DUBLIN — As if political tensions in Northern Ireland weren’t bad enough, Irish Republican Army die-hards unwilling to accept their side’s cease-fire appear determined to make matters worse.
An off-duty police officer is in hospital in a critical condition after being shot several times at close range Wednesday night as he coached a youth football practice on the outskirts of the Northern Irish town of Omagh. No group claimed responsibility, but politicians from all sides agreed that one of the small IRA splinter groups still active in the U.K. region must be to blame.
“The people behind this attack think they’re at war. Well they’re not,” said Colum Eastwood, the moderate Irish nationalist leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. “Their fight isn’t with any government, any police service or anyone else. It’s with the people of Ireland who have chosen peace. And it’s a fight they will never, never win.”
The last time any of the IRA factions killed a Northern Ireland police officer was in 2011, again in Omagh — also the scene of the deadliest attack of them all, when a Real IRA car bomb killed 29 people in 1998 in hopes of wrecking that year’s Good Friday peace accord.
The largest Irish republican paramilitary group, the Provisional IRA, killed nearly 300 officers as part of its own 27-year campaign of shootings and bombings, but laid down its arms in 1997 and surrendered them to foreign disarmament officials in 2005.
That key peacemaking step, required as part of the Good Friday deal, ultimately helped persuade the Democratic Unionist Party to end its opposition to power-sharing and finally form a unity government in 2007 with their Irish republican enemies in Sinn Féin, longtime partners of the Provisional IRA. However, last year the DUP collapsed their coalition as part of its campaign against post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland, a dispute that U.K. and EU negotiators have spent months trying to resolve.
Wednesday night’s shooting brought back grim memories from a generation ago when such violence was a nightly occurrence, an era when militants effectively filled Northern Ireland’s prevailing political vacuum with bloodshed. The Good Friday pact and the cross-community government it spawned were supposed to keep such violence at bay.
With the Stormont parliamentary building shuttered amid Brexit fallout, politicians from all sides briefly spoke with one voice on social media to condemn the officer’s attackers.
“Those responsible for such horror must be brought to justice,” said Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Chris Heaton-Harris, who has been in the post only since September.
“I woke at 5 o’clock,” the Estonian prime minister recalled recently. The phone was ringing. Her Lithuanian counterpart was on the line.
“Oh my God, it’s really happening,” came the ominous words, according to Kallas. Another call came in. This time it was the Latvian prime minister.
It was February 24, 2022. War had begun on the European continent.
The night before, Kallas had told her Cabinet members to keep their phones on overnight in anticipation of just this moment: Russia was blitzing Ukraine in an attempt to decapitate the government and seize the country. For those in Estonia and its Baltic neighbors, where memories of Soviet occupation linger, the first images of war tapped into a national terror.
“I went to bed hoping that I was not right,” Kallas said.
Across Europe, similar wakeup calls rolled in, as Russian tanks barrelled into Ukraine and missiles pierced the early morning sky. In recent weeks, POLITICO spoke with prime ministers, high-ranking EU and NATO officials, foreign ministers and diplomats — nearly 20 in total — to reflect on the war’s early days as it reaches its ruinous one-year mark on Friday. All described a similar foreboding that morning, a sense that the world had irrevocably changed.
Within a year, the Russian invasion would profoundly reshape Europe, upending traditional foreign policy presumptions, cleaving it from Russian energy and reawakening long-dormant arguments about extending the EU eastward.
But for those centrally involved in the war’s buildup, the events of February 24 are still seared in their memories.
In an interview with POLITICO, Charles Michel — head of the European Council, the EU body comprising all 27 national leaders — recalled how he received a call directly from Kyiv as the attacks began.
“I was woken up by Zelenskyy,” Michel recounted. It was around 3 a.m. The Ukrainian president told Michel: “The aggression had started and that it was a full-scale invasion.”
Michel hit the phones, speaking to prime ministers across the EU throughout the night.
Ursula von der Leyen and Josep Borrell speak to the press on February 24, 2022 | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
By 5 a.m., EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell was in his office. Three hours later, he was standing next to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as the duo made the EU’s first major public statement about the dawning war. Von der Leyen then convened the 27 commissioners overseeing EU policy for an emergency meeting.
Elsewhere in Brussels, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg was on the phone with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who were six hours behind in Washington, D.C. He then raced over to NATO headquarters, where he urgently gathered the military alliance’s decision-making body.
The mood that morning, Stoltenberg recalled in a recent conversation with reporters, was “serious” but “measured and well-organized.”
In Ukraine, missiles had begun raining down in Kyiv, Odesa and Mariupol. Volodymyr Zelenskyy took to social media, confirming in a video that war had begun. He urged Ukrainians to stay calm.
These video updates would soon become a regular feature of Zelenskyy’s wartime leadership. But this first one was especially jarring — a message from a president whose life, whose country, was now at risk.
It would be one of the last times the Ukrainian president, dressed in a dove-gray suit jacket and crisp white shirt, appeared in civilian clothes.
Europe’s 21st-century Munich moment
February 24, 2022 is an indelible memory for those who lived through it. For many, however, it felt inevitable.
Five days before the invasion, Zelenskyy traveled to the Munich Security Conference, an annual powwow of defense and security experts frequented by senior politicians.
It was here that the Ukrainian leader made one final, desperate plea for more weapons and more sanctions, hitting out at Germany for promising helmets and chiding NATO countries for not doing enough.
“What are you waiting for?” he implored in the highly charged atmosphere in the Bayerischer Hof hotel. “We don’t need sanctions after bombardment happens, after we have no borders, no economy. Why would we need those sanctions then?”
The symbolism was rife — Munich, a city forever associated with appeasement following Neville Chamberlain’s ill-fated attempt to swap land for peace with Adolf Hitler in 1938, was now the setting for Zelenskyy’s last appeal to the West.
Zelenskyy, never missing a moment, seized the historical analogy.
Five days before the invasion, Zelenskyy traveled to the Munich Security Conference, where he made one final, desperate plea for more weapons and more sanctions | Pool photo by Ronald Wittek/Getty Images
“Has our world completely forgotten the mistakes of the 20th century?” he asked. “Where does appeasement policy usually lead to?”
But his calls for more arms were ignored, even as countries began ordering their citizens to evacuate and airlines began canceling flights in and out of the country.
A few days later, Zelenskyy’s warnings were coming true. On February 22, Vladimir Putin inched closer to war, recognizing the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine. It was a decisive moment for the Russian president, paving the way for his all-out assault less than 48 hours later.
The EU responded the next day — its first major action against Moscow’s activities in Ukraine since the escalation of tensions in 2021. Officials unveiled the first in what would be nine sanction packages against Russia (and counting).
In an equally significant move, a reluctant Germany finally pulled the plug on Nord Stream 2, the yet unopened gas pipeline linking Russia to northern Germany — the decision, made after months of pressure, presaged how the Russian invasion would soon upend the way Europeans powered their lives and heated their homes.
Summit showdown
As it happened, EU leaders were already scheduled to meet in Brussels on February 24, the day the invasion began. Charles Michel had summoned the leaders earlier that week to deal with the escalating crisis, and to sign off on the sanctions.
Throughout the afternoon, Brussels was abuzz — TV cameras from around the world had descended on the European quarter. Helicopters circled overhead.
European leaders gathered in Brussels following the invasion | Pool photo by Olivier Hoslet/AFP via Getty Images
Suddenly, the regular European Council meeting of EU leaders, oftena forum for technical document drafting as much as political decision-making, had become hugely consequential. With war unfolding, the world was looking at the EU to respond — and lead.
The meeting was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. As leaders were gathering, news came that Russia had seized the Chernobyl nuclear plant, Moldova had declared a state of emergency and thousands of people were pouring out of Ukraine. Later that night, Zelenskyy announced a general mobilization:every man between the ages of 18 and 60 was being asked to fight.
Many leaders were wearing facemasks, a reminder that another crisis, which now seemed to pale in comparison, was still ever-present.
Just before joining colleagues at the Europa building in Brussels, Emmanuel Macron phoned Putin — the French president’s latest effort to mediate with the Russian leader. Macron had visited Moscow on February 7 but left empty-handed after five hours of discussions. He later said he made the call at Zelenskyy’s request, to ask Putin to stop the war.
“It did not produce any results,” Macron said of the call. “The Russian president has chosen war.”
Arriving at the summit, Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš captured the gravity of the moment. “Europe is experiencing the biggest military invasion since the Second World War,” he said. “Our response has to be united.”
But inside the room, divisions were on full display. How far, leaders wondered, could Europe go in sanctioning Russia, given the potential economic blowback? Countries dug in along fault lines that would become familiar in the succeeding months.
The realities of war soon pierced the academic debates. Zelenskyy’s team had set up a video link as missile strikes encircled the capital city, wanting to get the president talking to his EU counterparts.
One person present in the room recalled the percolating anxiety as the video feed beamed through — the image out of focus, the camera shaky. Then the picture sharpened and Zelenskyy appeared, dressed in a khaki shirt and looking deathly pale. His surroundings were faceless, an unknown room somewhere in Kyiv.
“Everyone was silent, the atmosphere was completely tense,” said the official who requested anonymity to speak freely.
Zelenskyy, shaken and utterly focused, told leaders that they may not see him again — the Kremlin wanted him dead.
Black smoke rises from a military airport in Chuguyev near Kharkiv on February 24, 2022 | Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
“If you, EU leaders and leaders of the free world, do not really help Ukraine today, tomorrow the war will also knock at your door,” he warned, invoking an argument he would return to again and again: that this wasn’t just Ukraine’s war — it was Europe’s war.
Within hours, EU leaders had signed off on their second package of pre-prepared sanctions hitting Russia. But a fractious debate had already begun about what should come next.
The Baltic nations and Poland wanted more — more penalties, more economic punishments. Others were holding back. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi aired their reluctance about expelling Russian banks from the global SWIFT payment system. It was needed to pay for Russian gas, after all.
How quickly that would change.
Sanctions were not the only pressing matter. There was a humanitarian crisis unfolding on Europe’s doorstep. The EU had to both get aid into a war zone and prepare for a mass exodus of people fleeing it.
