As part of its #BadDeal4Britain campaign the European Movement wants to highlight the local impact of Brexit and are looking for examples of individuals, businesses or communities that have been directly impacted by Brexit. Do you know of any specific examples in your immediate area?
What would be most useful, are stories of how people, companies and places have been affected.Such as:
firms that export and import, hit by the wall of new red tape, leading to increased costs and delays;
manufacturers hit by additional paperwork and supply-chain difficulties;
hauliers, fishers, farmers, retailers;
individuals and companies who are no longer able to provide services in the EU as they do at present;
consumers hit with exorbitant new costs to import goods to the UK or send items to the EU;
people unable to import products like prescriptions from the EU because of the new rules.
Make Votes Matter – Equal Votes Lobby – 12 March 2021 – Proportional Representation
3 minutes
On Friday 12th March, the movement for Proportional Representation will hold a virtual lobby of Parliament, calling on our MPs to back equal votes. This will be an opportunity to push electoral reform to the top of the political agenda.
In December, hundreds of us sent Christmas cards to our MPs calling for equal votes. This year, we’re planning the next step: our first virtual lobby of Parliament. Just fill in the form to send a meeting invitation to your MP. With most in-person constituency surgeries suspended due to the pandemic, we’ll be holding these meetings online.
Below, you can see some FAQs about the virtual lobby, including more details on how it will all work. Please share with your friends and fellow constituents to make this lobby as big as possible!
+ What is a parliamentary lobby?
+ Why should I lobby my MP?
+ Why now?
+ How does this fit with the wider strategy?
+ How do I sign up?
+ What do I do when they respond?
Invite your MP to the Equal Votes Lobby
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This has to be stopped – hard-won workers’ rights like the 48-hour working week, rest breaks at work and holiday pay entitlements are at risk. On Monday, MPs will vote on protecting these rights from being watered down by the government. Write to your MP today and send a message that our rights are not up for grabs.
Ministers have already admitted employment protections are being reviewed after Brexit. They claim there are no plans to undermine workers’ rights, but why order a review if you don’t intend to change anything?
The European Movement will fight any and all plans to dilute our rights. British workers currently enjoy specific protections:
Including overtime in holiday pay calculations, ensuring employees who put in extra hours are not left out of pocket
A legal cap on the number of hours people can be made to work by their employers
The right to rest breaks at work, protecting the safety of key workers
It is time this government killed the rumours and ruled out any change to these vital safeguards for British workers. If you agree with us that these vital rights must be protected, please write to your MP now.
The clock is ticking – it’s time to send a message.
Best Wishes,
Caroline Lucas MP
P.S. If you’re not yet a member of the European Movement, but would like to help us build a stronger movement and continue the struggle to safeguard our rights, just click below to join today. It starts from just £3.00 per month!
That’s the verdict of our brand new analysis of the deal. So we’ve avoided a January no-deal, but we’ll need to build a better deal in 2021.
Our report, written by trade expert David Henig, warns that, although the Johnson deal is better than a WTO arrangement, it will still result in ‘considerably higher barriers’ to trade.
Henig identifies many areas of concern, and also points out ways the UK could build on this basic deal with our closest neighbours. You can read the report in full here.
This deal was negotiated at speed, and it shows. It is far from the comprehensive deal voters were promised – it is woefully thin on services that account for the lion’s share of our economic power, and it bears little resemblance to a modern trading agreement.
But the foundations have been laid, and now the serious building work must begin. Our report prioritises the next ten storeys that the UK and EU should layer on top of the deal, to protect our consumers, workers and businesses.
Best for Britain will continue to scrutinise how this deal works in practice. And we will work to persuade the UK government to continue talking and cooperating with our European allies.
We want to see the recommendations in our report become real. This basic deal is just the beginning – we can make a proper modern trading relationship with the EU.
[This Blog Post is copied from Global Justice Now]
This year many of us in the UK have faced more restrictions on our freedom of movement than we ever imagined we would.
It’s been a tiny insight into what it must be like to be permanently separated from your family and friends – not temporarily to try and stop a deadly disease, but continuously, because of the unfairness of our deadly border system. For many, restrictions on movement have long been a fact of life. And it’s getting worse.
