Tag: Northern Ireland

Why Joe Biden’s whirlwind trip to Belfast went better than it looked

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BELFAST — He came, he saw … and he got the hell out as fast as he could.
But Joe Biden’s brief visit to Northern Ireland across Tuesday night and Wednesday — 18 hours total, about half of them in bed — featured none of the gaffes that have previously blotted his diplomatic copybook. (That would change, however, after he headed south to the Republic of Ireland a few hours later.)
Indeed, the U.S. president successfully navigated Northern Ireland’s famously choppy political waters, avoided throwing a spotlight on the failure of its unity government — and even revealed an often-hidden and more hopeful reality: Off-camera, these supposedly warring politicians actually get on well.

Wednesday’s gathering at Ulster University in Belfast brought Northern Ireland’s opposing political leaders — including the key figure blocking the revival of power-sharing, Democratic Unionist chief Jeffrey Donaldson — side by side at last, along with a selfie-shooting Biden.
The president carefully avoided confronting Donaldson directly about his party’s yearlong blockade of the Northern Ireland Assembly, while dangling the prospect of billions of dollars of U.S. business investment if powersharing is restored.
And instead of extolling his famous Irish Catholic roots, Biden’s speech noted the English and Protestant elements of his family tree, and the disproportionate contribution of Ulster Scots immigrants to the foundation of the United States.
“The family ties, the pride, those Ulster Scots immigrants who helped found and build my country, they run very deep,” Biden told the audience.
“Men born in Ulster were among those who signed the Declaration of Independence in the United States, pledging their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for freedom’s cause … Your history is our history.”
If Biden had punches to throw in the Democratic Unionists’ direction, he pulled them.
Speaking to POLITICO, a visibly relieved Donaldson said afterward that he’d appreciated the president’s “measured and balanced remarks” — and distanced himself from his unionist colleagues’ pointed criticisms of Biden as a poodle to Irish nationalism and even the outlawed IRA.
He also rebuffed a claim by his predecessor as DUP leader, Arlene Foster, that Biden “hates the United Kingdom,” stating: “The United Kingdom and the United States have a strong alliance and we want to build on that.”
Donaldson added that he had been reassured by the president during a brief backstage conversation “that he respects the integrity of Northern Ireland, that he respects our ability to restore the [power-sharing] institutions on the basis that we respect what the Belfast Agreement said — that Northern Ireland remains an integral part of the United Kingdom, and there should be no barrier to trade within the United Kingdom.”
The backdrop to the speech had been one of surprising unity, with unionists and Irish nationalists chatting amicably in the audience against background music of soft jazz.
Sinn Féin’s Conor Murphy — the Irish republican party’s finance minister in the five-party government that collapsed in October because of DUP obstruction — laughed heartily alongside former Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt as the two discussed the ins and outs of power-sharing.
“The parties do work well together when they get the opportunity,” Murphy told POLITICO afterward.
He noted that Biden’s speech diplomatically avoided assigning blame for the Stormont impasse and focused on making a better Northern Ireland for today’s Ulster University students, who are too young to remember the three decades of bloodshed that ended following paramilitary cease-fires in the mid-1990s.
But Murphy added: “Biden’s pitch is about the future. The DUP don’t get that. If they think they somehow got off the hook here because they didn’t get a slap from an American president. Well, the rest of this society’s moving on with or without them.”
US President Joe Biden delivers a speech at the Windsor Bar in Dundalk, Ireland | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Most of those present agreed that, even though some leaders had wanted Biden to visit the Stormont parliament building overlooking Belfast, the president’s decision not to do so meant their failure to form a new government hadn’t become the central image of the visit.
“Of course it’s a missed opportunity. We don’t have an assembly and an executive,” said Naomi Long, leader of the center-ground Alliance Party and justice minister in the failed government.
“But to have gone to Stormont today when it isn’t operating would have been farcical,” she said.
The assembly’s caretaker speaker, Alex Maskey, also from Sinn Féin, agreed that in hindsight, Biden was probably right to have declined his own invitation to visit what is essentially Ground Zero of Northern Ireland’s political dysfunction.
“It ran the risk of underlining the problem,” Maskey said. “It’s just as well he didn’t go there because you’d be spending the next two or three days trying to repair negative media.”
While Biden strikingly spent less than a day in Belfast before crossing the border to spend the rest of the week touring the Republic of Ireland, he left behind his new envoy to Northern Ireland, Joe Kennedy III, who will spend the next 10 days building business and political contacts across the U.K. region.
Kennedy, making his first trip here, chatted and joked with DUP politicians, particularly Emma Little-Pengelly, a close Donaldson ally and former special adviser to previous party leaders Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson.
They discussed tourist highlights of Northern Ireland’s glorious Giant’s Causeway coast and the best ice cream parlors in its resort towns. (Kennedy made a note of Little-Pengelly’s favorite: Morelli’s of Portstewart.)
Kennedy insisted Biden hadn’t needed to spend too much time in Belfast talking to local leaders this week — because he’d just had all of them, including Donaldson, as guests to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day.
His own mission, Kennedy added, “is not about the United States government coming in to tell the people of Northern Ireland what they need to do.”
“They’ve got a vision of what that future can be,” he said. “We can support them.”

