Today make sure to leave a little extra sparkle wherever you go!
Do you want to be able to manage your emotional and behavioural responses to people, events, STRESS, frustration, in your personal and professional life?! Do you want to strengthen and optimize your team, by increasing Leadership of self and others?
Head to LesleyCalvin.ca to find out more and/or schedule a complimentary 15 min introductory coaching conversation!
Engaging in life, one thought, one step, one emotionally intelligent action at a time!


text:
<?php
use PhpAmqpLib\Message\AMQPMessage;

/**
 * stub class representing AMQPEnvelope from pecl-amqp
 */
class AMQPEnvelope {

    private $app_id;
    private $body;
    private $content_encoding;
    private $content_type;
    private $correlation_id;
    private $delivery_mode;
    private $delivery_tag;
    private $exchange_name;
    private $expiration;
    private $headers;
    private $message_id;
    private $priority;
    private $reply_to;
    private $routing_key;
    private $timestamp;
    private $type;
    private $user_id;
    private $is_redelivery;

    /**
     * Get the application id of the message.
     *
     * @return string The application id of the message.
     */
    public function getAppId() {
        return $this->app_id;
    }

    /**
     * Get the body of the message.
     *
     * @return string The contents of the message body.
     */
    public function getBody() {
        return $this->body;
    }

    /**
     * Get the content encoding of the message.
     *
     * @return string The content encoding of the message.
     */
    public function getContentEncoding() {
        return $this->content_encoding;
    }

    /**
     * Get the message content type.
     *
     * @return string The content type of the message.
     */
    public function getContentType() {
        return $this->content_type;
    }

    /**
     * Get the message correlation id.
     *
     * @return string The correlation id of the message.
     */
    public function getCorrelationId() {
        return $this->correlation_id;
    }

    /**
     * Get the delivery mode of the message.
     *
     * @return integer The delivery mode of the message.
     */
    public function getDeliveryMode() {
        return $this->delivery_mode;
    }

    /**
     * Get the delivery tag of the message.
     *
     * @return string The delivery tag of the message.
     */
    public function getDeliveryTag() {
        return $this->delivery_tag;
    }

    /**
     * Get the exchange name on which the message was published.
     *
     * @return string The exchange name on which the message was published.
     */
    public function getExchangeName() {
        return $this->exchange_name;
    }

    /**
     * Get the expiration of the message.
     *
     * @return string The message expiration.
     */
    public function getExpiration() {
        return $this->expiration;
    }

    /**
     * Get a specific message header.
     *
     * @param string $header_key Name of the header to get the value from.
     *
     * @return string|boolean The contents of the specified header or FALSE
     *                        if not set.
     */
    public function getHeader($header_key) {
        if(!isset($this->headers[$header_key]))
            return false;

        return $this->headers[$header_key];
    }

    /**
     * Get the headers of the message.
     *
     * @return array An array of key value pairs associated with the message.
     */
    public function getHeaders() {
        return $this->headers;
    }

    /**
     * Get the message id of the message.
     *
     * @return string The message id
     */
    public function getMessageId() {
        return $this->message_id;
    }

    /**
     * Get the priority of the message.
     *
     * @return int The message priority.
     */
    public function getPriority() {
        return $this->priority;
    }

    /**
     * Get the reply-to address of the message.
     *
     * @return string The contents of the reply to field.
     */
    public function getReplyTo() {
        return $this->reply_to;
    }

    /**
     * Get the routing key of the message.
     *
     * @return string The message routing key.
     */
    public function getRoutingKey() {
        return $this->routing_key;
    }

    /**
     * Get the timestamp of the message.
     *
     * @return string The message timestamp.
     */
    public function getTimeStamp() {
        return $this->timestamp;
    }

    /**
     * Get the message type.
     *
     * @return string The message type.
     */
    public function getType() {
        return $this->type;
    }

    /**
     * Get the message user id.
     *
     * @return string The message user id.
     */
    public function getUserId() {
        return $this->user_id;
    }

    /**
     * Whether this is a redelivery of the message.
     *
     * Whether this is a redelivery of a message. If this message has been
     * delivered and AMQPEnvelope::nack() was called, the message will be put
     * back on the queue to be redelivered, at which point the message will
     * always return TRUE when this method is called.
     *
     * @return bool TRUE if this is a redelivery, FALSE otherwise.
     */
    public function isRedelivery() {
        return $this->is_redelivery;
    }

    /**
     * Build AMQPEnvelope from a php-amqplib message;
     *
     * @param AMQPMessage $message
     * @return AMQPEnvelope
     */
    public static function fromAMQPMessage(AMQPMessage $message) {

        $envelope = new self();
        $envelope->app_id = $message->has('app_id') ? $message->get('app_id') : '';
        $envelope->body = $message->body;
        $envelope->content_encoding  = $message->has('content_encoding') ? $message->get('content_encoding') : '';
        $envelope->content_type = $message->has('content_type') ? $message->get('content_type') : '';
        $envelope->correlation_id = $message->has('correlation_id') ? $message->get('correlation_id') : '';
        $envelope->delivery_mode = $message->has('delivery_mode') ? $message->get('delivery_mode') : '';
        $envelope->delivery_tag = $message->has('delivery_tag') ? $message->get('delivery_tag') : '';
        $envelope->exchange_name = $message->has('exchange') ? $message->get('exchange') : '';
        $envelope->expiration = $message->has('expiration') ? $message->get('expiration') : '';
        $envelope->headers = $message->has('application_headers') ? $message->get('application_headers')->getNativeData() : '';
        $envelope->message_id = $message->has('message_id') ? $message->get('message_id') : '';
        $envelope->priority = $message->has('priority') ? $message->get('priority') : '';
        $envelope->reply_to = $message->has('reply_to') ? $message->get('reply_to') : '';
        $envelope->routing_key = $message->has('routing_key') ? $message->get('routing_key') : '';
        $envelope->timestamp = $message->has('timestamp') ? $message->get('timestamp') : '';
        $envelope->type = $message->has('type') ? $message->get('type') : '';
        $envelope->user_id = $message->has('user_id') ? $message->get('user_id') : '';
        $envelope->is_redelivery = $message->has('redelivered') ? $message->get('redelivered') : '';

        return $envelope;
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Q: Heapsort. How is it possible so simulate worstcase-scenario? I am rather clear on how to programme it, but I am not sure on the definition, e.g. how to write it down in mathematics terms.
A normal heapsort is done with N elements in O notation. So O(log(n))
I just started with heapsort, so I might be a little bit off here.
But how can I for example look for a random element, when there are N elements?
And then pick that random element and delete it?
I was thinking that in a worst case - situation it has to go through the whole tree (Because the element could either be at the first place or at the last place, e.g. highest or lowest).
But how can I write that down in mathematics terms?

A: Heapsort's worst case performance is O(n log n), and to quote alestanis:

Max in max-heap: O(1). Min in min-heap: O(1). Opposite cases in O(n).

Here's an SO-answer explaining how to do the opposite cases in O(1) if you create the heap yourself.

A: To build maxheap array worstcase is O(n) and to max heapify complexcity in worst case is O(logn) so HeapSort worstCase is O(nlogn)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


MPL is an e-sports startup where users can play casual games, ranging from cricket to pool to racing and win money, depending on contests.
The financials are the last results of Flipkart Group as an independent company, and since then US-based retail giant Walmart acquired 77% stake for $16 billion in August 2018.
Bahl said he wanted to tell the story behind the "turnaround" at the Gurugram-based company after the aborted merger with Flipkart in 2017.


text:
Q: Does ActiveRecord's find method automatically call to_i on its argument? I've come to the conclusion that ActiveRecord automatically calls to_i on its argument, but would appreciate if anybody can confirm, particularly through a reference to some documentation.
The way I came to the conclusion is best illustrated with the following code sample:
dest_task = WorkEffort.find(params[:task_dest_id])

params[:task_src_ids].split.each do |src_id|
    WorkEffort.find(src_id).move_to_child_of dest_task
end

When I ran the above only the record associated with the first src_id was processed although I knew the task_src_ids parameter contained something such as "78,79".  Thinking it through, find must be calling to_i on that string, which will ignore everything after the first non-digit and return 78.
If find wasn't calling to_i an error should have resulted, and I would have to call to_i explicitly.  I of course fixed the code by calling "split(',')" and now it processes multiple task_src_ids instead of just the one that comes before the first comma.
I know I've sort of answered this myself, but as a Ruby/Rails newbie am looking for confirmation, and a link to relevant documentation, plus I thought it could help out others in the future.  Thanks in advance

