
I believe that those of us who believe that it’s a better world with a democratic EU still need to seek to influence the Labour Party and Government.
Image Credit: from flickr, Keir Starmer’s feed, CC 2024 BY-NC-ND …
Last week, the UK and the EU met at the most senior levels in what the labour government has described as a reset of EU relations. As usual, the conclusions are best documented on the EU website where they published a joint communique. Certainly the results of the negotiations have changed few minds. While I consider that the best result would be if both sides walked out thinking they’d won, my feeling is that this was a draw, although no major breakthroughs occurred and a huge opportunity wasted, primarily due to the lack of vision and ambition on the part of the Labour government. The rest of the article can be read over leaf ...
I wrote a little note on Cloud Operating Systems on Linkedin, provoked by an article, entitled “International Civil Society’s Tech Stack is in Extreme Danger” and published in “The Dissident”, this blog, is a fairly faithful reprint. The authors articulate the threat to civil society that the US corporate monopoly and Trump’s aggressive and unaccountable sanctions capability poses to progressives around the world. Trump has instructed the US cloud providers to sanction the International Criminal Court. The Dissident’s article asks how long it’ll be before progressive NGO’s are similarly targeted and whether US Banks and payment processors will similarly be mandated, as the US has done before.
It’s another example where the USA’s erratic and selfish political agenda must lead once friendly foreign governments to consider their “security of supply”. Most of the code required to run a cloud is open source, at the moment, and I would recommend that the British and EU governments ensure they can sustain access to this code as well as other critical open-source resources such as Office productivity and email products. We should also be looking at distributive governance models like mastodon and diaspora.
Fortunately, the EU has a massive, distributed computing capability and while the basic architecture of supercomputers and Internet platforms differs, they are in fact exceedingly similar. It’s also fortunate for the UK, while Rachel Reeves cancelled Sunak’s supercomputing projects, that the previous Tory government agreed to rejoin the EU’s supercomputing consortium.
Escaping from the US monopoly control requires will and knowledge and I am unsure that it exists within the UK’s political leadership, equally I’m unsure that it exists within the leadership of the EU member states. I should also add, it’s not really about the hardware, nor the land and electricity. …
I attended a lecture on AI Ethics and blogged on Linkedin and mirrored it on Medium, I catalogue the issues as presented by Dr Hung and used Google to see if there were any obvious gaps.
I look at Garbage In, Garbage Out problem, repeat the calls for transparency, I repeat my arguments about authority vs popularity and the role of the GDPR, and I look at copyright and the four [software] freedoms. …
The Election results on May 1st is disappointing for progressives in this country and dangerous. Reform won a by-election in one of labour’s safest seats, won two Mayoralties and took control of ten councils, two from Labour (Kent & Durham).
Labour’s response has been stupid, by suggesting we should have campaigned harder, or disgusting, as in we need to be harsher in “Stopping the Boats”. Copying reform empowers them, Labour must stop it!
Furthermore, it is little noticed that in Lambeth, the Greens, in a council by-election, won a ward from Labour. This is proof at the polls that there is clearly a constituency to the left of the Labour Party as it stands today.
It is little understood inside Labour that the “hero voter” strategy failed; few Tories came to Labour in 2024 with many voting either Reform or staying at home. In his article, “How Labour could beat Reform”, Phil Burton Cartledge, quotes the study, ‘Getting to Know Reform Curious Labour voters‘ which shows that Labour needs to ensure it does not lose its progressive base who seem more ready to vote for another party then Reform voters do to vote for Labour. As is the case for the Tories, the votes aren’t there on the right to make the difference.
The reasons for dissatisfaction withy Labour are clear, possibly best or at least succinctly summed up by John McTiernan on twitter, and in this thread. Labour is no longer trusted with the welfare state or public services. It needs to re-establish that trust by keeping its implicit as well as explicit promises.
After posting my thoughts, I was pointed at “Entering Faragia” by David Aaronovitch and have corrected my stats. He also points out that Liberal Democrats beat both Labour and the Tories which is further evidence that Labour faces an electoral threat other than Reform UK and the Tories. You might like to read the article as he examines the likely built in delivery failure of Reform’s promises, particularity a DOGE in every county, and questions the calibre of many of Reform’s candidates. He offers Labour three responses, which he describes as panics, firstly to steal Reform’s clothes, secondly, to forget the long term and thirdly to return to Corbynism, which I feel he summarises and characterises unfairly if only by omission. Aaronovitch feels these are all deadends but I would offer a fourth, a return to Starmer’s 10 promises made to the party while campaigning for leader. …
This is a comment on A new deal with the EU is exactly what Britain needs. Here’s how Labour will achieve it | Nick Thomas-Symonds | The Guardian – www.theguardian.com, I have made it with the help of diigo, where the headline comment on my bookmark, part generated and part selected from the article says, ‘via Comment is free | guardian.co.uk, subtitled, nonsensically, “This isn’t about politics – it’s about pragmatism. Working with our allies will make British people safer, more secure and more prosperous.”‘.