Janez Lenarčič, the EU’s crisis management commissioner, landed in Paris on the day of the invasion, returning from Niger. Officials started making plans to get ambulances, generators and medicine into Ukraine — ultimately comprising 85,000 tons of aid.
“The most complex, biggest and longest-ever operation” of its kind for the EU, he said.
By that weekend, there was also a plan for the refugees escaping Russian bombs. At a rare Sunday meeting, ministers agreed to welcome and distribute the escaping Ukrainians — a feat that has long eluded the EU for other migrants. Days later, they would grant Ukrainians the instant right to live and work in the EU — another first in an extraordinary time. Decisions that normally took years were now flying through in hours.
Looming over everything were Ukraine’s repeated — and increasingly dire — entreaties for more weapons. Europe’s military investments had lapsed in recent decades, and World War II still cast a dark shadow over countries like Germany, where the idea of sending arms to a warzone still felt verboten.
There were also quiet doubts (not to mention intelligence assessments). Would Ukraine even have its own government next week? Why risk war with Russia if it was days away from toppling Kyiv?
“What we didn’t know at that point was that the Ukrainian resistance would be so successful,” a senior NATO diplomat told POLITICO on condition of anonymity. “We were thinking there would be a change of regime [in Kyiv], what do we do?”
That, too, was all about to change.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz addressed Germany on the night of Russia’s invasion | Pool photo by Hannibal Hanschke/Getty Images
By the weekend, Germany had sloughed off its reluctance, slowly warming to its role as a key military player. The EU, too, dipped its toe into historic waters that weekend, agreeing to help reimburse countries sending weapons to Ukraine — another startling first for a self-proclaimed peace project.
“I remember, saying, ‘OK, now we go for it,’” said Stefano Sannino, secretary-general of the EU’s diplomatic arm.
Ironically, the EU would refund countries using the so-called European Peace Facility — a little-known fund that was suddenly the EU’s main vehicle to support lethal arms going to a warzone.
Over at NATO, the alliance activated its defense plans and sent extra forces to the alliance’s eastern flank. The mission had two tracks, Stoltenberg recounted — “to support Ukraine, but also prevent escalation beyond Ukraine.”
Treading that fine line would become the defining balancing act over the coming year for the Western allies as they blew through one taboo after another.
Who knew what, when
As those dramatic, heady early days fade into history, Europeans are now grappling with what the war means — for their identity, for their sense of security and for the European Union that binds them together.
The invasion has rattled the core tenets underlying the European project, said Ivan Krastev, a prominent political scientist who has long studied Europe’s place in the world.
“For different reasons, many Europeans believed that this is a post-war Continent,” he said.
Post-World War II Europe was built on the assumption that open economic policies, trade between neighbors and mild military power would preserve peace.
“For the Europeans to accept the possibility of the war was basically to accept the limits of our own model,” Krastev argued.
The disbelief has bred self-reflection: Has the war permanently changed the EU? Will a generation that had confined memories of World War II and the Cold War to the past view the next conflict differently?
And, perhaps most acutely, did Europe miss the signs?
Ukrainian refugees gather and rest upon their arrival at the main railway station in Berlin | Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images
“The start of that war has changed our lives, that’s for sure,” said Romanian Foreign Minister Bogdan Aurescu. It wasn’t, however, unexpected, he argued. “We are very attentive to what happens in our region,” he said. “The signs were quite clear.”
Aurescu pointed back to April 2021 as the moment he knew: “It was quite clear that Russia was preparing an aggression against Ukraine.”
Not everyone in Europe shared that assessment, though — to the degree that U.S. officials became worried. They started a public and private campaign in 2021 to warn Europe of an imminent invasion as Russia massed its troops on the Ukrainian border.
In November 2021, von der Leyen made her first trip to the White House. She sat down with Joe Biden in the Oval Office, surrounded by a coterie of national security and intelligence officials. Biden had just received a briefing before the gathering on the Russia battalion buildup and wanted to sound the alarm.
“The president was very concerned,” said one European official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. “This was a time when no one in Europe was paying any attention, even the intelligence services.”
But others disputed the narrative that Europe was unprepared as America sounded the alarm.
“It’s a question of perspective. You can see the same information, but come to a different conclusion,” said one senior EU official involved in discussions in the runup to the war, while conceding that the U.S. and U.K. — both members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance — did have better information.
Even if those sounding the alarm proved right, said Pierre Vimont, a former secretary-general of the EU’s diplomatic wing and Macron’s Russia envoy until the war broke out, it was hard to know in advance what, exactly, to plan for.
“What type of military operation would it be?” he recalled people debating. A limited operation in the east? A full occupation? A surgical strike on Kyiv?
Here’s where most landed: Russia’s onslaught was horrifying — its brutality staggering. But the signs had been there. Something was going to happen.
“We knew that the invasion is going to happen, and we had shared intelligence,” Stoltenberg stressed. “Of course, until the planes are flying and the battle tanks are rolling, and the soldiers are marching, you can always change your plans. But the more we approached the 24th of February last year, the more obvious it was.”
Then on the day, he recounted, it was a matter of dutifully enacting the plan: “We were prepared, we knew exactly what to do.”
“You may be shocked by this invasion,” he added, “but you cannot be surprised.”
Clea Caulcutt and Cristina Gallardo contributed reporting.
LONDON — Rishi Sunak insisted Saturday he wants to “get the job done” on Brexit, promising he was “giving it everything we’ve got” to secure a deal with Brussels.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, the British prime minister said he was hopeful of a “positive outcome,” as he launched a weekend media blitz, burnishing his Brexiteer credentials, and reassuring potential critics his deal “should command very broad support, because it ensures the free flow of trade within the United Kingdom’s internal market, it secures Northern Ireland’s place in our Union and it ensures sovereignty.”
Both sides continue to insist a deal to resolve the ongoing tension over Britain’s post-Brexit trading arrangements, which see Northern Ireland continue to follow some EU laws to get round the need for checks at the U.K.’s border with the Republic of Ireland, is not yet done, but could come within days if negotiators are able to close the remaining gaps.
Sunak, who himself backed Britain’s departure from the European Union in 2016, has been trying to win support from the Democratic Unionist Party and the hardline Brexit-supporting European Research Group in Westminster.
“I’m a Conservative, I’m a Brexiteer. And I’m a Unionist,” Sunak told the Sunday Times. “There’s unfinished business on Brexit and I want to get the job done,” he added.
Separately, in a piece for the Sun on Sunday, Sunak wrote: “There’s still more work to do but we have made promising progress recently and I’m determined to do right by the people of Northern Ireland and deliver for them.”
LONDON — After four months of intense talks (and plenty of squabbling before that), the EU and U.K. have a deal to resolve their long-running post-Brexit trade row over Northern Ireland.
But as U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak works to sell the so-called “Windsor framework” on the Northern Ireland protocol to Brexiteers and unionists, lawmakers on both sides of the English Channel and of the Irish Sea are getting to grips with the details.
From paperwork to plants, let POLITICO walk you through the new agreement, asking: Who has given ground, and how exactly will the deal thrashed out by EU and U.K. negotiators aim to keep the bloc’s prized single market secure?
Customs paperwork and checks
For businesses taking part in an expanded “trusted trader scheme,” the Windsor framework aims to considerably cut customs paperwork and checks on goods moving from Great Britain but destined to stay in Northern Ireland.
These goods will pass through a “green lane” requiring minimal paperwork and be labeled “Not for EU,” while those heading for the EU single market in the Republic of Ireland will undergo full EU customs checks in Northern Ireland’s ports under a “red lane.”
Traders in the green lane will only need to complete a single, digitized certificate per truck movement, rather than multiple forms per load.
Sunak has already claimed that this means “any sense of a border in the Irish Sea” — deeply controversial among Northern Ireland’s unionist politicians — has now been “removed.”
However, it’s by no means a total end to Irish Sea red tape. An EU official said that although the deal delivers a “dramatic reduction” in the number of physical food safety checks, for example, there will still be some — those seen as “essential” to avoid the risk of goods entering the single market.
These checks will be based on risk assessments and intelligence, and aimed at preventing smuggling and criminality.
U.K. public health and safety standards will meanwhile apply to all retail food and drink within the U.K. internal market. British rules on public health, marketing, organics, labeling, genetic modification, and drinks such as wines, spirits and mineral waters will apply in Northern Ireland. This will remove more than 60 EU food and drink rules in the original protocol, which were detailed in more than 1,000 pages of legislation.
Supermarkets, wholesalers, hospitality and food producers are likely to welcome the new arrangements. Many had stopped supplying to Northern Ireland because the cost of filling out hundreds of certificates for each consignment was deemed too high for a market as small as Northern Ireland.
Export declarations have been removed for the vast majority of goods moving from Northern Ireland to Great Britain.
The EU’s safeguards: While offering to drastically reduce the volume of checks carried out, the EU has toughened its criteria to become a trusted trader under the expanded scheme. The EU will now have access to databases tracking shipments of goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland in real time. The system was tested through the winter, helping build trust in Brussels, and is being fed with data from traders and U.K. authorities. The European Commission will be able to suspend part or all of these trade easements if the U.K. fails to comply with the new rules.
The timeline: The U.K. government said it will consult with businesses in the “coming months” before implementing the new rules. The green lane will come into force this fall. Labels for meat, meat products and minimally-processed dairy products such as fresh milk will come into force from October 1, 2024. All relevant products will be marked by July 1, 2025. “Shelf-stable” products like bread and pasta will not be labeled.
Governance
A key plank of the deal is the bid to address complaints by Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) — currently boycotting the power-sharing assembly in the region in opposition to the protocol — that lawmakers there did not have a say in the imposition of new EU rules in the region.
Under the terms of the new agreement, the Commission will have to give the U.K. government notice of future EU regulations intended to apply in Northern Ireland. According to Sunak, Stormont will be given a new power to “pull an emergency brake on changes to EU goods rules” based on “cross-community consent.”
