Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

As the English are de facto making all the decisions and also decided against English or regional devolved institutions, it is fair to blame them for the dysfunctional British federalism with its skewed political institutions and unclear constitutional power share.

I'm not sure about blame - in terms of that I can't really look past New Labour who I think had developed thoughts on devolving power to Scotland (and Northern Ireland in the specific context of the GFA). But I think Wales and England were after-thoughts. And I don't think they'd thought through the devolution settlement more widely or how it all interacts or what to do about England. But I think that is a feature of Blair's constitutional reforms especially that they were generally significant but each was seen in isolation so there was no overall view of how they all fitted together.

It's true voters in the North-East rejected a North-East regional assembly which was an attempt to have regional devolution. But I think one of the big issues with that is you have to work with the sort of mental map people have - England exists as a nation, counties exist, cities exist - and politics in those units works. But inventing a new level of government without as clear an identity won't work - particularly when it was clear that Labour was proposing that as an approach because they tend not to do well in England so they wanted to split it up into units where they would win some. So it was coming from a place of political opportunism.

But aside from that - there is no party to vote for that supports devolution to England, or an English parliament or any form of English democratic self-government. The Tories speak in front of the union flag and always refer to Britain when, very often, they mean England (this is true of lots of organisations). On the other hand, as I say, Labour relied on the votes of Scottish and Welsh MPs to pass reforms of the English health service or education system. Those are devolved matters, so English MPs do not have a vote on the Scottish or Welsh equivalent. All of that is a consequence of leaving the UK institutions to be responsible for governing England, which I'm not sure is a great idea but it is the decision of multiple governments now.

We're not a federal country - I personally think federalism would be a good idea but it should be as part of a wider settlement rather than the piecemeal reforms we've had previously. But I don't know if there's a way to unskew it because ultimately if the nation is your political unit, then England has 85% of the people in the country (and this proportion has been growing since the war).

[Zoupa]

A federal UK wouldn't work if you don't subdivide England.

[Sheilbh]

I agree - but there's no sign people really want it (and at least one referendum where 77% of them voted no) so it would have to be imposed on them. Also I think it'd be quite a complex and costly process because basically no bits of the state are really set up along the lines of those regions. I also wonder about the tax/spend implications because we raise very few taxes locally compared to most countries - there is some English hostility to the fact that they "subsidise" the Scots. That's sort of true but the bigger reality is that London and the South-East subsidise everywhere else in the UK and a lot of transfers are basically disguised under Englishness, just as they are broadly under the UK (there are only estimates of what the Scottish deficit would be for example). Without a significant shift in the tax system I worry we'd get the politics of rich regions resenting spending money on poorer regions who have services they don't, or if we go too far to local taxes poorer regions having worse public services.

Separately - a really interesting piece on the importance of consent in the British constitution. I was aware of Northern Ireland but had never really thought of the wider implications until 2014, and it is the line of the SNP: we are not a union of law or force but of consent and they have a mandate to ask the question. Which is something I find pretty persuasive - I can't think of a good reason to deny the Scottish government a referendum after the pandemic. notleast for the reasons here:

Consent: the dynamite at the heart of the British constitution
Popular sovereignty is fundamental, but our politicians forgot it until Brexit. If they forget again, they will blow apart the country
By
Helen Thompson
June 9, 2021
July 2021

The British constitution never looked less like itself than in the final months of the UK's EU membership. In office was a government that constitutionally speaking should not have existed: one that could no longer command a majority in the House of Commons. Fearing parliament would legislate against a no-deal Brexit, the prime minister used the Crown's prerogative powers to prorogue it for five weeks. This encouraged some opposition MPs to take to the Scottish Court of Session to petition for parliament's right to reassemble. In September 2019, the Supreme Court ruled the prorogation unlawful, elevating the judiciary to a role it had not hitherto performed: as the ultimate guarantor of the British constitution's conventions.

For those who saw the Court's decision as correct and necessary, the bedrock principle at stake was parliamentary sovereignty. For many who had long wanted Britain to leave the EU, their inspiration was that very same principle. Each meant something different by it, but all deployed a caricature of the constitution—missing the awkward reality that the principle of parliamentary sovereignty co-exists in practice with an idea of popular sovereignty, centred on democratic consent to constitutional change. Paradoxically, it took the EU experience to teach British politicians about the British constitution.

Only now, with this half-century period in our history over, does it become possible to understand how EU membership became a very British story about the perils of ignoring democratic consent. But if this chapter is closed, its lessons remain urgent: the three-century long Anglo-Scottish Union is reaching another crisis point, and we are again reckoning with the demands of consent for the constitutional order.

Original sin

From the beginning, the contrast between the British constitutional tradition and that of the legal order of the European Community that Britain would join in the early 1970s appeared stark. The British constitution was conventionally rendered as the idea that no parliament could bind its successor. This characterisation oversimplified. But the emphasis on parliamentary sovereignty did highlight one undeniable disparity with the EC: the absence of a constitutional court that could set aside the laws parliament passed.

It is inconceivable that the law lords—who then comprised the highest UK court—would have engaged in anything akin to what Perry Anderson, in a recent trio of essays for the London Review of Books, describes as the "brilliant coup" achieved by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In successive decisions in 1963 and 1964, the ECJ asserted the primacy of Community law over national law, getting the six member states to accept this doctrine as a constraining constitutional principle on their politics. Falling between Britain's first (1961-1963) and second (1967) unsuccessful applications to join the Community, these rulings heightened the constitutional implications of eventual accession. If the UK were an EC member, there would be new laws with direct effect across the UK authorised by a legislative body other than Westminster.

Aware of the problem, those who drafted the 1972 European Communities Act tried to muddy the waters—by structuring the legislation so that the formal applicability of EC law in the UK was conditional on the British parliament having legislated for it to have effect. Otherwise, the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath and his ministers fell back on obfuscation. "Essential national sovereignty," they insisted, remained in place, as if Britain retaining a veto in the Council of Ministers was the same as parliament retaining the sole right to legislate. Heath himself was also outright dishonest with the electorate about how he envisaged the Community's authority developing: as a telegram he sent to his chancellor in March 1973 quietly noted, his government's "goal" was "economic and monetary union," something then being pushed by the West German government.

But from the off, it was an aspect of the British constitution less lauded than parliamentary sovereignty that proved more troublesome for such ambitions. Heath himself had at one point acknowledged that membership would require the "full-hearted consent of the British parliament and people." Given his manifesto ("our commitment is to negotiate; no more no less") though, it was a struggle for him to claim a mandate for accession from the 1970 general election. In ultimately deciding that parliamentary assent alone was sufficient to bring about EC entry, Heath committed a constitutional sin by ignoring the issue of the electorate's consent to a major constitutional change.

