UK to depart from GDPR
lawgazette.co.uk
lawgazette.co.uk
TBH I'm glad companies stay away from my data if they don't know how to get consent, store data securely, or even what those things mean.
The law itself says that the default option should be to opt-out. Any site that doesn't have precisely equally prominent "agree to all" and "deny all" buttons violate the GDPR.
The problem seems to be in the complete lack of enforcement.
Konqueror even had "confirm cookies" as default for a while back then.
If a model box only has "I consent" and "Learn more" buttons, then I don't consider clicking on "I consent" to mean freely given GDPR consent. Since it's the only reasonable way of viewing the website, and the GDPR doesn't permit a consent-wall, it's non-consent, and any use of my personal data following that event remains illegal.
It's not a problem with the GDPR; it's a problem with the ICO failing to put a stop to this.
That way I never gave any consent.
Nowadays I have browser plugins that do that for me, but same idea.
In any case I block cookies on all sites except for a few whitelisted ones so big "ha" to them if they think they can cookie me up. "Functional cookies" my ass. The sites work just fine without them.
Obviously, it comes from the user's machine so it can be modified before being sent to the server. Unless you're doing something custom/fancy like signing that data you shouldn't trust that it hasn't been tampered with.
Well that seems untrue, as someone that regularly either outright declines, or goes through and chooses "functional only".
I do occasionally see websites that say "we no longer serve the european market". That's a shame but it's up to them.
GDPR regulates, among other things, how information is stored and deleted on servers. I have worked at multiple companies in both Europe and the US who take this very seriously and has definitely altered their practices based on this.
For example, pre-GDPR, we would "mark as deleted" but not delete. Now we delete.
GDPR covers way more requirements regarding data management. You need complete control over the lifecycle of sensitive data, exhaustive documentation of data transformations, you have concrete obligations regarding disclosure of incidents, data removal, limitations of for what data is used, user consent management, and the obligation to have people personally liable (which is big, just look at AML regulations to see the effect when not only the fuzzy concept of "the company" is liable).
I don't know if that was the case before gdrp but we have to centraly clarify if and when we store user data, what we do with it and we have to show that we can delete user data if requested.
Not sure how far small companies go through this thow.
I know of small companies that before GDPR didn't really consider the implications of private data at all. They'd just let their SQL databases grow forever (mark as delete and have "script to actually delete the data" as a TODO that never happened), had random backups lying around on dev machines.
GDPR forced them to actual define policy, start deleting old data that was no longer relevant, strip private data from developer test sets.
It was a bit more work, and adds a small bit of friction, but these are still important things!
Forcing cooks in restaurants to wash their hands after using the bathroom also adds friction to the process but is similarly important.
That is the theory. The reality is that many small businesses don't even know the GDPR exists. Others are not complying because they think they will get away with it, and they are probably right. The rules are so ambiguous in some important ways that even those who do intend to comply might not actually be compliant and won't find out until a regulator intervenes. And all of that together means that a small business that does try hard and become compliant is at a significant competitive disadvantage.
To be clear, I am a firm believer in strong privacy protections, and my own businesses seek to be in the latter category. But the GDPR is flawed in important ways, and future regulation deviating from it is not necessarily a bad thing. Obviously it depends on whether the deviation is of the selling-out or the fixing-problems variety. Though admittedly, with the current UK government, I fear the former is much more likely.
As another example, there is a new subject right to erasure of their data, though again this isn't absolute. Several potential complications were discussed about this right. One is how to handle copies of that data in back-ups, archives or retired equipment. Another is how to deal with data held in deliberately tamper-proof formats, some of which will already have existed before this right to erasure was introduced by the GDPR.
Another important way is the compliance costs, and in particular the disproportionate costs to small businesses. For example, it cost mine many hours and thousands of pounds to understand the new requirements, take advice, and update our documentation to be compliant, yet the actual data processing we did was always very light and so wasn't affected much by the new rules either. In other words, it cost us a significant amount of time and money without really benefitting anyone.
Related to that is the enforcement mechanism and penalty regime. Regulators are all-powerful, and again, while they can impose some heavy fines on big businesses, those are meaningfully capped. In contrast, the rules allow them to impose penalties high enough to literally destroy any SME. The practical safeguards are the limited resources of regulators and the idea that those regulators are supposed to work collaboratively with data controllers and impose proportionate penalties for any compliance violations that can't be resolved, but this is awfully close to relying on personal judgement and good will, not what is actually written in law.
Then there is the reality that the GDPR doesn't actually do that much to protect against some of the biggest threats to personal privacy. For example, I would argue that two of the biggest risks in our modern "big data" world are excessive collection and processing of personal data supplied by third parties and excessive collection and processing of data by governments. The GDPR has done very little to curb either of those things. Every time I go out, I'm still potentially being listened to or photographed by countless other people's devices, which may then be uploading that data to big tech firms along with time and place information. Countless people have probably handed over my phone number or email address to big tech firms by allowing apps to scan their address book. We still see ever more intrusive monitoring of normal people's daily lives by governments, with tech like facial recognition cameras or mass surveillance of communications routinely infringing on personal privacy, and the authorities pushing for these things are entirely unrepentant and rely on the usual vague justifications about security and what a dangerous world we live in.
In short, the GDPR imposes significant burdens on data controllers without being clear about what their obligations or how to interpret key details in practice, introduces a penalty regime that hangs like a sword of Damocles over data controllers and represents an existential threat to smaller controllers, and yet at the same time hasn't actually been very effective at reducing the big risks to data subjects or increasing their control over how data about them is used and by whom.
None of these concerns is new. All were discussed extensively around the time the GDPR was introduced. But, perhaps because it was a law meant to improve individual privacy and that's a cause many of us support in principle, sometimes people get very defensive of it instead of looking at it critically and asking whether it actually achieves what it set out to do and whether any costs it introduces are proportionate to any benefits it offers.
Being filmed in public, having your data handed to third-parties, facial recognition and mass surveillance are precisely some of the issues the GDPR has addressed, and it has already had massive impact; especially on tech companies (I’ve seen it firsthand). You talk about burdens but maybe you’re just angry you wasted money on a consultant? I honestly haven’t seen the bad side of it.
We didn't hire a consultant. Those guys were charging thousands per day, and no business our size has that kind of money to spend. We did take real legal advice from a real lawyer, but the main cost was our time understanding the new rules and updating things to be seen to be compliant. I am irritated that a lot of my own time, as a founder and at that time lead technical person for a business, was wasted on a bureaucratic exercise, and likewise for other key people. That hurt us, and once again, it benefitted no-one. Not our customers. Not our staff. Not our suppliers. Literally no-one was better off because, for example, we rewrote our documents to provide information in some new format that was specified by the GDPR.
Personal irritation aside, even if you just took the cost to us and scaled it by the number of businesses in the country to estimate the economic impact, that would mean billions in lost productivity as a result of the new rules. And that's clearly an underestimate, as the costs were running into millions for a lot of large organisations. A law that is going to cause that kind of economic hit should be justified by a greater benefit to society in some way, but I just don't see that "massive impact" you mentioned. There have been a few incremental changes here and there, but there hasn't been a big change in culture.
The attitude at bigger organisations is still often about how they can tick the required boxes while continuing to do what they want with the data. Just look at Facebook's resistance to even disclosing what personal data it has and how it's been using it, for example, despite data subjects having a clear right to that information under the GDPR.
Tracking is still going on everywhere, and if anything it's getting worse as the technological capabilities increase. Ironically, it's recent actions by Apple, not the GDPR, that have started to make some significant improvements in this area for users on their platform.
Small organisations are still often ignorant of their obligations under the GDPR and not compliant anyway. Governments are still encroaching further into individual privacy all the time. Individual privacy hasn't been improved at all in these kinds of situations.
This will be my last comment on this thread, because HN tends to downvote any comments critical of the GDPR, even if based on direct personal experience of implementing it, and that doesn't encourage open and constructive discussion. But I hope the above helps to explain why I have reached a different conclusion about these issues to you.
That to me sounds like they're most likely to sell the data, since they don't know how to use it themselves. Better these companies have less data, not more.
(b) many people make the disagree button small, hard to see, or require clicking through multiple screens to get to
GDPR really should have dictated "agree" and "disagree" be of equal visual weight and button styling and dictated disagreeing to be a 1-click action.
I'm pretty sure that everyone doing our (b) is not compliant at all. The problem is that GDPR isn't being enforced very well.
It does mandate something to that effect: the user should not have to spend more effort to disagree than to agree.
Purely anecdote, but zero companies I know in Germany, Italy or France are doing this. (The ones in Switzerland are.)
There is a cosmetic fix that produces an email so there is something to show a regulator if they come knocking. The logic being investing anything more than that is a crap shoot, given nobody knows how each of the EU’s 28 data regulators will interpret the rules.
But from what I have seen, most of that time was spent on the legal and policy site, not on actually implementing the technical changes required to properly handle, store and delete data.
I can absolutely guarantee you that the overwhelming majority EU companies could not properly carry out a GDPR deletion request.
In France in particular the right to access/change/delete any and all data a company has on you was there long before GDPR (by decades) so most serious company are well used and prepped for it.
They range from start-ups to national champions, but I won't disagree with you on the poor organization of most European companies point. Everyone one re-papered existing systems to some degree of compliance. Given nobody agrees on what full compliance is, they're all right in their own ways.
With Blizzard it went a bit different. They do have online automated tool to download your own data, but with a twist: they refused to provide what they consider security risk information. They did provide a lot of data (even years old chat logs) but did not provide the information I was looking for: list of processes running on my PC, which they scan periodically, as an anti-cheating mechanism. I went further and filed a GDPR infringement complaint to the national office but it failed. Last option was to sue, but I gave up.
Both Epic and Blizzard are US based.
The GDPR applies to all processing of all personal data regardless of whether that's pieces of paper in a filing cabinet or an entirely online social network.
Insurance? Private doctor? Youth services? Family (or any other) court? Pharmacy (in most of Europe)? Police (even in the most trivial of cases, and without judicial approval, and of course without verification or recourse)
Worse than that: the exception goes further than merely keeping data as well. Insurance company wants to change/add to your medical record? Immediately? Doctor? Court? Police? All can change your medical file, both adding and deleting (sometimes limited to what they added themselves). YOU want to change it? Not possible!
Weird since insurance company access to your data, and "the right to be forgotten" was one of the main selling points of this legislation, but since insurance companies are semi-government in almost all of Europe these days, a lot of them fall into the blanket exception.
And of course, you yourself ... cannot access this data. You cannot see it (sorry "you can, unless there's a reason not to let you see it", wanna bet there's always a reason?). For particular parts (espectially names, for example which doctor put something there about you are kept secret from you). Thankfully these institutions hate eachother, so there is some protection left because if anyone wants this data, they have to file requests in 5 different places. But there is no more legal protection against this happening.
It is now far easier, in the Netherlands, to get a serious crime stricken off your judicial record than, say, getting a doctor or pharmacist's claim that you falsely came in for a heart problem out of your medical file, say to threaten or attack them for painkillers, or even just getting the name of which doctor put that there (and of course such misleading information can kill you if you ever really do have a heart problem, and god help you if you need pain killers or ...)
GPDR protects you from Amazon offering you gift ideas for your kids' birthday if you object to that. You want a mental health stay 40 years ago to not be used in a family court case against you? THAT it makes MUCH easier. Faking such a thing and using it in a court case against you, that, too, it makes a lot easier.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
As for the "you can't get data removed or even access it", here's some specific examples:
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
Like everywhere else, medical and "social work" data (and keep in mind that both the medical and social workers can lock people up for extended periods of time, even in isolation. Extended means decades, even until death, and that under circumstances that are justified using records on which that applies. You can't access, remove or change that data, but it can (and is in practice) used to lock you away legally indefinitely)
Insurance:
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio... (NHS is the insurer in Scotland. Essentially, ANY data that can be used for legal purposes (whether to sue you or to defend itself or any decision it made) is exempt from GPDR. No matter how personal the data. Technically this may even cover publishing such data.
I realize this is for one specific part of Europe, but there are analogues everywhere. And, frankly, look at the size of that list. It's only the beginning, on the left, click open, "right to X" and there's yet another list of exemptions.
As an example, let's say I want to launch a blogging platform. You need some basic tables (data) like User, Posts, Tags, etc. I'd consider this data the business needs for core business. Does there need to be some GDPR compliance thing?
Anecdotally a dumb app I built I was worried about EU visitors and just wanted to block them instead of figure it out (yea yea maybe that's not the right approach but I'm sure the sentiment is common).
Sounds like you have to learn something before starting a business.
We all really enjoyed the days when we could throw together a project and focus on the fun parts. Then came all of the other things we should worry about -- security and scaling, which are at least technical problems, but then things like privacy, moderation, and even legality.
It's fun to put up a file-sharing service; it's less fun to think about the fact that it can be used to share child porn. It's fun to have a new chat site with no filters. It's less fun when people use it to plan crime.
We don't want to face that. We want to make it Not Our Problem. And here, now privacy is another one. We used to just gather up user data and we didn't plan to sell it or lose it so why did we care?
The Internet is a lot less fun than it used to be. Or rather, we just managed to ignore a lot of the problems, usually because we weren't the ones affected by them. And so we didn't fix them ourselves, so laws got passed instead, which are never as good as what we'd have come up with ourselves.
So yeah, it's time for people to learn stuff before starting a business. That's no fun. Too bad.
It wasn't always like this, but it is now and for very good reasons.
Yes. GDPR is about data protection. If you want to do business in its jurisdiction, then you need to know the laws.
In general, GDPR states that you cannot store anything that isn't strictly necessary, unless you outline what you want to collect and what it will be used for in your data policies. You are not allowed to use it for anything else and once its no longer needed for the outlined use, it must be removed. Personally identifiable information has some additional rules (and its important to note that anything could become PII if combined with something else, that would, together, allow for someone to be identified).
My own (EU-based) country's data protection websites states:
1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.
2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned, or some other legitimate basis laid down by law.
3. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.
4. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority.
This means that every individual is entitled to have their personal information protected, used in a fair and legal way, and made available to them when they ask for a copy. If an individual feels that their personal information is wrong, they are entitled to ask for that information to be corrected.
Spirit of the law is great. Implementation and end result is a typical bureaucracy mess, with not much benefit for end user, that functions mostly as a way for government to have a leverage over companies for non-compliance, whenever they want to put pressure on them.
Which is why you NEVER comply: you get exemptions.
People focus mostly on the cookie popups, but forcing companies to delete data after the user stopped using the service for too long, or even giving a legal stand on users requesting their data to be deleted wouldn’t have happened any other way I think.
