Brexit.
Remember Brexit? The UK left the EU at the end of January this year (boo!) but we are in a transition period until the end of 2020 – that’s less than four months away. The time has passed for extending the transition period, it ends on the last day of December. By that time we will either have a trade deal with the EU or not. These things always get done at the last moment but you can’t write a trade deal over a weekend and get it agreed and then implemented. This is a useful overview to read – click here.
We’re in the position, as always, that to some extent, our environmental fate will be decided by a trade deal (and the details of a trade deal will be strongly influenced on our side by political dogma and lobbying by powerful vested interests). The closer we remain to a level playing field (continuing to adopt the EU environmental measures that we have been part of inventing) the less the impact on the status quo. The Johnson government says that it doesn’t want a level playing field, so I’m assuming that the chances of a trade deal that will have knock-on positive effects on environmental protection are slim. Maybe I’m pessimistic but, as pessimists always say, I think I’m being realistic.
If we do not strike a deal, or if it is a deal which has no consequence of tying us to current EU environmental standards, then much remains the same on 1 January 2021 except that we then have the freedom (taking back control, and all that) to change the EU standards that are transcribed into UK law. If this government doesn’t do that, then a future one will. We could enhance those environmental standards, though we haven’t heard anything about that recently, or we could reduce them. I assume, though I will ask a friend about this, that those changes could happen differently and independently in different parts of the UK – particularly differently in Scotland compared with England. If I’m right, that will be ‘interesting’.
What would you say are the chances of better environmental standards and tightening of implementation and monitoring in a time of economic recession and global uncertainty?
Which brings us on to COVID…
COVID-19. You can’t have forgotten COVID-19! You know – the global pandemic? Here, in what will soon be North Northants, we have two COVID hotspots in Kettering and Corby – that must be where the young people live, I guess. Across the UK, cases of COVID are going up (partly because of more testing and partly because of more COVID (it seems) but death rates are still very low.
But winter is coming and everyone is worried about winter – more ‘ordinary’ flu to kill us off and make diagnosis of COVID cases slightly more difficult, more being indoors where transmission rates seem to be higher, a government which seems hell bent on protecting the coffee bar sector by forcing us all to commute into the centres of cities, and all accompanied by the end of the government furlough scheme, higher unemployment and the tightening impact of economic downturn.
Hope. It’s become commonplace to be told that one must offer people hope, well pick the hopeful bits out of the next six months! But there’s no point in offering false hope based on no analysis and no understanding of what the future brings.
It used to be perfectly reasonable to fall back on the ‘Well, I’m sure the government knows what it is doing so I’ll leave it to them’ as your incoherent basis for hope, but those times, if they ever were true, and personally I think they were in the simpler world of my youth, are long gone. It would be massively optimistic, based on their performance since the December election, to put much faith in the ability of this government, a government of none of the talents if ever there was one, to even be within sight of competence, or even looking in the right direction to find it.
So if you are entering the autumn with a sense of forboding then let me just tell you that you are right. We will be living in a country that is less socially coherent, less rich in financial terms and with less environmental protection in six months’ time than we are today. I hope it isn’t too tough for you.
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I totally agree with your analysis Mark. I don’t think we have ever had a Government at Westminster with less talent and less real commitment to wildlife and the environment. (HS2 etc) than this one. This lack of interest in nature and the environment starts from the top. So like yourself I am pessimistic. I think we have to some extent hope that provincial Governments, particularly Scotland stand up for nature and the environment and, as you say, we may well end up with quite different legislation in this area.
Some of the private initiatives on the rewilding front, it is hoped will continue and flourish. That may help to a small extent.
I am sure the leaving of the EU will, rather more quickly than we expected, be shown to have been a complete disaster for this country in virtually all respects
This shower in power are jingoistic clueless idiots. In negotiations with the EU they claim that they will not blink first and would be happy with a no deal Brexit. That has potentially very bad consequences for our environment, something they don’t seem to care a damn about as long as the economy is working. Well to my mind in this time of huge changes due to the pandemic our economy will be badly wounded by no deal on top of the pandemic downturn. One gets the impression that Johnson is being hopelessly optimistic. their management of the pandemic has been woeful, utterly incompetent and remains so Scotland and here in Wales its been done much better but they have the advantage of areas of much lower. Now with the rate of infection going up allegedly fuelled by the younger adult element of the population they want all folk back in “the office” to stop “café culture” collapsing. I’ve news for them lots of folk and companies have seen that all going to the office everyday is definitely not the future anymore than long distance travel to meetings.
HS2 was a white elephant vanity project before Covid now it is not only that and the environmental disaster we knew it would be but now runs counter to that view of the future and even more ridiculously expensive for a government that has no idea how to recoup the debts that Covid has incurred.
We and the country deserve much better than this shower of talentless uncaring n’er do wells, we even now have a misogynistic, homophobic, climate crisis denier imported from Australia as a trade advisor!
For me generally hope will only return when we have a government of competence and sanity in power with Johnson and the talentless ( Good name for a band on BGT) on the scrap heap of history.
Totally agree with you, Alan and Paul.
I think of this government as a coterie of clowns, and malicious ones at that.
Oh, I forgot to say ‘complacent’ too.
On arriving at Cherwell Valley Services one evening last year the Cornish Patsy stall was closed so I took a squint at the offerings in Greggs. I didn’t like the look of anything at all so I bought nothing. I couldn’t even choose a least worst option and felt depressed that people actually buy any of this crap and eat it. It’s the same with elections – the best choice is by default from a truly dreadful one.
There are small comforts to be had though but – Hillary Clinton did not become POTUS and Diane Abbott did not become Home Secretary.
But it is quite alarming that other stuff is in place – like the Speaker of the House of Representatives being third in line to operate the Nuclear Codes. Currently that position of responsibility is held by a woman who claims to have been duped by the management of a hair salon