The article says nothing new and repeats the isolationist nonsense fantasies of Labour’s triangulators that Brexit can be fixed. It includes the phrase “honour the referendum” despite the fact that it was nearly nine years ago, and we’ve had three general elections since then.
Quotes and comments
We are equally confident in what the UK can offer in return. It is a politically stable country, and the government has a huge mandate, with more than four years left to deliver our policies. This stability has already inspired the confidence of businesses across the world, unlocking tens of billions of pounds of long-term investment.
Labour is rising to meet the challenges in this new era of global instability.
This is not about ideology or returning to the divisions of the past, but about ruthless pragmatism and what works in the national interest.
When it comes to security, Nato is the cornerstone of our defence.
All of this will be framed by the very clear red lines we set out at the election. We won’t return to the arguments of the past: there will be no return to the single market, the customs union or freedom of movement.
We will only agree an EU deal that meets the needs of the British people and respects the 2016 referendum result.
You can’t do both if you believe honouring the referendum means staying out of the EU but the referendum mandate was dishonestly won and is now nearly nine years old; I estimate that about 4½ million voters have died since then. …
I attended Political Tech 25 in Berlin in January. The slides and videos are sadly not yet ready but here is a reflection from my notes. I spent the first part of the morning in the plenary hall, and then visited the break out rooms. These notes cover insights into “elections and electioneering”, and “IT, Social Media and Persuasiveness”; I also cover a presentation from the Labour Party about their successful campaign in a separate document. Possibly the key lesson is that old school techniques still work, that AI is not yet used for communicating with people and the social media companies need to be treated as hostile spaces for progressives. I also include a short summary from the LP{ presentation. Use the "Read More" button to see my key learning points and links to the two documents,. ...
I subscribe to Best for Britain’s news letter and they sent me the following. I can’t find it on their web site and so I have posted it here. Their front page has a comprehensive response to Trump’s trade war and is worth a look. Unlike me they are not focusing on the need for the single market to access the protection of the EU’s Digital Services Act and in fact are fundamentally in the “Fix Brexit” campaign, but what they say is interesting.
As you’ll no doubt have seen, the UK joins Brazil, Australia, and the uninhabited Heard Island – along with almost every other country in the world – in being slapped with a 10% tariff on all imports to the US. The EU has fared even worse, as they stare down the prospect of a 20% tariff. Unaddressed, this unprovoked and punitive move by Trump could wipe out all efforts to grow our economies, both here in the UK and in the EU.
We knew this was coming. Which is why we asked Frontier Economics to model how a better UK-EU trade deal could minimise the impact of Trump tariffs. The results should spur a simultaneous sigh of relief across Whitehall.
Not only would a common sense deal between the EU and UK cancel out the economic hit to the UK from Trump’s tariffs, it could also grow our economy by up to 1.5%. And those areas hit hardest by tariffs – manufacturing hubs like the Midlands and North East England – would see the greatest benefit. A deal that includes deep alignment between the UK and EU on goods and services would also shield the EU, reducing the impact of tariffs on the bloc by around a third.
Those sighs of relief should ripple around the Cabinet table too when you add in the results of our latest polling. Three times as many people think we should increase trade with the EU in response to Trump’s tariffs, compared to just 14% who say we should be sucking up to Trump in the hope of an exemption.
If there was any doubt, Trump is no friend of the UK. His unprovoked trade war will be felt by ordinary people across the country, in our pockets and in cuts to public spending. Anyone seeking to spin this slap in the face as a ‘Brexit win’ should remember the thousands now at risk of losing their jobs, and that Brexit itself has caused far more economic damage than Trump’s tariffs ever could.
But if we tear down barriers to UK-EU trade, we can gain significantly more from our largest trading partner than we stand to lose as a result of back-of-the-envelope calculations made in Washington.
In these choppy geopolitical waters, we’ll keep pushing the government to make the right decision and seek stability for us, and for our EU neighbours. Thank you for your support in helping us do it. …
I was given my Labour Party long service award to recognise 50 years of membership, I was able to make a speech of thanks, and I have posted my notes overleaf/below. …