A: [Answering this with activerecord-2.3.14code, as you didn't specify a version.]
Ultimately, your value is going to be run through the Quoting#quote method. I've pasted the beginning of that here, and as you can see on the block starting at line 15 when your column type is an int it will end up calling .to_i on the value passed in.
  1 module ActiveRecord
  2   module ConnectionAdapters # :nodoc:
  3     module Quoting
  4       # Quotes the column value to help prevent
  5       # {SQL injection attacks}[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection].
  6       def quote(value, column = nil)
  7         # records are quoted as their primary key
  8         return value.quoted_id if value.respond_to?(:quoted_id)
  9
 10         case value
 11           when String, ActiveSupport::Multibyte::Chars
 12             value = value.to_s
 13             if column && column.type == :binary && column.class.respond_to?(:string_to_binary)
 14               "'#{quote_string(column.class.string_to_binary(value))}'" # ' (for ruby-mode)
 15             elsif column && [:integer, :float].include?(column.type)
 16               value = column.type == :integer ? value.to_i : value.to_f
 17               value.to_s
 18             else
 19               "'#{quote_string(value)}'" # ' (for ruby-mode)
 20             end

A: Not sure since when but now in Rails 6, to_i will be called automatically to the argument of find if the primary key of the Active Record is an integer which I think it is in most cases.
Product.find 10        # #<Product id: 10>
Product.find '10'      # #<Product id: 10>
Product.find '10-ten'  # #<Product id: 10>

https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/FinderMethods.html#method-i-find


Muskegon Heights, MI – A drop in pressure in the Muskegon Heights water supply has occurred due to a water main break on November 16, 2012. Bacterial contamination may have occurred in the water system. Residents and businesses, including food establishments, in the City of Muskegon Heights area may be affected.
Bacteria are common throughout our environment and are not generally harmful. However, whenever a water system loses pressure for any significant length of time, precautionary measures are recommended.
DO NOT DRINK OR SERVE WATER WITHOUT BOILING IT FIRST. Bring all water to a boil, let it boil for one minute, and let it cool before using, or use bottled water. Boiling kills bacteria and other organisms in the water. Boiled or bottled water should be used for drinking, making ice, coffee, pop or other beverages, and preparing food until further notice.
Food establishment operators should follow the instructions in the "Emergency Action Plans for Retail Food Establishments" guide. This document is available on the Michigan Department of Agriculture Web site at www.michigan.gov/michiganprepares. Instructions are available in English, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese.
Muskegon County Public Health food safety inspectors are monitoring efforts of impacted food establishments to ensure the safety of food sold in the area. The City of Muskegon Heights is working to restore pressure. Water staff will take remedial actions such as flushing and collecting bacteriological samples from the system to determine when the water meets the state drinking water standards. The problem has been corrected and water service is being restored at the time.
This boil water notice remains in effect until results from the sampling verify the water is safe to drink. Another notice will be issued when the boil water advisory has been lifted.
Please share this notice with other people who drink this water by distributing this notice or posting in a public place.


Fourth of July American Writers! "Celebrating the Birthdays of Dead Writers" @ Ooh La La Market in Pritchard Park, Saturday, July 4!
Opening Day for Summer 2015 season of "Celebrating the Birthdays of Dead Writers" @ Ooh La La Market in Pritchard Park, Saturday, June 6!
En Garde Arts: Inspirational Site-Specific Theater from 1985-99 Comes Back in 2014!
Celebrating Two Birthdays! SciFi Writer Jack Williamson (1908-2006), and the Crow and Quill's 1st Year (2014-15)!
Passersby are invited to chose from selections by this German novelist, short story writer and poet who won the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1946. The selected passages will then be read to them.
More information about Hermann Hesse can be found at these links from Wikipedia and at the Nobel Prize website.
"Sentimentality is a basking in feelings that in reality you don't take seriously enough to make the slightest sacrifice to or ever translate into action."
Copyright © 2012. Monika Gross & At-A-Site Theater. All rights reserved.


Medical Risk Institute is a firm formed exclusively to provide proactive counsel to the health care community, help providers understand where liability risks originate and work to reduce or remove these risks. Their mission is to utilize their sub-specialized knowledge base and extensive expertise to a.) identify emerging threats of liability risk for physician groups and hospitals and b.) defuse these risks.
Why the Medical Risk Institute?
Ten percent of every dollar spent on health care is attributed to the cost of liability and defensive medicine (Price Waterhouse Coopers).
By age 65, 75 percent of physicians in low-risk specialties and 99 percent of those in high-risk specialties will face a claim (The New England Journal of Medicine).
2013 saw 2.6 billion in health care recovery and judgments under the False Claims Act, not including the $443 million recovered by state Medicaid programs (U.S. Department of Justice).
From instructional courses and materials to in-depth audits focused upon reducing liability claims, the Medical Risk Institute's interactive and engaging programs will give physicians and staff the skills needed for protection from liability claims for years to come.
Staying compliant with billing, privacy and employment law is essential for risk management. Medical Risk Institute offers a compliance calendar to help keep practices up-to-date with some of the highest priority compliance tasks each month – and all year long.
Medical Risk Institute offers online HIPAA training. This resource is vital to health care practices, as all faculty and staff are federally required to receive HIPAA training; this class fulfills that requirement.
As a Fuel member, you have access to discounted HIPAA certification training for your annual staffing requirements and a variety of service packages built to meet your compliance needs.
Medical Risk Institute is a valuable resource for your practice when it comes to HIPAA education and compliance. Visit the MedRisk Compliance Calendar to help you keep up with monthly compliance tasks at http://www.medriskinstitute.com/articles-resources/2019-compliance-calendar/.
For more information on the Medical Risk Institute, including the complete package details and pricing model (built out annually by number of providers), contact your regional manager or Medical Risk Institute today.
Interested in learning more about Industry Topics?


text:
First Class Photos
Complaints over Lincolnshire police increase by 16 per cent in a year
By Daniel Jaines, Local Democracy Reporter
Published: 17:20, 13 August 2019
| Updated: 17:21, 13 August 2019
Lincolnshire Police chiefs have put a 16 per cent increase in complaints about the force over the past year down to the "strain of the impact and complexity" of work and a "challenge around numbers".
A report to the Public Assurance committee on Monday said 605 complaints were received last year, with the worst month being June 2019, when 68 were made.
Deputy Chief Constable Jason Harwin said the data correlated with a decrease in user satisfaction of 7.5 per cent around the public being kept informed over investigations.
Jason Harwin(9897880)
The meeting was told the figures correlated with other forces and a "reduction in resources".
"We're starting to see some strain of the impact and complexity of work we're doing and a challenge around numbers," said Mr Harwin.
"Clearly officers are not having enough time to do some of the things they would expect and want to do in terms of keeping victims up to date at various stages of their investigations."
Around 49 per cent of complaints were for neglect and failure of duty, while 15 per cent were for incivility.
Mr Harwin told those attending that 71 per cent of complaints were able to be dealt with "locally", not resulting in a misconduct or performance action.
He said early action ensured the force "resolved the issue, while at the same time making sure the staff member is dealt with appropriately".
"We are a learning organisation, we're not necessarily looking to blame staff if we get it wrong," he said.
"We learn pretty quickly, but yes, if we continue to get it wrong, clearly we need to take action."
Lincolnshire Police and Crime Commissioner Marc Jones said he preferred complaints being dealt with at a local level. "I do believe organisations learn best from complaints by dealing with complaints. I don't wish to be more interventionist than that," he told the meeting.
AnimalsCourtsHuman Interest
Daniel Jaines, Local Democracy Reporter
Find Jobs in Grantham

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Kids on Camera sees an increase in web visitors and conversions with a new mobile responsive website and SEO (search engine optimization).
Kids on Camera is a leading kids casting agency in Johannesburg.
Natasha Brickman, Owner of Kids on Camera, came to Siteweb Online Marketing to strengthen her online brand and Google search presence, with the hope to drive highly qualified traffic to her website, resulting in increased conversion rates. Siteweb Online Marketing was able to accomplish these goals with a responsive website redesign and ongoing search engine optimization.
Visitor goals were accomplished by implementing a content marketing strategy. Within a few months, the number of visitors started to increase and since then, the website visitor growth has never stopped.
Through the implementation of effective onsite and offsite search engine optimization, Kids on Camera experienced a constant % increase in search engine traffic on a month to month and year to year basis.


