Panic and doom

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There was something very Corporal Jones-like about the Prime Minister appearing before the House of Commons on Monday.  The difference between ‘Don’t Panic’ and ‘This is a time for cool, calm heads’ is more about the tone in which the words are uttered than in the meaning which they convey.  And, for once she’s right; that’s exactly what is required.  But surveying the people around her, where does she think that she will find such a commodity?  Her cabinet is hopelessly divided, with around a third of the members actively and very ostentatiously plotting to undermine her; her party is split into at least three different factions, and the main opposition party is united only in demanding a better unicorn that the one she can never deliver.  The two cabinet ministers who actually got around to resigning because they don’t agree with her plans can’t even agree with each other – David Davis has magical spectacles which seem to see the EU in a state of panic which would allow the UK to press home its imaginary advantage, whilst Boris Johnson has an entirely different pair of spectacles which see a domineering EU forcing the UK into separation or submission.  Just as well they’re not on the same side, eh?  If the future really does depend on finding a few ‘cool, calm heads’ amongst this lot, then perhaps it’s Private Frazer to whom we should be listening, not Corporal Jones, because it means that ‘we’re doomed’.

Blind faith

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Following his resignation as Brexit Secretary, David Davis has rounded on those who claimed that he had no alternative proposal of his own, and he took to the pages of the Sunday Times (paywall) to refute the claim and outline his own alternative.  He’s certainly managed to demonstrate that he does indeed have an alternative plan, so in that sense, he wins the argument.  The question, though, is whether his alternative plan is a realistic and workable one.

As ever, the answer depends on the assumptions that we make.  His ‘plan’ basically amounted to conceding nothing, demanding the right to cherry-pick, and waiting for the EU27 to blink first.  It was, in essence, based on the idea that faced with complete intransigence from the UK side, the EU would eventually back down and start to dismantle the single market and customs union in order to allow the UK to pick the bits it wanted whilst rejecting the rest.  And underlying that are two assumptions that the Brexiteers have been making from the outset – ‘they need us more than we need them’; and the whole EU was only ever about trade and commerce.

For those who really believe that, there was never any need to negotiate anything (which provides, in a manner of speaking, another explanation for Davis’ apparent complete lack of activity), because the EU27 would eventually come to accept the UK position and tear up its carefully honed rulebook.  Even now, as the eleventh hour approaches, there are still plenty of Brexiteers willing to bet the entire country on their firm conviction that the EU27 are just bluffing, and will roll over eventually.  There is, for them, no need for any sort of Plan B, because Plan A is an absolute cert in their world of blind faith. 

It’s a blind faith which has held the government and prime minister prisoner for two years, locked into a position from which they’ve been unwilling to move.  And it’s the sort of blind faith which has its true believers screaming about heresy and betrayal when anyone dares to suggest that the world might not be as they believe and want it to be.  It also underlines the extent to which Brexit is more akin to religious cult than a rational policy for many of its adherents.

Leaving the frying-pan

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In his resignation letter and the series of interviews which followed it, David Davis did at least succeed in explaining his own apparently indolent and relaxed approach to negotiating with the EU – he still believes that ‘they need us more than we need them’, and the leaders of EU states would eventually fall into line and dismantle key aspects of the single market to accommodate the UK’s requirements.  Seen from that perspective, who needs to spend long hours locked in negotiations or carry voluminous files of paperwork as a basis for those talks?  It’s simply a matter of not blinking first, and his anger that May did blink gives him and the other Brexiteers the scapegoat they need. In Davisland, all would have been well if only they’d just done nothing and waited for the EU to bend.

It’s the stuff of fantasy, of course, because it turns out that for the EU (albeit not for the UK) it really is true that a bad deal (under which single market integrity is damaged) is worse than no deal (under which the biggest loser is the UK).  It’s what the Brexiteers have been saying all along, just the other way around.

With May in trouble, there’s no surprise that Labour are scenting blood, with the First Minister demanding a general election.  I entirely agree with Carwyn Jones when he says that “We need a different government with a different view on Brexit…”; I’m just utterly unconvinced that the Labour Party is offering that, let alone that a general election would produce one.  It’s true, as Paul Mason writes in the New Statesman, that there is a route by which the Labour Party could offer a coherent alternative based around the so-called Norway option; there’s just no sign that Corbyn is anywhere close to embracing that option.  It might be a sensible approach, and it’s certainly one which leaves the door open to re-joining easily and quickly at some future date (it was, after all, designed to allow easy admission to Norway should the political situation there permit it at some point). 

