Brexit - the sonic screwdriver approach

Michel Barnier, walking the border
between Ireland and Northern Ireland
with representatives of the Irish government

One of the big questions raised by this week's draft withdrawal agreement (and a hundred documents and meetings before it) is "How do we avoid a return to the borders of the past?". Or, as it's normally put now: "How do we avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland?". All sides have stated that they want the border to continue to be as open as it is today and, as we know, if "everybody wants it" and "it's in everybody's interests" then it will happen.

Theresa May was interrogated on the subject by the House of Commons Liaison Committee - a daunting assembly of the chairs of all the Commons select committees (though there are usually only about a dozen of them on any particular occasion). As the Times reported, "Asked about her government’s plans to avoid a hard border the British prime minister refused to rule out the use of cameras to monitor people and goods between the Republic and the North". But then "Pressed by Yvette Cooper, a senior Labour MP and chairwoman of the home affairs committee, on whether she could confirm numberplate recognition would not be used, Mrs May said: 'We have said that there will be no physical infrastructure in relation to Northern Ireland. We have put forward a number of suggestions as to how we think that border issue can be addressed'".

Those suggestions can be found in papers issued last summer on customs arrangements and specifically Northern Ireland and Ireland. A major suggestion for the border is what's usually referred to as "technology", which is taken to mean online registration of shipments, with VAT and customs duties being treated as an accounting process, plus the recognition of the largest companies as "trusted traders" who are assumed not to need stopping for customs checks.

That doesn't cover everyone of course, and former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern sums the scheme up as follows (see Give the impression of doing no work until it's far too late): "Our economy is relatively small, a huge amount of the trade is multinationals; it should be possible, I think, to do that by technology," Then: "But of course, when you come down to agriculture and smaller items, I don’t think technology would work. One thing we do not want, can’t have, is back to a physical border.” And then: "Theresa May, take her at her word, she’s confidently said she doesn't want a physical border, the EU don’t want a physical border, the Irish Government don’t. So you’re left down with the one alternative — to make technology work in most cases and to throw a blind eye to those areas that can’t come in within technology". The number of border crossings which would have to attract the blind eye (though obviously not the volume or value of goods in transit) has been estimated at 80%.

The proposals have been rejected as inadequate, unworkable or "magical thinking" by the Irish government and EU negotiators, probably because there is little detail. Brexiters pour scorn on this, accusing everybody of just being negative. After all, they say, other countries have frictionless borders - look at Switzerland and its neighbours, Norway and Sweden, Canada and the USA. They don't always recognise that Switzerland has free movement and is in the Schengen zone (people cross borders as well as goods) and has a raft of bilateral agreements replicating much of the single market and easing customs. Neither do they mention that both Norway and Sweden are inside the single market. And how frictionless are those borders anyway?

Excellent visit by select committee to Swiss border to see how political will and co operation and technology makes Swiss/German/French border crossings smooth. Useful info for our enquiry into land border issues NI/ROI pic.twitter.com/LPrVV7r5qK

— Kate Hoey (@KateHoeyMP) November 23, 2017

That's a border post. You know, the kind that nobody wants on the Irish border. "Zollabfertigung" means "customs clearance". The evidence that Hoey and the rest of the committee heard from the head of Swiss customs demonstrated that the vast majority of personal travel between Switzerland and its neighbours involves no stopping, and the vast majority of trade is done by pre-notification, trusted traders, risk assessment and technology, like cameras and ANPR. That's the vast majority, not all. There are stops, there are checks, and occasionally there are follow-ups away from the border.

But, the Brexiters cry, the EU itself has done the work... and they refer to a report called Smart Border 2.0 - Avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland for Customs control and the free movement of persons. It's not clear that they've read it though. 

(Incidentally, another Brexiter line is that neither Ireland nor the UK wants a border at all; it's "the EU forcing Ireland to erect checkpoints". However, this favoured report says "the withdrawal of the UK from the EU will create a requirement for some form of border controls on both sides of the Irish border" which presumably refers to the international legal context as set out in the rather technical Article XXIV of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT 1947) which effectively states that either you have a border or you form part of a customs union.)

