Especially since this isn't some hand-wavy-future agreement, it comes into force (provisionally) in 3 days.
Trying to keep lawyers in business it sounds like. “Intent” is one of the trickiest things in the world when you want it to be.
Putting on my govt contractor hat, there may be a business opportunity here to set up VMs running Win95/Netscape Communicator for use by all the civil servants looking to comply with the law. Could charge a pretty penny too - it’ll all get budgeted as “Brexit compliance” costs.
The text quoted in the linked article in no way mandates the use of Netscape Navigator or Mozilla Mail - it merely references them as being widely distributed software capable of using RSA 1024 and SHA-1 (which it does appear to mandate).
That reminds me of FIPS for some reason...
Sometimes they don't exist - who maintains a sufficiently reputable list of safe email clients and web browsers?
Sometimes they exist but they carry some baggage - the FIPS standards for cryptography are probably fine, certainly better than hardcoding a couple of algorithm names, but they're also controlled by a foreign government.
The secondary legislation is the bit that can be updated without requiring a new Act. If EU law is set up in the same manner, (and no doubt it will be similar as not only is this method good when meeting the ideal but useful for corrupt politicians to write law with less scrutiny) then the copy and paste is from secondary legislation. It may well need an update but that doesn't mean it can't be updated in the manner you advocate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegated_legislation_in_the_U...
Commercial agreements are complicated, if you can re-use text, you do.
I suggest the lawyers may not view the 'examples of tech' as we do, after all 'Mozilla' is still a 'browser'.
Brexit was never so much about commercial terms, it was about political ones. There would be no 'Brexit' from the EEC.
So if the mandate is 'keep the trade stuff the same as possible so 28 different countries can just say yes quickly' - then this snafu would seem more than rational.
This, combined with "Signal hacked by cellebrite" last week (bullshit: https://signal.org/blog/cellebrite-and-clickbait/) means the BBC is on a roll lately.
Is the fact that parts of this agreement, that means so much for so many, is nonsensical worthy of a journalist's attention and a paper's publication?
> A more charitable interpretation is that the copy/paste isn't because the authors are hopelessly out of touch: instead, they're seeking to enable the direct re-use of all of the executive policy and judicial precedent which has developed around those legal particulars since they were first codified.
I mean honestly if this is the most egregious thing they have found in the agreement so far, it doesn't sound that bad (and I voted to remain)
On the one hand, a legislative body so recklessly plunged the nation into chaos through its own incompetence that the parliament changed hands thrice, each assembling with a new headmaster more incompetent than the last. That it, in its eminence and wise foresight, divined it prudent to carefully and diligently craft both in word and in meaning a strong and thorough treatise that on its face may seem silly yet upon only the most assiduous review is the machination of a truly divine primium mobile into which this nation will resume its normal course...
or..
the same bumbling octogenarian landed gentry that put everything from food security to the protestant catholic truce in jeopardy has somehow forgotten the year again.
Not only will some corps leave for Ireland taking their jobs with them, not only will small businesses and consultants find it far harder to sell services in the EU, not only will the UK be excluded from cutting edge research programs and funding, and not only will UK students be excluded from the international Erasmus scheme - but the current government literally has no idea why these losses even matter, never mind why it's important to mitigate them.
The absence of No Deal means the UK will tend towards slow decay rather than instant crash and burn, but the medium/long term prospects of almost everyone working in IT are now significantly diminished.
Applying that razor, it seems a mite more likely to me than some octogenarians forgetfully bumbling their way into a thousand page agreement.
(I mean, I certainly am of the opinion that allowing that exchange to be uninterrupted is very important, but I also have that opinion about everything else Brexit wants to sever. I'm definitely not the person you need to convince that maintaining relationships with the EU is worth doing even if the cost is abiding by EU regulations.)
You answered your own question with "and perhaps to be desired if they are in the service of Britain". That's what sovereignty is and that's what the whole point has been - or at least a very large part - not to disrupt things for the sake of it. Does leaving the EU mean the UK must become its enemy?
Sovereignty apparently means whatever they want it to mean. If it means trashing the 80% of GDP devoted to services, strangling small businesses with expensive and time consuming red tape, trampling all over the goodwill that Europe used to have towards the UK by creating a hostile environment for EU citizens, and wasting everyone's time and money on vapid nationalistic posturing - then apparently that's "in the service of Britain."
Except it isn't. It's really only in the service of a corrupt, delusional, entitled, and frankly rather stupid rump aristocracy who saw their so-called sovereign power - and ability to evade taxes - being diminished by EU membership and decided to do something about it.
The idea that anyone could argue that low-rent cut and paste legal boilerplate is somehow evidence of national sovereignty is - really quite strange.
I would say this claim has been debunked, but in fairness the debunk is talking about reality while many of the most famous Leave campaigners have explicitly claimed they want to leave because of what they incorrectly believe about what EU law does.
https://fullfact.org/online/brexit-not-concealing-offshore-a...
