Getting out of the UK. Phew!

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The number of British nationals emigrating  to other EU countries has risen by 30% since the Brexit referendum, with half making their decision to leave in the first three months after the vote, research has found.  (Bravo. Ed.)

Analysis of data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Eurostat shows that migration from Britain to EU states averaged 56,832 people a year in 2008-15, growing to 73,642 a year in 2016-18.

The study also shows a 500% increase in those who made the move and then took up citizenship in an EU state. Germany saw a 2,000% rise, with 31,600 Britons naturalising there since the referendum.  Cited as reasons for moving are reduced levels of consideration and level-headedness in decision-making in the UK. and more impulsiveness, spontaneity and risk-taking”.  

While the EU withdrawal agreement enshrines the residency, work and social rights of EU citizens in the UK and Britons in the rest of the bloc, it failed to guarantee the free movement rights of British migrants, restricting future employment and residency prospects in other member states.

Co-author Daniel Tetlow said that “Brexit was by far the most dominant driver of migration decisions since 2016”. The jump in citizenship was “further evidence that an increasing number are making migration decisions to protect themselves from some of the most negative effects of Brexit on their lives”, the report said.

The key loss for British nationals is the freedom to move countries within the EU or to work across borders. This does not apply to EU nationals in the UK who retain free movement rights beyond Brexit courtesy of their EU member state citizenship.It means that unless British nationals take out citizenship in their host country, they can no longer work in or offer a service to another EU member state, impacting professions including accounting, law, architecture, translation and health.

More than 21,000 British nationals emigrated to Spain between 2016 and 2018.  11,00 went to Germany, 10,000 to France, 6000 to Ireland and 5000 to the Netherlands. ( Source: Guardian graphic. Source: Berlin Social Science Center.)

The second most popular country for British nationals was France, which does not require registration of EU migrants. Between 2008 and 2015 the number of registrations was just over 500 a year. After the referendum this rose tenfold with 5,000 registrations over the following two years.

In Germany, 14,600 Britons had dual nationality in 2019 compared to 622 in 2015. A total of 31,600 applied and received German citizenship in the three years after the referendum (2016 to 2019) with another 15,000 German passports expected for 2020. Overall half the estimated 120,000 Britons in Germany are expected to have dual citizenship by the end of this year.

In 2019, more Brits took German citizenship  than Poles, Romanians, Iraqis or Syrians.  Interviews with migrants in Germany for the study found those who migrated considered it a “big risk” but were prepared to make the trade-off to secure future residency and access across 27 countries.  (Lisa O’Carroll, 4 Aug 2020. Guardian).

My comment: Were I younger I think (my wife willing) that I would move to France.  Britain and the US (especially the US) seem to be blundering into a re- run of German, Italian and Spanish politics of the 1930s.  No one knows any history, and thus they blunder into a modern fascism without a clue what they are doing.

 

 

Monopolizing drugs

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So much for hopes of international cooperation in the fight against Covid-19. The US has just bought up “virtually all stocks” of the drug Remdesivir – leaving the rest of the world with none “for the next three months”. The drug, made under patent by the US pharma giant Gilead, is one of just two treatments proven to help people recover faster from the virus. The Trump administration has repeatedly shown it is “prepared to outbid and outmanoeuvre all other countries” to secure vital medical supplies. Still, the announcement this week was certainly timely: it coincides with evidence that the pandemic in the US is “spiralling out of control”. Other Western countries could secure supplies of the drug were they to tear up the patents’ rule book and buy from “generic companies in Bangladesh or India, where Gilead’s patent is not recognised”. So far, it hasn’t come to that. But America’s “unilateral action” raises fears of what will happen when the holy grail of a vaccine becomes available. Cornering the market on Remdesivir is perhaps a “taste of things to come”. (Sarah Boseley, The Guardian 4 July 2020)

My comment:   Of course what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander …….. were the Oxford University covid 19 drug to be proved effective and safe, what is the prevent the British from declaring their own monopoly and refusing access to Americans and everyone else?  Hard to keep up with the short-sighted stupidities.

I remember with affection the era in which the priority was to get nations working together for the common good.  There are still people, all too many, who do not subscribe to civilized mutual cooperation.  “Beggar you’re neighbour” seems to be quite acceptable as a policy for everything.  Anti-Epicurean to be sure; short- sighted as well.