The principle that he breached was one forcibly articulated in the writings of AV Dicey, the Victorian constitutional theorist usually invoked as the high priest of parliamentary—not popular—sovereignty. (His most famous lines are about parliament being free to "make or unmake any law whatever.") Dicey worried that parliament could in principle pass significant constitutional legislation that did not enjoy majority support from the people, and thus thought there was a place for referendums. Certainly, parliamentary sovereignty ensured that parliament had the sole legal authority to legislate however it saw fit. But for Dicey, parliament's political authority to legislate was limited by the final sovereignty of the people. As he explained in the Laws of England, the constitution's conventions were there to guarantee that what was decided "in the long run" gave "effect to the will of that power which in modern England is the true political sovereign of the state—the majority of the electorate."

In his 1890 essay "Ought the referendum to be introduced into England?" Dicey argued that there were two ways to win a mandate for constitutional change: a general election in which the constitutional issue was central to the campaign, or a referendum. Looking at what happened in practice, he saw examples of general elections doing that work: the one in 1831 fought over franchise reform, after which followed the 1832 Reform Act; and the 1868 election fought on disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, after which followed the 1869 Irish Church Act. Such episodes showed the constitution included "the spirit" if not the "form" of a referendum. But given general elections also had to settle the different matter of who is to govern, in some circumstances, he thought, the form might also be required to do the job.

Slow burn

After the EC accession legislation received royal assent, Labour's Harold Wilson threw the Diceyan argument at Heath, declaiming that "the treaty which he signed, which he now claims as sacrosanct, was signed without one whit of authority from the British people." This issue caused the first crisis of the UK's EC membership, one which Heath, taking full advantage of the British constitution, inadvertently precipitated.

The constitutional rupture in 1973 did not change the adversarial form of politics that the old constitution encouraged: with a first-past-the-post electoral system, a tendency to majoritarian single-party governments and power almost wholly concentrated at Westminster, there was less space for coalitions and the emergence of new governments between elections than in other EC states. The stakes were always high: the party that held power had everything but feared losing everything. The resulting culture was one in which oppositions were liable to oppose much of what a government did—which meant that anything, including treaties, could end up in the electoral mix.

Convinced he could exploit what he assumed was Labour's weakness over a miners' strike, Heath called an early election in February 1974. But Labour's promise of a referendum on the EC, allied to Enoch Powell's break from the Tories to back that position, meant Heath instead opened up an electoral contest about the treaty he had passed. With Labour narrowly winning that election and an autumn re-run, the referendum on EC membership that the constitution had arguably demanded back in 1972 finally took place in 1975.

Although the "Yes" campaign easily triumphed, ongoing consent to EC membership thereafter depended on two related conditions. First, subsequent new European laws could not intrude on electorally salient matters. Second, the EC's constitutional order needed to appear constant. Otherwise, the question of consent could re-materialise, and a government seeking to ratify a new treaty would be vulnerable to the opposition demanding a fresh referendum.

From the mid 1980s, there were moments that could have threatened these conditions. A new treaty, the Single European Act, arrived in 1986. Although it introduced veto-proof qualified majority voting on single market issues, in opposition the Labour Party of the day showed no interest in the issue and parliament held no debate on a referendum amendment. Meanwhile, in the Factortame case in 1991, the law lords appeared to strike down part of the 1988 Merchant Shipping Act because it violated EC law, thus formally subordinating parliament to British courts and ultimately the ECJ. But the ownership and registration of ships was not an electorally salient matter.

It was only the prospect of European monetary union and the Maastricht treaty, signed in 1992, that eventually blew open the whole issue. The economic issues involved were obviously crucial, and monetary union posed a painful policy dilemma: sterling's weakness appeared to be both a reason to seek safety on a European monetary lifeboat and a reason to fear the discipline of a single European currency. Most British politicians played for time, and as they did so they ignored the Diceyan problem of popular consent for constitutional change that loomed on the horizon.

For a while, they succeeded in postponing the moment of reckoning. Margaret Thatcher's apparent desire to fight a general election around her absolute opposition to monetary union generated dread in the upper echelons of the Conservative Party and brought her premiership to an end. Initially, her successor, John Major, looked like he would easily succeed in using parliamentary votes to ratify a treaty that committed Britain to the first two stages of monetary union—and gave any future government an easy formal means of taking the last step, of converting to the emerging euro. Banished to the backbenches, Thatcher attempted a Diceyan crusade against Maastricht, insisting that "anyone who does not consider a referendum necessary must explain how the voice of the people shall be heard." But Labour showed little interest in joining her: its spring 1992 manifesto neither categorically opposed the single currency nor tied entry to a referendum.

Only after the wreckage of Black Wednesday, when investors forced sterling out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, did the party leaders become seized by electoral anxiety over the future direction of the EU. While other European governments moved to rescue monetary union, British politicians now feared they would pay a price for further subordinating economic policy to the European Central Bank. In this new environment, and now with only a small government majority, ratifying the Maastricht treaty turned into siege parliamentary warfare. Battered by the experience, the Conservatives soon returned to opposition with a newfound Diceyan view about the indispensability of popular consent for further EU treaties. As for what they had already agreed in the Maastricht treaty, both main parties were fast coming to understand that there was no chance they could contemplate joining the euro in the future without promising a referendum, and both were committed to that being a condition by the 1997 election.

Henceforth, the issue of referendums around the EU would be a matter of British electoral politics. Advantaged by the size of his parliamentary majority, Tony Blair rode out the Amsterdam (signed 1997) and Nice (signed 2001) treaties. The 2004 European constitutional treaty proved a very different proposition: all three principal parties fought the 2005 general election with a commitment to subject it to a referendum. Blair was saved from redeeming Labour's promise only because French and Dutch voters rejected the treaty before a referendum could occur. When the constitutional treaty was eventually repackaged as the Lisbon treaty, and EU governments encouraged each other to avoid referendums on ratification, Gordon Brown was in charge. Fearing the treaty would be rejected, he invented spurious arguments about supposed differences between the treaties to rationalise purely parliamentary ratification.

For the Conservatives, their insistence that Lisbon should have been subject to a referendum was soon complicated by the rising significance of an issue written into a past treaty: internal EU migration. The party went into the 2010 general election with an immigration target that was—in effect—incompatible with established EU law, along with a promise of a referendum on future treaties, a manifesto package that in the course of events pushed an electorally salient issue (free movement) towards the Diceyan issue of democratic consent. Eventually, Cameron found there would be no new treaty on which he could hold a referendum, and so moved on to staging an in/out vote. But his predictable failure to achieve his immigration target would prove a significant liability in his bid retrospectively to secure the missing popular consent for the treaties from Maastricht to Lisbon.

Which "people"?

The 2016 referendum might have settled one question about consent, but it immediately raised another. Whereas back in 1972, Wilson had talked about "the sovereign authority of the British people," by 2016, the constitution no longer—if it ever did—made "the British people," or for that matter Westminster, the sovereign authority of the UK Union. And the question of whether the Scottish and Northern Irish people (who had both voted Remain) any longer consented to the Union would press with renewed force because as powers "came home" from Brussels, there would be fundamental questions about where exactly they were to be repatriated to, the answer to which would rework the relationship between devolved and reserved powers in the Union's internal constitutional order.