When I wake up in the morning I don't read the newspaper, I read blogs. Blogs are part of my creative and life inspiration. Blogs I love cover all sorts of aspects of my life including interiors (hello, renovations!), art ( hello creative inspiration!) and diy (hello, annoying the berjeebers out of my husband).
Interiors Addict - an Aussie site that has all thing interiors and design from around the globe.
Recycled Interiors - the lovely Helen Edwards has created this site for all things recycled, Eco and sustainable in the interior and design world. Helen is also features lots of small business on her site and I have been lucky enough to be included in this list. You can read my feature here.
Sfgirlbybay - a beautiful blog of an eclectic mix of interiors, design and homewares from around the world.
A Beautiful Mess - from room makeovers, photography tips and scrapbooking. This very cool and successful blog has got it all.
Paper and Stitch - looking for a weekend DIY, this is the blog to visit.
Deignlovefest - yummy recipes, great giveaways and free desktop wallpapers are just some of the things you will find here.
Dabblings - great mixed media inspiration and art journaling fun.
Journal Girl - more mixed media inspiration and colour love!
Painting Grace - is the blog of the very talented Georgie, whom I was lucky enough to be partnered with in the Springtime Surprise project. You can read all about that loveliness here. On Georgies blog you will find beautiful and sophisticated art using paint and flowers as some of her main mediums.
These are just a few of the blogs I love for all sorts of inspiration. Have you got any blogs that I should know about?
Be sure to subscribe to my newsletter so you don't miss out on other great blogs I will share about in the future.


text:
Texas Azerbaijanis
News about Azerbaijan
Travel to Azerbaijan
UN Security Council Resolutions on Nagorno-Karabakh
Music of Azerbaijan
Musical Instruments of Azerbaijan
Azerbaijani Music Examples [Mp3]
Karabakh Horse
The Flower of Karabakh
Azerbaijan Oil & Gas
BP launches production at new oil platform in Azerbaijan's largest field
ByTexas Azerbaijanis
Jan 29, 2014 azerbaijan, BP, largest platform
BP, project operator for the development of the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli offshore fields block, has commissioned the new West Chirag platform, a source in the Azerbaijani oil and gas market told Trend today.
"The platform has already been commissioned, and oil production started there," the source stressed.
The new platform was constructed in the framework of the Chirag oil project, which envisages an increase in oil production at ACG block.
The platform was installed at a depth of 170 meters between the already-running production platforms Chirag and Guneshli.
The Chirag Oil Project (COP) envisages an investment of $6 billion.
In total it is planned to produce over 300 million barrels of oil within the implementation of the project (by the end of the contract on Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli in 2024).
The contract for development of Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli large offshore field was signed in 1994. Shares are distributed as follows: BP (operator in Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli) – 35.78 per cent, Chevron – 11.27 per cent, Inpex – 10.96 per cent, AzACG – 11.65 per cent, Statoil – 8.56 per cent, Exxon – 8 per cent, TPAO – 6.75 per cent, Itochu – 4.3 per cent and ONGC – 2.72 per cent.
Source: Trend.az
Black January: The Path To Independence – OpEd
Azerbaijan-Georgia trade reaches $1.35bn
By Texas Azerbaijanis
Armenia attacks civilians in Azerbaijan
Oct 19, 2020 Editor In Chief
Azerbaijan – Armenia War September 2020 Timeline
Sep 28, 2020 Texas Azerbaijanis
Azerbaijan History
Theodora The Great Komnene
Around the World (16)
Azerbaijani News in U.S. (12)
Azeris in Texas (7)
Baku (17)
Food/Drink (3)
Galveston (1)
Interesting (26)
Journeys to Success (3)
Khojaly (1)
Tech News (17)
Travel to Azerbaijan (1)
Azerbaijan and Armenia at war?
Journeys to Success


The prize is provided by Club Rossie.
Club Rossie, their agents, related companies, their families, agencies and associated companies or anyone professionally connected with the promotion are excluded from the competition.
To enter you must "Like" the Win A House In Dublin page (facebook.com/winahouseindublin) "Tag" a friend in the comments of the pinned post and "Share" the pinned post.
The competition will run from 20.00 BST on Sunday, 21st October 2018 until 23.59 BST on Thursday, 25th October 2018.
One winner will be selected at random from all entries and announced on the Win A House In Dublin Facebook page on Friday, 26th October 2018.
Club Rossie's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
The Winner shall be notified via Facebook and given 3 calendar days from the date of notification to claim the prize. In the event that the Winner fails to respond within that period, chooses not to accept the Prize or is ineligible for the Draw, he/she shall be immediately disqualified from the Draw and he/she shall forthwith relinquish any right or entitlement to the Prize. Club Rossie shall then draw from all remaining eligible entries and an alternative Entrant shall be selected as winner of the Prize. The same terms will apply.
Club Rossie reserves the right to suspend or terminate the competition, extend the closing date or amend these terms and conditions.
Prize is not transferable for cash or any other alternative.
Club Rossie accepts no liability for any losses or injuries suffered in connection with the prize.
This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook. The information that you provide will only be used for the purposes of this promotion.


Global ethers demand is expected to grow at 3-4% per year. In contrast, global gasoline demand is expected to grow at a much slower rate: 1-2% per year.
Within a context of improving fuel quality standards, ethers efficiently replace lost octane from tighter sulfur, olefin and aromatic specifications.
As a source of octane, MTBE is more cost-effective than widely-used alkylates or reformates.
Unlike ethanol, the use of non-corrosive, non-hygroscopic, ethers as oxygenates do not entail increased infrastructure and maintenance. Ethers reduce overall emissions potential, while ethanol triggers ozone problems.
The Worldwide Fuels Charter (2013), the document that represents the position of "vehicle and engine manufacturers from around the world", calls ethers the preferred oxygenates.
More than 60 countries worldwide already use ethers as gasoline oxygenates.
15 out of the top 20 gasoline-consuming countries already use ethers as fuel oxygenates.