But if there’s one thing Labour can be depended on for in relation to Brexit, it’s taking a bad situation and making it worse.  The logical outcome of any sensible negotiation based on the May plan is a Brexit which looks remarkably like the Norway option, albeit using different words and descriptions in an attempt to pretend that no red lines are being crossed.  That logical outcome is exactly what is making May’s Brexiteers so angry with her; they can see the further concessions coming.  She knows that she doesn’t have a parliamentary majority for such a deal, which is why she is busy wooing other parties to support it.  And the current probability is that, rather than follow the approach outlined by Mason, the Labour Party will instead unite to vote against the outcome of May’s negotiations in the belief that a general election will lead to a Labour government – effectively demanding a ‘harder’ Brexit than the Prime Minister.  Unless and until the Labour Party changes its position, the First Minister is effectively asking us to leap out of the Tory frying-pan into the Labour fire.

Why bother?

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My initial reaction to the lack of resignations from Brexiteers following Friday’s ‘agreement’ by the UK cabinet was that they were so confident that the plan would be rejected by the EU27 that agreeing to the ‘plan’ was not so much a concession on their part as a prelude to the no-deal crashing out which they crave.  It certainly appeared as though May’s rebadging-with-conditions was putting down a series of conditions to which the EU27 could never agree; and her demand that the EU now start to be flexible sounded like the usual Brexit demand for the EU27 to abandon at least some of the basic tenets of the single market.  But yesterday’s resignation makes me wonder whether at least some of the Brexiteers are starting to realise that the plan does actually contain the outline of a possible deal, if we regard it as a two-year late opening position, rather than a last minute set of immutable demands.

Take the “combined customs territory” for instance.  It sounds a lot like a new name for a customs union, and the chief difference between the two seems to be that the May plan assumes that the UK will have the right to negotiate different tariffs from those set by the EU.  This is obviously fraught with difficulty; apart from being a smugglers’ charter for any goods where EU tariffs and UK tariffs are different, the proposed use of technology which doesn’t yet exist to control where imported goods end up looks like being completely impractical when one considers raw materials turned into components turned into finished goods.  Without a physical border check to determine whether the contents of a lorry are what the electronic ‘paperwork’ says they are, the potential for UK firms to gain an unfair competitive advantage is something that the EU will never allow.  But what if the ‘right’ to negotiate different tariffs was accompanied by an agreement that the ‘right’ would never actually be used?  That’s hardly an unusual approach from the EU, and it would leave the ‘combined customs territory’ different only in name from the customs union.  I can’t see the EU27 being particularly averse to allowing the UK to call it something different.

Or take the proposal to replace freedom of movement with a ‘mobility framework’.  If the only difference between the two is that the UK starts to apply restrictions already allowed for in the EU treaties (or can be negotiated to that point) – something which successive governments have decided not to do – then why would the EU object to the UK simply using a different nomenclature?

Or consider the ‘harmonisation’ of rules instead of membership of the single market for goods.  If the UK is prepared to guarantee that it will follow all relevant EU rules for goods (in which the EU has a trading surplus with the UK) and accept that the interpretation of those rules is down to the ECJ, whilst excluding services (in which the UK has a surplus with the EU), then why, in principle, would the EU27 not be willing to discuss the details of how that compliance is guaranteed and implemented?

The amount of money which the UK will need to pay into the EU budget will be something of a sticking point; it will certainly be higher than the May plan envisages.  But a little bit of creative accounting under which it becomes a series of individual payments for specific services will allow it to be presented as something other than a contribution to the central EU budget – again, as long as the amount they receive is consistent with other deals and meets their requirements, why would the EU 27 be particularly bothered about what the UK decides to call it?

The only way in which May’s plan can be considered to adhere to any of her red lines is by assuming that those red lines apply only to what things are called, not to what they achieve.  The plan, as Brexiteers are coming to realise, not only ignores the substance of all those precious red lines, but might also provide a sound basis for negotiating something which will end up looking an awful lot like the Norway option which Brexiteers correctly characterise as Brexit-in-name-only, and under which the UK would follow the rules whilst having no input into them.