For Dicey, consent was majoritarian and Anglo-British: his language openly betrays that he wanted to treat the English people and the British people as synonymous. He pressed his political case for a UK-wide referendum on Home Rule for Ireland precisely because he thought, in effect, that by virtue of size, the English majority should prevail on the structure of the Union.

But the British people are not, and never were, the English writ large. If a general change to the constitution is taken to require consent, any changes to the 1707 Act of Union's clear constitutional protections for Scotland should likewise require Scottish consent. Even if Dicey did not accept that, this argument can be cast using his very own distinction: parliament may have the legal authority to overturn the 1707 Act of Union, but it clearly lacks the political authority to do so. Indeed, before the end of Dicey's life, Westminster would explicitly legislate—in 1921—to restrict itself on matters pertaining to the Church of Scotland in acknowledgement of this.

During the years of EU membership, the idea that the "British people" could be constitutionally disaggregated had taken hold—in ways that would have made Dicey despair. In providing for referendums on the governance of Northern Ireland (1973, 1998), Scotland (1979, 1997, 2014) and Wales (1979, 1997, 2011), Westminster explicitly or implicitly acknowledged that the non-English peoples of the United Kingdom were the sovereign authority regarding their participation in the Union. (Devolution brought implications for England too—not least by creating a de facto English government responsible for matters that were devolved elsewhere—but the question about English consent to change was never asked.)

By the 2010s, both the general principle that constitutional change required plebiscitary consent, and the differentiation between the relevant "people" in the Union, had prevailed over any residual notion that the constitution was Westminster's business. Take the 2010 manifestos. On top of the various UK-wide referendum propositions floated—the alternative vote and Lords reform (Labour); a written constitution and an in/out vote for any new EU treaty that transferred powers from Westminster (the Lib Dems); the Tories' "referendum lock" on all such treaties—Labour put forward a Welsh plebiscite on devolving more powers, which the Conservatives signalled they wouldn't oppose. In the event, the 2010-2015 parliament witnessed the Welsh vote on powers, and—unanticipated at its start—a Scottish vote on independence, as well as a UK-wide referendum on the alternative vote. A consensus about the need for popular consent on constitutional change appeared to have formed. At least in part this included Europe: while Labour did not match Cameron's immediate referendum commitment in its 2015 manifesto, it did promise that any new treaty would bring an in/out plebiscite.

And yet—when it came—the EU referendum let loose a sustained attack on the very idea that popular sovereignty had any part in the British constitution. Some MPs reimagined parliamentary sovereignty so as to imply that referendums were alien to the British way. Meanwhile, a novel constitutional body that was never consented to in any general election or referendum—the Supreme Court—became an instrument used by various petitioners looking in one way or another to frustrate the UK government's discretion to pursue Brexit.

Through the Supreme Court's involvement, the idea that had underpinned two referendums—namely, that the British people had sovereign authority to decide to end EU membership—faltered. As it did, so the constitutional rules with which the Supreme Court chose to engage also became more contested: soon the government's opponents in the courts were deploying arguments to assert parliament's rights deriving from a distinct Scottish constitutional tradition at odds with a singularly English one.

Court short

The Supreme Court's first important ruling came in January 2017, the so-called Miller 1 case. The High Court had previously accepted Gina Miller's case that since Brexit would end legal rights created by parliament, the UK government could not fall back on the Crown's prerogative powers to trigger Article 50. Potentially lethally for the British government, the reasoning invoked to justify restricting its power appeared to erode the distinction between "reserved" matters, like EU membership, and devolved policy areas. Recognising the potentially massive implications, the Scottish and Welsh governments joined the case to argue that Holyrood and the Senedd had to consent before Westminster could trigger Brexit. In this instance, the Supreme Court shied away from the implications of the High Court's earlier judgment, which taken to its logical conclusion would have granted a Scottish and Welsh Brexit veto.

But the Supreme Court could not banish the pressure the Union now placed on the constitution. Even as it acted more obviously as a constitutional court than ever before, it sowed doubts about whether there was in fact a unified British constitution for the judges to arbitrate. In Miller 1, the Court upheld the petitioners' use of the pre-Union Scottish Claim of Right. In accepting this move, it asserted that the Scottish constitutional tradition was not extinguished by the Act of Union. That claim wasn't new—Scottish nationalists have maintained as much since the mid 20th century—but it is hard to square with any idea that the constitution serves and stabilises the Union.

Since neither Theresa May nor Boris Johnson's minority governments had the votes to pass their respective withdrawal agreements in the 2017-2019 parliament, and since MPs were unwilling to allow a no-deal exit, the Supreme Court remained a potential constraint on the executive and an opportunity for the opposition. In proroguing parliament in August 2019, Johnson overstepped the new judicial limits, inviting the opponents of Brexit to ask for them to be pushed further. In its ruling adjudicating between the completely opposed prior rulings offered by the highest English and Scottish courts, the Supreme Court made itself the arbiter of constitutional conventions. It also accepted the notion that there was pre-Union foundational constitutional law from Scotland governing the relationship between parliament and the executive.

Mistakes and high stakes

In making his case for the comparative virtues of a British constitutional way over the EU's "simulacrum of a sentient democracy," dependent on decree and subterfuge, Perry Anderson insists that the difference turns on the "fact... that British governments can only survive if they enjoy a majority in the Commons... and if they fall, elections to replace them must ensue." In this, however, he misses the force of the one constitutional change made by the 2010-2015 parliament without a referendum: the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. Without it, Johnson could have dissolved parliament for a general election before the Supreme Court ruled in Miller 2. With it, in the autumn of 2019 a majority in parliament locked in office a government that didn't enjoy the support of the Commons—and shut voters out from their place in the constitution.

But even in this constitutional void, the adversarial habits between parties bred by the old British constitutional order died hard. During the crucial September and October weeks, there were simply too few MPs willing to countenance making Jeremy Corbyn prime minister, and the Labour leadership was unwilling to support an alternative figure. In the resulting stasis, and confronted with the misplaced confidence of the Lib Dems and well-founded convictions of the SNP about their election prospects, the Labour leadership finally succumbed to Johnson's push for an election.

Once the voters were reintroduced into proceedings, the final decision to leave the EU eventually found its Diceyan resolution in a choice of the British people—albeit, ultimately, one expressed indirectly in a general election rather than the 2016 referendum. That 2019 election became what the EU's court-centric constitutional order inhibits: a high-stakes political contest where radically different outcomes were real possibilities.

The one that prevailed has only made likely more such contests in relation to the UK Union. The constitutional order as it applies to Scotland and Northern Ireland now has undeniably changed without the expressed consent of Scottish and Northern Irish voters, who had neither backed Brexit in 2016 nor returned Conservative majorities in 2019. Although in the case of Scotland, Westminster holds the legal authority over a referendum, the argument that the political consent of Scottish and Northern Irish voters with regards to the Union can be subject to another high-stakes test of consent is hard to rebut.

