The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Speaking of borders: Border checks… for the UK April 30, 2024

Today sees the first post-Brexit check on goods from the EU into the UK. 

This time there are question marks over the government’s readiness. In a leaked presentation seen by the Financial Times, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) outlined a plan to phase in controls, with physical inspections initially “set to zero” for all but the highest-risk products.

The government hit back, insisting that checks would be commencing on 30 April, but indicated that they would focus initially on higher-risk products, and scale up checks on other goods in a “sensible and controlled way”.

 

The shambles continues. But not just the shambles. This is having a very real impact and there are going to be more:

The first phase, which began at the end of January this year, required importers of most meat, dairy and plant to secure health certificates for products before they could enter the UK. This has already created problems for some importers.

Not only has it added extra costs to orders – the certificates can cost up to £200 for each product line – but some suppliers have struggled to find vets to carry out the checks or simply turned their backs on supplying the UK, unwilling to deal with the added bureaucracy. The result has been gaps on some deli shelves.

The move to physical checks will be more disruptive. Inspections will involve some lorries being held at the border. When the EU began controlling imports in 2021, UK exporters were left counting the cost of containers of meat rotting in European ports. The government has said the checks will enhance the country’s biosecurity, and protect farmers and the country’s food security from costly diseases.

And;

World Trade Organization rules statethat UK trade borders with the EU need to match those with the rest of the world, so as not to give the bloc a trading advantage.

But trade will be more costly. The government itself has admitted that businesses will have to pay £330m a year, which could add 0.2% to food inflation over three years. A recent Allianz Trade report put the cost as high as £2bn, with a 0.2% increase in headline national inflation.

A year. Every year. From now on. 

Meanwhile on the other side of the EU/UK border:

Ireland has landed a €700m (£600m) Brexit bonanza with a steep increase in tax revenues flowing from customs duties now applicable to imports of clothing, food and other goods from Great Britain.

Before Brexit, Britain enjoyed customs-free exports to Ireland and the rest of the EU because it was part of the single market and customs union.

But when Boris Johnson sealed a hard Brexit and quit the single market, it meant fresh controls, checks and duties would be payable on exports to the EU.

New data in Ireland shows a 90% jump in customs duty receipts in Ireland between 2020 and 2021 when Brexit came into force.

Taking the pandemic into account and comparing 2019 with the three post-Brexit years, a significant jump in revenues can be seen.

Interesting this:

Not all revenues remain in Ireland. Under EU arrangements, a member state can retain 25% of duties elected, with the remainder going into the bloc’s overall central budget.

Is this impacting on people here and their purchases? 

Scotland April 30, 2024

Some level of turmoil in politics in Scotland with SNP First Minster Humza Yousaf stepping down on Monday.

The scandals around his predecessor, Nicola Sturgeon, are staggering in a way. The calls for the return of John Swinney are intriguing. But even that points to the peril that the SNP finds itself in.

There’s a grain of truth in Alastair Campbell’s argument that the SNP as a broad-based party focused on independence needs to win to remain coherent. When it stops winning, the cracks are more difficult to paper over. We’ve seen that in countless other cases.

The difference between the Common Travel Area and the frictionless border…  April 30, 2024

There is one, but it would appear that some people don’t understand it. For example Ruth Dudley Edwards at the weekend wrote about how ‘the open border that Dublin insisted on is now allowing asylum seekers to pour into the country’. 

Making everything worse is the unintended consequence of the border. The Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, has had to admit that more than 80% of people applying for asylum in the Republic are pouring over the border from Northern Ireland and she clearly has absolutely no idea what to do about it.

But that’s not the case. As noted on Slugger in comments, the Protocol and all the efforts to deal with the post-Brexit issues have been about goods, not people. 

The Common Travel Area existed long before Brexit was thought of, before the European Union was a thing, before, well, you get the picture.

This is more reminiscent of the problems thrown up by two jurisdictions on the island during the pandemic. 

In any event what is she suggesting? That the movement of people must be controlled between the two parts of the island? But to what purpose? 

Given the CTA exists and there is not a fortified or visible border on this island – a good and necessary thing the latter and a political reality for the foreseeable with regard to the former (and really not a great issue per se in itself), and that this predates Brexit, then surely the issue is with Britain and how it conducts its own immigration policy.