Under this mechanism, the U.K. government will be able to suspend the application in Northern Ireland of an incoming piece of EU law at the request of at least 30 members of the assembly — a third of them. But if unionist parties in Northern Ireland want to trigger the new “Stormont brake,” they must first return to the power-sharing institutions which they abandoned last May. The EU and the U.K. could subsequently agree to apply such a rule in a meeting of the Joint Committee, which oversees the protocol.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said this new tool remains an emergency mechanism that hopefully will not need to be used. A second EU official said it would be triggered “under the most exceptional circumstances and as a matter of last resort in a well-defined process” set out in a unilateral declaration by the U.K. These include that the rules have a “significant and lasting impact on the everyday lives” of people in the region.
If the EU disagrees with the U.K.’s trigger of the Stormont brake, the two would resolve the issue through independent arbitration, instead of involving the Court of Justice of the EU.
Meanwhile, Northern Ireland’s courts will consider disputes over the application of EU rules in the region, and judges could decide whether to consult the CJEU on how to interpret them. In a key concession, the Commission has agreed not to unilaterally refer a case to the CJEU, although it retains the power to do so.
The EU’s safeguards: The CJEU will remain the “sole and ultimate arbiter of EU law” and will have the “final say” on EU single market disputes, von der Leyen stressed. Whether Brexiteers and the DUP are willing to accept that remains the million-dollar question.
Tax, state aid and EU rules
The U.K. government will now be able to set rules in areas such as VAT and state aid that will also apply in Northern Ireland — two major wins for Sunak that were rejected by the Commission in previous rounds of negotiations with other U.K. prime ministers.
It will, Sunak was at pains to point out Monday, allow Westminster to pass on a cut in alcohol duty that previously passed Northern Ireland by.
But London has had to give up on its idea of establishing a dual-regulatory mechanism that would have allowed Northern Ireland businesses to choose whether they would follow EU or British rules when manufacturing goods, depending on whether they intended to sell them in the EU single market or in the U.K. The whole idea was deemed by Brussels as impossible to police.
The EU’s safeguards: Northern Irish businesses producing goods for the U.K. internal market will only have to follow “less than 3 percent” of EU single market rules, a U.K. official said. But the nature of these regulations remains unclear, and there will be increased market surveillance and enforcement by U.K. authorities to try and reassure the EU.
The timeline: The U.K. government will be able to exercise these powers as soon as the Windsor framework comes into force.
Parcels
The EU and the U.K. have agreed to scrap customs processes for parcels being sent between consumers in Great Britain to Northern Ireland.
The EU’s safeguards: Parcels sent between businesses will now move through the new green lane, as is the case for other goods destined to stay in Northern Ireland. That should allow them to be monitored, but remove the need to undergo international customs procedures. Parcel operators will share commercial data with the U.K.’s tax authority, HMRC, in a bid to reduce risks to the EU single market.
Timeline: These new arrangements will take effect September 2024.
Pets
Residents in Great Britain will be able to take their dogs, cats and ferrets to Northern Ireland without having to fulfill a requirement for a rabies vaccine, tapeworm treatment and other checks.
Pets traveling from Northern Ireland to Great Britain and back will not be required to have any documentation, declarations, checks or health treatments.
The EU’s safeguards: Microchipped pets will be able to travel with a life-long pet travel document issued for free by the U.K.’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Pet owners will tick a box in their travel booking acknowledging they accept the scheme rules and will not move their pet into the EU.
The timeline: The new rules will take effect fall 2023.
Medicines
Drugs approved for use by the U.K.’s medicines regulator, the MHRA, will be automatically available in every pharmacy and hospital in Northern Ireland, “at the same time and under the same conditions” as in the U.K., von der Leyen said.
Businesses will need to secure approval for a U.K.-wide license from the MHRA to supply medicines to Northern Ireland, rather than having to go through the European Medicines Agency. The agreement removes any EU Falsified Medicines Directive packaging, labeling and barcode requirements for medicines. This means manufacturers will be able to produce a single medicines pack design for the whole of the U.K., including Northern Ireland.
Drugs being shipped into Northern Ireland from Great Britain will be freed of customs paperwork, checks and duties, with traders only being required to provide ordinary commercial information.
The EU’s safeguards: Medicines traveling from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will do so via the new green lane, which will have monitoring to protect the single market built in.
The timeline: The U.K. government said it will engage with the medicines industry soon on these changes.
Plants
The deal lifts the protocol’s ban on seed potatoes entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain, and its prohibition on trees and shrubs deemed of “high risk” for the EU single market. This will enable garden centers and other businesses in Northern Ireland to sell 11 native species to Great Britain and some from other regions.
The Windsor framework also removes sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) checks on all these plants, and ditches red tape on their shipment into Northern Ireland.
The EU’s safeguards: Supplying businesses will have to obtain a Northern Ireland plant health label, which will be the same as the plant passport already required within Great Britain, but with the addition of the words “for use in the U.K. only” and a QR code linking to the rules.
The timeline: The new scheme and the lifting of the bans will all come into force in the fall.
LONDON — The U.K. and the EU finally reached a deal after months of talks over contentious post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland.
Already, both sides are pitching it as a major reset in frayed relations — but U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak still has to sell it to skeptics in his own party and beyond.
The so-called “Windsor Framework” comes after a final day of talks between Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Windsor.
In key developments Monday:
— Sunak and von der Leyen talked up the deal as a “new chapter” in EU-U.K. ties at a Windsor press conference.
— The U.K. PM urged his MPs to get behind him in a Commons statement, as key Brexiteers gave supportive early comments.
— Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) vowed to study the text closely before deciding whether or not to back it.
— And Brexiteers in the U.K. hit out at No. 10 Downing Street over a meeting between King Charles III and von der Leyen on the same day a deal was struck.
‘New chapter’
Details of the new agreement are now being pored over by lawmakers on both sides of the English Channel, but the plan is aimed at easing customs red-tape, equalizing some tax rules across the United Kingdom, and giving Northern Ireland’s lawmakers more of a say over the future of the arrangement.
“The United Kingdom and European Union may have had our differences in the past, but we are allies, trading partners and friends, something that we’ve seen clearly in the past year as we joined with others to support Ukraine,” Sunak said at the joint press conference. “This is the beginning of a new chapter in our relationship.”
That line was echoed by von der Leyen, who said the plan would allow the two sides “to begin a new chapter,” and offer up “long-lasting solutions that both of us are confident will work for all people and businesses in Northern Ireland.”
Sunak — under pressure to hold a House of Commons vote on the agreement — told MPs Monday evening that the arrangement would end “burdensome customs bureaucracy” and “routine checks” on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, and claimed he had “delivered what the people of Northern Ireland asked for … We have removed the border in the Irish Sea.”
He now faces the sizable task of convicing Brexiteer lawmakers on his own Conservative benches, many of whom will be closely watching the verdict of Northern Ireland’s fiercely anti-protocol DUP, to get on board.
“Our judgment and our principled position in opposing the protocol in Parliament and at Stormont has been vindicated,” said DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson Monday night. “Undoubtedly it is now recognized that the protocol does not work. When others said there would be no renegotiation and no change, our determination has proved what can be achieved.”
Stormont brake
The protocol has been a long-running source of tension between the U.K. and the EU, and the two sides have been locked in months of talks to try to ease the way it works.
Under the arrangement, the EU requires checks on trade from Great Britain to Northern Ireland in order to preserve the integrity of its single market and avoid such checks taking place at the sensitive land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
The DUP has been boycotting the region’s power-sharing government while it pushes for major changes to a set-up it sees as driving a wedge between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K.
Speaking at the press conference, Sunak and von der Leyen talked up a host of changes to the protocol that they hope will be enough to restore power-sharing in Northern Ireland.
Under the revised plan, goods moving from Great Britain but destined only for Northern Ireland will travel through a new “green lane” with fewer checks, while a separate, more stringent, “red lane” for goods at risk of moving on to the Republic of Ireland — and thereby entering the EU’s single market — will now operate.
Sunak said food retailers would “no longer need hundreds of certificates for every lorry” entering Northern Ireland, while food made to U.K. standards will be able to be freely sent to and sold in Northern Ireland. He also vowed that the new pact would scrap customs paperwork for people sending parcels to family or friends or shopping online.
UK PM Rishi Sunak and EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen hope that the host of changes to the Brexit protocol announced today will be enough to restore power-sharing in Northern Ireland | Dan Kitwood/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
The two sides have also amended the text of the protocol, Sunak said, to allow U.K. VAT and excise changes to apply in Northern Ireland — while a “landmark” settlement on medicines will mean drugs approved for use by the U.K. medicines regulator will be “automatically available in every pharmacy and hospital in Northern Ireland.”
And London and Brussels are now jointly pitching a new “Stormont brake,” claiming this will allow the devolved assembly in Northern Ireland — currently on ice amid a DUP boycott over the protocl — to prevent changes to EU goods rules “that would have significant and lasting effects on everyday lives” from applying in the region.
“This gives the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland a powerful new safeguard based on cross-community consent,” Sunak promised.
DUP’s next move
As he departed for London, DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson said he and senior party colleagues would “take time to look at the deal” – a process likely to run at least through the weekend and to involve specially-commissioned analysis by constitutional lawyers. Early word from some Conservative Brexiteers was positive, with David Davis — who quit Theresa May’s government over her own EU deal-making — hailed it as a “a formidable negotiating success.”
Before flying out of Belfast, Donaldson briefed his party’s 25 members of the Northern Ireland Assembly about the expected key points. The DUP lawmakers met at Stormont, the seat of the power-sharing legislature that the DUP has blocked since May.
Donaldson said the DUP’s legal counsel would produce a detailed analysis for consideration by the party’s executive officers.
“It is vital that Northern Ireland’s place within the U.K. and its internal market is restored. We will have lawyers assess the legal text to ensure that this [is] in fact the case,” Donaldson told the Belfast News Letter, the main unionist newspaper in Northern Ireland.
Later, Donaldson told the BBC he was “neither positive nor negative” when assessing whether the DUP should accept the compromise package on offer.
“We need to take time to look at the deal, what’s available, and how does that match our seven tests,” he said, referring to the DUP’s July 2021 list of demands for “replacing” the protocol.