Smart Border 2.0 seems a good report, with useful data such as numbers of person and vehicle movements across the border, and studies such as the Swiss, Norwegian etc cases mentioned above. But what it sees as eliminating a "hard border" seems rather different from May & co's idea. To take the list of features from the executive summary (comments in round brackets come from elsewhere in the report) and [comments in square brackets are my additions]:

Free Movement of persons under CTA (Common Travel Area):

• Free movement lanes at major border crossings for eligible people covered under CTA (special lanes at major crossings, minor crossings completely open)
• Use of enhanced driver's licenses [this is a US notion; is it relevant here?] and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Device) capabilities [the range at which such devices can be read varies with the chosen technology]
• Use of ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) at manned and unmanned border crossings (for example, at unmanned crossings to identify vehicles which should present at a manned border crossing) 
• Requirement for people not eligible under CTA to present at a manned border crossing (if such a person uses another crossing they're considered to have entered illegally)
• One check: at jurisdiction of entry [I assume this means that everything can always be done at the border]
• Creation of a frequent travellers program for people not eligible under the CTA
• Legal basis for collaboration and data exchange between Ireland and Northern Ireland/UK

Create a low-friction border for the movement of goods by:

• A bilateral EU-UK agreement regulating an advanced Customs cooperation that avoids duplication and where UK and Irish Customs can undertake inspections on behalf of each other
• Mutual recognition of Authorized Economic Operators (AEO)
• A Customs-to-Customs technical agreement on exchange of risk data
• Pre-registration of operators (AEO) and people (Commercial Travellers programme in combination with a Certified Taxable Person programme)
• Identification system by the border
• A Single Window (this is an international standard for information management between the private sector and government in relation to import and export) with one-stop-shop-elements (coordinated border management approach where businesses, at import and/or export, have a single contact with one government agency also representing other agencies at the release of goods [I assume this would cover things like (phyto)sanitary checks on farm produce])
• A Unique Consignment reference number (UCR) (A specific number regulated by a standard from the World Customs Organization that follows a consignment through its life cycle in the global supply chain, making it possible for governments to identify and follow a specific consignment from a risk and compliance perspective)
• A simplified Customs declaration system (100% electronic) with re-use of export data for imports
• Mobile Control and Inspection Units
• Technical surveillance of border (CCTV, ANPR etc)

A Swiss border crossing

There's a lot of technology there, and lots of structures to be designed, implemented and staffed, but the report does talk in terms of it being available by March 2019, and also serving as a model for future UK/EU working, so I'll leave that for now. For the purposes of this post I'll just point out that here we have:

• manned crossings
• free movement lanes (and therefore other lanes where you have to stop)
• radio frequency readers for people via their passports, and for goods
• ANPR and CCTV

This is infrastructure at the border - quite a lot of it - including several items which the UK government has said will not be present, or Northern Irish representatives have said must not be there.

Then there are significant logistical and legal agreements, including:

• an agreement that UK and Irish Customs can undertake inspections on each other's behalf
• mobile control and inspection units (at the Swiss border the two countries' people can operate on either side of the border; they even have helicopters)

When these measures were mentioned in the evidence session with Swiss and Norwegian customs staff, eyebrows were raised and committee members expressed some doubt that they were appropriate for this case.

In addition there are several requirements for data sharing, which in other areas raises the question of which legal jurisdiction is to be used, and which court or other body is required to settle disputes.

This is an idea of "smart borders" that claims to bring together international standards, best practice and new technologies to create low-friction borders that support fast and secure movement of persons and goods. Coordinated border management, with trusted trader and trusted traveller programmes, it says, can significantly reduce compliance requirements and make borders almost friction free [my emphasis]. That sounds very much like the Swiss or Norwegian/Swedish borders, or even the idea presented to cabinet by Boris Johnson (and then publicly rejected by his boss) which considered: "Even if a hard border is reintroduced, we would expect to see 95% + of goods pass the border [without] checks."

It doesn't sound quite like the Irish border someone ordered.

And finally

Why did I mention a sonic screwdriver? Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times wonders whether Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and other leading Brexiters are big fans of Dr Who, because he observes "much evidence of sonic screwdriver strategy (the all-purpose get out of jail free card for scriptwriters) in their thinking. Their mystical faith in technological solutions is most obvious in discussions about the Irish border". If you can get round the paywall, it's worth a read.

The rule of law, British style

[This was first posted on Monday 18 September.  Between us, Google and I then managed to lose it and revert to an earlier edit.  I've reconstructed it as far as possible, but some of it might feel a bit out of date.]


Some campaigners to leave the EU liked to reel off a list of things the British have given to the world, which would stand us in good stead when we set out on the great global journey on our own - things like the English language, the BBC and the rule of law.  And yet...

