UK getting ready to go it alone on Galileo The UK is about to press the big red button on its own satellite navigation system as an agreement for access to the EU’s Galileo programme looks more and more unlikely. Following hot on the heels of the release of papers detailing the customs and tax implications of a no-deal Brexit come reports that the UK Treasury has …
the only really successful Euro fighters are single country developments (the Gripen and the Rafale).
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True.
The E/F Gripens look like they could be a good choice - particularly if you spend the same amount of money and thus have more aircraft. Plus an operating cost of about 20% that of the F35 with a much higher availability.
"no European military could conduct a major military operation without US support, even ourselves and the French, and if you wanted to re-establish that capability, a "new GPS" would not be what you would start with: you would fill out military logistic support organisations, start running large military exercises again to rebuild the "corporate knowledge", and increase ammunition and spare part holdings to increase readiness. You can understand why Baidu and GLONASS were built, but not Galileo.'
I think you are missing the point.
While a GNSS is useful in conventional military operations its unique value is improving the flexibility of long range nuclear strikes.
If you want a credible counter-force deterrent, you need accurate ICBMs, SLBMs and cruise missiles.
A counterforce capable deterrent is more credible than a countervalue deterrent because people find it harder to believe that you are willing to escalate to mutual city destruction.
The interesting thing is that a nuclear deterrent is both more effective and much less expensive than a conventional force capable of fighting a major war.... but to make it really believable, you want a GNSS that is not controlled by someone else, who may decide to stop you.
Anyone read the history of the Suez Crisis?
There is *no way* we are going to utilise either the British or French deterrents as counterforce forces. We have a fraction of the missiles required to even make a small impact on say China, let alone Russia. Those nukes are city busters only, doomsday weapons.
Rupert Fiennes,
The British and French have sufficient nuclear weapons (of sufficient accuracy) to use as counter-force against any similar sized or smaller force. So India, North Korea, Israel, Pakistan and China are perfectly possible. The Chinese have been pretty moderate in their nuclear posture - pretty much going for the same level of making it unacceptably costly to attack them as we did.
Only the US and Russia have gone down the total overkill path. They both have sufficiently large forces to be practically unstoppable. Although with the low levels of Russian military spending for the two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, you do wonder how much of their older stuff still works.
I understand that the fiction in UK nuclear planning is still that we target important military installations - even if those do just happen to be in/near major cities.
On the other hand, once the other side have some portion of their deterrent on a submarine, counter-force becomes useless, unless you can find the damned thing (and hold the contact until the correct moment).
We have a fraction of the missiles required to even make a small impact on say China, let alone Russia.
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So your position is that losing a hundred military bases and communications / logistics centers would have no effect on the ability of Russia to sustain an invasion of Europe?
Which would still leave missiles for city busting.
Please share your analysis.
Long-range weapon systems like ICBMs and cruise missiles don't use GPS as a primary source of targetting information because it can be spoofed close to the target. They use internal accelerometer systems and, in the case of ballistic missiles a star-tracking system to provide final course correction before re-entry.
GPS can be used before launch of mobile weapons such as cruise missiles to initialise the on-board tracking systems but that's done in friendly territory where spoofing is less likely to occur since it relies on flooding the local area with carefully degraded GPS signals for the receiver to pick up and accept as valid data.
Given GPS was available to us as US allies, it was hard to see why we needed to duplicate it: no European military could conduct a major military operation without US support, even ourselves and the French, and if you wanted to re-establish that capability, a "new GPS" would not be what you would start with: you would fill out military logistic support organisations, start running large military exercises again to rebuild the "corporate knowledge", and increase ammunition and spare part holdings to increase readiness. You can understand why Baidu and GLONASS were built, but not Galileo.
You do understand that America won't be around in 100 years, and that American World Military Dominance will prolly go in 50 --- as has happened in the end to every other dominant power, even those with far stronger polities than that of the USA ?
Soon or late the rest of us have to make our own accommodations with shifting power and our military positions --- even if every other country too shape-changes and adopts new political systems --- so, it is better to stick to near Europe than an alien far power such as America or Russia, whatever the cost to our realizations of loss of importance.
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America... 'Mistah Kurtz, he dead' : More people worship the rising than the setting sun, as Pompey Magnus told Sulla Felix.
Really? So big economy gives you big bucks to spend with countries and so influence them. Small economy gives you less and tends to mean you have less influence. As for the military, really, a strong military gives you no influence? Go ask Vietnam, Cambodia, The Philippines how they feel about China building a massive military base in waters that technically do not belong to them.