Other DUP officials said the party’s senior leadership would convene at party headquarters in Belfast, possibly on Saturday, to review the party’s legal verdict on the deal – and whether concessions won by the U.K. government were sufficient to end the DUP’s obstruction of power-sharing at Stormont.
Donaldson will seek maximum support at that meeting before committing to any policy pivot on the protocol. Other senior officials, including former deputy leader Lord Dodds, have explicitly rejected the idea of reviving Stormont if the revised protocol agreement retains any oversight role for the CJEU. Both Donaldson and the DUP’s “seven tests” have stopped short of drawing this red line.
Ever since narrowly losing May’s assembly elections to the Irish republicans of Sinn Féin, the DUP has refused not only to form a new cross-community government – the assembly’s central function under terms of Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord – but also has blocked the election of a neutral speaker for the assembly, preventing it from sitting.
This developing story is being updated. Annabelle Dickson and Noah Keate contributed reporting.
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Matt Honeycombe-Foster, Andrew McDonald and Shawn Pogatchnik
LONDON — It was clear when Boris Johnson was forced from Downing Street that British politics had changed forever.
But few could have predicted that less than six months later, all angry talk of a cross-Channel trade war would be a distant memory, with Britain and the EU striking a remarkable compromise deal over post-Brexit trade rules in Northern Ireland.
Private conversations with more than a dozen U.K. and EU officials, politicians and diplomats reveal how the Brexit world changed completely after Johnson’s departure — and how an “unholy trinity” of little-known civil servants, ensconced in a gloomy basement in Brussels, would mastermind a seismic shift in Britain’s relationship with the Continent.
They were aided by an unlikely sequence of political events in Westminster — not least an improbable change of mood under the combative Liz Truss; and then the jaw-dropping rise to power of the ultra-pragmatic Rishi Sunak. Even the amiable figure of U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly would play his part, glad-handing his way around Europe and smoothing over cracks that had grown ever-wider since 2016.
As Sunak’s Conservative MPs pore over the detail of his historic agreement with Brussels — and await the all-important verdict of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland — POLITICO has reconstructed the dramatic six-month shift in Britain’s approach that brought us to the brink of the Brexit deal we see today.
Bye-bye Boris
Johnson’s departure from Downing Street, on September 6, triggered an immediate mood shift in London toward the EU — and some much-needed optimism within the bloc about future cross-Channel relations.
For key figures in EU capitals, Johnson would always be the untrustworthy figure who signed the protocol agreement only to disown it months afterward.
In Paris, relations were especially poisonous, amid reports of Johnson calling the French “turds”; endless spats with the Elysée over post-Brexit fishing rights, sausages and cross-Channel migrants; and Britain’s role in the AUKUS security partnership, which meant the loss of a multi-billion submarine contract for France. Paris’ willingness to engage with Johnson was limited in the extreme.
Truss, despite her own verbal spats with French President Emmanuel Macron — and her famously direct approach to diplomacy — was viewed in a different light. Her success at building close rapport with negotiating partners had worked for her as trade secretary, and once she became prime minister, she wanted to move beyond bilateral squabbles and focus on global challenges, including migration, energy and the war in Ukraine.
“Boris had become ‘Mr. Brexit,’” one former U.K. government adviser said. “He was the one the EU associated with the protocol, and obviously [Truss] didn’t come with the same baggage. She had covered the brief, but she didn’t have the same history. As prime minister, Liz wanted to use her personal relationships to move things on — but that wasn’t the same as a shift in the underlying substance.”
Indeed, Truss was still clear on the need to pass the controversial Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which would have given U.K. ministers powers to overrule part of the protocol unilaterally, in order to ensure leverage in the talks with the European Commission.
Truss also triggered formal dispute proceedings against Brussels for blocking Britain’s access to the EU’s Horizon Europe research program. And her government maintained Johnson’s refusal to implement checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain, causing deep irritation in Brussels.
But despite the noisy backdrop, tentative contact with Brussels quietly resumed in September, with officials on both sides trying to rebuild trust. Truss, however, soon became “very disillusioned by the lack of pragmatism from the EU,” one of her former aides said.
“The negotiations were always about political will, not technical substance — and for whatever reason, the political will to compromise from the Commission was never there when Liz, [ex-negotiator David] Frost, Boris were leading things,” they said.
Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss announces her resignation outside 10 Downing Street in central London on October 20, 2022 | Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images
Truss, of course, would not be leading things for long. An extraordinary meltdown of the financial markets precipitated her own resignation in late October, after just six weeks in office. Political instability in Westminster once again threatened to derail progress.
But Sunak’s arrival in No. 10 Downing Street — amid warnings of a looming U.K. recession — gave new impetus to the talks. An EU official said the mood music improved further, and that discussions with London became “much more constructive” as a result.
David Lidington, a former deputy to ex-PM Theresa May who played a key role in previous Brexit negotiations, describes Sunak as a “globalist” rather than an “ultra-nationalist,” who believes Britain ought to have “a sensible, friendly and grown-up relationship” with Brussels outside the EU.
During his time as chancellor, Sunak was seen as a moderating influence on his fellow Brexiteer Cabinet colleagues, several of whom seemed happy to rush gung-ho toward a trade war with the EU.
“Rishi has always thought of the protocol row as a nuisance, an issue he wanted to get dealt with,” the former government adviser first quoted said.
One British officialsuggested the new prime minister’s reputation for pragmatism gave the U.K. negotiating team “an opportunity to start again.”
Sunak’s slow decision-making and painstaking attention to detail — the subject of much criticism in Whitehall — proved useful in calming EU jitters about the new regime, they added.
“When he came in, it wasn’t just the calming down of the markets. It was everyone across Europe and in the U.S. thinking ‘OK, they’re done going through their crazy stage,’” the same officialsaid. “It’s the time he takes with everything, the general steadiness.”
EU leaders “have watched him closely, they listened to what he said, and they have been prepared to trust him and see how things go,” Lidington noted.
Global backdrop
As months of chaos gave way to calm in London, the West was undergoing a seismic reorganization.
Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered a flurry of coordinated work for EU and U.K. diplomats — including sanctions, military aid, reconstruction talks and anti-inflation packages. A sense began to emerge that it was in both sides’ common interest to get the Northern Ireland protocol row out of the way.
“The war in Ukraine has completely changed the context over the last year,” an EU diplomat said.
A second U.K. official agreed. “Suddenly we realized that the 2 percent of the EU border we’d been arguing about was nothing compared to the massive border on the other side of the EU, which Putin was threatening,” they said. “And suddenly there wasn’t any electoral benefit to keeping this row over Brexit going — either for us or for governments across the EU.”
A quick glance at the electoral calendar made it clear 2023 offered the last opportunity to reach a deal in the near future, with elections looming for both the U.K. and EU parliaments the following year — effectively putting any talks on ice.
“Rishi Sunak would have certainly been advised by his officials that come 2024, the EU is not going to be wanting to take any new significant initiatives,” Lidington said. “And we will be in election mode.”
The upcoming 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday peace agreement on April 10 heaped further pressure on the U.K. negotiators, amid interest from U.S. President Joe Biden in visiting Europe to mark the occasion.
“The anniversary was definitely playing on people’s minds,” the first U.K. official said.“Does [Sunak] really want to be the prime minister when there’s no government in Northern Ireland on the anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement?”
The pressure was ramped up further when Biden specifically raised the protocol in a meeting with Truss at the U.N. General Assembly in New York in late September, after which British officials said they expected the 25th anniversary to act as a “key decision point” on the dispute.
The King and I
Whitehall faced further pressure from another unlikely source — King Charles III, who was immediately planning a state visit to Paris within weeks of ascending the throne in September 2022. Truss had suggested delaying the visit until the protocol row was resolved, according to two European diplomats.
The monarch is now expected to visit Paris and Berlin at the end of March — and although his role is strictly apolitical, few doubt he is taking a keen interest in proceedings. He has raised the protocol in recent conversations with European diplomats, showing a close engagement with the detail.
One former senior diplomat involved in several of the king’s visits said that Charles has long held “a private interest in Ireland, and has wanted to see if there was an appropriately helpful role he could play in improving relations [with the U.K].”
By calling the deal the Windsor framework and presenting it at a press conference in front of Windsor Castle, one of the king’s residences, No. 10 lent Monday’s proceedings an unmistakable royal flavor.
The king also welcomed von der Leyen for tea at the castle following the signing of the deal. A Commission spokesperson insisted their meeting was “separate” from the protocol discussion talks. Tory MPs were skeptical.
Cleverly does it
The British politician tasked with improving relations with Brussels was Foreign Secretary Cleverly, appointed by Truss last September. He immediately began exploring ways to rebuild trust with Commission Vice-President and Brexit point-man Maroš Šefčovič, the second U.K. official cited said.
His first hurdle was a perception in Brussels that the British team had sabotaged previous talks by leaking key details to U.K. newspapers and hardline Tory Brexiteers for domestic political gain. As a result, U.K. officials made a conscious effort to keep negotiations tightly sealed, a No. 10 official said.
“The relationship with Maroš improved massively when we agreed not to carry out a running commentary” on the content of the discussions, the second U.K. official added.
This meant keeping key government ministers out of the loop, including Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, an arch-Brexiteer who had been brought back onto the frontbench by Truss.
British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly is welcomed by European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič ahead of a meeting at the EU headquarters in Brussels on February 17, 2023 | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
The first U.K. official said Baker would have “felt the pain,” as he had little to offer his erstwhile backbench colleagues looking for guidance while negotiations progressed, “and that was a choice by No. 10.”
Cleverly and Šefčovič “spent longer than people think just trying to build rapport,” the second U.K. officialsaid, with Cleverly explaining the difficulties the protocol was raising in Northern Ireland and Šefčovič insistent that key economic sectors were in fact benefiting from the arrangement.
Cleverly also worked at the bilateral relationship with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, while Sunak made efforts to improve ties with French President Emmanuel Macron, Lidington noted.
A British diplomat based in Washington said Cleverly had provided “a breath of fresh air” after the “somewhat stiff” manner of his predecessors, Truss and the abrasive Dominic Raab.
