As if the problem of moving in a new nation is the strictly bureaucratic one and not the cultural one.
In my understanding from this article UK got everything from they wanted AND they control the supply of their currency. What is the advantage for Italy or Spain to stay in the union?
Some limitations which I do know of:
* British nationals can’t live and work freely on Europe, so an architect based in London can’t jump on a Eurostar and take a business meeting in Paris by default, they would have to get a visa specific to the country and activity. And their professional qualifications may not be recognised, so would have to operate through local professionals (not sure how that would work in practice).
* Products sold into the EU will have to be recertified for that market, no assumption of regulatory compliance or compatibility. So a lot more red tape and checks in moving products across borders, in particular that will impact food and products built as part of just in time supply chains.
* No ability for British firms to operate in other European countries with equivalent rights as a local company, will have to form subsidiaries instead in many cases.
Would be interested what else people can add.
The second also isn’t true - no recertification appears to be required but could be required in the future should legislation diverge.
As well as the actions all travellers need to take, there are extra actions if you’re travelling to the EU for business.
Business travel includes activities such as travelling for meetings and conferences, providing services (even with a charity), and touring art or music.
Entry requirements The country you’re travelling to might have its own entry requirements, or ask you to have certain documents.
Check the entry requirements for the country you’re visiting.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-24/johnson-i...
The deal doesn’t include any mutual recognition of conformity assessment [...] meaning firms will have to pay the regulatory cost of certification twice if they wish to sell their products in both the U.K. and the bloc
People heading to conferences in the UK have occasionally been caught by aggressive immigration officers and deported.
If you're from Western or Northern Europe, or North America, you will often be exempt for tourism, conferences and meetings for similar countries.
But I, and probably you, need a business visa for a simple meeting in Moscow.
It's up to each EU country what requirements they put on British visitors, but it looks like at least some will require visas for at least some types of business.
This has never been the case.
To enjoy full rights, you have to have a local office. Tax forms e.g. Hungarian employment tax forms doesn't even accept the UK postcodes as administrative address, let alone grant application forms.
>What is the advantage for Italy or Spain to stay in the union?
The single market and and access to trade deals EU negotiated with the rest of the world. You may say that maybe Italy and Spain should get their own trade deals instead of EU's but EU's trade agreements are theirs already.
EU is not a shop in Brussels where some foreigners produce regulations or agreements. Each country elects and appoints people who do these things.
In practice, free moment of people means that I can go to any EU country and register there as a resident. I just need a birth certificate. Then I can get employment on the same rules as native citizens. It's really easy to do.
Overall EU provides 4 fundamental freedoms:
- Free movement of goods - Free movement of capital - Freedom to establish and provide services - Free movement of persons
The biggest reason why Schengen Area is not equivalent with EU is that there are countries that are not part of EU, but are part of Schengen - Switzerland and Norway as well as there are countries that are part of EU but not yet part of Schengen like Bulgaria and Romania. I never was in Bulgaria and Romania, so I can't speak of practicalities.
And yes, Schengen countries have common visa policy.
Or British meat..
https://www.france24.com/en/20160406-spain-summons-french-am...
https://www.catalannews.com/business/item/catalan-farmers-an...
Could it be that you are underestimating the importance of (not dealing with) bureaucracy? It determines if you need to collect lots of documents like criminal-records certificates in each country you've lived in, to verify your degree abroad, to do a bunch of medical tests in approved institutions.
It determines what legal restrictions you need to deal with if you change jobs while your work-permit card has the name of your employer on it.
Many opportunities simply won't happen for a person separated from them with a bureaucratic boundary.
When it comes to working visas, most of the time you will need to have formal relationship(like marriage) and he/she would't be allowed to work or the options would be extremely limited.
What people don't get here ironically is that every bureaucracy's purpose is to get bigger and gain more power at the expense of the people they rule over. Nobody learned anything from the USSR fiasco. These kind of supra national governments never work on the long run. Europeans are too different.
In France, already governed by a fairly conservative and authoritarian government, the far right is at the doorstep of power and banking on the relatively successful brexit.
The Lisbon treaty was long overdue and it did manage to improve how the EU works.
Now that the UK is gone, we should further perfect it. The UK has always been a detractor of any real initiative to improve peaceful coexistence of continental EU states. Acknowledging that without them we can better work together would be a huge step forward.
The news stories about civilians - including children - being shot from afar when trying to cross "Sniper Alley" in Sarajevo made a particularly big impression on me.
In my book this was not a small conflict but a bloody and grim civil war.
Europe is the first and main reason, if not THE reason, we have had the longest period of peace in Europe since the fall of the Roman empire.
As noted, the agreement is 2k pages long. The only real thing the article digs into, and that’s a very generous use of dig, is fisheries, which though a political sticking point isn’t all that interesting or relevant in the grand scheme of things.
The UK already did and always has controlled the supply of their own currency as do many EU member states.
And as others pointed out, they are still bound by EU regulations apparently also future ones without having a say in it.
Of course, they will tell you that they got what they wanted.
The big non-EU headquartered institutions have had offices and branches in multiple non-UK EU jurisdictions dating back decades and have served eg local major corporates out of those offices this way for a long time.
The question was whether and how much they would move significant chunks of wholesale activity including staff out of London. The answer seems to be not very much at all so far. Noone I know has been moved out of London and the sector has continued to expand over the past four years.