text:
Archaeological Finds Not mentioned in books
In: Book Review | cities/geography | Essays | Events/Cultural/Educational/Arts | social articles
10 Incredible Archaeological Finds Your History Books Probably Didn't Mention
1. L'Anse aux Meadows:
Many believe that it was Columbus who discovered the New World, but this settlement in Newfoundland proves that the Vikings were the first to settle in North America. The site was built 1,000 years ago, and was able to support 30 to 160 Vikings.
The vikings were into North America before it was cool!
2. Saksaywaman:
This complex fortress sits on the outskirts of Cusco, Peru, the former capital of the Incan empire. The rocks are so tightly fit together you can't even slip a piece of paper between them.
Also, the Incans managed to build this without mortar. If you know anything about construction (I don't), this is pretty important to the process.
3. Mohenjo-daro:
This town was built in 2600 BCE in present-day Pakistan. It is one of the first examples of city-planning in human history. It has roads and even a draining system similar to a sewer.
The city was mysteriously abandoned seven centuries after it was founded. It wasn't rediscovered until 1922. How do you lose a whole city like this?
4. The Gate of the Sun:
Located in west Bolivia, this gate is the precisely cut, megalithic stone archway of the Tiwanaku empire. The empire stretched from Peru to parts of Bolivia 1500 years ago. It was the most powerful South American nation before the Incans.
Scholars believe this might not be the original location of the archway, suggesting a bizarre, Stonehenge-like situation here.
5. Stone Age tunnels:
Just a few years ago, archaeologists found a new, underground network of tunnels built by people of the Stone Age. It stretches from Scotland, through Europe, and into Turkey. (This one is Not believable)
deusnexus
They are calling it a "highway," but given that most of the tunnels are only 70 cm wide in diameter, it's more like the playground in a Chuck E Cheese's.
Tags: adonis49, Archaeological Finds, L'Anse aux Meadows, Mohenjo-daro, Not mentioned in books, Saksaywaman, Tiwanaku empire, Vikings
Britain PM Theresa May's Speech: Laying Out the U.K's Plan for Brexit
In: economy/finance | Essays | Events/Cultural/Educational/Arts | political Artical | social articles | women
May's Speech Laying Out the U.K's Plan for Brexit
In a major speech on Tuesday, the British Prime Minister Theresa May outlined a 12-point plan on what relationship Britain will seek to have with the E.U. once it leaves the bloc.
Here's the text of her speech, as delivered at London's Lancaster House on Jan. 17
A little over six months ago, the British people voted for change.
They voted to shape a brighter future for our country.
They voted to leave the European Union and embrace the world. (If they even failed to embrace Europe, how will they embrace Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Africa…?)
And they did so with their eyes open: accepting that the road ahead will be uncertain at times, but believing that it leads towards a brighter future for their children – and their grandchildren too. (Eyes wide shut?)
it is the job of this Government to deliver it. (Not this one or the next one)
That means more than negotiating our new relationship with the EU. It means taking the opportunity of this great moment of national change to step back and ask ourselves what kind of country we want to be. (Had decades to do that and failed to let the people participate and communicate with it)
My answer is clear. I want this United Kingdom to emerge from this period of change stronger, fairer, more united and more outward-looking than ever before. I want us to be a secure, prosperous, tolerant country – a magnet for international talent and a home to the pioneers and innovators who will shape the world ahead. I want us to be a truly Global Britain – the best friend and neighbour to our European partners, but a country that reaches beyond the borders of Europe too. A country that gets out into the world to build relationships with old friends and new allies alike.
I want Britain to be what we have the potential, talent and ambition to be. A great, global trading nation that is respected around the world and strong, confident and united at home.
A Plan for Britain
That is why this Government has a Plan for Britain. One that gets us the right deal abroad but also ensures we get a better deal for ordinary working people at home.
It's why that plan sets out how we will use this moment of change to build a stronger economy and a fairer society by embracing genuine economic and social reform.
Why our new Modern Industrial Strategy is being developed, to ensure every nation and area of the United Kingdom can make the most of the opportunities ahead.
Why we will go further to reform our schools to ensure every child has the knowledge and the skills they need to thrive in post-Brexit Britain. Why as we continue to bring the deficit down, we will take a balanced approach by investing in our economic infrastructure – because it can transform the growth potential of our economy, and improve the quality of people's lives across the whole country.
It's why we will put the preservation of our precious Union at the heart of everything we do. Because it is only by coming together as one great union of nations and people that we can make the most of the opportunities ahead.
The result of the referendum was not a decision to turn inward and retreat from the world.
Because Britain's history and culture is profoundly internationalist. (Colonialist, imperialist?)
We are a European country – and proud of our shared European heritage – but we are also a country that has always looked beyond Europe to the wider world. (Taking the strategic position that USA is the main support instead of Europe?)
That is why we are one of the most racially diverse countries in Europe, one of the most multicultural members of the European Union, and why – whether we are talking about India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, countries in Africa or those that are closer to home in Europe – so many of us have close friends and relatives from across the world.
Instinctively, we want to travel to, study in, trade with countries not just in Europe but beyond the borders of our continent. (A lot of hog wash)
Even now as we prepare to leave the EU, we are planning for the next biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in 2018 – a reminder of our unique and proud global relationships.
A message from Britain to the rest of Europe
And it is important to recognise this fact. June the 23rd was not the moment Britain chose to step back from the world. It was the moment we chose to build a truly Global Britain.
I know that this – and the other reasons Britain took such a decision – is not always well understood among our friends and allies in Europe. And I know many fear that this might herald the beginning of a greater unravelling of the EU.
But let me be clear: I do not want that to happen. It would not be in the best interests of Britain. It remains overwhelmingly and compellingly in Britain's national interest that the EU should succeed. And that is why I hope in the months and years ahead we will all reflect on the lessons of Britain's decision to leave.
So let me take this opportunity to set out the reasons for our decision and to address the people of Europe directly.
It's not simply because our history and culture is profoundly internationalist, important though that is. Many in Britain have always felt that the United Kingdom's place in the European Union came at the expense of our global ties, and of a bolder embrace of free trade with the wider world.
There are other important reasons too.
1. Our political traditions are different.
Unlike other European countries, we have no written constitution, but the principle of Parliamentary Sovereignty is the basis of our unwritten constitutional settlement. We have only a recent history of devolved governance – though it has rapidly embedded itself – and we have little history of coalition government.
The public expect to be able to hold their governments to account very directly, and as a result supra-national institutions as strong as those created by the European Union sit very uneasily in relation to our political history and way of life.
And, while I know Britain might at times have been seen as an awkward member state, the European Union has struggled to deal with the diversity of its member countries and their interests.
It bends towards uniformity, not flexibility. David Cameron's negotiation was a valiant final attempt to make it work for Britain – and I want to thank all those elsewhere in Europe who helped him reach an agreement – but the blunt truth, as we know, is that there was not enough flexibility on many important matters for a majority of British voters. (Have the cake and Eat it too?)
Now I do not believe that these things apply uniquely to Britain. Britain is not the only member state where there is a strong attachment to accountable and democratic government, such a strong internationalist mindset, or a belief that diversity within Europe should be celebrated. And so I believe there is a lesson in Brexit not just for Britain but, if it wants to succeed, for the EU itself.
Because our continent's great strength has always been its diversity.
And there are two ways of dealing with different interests. You can respond by trying to hold things together by force, tightening a vice-like grip that ends up crushing into tiny pieces the very things you want to protect. Or you can respect difference, cherish it even, and reform the EU so that it deals better with the wonderful diversity of its member states.
So to our friends across Europe, let me say this.
Our vote to leave the European Union was no rejection of the values we share.
The decision to leave the EU represents no desire to become more distant to you, our friends and neighbours. It was no attempt to do harm to the EU itself or to any of its remaining member states.
We do not want to turn the clock back to the days when Europe was less peaceful, less secure and less able to trade freely.
2. It was a vote to restore, as we see it, our parliamentary democracy, national self-determination, and to become even more global and internationalist in action and in spirit.
We will continue to be reliable partners, willing allies and close friends. We want to buy your goods and services, sell you ours, trade with you as freely as possible, and work with one another to make sure we are all safer, more secure and more prosperous through continued friendship.
You will still be welcome in this country as we hope our citizens will be welcome in yours.
At a time when together we face a serious threat from our enemies, Britain's unique intelligence capabilities will continue to help to keep people in Europe safe from terrorism. And at a time when there is growing concern about European security, Britain's servicemen and women, based in European countries including Estonia, Poland and Romania, will continue to do their duty.
We are leaving the European Union, but we are not leaving Europe. (You cannot, even if you wish it)
And that is why we seek a new and equal partnership – between an independent, self-governing, Global Britain and our friends and allies in the EU.
Not partial membership of the European Union, associate membership of the European Union, or anything that leaves us half-in, half-out. We do not seek to adopt a model already enjoyed by other countries. We do not seek to hold on to bits of membership as we leave.
No, the United Kingdom is leaving the European Union. And my job is to get the right deal for Britain as we do.
Objectives and Ambitions
So today I want to outline our objectives for the negotiation ahead. 12 objectives that amount to one big goal: a new, positive and constructive partnership between Britain and the European Union.
And as we negotiate that partnership, we will be driven by some simple principles: we will provide as much certainty and clarity as we can at every stage. And we will take this opportunity to make Britain stronger, to make Britain fairer, and to build a more Global Britain too.
Certainty and clarity
1. Certainty
The first objective is crucial. We will provide certainty wherever we can. (There is no certainty: Huge lie from the start)
We are about to enter a negotiation. That means there will be give and take. There will have to be compromises. It will require imagination on both sides. And not everybody will be able to know everything at every stage.
But I recognise how important it is to provide business, the public sector, and everybody with as much certainty as possible as we move through the process.
So where we can offer that certainty, we will do so.
That is why last year we acted quickly to give clarity about farm payments and university funding.
And it is why, as we repeal the European Communities Act, we will convert the "acquis" – the body of existing EU law – into British law.
This will give the country maximum certainty as we leave the EU. The same rules and laws will apply on the day after Brexit as they did before. And it will be for the British Parliament to decide on any changes to that law after full scrutiny and proper Parliamentary debate.