On the broader issue, this struck me as curious: 

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said he is “not interested” in pursuing a deal with the Government on returning asylum seekers from Ireland to the UK.

Mr Sunak told ITV News: “We’re not interested in that. We’re not going to accept returns from the EU via Ireland when the EU doesn’t accept returns back to France where illegal migrants are coming from.

“Of course we’re not going to do that.”

Asked whether there were any negotiations with the EU on returns, he said: “No, I’m focused on getting our Rwanda scheme up and running.”

Of course Sunak with locals on Thursday is playing to the gallery. But wait, perhaps a deal on returns already exists?

The Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media has said Ms McEntee decided not to travel to London because she is working in emergency immigration legislation to be brought before a meeting of the Cabinet tomorrow.

“She has a series of engagements with senior officials and I know she’s bringing legislation before the Cabinet tomorrow which will be very important in relation to ensuring that the UK is seen as a safe country,” Minister Catherine Martin said.

“We know that that has been an agreement in place since Brexit in relation to the returns in relation to the UK and Ireland.”

For the many, not the few April 29, 2024

In the Observer this weekend, there was mention of the above slogan. Sonia Sodha, Observer columnist and chief leader writer, musing on the meritocracy and the roles of supposed ‘hard work’ and luck in how people progress in life, argued that:

There are traps for the left at the other extreme too. One is thinking that hitting the top 1% will be popular simply because most people don’t fall into that category. Jeremy Corbyn’s “for the many, not the few” 2019 slogan bombed because the public aren’t generally anti-wealthy unless there is a specific reason, as with bankers after the financial crisis.

But hold on. As noted BTL on the article – that is far from the first time that slogan was introduced. 

In 1997 someone wrote the following in their Party Manifesto:

‘Our case is simple: that Britain can and must be better’

‘The vision is one of national renewal, a country with drive, purpose and energy’

‘In each area of policy a new and distinctive approach has been mapped out, one that differs from the old left and the Conservative right. This is why new Labour is new’

‘New Labour is a party of ideas and ideals but not of outdated ideology. What counts is what works. The objectives are radical. The means will be modern’

‘ This is our contract with the people’

I believe in Britain. It is a great country with a great history. The British people are a great people. But I believe Britain can and must be better: better schools, better hospitals, better ways of tackling crime, of building a modern welfare state, of equipping ourselves for a new world economy.

I want a Britain that is one nation, with shared values and purpose, where merit comes before privilege, run for the many not the few, strong and sure of itself at home and abroad.

I want a Britain that does not shuffle into the new millennium afraid of the future, but strides into it with confidence.

Any excuse will do April 29, 2024

Interesting piece in the Guardian over the weekend on the far-right coup effort in Germany in 2022. This was a bizarre, implausible but very real effort, so far as can be seen, to try to overthrow the German state. There’s 27 people on trial, to be broken into groups in order to expedite the proceedings.

On Monday a group of nine, identified as the “military wing” behind the group ringleader, the self-proclaimed Heinrich XIII, Prince Reuss, 72, will be the first to go on trial in the southern city of Stuttgart on terrorism charges. Nine others, including Reuss and other prominent members, go on trial in Frankfurt on 21 May.

Prince Reuss, an antisemitic businessman, descended from a formerly aristocratic family, founded the group with the express wish to violently eliminate the state order. In the event of the coup’s success, he was due to be declared provisional head of a new German state, which would have redrawn the country according to its 1937 borders.

However unlikely the path they chose, they appear to have been well resourced:

According to federal prosecutors, the group planned to enter the Reichstag in Berlin with armed support to arrest members of the Bundestag or parliament with the intention of “overthrowing the system”.

The plotters aimed to forcibly eliminate the existing state order and replace it with their own government. They had been forging the plans from August 2021, until they were uncovered in December 2022 in a series of large scale anti-terror raids involving thousands of officers searching 150 properties across 11 German states, as well as abroad.

Members, many connected to the German far-right extremist Reichsbürger movement, had access “to a massive arsenal of weapons”, prosecutors said, including 380 firearms, 350 cutting and stabbing weapons, almost 500 other weapons and 148,000 pieces of ammunition, which they referred to by the codename “bonbons”.

“These are people who do not recognise the federal republic and its democratic structures,” the prosecutors said.