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"German politician Elmar Brok has ridiculed Theresa May's offer to protect the rights of EU nationals living in the UK" reports the Daily Express, whereas the government position is that "The commitment we will make will be enshrined in UK law, and enforceable through our highly respected courts".

If it comes to it I'd generally back UK courts (which is more than the Daily Mail sometimes does) but they can only work with the law they're given and, it appears, the government they work under.

Why would Elmar Brok be so concerned?  There might be some detail to sort out but surely a British court is up to the job of guaranteeing people's rights.  Yes, but what will be the law they're given to do it with?  And will the government take any notice?

On Thursday the British government expelled an Afghan in contravention of a court order. The young man, who had worked for the Afghan government and US companies, and feared for his life, sought refuge in the UK to join his father who had already been granted asylum.  He is his father's main carer.

Amber Rudd, Home Secretary

The Guardian reports that the Home Office "decided not to abide" by a court order intended to prevent him being put on a plane to Kabul, so there he ended up.  At that point a second order was granted which described the home secretary’s breach of the first court order as “prima facie contempt of court”.  The Independent reports he is "expected to be returned to London on Sunday morning after the Court of Appeal threw out the Government’s attempt to keep him in Afghanistan".

Latest update, 18 September:  Mr Bigzad has been brought back to the UK overnight, as reported by the BBC.

This follows many stories about Afghans who worked as interpreters for coalition forces during the occupation of their country but found it difficult to seek refuge with their erstwhile employers when the Taliban identified them as collaborators and threatened them with execution.

Those "highly respected courts" have done their jobs here, but the government has gone against their orders.  The same government which declares that the rights of EU expats will be "enshrined in UK law".  Could the UK's intentions, declared to the EU withdrawal negotiations, come into question?

The UK has always made it more difficult than other countries for EU expats who make a home here to apply for permanent residence, which they have the right to do after five years.  Until recently our form has been 85 pages long, compared with half a dozen in some other countries, original documents have been required, and sometimes kept for months, and people have sometimes found it necessary to pay for legal representation to navigate the process.

One of the common reasons permanent residence has been refused is that applicants have no health insurance. They might have been in the UK for a decade, using the NHS as is their right under EU arrangements, but suddenly they were required to have separate insurance.  The EU Commission has warned the UK government that this is not legal: "Under the Free Movement Directive, EU citizens who settle in another EU country but do not work there may be required to have sufficient resources and sickness insurance. The United Kingdom, however, does not consider entitlement to treatment by the UK public healthcare scheme (NHS) as sufficient. This breaches EU law".

That was until recently.  Now, if you go to the government website to the page headed Status of EU citizens in the UK: what you need to know you're told "There is no need for EU citizens living in the UK to do anything now. There will be no change to the status of EU citizens living in the UK while the UK remains in the EU. If you would like to find out the latest information you can sign up for email updates".

Until there is an agreed system, they admit, there's no point in doing anything.  Not least because "People who have been continuously living here for 5 years will be able to apply to stay indefinitely by getting ‘settled status'".  This means that people who already hold a permanent residence card, who've filled in the 85 pages and run the gauntlet of the process, who've eventually got all their documents back, will have to do it all again.  We're promised it will be a simpler system, which I, EU expats and our EU partners will believe when we see it.

This shouldn't be treated as a postscript, but finally there are the 100 deportation letters sent "in error" to EU expats in the UK.  When the alarm was raised across social media apologies came thick and fast, with Theresa May called it an "unfortunate error", adding:  "I want to assure EU nationals here in the UK that their rights and status in the UK have not changed".  To which an appropriate response might be "Yeah, right".

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Customs is one of dozens of areas requiring detailed negotiation and comprehensive system design to have any hope of working after Brexit.  The UK government put out a discussion paper on customs for the Brussels negotiations which David Davis quickly dismissed as blue sky thinking.  It calls for "flexible and imaginative" solutions, not least to the question of Northern Ireland's border with the Republic.

All the suggestions seem to be based on the twin ideas that:

1. The UK should keep its regulations and customs areas aligned with the EU's - oh, and we'll collect each other's customs duties (which should annoy the Brexiters)
2. Everything should work much as it does now, but outside the customs union and without the ECJ to underpin the legal framework (which should annoy the EU which would have to foot the bill for a new and more complex system with no advantage to them)

But everyone should get a laugh from "We acknowledge this is an innovative and untested approach that would take time to develop and implement".

