Quote Originally Posted by Elwood Blues View Post
Having made the mistake of helping this thread off track by a good discussion with Sludge about DLA/PIP, I will try not to do the same again. I will therefore not discuss Leave voters or Remain voters or pigs in a trough or gammon and concentrate on replying to your last sentence

There may have been little or nothing for leave supporter to get their teeth into (in the last month possibly correct, in the last 4 years questionable but that's another thread, let's not get side tracked again! )

But this comedy of errors was a Doozie and has turned into the gift that kept giving.

First the EU as I pointed out at the start seemed to suggest that Astra Zeneca should fulfill the contract with them at the expense of us giving them some of our vaccines so that the UK Astra Zeneca contract won't be fulfilled on time even though we signed ours three months before the EU finally got round to signing one!!

Then the Germans suddenly seem to find that the Astra Zeneca vaccine won't be effective on under 65's and say they won't give it to them, followed Macron sneering that it will have very little effect on the over 65's

Now, I suppose there is still a chance that they may be right, but several eminent scientists in this country and our regulatory authority disagree with them, and perhaps more important Europe's own medical regulatory authority also seems to think they are wrong.

Then comes the real killer. They threaten to invoke a part of the Northern Ireland protocol, section 16 (which I suspect was probably there in times of dire emergency), which restrict the free movement of medical vaccines and therefore go against the Belfast agreement which not long ago the EU seemed to regard as sacrosanct.

Worse than this they don't even appear to have consulted their own member state who are directly involved. Ireland would have been particularly affected if it had got to the stage where the UK decided to take reprisals and invoked section 16 themselves on some other goods.


Even worse they then seem to try to ay it was a "bureaucratic mistake" when such a decision should surely be taken at the very highest level of the commission i.e by Ursula Von der Leyen and then only I would have though after consultation with all member states and certainly with Ireland.

Vindictive, bungling, bullying ,spiteful, inefficient, arrogant are all words with are apt here

I'm sure I have missed somethings they said as well bul
t let's not overegg the pudding

Finally by even suggesting that section 16 can be invoked at the drop of a hat, apparently without much discussion, they have may have made it easier for Britain to use or threaten to use it at some time in the future.
Other than that though they're doing quite well.