Agreement reached to ‘slash red tape’ on food products, in exchange for extended EU access to fishing waters

The deal – which will grant EU fishers access to British waters for an additional 12 years – will remove checks on a significant number of food products as well as a deeper defence partnership and agreements on carbon taxes.

The UK said the deal would make “food cheaper, slash red tape, open up access to the EU market”. But the trade-off for the deal was fishing access and rights for an additional 12 years – more than the UK had offered – which is likely to lead to cries of betrayal from the industry.

The two sides will also begin talks for a “youth experience scheme”, first reported in the Guardian, which could allow young people to work and travel freely in Europe again and mirror existing schemes the UK has with countries such as Australia and New Zealand.

The government said it would put £360m of modernisation support back into coastal communities as part of the deal, a tacit acknowledgment of the concession.

  • rah@feddit.ukOPEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    You know all of the promises that Boris Johnson the enormously deceitful individual gave.

    No. I didn’t pay any attention to the brexit campaigning. I’d been arguing to leave the EU for years before all that nonsense happened. Why on Earth anyone would pay any attention to anything Johnson says, ever, is beyond me.

    How are we better out of the EU than we are in it if our biggest trading partner remains the EU

    There’s more to life and government than just trade. If you want to know some of my arguments for why we’re better off out of the EU, I’ll repurpose a previous comment:

    For a start it means that the structure of the government better reflects the concerns of the population. The EU never really made much of a dent in the consciousness of Britons. I expect the number of citizens who knew the name of their MEP off the top of their head would be dwarfed by the number of citizens who knew the name of their MP. This is in comparison to continental countries, particularly in my mind Germany, where the EU, EU political parties and MEPs are very much present in the minds of the electorate. At least, that was my experience.

    Also, in my view the EU is quite undemocratic. The separate Council, Commission and Parliament are an affront. Especially the fact that the Parliament, which represents the electorate, does not have the power to introduce legislation. The people are an inconvenient afterthought in the EU power structure. Here’s Yanis Varoufakis when he was finance minister for Greece back when they had their economic meltdown, talking about the impending referendum on whether to accept European proposals regarding Greece’s debt: [in the event that the referendum accepts the European proposals] “I am not going to impede its progress through parliament. This is my commitment to democracy and my commitment to the people, that I have entrusted with the decision, with the verdict of yes/no, or no, in a way that has incensed my colleagues in the Euro group who don’t believe that ‘such complex matters’, as I’ve been told, ‘should be put to common folk’.” – https://youtu.be/OmqnYHmRg48?t=625 That, to me, is the EU. The British people are better off out of it.

    EU Regional Development Funds are another horror. They’re run by unelected bureaucrats, stepping on the toes of existing, democratically elected regional institutions like… councils. Instead of giving hundreds of millions to councils for development projects, or even creating larger regional institutions with democratically elected leadership, someone thought it would be a good idea to give those millions to unelected bureaucrats to spend in the same area. I’m still mystified as to how this ever came to pass. Brexit couldn’t come soon enough.