Brexit
Express
EMMANUEL MACRON was challenged by Parisians on Brexit as one person said they “don’t blame England” for the fall out, unearthed accounts show.
French President Emmanuel Macron appears to have rejected the prospect of attending a summit with Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The Times has reported that the French government has rebuffed attempts by diplomats to arrange a date for a meeting between the two leaders. A senior diplomatic source told the newspaper: “The Government has reached out to try to arrange a summit but the French aren’t interested.
“They’ve simply said there’s no point.”
This comes after Mr Macron offered to reset UK-France relations if Mr Johnson stands by the Brexit divorce deal.
Paris and London have come to blows over a number of issues during the Brexit process, including fisheries, financial services and the Northern Ireland protocol.
In 2019, the Guardian spoke to Parisians about how they viewed the Brexit debate.
Express
LORD FROST is set to deliver a solution to business and manufacturer leaders in a move that could set UK industry free from the shackles of the current red tape nightmare.
The UK Brexit minister’s team, aided by other government officials, is due to present a solution to industry in the autumn. During Brexit talks with the European Union, the UK did not secure an agreement with Brussels to recognise one another’s safety standards, known as conformity assessments. But leading figures have warned failure to find a suitable replacement for the EU’s safety standards system could fotrce manufacturers to move trade elsewhere as the components needed for use in the UK will not have a suitable “kitemark”.
There are currently markings on products in locations throughout Britain and European that say “CE”, which means they meet European health, safety and environmental standards.
A Government-approved testing body must manage these kitemarks, but from the start of next year, products must be separately approved for a UK regime.
But industry bodies have warned time is fast running out to find a solution, as there is next to no capacity for testing certain goods ahead of the January 1, 2022 deadline.
Three people familiar with the matter told The Independent these issues had come to a head during a meeting of the Business Brexit Taskforce last months, which includes the B5; the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), Confederation of British Industry (CBI), Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), Institute of Directors (IOD) and Make UK.
The City
Express
BREXIT could provide London and Amsterdam a huge opportunity – as the two capitals may join forces to take on the EU and become one of the great financial centres of the 21st century, it has been claimed.
The Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, has said he does not expect the EU to open the doors to UK financial services exports after Brexit. He told a news conference earlier this month: “On equivalence, I think it’s fair to say that nothing really has moved forwards.” After months of wrangling, new rules for trade were finally agreed on Christmas Eve last year but in a document spanning over 1,200 pages, there was very little mention of financial services: a sector which accounts for seven percent of the UK’s economy and 10 percent of its tax receipts.
Without this recognition, London firms will be blocked from gaining access to the market.
The gloomy remarks echo comments made by Chancellor Rishi Sunak who recently said that a financial services deal between the two blocs “has not happened” – despite the Brexit transition period ending over six months ago.
The UK has recognised equivalence for the EU in several financial service activities, but these have not been reciprocated in Brussels.
The EU’s intransigence is not a major surprise as ever since the UK decided to leave the bloc, major European capitals such as Paris or Frankfurt have tried to take the City’s place as Europe’s financial centre.
Labour Party
Express
NICOLA Sturgeon has been named as a sensational option for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party as the leader of the opposition grapples with a “poison chalice” role that leaves him with next to no
chance of success.
Biographer Nigel Cawthorne suggested Labour‘s position is so bad, leaders might be better off inviting Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to take over. Mr Cawthorne, whose book, Keir Starmer – the Reluctant Politician, was published last month by Gibson Square Books, was speaking at a time when the Tories are maintaining a steady lead of between five and seven percent in recent opinion polls.
The ongoing gap reflects the struggles Sir Keir has faced since he was elected in April of last year, when he beat Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy to the top job.
Last month’s Batley and Spen by-election was portrayed by many as a must-win for the party, and while Kim Leadbeater’s victory secured him some breathing space, Mr Cawthorne said he was nevertheless in a far from comfortable position.
With respect to the role of Labour Party leader, which was previously held by Jeremy Corbyn prior to the disastrous 2019 election, Mr Cawthorne told Express.co.uk: “It’s undoubtedly a poison chalice with the factors facing the Labour Party, the continuing allegations of anti-semitism etc.
“And of course their real problem is that the Labour Party has always been really dependent, when it comes to elections, on people’s contribution from Scotland which it no longer has.
Migrants
Mail
Migrants have boasted of dodging quarantine due to poor security at hotels being paid for by the British taxpayer, reports say.
Some admitted they left their rooms and were allowed to go shopping amid confusion among guards over who was supposed to be self-isolating.
It comes despite Britons returning from trips abroad having to lock themselves away for ten days with police checking up on them and daily phone calls.
The Channel migrant crisis reached new heights yesterday as the number reaching Britain this year topped 10,000.
More than 260 are thought to have arrived aboard a dozen boats yesterday. They were brought to Dover Marina in Kent for processing by immigration officers.
There had been 9,740 confirmed arrivals by the end of Tuesday, plus an estimated 269 yesterday. By comparison, there were 8,500 arrivals across the Channel in the whole of last year and 1,850 in 2019.
The latest staggering milestone was reached while Home Secretary Priti Patel was in Greece during a visit to an asylum reception centre.