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

April 11, 2023
Oh no, Joe: Biden confuses ‘All Blacks’ rugby team with ‘Black and Tan’ military force

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DUBLIN — That didn’t last long.
Joe Biden managed to tread carefully around historic and current political sensitivities during the first part of his trip to the island of Ireland this week, marking 25 years since the U.S.-brokered Good Friday Agreement sought to secure lasting peace for Northern Ireland.
But not long after crossing from that U.K. region into the Republic of Ireland on Wednesday, the U.S. president made a major gaffe: He confused New Zealand’s “All Blacks” rugby team with the notorious “Black and Tans” British military unit that fought the Irish Republican Army a century ago.
At the end of a rambling speech in a pub Wednesday night, Biden — flanked by Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin and star rugby player Rob Kearney, a distant cousin — tried to pay a compliment to one of Kearney’s greatest sporting accomplishments. That would be when Ireland’s rugby team defeated New Zealand for the first time in 111 years, in November 2016 in Chicago. New Zealand’s squad is famously called the All Blacks, in reference to their uniforms.
Trouble is, Biden let slip a reference that could well reflect his affinity with Irish rebel history and its folk songs.
“He’s a hell of a rugby player, and he beat the hell out of the Black and Tans,” Biden said to audience laughter.
The Black and Tans were an auxiliary unit of Britain’s security forces that fought IRA rebels in their 1919-21 war of independence from Britain. Their name reflected the improvised and inconsistent colors of their uniforms.
The unrelentingly pro-Biden coverage on state broadcaster RTÉ, which televised his speech live, didn’t acknowledge the mistake. The commentator’s sign-off? “Well, that’s Joe Biden: a little bit sentimental, a little bit schmaltzy, but a thoroughly decent guy and a great friend to Ireland. The trip is off to a great start.”

But the gaffe and “Rob Kearney” blew up on social media in Ireland. Some listed the retired rugby fullback’s career accomplishments including, most famously, his single-handed defeat of the British forces a century ago.
“The greatest gift Ireland wanted from Joe Biden was a signature gaffe. And … didn’t he just go and give us one for the century,” tweeted comedian Oliver Callan.
Attempting to hose down the row on Thursday, Biden aide Amanda Sloat, the National Security Council senior director for Europe, said: “I think for everyone in Ireland who was a rugby fan it was incredibly clear that the president was talking about the All Blacks and Ireland’s defeat of the New Zealand team in 2016.”
She added: “It was clear what the president was referring to. It was certainly clear to his cousin sitting next to him who had played in that match.”
Lost in the shuffle was Biden’s other Kearney gaffe: He still hasn’t figured out how to say his name.
When introducing Kearney at the White House on St. Patrick’s Day, Biden called him Keer-ney. The Irish pronounce the name Kar-ney. Biden stuck with Keer-ney on Wednesday.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

April 11, 2023
Biden’s Northern Ireland ultimatum looks doomed to fail

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LONDON — Joe Biden is not someone known for his subtlety.
His gaffe-prone nature — which saw him last week confuse the New Zealand rugby team with British forces from the Irish War of Independence — leaves little in the way of nuance.
But he is also a sentimental man from a long gone era of Washington, who specializes in a type of homespun, aw-shucks affability that would be seen as naff in a younger president.

His lack of subtlety was on show in Belfast last week as he issued a thinly veiled ultimatum to the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) — return to Northern Ireland’s power sharing arrangements or risk losing billions of dollars in U.S. business investment.
The DUP — a unionist party that does not take kindly to lectures from American presidents — is refusing to sit in Stormont, the Northern Ireland Assembly, due to its anger with the post-Brexit Northern Ireland protocol, which has created trade friction between the region and the rest of the U.K.
The DUP is also refusing to support the U.K.-EU Windsor Framework, which aims to fix the economic problems created by the protocol, despite hopes it would see the party reconvene the Northern Irish Assembly.
The president on Wednesday urged Northern Irish leaders to “unleash this incredible economic opportunity, which is just beginning.”
However, American business groups paint a far more complex and nuanced view of future foreign investment into Northern Ireland than offered up by Biden.
Biden told a Belfast crowd on Wednesday there were “scores of major American corporations wanting to come here” to invest, but that a suspended Stormont was acting as a block on that activity.
One U.S. business figure, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Biden’s flighty rhetoric was “exaggerated” and that many businesses would be looking beyond the state of the regional assembly to make their investment decisions.
The president spoke as if Ulster would be rewarded with floods of American greenbacks if the DUP reverses its intransigence, predicting that Northern Ireland’s gross domestic product (GDP) would soon be triple its 1998 level. Its GDP is currently around double the size of when the Good Friday Agreement was struck in 1998.
Emanuel Adam, executive director of BritishAmerican Business, said this sounded like a “magic figure” unless Biden “knows something we don’t know about.”
DUP MP Ian Paisley Jr. told POLITICO that U.S. politicians for “too long” have “promised some economic El Dorado or bonanza if you only do what we say politically … but that bonanza has never arrived and people are not naive enough here to believe it ever will.”
“A presidential visit is always welcome, but the glitter on top is not an economic driver,” he said.
Joe Biden addresses a crowd of thousands on April 14, 2023 in Ballina, Ireland | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
Facing both ways
The British government is hoping the Windsor Framework will ease economic tensions in Northern Ireland and create politically stable conditions for inward foreign direct investment.
The framework removes many checks on goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland and has begun to slowly create a more collaborative relationship between London and Brussels on a number of fronts — two elements which have been warmly welcomed across the Atlantic.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said Northern Ireland is in a “special” position of having access to the EU’s single market, to avoid a hard border with the Republic of Ireland, and the U.K.’s internal market.
“That’s like the world’s most exciting economic zone,” Sunak said in February.
Jake Colvin, head of Washington’s National Foreign Trade Council business group, said U.S. firms wanted to see “confidence that the frictions over the protocol have indeed been resolved.”
“Businesses will look to mechanisms like the Windsor Framework to provide stability,” he said.
Marjorie Chorlins, senior vice president for Europe at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the Windsor Framework was “very important” for U.S. businesses and that “certainty about the relationship between the U.K. and the EU is critical.”
She said a reconvened Stormont would mean more legislative stability on issues like skills and healthcare, but added that there were a whole range of other broader U.K. wide economic factors that will play a major part in investment decisions.
This is particularly salient in a week where official figures showed the U.K.’s GDP flatlining and predictions that Britain will be the worst economic performer in the G20 this year.
“We want to see a return to robust growth and prosperity for the U.K. broadly and are eager to work with government at all levels,” Chorlins said.
“Political and economic instability in the U.K. has been a challenge for businesses of all sizes.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said Northern Ireland is in a “special” position of having access to the EU’s single market | Pool photo by Paul Faith/Getty Images
Her words underline just how much global reputational damage last year’s carousel of prime ministers caused for the U.K., with Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey recently warning of a “hangover effect” from Liz Truss’ premiership and the broader Westminster psychodrama of 2022.
America’s Northern Ireland envoy Joe Kennedy, grandson of Robert Kennedy, accompanied the president last week and has been charged with drumming up U.S. corporate interest in Northern Ireland.
Kennedy said Northern Ireland is already “the number-one foreign investment location for proximity and market access.”
Northern Ireland has been home to £1.5 billion of American investment in the past decade and had the second-most FDI projects per capita out of all U.K. regions in 2021.
Claire Hanna, Westminster MP for the nationalist SDLP, believes reconvening Stormont would “signal a seriousness that there isn’t going to be anymore mucking around.”
“It’s also about the signal that the restoration of Stormont sends — that these are the accepted trading arrangements,” she said.
Hanna says the DUP’s willingness to “demonize the two biggest trading blocs in the world — the U.S. and EU” — was damaging to the country’s future economic prospects.
‘The money goes south’
At a more practical level, Biden’s ultimatum appears to carry zero weight with DUP representatives.
DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson made it clear last week that he was unmoved by Biden’s economic proclamations and gave no guarantee his party would sit in the regional assembly in the foreseeable future.
“President Biden is offering the hope of further American investment, which we always welcome,” Donaldson told POLITICO.
“But fundamental to the success of our economy is our ability to trade within our biggest market, which is of course the United Kingdom.”
A DUP official said U.S. governments had been promising extra American billions in exchange “for selling out to Sinn Féin and Dublin” since the 1990s and “when America talks about corporate investment, we get the crumbs and that investment really all ends up in the Republic [of Ireland].”
“President Biden is offering the hope of further American investment, which we always welcome,” Donaldson said | Behal/Irish Government via Getty Images
“The Americans talk big, but the money goes south,” the DUP official said.
This underscores the stark reality that challenges Northern Ireland any time it pitches for U.S. investment — the competing proposition offered by its southern neighbor with its internationally low 12.5 percent rate on corporate profits.
Emanuel Adam with BritishAmerican Business said there was a noticeable feeling in Washington that firms want to do business in Dublin.
“When [Irish Prime Minister] Leo Varadkar and his team were here recently, I could tell how confident the Irish are these days,” he said. “There are not as many questions for them as there are around the U.K.”
Biden’s economic ultimatum looks toothless from the DUP’s perspective and its resonance may be as short-lived as his trip to Belfast itself.
This story has been updated to correct an historical reference.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