In a lot of european countries GDPR came on top of other existing customer protection, but it helped make companies think about compliance as needed for continued business, instead of something akin to properly filing random local paperwork.
“Storing data securely” and “getting consent” are both wildly different from full compliance with the onerous requirements of GDPR. You can do both of these things in absolute good faith and still be in violation. Unless you have a team of legal scholars working for you, odds are that you are in violation of at least one provision of this massive, unwieldy legislation - no matter how respective of user privacy you are.
That is why the UK is abandoning it. GDPR, as written, is a business-killing mess.
GDPR has been in place for years, which businesses has it killed?
Do you have an example of a company that you consider was not doing anything wrong in your personal opinion but still got a GDPR fine?
Words like “reasonable” and “legitimate” in the law are not something it is safe for a layperson to reason about. They have specific meanings depending on the nuances of case law, judicial understanding of legislative intent, ideological leanings of the judge you happen to draw, etc.
No company is competent at this, some just have enough money at stake and enough to spend on lawyers that they’re willing to risk it.
Because GDPR allows for liquidating fines, even for Google. I believe it has a cap of 2% annual global turnover, per infraction, or something similar.
Problem is, GDPR is not enforced. I haven't heard of small companies being investigated, let alone having any fines imposed, even when blatantly violating GDPR.
An email address is considered PII, so if users request their data be deleted, the small business is honest and says they can’t, and the user and others raise this to the government, you think that small company won’t be fined? That company, worried about doing things illegally, may end up giving a bunch of money to a contractor to fix their application- and for what? To allow users to request that their email address be anonymized or removed? That’s stupid.
If you know how to get a company fined, could you please share, so I can report and have action taken against companies that violate and misuse personal data?
I’m sure that’ll go over well.
Then maybe you can submit an Ask HN to see how many startups will self-report to you.
There are over 26M small businesses in the EU. You’d better get started...
By the way, GDPR isn’t just about misuse of PII, it’s about use of PII after it’s been asked to have been removed; and most sites use email addresses as usernames which are PII, so that’s all over the application logs, comments, etc. and when people submit a PII removal request, you can’t share or store the PII in the request itself, so better not use Slack, email, etc. and accidentally refer to the PII to be removed. If you do and need to follow-up again with clean-up, don’t refer to it then either, or you could get stuck in a endless loop of PII removal. Also, how do you know you removed the PII of the user who didn’t specify all of it I’m the removal request? You ask them for it- but does that allow the PII they sent at that point to be kept? I don’t know!you know why? Because it’s not fucking defined in the law clearly enough. What if they requested removal of data that wasn’t their PII?
The law is not like code. Thank god.
I really don't get the fear mongering over this.
Where are the examples of companies following the spirit of it getting punished regardless?
The law is clear that enforcement is primarily done via helping companies correct mistakes, not immediately handing out fines, and that's what has been happening.
And that's if you can get said legal minds to take a firm position in the first place, instead of the more usual five - six figure "maybe"
It's very much more healthy (and lawful) than just mucking on, stuffing data into limitless digital vaults and then not having a clue when all that data gets leaked.
In the good old days, paper records had the good manners to take up physical space. It was clear when you had too many records because it was a serious inconvenience to your business.
In the short term it may sound great that a lot of companies are erring on the side of caution and not using the data, when perhaps they could.
But if there's no enforcement this gives a huge competitive advantage to companies who just don't care at all. They might crowd out the former set. If such companies were not erring on the side of caution, and using some data in a natural way like they used to rather than avoiding it like the plague, they may provide competitive pressure against this dishonest set.
It is a lot like paying taxes. If I am an honest small business owner who pays my taxes but my competitors in the field are known for underhanded cash schemes that dodge tax, I'm not going to last long. I need the law to go after them or I'm done unless I start playing the same game. After dabbling in a small business compliance can be a real killer and it's my honest opinion a lot of people just play it dumb except where they know it matters, and hope for the best.
Does anyone else?
American-like but with no negotiating leverage and having burned all the bridges to the other economic unions.
Hacker News has reached new lows :(
But the treaty of Lisbon changed almost nothing in reality. At least, not enough to warrant the birth of "Modern EU"
It's like newspaper headlines that say X, but (have to) nuance it in the article itself. Except that Twitter doesn't support articles, so it's only headlines.
The euro is truly an unremarkable currency and I'm not sure that the EU would be much worse without it. It's equally likely that the EU would have done much better without the euro. I can't blame the UK for avoiding the euro.
UK market is large enough to stand on it's own and EU has been grossly incompetent in public for a while now. There's going to be downsides for sure but becoming "America like" is not going to be one of them.
The European Union has categorically failed, and if it survives this, it will need huge amounts of change.
It makes sense for smaller countries like mine (Croatia) because of free travel, easier access to a larger market, lower cost of doing business, and truly being too small to negotiate good terms on a global scale. It probably makes a lot less sense for UK which can negotiate it's own terms with other global powers that fit them much better.
I have no doubt there will be many negatives to Brexit, but as demonstrated by COVID situation there's a huge opportunity for UK - for example I suspect they can secure better trade deals with the US without having to worry about the protectionist interests pushed by other EU members.
(I'm aware that all sounds quite America-like already)
I'm really not sure about that. I agree that may be the case with some of those ruling individuals. My impression is that Johnson doesn't believe in anything, except his personal interest and profit.
Others in that cabinet, however, really appear to be true believers.
> Others in that cabinet, however, really appear to be true believers.
My impression is that they all have those same beliefs - their personal interest and profit.
(Clarification: I'm exaggerating for rhetorical effect. The UK won't become impoverished or really stop being an advanced-economy, but it's still going to be far poorer (in a total GDP and PPP sense) than it would be had this whole Brexit business never happened.
Debatable. But even if the EU was - or was not - a tightly integrated federated state, I'm far more concerned about the UK withdrawing itself from the world's largest free trade bloc. I see it heading towards either economic protectionism (bad in the long-term) or getting into a race-to-the-bottom (potentially even worse).
That's a strange thing to say. Globalisation is usually criticized as a race to the bottom. The opposite of that is protectionism, which you say is bad. So which one are you in favour of?
Take the UK for example: at the time of its accession to the EU it had a sizeable manufacturing and mining economy. Globalisation directly led to those factories and mines closing, but being in the EU meant the UK could specialise in emerging sectors and immediately export to the rest of the EU for free (e.g. service-sector, information economy, banking, finance, media, etc).
Globalisation and economic-interdependence is also the main driver for world-peace. I’d rather be unemployed because someone in France does my job but cheaper than be fighting in a war against France for some sense of “national pride”.
Globalisation needs a friendlier face, yes. And we need better ways of managing the local negative effects, like better unemployment income for plant closures - but I don’t believe the sentimental negatives in any way outweigh the long-term benefits.
A bit like a supercritical fluid, where transition between liquid and gas occurs spontaneously.
Thankfully the armed police have very stringent training in the Uk.
What we can't have is pistols, apart from 20 or so people in the Olympic pistol shooting teams.
Brexiteers would see tony martin as a hero.
(Is this another one of those issues where someone is in favour of Brexit because they think the EU prevents something that is nothing to do with them, because they've been lied to by the UK press again?)
Do you know what does help keep the wealthy wealthy? A ready supply of cheap labour from outside the UK.
This is much talked about but so far I've only been seeing the opposite. Since brexit, the UK has so far banned fish trawling in the North sea, banned live export of animals, banned the import of fois gras, and created a much more environmentally friendly alternative to the EU's (absolutely atrocious) common agricultural policy.
> lowering regulatory standards
I'd argue that not all regulation is good regulation, e.g. the GDPR
> Lowering taxes
This is could feasibly happen and you could say it already is by looking at the way the tories have further rigged the housing market and stamp duty post-covid. But I fail to see what that has to do with the EU really. I don't know a lot on this subject though.
> undoing workers' rights legislation
I can see this one happening sadly. Am I not right in saying though that a lot of workers rights come from the judiciary, not the government? Example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56123668
Many leading brexit proponents are rich people who made their money from the collapse of the soviet union and have assets largely outside the UK. One conspiracy theory is that they are attempting to crash the UK economy in order to buy the dip, make money from shorts and the sell off of state assets.
Another conspiracy theory is that brexit has an ideological basis in the idea of the soverign individual - related to the idea of the randian hero, the idea is that as states weaken in power, rich people will be able to transcend citizenship and attain some kind of libertarian utopia where they can do what ever they want. One of the leading brexiteers dad wrote a book about it which apparently has some following, but maybe people are just surprised that right wing politicians want a smaller state.
There is also an idea that the UK and its dependencies (e.g. virgin islands) are a tax haven. A lot of brexit money came from US activist billionaires and hedge funds, but a lot of it came from very rich russians who fled tot he UK in the 1990s with huge amounts of money that Russia say was stolen visa corruption and other criminality. The theory is that brexit was a response to EU money laundering and tax evasion rules that would have linked these rich criminals to their money to its sources, leaving them open to russian legal challenge. The theory is that for those people, brexit was a means to escape the net.
In my opinion, the role these factors played is probably overstated - brexit was primarily a backlash against globalisation and change, and a protest against the UK status quo by parts of the population that didn't believe they benefited enough from it, much like the election of Trump in the US.
The basic premise of the "it's an establishment stitch up" argument is that Britain will be weaker and poorer, but the establishment will end up with a much, much bigger slice of the smaller pie such that they gain overall. It's not clear to me how that's supposed to work though. How is this pie-grab supposed to work as the pie itself shrinks? Some people might manage to pull it off, but the whole establishment class as a group?
Anyway, this whole premise flies in the face of who we know voted overwhelmingly for Brexit - ordinary British voters, many of them up north and from working backgrounds - even as the actual political parties, majority of MPs and most business leaders were arguing against it. The evidence for an establishment stitch up rests on a few very specific data points, like the fact that Jacob Reese Mog and some of Nigel Farage's hedge fund friends have already and will continue to do quite well out of it. They're hardly "The Establishment" as a whole though. They're just some of the people I was talking about trading on volatility, and hardly representative of the financial sector as a whole that is getting screwed over by losing passporting.
The Conservatives have a majority and are there any Remainers left in that party - I thought most of them had been purged before the last election?
Interesting guy, my opinion of him changed (for the better) when I found out he presented a regular Jazz show on the radio.
My MP still has posts on her blog about how ardently pro EU she was and how she believed staying in the EU was the best idea. Not long after the referendum and May coming in, she was fully behind Brexit and ready to do whatever it takes. A lot of Tory MPs will just go with the prevailing wind on everything and this is also how they stay in power because being progressive is not a vote winner in a broadly (small c) conservative country.
And the ones that didn't were purged
The vast majority of the city and other business leaders where asleep at the wheel - what they should have done is had a quiet word with Harry Peirce (MI5) at the club about these dangerous subversives.
I have always wondered how true this is. It is certainly a common claim, but anecdotally I know several small business owners who I am fairly sure voted Leave because they didn't agree with EU-style regulation such as the subject of today's discussion. And this is in the Cambridge area, which overall was literally the most pro-Remain place in the entire country. Most of those people did not talk much about their views on Brexit in public because of the peer pressure, which I think was unfortunate. Even if few minds might have been changed in either direction, it would have been better for the issues to have been properly debated.
This is false, because every time it was presented for a vote Leave won. If the majority were Remain, Brexit would necessarily not have happened.
As for the alleged ordinary voters, what did they want out of it and what are they actually getting out of it?
The only thing the EU referendum conclusively demonstrated was how easily manipulated people are by the media they consume.
Let's back that claim up with some examples:
Why the referendum was called in the first place? Cameron never wanted a referendum but did so as an attempt to unify the Conservative party because with the right wing opinions fragmenting between multiple parties the Tories were starting to lose dominance (more parties within a set demographic on a first past the post electoral system means fewer votes for any particular party within that demographic). When the Conservatives had a near monopoly in the centre and right wing policies it meant that left wing parties could never catch up due to how fragmented they are (Green, Labour, SNP, local independents, etc) so left wing voters have always had to vote a little more tactically and go for the party most likely to win in their area and hope for a coalition. So the original goal for the referendum wasn't about addressing European issues but instead about monopolising the right wing vote which was getting fragmented by nationalist parties. Cameron assumed it was an easy win and that he could curb the tide of MPs leaving his party for more nationalistic counterparts. He's even gone on record stating this and how it turned into an epic own goal.
With regards to whether we would have been better off in or out of the EU -- frankly that's one argument I don't want to get drawn into because, frankly, nobody actually knows. Most of the arguments on both sides of the debate were FUD and the most honest point anyone made was "it's complicated and we don't really know for sure."
The referendum was advisory, so it would have been possible for parliament to vote not to enact article 50. But parliament voted for it.
Not all the parties did. Labour, for example, also didn't. The Greens have always been fiercely pro choice so a referendum falls within their remit and LibDems have often flip flopped around the issue of Europe depending on what seems the most popular alt-vote at the time. Then you have the right wing parties who are naturally nationalistic. But many of the left-wing nationals (like SNP) were pro-Europe.
This is all moot though because my point wasn't who supported the EU but rather the Tories motives for the referendum.
> The referendum was advisory, so it would have been possible for parliament to vote not to enact article 50. But parliament voted for it.
Indeed. But that is another tangential point too. I do have opinions as to why it wasn't treated as an "advisory" vote but those are just opinions so I'll refrain from clouding the debate.
I'd like to hear them!
Thanks to your comment I re-checked the Labour party manifesto for the 2015 general election and you are right. They do mention a referendum but only in the case of a transfer of power from Britain to the EU:
"Labour will legislate for a lock that guarantees that there can be no transfer of powers from Britain to the European Union without the consent of the British public through an in/out referendum."
What we need is respect for democracy.
I wasn't complaining about stolen votes. Nobody was suggesting election fraud had happened with the EU referendum.
Manipulated people, sure. But there is evidence of that with many of the claims made during the campaigns being proven false (like the Brexit bus slogan and like many of the ads reported here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-44966969). There is actually a lot of documented evidence about the misinformation that happened during the referendum on both sides of the debate (https://constitution-unit.com/2016/08/23/fact-checking-and-t...) but it didn't seem to make any difference because you'd often see the same FUD repeated (both for and against Europe) when chatting to people -- be it social media, TV/Radio call in shows or regular face to face conversations with family and friends, etc.
The question of our EU membership was such a complex one that even many experts were littering their statements with caveats and disclaimers. So it wasn't really a topic I'd have expected the layperson to be informed enough to make a good judgement of. And the targeted ads on platforms like Facebook, plus the aforementioned deliberate misinformation campaigns did little to help the situation. So I do think it's fair to call out the result of the referendum as being within a margin of error.