By the Conservative party conference in early October, the general mood among EU diplomats in attendance was one of expectation. And the Birmingham jamboree did not disappoint.
Sorry is the hardest word
Baker, who had once described himself as a “Brexit hard man,” stunned Dublin by formally apologizing to the people of Ireland for his past comments, just days before technical talks between the Commission and the U.K. government were due to resume.
“I caused a great deal of inconvenience and pain and difficulty,” he said. “Some of our actions were not very respectful of Ireland’s legitimate interests. I want to put that right.”
The apology was keenly welcomed in Dublin, where Micheál Martin, the Irish prime minister at the time, called it “honest and very, very helpful.”
Irish diplomats based in the U.K. met Baker and other prominent figures from the European Research Group of Tory Euroskeptics at the party conference, where Baker spoke privately of his “humility” and his “resolve” to address the issues, a senior Irish diplomat said.
“Resolve was the keyword,” the envoy said. “If Steve Baker had the resolve to work for a transformation of relationships between Ireland and the U.K., then we thought — there were tough talks to be had — but a sustainable deal was now a possibility.”
There were other signs of rapprochement. Just a few hours after Baker’s earth-shattering apology, Truss confirmed her attendance at the inaugural meeting in Prague of the European Political Community, a new forum proposed by Macron open to both EU and non-EU countries.
Sunak at the wheel
The momentum snowballed under Sunak, who decided within weeks of becoming PM to halt the passage of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill in the House of Lords, reiterating Britain’s preference for a negotiated settlement. In exchange, the Commission froze a host of infringement proceedings taking aim at the way the U.K. was handling the protocol. This created space for talks to proceed in a more cordial environment.
An EU-U.K. agreement in early January allowed Brussels to start using a live information system detailing goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, seen as key to unlocking a wider agreement on physical checks under the protocol.
The U.K. also agreed to conduct winter technical negotiations in Brussels, rather than alternating rounds between the EU capital and London, as was the case when Frost served as Britain’s chief negotiator.
Trust continued to build. Suddenly the Commission was open to U.K. solutions such as the “Stormont brake,” a clause giving the Northern Ireland Assembly power of veto over key protocol machinations, which British officials did not believe Brussels would accept when they first pitched them.
The Stormont brake was discussed “relatively early on,” a third U.K. official said. “Then we spent a huge amount of effort making sure nobody knew about it. It was kept the most secret of secret things.”
Yet a second EU diplomat claimed the ideas in the deal were not groundbreaking and could have been struck “years ago” if Britain had a prime minister with enough political will to solve the dispute. “None of the solutions that have been found now is revolutionary,” they said.
An ally of Johnson described the claim he was a block on progress as “total nonsense.”
The ‘unholy trinity’
Away from the media focus, a group of seasoned U.K. officials began to engage with their EU counterparts in earnest. But there was one (not so) new player in town.
Tim Barrow, a former U.K. permanent representative to the EU armed with a peerless contact book, had been an active figure in rebuilding relations with the bloc since Truss appointed him national security adviser. He acquired a more prominent role in the protocol talks after Sunak dispatched him to Brussels in January 2023, hoping EU figures would see him as “almost one of them,” another adviser to Sunak said.
Ensconced in the EU capital, Barrow and his U.K. team of negotiators took over several meeting rooms in the basement of the U.K. embassy, while staffers were ordered to keep quiet about their presence.
Besides his work on Northern Ireland trade, Barrow began to appear in meetings with EU representatives about other key issues creating friction in the EU-U.K. relationship, including discussions on migration alongside U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
Barrow “positioned himself very well,” the first EU diplomat quoted above said. “He’s very close to the prime minister — everybody in Brussels and London knows he’s got his ear. He’s very knowledgeable while very political.”
But other British officials insist Barrow’s presence was not central to driving through the deal. “He has been a figure, but not the only figure,” the U.K. adviser quoted above said. “It’s been a lot of people, actually, over quite a period of time.”
When it came to the tough, detailed technical negotiations, the burden fell on the shoulders of Mark Davies — the head of the U.K. taskforce praised for his mastery of the protocol detail — and senior civil servant and former director of the Northern Ireland Office, Brendan Threlfall.
The three formed an “unholy trinity,” as described by the first U.K. official, with each one bringing something to the table.
Davies was “a classic civil servant, an unsung hero,”the official said, while Threlfall “has good connections, good understanding” and “Tim has met all the EU interlocutors over the years.”
Sitting across the table, the EU team was led by Richard Szostak, a Londoner born to Polish parents and a determined Commission official with a great CV and an affinity for martial arts. His connection to von der Leyen was her deputy head of cabinet until recently, Stéphanie Riso, a former member of Brussels’ Brexit negotiating team who developed a reputation for competence on both sides of the debate.
Other senior figures at the U.K. Cabinet Office played key roles, including Cabinet Secretary Simon Case and senior official Sue Gray.
The latter — a legendary Whitehall enforcer who adjudicated over Johnson’s “Partygate” scandal — has a longstanding connection to Northern Ireland, famously taking a career break in the late 1980s to run a pub in Newry, where she has family links. More recently, she spent two years overseeing the finance ministry.
Gray has been spotted in Stormont at crunch points over the past six months as Northern Ireland grapples with the pain of the continued absence of an executive.
Some predict Gray could yet play a further role, in courting the Democratic Unionist Party as the agreement moves forward in the weeks ahead.
For U.K. and EU officials, the agreement struck with Brussels represented months of hard work — but for Sunak and his Cabinet colleagues, the hardest yards may yet lie ahead.
This story was updated to clarify two parts of the sourcing.
Here is a not-so-secret trade secret: before each of my weekly missives is posted, Al Jazeera editors return the edited copy to me so I can review any changes they have made.
By now, the opinion page editors understand that I tend to be picayune about every word in every sentence of each and every column I write.
I sense that, on occasion, this grating habit tests their patience. Still, they tolerate my neurotic bent because the basis of any relationship between a writer and editor is mutual respect.
I respect that the role of the editor is to be, in large measure, a surrogate for the audience and that editors, in turn, respect the choices I make about what I want to say and how I want to say it.
Sometimes, we quibble. Happily, we never quarrel. Sometimes, my copy is left intact. Sometimes, it isn’t.
So, when I was asked to devote a column to the brewing brouhaha over a slew of word changes introduced to the new editions of some of late British writer Roald Dahl’s most famous children’s stories, my initial visceral reaction was that this was an irresponsible and disrespectful act.
There have, of course, been a flurry of tweets and columns from prominent novelists and freedom of expression advocates decrying the “shameful” “censorship” of Dahl’s stories by misguided puritans moved to “modernise” his popular works by draining them of their signature prickly and nasty bits.
My older and wiser sister, Kimete Mitrovica-Basha, agrees. She knows the rainbow of authors who populate the ingenious orbit of children’s books, having been the executive director of the Basel-based non-profit group, the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) from 2002 to 2004.
A former teacher and librarian, Kimete remains dedicated to bringing children together through books. She calls the supposed “fixes” to Dahl’s work “shocking and wrong”.
Her overarching concern, which tilts into a palpable fear, is that the “policing of thought and language” that Dahl has posthumously and involuntarily endured is bound to happen to other writers – dead or alive.
“It’s dangerous,” she told me on Monday from Brussels. “The questions that writers and readers are obliged to confront are profound: Where will this end and who will be the next targets of the sensitivity police?”
It is a worry shared by Suzanne Nossel, the Chief Executive Officer of PEN America.
“The problem with taking license to re-edit classic works is that there is no limiting principle. You start out wanting to replace a word here and a word there, and end up inserting entirely new ideas (as has been done to Dahl’s work),” she wrote.
“Literature is meant to be surprising and provocative. That’s part of its potency. By setting out to remove any reference that might cause offense you dilute the power of storytelling,” Nossel added.
While I side – wholeheartedly – with the thrust of these complaints that art should not be rewritten by anyone other than the artist who produced it, my rebuke of the publisher’s cockeyed actions has a more personal tint.
In unilaterally tweaking his stories, Dahl’s publisher, Puffin Books, and estate have insulted their patron and questioned his provenance over the places and characters that sprang like a gusher from his pen and imagination.
Once published, Dahl, alone, should own those words. And he, alone, has the right and privilege to change them.
To tinker with Dahl’s words is as sacrilegious as tinkering with an image by Francis Bacon or correcting a score by Benjamin Britten. It is also as outrageous as it is unfathomable. Dahl’s words are as sacrosanct as Bacon’s dab of colour on a canvas or Britten’s reach for a note in a tablature.
It is no surprise that Dahl was notorious for being oh-so-particular about the sweet and sour words and phrases he weaved together to tell the tales that countless children across the globe have devoured and enjoyed, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach.
That editors he did not know or trust have chosen to switch the words that Dahl chose for others would, I suspect, have infuriated him.
Before any changes were contemplated or fashioned, Dahl, the conjurer of these unforgettable worlds with their fantastical characters, was the ultimate authority to reject or consent to any alteration made on his behalf.
Since Dhal died in 1990, he could not do either. It should have been apparent to anyone involved in this debacle that swapping one word for another without the author’s explicit approval is an affront to the integrity of his text.
Reportedly, editors have disfigured hundreds of Dahl’s words. The number, like the editors’ motivations – which I will address in a moment – is irrelevant. To have tampered with even one of Dahl’s printed words is tantamount to tampering with art and history.
That is not hyperbole. Dahl’s books reflect time and place – with all the beliefs and myths, rights and wrongs, strengths and weaknesses, beauty and ugliness inherent to them.
It would be akin to sanitising Dahl’s long, repellant expressions of anti-Semitism to paint a more agreeable or palatable version of him for readers – young and old.
Being well-meaning is the antithesis of art and history.
Dahl’s publisher and the author’s estate have defended their decision to deface the descriptions of characters’ appearances, races and genders, in at least 10 of the author’s 19 children’s books by insisting that their clumsy surgery is “small and carefully considered”.
This is condescending tripe. Every small or big word Dahl wrote took considerable consideration on his part. If he had wanted to alter so much as a syllable, Dahl would have done so of his own volition.