Back in the real world, HMRC envisages a new unified system to draw together 26 organisations which deal with various aspects of cross-border dealings, but significant work is required even to complete an upgrade of the existing system to handle 130,000 UK companies which import from and export to other EU countries but currently have no need to come into contact with customs due to single market membership.

The number of customs declarations is expected to increase up to five-fold to 255 million a year but as Private Eye (issue 1451) and other commentators point out, new government IT systems don't have a good reputation.  The National Audit Office identifies a "risk that HMRC will not have the full functionality and scope of CDS (Customs Declaration Service) in place by March 2019 when the UK plans to leave the UK". Since the future UK-EU customs relationship will not be known for some time, and quite possibly not by the likely withdrawal date of March 2019, HMRC are obviously preparing options for transitional arrangements.

But surely, with good will on all sides and a following wind everything will go all right.  No?  But where would that good will come from?  An inquiry by the EU's anti-fraud office has concluded that the UK should pay a fine of €2bn for customs failures. Other EU member states acted to stop fraud associated with lost customs duties on Chinese-produced textiles and shoes imported into the EU via the UK between 2013 and 2016, but HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) continued to ignore fraudulent evasion of duties.  Several countries have also reported significant losses of VAT.

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A final example of this government's shaky relationship with the rule of law goes back a couple of years.  The FT's legal commentator wrote in April 2015:  "In a judgment handed down today the High Court held that yet again the Ministry of Justice under Grayling had acted unlawfully".

Chris Grayling was Justice Secretary at the time, which made him the only minister with a responsibility to uphold the rule of law specifically written into statute.  And yet he was determined to ignore his ministry's own statutory rules to force a change of policy about the treatment of prisoners.

He had told his barrister to argue that the rules (called Directions) had been issued by a Justice Secretary, could be changed or removed by a Justice Secretary, and that therefore they were "not directions to him but by him, and he cannot be bound by them".  The judge dismissed this argument, declaring that "so long as [the directions] remain in force they are binding on the Board and also binding on the Secretary of State, in the sense that he cannot lawfully tell the Board to ignore them or his officials to frustrate them".

Saboteurs department

Boris Johnson decided that six days before May makes her speech in Florence was a great day to write 4000 words (maybe 1000 when you remove the waffle) on his "optimistic" vision of Brexit.  The full piece is here, and Christopher Hope's bullet-point style introduction to it is here.  Both are behind a paywall, so here's an even more bullet-point style illustration just in case.

This was prepared by someone who is far from friendly to Johnson's cause but does reproduce Hope's ten headlines faithfully.  To take just one of these "points from a plan", does this look like a point from a plan?

And to take just one passage from Johnson's original article (this is from the section entitled "Our destiny will be in our own hands"):

"But, of course, this country still has chronic problems, and at least some of them have been exacerbated by the rigidities of EU membership - and certainly by the way we have chosen legally to apply those obligations.  Our infrastructure is too expensive - and takes far longer than France or other countries.  Successive governments have failed to build enough homes - though this is now being tackled by Sajid Javid.

"Our vocational training is often superb - but still not inspirational, and we have yet to find a way of persuading middle-class kids that they might be just as well off getting a skill as a degree.  We do not conduct enough basic research in science, and I am afraid we still have too many schools that are content with second-best.  The result of all these failings - over decades - is that we have low productivity: lower than France or Germany."

So according to Johnson, EU membership has exacerbated at least some of this country's problems and the way we've chosen to implement them has certainly exacerbated some of them.  Note that word "chosen".  It's up to each member state to decide how to implement each EU directive, and I'd certainly look at any examples Johnson puts forward.

But what does he put forward?  In infrastructure, house building, vocational training, basic scientific research, school quality, we're just not doing as well as... France and Germany.  What exactly is he blaming on the EU?

Finally, this morning's contribution from Chris Giles, the Financial Times' economics editor, is valuable because it analyses the claim made, seeks out the source and then evaluates the argument.  Importantly, and again, Brexit turns out to be irrelevant.  Read the thread of tweets for yourselves.

While Boris Johnson's lies about £350m got most people's juices flowing, I was intrigued but this claim in his Brexit "essay" pic.twitter.com/Xw5fG9lT0T

— Chris Giles (@ChrisGiles_) September 18, 2017

The Great Copy And Paste Bill™

Farewell Great Repeal Bill

The Great Repeal Bill, which was trumpeted in #MrMe's Lancaster House speech in January, and survived in many a committed Brexiter's imagination long before that word was coined, is an easy enough thing as a headline - repeal the European Communities Act, which implements EU law in the UK, but keep all the old law, up to and including the moment of withdrawal, so that everybody knows where they are.

