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How UK-EU trade deal will change relations between Britain and Brussels

Sam Fleming and Jim Brunsden in The FT

The future relationship deal struck between the UK and the EU (24 Dec 2020) will bring far-reaching changes, as both sides are forced to adapt to the end of Britain’s 30-year membership of the European single market

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The trade agreement between London and Brussels will offer UK and EU companies preferential access to each other’s markets, compared with basic World Trade Organization rules — ensuring imported goods will be free of tariffs and quotas. 

But economic relations between the UK and the EU from January 1, when the deal is due to take effect, will be on more restricted terms than they are now.  

“Everyone needs to get prepared for a situation next year that will be very different to today,” said an EU official. 

A trade agreement along the lines of the one negotiated between the two sides will leave Britain facing a 4 per cent loss of potential gross domestic product over 15 years compared with EU membership, according to the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility. Failure to secure an agreement would have led to lost potential GDP of almost 6 per cent, the fiscal watchdog estimated. 

Below are some of the benefits conferred by the UK-EU future relationship deal, which also includes security co-operation — and the important areas in which Britain’s links with the bloc will fall short of existing arrangements. 

1. Trade in goods  

The EU and UK’s starting point for the future relationship talks was that they should lead to a deal with no tariffs on trade in goods between the two sides. They also wanted no quantitative restrictions on the volume of goods that could be sold free of tariffs.  

That was negotiated, meaning the deal will go beyond what the EU has done with any other advanced economy outside the European single market.  

But the agreement is still a very different state of affairs to membership of the EU single market and customs union. 

Once implemented, from January 1, a hard customs and regulatory border will exist between the EU and UK, and goods will face checks and controls that can be smoothed at the margins only by co-operation. 

The deal will include facilitations such as co-operation on trusted trader schemes, but none of these erase border checks. 

“The agreement provides for continued and sustainable air, road, rail and maritime connectivity, though market access falls below what the single market offers,” said the European Commission.

2. Fair business competition 

The EU’s offer on tariff-free trade was contingent on the UK agreeing to uphold a “level playing field” on fair business competition in areas such as environmental standards. 

Brussels was also keen to ensure the UK does not have unfettered scope to disburse state aid to prized industries, giving them a competitive advantage.  

The agreement includes common binding principles on state aid, enforceable in both sides’ courts, which would be able to recover illegal subsidies. 

It also includes a painstakingly negotiated “rebalancing mechanism” to deal with a situation where the sides’ regulations in areas such as labour rights diverge over time. 

The mechanism, which would be subject to independent arbitration, would allow the disadvantaged side to impose tariffs to restore fair competition. 

But, crucially for the UK, it will not be required to follow EU rules directly or be subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. 

Being outside the European single market has other regulatory consequences for Britain. For example, UK businesses will no longer be able to assume that product authorisations from British watchdogs will allow their goods to be placed on the European market.  

3. Fish 

The deal creates a five-and-a-half-year transition period during which EU fishermen will have guaranteed access to UK waters. 

EU quotas in British waters will decline in the transition by 25 per cent compared with current levels, and this will have the knock-on effect of boosting how much UK fishermen can secure. EU boats currently catch about €650m of fish in British waters each year. 

Once the transition period is over, EU boats’ access to UK waters will in principle depend on annual negotiations between both sides. Those talks will also determine the overall quantities of different species that can be caught. 

Should EU boats’ access to British waters ever be revoked by the UK, the bloc will have the right to take compensatory measures. These include retaliatory closing of EU waters to UK boats, and the imposition of tariffs on British fish. 

The deal also links the UK’s access to the EU energy market to access to British fishing waters. 

The UK warded off EU demands for a cross-retaliation power to hit other parts of the British economy should a dispute over fish escalate. 

Still, the deal does provide a last-resort “safeguard” option that would allow either side to take emergency measures to protect coastal communities, subject to dispute-settlement arrangements in the agreement. 

The deal enshrines the principle that Britain is now outside the EU’s common fisheries policy: an independent coastal state with sovereignty over its waters. 

4. Financial services 

The City of London will exit the EU’s single market for financial services at the end of the Brexit transition period on December 31. 

Both sides have said that the new market access arrangements for UK and EU financial services companies should be based on unilateral decisions by Britain and the bloc, rather than be provided for in the trade agreement. 

These so-called equivalence decisions involve each side evaluating whether the other’s financial services regulations are as tough as its own. 

Banks and traders have acknowledged that the proposed system is more piecemeal than existing arrangements, and less stable. The EU did not announce any fresh equivalence decisions on UK access to the bloc’s markets alongside the trade agreement on Thursday, resulting in uncertainty in key areas including share trading and derivatives. 