Indeed, the distinct premium on consent—and the fact that such contests are ultimately hard to avoid in British politics—is a part of what made the UK unsuited for EU membership. Although the states that joined the EC with Britain held referendums prior to accession, and they and several others went on to hold votes on treaties, there is one clear difference around the seriousness with which consent is taken: no EU state recognises a unilateral right of secession of any part of its territory in the way that such a right is understood to apply to at least the non-English parts of the UK.

That certainly makes it likely there will be difficult times ahead for the Union. But forms of democratic politics structured to manufacture consensus and keep questions of consent at bay cannot make them permanently disappear. Rather, the places where they manifest mutate. After French voters rejected the EU constitutional treaty, the hitherto referendum-orientated Fifth Republic dispensed with them. Instead, in 2017, it ended up with an unusually high-stakes presidential election, after neither candidate from the two principal parties made it to the second round. Emmanuel Macron prevailed over the hard-right Marine Le Pen by promising to make Europe more French again, only to find the EU's structures less than pliable to French election results and democratic discontent on the French streets. Weakened, the French Republic must next year be put to existential test again.

For the UK, the demands of consent remain onerous. It is easier to govern if these questions don't have to be asked. But the Union has already been subject to such constitutional change and the constitution become too complicated by the Union for the status quo to endure for long. There is still a lot more of the politics of consent to come, including in relation to England, and it is incumbent upon politicians to grasp this. If they fail to understand how we have got here, and why consent keeps rearing its head, they and the Union will eventually pay the price.

Helen Thompson
Helen Thompson is professor of political economy at Cambridge and a regular on the Talking Politics podcast

[Zanza]

There are at least three parties that you can vote for to get English institutions: SNP, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Fein... all of these work towards an English nation state. 

[Syt]

So, there's GB News as a new right wing news station in the UK, pardon: GB?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/world/europe/britain-media-gbnews-neil.html

Britain's New Entry in Conservative Media Is Off to a Splashy, but Shaky, Start

Advertiser boycotts, dropped microphones and prank calls bedeviled GB News, but its evening talk show drew higher ratings than competitors on the BBC and Sky.

LONDON — Last Sunday evening, shortly after Prime Minister Boris Johnson had finished selling his vision of a "Global Britain" to world leaders at a Group of 7 summit meeting in Cornwall, a new television news channel took to the airwaves across the country. It offered a rather different vision of Britain.

While Mr. Johnson talked of his country being an open, outward-focused player on the global stage, the new channel, GB News, struck a bluntly populist, patriotic tone. Its chief on-air personality, Andrew Neil, condemned "cancel culture" and vowed to stick up for the kind of people who do not pay much attention to G7 meetings.

"We are proud to be British," Mr. Neil declared in a punchy opening monologue. "The clue is in the name."

The juxtaposition speaks to a country that, five years after voting to leave the European Union, is still wrestling to fashion a post-Brexit identity. While Mr. Johnson played the statesman in Cornwall, his government spends much of its time catering to the same pro-Brexit audience as GB News — a fact that seems to be playing to the channel's advantage in its early days.

Mr. Neil, a prominent former BBC anchor known for his forensic interviewing style, quickly scored a sit-down with Rishi Sunak, the chancellor of the Exchequer and perhaps the most popular Conservative Party politician in the country.

On Monday, Mr. Johnson called on a GB News reporter at a news conference to announce a four-week delay in reopening England's economy because of worries about a fast-transmitting variant of the coronavirus.

Never mind that the night before, another GB News anchor, Dan Wootton, excoriated the prime minister for the delay. "It's looking like Boris Johnson is going to deny us our freedoms tomorrow," he said to a guest on his program, "Can you understand that at any level?" She shook her head.

GB News, whose financial backers include the American cable giant Discovery, was initially going to be one of two Fox News-like entrants in the British market. The other — supported by the Fox News founder, Rupert Murdoch — pulled in its horns amid doubts about the viability of a politically-opinionated, advertiser-supported, 24-hour news channel in a country dominated by the publicly-funded BBC.

With the field to itself, GB News has had a splashy debut in a country where newspapers are gleefully partisan but broadcasting is strictly regulated to prevent the emergence of American-style cable channels.

Mr. Neil's nightly talk show has drawn higher ratings than its competitors on BBC or Sky. He describes GB News not as a clone of Fox but as an antidote to "the metropolitan mind-set that already dominates so much of the media."

Still, the biggest dust-up so far has been over what Mr. Neil claims is an advertiser boycott orchestrated by a left-wing advocacy group, Stop Funding Hate. Ikea, Vodafone, Nivea and several other companies pulled ads from the channel, with some saying they were placed on it without their knowledge.

"It's quite remarkable that serious, important executives in well-established companies can be so easily cowed," Mr. Neil said on his program Thursday. "They've all taken the knee to Stop Funding Hate."

Several companies scrambled to clarify their position. Vodafone insisted it was not engaged in a boycott but was merely assessing the commercial case for advertising on GB News. Ikea said it had pulled its ads too quickly and would now carefully assess whether the channel was an appropriate venue.

"The decision to suspend our advertising was taken at great speed," the Swedish company said in a statement. "We want to make it clear that it was not our intention to polarize our customers or others in this debate."

In its first week at least, GB News was less polarizing than problem plagued. The channel suffered dropped microphones, shaky camera work and suddenly blank screens. Schoolboy pranksters called in with fake names, while a half-dressed comedian appeared to moon viewers with a mirror placed strategically behind him as he spoke into a camera. A Twitter account, @GBNewsFails, attracted 65,000 followers with a minute-by-minute chronicling of the channel's bloopers.

Media analysts said GB News faced a bigger long-term challenge: It wants to be treated as a traditional ad-supported news channel, but it is promoting itself as a politically opinionated combatant in the culture wars.

"GB News is pitching itself along identity lines but using the idea of a separation between advertisers and editorial to fight back against its critics," said Meera Selva, director of the Reuters Journalism Fellowship Program at the University of Oxford.

There are also questions about whether GB News will run afoul of Britain's broadcast rules. Several hundred viewers filed complaints with the broadcasting regulator, known as Ofcom, after Mr. Wootton's harsh criticism of Mr. Johnson's postponed reopening — a warning sign, given that it was the channel's first night.

Under the regulations, broadcasters are allowed to deliver opinions, provided there is a rough balance over the course of a day between left and right. Some media experts said the mix of programming on GB News — from Mr. Wootton's commentary to Mr. Neil's interviews — suggested that it was trying to strike that balance.

"They're not trying to bust the rules," said Stewart Purvis, a former chief editor at the broadcaster ITN, who oversaw content and standards at Ofcom. "They're trying to understand the rules."

