EU-DIGEST

Last week, Anand Menon, a professor of politics at King’s College London, won plaudits on social media for his no-nonsense performance on Question Time, a popular BBC political show, and his blunt explanation of what a no-deal Brexit entails.

“It means that all the laws governing our interaction with the EU — whether you can fly, whether you can shop, whether you can trade, whether you can travel — cease to exist,” he said. swiftly dismissing a suggestion by one panellist, who equated it with walking away from a deal to buy a car that you weren’t convinced by.

He was equally candid in his assessment of the second referendum. “Whatever you think of [the referendum] it was a remarkable moment in democratic history that people that hadn’t voted ever or for a very long time did so and they would, with some reason, feel hacked off.”

Besides what would happen if the result of a second referendum were 52 to remain and 48 to leave on a lower turnout. Would that settle anything?

Questions and facts around Brexit are something Mr. Menon deals with on a daily basis as the director of ‘U.K. in a Changing Europe’ — teams of researchers carrying out Brexit-related research up and down the country, in an attempt to give factual grounding to an emotional debate.

Funded by Britain’s Social Research Council, it is based on a similar project that had been set up ahead of the Scottish referendum. It has grown from a part-time one-person role for Mr. Menon to 25 teams across the country researching to provide the public with factual analysis.

“We report what the research says... in that sense we are not looking to support leave or remain or a soft Brexit or a hard Brexit,” he told The Hindu in a recent interview. “Sometimes, you of course end up taking a position — and our analysis is pretty unequivocal that leaving with no deal will be damaging. We are not afraid to stand up and say that, and we do end up with fights with people who say we are biased, but my response is that ‘if we are wrong, tell us why we are wrong’?”

Their approach has garnered considerable public interest — some one million people visited their website over the past few weeks.

Mr. Menon admits that he’s conflicted over the issues and the aftermath of the referendum. Born to a Malayali family who moved to northern England in the 1960s, he grew up in Wakefield, a West Yorkshire former mining town that has known its fair share of deprivation, and which voted heavily to leave the EU in the referendum. An image of a harmonious Britain cruelly thrown out of balance by the referendum — put forward by some Remain supporters who were caught off guard by the result — is not one that he shares. During the miners strikes of the 1970s, he recalls seeing the wives of miners on the streets begging for loose change.

“You’ve just realized what a nasty divided country we’ve always been,” he recalls telling someone surprised after the referendum result. The role that deprivation played in the referendum cannot be discounted or glossed over, he argues. “There are people who don’t like the EU — the added element of the vote being a collective two fingers at the establishment whether its Brussels or London
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The sense of alienation has been made worse by an electoral system that means that unless you vote for one of the two big political parties it doesn’t count for much. “Protesting against the two big parties has been very difficult for people and the referendum provided an opportunity to do that.”

The real success of the leave campaign was in drawing the link between immigration and the EU, says Mr. Menon, noting that until the referendum, the EU had not been regarded as a salient political issue though immigration had been.

But on this count, research published by ‘U.K. in a Changing Europe’ this week has a remarkable finding: a sharp and sustained drop in those who see immigration as a salient issue to around 20%.

Mr. Menon says this remains an open question but what the research has further shown is that people across the country now have strong Brexit identities that trump their political ones, mirroring what has happened across the world, from India to the U.S.

“The politics of identity, the politics of culture are competing with the traditional politics of the left versus right and that is what was mobilised by Brexit, and it was mobilised very strongly. You see the same in the US and India – a coalition between the wealthy and poorer voters who share social values but aren’t on the same side of the spectrum when it comes to the redistribution of wealth….I hear people in the UK talk about Brexit triggering populism and I say to them: Modi was the precursor of nativist politics and to understand populism you have to understand it is not just global and not just Western.”

He sees strong parallels between the forces that drove Brexit and the endurance of the BJP. “It may well be the case that many of the issues that led people to vote leave had nothing to do with the EU but it doesn’t mean they were not legitimate — and you may not like the fact that people are voting BJP but you can understand the fact why people [were] fed up with Congress. There was corruption; there was this sense of entitlement. Why wouldn’t people react to that and say a plague on all your houses and let’s vote for something different?”