April 11, 2023
Biden to mark Good Friday peace deal in 5-day Irish trip

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DUBLIN — U.S. President Joe Biden will pay a five-day visit to both parts of Ireland next month to mark the 25^th anniversary of the U.S.-brokered Good Friday peace accord, according to a provisional Irish government itinerary seen by POLITICO.
The plans, still being finalized with the White House, have the president arriving in Northern Ireland on April 11. That’s one day after the official quarter-century mark for the Good Friday Agreement, the peace deal designed to end decades of conflict that claimed more than 3,600 lives.
With Irish roots on both sides of his family tree, Biden has long taken an interest in brokering and maintaining peace in Northern Ireland. He has welcomed the recent U.K.-EU agreement on making post-Brexit trade rules work in the region — a breakthrough that has yet to revive local power-sharing at the heart of the 1998 accord.

According to two Irish government officials involved in planning the Biden visit itinerary, the president will start his stay overnight at Hillsborough Castle, southwest of Belfast, the official residence for visiting British royalty, as a guest of the U.K.’s Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris.
Then he’s scheduled to visit Stormont, the parliamentary complex overlooking Belfast, at the invitation of its caretaker speaker, Alex Maskey of the Irish republican Sinn Féin party.
That could prove controversial given that, barring a diplomatic miracle, the Northern Ireland Assembly and its cross-community government — a core achievement of the 1998 agreement — won’t be functioning due to a long-running boycott by the Democratic Unionists. That party has not yet accepted the U.K.-EU compromise deal on offer because it keeps Northern Ireland, unlike the rest of the U.K., subject to EU goods rules and able to trade more easily with the rest of Ireland than with Britain. Nonetheless, assembly members from all parties including the DUP will be invited to meet Biden there.
The president is booked to officiate the official ribbon-cutting of the new downtown Belfast campus of Ulster University. During his stay in Northern Ireland he also is expected to pay a visit to Queen’s University Belfast, where former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton serves as chancellor.
Next, the Irish government expects the presidential entourage to cross the border into the Republic of Ireland, potentially by motorcade, the approach last adopted by Bill Clinton during his third and final visit to Ireland as president in 2000.
This would allow Biden to pay a visit to one side of his Irish family tree, the Finnegans, in County Louth. Louth is midway between Belfast and Dublin. Biden previously toured the area in 2016 as vice president, when he met distant relatives for the first time and visited the local graveyard.
In Dublin, it is not yet confirmed whether Biden will deliver a speech at College Green outside the entrance of Trinity College. That’s the spot where Barack Obama delivered his own main speech during a one-day visit as president in 2011.
A White House advance team is expected in Dublin this weekend to scout that and other potential locations for a speech and walkabout. He isn’t expected to hold any functions at the Irish parliament, which begins a two-week Easter recess Friday.
Members of Ireland’s national police force, An Garda Síochána, have been told by commanders they cannot go on leave during the week of April 10-16 in anticipation of Biden’s arrival. The Irish expect U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to accompany the president and take part in more detailed talks with Northern Ireland’s leaders.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar plans to host the president and Blinken at Farmleigh House, a state-owned mansion previously owned by the Guinness brewing dynasty, inside Dublin’s vast Phoenix Park.
The final two days of Biden’s visit will focus on the other side of his Irish roots, the Blewitts of County Mayo, on Ireland’s west coast, which he also visited in 2016. Distant cousins he first met on that trip have since been repeated guests of the White House, most recently on St. Patrick’s Day.
White House officials declined to discuss specific dates or any events planned, but did confirm that Biden would travel to Ireland “right after Easter.” This suggests an April 11 arrival in line with the Irish itinerary. Easter Sunday falls this year on April 9 and, in both parts of Ireland, the Christian holiday is a two-day affair ending in Easter Monday.
Jonathan Lemire contributed reporting.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

