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LONDON (AP) A timeline of key events related to Britains decision to leave the European Union:

Jan. 23, 2013: British Prime Minister David Cameron promises a referendum on Britains membership in the EU if the Conservative Party wins the next general election. He does so to try to garner support among euroskeptics within his own party.

May. 7, 2015: British voters elect a majority Conservative government. Cameron confirms in his victory speech that there will be an in/out referendum on European Union membership.

Feb. 20, 2016: Cameron announces that he has negotiated a deal with EU leaders that gives Britain special status. He confirms that he will campaign for Britain to remain in the 28-nation bloc. The referendum date is set for June.

Feb. 21: Cameron is struck with a severe blow when one of his closest Conservative allies, the media-savvy Boris Johnson, joins the leave campaign.

June 16: One week before the referendum, Labour Party lawmaker and remain campaigner Jo Cox is killed by extremist Thomas Mair, who shouted Britain First before shooting and stabbing her.

June 23: Britain votes 52% to 48% to leave the European Union.

June 24: Cameron says he will resign in light of the results because Britain needs fresh leadership to take the country in a new direction.

July 13: Following a Conservative Party leadership contest, Home Secretary Theresa May becomes prime minister.

Oct. 2: May says Britain will begin the formal process of leaving the EU by the end of March 2017. To do this, the British government needs to invoke Article 50 of the EUs Lisbon Treaty.

March 29, 2017: The British government formally triggers Article 50, setting in motion a plan for Britain to leave the EU on March 29, 2019.

June 8: A general election called by May to bolster her partys representation in Parliament to help with the Brexit negotiations backfires. Her Conservative Party loses its majority and continues in a weakened state as a minority government.

July 7, 2018: May and her Cabinet endorse the so-called Chequers Plan worked out at a fractious session at the prime ministers country retreat. The plan leads to the resignations of Brexit Secretary David Davis, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and others who favor a more complete break with EU.

Nov. 25: EU leaders approve a withdrawal deal reached with Britain after months of difficult negotiations. May urges the British Parliament to do the same.

Dec. 10: May delays the planned Brexit vote in Parliament one day before it is set to be held because it faces certain defeat. She seeks further concessions from the EU.

Dec. 12: Conservative lawmakers who back a clean break from the EU trigger a no-confidence vote in May over her handling of Brexit. She wins by 200 votes to 117, making her safe from another such challenge for a year.

Jan. 15, 2019: The Brexit deal comes back to Parliament, where it is overwhelmingly defeated on a 432-202 vote. The House of Commons will end up rejecting Mays agreement three times.

April 11: Britain and the EU agree for a second time to extend the withdrawal deadline, originally scheduled for March 29, to keep Brexit from happening without a deal in place. The new deadline is Oct. 31.

June 7: May steps down as Conservative Party leader over the stalled Brexit agreement, clearing the way for Johnson to take over as Tory leader and Britains prime minister.

July 23: Johnson wins Conservative Party leadership contest.

July 24: Johnson takes office and almost immediately makes clear the U.K. with leave the EU on Oct. 31, with or without a deal.

Aug. 28: Johnson says he will temporarily shut down Parliament by scheduling the Queens Speech for Oct. 14. The speech normally is a formality that outlines the legislative agenda but since Parliament is ordinarily suspended beforehand, the move means the opposition will have less time to thwart a no-deal Brexit.

Sept. 3: Rebel Conservative Party lawmakers vote against the government in protest of Johnsons strategy. They are expelled from the party.

Sept. 5: Johnson asserts he would rather be dead in a ditch than ask for another Brexit extension.

Sept. 9: A parliamentary measure that prevents the U.K. from leaving the EU without a deal becomes law.

Sept. 24: U.K. Supreme Court rules governments suspension of Parliament was unlawful.

Oct. 10: Johnson and Irish leader Leo Varadkar announce pathway to a possible deal.

Oct. 17: U.K. and EU announce theyve struck a deal after U.K. makes concessions over Northern Ireland.

Oct. 19: Parliament sits on a Saturday and demands to see legislation before approving the deal.

Oct. 22: Johnson puts Brexit legislation on pause.

Oct. 28: EU gives UK flextension until Jan. 31.

Dec. 12: Johnson wins election decisively.

Jan. 23, 2020: Withdrawal Bill becomes law.

Jan. 29: European Parliament approves divorce deal.

Jan. 31: U.K. to officially leave the EU at 11 p.m.