If only we had an alternative government-in-waiting which was prepared to look at all of this and ask one simple question: “Why bother?”

Agreement breaks out?

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After many months of difficult negotiations, accompanied by sometimes bitter briefings, leaks, and recriminations, agreement has finally been reached on one key element in the increasingly fraught EU negotiations.  Theresa May and David Davis have finally managed to achieve what look like consensus on the colour of the unicorn which they are going to demand from the EU.  It’s taken two years, but at last there is now a clear route forward to the point at which the UK government formally asks the EU to declare its proposals unworkable, unrealistic, and undeliverable.

How on earth they can possibly imagine that the EU’s insistence on a backstop arrangement for Ireland – to which they both apparently agreed last December (albeit with their fingers crossed behind their backs) – can be realised by agreeing a date at which said backstop comes to an end whilst still not having a clue about what will replace it, is a mystery only to those who fail to understand the sheer uniqueness and specialness of the UK.  So, most of the world, then.

Meanwhile, Corporal Johnson, one of the other ringleaders of this whole process, has been recorded privately warning that Brexit (or rather the more ‘combative’ approach which the Prime Minister is going to take in relation to her demand for that unicorn) will lead to a ‘meltdown’, but like his near namesake, his response is simply to tell everyone not to panic.  But as I recall from that old TV programme, the customary sequel to “Don’t panic” was a request for “Permission to panic, sir?”, so we have at least something to look forward to in this long-running end-of-the-pier show before the entire cast lead the audience over the end of said pier, waving union flags and singing Rule Britannia out of key.

A good scriptwriter would have at least some idea about how he’d get his characters out of the briny for the next episode; but at the moment there’s nothing better on offer than the traditional “with one bound he was free”.  It’s a plot line that might have worked on steam radio in the 40s and 50s, but surely no-one would seriously depend on such a cliched mechanism in this day and age?

Two speeches and a confession

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There are two types of obstacles to ‘frictionless trade’, which is the stated goal of the UK Government in the negotiations with the EU.  The first type is tariffs, and although it can take months and years of negotiations, abolishing or reducing tariffs is the easy part.  If by ‘free trade’ the government actually means ‘tariff-free trade’ (which is the way things look at times), then an agreement ought to be perfectly possible, even if the desired timescale is more than a little optimistic.  The second type of barrier is about rules, regulations and standards.  Ensuring that goods and services from one jurisdiction are being produced on a ‘level playing field’ before allowing them to be freely sold in another jurisdiction is one of the issues which leads to the creation of a so-called ‘hard’ border.  And it isn’t just about things like quality of the finished goods, it also includes things like whether different countries have different standards for environmental protection or health and safety – lower standards can reduce costs and therefore provide a potentially unfair advantage.  Regulatory alignment is much harder than tariff alignment, and takes longer to achieve - the best way of avoiding such problems is to adopt a common set of rules and regulations, arrived at by agreement.  (We could, perhaps, call it something like a ‘single market’.)

But given two different sets of regulations, does it necessarily follow that there need to be controls and checks on goods and services crossing from one to the other?  The UK Government’s position appears to be that it does not, and that if the EU imposes such checks it is the EU erecting new barriers to trade.  This seems to be the general gist of Liam Fox’s speech this week.  He explicitly referred to the possibility of ‘Europe’ “erecting barriers to trade where none yet exists”.  It chimes with one of the regular themes of the Brexiteers that we don’t need border checks and controls, and if we end up having them, it’s not the UK’s fault, it’s all the faulty of those nasty vindictive Europeans.  There is a sense in which the core message there – leaving out the name-calling – has an element of truth about it.  If you have two countries or groups of countries with different regulatory regimes covering goods and services, and if one of those regimes sets high standards whilst the other sets out to abolish as many standards as it can, which of the two is the one that it going to want to impose controls over goods entering its territory?  Not the one with low standards, naturally – if someone else wants to send them goods produced to higher standards, why wouldn’t they let them in?  But seen from the other perspective, why on earth would the more highly regulated country want to allow in goods produced to lower standards which can undercut the prices of its own manufacturers?  So there’s a sense in which it’s true that it could be the EU that will end up insisting on border controls.

