Brussels’ doubts: another Brexit delay

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. In China, a few local governments are running social experiments giving citizens and businesses a trustworthiness score. It's a way to encourage good civil behavior and discourage things like paying bills late. On a visit to one of these cities, we ask if such plans are as Orwellian as they seem. And in the 1960s, a talented programmer founded a software company that went a bit against the grain, encouraging flexible working hours among its all female staff and not really trying to make much money. Dame Stephanie Shirley pushed the boundaries for women in computer science and is still doing so today. But first, Early this morning, many hours after the leaders of the European Union sat down to dinner to discuss its most troublesome member, an agreement was reached on what to do next.

Tonight, the European Council decided to grant.

The United Kingdom a flexible extension of.

The Article 50 period until 31 October.

European Council President Donald Tusk pulled Britain back from a cliff edge, averting a default no Deal Brexit tomorrow. But the change in timeline came with a plea.

This extension is as flexible as I.

Expected and a little bit shorter than I expected.

But it's still enough to find the best possible solution.

Please do not waste this time.

Britain's Prime Minister, Theresa May hadn't been invited to the dinner. Instead, she ate humble pie, coming back to Brussels once again without a consensus on how to leave the eu, nearly three years after Brits voted out.

Let me conclude by saying this. I know that there is huge frustration from many people that I had to request this extension. The UK should have left the EU by now, and I sincerely regret the fact that I have not yet been able to persuade Parliament to approve a deal which would allow the UK to leave in a smooth and orderly way. But the choices we now face are stark and the timetable is clear.

That frustration had been all too evident over the course of the evening.

The big gap was between Angela Merkel of Germany, who had most of the other leaders gathered around her, and a minority around Emmanuel Macron of France.

Jeremy Cliff writes Charlemagne, our column about European politics. He's been watching all of this from Brussels.

Mrs. Merkel was for granting Britain a very long extension to work out what it really wanted from Brexit and to ideally pass a deal. So the German Chancellor was pushing for a delay until at least the end of the year, perhaps into 2020. On the other hand, Emmanuel Macron wanted to force Britain to make up its mind sooner than that and was pushing for maybe just a few additional weeks. So avoiding a no deal exit this Friday, but nonetheless getting on with the decision and getting out of the way of other issues that he thinks are more important for the eu.

So how was a middle way found? How did they hammer this out in the end?

Essentially, they decided to split the difference by going for October 31, which some would consider a reasonable balance between the imperatives of getting the Brexit issue sorted and out of the way on the one hand, and also giving Britain time to sort itself out on the other. On the flip side, you could say that it's both long enough for Britain to cause disruption and not long enough for it necessarily to make its mind up.

But in the meantime, one of the ways that Britain can make mischief is at next month's European Parliament elections. How much is that a factor in all of this?

Yes, originally, both sides really wanted to avoid Britain participating in the European Parliament election. The Brits, because they didn't think it would look good. Three years after Britain voted to leave the eu, to be voting yet again new legislators to the Parliament in Strasbourg. And on the European side, I think there was a sense that Britain, now that it's already halfway out of the door anyway, would be a disruptive force in the European Parliament and could end up leaving the club quite soon after it elects MEPs.

There is another way, which is that Britain kind of enters a gentleman's agreement simply to lay low and to not make mischief.

And that's effectively what it's entered into. Britain has, for example, said that it won't interfere in the choice of the next European Commission president. It won't get in the way of the Union's long term objectives. And to confirm that, there will be an informal summit in June that will review Britain's behaviour as an ongoing member of the club. There's no suggestion that Britain will be ejected prematurely on the back of that, but I think that is meant as a reassurance to people like Emmanuel Macron who worry that Britain will cause trouble.

So is Brexit having an effect on the EU more broadly? Are all of these kinds of disagreements and these long meetings sort of highlighting other divisions within the euro?

But what you're starting to see now is an interesting split between those who would like to see Britain change its mind, either in a general election or in a second referendum and rejoin or commit to stay in the eu. And I think you could count perhaps Angela Merkel among those and some of the other northern members, and those who think that really it's time that Britain left and that the club needs to make a virtue of that. And I think that Emmanuel Macron belongs to that club. And those, I think, speak to broader divides about what sort of EU Europe should be aiming for. Should it be a sort of a tight, more integrated Europe or a broader one along more sort of loose lines? So I think you're going to see that play out, particularly if Britain comes back to ask for yet another extension in October.

For Theresa May, this could have been a lot worse. She could have been looking at a long extension which some EU member states wanted. I think that would have just eaten up her remaining political capital with her party.

Anne McElvoy is a senior editor at the Economist and has been following the Brexit contortions from Westminster.

The trouble is this new October deadline. It's neither long nor short. It's too soon to have both a leadership challenge and a general election. But it's long enough away for Conservatives who are thinking that the May era must come to a close to start mounting their forces against her and holding a leadership race.

Well, it seems as if she's spent sort of all of her political capital now. What can she do now?