And on Thursday it made its entrance. Twice, or possibly three times.  Wednesday evening saw a complaint in the Commons that the government intended to brief the media on the bill before it was seen by MPs.  Speaker Bercow "hoped" ministers would do something about that, though the way commentators were talking next morning they'd obviously seen some of it.

Then just after midday it was there, but without the normal pages on the parliamentary web site, and the FT's legal commentator David Allen Green had given it a going over.

Right.

Read through the Bill.  Only 19 clauses over 14 pages.  The rest of the 60 odd pages are schedules.

— David Allen Green (@davidallengreen) July 13, 2017

It all appeared in the right place following a complaint about this early release and its presentation to the Commons, when no debate was allowed - all as creaky as usual in our Ruritanian parliament.  It was now called the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill - a boast like "Great" isn't allowed in the name of a bill - and I was glad I hadn't actually put any money on my prediction of European Communities (Withdrawal) Bill.

It's quite a short bill considering the ambition of what it's intended to achieve, mostly because it hardly bothers to identify which EU laws are to be copied and pasted into British law.  Essentially it looks at any law which applies "immediately before exit day" and "exit day" is not defined.  A minister has to remember to put a measure through parliament to bring this thing to life.

Drawing back a little, here's Adam Bienkov in Business Insider:  "Huge parts of EU law are already embodied in both primary and secondary UK legislation, while other parts are not really laws at all but judgments made by the Court of Justice, or rulings by EU regulators. Deciding which parts of this will need to be adopted or amended is a bureaucratic nightmare that would take many years to do properly. Britain will have about 18 months."

Long live the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

A few bits of this great collection of laws can be discarded immediately but most will be copied over.  The hard bit is to change important things before that elusive exit day, which can't all be done in the usual way, with MPs having a few bites at the cherry to identify and resolve problems, then into the Lords for more of the same.  Apart from the scale of the thing, and the limited time available, there's the small problem that many potential changes depend on what is finally agreed by the Article 50 negotiations (and then any trade deal negotiations after that).

(I'm discounting the ridiculous notion of "no deal", though this bill doesn't, entirely.)

To achieve this the bill proposes to allow ministers to make changes with far less scrutiny than usual, using things called regulations (or statutory instruments, or secondary legislation) which parliament can do little more than accept or reject, and in many cases ministers are to be given "Henry VIII powers", so called because of their draconian scope.  Here's a relevant chunk of the bill, and sorry about the page break.

Essentially any minister (because these laws might come under any part of government) can make a change he or she considers appropriate, any change which can be made by an Act of Parliament (a full, proper law), with certain limitations in scope, and with a time limit (different limitations and time limits apply to different parts of the bill).  But notice the last four words of (2) above.  A minister can do anything, including modifying this act, including modifying this part of this act, including removing the restrictions or the time limit.  That would be extreme...

MPs don't like too much secondary legislation and the Lords have made a lot of noise about it, but it's hard to see how this project could possibly work without a least some of it.  David Allen Green says "Other lawyers may have seen discretionary powers wider than clause 7 of this Bill. I have not."  Clause 7 is far more complex than the the one I've selected, but clause 9 is a good enough illustration.

Opposition parties definitely don't like these proposals.  Labour's shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer says Labour will demand concessions in six areas, including:

• ensuring that workers’ rights in Britain do not fall behind those in the EU (which seems to be a matter entirely for future British law, unless Starmer is proposing that the UK-EU withdrawal agreement should contain such a undertaking)
• incorporating the European Charter of Fundamental Rights into UK law (this will be unpopular with Brexiters - the European Convention on Human Rights is bad enough - and the government's opening position is that it doesn't actually impart much that we don't already have in other ways)
• limiting the scope of the so-called “Henry VIII powers” (I've also seen a demand to remove any time limits, which might be seen as contradicting that demand)

We'll see what is said in the days up to actual debate on the bill, which won't be until after the long parliamentary holidays, when there will be little more than twelve months left of the time available before the date pencilled in for ratification of any treaties and agreements which come out of the Article 50 negotiations.

 The Article 50 process as of 14 July 2017

Saboteurs department 1

There are rather a lot of saboteurs today, starting with comments on the bill itself

Liberty and Amnesty International want the law to include a commitment not to reduce rights and freedoms, and government to conduct an audit of EU-derived human rights law and ensure these rights and freedoms are protected after Brexit.

