It looks like successive Tory home secretaries are trailblazing on migration as Olaf Scholz has just announced the German government will “examine” a Rwanda-style policy of processing migrant applications abroad. The pledge comes as a result of a late-night crisis meeting with regional leaders to hammer out a harder migration framework. Austria has already signed a “migration and security agreement” last week with the UK to co-operate on offshoring schemes. While pearl-clutchers gasp at the Tories’ ‘inhumanity’ on Twitter, European governments are taking the UK’s lead…
The German coalition government has agreed to a massive corporation tax cut worth €32 billion over four years in a bid to revive its flagging economy, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz declaring yesterday that the package – part of the new “Growth Opportunities Law” – will provide the necessary “big boost” to get the country on a path to growth. When even a left-of-centre led coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and the liberal Free Democrats are coming up with a growth plan based on tax cuts it emphasises the anti-growth nature of Rishi’s corporate tax hikes.
Germany was forecast to be the worst-performing leading economy this year. So far, it has seen no growth in the three months to June, and shrank in the two previous quarters. After a few weeks of inter-party squabbling, the coalition has finally realised how to fix it. Hint: it wasn’t through more inflationary spending. Finance Minister Christian Lindner instead pushed for tax cuts to “improve Germany’s competitiveness” and “give new impulses for growth“. Is His Majesty’s Treasury paying attention?
In 2009, nuclear power supplied 25% of Germany’s electricity. As a result of the December 2021 election, which produced an Olaf Scholz-led traffic light coalition of the SPD, FDP, and Greens, the federal government announced they would shut down the last three functioning modern nuclear power plants this year. Yet in a belated outburst of rationality, the German government has decided to keep them open – for now. The Green Party, which has delivered Germany into reliance on the kindness of Vladimir Putin, is reluctantly going along with the “temporary” policy reversal.
With energy prices rising almost exponentially, German industrial production was suffering badly. Business logic was always likely to prevail over politics. Whatever German industry wants, German industry tends to get…
Yesterday’s Observer carried a nose-butting op-ed from Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s minister for foreign affairs, who in a joint byline with Simon Coveney slammed the UK government’s “unilateral” plans to change the Northern Ireland protocol and threaten the “rules-based international order”. According to the German government, there is “no legal or political justification” for the government’s proposal to de-restrict goods shipping between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. “We urge the British government to step back from their unilateral approach and show the same pragmatism and readiness to compromise that the EU has shown,” they say…
The UK government will be rightfully outraged at this hypocritical de haut en bas attitude from the German government. While their foreign minister is telling the UK to accept a border within the UK, five days ago president Olaf Sholz sought to cool tensions in the Baltics by urging Lithuania and the EU to lift restrictions on freight going from Russia to their Kaliningrad exclave, arguing war crime-committing Russia should be able to move goods freely through the EU single market because it’s all part of their country. If only Germany relied on Great Britain for swathes of their gas…
To compound the outrage, Annalena Baerbock’s op-ed went on to cite the Ukraine war as a reason against the UK’s unilateral move against the Northern Ireland protocol:
“In these difficult times, as Russia is leading a ruthless war in Ukraine, breaking with our European peace order, the EU and UK must stand together as partners with shared values and a commitment to uphold and strengthen the rules-based international order.”
If Germany is demanding the UK “show the same pragmatism and readiness to compromise the EU has shown”, perhaps they should be consistent in countenancing facilitations of moving goods around the continent for both Great Britain and Russia. Germany seems keener to appease Russia’s desire to export weapons to Kaliningrad than Britain’s desire to export sausages to Northern Ireland…
While FBPEers try sniping the government at any opportunity, in the real world an astonishing poll puts into perspective just how well the PM’s handled Ukraine in the eyes of those who matter: Ukrainians.
The poll conducted by US outlet Cyngnal finds Boris’s net approval rating in Ukraine is second only to that of Zelenskyys, and is well ahead of Biden and Sholtz.
- Zelenskyy: +79%
- Boris: +49.6%
- Biden: +25.8%
- Scholz: +23.4%
- Xi Jinping: -19.4%
- Putin: -86.7%
The UK also stands as the most popular ally in all this, 14 points ahead of the EU and 23 points ahead of the US:
- 🇬🇧: 56%
- 🇪🇺: 42.2%
- 🇺🇸: 33.3%
- Nato: -16.8%
Following the Kosovo conflict, parents started calling boys Tonibler – will Boris be the new baby name de jour of Ukraine when all this is over?
