With three weeks to go until crunch Brexit talks in Brussels, the UK’s leading logistics trade body says that its confidence in Government’s ability to deliver a ‘frictionless’ Brexit that will ‘Keep Britain Trading’ with the EU is fast collapsing. The Freight Transport Association (FTA) is one of the UK’s largest and most influential industry groups, and speaks for the whole of the logistics industry.
As James Hookham, the organisation’s Deputy Chief Executive explains, the lack of progress on the industry’s key demands of government for a trade agreement, means that those in the industry charged with maintaining the country’s supply chain after Brexit are left with no means by which to operate effectively:
“Of the eight demands made in FTA’s list of essentials to ‘Keep Britain Trading’ issued at the beginning of the year, not a single one has been progressed,” he says. “Details of whether or not the country will have a Transition/Implementation Period are still unclear, there is still no decision on what Customs arrangements we will have from March 2019 onwards.
“We keep getting told that all food and agricultural exports to the Continent and Ireland will be checked at EU ports - but there is nowhere to check them, and the system to check them does not exist. We still don’t know if we will be able to employ the 43,000 truck drivers in the UK that are nationals from another member state – that’s 13% of our driver workforce! There is no clarification on whether UK drivers’ qualifications are to be recognised, so they could well be barred from driving their own vehicles on the Continent.
“But the real show stopper is that, under European law, unless an agreement is reached, there will only be 103 international haulage Permits to cover the 300,000 journeys made by British trucks to Europe each year. The logistics industry is being asked to decide who would get a Permit to Drive if there are not enough to go around – in effect, being asked to destroy the businesses of its international haulage members.”
As Mr Hookham continues, with less than 300 days to the UK’s scheduled departure from the European Union, and no progress made on trade talks, the lack of clarity over key issues is eroding the country’s invaluable trading relationships with businesses overseas, and foreign businesses based in Britain:
“All these potential barriers were thrown up by the Government’s decision to leave the Customs Union and the Single Market. In return we were promised that ‘frictionless’ trade would continue through special agreements reached with the EU. Trade talks haven’t even started. In the event of a No Deal Brexit it will be the logistics industry, which operates 24/7 365 days a year, that will have to pick up the pieces of the failure of politicians to agree. No doubt we will face the unwarranted ire of consumers and businesses if goods cannot be delivered on time.
“The industry’s frustration with the lack of progress is building daily. Logistics businesses simply cannot answer their customers’ questions about how they will move goods after Brexit. Manufacturers and retailers are losing faith and fear that post-Brexit Britain is at real risk of becoming nothing more than a series of road blocks at our ports and airports.
“What is really making our members angry is that these real, legitimate concerns are simply being dismissed by some members of the Government on the basis that it will not be in the EU’s interests to impose them. This is a reckless attitude to take and is playing chicken with crucial parts of the British economy and the livelihoods of the seven million Britons in the industry. All the evidence is that the other EU member states are recruiting hordes of border officials to enforce their rule book, regardless of the cost to their businesses and consumers. Expecting economic realism to kick in after 50 years of top-down bureaucracy is a bit of a stretch from UK politicians who have always slammed the EU for its obsession with rules and bureaucracy. The reliance on the other side blinking first is hanging the logistics industry out to dry.
“To date, all the focus has been on what the new Customs arrangements will be. But this misses the point. The real issue will be the lack of permits to allow the trucks carrying the goods to travel to the Continent in the first place. This is the trucking equivalent of the threat to the aviation sector because of the ending of Europe-wide agreements when the UK leaves the Single Market.”
Mr Hookham is adamant that Britain’s supply chain requires decisions now, in order to provide the required logistics support to the nation’s business community, but is frustrated that no decisions are being made:
“Over the past year, we have continued to push the Government on what needs to be agreed to ‘Keep Britain Trading’ after Brexit. Yet with less than ten months to go until the country is set to leave the EU, we have nothing agreed and there is every prospect of another flunked summit at the end of this month. Kicking the can down the road to October may be easy for politicians but by then the Christmas delivery season will be in full swing for the logistics sector and another four months of planning time will have been lost. Our members want to make things work, but our hands are tied. With “Armageddon” scenarios apparently being developed by Whitehall to cope with a No Deal Brexit next March even the Government seems to think it may be all over!”
FTA is hosting a one day conference, entitled Keep Britain Trading, on 20 June 2018 at 1 Great George Street, London SW1 to enable logistics operators to discuss the arrangements which need to be implemented for a smooth Brexit. Speakers will include Robin Walker MP from the Department for Exiting the EU, as well as Karen Wheeler, Director General of the Cross Government Border Delivery Group. To find out more, and book a place, please visit https://fta.co.uk/events/preparing-leaders-in-logistics-for-brexit
There was a report on Radio 4 this morning. They sent a reporter to Norway to see how the customs work going across the border with Sweden. Norway is EFTA, Sweden is EU, Norway is not in the customs union.
Private vehicles are more or less waved through. The process takes a few seconds.
Commercial lorries take longer. It takes several minutes providing the paperwork is in order in the computer system. They also have a huge scanner that you can drive the entire lorry into for an X Ray scan.
They are working on a more sophisticated system which will bring the waiting times down to near zero -- much like our proposed Max Fac system -- but it's still not finished after three years development, which included an 18-month hiatus when they halted it because it was starting to run well over budget.
Clearly we would not be able to get this in place for next March.
Kilkrazy wrote: There was a report on Radio 4 this morning. They sent a reporter to Norway to see how the customs work going across the border with Sweden. Norway is EFTA, Sweden is EU, Norway is not in the customs union.
Private vehicles are more or less waved through. The process takes a few seconds.
Commercial lorries take longer. It takes several minutes providing the paperwork is in order in the computer system. They also have a huge scanner that you can drive the entire lorry into for an X Ray scan.
They are working on a more sophisticated system which will bring the waiting times down to near zero -- much like our proposed Max Fac system -- but it's still not finished after three years development, which included an 18-month hiatus when they halted it because it was starting to run well over budget.
Clearly we would not be able to get this in place for next March.
But crucially, it could work if it was given enough time to be implemented right?
Hindsight is a wonderful thing but May has botched this from the start. Preparing to move to EFTA is what we should have done, and sooner. It’s not perfect but it’s a compromise that would satisfy everyone except the outer edge extremists.
The Norwegians think it can work, or they wouldn't have restarted the project.
I expect it looks completely feasible in theory, but may be difficult to achieve in practice. There are a number of government computer related projects which have been abandoned over the years, some of them after implementation revealed their flaws.
That said, EFTA membership looks like the best option available. Its main drawback is the Freedom of Movement clause. It's pretty unlikely we could get back into EFTA without having to accept that. The other thing is whether the border with Eire would be soft enough.
Anyway, if we did aim to join EFTA, we should approach the Norwegians and see if we can help with their customs clearnace project because we need something like that whatever happens. (Only staying in the EU removed the need for some kind of customs system.)
Anyway, if we did aim to join EFTA, we should approach the Norwegians and see if we can help with their customs clearnace project because we need something like that whatever happens. (Only staying in the EU removed the need for some kind of customs system.)
Given how frequently we tend to botch implementation of such new measures, I would think it would be in the Norwegian's best interest to keep us as far away as possible from any of their projects....
I should say rejoin EFTA, because the UK was a member until we joined the EU.
However, despite our prowess in big scale IT projects, the only outcome that does not require us to have something for a customs system is to stay in the EU.
Given we are going to be (in)effective EU members until the end of Dec 2020, we've now got two and a half years to invent something that supports the decision we haven't made yet about what we want to do. We might do better to hope that Norway sorts out their new system and will sell it to us.
