Daily Archives: October 17, 2022

The UKs Brexit divorce bill stood at 41.8bn (36.7bn) in 2021, according to the EUs official auditors.

The European court of auditors annual report revealed that the UK was expected to make 10.9bn in payments to the EU during 2022.

The Brexit divorce bill was down from 47.5bn (41.7bn) in 2020, reflecting payments made by the British government.

Tony Murphy, the president of the European court of auditors, said the final amount the UK pays to the EU was not expected to change much. Overall its pretty stable; there could be some adjustment, but I dont think it will be that significant.

EU estimates of the Brexit financial settlement have tended to be higher than those of the British government, which forecast Brexit spending commitments between 35 and 39bn.

The Treasury, however, in July revised the Brexit bill upwards by 5bn, from 37.3bn to 42.5b, blaming the rising cost on meeting the UKs obligations to pay EU staff pensions.

The Brexit financial settlement largely consists of EU projects the UK agreed to co-fund during its time as a member state, a category worth 28.6bn, according to the court of auditors. The second largest component, 14bn, is the cost of EU staff pensions, reflecting liabilities incurred during Britains 47 years of membership. Smaller elements include loan guarantees offered by EU member states, including the UK, to countries such as Ukraine.

When Britain left the EU on 31 January 2020, it had agreed a way to calculate the divorce bill, but not a figure. The final total depends on variables such as projects being cancelled, actuarial estimates changing, and EU loans going bad.

The report was published amid an improvement in EU-UK relations. Liz Truss, in contrast with her domestic troubles, smoothed relations with European neighbours last week by attending a European summit in Prague that brought together EU and non-EU countries to discuss the war in Ukraine.

Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning

EU diplomats, however, say they have few illusions about her stance on the EU. The governments emollient tone on the Northern Ireland protocol is attributed to its domestic troubles and turbulence on financial markets, which are seen as reducing appetite for a trade war with the EU.

A UK government spokesperson said: These figures were originally published in the EUs 2021 annual accounts and are consistent with the Treasurys latest estimates. We recognise the importance of ensuring that taxpayers money is well spent and are committed to transparency we regularly report these figures to parliament.

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UKs Brexit divorce bill stood at 36.7bn in 2021, EU audit reveals - The Guardian

BELFAST British and European negotiators are working to agree a way forward on post-Brexit trade arrangements that will give Britain enough political cover to avoid snap elections in Northern Ireland, Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said Wednesday.

Speaking after he met four of the five main parties in Northern Irelands crippled legislature, Coveney suggested that a framework agreement on simplifying EU-required checks at local ports could be announced on or shortly before October 28.

That date is the last day under existing rules of Northern Ireland power-sharing for a new cross-community administration to be formed at Stormont, the government base overlooking Belfast.

The main pro-British party, the Democratic Unionists, say they wont permit this unless the EU agrees to end all checks and restrictions on British goods staying in Northern Ireland. The DUP declined to send any representatives Wednesday to meet Coveney, citing unspecified diary conflicts.

Britains secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Chris Heaton-Harris, has said he will be legally bound to set a date for new Northern Ireland Assembly elections on October 28 exactly 48 weeks after the current assemblys first deadlocked sitting if the DUP doesnt end its obstruction by then.

However, Coveney said this publicly rigid deadline could be set aside if ongoing London-Brussels dialogue overseen by U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly and the European Commissions point man on Brexit, Maro efovi, sufficiently narrows the ground between them.

Coveney noted that the existing law would require Britain to set a new Stormont election date if there isnt a way forward by the 28th.

"I dont think anybody wants to do that," he told reporters at a hotel near Stormont.

However, he expressed hope that this "way forward," outlining common ground already achieved and issues still to be resolved, could be published on or shortly before that date.

Were working hard to try to ensure that the Cleverly-efovi teams focus on what is possible this side of the 28th of October, Coveney told reporters.

The goal, he said, is to achieve enough U.K.-EU consensus within the next two weeks to provide an alternative to a new election cycle in Northern Ireland.

Leaders of four local parties the center-ground Alliance Party, the Irish nationalists of Sinn Fin and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), and the Ulster Unionists said they agreed with Coveney that an election should be avoided if possible.