More than a British version of Fox, Mr. Purvis said, GB News was an example of "grievance television." Its targets are the media establishment, personified by the BBC, and the politically correct precincts of academia and government. That will appeal to its mainly pro-Brexit audience, he said. But when Mr. Neil is not on the air, GB News fills the time with far less well-known figures.

"What we've never had before in British television is a succession of young people just talking to each other," Mr. Purvis said. "Whether there is an audience for endless, anti-woke, happy talk is less clear."

[Tamas]

Only reason I am aware of the existence of this assumedly right-wing channel is that the GUardian has been making sure people are aware, with repeated articles on it

[Sheilbh]

Well I can't vote for them. They don't run in South London

Good piece in the Guardian on the roiling mood in Northern Ireland:

Ignored, bullied, patronised: why loyalists in Northern Ireland say no to Brexit 'betrayal'


Bandsmen march during the annual Twelfth of July parade in Belfast, 2019. Photograph: Paul Faith/AFP/Getty Images

As the often volatile marching season approaches, bitter tensions over the EU protocol grow, along with a belief that NI is being cast adrift by a duplicitous British government
Rory Carroll
@rorycarroll72
Sat 12 Jun 2021 16.00 BST
Last modified on Sun 13 Jun 2021 05.08 BST

They gathered in their thousands at the top of the Shankill Road with banners and drums to send a message to the far side of the Irish Sea, where a treacherous prime minister played his charade in a kingdom no longer fully theirs.

Some waved union jack flags, others had union jack masks, one had a union jack balaclava, and they tramped behind marching bands with drums, flutes and cymbals, a percussive shockwave in the Belfast dusk.

Across the sea, across the border, Boris Johnson was hosting Joe Biden in Cornwall and talking up Britain's post-Brexit wonderland, but in this corner of Northern Ireland the Queen's most loyal subjects, her face peering from tattoos, murals and portraits, were shouting "No".

No to the Northern Ireland protocol that was the price of Johnson's deal with the EU. No to trade barriers with the rest of the UK that they fear will tilt them towards a united Ireland. No, as they saw it, to being ignored, belittled, patronised, betrayed.

The procession last week – peaceful but without authorisation and in violation of pandemic rules – may herald a long, combustible summer in Northern Ireland. "The fight is against those who would seek to undermine our British sovereignty and deny the British citizens of Northern Ireland their fundamental birthright through the use of political treachery," a masked, anonymous orator told the crowd – 3,000 strong according to police, and one of the biggest protests so far – after it marched and assembled outside a leisure centre.

Rory Carroll
@rorycarroll72
Marching down the Shankill against the protocol, against Boris, Biden, DUP, EU, Dublin. Will marches kill the protocol? Nope, says everyone I spoke to. Only violence, and it will come.
(Video in link: https://twitter.com/rorycarroll72/status/1403079429648171011)

"Our British sovereignty and status within the United Kingdom is in its greatest danger since the state of Northern Ireland was created 100 years ago." What the IRA failed to do with bombs and bullets, an Irish pan-nationalist front that encompassed Washington and Brussels sought to accomplish with trickery, he said. "We can no longer stand idly by and accept this political assault on our democracy, by a group of foreign powers, driven by an anti-British agenda, and encouraged by elements within the establishment in the Republic of Ireland."

At a signal a man in a wheelchair lit a huge banner – purloined from Sinn Féin – that exhorted a united Ireland. Cheers erupted as flames whooshed across the fabric.

The man given the honour of immolating Irish unity said his name was Joe – surname withheld – and that he was 63, had served 18 years in prison during the Troubles, was terminally ill with cancer, and felt violence could return in his lifetime. "If that's the way it has to be, then that's how it'll be."

John Major and Tony Blair, among others, had warned before the 2016 Brexit referendum that departing the EU would destabilise Northern Ireland and here, with smoke pluming into a darkening sky, the genie was out of the bottle.

For loyalists, a week of tense talks between British and EU negotiators, a "sausage war" beyond Swiftian satire, turmoil in the Democratic Unionist party and a US president quoting a poem about Irish republicanism all fed a sense of existential threat.

That Johnson and Biden affirmed the sanctity of the 1998 Good Friday agreement and that Northern Ireland commanded attention amid the G7 summit's grand themes of safeguarding democracy and the planet's climate did not reassure the marchers, because they believe the game is rigged.

Rather than safeguard the Good Friday agreement – by averting a hard border on the island of Ireland - they say the protocol shreds its principles of consent and sovereignty.


Loyalists from the Unionist and Loyalist Unified Coalition in front of a 12th of July bonfire in Portadown. Photograph: Paul McErlane/The Guardian

"People of our generation didn't go to jail and fill the graveyards to see Sinn Féin rule the country and our sovereignty shredded," said a spokesman for the Unionist and Loyalist Unified Coalition (ULUC), one of several groups that have proliferated online in recent months. "We don't want to feel less part of the UK."

They blame the Irish Sea border on Johnson – a prime minister so duplicitous, they believe, that he still denies there is a border – and see it as a victory for an old foe who comes in many guises: the IRA, Sinn Féin, the Dublin government, which they said used the spectre of republican violence to avert a border between the north and south of Ireland, a ploy adopted by the European Commission to move the border to the Irish Sea.

This unholy alliance now includes a misty-eyed Irish-American president. "The world is changed, changed utterly," Biden told US troops after touching down at an RAF base in Sussex. "A terrible beauty has been born." He was referencing WB Yeats in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, but loyalists inferred additional meaning from the fact the poem, Easter, 1916, is about a revolt against British rule in Ireland.

On the Shankill, freshly printed posters showed the president with Gerry Adams, the former Sinn Féin leader, and declared: "Joe Biden is an enemy of Ulster."

That the Democrat in the White House was a republican made the battle against the protocol all the graver, said one middle-aged man. "I'm here to defend my faith, my religion and my Britishness."

The biggest banners, the length of billboards, said: "Protect the Northern Ireland peace process: trigger article 16," a reference to an emergency cord in the protocol.

That these working-class men and women now march behind such arcana shows the political toxicity of regulatory checks on some products travelling between Britain and Northern Ireland.

Amid deafening drumming it is easy to forget that in a recent poll 47% of respondents wanted to keep the protocol versus 42% wanting to dump it. Most people in Northern Ireland voted to stay in the EU and wish politicians would iron out difficulties in the protocol and make it work.

Rosemary Jenkinson, an award-winning Belfast writer who has written a play about loyalist bonfires, Billy Boy, said the protocol worsened a "parlous psychological state" within loyalism. "There is a feeling of being unmoored and adrift. The tethers with the UK feel more frayed. It's a conflation of things."

A census this year is expected to confirm that Catholics outnumber Protestants for the first time since Northern Ireland's creation in 1921, a bitter centenary landmark for unionists and loyalists. Many claim Sinn Féin's political heft has tilted policing against them – which the police vehemently reject – and that this will worsen as Sinn Féin, emboldened by Scottish nationalism, pushes for a referendum on Irish unity.