Under this government, Priti Patel’s Home Office is doubling down on the ‘hostile environment’. Just this week it has announced plans to refuse asylum applications from refugees who have passed through ‘safe’ third countries, in an apparent breach of international law; a former minister has accused the Home Office of planning to house migrants in camps with no access to electricity or healthcare; and we have discovered that 29 asylum seekers have died in government accommodation this year – five times as many as those who died trying to cross the Channel.
When we bear in mind that many of those seeking a better life are leaving behind poverty and conflict which Britain and other rich countries have fuelled through arms sales, toxic trade deals, dodgy debts, land grabs and climate change, the situation seems even more shameful.
Today, on International Migrants Day today, we want to show that there are alternatives. Our new pamphlet: Freedom of Movement: Why we need open borders, aims to summarise the case for global free movement as a long-term demand in the fight for global justice. You can read the introduction, and download the full pamphlet, here:
We can’t deny that global free movement is a very long-term goal. Nor is it the whole answer – we also need to create a much more equal world, stopping those policies which are fuelling forced migration in the first place. But when you look at the increasing violence caused by ever more brutal borders, the inequalities, exploitation and racism that the global border regime entrenches, we believe it is urgent to look for a radical alternative.
It cannot be right that the place you are born dictates whether you will live a life of poverty or plenty, of freedom or imprisonment. It cannot be right that while the richest, at least in normal times, move around with ease, the poorest are imprisoned in geographical poverty.
In the pamphlet we also look at some of the short-term measures that we can push in order to strengthen migrants’ rights here and now, to take us closer towards the goal of free movement. And we look at past and present regional free movement zones which offer concrete examples of how it could work. Finally, we look at a variety of common fears that we need to understand and respond to as part of making the arguments for free movement.
Freedom of Movement is our small contribution to injecting hope and energy into a debate which often sees those championing migrants rights pushed onto the back foot. After all, really big changes have always come about when those campaigning and organising have been ‘unrealistic’ in what they’re calling for; when we have demanded the impossible.
It is only by starting to free our imaginations that can we begin to really see how things could be otherwise. This year has shown us that more than ever.
Saturday, 12 December marks one year since the last General Election, where 7 out of every 10 votes were wasted. At Make Votes Matter, we want to increase the pressure on MPs to change the voting system. That’s why we’re asking all our supporters to send a Christmas card to their MP calling for equal votes.
On the 12th December, electoral reform campaigners from across the UK will, once again, be demanding that their MPs support fair votes, sharing photos on social media and grabbing some press coverage.
With just over two months until the UK cuts the final ties that bind it to the EU, we still don’t have any kind of trade deal. In spite of the government’s blandishments about WTO rules and an “Australian-type” deal, reasons for anxiety continue to grow. What enrages in particular is the obstacle that is the British fishing industry. The briefest look at the numbers reveals that it is the stump of a tail effectively wagging a very large dog.
The figures are fascinating, not least because it shows British fishing willing to cut off the UK’s nose to spite its face. Fishing contributes about one eighth of one per cent (0,12%) to the gross domestic product of the UK, and yet is holding the UK and its economy to ransom. The current workforce of below 24 000 represents less than 1% of the national workforce of around 33 million. Our nation consumes an enormous weight of cod, yet about 83% has to be imported. In all, Britain buys in around 70% of what it consumes, and sells off about 80% of what it catches.
British fishermen catch large numbers of shellfish, 80% of which is sold into the single market, largely France and Spain. This represents around £ 430 000 000 per annum, or about a quarter by value of all fish sold. It appears that under WTO rules selling seafood into the European single market attracts a tariff which could be as high as 24%, or £ 103 200 000.
Will our fish exporters be in a position to absorb the additional cost of their goods to continental consumers, or can our government guarantee that continental fish-lovers will be willing to cough up the extra? All we can do for now is wait and see. But I’m not holding my breath.
One has to be so careful nowadays. The wrong word, or a word missing or a word too many, and you could be facing catastrophe, or worse!
In short, Nico has resigned as Chair of the Mid Kent branch, partly because of unclear wording in our constitution. A request for a Special Meeting required “five members or 10% of the membership”. The intention, clearly, was that the request should be made by 10% of the current membership, with a minimum of five, whichever is the greater. The general interpretation, however, is that five requests are all that is necessary in all circumstances.