Future War Cultist wrote: We need to go EFTA, so that we’re just stepping outside into the hallway rather than climbing out the window.
As long as we get out the EU, we can escape across the roof for all I care.
As Ronald Reagan once said, tear down that wall. Break these chains, these shackles, and get the feth out of the EU.
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Kilkrazy wrote: I should say rejoin EFTA, because the UK was a member until we joined the EU.
However, despite our prowess in big scale IT projects, the only outcome that does not require us to have something for a customs system is to stay in the EU.
Given we are going to be (in)effective EU members until the end of Dec 2020, we've now got two and a half years to invent something that supports the decision we haven't made yet about what we want to do. We might do better to hope that Norway sorts out their new system and will sell it to us.
If Britain, with all its wealth and expertise, can't come up with a half-decent IT system to sort this out, we may as well call it a day.
Future War Cultist wrote: We need to go EFTA, so that we’re just stepping outside into the hallway rather than climbing out the window.
As long as we get out the EU, we can escape across the roof for all I care.
As Ronald Reagan once said, tear down that wall. Break these chains, these shackles, and get the feth out of the EU.
The irony in this statement being that it was a speech to encourage the two sides to open their doors for freedom of movement, trade, rules, legislation and so forth. So you've managed to butcher the intent on the speech completely by using it advocate for Wrexit which is for all intents and purposes the exact opposite to what Reagan was talking about.
If Britain, with all its wealth and expertise, can't come up with a half-decent IT system to sort this out, we may as well call it a day.
This is terribly naive veiw of IT systems. The issues is when you have to consider likely billions of potential different scenarios and cope with every single one of them. Inevitably even if you comprehensively asked all industries (which the Tories are doing the exact opposite of) then you will always miss some scenario. Whether that includes you taking your own caravan to the France to set up as a holiday home, to reel of copper cable, to a car where the overall components have to be considered as to whether they can included in the free trade agreement and who is responsible for the information's accuracy. An ANPR camera on the motorway just won't cut it. We already have major traffic/port difficulties. Even a few minutes extra delays will cause extra issues. Still if the doomsday scenario does arise then Scotland will run out of fuel and food first apparently.
Billions of pounds will be lost to the exchequer as a result of delays to key HM Revenue and Customs projects caused by Brexit, The Times can reveal.
HMRC has given MPs a list, due to be published within days, of 39 IT projects and changes that have had to be put on ice as the department focuses on how it will implement customs after Brexit.
At any rate, I don't know why Remain supporters are that bothered by Brexit. If the latest government document is anything to go by, we're not leaving anyway.
We're looking at a 100 year transition, and the ECJ still having its say.
Billions of pounds will be lost to the exchequer as a result of delays to key HM Revenue and Customs projects caused by Brexit, The Times can reveal.
HMRC has given MPs a list, due to be published within days, of 39 IT projects and changes that have had to be put on ice as the department focuses on how it will implement customs after Brexit.
Spoiler:
I don't know how much experience you've had with the taxman, but they were useless before Brexit, useless during Brexit, and will be useless after it.
I won't go into personal details for obvious reasons, but I'm having dealings with the taxman right now, and they are fething useless. And they were fething useless 10 years ago when I a) had this problem before and b) when we were still in the EU.
There's a vast amount of work going on in Child Benefit just to avoid paying someone rich £20 a week.
Or not going on any more, I suppose.
No-one knows what's going to happen to UK citizens abroad or EU citizens in the UK. Probably nothing, because we've long passed the time when it was going to be remotely do-able.
Three of the ladies in my 4-desk "pod" are Euros. I've told them there's no way they are getting registered by the deadline.
If the home office/border farce start work today, they have to register an EU citizen every 7.5 seconds to finish before the end of March next year. It just isn't going to happen. People are taking things into their own hands, by applying for dual nationality and so on.
David Davis has joked that he was not appointed to his job for “my intellect”, risking fresh accusations that he is not up to delivering Brexit.
A TV documentary on life in the European Parliament caught the Brexit Secretary’s response when he was asked if he was finding the negotiations gruelling.
“Well, I’m really probably employed for my character more than my intellect,” he replied with a chuckle.
The comment follows Mr Davis raising eyebrows last year, when he told a radio interviewer that he "doesn't have to be very clever" to do his job.
There's little value in the £ now relative to Euro. If you can be paid the same in the country you live in, then why leave to live in a more expensive country where a third of the population don't want you there anyway.
If Britain, with all its wealth and expertise, can't come up with a half-decent IT system to sort this out, we may as well call it a day.
So you've no experience of UK government IT projects then?
Almost always hugely over time, hugely over budget and usually completely broken. You don't get a better textbook example on how not to do IT than the UK government.
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Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: At any rate, I don't know why Remain supporters are that bothered by Brexit. If the latest government document is anything to go by, we're not leaving anyway.
We're looking at a 100 year transition, and the ECJ still having
Because we've wasted billions in cash and opportunity, thrown away influence and validated xenophobia to achieve the grand total of gal all. There's literally no tangible benefit now or on the horizon. We've chased highly skilled employers out of the country, tanked our currency (it's since recovered) and potentially triggered a recession. For What?
But we don't even gain any sovereignty. We went from making the decisions to deciding if we want to do what the EU tells us in order to continue to trade. In the latter case the choice is technically ours, just like I can choose to pay my council tax rather than deal with bailiffs.
Herzlos wrote: tanked our currency (it's since recovered)
This one is questionable. Although it recovered a bit when rumours started circulating about staying in the free market in December it is back to similar levels against the Dollar following the referendum. Combined with the high oil prices, is a soubly whamy for petrol prices (which will likely feed through into another wave of inflation).
I've heard that people of Irish descent are entitled to Irish passports even if they weren't born in Ireland. Does France do this too? My girlfriend has a French mother, would that entitle my gf to a French passport?
Shadow Captain Edithae wrote: I've heard that people of Irish descent are entitled to Irish passports even if they weren't born in Ireland. Does France do this too? My girlfriend has a French mother, would that entitle my gf to a French passport?
It varies from Country to Country (and in some how much you are willing to pay). I believe in Ireland are more flexible in their allowance because of the issues of English occupation and the impacts this had on families.
Yes. Your gf would need to contact the Nationality Office in Paris to apply for a Certificate of French Nationality first. She'll need a copy of both her and her mother's birth certificates, and possibly other evidence of her mother's French citizenship.
Yes. Your gf would need to contact the Nationality Office in Paris to apply for a Certificate of French Nationality first. She'll need a copy of both her and her mother's birth certificates, and possibly other evidence of her mother's French citizenship.
Yeah...Thats never going to happen. They've been estranged for 15 years.
Unless it's possible to get ahold of a parent's birth certificate without going through the parent/getting their consent?
We've all been at each other's throats these past months, mostly on the Brexit issue, but here's a question for everybody on dakka: why is Britain and Europe falling behind the rest of the world?
Let me explain. Somebody on the radio made a good point the other day and it went like this:
The USA is shaping the IT future with Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple etc etc and you see how rich and powerful and influential these companies are.
but where is the British and European versions of this?
And then you look at Asia with all its manufacturing and Japanese companies in Europe, and China surging ahead etc etc
But where is the British and European version?
We as a continent are miles behind Is Britain and Europe just a museum and holiday destination these days?
Why have we lost the initiative?
Far enough, it might be impossible to compete with Chinese factories churning out stuff by the bushel, but the USA is a fellow 1st world democracy with similar advantages and disadvantages to Europe...
I'm talking about stuff that captures the popular imagination and shapes the agenda.
"The USA is designing the future. Asia is building it."