And when it comes to Parliament, there is one other way in which I would like to provide certainty. I can confirm today that the Government will put the final deal that is agreed between the UK and the EU to a vote in both Houses of Parliament, before it comes into force.
A Stronger Britain
Our second guiding principle is to build a stronger Britain.
2. Control of our own laws
That means taking control of our own affairs, as those who voted in their millions to leave the European Union demanded we must.
So we will take back control of our laws and bring an end to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in Britain.
Leaving the European Union will mean that our laws will be made in Westminster, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. And those laws will be interpreted by judges not in Luxembourg but in courts across this country.
Because we will not have truly left the European Union if we are not in control of our own laws.
3. Strengthen the Union
A stronger Britain demands that we do something else – strengthen the precious union between the four nations of the United Kingdom.
At this momentous time, it is more important than ever that we face the future together, united by what makes us strong: the bonds that unite us as a people, and our shared interest in the UK being an open, successful trading nation in the future.
And I hope that same spirit of unity will apply in Northern Ireland in particular over the coming months in the National Assembly elections, and the main parties there will work together to re-establish a partnership government as soon as possible.
Foreign affairs are of course the responsibility of the UK Government, and in dealing with them we act in the interests of all parts of the United Kingdom. As Prime Minister, I take that responsibility seriously.
I have also been determined from the start that the devolved administrations should be fully engaged in this process.
That is why the Government has set up a Joint Ministerial Committee on EU Negotiations, so ministers from each of the UK's devolved administrations can contribute to the process of planning for our departure from the European Union.
We have already received a paper from the Scottish Government, and look forward to receiving a paper from the Welsh Government shortly. Both papers will be considered as part of this important process. We won't agree on everything, but I look forward to working with the administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to deliver a Brexit that works for the whole of the United Kingdom.
Part of that will mean working very carefully to ensure that – as powers are repatriated from Brussels back to Britain – the right powers are returned to Westminster, and the right powers are passed to the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
As we do so, our guiding principle must be to ensure that – as we leave the European Union – no new barriers to living and doing business within our own Union are created,
That means maintaining the necessary common standards and frameworks for our own domestic market, empowering the UK as an open, trading nation to strike the best trade deals around the world, and protecting the common resources of our islands.
And as we do this, I should equally be clear that no decisions currently taken by the devolved administrations will be removed from them.
4. Maintain the Common Travel Area with Ireland
We cannot forget that, as we leave, the United Kingdom will share a land border with the EU, and maintaining that Common Travel Area with the Republic of Ireland will be an important priority for the UK in the talks ahead.
There has been a Common Travel Area between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland for many years. Indeed, it was formed before either of our two countries were members of the European Union. And the family ties and bonds of affection that unite our two countries mean that there will always be a special relationship between us.
So we will work to deliver a practical solution that allows the maintenance of the Common Travel Area with the Republic, while protecting the integrity of the United Kingdom's immigration system.
Nobody wants to return to the borders of the past, so we will make it a priority to deliver a practical solution as soon as we can.
A Fairer Britain
The third principle is to build a fairer Britain. That means ensuring it is fair to everyone who lives and works in this country.
5. Control of immigration
And that is why we will ensure we can control immigration to Britain from Europe.
We will continue to attract the brightest and the best to work or study in Britain – indeed openness to international talent must remain one of this country's most distinctive assets – but that process must be managed properly so that our immigration system serves the national interest.
So we will get control of the number of people coming to Britain from the EU.
Because while controlled immigration can bring great benefits – filling skills shortages, delivering public services, making British businesses the world-beaters they often are – when the numbers get too high, public support for the system falters.
In the last decade or so, we have seen record levels of net migration in Britain, and that sheer volume has put pressure on public services, like schools, stretched our infrastructure, especially housing, and put a downward pressure on wages for working class people. As Home Secretary for six years, I know that you cannot control immigration overall when there is free movement to Britain from Europe.
Britain is an open and tolerant country. We will always want immigration, especially high-skilled immigration, we will always want immigration from Europe, and we will always welcome individual migrants as friends. But the message from the public before and during the referendum campaign was clear: Brexit must mean control of the number of people who come to Britain from Europe. And that is what we will deliver.
6. Rights for EU nationals in Britain, and British nationals in the EU
Fairness demands that we deal with another issue as soon as possible too. We want to guarantee the rights of EU citizens who are already living in Britain, and the rights of British nationals in other member states, as early as we can.
I have told other EU leaders that we could give people the certainty they want straight away, and reach such a deal now.
Many of them favour such an agreement – one or two others do not – but I want everyone to know that it remains an important priority for Britain – and for many other member states – to resolve this challenge as soon as possible. Because it is the right and fair thing to do.
7. Protect workers' rights
And a fairer Britain is a country that protects and enhances the rights people have at work.
That is why, as we translate the body of European law into our domestic regulations, we will ensure that workers rights are fully protected and maintained.
Indeed, under my leadership, not only will the Government protect the rights of workers' set out in European legislation, we will build on them. Because under this Conservative Government, we will make sure legal protection for workers keeps pace with the changing labour market – and that the voices of workers are heard by the boards of publicly-listed companies for the first time.
A Truly Global Britain
But the great prize for this country – the opportunity ahead – is to use this moment to build a truly Global Britain. A country that reaches out to old friends and new allies. A great, global, trading nation. And one of the firmest advocates for free trade anywhere in the world.
8. Free trade with European markets
That starts with our close friends and neighbours in Europe. So as a priority, we will pursue a bold and ambitious Free Trade Agreement with the European Union.
This agreement should allow for the freest possible trade in goods and services between Britain and the EU's member states. It should give British companies the maximum freedom to trade with and operate within European markets – and let European businesses do the same in Britain.
But I want to be clear. What I am proposing cannot mean membership of the EU's Single Market.
European leaders have said many times that membership means accepting the "four freedoms" of goods, capital, services and people. And being out of the EU but a member of the Single Market would mean complying with the EU's rules and regulations that implement those freedoms, without having a vote on what those rules and regulations are. It would mean accepting a role for the European Court of Justice that would see it still having direct legal authority in our country.
It would to all intents and purposes mean not leaving the EU at all.
And that is why both sides in the referendum campaign made it clear that a vote to leave the EU would be a vote to leave the Single Market.
So we do not seek membership of the Single Market. Instead we seek the greatest possible access to it through a new, comprehensive, bold and ambitious Free Trade Agreement.
That Agreement may take in elements of current Single Market arrangements in certain areas – on the export of cars and lorries for example, or the freedom to provide financial services across national borders – as it makes no sense to start again from scratch when Britain and the remaining Member States have adhered to the same rules for so many years.
But I respect the position taken by European leaders who have been clear about their position, just as I am clear about mine. So an important part of the new strategic partnership we seek with the EU will be the pursuit of the greatest possible access to the Single Market, on a fully reciprocal basis, through a comprehensive Free Trade Agreement.
And because we will no longer be members of the Single Market, we will not be required to contribute huge sums to the EU budget. There may be some specific European programmes in which we might want to participate. If so, and this will be for us to decide, it is reasonable that we should make an appropriate contribution. But the principle is clear: the days of Britain making vast contributions to the European Union every year will end.
9. New trade agreements with other countries (As Obama warned you, you will Not have priority over others in trade negotiations)
But it is not just trade with the EU we should be interested in. A Global Britain must be free to strike trade agreements with countries from outside the European Union too.
Because important though our trade with the EU is and will remain, it is clear that the UK needs to increase significantly its trade with the fastest growing export markets in the world.
Since joining the EU, trade as a percentage of GDP has broadly stagnated in the UK. That is why it is time for Britain to get out into the world and rediscover its role as a great, global, trading nation.
This is such a priority for me that when I became Prime Minister I established, for the first time, a Department for International Trade, led by Liam Fox.
We want to get out into the wider world, to trade and do business all around the globe. Countries including China, Brazil, and the Gulf States have already expressed their interest in striking trade deals with us. We have started discussions on future trade ties with countries like Australia, New Zealand and India. And President Elect Trump has said Britain is not "at the back of the queue" for a trade deal with the United States, the world's biggest economy, but front of the line.
I know my emphasis on striking trade agreements with countries outside Europe has led to questions about whether Britain seeks to remain a member of the EU's Customs Union. And it is true that full Customs Union membership prevents us from negotiating our own comprehensive trade deals.
Now, I want Britain to be able to negotiate its own trade agreements. But I also want tariff-free trade with Europe and cross-border trade there to be as frictionless as possible.
That means I do not want Britain to be part of the Common Commercial Policy and I do not want us to be bound by the Common External Tariff. These are the elements of the Customs Union that prevent us from striking our own comprehensive trade agreements with other countries. But I do want us to have a customs agreement with the EU.
Whether that means we must reach a completely new customs agreement, become an associate member of the Customs Union in some way, or remain a signatory to some elements of it, I hold no preconceived position. I have an open mind on how we do it. It is not the means that matter, but the ends.
And those ends are clear: I want to remove as many barriers to trade as possible. And I want Britain to be free to establish our own tariff schedules at the World Trade Organisation, meaning we can reach new trade agreements not just with the European Union but with old friends and new allies from outside Europe too.
10. The best place for science and innovation (30% of UK university grants were provided by the EU. How are you going to substitute that largess?
A Global Britain must also be a country that looks to the future. That means being one of the best places in the world for science and innovation.