The two sides plan to put in place a regulatory dialogue on financial services based on a separate memorandum of understanding. 

5. Migration 

Current British and EU expatriates have their rights safeguarded by the UK’s 2019 withdrawal agreement with the bloc, but big changes to migration arrangements take effect from January 1. 

Britons will no longer have the benefit of European freedom of movement: the right to go to any EU member state and seek to work and live there on the same basis as the country’s own citizens.  

Instead, Britons will rely on a visa-waiver programme to travel to the EU for short stays, and on member states’ national rules for the right to work.  

Ending free movement for EU nationals in the UK was identified by the British government as one of the benefits of Brexit, allowing the country to devise a new immigration system.  

6. Security 

The EU and UK have been at pains to emphasise the importance of continuing co-operation in the fight against terrorism and organised crime, although talks in this area were complicated by Britain’s determination to escape the ECJ’s jurisdiction. 

But ahead of the deal being finalised, EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier confirmed the sides had found ways to maintain “close co-operation” on crucial matters including the work of the bloc’s crime-fighting agencies Europol and Eurojust, and the sharing of criminals’ DNA data. 

Brussels said the deal “builds new operational capabilities, taking account of the fact that the UK, as a non-EU member . . . will not have the same facilities as before”.  

The deal establishes that security co-operation can be suspended if the UK breaks away from the European Convention on Human Rights. 

Benaud - the wise old king

Gideon Haigh in Cricinfo

If we don't remember him as an elite legspinner, a thinking captain or one of cricket's true professionals, it's because of the phenomenal work he has done as a commentator, writer and observer

If Arlott was the voice of cricket, Benaud was the face © Getty Images



"Did you ever play cricket for Australia, Mr Benaud?" In his On Reflection, Richie Benaud recalls being asked this humbling question by a "fair-haired, angelic little lad of about 12", one of a group of six autograph seekers who accosted him at the SCG "one December evening in 1982".

"Now what do you do?" Benaud writes. "Cry or laugh? I did neither but merely said yes, I had played up to 1963, which was going to be well before he was born. 'Oh,' he said. 'That's great. I thought you were just a television commentator on cricket.'" Autograph in hand, the boy "scampered away with a 'thank you' thrown over his shoulder".

It is a familiar anecdotal scenario: past player confronted by dwindling renown. But the Benaud version is very Benaudesque. There is the amused self-mockery, the precise observation, the authenticating detail: he offers a date, the number of boys and a description of the appearance of his interlocutor, whose age is cautiously approximated.

In his story Benaud indulges the boy's solecism, realising that it arises not merely from youthful innocence but from the fact that "he had never seen me in cricket gear, and knew me only as the man who did the cricket on Channel 9". Then he segues into several pages of discussion of the changed nature of the cricket audience, ending with a self-disclosing identification. "Some would say such a question of that kind showed lack of respect or knowledge. Not a bit of it… what it did was show an inquiring mind and I'm all in favour of inquiring minds among our young sportsmen. Perhaps that is because I had an inquiring mind when I came into first-class cricket but was not necessarily allowed to exercise it in the same way as young players are now."

I like this passage; droll, reasoned and thoughtful, it tells us much about cricket's most admired and pervasive post-war personality. It is the voice, as Greg Manning phrased it inWisden Australia, of commentary's "wise old king". It betrays, too, the difficulty in assessing him: in some respects Benaud's abiding ubiquity in England and Australia inhibits appreciation of the totality of his achievements.

In fact, Benaud would rank among Test cricket's elite legspinners and captains if he had never uttered or written a word about the game. His apprenticeship was lengthy - thanks partly to the prolongation of Ian Johnson's career by his tenure as Australian captain - and Benaud's first 27 Tests encompassed only 73 wickets at 28.90 and 868 runs at 28.66.

Then, as Johnnie Moyes put it, came seniority and skipperhood: "Often in life and in cricket we see the man who has true substance in him burst forth into stardom when his walk-on part is changed for one demanding personality and a degree of leadership. I believe that this is what happened to Benaud." In his next 23 Tests, Benaud attained the peak of proficiency - 131 wickets at 22.66 and 830 runs at 28.62, until a shoulder injury in May 1961 impaired his effectiveness.

Australia did not lose a series under Benaud's leadership, although he was defined by his deportment as much as his deeds. Usually bareheaded, and with shirt open as wide as propriety permitted, he was a colourful, communicative antidote to an austere, tight-lipped era. Jack Fingleton likened Benaud to Jean Borotra, the "Bounding Basque of Biarritz" over whom tennis audiences had swooned in the 1920s. Wisden settled for describing him as "the most popular captain of any overseas team to come to Great Britain".