The deep-rooted nature of these identities adds to the problems around the route forward for Britain. There is little evidence that people have changed their positions on Brexit — the slight shift which has tipped the scales from slightly pro-Leave to slightly pro-Remain has come not from people changing their minds but from those who didn’t or couldn’t vote last time round saying they would in a future referendum. “We live in an age where people interpret evidence through the prism of prior belief. Throwing facts at people is not going to get them to change their mind,” he says.

However, it doesn’t make what U.K. in a Changing Europe are doing any less important. “The evidence we provide doesn’t say you should be for or against anything. Part of the Brexit debate is that it involves trade-offs between politics and economics: how much of an economic trade-off are you willing to make to free yourself from the EU is a personal thing that can’t be determined by research. But what can be determined by research is the nature of that political freedom, how constraining the EU is, what trading with China and the U.S. would add, and the economic costs,” he says. “If you are going to support a no-deal Brexit be honest that it’s going to be hugely disruptive.”

The same applies to the consequences of leaving, and the potential for trade with countries like India to fill the gap. “We export more to the Republic of Ireland than we do to Brazil, China, Australia, South Africa and India combined,” he notes, adding that while the loss to growth from exiting the single market and the customs union would be between 3% to 5% for the U.K., an FTA with the U.S. that scrapped every tariff that currently exists would lead to an uptick of just 0.3% to 0.4%.

However, economic costs aren’t everything. He recalls discussing the independence movement with his grandmother. “She used to say we would rather live on rice than steak and chips under the British. Of course it’s not at all the same situation — a colony is a very different situation to a member state. But it shows our willingness to make an economic sacrifice to achieve a political objective. What I aspire to is people being honest and what some Remainers do is underestimate the degree to which some people are willing to say: if there is economic damage we will live with it.”

Read more: ‘Deprivation played a key role in the Brexit referendum’ - The Hindu

The EU reacted cautiously on Monday (5 March) after Italian elections gave no clear outcome and leave the door open to weeks of uncertainty and possibly a eurosceptic government.

"Keep calm and carry on," European Commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas said when asked about the vote's potential impact for the EU.

"We have confidence in president [Sergio] Mattarella's abilities to facilitate the formation of a stable government in Italy," he said, while refusing to comment on the election's outcome as long as the final results were not known.

"In the meantime, Italy has a government led by prime minister [Paolo] Gentiloni with whom we are working closely," he said.

In Berlin, chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said he "wish[ed] everyone that it doesn't take six months" to form a government - a reference to the time it took Germany to have a new government.

Read more: EU: 'Keep Calm', as Italy struggles to form government

The World Bank has confirmed that it will stop financing upstream oil and gas projects after 2019 except under exceptional circumstances in the world's poorest countries.

The global financial institution made the announcement at climate summit in Paris on Tuesday, which took place roughly two years after the historic COP21 climate conference in the same city.

At Tuesday's summit, French insurance giant AXA announced that it will cease insuring the oilsands sector and new coal projects, and will divest more than US$3.5 billion from oilsands and coal companies. This includes divestment from energy giants TransCanada, Kinder Morgan and Enbridge, all of which have Canadian offices and are constructing major pipelines: Keystone XL, the Trans Mountain expansion and Line 3, respectively.

The announcements were among highlights of a one-day "One Planet Summit" attended by about 50 world leaders and 2,000 participants, including Canada and Quebec environment ministers, environmental organizations, business officials and public figures such as actor Sean Penn.

The goal was to find financial solutions to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and allocate more money to help developing countries that will help their transition to low-carbon economies in the fight against climate change.

“We’re determined to work with all of you to put the right policies in place, get market forces moving in the right direction, put the money on the table, and accelerate action,” World Bank president Jim Young Kim told the closing plenary.

Conference co-organizers, including the Government of France, the World Bank and the United Nations, called in advance of the summit for “concrete action” to reignite momentum as the United States remains absent from the historic Paris Agreement on climate change. Reached in December 2015, the accord aims to keep global warming below 2°C this century.

“We are losing the battle,” French President Emmanuel Macron told participants. “The agreement has become fragile and we’re not going fast enough.”

Several financially stable countries and multilateral institutions made important pledges to help developing countries meet their commitments under the 2009 Copenhagen Accord on climate action.