Well, her first move in the middle of the night and she acted very quickly to do this. Shows how important she thought it was, was she laid out this date of leaving on Saturday 1 June. That means that the vote would have had to have gone through in the first weeks of May in order to avoid European elections, which she very much doesn't want to hold. Technically, of course, she's now got this extension until October, but she knows in her own party there's no way that she could spin it out that long. She spins things out quite long as it is. She wouldn't get away with that. The only way that she keeps her momentum, she's riding that bike and the only way she keeps it steady at all is by putting dates that are much closer to now. Any amount of time is a danger for her.

And so what do you think her chances are of getting something hammered outy within that deadline?

The parliamentary arithmetic still does not look good for Theresa May. She hasn't convinced many of her own Brexiteers, some, but not enough to come over. She's got this very small majority. She's got problem with the dup and these talks with Labour I've been looking at this week seem to me to be a fig leaf. I don't see that they're going to get very close at all. So where are these votes going to come from? She will say you, it's your last chance. If you want Brexit, you're in danger of gambling it away. You may not get it at all. And she'll be saying to others, if you're on the Remain side, you could end up with a really Eurosceptic leader. So take my deal. It's the middle of the road kind of deal. But the numbers are still looking elusive.

It sounds as if, then it seems unlikely that a deal will get passed. This will all get resolved with her as Prime Minister.

I think it is very unlikely to get resolved with her as Prime Minister. Just one caveat. We've been saying that all the way through and she's still the Prime Minister. And the Conservative Party is going to have to decide pretty soon how long they want to extend that line of oxygen to her premiership. If not, we're into a leadership race and all better off about what kind of leader and what kind of Brexit.

Anne, thanks very much for joining us.

Pleasure as always.

Foreign. Hi, this is Christy from Back to the Bar. You've probably heard about GLP1 weight loss medications and the side effects that can come with jumping in too fast. That's why I love Noom. Makes getting started easy. Their microdose GLP1 program begins with a smaller dose and gradually scales up based on how your body reacts. The Noom GLP1 microdose program starts at $99 and is delivered to your door in seven days. Start your microdose GLP1 journey today at noom.com that's n o o m.com Noom micro changes big results average weight loss 8 pounds in first month meds and personalization based on clinical need and not available to all individuals. Medications are not reviewed by FDA for safety, efficacy or quality Pricing based on first month only.

Some cities in China have been coming up with ways to give individuals and business a score to indicate their trustworthiness. While citizen scoring schemes are still uncommon in the country, they share similarities with so called social credit schemes elsewhere that have come in for serious criticism. Mike Pence, America's vice president, called them.

An Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually.

Every facet of human life.

But what do these experiments actually mean for the residents who sign up to them? Is the whole idea progressive or repressive?

We chose to go to a city called Sutian, which has about 4 million people. It's in Jiangsu Province on the eastern coast.

Our China correspondent, Mark Johnson went to visit one of the places running a trial.

We chose to go there because last year the government published a regulation saying that as an experiment, it was going to give every suiteian citizen 1000 points. It said that it would subtract points from people who broke rules, for example, by paying their utility bills less or through traffic violations. And it also said that it would give points to people who did good deeds, for example, by donating blood or by spending time volunteering. And it said that it would reward people who acquired a lot of points with benefits, things like getting discounts on city travel passes.

How's the experiment going?

Well, we found that for now, the scheme in Suitean at least exists pretty much in name only. And it's true that if you have a Chinese citizen ID number, you can indeed log into this city's very basic mobile phone app and you can be allocated your 1000 points to get started with. But when we actually asked ordinary people in Sutian about this, almost nobody knew what we were talking about. So it doesn't seem to be operational in a way that makes any difference to the daily life of people who live there and who knows if it will be. But where the Sutian authorities have had more success it seems, is in building point systems that are designed to incentivise good behaviour in particular industries. So for example, on one of such an's main streets there's a booth marked as a trustworthy neighbourhood service centre and this has two local officials in it whose job is to do daily inspections of the shops that are on this particularly busy strip nearby. And they explain to us that local stores had all been given 100 points, that they could gain points if they succeeded in keeping their shop fronts clean and if they managed to keep the surrounding pavements clear of obstruction, but also that they could lose points if they did not. So this was certainly a curious scheme, but it wasn't exactly Orwellian.

Well, I mean how widespread are these kinds of point based systems? Is there a broader push to bring these kinds of incentives, disincentives to businesses, to people?

Well, there are a few, mostly small cities that have been experimenting with schemes of the kind that I've just outlined in Suiten, at least of the kind that the Sutian government said it wanted to bring in. And the other thing that's going on is that in some big cities, places like Hangzhou, Fuzhou and Tiamen city authorities have created apps that are also able to give citizens a trustworthiness score. So rather than being based on a menu of good and bad things, you do these just claim that they're digging into government databases and pulling out a number based on things like whether you've defaulted on debts, whether you've got a criminal record, stuff like that. It all sounds Orwellian I grant you. I think in principle it's objectionable to think that the government thinks it has a right to tell you a number of how good a citizen you are. The thing to bear in mind when thinking about this is that as in Sutian on the ground in these cities it's completely ignorable and most people probably don't know that you can do this. So there are never any penalties at the moment for having a low score, There are only pretty measly rewards for having a good one. Things like not having to put down so big a deposit when you sign up to use your local library giving.