One of Benaud's legacies is the demonstrative celebration of wickets and catches, which was a conspicuous aspect of his teams' communal spirit and is today de rigeur. Another is a string of astute, astringent books, including Way of Cricket (1960) and A Tale of Two Tests (1962), which are among the best books written by a cricketer during his career. "In public relations to benefit the game," Ray Robinson decided, "Benaud was so far ahead of his predecessors that race-glasses would have been needed to see who was at the head of the others."

Benaud's reputation as a gambling captain has probably been overstated. On the contrary he was tirelessly fastidious in his planning, endlessly solicitous of his players and inclusive in his decision-making. Benaud receives less credit than he deserves for intuiting that "11 heads are better than one" where captaincy is concerned; what is commonplace now was not so in his time. In some respects his management model paralleled the "human relations school" in organisational psychology, inspired by Douglas McGregor's The Human Side of Enterprise(1960). Certainly Benaud's theory that "cricketers are intelligent people and must be treated as such", and his belief in "an elastic but realistic sense of self-discipline" could be transliterations of McGregor to a sporting context.

Ian Meckiff defined Benaud as "a professional in an amateur era", a succinct formulation that may partly explain the ease with which he has assimilated the professional present. For if a quality distinguishes his commentary, it is that he calls the game he is watching, not one he once watched or played in. When Simon Katich was awarded his baggy green at Headingley in 2001, it was Benaud whom Steve Waugh invited to undertake the duty.

The forgotten legspinner © PA Photos


Benaud's progressive attitude to the game's commercialisation - sponsorship, TV, the one-day game - may also spring partly from his upbringing. In On Reflection he tells how his father, Lou, a gifted legspinner, had his cricket ambitions curtailed when he was posted to the country as a schoolteacher for 12 years. Benaud describes two vows his father took: "If… there were any sons in his family he would make sure they had a chance [to make a cricket career] and there would be no more schoolteachers in the Benaud family."

At an early stage of his first-class career, too, Benaud lost his job with an accounting firm that "couldn't afford to pay the six pounds a week which would have been my due". He criticised the poor rewards for the cricketers of his time, claiming they were "not substantial enough" and that "some players… made nothing out of tours". He contended as far back as 1960 that "cricket is now a business".

Those views obtained active expression when he aligned with World Series Cricket - it "ran alongside my ideas about Australian cricketers currently being paid far too little and having virtually no input into the game in Australia". Benaud's contribution to Kerry Packer's venture, both as consultant and commentator, was inestimable: to the organisation he brought cricket knowhow, to the product he applied a patina of respectability. Changes were wrought in cricket over two years that would have taken decades under the game's existing institutions, and Benaud was essentially their frontman.

In lending Packer his reputation Benaud ended up serving his own. John Arlott has been garlanded as the voice of cricket; Benaud is indisputably the face of it, in both hemispheres, over generations. If one was to be critical it may be that Benaud has been too much the apologist for modern cricket, too much the Dr Pangloss. It is, after all, difficult to act as an impartial critic of the entertainment package one is involved in selling.

Professionalism, meanwhile, has not been an unmixed blessing: what is match-fixing but professional sport in extremis, the cricketer selling his services to the highest bidder in the sporting free market? Yet Benaud is one of very few certifiably unique individuals in cricket history. From time to time one hears mooted "the next Benaud"; one also knows that this cannot be.

It's time to tackle the myths in education

Tom Bennett in The Telegraph

Are you a visual learner or a kinaesthetic learner? Perhaps you are an auditory learner? Maybe you learn best when implementing a combination of these 'learning styles'.

Over the past 40 years, the 'learning style' theory has garnered support from professionals across the education community and has become a much-used teaching tool across the UK.

But does the longevity of 'learning styles' and its persistent presence in the classroom actually mean it has any educational value at all? The simple answer is, no one can be sure; because no one has categorically proved the theory one way or the other.

Tom Bennett, teacher, author and Director of researchED, says there are many such theories that fill classrooms across Britain that have little grounding in scientific research. According to Bennett, it's time teachers learnt to raise a "sceptical eyebrow".

“We have had all kinds of rubbish thrown at us over the last 10 to 20 years,” he says. “We’ve been told that kids only learn properly in groups. We’ve had people claiming that children learn using brain gym, people saying that kids only learn if you appeal to their learning style. There’s not a scrap of research that substantiates this, and, unfortunately, it is indicative of the really, really dysfunctional state of social science research that exists today.” 

