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Listen: ��Ī experts talk post-Brexit options for the UK

fpjl2 — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 13:02:30 +0000

The one day workshop was run by the Centre For Business Research (CBR) and the ��Ī Public Policy Strategic Research Initiative. On the day, the CBR's Boni Sones sat down with some of the experts to get their take on the major issues facing Brexit Britain. You can listen to their conversations below:

Prof Simon Deakin: Social policy post Brexit and workers’ rights

Simon Deakin is a Professor of Law and the Director of the Centre For Business Research. He specialises in labour law, private law, company law and EU law. His research is concerned, more generally, with the relationship between law and the social sciences.

To what extent we remain outside the Single Market is going to be a matter of degree. The current government’s decision for a deep and comprehensive trade agreement actually takes us back in to much of the single market, and we will be bound going forward to single market rules.”
Simon Deakin

Dr Kirsty Hughes: The right to remain of EU nationals

Kirsty Hughes is a University Lecturer in Law specialising in Human Rights and Public Law. She lectures on Civil Liberties, European Human Rights Law and Constitutional Law among other areas, and has a forthcoming book on Privacy Theory.

The suggestion that residency can be used in withdrawal negotiations does seem to be overstating matters given that residency is preserved under human rights law. It will be unlawful for us to expel EU nationals, and given therefore that it would be unlawful it seems particularly insensitive and unfair for EU nationals to be living in a state of uncertainty which is completely unnecessary.
Kirsty Hughes

You can read Dr Hughes's paper on the right to remain of EU nationals in full here.

Dr Michael Waibel: The financial cost to the UK of leaving the EU

Michael Waibel is a University Lecturer and Deputy-Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. He researches economic law with a particular focus on finance and the settlement of international disputes.

The House of Lords’ assessment as a backdrop to these Brexit negotiations is that there is no legal liability. In purely legal terms I think the House of Lords has got it wrong. The UK is in principle liable for a share of the EU’s budget commitments that the UK made as a member of the EU.
Michael Waibel

You can read Dr Waibel's paper on the financial cost of leaving the EU in full here.

Dr Lorand Bartels: The WTO option

Lorand Bartels is a Reader in International Law, and teaches international law, WTO law and EU law. He was appointed as a Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Select Committee on International Trade at the end of last year.

I think legally nothing changes, in terms of the underlying rules and rights and obligations. At the moment the government’s position, and I think it is absolutely correct, is that the UK has existing rights and obligations in the WTO but you don’t see them at the moment because it is exercised via the EU.
Lorand Bartels

Dr Graham Gudgin: A critique of treasury estimates of the impact of Brexit

Graham Gudgin is currently Research Associate at ��Ī's Centre For Business Research and part-time Senior Economic Advisor with Oxford Economics. He has been a Special Adviser to the Northern Ireland First Minister on economic policy.

Over the past 15 years we have created about 3 million extra jobs in the UK, but that has been associated with a rise of about 85 per cent of people born from abroad, and a high proportion of these work on or at the minimum wage. That is not great for productivity...
Graham Gudgin

Prof David Howarth: The UK Constitution, the White Paper and the proposed Repeal Act

David Howarth is a Professor of Law and Public Policy in the Department of Land Economy. He served as the Member of Parliament for ��Ī between 2005 and 2010.

A lot of this process is far too short. Designing and drafting new law is not easy. It can’t be done by amateurs, it can’t be done by politicians on the hoof on the floor of the House of Commons. It needs to be thought through and there is just not enough time to think it through.
David Howarth

Dr Martin Steinfeld: The Free Movement of People and EU law

Martin Steinfeld is an Affiliated Lecturer in EU law. He was previously a barrister at the Chancery Bar and worked at both the European Parliament and the Court of Justice of the European Union.

There are many rights that EU citizens exercising their rights to free movement have had for many years. That is a matter for huge discussion on a domestic level in terms of what pieces of legislation may or may not flow to replicate the rights they already have.
Martin Steinfeld

Prof Catherine Barnard, Prof John Bell and Prof Brendan Simms: The White Paper; Brexit and Devolution; the Geopolitics of Brexit

Catherine Barnard is a Professor of European Union Law and Fellow of the UK in a Changing Europe programme.
John Bell is a Professor of Law and Director of the Centre for Public Law.
Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Studies.

The actual logistics of disentangling ourselves from the EU are incredibly large and it will take a considerable period of time – certainly more than the two years the government thinks it can be done in.
Catherine Barnard

Dr Julian Ghosh: Brexit and our tax laws

Julian Ghosh is a QC and Bye-Fellow at Peterhouse, ��Ī. His practice covers all areas of taxation. He is particularly well known for his corporate work and that involving European taxation issues.