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Timeline of events in Britain's exit from the European Union | News, Sports, Jobs - Lewistown Sentinel

Even when I was excited about the European Union, I was bored by it. It came into my life as an issue after the Cold War ended. Until then, I had rudely brushed aside a friend of mine who insisted, with the desperate passion of the ignored prophet, that it was important. When the U.S.S.R.s Third Shock Army still sat in East Germany and lovely Prague was still frozen in despotism, it just didnt seem to matter. Somebody recently unearthed a recording of me saying so as late as 1994, so I cannot claim, even if I wanted to, to be an ancient combatant in this controversy. You could see the Cold War as a material force, wrought in rough concrete and rusty steel, and I had done so. You could even smell it in the East Berlin perfume of brown coal and two-stroke exhaust. And you would have to be very slow to miss the U.S.S.R.s morally simple challenge to the conscience, its abuse of psychiatry to torture and crush dissent being perhaps the most repulsive of its many crimes.

You couldnt really see the European project. If you went to Brussels, it gave you a nice lunch and told you not to worry. You caught it at the end of a document, in a peevish speech by a German politician, in the fine print of life. It expressed itself quite often in absences, the abolished frontier posts that followed the Schengen Agreement, the disappearance of the national currencies of the continent.Only once did I really see it spitting, oppressive, and harshly demandingand that was over an issue that I was almost alone in caring about. I watched a British shopkeeper called Steve Thoburn be spitefully, relentlessly prosecuted for the crime of selling bananas to his customers in English pounds rather than continental kilograms. This is the kind of thing that makes me uncontainably furious; I glimpsed for the first time what each of the multiple humiliations of subjugation and occupation by foreigners must feel like. And at that point I became what my old friend had been: an Ancient Mariner, eyes glittering, gnarled fingers clutching the wrists of passersby, gripped with a seething passion I could not communicate. Who cares about your silly old ounces and inches and furlongs? And yet I did, involuntarily. I have the same problem with Common Law versus the Civil Code and Roman Law. These are priceless, unique possessions, facts as well as symbols of an ancient liberty.

I read the historiesthe liberal This Blessed Plot by Hugo Young and the conservative The Great Deception by Christopher Booker and Richard North. I was struck by how similar their descriptions were: Both books depicted the European project as a stealthy, relentless effort to create something never previously seen, an empire without an emperor, a supranational state that never quite admitted its statehood. As I am utterly fascinated by the twentieth-century history of Europe and the repeated attempts of Germany to dominate that continent, it seemed to me that the European Union was the Continuation of Germany by Other Means, the peaceful and civilized establishment of a dominance over Western Europe that has been inevitable since the final defeat of Bonaparte in 1815. Actually, I like Germany so much that I go there on vacation and would enjoy living there. I admire its creation of a free, law-governed society on the ruins of a homicidal tyranny. I can easily see why the original members of the Common Market might want such a merger. I understand why later entrants saw it as a sort of convalescent home where they could recover from dictatorship or Soviet domination. But I could see no need for Britain to be part of this political project.

What I hoped was that we might leave the European Union as part of a counter-revolution against all the errors of the past fifty years. I thought this would involve, above all, the destruction of the British Conservative Party, which occupied the space that should have been filled by a genuinely patriotic, Christian, and conservative formation. Then it all turned upside down.

By some strange process, the Conservative Party realized that it was in genuine danger. It wasnt coherent or rational, more like some sort of fat white weed groping for the light solely to survive. After all, its support for the E.U. made it blazingly obvious that it was not what it said it was. As the E.U. issue became entangled with unpopular levels of mass immigration, and with a general malaise about the way the country was run, it sought to defuse the issue with a referendum. It assumed that the referendum would vote to remain. But it didnt, and so we have had the past three years, which have resembled a cricket match played without a ball, by men in blindfolds. And out of this has come the weird conclusion that what we all really wanted was more free trade with Indonesia, which as far as I can see is what we have got.

Heaven knows what will happen to Britain. The government certainly doesnt.But I have a worrying feeling that instead of sacrificing the Tory Party to save the country, we may have sacrificed the country to save the Tory Party.

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the LondonMail on Sunday.

Photo by Chris Breeze via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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Goodbye to the European Union | Peter Hitchens - First Things

By: New York Times | Published: January 30, 2020 2:57:55 pm Still, experts warn that the battle for Huawei isnt over. In the Czech Republic, for example, cybersecurity authorities have warned against using Huawei in their 5G rollout. (Image: Reuters)

By Matina Stevis-Gridneff

The European Union told its members Wednesday that they should limit so-called high-risk 5G vendors, a category that includes Chinese tech giant Huawei, but stopped short of recommending a ban on the firm, despite a lengthy and aggressive campaign by the Trump administration.

