Tag: Negotiations
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Smelling of Ruses
I’m probably way off the pace with this Alaska conflab, but it looks like a reshuffling of the cards in a typical Trump deal. The lore of deal-making – whatever piffle gets pushed out will be lauded as ‘great’, and the two leaders will come up smelling of ruses. It’s a funny old world right…
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The Piper
He who pays the piper, calls the tune. For the Ukraine, that means the US will be calling the shots in peace talks. That’s come as a shock to the bloke who is the most enthusiastic piper in Eastern Europe. President Zelensky has spent the last 3 years or so travelling the globe begging for…
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Coming Home To Roost
The UK Government has been taking a public beating recently for reneging on the Withdrawal Agreement, but perhaps for once this is not quite what it seems. I recall reading a fascinating paper – written by a hardcore feminist – that railed against the ‘No means no’ mantra. Her argument was a cogent one. If…
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The Same Game
You’d have to have a heart of stone not laugh at the current Brussels pantomime, and we’re not yet even in the run-up to Christmas. The anglosphere has converged to squeeze France out of a $90bn submarine contract, and French indignation is, well, ripe. Strangely, there seems to be no sign of smug Europhiles gleefully…
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Base Graft
We’ve had backstops, level playing fields, hard & soft Brexits and a veritable shower of various other petals of EU word-confetti. The UK has of course added its own: oven-ready, Canada-Plus and Australian terms. All of them designed to label something that their patrons never progress to articulate beyond a one-liner. And now, there is…
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Smash-and-Grab
Never prior to 2020 did the sands of sanity shift as they do now with unfathomable regularity. Back in the loony bin of the UK’s Coronaresponse engine room, some faceless, but majestically twisted tit has fluffed up a concept hardon that will take some beating – a 5-day Christmas holiday from restrictions that the public…
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The Icing on the ‘Cake’
This week’s European entertainment came to us courtesy not of the usual Vaudeville Euro parliament speeches, but of Poland and Hungary as they stuck the kai-bosh onto the EU’s bug recovery budget. And what a corker it was. Went down like a vomit gazpacho in Brussels. Well that’s democracy for you. Or to put it…
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Bye, Den
It’s customary for the US Presidential Election to be followed by a transition period, but in this context, you have to wonder whether there would be any point in it. Hard to imagine that Joe Biden will have too much interest in slicing tee-offs, spaffing investor cash, and grabbing pussy. ‘Stop the count!’ was the…
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A State of Denial
Just when you thought that we had had enough madness for one year, think again. A petition has been launched to press the PM to ask the EU for an opt-in associate membership for UK citizens. In other words, Remain for all has failed, but we would like a non-reciprocal Remain deal for ourselves. Is…
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