That was a great quote, and one I wish I had coined myself. In comparison, Britain and Europe seems to be dying on its arse.
Microsoft, Ebay, Paypal, Google, Amazon, Hollywood, Nextflix, Facebook. Nobody can deny the impact they have made on the world.
Look at the world of video games: Xbox and PlayStation, which are American and Japanese respectively. Look at the influence of Korean and Japanese car building in Europe.
Look at the rise of India and China...
And like I said, where's Britain and Europe's answer to this? We're getting left behind in the departure lounge...
A Town Called Malus wrote: So, if we ignore what Europe is doing and leading the world in then we can say that Europe is falling behind.
I'm not denying the importance of science or the fact that British and Europeans were responsible for discovering or inventing most of this stuff
But in terms of economic growth, we're the sloth to their cheetah.
The average person is not going to care about John Logie Baird's TV invention.
They will care about those cheap 50 inch TVs coming from the rest of the world and the Facebook app they can access through that TV to talk to their mates and loved ones.
I'm talking about stuff that captures the popular imagination and shapes the agenda.
"The USA is designing the future. Asia is building it."
And the tools with which Asia and the US build their stuff are made in Germany.
There's nothing wrong with being very good at something and sticking with it, even if it's lower profile that the bells and whistles of the latest app du jour.
We should not ask people to vote on a blank sheet of paper and tell them to trust us to fill in the details afterwards. For referendums to be fair and compatible with our parliamentary process, we need the electors to be as well informed as possible and to know exactly what they are voting for.
The problem with comprehension is, it often comes too late
I'm talking about stuff that captures the popular imagination and shapes the agenda.
"The USA is designing the future. Asia is building it."
And the tools with which Asia and the US build their stuff are made in Germany.
There's nothing wrong with being very good at something and sticking with it, even if it's lower profile that the bells and whistles of the latest app du jour.
Yeah, but who's the driving force behind the future: automation, electric cars, Tesla, missions to Mars, solar panels, social media, and all that jazz.
It's those people across the Atlantic who are neither British or European.
I'm communicating with you on an American designed laptop that was built in China....
You can of course appreciate where I'm going with this?
I'm talking about stuff that captures the popular imagination and shapes the agenda.
"The USA is designing the future. Asia is building it."
And the tools with which Asia and the US build their stuff are made in Germany.
There's nothing wrong with being very good at something and sticking with it, even if it's lower profile that the bells and whistles of the latest app du jour.
Yeah, but who's the driving force behind the future: automation, electric cars, Tesla, missions to Mars, solar panels, social media, and all that jazz.
It's those people across the Atlantic who are neither British or European.
I'm communicating with you on an American designed laptop that was built in China....
You can of course appreciate where I'm going with this?
I'm talking about stuff that captures the popular imagination and shapes the agenda.
"The USA is designing the future. Asia is building it."
And the tools with which Asia and the US build their stuff are made in Germany.
There's nothing wrong with being very good at something and sticking with it, even if it's lower profile that the bells and whistles of the latest app du jour.
Yeah, but who's the driving force behind the future: automation, electric cars, Tesla, missions to Mars, solar panels, social media, and all that jazz.
It's those people across the Atlantic who are neither British or European.
I'm communicating with you on an American designed laptop that was built in China....
You can of course appreciate where I'm going with this?
Over a medium invented by a Brit
The internet and the WWW are two different things.
In Switzerland, while trying to find out how the entire universe works. Europe based projects are working hard to develop nuclear fusion, while developing a replacement for GPS and space missions to other planets.
Or, in other words, you're talking nonsense. Again.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Oh, and as for why the Big Companies are American - the American take on capitalism currently seems massively in favour of the development of monopolies, which a lot of European countries try to break up.
Graphite wrote: In Switzerland, while trying to find out how the entire universe works. Europe based projects are working hard to develop nuclear fusion, while developing a replacement for GPS and space missions to other planets.
Or, in other words, you're talking nonsense. Again.
I think you're being wilfully argumentative for the sake of it and have completely misunderstood what I was getting at.
Would you deny that Facebook, Amazon, Ebay, et al haven't shaped the agenda, the conversation, of billions of lives the world over?
I don't think you would.
This is not me defending Brexit or attacking the European Union.
This is me genuinely asking: where is the British Facebook? Where is the European Amazon?
Why isn't Britain and Europe, with all its wealth and knowledge, not shaping the future agenda?
I'm talking about stuff that captures the popular imagination and shapes the agenda.
"The USA is designing the future. Asia is building it."
And the tools with which Asia and the US build their stuff are made in Germany.
There's nothing wrong with being very good at something and sticking with it, even if it's lower profile that the bells and whistles of the latest app du jour.
Yeah, but who's the driving force behind the future: automation, electric cars, Tesla, missions to Mars, solar panels, social media, and all that jazz.
It's those people across the Atlantic who are neither British or European.
I'm communicating with you on an American designed laptop that was built in China....
You can of course appreciate where I'm going with this?
Over a medium invented by a Brit
The internet and the WWW are two different things.
www.dakkadakka.com
and of course ignoring the collaborative efforts of the internet in the first place.
I'm talking about stuff that captures the popular imagination and shapes the agenda.
"The USA is designing the future. Asia is building it."
And the tools with which Asia and the US build their stuff are made in Germany.
There's nothing wrong with being very good at something and sticking with it, even if it's lower profile that the bells and whistles of the latest app du jour.
Yeah, but who's the driving force behind the future: automation, electric cars, Tesla, missions to Mars, solar panels, social media, and all that jazz.
It's those people across the Atlantic who are neither British or European.
I'm communicating with you on an American designed laptop that was built in China....
You can of course appreciate where I'm going with this?
Again, those Teslas are built on German automated lines and robots.
I see where you're going, but as someone working on one of the least glamorous sectors out there (agrochemicals) yet one that has massive R+D and feeds an increasing world population day in day out I'm not overly concerned about how much glitter is there on my linkedin.
Those Chinese millionaires and Silicon Valley executives eat organic food that has been grown using my products. It all starts on the ground
Nestlé is Swiss, H&M, Spotify and IKEA are Swedish, Bayer (German) is just about to swallow Monsanto whole and so on and so forth. CERN is European. The Galileo project is European.
As for cultural impact, both Sweden and the UK are pop music juggernauts, punching well above our respective weights.
I know where you’re coming from DINLT, and it would be nice if we could start up some rival tec giants to Amazon and Apple and Netflix, but we do have our strengths in other fields and we mustn’t forget that.
Kilkrazy wrote: Why does it matter that companies like Apple are very big?
To put it differently, why is that a good thing that we should want to emulate?
Because apparently putting out phones which are sometimes years behind their competitors in terms of features and survive based entirely on hype and a fanatical fanbase is the best?
Kilkrazy wrote: Why does it matter that companies like Apple are very big?
To put it differently, why is that a good thing that we should want to emulate?
This isn't a Brexit or a Remain argument I'm going for here.
But rightly or wrongly, we hear a lot about European values and all that.
Why shouldn't European values shape the technology of the future with regards to drones, automation, personal privacy and information, exploration trips to Mars or Planet Zog or wherever?
The USA is obviously a democracy with the rule of law and a love of liberty and freedom. That much we have in common with them, but nobody would deny we do differ with them on a lot of things.
Shouldn't Europe be in the conversation rather than let the USA do all the running?
again I ask: where is Britain and Europe's answer to Silicon valley?
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Future War Cultist wrote: I know where you’re coming from DINLT, and it would be nice if we could start up some rival tec giants to Amazon and Apple and Netflix, but we do have our strengths in other fields and we mustn’t forget that.
