Westministenders: The Beginning of Negotiations

[RedToothBrush]

Transition has a few hours left.

Then negotiations start and trade stops.

Far from being over, there are huge numbers of issues that lay unresolved.

And businesses both now in the UK and EU will cease to trade with each other just because the red tape is such a pain.

So whilst people will celebrate and think things are 'done' that just shows how much people are paying attention.

It will be interesting to see people gradually realising what has been lost...

I don't think it'll be that big...

FT reporting that the Turing scheme only covers costs of £2800 per student for tuition, travel and accommodation, and it doesn’t cover foreign students coming to the UK to study - so no reciprocity and no incentive for foreign institutions to take part.

It’ll channel money to Tory chums and then be quietly dropped.

What a fucking scam compared to what we have lost. Which even non-EU countries are a part of.

So much fucking winning, eh?

I would agree with you notimagain, so I don't really think I deserve the biscuit.

You didn't, my apologies...if I may digress one last time:

A competent Government would have negotiated much much earlier so the airlines would have had time to get their IT systems adapted and up and running,

To some extent that's true but according to some involved in the setting up of LHR T5 over a decade back it was going to be a modern wonder of the world that would allow a massive reduction in headcount of passenger facing staff...

Hence "semi-automated" check-in from the start, then self service bag drops (yuck), then self service gates..except they're not quite...and of course that meant staff could be laid off...

All well and good when all the traveller needed was machine readable standard documentation but no so clever when Covid arrived and countries started introducing producing bespoke forms, letters and testing requirements that can only be deciphered by lots of knowledgable human beings behind the desk. and/or at the gates......

I imagine that there was no plan for it in the first place, and that Johnson just made it up on the spur of the moment, and that Turing's was the first name that popped into his head.

@SabrinaThwaite

FT reporting that the Turing scheme only covers costs of £2800 per student for tuition, travel and accommodation, and it doesn’t cover foreign students coming to the UK to study - so no reciprocity and no incentive for foreign institutions to take part.

It’ll channel money to Tory chums and then be quietly dropped.

The Tory party doesn't want British kids with talent leaving. It doesn't want them to be influenced by politics outside the UK. It doesn't want them to make friends (and certainly not fall in love) with people outside the UK. And it doesn't really want an educated public full stop, because education is associated with not voting Tory these days...

From the THE article I linked to, which is behind a paywall:

UK universities now face a number of hurdles maintaining existing European exchanges and striking up new ones further afield to compensate for the loss of Erasmus+.

Erasmus+ waives fees for students on exchanges, meaning studying abroad should cost no more than staying at home. It also provides a modest grant to help cover travel and subsistence.

But the Turing scheme will not contribute towards the costs of students coming to the UK, a Department for Education spokeswoman confirmed. This is a “dangerous” approach to take, according to Kostis Giannidis, president of the Erasmus Student Network. “Exchange is by nature reciprocal,” he said.
Nor will it fund the tuition fees of UK students going abroad, or European students coming to the UK. This leaves UK universities needing to strike fee waiver agreements with overseas partners, which may be financially tricky if there are big price discrepancies.

“Elite universities in the US are not just going to accept UK students not paying a fee,” said Paul James Cardwell, a law professor at the University of Strathclyde, who has spent much of his career organising student exchange programmes. “The Turing scheme isn’t going to pay astronomical tuition fees for a semester or a year.”

And, on the flip side, European universities and governments may be unwilling to pay UK international fees, which are on the whole much higher than those on the Continent. “There’s a big difference between French and UK universities regarding fees,” cautioned Manuel Tunon de Lana, president of France’s Conference of University Presidents.

Seeing a lot of these issues on Twitter as well.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/living_overseas/4118259-VPN-advice-recommendations

@jasjas1973... we must be close! Also Tamar Valley.

@mathanxiety, appreciate the endangered nature of the blue fin tuna, but sometimes they are caught unintentionally, and having to dump a dead fish back because the fisherman has no quota is a scandalous waste.

Glad to offer some quality reading. I hope you enjoy it.

Otherwise, I haven't caught up properly yet.

My phone knows me too well - looking at the FT Turing article has given me this Twitter ad.