The EU has influence precisely because it is a massive economic market, not because it is some beacon of moral rectitude.
"The UK Government has found it difficult to understand that if one stops being a member of a club, one loses access to that club’s facilities."
We're an ESA member and a NATO member.
Norway is in the Galileo programme (though the EU is still dragging their heels on whether to grant them PRN access), so there is little reason to question the UK's continued involvement.
Even if they wanted to remove work-share from the UK, the notion of withholding a resource like PRN from key strategic defence allies like the UK and Norway is bizarre. Who controls the GIUK gap? France? Germany? Nah, that'd be us and Iceland. How about the North Sea? Us and Norway. Dear EU: You're welcome.
EU Defence != European Defence.
If the EU wishes to become a federal state (as they obviously do), they need to learn to take a more nuanced and diplomatic approach to different types of diplomacy. Defence =! Trade. Your defence partners and allies are not necessarily people who have signed up to a particular trade treaty. Granting access to defence assets based on trade-treaty status is downright silly.
"The other point here, is that the EU and Barnier announced during the initial divorce talks that how dare the UK bring military, security and anti terrorism support as negotiating points to the table"
Those morons are the same ones who insisted money, Irish border and invaded sovereignty had to be agreed before anything, against their own rules that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. But then we are using article 50 which apparently exists but was never intended to be used so they argue it may need to be removed or rewritten.
The Irish Border is an EU issue not a UK one. The UK will just continue with no border and let the EU work out how to handle the issue without upsetting the Irish by imposing customs between Eire and the rest of the EU. Should be entertaining to watch.
The Irish Border is a UK problem while Northern Ireland is still a part of the UK (while there is still a UK, the whole Brexit thing seems to be an English idea). A hard border between North and South could well kick off the troubles again.
Nothing has been healed there, merely stitched together, as the population keeps voting the same idiot parties in (but then, people keep voting the same idiots in everywhere, as the alternative idiots are assumed to be more dangerous, and the alternatives are judged to small/ineffective/untried).
The Irish Border is a UK problem while Northern Ireland is still a part of the UK (while there is still a UK, the whole Brexit thing seems to be an English idea). A hard border between North and South could well kick off the troubles again.
Nothing has been healed there, merely stitched together, as the population keeps voting the same idiot parties in (but then, people keep voting the same idiots in everywhere, as the alternative idiots are assumed to be more dangerous, and the alternatives are judged to small/ineffective/untried).
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The UK has always seemed weirdly divided and fragmented by geography, class, local grudges, etc.
And somehow, these things seem to linger for centuries without much real progress.
Seen from a safe distance, it looks like a case where major restructuring is in order... probably starting with eradicating class/dialect/accent/wealth/status differentiation. Not sure how you would do it, but really, it has to be done.
Otherwise, social attitudes look to stay stuck in the 17th century.
Actually he has it spot on. I've lived in the UK my entire life. Ask scousers what they think of Manchester. Maccams what they think of Newcastle. Weegies what they think of Edinburgh. Or England. Most of the country what they think of London. Londoners whether they have heard of any of these places outside London.
And so on. And the country is more divided than ever. Scotland will be independent within a decade. We'll give Ireland the rest of their country back. No idea what will happen with Wales. They never seem to know what they want.
The UK has always seemed weirdly divided and fragmented by geography, class, local grudges, etc.
Only for outsiders who make assumptions without understanding the facts.
Seen from a safe distance,
Enough said...
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Looking at something from the outside usually limits personal experience and observation, thus reducing 'zero effort knowledge'.
It also has a tendency to increase objectivity.
Human nature being what it is, it is usually easier to acquire more information than to acquire more objectivity.... and humans are at least as good at recognizing their lack of information as they are at recognizing their lack of objectivity, and usually better.
Well........ Last couple of "world wars" last century were between countries that were huge trading partners with each other. I suggest if history tells us anything, it tells us that the people we hurt economically are the ones that start aggressive maneuvers. Hence if what is left of the EU after we leave will be doing it's darndest to damage the UK, then this "Galileo" nonense is just that. They are the ones we need to protect ourselves from (NATO not withstanding).
I still believe that the EU's biggest worry is that other nations will follow us out. Destroying Germany's great federation plan designed to have every other member making them riches beyond measure.
That's really all we need to accept.
I still believe that the EU's biggest worry is that other nations will follow us out. Destroying Germany's great federation plan designed to have every other member making them riches beyond measure.