Kilkrazy wrote: Why does it matter that companies like Apple are very big?
To put it differently, why is that a good thing that we should want to emulate?
Because apparently putting out phones which are sometimes years behind their competitors in terms of features and survive based entirely on hype and a fanatical fanbase is the best?
It is. From a purely financial standpoint at least.
ESA sent the UK-built Mars-lander Beagle 2 to Mars in 2005, and partnered with Roskosmos to send atmospheric probe Schiaparelli to Mars in 2016. We ARE sending stuff to Mars.
Well, here's a case in point: in the last few minutes, the sports news is reporting that Amazon have just muscled in and snapped up a chunk of the Premier League football broadcasting rights...
I won't get into the rights and wrongs of Amazon here, but their tentacles are getting everywhere from food to football, IT to books.
Parts of Europe, including the UK, were major players in the industrial age. Then we spent 30 years lobbing bombs at each other and attempting to destroy our respective industries, and then spent the next 45 giving each other suspicious glances whilst slowly learning to get along.
It didn't help.
Oh, Nokia is another good example of a leading European company.
So apparently the UK has finished having a dramatic argument with itself about a backstop proposal that the EU will reject.
They will simply look at it, say "That's a lovely paper, but we're sticking with what we already agreed in December, thanks. Since you are a reliable partner you will obviously be sticking to what you already agreed, if not, transition is off the table."
I'm almost beginning to feel the same as Davies, that May is laying a very subtle, very long games that will end with the UK half-in and half-out forever.
Kilkrazy wrote: I'm almost beginning to feel the same as Davies, that May is laying a very subtle, very long games that will end with the UK half-in and half-out forever.
That gives May way too much credit. I don't think she has ever shown anything approaching subtlety in her entire career. The "Go Home" vans weren't subtle, her parroting of "Strong and Stable" wasn't subtle (she didn't even break open a thesaurus to find some synonyms for strong and/or stable after it became a joke), her leather trousers weren't subtle and neither did she have Yugi Motos ability to look good in leather, etc. etc.
Lots of those huge American companies have European teams doing R&D work, you need to look at where the staff Are, not the head office.
The UK and Europe lead the way in all sorts of subtle things and quite often are used by the US/Chinese multinationals. As companies get bigger ownership tends to move to the US/China because that's where the investment money is.
Europe is full of small industrial estate units quietly changing the world that you benefit from but have never heard of.
Brussels source: “EU will accept no time limit in the Withdrawal Agreement. HMG can say it expects this or that by YE21; this does not commit the EU27”
BREXITEERS ATWAR: A senior brexit-supporting gvt source:
"DD claims of victory are simply delusional. He has once again been outmanoeuvred and outwitted by Robbins and his officials. Even Barnier is now expressing sympathy for him. It's beyond a joke now."
The USA is shaping the IT future with Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple etc etc and you see how rich and powerful and influential these companies are.
The problem with all of these are that they have become household names because the US's capitalist culture significantly favours larger companies whereas Europe is by far more socialist. The latter tends to mean the population are exploited 'less'. For example the Google / Facebook/ Apples etc all require intense energy requirements to support the server infrastructure. In the US they can exploit the low cost of energy (regardless of the environmental consequences) that Europe simply wouldn't accommodate. Amazon and Apple exploit low skilled labour for retail/manufacturing the former selling cheap and en-masse, the latter at stupidly high prices manufactured in slave sweat shops. However I'd note that I think Apple is a bubble that will burst. I think they are an over-hyped company.
However, back to topic, the EU does have world famous companies but they are less day to day household names (though some are) because they are more specialised. Companies like Airbus, Rolls-Royce, GlaxoKleinSmith, Unilever, VW, Shell, Daimler, BP, Nestle and so forth.
I think I can effectively shorten this whole paragraph
Time Limiting the agreement
29. The UK is clear that it is again punting the ball into the long grass as we don't have a clue.
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Kilkrazy wrote: If Davies is ex-SAS he should know their unofficial motto -- Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss-poor Performance.
It's probably why he is ex-SAS; didn't believe in the motto. Just ran forward yelling it "run for the cliffs folks it will all be fine".
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Kilkrazy wrote: I'm almost beginning to feel the same as Davies, that May is laying a very subtle, very long games that will end with the UK half-in and half-out forever.
I think it is more likely she doesn't want to lose the job of being PM. No one else wants it whilst Wrexit is going on. Hence the easiest way to stay in the job longer, is make Wrexit last longer...Give it a couple of years and I'm sure she'll find a way to cancel the next General Election.
This is a very interesting development, because the Daily Mail is a highly influential paper, nationalistic and Brexitty, while the Mail on Sunday under Greig is far more moderate and anti-Brexit.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Abortion in NI...
If you follow the legal news, you will already be aware that the Supreme Court ruled they could not rule on today's case regarding abortion in NI because the plaintiff had no standing. However they equally said that their majority opinion was that NI law violates human rights, and if an actual victim brings case, it will be a walk-in. (My words, not theirs.)
Can we just go back to the polls and make BoJo, Rees-Move and that witch Gove cry?
You know it’s coming.
I know it’s coming.
Everyone knows it’s coming.
Especially Brexiteers, hence their rabid ‘BUT WILL O RA PEEPUL’ drivel and determination to paint anyone who doesn’t embrace their frankly nihilistic approach a ‘traitor’.
I doubt if anybody will be surprised to learn this, but my blood pressure is going through the roof.
More fudge, more sham, more long grass, more cans getting kicked down the road.
What we've come to expect from May...
And as always, Tory Brexiteers talk the talk, but when push comes to shove, they always seem to run out of stamps for their no confidence letters to the 1922 committee...
And on cue, the EU expresses doubts about any new UK proposal....
Two years, 2 fething years of this sham. 2 fething years of incompetence and ineptitude at every level
If I was to assemble Mad Doc, reds8n, Kilkrazy, Herzlos, Da Boss, whirlwind, Town called Malus and any other EU supporters on this thread
and asked you guys to negotiate Brexit.
Feth me, you'd probably do a better job than this shower of horsegak...
Unfortunately this will fall on deaf ears. Maybe not on here, but I bet among Brexit supporters the is blaim of everything from a pro EU plot, via incompetent negotiation or the evil EU but not ever that this was warned about and predicted. Brexit always was going to be a clusterfeth and always will be.
I'm talking about basic negotiating skills here. Or in this case, the lack of. Remain never predicted anything about the government's abject failure to go through even the motions of preparing for a no deal scenario. Remain didn't have a crystal ball and anybody, regardless of what side they were on who says otherwise, is a liar...
No insult intended to you. Nobody in the known universe could predict incompetence on this scale...
Here's an example of what I mean: 2 years ago, Private Eye ran a story that told us the UK lost one of the world's best trade negotiators because we weren't willing to pay him a few extra quid...
So on the eve of Brexit talks with the EU worth billions, absolute billions, and the UK's future at stake...we turned scrooge
Why? Fething why?
I would have launched suitcases full of money at him. Drowned him in £10 notes. Paid him 10 million a year if need be...Gave him the Mona Lisa. Whatever it took...
And if anybody moaned, I would have said, shut the feth up. Becuase we're paying this guy millions to save us billions...
Seriously, who on God's earth could have predicted a blunder like that?
But we did predict it; a big deal was made about our lack of negotiators and negotiating skill. Admittedly we thought Cameron would be the one to make a mess of negotiations or It'd be this bad; but we definitely warned you aboit exactly this on here and we're ignored as "project fear".
It's not going to get any better for a long time so if this is upsetting your blood pressure it might be best to ignore negotiations for another 3 years.