That roadmap calls for the world to raise US$100-billion every year to help such countries meet their emissions goals by 2020. Last year however, the OECD estimated that only US$43 billion had been pledged, including $2.65 billion in funding from the Government of Canada by 2021

The absence of the United States remained bittersweet and disappointing for most participants, including California Governor Jerry Brown and former United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, who talked about U.S. President Donald Trump’s “irresponsible” decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

But former New York mayor and businessman Michael Bloomberg said he thought it had increased momentum.

“There isn't anything Washington can do to stop us, quite the contrary, I think that President Trump has helped rally people who understand the problem to join forces and to actually do something rather than waiting for the federal government to do something,” Bloomberg said at a press conference.

Bloomberg and several other major economic leaders, including Bank of England governor Mark Carney, announced 237 companies worth more than $6.3 trillion had committed to participate in a wide-reaching Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures.

The task force aims to gather reliable data about the environmental metrics of its members, such as the carbon footprint of their operations.

According to the task force, only 20 per cent of major companies are currently reporting this kind of data. Bloomberg and his partners want to change that so CEOS, board members and shareholders can make informed decisions about their management practices and investment.

“Nobody would survive a board meeting where they said, 'I don't know that this risk is going to happen so let's just sit around and do nothing,'" said Bloomberg.

One of the task force members is AXA, the world’s third largest insurance company.

Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna was among the world leaders who said private sector involvement in climate financing is urgent in the race against environmental catastrophe.

“We need to be smarter about this. We have to stop the old school way of thinking where governments are going to take actions,” she said at a panel. “We're missing a lot if we don't leverage the private sector.”

Responding to McKenna's comments however, Environmental Defense national program manager Dale Marshall emphasized that public financing will always be necessary.

“It's really hard to leverage private sector dollars to do adaptation work and that's really where governments need to step in with public money,” Marshall told National Observer.

Pembina Institute federal policy director Erin Flanagan made similar comments. National transitions to a low-carbon economy should be led by governments, she explained, and public policy must create a clear and assertive framework for the private sector, so it understands how it can support the green transition.

“If industry knows that the government is serious about achieving emissions neutrality by 2050, they will be less likely to build gas plants, they will be less likely to build new oil sands operations,” she told National Observer at the summit. “I think we still have a way to go at home to make sure that that consensus on the deadline is well developed.”

Meantime, McKenna unveiled a partnership with the World Bank to support developing countries’ transition away from traditional coal-fired electricity and toward clean energy. A press release said the parties would share best practices "on how to ensure a just transition for displaced workers and their communities."

The partnership announcement came just as a Canadian and German environmental organizations released a report listing six Canadian financial companies among the world's top 100 investors in new coal plants. Friends of the Earth and Urgenwald looked at the top 100 private investors putting money down to expand coal-fired electricity — sometimes in places where there isn't any coal-generated power at the moment.

Together, Sun Life, Power Corporation, Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec, Royal Bank of Canada, Manulife Financial and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board have pledged $2.9 billion towards building new coal plants overseas, the report said.

Urgewald tracks coal plants around the world and reports there are 1,600 new plants in development in 62 nations, more than a dozen of which don't have any coal-fired plants now.

Read more: World Bank won't back oil and gas projects after 2019 | National Observer

The Catalan government said around 2.26million people voted in the banned independence referendum to leave Spain on Sunday, representing a turnout of around 42.3 percent of Catalonia's 5.34million voters.

Throughout history plebiscites have often been tools for dictators to force voters to give up their freedoms while keeping up an appearance of having the nation’s support

This one in Catalonia was not any different, but adding to the controversy was also the fact that like in previous Catalan referendums less than 50 % of the Catalan voters turned out.

As to claims of police brutality, all fingers should be pointing to the Catalan government, which despite the fact that the Supreme court of Spain and the Spanish government ruled the referendum was illegal, the local Catalan government still went ahead with the referendum.

EU-Digest   

During a second sitting around the negotiating table, the EU and the UK stuck to their guns on the financial obligations London should pay and what court would guarantee EU citizen rights in a post-Brexit world.