I do agree there have been parallels between the EU referendum and Trump's campaigns (both of them in fact). But you also do need to be careful not to dismiss the credible claims of bad practice because some egotistical oaf also happened to make wild made up claims too. There's definitely a sliding scale of misinformation where some items aren't technically inaccurate but are worded in a way that intentionally misinforms the reader (a practice often seen in click-bait headlines) but on the other end of the scale you'd have statements that are very clearly bullshit (like the Hillary child sex ring "scandal").
It's fair to say the last 5 years has been a real low point for my trust in the democratic process.
> What we need is respect for democracy.
I agree but that respect has to be earned from the campaigners rather than blindly given by the voters.
My point was that the first side which started claiming faulty elections wasn't Trump.
He also made repeated claims of "large scale voter fraud" in the lead up to the presidential election of that year.
I also feel there's a real difference between "we have evidence Russia's been up to something, and think Trump may be involved" and "Everything that goes against me is stolen! You can't trust anything!"
> I'm not American so I've not been following it that closely.
Neither am I, but from what I can tell the Mueller report came back saying it didn't have enough to pursue, or really link Trump, but something was definitely up. Various Trump supporters went to jail over that report IIRC as well, having lied. Very murky dealings.
What do people mean when they say this?
The referendum wasn't a statistical exercise that sampled a subset, so the idea of "error" seems really oddly applied here.
- There was a lot of misinformation spread (on both sides of the debate). So people were voting for issues that didn't apply.
- There were a lot of protest votes from people who assumed "Remain" would win and who also did want to remain but wanted to voice disagreement with the government and/or concern about unconditional relationships with the EU.
- There options were too vague. "Remain" largely meant keeping the status quo but some read it to mean including countries like Turkey (who were extremely unlikely to ever join the EU anyways). Likewise "Exit" meant different things to different people. Some people wanted a "hard exit" (no EU trade deal). Some people wanted to stay connected to the EU but to have a revised deal. People were voting for the same options but expecting different outcomes.
And as a result of this there had been a high number of people voice regrets about the vote they had cast in post-referendum opinion polls.
Sadly we will never know just how accurately the results reflected peoples true opinions because all calls for a follow up vote had been literally laughed at. However subsequent general elections have demonstrated just how far from settled the debate was.
I just object to the use of the phrase - there is no margin for error here, it forms the full picture of how the population voted, not an estimate.
People use this phraseology, and I've even seen the term "not statistically significant" bandied around as well, to try to say that no conclusions could be drawn, as if it's a scientific paper with a sample in it.
"This result is reflective of what the majority _want_"
"This result is reflective of what the majority _voted for_"
I do get your point that "margin for error" is a statistical term and it is not technically being applied correctly here. But the crux of what that term refers to does still apply to the former context above.
As for why the context matters: because every conversion that happened since focused on the former point with MPs even coining the phrase "the will of the people" yet the people's "will" was still unclear.
That all said, I don't think there is any way such a referendum would have worked on a topic as diverse and complex as our relations with the EU.
But they are a 100% reliable indicator of how people would vote, because they did vote that way. And I'm really not sure it's valid to start second guessing that what people actually wanted is different to that, because you then have to second guess every vote and really, where does thaty leave democracy?
> That all said, I don't think there is any way such a referendum would have worked on a topic as diverse and complex as our relations with the EU.
Very much agreed.
Normally I'd agree. But as I said, there were concerns going into the vote that the options were too vague and as a result opinion polls post-referendum showed that a considerable number of people voted for options that didn't support their opinion.
This wasn't a typical poll where you vote for a party to entrust or a narrowly defined set of options. This referendum was vague and poorly defined. In cases where that's been a problem in Europe those respective countries have then responded with second referendum after communicating clearer information, reviewing the poll options and taking other measures to ensure they accurately capture public opinion. Instead the UK called a general election and as a result muddied the conversation even further with topics like education and healthcare.
Hoping we see the light, and the blight that is the cookie law goes the way of the dodos.
If your teeth turn out blighted all blue/purple, you generally don't blame the tablets. ;-)
It’s really just theatre and on balance it makes the internet a crummier experience.
Meanwhile, the intent is to avoid the people with purple teeth until they learn to brush responsibly. ;-)
(Or if you truly must interact with them: use a lot of ad blockers and privacy tools; because you know what you're getting into)
I would rather bad actors were punished and enforced cookie banners were eliminated.
It's really hard to legislate against something that some people really want to do :-/
We were discussing something in a similar vein the other day regarding a security form for an enterprise contract and my reoccurring response was “officially or actually?” There tends to be a big gap between official compliance and what was originally desired.
Many years ago I worked with a mega mega corp that required a complex form with every change request, but they still ran my script that escalated my database permissions because they ran it as root.
If anything I think it is rather unfair to hear people from other EU countries treating this process as something along the lines of 'suits them' and 'they've made their bed'. When in reality a large chunk of them have pretty much not agreed to any of this but are still set to suffer the consequences.
Yes, but a far larger chunk has. Every country gets the leaders it deserves and the UK is no exception.
All things considered it was relatively close so not exactly a far larger chunk.
I don't have any spite towards the British people but I do hope that the EU will act in EU interest which means facilitating the return of financial services that shifted towards London since they joined and not letting the UK and whatever the borderdeal ends up as serve as a loop to ignore single market regulations.
"there are some demographic trends that will influence opinion in future. These changes will tend to pull British public opinion in a pro-European direction, and should be sufficient to produce a majority of 52%-48% for ‘Remain’ in 2021"
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/05/01/demographic-trends...
also add the EU's disastrous vaccine procurement scheme, combined with its attempt to obscure its total incompetence with petulant nationalistic flailing
I haven't done the math, so I won't make assumptions, but I would bet the percentages from the polls roughly match up with the actual results from the referendum
> Also did they vote remain because it's cool or did they actually have some other reason?
That's an entirely different point, you're just moving the goalposts now. The question isn't whether young people were justified in voting remain, the question is did they vote remain.
Your own example is a single datapoint and according to the vote statistics you are a de facto minority in your age cohort.[0]
[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/graphics-how-the-uk-voted-eu...
What were your reasons behind your decision? What economic class are your parents in?
The EU isn't perfect, but you'll struggle to argue that it hasn't expanded peace, prosperity and human rights across the continent. This is motherhood-and-apple-pie stuff.
Arguments in favour of Brexit thus tend to boil down to immigration and 'sovereignty'.
There's a consensus amongst economists that immigration makes us financially better off. That makes it hard not to ascribe a strong desire to cut immigration to a powerful desire for ethnic homogeneity and/or a powerful dislike of foreigners. Those things are very close to racism.
Meanwhile, the 'sovereignty' Brexit delivers is almost wholly illusory. In practice, we'll get to choose which of the big players to take the rules from. That's going to be either the US (which hardly anybody actually wants — most Brits value our health service, non-toxic food and drinking water, holiday pay, and so on — and also isn't very helpful, because the US is far away) or the EU (whose decisions we used to play an outsized role in, but no longer have any influence over).
It would be hilarious — if it weren't tragic and a little terrifying — that the ones in charge of 'taking back control' are also the ones stifling parliament, suppressing voting, and attacking academics, judges and the rule of law. As far as I can see, the only ones taking back control are the rulers, and the only ones they're taking back control from are the other citizens of the UK.
Do you really want them to have an influence across the whole of the EU? By leaving, our dysfunctional politicians lose influence which will help with the peace and human rights that you mentioned earlier.
Peace takes two sides, so it's hard to argue that having your dysfunctional politicians run unchecked isn't going to lead to worse outcomes across the board.
Edit: maybe you were joking? Ha ha.
If we had remained then, what would the EU have prevented them from doing so far? Would they have stopped the corruption with regards to the Covid contracts? I guess we would have to keep GDPR, but then GDPR might have been stronger in the first place without the UKs influence.
> the UK used to be a major world advocate for human rights
Yes, but we aren't any more and our press freedom index is quite low by EU standards.
>Yes, but we aren't any more
Have you got a source for this?
Is it necessary for the UK to stay in for this peace to continue? Would you like to talk to some of the southern states about the expansion of prosperity that has come along with monetary union?
> There's a consensus amongst economists that immigration makes us financially better off.
In aggregate, not individually. Great for those of us in the middle classes, but I have a lot of sympathy for those who see their low wages effectively pegged to minimum wage, and who have to compete for those minimum wage jobs with a huge pool of people.
We have stories of fruit and veg going unpicked because labour can't be imported as easily, and the few brits who enquired about the work wouldn't do it, they wouldn't live on the farm and work long days for the lowest possible pay. This speaks to me of industries in dire need of reform, propped up by the importation of those willing to accept standards nobody should have to accept, because of a disparity in wealth between countries.
Was leaving the EU the right way to go about fixing this? Probably not, but to sweep these issues under the rug or worse, call people racist because of them, was counterproductive.
>> In aggregate, not individually. Great for those of us in the middle classes, but I have a lot of sympathy for those who see their low wages effectively pegged to minimum wage
There are two arguments here:
1. If an aggregate gain isn't being redistributed so we're all better off, that's a failure of the tax and benefits systems that politicians could (and I believe should) address.
2. But aside from that, there's good evidence that immigration simply doesn't hurt those earning least. See Esther Duflo, for example: studies "all come to the conclusion that the effect of low-skilled migration on low-skilled wages is zero". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1pZfFY132Q
I haven't watched the video yet. But does she address the BoE paper? https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2015/the-impac...
"Empirical research on the labour market effects of immigration in the UK suggests that immigration has relatively small effects on average wages, with negative effects on low-paid workers and positive effects on high-paid workers."
I'm going to presume that page is well sourced as it's associated with Oxford University.
I don't disagree that many of the reasons people voted for Brexit were things that could have been addressed by the UK government in various ways. But they weren't, and Brussels Buck-passing was practically a parliamentary sport. Perhaps that can end now.
The solution is to create more jobs, not shrink the population. The idea that you get free labor and don't take advantage of it so backwards. It's only working because it's a psychological trick. In aggregate you are worse off.
Literally every country suffering from an underutilized workforce should just utilize it, even if artificially. Restricting immigration is basically equivalent to a waiting strategy where you just hope that the competition (e.g. China) runs into labor shortages and thus your own labor surplus no longer becomes a liability. It works but it's so slow that if you were the politician of a waiting nation you should rightfully be criticized for doing nothing.
>We have stories of fruit and veg going unpicked because labour can't be imported as easily, and the few brits who enquired about the work wouldn't do it, they wouldn't live on the farm and work long days for the lowest possible pay. This speaks to me of industries in dire need of reform, propped up by the importation of those willing to accept standards nobody should have to accept, because of a disparity in wealth between countries.
This is where things get absurd. You are complaining that all those immigrants are stealing all the farm jobs with impossibly low pay but at the same time you never cared a single bit about those jobs and would never do them yourself?
Is this not just the broken window fallacy?
> Restricting immigration is basically equivalent to a waiting strategy where you just hope that the competition (e.g. China) runs into labor shortages
I'm not sure I understand the point you're trying to make here?
Are you trying to say that in order to compete on the world stage you need a surplus of low/underpaid labour? Why is that good for the people that find themselves in that surplus?
> You are complaining that all those immigrants are stealing all the farm jobs
I'm doing no such thing. Please re-read my post after discarding some of your preconceptions.
I'm saying the pay and conditions attached to those jobs are wholly unreasonable. That they should not be run like that in the first place, immigrants or no.
Those companies were only viable because people could be flown in from places where there were lower expectations on working conditions and enough of a wage disparity that it made it worthwhile for those workers to be paid the minimum. They were often made to live in cramped conditions in temporary accomodation on-site, in a way that's totally incompatible with (for instance) a family life. That's not a good thing. That sector needs reform.
(Yes, immigration law was hiding this and contributing to wage suppression. I am in no way accusing any class of people, immigrant or otherwise of "stealing jobs".)
Maybe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Agreement#Brexit
That is indeed a problem, but it is your problem. If 48% of people support anything, there must be some reasons for it.
You're right about the consensus among economists. At the same time, 10 years ago there was a consensus about the virtues of free trade. Then Autor et al. wrote "The China Shock" and other similar papers, and, well, now there's not a consensus any more. Also, economics isn't immune to bias. Are papers showing a link from immigration to low wages, or crime, or reduced trust, likely to get a fair hearing?
Is desire for ethnic homogeneity close to racism? It seems to be very widely shared - including among impeccable liberals. See the evidence on white flight in Kaufmann's Whiteshift. Homophily is close to a human universal, so it's not obvious that it is wrong, or stupid, to prefer others like ourselves.
If we trade we have to accept rules. But now we get to choose which, right? As you say, if we don't like US rules on chicken, we can trade that off against the costs. The value of tying ourselves to the EU depends on how you view its future. There's a fair case that it is an aging, sclerotic continent that can only make money by imposing fines on US tech companies. I don't say that's the only perspective that you can make.
Lastly, the UK is a democracy. The EU, hardly (see Perry Anderson's recent essays in the LRB for a fairly comprehensive account). Democracy sure has its flaws, but doesn't the threat of the boot encourage politicians to get things done? In this context, the contrast between the UK's vaccination program and the EU's is telling.
Sure, and I think the most palatable conclusion is that a very large number of people are not well informed. If you look at UK news outlets — what they choose to report, how they choose to report it, and the interests of the people who own them — this doesn't stretch credibility very much.
> Also, economics isn't immune to bias. Are papers showing a link from immigration to low wages, or crime, or reduced trust, likely to get a fair hearing?
Yes, I believe they are. I am wary here of Michael Gove's quasi-fascist rhetoric of having "had enough of experts".
> it is an aging, sclerotic continent that can only make money by imposing fines on US tech companies
The big tech companies are too large and too powerful to be safe for democracy (or indeed for healthy forms of capitalism involving genuine competition). I would like to see more action taken against them everywhere. The EU is large enough to stand up to large corporations of this sort. The UK outside the EU is not.
Why not? Australia is smaller and just stood up to them.
1/ You're right, UK is big an rich enough to make them cave a little, and is also speaking english and have a good diplomatic reputation, that will help.
2/ Australia is a weird country and have weird politicians, i don't think any western country could've done the same on their own.
>Yes, I believe they are. I am wary here of Michael Gove's quasi-fascist rhetoric of having "had enough of experts".
Heh.... I'm an economist. Trust me on this one.
Physical reality: Factories are in China we don't have to work in the EU to get manufactured stuff! The Chinese are working their butts off for us and we are making them rich in the process!
Anti free trade idea: Chinese people working their butts off for us should be illegal. We would rather work ourselves and prefer expensive domestically produced products (if you did, why make the "inferior" competition illegal?). We don't need high skill jobs, low skill work is just as important!