One of our great strengths as a nation is the breadth and depth of our academic and scientific communities, backed up by some of the world's best universities. And we have a proud history of leading and supporting cutting-edge research and innovation.
So we will also welcome agreement to continue to collaborate with our European partners on major science, research, and technology initiatives.
From space exploration to clean energy to medical technologies, Britain will remain at the forefront of collective endeavours to better understand, and make better, the world in which we live.
11. Cooperation in the fight against crime and terrorism
And a Global Britain will continue to cooperate with its European partners in important areas such as crime, terrorism and foreign affairs.
All of us in Europe face the challenge of cross-border crime, a deadly terrorist threat, and the dangers presented by hostile states. All of us share interests and values in common, values we want to see projected around the world.
With the threats to our common security becoming more serious, our response cannot be to cooperate with one another less, but to work together more. I therefore want our future relationship with the European Union to include practical arrangements on matters of law enforcement and the sharing of intelligence material with our EU allies.
I am proud of the role Britain has played and will continue to play in promoting Europe's security. Britain has led Europe on the measures needed to keep our continent secure – whether it is implementing sanctions against Russia following its action in Crimea, working for peace and stability in the Balkans, or securing Europe's external border. We will continue to work closely with our European allies in foreign and defence policy even as we leave the EU itself.
A phased approach
12. A smooth, orderly Brexit
These are our objectives for the negotiation ahead – objectives that will help to realise our ambition of shaping that stronger, fairer, Global Britain that we want to see.
They are the basis for a new, strong, constructive partnership with the European Union – a partnership of friends and allies, of interests and values. A partnership for a strong EU and a strong UK.
But there is one further objective we are setting. For as I have said before – it is in no one's interests for there to be a cliff-edge for business or a threat to stability, as we change from our existing relationship to a new partnership with the EU.
By this, I do not mean that we will seek some form of unlimited transitional status, in which we find ourselves stuck forever in some kind of permanent political purgatory. That would not be good for Britain, but nor do I believe it would be good for the EU.
Instead, I want us to have reached an agreement about our future partnership by the time the two-year Article Fifty process has concluded. From that point onwards, we believe a phased process of implementation, in which both Britain and the EU institutions and member states prepare for the new arrangements that will exist between us will be in our mutual self-interest. This will give businesses enough time to plan and prepare for those new arrangements.
This might be about our immigration controls, customs systems or the way in which we cooperate on criminal justice matters. Or it might be about the future legal and regulatory framework for financial services. For each issue, the time we need to phase-in the new arrangements may differ. Some might be introduced very quickly, some might take longer. And the interim arrangements we rely upon are likely to be a matter of negotiation.
But the purpose is clear: we will work to avoid a disruptive cliff-edge, and we will do everything we can to phase in the new arrangements we require as Britain and the EU move towards our new partnership.
The Right Deal for Britain
So, these are the objectives we have set. Certainty wherever possible. Control of our own laws. Strengthening the United Kingdom. Maintaining the Common Travel Area with Ireland. Control of immigration. Rights for EU nationals in Britain, and British nationals in the EU. Enhancing rights for workers. Free trade with European markets. New trade agreements with other countries. A leading role in science and innovation. Cooperation on crime, terrorism and foreign affairs. And a phased approach, delivering a smooth and orderly Brexit.
This is the framework of a deal that will herald a new partnership between the UK and the EU.
It is a comprehensive and carefully considered plan that focuses on the ends, not just the means – with its eyes fixed firmly on the future, and on the kind of country we will be once we leave.
It reflects the hard work of many in this room today who have worked tirelessly to bring it together and to prepare this country for the negotiation ahead.
And it will, I know, be debated and discussed at length. That is only right. But those who urge us to reveal more – such as the blow-by-blow details of our negotiating strategy, the areas in which we might compromise, the places where we think there are potential trade-offs – will not be acting in the national interest.
Because this is not a game or a time for opposition for opposition's sake. It is a crucial and sensitive negotiation that will define the interests and the success of our country for many years to come. And it is vital that we maintain our discipline.
That is why I have said before – and will continue to say – that every stray word and every hyped up media report is going to make it harder for us to get the right deal for Britain. Our opposite numbers in the European Commission know it, which is why they are keeping their discipline. And the ministers in this Government know it too, which is why we will also maintain ours.
So however frustrating some people find it, the Government will not be pressured into saying more than I believe it is in our national interest to say. Because it is not my job to fill column inches with daily updates, but to get the right deal for Britain. And that is what I intend to do.
A new partnership between Britain and Europe
I am confident that a deal – and a new strategic partnership between the UK and the EU – can be achieved.
This is firstly because, having held conversations with almost every leader from every single EU member state; having spent time talking to the senior figures from the European institutions, including President Tusk, President Juncker, and President Schulz; and after my Cabinet colleagues David Davis, Philip Hammond and Boris Johnson have done the same with their interlocutors, I am confident that the vast majority want a positive relationship between the UK and the EU after Brexit. And I am confident that the objectives I am setting out today are consistent with the needs of the EU and its Member States.
That is why our objectives include a proposed Free Trade Agreement between Britain and the European Union, and explicitly rule out membership of the EU's Single Market. Because when the EU's leaders say they believe the four freedoms of the Single Market are indivisible, we respect that position. When the 27 Member States say they want to continue their journey inside the European Union, we not only respect that fact but support it.
Because we do not want to undermine the Single Market, and we do not want to undermine the European Union. We want the EU to be a success and we want its remaining member states to prosper. And of course we want the same for Britain.
And the second reason I believe it is possible to reach a good deal is that the kind of agreement I have described today is the economically rational thing that both Britain and the EU should aim for. Because trade is not a zero sum game: more of it makes us all more prosperous. Free trade between Britain and the European Union means more trade, and more trade means more jobs and more wealth creation. The erection of new barriers to trade, meanwhile, means the reverse: less trade, fewer jobs, lower growth.
The third and final reason I believe we can come to the right agreement is that cooperation between Britain and the EU is needed not just when it comes to trade but when it comes to our security too.
Britain and France are Europe's only two nuclear powers. We are the only two European countries with permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council. Britain's armed forces are a crucial part of Europe's collective defence.
And our intelligence capabilities – unique in Europe – have already saved countless lives in very many terrorist plots that have been thwarted in countries across our continent. After Brexit, Britain wants to be a good friend and neighbour in every way, and that includes defending the safety and security of all of our citizens.
So I believe the framework I have outlined today is in Britain's interests. It is in Europe's interests. And it is in the interests of the wider world.
But I must be clear. Britain wants to remain a good friend and neighbour to Europe. Yet I know there are some voices calling for a punitive deal that punishes Britain and discourages other countries from taking the same path.
That would be an act of calamitous self-harm for the countries of Europe. And it would not be the act of a friend.
Britain would not – indeed we could not – accept such an approach. And while I am confident that this scenario need never arise – while I am sure a positive agreement can be reached – I am equally clear that no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain.
Because we would still be able to trade with Europe. We would be free to strike trade deals across the world. And we would have the freedom to set the competitive tax rates and embrace the policies that would attract the world's best companies and biggest investors to Britain. And – if we were excluded from accessing the Single Market – we would be free to change the basis of Britain's economic model.
But for the EU, it would mean new barriers to trade with one of the biggest economies in the world. It would jeopardise investments in Britain by EU companies worth more than half a trillion pounds. It would mean a loss of access for European firms to the financial services of the City of London. It would risk exports from the EU to Britain worth around £290 billion every year. And it would disrupt the sophisticated and integrated supply chains upon which many EU companies rely.
Important sectors of the EU economy would also suffer. We are a crucial – profitable – export market for Europe's automotive industry, as well as sectors including energy, food and drink, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture. These sectors employ millions of people around Europe. And I do not believe that the EU's leaders will seriously tell German exporters, French farmers, Spanish fishermen, the young unemployed of the Eurozone, and millions of others, that they want to make them poorer, just to punish Britain and make a political point.
For all these reasons – and because of our shared values and the spirit of goodwill that exists on both sides – I am confident that we will follow a better path. I am confident that a positive agreement can be reached.
It is right that the Government should prepare for every eventuality – but to do so in the knowledge that a constructive and optimistic approach to the negotiations to come is in the best interests of Europe and the best interests of Britain.
We do not approach these negotiations expecting failure, but anticipating success.
Because we are a great, global nation with so much to offer Europe and so much to offer the world.
One of the world's largest and strongest economies. With the finest intelligence services, the bravest armed forces, the most effective hard and soft power, and friendships, partnerships and alliances in every continent.
And another thing that's important. The essential ingredient of our success. The strength and support of 65 million people willing us to make it happen.
Because after all the division and discord, the country is coming together.
The referendum was divisive at times. And those divisions have taken time to heal. (did it heal already?)
But one of the reasons that Britain's democracy has been such a success for so many years is that the strength of our identity as one nation, the respect we show to one another as fellow citizens, and the importance we attach to our institutions means that when a vote has been held we all respect the result.
The victors have the responsibility to act magnanimously. The losers have the responsibility to respect the legitimacy of the outcome. And the country comes together.
And that is what we are seeing today. Business isn't calling to reverse the result, but planning to make a success of it. The House of Commons has voted overwhelmingly for us to get on with it. And the overwhelming majority of people – however they voted – want us to get on with it too.
So that is what we will do.
Not merely forming a new partnership with Europe, but building a stronger, fairer, more Global Britain too.
And let that be the legacy of our time. The prize towards which we work. The destination at which we arrive once the negotiation is done.
And let us do it not for ourselves, but for those who follow. For the country's children and grandchildren too.