And that brings us to David Davis’s little contribution yesterday.  Despite all the hype from the outset about ‘freeing UK businesses from unnecessary EU rules and regulations’, he seemed to be saying, in effect, that far from reducing standards, the UK will in fact set higher standards.  There will be no race to the bottom in terms of regulations and standards.  It’s a U-turn that, if he’s really serious about it (and I have my doubts), many consumers will surely welcome.  And if UK standards really are better and higher than the EU equivalents, there should be a lot less difficulty in allowing UK goods and services into the EU, which was the thrust of his argument as I understand it.  Hold on a minute, though.  If in this wonderful new world that he now seems to envisage, UK companies are committed to more regulation and higher standards than their competitors in the EU, doesn’t that give those EU companies an unfair advantage, allowing them to undercut UK prices?  In those circumstances, isn’t it the UK which needs hard borders to protect itself from unfair competition?  

Two speeches, but not really a lot more clarity or honesty.  And the confession?  That came from David Davis when he referred to an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ race to the bottom.  What is that, if not an admission that Brexit is really all about England?

Latest update from Planet Zog

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I thought that David Davis was simply making an attempt to re-affirm his extra-planetary origins in his speech last week.  The BBC’s Europe Editor saw it as evidence that the two sides were inhabiting “parallel universes”, but EU chief Donald Tusk dismissed it as simply an example of the “English sense of humour”.  It’s a kindness of approach which the UK Government has done little to deserve.  In the course of the speech, the Secretary of State for Exiting the EU gave us his latest take on the state of talks.  It was full of absolute gems:

·       The minister charged with ending the UK’s existing membership of the world’s most successful free trade area declared that he wants the “freest possible trade in goods and services”, and even that the UK’s current close economic ties “should continue, if not strengthen” after the UK breaks those ties.  Yes, he really is arguing that the ties with a non-member can be stronger than those amongst members.

·       The same minister, who is also charged with implementing the political decision to leave the EU, strongly warned the EU against “putting politics above prosperity”, because, after all, "Putting politics above prosperity is never a smart choice".   An understanding of irony is clearly in short supply on Zog.

·       With his responsibility for ending the over-regulation for which he and his team have been blaming the EU for decades, he made it clear that he wants the UK to lead a "race to the top on quality and standards" rather than engage in a "race to the bottom" that would mean lower standards.  Adding more regulation and standards is now better than abolishing them, apparently.

·       To complete his full house of demands for everything to change whilst everything stays the same, he went on to say that being able to resolve disputes without being subject to the rulings of a supranational body like the EU Court of Justice would require the creation of a supranational body to whose rulings both the UK and the EU would both be subject.

There is, of course, a very simple and obvious way in which he and the UK Government can have all that they claim to want here, but that is simply not the way that things are done on his home planet.

Nothing’s agreed until everything’s agreed

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Much of the hoo-ha about David Davis’ suggestion that Parliament might not get its vote on the EU deal until after the UK has left was based on a real and fair assessment of normal EU practice.  The same applies to the mantra of May and her not-so-merry band for some time that ‘nothing’s agreed until everything is agreed’.  Both of these are a quintessential part of the normal modus operandi of the EU.  Lengthy discussions, give and take, and an eventual agreement at one minute to midnight (even if the clocks have to be stopped to prevent midnight arriving before they’re ready) is a long-standing feature of discussions amongst the member states.  So I can understand, up to a point, why some Brexiteers think that the same should apply to the UK’s exit and trade deal negotiations, and expect everything to be tied up at once.

They’re forgetting something very important though.  The exit part of the negotiations is indeed akin to the discussions amongst members over the years and decades.  And in those internal discussions, it is entirely normal to agree that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.  But that’s only part of the process.

The negotiations on a future trade deal are something entirely different; they aren’t internal discussions between members, they are discussions between the EU as a bloc and a former member state which has decided to make itself a ‘third party’.  Trying to create dependencies between a set of internal treaty-mandated negotiations amongst members and another set between members and an external third party is a wholly unrealistic expectation, yet it is at the core of the UK’s stance.

I really don’t understand why the Brexiteers cannot understand that finalising the negotiations which the EU is required to conduct under article 50 of its own formal treaty is very different from conducting negotiations to which the EU has no treaty obligation whatsoever with a third party country seeking favourable access to EU markets.  The problem here isn’t Brussels’ intransigence, but the expectation by the UK that it can demand a special and unique status, and that it can threaten to walk away, not just from that second set of negotiations, but also from its formal treaty obligations, if it doesn’t get what it wants.