One particular reason: while trade increases welfare, it also has distributional effects. As trade barriers go to zero, the marginal effect on welfare of a further reduction becomes small, compared to the marginal effect on distribution.
Another reason: globalization allows capital to avoid restrictions (e.g. on environmental externalities, child labour, slavery) that are seen in the West as part of the social contract.
Here's the Autor paper: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18054/w180...
Dani Rodrik's recent work on populism: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23559/w235...
And his classic "Has globalization gone too far" is worth reading too.
The UK is actually the exception to the growing hate and nationalism in Europe!
The benefit of UK in Europe was that it helped curtail the exscesses of the continent. I worry for the EU now as it seems more toxic after Brexit than before.
The main representation of the UK in the EU parliament was from UKIP, a nationalistic political party that formed a grouping with other nationalists.
By leaving, the UK has reduced the size of that nationalistic group.
Are you in the UK? I find this a rather peculiar view.
LOL
Actually I think after seeing the vaccine rollout by the EU, many more Brits would vote to leave.
It's interesting how events have turned out.
It’s the other continental armies (China, America, Russia) that worry me more.
Right now we have a global pandemic so all countries world wide are affected. And unless the whole world is vaccinated we won't get past it since the chance that mutations occur that all possible immune against our vaccines increases the more people get infected.
Currently there are 4 Producing Vaccine "producing" countries/groups
USA, UK, EU, Russia and China.
From these 5 groups only the EU and China are exporting vaccines. I am unsure about russia. And the Chinese vaccine is also not that widespread outside China. But I know that the EU even supplies Canada and Mexico with vaccines, while the USA and the UK have export bans. That is one of the reasons why vaccinations are slow in the EU in addition to being slow last year with ordering.
So while they have great numbers at home concerning the amount of people vaccinated. It is morally debatable whether or not that is the correct approach for a global problem.
You can easily find this information online. The following picture is pretty clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_V_COVID-19_vaccine#/me...
Also Russia is quite open about licensing the vaccine production technology to other countries, e.g. one of the countries which will soon start manufacturing it domestically is Italy.
My theory is simply that, at this point in time, the EU countries are insufficiently well linked and coordinated to face a crisis on this scale with the efficiency of something like the US, due in part to the variety of cultures, languages and political philosophies within the bloc.
> It's interesting how events have turned out.
it's more or less the same as every other crisis the EU has had to deal with: it ends up being handling extremely poorly
the EU is more or less good at one thing: trade negotiations
everything else it ends up involved with has pretty much been a disaster (sovereign debt crisis, migrant crisis, last days of yugoslavia, vaccine procurement, Russia, etc)
The ECSC then EEC did that, and of course NATO, ECHR, Schengen and various other institutions and agreements. The EU came into existence much later and claimed credit for things that were set in motion decades before. Noone would have voted to leave the EEC, the EEC was great.
One wonders if remain had one if the leave campaign would have accepted "The vote was clear, put up with it and shut up".
I completely understand why EU governments would be absolutely fed up with the UK government though.
Sadly my generation (40 and younger) are going to have to live the consequences of something we didn't vote for (49 and younger voted remain getting more strongly remain as you go younger) - it's absolutely frustrating.
"In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-3630668...
It's also apparent to me that the remain camp did keep fighting Brexit tooth & nail much like Farage might have, so I guess we have symmetry.
Add onto this the fact that the government wheeled out every 'expert' it could find to constantly cry about how bad brexit would be - most of them were lying (Mark Carney, George Osbourne in particular told lies of the most astounding nature - for example that brexit would cause more damage to the economy than WW2? Think about that for a minute.).
If anything the establishment was stacked against brexit.
It was clearly reckless to hold a vote on something without a plan on how it was actually to be implemented or even what it might look like; and there were calls for the government to do some investigation here and publish a report or some such document - the decision not to do so was in order to sow that uncertainty.
So no plan. Genius.
I think it would have been democratically unconscionable to not have had "No Brexit" as an option on a second referendum, but that would have required a relatively complicated ranked voting system, and arguably it would have made more sense for the first referendum to have been set up that way instead.
I suppose the alternative would have been for Remainers to boycott the hypothetical second referendum, and hope that the number of votes for the different Brexit options summed to substantially less than the number of votes for Brexit in the initial referendum.
[0] https://www.markpack.org.uk/150719/dominic-cummings-second-r...
[1] https://metro.co.uk/video/jacob-rees-mogg-suggests-holding-s...
There was no single, set-in-stone outcome on either side.
I voted to stay in, but the remain campaign was far from honest.
But on your WW2 point, I did think about it for a minute.
Britain fought WW2 for 6 years, 1939 – 1945. Brexit has no known endpoint. Imagine that even 10% of the trade impacts we've seen since the end of the transition period on 1 January persist. Then you can quite easily calculate how many years it will take to damage the economy more than WW2. Off the top of my head, I don't know if that's 6 years, or 60 years, or 600 years. But there's certainly some finite number that will do it.
But equally, politically, and democratically, it is not tenable to call a referendum (which is something quite rare in the UK) and then to ignore the result. So the reality is that the government and Parliament had to abide by the result even if the referendum was legally not binding.
Now people are of course free to campaign for the UK to join the EU.
Or to campaign to leave the UK - which I suspect is a more achievable and sensible option. I'd doubt if the EU would want the UK back anyway.
But it feels like the UK needs to do some domestic cleanup before that has a chance of happening. Seems like the UK media and political landscape has gone completely off the rails.
Bit like buying a house - you want it? Ok, well do a survey... it has a bit of dry rot - you still want it or shall we look at other options?
This would smooth out the issue of sampling the decision at one exact point.
Yeah, but unfortunately only 64% of the under 35 year olds bothered to turn up, while in the older age groups the turnout was much higher (80% for 35-64, 89% for over 65). That was probably a result of many (including the polls) thinking that the "Leave" side didn't have a chance of winning, same as many US Democrat supporters (also supported by the polls) didn't think Trump could win. The US voters got to correct their mistake four years later, no such luck for the UK voters unfortunately...
So the students (18-24) that could vote had to be:
A) living with parents during studies, or registered to vote at parents place while not living there full time (illegal) — or! Live full time on their own, which is rarely
and
B) to not go to Glastonbury, one of the largest festivals in the UK for young adults.
Hindsight being what it is tells us this was foolish, it that’s how it was.
https://www.gov.uk/electoral-register
> It’s sometimes possible to register at 2 addresses (though you can only vote once in any election).
> For example, if you’re a student with different home and term-time addresses, you may be able to register at both.
(I say this with tongue firmly in cheek, but I do think there is some truth to the idea that people broadly get more conservative as they get older)
From my perspective, it's more like "it was inevitable". The people pushing for Brexit would never give up. So the choice was either leave now, or keep talking for the following years/decades/centuries about how the evil EU oppresses the UK, and how everything in UK would be perfect if only...
In some way, it reminds me of dissolution of Czechoslovakia. I was not happy about that either, but realistically, the choice was either do it now, or keep forever listening to voices on both sides about how all problems are caused by the other half and everything would be perfect (though probably disastrous for the other half) if only...
Once you have a major fraction of your population -- and it doesn't make a difference whether it's 48% or 52% -- believing they are being oppressed, it becomes unfalsifiable. Every time something bad happens, you have an explanation ready, and it doesn't matter whether it makes sense or not, believing that it is all someone else's fault is always popular.
If the lesson from Czechoslovakia applies here, at the end none of the prophecies of heaven or hell came true, both sides continue living their boring lives. The only change is that now when something bad happens, this one excuse is no longer available.
So, my guess is that after Brexit, the life in EU will more or less remain the same, and the life in UK will more or less remain the same, with the exception that "everything would be perfect if only EU stopped interfering with our perfect country" will disappear from political speech.
That doesn't seem to be disappearing. My guess is we will be hearing a lot more about the EU for the foreseeable future.
Soon after dissolution of Czechoslovakia, people in Slovakia blamed Czechs for all kinds of things. (We had an agreement that neither side will use the old federal flag; they kept it. We had an agreement that the national treasure will be split proportionally; they decided to keep it all. Plus a few more things. I am sure the other side also had their complaints.) A decade later, after most politicians from that era retired, no one mentioned this anymore. People who were not yet adult during the federation simply don't care; it's ancient history for them, like complaining that your garden does not have nice flowers because dinosaurs once stomped on it. Yeah, but what did you do about it since then; you had enough time to do something, right?
I feel like an old person just for mentioning the old issues. Similarly, ten or twenty years later, Farage will be just some uncool old grandpa no one cares about. It may be hard to imagine, but it will happen.
>Farage will be just some uncool old grandpa
Fortunately that has already happened.
Of course it's very fashionable on the internet to shit on brexit. "haha brits be dumb cus independent" - I can only imagine what sort of insecurity you're dealing with about your own country that you have to resort to this.
Just ignore every other benefit of the EU to make your case.
Before, it was my right to live in the Netherlands. Now, it is just a possibility.
Thanks to the Withdrawal Agreement, because I already live here, I was given the "right" to apply for a residency, which like 99% of applicants, I received. I can now enjoy that for 5 years, after which I will need sponsorship from a company.
This sponsorship is a key difference, which anyone who has moved to the US can attest to. When your continued existence in a country is contingent on workplace sponsorship the power dynamics between you and your employer are really quite different.
In addition, it's one thing for me in a skilled occupation to be able to leave the country. But I have a friend whose boyfriend may be coming here on an art scholarship. She isn't in a skilled occupation. Before, she would have had the right to come here too. Now, I'm pretty doubtful that she'll be able to join him.
At 24 and probably unlikely to ever leave the UK I wouldn't expect you to understand any of this. But it is the lived reality, previously of every British person leaving the EU and now every British person who leaves the UK.
Edit: But of course, I'm not the first person to explain this to you, and it's not the last time you'll bray to the cheap seats with this mischaracterisation.
My point was that it is plain to see that the vaccine roll out in the EU has been mired by competing interests and slow bureaucracy, which is exactly what the eurosceptics were claiming is wrong with the EU in 2016. Thus the vindication.
If anything, this vindicates the Remainers who claimed that the UK government would become more deregulated and more beholden to corrupt interests.
The EU was faced with an almost impossible set of constraints, either leaving the poorer countries to fend for themselves (and being portrayed as not caring about its ideals of unity and equality), or forcing the richer countries to vastly overpay for the doses of the poorer countries (and being portrayed as a wasteful drain on successful economies).
Of course, it is in the interests of rich countries to help people in poor countries get vaccinated so that they don't become breeding grounds for new variants, especially if those countries have important trade links and free movement with said rich countries, but unfortunately people can get quite selfish during a crisis and not see the bigger picture. This is why we can't have nice things.
Talking about "queue jumping" or "corruption" really seems to be rooted in bitterness or just anti-UK sentiment.
Actually I thought I had written "corporate interests", but I guess that was a Freudian slip.
We'll see if this is still the economic "gold standard" to compare countries when China overturns the US in GDP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
This comment seems to be borne out spite more than any kind of logic.
Note that it's morning in Europe, and as such there will be lots of British/European people around, for whom Brexit is a bigger deal.
Brexit mostly was and remains a domestic issue which is why it's such a touchy subject on HN where there is probably a significant number of Britons commenting.
As someone from the continental Europe, this is not at all my experience, but I'm sure this depends on the specific social bubble I'm in. There are plenty of people around that had their lives complicated because of it, enough that most people I know have very strong feelings about it.
But mostly, no one cares.
"I think it's hilarious that Britain will fail. Who agrees?" is not really what I consider a good seed comment. It's fine to think Britain will fail, but at least provide something for people to discuss with you.
The barbarians are good, loyal and brave. They don't spend their time with cultural frivolities like theater, bathing and running a shop.
Similar to how broadly views on Trump outside of the US tended to be similar, when people have some distance from a debate they do tend to fall down on one "side".
I presume by "Twitter hot take" you just mean "takes I personally disagree with", right?
(In my mind: I am just a person on planet Earth, trying to get from position A to position B, less than 5 metres away).
Having now lived in the UK and Netherlands for over 10 years, I feel this would never happen here. I would expect this in the US though (so I rarely jaywalk on the few times I have been there).
I tell this anecdote as an example to my friends when I try to describe how Australia has a mix of influences from both Europe and the US.
It wouldn't happen in the UK because jaywalking is not a crime in UK.
Quiet Australians accept authority moreso than UK folk.
This is so far from my stereotype of Aussies that I feel sure it must be a troll, designed to bring out a legion of shirtless, shrimp-barbecuing cobbers, turning the air blue with their feelings about authority.
It's definitely true. Australia loves the smack of firm government and is quietly very, very authoritarian.
There's an Aussie term "Wowsers" [0] which is fascinating, as there is no British equivalent term. It often feels like the Wowsers and the Larrikins [1] are fighting an endless battle for Australia's soul. The Wowsers always win.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wowser [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrikin
* Lockout laws
* Jaywalking laws
* Weaker environmental protests than UK, despite Aus lagging the rest of the world on environmentalism.
* Mandatory helmet laws.
* Illegal to perform DIY electrics, e.g. change a plug.
* International travel currently banned. To leave Australia at the moment would require either exemption, or I relinquish citizenship.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Cronulla_riots was the last riot involving shirtless shrimp barbecuing cobbers. Not a proud moment.
??
As someone moving to Australia in a few months, I feel like this is something I ought to know about...
> International travel currently banned.
This is the same in many countries, including the UK right now.
Arduino is fine.
> This is the same in many countries, including the UK right now.
Yes, true in UK during the past 1-2 months of national lockdown?
Aus's has been the case for 12 months.
Current lockdown started on the 4th of Jan, and the travel restrictions came in then. We also had lockdown part 2 back in November, for the whole of November, lockdown part 1 from April-June last year, and various degrees of lockdown in between with regional variations...
I've lived in Aus before, and I agree it's great for many reasons, am looking forward to being back.
On the electrical thing, I know there are some restrictions on what you can do in the UK - putting in new circuits, adding new lighting circuits etc. I've pushed the boundaries a bit here AFAICT by fixing a lighting circuit* and swapping a few single sockets for doubles. Other work like putting cat 6 in the walls I did myself without a thought. Looks like I need to take a look at the regs.
( * the light switch in our bedroom somehow flicked between "one bulb on" and "two bulbs in series", with no off setting )
(oh wow, you're right, I can't change a light fitting, or even legally change a plug from UK -> Aus without breaking the law. Will have to buy new cables where I can, maybe change one or two plugs before I leave!)
> This is the same in many countries, including the UK right now.
