John Hemming's Web Log

It has been suggested to me that the UK's membership of the EEA is separate to its membership of the EU. The EEA agreement is here and the UK is a signatory rather than the EU on behalf of the UK. This actually means that leaving the EU without leaving the EEA has no effect on freedom of movement - one of the big arguments.

What is good about the video below is that it simple takes part of the arguments of the people who wish to leave the EU and puts them together. I have looked at this issue before. UKIP used to propose the EEA which means not having a vote and just being consulted on the rules that the UK has to follow.

It is interesting that Barack Obama has been clear about what is entirely obvious in terms of trade agreements. The EU is a Common Market. It starts out as a trade agreement. It has rules as to how the trade agreement's detailed rules change, but it is a trade agreement. There is a debate about establishing an agreement between the EU and the US which is called TTIP. However, the UK should not expect to establish trade agreements before the EU has completed its agreements. More importantly the terms of any agreement the UK has with other countries is likely to be essentially the same rules as in the larger regional trade agreements. Hence we end up in a situation in which we are subjected to rules that we have no control over.

Comment by John Hemming: "The Court of Appeal are right to strike down the injunction. They are also right, however, to give leave to appeal to the Supreme Court. This issue needs to be resolved such that it is not subject to an almost immediate challenge. People generally need to know that they do not face jail for joking and gossiping. The media need to know what they can write without having to spend shedloads of cash with legal advisers before they put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). The powerful need to know that if they don't want something on the front page of the newspaper they should not do it." "In the end it is more important that this issue is properly resolved than it is resolved quickly. We need an answer that allows people to go about their daily lives knowing what the law is. There have been too many injunctions recently and that needs to come to an end." "Additionally there is a difference between the way in which the Eu...

What is interesting about this guardian article is that they have decided that naming the Sunday Mail is potentially in breach of the court order (which I have not seen). They do, however, reveal that if you want to confirm the names involved you have to go to Scotland. Hence as that is the hardest part of the process I would presume that if they are right about naming the outlet they are wrong about naming the country. Still it is all a bit silly really. My big worry about the legal aspects here is that the people who are being gagged (not the newspapers, but the people who want to talk about what happened to them) cannot sensibly take the financial risk of defending their position in court. Unless there is a guarantee costs won't be awarded against them they are forced into a legal corner.

There is no sense me writing much about The Streisand Effect . It suffices to read the wikipedia article I have linked to and note that as with Ryan Giggs taken legal action to prevent something being publicised can actually draw attention to it. We have that now with an injunction that has been sustained by the Court of Appeal on privacy. It always seems a bit odd that such relatively minor things are made state secrets ... for those with enough money to spend on the lawyers. What would be a one or two day story at the most then becomes a running sore that gets far more attention than just having the one day story. The House of Lords decision in Spycatcher was clearly right. I have linked to the judgment. " If Mr. Wright were to publish a second book in America or Australia or both and it were to become readily available in this country, as has happened in regard to his first book, newspapers which published its contents would have as good a defence as the responden...