Comment by pasabagi
5 years ago
I first thought about the problem when I read about the history of the Kashmir region, but actually, it's pretty universal in history. Ask any Mexican about how it is to be the neighbor of a much more powerful polity. Or a Lebanese person. Or an Okinawan. Or an Irish person.
I don't really know the details of the deal, but it seems to me that even if you do get a good deal at one point, the fact is, the UK has very little negotiating power in comparison to the EU. If the EU decided, much like the USA decided with Japan in the 80's, that the UK should sign an unfavourable deal like the Plaza Accord, the UK would be able to do very little but sign it.
Obviously, as you've pointed out, there are a ton of countries that, for some time, step their way around all the pitfalls of this kind of position. But none of them are as large as the UK.
So it turns out that we were able to test this theory EU supporters have about overwhelming negotiating power much faster than anyone anticipated, in the form of bulk purchasing of vaccines.
This is a perfect example where the EU should have totally crushed the UK by using its supposedly superior size and strength, according to size=power theory. And yet what we see is the opposite.
The EU demanded that individual nations buy collectively through the Commission. The Commission is run by diversity hires: half the commissioners had to be women, by demand of von der Leyen. They then moved way too slowly, didn't approve vaccines quickly (and still haven't), didn't order enough and now EU countries are at the back of the queue as a result. The first German to be vaccinated with German technology received their jab in ... the UK. The collective buying operation has since collapsed, with Germany running to Russia to try and acquire some of the Sputnik vaccine.
The whole pathetic affair is documented here:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-eu-has-botched-its-v...
When it comes to bureaucracies, size does not equal power. Size does not equal benefits. Size equals incompetence, lethargy and internal decay. The EU is run by people who failed upwards their entire careers. They insisted they be given power over vaccines even though the EU has no formal treaty-defined role in healthcare, and then they screwed it up on a massive scale.
> diversity hires
Oh dear. I suppose you think Boris Johnson got to where he was by his sharp intellect? Or does he also qualify as a diversity hire, on the basis that his family tree is more a family strongly-connected graph?
On the other hand, perhaps you are seeing the brilliance of british leadership in the coronavirus numbers, which are of course, neck and neck with other great nations, like the US, and Brazil.
Johnson won the London mayorship, leadership of his party and then an election (by a landslide), all of which were open and competitive contests. Love him or loathe him, he got to be PM by fighting for it: it wasn't handed to him on a plate. Far from it. His own colleague Michael Gove famously stabbed him in the back to stop him becoming PM on a prior occasion!
van der Leyen got to be head of the EU via an entirely secret process, about which we only have one public piece of evidence as to how it works: the claim that the next president of the Commission had to be a woman. She won nothing whatsoever to get there. Then she insisted that half of all Commissioners be women: this is a matter of public record. In theory she doesn't even get to influence the choice of Commissioners, that's meant to be up to the country, but the reality of the EU often doesn't seem to match what the treaties say.
COVID doesn't really respond to political leadership. That's one of the few things we can say about it with certainty. None of the interventions tried so far have any statistical correlation with healthcare outcomes. Vaccination programmes are quite responsive to politics, on the other hand (whether COVID will respond to vaccines is another topic, but the manufacturing and rollout are within the scope of human control).
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