It isn't really. Many countries barred non-resident non-citizens from entering but only a couple went to the extent of attempting to prohibit their own citizens from leaving. The latter restriction is far more draconian.
OK then, but the UK is currently one of those places. Without good reason it's currently prohibited.
ANd I honestly don't have a problem with it, we're in the midst of a pandemic. :shrug:
By all means, protect your own country by preventing people from going in, but people should be free to leave to a different place with more relaxed rules at their own risk.
Preventing your citizens from coming back is worse.
I remember when there was a law who passed thru in Australia where every small company could fire anyone on the day (it wasn't the case before, i think there was a 3 month period or something).
The law passed and the only comments I could get from colleague at that time (not from you dan ;)) was "humm okay then"
In france there would be riots for months and years if such law passed.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it does seem unusually French.
From what I can tell the workers rights situation in France really does dissuade some companies from setting up there.
I think there would be a lot of noise in the press about it here, but I don't think riots in the streets would be part of it!
Weird, as I met a dutch woman in Australia, from Maastricht, who was deathly afraid of crossing the road at the wrong time because where she was from she could get in trouble for that.
Whereas I lived in WA for a couple of years and never saw anything like it.
I think what happens is they just get told one day to target it, when they'll stand around and catch people, otherwise they just don't care unless they take a personal dislike to you. I have heard of times they'll descend on Sydney CBD intersections like this in mobs to send a message. The rest of the time, jaywalking is generally very casually done here and not really a big deal like in some US movies.
The shock of their financial sector leaving.
The shock of getting pitiful trade negotiating.
Being unprepared with anything to offer for negotiating leverage.
The domestic identity further polarizing and inability to form consensus.
Let’s hope that the NHS gets properly funded and doesn’t get privatised. Because the US vaccination rollout is a shambles.
Japan: You guys have vaccines?
In all honesty, this statement is fairly close to being hilariously wrong. The US vaccinates more people per day than any other country in the world. The reason why the UK has a higher per-capita vaccination rate is A) there's less of you to vaccinate, and B) the UK isn't doing two doses. The former makes the rollout easier - there are countries like Israel where they're close to vaccine herd immunity as they simply needed fewer doses. The latter is a calculated risk only somewhat supported by the available medical data. I don't expect every country to adopt First Dose First, especially if they've already given two doses to high-risk populations that would benefit from getting half their protection sooner.
Trust me, there's plenty of other things you can harangue the US about all day - vaccines aren't one of them.
I trust "the math" that shows a better population outcome there, even though individuals will have higher risk profiles this way.
You speak in the past tense but this hasn’t actually happened and shows no signs of happening in terms of banks relocating jobs and capital. If anything London is getting stronger.
#2 The UK has departed from the trading bloc it does 60% of its trade with. It desperately needs new trade deals outside of it. Since America is the biggest economic bloc outside of Europe and because they're big and we are small they have the leverage and that means we start abiding by their rules.
#3 There were plans leaked on how this would be done with the NHS (e.g. deliberately hamstringing the NHS's ability to negotiate drug prices). They kept them secret from the public.
To be frank, your comment seems borne out of a kind of appeal to moderation rather than particular knowledge of UK domestic politics.
Nonetheless you can measure each country's contribution to the Iraq War as a rough proxy for how much they supplicate. The UK contributed by far the most of the three while Canada's involvement was minimal.
For as long as I can remember, the Irish government has been quite deferential towards the US, e.g., allowing the use of Irish airports (mostly Shannon, a civilian airport – but also Casement Aeorodome, the headquarter of the Irish Aer Corps) by US military to carry troops, weapons and – quite possibly (aircraft were never inspected) – victims of “extraordinary rendition”. Every year, our Taoisigh (prime ministers) are always eager to have a photo opportunity with the US president on St. Patrick’s day.
I’m guessing that this is mostly to attract Foreign direct investment into Ireland from US multi-national corporations as can be seen by our notably low rate of corporation tax – and the government’s unwillingness to accept the tax income that the EU considers to be owed to us by Apple. Neo-liberalism has been the dominant political ideology over the past few decades with one former Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) famously declaring that Ireland was (ideologically) closer to Boston than Berlin. This dominance left Ireland particularly vulnerable when the 2008 financial crisis eventually hit us – without the widely touted “soft landing”.
However, the relationship isn’t all bad: a number of US administrations – particularly Bill Clinton’s – helped to bring about the end of armed conflict in Northern Ireland. That was probably the most important political achievement in the recent history of Britain and Ireland (one that Brexiteers, sadly, don’t seem to care about or have forgotten about).
Ireland is officially a neutral country but, as you correctly point out, has a long history of allowing the US to use Shannon as a de facto US Airbase. And, as you also correctly point out, has almost built its entire economy in recent years on providing tax incentives and other bribes for US mega-corporations to set up [nominal] HQ there. The phrases "House of Cards" and "They don't love you back" immediately spring to mind.
That unfortunately means sending kids to die in Vietnam.
- The EU exit was, among other things, accused of being a way to relax regulation and legislation to degrade product standards to a US-like level. Chlorinated chicken was a big item on everyone's discussion agenda a while back. This is now evidently happening.
- The government is severely underfunding the NHS, despite paying it lip service. Some accuse the government of doing this as a form of sabotage, so that the service quality degrades and the private sector can swoop in as the saviour. This is controversial because:
a) Brits are very proud of the NHS as a nation (or at least that's the dominant narrative in my news bubble)
b) The privatisation of British rail has been a disaster - ticket prices have skyrocketed, and service quality took a nosedive in some areas.
Indeed, you seem to admit that here, when you state that you got your views of what British people believe from your "news bubble". For example you think everyone else thinks the NHS is awesome, because left-wing journalists told you that's what everyone thinks. One day you'll talk to a Brit outside of that bubble and get a real shock to discover they aren't enamoured with the NHS at all. Remember, nobody has copied the NHS model. Nobody! The rest of the EU looked at it and thought the UK was crazy to do that, they all went with far greater private sector involvement. The NHS is a socialist anachronism and plenty of people would love to move to a more standard social insurance model, but even expressing such an opinion results in nasty, vicious attacks by the left, so people quickly learn to just stay quiet about it.
Quite possibly one day there will be a referendum on this and the same sorts of people whose minds were blown by Brexit will have their minds blown a second time by the degree to which people vote against the NHS.
Likewise for rail. The UK just had a vote on that: Corbyn had very few identifiable policies but re-nationalisation of rail was one of them. Voters rejected that agenda on an a-historic scale. Again, if it ever became a topic of serious political debate like the EU did before the Brexit referendum, you'd be shocked at how little support nationalisation would end up having. Ridership was in decline for decades before privatisation. The moment they were privatised that trend went into reverse and ridership started climbing again, until it reached new records pre-COVID. Ticket prices were rising because the newly privatised railways became so popular (limited supply+growing demand=rising prices).
Regulation: Whilst the US is not a low regulation zone by international standards, the EU is even worse. I love this headline, UK leaving GDPR. Hell yes. Another brilliant move by the UK post-Brexit, the latest in a string of them. GDPR is a disastrous "law", in quotes because it barely qualifies as a law at all in the traditional sense when you read it. Laws are meant to explicitly state what they disallow but the GDPR is so vaguely worded it could be interpreted to mean almost anything. Just on basic constitutional grounds, junking it is a smart move.
But there are practical benefits too. GDPR imposes staggering costs on businesses to deliver dubious 'benefits' which approximately nobody outside of the reflexive "it's EU so it must be good" bubble actually cares about. There has been no mass migration away from US tech firms at any point, GDPR implementation changed basically nothing about the online experience and the EU's various attempts to legislate tech firms away from domestic markets just made it impossible to create local competitors. Beyond being banned from some local US newspapers and forcing yet more privacy popups everywhere, GDPR has been largely impact-free.
Or because 87% of Britons polled said that they are very proud of it.
>you'd be shocked at how little support rail nationalisation would end up having.
56% in favor. 15% actively against. Majority support even by members of the party that was most against it.
>The NHS is a socialist anachronism
This is a popular view among investors & high net worth individuals. The US system is extraordinarily profitable as a mechanism for parasitic wealth extraction and UK based investors are not blind to this. They want some sugar too.
Nonetheless even UK right wing papers owned by those very people shy away from this view. 87% is above the threshold where they feel comfortable contradicting the popular view.
Rail nationalisation was below that threshold and the barclay brothers owned telegraph, for instance, would attack the idea with savage abandon of a rabid dog.
When Cameron first called the referendum Remain was in the lead. When topics are debated thoroughly in the public sphere and serious campaigns are run, people's opinions can shift pretty dramatically. That's why politicians campaign.
Nobody has ever spent time campaigning to keep railways privatised in the UK because the Conservatives have always chosen to fight elections on other issues, whilst Labour have made nationalisation a priority for years. If people were asked to make a direct decision on this and there was competent campaigning involved, I am very sure nationalisation would lose. The arguments are weak.
87% of Britons polled said that they are very proud of [the NHS]
The same poll showed even more people are "proud" of the fire brigade, although there's nothing special about the British fire service. They are also more "proud" of the post office than Oxford or Cambridge universities. All that poll says is that people tend to answer "proud" (whatever that's interpreted to mean) when asked about institutions which they frequently interact with and are rarely exposed to any criticism of.
Just like with the railways, British people are not exposed to serious debate about the NHS. The Conservatives have, for now at least, given up trying to debate it because they prefer to be a centrist party and because Labour consistently exploit people's emotions by conflating the NHS with healthcare. For instance the left will happily imply that any criticism of the NHS (a bureaucracy) means hatred of nurses and loving of cancer, or other nonsense.
They're exposed to investor dogma like yours on a daily basis from most of the investor owned media (telegraph, the mail, etc.). It isn't quite as vehement as yours because they know the limits of what their audience would accept but their owners views are broadly in line with yours.
It's a bit hard to attack an institution that cured your readerships' mother's cancer, for instance, and not lose their trust. They learned this lesson the hard way.
>For instance the left will happily imply that any criticism of the NHS (a bureaucracy) means hatred of nurses
They'll state that a below inflation pay rise does that because it does. They tried to supplant it with a weekly "clap a thon" instead. Cringeworthy.
Although, it's not strictly nurses investors and the investor backed government hate it's nursing unions, among other impediments to parasitic US-style profit driven value extraction.
> All that poll says is that people tend to answer "proud" (whatever that's interpreted to mean) when asked about institutions which they frequently interact with and are rarely exposed to any criticism of.
You just wrote above:
> One day you'll talk to a Brit outside of that bubble and get a real shock to discover they aren't enamoured with the NHS at all.
> plenty of people would love to move to a more standard social insurance model
Probably should choose one: either people have an bad opinion of NHS, or they don't.
I believe the NHS funding and operational model is similar to that used by military veterans in the US.
FWIW, I think we should keep the NHS and have it free at point of use. However, I don't really care how that service is provided - government employees, private, whatever - as long as the service is good.
Do you have a source for this? How does it stack up against other countries? Is it possible a greater share of people were hospitalised and thus the number of infections at hospitals was higher as a result?
Overall costs have not been going down much but various parts of the service are given to contractors who do a worse job at a higher price and take a fat cut. Richard Branson notably has done this. The PPE fiasco that caused much of the spread of COVID was largely because of this - much of it was bought and didn't arrive: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ppe-scandal-procur...
Nonetheless people's emotional impressions of the service tend to have a lag. Your Mother's cancer treatment from 9 years ago will have a much bigger effect on your impression of the institution than statistics about how well it is doing now.
Eventually it will be privatized entirely as a "fix" for the problems caused by privatization and the costs will skyrocket.
Just like the cost of my railway season ticket to London or a trip to the doctor in the US.
And let's not forget Tony Blair put in place some internal market reforms as well.
>The NHS is a socialist anachronism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan
"Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community."
I would say that most people will not vote against the NHS though. They may vote to reform it or get it more money, but they will not mostly vote to get rid of it.
The NHS is an upside down version of the US healthcare system. In the UK the political system is hijacked by the population to keep doctors wages low. In the US the political system is hijacked by the healthcare industry in order to keep healthcare wages high.
2) left wing journalists? For what newspaper? The UK newspaper industry is dominated by right wing papers. I think international readers may get there wrong idea about it because they see the guardian online... because the guardian is free it gets shared a lot. If you want to see a typical British newspaper try the Daily Mail (Don't take this as a recommendation!)
3) The idea that the Corbyn election defeat was mostly about rail nationalisation is one of the most absurd things I have ever read.
4) The businesses I work with spent trivial sums on GDPR.
Privatisation has not been perfect, but only someone who does not remember the old days of British Rail in the 1980s and 1990s would consider it a disaster. It's true that fares are high, but service levels and passenger numbers are both far above the British Rail days. (UK rail passenger numbers reached an all time record in 2019)
Prior to Covid, many of the busiest lines were operating near their capacity limits, so setting fares any lower would just cause even more severe crowding. And fares, of course, generate revenue to reinvest into expanding capacity.
In any case, UK rail operators are now de-facto nationalised due to Covid. This has been recognised by the ONS, with rail operator's debts now counted on the government balance sheet.
ONS recognises full nationalisation of the UK railways: https://www.ft.com/content/1baa6b50-47ba-416e-b172-90a77a34c...
This isn't the vindication of privatisation you seem to think it is. Passenger numbers (and fares) are hitting records, and the operators are still using the exact same rolling stock as in 'the old days of British Rail'. Privatisation has led to massive corporate profits at the taxpayers' expense, without providing the investment the railways need.
How is it that half of the UK's private operators are subsidiaries of other countries' nationalised operators? When the East Coast Mainline was renationalised (after the franchise holder claimed it was impossible to run profitably), it jumped from the most expensive line with the least customer satisfaction to the line with the highest customer satisfaction.
The 'bad old days' of British Rail were because of persistent underfunding, not the ownership structure. The UK state spends more on railways today under a privatised system than they did when the entire system was nationalised.
Some are, some aren't - Cross Country had plenty of new rolling stock when they were Virgin owned, and GWR have replaced many of the 125s in the last 5yrs
I'm not suggesting it is. I'm saying that privatisation has not been a disaster, which was the OP's claim. If privatisation was a disaster, passengers would not have flocked to the railways in record numbers.
> "the operators are still using the exact same rolling stock as in 'the old days of British Rail'"
This isn't true in the vast majority of cases. With very few exceptions (like a few remaining HSTs), you'd be hard pressed to find any train operating into London that dates back to British Rail. Many routes have been through multiple rolling stock upgrades since the BR days!
But note that rolling stock is not something that the operators have much control over anyway. Upgrades are decided/determined by the Department for Transport as part of the franchise terms. So if you do find yourself on an ancient train on some regional route, that's really the government's fault, not the operator's.