Of course it is. With hindsight, it should have been obvious that the EU would angle for no deal - not just a bad deal for the UK, but a no-deal Brexit because they're terrified of others following. A colleague was in Italy working during the referendum and woke up wondering what the reception would be like when he got into the Italian office he was visiting. He was met with a rousing cheer of "now we can leave too!".
It's the same reason that various EU countries started piping up around the time of the Scottish IndyRef stating that Scotland joining the EU as an independent state would not be a shoe-in and they'd have to apply like everyone else and wouldn't be fast-tracked as a former bit of Britain. Funnily enough, those countries tended to be the ones with bolshy separatists angling for independence like Spain (Basque Country & Catalonia), Italy (South Tyrol), Belgium (Wallonia) who don't want precedent set and want to squash any hopes separatist movements might have of joining the EU as Independent States. Brexit is just the same principle scaled up a tier.
I like your implied definition of 'control'. Perhaps in 1970, we controlled a bit of it, although the Americans in Keflavik and the Norwegians had a tiny role to play.
Today if it ever came to an all out shooting war I'm sure we could go it alone. Basically we can moor Reese Mogg in a dinghy off Murmansk, and the localised time warp he generates will spirit up a Dreadnought (1906 version or two) - to teach the Tsar a lesson he won't forget before tea and crumpets.
We can't "disable" it but there was talk of withholding an export license for any new satellites, etc.
I suspect it would just be added to the Brexit divorce bill if we did as I guess we were contracted to supply it and *we* were the ones who decided to pull out of the agreements.
The funding of the Galileo work was spent in the countries that contributed it, basically. The money that Britain has put into the project has already been paid to British companies building the Giove test satellites and other parts of the system. There's no funds left to refund. Since Britain is leaving the EU and thus the Galileo project we won't be contributing any more funds to it but we won't be getting contracts to build any more of it either. Out means out, as the Leave campaign said.
"If the UK is kicked out they will be entitled to a refund."
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The UK was *not* kicked out.
It quit the club, against the advice of the other members, and many others.
Then it decided it wanted to keep some of the extras perqs, which broke the rules it insisted on writing into the deal, so it should have know that Quiting Means Quiting.
The resultant whining is totally unjustified.
Does May really think this and the other "We can handle No Deal" bluffs will fool the EU ?
It should at least not fool the intelligent readers of The Register, who must surely realise that no real money will be spent, because such a system will be way too expensive for what will be a poor country after Brexit.
Bluff called.
"The UK Government has found it difficult to understand that if one stops being a member of a club, one loses access to that club’s facilities."
And if rather than just "hiring" the Gym you actually paid to construct part of your Gym's building and the equipment you reckon they should keep it all then ?
The gym argument is stupid. As is the divorce one. We're actually negotiating leaving the EU. It's a unique situation. It's as silly as all those car analogies for music piracy / copyright.
But two can play at being stupid, and there is another side to said gym argument. i.e. why would we pay a bill to leave the EU? The EU has legal personality - so technically is liable for its own bills. So there's no reason for us not to pay up to the day we leave the "gym" and then pay not a penny more? That is how membership of a club works, if that's the argument you want to make. As I understand it this is the actual legal position. Perhaps the Commission need to play a bit carefully on how they negotiate this?
I believe we did individually guarantee some loans to Ukraine, which will probably not get paid back in full, and I'm sure there's a few other wrinkles, where the UK government is directly liable for certain spending committments. But in general the EU is liable for what it's guaranteed to spend, and then responsible for collecting the required money from its member governments.
>We're actually negotiating leaving the EU.
No. We're (feebly) negotiating the aftermath of leaving - trying to limit the damage. Different thing entirely.
>why would we pay a bill to leave the EU?
No. We aren't paying to leave. We're fulfilling longterm commitments (if we have any sense of honour left).
No. We aren't paying to leave. We're fulfilling longterm commitments (if we have any sense of honour left).
The EU does its accounts in a very odd way. In that the Commission authorises a lot of speculative spending, which can in rare cases take over a decade to happen, or often not happen at all. They work on the same principal as airlines over-selling seats on fully booked planes, because some people always fail to turn up. So the Commission will authorise more spending committments than it has budget for, as the project can't go ahead unless their funding is matched in-country, and then wait to see what happens. Makes the budget a right old mess. This leads to a lot of under and over spends, which will hopefully net off against each other.
Anyway, the Commission's argument is that we're still on the hook for a bunch of these projects that were authorised while we were members. But we're not due any of the benefits from the things we paid for while members. Which is utterly illogical. Apart from the pensions of EU civil servants and the loan guarantees to Ukraine, I can't think of any other major financial committments we are morally or legally on the hook for (though I'm sure there are a bunch of smaller ones).