March 30, 2023
Rishi Sunak picks his way through budget minefield

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LONDON — “Better than the last guy” might not be quite the tagline every world leader hopes for. It could yet be Rishi Sunak’s winning formula.
The British prime minister, swept into office late last year by wave after wave of Tory psychodrama, has cleared several major hurdles in the space of the past month. His success has even sparked a shocking rumor in Westminster that — whisper it — he might actually be quite good at his job.
That was the murmur among hopeful Conservative MPs ahead of this week’s U.K. budget, anyway — many of them buoyed by the PM’s recent moves on two long-running sources of angst in Westminster.
First came an apparent resolution to the intractable problem of post-Brexit trade arrangements in Northern Ireland. Sunak’s so-called Windsor Framework deal with Brussels landed to near-universal acclaim.
A week later, Sunak unveiled hard-hitting legislation to clamp down on illegal migration to the U.K., coupled with an expensive deal with France to increase patrols across the English Channel. Tory MPs were delighted. The Illegal Migration Bill sailed through parliament Monday night without a single vote of rebellion.
Then came Wednesday’s annual budget announcement, with Sunak hoping to complete an improbable hat trick.
It started well, with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt making the big reveal that the U.K. is no longer expected to enter recession this year, as had been widely predicted.
But a series of jaw-droppers in the budget small print show the scale of the challenge ahead.

The U.K.’s overall tax take remains sky-high by historic standards — an ominous bone of contention for skeptical Tory MPs and right-wing newspapers alike. Meanwhile, millions of Britons’ living standards continue to fall, thanks to high fuel bills and raging inflation. U.K. growth forecasts remain sluggish for years to come.
“He’s chalking up some wins,” observed one former party adviser grimly, “because he’s going to need them.”
‘Workmanlike’
Among all but the bitterest of Sunak’s Tory opponents, there is a palpable sense of relief about the way he has approached his premiership so far.
“It doesn’t mean everything will suddenly turn to gold,” said Conservative MP Richard Graham, a longtime Sunak-backer. “But like Ben Stokes and England’s cricket team, his quiet self-confidence may change what the same team believes is possible.”
Nicky Morgan, a Conservative peer and former Treasury minister, praised a “workmanlike” budget that would reassure voters and the party there was a “firm hand on the tiller” after the “turmoil” of the preceding year with two prime ministers stepping down, Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss.
UK Chancellor Jeremy Hunt meets children during a visit to Busy Bees Battersea Nursery in south London after delivering his Budget earlier in the day | Stefan Rousseau/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Most of Wednesday’s biggest announcements, including an extra £4 billion for childcare and a decision to lift the cap on pensions allowances, were either trailed or leaked in advance. This may have made for a predictable budget speech, but as Morgan put it: “I think that’s probably what businesses and the public need at the moment.”
An ex-minister who did not originally support Sunak for leader said that the general tone of the budget, together with the Northern Ireland deal and small boats legislation, meant that “increasingly it’s hard for hostile voices to pin real failure on Rishi.”
Others, however, fear key announcements could yet unravel. An expensive change to pension taxes was instantly savaged by critics as a “giveaway for the 1 percent.” Headline-grabbing back-to-work programs and an expansion of free childcare will take years to kick in.
Hiking corporation tax was the “biggest mistake of the budget,” Truss ally and former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg complained.
Doing the hard yards
Observers note that in the wake of the rolling chaos under Truss and Johnson, the bar for a successful government has been lowered.
“[Sunak] could stand at the podium and soil himself, and he’d be doing a better job than his predecessors,” noted one business group lobbyist on Wednesday evening, having watched budget day unfold.
But even Sunak’s fiercest critics praise his work rate and attention to detail, in sharp contrast to Johnson. Most accept — grudgingly — he has set up an effective Downing Street operation.
Having returned from his Paris summit last Friday evening, the PM kicked off budget week with a whirlwind trip to the west coast of California to launch a defense pact with the U.S. and Australia, arranging a bank bailout along the way. He landed back in the U.K. less than 24 hours before Hunt unveiled the annual spending plan.
“It turns out working like an absolute maniac and being forensic is quite useful,” one of his ministers said.
Another Tory MP added: “He’s got the brainpower and will do the hours. He’s not good at barnstorming politics or old school dividing lines — but he is good for the politics we have right now.”
There has also been a clear effort to run a tighter ship behind the scenes at No. 10. One veteran of Johnson’s Downing Street said the atmosphere seemed “calm” in comparison.
There are tentative signs that voters are starting to notice.
James Johnson, who ran a recent poll by JL Partners which showed Sunak’s personal ratings are on the up, said the PM’s growing reputation as a “fixer” seems to be behind his recent rally, and that the biggest increase on his polling scorecard was on his ability to “get things done.”
It remains to be seen if this will shift the dial on the Tory Party’s own disastrous ratings, however, which languish some 25 points behind the opposition Labour Party. “Voters have clearly lost trust in the Tories,” Johnson said. “But if government can deliver … I would expect it to feed through.”
Anthony Browne, a Tory MP elected in 2019, expressed hope that Sunak had begun “changing the narrative” which in turn “could restore our right to be heard.”
Trouble ahead?
Sunak will be well aware that plenty of recent budgets — not least Truss’ spectacular failure last September — have unraveled in the 72 hours after being announced.
And while expanding free childcare, incentivizing business investment and ending the lifetime pensions allowance were all crowd-pleasers for his own MPs, they were not enough to conceal worrying subheadings.
The tax take is predicted to reach a post-war high of 37.7 percent in the next five years, while disposable incomes are hit by fiscal drag pulling 3.2 million people into higher tax bands. Right-wing Tories are not impressed.
Ranil Jayawardena, founder of the Conservative Growth Group of backbench MPs, described it in a statement as “an effective income tax rise,” which will be “a concern to many.”
Net migration is set to rise to 245,000 a year by 2026-27, and will add more people to the labor force than all the measures intended to make it a “back to work” budget, according to the Whitehall’s fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The message is not one Conservative MPs want to hear.
Already singled out by Labour’s Keir Starmer as a “huge giveaway to the wealthiest,” scrapping the lifetime allowance on pensions will cost £835 million a year by 2027-28 while benefiting less than 4 percent of workers. Conservative MPs reply that NHS doctors are one of the main groups to benefit.
Perhaps most worrying of all, the government’s own budget expects living standards to fall by 6 percent this year and next — less than the 7 percent fall predicted in November but still the largest two-year fall since records began in the 1950s.
There are some problems that can’t be solved by pulling an all-nighter. Ironically for Sunak, whose career was made in the Treasury, his may prove to be the state of the U.K. economy.
Rosa Prince, Stefan Boscia and Dan Bloom contributed reporting.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