> "How is it that half of the UK's private operators are subsidiaries of other countries' nationalised operators?"
Nationalised operators tend to have low costs of capital, so can potentially bid lower for franchises than private competitors who are likely to be paying higher interest rates. They also already have management experience in running large railways, which helps to support their bids.
> "The 'bad old days' of British Rail were because of persistent underfunding, not the ownership structure."
I think this is partially true.
> "The UK state spends more on railways today under a privatised system than they did when the entire system was nationalised."
Yes, but again, passenger numbers have increased dramatically in that time. In 2019, the UK's total rail subsidy (including Network Rail spending) was 3.97p per passenger mile. That's just about as low as it's ever been since at least 1980.
TL;DW revenues and passenger numbers are demonstrably lower with privatization than when nationalized. Unlike other industries, the UK's franchise privatization model is not subjected to free market forces, allowing rail companies to win contracts by underbidding only to fail to meet their targets.
Have you ever known any government departments that don’t howl about being underfunded? The NHS is the 4th largest employer in the world, 1.3 million employees to provide healthcare to a nation of 67 million.
The Labour Party is currently claiming that NHS spending will be cut next year... because the emergency funding for the Covid situation won’t be made a permanent part of its budget!!
Yet taxpayer funding for health per head of population in the UK is lower than
France
Germany
Sweden
Switzerland
And get this -- THE USA
In 2009 - so before Obamacare came in, the US government spent $3,700 per person on healthcare. Not per person covered by medicare and military, per citizen.
The UK spent $2,700, and everyone was covered.
Doctors and administrators are very well paid. Even nurses are when you factor in the pension. The only genuinely underpaid staff in the NHS are its cleaners who are the REAL frontline against infectious diseases. Didn’t see them doing many Tiktok dances however, too busy with real work.
Train company profits count for about 2% of the total cost of the ticket, and (pre covid) the network carried more than twice as many passengers as it was under BR - nearly 2 billion journeys a year vs a steady 800m in the 70s through 90s. in terms of distance, pax-km
1970 36b 1980 35b 1990 40b 1997 42b (end of BR) 2010 64b 2018 81b
Since 1997 that's a 90% increase.
France has increased 40% since 1997, Germany by 60%.
Fares have increased, but this is a reflection of the cost shifting to the passenger and away from the taxpayer. In 2009/10, franchised train operating companies were paid £275m to run the services (and another £3b was spent on the network those trains run on)
By 2015-2016 that operating subsidy had gone, and instead the TOCs paid £1.2b/year to operate their trains (some areas like Northern and West Midlands were still subsidised, but South West trains and Southern were paying their operating dues and paying for the tracks they run on)
It doesn't make sense to justifiably complain about overcrowdning (high demand) on one hand, but complain about high prices on the other. There is competition to rail if the price was too high -- driving, coaches, flying, not traveling, but the fare is obviously at the right level to result in record levels of travel and relatively low subsidy.
https://fullfact.org/economy/how-much-does-government-subsid...
Government subsidies have tripled since privatisation and fares have risen by 20% after inflation.
That doesn't seem like a win for efficiency. And of course it's the customer who bears the cost - which aren't just economic, but also social, because good public infrastructure reliably offers many-multiple ROI for economic activity in general.
And the question remains - how would BR have fared (ha...) with those generous subsidy levels instead of the very constrained resources it was forced to operate with?
Not only has privatisation been very expensive and poor value in real terms, it also destroyed one of the UK's biggest engineering employers and R&D development cultures.
The HS125 is still one of the most popular trains today. Experimental APT tilting technology was given away to European companies and then sold back to the UK in the form of foreign-built tiling trains.
Those could easily have been designed and built in the UK. There were also losses in signalling research - essential for maximised efficiency - and in network integration.
So it absolutely does make sense to complain about overcrowding and high prices when a nationalised network would have been cheaper to run, better value, and also more advanced technologically.
Of course this ideologically unpossible. Even so. Ideologues need to explain why jobs were lost, safety was trashed, engineering and R&D skills were off-shored in addition to higher subsidies and uneconomic fares.
Note this importantly doesn't include Scotland, Wales, Merseyrail (public) or TFL (public)
Rail subsidy jumped after railtrack was replaced with nationalrail, and the legacy of decades of underfunding in rail under BR was apparent. That underfunding is obviously going to happen under a tory government interested in cutting short term costs. You can see that as of 2015 subsidy per passenger mile was about the same as it was in the 80s and 90s[0]
Rail subsidy is split into two parts
1) Track costs 2) Service costs
Your figures are including major capital expenditure - specifically HS2 and Crossrail, so not really comparable with subsidies in the 70s and 80s when there weren't massive capital programmes and expansion.
I'm less concerned about track maintenence costs or track capital costs -- that's like the government paying for road maintenance or new motorways - it's good. It's the service subsidies that interest me. Basicalyl how much is the taxpayer using to subsidise rail travellers (who tend to have higher income and higher wealth than average), and during the 6 years I have data on, those dropped by £1.4 billion.
Remember that under BR there were competing sectors - intercity, regional railways, network southeast, all of which were shit. Now there are competing franchisees, some of which are shit, but we often get a choice (Virgin vs Chiltern vs London Midland for London-Birmingham, XC vs TFW for Crewe-Bristol, etc. This means more choice and cheaper fares for me, the passenger).
In 2015/16 the franchise "GTR (Thameslink etc)" pays £278m for the privilige of running trains through central London. Meanwhile Northern, which have very few routes that pay their way, get paid £122m from central government. You could argue that Grant Shapps would be better running these services, I'm not convinced.
Effectively Brighton->London commuters are subsidising rural travellers in Yorkshire. You could argue this shouldn't happen, and those commuting into London for high paying jobs should have cheaper fares, at the expense of fewer services in the North. That's a very Thatcherite view, but that's ok, everyone's entitled to a view.
APT predated privitisation by 2 decades so I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. Virgin ordered the class 390s.
It sounds like you don't like the state of the rail industry in Britain in the 80s and 90s, which is reasonable. It's hardly the fault of privitisation didn't start until 1993 and didn't begin operation until about 1997
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...
Considering that this is about the same as inflation and less than the usual annual ticket price increase which is decided in part by the government, I strongly suspect that this number is an accounting exercise more than anything else.
There's also the profits made by the trains leasing companies as many TOCs lease their rolling stock
> There is competition to rail if the price was too high -- driving, coaches, flying, not traveling
There's no real competition for most commuters around London at least. The trade-off is rather with the cost of housing.
It makes perfect sense to complain about overcrowding for that reason and because pay a lot of money for their tickets, indeed.
People commute by train because it's the least bad option and/or the only viable option. That does not mean that it's good or that there is real competition.
If the number of trips has been increasing I think that the main drivers are the concentration of jobs within London and the booming housing costs: People live further and further away and have to commute by trains.
I'm no fan of the franchise system - especially when companies like Virgin East Coast get out of the obligations if they don't make enough money, but rail is stronger now (well 2019) than it has been since before the motor car was created, and the strength coincided with the franchise system coming in.
> People commute by train because it's the least bad option and/or the only viable option. That does not mean that it's good or that there is real competition.
We haven't seen the same growth in other European countries though. And it's not just commuting into London -- long-distance travel has ballooned too - hence the need to build HS2.
In cities like Paris, public transport has huge capacity and is cheap (and in Paris employers have to pay half your season ticket).
Lower growth there does not mean that we're doing better, it means that we're starting from lower... And the UK has had a robust population growth as well.
That sounds awful - so I effectively get a paycut if I walk or ride to the office?
If you buy a season ticket (at least a monthly ticket) to commute between your home and office you send a copy to HR and they have to refund you half of it.
What seems to happen now is the manufacturers e.g. Hitachi lease the trains to TOCs complete with maintenance plans built it.
Think Eurostar was the first model of this in the Uk
There are a couple of other reasons:
The Lansley reforms were about increasing non-NHS provision. They mostly failed because private providers simply can't do the job for the money the NHS gets paid.
Where we see private provision (for example, specialist commissioning in mental health services, or learning disability and autism services) we see terrible standards of care. Winterborne View, Whorlton Hall, St Andrews, are all non-NHS providers. Cygnet Health have had a bunch of inadequate CQC reports.
I'm rather sure your Labor party (at least Corbyn) was constantly attacking EU/Brussels and often dutch for neoliberalism.
If your political position is re-nationalisation then it's easier to do it outside the EU unless you think the Conservative party stays in power forever.
Seems like not being part of a larger "union" has allowed them to start vaccinating at 3 times the pace of its European neighbours. Historically, power removed further from the people does not benefit the people. There are very few "economies of scale" in politics. As the system grows larger, accountability becomes more difficult and decision making is harder and harder.
Nice example is Iceland. after the 2008 crash. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-03-31/welcome-t...
Giggle count: zero.
GDPR has given a 50M EUR handslap to Google and similar to some other large companies[1] while seriously hurting smaller companies with existing custom web applications for whom they may not even have someone on staff to modify those to be GDPR-compliant.
Small businesses like others must determine what PII is, how to anonymize it, and how to remove it when users request their PII to be removed. PII could be in their server logs or other locations that are inaccessible to most employees of the business. Backups might be excluded from PII scrubbing, but so much is unclear.
Let’s also talk about what it doesn’t protect. PCI, not GDPR, attempts to provide protection for cardholder data. GDPR doesn’t protect against PII that was previously shared. Nor does it protect from data being stolen, unless the user had their data removed prior.
[1]- https://dataprivacymanager.net/5-biggest-gdpr-fines-so-far-2...
Companies of all sizes can have a lot of PII and code that’s not GDPR compliant, and it’s non-trivial to fix that. When asked by a user to remove PII, the removal is sometimes incomplete at these companies. Even the process of incompletely the removing PII wastes time; the users requesting PII removal often didn’t even do business with the company, in my experience.
Companies of all sizes but often small companies hire out development of web apps that keep PII and may not have someone permanently on staff to maintain it to make the changes needed to allow users to remove their PII.
I’d go so far as to say that I’d intentionally not work with users if I knew they would be painful to work with, leaving me with nothing but a legal requirement to wipe their asses because they used my old site. I hope that EU didn’t intentionally do this to hurt small businesses and foster new startups within the EU to brunt the cost of this stupid, stupid law.
I’m a privacy advocate.
* A company is holding PII in a system they don't have the resources to manage .
* The software is insufficiently secure to hold that data.
* The company appears to be even be holding data on people that didn't even do business with the company.
* This is in-part caused by the (sub)hiring of companies that also were not scrupulous with PII in the past.
You say that this hurts said company, and they are going to stop doing that.
I'd say this is the exact intended effect of the law. Not so stupid after all!
Meanwhile, for people who scrupulously and ethically avoided collecting extraneous PII in the first place; I think the GDPR provides no great additional burden.
The situation we have now is that massive amounts of code and business processes that were created without the assumption that things like email addresses were protected information that users have a right to purge whenever they want. It doesn't particularly matter if you think this is right or wrong, what matters is that this is how the world is. So then, what to do about it?
A rational approach is to try to look at a cost-benefit analysis of various solutions -- how much would it take to refactor the code and update the business processes? More importantly, how much would it take to put into operation controls that effectively ensure that all the data was deleted? Finally, how much would it cost to get rid of all that data -- remember companies can have tape backups, recovery centers, and data was sprayed everywhere for decades.
So you get some number, say a hundred billion. Is it still worth the expense? Could there be some other solution?
For example, force companies to delete old data after X years, where X is say 10 after the business relationship has been ended. Or some other approach. That approach might cost only 20 billion. Or force companies to do this for new code and business processes but leave the legacy ones in place for X years. That might be only 10 billion.
As another example, look at C code. It's unsafe. We are aware of the problems with C code now and have discovered safer languages. But the cost of rewriting the existing pool of C code is huge. It doesn't help to wring your hands and approach this from a moral argument -- so security doesn't matter, we declare indignantly? Instead, look for practical ways of transitioning to safer languages over time, and other ways to isolate and mitigate the damage of unsafe code.
But at all costs, understand the limitations involved, and craft remedies that give you the most bang for the buck, because resources are limited and a dollar spent on this is a dollar not spent on some other cause, which might be more worthwhile than being able to delete any email address on command from a customer letter.
Especially taking into account that there might not be a linear relationship between the damage accrued by society versus the costs of the company to ameliorate such damage.
In this company, is there a solid technical reason why the log couldn't get rotated and/or aggregated and/or truncated to begin with?
Those are fairly typical things you might want to configure to do with a log; GDPR or no.
If the government passed a law requiring all housing to be be built to code to survive a magnitude 9 earthquake in a region where there are no earthquakes, and every house needs to be retrofitted, would you say the burden is low? After all, if you start from scratch without a house there is no requirement to do anything! And building a new house is much easier, after all!
But this is more like trying to explain why your attic has strengthened beams that were not on the original (default) architectural drawings, and gosh what are all those bags of white powder doing there?
The government doesn't even make it illegal, mind. You just need to explain why, if someone asks politely.
( https://goo.gl/maps/UgRPhuxfXoezDJHB9 so this business still wouldn't get in trouble. )
I find that many of the quintessential problems of the U.S.A. were inherited from the British Empire and seem pervasive throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. England too has a district based system, leading to close to a two-party state, and a common law legal system where the judge and juror are often more powerful than the letter of the law.
If anything, the U.S.A. remedied some of the unusual quirks of common law legal systems. — I was recently acquainted with knowledge that in both the U.K. and Australia, a criminal defence attorney would, when his client confess to the crime to him, almost certainly recommend that he be released, and that latter seek new counsel, and that the new counsel be kept in the dark, as apparently the system is designed such that a criminal defence attorney is completely handicapped in defending his client, know he of the latter's guilt. — this is less so the case in the U.S.A., which is rather unique for jury trials, and in most civil law jurisdictions there is no reason not to confess to one's attorney.
The US for all the lack of controls that citizens have over business at the very least has a very federalised (in the Euro sense of the term), distribution of power, whereas Britain is pretty much governed from London.
The trouble with the DPA was fines capped out at £500k and international enforcement was limited so large international companies like Google and Facebook could treat the law as an optional slap on the wrist while smaller international businesses effectively flew under the radar, the GDPR largely rectified both of these issues while modernising the laws in response to issues that generally didn't exist prior to the mid 2000s.
I’m sure they’ll feel much better when there’s yet another set of rules and laws they’ll have to follow. Oof.
This is a deeply depressing take if the conclusion is to scrap GDPR. Is this true for 'data' in the general sense, or actually only true in the murky cases where there's an opportunity to use and abuse our personal data.
In my book, that implies that GDPR is working exactly as we hoped it would.