Indeed, which is why no one is. You’ve also got a reply that shows you’re incorrect on the tax claims, and the part about trashing the economy could be pulled from the writings of Nostradamus it needs that much clairvoyance and doom-mongering.
When I find I haven’t researched a topic properly and I’m demonising people based on malicious rumour and a mind reading ability I’m not even sure I’d want, that’s a good time to reconsider my opinion.
What is the principle that determines that this treaty is worth signing but also determines that staying in the EU is not worth it?
(Maybe the answer is just "The people demanded Brexit out of a sense of identity, but they don't want Brexit as an actual policy, and so this preserves national morale without affecting anything else"?)
That question cannot be answered to your satisfaction without answering this:
> I guess I don't see the sense in which Britain did not already have its sovereignty and now gains it by this move.
The easy way to distinguish the level of sovereignty is not to compare UK/EU treaties before and after Brexit, but to compare them with the treaties and level of sovereignty between the EU and Canada or Japan. The treaty we’re discussing now is of that ilk, and clearly, the level of sovereignty of those countries is of a different level to that of one in the EU. Can the EU make a law that Japan must implement domestically? No, they are covered by international law as a sovereign state. Same goes for Canada, and now the UK.
The argument that the UK had full sovereignty in the EU was a popular argument by those opposed to leaving but it was obviously false, which is surely one of the reasons their arguments were unpersuasive. From 22:31 of Vernon Bognador's talk[0] at Yale (which is fascinating from start to finish, by the way):
> When Harold Macmillan sought to join, he encountered fundamental difficulties, difficulties which probably have never been resolved, and the essence of the problem was one of fitting Britain into a continental system whose assumptions about constitutions, politics and economics was so different from those held in Britain.
> The most fundamental problem, perhaps, was that of fitting a constitutional system based on the sovereignty of parliament and the absence of a codified constitution into one based on a written constitution, the separation of powers, and subordination of the legal systems of the member states to superior system of European law.
Vernon Bognador is British Research Professor at the Institute for Contemporary British History at King's College London and Professor of Politics at the New College of the Humanities. He is also Emeritus Professor of Politics and Government at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, and has written several books on the British constitution and Brexit. He voted to remain in the EU[1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMV9wSSLcCY
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/10/10/second-refer...
Edit: formatting, will I ever get used to this flavour of markdown? </lament>
You mean the electorate.
They didn't. Ever.
At no point have any of their many promises - to stay in the Single Market, to eliminate red tape, to pay an extra £350m a week to the NHS, to be able to trade globally without restrictions, to continue Erasmus membership, and on and on and on - been in any danger of coming true.
So the voters voted for the most ridiculous lies, and apparently that's "democracy."
No, it isn't. It's fraud - plain and simple.
The current state of democracy in countries like UK and US brings to mind that famous Churchill quote:
"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
The common conclusion seems to be "oh, okay, guess that's it, then" rather than "maybe it's time to try something we haven't yet".
Elections are some times a democratic institution, but not always.
Democracy is government for and by the people. Considered decision making is a very important part of it.
By fetishising voting proponents of referendums cast aside all the important bits of democracy - consultation, consideration, listening to other views, expressing dissent.... and replace it with a brutal contest of propaganda.
Voting is important, but it is not the most improtant part of a democracy and if all yu have is voting and elections you do not have democracy.
If you tell people R will give them S, and they vote to get S, but it turns out R doesn't give S at all and you knew it all along; that doesn't mean people voted to get R. They voted to get S, giving them R is not therefore "technically" democracy (or any other weasel way of saying it).
Let's start with the simple case: in a democracy, people vote to affect policy. There's a referendum, and the will of the majority of the people voting in it determines the outcome. Easy.
Now, going in a more sci-fi direction, as a thought experiment: imagine that an evil mastermind invented mind control, and used it to ensure the majority of people voted a certain way in said referendum. Technically, I guess this would still be a democracy -- but in name only. In reality, the will of a single person determines the outcome.
Pulling back into reality, obviously we don't have mind control, nor an evil mastermind concocting schemes. We do know that if trusted people in positions of power abuse that power to outright lie, and spend very large sums of money to pursue a specific goal, then the will of these people will end up having a noticeable effect on the will of the population. If someone manipulated you and convinced you of something that wasn't true for their own hidden goals, is it still really your will that you're enacting by voting for it? or have you been tricked into enacting someone else's will?
So while by a surface definition of democracy, any of the above processes are democratic because they allow people to vote, a functional democracy relies on a well-informed populace -- we knew this even in Jefferson's time ("wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government").
The current PM was one of the relatively few political voices supporting Brexit.
Seems that with enough money from oligarchs you can make enough lies stick to swing a simple majority.
We have to try and move on from this; the next decade is going to make some rich people incredibly wealthy at the expensive of many, many people becoming poorer in the UK - not just by financial measures, but in terms of opportunity, health, quality of life. It's grim.
I often wonder what Douglas Adams would have thought of all this. The quintessential intersection of proud Englishman and citizen of the world.
He would have had some choice words for this whole mess I am sure.