And those 34 million need to march on Parliament and send those fethers packing, tear down the Commons and start again.
The Remain voters can chase MPs away for agreeing to the referendum in the first place.
Leave voters can direct a boot to the rears of MPs for botching the negotiations and making us a laughing stock.
I say to everybody, regardless of what side you were on, that we've all been badly let down by our politicians for decades...
British society has got the government we deserve, and we've nobody to blame but ourselves for maintaining the system, because we have always had the power to change it...
This is on you. You and your fellow Leave voters. Again, feel free to grab the mop and start clearing up your mess whenever you feel like it, yeah? Ideally *now*.
There were four fundamental errors made right at the start.
1. Ignoring the fact that over 48% of the electorate didn't support the objective.
2. Calling an election for "Strong and Stable" which the Conservatives lost because of 1.
3. Triggering Article 50 and starting the countdown, thus putting a limit on the time available for negotiations. Most of the House of Commons must bear collective responsibility for that. Labour should have found the courage to vote against.
4. Setting out the "Red Lines" which make it impossible to negotiate a deal and almost inevitably lead to a Hard Brexit which causes economic meltdown and violates the Good Friday Agreement.
It was also a mistake to bribe the DUP to support the Conservative government, robbing the government of any shreds of democratic and moral legitimacy that might have remained to them.
Herzlos wrote: DINLT - what the gak were you expecting to happen?
As a student of British history, I really thought that our current politicians would follow the example of our forefathers and try their best for the nation in such a moment of national importance.
Pull out all the stops, work around the clock, put the country before party interest etc etc
But I made the mistake of reading books about David Lloyd George, Atlee, Harold Wilson etc etc and thinking that our current politicians could match their political acumen and cunning...
What we got instead was David Cameron and Theresa May. Two people who couldn't find a bowl of rice in China...
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Kilkrazy wrote: There were four fundamental errors made right at the start.
1. Ignoring the fact that over 48% of the electorate didn't support the objective.
2. Calling an election for "Strong and Stable" which the Conservatives lost because of 1.
3. Triggering Article 50 and starting the countdown, thus putting a limit on the time available for negotiations. Most of the House of Commons must bear collective responsibility for that. Labour should have found the courage to vote against.
4. Setting out the "Red Lines" which make it impossible to negotiate a deal and almost inevitably lead to a Hard Brexit which causes economic meltdown and violates the Good Friday Agreement.
It was also a mistake to bribe the DUP to support the Conservative government, robbing the government of any shreds of democratic and moral legitimacy that might have remained to them.
1. The referendum was a straight shoot-out, winner takes it all, so no offence, but I never gave a damn about the losers, because I fully expected the other side not to give a damn about me, had they won, and I would have had no complaints...
2. The election was a fething disaster, so we're in agreement there, but IMO it wasn't about 1. May is just useless and the country knew it.
3. 2 years should have been enough time. This government is so incompetent, that 2 centuries wouldn't have been enough. The time limit was never the problem.
4. Red lines were essential. You need some kind of limit before you sit down at the table, and besides, the EU have their red lines.
If I was negotiating Brexit I would be going for the softest of soft brexits because that is what I think makes the most sense. So I am not sure you would like me to be doing it.
What staggers me is that the failure is not really confined to the politicians. The delusional behaviour is on show in the various think tanks, stuffed with apparently highly educated people from oxbridge, it is visible in how the media commentators talk about it and frame it (the breathless drama over Davis and May today, debating a proposal they must know is not going to be accepted by the EU, and all of the media treating it like it was the main event, it has been like this the entire way through!). They are all oxbridge educated too, as are most of your politicians. It really makes me wonder what the hell they are teaching them over there. It is a total social failure, but particularly of the elite and establishment.
I remember at the start of the negotiations, the British media wags confidently stating that the EU would have trouble staying united against the UK. Some joke eh? The 27 are united, the 1 is divided against itself, even within its ruling party. An absolutely embarrassing shambles. Britain used to be a serious country.
Da Boss wrote: If I was negotiating Brexit I would be going for the softest of soft brexits because that is what I think makes the most sense. So I am not sure you would like me to be doing it.
What staggers me is that the failure is not really confined to the politicians. The delusional behaviour is on show in the various think tanks, stuffed with apparently highly educated people from oxbridge, it is visible in how the media commentators talk about it and frame it (the breathless drama over Davis and May today, debating a proposal they must know is not going to be accepted by the EU, and all of the media treating it like it was the main event, it has been like this the entire way through!). They are all oxbridge educated too, as are most of your politicians. It really makes me wonder what the hell they are teaching them over there. It is a total social failure, but particularly of the elite and establishment.
I remember at the start of the negotiations, the British media wags confidently stating that the EU would have trouble staying united against the UK. Some joke eh? The 27 are united, the 1 is divided against itself, even within its ruling party. An absolutely embarrassing shambles. Britain used to be a serious country.
I do wonder about Oxbridge...
None the less, the EU 27's unity it not as cast iron as some people would like to have us believe...
Britain genuinely could have exploited some of the tensions there and won us friends at the table...
With a competent Foreign secretary, we could have been promising the Baltic nations more troops to reassure them about Russia.
Denmark has always been worried about more integration. The Dutch as well. With Roterdam, we could have lob the Dutch some cash for their upgrades to the port...
We could have bunged Greece a few quid, sent more patrol boats to help the Italians with the refugees.
Exploited EU/Hungary tensions. Cynical I know, but this is politics,
plus a hundred other things that could have been done, or at least attempted. We coud have at least have tried them...
But we did none of that because we have a buffoon in the job, and a ditherer who appointed him in the first place...
Herzlos wrote: DINLT - what the gak were you expecting to happen?
Oh that was irrelevant. As far as him is concerned UK, hell even entire world, can burn as long as UK leaves EU. Armageddon is fair price to pay for that for him. If entire human race has to go extinct for UK to leave EU then he's the first one to press the button.
That is the truth and that is the great pity of it all.
Back in the 1990s the UK could have been Top Nation of the EU like a boss, while the Germans were busy trying to integrate East Germany back into a united nation, Poland was trying to get in and loved the UK, and we had the enthusiastic support of the Scandis and Dutch.
We pissed it away with whining about bendy banana bans and other made up stuff.
Kilkrazy wrote: That is the truth and that is the great pity of it all.
Back in the 1990s the UK could have been Top Nation of the EU like a boss, while the Germans were busy trying to integrate East Germany back into a united nation, Poland was trying to get in and loved the UK, and we had the enthusiastic support of the Scandis and Dutch.
We pissed it away with whining about bendy banana bans and other made up stuff.
Cool Britannia?
Fool Britannia more like...
Yeah, even I have to concede that. Britain won the war but well and truly lost the peace...
Britain could have been the driving, beating heart of the European project...
We never took it seriously, and spent our time hanging onto America's coat tails and spouting bollocks about the special relationship...
Herzlos wrote: DINLT - what the gak were you expecting to happen?
As a student of British history, I really thought that our current politicians would follow the example of our forefathers and try their best for the nation in such a moment of national importance.
Pull out all the stops, work around the clock, put the country before party interest etc etc
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha....That was a joke right...
What a sorry mess this all is. It's just a shame I don't have close enough Irish ancestory.
The real villain in all this is the British establishment, who fethed everything up from day one. Not just from the referendum, but from 1992. Cow that she was, at least Maggie could play the game. Repeatedly bungling everything, selling off all of our fishing rights, not putting controls in place after the eastern block countries joined up, being underhanded about the Lisbon treaty, and the threat of the euro hanging over us. In the end I couldn’t trust them with the eu anymore.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: The Dutch as well. With Roterdam, we could have lob the Dutch some cash for their upgrades to the port...