[Business] could say you said we were subject to EU law previous to this date but this post two year date decision tells us what that law actually is, so see you in court. It is hopeless for the government and business.
Julian Ghosh

On 30 March, the day after the 'triggering' of Article 50 began the official Brexit process, a group of ��Ī lawyers, economists, historians and tax experts gathered in Peterhouse.

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Opinion: Britain and Europe: a long history of conflict and cooperation

Anonymous — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 15:46:59 +0000

Britain’s referendum on the EU marks another step in the country’s long and troubled history with its European neighbours. Divorce or not, Europe will continue to have a huge influence over British politics and society – history has a few lessons for us here.

Europe made the UK. The emergence first of England as a nation state was the product of European pressures – to defend itself against Viking raids. So was the formation of the United Kingdom, which rallied England and Scotland against the France of Louis XIV.

Moreover, Europe has almost always been more important to us than the rest of the world. The 18th century statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, for example, spoke of a “Commonwealth of Europe”, long before the British Commonwealth of Nations was even thought of.

The nature of the European challenge varied greatly over time. It was always strategic. In the Middle Ages the main enemy was France. In the 16th century and early 17th centuries it was Spain. From the late 17th to the early 19th century it was France again; in the mid to late 19th century it was Tsarist Russia. Then, in the early and mid-20th century it was first the Kaiser and then Hitler’s Germany; and then Russia again – with a brief interruption after the fall of the Berlin Wall – from the end of World War II to the present day.

Very often, the danger was also ideological. From continental heresy in the Middle Ages, through counter-reformation Catholicism (which also become a synonym for absolutism and continental tyranny) in the 16th and 17th centuries, French Jacobinism in the late 18th century, right and left wing totalitarianism in the 20th century, to Islamist terrorists arriving from Europe as migrants today.

Anti-Jacobin sentiment in 18th century British papers. Library of Congress

Furthermore, Europe has profoundly shaped domestic politics in the UK. It has been the subject of argument without end for hundreds of years. In the 16th and 17th century there were furious debates over the best way to protect Protestantism and parliamentary freedoms in a Europe in which both were under severe attack.

From the 18th century onwards, Britons disagreed on the best strategy for maintaining the European balance of power. The prevailing orthodoxy among one side of parliament (the Whigs) looked to alliances and armies on the continent. The Tories on the other side called for greater restraint and more focus on the country’s naval and colonial power. Throughout these debates, some argued for military intervention on the continent and interference in the internal politics of sovereign states there, while others demanded equally passionately that Britain should stay out, for reasons of pragmatism, as well as principle. Both views are well represented in both major political parties today.

Of each other’s making

If Europe made Britain, then Britain also made Europe. The British shaped Europe in their interests and increasingly in their image. Their military presence and reputation on the continent was usually formidable, from the iconic victories at Agincourt, Dunkirk, Blenheim, Dettingen, Waterloo, in the Crimea, during the two world wars to the deterrence in Europe under NATO. It was enhanced rather than reduced by the fact that many of these triumphs were secured with the help of coalition partners.

Britain played an important, and often a decisive role in most of the major European settlements since the late 17th century: the treaty of Utrecht, which enshrined the principle of the “balance of power”, through the Congress of Vienna, which remodelled Europe after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars – right down to the treaties on European Union we have today.

Plus, Britain saw and realised its security through the power of ideology. This began with the defence of the Protestant interest in the 16th and 17th centuries, the protection of European “liberties” in the 18th century, the promotion of liberalism in the 19th century, and the spread of democracy in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Euroscepticism and engagement has a long history. US Library of Congress

Britain has therefore been distinctive in Europe. Its European story is not merely separate and equal to that of the continent, but fundamentally different and more benign. The British pioneered two innovative forms of political organisation: the nation state as represented in parliament and then the concept of multinational union based on a parliamentary merger of Scotland and England.

Over the past 500 years, by contrast, Europeans have explored political unhappiness in many different forms. These have ranged from absolutism, through Jacobinism, Napoleonic tyranny, Hitler, Soviet communism, to the well-meaning but broken-backed European Union today.

Continental Europe, in short, had failed before 1945, and even now the European Union is only failing better. Unlike virtually every other European state, which has at some point or other been occupied and dismembered, often repeatedly, England and the United Kingdom have largely – with very brief exceptions – been a subject of European politics, never merely an object.

This should not be an occasion for British triumphalism. On the contrary, whatever the outcome of the referendum on membership, the European Union is not the UK’s enemy. The failure of the European project, and the collapse of the current continental order, would not only be a catastrophic blow to the populations on the far side of the channel but also to the UK, which would be directly exposed to the resulting storms, as it always has been.

Brendan Simms, Professor in the History of International Relations, ��Ī

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ��Ī.

Brendan Simms (Department of Politics and International Studies) discusses Britain's relationship with Europe, from the Vikings to the Referendum.

Wikimedia Commons

The Battle of Waterloo by William Sadler II