The recommendations are as far as the European Union can go in dictating policy to its member nations, whose governments will have the final word on whether and how they want to let Huawei help build their next generation of wireless telecommunications networks.

The EU guidance, referred to as the 5G toolbox, is a key moment in the blocs intensive work to help its members decide how to navigate fraught political and technical considerations as they and their wireless carriers prepare to invest billions of dollars in telecommunications infrastructure.

We can do great things with 5G, said Margrethe Vestager, a top official of the European Commission, the European Unions executive body. But only if we can make our networks secure.

The United States maintains that Huawei poses an espionage threat, as it can be compelled by Chinese law to hand over data or spy on behalf of the Chinese government, and some European officials have voiced similar concerns. The company vehemently rejects the accusations and has repeatedly said it would never engage in espionage.

The British government said Tuesday that it would permit Huawei to develop part of its own next-generation networks. Huawei, considered a high-risk vendor under the British rules, would be limited to 35 per cent of the network and would be kept at arms length from some more strategically sensitive infrastructure, such as nuclear power and defense systems.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, commenting on the European Unions announcement, said, Well have to see what they actually do and, importantly, how they implement what theyve laid out.

There is also a chance for the United Kingdom to relook at this as implementation moves forward, he added.

The European Commission experts recommended that national regulators should enforce some restrictions to protect so-called core parts of their networks seen as particularly vulnerable to hacking or espionage.

Countries should apply relevant restrictions for suppliers considered to be high risk, including necessary exclusions to effectively mitigate risks for key assets, the commission said.

The twin announcements, in Brussels on Wednesday and London on Tuesday, represent a victory for the Chinese tech giant, which has launched a charm offensive in Europe after it was practically banned from doing business in the United States.

They also highlighted the limited effect of a monthslong, intensive and highly publicized lobbying effort by the Trump administration, which pressured both the European Union as a whole and member countries individually to follow its lead and ban Huawei.

The campaign included multiple visits by senior US officials to Brussels and other European capitals. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote an op-ed, published last month in Politico Europe, that urged European leaders to keep Huawei out of their countries networks.

China steals intellectual property for military purposes, Pompeo said in May on a trip to London. It wants to dominate AI, space technology, ballistic missiles and many other areas.

Germany, the European Unions biggest and most important economy, is due in the coming months to publish its own decision on how to treat Huawei, a matter that has driven bitter internal debate in the main governing party.

The EU recommendations also come ahead of trade negotiations with the United States that were already likely to be fraught.

Brussels has been treading a fine line between China and the United States, trying to balance and maintain both relationships despite pressure from Washington to pick sides.

The treatment of Huawei also indicates that despite Brexit, which takes effect later this week, London and Brussels may remain largely aligned on strategic issues, even in the face of pressure from the United States.

Still, experts warn that the battle for Huawei isnt over. In the Czech Republic, for example, cybersecurity authorities have warned against using Huawei in their 5G rollout.

The European Commission guidance will permit outright bans of companies, if thats what national authorities prefer.

The toolbox suggests we need to take strategic measures to mitigate these risks and these strategic measures mention all approaches currently on the table, said Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, director of the European Center for International Political Economy, a research group based in Brussels.

He added that, despite the European Unions guidance, Britains decision to include Huawei was also a reflection of the countrys large cyberdefense capabilities.

Other countries may find it cheaper to just rip and replace Chinese equipment, or they may have no state secrets to protect vis--vis China, he added.

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E.U. Recommends Limiting, but Not Banning, Huawei in 5G Rollout - The Indian Express

At the age of 20, in June of 1975, I became one of the young people who voted to confirm our membership of the European Union. In 2016, my generation voted to bring us back out. Why did we change our minds? There are several reasons, but the main one is simply our loss of sovereignty.

I was personally comfortable with sharing sovereignty. The European states were democratic, I felt there was common cause between us, we had a shared interest in an enduring peace between us, and nationalism seemed an unmitigated evil, especially when combined with an ideology.

My own comfort gradually disappeared as it became clearer that our lives were increasingly being shaped by officials whom we had not elected. We had joined the Common Market and been told that it was all about free trade, which always sounds like a good thing.