All recalled previous crises in Stormont power-sharing when British governments publicly set supposedly make-or-break deadlines for agreement, only to shift those deadlines to create more space for talks.

Alliance leader Naomi Long, justice minister in Northern Irelands currently leaderless government, said forcing her and other remaining ministers from their jobs on October 28 would needlessly create a political void at a time of unprecedented crisis.

Reflecting other parties' bad blood with the Democratic Unionists, Long sparred online with DUP Agriculture Minister Edwin Poots, who avoided Wednesday's meetings.

Ulster Unionist leader Doug Beattie called the October 28 deadline artificial and really unhelpful because it would discourage good negotiations.

It will harden positions. It will drive people to the trenches, he said, suggesting that any election re-run would strengthen hardliners at the expense of moderates.

In the May election, Sinn Fin overtook the DUP for the first time, putting outgoing Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill in line for the top post of first minister and reducing the DUP's share of ministerial posts.

Several DUP figures told POLITICO at their annual party conference last weekend that they see a snap election as offering a potential opportunity to reverse that outcome. The DUP, which currently has 25 assembly seats versus Sinn Fin's 27, would target up to three seat gains in the next election.

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Ireland: Progress on Brexit protocol talks could shelve Belfast election that nobody wants - POLITICO Europe

Hard to believe now, when were in the middle of the maelstrom, but one day this too will be the past. And when it is, when were out of the hourly psychodrama no longer staring at the screen, watching Kwasi Kwartengs plane do an actual U-turn in the sky en route to his being fired on touchdown, for the crime of doing what his boss wanted him to do it may not look all that complicated.

Historians will look back and see a point of origin to the current madness, one that explains how a new prime minister could see her administration fall apart in a matter of weeks, even if we struggle to name that cause out loud right now. When the textbooks of the future come to the chapter we are living through, in the autumn of 2022, they will start with the summer of 2016: Brexit and the specific delusion that drove it.

They will point to the obvious impact of Britains decision to leave the European Union, and the role that played in upending a country once renowned for its stability. They might begin with the basics. Exit, they will write, shrank the UK economy thanks to a 5.2% fall in GDP, a 13.7% fall in investment and a similar drop in the trade in goods. That self-inflicted contraction helps explain why Britain felt international shocks surging inflation, for example harder than most. If your economy is smaller, you either have to tax people more to pay for the services they expect, or you cut those services, or you borrow. There are no other ways out.

Unless you resort to magical thinking. Which brings us to the second causal connection between the craziness of now and the turning point of 2016. Brexit broke the link between governance and reason, between policy and evidence. Until Brexit, politicians only rarely got away with defying the empirical facts or elementary logic. But in 2016 they pretended that a country could weaken its trading ties to its nearest neighbours and get richer, which is like saying you can step in a bath of ice and get warmer. Once the taboo on magical thinking was broken, once fantasy became a Conservative habit, Trussonomics became inevitable smilingly insisting that you could cut taxes for the richest, make absolutely no cuts to public services and control borrowing, all at the same time.

But there is a less obvious way in which Brexit made the current great unravelling a political death foretold. It turns on the idea that powered the urge to leave the EU more than any other: call it the sovereignty delusion.

The leavers slogan, Take back control, urged Britons to shake off the constraints of Brussels and become a proud, sovereign nation once more a nation that, alone, would decide its fate. After Brexit, they promised, Britain would be the sole master of its destiny, unburdened by the need to consult or even accommodate anyone else.

The three weeks since Kwarteng delivered his mini-budget have seen the shattering of that delusion. For Truss and her now ex-chancellor were given the rudest of reminders that in our interdependent world there is no such thing as pure, untrammelled sovereignty. No government can do what the hell it likes, heedless of others. In this case, the restraint on sovereignty was not the EU: it was the money markets. But their verdict was as binding as any Brussels edict; in fact it was more so. They ordered the removal of a chancellor after just 38 days in office and the cancellation of the governments economic strategy. It is the financial markets that have taken back control.