"It's like a republican threat is hugely respected and noticed but a loyalist threat isn't," said Jenkinson. "It's like they don't exist."

A rogues' gallery of protocol culprits on billboards and banners features Johnson, Biden, the Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney and the European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič.

Notable absences are Arlene Foster, the outgoing DUP leader and first minister, and Edwin Poots, the new DUP leader. It is not for want of contempt.

Loyalists scorn Foster for being duped into the protocol and they dismiss Poots as talk but no action. The recent DUP soap opera – an internal putsch against Foster followed by walkouts, resignations and a reshuffled ministerial team at the Stormont executive, including a newly designated first minister, Paul Givan – is shrugged off as a sideshow.

The DUP, after all, gave Johnson a standing ovation when he made hollow promises at the party conference in 2018. In January it briefly tried to peddle the protocol as a great economic opportunity before making a screeching U-turn.

Now it claims to lead the resistance but permits regulatory checks on goods from Britain and still cooperates with the Irish government – Poots recently met the taoiseach, Micheál Martin, in Dublin. Next week the party may grant Irish language concessions to Sinn Féin. To do otherwise risks collapsing Stormont and triggering an early election which, polls say, would annihilate the DUP.

Loyalists and unionists pound the pavements every summer to commemorate ancient victories but this marching season, coming in the wake of riots over Easter, feels like a tinderbox.

"The question is how long will the protests remain peaceful because the impression given by governments over the years is that violence pays," said Davy Jones, who was an Orange Order spokesman during protests at the County Armagh village of Drumcree in the 1990s, when police blocked Orangemen marching past Catholic homes.

Protests also failed to overturn the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement and Belfast city council's 2012 decision to fly the union jack less frequently, yet former IRA members with blood on their hands now sit in Stormont, said Jones. "That's an awful bad message to give out because eventually it is bound to lead to the violence that we don't want."

A young man at a nearby bonfire site – it will be lit on 9 July to celebrate William of Orange's victory at the battle of the Boyne – said peaceful protests would accomplish nothing. "If that means violence, then there will be violence."

This could all be bluster. The marches, though growing in number and size, are still tiny compared with previous eras. Paramilitary representatives have said they do not plan a return to "war". A compromise between London and Brussels could ease trade frictions and perhaps lull the tiger.

Yet there was a striking consistency among loyalists in Belfast and Portadown, a stronghold near Drumcree. "The protocol has killed the Good Friday agreement stone dead," said one of three representatives of the Unionist and Loyalist Unified Coalition, interviewed at a loyalist hall.

Tweaking the protocol would not suffice, he said. "We're being driven economically into a united Ireland." Conversations in such halls led to the 1994 loyalist ceasefires but recent conversations in those same halls had a darker hue, he said. "We're hearing concerns about violence. It's becoming increasingly difficult to stop." Asked about potential targets, he cited trade infrastructure between north and south such as roads and warehouses. "It could be disrupted."

Boris Johnson covered Drumcree protests in 1996 and 1999 as a journalist with the Daily Telegraph. He assailed Sinn Féin and its republicans allies but did not sympathise with the other side.

"You don't take the pith out of the Orange," he wrote, before doing so with references to "ginger-haired Orangemen", "bowler-hatted bashi-bazouks" and "assorted flat-visaged thugs in jeans and tattoos who roll shiftily around and represent the loyalist paramilitaries".

These dispatches of amused exasperation, of an Englishman trying to make sense of exotic grievance, did make a prophecy of sorts. If government policy appears to reward republicans at the expense of loyalists, watch out, wrote the future prime minister. "In those circumstances, in which IRA murder will be seen as extorting constitutional change to the status of Ulster, the loyalists will strike."

The thing I find most striking about all the pictures and marches this year is the number of people wearing balaclavas and they don't physically look like the lads at the top of that story. They look like they're a lot younger than the sort of re-enactment society element which is one of the things that worries me.

[Tamas]

I am not buying this loyalist BS around Brexit. If they voted Leave they have not been ignored.

More importantly, the DPU actively worked toward torpedoing any sort of deal, and I know Sheilbh you explained earlier why they would not want a hard border between them and Ireland but I am still having a hard time buying that. If your chief objective is to avoid NI joining Ireland (because you fear for your rights and your safety) then the most certain way to avoid that is a hard border which is difficult to cross.

[Sheilbh]

Only reason I am aware of the existence of this assumedly right-wing channel is that the GUardian has been making sure people are aware, with repeated articles on it

Same. I imagine they'll have to adhere quite strictly to the rules because the least bit of deviation will result in complaints to Ofcom. I think Channel 4 News is probably at the outer limits of what you can do in terms of having a clear opinion/agenda which is where this will probably end up. The rules are quite strict and why, despite Murdoch being involved in British news broadcasting for 40 years, we don't have a Fox News UK or The Sun TV. I also think that the fact they're competitors to Sky (a Murdoch property) will make it difficult for them because I imagine they will get zero or only negative coverage from Murdoch's papers which isn't helpful given their market.

Although - I think Andrew Neil is an excellent interviewer - and I saw a clip of his interview with Sunak which is where I could see value in something like this. He was asking Sunak about net zero and in particular about the need to upgrade homes etc and I think most broadcasters in the UK would focus on whether our net zero targets are going quick enough and should the government be doing more; Neil focused on who will pay for upgrading people's heating systems etc. I think that's where another perspective can be helpful - but, I think Andrew Neil was more than capable of doing that on the BBC or Sky.

Having said that it's really weird that they've gone in so hard with Dan Wootton's anti-lockdown stuff. Lockdown is very, very popular and widely supported in the UK, but what's weirder is that it's particularly strongly supported (for obvious reasons) by older people who are largely also conservative. Those are the people most concerned with wokeness and I feel like you can either pitch anti-woke stories with concern about covid and get the old conservative audience, or you can pitch anti-lockdown stories and aim for a younger audience. I don't think you can do both.

[Tamas]

Having said that it's really weird that they've gone in so hard with Dan Wootton's anti-lockdown stuff. Lockdown is very, very popular and widely supported in the UK, but what's weirder is that it's particularly strongly supported (for obvious reasons) by older people who are largely also conservative. Those are the people most concerned with wokeness and I feel like you can either pitch anti-woke stories with concern about covid and get the old conservative audience, or you can pitch anti-lockdown stories and aim for a younger audience. I don't think you can do both.

I think that may just show that they don't want to just report what people think - they want to influence it. And aligning the British right with the American one even more fully would benefit them greatly since "issues" could be lifted even more directly over, more efficiently creating the kind of division and siege mentality they can use to stay in power and just do whatever they want.

[Sheilbh]

I am not buying this loyalist BS around Brexit. If they voted Leave they have not been ignored.