March 15, 2023
Biden rebuffs UK bid for closer cooperation on tech

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LONDON — Britain was rebuffed by the Biden administration after multiple requests to develop an advanced trade and technology dialogue similar to structures the U.S. set up with the European Union.
On visits to Washington as a Cabinet minister over the past two years, Liz Truss urged U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and senior Biden administration officials to intensify talks with the U.K. to build clean technology supply chains and boost collaboration on artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductors.
After Truss became prime minister in fall 2022, the idea was floated again when Raimondo visited London last October, people familiar with the conversations told POLITICO. But fear of angering the U.S.’s European partners and the U.K.’s diminished status outside the EU post-Brexit have posed barriers to influencing Washington.

Businesses, lawmakers and experts worry the U.K. is being left on the sidelines.
“We tried many times,” said a former senior Downing Street official, of the British government’s efforts to set up a U.K. equivalent to the U.S.-E.U. Trade and Technology Council (TTC), noting Truss’ overtures began as trade chief in July 2021. They requested anonymity to speak on sensitive issues.
“We did speak to Gina Raimondo about that, saying ‘we think it would be a good opportunity,’” said the former official — not necessarily to join the EU-U.S. talks directly, “but to increase trilateral cooperation.”
Set up in June 2021, the TTC forum co-chaired by Raimondo, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. trade chief Katherine Tai gives their EU counterparts, Margrethe Vestager and Valdis Dombrovskis, a direct line to shape tech and trade policy.
The U.S. is pushing forward with export controls on advanced semiconductors to China; forging new secure tech supply chains away from Beijing; and spurring innovation through subsidies for cutting-edge green technology and microprocessors.
The TTC’s 10 working groups with the EU, Raimondo said in an interview late last year, “set the standards,” though Brussels has rebuffed Washington’s efforts to use the transatlantic body to go directly after Beijing.
But the U.K. “is missing the boat on not being completely engaged in that dialogue,” said a U.S.-based representative of a major business group. “There has been some discussion about the U.K. perhaps joining the TTC,” they confirmed, and “it was kind of mooted, at least in private” with Raimondo by the Truss administration on her visit to London last October.
The response from the U.S. had been ‘’let’s work with what we’ve got at the moment,’” said the former Downing Street official.
Even if the U.S. does want to talk, “they don’t want to irritate the Europeans,” the same former official added. Right now the U.K.’s conversations with the U.S. on these issues are “ad hoc” under the new Atlantic Charter Boris Johnson and Joe Biden signed around the G7 summit in 2021, they said, and “nothing institutional.”
Last October, Washington and London held the first meeting of the data and tech forum Johnson and Biden set up | Pool photo by Olivier Matthys/AFP via Getty Images
Securing British access to the U.S.-EU tech forum or an equivalent was also discussed when CBI chief Tony Danker was in Washington last July, said people familiar with conversations during his visit.
The U.K.’s science and tech secretary, Michelle Donelan, confirmed the British government had discussed establishing a more regular channel for tech and trade discussions with the U.S., both last October and more recently. “My officials have just been out [to the U.S.],” she told POLITICO. “They’ve had very productive conversations.”
A U.K. government spokesperson said: “The U.K. remains committed to working closely with the U.S. and EU to further our shared trade and technology objectives, through the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, the U.S.-U.K. Future of Atlantic Trade dialogues, and the U.K.-U.S. technology partnership.
“We will continue to advance U.K. interests in trade and technology and explore further areas of cooperation with partners where it is mutually beneficial.”
Britain the rule-taker?
Last October, Washington and London held the first meeting of the data and tech forum Johnson and Biden set up. Senior officials hoped to get a deal securing the free flow of data between the U.S. and U.K. across the line and addressed similar issues as the TTC.
They couldn’t secure the data deal. The U.K. is expected to join a U.S.-led effort to expand data transfer rules baked into the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation trading agreement as soon as this year, according to a former and a current British official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The next formal meeting between the U.K. and U.S. is penciled in for January 2024.
Ongoing dialogue “is vital to secure an overarching agreement on U.K.-U.S. data flows, without which modern day business cannot function,” said William Bain, head of trade policy at the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC). “It would also provide an opportunity to set the ground rules around a host of other technological developments.”
In contrast, the U.S. and EU are always at work, with TTC officials in constant contact with the operation — though questions have been raised about how long-term the transatlantic cooperation is likely to prove, ahead of next year’s U.S. presidential election.
“Unless you have a structured system or setup, often overseen by ministers, you don’t really get the drive to actually get things done,” said the former Downing Street official.
Right now cooperation with the U.S. on tech issues is not as intense or structured as desired, the same former official said, and is “not really brought together” in one central forum.
Britain has yet to publish a formal semiconductor strategy | Thomas Coex/AFP via Getty Images
“This initiative [the TTC] between the world’s two regulatory powerhouses risks sidelining the U.K.,” warned lawmakers on the UK parliament’s foreign affairs committee in a report last October. Britain may become “a rule-taker rather than a rule-maker,” MPs noted, citing the government’s “ambiguous” position on technology standards. Britain has yet to publish a formal semiconductor strategy, and others on critical minerals — like those used in EV batteries — or AI are also missing.
Over the last two years, U.S. trade chief Tai has “spoken regularly to her three successive U.K. counterparts to identify and tackle shared economic and trade priorities,” said a spokesperson for the U.S. Trade Representative, adding “we intend to continue strengthening this partnership in the years to come.”
All eyes on Europe
For its part, the EU has to date shown little interest in closer cooperation with the U.K.
Three European Commission officials disregarded the likelihood of Britain joining the club, though one of those officials said that London may be asked to join — alongside other like-minded countries — for specific discussions related to ongoing export bans against Russia.
Even with last week’s breakthrough over the Northern Ireland protocol calming friction between London and Brussels, the U.K. was not a priority country for involvement in the TTC, added another of the EU officials.
“The U.K. was extremely keen to be part of a dialogue of some sort of equivalent of TTC,” said a senior business representative in London, who requested anonymity to speak about sensitive issues.
U.K. firms see “the Holy Grail” as Britain, the U.S. and EU working together on this, they said. “We’re very keen to see a triangular dialogue at some point.”
The U.K.’s haggling with the EU over the details of the Northern Ireland protocol governing trade in the region has posed “a political obstacle” to realizing that vision, they suggested.
Yet with a solution to the dispute announced in late February, the same business figure said, “there will be a more prominent push to work together with the U.K.”
TTC+
Some trade experts think the U.K. would increase its chances of accession to the TTC if it submitted a joint request with other nations.
But prior to that happening, “I think the EU-U.S. TTC will need to first deliver bilaterally,” said Sabina Ciofu, an international tech policy expert at the trade body techUK.
Representatives speak to the media following the Trade and Technology Council Meeting in Maryland | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
When there is momentum, Ciofu said, the U.K. should join forces with Japan, South Korea and other advanced economies to ask for a TTC+ that could include the G7 or other partners. At the last TTC meeting in December, U.S. and EU officials said they were open to such an expansion around specific topics that had global significance.
But not all trade experts think this is essential. Andy Burwell, director of international trade at the CBI, said he doesn’t “think it necessarily matters” whether the U.K. has a structured conversation with the U.S. like the TTC forum.
Off the back of a soon-to-be-published refresh of the Integrated Review — the U.K.’s national security and foreign policy strategy — Prime Minister Rishi Sunak should instead seize the opportunity, Burwell said, to pinpoint where Britain is “going to own, collaborate and have access to various aspects of the supply chains.”
The G7, Burwell said, “could be the right platform for having some of those conversations.”
Yet the “danger with the ad hoc approach with lots of different people is incoherence,” said the former Downing Street official quoted above.
Too many countries involved in setting the standards can, the former official said, “create difficulty in leveraging what you want — which is all of the countries agreeing together on a certain way forward … especially when you’re dealing with issues that relate to, for example, China.”
Mark Scott, Annabelle Dickson and Tom Bristow contributed reporting.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