One of the main problems in resolving this issue is the fact that educational theory, unlike the actual sciences, is very difficult to test. How do you find out if the assertion that ‘children learn best in groups’ is actually correct? How do you test the effectiveness of 'homework', when homework can consist of anything from essays to artwork?

A new fund, launched last year by the Wellcome Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), is seeking to answer some of these questions. Six university-led projects have been funded to research how neuroscience can help pupils learn more effectively in the classroom.

While Bennett welcomes the work of the EEF, he says teachers need to be weary of who is leading research projects.

“You hear people say that children must have iPads in order to be 21st century learners, but when you look at the research that tries to substantiate this claim, it’s normally written by iPad manufacturers and technology zealots, and that’s fine, but don’t pretend it’s research," he says. "Children don’t have the time to waste on that rubbish, especially poor children.”

Bennett isn’t the only one to voice these concerns. According to new research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), trillions of dollars are spent on education policies around the world, but just one in 10 are actually evaluated.

Commenting on the research, Andreas Schleicher, OECD director of education and skills, said: "If we want to improve educational outcomes we need to have a much more systematic and evidence-based approach.”

Speaking at the Education World Forum in London, Schleicher added: "We need to make education a lot more of a science."

It seems an obvious statement, but, clearly, not one that has been put into practice over the years. With many initiatives left unsubstantiated.

Bennett has been a vocal critic of such educational practices and founded researchED as a way to counter the myths in education and improve research literacy within the education community.

“There are two main things I am calling for here,” he says. “One is that I want to highlight to teachers the rubbish that is out there, so that when someone comes along and says, ‘you should do this to help children learn’ teachers can raise a sceptical eyebrow and say ‘what’s the evidence behind that?’, ‘why should I spend six extra hours a week doing this?’, ‘why should my school spend half a million pounds doing it?’

“These are really important questions; both for ministers looking at education policy, and for team leaders within a school environment.

“The second thing is I would like teachers to engage more with driving good research. At the moment, a lot of research is very distant from the classroom, it’s done by people who don’t understand children, it’s done by people who have never taught. I want teachers to engage more with good research and drive future research.”

One of Bennett’s goals with researchED is to give teachers the opportunity and courage to question research, to be sceptical about practices and to look at the provenance of research before wholly accepting assertions as fact.

The organisation has proved hugely successful since its launch in 2013, growing from an initial conference in Dulwich College, to launches in New York and Sydney this year.

It has also led to Bennett being nominated for the inaugural $1 million Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize, the largest prize of its kind given to one exceptional teacher in recognition of their contribution to education.

Along with Richard Spencer, a teacher at Middlesbrough College in Billingham, County Durham, Bennett is the only nomination from the UK.

“It’s very strange,” he says. “I certainly don’t feel like one of the top two teachers in the country. There are probably better teachers in my school.

“I like this award, not only because I’ve been nominated, but because it’s a celebration of teachers and raises their status nationally and internationally. All the people on the list – and I’m very honoured to be on the shortlist – have done lots of things outside of the classroom to try and make things better for teaching in general.”

“From my point of view, and to return to my main argument, I want teachers to be a lot more sceptical of what they read, because often the evidence is far less conclusive than people would like to have you believe.

“Really good science tells you when you’re wrong. I’m not saying that people don’t have learning styles, because there is no evidence that we don’t. But as Richard Dawkins highlighted, ‘you can’t prove a negative’”

Learning batting from David Warner

Ed Smith

On Sunday, I fly to Adelaide for the fourth Test between India and Australia. I'm due to arrive just in time for the first ball. I hope the plane isn't late: David Warner might have scored a hundred by lunch.

In smashing 180 off 159 balls in Perth, Warner proved quite a few people wrong - not least those who said that Twenty20 would never produce a Test cricketer. Warner, of course, played T20 for Australia and in the IPL long before making the step-up to Test cricket - well, I suppose it's up to him to judge whether it's a step up. 

We've all heard the arguments against the Warner career path: that T20 ruins technique rather than developing it, that you have to learn to bat properly before you can learn to smash it, walk before you can run etc.

But the naysayers may be wrong. The Warner story reveals deep truths about how players bat at their best. In fact, I think it is time we reconsidered the whole question of what constitutes good technique.