This wouldn't have worked. The Netherlands is going to be quite negatively affected by the UK leaving. Throwing money at one of the most developed ports in the world wasn't going to make us any friendlier when you're directly endangering a chunk of trade Rotterdam relies on. The overwhelming opinion here is that Brexit is a bad thing for us, why would we want to help you accomplish that? As a transit trade nation, its not in our interest to make it easy on people leaving what is one of the best systems for our economy
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: The Dutch as well. With Roterdam, we could have lob the Dutch some cash for their upgrades to the port...
This wouldn't have worked. The Netherlands is going to be quite negatively affected by the UK leaving. Throwing money at one of the most developed ports in the world wasn't going to make us any friendlier when you're directly endangering a chunk of trade Rotterdam relies on. The overwhelming opinion here is that Brexit is a bad thing for us, why would we want to help you accomplish that? As a transit trade nation, its not in our interest to make it easy on people leaving what is one of the best systems for our economy
Because if we're doing it anyway and you're going to suffer for it, taking our cash to upgrade your ports further might at least help mitigate the damage?
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: The Dutch as well. With Roterdam, we could have lob the Dutch some cash for their upgrades to the port...
This wouldn't have worked. The Netherlands is going to be quite negatively affected by the UK leaving. Throwing money at one of the most developed ports in the world wasn't going to make us any friendlier when you're directly endangering a chunk of trade Rotterdam relies on. The overwhelming opinion here is that Brexit is a bad thing for us, why would we want to help you accomplish that? As a transit trade nation, its not in our interest to make it easy on people leaving what is one of the best systems for our economy
Because if we're doing it anyway and you're going to suffer for it, taking our cash to upgrade your ports further might at least help mitigate the damage?
Because if you're doing it anyway making it as hard as possible so that others don't leave the system that is very beneficial to our economy is much better. Its nice if you want to pay for Rotterdam, but if everyone is going to leave the EU on good conditions we're left as a tiny country with an oversized port. The UK being in the EU already pays for Rotterdam through trade moving through there. We would be shooting ourselves in the foot long term.
Rotterdam could still ask the UK to fork out for another expansion in order to store the queuing trucks due to the Brexit delays.
Bribing individual countries won't work. The 27 have been far more unified than we expected and we keep getting stonewalled.
As soon as we triggered A50 we should have started building a port big enough to take the big Chinese ships we need to rely on Rotterdam for. We could do with that anyway and It'd save us being completely screwed over.
Herzlos wrote: Rotterdam could still ask the UK to fork out for another expansion in order to store the queuing trucks due to the Brexit delays.
Well they are either going to do just that or block all trafic toward UK if it hurts them. Which ever hurts Rotterdam least. If that is way that hurts UK most...Well that's too bad.
Herzlos wrote: Rotterdam could still ask the UK to fork out for another expansion in order to store the queuing trucks due to the Brexit delays.
Bribing individual countries won't work. The 27 have been far more unified than we expected and we keep getting stonewalled.
As soon as we triggered A50 we should have started building a port big enough to take the big Chinese ships we need to rely on Rotterdam for. We could do with that anyway and It'd save us being completely screwed over.
But its easier for Rotterdam to play hardball as the main port for the UK to the outside world. Insisting on the European freedom of movement and really holding to that stance might see the UK blink in the end. Besides, forking out for a parking lot is peanuts
Fully tarmac over a percentage of all the Leave-supporting counties/constituencies down there equal to the Leave vote percentage and let the lorries park there.
Riquende wrote: Fully tarmac over a percentage of all the Leave-supporting counties/constituencies down there equal to the Leave vote percentage and let the lorries park there.
You'd need to get them through the border first :(
The USA is shaping the IT future with Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple etc etc and you see how rich and powerful and influential these companies are.
The problem with all of these are that they have become household names because the US's capitalist culture significantly favours larger companies whereas Europe is by far more socialist. The latter tends to mean the population are exploited 'less'. For example the Google / Facebook/ Apples etc all require intense energy requirements to support the server infrastructure. In the US they can exploit the low cost of energy (regardless of the environmental consequences) that Europe simply wouldn't accommodate. Amazon and Apple exploit low skilled labour for retail/manufacturing the former selling cheap and en-masse, the latter at stupidly high prices manufactured in slave sweat shops. However I'd note that I think Apple is a bubble that will burst. I think they are an over-hyped company.
However, back to topic, the EU does have world famous companies but they are less day to day household names (though some are) because they are more specialised. Companies like Airbus, Rolls-Royce, GlaxoKleinSmith, Unilever, VW, Shell, Daimler, BP, Nestle and so forth.
Just because they are closer to home for me; Novozymes and Vestas are European companies.
If your first instinct is to say; "Who?", you are making Whirlwind's point.
They are the world's leading companies in industrial enzymes and wind turbines respectively.
We have Mammoet, Dutch, leading company in lifting superheavy material. Best know for raising the Kursk I assume. Boskalis, world leader in dredging and maretime infrastructure. In general the Netherlands is a leading nation in the development of water management/defences, something that is becoming ever more relevant with climate change. Having an IT future is nice and all, but it helps if that IT future isn't standing in 6 feet of water.
Mrs Mays brilliantly conceived and executed General Election was 1 year ago today.
1 year on - backstops, 'meltdown', possible food and fuel shortages in the event of no deal. And of course the risks for NI and Ireland in whatever follows.
I could just laugh long and hard at what Britain is becoming(we've spent the last 40 years throwing billions at non-doms to tell us how awful foreigners are, we deserve it), except I have kids. Any of the Brexiteers on here parents, and still believe the next decade or two of their children's lives are going to be improved by all this?
Not a Brexiteer, but very concerned for my sisters kids. They have a bit of a varied age range, but I think their future is going to be made a damn site tougher going forward. Personally speaking, I'm moving to Norway with my fiancé in the next six months or so, so all I can do now is watch from over the horizon.
Speaking of US companies being the 'future'. Anyone see the new Amazon Germany scandal? In a nutshell, Amazon DE justt destroys items that are being returned on a massive scale. Even functioning brand new electronics and furniture. Its reported that its destroying tens of thousands of euros in product every day. Just thought it was funny to mention in the context of the recent discussion.
It's not the first bit of evidence that Labour could do very well by declaring a strong soft-Brexit stance.
I think Corbyn is the problem. He's always been a bit of a Euro-sceptic and seems to indentify the EU as a mechanism of corporatism and capitalism when actually it consists of far more socialist nations than any other organisation.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I've been thinking about it and I've come to the conclusion that the best compromise is the Norway model (EFTA).
However it depends on your main concern -- sovereignty or economic factors.
The plusses of the Norway model are economic:
Full access to EU market and trade deals done by the EU.
Ability to create separate trade deals with third party countries.
The NI border could be kept almost frictionless. (This is political.)
The minusses are about sovereignty:
Still subject to ECJ
Freedom of movement (though we can put more restrictions and conditions on EU citizens than we have done so far. We can also do this even if we stay in the EU.)
A rule-taker not a rule-maker (though we would have the right to consultation and some degree of veto over proposals for changes.)
Personally I am not very concerned about the theoretical matter of sovereignty. I regard it as a tool to be used or not depending on how useful it may be for your national purposes.
It's interesting that once you scratch the surface about the positives of the EU, and Europe in general, there are a number of areas the bloc is a world leader in. You never read that in a news headline, which is perhaps where we've been going wrong in the past. America and Asia catch the eye of the superficial because the papers are full of stories on Amazon and Google and steel production, but rarely about cutting edge renewables and other industries which we dont necessarily have direct contact with. It's hard to relate to a world leading dredging company, when you have a flashy app for your phone, especially if it's never mentioned.