In the current covid-ridden circumstances it was deemed to be in no one’s interest to try and convene an Extraordinary General Meeting to settle the matter, hence Nico’s decision to tender his resignation with instant effect.
The situation is made all the more confusing by the fact that the constitution defines membership so widely, that practically everyone in Kent could declare themselves a member of MidKent4EU! Still only five of them would be necessary to call an EGM.
For now, therefore, Peter Daws, the Vice-Chair, becomes acting Chair, and we wish him all good as he shoulders this burden. Arrangements will need to be made for elections at some stage, maybe at the next Annual General Meeting. Certainly at the next AGM there need to be proposals for amendments to the constitution, to plug the visible holes and to remedy some of the vagueness.
A recent edition of Radio 4’s “Any Questions” was asked to say whether or not Shamima Begum should be permitted to return to England to appeal in person against the removal of her british citizenship. This may not seem, at first sight, to relate to the UK’s membership of the European Union, but it does go straight to the heart of the kind of country we claim to be. Membership of the EU does the same.
For all that we claim to be a secular and diverse society, the values which we vaunt as british, and are shared by our continental kin, are rooted deep in the teaching of the christian scriptures. As I listened to the panel giving their views, I kept hearing the voice of a teacher from Galilee, as he spoke to those who came to hear him. Someone asked him, “Who is my neighbor?” He told the story of a man who was violently robbed and left for dead. Those of his own community shunned his apparent corpse, but a despised outsider shewed pity and arranged for his care out of his own pocket. It turns out that our neighbor is not necessarily among our kith and kin, but may be a despised foreigner.
There are reasons to believe that Miss Begum is undesirable as a citizen of the United kingdom, but there is no reason to withhold justice from her, just because she’s different. It’s one of the qualities—justice, fair play—which we claim as being truly british. If we do not allow her to have her day in court, we shew ourselves to be as callous as she appears to be. The way to spread our values can never be to lower ourselves to the level of those for whom we have contempt, but to seize the higher, more humane ground. To try to be “Good Neighbors”, even to those whom we fear.
June has come and gone, and despite our worthiest efforts—writing letters or sending emails to our MPs—Her Majesty’s so-called Government has ensured that there will be no extension to the “implementation” or “transition” period. To all intents and purposes this guarantees that from the first of 2021 the United Kingdom will have no trade agreement of any kind with anyone, anywhere on earth.
In case you are wondering how this can be the case, the answer is simple: every trade agreement in which we have hitherto participated since 1973 has been via our membership of the European Union. By withdrawing from the EU, we have withdrawn from every one of those agreements; so far as negotiation of new agreements with the rest of the world is concerned, we are not even on the starting grid. Granted that there has been talk of starting negotiations with Australia, but so far as I am aware, nothing has so far taken place.
Let’s face it: six months is hardly enough time to do anything of any real consequence, let alone negotiate a whole bundle of separate trade deals with disparate nations around the globe, deals which, with the best will in the world, would generally take five to ten years to complete. The significance for us in Kent is immense, essentially because Kent straddles the two most important routes to and from the Continent, M2 and M20. While the greater proportion of freight traffic is carried on M20, a not-insignificant amount also uses M2. “Aye, there’s the rub!”
For at the end of these motorways there are cross-Channel terminals: Eurotunnel near Folkestone, and the Port of Dover. At present, and until the end of 2020, we can board a shuttle or a ferry with our lorry load of goods, with nothing more than a cheery wave, and disembark at the other end with another wave, no matter the direction in which we’re traveling. Come 1 January 2021, and not a single freight vehicle will be allowed to board without first clearing all export/import requirements. The result? Long tails of traffic stretching into the hinterland in both directions; introduction of “Operation Brock” in Kent, with the subsequent slowing down of traffic, shifting a great deal onto M2 and then, because M2 is blocked for whatever reason, Along A2 through the Medway Towns and beyond.
In vain does HMG believe that they can simply wave incoming trade through Customs, without inspecting documentation at the point of entry. We shall, as a “third nation” be trading under World Trade Organization rules. These categorically forbid any such behaviour unless it extends to every trading partner. No payment of duties by any importer; no requirement to observe quality control by any importer; and absolutely no chance that our nearest and largest trading neighbour will even consider extending the same privilege to us.
European Movement Mid Kent 