March 2, 2023
Gun attack on policeman deepens political tensions in Northern Ireland

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DUBLIN — As if political tensions in Northern Ireland weren’t bad enough, Irish Republican Army die-hards unwilling to accept their side’s cease-fire appear determined to make matters worse.
An off-duty police officer is in hospital in a critical condition after being shot several times at close range Wednesday night as he coached a youth football practice on the outskirts of the Northern Irish town of Omagh. No group claimed responsibility, but politicians from all sides agreed that one of the small IRA splinter groups still active in the U.K. region must be to blame.
“The people behind this attack think they’re at war. Well they’re not,” said Colum Eastwood, the moderate Irish nationalist leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. “Their fight isn’t with any government, any police service or anyone else. It’s with the people of Ireland who have chosen peace. And it’s a fight they will never, never win.”
The last time any of the IRA factions killed a Northern Ireland police officer was in 2011, again in Omagh — also the scene of the deadliest attack of them all, when a Real IRA car bomb killed 29 people in 1998 in hopes of wrecking that year’s Good Friday peace accord.
The largest Irish republican paramilitary group, the Provisional IRA, killed nearly 300 officers as part of its own 27-year campaign of shootings and bombings, but laid down its arms in 1997 and surrendered them to foreign disarmament officials in 2005.
That key peacemaking step, required as part of the Good Friday deal, ultimately helped persuade the Democratic Unionist Party to end its opposition to power-sharing and finally form a unity government in 2007 with their Irish republican enemies in Sinn Féin, longtime partners of the Provisional IRA. However, last year the DUP collapsed their coalition as part of its campaign against post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland, a dispute that U.K. and EU negotiators have spent months trying to resolve.
Wednesday night’s shooting brought back grim memories from a generation ago when such violence was a nightly occurrence, an era when militants effectively filled Northern Ireland’s prevailing political vacuum with bloodshed. The Good Friday pact and the cross-community government it spawned were supposed to keep such violence at bay.
With the Stormont parliamentary building shuttered amid Brexit fallout, politicians from all sides briefly spoke with one voice on social media to condemn the officer’s attackers.

