Starmer is in the Commons to give a ministerial statement on the UK-EU surrender summit. He will field questions from MPs. Expect fish, energy, and defence to come up…
Starmer says of youth mobility: “And it delivers for our young people, because we are now on a path towards a controlled youth experience scheme with firm caps on numbers and visa controls. A relationship we have with so many countries around the world, some actually even set up by the party opposite. We should be proud to give our young people that opportunity.” No word on how much it would be ‘capped’ by…
Guido is told this morning by multiple sources close to the UK-EU negotiations that Starmer has made a “massive sellout” on fishing rights in order to get the deal over the line. Negotiations were slowing down yesterday evening but accelerated after midnight as Starmer made a series of “concessions in the early hours” particularly on the length of access enjoyed by EU member states to UK waters. None of this is good for Starmer’s attempt to cosplay as right-wing…
Earlier this week Mike Cohen, chief executive of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations, had warned the government to hold its nerve on the issue. He told the Financial Times Starmer should refuse an EU demand to extend extant access arrangements to British waters. The paper reported: “Cohen said EU fishermen took about £500mn of fish each year from UK waters under a post-Brexit deal that comes up for renewal in 2026.” Meanwhile the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation wrote a letter to the PM urging caution – its chief executive told the BBC that “if another multi-year deal is on the table, that must come with some transfer of meaningful commercially viable fishing opportunities to the UK.” Starmer is going to suffer a huge backlash on this…
UPDATE: 12 year fishing rights confirmed. A major sellout…
UPDATE II: Nigel Farage says that is “the end of the fishing industry.“
The Court of Justice of the European Union has just ruled that the European Commission was wrong to reject a request from the New York Times to access messages between Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla from Jan. 1, 2021 and May 11, 2022. “Pfizergate” has been wound up to represent the EU’s issues with accountability at its top levels…
Co-conspirators used to firing FoIs will be familiar with the case:
“The Court notes that the Commission’s replies regarding the text messages requested throughout the procedure are based either on assumptions or on changing or imprecise information. By contrast, Ms Stevi and The New York Times have produced relevant and consistent evidence describing the existence of exchanges, in the form of text messages in particular, between the President of the Commission and the CEO of Pfizer in the context of the procurement of vaccines by the Commission from that company during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have thus succeeded in rebutting the presumption of non-existence and of non-possession of the requested documents.”
The Commission has lost on all counts in the ruling – the case was brought to the ECJ in January 2023. Two months to appeal now…
US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent is in Riyadh today after climbing down on tariffs with China. Speaking at the Saudi-US Investment Forum on future trade deals with other countries, Bessent didn’t exactly give good news for the EU. He said:
“On my side of the world things are going very well. I think the US and Europe may be a bit slower. My personal belief is Europe may have a collective action problem. The Italians want something that’s different than the French. But I’m sure at the end of the day we will reach a satisfactory conclusion.”
That’s after President Trump said yesterday that “the European Union is in many ways nastier than China. We have all the cards. They treated us very unfairly.” Meanwhile, Downing Street still refuses to accept that the US-UK trade deal was a Brexit benefit. All as Starmer gears up for major concessions at the EU surrender summit next week…
Vice President J.D. Vance has just finished talking to Wolfgang Ischinger at the MSC’s Munich Leaders Meeting in Washington D.C., in which European industrial failure received an earful:
“There is this fear that we have when we look at some of our European friends, and I made this point at the first Munich security conference I ever went to, that when I looked at Germany 10, 15, 20 years ago one of the things that the Germans were very good about is that they were they had kept the industrial strength of their economy consistent with the first world standard of living, but now what we see in Europe is a lot of our European friends are de-industrialising at the very moment where we’re all seeing the hard power underpinning or the economic underpinning of real hard power requires very strong and powerful industry.”
Vance pointed out that it is fine for Europe to disagree with the US but this “is an area where we’re fundamentally right and I think it’s it’s gratifying to see so many of our European friends recognise that and recognise that Europe does really have to play a bigger role in continental defense.” In an update the VP also said Russia was “asking for too much” to end the war in Ukraine. Ischinger tried to point out German efforts to lift the debt brake on defence spending, to a muted response from Vance…
The European Commission is meanwhile busy suing five of the EU’s member states for non-compliance with its Digital Services Act. An unserious bloc…
The EU has approved retaliatory tariffs on the US after votes. Duties of between 10% and 25% will be placed on products including tobacco, poultry, steel, aluminium, and motorcycles. 26 out of 27 voted in favour – Hungary against. 15 were required for the motion to pass…
The tariffs are worth €22 billion. The Commission previously plotted tariffs on more goods worth €26 billion – threats from Trump to impost 200% tariffs on EU alcohol products put paid to plans to tariff American bourbon. The Commission is still to respond to additional 25% car tariffs and 20% on EU goods…
Former leader of the SNP in Westminster Ian Blackford told Times Radio why he believes Nicola Sturgeon’s claim that she spent no time in the kitchen and therefore didn’t see any of her husband’s purchases:
“She doesn’t have a passion for cooking.”