The story and spikey, inventive language are what mattered to him – not the fragile sensibilities of anonymous editors who will not be read or remembered as the writer they deign to “edit”.
Apparently, those editors thought it necessary, for example, to “update” references to “mothers” and “fathers” to “parents” or “family”.
Their reasoning? Some readers might find Dahl’s word choice offensive because it perpetuates anachronistic stereotypes.
Dahl was familiar with his touchy critics and their pedantic criticism. Inevitably, they were adults, not children.
“I never get any protests from children,” Dahl once said. “All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what children like.”
Finally, there is also the practical matter of what is to be done with the millions of Dahl’s original works taking up, I gather, disagreeable space among bookshelves in libraries, classrooms and homes.
“What are you going to do about them? All those words are still there. [Are] you going to round up all the books and cross them out with a big black pen?” author Phillip Pullman told the BBC.
The other option, Pullman suggested, was to let Dahl’s at times jarring and uncomfortable work fade into irrelevancy and go out of print.
That would be a shame, too.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
London — Sasha has been struggling to sleep for weeks. She escaped the bullets and bombs raining down on her hometown of Zaporizhzhya, in eastern Ukraine, and reached the U.K. as a refugee in December, but the effects of the war have left her with severe PTSD and anxiety.
“I’m living on three to four hours of sleep on good days, and on a bad day, I don’t have any sleep at all and just feel like blacking out,” she told CBS News.
Depression and panic attacks drove Sasha to seek an emergency appointment through Britain’s National Health Service, the NHS, hoping to get a new prescription for medication. But Sasha found herself on a lengthy waiting list for an appointment, and now, despite the war still raging in her country, she’s considering a drastic alternative — going back home to get immediate medical treatment.
“It would be faster for me just to fly over to Ukraine than to wait for these appointments,” she told CBS News.
Ambulances waiting at the Royal London hospital in London, Jan. 6, 2023, as flu cases continued to rise amid a winter surge, ambulance delays, and a hospital bed shortage.
Aaron Chown/PA Images via Getty
“I come from quite a hot region in terms of the scale of the war you have over there, as it’s in the very east of Ukraine,” Sasha said. But still, she said she could “get an appointment just the next day.”
It’s a familiar story to some of the estimated 162,700 Ukrainians who have come to Britain seeking an escape from the dire conditions back home.
Sasha and other Ukrainian refugees who spoke to CBS News have painted a picture of a speedy and resilient Ukrainian health care system still able to provide routine care despite the war, which enters its second year later this week. But they also provided a damning insight into the crisis engulfing Britain’s cherished but beleaguered NHS. The refugees all asked to be identified only by their first names for privacy reasons.
Critics say the 75-year-old public health service has been plagued by underfunding for more than 12 years under governments run by the Conservative Party, and it has come under enormous strain in recent months, struggling to recover from the onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic amid staff shortages and a series of labor strikes as public sector workers demand pay rises to help them cope with record-high inflation and a severe cost of living crisis.
It’s a crisis evident in data: According to the British Medical Association, a record-high 3.1 million people were waiting over 18 weeks for non-urgent treatment as of December 2022.
The average wait time for non-urgent treatment is 14 weeks — significantly higher than the median pre-COVID wait of eight weeks in December 2019, the BMA data show.
Analysis by the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics shows more than 1 in 10 job vacancies posted online in December were in health care — more than in any other sector in the country’s economy.
“For the last 15 years, our nurses’ pay and doctors’ pay has dropped by 30%,” Dr. Andrew Meyerson, an emergency room doctor, told CBS News in January. “We have half of our hospital setting up food banks for NHS staff. … We just can’t afford to live.”
There have been some improvements recently, with patients waiting less time for ambulances and receiving faster emergency care in January compared to December 2022, according to the most recent NHS data.
Olha, another Ukrainian refugee, told CBS News she had returned home multiple times for health care appointments since the war began.
“It has become a meme amongst the Ukrainians living in the U.K., but the reality of undiagnosed diseases due to lack of accessibility to the NHS is scary,” she said.
Maiia left Kyiv not long after the war started and found refuge in east London. In December, she experienced “very strong pain simultaneously in my ears, teeth, and near my eye,” and she tried to get treatment from her local NHS doctor.
Despite multiple attempts, she said she was unable to get a face-to-face appointment with a doctor. Over-the-counter painkillers didn’t help, so she decided to go to the emergency room as “the pain was so strong that I could not bear it.”
After a four-hour wait, she was handed more over-the-counter painkillers despite insisting to staff that she had already tried them. They still didn’t help.
Maiia expressed praise for the fact that Britain’s universal health care system is accessible to everyone and free at the point of care, including to herself and other refugees, but she “decided that the best option would be to go to Ukraine and see the doctors there.”
After a dangerous trip to Ukraine, driving from Poland to Kyiv, Maiia was referred to a local dentist who quickly diagnosed the problem. The pain was coming from pulpitis, a condition where the innermost tissue in your tooth becomes inflamed. A Ukrainian doctor extracted her tooth almost immediately.
Mariia Kaschenko, Anhelina Shamlii and Victoria Stepanets contributed to this report.
London’s mayor has announced an emergency program to provide free meals for all children attending state primary schools in the capital, adding to a string of fresh evidence that Brits are struggling to afford necessities.
“The cost-of-living crisis means families and children across our city are in desperate need of additional support,” Sadiq Khan, who himself received free school meals as a child, said in a statement Monday.
The £130 million ($156 million) program will run for the academic year starting in September and save families around £440 ($529) per child. It willalso help reduce the “stigma that can be associated with being singled out as low income,” the statement added.
It is expected to help around 270,000 pupils who, according to estimates byresearchers for the city government, would benefit from free school meals but are not currently eligible under national criteria, which are broadly based on household income.On this basis, a quarter of all London pupils, including those in high school, qualify for free school meals, according to official data.
This number tallies with an estimate by the Child Poverty Action Group that about 210,000 children living in poverty in London don’t qualify for free school meals because the eligibility criteria are “so restrictive.”
There was further evidence Monday that more and more Brits are struggling to afford food and electricity as inflation, which is near its highest level in four decades, erodes wages and welfare payments.
A survey of 85 food banks by the Independent Food Aid Network, an advocacy group, found that 89% saw demand increase in December and January, compared with the same period 12 months ago.
More than 80% of food banksreported a significant number of people needing help for the first time, as well as an increase in the number of people needing ongoing support rather than occasional food parcels. Just over a third of organizationssaid they had served staff working for the National Health Service (NHS), which has been hit with successive strikes since December over pay and working conditions.
“Our fastest-growing client group are working people on low wages who cannot make ends meet,” said Su Parrish from The Easter Team, a food bank in Crawley, south of London.
Parrish added that the food bank had provided a “record” number of Christmas parcels and modified their usual contents as “clients told us they wouldn’t be able to afford to put ovens on, even on Christmas Day.”
A survey of more than 2,700 UK adults, published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Monday, found that 51% were worried about keeping warm in their homes this winter.
Some 60% of respondents, who were polled between January 25 and February 5, said they were using less gas or electricity at home to cope with the increased cost of food, fuel and energy bills.
“We hear horror stories of people living in cold flats keeping their entire energy budget for keeping the fridge going,” said Andi Hofbauer of St Aidan’s FoodShare in Leeds.
Also on Monday,a separate ONS survey of nearly 18,500 UK adults between September and January found that 34% of those aged 25 to 34 years reported borrowing more money or using more credit than usual compared with a year ago.
Andover half of adults living in rented accommodation said they would be unable to afford an unexpected, but necessary, expense of £850 ($1,000).
LONDON — Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss argued the U.K. should have “done more earlier” to counter Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric before he invaded Ukraine, and said the West depended on Russian oil for too long.
Truss — the U.K.’s shortest-serving prime minister who resigned amid market turmoil last year — was speaking in a House of Commons debate about Ukraine, her first contribution in the chamber as a backbencher since 2012. She has been increasingly vocal on foreign policy since leaving office.
The former prime minister, who as served foreign secretary for Boris Johnson before succeeding him in the top job, recalled receiving a phone call at 3.30 a.m. on the morning of the invasion, and told MPs: “This was devastating news. But as well as being devastating, it was not unexpected.”
Truss praised the “sheer bravery” of Ukrainians defending their country, as well as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his Cabinet for not fleeing the country in the aftermath. “I remember being on a video conference that evening with the defense secretary and our counterparts, who weren’t in Poland, who weren’t in the United States,” she said of Ukraine’s top team. “They were in Kyiv and they were defending their country,” she added.
But while Truss argued Western sanctions had imposed an economic toll on Putin’s Russia, said urged reflection. “The reason that Putin took the action he took is because he didn’t believe we would follow through,” she argued, and said the West should “hold ourselves to high standards.”
Ukraine, she said, should have been allowed to join NATO.
“We were complacent about freedom and democracy after the Cold War,” she said. “We were told it was the end of history and that freedom and democracy were guaranteed and that we could carry on living our lives not worrying about what else could happen.”
Truss urged the U.K. to do all it could to help Ukraine win the war as soon as possible, including sending fighter jets, an ongoing matter of debate in Western capitals despite Ukrainian pleas.
And the former U.K. prime minister said the West should “never again” be “complacent in the face of Russian money, Russian oil and gas,” tying any future lifting of sanctions “to reform in Russia.”
Police searching for missing UK mom Nicola Bulley said Sunday they had found a body.
A body was recovered from a river near where Bulley went missing in the northern English village of St. Michael’s on Wyre, Lancashire Police said. The body has yet to be formally identified, but Bulley’s family has been informed of the discovery.
“We were called today at 11:36am to reports of a body in the River Wyre, close to Rawcliffe Road,” a police statement read.
“An underwater search team and specialist officers have subsequently attended the scene, entered the water and have sadly recovered a body.
“Nicola’s family have been informed of developments and our thoughts are with them at this most difficult of times. We ask that their privacy is respected.”
Bulley, who worked as a mortgage adviser, went missing on the morning of Friday, January 27. Police say she was walking her dog after dropping her two children off at school.