“Those responsible for such horror must be brought to justice,” said Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Chris Heaton-Harris, who has been in the post only since September.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 21, 2023
Rishi Sunak: ‘We’re giving it everything we’ve got’ on Brexit deal

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LONDON — Rishi Sunak insisted Saturday he wants to “get the job done” on Brexit, promising he was “giving it everything we’ve got” to secure a deal with Brussels.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, the British prime minister said he was hopeful of a “positive outcome,” as he launched a weekend media blitz, burnishing his Brexiteer credentials, and reassuring potential critics his deal “should command very broad support, because it ensures the free flow of trade within the United Kingdom’s internal market, it secures Northern Ireland’s place in our Union and it ensures sovereignty.”
Both sides continue to insist a deal to resolve the ongoing tension over Britain’s post-Brexit trading arrangements, which see Northern Ireland continue to follow some EU laws to get round the need for checks at the U.K.’s border with the Republic of Ireland, is not yet done, but could come within days if negotiators are able to close the remaining gaps.
Sunak, who himself backed Britain’s departure from the European Union in 2016, has been trying to win support from the Democratic Unionist Party and the hardline Brexit-supporting European Research Group in Westminster.
“I’m a Conservative, I’m a Brexiteer. And I’m a Unionist,” Sunak told the Sunday Times. “There’s unfinished business on Brexit and I want to get the job done,” he added.
Separately, in a piece for the Sun on Sunday, Sunak wrote: “There’s still more work to do but we have made promising progress recently and I’m determined to do right by the people of Northern Ireland and deliver for them.”

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 21, 2023

Rishi Sunak in final push to get Brexit done

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LONDON — Boris Johnson may have coined the phrase, but Rishi Sunak hopes he’s the man who can finally claim to have “got Brexit done.”

The British prime minister will on Monday host European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in what’s being sold by No. 10 Downing Street as the pair’s “final talks” on resolving the long-running row over post-Brexit trading arrangements in Northern Ireland.

Downing Street has drawn up a carefully choreographed sequence of events following the meeting. Sunak will brief his Cabinet following the late lunchtime face-to-face with the European Commission chief.

He then hopes to hold a joint press conference with von der Leyen to announce any deal before heading to the House of Commons late on Monday to begin his trickiest task yet — selling that deal to Brexiteer MPs on his own Conservative benches, many of whom will be closely watching the verdict of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

It’s likely to mark a defining moment in Sunak’s young premiership, which only began in October when he took over a Conservative Party still riven with divisions following the departures of Johnson and Liz Truss in quick succession. If successful, he will hope to draw a line under the rancorous follow-up to Britain’s 2020 departure from the bloc, and herald an era of closer cooperation with Brussels.

But even as Downing Street was drawing up plans for Monday’s grand unveiling, members of Sunak’s own party were voicing skepticism that the prime minister will have done enough to win their backing. And without DUP support, Northern Ireland’s moribund power-sharing assembly could remain collapsed.

Testing times

Since taking office, Sunak has put securing a deal with Brussels on the so-called Northern Ireland protocol near the top of his to-do list.

The post-Brexit arrangement has been a long-running source of tension between the U.K. and the EU, and the two sides have been locked in months of talks to try to ease the operation of the protocol while addressing the concerns of both the DUP and traders hit by extra bureaucracy.

Under the protocol, the EU requires checks on trade from Great Britain to Northern Ireland in order to preserve the integrity of its single market while avoiding such checks taking place at the sensitive land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

But the DUP sees the protocol as separating Northern Ireland from the rest of the U.K. and is boycotting the region’s power-sharing government until changes are made.

In a statement Sunday night, Downing Street said Sunak wanted “to ensure any deal fixes the practical problems on the ground, ensures trade flows freely within the whole of the U.K., safeguards Northern Ireland’s place in our Union and returns sovereignty to the people of Northern Ireland.”

GettyImages 1048666320 — The Belfast to Dublin motorway crosses the border line between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

Downing Street has kept the detail of any deal a closely-guarded secret. In an interview on Sky News Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab talked up the prospect of “more of an intelligence-based approach” to goods checks, and a move away from individual checks at Northern Irish ports. The U.K. and EU have already talked up more access for Brussels to British goods data.

One of the biggest flashpoints for Brexiteer MPs and the DUP will be the status of the Court of Justice of the European Union in governing disputes under the protocol. They see the continued presence of the EU’s top court in the arrangement as a challenge to British sovereignty.

On Sunday, Mark Francois, chairman of the European Research Group of Conservative Euroskeptics, set a high bar for his support, warning any deal must see Northern Ireland treated on the “same basis” as the rest of Great Britain. He warned that even a reduced role for the CJEU over Northern Ireland was not “good enough.”

Raab told Sky that scaling back some of the regulatory checks and paperwork “would in itself involve a significant, substantial scaling back of the role of the ECJ,” and he talked up the idea of a “proper democratic check coming out of the institutions in Stormont,” the home of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing assembly.

Minefield

One potential source of Brexit trouble on Sunak’s benches is Johnson himself, who has already been warning the prime minister not to drop the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill aimed at allowing U.K. ministers to unilaterally sideline the arrangement.

The Sunday Times reported that Johnson, while being lobbied to support a deal to cement relations with U.S. President Joe Biden, responded with the colorful retort: “F*** the Americans!” The same paper cited a “source close to” Johnson who dismissed it as “a jocular conversation in the [House of Commons] chamber that someone evidently misunderstood.”

As another defining Brexit week begins, Sunak appears willing to plow ahead, even without the support of the most hardline Brexiteers in his party. Raab insisted on Sunday MPs would “have the opportunity to express themselves on the deal,” but did not elaborate on whether there will be a House of Commons vote on the arrangement.

Former Chancellor George Osborne, one of the key figures in the campaign to remain in the European Union, urged Sunak to press on and “call the bluff” of the DUP, Johnson and the ERG — or his premiership would be “severely weakened.”

“Having got to this point in the minefield, he has to proceed,” Osborne told the Andrew Neil Show.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 21, 2023

Brexit: UK and EU strike deal on Northern Ireland protocol

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LONDON — The U.K. and the EU finally reached a deal after months of talks over contentious post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland.

Already, both sides are pitching it as a major reset in frayed relations — but U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak still has to sell it to skeptics in his own party and beyond.

The so-called “Windsor Framework” comes after a final day of talks between Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Windsor.

In key developments Monday:

— Sunak and von der Leyen talked up the deal as a “new chapter” in EU-U.K. ties at a Windsor press conference.

— The U.K. PM urged his MPs to get behind him in a Commons statement, as key Brexiteers gave supportive early comments.

— Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) vowed to study the text closely before deciding whether or not to back it.