Following a first encounter last month, the negotiating teams led by Michel Barnier, on the EU side, and David Davis, on the British side, concluded on Thrusday (20 July) a four-day round of talks to set the terms of Britain’s departure from the EU.

But the negotiations barely managed to spot areas of disagreement that have already been identified.

As expected, the financial settlement London must cover and the European Court of Justice’s role in ensuring citizen rights were the most controversial issues.

But both sides could not even start sketching out the bare bones of a compromise as Britain came to Brussels empty handed.

Read more: No solution in sight for Brexit’s controversial issues – EURACTIV.com

EU countries where voting was possible, 707,430 votes supported Erdoğan’s reforms. Just 409,012 opposed the proposed switch from a parliamentary to a presidential system.

While the number of ‘yes’ votes cast in EU member states far outweighed the ‘no’ vote, the number of countries did not. Only seven out of 19 came down on the winning side (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, German, Luxembourg and the Netherlands).

Voting was allowed in 57 countries around the world, including the United States, Australia, Thailand and South Africa.

The total overseas vote, which was closed before Turkey itself went to the polls, ultimately favoured ‘yes’ by 831,208 votes to 575,365.

Largely-Turkish Northern Cyprus, which has been the focus of a bitter dispute between Turkey and Greece since the former invaded the island in 1974 and which has curtailed Ankara’s accession progress, surprisingly voted against the reforms.

Read more: EU’s Turkish voters backed Erdogan’s reforms – EURACTIV.com

Turkey Referendum :Erdogan 's intimidation worked  barely

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a historic referendum Sunday that will greatly expand the powers of his office, although opposition parties questioned the outcome and said they would challenge the results.

With 99 percent of the ballots counted, the “yes” vote stood at 51.37 percent, while the “no” vote was 48.63 percent, according to the state-run Anadolu Agency. The head of Turkey’s electoral board confirmed the “yes” victory and said final results will be declared in 11-12 days.

Although the margin fell short of the sweeping victory Erdogan had sought in the landmark referendum, it could nevertheless cement his hold on power in Turkey and is expected to have a huge effect on the country’s long-term political future and its international relations.

The 18 constitutional amendments that will come into effect after the next election, scheduled for 2019, will abolish the office of the prime minister and hand sweeping executive powers to the president.

In his first remarks from Istanbul, Erdogan struck a conciliatory tone, thanking all voters no matter how they cast their ballots and calling the referendum a “historic decision.”

“April 16 is the victory of all who said ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ of the whole 80 million, of the whole of Turkey,” Erdogan told reporters in address that was televised live.

But he quickly reverted to a more abrasive style when addressing thousands of flag-waving supporters in Istanbul

“There are those who are belittling the result. They shouldn’t try, it will be in vain,” he said. “It’s too late now.”

Responding to chants from the crowd to reinstate the death penalty, Erdogan said he would take up the issue with the country’s political leaders, adding that the question could be put to another referendum if the political leaders could not agree.

Note EU-Digest: Given the result of the referendum and charges of intimidation in addition to the possibility of massive electoral fraud, President Erdogan, in all reality, can not really claim he got a sweeping mandate to change the Turkish Constitution in this referendum

The fears of electoral fraud and government meddling is now more relevant than ever, fueled by the extraordinary powers the government wields under the state of emergency. 

The badly crippled Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the main Kurdish political force, which has been trying to soldier on with its “no” campaign against its main rival, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has also voiced their concerns.

HDP members say they have been facing the “unchecked power” of the government, reflected not only in obstructions to their campaigns, but also in moves to keep party activists away from polling stations today, March 16.

Read more: Turkey votes to expand president’s powers; critics cry fraud - The Washington Post

The banks now have nine months to shore up their finances or risk being shut down. No UK banks are included.

The review was based on the banks' financial health at the end of 2013.

Ten of them have taken measures to bolster their balance sheets in the meantime. All the remaining 14 banks are in the eurozone.

The health check was carried out on 123 EU banks by the EBA to determine whether they could withstand another financial crisis.

The list of 14 includes four Italian banks, two Greek banks, two Belgian banks and two Slovenian banks.

The worst affected was Italian bank Monte dei Paschi, which had a capital shortfall of €2.1bn (£1.65bn, $2.6bn).

Read more: BBC News - Twenty-four European banks fail