>The UK has the freedom to strike its own partnerships, he said, and he would announce priority countries for data adequacy agreements shortly
will be an announcement that the US has adequate data protection.
Overall I think GDPR is a very positive thing, but from the government's perspective if they could keep the adequacy agreement in place with the EU while still relaxing some of the current GDPR legislation then that would be a big win for them, especially from a political point of view as it would be some much-needed validation of their brexit strategy: "Look! We have all the benefit of being in the EU [via the adequacy decision] but we get to make our own rules! Go us." I could imagine them doing something along the lines of greatly reducing the maximum fine, for example. Big fines are typically not being issued, so they likely wouldn't see it as a big loss.
No-no of course we don't want to sell your data for profit, that would be ridiculous. Clearly it is just our corporate sponsors who will be doing it for us!
Kind of like the drunken neglectful husband who pats himself on the back for not beating his wife like some guys he sees on TV.
The nation (any country) needs to have human goals - not economical goals for their own sake - but a better life for us, for us all.
Like Brexit, the people benefiting most from it are already well settled, they're working on their short- to mid-term plan to earn a lot of money before retiring to their private island or estate or whatever. They live outside of the negative consequences of their decisions.
Meanwhile, the rest of the population will have to suffer through the consequences for the foreseeable.
Tl;dr, policy optimizing for short term individual gain instead of long term sustainable gain. And the long term gain would be so much more better as well.
All of the countries currently under a short term gain capitalist regime could be so much better for their inhabitants. Wealth, socialist policies, comfort, safety, stability, etc is all in reach. But instead the people at the top - who already live a very comfortable and privileged life so they don't see and never will see the problem - choose short term personal gain for them and their 1% friends.
Oh, nonsense. People disagree with you politically. That doesn't make it 'unveiled corruption'. What a lazy way to think.
But there is a systemic and widely recognised issue in the UK with the government flagrantly handing out public money without due diligence or fair recourse.
Selling citizens data for profit is just another data point.
https://medium.com/shit-britain/the-bumper-uk-conservative-g...
https://thejist.co.uk/politics/a-list-of-alleged-conservativ...
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/how-the-tories-no...
It's also not inherently corruption when a (group of) companies go to a politician and say "we think X would be good" and the politician goes on to support X. Even if X is profitable for the companies. Many things that are profitable are also good for wider society.
Are they? Are targeted ads really increasing the number of hairdressers and/or making them more profitable?
What a lazy way to think
From a GDPR standpoint, compliance means that the country where the data is stored has an agreement with the EU AND you must have enforceable and strong, negative consequences for the foreign party in your contract.
The EU can only make such an agreement for a foreign country if the data protection laws are sufficient. I do not know whether or not the UK laws are considered sufficient, but without any such agreement, you cannot assume that you can just store EU personal data in the UK.
With the death of Privacy Shield and its siblings, this first requirement isn't even the case for the US anymore as the US will not guarantee the safety of EU citizens' information from things like the patriot act. However, I haven't seen any country complain about storing data with Google, Amazon or Facebook yet so I don't think this rule will be enforced any time soon. Technically, though, storing PII in a foreign, non-EU country without the necessary requirements is still very much illegal with the full suite of fines available to the data processing agencies.
"Fortunately, Switzerland, along with 12 other non-EEA countries, has received an "adequacy decision" from the European Commission. An adequacy decision is a recognition of the strength of Switzerland's data protection law."
They ought to be annoying. so sites that do not track you for advertising can just add your cookie when you actively sign in, without the annoying popup on first visit, and receive more traffic because they are less-annoying.
Most of the modals are full of dark patterns that basically force you to accept the cookies etc. unless you go through multiple different screens and checkboxes.
as they should.
At least it is in their face now and can entice curiosity.
if you visit site A, you click OK, get all the cookies, get screwed, and annoyed.
you visit site B, you don't see the popup, you don't get annoyed (and screwed with invisible tracking, but you just said you don't care about that)
In the long run, we should hope site B will get less attrition and keep more users, by being less annoying (as a consequence of not tracking you)
The problem is that the ICO is absolutely incompetent at enforcing it (I found it very funny that the article claims businesses are afraid to use data while in reality not only do they appear to use it just fine and even a bit too much for my liking, but our regulator has only ever handed out 4 fines, all for data breaches and not other abusive usage of data).
GDPR has nothing to say on state snooping and if you think Germany or plenty other members aren’t.... I’ve got some bad news for you
Maybe if they harmonize along CCPA or something it would be of value.
I am surprised that nobody is realizing that what's bad for startups and SMBs is also ultimately bad for the users, just on a longer timescale (with an equally long reversal period).
I remember the US Congress grilling Zuckerberg back in 2018, and him responding that he's certainly willing to make amendments, but if you tie his hands too much, someone from China will swoop in and bypass all regulations. Everyone scoffed at that, and less than 3 years later, TikTok is unstoppable despite Facebook's best efforts. While users' privacy has benefited from Facebook's downfall, their privacy has never been at more risk with the rise of TikTok (I do realize that TikTok's servers are in the US and Singapore, but let's not fool ourselves - the ByteDance leadership would be quickly replaced if they refused a data request from their government). I would consider this a net negative for the users, and particularly for the US as a country.
Just another example proving that the paradox of tolerance [0] is a real thing. If you get too tolerant too quickly, you end up with a less tolerant outcome.
On the second-order basis, there is an interesting comparison between how well Facebook hindered Snapchat's growth with their rollout of Stories, vs how well it hindered Tiktok's growth with their rollout of Reels (not very). There are obviously a million factors to consider, but I would argue that us taking Facebook through the dirt 1) weakened its hold over its users and 2) triggered a talent exodus, both of which contributed to Facebook's Reels not being as impactful as Stories (viewed strictly through the lens of defending against the new competitor).
A nice idea, but no one will care that much.
You have no idea who they have approached, nor what they have asked [= insisted] for.
And to be clear, because of the CLOUD Act, this reaches all EU citizens on US owned platforms.
I have customers that are asking "Do we really need this kind of data".
“Did we do a PIA?”
“Is this a data leak and should we contact their privacy officer?”
These are common questions now. GDPR changed a lot of things. The basic idea that you'd just send and receive any data you have that seems useful from a technical standpoint to third parties and see what you would actually end up using is gone. Step one is as you say: “do we really need this kind of data?”
GDPR and California et al. turned data privacy from a technical-moral issue into a legal one.
And healthy companies have a robust, empowered legal department to keep them on the right side of the law.
When Technical Architect says "We shouldn't do this," few listen. When General Counsel says "We can't do this," things change.
All the mobile apps that implement tracking & analytics SDK do not comply unless they request explicit consent.
You can start there. The GDPR's spirit is great but the entities tasked with enforcing it are absolutely incompetent.
I think most corps by now realize that and are willing to live with the risk rather than lose a lot of data and introduce a lot of processes.
It may cost some money, but not that much by far. The reality is that in the long term, you'd save some as well by virtue of having clearer, cleaner and simpler processes.
We are a large bank, most of our processes are decades old and are an impossible mess. For reference, we have a total of around 5000 systems running in the bank... Till GDPR and also some post-2008 regulation, I guess the strategy was to mostly accept the mess we're in (it's basically an absolutely extreme version of technical and organizational debt), with some targeted initiatives to make some areas slightly cleaner. Now, GDPR would require a major redoing of a lot of stuff, most of which is not really redoable - who wants to touch critical code written in COBOL, which is powering the significant parts of economies of a couple of European countries? I suspect most of the world's top20 banks are like that. In this realm, full GDPR compliance (for example, the right to be forgotten, when the data is copied willy-nilly across 5000 apps, with no one knowing exactly where and how the data flows) is a fantasy that could only be enforced by multibillion fines.
It's essentially similar problem to global warming - till recently, all of bank's depratments were solving problems locally, but now a new threat (global warming/GDPR legislation) requires global coordination, which is extremely costly given that the bank was basically not designed for it.
1. Business and IT in big banks are both extremely complex. Business just because of regulations making everything difficult and because the business people have had centuries of time to come up with complicated schemes on how to make money and/or serve customers in a competitive way. IT because paying off tech debt is not something that banks do for the most part.
2. IT in banks is often old and undocumented, making deep modifications very hard and risky.
3. Big banks are parts of the country's (or, in case of biggest banks, world's) critical infrastructure. Hence, they're REALLY risk averse. I.e. if Google Ad words goes down, the the only impact is that people's browsers around the world start running faster without all the ads... If the bank's transactional system goes down (or worse, transfers money where it shouldn't go), then the whole social order is at risk.
There are other industries that are similar - are also old, complex and critical - like for example the utilities, but unlike banks they don't make money off of people's private data like the banks do, so they don't transfer customer's details back and forth between their systems - so the GDPR impact is much lesser.
Edit: removed needlessly aggressive "That is a lie" opening gambit.
I think you need to back that up with credible numbers.
GDPR was and has been a massive kick in the backside for companies large and small in the UK. I certainly know from talking to my past client base and current network, which is from a fairly broad spectrum of organisations, they treated GDPR compliance pretty seriously. Hell even my local village pub made sure they were in compliance, despite just having a manual paper based guest register.
Imagine the desire for wealth and power at the expense of others being defined as a mental illness that needed treating instead of giving these cunts more power.
Why didn't the EU prevent the UK from selling/sharing 1.6 million patient records in 2016? https://www.newscientist.com/article/2086454-revealed-google...
Consider me zinged. I knew you were setting me up for something.
Congratulations Britons, your data's back on sale.
The thing is, even though the GB decides to ditch GDPR, they're still bound by it if they want to do business with the rest of Europe, just like the US is bound by it.
Instead of frontloading compliance for any new venture, they can build for the UK first then work on compliance if and when they go for EU business.
I know that some purchases of cloud services are halted for now to be sure about this. Data movement is going to be increasingly an important matter. It should have been from the begining but here we are.
https://incountry.com/blog/data-residency-laws-by-country-ov...
Organisations which receive and hold any of regulated data types to follow the GDPR requirements. According to GDPR, companies have to keep the data secure inside the EU and if the data is to be transferred outside of the UE, then it can only be transferred to countries or organisations that have signed up to equivalent privacy protection."
So the EU has all the power here to say that the UK doesn't meet their standards and require businesses to transfer their data.
However, I would guess that most international organisations would have already moved their EU customer data out of the UK.
There were years of uncertainty with the Brexit negotiations, keeping data in the UK would have too much risk.
Plus many other countries have data residency laws, so it's not like a foreign concept to international businesses.
edit: wow that's a lot of downvotes in a short space of time. Maybe I should back my point up with some evidence to prove I'm not talking out of my arse (though it was widely reported at the time so I'm surprised anyone would disagree with me): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-44966969
we'll wait for the actual documents, but in the meantime:
1. does this mean no more cookie stuff, and no more "click here to accept" modals? if yes, then it's a huge win. years of useless clicking, and countless Mwh will be saved in the long run.
2. will this mean no more protections whatsoever? this is not so great imo, and sincerely impossible in today's world of Big Tech legislation (especially in the highly litigious Europe).
3. what about the right to forget? will they touch that part as well?
I am not sure this will have a significant impact, as UK will have to comply with GDPR if they want to to reach European customers.
[1] https://www.activemind.legal/gb/guides/eprivacy-regulation/
On the one hand, I think GDPR is a great step towards stopping companies hoarding your data and holding you hostage to it. On the other, main GDPR change is those awful 'hand over data / pretend you're not' dialogue boxes. When I'm feeling strong, I look for the 'reject / object / blah' box, but often I don't find it in me to resist anymore.
So maybe it's not awful they're reshaping GDPR.
No active (this does NOT include "by using this site you accept...") approval = no permission to collect data and give it to third parties.
That's the law. But we'll still need some hard work and hefty fines to make everyone obey it.
I've done this before and there are active cases running with the regulatory offices in Germany.
It's a slow process for sure but it'll get faster and words will spread, that people are using their rights.
I remember it used to be a thing in the netscape navigator days until everyone got sick of it.
All you need to do is not say yes. The easiest way to do this is filter cookiebars/walls/whatever in as many places as you can. Without an answer, the answer is no.
The UK has an equivalence agreement with the EU, which unlike a trade agreement can be rescinded quickly (something like 4 weeks). This means that we have to have equivalent provisions to continue to handle data about EU citizens.
so the UK might be "departing" from GDPR in name, it won't be in substance just by this act.
This of course assumes the the UK is acting rationally.
Those who ultimately respect user privacy and want to do the right thing are often paralysed by process and making sure that they absolutely can't be sued, rather than being able to show respect for data and best practices but still getting things done.
Those who ultimately don't respect user privacy use it as an excuse. They plaster their services with GDPR notices, and then ignore the spirit of the law and sweep up all the data they want, regardless of whether they need it or should have it, but of course this is invisible to users so nothing happens about it.
I wonder if this disconnect comes from the enforcement? I'd like to see a few high-profile cases that set out some precedents for what is and what isn't a breach of GDPR.
Things it didn't fix: Data leaks.
If I was a betting man, I wouldn't bet on this being a significant change, given the world is moving more towards privacy (yes, including US).
https://edri.org/our-work/uk-japan-trade-agreement-violates-...
As Boris Johnson said, "The UK won't immediately send children up the chimneys or fill beaches across the country with raw sewage". Emphasis on "immediately".
...Dowden said that under the regime ‘too many businesses and organisations are reluctant to use data – either because they don’t understand the rules or are afraid of inadvertently breaking them’."
However this would only be in relation to UK data. If they want to do business with EU citizens, then businesses have to comply with GDPR.
Seems pretty myopic.
I'm sure this is a minority opinion on HN but I'm glad to see some countries pulling back, especially in light of recent calls to expand GDPR even further (!).
It seems this can only lead to
1) Rolling back to pre GDPR, where user data is largely a free for all 2) The UK having it's own 'unique' rules
Neither which seems very good for users and/or businesses.
Perhaps the point here is to make some kind dubious 'look what we can do because of brexit' argument. When the reality is that 'freedom' has a reality which is more negative than any positives it might have.
What does that have to do with personal data? Sounds like keyword stuffing
Quotes from Alex Voss in today’s Financial Times [1]
> The government has sent a first signal of its intention for UK data protection laws to part company with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. In a Financial Times article last week, culture secretary Oliver Dowden said he would use the appointment of a new information commissioner to focus not just on privacy but on the use of data for ‘economic and social goals’.
So we don't know the UK is going to depart from the GDPR, but despite that, this website is reporting that it will.
>The UK has the freedom to strike its own partnerships, he said, and he would announce priority countries for data adequacy agreements shortly
Either he recant that comment or announce a country (the US I bet) that doesn't have an adequacy agreement with the EU. You can't have it both ways. If he does announce a list that isn't the same as the EU's they'll have scrapped GDPR.