Warming of the Globe

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To The Economist

Limiting temperature rises to 2°C above pre-industrial norms would still leave atmospheric carbon dioxide at well over 450 parts per million (ppm). We evolved – and until less than a century ago, lived – on a 300ppm planet. We need to return the Earth’s climate to its pre-industrial state, without doing the same to the economy.

The UN recently hosted the first Global Forum on Climate Restoration. Entrepreneurs and climate scientists discussed the undoubtedly gargantuan challenge of removing and permanently storing around a trillion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere by 2050, and presented technically viable ways to do this. Even if market-based approaches to remove carbon dioxide fail entirely, and they won’t, a reasonable estimate is that it would cost 3-5% of global GDP for 20-30 years to return the atmosphere to 300ppm. As a comparison, ten years ago America diverted 3.5% of its annual GDP to prevent the financial system from collapsing. That felt like a good investment. So does this.  (Jon Shepard, Global Development Incubator, under the title “A cooling investment“)

My comment: A minority of people throughout the world are trying hard to concentrate the attention of politicians to the scary warming of the planet, so far with small effect. The best news today is that BP has announced that it will stop oil exploration and development and concentrate only on renewable energy.  But this is just one company.  A large number of Americans seem to think that warming is a hoax.  Their names and activities will go down in history as betrayers  of the human race.  But in a culture where money is god, and you have no right to stop them making money, however recklessly and selfishly, this is how it is and will quite possibly destroy civilized life. But who cares?

 

American storm troops.

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“He sent what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called his “unidentified storm troopers” togged out like soldiers in a war zone onto streets filled with protesters in Portland, Oregon. Those camouflage-clad federal law enforcement agents were evidently from the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service and the Customs and Border Protection agency.

Soon, hundreds of them are evidently going  to “surge”– a term that should sound eerily familiar — into Chicago and other cities run by Democratic mayors. In such a fashion, the Administration is quite literally bringing this country’s wars home. Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office, Trump recently described everyday violence in Chicago as “worse than Afghanistan, by far.” He was talking about the country the U.S. invaded in 2001 and in which it hasn’t stopped fighting ever since, a land where more the 1000,000 civilians reportedly died violently between 2010 and 2019. By now, violence in Chicago (which is indeed grim) in the mind of the Great Confabulator, become “worse than anything anyone has ever seen”, and so worthy of yet more militarized chaos”. (William Astor, Tomgram july 26, 2020).

My comment:  I happen to have a history degree, one of my tutors having been a senior translator at the Nuremberg trials.  He was an expert on Europe in the period leading up to the Second World War.   All the time I am reminded of his horrific stories and regret that Americans have such superficial knowledge of the history of fascism, enabled as it was by the aftermath of the 1929 financial disaster.  The modern parallels are truly scary, the personalities involved weirdly parallel, the activities of Q-Anon little different from German, Italian and Spanish fascism of the 20s and 30s.  Epicureanism  is partly about peace of mind.   Hard to maintain!

Meanwhile, the world temperatures are rising…….

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Verkhoyansk, Russia

The highest temperature ever seen in the Arctic circle – 38°C – has been recorded in a town in Siberia. Scientists had previously predicted that the Arctic circle would not experience temperatures like that until 2100. A small town with a population of 1,000, some 3,000 miles east of Moscow, Verkhoyansk is known for its exceptionally cold winters. Its record low of -67.8°C is one of the coldest temperatures recorded on Earth. In summer, it typically reaches highs of 20°C.

However, Siberia has been in the grip of an exceptional heatwave for more than a month, causing wildfires that have sent smoke stretching over thousands of miles. On 23 May, the mercury in Khatanga, more than 100 miles north of Verkhoyansk, hit 25°C, an astonishing 13°C higher than its previous record.  (The Week 27 June 2020).

My comment:  There are governments that are actually trying to devise responsible policies to fight global climate change.  But for some, the United States in particular, the whole thing is being treated as a hoax devised to damage the economy and to make life harder for the pampered super-rich, who effectively control the current government and dictate policy.  For them the clear and obvious effects of warming are to be treated as party political. Global warming is deeply inconvenient for these selfish people and is best ignored or treated as party politics.

I won’t live to see the worst effects of the calamity facing the planet, but i feel for and fear for those who come after me and I doing my pathetic best not to make matters worse.