A short while later, her dog was found wandering alone and her phone spotted on a bench next to the river, still logged into a group work call. But for three weeks, the search launched by Lancashire Police for the 45-year-old mother of two drew a blank.
The case baffled the public and attracted widespread media attention, with police also – unusually – choosing to reveal that Bulley had been struggling with alcohol issues and menopause at the time of her disappearance.
Last week saw investigators sharply criticize members of the public they said were pedaling “persistent myths.”
Lancashire Police Detective Superintendent Rebecca Smith told journalists on Wednesday that the social media frenzy had “significantly distracted” the investigation. “In 29 years’ police service, I’ve never seen anything like it.
“Some of it’s been quite shocking and really hurtful to the family. Obviously, we can’t disregard anything, and we’ve reviewed everything that’s come in but of course it has distracted us significantly.”
Lancashire Police’s decision to reveal personal details about Bulley sparked widespread criticism, with many accusing the force of sexism. Even the government slammed the police, with Home Secretary Suella Braverman raising concerns over its handling of the case.
Stephanie Benyon, a friend of Bulley’s whose children attend the same school, previously told CNN that she is a “kind, loyal and thoughtful person who adores her two girls and family and friends.” Bulley’s partner of 12 years, Paul Ansell, had described the situation as a “perpetual hell.”
Scotland First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced she is resigning. She has been a leader in the fight for Scottish independence. CBS News foreign correspondent Ramy Inocencio spoke with anchors Lana Zak and Errol Barnett about why ther resignation is so significant.
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Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister and the figurehead of the faltering Scottish independence movement, is set to resign, UK media reported Wednesday.
The Scottish National Party leader is expected to hold a press conference in Edinburgh in the next hour.
This is a developing story. Check back for more updates.
There’s more bad news for Vladimir Putin. Europe is on course to get through winter with its vital gas storage facilities more than half full, according to a new European Commission assessment seen by POLITICO.
That means despite the Russian leader’s efforts to make Europe freeze by cutting its gas supply, EU economies will survive the coldest months without serious harm — and they look set to start next winter in a strong position to do the same.
A few months ago, there were fears of energy shortages this winter caused by disruptions to Russian pipeline supplies.
But a combination of mild weather, increased imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), and a big drop in gas consumption mean that more than 50 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas is projected to remain in storage by the end of March, according to the Commission analysis.
A senior European Commission official attributed Europe’s success in securing its gas supply to a combination of planning and luck.
“A good part of the success is due to unusually mild weather conditions and to China being out of the market [due to COVID restrictions],” the official said. “But demand reduction, storage policy and infrastructure work helped significantly.”
Ending the winter heating season with such healthy reserves — above 50 percent of the EU’s roughly 100bcm total storage capacity — removes any lingering fears of a gas shortage in the short term. It also eases concerns about Europe’s energy security going into next winter.
The positive figures underlie the more optimistic outlook presented by EU leaders in recent days, with Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson saying on Tuesday that Europe had “won the first battle” of the “energy war” with Russia.
EU storage facilities — also vital for winter gas supply in the U.K., where storage options are limited — ended last winter only around 20 percent full. Brussels mandated that they be replenished to 80 percent ahead of this winter, requiring a hugely expensive flurry of LNG purchases by European buyers, to replace volumes of gas lost from Russian pipelines.
The wholesale price of gas rose to record levels during storage filling season — peaking at more than €335 per megawatt hour in August — with dire knock-on effects for household bills, businesses’ energy costs and Europe’s industrial competitiveness.
Gas prices have since fallen to just above €50/Mwh amid easing concerns over supplies. The EU has a new target to fill 90 percent of gas storage again by November 2023 — an effort that will now require less buying of LNG on the international market than it might have done had reserves been more seriously depleted.
“The expected high level of storages at above 50 percent [at] the end of this winter season will be a strong starting point for 2023/24 with less than 40 percent to be filled (against the difficult starting point of around 20 percent in storage at the end of winter season in 2022,” the Commission assessment says.
Analysts at the Independent Commodity Intelligence Services think tank said this week that refilling storages this year could still be “as tough a challenge as last year” but predicted that the EU now had “more than enough import capacity to meet the challenge.”
Across the EU, five new floating LNG terminals have been set up — in the Netherlands, Greece, Finland and two in Germany — providing an extra 30bcm of gas import capacity, with more due to come online this year and next.
However, the EU’s ability to refill storages to the new 90 percent target ahead of next winter will likely depend on continued reduction in gas consumption.
Brussels set member states a voluntary target of cutting gas demand by 15 percent from August last year. Gas demand actually fell by more than 20 percent between August and December, according to the latest Commission data, partly thanks to efficiency measures but also the consequence of consumers responding to much higher prices by using less energy.
The 15 percent target may need to be extended beyond its expiry date of March 31 to avoid gas demand rebounding as prices fall. EU energy ministers are set to discuss the issue at two forthcoming meetings in February and March.
The United Kingdom lost more working days to strikes in 2022 than in any year since 1989, as employees walked out in large numbers over pay amid soaring living costs.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed Tuesday that nearly 2.5 million working days were lost to industrial action between June and December, the highest since 1989 when 4.1 million days were lost.
The ONS said 843,000 working days were lost in December 2022 alone — the highest monthly number since November 2011.
Workers in health care, communications and transportation were among those who walked out in the run-up to Christmas. The Royal College of Nursing, which represents nearly 500,000 nurses, midwives and health care assistants, staged its first ever strike in December.
Strike action has dragged into the new year, disrupting schools and public transport. As many as half a million workers, including teachers, staged the biggest single day of walkouts in more than a decade on February 1.
Workers are demanding higher wages as they grapple with a cost-of-living crisis, with inflation near its highest level in four decades. Many public sector workers have been offered raises of 4% or 5% for the current financial year, far lower than the 10.5% annual inflation rate in December. The ONS will publish inflation figures for January on Wednesday.
The UK government has so far refused to grant public sector workers higher pay awards, arguing that doing so risks making the inflation problem worse. The government is instead introducing laws that will make it harder for key workers to strike.
The ONS said Tuesday that after taking inflation into account, growth in average regular pay, which excludes bonuses, fell by 2.5% between October and December 2022 compared with the same period in 2021. That’s among the largest drops since records began in 2001.
For public sector workers, the decline in real pay will have been worse as, without adjusting for inflation, their wages grew a lot less compared with private sector earnings. Average regular pay growth for the public sector was 4.2% in the final three months of last year compared with the same period in 2021, versus growth of 7.3% for the private sector.
The ONS said private sector pay growth was at its strongest outside the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Although there is still a large gap between earnings growth in the public and private sectors, this narrowed slightly in the latest period,” ONS director of economic statistics Darren Morgan said in a statement. “Overall, pay, though, continues to be outstripped by rising prices.”
A separate survey published Monday by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) found that UK employers expect to give employees a median pay rise of 5% this year, the highest increase in 11 years.
“However, median anticipated public sector pay rise expectations of 2% lag those in the private sector at 5%, with the gap providing the context for ongoing discontent and strikes among key public sector workers,” the CIPD said.
LONDON (AP) — Microsoft’s stalled $68.7 billion deal to buy video game company Activision Blizzard has hit a fresh hurdle in the United Kingdom, where the antitrust watchdog said Wednesday that it will stifle competition and hurt gamers.
Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority said its in-depth investigation found that the deal could strengthen Microsoft’s position in the growing cloud gaming market, “harming U.K. gamers who cannot afford expensive consoles.” In cloud gaming, players stream games on mobile phones and handheld devices they already own.
The blockbuster deal also could hurt British gamers by “weakening the important rivalry” between Microsoft’s Xbox console and Sony’s rival PlayStation machines, the watchdog said in a provisional report.
The all-cash deal, which is set to be the largest in the history of the tech industry, is facing opposition from Sony and pushback from regulators in the U.S. and Europe because it would give Microsoft control of popular game franchises such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush.
“Our job is to make sure that U.K. gamers are not caught in the crossfire of global deals that, over time, could damage competition and result in higher prices, fewer choices, or less innovation,” Martin Coleman, chair of the independent expert panel that carried out the investigation, said in a press release. “We have provisionally found that this may be the case here.”
Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, Rima Alaily, said the company is “committed to offering effective and easily enforceable solutions that address the CMA’s concerns.”
Activision also said it hopes to “be able to help the CMA better understand our industry.” In an internal email to employees, CEO Bobby Kotick said Activision looks forward to continuing constructive talks with regulators in Britain and the European Union, where a separate investigation is underway.
“We are also confident that the law — and the facts — are on our side,” he said.
The U.K. antitrust investigation is now set to drag on for a few more months, dashing Microsoft’s hopes that a speedy favorable outcome could help it resolve a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
But the fact that the U.K. didn’t move to prohibit the deal leaves an opening to Microsoft for further negotiation, said William Kovacic, a former FTC chairman
“The key thing in the decision is it invites further discussion about solutions,′ said Kovacic, now a law professor at George Washington University.
The British regulator said it will seek feedback, including possible options to address its competition concerns, from interested parties for its final report due April 26.
The FTC has sought to block the deal, arguing that the merger could violate antitrust laws by suppressing competitors to Xbox and its growing game subscription business.
Microsoft told the FTC’s administrative judge in January that it was working to resolve the U.K. investigation, as well as the EU probe, and hoped to bring back proposed remedies to U.S. regulators. But emboldened by President Joe Biden to take a tougher look at big mergers, the Democratic-led commission has shown little appetite for talks.
“It helps the FTC enormously if another major competition authority in the world moves to ban the transaction and not accept a settlement,” Kovacic said.
The Activision Blizzard deal is one of several regulatory hassles for Microsoft in Europe amid expanded scrutiny for Big Tech companies on both sides of the Atlantic over worries that they have become too dominant.
One of the deal’s flashpoints is Activision’s hit video game Call of Duty. Sony has raised concerns about losing access to what it calls a “must-have” game title, while Microsoft has promised to make it available on all platforms.
“Our commitment to grant long-term 100% equal access to Call of Duty to Sony, Nintendo, Steam and others preserves the deal’s benefits to gamers and developers and increases competition in the market,” Alaily said.