None of these events should be a surprise. There were plenty who warned this would happen, not least Trusss summer opponent, Rishi Sunak. But Truss and Kwarteng went ahead anyway, issuing their proclamations as if they were the sole actors on the stage, oblivious to the fact that you cant just announce 43bn of unfunded tax cuts without those whom you expect to lend you the money expressing a view in this case by triggering an instant spike in the cost of borrowing. You cannot simply bypass the official spending scrutineer, the Office for Budget Responsibility, without the markets concluding that youve become unpredictable and, therefore unreliable, a bad risk.

As remainers were mocked for pointing out six long years ago, there is no such thing as unfettered sovereignty in the 21st century: every country has to accommodate its neighbours, the global economy, reality. But the leavers, and their zealous convert Truss, refused to hear it. When Sunak tried to spell out these rudimentary facts, Conservative party members thought he was being a spoilsport. The Treasury permanent secretary, Tom Scholar, was seen as the embodiment of such boring, reality-based thinking, and so Truss fired him.

This week Sanjay Raja, chief UK economist of Deutsche Bank, told a Commons committee that Britain was facing a unique form of trade shock: We havent seen this kind of trade deficit since 1955, since national account records began. It was odd, because I too had been thinking about the mid-1950s, specifically the Suez crisis of 1956. The failure of that military adventure is now seen as the moment when a bucket of cold reality was thrown into Britains face, a humiliation that stripped the country of its imperial delusions, forcing it to accept that it was no longer a global superpower that could act alone. For a while, Britain learned that lesson: just five years after Suez, the country was knocking on Europes door, asking to join the club.

But some, especially in the Conservative party, never shook off the old delusion. By 2016, it was back, the Tories high on Brexit talk of a global Britain once again sailing the worlds oceans, free of the constraining hand of the EU, ready to return to its rightful grandeur. The Tories have been breathing those fumes for six years, and the Truss-Kwarteng mini-budget was the result: the Suez of economic policy, a disastrous act of imagined imperial sovereignty.

As several economists have noted, Truss was acting as if Britain were the US, issuer of the worlds reserve currency, with markets falling over themselves to lend it money. Like Anthony Eden before her, she could not accept that Britains place is not what it was: it can never be sovereign like a king in a fairytale, able to bend the world to his will. That kind of sovereignty was always a fantasy, one that both fed Brexit and was fed by it.

Now she has had to make a concession to reality, laying down the political life of her friend and abandoning what had been a signature policy. She is not in charge of events; she is not even in charge of her own government. Jeremy Hunt was an appointment forced on her. Her demeanour in her afternoon press conference on Friday shell-shocked, brittle suggested she has not absorbed the full meaning of what has just happened.

She is finished, a hollow husk of a prime minister. But this is bigger than that. The Brexit bubble has burst. The country has seen that the Tory hallucination of an island able to command the tides was no more than a fever dream, and a dangerous one at that. We can pronounce Trussonomics dead. Bring on the day we can say the same of the delusion that spawned it.

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The markets have taken back control: so much for Trusss Brexit delusion of sovereignty - The Guardian

The immediate cause of the United Kingdoms self-inflicted economic crisis, that led to prime minister Liz Truss sacking her chancellor of the exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, was a series of elementary misjudgments. Those mistakes reflected the prioritisation of swaggering self-confidence over expert advice, the favouring of maverick instincts over objective facts.

However, the roots of the current mayhem lie deep in the soil of Brexit. The original sin was Brexit itself. The mentality that led to Britains departure from the European Union continues to significantly shape British government policy.

There are at least four direct links between the Brexit fable and the budgetary bedlam of recent days.

The economies of many EU countries are in a healthier state than that of the UK. But the fiction about the dead hand of Brussels bureaucracy is another necessary tenet of the Brexit cult

First is the explicit dismissal of expertise. During the 2016 referendum, the arguments about the benefits to the UK of EU membership were objectively so strong that they could only be combatted by denouncing the experts making those arguments. Michael Goves repudiation of experts was not a slip of the tongue but a fundamental doctrine of the Brexit faith. Similarly, the Truss government made clear from the outset that experts were to be sidelined. On his first day in office, her short-lived chancellor sacked the highly admired permanent secretary of his department, a move that conveyed a wider message about the value he attached to objective advice.