It's a shame that we seem to have been afflicted with a "grass is greener" outside sort of mentality, without bothering to check if thats really the case.
Hopefully the whole stupid idea will burn itself out, and the Govt will have to admit that they've well and truly fethed this up, and call it all off. Inevitably they'll get destroyed in the next GE, and we have to learn to deal with millions of angry, resentful citizens but that's likely to happen anyway if we crash out.
Basically their choice is get destroyed at the next GE and take the country down with them, or get destroyed at the next GE and the country carries on as it has done for the last 40 years. I have a feeling I know which one they'll choose.
It's not the first bit of evidence that Labour could do very well by declaring a strong soft-Brexit stance.
I think Corbyn is the problem. He's always been a bit of a Euro-sceptic and seems to indentify the EU as a mechanism of corporatism and capitalism when actually it consists of far more socialist nations than any other organisation.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I've been thinking about it and I've come to the conclusion that the best compromise is the Norway model (EFTA).
However it depends on your main concern -- sovereignty or economic factors.
The plusses of the Norway model are economic:
Full access to EU market and trade deals done by the EU.
Ability to create separate trade deals with third party countries.
The NI border could be kept almost frictionless. (This is political.)
The minusses are about sovereignty:
Still subject to ECJ
Freedom of movement (though we can put more restrictions and conditions on EU citizens than we have done so far. We can also do this even if we stay in the EU.)
A rule-taker not a rule-maker (though we would have the right to consultation and some degree of veto over proposals for changes.)
Personally I am not very concerned about the theoretical matter of sovereignty. I regard it as a tool to be used or not depending on how useful it may be for your national purposes.
EFTA buddies!
All this time I had in my mind an idea of what I’d like our relationship with Europe to be; with it but not ‘in’ it. And efta is pretty much that. I’ll say this again, but initially I dismissed it because I thought it was ‘governed by fax’ but after researching it I realised this isn’t strictly true. Even my brother has now enthusiastically came around to the idea of re joining EFTA (we’re slowly rebuilding our relationship).
We should have prepared for this much sooner, and worked with the others (Norway etc.) but nearly 2 years has been squandered.
I think the EU 27 would rather have the UK in EFTA than farther away, and so fast-track entry could be arranged, especially with the close alignment period from April 2019 to Dec 2020 giving extra time to complete any necessary adjustments.
The political problem with this idea is that neither the government nor the Labour Party are up for it, however much of the UK population might vote for it.
jouso wrote: That's cool and that, but has anyone bothered to ask EFTA if they want the UK back in?
I mean, the same EFTA the UK founded then said, feth it, this is a failed experiment I'm going with the big boys.
This is an issue. The UK joining would massively throw off the balance of economic power between the members of the EFTA. The UK would be close to 5 times the economic weight of the current richest member (Norway).
Honestly, it was probably a mistake for us to have left it in the first place. In the past it also included Austria, Portugal and Finland.
Pure speculation on my part, but unless Italy sinks the euro sometime soon, I think there will come a time when all the non euro using eu countries will be made to either accept it or go, and I think EFTA is where they’ll go to.
But I’m getting distracted; I honestly think EFTA is the way to square the circle. It’s a compromise that satisfies everyone except the extremist of extremists. There is the issue of the imbalance in the size of us and the other states within it but I think that could be overcome.
Kilkrazy wrote: EFTA membership requires a unanimous vote by the EFTA council (one representative from each member nation, i.e. four at the moment.)
There's no reason why the UK having a large economy is a threat to the others. Iceland has a tiny economy compared to Norway and is perfectly happy.
It's not a matter of being a threat. The UK economy is over twice that of all 4 other members combined, its population 5 times the current combined population.
The UK will either have to accept a much minor role relative to its population and economy or the other members will have to basically agree that the UK will have the ultimate word.
Nº2 will be unacceptable to Norway and Switzerland, and nº1 is top reason for leaving for many brexiteers (they rule us from Brussels, our voice doesn't mean feth, etc).
Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg wrote: pointed out that it (joining EFTA) would mean Britain continuing to abide by the four EU freedoms, including freedom of movement, as well as having no decision-making power in Brussels. “Then I should just ask why … should you leave the EU if you’re accepting that?” she said.
To be honest I agree with her, and that's why I personally would prefer to Remain, however I feel EFTA membership is a compromise position that might satisfy enough moderate Remainers and Leavers to get a majority in a referendum. For me, the economic argument is much power powerful than the soverignty argument, and EFTA allows a degree of trade sovereignty.
To put it a different way, the UK as a nation has to find a compromise position which satisfies enough Leavers and Remainers. That position certainly isn't Hard Brexit, and the government's various undecided "magical" solutions don't look like they will ever work.
Withdrawing from the EU and joining EFTA will put a halt to any further integration. Thats good enough for me and satisfies my sovereignty complaint, if only partially.
Future War Cultist wrote: We would still be consulted on future developments, and if I remember correctly, efta members could block them if they don’t like them.
Much in the same way UK now opts out.
We are also out of the customs union, giving us more flexiblity there.
We would also be out of the common fisheries policy and the common agricultural policy (yay!).
And we would have an immigration break that isn’t dependent on the other members giving us permission to use it.
And we’ll be less likely to end up in the Euro or Schengen or any of that. Plus I imagine our contributions will be much smaller too.
Ask your farmers if they want to be part of CAP.
And no, your contributions will stay because the rebate ceases to apply. As we've mentioned before Norway's contribution per cápita now is higher than Britain's.
Cheat and hypocrite? Enema of the People? Were any of the Leave campaigns untainted?
You be the judge.
Did you mean 'enema', not that I disagree. I think I can answer the one true question. "Did you fund this because you personally thought you'd get much wealthier out of the process?"
Aaron Banks strikes me as someone with too much money and no good ideas of what to do with it, who instead gets his fun from being disruptive and "anti-establishment".
TL/DR: 75% drop in young Europeans applying to Au Pair agencies in the UK.
A lot of people will laugh and say this is a 1st World problem, which is true up to a point. But au pairs are a valuable form of child care for a lot of families, and perhaps more importantly, the system offers opportunities for international outreach, language learning and cultural exchange.
Full disclosure: I've never had an au pair and I don't actually know anyone who does.
I might be tempted by the EFTA argument if I thought it was but a staging post to a clean Brexit a few years down the line, but the language makes me think that it's a Trojan Horse to take us back in the other direction.
After al, it's not much of a leap back into full EU membership...
None the less, two issues spring to mind.
1. Other EFTA members. We screwed them over back in the day, and I wouldn't blame them if they gave us the middle finger, and do they really want a giant boulder crashing into their peaceful swimming pool? The UK would hugely imbalance EFTA.
2. It's been my understanding over the years that the EU sees EFTA as a damn nuisance, and would love to absorbed it into the EU fold. Will the EU tolerate the UK fighting a guerrilla war against it from EFTA, sniping away from the side-lines and perhaps trying to lure in other EU members who might be uncomfortable by ever closer union?
The EU would be mad to let this happen and would tie us up in all sorts of red tape and conditions.
EFTA is but a pipe dream...
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Kilkrazy wrote: Aaron Banks strikes me as someone with too much money and no good ideas of what to do with it, who instead gets his fun from being disruptive and "anti-establishment".
TL/DR: 75% drop in young Europeans applying to Au Pair agencies in the UK.