But what struck me most forcibly was the following:

The would-be putchists paid a Swiss criminal gang around €140,000 (£120,000) for weapons, and had plans to search for “subterranean children’s prisons” in which they believed a secret “world government” was carrying out experiments on children.

Doesn’t this seem to be of a piece with the current far-right playbook. A revolting self-serving approach where children are used as an excuse for their actions. The dynamic being that using that excuse near enough any extremity can be waved through. The end of democracy, the murder of political opponents – they’re doing it to save the children. That the idea of underground prisons, or a world government involved in experiment on children is an absurdity.

The reality of a historical record of conservative and reactionary social and religious structures which placed children in contexts of appalling abuse – both on this island and elsewhere – is seemingly ignored entirely. That historical record needs to be pointed to time and again in all this. 

Left Archive: Ireland’s Resources, the Case for State Control, Resources Protection Campaign, 1975 April 29, 2024

Please click here to go the Left Archive.

Many thanks to the person who forwarded this to the Archive.

This document, dating from 1975, was one of many produced by the Resources Study Group, later the Resources Protection Campaign. As the Archive notes:

The Resources Protection Campaign was formed on October 10th 1973 and campaigned for state responsibility for the extraction of natural resources, and against tax breaks and low-cost sell-offs for private exploitation. It succeeded the Resources Study Group.

The RSG/RPC were very close to Official Sinn Féin and the latter, as noted in The Lost Revolution, ‘became a key area of SF agitation’. This document argues that:

The necessity to retain State control of Irish nature resources in order that the real benefits accuse to the Irish people has never been more evident. The RPC is anon-political public education campaign which has as its main objective the development of State companies to explore for, produce and develop industries from our immense natural wealth. As authors of this booklet we ask you to form your local branch and assist in the campaign’s objectives which are of crucial importance to the future development of this country. 

The document is divided into a number of chapters – some dealing with the history of resources extraction in Ireland, others noting the prominence of state resource development companies in other states. It notes the fact that there were already state resource companies such as Bord na Mona. And in relation to that example it states ‘BnaM is a perfect example of what can be achieved with State enterprise and a natural fuel in Ireland. It is a considerable success story which has contributed quietly to Ireland’s economy for thirty years, creating employment, using a native file, and developing its own technology which has now been copied by other countries’. 

Spirit of Revolution: Ireland from below 1917-1923 – Launch Events April 28, 2024

Culture Thread 28/4/2024 April 28, 2024

Our third of the year.

gregtimo proposed in comments recently the idea of a Culture Thread.

It’s a great idea. Currently culture is a bit strange, but people read, listen to music, watch television and film and so on – spread the net wide, sports, activities, interests, all relevant – and any pointers are always welcome. And it’s not just those areas but many more. Suggestions as to new or old things, events that might have been missed, literally anything.

Non-alcoholic drinks that make you tipsy but not drunk? April 28, 2024

Add to my fascination with vegetarian foods that are like meat (hallo, Beyond Meat Burgers etc) an almost equal fascination with non-alcohol or low alcohol-beers. Non-alcohol beers tend to be okay, best in show those from Guinness with its 0.0% stout.

Low-alcohol beers, very low-alcohol beers, area slightly different. For a start they have that slight tang of alcohol. Even a 1% such as Kinnegar’s 37 has a bit of bite. And as you move from 1% to 2.5% and up to 3.5% there’s a fair range. John Smith, for example, is at the latter end of the scale and is not a million miles away from Kilkenny’s ‘draught cream ale’ though due to the introduction of the deposit return scheme they may not be imported into the state much longer.

And what’s this, Vox did a piece on ‘the endless quest to replace alcohol’. A lot of it seems like fluff – all ‘wellness’ this and ‘wellness’ that, but there was mention of this:

Similarly, a UK startup called GABA Labs launched a synthetic alcohol called Sentia, designed to mimic the effects of alcohol without the hangovers or health problems.

Now Sentia is very intriguing indeed. 

For years, David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London and co-founder of GABA Labs, has been toying with the idea of a synthetic alcoholic drink that mimics the same euphoric effects of alcohol, without any of the groggy weekend-ruining hangovers. Think Star Trek’s synthehol come to life.

You might recall Nutt for a political reason.