Then he explicitly blocked the office of budgetary responsibility, the very name of which may offend his devil-may-care instincts, from offering an opinion on his controversial mini budget. It is hard to overstate the importance, for any government, of public servants who give objective advice and ministers who are prepared to listen to them. The prime ministers dramatic U-turns reflect the belated intrusion of some reality into policy deliberations in London, but pesky reality continues to grapple with preconceived ideology.

[Liz Truss sacks chancellor and makes another budget U-turn]

A second common thread linking the Brexit rhetoric of six years ago to the recent debacle is the notion that it was EU regulation that was holding the UK economy back. This was, of course, always nonsense. The economies of many EU countries are in a healthier state than that of the UK. But the fiction about the dead hand of Brussels bureaucracy is another necessary tenet of the Brexit cult. Since the UK has not yet derived any benefit from Brexit, it must still aspire to unchain itself from fictional European manacles. Hence Kwartengs removal of the cap on bankers bonuses. Hence his buccaneering ambition to build his Singapore on the Thames, a paradise for the wealthy that goes well beyond the Brexit the British people were asked to vote for. Nor does it bear any relation to the Conservative election manifesto put before the British people in 2019.

A third aspect of the original Brexit ideology that has gained a firm foothold in the Truss economic philosophy is an exaggerated sense of the UKs importance. The UK is, of course, still an important country. However, it is not important enough to go it alone in the world. Nobody in Tokyo or Ottawa considers the UK as more global than, say, Germany or France, or indeed than the UK itself when it was still a member state of the EU. Kwartengs misfiring budgetary bazooka smacked of a similar delusion that the UK was big enough to dismiss the economic orthodoxy of its largest international partners, the concerns of the IMF and the predictable reaction of the markets.

The simple fact remains that Brexit can bring no benefits to anyone. The EU has understood this from the outset

Fourth, the dismissal of expertise makes it possible to believe the unbelievable. For Johnson, one great fantasy was that the UK could have its cake and eat it, that it could leave the EU while retaining its benefits. A similar great fantasy of the Truss government seems to be that it is plausible to have a minister for levelling up while pursuing an economic philosophy designed to foster greater divergence in society. The disconnect from reality was further underlined by implausible ministerial assertions that the UKs recent economic turbulence was part of a global phenomenon, largely unrelated to the now notorious mini-budget.

The simple fact remains that Brexit can bring no benefits to anyone. The EU has understood this from the outset. However, despite all the evidence to the contrary and despite a radical shift of the public mood in the UK in favour one day of rejoining the EU, the high priests of Brexit have no choice but to continue to believe and assert that Brexit will one day be a success. Otherwise, they would have to acknowledge the irreparable damage they have done to their country. Their desperate but necessary fantasy is that Brexits sunlit uplands lie just around some corner, if only they could find the right corner. The forlorn search for that much promised land seems to have been a significant factor behind the recent, now crumbling, budgetary gamble.

Bobby McDonagh is a former ambassador to London, Brussels and Rome

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Bobby McDonagh: Four direct links between the Brexit fable and the UK budgetary bedlam - The Irish Times

Did you vote for the UK to leave the European Union in 2016 and later have a change of heart? We would like to hear from people in the UK who voted for Brexit but reconsidered their position.

What led you to change your mind? When did it happen? How do you feel about it? If you havent changed your position, let us know as well.

We are also interested in hearing from people who voted to Remain and believe the UK has benefited from leaving the European Union.

We will only use the data you provide us for the purpose of the feature. We will delete any personal data when we no longer require it for this purpose. For more information please see our terms of service and privacy policy.

If you are 18 years or over, you can get in touch by filling in the form below or contacting us via WhatsApp by clicking here or adding +44(0)7766780300. Your responses are secure as the form is encrypted and only the Guardian has access to your contributions. One of our journalists will be in contact before we publish, so please do leave contact details.

If youre having trouble using the form, click here.

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Tell us: are you a Brexit voter who has changed their mind? - The Guardian

Many Conservative party members will be wondering where they go from here.

There is talk of damage limitation and trying to save as many seats as possible in the next election.