Cricket gets itself in a tangle about the word. In football, technique is short-hand for skill. Pundits explain how Cesc Fabregas' brilliant technique allows him to make the killer pass or eye-catching volley. Technique is not the enemy of flair and self-expression: it is the necessary pre-requisite. "Technique is freedom," argued the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

Sadly, the word "technique" in cricket is often used as short-hand for controlled batsmanship, even introspection. It is true that some great technicians are very controlled players (think of Rahul Dravid - though even he plays best technically when he is positive). But it is not compulsory that good technique has to be accompanied by caution or repression. After all, Adam Gilchrist had a wonderful technique: there is no other explanation for how he managed to hit the ball in the middle of the bat quite so consistently.

In fact, good technique has a very straightforward definition: it is the simplest, most efficient way of doing something.

Andre Agassi had near-perfect technique on his groundstrokes. He could hit with exceptional power and consistency. How did he learn this technique? When Agassi was a boy, his father used to get him to hit thousands of tennis balls as hard and as cleanly as possible. "Hit it, Andre!" That was the essence of his coaching. If you learn how to hit the ball hard in the middle of the racket, you have to move your body and feet into the right positions to do so. In the same way, Jack Nicklaus summed up his approach to learning golf: "First, hit it hard. Then we'll worry about getting it in the hole."

I should have remembered Agassi and Nicklaus when I was out of form as a batsman and needed to go back to basics. Not only did I suffer prolonged periods of bad form, I would often get out in similar ways - nicking off to the slips, or getting trapped lbw. There were usually plenty of theories about what I was doing wrong. As one coach memorably put it to me, "If you stop getting caught and lbw, you'll be a top player." Er, yes: it would take great ingenuity to get bowled or run out throughout your career!

Many coaches tried to persuade me to change my shot selection. But that rarely helped. When I was nicking off, it was usually because I was driving badly rather than driving at the wrong ball. And I was a far less good player when I was knocked off my instinct to play positively. I came to realise that good form was a very simple issue, almost binary - like a switch that just needed to be clicked back on.

Here comes the difficult part that used to get me into trouble. I learnt that the best way to click the switch back on, to get back into the groove of playing well, was to practise driving on the up. You've probably guessed why it got me in trouble. Imagine a situation in which I had failed three or four times in a row, each time caught in the slips, and the coach walks into the nets and sees me…practising drives! I'd sense him thinking: "Doesn't he ever learn?"

But I knew what worked for me, and I think there are good reasons why it worked. To play at my best, I needed to get into good positions to attack. Why? Because when I was in position to attack, I was inevitably in a good position also to defend. But when I set out my stall to play a defensive shot - before the ball was even bowled - then I not only attacked badly, I also defended badly. Having the intention of defending caused me to be passive and late in my movements. The shot would almost happen to me, rather than me determining the shot.

	To play at my best, I needed to get into good positions to attack. Why? Because when I was in position to attack, I was inevitably in a good position also to defend

On the other hand, having the intention of attacking was a win-win: I defended and attacked better. I would set myself to play positively, which had the effect of giving me more time at every stage of the shot.

I think many players are the same. The key to their batting - whether it is defence or attack - is the question of intent. That has nothing to do with recklessness, or even scoring rate. Intent merely determines the messages you send to your brain. Imagine batting as a series of dominos that culminates in the ball being struck. The very first domino, the critical one that begins the whole process, is not physical, but mental. We might call it your "mental trigger movement".

I know it sounds ridiculously simplistic - technique from kindergarten - but many players find that the best mental trigger movement is setting themselves to move towards the ball to strike it back in the direction that it comes from. That does not mean you commit to lurching onto the front foot or playing a drive; you still react to whatever is thrown at you. But your intent is positive and pro-active.

Greg Chappell used the science of physiology to examine the connection between intent and good execution. He studied the preliminary movements of the world's greatest players. Though they all had unique styles and methods, their techniques shared one common thread: at the point of delivery, they were all pushing off the back foot, looking to come forward. Chappell argued that this trait gives great players optimal time to judge length. Why? Because a full ball is released from the bowler's hand early, a short ball is released later. So when batsmen set themselves for the full ball, they will inevitably have time to adjust for the short ball.

Here is my heretical conclusion: by encouraging them to have the intention of striking down the ground with a proper backlift and swing of the bat, T20 may help batsmen get into some good technical habits. Admittedly, T20 will not develop the refinements of sophisticated Test match batting, such as soft hands and the ability to concentrate for six or seven hours. But in terms of basic technique, there is a lot to be said for keeping cricket as simple as possible. The foundation is positive intent and a clear head. In short, we could all learn something from Warner.

The counter-argument is that Warner is a freak of nature, and that no one should try copying him just yet. Either way, I can't wait to watch him in Adelaide and judge for myself.