Interesting Links for 03-04-2017

[andrewducker]

Spain drops plan to impose veto if Scotland tries to join EU (tags: scotland europe spain ) Anger as tampon tax is used to help fund anti-abortion group (tags: menstruation abortion charity OhForFucksSake ) A Retiree Discovers an Elusive Math Proof-And Nobody Notices (tags: mathematics ) Don't believe the 500 million quid passport story until

Comments

[cmcmck]

Makes one wonder if Spain thinks Gibraltar a better bet as a way of causing trouble? All of this is displacement activity over Catalonia of course.

Did you hear that silly old fart Howard talking about declaring war on Spain over that very issue yesterday?

[danieldwilliam]

I don't know which is more important to Spain, Gibraltar or Scotland, on probability weighted fully costed basis

[cmcmck]

Ah well, I know all about being thrown overboard being trans- that's something I'm waiting to see happen again when May rescinds all our human rights legislation in the near future!

My other 'home' country, Belgium, might also be having things to say if they hadn't so comprehensively managed to disinvent the country over the past decade or so!

[danieldwilliam]

Aye.

I fear a lot of people and things are going to be thrown overboard in the coming two or three years. Anyone who isn't an able bodied, straight, cis, white Englishman with a job is probably at risk. Some of us, like the Scots, might be graciously allowed to purchase our own lifebelt.

I'm not sure I understand the Belgian objection. I mean, I understand that there are organised groups in Belgium who would like their part of Belgium to be a separate country. I see that if you're the government of Belgium you'd be against that sort of thing on general principles but I don't quite understand why Belgians would care as much about it as the Spanish. I wouldn't have put Belgium high on a list of countries with strong sense of nationalism. Perhaps I'm wrong. I think the other thing that exercises Spain about Catalonia is that Catalonia is one of the richer parts of Spain and the Spanish public sector finances would look much worse without Catalonia. Is there much difference in the economic performance of the various parts of Belgium?

[a_pawson]

I doubt many of those 30,000 people would remain in Gibraltar if they had to pay Spanish taxes (or indeed British taxes). The banks, bookies and other financial organisations aren't based there because of he nicer weather.

[danieldwilliam]

I think you're probably right.

I wonder where they would relocate to. Is there any room in any of Britain's other clement tax havens?

[a_pawson]

Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Isle of Man, Jersey, Sark, Alderney, Guernsey. There are plenty of alternatives. For all the complaining we do about companies avoiding tax, the UK controls a surprising number of tax havens.

[danieldwilliam]

Would any of them collaborate in the ethnic cleansing of Gibraltar?

[octopoid_horror]

The UK's hypocrisy on this is hilarious and the rest of Europe is now starting to call us out on it, since we're going.

[kalimac]

Boris has assured the Gibraltans that they won't be thrown overboard.

I can think of no stronger assurance that they will be.

[danieldwilliam]

There future could only be in more doubt if he'd written his promise on the side of a bus.

[andrewducker]

I'm confused as to why you think Spain is going to have to make a choice in the future, when they've said they are not going to block Scotland? (Top link)

[danieldwilliam]

I think that's them making their choice. However policy is changable. It always open to the Spanish government of the day to dial up or dial down the rhetoric and some point they will actually have to either try to veto Scotland's membership of the EU or not.

I've alway thought the likelihood of Spain vetoing Scotland's membership of the EU was over stated. The idea that the EU would be closed to prosperous European social democracies who really wanted to join seems fatal to the whole enterprise and it's not entirely established to my satisfaction that Scotland would be considered a new entrant over whom Spain could exercise a veto.

But we'll only know for sure as and when we get to it. At that point Spain has some actual choices to make. Depending on how things sit domestically they might decide to row back from their current position (which I understand to be that Spain would rather large countries didn't break up but if they do so according to their own rules, so be it) to a more actively opposed position.

[skington]

Spain has a pretty good argument about not wanting a tax haven on their border (although cough Andorra). And Spain has always been annoyed at having part of its territory inexplicably owned by Brits. That's been subdued in the recent past because Spain and the UK were both in the EU, so the four freedoms, but with Brexit Gibraltar's going to have a problem. If some of my family are anything to go by, many Gibraltarians work in Gibraltar but live in Spain (because there's not enough room in Gibraltar for everyone to have a nice house). If Brexit means you no longer have an automatic right to live and work in any other EU country, that's going to be a problem. Especially when you add health care to the mix.

[cmcmck]

Exactly!

I'm a UK citizen but one who lived for some years in Belgium and I'm now deeply regretting not having stayed a few more months in order to be able to claim citizenship.

If I'd known then what I know now.............. :o(

[skington]

I grew up in France and I think I would have qualified for automatic French citizenship even though I wasn't born there, because I'd been in school continuously for years. I decided not to because I didn't want to do military service.

(I don't actually know whether I'd have had to or not - this was pre-Internet days when it wasn't easy to trivially look this sort of thing up, so I didn't, and just assumed that military service was on the cards.)

I still have my parents' house there, and if Scotland doesn't become independent and rejoin at the very least the EFTA I'll be kicking myself.