The latest polls show the Tories on just 19%, with Liz Truss's approval rating at 9%. These are historic lows.

Electorally those figures would represent a wipeout never seen before in British parliamentary history.

Party members might look at how they got here, and it is hard to find anyone who disagrees with the idea that the Tories, and Britain as a whole, has arrived at its present state of political disarray on a journey that started with Brexit.

For a start it is hard to see how Liz Truss would have become Prime Minister if she had not fitted the demands of the hard Brexiteers. She was not a front runner for the leadership race but she was willing to unilaterally rip up an international treaty with her Northern Ireland Protocol Bill and won the support of the powerful ERG group.

Sure, she was a Remainer at one stage but then again so also were the vast majority of the British people.

However, there was a revolution and a lot of it had to do with a rejection of established ideas.

The vast majority of economic experts argued against Brexit. When the skies did not fall in after the vote in June 2016, Michael Gove gleefully announced that the "country has had enough of experts ... saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong".

Ever since the Brexit referendum campaign started there has been this idea - almost a conspiracy theory - that there were shadowy forces or institutions holding Britain back. Almost like the "deep state" theory in the US.

For Brexiteers it was mainly "unelected Brussels bureaucrats". However, it was also often the British establishment itself - "the blob" as Dominic Cummings called it.

In her leadership campaign, Liz Truss posed as a disruptor who would take on the "Whitehall Machine".

The party membership enthusiastically endorsed her vision of economic prosperity despite warnings that the sums did not add up just as they had done with Brexit.

In her conference speech Ms Truss widened her attack to the "anti-growth coalition" including those who "taxi from north London townhouses to the BBC studio to peddle the status quo".

As well as continuing to blame others, there has also been a consistent reluctance on the part of the Conservative leadership to provide a plan.

There was no detail for the Brexit project. "Not even the sketch of a plan" as Donald Tusk then President of the European Council once put it.

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng tried to avoid providing detail for their economic revolution by saying it was not even a budget and therefore not subject to scrutiny by the official watchdog the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

Even in his speech Mr Kwarteng did not give even the vaguest notion as to how the government would manage the 45bn hole in public finances resulting from the tax cuts.

The markets who free marketeers usually regard as the source of wisdom recoiled. The IMF issued a warning.

Instead of Brussels or economic experts, there were new targets. Incredibly, Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg and Foreign Secretary James Cleverly started criticising the IMF as biased. They both said the IMF is "not a friend of the UK".

Liz Truss even accused the markets of "group think" and the Bank of England was also being blamed.

Take this quote from a column in The Spectator by Charles Moore complaining about the IMFs warning being "insulting" to Britain.

"It is best seen as part of a pattern, like the early attempts to reverse Brexit, or the US governments related interventions over the Northern Ireland Protocol".

Mr Moore urged the Prime Minister and Chancellor to "fight back".

However, Rishi Sunak, himself a Tory Brexiteer, had described Ms Trusss economic plan as a fairytale. And there were already signs that some of the almost delusional thinking behind Brexit was beginning to clear.

Liz Truss was the architect of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill and did not deny saying once that the impact of a no deal on Ireland would only "affect a few farmers with turnips in the back of their trucks".

But ironically the Irish Government is reporting a sea-change in attitudes since she became prime minister or a "different space" as Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney put it.

Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker recently apologised for his hardline Brexit stance and even talked of "eating humble pie".

There are different theories on why this has happened. Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris himself said it was the war in the Ukraine and the resulting economic difficulties that brought home the need for co-operation

Another theory is Heaton-Harris and Baker saw for themselves the complexity of the Northern Ireland Protocol situation and, as they are both hardline Brexiteers, there was no one left to criticise them for being willing to negotiate.

Maybe Liz Truss was anxious to get a deal to avoid a trade war at a time of economic difficulty.

Or maybe it was just the Brexit ideology running out of road.

In any event there will be those saying that the Conservative party needs to get out a map and, this time, plan a route for the road ahead.

