Thursday, 24 August 2017

How to prepare for important negotiations... badly


Theresa May's house of cards


The government whose manifestos have proclaimed that an annual net immigration figure below 100,000 is a pledge (2010), an ambition (2015) and an objective (2017) is beginning to admit that it has based policy on bad or non-existent data.

Amid fears of huge numbers of foreign students staying on after college and fading into the British economy, Theresa May as home secretary "closed down hundreds of bogus colleges" and tightened the rules on student visas.  Some of the targeted students and colleges were treated unjustifiably (Disaster for Theresa May as legal ruling brings student deportations to a halt) and the UK was reported to be "losing the economic argument over international students; that priceless political soft power, which for generations has been one of the greatest assets arising from British education... trashed by a Conservative government that has been making decisions based on spurious evidence".

But at least the numbers were right.  Weren't they?  Until the Telegraph (notorious friend of immigrants) reported that "the Government will reveal on Thursday that new border checks  introduced last year found 97 percent of international students - one of the biggest groups of immigrants - left after finishing their studies".  Doubts over these numbers, and others based on airport survey figures, have been raised for years, often by such "pro-immigration" commentators as Jonathan Portes, whose comment on the following quote from May is "We should be clear - at the time Theresa May said this, she, and everybody else who understood [the] issue, knew it was nonsense".





As the Office for National Statistics reported another fall in net immigration - "These results are similar to 2016 estimates (published in May 2017) and indicate that the EU referendum result may be influencing people’s decision to migrate into and out of the UK, particularly EU and EU8 citizens. It is too early to tell if this is an indication of a long-term trend" - now home secretary Amber Rudd has thought to ask the government's Migration Advisory Council "to examine the effect that both EU and non-EU students have on the labour market and economy while in the UK and [to] report back next September".

The ONS also reported on the work they've been doing to generate better numbers on international student migration, the first fruits of which we are seeing now.

Oh yes, Thursday was also the day that the first results under a new maths GCSE marking standard were announced.

We're leaving now, but save this seat for me 

Thursday's publication for the Brexit negotiations was a "future partnership paper" (not a position paper, not even as definite as that).  It seemed to come with none of the media management that's been normal so far in August, which made me think it might be expected to annoy the Brexiters among us.

A couple of weeks ago the government announced that it would be passing a new data protection law.  The Telegraph was refreshingly honest (if optimistic) about it:

 "Why are we doing this?
Next May, the GDPR, a new set of cross-EU data rules, comes into force. The UK’s existing data rules must be updated to match them so they are equivalent to the EU's laws after Brexit. This is to ensure that organisations can freely send data back and forth with Europe after we leave."

The Mail seems to have had the same memo.  Their main interest was (quite reasonably) the consumer protection side of things, but they did have the EU angle:

"The legislation will bring the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) into domestic law.  This will help Britain prepare for Brexit because it will mean the systems are aligned when the UK leaves the bloc."
This law would cement the right to be forgotten, even to have everything embarrassing you posted online before the age of 18 to be deleted (but not those pictures from your 47th birthday party at the Rose and Crown...).  The government, and spokesperson Little Matty Hancock (pictured), didn't shout very loudly about its place in the EU scheme of things (a member like the UK has to have implemented the General Data Protection Regulation by May next year) but somehow the papers got the idea that it was to prepare for Brexit.

And then on Thursday came the "future partnership paper" which might one day feed in to negotiations on a future UK-EU relationship.  Steve Peers, Professor of EU, Human Rights and World Trade Law at Essex University, runs through it in the tweet thread below, but the overall impression from commentators was that May & co intended that the UK would have a framework of data protection regulation on "exit day" which is perfectly aligned with the EU's regime, that we would keep it aligned for ever, and that we rather expect to be consulted on any changes the EU might want to make to these things in future.





A phrase from my student days, which has been hovering at the back of my mind for a while now, can no longer be denied.  These proposals are "on the hubris side of chutzpah", where hubris is "extreme or foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence" and the favoured definition of the Yiddish word involves the man who kills his parents, then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he's an orphan.

Brexit talks resume next Monday

There's some indication that Brussels is discussing Westminster's latest output.  But also that they're having a good giggle.  And UK civil servants are playing a straight bat at best.





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