So that when future generations look back at this time, they will judge us not only by the decision that we made, but by what we made of that decision.
They will see that we shaped them a brighter future.
They will know that we built them a better Britain.
Tags: adonis49, Theresa May, U.K's Plan for Brexit
How the End of Capitalism began? How post-capitalism looks like?
In: Book Review | economy/finance | Essays | social articles
How the End of Capitalism began?
Post-capitalism? Once economics is no longer central to life.
The red flags and marching songs of Syriza during the Greek crisis, plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above.
For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse.
over the past 25 years it has been the left's project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a "proletariat", but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.
If you lived through all this, and disliked capitalism, it was traumatic.
But in the process technology has created a new route out, which the remnants of the old left – and all other forces influenced by it – have either to embrace or die.
Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I call this postcapitalism.
As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism's replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.
Postcapitalism is possible because of 3 major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years.
First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.
Second, information is corroding the market's ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system's defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last.
By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.
Third, we're seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy.
The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue.
Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the shattering of the old structures in the post-2008 crisis.
You only find this new economy if you look hard for it.
In Greece, when a grassroots NGO mapped the country's food co-ops, alternative producers, parallel currencies and local exchange systems they found more than 70 substantive projects and hundreds of smaller initiatives ranging from squats to carpools to free kindergartens.
To mainstream economics such things seem barely to qualify as economic activity – but that's the point. They exist because they trade, however haltingly and inefficiently, in the currency of postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free stuff.
It seems a meagre and unofficial and even dangerous thing from which to craft an entire alternative to a global system, but so did money and credit in the age of Edward III.
New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the "sharing economy". Buzzwords such as the "commons" and "peer-production" are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself.
I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do.
And this must be driven by a change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: "This is simply no longer my survival mechanism, my bolt hole from the neoliberal world; this is a new way of living in the process of formation.
The 2008 crash wiped 13% off global production and 20% off global trade. (In paper transactions?)
Global growth became negative – on a scale where anything below +3% is counted as a recession.
It produced, in the west, a depression phase longer than in 1929-33, and even now, amid a pallid recovery, has left mainstream economists terrified about the prospect of long-term stagnation. The aftershocks in Europe are tearing the continent apart.
The solutions have been austerity plus monetary excess. But they are not working.
In the worst-hit countries, the pension system has been destroyed, the retirement age is being hiked to 70, and education is being privatised so that graduates now face a lifetime of high debt. Services are being dismantled and infrastructure projects put on hold.
Even now, many people fail to grasp the true meaning of the word "austerity".
Austerity is Not 8 years of spending cuts, as in the UK, or even the social catastrophe inflicted on Greece. It means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up.
Meanwhile in the absence of any alternative model, the conditions for another crisis are being assembled.
Real wages have fallen or remained stagnant in Japan, the southern Eurozone, the US and UK.
The shadow banking system has been reassembled, and is now bigger than it was in 2008.
New rules demanding banks hold more reserves have been watered down or delayed. Meanwhile, flushed with free money, the 1% has got richer.
Neoliberalism has morphed into a system programmed to inflict recurrent catastrophic failures.
Worse than that, it has broken the 200-year pattern of industrial capitalism wherein an economic crisis spurs new forms of technological innovation that benefit everybody.
That is because neoliberalism was the first economic model in 200 years the upswing of which was premised on the suppression of wages and smashing the social power and resilience of the working class.
If we review the take-off periods studied by long-cycle theorists – the 1850s in Europe, the 1900s and 1950s across the globe – it was the strength of organised labour that forced entrepreneurs and corporations to stop trying to revive outdated business models through wage cuts, and to innovate their way to a new form of capitalism.
The result is that, in each upswing, we find a synthesis of automation, higher wages and higher-value consumption. Today there is no pressure from the workforce, and the technology at the centre of this innovation wave does not demand the creation of higher-consumer spending, or the re‑employment of the old workforce in new jobs.
Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet. (Increase in sweatshop factories?)
As a result, large parts of the business class have become neo-luddites. Faced with the possibility of creating gene-sequencing labs, they instead start coffee shops, nail bars and contract cleaning firms: the banking system, the planning system and late neoliberal culture reward above all the creator of low-value, long-hours jobs.
Innovation is happening but it has not, so far, triggered the fifth long upswing for capitalism that long-cycle theory would expect. The reasons lie in the specific nature of information technology.
We're surrounded not just by intelligent machines but by a new layer of reality centred on information. Consider an airliner: a computer flies it; it has been designed, stress-tested and "virtually manufactured" millions of times; it is firing back real-time information to its manufacturers. On board are people squinting at screens connected, in some lucky countries, to the internet.
Seen from the ground it is the same white metal bird as in the James Bond era. But it is now both an intelligent machine and a node on a network. It has an information content and is adding "information value" as well as physical value to the world. On a packed business flight, when everyone's peering at Excel or Powerpoint, the passenger cabin is best understood as an information factory.
But what is all this information worth? You won't find an answer in the accounts: intellectual property is valued in modern accounting standards by guesswork. A study for the SAS Institute in 2013 found that, in order to put a value on data, neither the cost of gathering it, nor the market value or the future income from it could be adequately calculated. Only through a form of accounting that included non-economic benefits, and risks, could companies actually explain to their shareholders what their data was really worth. Something is broken in the logic we use to value the most important thing in the modern world.
The great technological advance of the early 21st century consists not only of new objects and processes, but of old ones made intelligent. The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them. But it is a value measured as usefulness, not exchange or asset value. In the 1990s economists and technologists began to have the same thought at once: that this new role for information was creating a new, "third" kind of capitalism – as different from industrial capitalism as industrial capitalism was to the merchant and slave capitalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. But they have struggled to describe the dynamics of the new "cognitive" capitalism. And for a reason. Its dynamics are profoundly non-capitalist.
During and right after the second world war, economists viewed information simply as a "public good". The US government even decreed that no profit should be made out of patents, only from the production process itself. Then we began to understand intellectual property. In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free market economy the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights. He noted: "precisely to the extent that it is successful there is an underutilisation of information."
You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data, capture the free social data generated by user interaction, push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before, mine the existing data for predictive value – always and everywhere ensuring nobody but the corporation can utilise the results.
If we restate Arrow's principle in reverse, its revolutionary implications are obvious: if a free market economy plus intellectual property leads to the "underutilisation of information", then an economy based on the full utilisation of information cannot tolerate the free market or absolute intellectual property rights. The business models of all our modern digital giants are designed to prevent the abundance of information.
Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable.
Once a thing is made, it can be copied/pasted infinitely. A music track or the giant database you use to build an airliner has a production cost; but its cost of reproduction falls towards zero. Therefore, if the normal price mechanism of capitalism prevails over time, its price will fall towards zero, too.
For the past 25 years economics has been wrestling with this problem: all mainstream economics proceeds from a condition of scarcity, yet the most dynamic force in our modern world is abundant and, as hippy genius Stewart Brand once put it, "wants to be free".
There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance created by corporations and governments, a different dynamic growing up around information: information as a social good, free at the point of use, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced.
I've surveyed the attempts by economists and business gurus to build a framework to understand the dynamics of an economy based on abundant, socially-held information. But it was actually imagined by one 19th-century economist in the era of the telegraph and the steam engine. His name? Karl Marx.
The scene is Kentish Town, London, February 1858, sometime around 4am.
Marx is a wanted man in Germany and is hard at work scribbling thought-experiments and notes-to-self. When they finally get to see what Marx is writing on this night, the left intellectuals of the 1960s will admit that it "challenges every serious interpretation of Marx yet conceived". It is called "The Fragment on Machines".
In the "Fragment" Marx imagines an economy in which the main role of machines is to produce, and the main role of people is to supervise them. He was clear that, in such an economy, the main productive force would be information.
The productive power of such machines as the automated cotton-spinning machine, the telegraph and the steam locomotive did not depend on the amount of labour it took to produce them but on the state of social knowledge.
Organisation and knowledge made a bigger contribution to productive power than the work of making and running the machines.
Given what Marxism was to become – a theory of exploitation based on the theft of labour time – this is a revolutionary statement. It suggests that, once knowledge becomes a productive force in its own right, outweighing the actual labour spent creating a machine, the big question becomes not one of "wages versus profits" but who controls what Marx called the "power of knowledge".
In an economy where machines do most of the work, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be "social".
In a final late-night thought experiment Marx imagined the end point of this trajectory: the creation of an "ideal machine", which lasts forever and costs nothing. A machine that could be built for nothing would, he said, add no value at all to the production process and rapidly, over several accounting periods, reduce the price, profit and labour costs of everything else it touched.
Once you understand that information is physical, and that software is a machine, and that storage, bandwidth and processing power are collapsing in price at exponential rates, the value of Marx's thinking becomes clear. We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could, if we wanted them to, last forever.
In these musings, not published until the mid-20th century, Marx imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a "general intellect" – which was the mind of everybody on Earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody.