People ratings and credits and demerits and what have you for various behaviors sounds a lot like the social credit idea.

So the people behind these projects like to associate them with social credit system. How much of that is really true? Is in fact a live debate. The simplest way to understand what Social Credit is, to the extent that we understand it, is that it's an effort by the government to centralise all of the data that its various ministries and agencies hold about both people and about businesses. And I think it sees various benefits for doing this, but one of its main priorities is to find more effective ways of enforcing the regulations that already exist. Now, the most advanced project in the social credit ecosystem as it exists right now, is this system of nationwide blacklists that are designed to create disincentives against breaking the law. The clearest example of this, the easiest way to understand it, is that since 2016, people who are deemed to have failed to fulfil the order of a court, for example, by refusing to pay a fine, refusing to pay off a debt, refusing to hand over an asset, those people have been barred from getting on planes and the fastest trains, from staying in posh hotels, from starting companies in the foods and drugs business, and from being promoted into a top job at a state owned enterprise, among various other limitations. Now, the government quite likes this model. It thinks that's worked well in that case. So it's now getting all of China's ministries and regulators to set up blacklist systems of their own. So if a company you own breaks some kind of environmental regulation, its executives can also now be punished, not only by the environmental regulator, but perhaps by other departments that have agreed to participate in the punishment. I think what's worried a lot of people is the idea that the government might start creating citizenship scores and using them to determine whether people are subject to some of the limitations that are being created as part of this blacklist system. And the truth is, we're not at that stage.

You say it's just a matter of downloading kind of a clunky app and you get your points. Did you do that? Do you have a score on one of these things?

So when we went to Su Tian, we logged in with a Chinese citizen ID to the Su Tian mini app. It gave us 1000 points.

So.

So it's not especially sophisticated. He didn't know that we weren't residents in the city. It's not a very high quality, complicated scheme.

Mark, thanks for joining us.

Thank you.

When computer software was first being developed, it was a largely female field with less status than the male led hardware side of things. But as programming gained status, the women got pushed out. So in 1962, Stephanie Shirley founded her own all female software company, Freelance Programmers. It eventually came to be valued at more than $3 billion. Ken Cukier, the host of Babbage, our science and technology podcast, spoke to now. Dame Stephanie.

What was the technology industry in Britain like for women programmers in the 1950s?

Well, there were more women around than there are today. Proportionately. There were a lot of. It was considered to a certain extent a woman's career because it was so boring. Let the women do it. And I'm quite serious. It had come out of the clerical sector administrators and secretaries who wanted to have a go at. Took some time for people to realize that this was a highly paid job, that it was in fact very important to the business and perhaps the men should be doing it as well. And they came in and they were trained by the women who were then pushed that sideways.

Back then. Software, of course wasn't paid for, it came for free and people paid for the hardware. So what made you decide in the 1960s, early 60s to create a software company that's really going against the countervailing? Received wisdom.

I think it was my motivation really. I wasn't going into business to make money. I wanted to go into business to get a work pattern that suited me and for other women. So it was very much part of a women's crusade for women. And the way in which I approached it was like a social business. I investigated first of all whether to to have it as a charity to have this all women company writing software. Software was what I loved. I loved to do it. I found it absolutely fascinating.

So how did you structure the business so that it was friendly to women as they were either working part time or to raise children or to reinsert themselves into the workforce after taking time away?

Well, I think we went for flexibility to the extreme. People could work part time, full time, annualized hours, min max contracts of which zero hour contracts are a special case. However they wanted to work. We had the first job share, for example, when a husband and wife said can we do one job between us? And we said, well why not, let's just try it. So the approach was very much we want to do this, we have these skills, we have this somewhat reduced availability. How are we going to make it happen?

What do you think of the opportunities of women in technology today? What needs to change?

In a sense, all the overt problems that I was up against, basic sexism. You can't do this, you can't work at night, you can't drive a bus, you can't. I couldn't even open the company's bank account without my husband's signature and in fact, in the whole of that period, mail signatures were required if you wanted to hire a car or you, heavens above, get, get a mortgage. So, you know, women were very much second class citizens at the time. All those overt things have gone and one is left with cult difficulties. And the cultural difficulties start pretty early on. The employers say it starts at the universities. Academe says it starts at school. The school says it's in the infancy and it does start very early. One of the things where people learn computing as children is with games. And these are very important male oriented games. But somehow between the ages of about 8, 9, 10, when girls really like the STEM subjects, and 14, 15, 16, when they're beginning to think in terms of vocational training for some sort of future career, they have lost all that interest in stem. Somehow we're lost to the workforce.

And do you have any Advice for Women CEOs in tech today?

Never underestimate yourself. Present yourself at your aspirational level. Get trained and more trained and networked and more networked and then just go for it.

Dame Stephanie, thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

For more stories like this, tune into Babbage, available every Wednesday wherever you listen. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.

Sam.