Ms Patel sailed on the Aegean with the Hellenic coastguard, who have been accused of deploying hard-line tactics against migrants attempting to reach Europe.Her fact-finding mission to the Greek government’s recently completed processing centre on the island of Samos is expected to feed into Home Office plans to build similar facilities here.
Similar stories can be read in the Telegraph, Times
Covid
Telegraph
Authoritarian governments have “obfuscated” the truth and suppressed their Covid-19 death figures, according to an analysis of excess mortality rates in more than 100 countries worldwide.
The study, published in eLife journal on Tuesday and known as the World Mortality Dataset, found countries including Tajikistan, Nicaragua, Belarus and Russia have been “substantially under reporting their Covid-19 deaths” throughout the pandemic.
The discrepancies are so large, the paper adds, that it “strongly suggests purposeful misdiagnosing or under reporting of Covid-19 deaths”.
For instance, in 2020 Tajikistan recorded just 90 coronavirus fatalities. But excess deaths – a measure of the number of deaths beyond what would have been expected in a ‘normal’ year – suggest that an added 9,000 people died last year.
Meanwhile in Belarus just 390 confirmed Covid-19 fatalities were reported in the first six months of the pandemic, compared to 5,700 excess deaths, while Nicaragua reported 140 coronavirus fatalities – excess deaths for that period stand at 7,000.
Russia, too, had a pronounced discrepancy: up until May 2020, some 110,000 deaths had been confirmed. The latest paper puts excess deaths at 500,000.
Times
More than 90 per cent of adults in England have coronavirus antibodies as rising immunity levels help to drive cases down.
The final phase of vaccination in adults, coupled with a surge of cases in young people, mean that 80 per cent of those aged 16-24 had antibodies in the week of July 12, up from 67 per cent two weeks earlier. Overall, 94 per cent of English adults have antibodies.
More than half of 16- and 17-year-olds have acquired their antibodies through infection, as ministers approve vaccination of all 1.4 million people in this age group yesterday.
Office for National Statistics data shows antibody levels have increased by two percentage points overall since the last figures were released two weeks ago.
NHS
Independent
The NHS has lost its rating as the best healthcare system in the world, an accolade it had held for seven years.
In a survey of healthcare in 11 wealthy countries, the UK has been ranked only in fourth place, dropping down from first in 2017 and 2014.
And it came only ninth in a comparison of healthcare outcomes, which includes early deaths, cancer survival and baby deaths at birth.
The study, by American think tank the Commonwealth Fund, found Norway, the Netherlands and Australia were the top-performing countries overall, ahead of the UK.
Issues such as access to care and the experiences of lower-income groups were blamed for the NHS’s slipping.
Following exceptional demand for care during the pandemic, the number of people in England waiting to start routine hospital treatment rose this summer to a new record high, of 5.1 million people.
Last month the care watchdog warned that “exceptional” pressures on the NHS was affecting the care of patients across England with healthcare workers pushed to the brink.
“The UK’s drop in rank from #1 to #4 is associated with that country’s lower performance on several domains (such as access to care and equity) compared to 2017,” the report says.
Trade
Telegraph
Britain must reach out beyond its old “baseline alliances” in the West, Dominic Raab has declared, as the UK becomes the first new partner of the Southeast Asian bloc in 25 years.
On Thursday morning, the Foreign Secretary will attend a virtual signing ceremony with the 10 nations that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), as Britain joins its “dialogue partner” club.
The move forms the diplomatic pillar of a three-pronged foreign policy strategy in the region, which also involves bolstering security and trade ties. It is part of the UK’s wider tilt towards the Indo-Pacific, as the Government pursues a post-Brexit vision of “Global Britain”.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Raab explained that membership of the club would offer Britain opportunities, as well as mitigate threats as the global “matrix of risk” evolves in the coming decades.
He said it was important to seek ways to “positively influence China” in the region, but added: “It’s not all about China, it’s about positive opportunities. The Indo-Pacific is the growth market of the future, if you take a 10-year period.”
Stronger ties to the Asean nations – which are Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, Brunei, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines and Vietnam – include underscoring new British jobs and providing “scaling-up opportunities for startups”, he said.
The bloc has a combined GDP of $3.2 trillion (£2.3 trillion). By formalising relations, the UK will be invited to attend annual meetings of foreign and economic ministers, cooperating at greater depth on trade, investment, climate change, the environment, science and technology, and education.
Pingdemic
Mail
Britain’s economic recovery began to slow in July as the ‘pingdemic’ kept workers and shoppers stuck indoors.
Activity in the dominant services sector, which includes industries from banking to retail, grew for the fifth month in a row, as Covid restrictions lifted.
But the rate of growth was the weakest since March, at the end of the winter lockdown, as staff shortages squeezed supply.
Close to 700,000 people were pinged by the NHS Covid app in the week to July 21 alone. Many forced to self-isolate have received both their vaccines, or turned out to be healthy, but still have to stay off work for up to ten days.
The app has hurt sectors such as retail and hospitality and many businesses have been forced to close again. In the latest data on shopper numbers from analyst Springboard, visits to UK shops fell 24.2 per cent in July from the same time in 2019.