In short, he had imagined something close to the information economy in which we live. And, he wrote, its existence would "blow capitalism sky high".
With the terrain changed, the old path beyond capitalism imagined by the left of the 20th century is lost.
But a different path has opened up.
Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework – just as it created the framework for factory labour, sound currencies and free trade in the early 19th century. The postcapitalist sector is likely to coexist with the market sector for decades, but major change is happening.
Networks restore "granularity" to the postcapitalist project. That is, they can be the basis of a non-market system that replicates itself, which does not need to be created afresh every morning on the computer screen of a commissar.
The transition will involve the state, the market and collaborative production beyond the market.
But to make it happen, the entire project of the left, from protest groups to the mainstream social democratic and liberal parties, will have to be reconfigured. In fact, once people understand the logic of the postcapitalist transition, such ideas will no longer be the property of the left – but of a much wider movement, for which we will need new labels.
Who can make this happen? In the old left project it was the industrial working class. More than 200 years ago, the radical journalist John Thelwall warned the men who built the English factories that they had created a new and dangerous form of democracy:
"Every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse."
Today the whole of society is a factory. We all participate in the creation and recreation of the brands, norms and institutions that surround us. At the same time the communication grids vital for everyday work and profit are buzzing with shared knowledge and discontent. Today it is the network – like the workshop 200 years ago – that they "cannot silence or disperse".
True, states can shut down Facebook, Twitter, even the entire internet and mobile network in times of crisis, paralysing the economy in the process. And they can store and monitor every kilobyte of information we produce. But they cannot reimpose the hierarchical, propaganda-driven and ignorant society of 50 years ago, except – as in China, North Korea or Iran – by opting out of key parts of modern life. It would be, as sociologist Manuel Castells put it, like trying to de-electrify a country.
By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.
This will be more than just an economic transition. There are, of course, the parallel and urgent tasks of decarbonising the world and dealing with demographic and fiscal timebombs.
But I'm concentrating on the economic transition triggered by information because, up to now, it has been sidelined. Peer-to-peer has become pigeonholed as a niche obsession for visionaries, while the "big boys" of leftwing economics get on with critiquing austerity.
In fact, on the ground in places such as Greece, resistance to austerity and the creation of "networks you can't default on" – as one activist put it to me – go hand in hand. Above all, postcapitalism as a concept is about new forms of human behaviour that conventional economics would hardly recognise as relevant.
So how do we visualise the transition ahead?
The only coherent parallel we have is the replacement of feudalism by capitalism – and thanks to the work of epidemiologists, geneticists and data analysts, we know a lot more about that transition than we did 50 years ago when it was "owned" by social science.
The first thing we have to recognise is: different modes of production are structured around different things.
Feudalism was an economic system structured by customs and laws about "obligation".
Capitalism was structured by something purely economic: the market. We can predict, from this, that postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society. But we can only begin to grasp at a positive vision of what it will be like.
I don't mean this as a way to avoid the question: the general economic parameters of a postcapitalist society by, for example, the year 2075, can be outlined. But if such a society is structured around human liberation, not economics, unpredictable things will begin to shape it.
For example, the most obvious thing to Shakespeare, writing in 1600, was that the market had called forth new kinds of behaviour and morality. By analogy, the most obvious "economic" thing to the Shakespeare of 2075 will be the total upheaval in gender relationships, or sexuality, or health. Perhaps there will not even be any playwrights: perhaps the very nature of the media we use to tell stories will change – just as it changed in Elizabethan London when the first public theatres were built.
Think of the difference between, say, Horatio in Hamlet and a character such as Daniel Doyce in Dickens's Little Dorrit.
Both carry around with them a characteristic obsession of their age – Horatio is obsessed with humanist philosophy; Doyce is obsessed with patenting his invention. There can be no character like Doyce in Shakespeare; he would, at best, get a bit part as a working-class comic figure.
Yet, by the time Dickens described Doyce, most of his readers knew somebody like him. Just as Shakespeare could not have imagined Doyce, so we too cannot imagine the kind of human beings society will produce once economics is no longer central to life.
But we can see their prefigurative forms in the lives of young people all over the world breaking down 20th-century barriers around sexuality, work, creativity and the self.
The feudal model of agriculture collided, first, with environmental limits and then with a massive external shock – the Black Death. After that, there was a demographic shock: too few workers for the land, which raised their wages and made the old feudal obligation system impossible to enforce. The labour shortage also forced technological innovation. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradeable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method).
Present throughout the whole process was something that looks incidental to the old system – money and credit – but which was actually destined to become the basis of the new system. In feudalism, many laws and customs were actually shaped around ignoring money; credit was, in high feudalism, seen as sinful. So when money and credit burst through the boundaries to create a market system, it felt like a revolution. Then, what gave the new system its energy was the discovery of a virtually unlimited source of free wealth in the Americas.
A combination of all these factors took a set of people who had been marginalised under feudalism – humanists, scientists, craftsmen, lawyers, radical preachers and bohemian playwrights such as Shakespeare – and put them at the head of a social transformation. At key moments, though tentatively at first, the state switched from hindering the change to promoting it.
Today, the thing that is corroding capitalism, barely rationalised by mainstream economics, is information. Most laws concerning information define the right of corporations to hoard it and the right of states to access it, irrespective of the human rights of citizens. The equivalent of the printing press and the scientific method is information technology and its spillover into all other technologies, from genetics to healthcare to agriculture to the movies, where it is quickly reducing costs.
The modern equivalent of the long stagnation of late feudalism is the stalled take-off of the third industrial revolution, where instead of rapidly automating work out of existence, we are reduced to creating what David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs" on low pay. And many economies are stagnating.
The equivalent of the new source of free wealth? It's not exactly wealth: it's the "externalities" – the free stuff and wellbeing generated by networked interaction. It is the rise of non-market production, of unownable information, of peer networks and unmanaged enterprises. The internet, French economist Yann Moulier-Boutang says, is "both the ship and the ocean" when it comes to the modern equivalent of the discovery of the new world. In fact, it is the ship, the compass, the ocean and the gold.
The modern day external shocks are clear: energy depletion, climate change, ageing populations and migration. They are altering the dynamics of capitalism and making it unworkable in the long term. They have not yet had the same impact as the Black Death – but as we saw in New Orleans in 2005, it does not take the bubonic plague to destroy social order and functional infrastructure in a financially complex and impoverished society.
Once you understand the transition in this way, the need is not for a supercomputed Five Year Plan – but a project, the aim of which should be to expand those technologies, business models and behaviours that dissolve market forces, socialise knowledge, eradicate the need for work and push the economy towards abundance. I call it Project Zero – because its aims are a zero-carbon-energy system; the production of machines, products and services with zero marginal costs; and the reduction of necessary work time as close as possible to zero.
Most 20th-century leftists believed that they did not have the luxury of a managed transition: it was an article of faith for them that nothing of the coming system could exist within the old one – though the working class always attempted to create an alternative life within and "despite" capitalism. As a result, once the possibility of a Soviet-style transition disappeared, the modern left became preoccupied simply with opposing things: the privatisation of healthcare, anti-union laws, fracking – the list goes on
If I am right, the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what's urgent, and what's important, and that sometimes they do not coincide.
The power of imagination will become critical. In an information society, no thought, debate or dream is wasted – whether conceived in a tent camp, prison cell or the table football space of a startup company.
As with virtual manufacturing, in the transition to postcapitalism the work done at the design stage can reduce mistakes in the implementation stage. And the design of the postcapitalist world, as with software, can be modular. Different people can work on it in different places, at different speeds, with relative autonomy from each other. If I could summon one thing into existence for free it would be a global institution that modelled capitalism correctly: an open source model of the whole economy; official, grey and black. Every experiment run through it would enrich it; it would be open source and with as many datapoints as the most complex climate models.
The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next.
Is it utopian to believe we're on the verge of an evolution beyond capitalism? We live in a world in which gay men and women can marry, and in which contraception has, within the space of 50 years, made the average working-class woman freer than the craziest libertine of the Bloomsbury era. Why do we, then, find it so hard to imagine economic freedom?
It is the elites, cut off in their dark-limo world, whose project looks forlorn
It is the elites – cut off in their dark-limo world – whose project looks as forlorn as that of the millennial sects of the 19th century. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago.
All readings of human history have to allow for the possibility of a negative outcome. It haunts us in the zombie movie, the disaster movie, in the post-apocalytic wasteland of films such as The Road or Elysium. But why should we not form a picture of the ideal life, built out of abundant information, non-hierarchical work and the dissociation of work from wages?
Millions of people are beginning to realise they have been sold a dream at odds with what reality can deliver. Their response is anger – and retreat towards national forms of capitalism that can only tear the world apart. Watching these emerge, from the pro-Grexit left factions in Syriza to the Front National and the isolationism of the American right has been like watching the nightmares we had during the Lehman Brothers crisis come true.
We need more than just a bunch of utopian dreams and small-scale horizontal projects. We need a project based on reason, evidence and testable designs, that cuts with the grain of history and is sustainable by the planet. And we need to get on with it.
Postcapitalism is published by Allen Lane on 30 July. Paul Mason will be asking whether capitalism has had its day at a sold-out Guardian Live event on 22 July. Let us know your thoughts beforehand at theguardian.com/membership.
Andrew Bossone shared this link July 17, 2015
"At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy.
The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it's time to be utopian."
The end of capitalism has begun
Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era.
http://www.theguardian.com|By Paul Mason
Tags: adonis49, End of Capitalism, Fragment on Machines, information economy, John Thelwall, Paul Mason, postcapitalism