More importantly, the DPU actively worked toward torpedoing any sort of deal, and I know Sheilbh you explained earlier why they would not want a hard border between them and Ireland but I am still having a hard time buying that. If your chief objective is to avoid NI joining Ireland (because you fear for your rights and your safety) then the most certain way to avoid that is a hard border which is difficult to cross.

Oh you're absolutely right - I don't think they particularly care if there's a hard border with Ireland. Having said that the DUP and unionists in general support GB aligning with EU agricultural/SPS rules because they don't really care about the type of Brexit in the way that GB Brexiteers do.

Their point would be that nationalists care about a land border and were listened to - they got the EU and the UK to accept a position that was unacceptable in the negotiations in general (for the EU basically cherry-picking, for the UK being subject to EU laws and legal framework). In the Northern Irish press/unionist presence I see them mention a lot the EU Council meeting when Leo Varadkar took a newspaper from the 1970s with a frontpage of a bomb killing people at a border crossing - the unionist take on this is that the NIP was driven by a fear of nationalist violence, so if they want their way they need to threaten violence too. Micheal Martin has explicitly spoken about this recently and said that while Varadkar did that it wasn't decisive for the Council and it didn't have that much influence - as I say I think Martin is really good and gets the sensitivities a lot better than Fine Gael did and I think he is trying to calm the situation down.

The wider issue is the feeling that under the GFA the nationalists get what they want because of the risk of violence while unionists are ignored/sold meaningless sops and that the direction of travel under the GFA is one-way to an eventual united Ireland. I don't agree with that, but I think the perception is quite strong as mentioned in that article.

It's why the historic prosecutions issue has been a big issue in Northern Ireland (and for Tory MPs representing military constituencies/with a military background), because I think they see that as an example of the unfairness. Under the GFA a lot of paramilitaries were released on certain conditions - such as not going back to violence. These were people with normally pretty serious convictions but it was part of the peace process that they were released and, as noted in that article, a number are now sitting in Stormont and senior in Sinn Fein. Another part of the peace process has been to try and give victims some form of answer through investigation and prosecution of legacy crimes - including by British military personnel.

A perception has grown up - which I think is wrong - that basically nationalist terrorists were released and now sit in government in Northern Ireland while British soldiers are being prosecuted. Obviously you can't apply the same standards to paramilitaries as members of an actual military and I also understand the legacy prosecutions have also included prosecutions of former paramilitaries. I also think there's a danger of creating a perception that the unlawful behaviour of British troops was the norm if that's what you're defending, when actually restraint and military discipline were the norm and, in my view, the unlawful behaviour should be punished. But regardless the perception is there in unionist and veteran communities that they are sort of being targeted by this process.

I sort of think this is actually a consequence of not setting a South African style truth and reconciliation commission in Northern Ireland - which I understand is being considered - which would allow participants in the conflict to tell the truth about what they did. If they are truthful then they will not be prosecuted (but if it turns out they lied then they can be) - as most of the deaths were caused by Republican actions that would probably be quite uncomfortable for Sinn Fein. My understanding is that in the moment of the GFA, Sinn Fein didn't want a truth and reconciliation approach and generally people just wanted to move on and try to actively build peace. But I think the legacy of the conflict does need to be addressed and these legacy prosecutions are a way of doing that even if they are very controversial.

[garbon]

I do like Andrew Neil as an interviewer and think this GB News business is a shame.

[Sheilbh]

I think that may just show that they don't want to just report what people think - they want to influence it. And aligning the British right with the American one even more fully would benefit them greatly since "issues" could be lifted even more directly over, more efficiently creating the kind of division and siege mentality they can use to stay in power and just do whatever they want.

But again - I'm not sure how easily that works if they're not part of the Murdoch network where they could really easily copy and paste from Fox. As I say I could be wrong but I feel like the fact Murdoch hasn't done this - and I think he would if he could - is a big sign it might not work as easily as they think.

I also think people overestimate the media's influence - despite the right-wing press in this country being clearly anti-lockdown it's had no impact on support for lockdown even among their readers. I know there's that study of Liverpool's 30 year boycott of the Sun increasing the remain vote there by about 10, but I'm really not sure about that (not least because the vote in wider Merseyside was far closer and the city of Liverpool's vote was basically the same as Manchester which seems like the natural comparison).

I was listening to a left podcast recently that noted that Starmer was doing as badly as Corbyn in the polling despite having far more sympathetic media coverage - and my first thought was maybe because they media is just less influential than we think on a lot of issues or works in a less simple/direct way than people think especially when it comes to things people form opinions on/care about.

Edit: Also I'm really not sure that the advertising boycott will work given that their main investor, I believe, is Legatum which is a Dubai based investment fund who have said that it will "not just be judged by viewing figures or advertising revenue" - and I don't fully understand what the Legatum network is doing but they've got this investment wing, they've got a London think-tank policy wing etc. But it makes me suspect that they're being funded regardless of their commercial success - a bit like Russia Today (which is also broadcast in the UK).

[Josquius]

But the Tories are very good at change while Labour is very small-c conservative and quite bad at adapting to new realities. I've never heard anyone reporting from a conservative seat say "my dad/mum/grandad will be spinning in their grave because I'm not voting Conservative" that is something that you do hear with people moving from Labour.

I think there was a strong and actively policed social view of "we vote Labour" that has broken down in the last 20 years. I don't think there's ever really been anything as strong in Tory seats.

I've definitely see it on the Tory side.
From the Labour side it tends to be quite the opposite, less always vote labour and more never vote tory. Though yes, it is falling away with the older generation.

England is the only nation in the UK with a democratic voice or democratic self-government. And we can't complain about the British government or British unionism being so Anglo-centric when British politics is in fact the only space for English politics.

As it should be. The UK isn't a federal state, its a unitary states with some small bits having limited self-government.

Even with voting reform - the Tories got about 47% of the vote in England alone at the last election.

I think a lot of this was down to the Corbyn factor as mentioned. Given a free choice I'd think many of those would have much rather gone for a centre right or even in some cases left of centre party.

That's an incredibly kind and generous reading of his conduct over his entire career. I don't think you or anyone else would be so kind about a Tory MP who routinely spoke with UVF or UDA leaders during the Troubles. We'd see that for what it is and we should with Corbyn too. If your goal is peace and you just want to talk about things - I think you need to talk to more than the most violent groups on one side of a conflict. He'd personally said less incendiary things than McDonnell (who in the 2000s praised the IRAs "bullets and bombs" for bringing the British state to the negotiating table - this was at the point when the peace process was on life support over the IRA failure to decommission their weapons), but he has a deeper history of being involved with lots of these groups.

I mean even if we ignore the IRA or being present but not participating in Black September commemorations (again - imagine the Tory equivalent of an MP present at some international commemoration of Islamophobic terrorism), he was President of Stop the War Coalition. Like Stand Up To Racism, they are a SWP front who inevitably had to scrub their online archives as soon as he got elected to remove, for example, the pieces they published supporting Iraqi insurgents killing British troops.