From an EU perspective, the very fact that it has agreed in principle at least to start the second set of negotiations in parallel, once sufficient progress has been made on the contractual part of the discussions, is a huge concession to a departing member.  It is only that extraordinary sense of British exceptionalism which seeks to portray a significant concession as being so inadequate as to constitute some form of punishment or bullying.  And, perhaps, a desire to be able to blame someone else.

Keeping one's head in a crisis

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The Secretary of State for Exiting the EU told Parliament yesterday that anyone who voted against the government bill on withdrawal was voting for a chaotic Brexit.  In the light of events so far, and in particular his own performance to date, it’s tempting to ask whether there actually is any other type of Brexit, whichever way they vote.  Chaos seems to be the order of the day, and it’s largely self-inflicted.

It looks like another attempt to blame someone else – anyone – for the failures of a government which gives every appearance of having not a clue what it wants in any degree of detail, but continues to maintain that whatever it is, the others should give it to them, because, well, UK.  There was another example of blame-apportioning a week or so ago, when William Hague argued that the government shouldn’t blame the voters even though it was really all their fault; by not giving the Tories the bigger majority which May had assumed would follow the election, they were going to end up having to pay more to leave the EU.  The mechanism by which the size of the government’s majority affects the amount of money owed to the EU was not spelled out of course (it would be interesting to see him try), but the electorate is the latest convenient scapegoat.

In the meantime, the leader of the Scottish branch of the Conservative and Unionist Party, said last week in relation to Brexit: “My real fear is that if there’s a short-term economic hit, we don’t bounce back from it”.  It’s an interesting definition of ‘short-term’ to say the least.

However, whilst her party, government, and ministers thrash around spending more time debating with each other than negotiating with the EU27, the not-at-all-robotic Prime Minister continues to talk serenely about smooth transitions, strength, and certainty.  It reminds me of someone I once worked with who, at a particularly difficult time in a large and complex project, said to the project manager, “if you can keep your head whilst all around you are losing theirs, you haven’t got a (expletive deleted) clue what’s going on”.

Punishment and excuses

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The Brexit Secretary came up with a new formulation of ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ this week when he said that no deal would be better than a ‘punishment deal’.  It has a nice ring to it in terms of rhetoric, but it’s every bit as silly as the previous formulation.  And it glosses over the fact that there will be two agreements, not one. 

As far as the second deal, the trade deal, is concerned, we already know that the worst possible outcome is to revert to WTO rules, and that outcome is the inevitable result of no deal.  There is simply no means by which the EU27 can offer worse terms than that; so there is no way of ‘punishing’ anyone.  And we already know that no deal which leaves the UK outside the single market (an inevitable consequence of rejecting freedom of movement and the jurisdiction of the ECJ) can never be as good as membership of the EU.  So any agreement will be better than WTO terms but worse than current terms; ‘no deal’ cannot be better than even the worst negotiated deal.

But prior to that trade deal, the first deal – and the one that has to be largely agreed as a precursor to any trade deal – is about the terms of exit.  There will be many elements to this, but the only one that offers any scope for meting out anything resembling ‘punishment’ is the agreement over the amount to be paid by the UK to the EU.  This has regularly – and wrongly – been presented as though it were some sort of ‘exit bill’.  It is not; it is a calculation of the amount of money which is required to be paid to meet the UK’s obligations under agreements to which it is already party. 

There is certainly plenty of scope for a difference of opinion over which elements should be included and the number of pounds to be attached to each element, and if the EU27 really wanted to punish the UK for daring to leave, this is where they have the most scope for doing so.  The Institute of Economic Affairs has suggested that the total could be as low as £26billion; rumours from within the EU suggest a number anywhere up to £100billion. 

Whether it would be in the EU’s interests to demand an excessive sum is another question entirely; getting something from the UK is obviously better than seeing the UK walk away without paying anything.  And it’s ‘true’ that the UK could simply walk away and pay nothing; but it isn’t the cost-free option as which some seem to see it.  In the first place, seeking a trade deal on better terms than the WTO terms with the EU immediately after walking away from previously agreed commitments isn’t exactly the best way to get them in the right frame of mind for the negotiation.  And in the second place, it would seriously harm the UK’s reputation and ability to make agreements with anyone else.  Who, after all, would want to negotiate a deal on anything with a country which thinks it can tear up a contract at will and walk away with no consequences?  Who would trust such a country?