In a joint statement, Global Justice Now and Another Europe Is Possible say "EU law incorporates some of our most cherished protections and rights, as well as rules that, for instance, prevent our government from selling products that can be used in torture overseas.  Giving Theresa May the powers of a renaissance monarch to translate these rights and protections into British law is terrifying, as it enables her government to change the way these laws work in fundamental ways, without parliamentary scrutiny".

The Scottish and Welsh governments have threatened to withhold legislative approval (and there will be arguments about how often that will be necessary in the months to come), calling the bill a "naked power grab".  This is due to the fact that any powers "taken back from Brussels" which relate to devolved areas of competence will initially be held by Westminster, to be (re-)devolved at a later date.

Needless to say David Mundell, the Scottish secretary, disagrees.  "This is not a power grab, it is a power bonanza for the Scottish parliament because after this bill has been implemented the Scottish parliament will have more powers and responsibilities than it has today."  Glass half empty v glass half full.

The London Evening Standard has an editorial which exhibits a bit of George Osborne's characteristic hyperbole:  "This is the single greatest act of regulation in UK history. Thousands of EU rules are being imported wholesale into our law. Not one is being watered down, and none of the rules are being abolished".

A careful reading of the explanatory notes which accompany the bill caused a stir among EU expats.  Dr. Paul Daly, Senior Lecturer in Public Law at the University of Cambridge, discusses it here.  The complex clause 7 noted above appears to give ministers extraordinary powers: "The power to deal with deficiencies can therefore modify, limit or remove the rights which domestic law presently grants to EU nationals, in circumstances where there has been no agreement and EU member states are providing no such rights to UK nationals".  It's hard not to read it without sometimes seeing EU citizens living in the UK themselves as "deficiencies".

Saboteurs department 2

Problems were raised in areas quite separate from the star bill of the day.  Osborne's creation, the Office for Budget Responsibility produced a Fiscal Risk Report which warned that recession is inevitable and that a minority government has less power to intervene:  "Governments should expect nasty fiscal surprises from time to time... and plan accordingly. And they have to do so in the context of ongoing pressures that are likely to weigh on receipts and drive up spending and a variety of risks that governments choose to expose themselves to for policy reasons.  This is true for any government, but this one also has to manage the uncertainties posed by Brexit, which could influence the likelihood or impact of other risks".

Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, came up with the image of the day in discussing the current situation:  "What we don't want to find is that at the first tap, this falls apart like a chocolate orange. It needs to be coming through as uniform, a little bit more like a cricket ball".  Claiming that "Brexit was the biggest peacetime challenge to government" but that it was "only just beginning to click into people's awareness" the report cast doubt among other things on the completion of new customs processes just two months before what is currently the established date for Brexit. Government IT projects have a well deserved reputation for coming in late, and contingency is not available for this one since the date is set in stone.

Those two august bodies do these reports all the time but the question of nuclear regulation, discussed on Wednesday,  is (we hope) a one-off.  In response to the government's belated publication of a paper on the subject (which failed to say anything on the live issue of medical radioisotopes).  The chairman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Roger Cashmore, hoped that associate membership of Euratom could be negotiated at a "similar cost, if not more than, what we're paying in via the EU at the moment".  The Nuclear Industry Association also remained to be convinced:

"While containing very little detail, the UK Government’s position paper demonstrates the complexity of replicating Euratom arrangements in UK regulation and co-operation agreements with third countries which the industry has warned of. Government must therefore make the need for transitional arrangements its starting point in negotiations. Failure to do so will risk precisely the disruption the government state they want to avoid.

"It remains the UK nuclear industry’s view that retaining Euratom membership will best serve the national interest. It may also be the most straightforward, seamless and sensible way to achieve the government’s stated preferred outcome is through the associated membership the Euratom treaty enables. Exploring that should be a priority in discussions with European institutions.

"The government has also said it wishes to provide 'certainty and clarity' to industry. Given the lack of clarity to date, it is imperative now that the government ensures there is regular and ongoing dialogue with industry so there is a full appreciation of the practical, logistical and administrative consequences of these negotiations."
And finally...  This Twitter thread, reviewed as "All about how UK voted Brexit out of objection to all the EU policies that the UK proudly drove" had been retweeted 11,240 times at the last count.

1. Hello, United Kingdom, it’s the United States of America here, and we need to talk.

— Steve Analyst (@EmporersNewC) July 10, 2017