Since 2016, the former drug tsar who was famously sacked after stating that cannabis, ecstasy and LSD were less harmful than alcohol, has been working on developing such a molecule. In 2021, GABA Labs launched Sentia Spirits, the world’s first plant-based, botanical-powered spirits that have 0% ABV but still make you tipsy. “It’s a drink that is based on the science of alcohol, particularly the low doses of alcohol that relax you and make you more sociable,” Nutt tells The Independent.        

So:

Sentia is what Nutt calls a “GABA spirit”. GABA, or gamma-aminobutyric acid, to give it its full name, is an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain that produces a calming effect. When you’re drinking an alcoholic beverage, those alcohol molecules bind to GABA receptors and cause the sedative, relaxing effects of GABA to be enhanced.

Anyhow, Sentia is a mix of various herbs and botanicals, including valerian, into a drink that is promised to give some sense of the experience of drinking alcohol with none of the side effects. Does it work? The Independent appears to think so in this review. There are two flavours, Sentia Red and Sentia Black. They really liked the Red. 

Sceptical as we might’ve been, Sentia’s non-alcoholic spirits did make us a little squiffy. While Sentia black tasted pretty horrendous, with a spicy, medicinal flavour that overpowered most mixers, it did give us that slightly woozy feeling you get when you have your first or second pint.

And as Nutt notes these are ‘proof of concept’.

But is it truly without side-effects? Some of those Time consulted seems somewhat sceptical.

Any product that promises neurological rewards could also become habit-forming, says Stanford’s Lembke. “There’s no way to get a euphoric effect or relaxant effect and not have some kind of rebound phenomenon,” she says. “In terms of biological systems, there’s no free lunch.” (While Orren and Nutt can’t promise their products won’t be habit-forming without clinical trials, Nutt emphasizes that he’s worked in psychopharmacology for decades and developed some of the methodologies used for assessing tolerance.)

Still, it’s an interesting approach. And there’s quite a few companies moving into this area.

Sentia is not the only product of its kind on the market. Kin Euphorics, Ghiaand Psychedelic Water are three of several startups selling alcohol-free beverages that use plant compounds to create a slightly buzzy, relaxing sensation. All three have trendy bragging rights: supermodel Bella Hadid is a partner in Kin Euphorics, Ghia was founded by an ex-Glossier executive and Psychedelic Water went viral on TikTok this year. All told, non-alcoholic spirit sales in the U.S. grew by almost 300% from 2016 to 2020, according to beverage-industry research firm IWSR.

Sunday and other stupid statements from this week  April 28, 2024

All examples welcome.

Shane Coleman trots this old chestnut out in the Business Post today:

The fundamental question – that people in the media and public life must not shy away from – is who is the health service designed for: the patient or the people who work in it? Because for too long, it has seemed like the answer is the latter, not the former.

Eilis O’Hanlon sets up an unlikely choice: Simon Harris must do more than feel our pain – it’s better to lead with the head, not the heart

Then there’s this:

More than once the Sinn Féin Housing spokesperson, Eoin Ó Broin, has come under gentle fire for his cooking habits. Not because they resemble what we tend to associate with the towering heights of Irish cuisine: boiled cabbage, boiled ham, boiled potatoes. But because they seemingly demonstrate his disconnect with the common man. In May 2020 he asked “what’s for dinner in the Ó Broin household…? Well, oysters/oisre of course!”; in August 2020 he tweeted about slow-cooked beef cheek wellington with porcini mushrooms; a year later he posted a photo of a kitchen table groaning under the weight of what appears to be several types of fish, two cuts of beef and a bottle of dessert wine.

Some seemed to wonder how a man like Ó Broin could position himself as a serious advocate for social housing – in a left-wing party, no less – while entertaining such rarified culinary proclivities? To the so-called food snobs, Ó Broin’s depth of knowledge and curiosity is compelling. To the detractors it is something to apologise for: “A bit crass Eoin” read one response. It seems that liking food and wanting to rectify a housing crisis are anathema. How decadent, and dare we say, European of him.

And lastly this:

Ireland contains only 0.06pc of the total world population. This is smaller than tiny. In chemistry it might be regarded as a barely detectable “trace element”. How do we reconcile this with last week’s achievement of singer-songwriter Hozier’s song Too Sweet reaching number one on the US Billboard Chart? Is this a random fluke or is it part of a pattern?