How does this work out of interest? Could this office be very small, just with a presence and perhaps the capital to meet compliance, and then just refer onwards to staff outside the EU, or is there some expectation the work is done inside the territory?
Very few markets front office people (ie traders) will be outside London though, which is where there has been perhaps most debate about who might move (though one issue is very few of those people are willing to move - some banks tried early on to move teams and found whole teams simply quitting to move to a competitor who didn't ask for that instead). This is where most people in the industry feel there is still some risk of further moves but the risk seems to be receding rapidly now.
In asset management, the fund itself may well be in one jurisdiction (usually Ireland or Luxembourg for reasons relating to tax transparency for ultimate investors and the flexibility of legal form offered, though sometimes Cayman Islands/Jersey/etc are used and very occasionally UK, Germany France etc). There will often need to be some form of local presence to ensure the right tax treatment there, but usually this is administrative/token and often outsourced. There might also be feeder entities in other jurisdictions again due to individual investor tax/legal requirements (fund which invests in the main fund or similar). Management for the funds can be across more than one office though this might often mirror the banking set up - bulk of junior find management staff will be in a single location (typically London) and there might then be a few senior staff in one or two other offices.
Early on the EU tried to put pressure on asset management industry to move full management of funds "onshore" but this is fraught with difficulty because it's very hard to write a rule which "penalises" London like this but doesn't have massive negative consequences for institutions who invest with funds managed outside both the EU and UK. I think this has probably gone away now.
Elsewhere, I believe some rating agency staff have been moved from London to the EU and there is an ongoing debate about clearing house location for some trades (at the moment that's staying in London because there isn't the capacity to do it anywhere else in the EU and I suspect the pressure to move will subside even more now).
The reality is that the UK has lost a lot compared to its previous position as EU member whatever the details of that deal.
Because at least to me it is not clear at all.
Now they have agreement that will give them the same access to EU market what they used to have while UK was part of EU, but if they want to use that access they have to follow all the EU rules and regulations like other EU member states.
Only thing that changed is that UK no more has any decision making power within EU.
Some of those rules have been reformed, however that they existed in the first place was a ridiculous overreach of EU power.
Why, for example, is vacuum cleaner power regulated by the EU? Why can’t people sell and buy vacuums that meet their needs? If I have a need for a 3000 watt vacuum, he EU won’t let me have it, even though I pay not only for the product, but any power it consumes.
Remember trade is a two way street. If the EU wants access to the UK market, they’ll have to play by UK rules.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/2453204/Be...
But you probably always could - seeing as industrial vacuum cleaners are outside the scope of the regulation. Maybe you really want a 3KW ‘domestic’ vacuum but they probably never existed, in the same way that a Smart Car with a truck engine doesn’t. I found this document from the EU itself with a brief search that clarifies this https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/commission_guidel...
I admit it’s probably more dry than any sensationalist newspaper that wants to sell clicks and yes, the EU could’ve done a lot more to publicise the actual truth around this.
But buying psychology just promotes inefficient vacuums at that point, so it could make sense for the regulator to try and fix that. (From an environmental perspective I agree with this one)
Note: I’m not even sure if the EU even legislated this at all. Turns out, a lot of so called EU regulations bashed by the UK tabloids were represented overly simplified to fit a desired narrative.
E.g. here is Wikipedia on how both sides used the regulation on food to ridicule and defense the EU:
> This regulation requires that bananas as a minimum standard must not have "abnormal curvature",[5] although no definition or guidance was given about the degree of curvature that would be regarded as "abnormal". This led to various stories about an EU ban on curved bananas.[6] This has been frequently repeated by pro-Europeans and Euro-sceptics alike; the former tending to regard it as an apocryphal or misleading Euromyth[6] and the latter regarding it as an example of needless European bureaucracy.
Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_Regulation_(EC)_N...
I know that this is often used as an example of how ridiculous the EU is, but if you think about it, actually isn't. You need rules and standardization to be able to trade effectively.
If everyone is happy and close by, trade is simple. But as soon as there's conflict, it becomes messy, especially if the trade is international, and spread over time.
Let's say I order a few containers of cucumbers from you. A couple of months later they arrive, I open the containers and inspect the cucumbers, but find out that they're wrong. The colour is wrong, or the shape is wrong, or it's the wrong cucumber species. I complain and say that I can't sell these in my country, consumers wouldn't want to buy them, but you just say that in your country you call these things cucumbers, and customers would happily buy them.
I paid for cucumbers, you shipped cucumbers, but our respective definition of cucumbers are not the same, so now we have an international trade conflict.
And that's exactly what the "ridiculous" EU trade rules solve. They set up common shared definitions of stuff that gets traded so that everyone agrees what a cucumber is, and so that the above scenario doesn't happen. So you have to write down the accepted curvature and greenish hue a cucumbers has to have to be called a cucumber, even if you think it's ridiculous.
It encourages advances in lower power vacuums, just like energy labeling does (and did) for other appliances. We don't want manufacturers to compete by having ever higher wattage numbers, which they are wont to do. This is not going to appeal to libertarians, obviously, and the UK is now free to finally become a Thatcherite libertarian experiment.
It would be nice to tax CO2, making electricity ten to twenty times more expensive. Then making rules like these might be superfluous.
Do you have any sources on that?