The EU has legal personality since the Lisbon constitution treaty. - so makes all its financial committments in its own name. Therefore if it's a club, we owe the fees while we're a member and not afterwards. Otherwise, if we owe ongoing fees, we also own our share of the assets. And should net our share off against our liabilities.
I think the legal position is very clear. And so, I suspect, do the Commission. Which is why they refused to even start to negotiate anything else, before getting a huge financial committment agreed.
So no, morally I don't think we're on the hook for £35 billion. Or legally either.
I wouldn't have done the negotiations like this. I'd have offered a settlement for EU citizens living in the UK (guaranteed whatever the outcome) and a large payment to cover this stuff at the beginning, and a couple of options/suggestions on the ongoing trade relationship and let the negotiations start from there. But actually it hasn't been the British government that have made the negotiations so adversarial - that's been pretty much all down to the Commission. They've been the ones doing the leaking (and what looks like some outright lies) on a regular basis, while May didn't stoop to that level (perhaps she should have?). It looks like pretty much the same playbook as in the negotiations with Greece. And they were the ones who started deliberatly with talk of a £100bn UK payment in order to be politically unacceptable and poison the atmosphere - when it was obvious to anyone that a payment could have been negotiated in parallel with everything else - on the simple grounds of no payment no goodies. Doing it simultaneously makes it a lot easier to sell, so it was pretty clear they were deliberaly trying to make political difficulties for May's government. Which may well have backfired - and led to a situation where no deal is now quite likely. Though the treaty is clear that the Commision does not have the comptetence to negotiate the exit deal, that is in the competence of the Council of Ministers, so it could just be a bit of good cop bad cop thing.
Oh, and you're wrong. We're not negotiating the aftermath of leaving. We're negotiating the exit. The Commission have refused to do that until the transition period - i.e. once we've actually left.
Article 50 states that the Council of Ministers shall negotiate a withdrawal agreement which takes account of the future relationship with the leaving country. But a future trade deal is entirely within the legal competence of the Commission, and they've refused to even discuss that until we're a third country. i.e. during the transition period. So what we're currently negotiating is all the nitty-gritty of how to leave and all the institutional fall-out from that. With an outline of the future trade/security arrangements to be agreed later. Then, after we've left, we negotiate the detail of that outline understanding - during the transition period. When we'll trade as if we're still in the EU, but not be part of it. Hence the security relationship now going titsup, because that isn't part of the transition agreement, but the Commission has barely even started talking to us about that and has surprised us with its initial uncooperative position. Given our current position is to offer full cooperation at no cost (i.e. a huge benefit to other EU members) and the Commission's current position appears to be to reject some of that free cooperation and demand we pay a cost to offer some of the other things we contribute.
I thought "no deal" was a 5-10% chance back in 2016. It's looking like 30-50% at the moment. But I'm seeing rumours of Barnier losing influence - so I wonder if he's pushed a bit harder than he was supposed to? We shall see. At the moment even a Canada style trade deal is off the table, which I do find a bit surprising.
Good analysis.
But I'm seeing rumours of Barnier losing influence - so I wonder if he's pushed a bit harder than he was supposed to?
Could be. Barnier & Macron are now starting to talk about a "very special" deal for the UK. They may have finally realised that stonewalling in the expectation that the UK will give up & stay was never going to work, and that "no deal" really is something we're willing to risk. Pity Theresa May didn't have the balls to make that clearer at the start, indeed.
Pity Theresa May didn't have the balls to make that clearer at the start, indeed.
On that I disagree. The priority of the EU27 is the continuing integrity and success of the EU. Which is perfectly reasonable, and not something we should seek to disturb - even though we're leaving. Obviously the EU has major problems, mainly the Euro clusterfuck - but in general it's still a reasonably useful organisation, despite many drawbacks.
So going in all adversarial and trying to pit us against them was always going to fail as a tactic - and make compromise harder, not easier. Remember governments have to sell the deal to their populations, just as the UK did. This was why the Greeks were fucked when Syriza won. Varoufakis was actually making somer very sensible proposals, but the creditor countries weren't even willing to listen at the point, because their poplulations believed that the Greeks were lazy good-for-nothings who deserved everything they got. Now admittedly a lot of the reason for that is that the German government deliberately painted the issue that way, in order to avoid the first bail-out and to avoid admitting that the Euro is a continuing clusterfuck that needs to be massively reformed or abandonded... But I digress.