@XingMing

@mathanxiety, appreciate the endangered nature of the blue fin tuna, but sometimes they are caught unintentionally, and having to dump a dead fish back because the fisherman has no quota is a scandalous waste.

He should not have dumped a dead fish overboard, he should have landed it as per the Landing Obligation.

marinedevelopments.blog.gov.uk/2019/01/11/what-is-the-landing-obligation-discards-ban/

www.gov.uk/government/news/bluefin-tuna-in-the-uk

[quote SwedishEdith]Seeing a lot of these issues on Twitter as well.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/living_overseas/4118259-VPN-advice-recommendations[/quote]
Because when you are looking for the needle in a haystack of dodgy characters hiding their internet traffic (terrorists, drug dealers and paedophiles) the best possible strategy is to build a few more fucking haystacks to help them hide in.

If nothing else the medias "only a paedo would have a VPN" line is going to have to change.

So presumably the UK student would pay the UK university fee and the EU student would pay their own EU university fee, but they would essentially swop places for 6 months?

appreciate the endangered nature of the blue fin tuna, but sometimes they are caught unintentionally, and having to dump a dead fish back because the fisherman has no quota is a scandalous waste

but if you don't enforce this, then unscrupulous fishermen would deliberately catch whatever they like and say it was accidental..... and they would, its human nature.

Yes, I agree that Turing is probably being set up to pass public funds into the hands of a friend or relative, as it doesn't appear to have been designed actually to function? Or is the word "design" misleading?

Turing is being set up to be pointed to and say "Look ! We do have that" without anyone actually being expected to use it or look closer.

@2magpies1pigeon

Yes, I agree that Turing is probably being set up to pass public funds into the hands of a friend or relative, as it doesn't appear to have been designed actually to function? Or is the word "design" misleading?

I have said before and I'll say it again, the Government will pay millions to a crony or cronies to set up the Turing scheme, only for it to fail because the UK won't pay enough to make it attractive to universities (remember, Bloody Stupid Johnson complained that Erasmus was "extremely expensive).

See also, the Government will in addition screw up the visa process for incoming students.

Just heard on radio 1 - a segment on how Brexit has affected businesses..... all things we have known, all I could think was a bit bloody late.....

So presumably the UK student would pay the UK university fee and the EU student would pay their own EU university fee, but they would essentially swop places for 6 months?

They might.
But since it costs 200e to study at a French university, there will need to be negotiated fee waivers, or else the home university would have to stump up for the difference when sending students to English universities where fees are £9k. Chances of that happening? Zilch in my university, because when students pay 200e, there is no spare dosh swilling around for such things. That was what Erasmus allowed for...plus it provided a grant: which outgoing UK students will have under Turing, but incoming EU ones won't because Turing only exists in the UK, on the back of a fag packet.

Irish HE is going to be the focus of much attention and I guess Scottish universities might be in a better position to negotiate reciprocal fee waivers, as theirs are lower.

The ironic that a scheme as moronic as Turing should bear that name is shitting on the mans memory, I think.

I wonder if there's scope for a petition to rename it ? The "Johnson" scheme fits much better for so many reasons.

Or 'The Inadequate Johnson Scheme' has a nice ring to it.

DGR and you could have awards - the Bergholt Stuttley Johnson award for international studies.

Or how about the dePfeffel scheme and then everyone would know who was being talked about.

The only thing it has in common with Turing is a narrow-minded, inward-looking intolerance akin to that shown him by the then authorities.

Meanwhile, it is snowing in Provence .

@2magpies1pigeon

So presumably the UK student would pay the UK university fee and the EU student would pay their own EU university fee, but they would essentially swop places for 6 months?

£100m for an outbound scheme, yet to be set up but the aim is for Sept '21. UK decided not to remain in Erasmus+ because of cost. PM Boris Johnson noted that the UK accepted far more incoming students than there were British students using the scheme as outbound participants

“The issue really was that the UK is a massive net contributor to the continent’s higher-education economy because over the last decades we had so many EU nationals, which has been a wonderful thing, but our arrangements mean the UK exchequer more or less loses out on the deal,” Johnson said. “Erasmus was also extremely expensive.”