— And Brexiteers in the U.K. hit out at No. 10 Downing Street over a meeting between King Charles III and von der Leyen on the same day a deal was struck.

‘New chapter’

Details of the new agreement are now being pored over by lawmakers on both sides of the English Channel, but the plan is aimed at easing customs red-tape, equalizing some tax rules across the United Kingdom, and giving Northern Ireland’s lawmakers more of a say over the future of the arrangement.

“The United Kingdom and European Union may have had our differences in the past, but we are allies, trading partners and friends, something that we’ve seen clearly in the past year as we joined with others to support Ukraine,” Sunak said at the joint press conference. “This is the beginning of a new chapter in our relationship.”

That line was echoed by von der Leyen, who said the plan would allow the two sides “to begin a new chapter,” and offer up “long-lasting solutions that both of us are confident will work for all people and businesses in Northern Ireland.”

Sunak — under pressure to hold a House of Commons vote on the agreement — told MPs Monday evening that the arrangement would end “burdensome customs bureaucracy” and “routine checks” on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, and claimed he had “delivered what the people of Northern Ireland asked for … We have removed the border in the Irish Sea.”

He now faces the sizable task of convicing Brexiteer lawmakers on his own Conservative benches, many of whom will be closely watching the verdict of Northern Ireland’s fiercely anti-protocol DUP, to get on board.

“Our judgment and our principled position in opposing the protocol in Parliament and at Stormont has been vindicated,” said DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson Monday night. “Undoubtedly it is now recognized that the protocol does not work. When others said there would be no renegotiation and no change, our determination has proved what can be achieved.”

Stormont brake

The protocol has been a long-running source of tension between the U.K. and the EU, and the two sides have been locked in months of talks to try to ease the way it works.

Under the arrangement, the EU requires checks on trade from Great Britain to Northern Ireland in order to preserve the integrity of its single market and avoid such checks taking place at the sensitive land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

The DUP has been boycotting the region’s power-sharing government while it pushes for major changes to a set-up it sees as driving a wedge between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K.

Speaking at the press conference, Sunak and von der Leyen talked up a host of changes to the protocol that they hope will be enough to restore power-sharing in Northern Ireland.

Under the revised plan, goods moving from Great Britain but destined only for Northern Ireland will travel through a new “green lane” with fewer checks, while a separate, more stringent, “red lane” for goods at risk of moving on to the Republic of Ireland — and thereby entering the EU’s single market — will now operate.

Sunak said food retailers would “no longer need hundreds of certificates for every lorry” entering Northern Ireland, while food made to U.K. standards will be able to be freely sent to and sold in Northern Ireland. He also vowed that the new pact would scrap customs paperwork for people sending parcels to family or friends or shopping online.

GettyImages 1247532264 — UK PM Rishi Sunak and EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen hope that the host of changes to the Brexit protocol announced today will be enough to restore power-sharing in Northern Ireland | Dan Kitwood/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

The two sides have also amended the text of the protocol, Sunak said, to allow U.K. VAT and excise changes to apply in Northern Ireland — while a “landmark” settlement on medicines will mean drugs approved for use by the U.K. medicines regulator will be “automatically available in every pharmacy and hospital in Northern Ireland.”

And London and Brussels are now jointly pitching a new “Stormont brake,” claiming this will allow the devolved assembly in Northern Ireland — currently on ice amid a DUP boycott over the protocl — to prevent changes to EU goods rules “that would have significant and lasting effects on everyday lives” from applying in the region.

“This gives the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland a powerful new safeguard based on cross-community consent,” Sunak promised.

DUP’s next move

As he departed for London, DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson said he and senior party colleagues would “take time to look at the deal” – a process likely to run at least through the weekend and to involve specially-commissioned analysis by constitutional lawyers. Early word from some Conservative Brexiteers was positive, with David Davis — who quit Theresa May’s government over her own EU deal-making — hailed it as a “a formidable negotiating success.”

Before flying out of Belfast, Donaldson briefed his party’s 25 members of the Northern Ireland Assembly about the expected key points. The DUP lawmakers met at Stormont, the seat of the power-sharing legislature that the DUP has blocked since May.

Donaldson said the DUP’s legal counsel would produce a detailed analysis for consideration by the party’s executive officers.

“It is vital that Northern Ireland’s place within the U.K. and its internal market is restored. We will have lawyers assess the legal text to ensure that this [is] in fact the case,” Donaldson told the Belfast News Letter, the main unionist newspaper in Northern Ireland.

Later, Donaldson told the BBC he was “neither positive nor negative” when assessing whether the DUP should accept the compromise package on offer.

“We need to take time to look at the deal, what’s available, and how does that match our seven tests,” he said, referring to the DUP’s July 2021 list of demands for “replacing” the protocol.

Other DUP officials said the party’s senior leadership would convene at party headquarters in Belfast, possibly on Saturday, to review the party’s legal verdict on the deal – and whether concessions won by the U.K. government were sufficient to end the DUP’s obstruction of power-sharing at Stormont.

Donaldson will seek maximum support at that meeting before committing to any policy pivot on the protocol. Other senior officials, including former deputy leader Lord Dodds, have explicitly rejected the idea of reviving Stormont if the revised protocol agreement retains any oversight role for the CJEU. Both Donaldson and the DUP’s “seven tests” have stopped short of drawing this red line.

Ever since narrowly losing May’s assembly elections to the Irish republicans of Sinn Féin, the DUP has refused not only to form a new cross-community government – the assembly’s central function under terms of Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord – but also has blocked the election of a neutral speaker for the assembly, preventing it from sitting.

This developing story is being updated. Annabelle Dickson and Noah Keate contributed reporting.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 21, 2023

Tag: Northern Ireland

Facing both ways

‘The money goes south’

‘Workmanlike’

Doing the hard yards

Trouble ahead?

Britain the rule-taker?

All eyes on Europe

TTC+

Testing times

Minefield

‘New chapter’

Stormont brake

DUP’s next move