The services business activity index from IHS Market dipped to a reading of 59.6 in July from 62.4 in June. A score above 50 indicates growth. Businesses’ woes were compounded by costs rising at the fastest level in 25 years.
A similar story can be read in the Independent
Climate change
Independent
Glaciers and ice caps in parts of the Russian Arctic are losing meltwater equivalent to nearly five million Olympic-sized swimming pools every year, research has indicated.
Data collected from satellites suggests that the quantity of ice lost between 2010 and 2018 would submerge an area the same size as the Netherlands under seven feet of water.
Researchers say that rising temperatures in the Arctic Ocean seem to be playing a key role in accelerating ice melt from two large archipelagoes that border the Kara Sea.
Warming of the Arctic Ocean appears to play a key role in accelerating ice loss from two large groups of islands that border the Kara Sea, researchers say.
A team from the University of Edinburgh used data collected by the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 research satellite to map and monitor changes to both the surface height and the mass of ice caps and glaciers.
The team then compared their findings with climate data for the same period of eight years and found what they say is a clear link between rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures and an increase in loss of ice from the two groups of islands.
Analysis indicated that between the years of 2010 and 2018, the Novaya Zemlya and Severnaya Zemlya archipelagos – which make up a combined area of about 50,000 square miles – lost a total of 11.4 billion tonnes of ice annually.
Climate change.
If it is happening , Should we not notice ? Should we not look at a globe not at a schoolchildish computer map. Surprose, Shock, Horror, Amazement. The Shetlands are closer to China than we can believe. We are prfectly placed to be the distribution hub for West Africa East atlanticseaboard and countless growing markets.Suddenly., we’re quite close to China and don’t have to cross deserts mountains and seas.
Tell someone. We could be the world sorting office.
Of course there are hundreds of insurmountable dofficulties HS2 to be freight as well. Cross Britain becomes far more important than London. Blow up a few Windmills
Look at a globe not the back of your own head.
They won’t get stuck in Suez.
There is no quarrel between the Brit and French or indeed other channel country. The Battle is between companies battling for Markets , Market shares, and willing to destroy the world to do it.
I think it high time we invented a new kind of Ltd.with incorruptible Articles and Memoranda. with some me huge incentive ( Guernsey tax levels, laws etc. ), able to fight the Vast sums of Corrupt money and corruptgovernments available to large companies with their processing plants and factory fleets.able to make laws to suit themselves and governments to grovel for silver..( What is the word for a dog that squirms and twists in ecstasy and voids its bladder for its masters approval ).
Our political Masters and their Civil service henchmen Will attempt to get our applause. … Refuse ( ? )
It’s not Debbies fault of course but I’ve got to the point where I don’t believe a word of any of it.
In particular the ‘ice melting’ ‘news’. We’ve heard it all before. To put it politely the ‘data’ is selective.
When I started reviewing the papers for Independence Daily several years ago, I included reports on the same subject by different media, so that readers could see how each news outlet skewed the facts to meet its own political stance. This made each report very selective.
Many of the media don’t do any proper journalism any more; they simply report on reports of other media. It’s a very lazy way of reporting and if the original story isn’t accurate, the inaccuracy spreads until it starts to be believed.
Climate change/global warming is controversial but I look at the record-breaking rainfall and temperatures, floods, wildfires and other weather phenomena and I wonder. Still, I see very little serious attempt to do anything about the problem so while I try and do my bit where I can, I feel I’m barely scratching the surface.
Debbie, as TGS says above : “Climate change. If it is happening , Should we not notice?”…. A very good point, we ought to be able to notice rapidly rising sea levels from (supposedly) unprecedented global warming causing ice at the north & south poles to melt. But do we? Are our beaches underwater at low tide now? Are Venice or the Seychelles under the waves now? No, strangely enough they’re not.
Whoops!! I meant the Maldives not the Seychelles.
Debbie I don’t think there are record breaking rainfall, temperatures, floods and wildfires. Looking back I can remember all these things happening before, during my lifetime. Remember data and statistics can be selected to ‘prove’ anything.
The ‘journalism’ is as you have described.
The problem is that there is, or at least is looks as though there is, a very nasty agenda behind these ‘scare’ stories.
When we joined Europe,The BS ( British Standard ) were the gold standard. . Our own civil service forced us to provide them for any rag tag and bobtail of a EU manufacturer to work to. This Including a Directive from fat Heath to provide manufacturing processes secret or not, in BS format and available for inspection photography etc.
For our government to copy them, is just strange, and probably purely a gambit.I did in fact once produce a BS which was impossible to attain. Nevertheless the French and Germans both claimed to comply.
Time to cancel all French fishing permits me thinks, they are as they always were – our enemies
Make all fishing illegal With democratically elected Dolphins and Whales democratically chosen.. Empowered to return waste and other human filth.To Westminster, London, Noo Yoik, Beijing etc.
Similarly Elephants, Mice and Eagles.
TG Spokes, would those eligible Whales, Dolphins, Elephants, Mice and Eagles needed to have been a UKIP member and ran, flown or swam on a committee first???