The point is that we probably should have been even more reasonable and fluffy. People like Johnson and Fox should have been told to be helpful, shut the fuck up or be sacked. We should have started with a generous offer and said that we can't accept full freedom of movement and that if they aren't willing to give single market access without it - then we'd like the closest relationship they were willing to offer within those terms.
I think the Commission have over-played their hand, in almost trying to force May to stay in the Single Market - while also trying to undermine her authority - despite the fact that she'd be the person that has to get any deal through Parliament. And I'm not sure if a generous start to proceedings would have made any difference, but in PR terms it would have made the Commission look as petty as they're actually being.
At the moment we're in a situation with no exits, because I don't think anyone can get full Single Market membership through the Commons, and the Commission have pushed so hard on the Irish border issue that we don't currently even have the option of no special deal, but just to leave and do a Canada style free trade deal. I suppose Corbyn might be willing to basically create an internal legal and customs border between two parts of the UK - but could he persuade the rest of Labour, let alone a numnber of Conservatives and the DUP?
Even then no deal probably means lots of little deals. There are lots of mostly non-political meetings going on about things like mutual airline recognition. I know it's a common remainer trope to portray May as utterly incompetent and the EU as great, but given we have the same legal code as when we were members and we've guaranteed EU flights continuing access to our airspace - would it really be us who were a laughing stock if next year the EU refuse to allow our planes into their airspace? Or would it be them who looked vindictive and incompetent?
It's not like they've got massive economic growth and us none, so deliberately massively disrupting our common trade is also not a good look. As well as risking a sudden recession. It might be worse here, but we don't have the handicap of the Eurozone. Pushing Italy into recession would be a really bad idea. So I'm not optimistic for a great deal, but I'm hoping that common sense means something will get cobbled together that isn't awful for anyone - even if it doesn't please anyone either.
On that I disagree.
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So going in all adversarial and trying to pit us against them was always going to fail as a tactic
Oh, that wasn't what I meant. It clearly is a failed tactic, it's what the EU tried on us, and it hasn't worked.
My comment on May lacking balls was more that she didn't make it clear from the start that we were willing to walk away with no deal rather than accept a bad one. Instead she gave the impression that we would allow ourselves to be pushed into a bad deal. That left Barnier & co. thinking that they could be adversarial, and it's taken much too long to get to the point of real discussion because of that. I do think that Johnson & Davis would have set the tone for the negotiations on a much more realistic basis at the start, if they had been allowed to do so.
Other than that I agree with the rest of your post.
I see what you mean.
However, if May had said she was happy with no deal, would anybody believe her? In fact she did in her initial speeches say that no deal was better than a bad deal - but the problem is there's almost no deal that's so bad that leaving in complete chaos is better. Admittedly leaving in complete chaos is unlikely, as lots of the little stuff is non-controversial and could be sorted out by direct civil service to civil service contact. But encouraging talk of no-deal could even lead to stuff like that being held hostage. If you completely break the relationship, anything could happen. And nobody likes dealing with threats - apart from anything else it makes selling the eventual deal to your electorate very hard.
There's no point in trying to say something that isn't true - if the other side know it isn't true. Anyway this isn't poker, the deal has to get done but also has to survive in the long term. What you win by dodgy tactics now, will only get snatched away as the future relationship deteriorates. As Barnier may just be realising...
Plus you have to remember that May campaigned for remain. Also, despite the Conservative party being quite anti the EU justice portfolio (on which we had an opt-out) - May signed us back up to most of it as Home Secretary. Not only that, she persuaded a cabinet with quite a lot of eurosceptics in it to sign off on that. She actually made quite a few friends in Brussels at the time (about 2012-13 IIRC).
I think her attitude to the EU is mostly pragmatic (a proper Conservative view in my book - idealism is higher risk). A view shared by a majority of voters - only a minority have strong opinions on the EU either way. But her cost-benefit calculation came out for remain. So I supect that she'd feel a no-deal messy exit would be a disaster, and she might personally be happy with EEA membership - but has made the calculation that unlimited freedom of movement isn't acceptable to the electorate. So on that basis, to threaten it would be hard to believe - and I suspect she'd feel, irresponsible. After all, she is a cautious middle-of-the-road conservative type.
Also it's very easy to say, "take the big risk and play for the big stakes" when it's not you that has to make the decision. It's a bit different when you've got a whole department of civil servants advising you to be cautious - and whatever you think of their opinion on the EU, there are good reasons to be cautious. Particularly when that decision is so big that historians and political theorists will be writing fat books on your decisions for the next century. That's quite a lot of pressure...
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