Because nobody else was talking to them.
As a minor backbench MP you don't exactly have the full power to hold a peace conference with all sides attending. You should however make use of what connections you have to talk to those who may be getting sidelined by the mainstream.

I am no fan of the IRA at all. They're absolute scum. But they weren't going to just go away by shouting at them to be nice or sending in more and more soldiers. Talking was necessary.

I'm not saying he was totally innocent and behaving absolutely beyond reproach there, but it wasn't the dire he loves the IRA and hates British soldiers that was presented.

I'm not sure about blame - in terms of that I can't really look past New Labour who I think had developed thoughts on devolving power to Scotland (and Northern Ireland in the specific context of the GFA). But I think Wales and England were after-thoughts. And I don't think they'd thought through the devolution settlement more widely or how it all interacts or what to do about England. But I think that is a feature of Blair's constitutional reforms especially that they were generally significant but each was seen in isolation so there was no overall view of how they all fitted together.

It's true voters in the North-East rejected a North-East regional assembly which was an attempt to have regional devolution. But I think one of the big issues with that is you have to work with the sort of mental map people have - England exists as a nation, counties exist, cities exist - and politics in those units works. But inventing a new level of government without as clear an identity won't work - particularly when it was clear that Labour was proposing that as an approach because they tend not to do well in England so they wanted to split it up into units where they would win some. So it was coming from a place of political opportunism.


We're not a federal country - I personally think federalism would be a good idea but it should be as part of a wider settlement rather than the piecemeal reforms we've had previously. But I don't know if there's a way to unskew it because ultimately if the nation is your political unit, then England has 85% of the people in the country (and this proportion has been growing since the war).

People from outside the region always bring this the north east referendum. Though really it cannot be understated just how much of a completely shambolic non-event that referendum was.
It was postal vote only, at a time when this was uncommon, and in Durham at least mixed in with another vote about disbanding local districts into a unitary County Durham (incidentally this vote failed too, but went ahead anyway).
About the only campaigning I remember seeing at the time was a giant inflatable rat saying 'southern politicians' in Durham city centre.
I honestly am not sure which way I voted, though I suspect it was against it.
Yet it keeps getting dredged up time and again as proof that a unitary English parliament is needed and the country is opposed to regional devolution.

As well as running the vote competently it really would have helped it had it took place a decade later when we'd be able to see from London and Scotland quite what it actually meant and what it could deliver. As things were even with a properly ran vote it would have been a tough sell.

It seems we are going this way anyway, albeit with city regions rather than regions. Which....is not ideal. But has promise, petty local rivalries aside (North of Tyne, pff).

[garbon]

I find it hard to sympathise/agree with the EU on this one.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/21/eu-prepares-cut-amount-british-tv-film-shown-brexit

EU prepares to cut amount of British TV and film shown post-Brexit

The EU is preparing to act against the "disproportionate" amount of British television and film content shown in Europe in the wake of Brexit, in a blow to the UK entertainment industry and the country's "soft power" abroad.

The UK is Europe's biggest producer of film and TV programming, buoyed up by £1.4bn from the sale of international rights, but its dominance has been described as a threat to Europe's "cultural diversity" in an internal EU document seen by the Guardian.

The issue is likely to join a list of points of high tension in the EU-UK relationship since the country left the single market and customs union, including disputes over the sale of British sausages in Northern Ireland and the issue of licences in fishing waters, which led to Royal Navy patrol boats being deployed to Jersey earlier this year.

In Brussels' target this time is the continuing definition of British programmes and film as being "European works".

Under the EU's audiovisual media services directive, a majority of airtime must be given to such European content on terrestrial television and it must make up at least 30% of the number of titles on video on demand (VOD) platforms such as Netflix and Amazon.

Countries such as France have gone further, setting a 60% quota for European works on VOD and demanding 15% of the turnover of the platforms is spent in production of European audiovisual and cinematographic works.

According to an EU document tabled with diplomats on 8 June, in the "aftermath of Brexit" it is believed the inclusion of UK content in such quotas has led to what has been described as a "disproportionate" amount of British programming on European television.

"The high availability of UK content in video on demand services, as well as the privileges granted by the qualification as European works, can result in a disproportionate presence of UK content with the European video on demand quota and hinder a larger variety of European works (including from smaller countries or less spoken languages)," a paper distributed among the member states reads. "Therefore the disproportionality may affect the fulfilment of the objectives of promotion of European works and cultural diversity aimed by the audiovisual media services directive."

The European Commission has been tasked with launching an impact study on the risk to the EU's "cultural diversity" from British programming, which diplomatic sources said would be a first step towards action to limit the privileges granted to UK content.

Industry figures said a move to define UK content as something other than European, leading to a loss of market share, would particularly hit British drama, as the pre-sale of international rights to shows such as Downton Abbey and The Crown has often been the basis on which they have been able to go into production.

Adam Minns, the executive director of the Commercial Broadcasters Association (COBA), said: "Selling the international intellectual property rights to British programmes has become a crucial part of financing production in certain genres, such as drama.

"Losing access to a substantial part of EU markets would be a serious blow for the UK TV sector, right across the value chain from producers to broadcasters to creatives."

The sale of international rights to European channels and VOD platforms earned the UK television industry £490m in sales in 2019-20, making it the second biggest market for the UK behind the US.

According to the leaked EU paper, entitled "The disproportionate presence of UK content in the European VOD quota and the effects on the circulation and promotion of diverse European works", it is thought necessary for the bloc to reassess the "presence of UK content in the aftermath of Brexit".

"The concerns relate to how Brexit will impact the audiovisual production sector in the European Union as, according to the European Audiovisual Observatory, the UK provides half of the European TV content presence of VOD in Europe and the UK works are the most actively promoted on VOD, while the lowest EU27 share of promotion spots is also found in the UK," the paper says.

It adds: "Although the UK is now a third country for the European Union, its audiovisual content still qualifies as 'European works' according to the definition provided by the AVMS directive, as the definition continues to refer to the European convention on Transfrontier Television of the Council of Europe, to which the UK remains a party."

It was long feared in the industry that the EU would seek to undermine the UK's dominance of the audiovisual market once the country had left the bloc. The government had been repeatedly warned of the risk to the British screen industry.

Industry sources said they had believed it was a matter of "when not if", with the government appearing to have little leverage over Brussels on the issue.

EU sources suggested the initiative would probably be taken further when France takes over the rolling presidency of the union in January, with the backing of Spain, Greece, Italy and Austria, among others. There is a midterm review of the AVMS directive due in three years' time, which sources suggested may be the point at which changes could come into force.

A UK government spokesperson said: "The UK is proud to host a world-class film and TV industry that entertains viewers globally and which the government has supported throughout the pandemic, including through the film and TV restart scheme.

"European works status continues to apply to audiovisual works originating in the UK, as the UK is a party to the Council of Europe's European Convention on Transfrontier Television (ECTT)."