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Is the Brexit ideology running out of road? - RTE.ie

Saturday, October 15th 2022 - 14:50 UTC MLA Teslyn Barkman will be informing MPs on the European Scrutiny Committee

The UK represented the Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories in relations with the EU while a member of the block. But since Brexit, how is it performing at engaging the EU to represent their individual interests?

MPs on the European Scrutiny Committee will find out when they hear evidence from Isle of Man Chief Minister Alfred Cannon, and representatives of Jersey, Anguilla and the Falkland Islands.

On Wednesday 19 October at 2:30 PM, Witnesses will be,

Deputy Philip Ozouf, Minister for External Relations, States of Jersey;

Deputy Jonathan Le Tocq, Minister of External Affairs, Bailiwick of Guernsey;

Hon Alfred Cannon MHK, Chief Minister, Isle of Man Government

While at 3.30pm, Dorothea Hodge, Representative, Anguilla Government, and Hon Teslyn Barkman, MLA, Falkland Islands

The Overseas Territories were carved out of the trade agreement between the UK and the EU that has allowed the UK and the Crown Dependencies to continue tariff-free trade on the majority of goods with the block.

In written evidence given to the Committee, the UK Overseas Territories Association raised concerns that its interests are not being heard. It said there had been a lack of engagement with the UK Government on what their future relationship with the EU will look like. It added that inclusion in future trade agreements, while welcome, did not make up for the loss of EU trade and called for tariffs to be lifted.

This will be the second session of the Committees inquiry into the UK's representation in Brussels examines the work of the UK Mission to the European Union, its performance in representing the interests of the UK and the territories it has responsibilities and the value it provides to taxpayer.

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Falklands MLA will report on trade agreements with EU, UK following on Brexit - MercoPress

First the dynamic duo, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, were going to hit the ground running; then they claimed they hadnt prepared the ground they were going to hit. What their marriage of culpable ignorance and arrogance in fact achieved was something greeted with astonishment not only by them, but worldwide: they hit the pound running.

The Conservative party took a long time to recover from Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992, when the pound was ejected humiliatingly from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism the ERM membership of which had become the fulcrum of their economic policy.

Well, it is going to take a long time for what is left of the old Conservative party to recover from this self-imposed financial crisis. The financial markets voted with their feet on Labours economic policies of the 1970s forcing the Callaghan government to borrow from the International Monetary Fund in 1976; and they have voted with their feet on Trusss and Kwartengs policies now. It took Labour ages to recover from that.

It was no good the duo and their ilk trying to dismiss the U-turn in their plan for reducing the top rate of tax as a distraction. Bringing it down from 45% to 40% was the centrepiece of their growth plan.

It goes right back to the 2012 tract, Britannia Unchained, of which they were joint authors. In a wonderful Freudian slip, Kwarteng gave the game away by beginning to say the policy was 10 years old then corrected himself to say 10 days old.

The gulf between Trusss support among Conservative party members who voted her in and Conservative MPs has become all too apparent. But when people say to me Dont you regret your opposition to Johnson? I know they must be speaking tongue-in-cheek. However appalling Truss is, Johnsons proroguing of parliament and shameless disregard for national and international law did much damage to this countrys reputation. He had to go.

The bring-back-Boris brigade need their heads and values examined. Anyway, we now learn that my old acquaintance Boris has already embarked on the US lecture circuit, where he is boasting about Brexit, while on this side of the Atlantic his obsession with getting Brexit done is recognised as a first-class disaster. A recent YouGov poll shows that 87% of respondents agree the economy has suffered since Brexit, with 38% of leave voters and 37% of Conservative voters blaming Brexit. As the Nous thinktank (formerly Global Future) points out, respondents want politicians to stop avoiding the subject Keir Starmer please note!

Which brings us to that growth plan. To my knowledge, and to the knowledge of most economists I respect, there is no evidence that cutting higher rates of tax does anything to stimulate economic growth. Moreover, the benefits do not trickle down: they remain stuck at the top. On which subject, the economist Amos Witztum points out there should be far more attention paid to the distribution of gross domestic product than to its growth.

However, against a political background where Truss has decided that the jury is no longer out on our relations with France, and President Macron is a friend, I have a suggestion for Truss, or whoever succeeds her if her parliamentary colleagues decide her political career is to be, as it were, trussed up.