And big companies seem to completely ignore it anyway. Take twitter - all they have is a banner along the bottom that says:
"By using Twitter’s services you agree to our Cookies Use. We and our partners operate globally and use cookies, including for analytics, personalisation, and ads."
and a close button. How is that consent?
Also, your Twitter quote shows another issue: conflating GDPR with the Cookie directive. They are two very different laws. GDPR is concerned with personally identifiable data and data protection, the cookie laws are concerned with tracking users online. GDPR applies to all data (not just websites), the cookie laws deal with what websites can do. They are not at all the same thing. The popups you see tend to be for the cookie law, because GDPR doesn't require anything like that. Both do require consent (opt-in) though, but both also have exemptions for data and cookies required to provide the service.
Twitter are specifically saying that they’re going to use cookies for a bunch of things there that are not necessary - like ads. So how is that allowed?
If you're an online business established outside of the EU with no presence in the EU then as long as you abide by the data protection laws of your own country I don't see how an EU country's data protection authority could do anything to you.
This is a general issue online where sites and potentially services can be reached and used globally whilst each country basically cannot do anything outside of its own borders.
The part of the GDPR that says that the regs apply worldwide as long as the individual is in the EU is not really realistic in many actual situations.
In some cases bad actors exploited GDPR for fraudulent purposes - eg. requesting a full account deletion in the event of a ban. They can then recreate the same account with the same data.
Just because the effects are not obvious to a layman, doesnt they aren't there
Right to restriction of processing is not right to restriction of storage. Trying to re-register with your banned e-mail address is consent to processing and subsequent refusal to serve the person.
Good for them.
Looks like in the UK there will be a lot less time wasting clicking on useless "Accept all cookies or else" disclaimers pop-ups.
``` window.getPersonalDataPreferences() ```
It should only prompt the user to submit their preferences if no preferences were detected, or a specific permission is required to allow certain features.
People may argue that everyone will just turn everything off everywhere and forget about it, and I would argue "so what?".
The burden of GDPR has been dumped on the wrong people and has become so tedious to administer it's basically useless and a massive waste of time and energy.
The GDPR applies when any processing of any data is done regardless of context.
Have you even read it? The GDPR is a quite straightforward piece of legislation.
A pdf copy of it runs to 156 pages. Not particularly straightforward.
Can you sum what the legislation does up in a couple of paragraphs?
Does this mean no more of those stupid little popups every time I see a site? HOORAY.
Does it mean less absurd bureaucracy and non-jobs? GREAT.
As for data privacy... does anyone seriously think that Facebook was stopped from collecting data due to GDPR?
Right to delete (not just deactivate) your account only exists due to gdpr.
Right to opt out at all only exists because of gdpr, and many companies do actually stick to it.
That many don't follow the spirit of the regulation is not really the fault of the regulation. Thing is its not been tested much in the courts yet, but the cases have really started last year so hopefully more enforcement incoming.
I doubt that since takeout precedes gdpr by several years.
https://www.decisionmarketing.co.uk/news/facebook-sets-aside...
Have you ever tried browsing many US news sites? They block the entire EU from even seeing their content. That's how much they care about their in-GDPR users. The idea that people cater to a global audience by just implementing the EU rules for everyone is patently false. If the UK diverges, it's free revenue to just add it to the whitelist, basically.
This is anecdata, so fair warning, but over the last year (at a guess) I've noticed many US sites, FAANG companies but also smaller sites too, all flashing cookie/data protection type popups at me where they didn't previously. I've assumed that's because they need to comply with the CCPA which came into force last year, though it's totally a guess. I suppose their geoIP tracking may've just improved and spotted I'm in a GDPR country.
When does this type of legislation reach a point of critical mass where the UK is simply behind the curve and most companies just show the popup by default?
From a development perspective, having a whitelist or varying set of conditions per country adds complexity, I could very easily see a development decision being made to use GDPR as the common denominator and just code once for that, knowing that'll cover the company globally. Sure if your business relies on tracking and serving ads, then you may accept the additional complexity to behave different for different countries, but it still becomes a development decision that didn't have to be made before, and it's one with diminishing returns as legislation on privacy tightens.
Yes it adds complexity, but the size of the markets and companies involved means there's a massive leverage effect. If you get 1,000 people landing on your homepage, small changes in conversion don't justify engineering time or complexity, true. If you've got billions of users, engineering cost pales in comparison to the revenue gain from even a marginal improvement in conversion rate, so it gets done.
I suppose my only counter left would be "is the UK market alone worth the complexity?" Having split off from Europe, and in-fighting among ourselves to the point where we may see the UK itself splitting up again in the next decade. Is it really worth adding additional complexity for a comparatively small market when companies could simply target the continent of Europe as a single market, regardless of EU membership, and probably reach a similar audience with a similar conversion rate.
I'm probably being overly cynical and only time will tell, but I just don't feel the UK alone commands the importance to have things its own way, so to me being lumped in with the EU as the lowest common denominator seems inevitable.
The UK does get advantages from being an Anglophone country though. That's one of the issues with the EU single market: it sounds great in theory--a unified regulatory system that lets you attract customers from the whole EU. In practice though, you start having to consider whether Poland or Lithuania or wherever is worth localizing for.
Sites where I have granted access keep asking me to re-grant no matter what. Sites where I have denied do the same (although here I would expect it, not that I agree, since I already clicked "no").
And actually it's cool, sometimes you go to some docs and there's 33 "essential" cookies for the well functioning of the website (for a paid product) from which 30 are trackers.
Others, like wetransfer will show them as non-essential when receiving a file, but about the same amount of trackers, and this is ok, it's well defined and they're not trying to trick me into clicking "accept essential cookies" with 30 trackers tackled on them.
Perhaps one day we can start blacklisting those who don't implement a correct consent cookie form from the internet and dns wouldn't resolve for those non-compliant domains.
Sometimes people talk about technological solutions to social problems. I think here the tech solution (like tracker blocking) kind of works, like I can use it on Firefox or Safari and it doesn't waste my time; and the legal solution is a failure.
For me this is a question of privacy, I'm ok with ads, but you don't need this to show me ads. It's not a problem that FB has a face recognition pipeline capable of linking me to any image posted in their platform and that a state sponsored agency could use, and track me throughout internet while logging me around, and which emails I open, and my location individually, and then my chats and probably WhatsApp too now, and instagram likes.
The problem is when you connect all these systems, with everything else and suddenly you can derive almost a 24/7 coverage of the life of an individual. If you and another person meet and both are carrying their phones then it's easy to sort of connect the remaining dots, specially in light of all other data points captured, security surveillance (public and covert), etc. And this is not problematic by itself, it's problematic when it becomes a system that is available to be used by whatever powers that sit in a position to use them. Today it might not be nefarious but you don't know if tomorrow is the same, but once there it might be difficult to revert the situation.
The problem is the complete lack of enforcement, and the ICO has been particularly incompetent regarding this.
Comments skip straight to how dumb we all are.
:shrug:
Who will create forum for a community if one has to deal with all the bureaucracy, "right to be forgotten", data accuracy checks, data export request, gathering consents, being responsible for bugs in some forum software if there will be data leak and risk huge fines if something is not done correctly.
Another issue is vagueness of the regulation. What exactly is data processing/controlling? If kids leave they clothes in kindergarten or school, can clothes be signed with kid first and last name (so it is easier to find lost items)? Is school a processor or controller of kids' PII in that case? Probably not, but who knows what will happen if someones signed hat will be stolen?
In the end though, you don't have to go crazy about it, because there is zero chance of enforcement over small pebbles.
The centralization of the web on very few commercial platform has many reasons, data protection is probably the least important and might even be a counter-force in my experience.
Forums do not necessarily require personal information to exist.
AND EVEN THE RANDOM UUID THAT YOU ASIGN TO USERS ON YOUR FORUM BECAUSE YOU'VE GIVEN UP AND ONLY IDENTIFY USERS BY THAT AND THEIR PASSWORD.
In effect everything where a user has to input something instead of being just a recipient, or where the user is connected to any persistent identifier contains PI according to GDPR.
Say bye bye to most kinds of technical server logs used to debug stuff, to your database, and storing stuff in general.
The only way to be truly GDPR compliant if you followed the law to the letter would be to just provide TV and Teletext service via radio waves.
I'm afraid your example is a prime case of that - leaving a hat at school that happens to have your name on it clearly doesn't fall within the remit of data processing under GDPR, it's a strawman (straw boater?) argument
I also don't agree it's a bad thing to make no distinction on size of company, doing so would leave a grey area of when a thing becomes "big enough" to transition from outside to inside scope and therefore gaps in the enforcement.
If you want to build a hobby forum, you're free to do it without requiring my personal data. If you want to collect my data for analysis or marketing then I absolutely want you to abide by the rules and look after it even if you're a lone programmer in his basement.
> Who will create forum for a community if one has to deal with all the bureaucracy, "right to be forgotten"
Most forums are created with softwares handling everything, virtually nobody creates a forum from scratch with his own tech stack.
> If kids leave they clothes in kindergarten or school, can clothes be signed with kid first and last name (so it is easier to find lost items)? Is school a processor or controller of kids' PII in that case?
People asking these kind of questions are either trolling or making their life much harder than necessary.... The text is pretty simple if you read it in good faith and don't act like a 6th grader who doesn't want to do his homework and pretend he doesn't understand the question...
Do you think GDPR is aimed at facebook &co storing millions of users data without the immediate business need nor the consent for it ? or at kindergarten kids who have their name written on their clothes ?
If you don't host the forum yourself you need a data processing agreement with the hoster to be GDPR compliant. If you want to load the user image from Gravatar, you need a DPA with Tumblr. Good luck with that.
Reading contracts and laws in good faith is a pretty bad idea if you don't like being sued and loosing. Always read laws in a way as if someone was going to use it just to ruin your day.
No, I do not think EU would really do major sanctions, but I do think it's something some fear and I do think it's a fear the EU plays into. Many in ex-Soviet and ex-Soviet-satellite countries see EU membership as the guarantor of access and lasting ties with not just Western Europe but the "free world" in general (as in not being part of the Russia/China/Iran/+ club). Even in the UK you see some semblance of this sentiment despite being rather ridiculous. In countries that have a fairly recent history of being excluded for no good reason it seems all the more compelling.
Moreover, they don't want to copy any of the successes - e.g. their public housing system or strict "you WILL go to prison if you overcharge" price controls on medical care.
They just want the tax haven, deregulation, an under the thumb easily exploited workforce working themselves half to death and handouts to their friends.
The price controls also apply to medical tourism.
In theory this kind of thing should show up on those economic freedom indices but they're so enamored of Singapore's lavish aid to foreign investors that they tend to look past this stuff (especially since it mostly just applies to locals).
As for exploitation of workers, Singapore has seen massively more wage growth than the UK over the last 50 years, so I don't equate a free labor market with exploitation.
I will add that there are important ways in which the UK is more conducive in the long run to a free market and free society than Singapore, but at least in the short run, Singapore's simulation of a free market economy has been offering more practical liberty and working better at raising living standards.
Ideally, the UK would maintain its pluralistic and democratic core, while adopting Singapore's economic policies.
Singapore is massively more favorable to investors and this gets charactized as "free".
Forced savings accounts with strict rules about how you can use the money are pretty much the antithesis of economic freedom, for instance, but it won't show up in economic freedom indices. The Economist is squarely aimed at foreign investors with moolah to invest, not Singaporean toilet cleaners pissed off that they can't access their CPF.
>As for exploitation of workers, Singapore has seen massively more wage growth than the UK over the last 50 years
As for exploitation of workers, Russia has seen even more wage growth than the UK in the last 20 years (somewhwre between 60-150% I think?).
Would you like to endorse the lack of exploitation of Russian citizens or retract your statement?
>Singapore's simulation of a free market economy has been offering more practical liberty and working better at raising living standards.
Ironically it's been the deliberately anti free market stuff they've done which has boosted living standards the most. The HDB program is practically Soviet both in inspiration and nature and dragged the citizens out of shantytown kampongs and led to an exceptionally well oiled and competitive private property market that brings a huge inflows of capital.
This is in addition to the Winsemius plan.
>Ideally, the UK would maintain its pluralistic and democratic core, while adopting Singapore's economic policies.
Ideally none of that. It's their economic policies that are partly what made it such a nasty place for me to work in. I was so glad to come home.
Just my 2 cents as somebody who lived under the "investors uber alles" regime.
Forced savings are less of an affront to economic liberty than redistributive taxes. With Singapore's MediSave accounts, you are also free to start spending some of the funds on a wider range of goods/services once you have built an adequate amount of savings. This is not pure libertarianism, by any stretch of the imagination, but it is less of an expropriation of private property than taxes that create an uncapped obligation for you to support people you have no relationship to beyond being co-nationals.
The most important thing about Singapore is that it doesn't have a welfare culture. Situations you see in the West, like a person suffering from drug addiction all their life, and spending a lifetime being arrested for stealing from other residents, and quickly released each time due to a left-wing pity culture, while they receive disability and welfare cheques each month, that other citizens - the same ones losing their precious property to the lifelong addict - are forced to pay for, and that are promptly converted to drug money via their local dealer and node in the organized crime controlled drug trafficking network, are unheard of in Singapore, because there is no large Welfare Culture like there is in the UK and other Western countries.
>>Would you like to endorse the lack of exploitation of Russian citizens or retract your statement?
Fair point. Much of the wage growth in Singapore can be attributed to the catch up effect. But even after becoming an advanced economy, it has seen more rapid wage growth than the UK, and that is not attributable to the catch-up effect. That is because economic liberty is in the long-term interest of workers, because it raises overall productivity and average wages.
>>Ironically it's been the deliberately anti free market stuff they've done which has boosted living standards the most.
Western countries have massive intervention in their housing markets too. At least Singapore's is about expanding supply and making it available to the general market, as opposed to creating poverty-concentrations/ghettos by targetting socialized housing to those with low reportable income.
Ironically, Singapore's government, by building towers across the city, did away with one of the major impediments to housing markets in the West - zoning restrictions on building density/height.
no matter how much I like this idea, this will never happen in a European country unfortunately. there's just too much baggage of big state and other nonsense.
Not to say that the necessary technology (big data, ML etc.) is to a great extent driven by commercial applications - and businesses should have economic incentives to develop them further.
GDPR does not prevent EU government from handling their citizens personal data for bureaucracy.
However a good example of GDPR applying to the government is the COVID tracking app built by (for?) the French government, which still has to provide ways to opt out from tracking + clean your personal data.
I think that's what the GP was talking about.