One good reason for doing this regular tracking report is that is means we (i.e. I) can abreast of what is an ever-changing landscape of interactions between the EU and the UK.
As a case in point, I’d rather missed that the past couple of weeks have been packed with meetings of the numerous Trade & Cooperation Agreement bodies. Possibly that’s a reflection of the lack of substance behind most of those, possibly because the key forum – the Partnership Council – is now some 18 months since it last (and, indeed, first) met.
As the graphics below point up, the architecture of regular interaction is present and the channels are open should both sides wish to use them.
But the absence of substantive shift in policy by Rishi Sunak means that while there is a stream of more informal work going on around the Protocol, this has not translated into a need to make more of the WA/TCA bodies.
As usual, you can follow the hyperlink below each one to a PDF version with clickable links to minutes and agendas for each meeting.
Meanwhile, one area that isn’t seeing any obvious activity is the UK’s stated project of removing Retained EU Law (REUL) from the statute books.
Since the government launched its tracker back in June, there hasn’t been a single instance of repeal, amendment or replacement that wasn’t already there.
The generous interpretation would be that someone’s not updating the tracker (the last edit is in September), but as I discuss in a thread on Mastodon (below) there’s probably more reason to think that the big block that remains in force is actually useful.
[and don’t worry too much about that ‘sensitive content’ warning – it’s just a graph, regardless of what the blur might look like to you]
Finally, you might want to sign up (again) to my podcast, A Diet of Brussels, which is now not only the very first Brexit-related podcast but also one of the few remaining ones.
I might not reach the production values of Brexit Republic (which I heartily recommend to you), but I will be producing new, monthly episodes that might be of interest as I think we’re moving into a new phase of things.
If that sounds like I might be becoming more positive, note that I’m calling that new phase ‘Long Brexit’…