Half the Labour Party was opposed to it, however. Remainers have enjoyed depicting Leavers as little Englanders and rightwingers, but there are also impeccable leftwing reasons for opposing membership.

I remember the big posters enjoining us to Say no to the Bosses Europe, and the Labour manifesto of 1983 declaring that we would leave if they were elected. They were worried about food pricing, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and restrictions on socialist industrial policy.

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Why I changed my mind on the European Union - Telegraph.co.uk

Pro-European Dundonians will mark the UKs departure from the EU with a candlelit vigil in the city centre.

Europhiles are gathering in City Square at 5pm tomorrow, six hours before the UK officially leaves the EU, to mark the end of the 47-year membership.

The Dundee and Angus Independence Group, behind the event, intends to recreate the EU flag in candles before congregating at the steps of the McManus Galleries to have a lone piper mark the occasion.

Meanwhile, Dundee City Council will light the Caird Hall, Seabraes, Dundee House, Dundee railway station and Slessor Gardens blue in solidarity with the EU. The City of Discovery voted to remain in 2016s referendum.

Lynne Short, council equalities spokeswoman, believes it is important the occasion is marked.

We want to show the strength of our feelings and to protest at what is being done to us, she said.

We also hope to send a message of solidarity, support and friendship to our EU citizens and maybe even beyond, to other EU countries, through social media.

From my point of view as equalities spokesperson I want to send the message that no matter where you come from, if Dundee is your home then you are welcome here, just as I was welcomed as an EU citizen when I lived in mainland Europe.

Jane Phillips, organiser of the event, added: Were devastated this is happening I feel its so sad to be taking away the cooperation and friendship and the other good things about Europe.

Pro-European locals have expressed concerns at what the future holds for a Dundee outside of Europe.

Scientist Emma Sands, 24, said European colleagues were planning their departures.

She said: Its all people talk about at lunchtime in work. And weve already lost so much funding and talent coming to the UK. I have an Italian colleague who is learning German so he can go and work in Germany instead of staying here.

Teenager Brogan Connolly said: Were losing potential partnerships and opportunities. Its unlikely I will be working or studying in a European country in the future.

Will Dawson, Brexit working group chairman, has written to both the UK and Scottish governments to request ongoing participation in the Erasmus+ student exchange programme.

It enables youngsters to study, work, teach and train in other countries signed up to the scheme.

Mr Dawson, who has addressed his letter directly to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and Prime Minister Boris Johnson, says educational establishments have strongly benefited from the scheme to the tune of 3.7 million since 2014.

Of Fridays plans, he said: My biggest regret about this whole situation is with regards to the opportunities that our young people will lose.

Things such as the right of free movement which has been enshrined in the EU and allowed people to learn, live, work and travel in Europe without barriers.

What must be remembered in all of this though is that Dundee is very much a European and international city, with strong ties to Poland and twin cities in France, Croatia and Germany.

It is a melting pot of different nationalities, languages and customs and despite our leaving the EU, everyone is welcome to both Dundee and Scotland.

The direct impact of Brexit on Dundee is yet to be fully ascertained, though the council has warned of significant financial and operational risks associated with the planned EU exit.

Exactly how the city will be affected over time is expected to become clear as negotiations continue between the UK Government and the European Union over the countrys future relationship with the bloc.

Ms Short added: The Brexit briefings we receive as councillors are revised right up to the line. Theyre still working on them right up to the point were given them.

As of 11pm this Friday January 31 the UK is no longer part of the EU. From now until December 31, the country enters into a transition period, during which intense negotiations will take place between the UK Government and the EU. During this time, the UK will continue to follow EU rules.

No. The Withdrawl Agreement Bill passed earlier this month in Parliament writes into law the decision to leave the European Union. Negotiations between now and the end of the year could see a deal agreed, or could see the UK crash out without a future trading agreement in place (a no-deal Brexit).

Alongside trading arrangements, the UK needs to come to agreements with the EU on things like how data will be shared, access to fishing waters and citizens future rights.

In a word, no. Sovereignty of the UK is an issue reserved to the UK Government. MSPs in Holyrood voted earlier this month not to recognise the Withdrawl Agreement Bill that will take the UK out of the EU. But in a letter sent to Scottish minister Mike Russell after the vote, Brexit secretary Steve Barclay said the government would press ahead with the WAB all the same despite the fact it would breach constitutional conventions.

Continued here:
Brexit vigil planned as Dundee says goodbye to the European Union - Evening Telegraph