Two ways of improving this countrys growth rate would be to rejoin the single market and welcome EU citizens who want to work here, and, my goodness, plenty of British employers would welcome them. The obverse of the boost to the UKs economic growth from membership of what was the European Economic Community from 1973 is typified by our Brexit-induced probable exclusion from the 95bn Horizon Europe science programme. To make the most of its eminence in scientific innovation, the UK needs to coordinate with the EU.

In which context it is interesting to note, as my fellow journalist Fintan OToole pointed out in the Irish Times, that in their strange work Britannia Unchained, Truss, Kwarteng and co did not see our then EU membership as a problem!

By quite unnecessarily disrupting the financial markets, Kwarteng has every chance of going down in history as having been responsible for one of the worst British economic policy decisions since Winston Churchill took us back on the gold standard in 1925. The essence of that decision was that, for reasons of national pride, the British exchange rate was revalued upwards to the point where our exports became seriously uncompetitive.

The Brexit about which Johnson boasts has eroded our access to our principal market, with devastating effects on our trade. Kwartengs desire to aggravate the impact of austerity, Brexit and the cost of living crisis in order to cut taxes for the rich, with no evidence it would stimulate growth, was deranged.

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Heres my plan for growth, Liz Truss: rejoin the EU and let its citizens work here - The Guardian

Remainers have claimed Brexit is a "monster" and hinted that the country could rejoin the European Union. A pro-EU Twitter account has also claimed the departure from the bloc is "destroying its creatures" while questioning its support base. The vote has come under attack recently as experts question the impact on the UK's economy.

Missing EU funds have left the country scrambling for money and could put British jobs at risk, with the Government at the mercy of financial markets.

A Twitter user has said trouble stemming from the vote has left the UK "in a panic".

A former corporate lawyer and dual citizen named Mafevema said: "The Brexit monster is destroying its creatures.

"One by one, they fall. First in slow motion. Now in fast forward."

READ MORE:Brexit Boom - Badenoch slashes red tape on Scottish whisky exports

The ESF Peer Group, born from the EU's European Social Fund (ESF), has warned the Levelling Up Fund won't replace the funding given to Northern Ireland.

The ESF previously provided approximately 40 million per year on its own, matched in part by Stormont.

Together, the two organisations provided a combined 54 million.

Those funds allowed the group to provide residents with vital employment aid.

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Representatives said the Government's planned Levelling Up funds wouldn't cover the lost income.

And they claimed to have sought a solution from Stormont and Westminster for over a year.

The group's chairman told the BBC the EU was funding aid for vulnerable and disadvantaged people who couldn't find work.

Rev Andrew Irvine said that, without the appropriate funding, the group's 1,700 workers would be left in an "uncertain" position.

He said: "Everyone accepts that the work of our members is invaluable to the most disadvantaged and marginalised in society who find it difficult to access employment.

"If, however, we can't secure continuity in funding, the 1,700 people who provide this support will face a very uncertain future.

"Much good work has already taken place to secure funding, but a final agreement is still outstanding.

"There is a small window of opportunity to address these issues this week. If no solution can be reached, jobs and our support programmes will be lost."

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Brexit monster 'is destroying its creatures' as Remainer vows 'we will be back' - Express

However, the Direccion General de Trafico (DGT), Spains driving authority, notes that those exchanges would only be processed provided that they have been verified by the United Kingdom authorities before January 1, 2021. Otherwise, from May 1 this year, any expats living in Spain cannot drive using a UK licence, and have to obtain a new Spanish one.

Negotiations have been ongoing between the UK and Spain to resolve the issue, but the failure to reach an agreement is beginning to draw the ire of expats living without the use of a car.

Ms Barnes said: Life is lovely here, but not being able to drive affects considerably our mental health. Being away from family with young kids can be hard enough without having extra stress that could be so easily avoided.

In Mallorca, you cannot solely rely on public transportation. Especially in the high season and in extreme heat. Theres also a shortage of taxis. And why would we have to pay extra to have the basic right to be mobile where you live and pay taxes?

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Couple who moved to Mallorca punished by post-Brexit driving licence rules - Express