So, on the specific issue of the amount to be paid, both sides have a clear interest in coming to an agreement  Threats to the contrary by one side will be more of an obstacle than an aid in reaching that agreement.  I can’t believe that David Davis doesn’t understand all this; his abject capitulation over his previous suggestion that the scheduling of talks would be the ‘row of the summer’ certainly suggests that he has a better grasp of reality than his rhetoric indicates.  So why go to so much trouble, repeatedly, to make things harder for himself by trying to raise the stakes?  I wonder if he really wants a deal at the end of the day or not; perhaps he’s just setting the scene to be able to blame those nasty foreigners for the outcome that he really wants – an excuse to walk away.

It's not really all about Prosecco

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There are a lot of international agencies of various sorts across the world, and they all need to have their headquarters somewhere.  Not all of them are related to membership of the EU, but I’m struggling to think of a single one either in or out of the EU which ever has, or ever would, site or retain its headquarters in a country which decided that it no longer wished to be a member of the relevant organisation, use its services, or follow its rules.  And that strikes me as a perfectly reasonable approach.  But then, I’m not a deluded Brexiteer.

Faced with the UK’s imminent departure from membership, the EU is quite naturally considering where to relocate two key agencies both of which are currently based in London.  However, the UK’s delusionist-in-chief, David Davis, says he can see no reason why the agencies cannot stay in London after Brexit, a position which has, unsurprisingly, led to a degree of astonishment in the other 27 EU capitals. 

That which appears logical and straightforward to any rational observer is, for him, merely a point for negotiation – along with all the other things that he and his colleagues continue to argue, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, are negotiable options for the future.  The basis for this belief is largely based, apparently, on exaggerated perceptions such as how much Prosecco gets drunk in the UK and how vital we are to the other economies of the EU as a result.  But the underlying rationale always seems to be implicitly based on ‘because UK’; and the question of the EU agencies is yet another example of the exceptionalism and sense of entitlement which pervades the corridors of the imperial capital.

But Davis isn’t the only one for whom logic doesn’t enter into the equation.  As this story indicates, some angry Brexit voters are seeing the removal of these agencies as ‘evidence’ that the EU is punishing the UK, and therefore confirmation that leaving the EU is the right thing to do.  It’s an example of the sort of confirmation bias from which we can all suffer at times, but it serves to underline the fact that there are some who will see any and every piece of evidence as either backing up their views or else being a lie.  It makes rational argument more than a little difficult.

Trading freely

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The UK Government’s approach to Brexit is at last slowly being spelled out.  The objective is for the UK to once again take its rightful place ruling the waves at the heart of the world’s trade network, in free trade arrangements with all countries across the whole globe and being subject only to rules made in the sovereign parliament of these islands, and not to any other jurisdiction, especially if there are any foreigners involved. 

The strategy for achieving this is firstly to remove the UK from the world’s largest and most successful free trade area sitting on our doorstep, with which we conduct around half our trade, and subsequently negotiate free trade arrangements on a bilateral basis with a host of other countries further away. 

It’s certainly an ‘interesting’ approach, but it’s being driven by an absolute determination to do something called ‘controlling our borders’ which apparently means that foreigners will not be allowed in, unless they’re doctors, nurses, bankers, plumbers, builders, fruit pickers, or in any other way essential for the UK economy.  But ‘we’ will have control.  Honest.

In other news, the minister for exiting the EU, David Davis, writing in the Sunday Times, has said that “It is absolutely in our interest that the EU succeeds”.  It turns out that the EU is a damned fine idea after all for those European chappies; just not for we British.  And we don’t want it to fail at all. 

It’s funny though – I must have imagined all those stories before and since the referendum when the Brexiteers told us that the EU was a failing project which was going to fall apart anyway, let alone those stories which had Brexiteers rubbing their hands with glee at the thought that other countries would follow the UK’s example and hold their own exit referendums.  Like this one for instance by someone called David Davis who described the EU as “a crumbling relic from a gloomy past”.  I wonder what became of him?