Skirmish at sea between French and Jersey fishermen highlights the dysfunction and discord in the post-Brexit trading relationship.
The deal the European Union and United Kingdom agreed on and signed at the eleventh hour last year was a compromise — but not just between the positions of the two sides in the negotiation. It was also a compromise between two scenarios: the deal falling apart, and the deal being fully completed.
It is choc-full of future dates for negotiation and re-negotiation, and mechanisms for potential change. It is characterised by what is generously referred to as “constructive ambiguity” in the world of international agreements and negotiations. …
The Northern Ireland Protocol in the Brexit deal is causing shortages and violence in the region. Here’s how it can be fixed.
Every version of the world where the UK left the EU is worse than every version of the world where the UK remained in the EU.
The UK could either have had true independence to make its own trade deals, meaning huge economic loss, disruption to supply chains, and trouble in Northern Ireland, or left the EU but not its regulatory institutions, causing little real damage but leaving the UK without a vote on laws which affect it.
The UK and EU went for the former: they have regulatory disalignment as a result of the Withdrawal Agreement and the trade…
The current social care system is plagued by poor standards and low funding. But even if we fix these problems, there’s another lurking ahead.
The British social care system needs reform.
On that, almost everyone can agree. There is simply not enough funding in the system, nor good enough provision, nor sufficient staffing levels. Ultimately, though, most problems in the sector flow from funding, and, in particular, the mechanisms through which the social care sector is funded.
But where the NHS has a simple funding mechanism, and is thus a simple institution with basic flaws, we might shed the most light on the social care system by recognising that it is not really a ‘system’ at all. …
The stakes of the climate crisis have never been higher — and now they’re staring us in the face.
Over the last 5 years in politics, decades have happened. Politics — both global and national — has moved at break-neck speed. Populism rose from the ruins of the financial crisis, and was blunted by the cruel, complex reality of a pandemic.
In such a rapidly-changing political climate, the pace of change in the atmospheric climate was forgotten — and, at times, denied. But just as politics underwent a rapid evolution, so too did the state of the natural world. What before was known merely as climate change, is now a climate emergency.
We offered respite to our planet last…
The NYT’s Visual Investigations Team does vital work — verifying information and bringing clarity to chaos. We need more of this type of journalism.
Protests, riots, conflicts: chaotic situations are vacuums of information. There’s little conventional reporting on them, because they’re so difficult to cover properly.
And what information does come out is via social media. It’s difficult to verify, especially for the layperson trying to work out what’s going on as they scroll through Twitter, and laden with misinformation and disinformation: edited or old photos, and videos captured in other places and at other events.
There are techniques to identify misinformation and narrow down the mass of material into what is real and what is not, of course. Through reverse image searches, you…
The government seems keen to reinvent social care — but it’s not yet clear how. Here are the key decisions they have to make.
If the early rhetoric of new Health and Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid is anything to go by, the Tories’ manifesto commitment to reform the social care system is, for the first time, back at the top of the government’s priorities.
The Secretary of State told MPs on Monday that his goal, beyond ridding the country of the current coronavirus restrictions, is to find “a long-lasting, sustainable solution to the social care challenge that this country faces”.
In the 2 years that Johnson has been at the helm of the government, we’ve heard this very same message a number of…
There’s panic about a double-mutation variant of coronavirus spreading in India and beyond — but what does this variant actually mean?
Throughout the last month, the world has looked on in horror as India has racked up the world’s highest death tolls at any point in the pandemic during a devastating second wave. At the peak of the epidemic in India, new daily cases soared above 400,000, and over 4,000 Indians were — and still are — dying every day from coronavirus.
The rise in cases in March and April which led to this was fuelled by a new variant that had originated in India sometime in late November 2020, but that had not picked up much traction until February 2020…
A more informative lens for the Israel-Palestine conflict could help to reduce tensions, reveal the truth, and pave a way forward.
I don’t intend to discuss the events of recent days at length. I’ll mostly leave that to people far better placed than me to dissect exactly what’s happened, but here’s a very basic potted summary of the flare-up between Israel and Palestine.
The violence started a couple of days ago over a land dispute between the two countries in East Jerusalem. In the predominantly Palestinian neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, Israeli settlers, who claim this neighbourhood is a part of Israel, are working to displace the roughly 70 Palestinians there. The residents staged a protest, the police turned up, the resident…
But we’re turning immigrants away.
The last half-decade has seen two decades of rising populism come to the fore of global politics. The unfounded resentment of immigration which was an unwelcome undercurrent to much of our politics following the 9/11 attacks and the financial crisis has become a key issue, driving voters towards the populist radical right.
Bolsonaro, Trump, Modi, Johnson, Orban — you know the names, you know what they stand for. Every one has embraced a nativist ideology that rejects multiculturalism, immigration, and refugees as a scourge on society, the source of economic stagnation, and a parasitic force.
It is all too simple…
Following last week’s local and mayoral elections, the government is pressing ahead with self-interested, regressive electoral reform.
It should come as no surprise.
After all, this is the government that tried to prorogue Parliament for 5 weeks in 2019 to force through a no-deal Brexit without democratic consent — before being knocked back at the Supreme Court, the judges of which senior government figures then proceeded to attack, smear, and threaten with talk of a politicised appointments process.
This is the government that consented to more devolution of powers in the cities and regions of England, and then when one mayor, Andy Burnham, dared to give them an answer they didn’t want, kicked up a stink, stripping…