The U.K. watchdog said options to ease its concerns include blocking the deal, selling off part of Activision’s business or a so-called behavioral remedy such as an agreement to make popular games like Call of Duty available on other platforms, which it said would be less effective.
It’s not the first time the British watchdog has flexed its antitrust enforcement muscles over a Big Tech agreement. Last year, it blocked Facebook parent Meta’s acquisition of GIF-sharing platform Giphy over competition concerns, forcing the social media company to unwind the deal.
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AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien in Bellevue, Washington contributed to this report.
A World War II bomb that was found in Great Yarmouth, England exploded on Friday in what authorities are calling an “unplanned” detonation.
Officials first became aware of the 250 kilogram (about 550 pounds) explosive on Tuesday, Feb. 7, when a contractor who was doing dredging work in the River Yare discovered it, according to a news release from the city. Emergency services and local authorities declared a “major incident” and activated emergency plans. An Explosion Ordnance Device team was also summoned to the area. Roads were closed and the immediate area was evacuated.
On Friday, work began to disarm the explosives remaining in the device, but somehow it detonated, causing a large explosion that was captured on video by a police drone. The video was shared on Twitter.
The unexploded bomb in #GreatYarmouth detonated earlier during work to disarm it. Our drone captured the moment. We can confirm that no one was injured. Public safety has been at the heart of our decision making all the way through this operation, which we know has been lengthy. pic.twitter.com/9SaeYmHkrb
In a news release, officials said that a protective sandbox had been built around the bomb in case of an unexpected detonation. That sandbox prevented injuries, and on Twitter, officials said that “no one was injured” in the day’s events.
Evacuation orders have been lifted and Great Yarmouth Borough Council Chief Executive Sheila Oxtoby thanked community members for their patience and understanding throughout the multi-day process.
“This has been an unsettling time for many people, most of all for those who were evacuated from their homes. Safety of the public has been at the heart of decision making throughout this multi-agency operation. While it may have been slow, yesterday afternoon’s events show why it was so important to take all necessary measures to minimize any risk to the public,” Oxtoby said, according to the news release. “… I’d like to thank everyone involved for bringing this to a safe conclusion and we will continue to help those residents displaced.”
It’s not clear how many people were displaced due to the explosion.
Officials said that a nearby tower crane seen in the drone video has been deemed “safe.” Environment Agency engineers will inspect a river wall today that was damaged in the explosion, but “initial assessments show” that the flood defense it provides has not been compromised.
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Police in the northern England town of Knowsley, Merseyside, arrested three people on Friday after violence broke out during a protest outside a hotel used to house asylum seekers.
Merseyside Police said those arrested were being held “on suspicion of violent disorder and taken to police stations to be questioned.”
The protest, sparked by a video filmed near the hotel, had started peacefully, police said, but the situation later became tense and projectiles were thrown at the officers.
Videos shared online Friday from the area appeared to show officers in riot gear with large shields and a police vehicle set ablaze.
The police said they were dealing with two groups of protesters after a demonstration descended into chaos outside the Suites Hotel in Ribblers Lane.
Care4Calais, a refugee charity, tweeted: “The far right have split into three groups and surrounded us at the hotel. The police don’t have the capacity to cover all three groups.”
Clare Moseley, founder of Care4Calais, told the UK Press Association news agency that she “was among 100 to 120 people from pro-migrant groups who went to the scene in reaction to the protest to show support for the asylum seekers.”
“I’m trying to get in touch with some of the poor men in that hotel, I can only imagine how frightened they are. It was like a war zone,” she told the PA on Friday.
Assistant Chief Constable Paul White of Merseyside Police said in a statement: “We will always respect the right to protest when these are peaceful, but the scenes tonight were completely unacceptable, putting those present, our officers and the wider community in danger.”
“Thankfully we have not had any serious injuries reported up to this point, but for officers and police vehicles to be damaged in the course of their duty protecting the public is disgraceful,” he said.
“We have arrested some of those suspects and will continue without hesitation to review all and any evidence which comes in, through CCTV, images or other information you may have,” he added.
Newswise — A damselfly species that came to the UK from Europe poses a minimal risk to native damselflies and dragonflies, new research shows.
As tens of thousands of species shift their “range” (the areas they live in) due to climate change, the small red-eyed damselfly has spread northwards from the Mediterranean. It was first observed in the UK in 1999 and has since established itself.
The new study – by the University of Exeter and the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology – used data from the British Dragonfly Society to see if it had caused native damselflies and dragonflies to decline.
The results showed most native dragonflies and damselflies were either found more often or were unchanged in areas colonised by the small red-eyed damselfly.
However, two damselfly species might have been negatively affected, and more research is needed to investigate this.
“With range-shifting increasing globally, we need to understand what impact newly arrived species have on ecosystems,” said Dr Regan Early, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall.
“In this case, it seems the small red-eyed damselfly has established itself in the UK without harming similar species.
“It may be establishing itself most strongly in areas with good habitats, and these biodiverse sites could be important for increasing numbers of range-shifters in the future.”
Dr Early stressed the difference between range-shifters, which arrive naturally from nearby areas (in this case mainland Europe), and invasive species.
Range-shifters have typically evolved in similar ecosystems to those they arrive in, and the existing native species have usually encountered similar species before.
Invasive species arrive by human transportation, often from an entirely different part of the world, and can therefore bring behaviours and diseases that threaten native species (eg grey squirrels in the UK).
Citizen science
Using British Dragonfly Society records from almost 50,000 site visits from 2000-2015, the new study focussed on sites where each of 17 native UK dragonflies and damselflies were found in each year.
Researchers then estimated whether the arrival of small red-eyed damselflies had affected these native species.
“Our approach allows rapid assessment of how range-shifters are affecting native wildlife,” said Dr Jamie Cranston, also from the University of Exeter.
“It shows how citizen science can be really powerful, in this case by providing an ‘early warning system’ about possible threats to UK wildlife.”
Of the two damselfly species that have declined where small red-eyed damselflies have established, one is closely related to the new arrival. Dr Early suggests that similarities between their habitat preferences and flight season could cause the small red-eyed damselfly to outcompete its sister species.
However, damselflies eat a wide variety of foods, so competition should be low unless conditions caused severe food shortages.
Additionally, the UK has a relatively small variety of these species compared to the rest of Europe, so there may be “vacant niches” for new arrivals to exploit.
The study was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
The paper, published in the journal Insect Conservation and Diversity, is entitled: “Associations between a range-shifting damselfly (Erythromma viridulum) and the UK’s resident Odonata suggests habitat sharing is more important than antagonism.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a heartfelt appeal to lawmakers in Brussels on Thursday to allow his country to become part of the European Union, insisting that Europe is Ukraine’s “home.”
During an address to the European Parliament, Zelensky said his country and the EU share the same values, and that the “European standard of life” and the “European rules of life” are “when the law rules.”
“This is our Europe, these are our rules, this is our way of life. And for Ukraine, it’s a way home, a way to its home,” Zelensky said, referencing Ukraine’s aim to join the European Union.
“I am here in order to defend our people’s way home,” he added.
Zelensky’s emotional message was designed to try to connect with EU parliamentarians as he continues to push for Ukraine to join the bloc.
He underlined that Ukraine shares values with Europe, rather than with Russia, which he said is trying to take his country back in time.
The president warned European lawmakers that Russia wants to return Europe to the xenophobia of the 1930s and 1940s. “The answer for us to that is no,” he said. “We are defending ourselves. We must defend ourselves.”
Zelensky thanked all the countries that have provided weapons and military assistance to Ukraine, while stressing that his country still needs modern tanks, long-range missiles and modern fighter jets to protect its security, which he said is also Europe’s security.
“We need artillery guns, ammunitions, modern tanks, the long-range missiles and modern fighter jets,” Zelensky said. “We have to enhance the dynamic of our cooperation” and act “faster than the aggressor,” he added.
European Parliament President Roberta Metsola introduced Zelensky ahead of his address, telling him: “Ukraine is Europe and your nation’s future is in the European Union.
“We have your back. Freedom will prevail.”
Zelensky made a “secret” trip to Brussels on Thursday, a day after he made a surprise visit to London and Paris as part of an unannounced diplomatic tour of European capitals aimed at persuading the West to send more weapons and military support to counter an expected Russian spring offensive.
Zelensky’s renewed appeal to join the EU comes after Ukraine officially became an EU candidate state last year. It is still likely to be years before Kyiv can start any accession talks to join the bloc.
During his trip to Brussels, Zelensky was expected to renew his pleas to European leaders to provide Ukraine with Typhoon and F-16 fighter jets.
On Wednesday evening, the Ukrainian leader was hosted in Paris by French President Emmanuel Macron alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Macron awarded the visiting Ukrainian president with France’s highest order of merit, the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor.
Earlier, Macron told Zelensky that France is “determined” to assist Ukraine in its war against Russia. “We stand by Ukraine, determined to help it to victory,” Macron said. “Ukraine can count on France and its allies to win the war, Russia should not and will not win the war.”
European leaders have been clear in their support for defending Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, with several countries including Germany, Poland and the Netherlands recently giving the green light to provide Kyiv with heavy battle tanks.
Scholz last June insisted that Ukraine “belongs to the European family.”
“My colleagues and I have come here to Kyiv today with a clear message: Ukraine belongs to the European family,” Scholz said during a joint news conference in Kyiv with Zelensky.
Earlier Wednesday, Zelensky addressed the UK parliament during a surprise visit to London, thanking Britain on behalf of his country’s “war heroes.”
Zelensky expressed gratitude to British parliamentarians for supporting Ukraine during his speech in Westminster Hall. “Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for your bravery,” he said. “Thank you very much. From all of us.
“London has stood with Kyiv since day one,” he told lawmakers. “Since the first seconds and minutes of the full-scale war. Great Britain, you extended your helping hand when the world had not yet come to understand how to react.
He added: “We know Russia will lose. We know victory will change the world, and this will be a change the world needed. The United Kingdom is marching with us towards the most important victory of our lifetime. The victory over the very idea of war.
“After we win, any aggressor, it doesn’t matter, big or small, will know what awaits him if he attacks international order.”