A lot of people will laugh and say this is a 1st World problem, which is true up to a point. But au pairs are a valuable form of child care for a lot of families, and perhaps more importantly, the system offers opportunities for international outreach, language learning and cultural exchange.
Full disclosure: I've never had an au pair and I don't actually know anyone who does.
At the end of the article, it says they don't get paid minimum wage.
After al, it's not much of a leap back into full EU membership...
And you wouldn't want prosperity to accidentally happen after all. i mean, my god, what would the peasants do with money? They might not have to bend a knee to their better!
And another thing: much was said about Leave voters and the fact that they voted for Brexit because they were worried about Johnny Foreigner stealing their jobs and council houses.
But it's clear from Kilkrazy's article that Middle-Class Remain supporters were worried about losing the ability to exploit cheap nannies from Eastern Europe and losing access to their second homes in Tuscany.
Then again, what would you expect from these champagne socialists and Bollinger Bolsheviks....
After al, it's not much of a leap back into full EU membership...
And you wouldn't want prosperity to accidentally happen after all. i mean, my god, what would the peasants do with money? They might not have to bend a knee to their better!
And will we be seeing an application for EU membership forthcoming from the Seneca nation, if the EU's that good?
By every metric (life expectancy, economic prosperity etc etc ) Native Americans don't seem to be getting a good deal from the USA...
Hmm, I dated a New Zealand girl very briefly a few years back. She lived in London - her mate was an au pair, and did very well out of it. Being honest, she was far better off financially than I was at the time, and I was doing ok. She was easily earning more than £100 a week more than me, and I had a damned degree. Hers amounted to very decent wages for a young twenty something. And I spoke to her (and other au pairs too) about the job, she had quite a lot of power in being able to just walk out of situations that were exploitative or made her feel unsafe or used or mistreated etc.
I saw very little of what she did that could be considered anywhere close to 'exploited cheap nannies'.
I just got another letter from the car park. Funny, I haven’t heard from them in months. They’re now looking for £99 (down from the original £320) otherwise it’s off to court...even though the last six letters were also the ‘final warning’.
It costs £60 to enter a small claim, which can be up to £5,000, I think. You can also add the cost of entering the claim, and other reasonable costs. However, the worst that can happen is a judgement against you, which if you ignore it, then costs more time, effort and money to try and enforce it.
For example, the next step would be to try to obtain an order to garnishee your bank account, but first they have to find out the details of your account to be garnisheed, which it another task.
There's always the risk that the judgement would be in your favour, or the judge might find against you but not award full costs.
I am not a lawyer. I've just been involved in a few small claims cases over the years.
Not paying when ordered by a court is a terrible idea; an unsatisfied CCJ will screw your credit rating for 6 years.
Future War Cultist wrote: I just got another letter from the car park. Funny, I haven’t heard from them in months. They’re now looking for £99 (down from the original £320) otherwise it’s off to court...even though the last six letters were also the ‘final warning’.
Is it even worth going to court for £99?
They might to make a point but they'll lose money even if they win. You stand to lose no more than just paying so I'd call their bluff.
If it goes to court and you lose, you can hand the about £150 cash and move on, know If it's cost them double that. If you win (which is pretty easy) you can get them to pay you your costs, and potentially damages for violating the data protection act.
And will we be seeing an application for EU membership forthcoming from the Seneca nation, if the EU's that good?
By every metric (life expectancy, economic prosperity etc etc ) Native Americans don't seem to be getting a good deal from the USA...
i'd have to ask about it, since I doubt it's even occurred to anyone, but, hey, China lent us a Billion dollars, I wonder who much we can get from the EU?
Emails by Banks and his sidekick Andy Wigmore, shown to The Sunday Times, reveal an extensive web of links between Banks’s Leave.EU campaign and Russian officials.
They show they made repeated contact with officials to discuss business opportunities and issues of mutual interest throughout the referendum campaign and its aftermath.
In his book on the referendum, The Bad Boys of Brexit, and in another public statement, Banks claimed to have had only one meeting with Putin’s envoy Alexander Yakovenko, in September 2015.
But today The Sunday Times can reveal that the pair also had lunch with the ambassador just three days after they and Nigel Farage visited US president Donald Trump in New York in November 2016.
Last night Banks admitted that he handed over telephone numbers for members of Trump’s transition team to Russian officials.
Trump, whose campaign staff are under investigation by a special prosecutor probing whether they colluded with Moscow, stunned the world yesterday by calling for Russia to be readmitted to the G7 group of nations.
The 40,000 emails were obtained by the journalist Isabel Oakeshott, Banks’s ghostwriter on The Bad Boys of Brexit. She is now writing a book with Lord Ashcroft, a former treasurer of the Conservative Party, that covers Russian “hybrid warfare” techniques to influence western politics.
She came forward after her emails were “hacked”. They have now been passed to the House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport select committee, which is investigating Russian attempts to influence western politics with fake news.
The Sunday Times has also seen a 2,000-word account of the meetings written by Wigmore and has conducted several interviews with Banks.
Last night Banks downplayed the significance of the meetings and denied that Russian officials sought to influence his Leave.EU referendum campaign.
But the revelations are likely to trigger fresh investigations by the Electoral Commission and MPs into the conduct of the referendum and the extent of Russian influence.
"denied that Russian officials sought to influence his Leave.EU referendum campaign.2
The following is a matter of immense public interest and relevant to multiple international criminal and regulatory investigations:
Found a config file which appears to succinctly illustrate interplay between AIQ, Cambridge Analytica, and Breitbart.
And will we be seeing an application for EU membership forthcoming from the Seneca nation, if the EU's that good?
By every metric (life expectancy, economic prosperity etc etc ) Native Americans don't seem to be getting a good deal from the USA...
i'd have to ask about it, since I doubt it's even occurred to anyone, but, hey, China lent us a Billion dollars, I wonder who much we can get from the EU?
Since you aren't in Europe you'd need to ask some member to annex you first.
Since you aren't in Europe you'd need to ask some member to annex you first.
Ireland maybe?
Sorry, much as I like the Irish, we'll pass on annexation by any more crazy white people. Maybe a trade deal like CETA though where we can sell you all the tobacco you could want tariff free.
To return the topic to UK Politics, it appears that Leave.EU's main sponsor, Arron Banks, had multiple meetings with Russian officials during the run-up to the Brexit campaign.
Kilkrazy wrote: To return the topic to UK Politics, it appears that Leave.EU's main sponsor, Arron Banks, had multiple meetings with Russian officials during the run-up to the Brexit campaign.
I may be a Brexit supporter, but I'm happy to have a full investigation into Russian involvement in British politics. Our democracy is precious and needs to be defended against outside influence.
We could start by going after their dodgy money in London.
I've argued before that 40 years of Euro-Scepticism predates Putin, so I would argue that any Russian involvement would have been negligible on parts of British society that have always been hostile to the EU. Others will probably disagree.
Still, questions need to be asked.
The thing is though, is anybody going to give two hoots for it? The world cup starts this week, and politics will be shunted aside in favour of the English football team...
Da Boss wrote: Woo! We get to join the Imperialist club! At last we will be real Europeans.
By we do you mean Germany? - they had their imperial past just any other nation - African and other colonies were lost after the first world war.
I am aware of Germany's imperial past. I am Irish, the flag is a lie! (I live in Nuremberg, and married a German).
(Also my comment was tongue in cheek - Irish people were certainly happy enough to exterminate the indigenous people in Australia when they were deported there. We sort of inhabit a bit of an imperial netherworld where we were servants and victims of the British Empire.)
(Also also, "any" country? Most countries did not have global Empires. That is a pretty small club, really.)
DINLT: I want more evidence of Russias unfriendly actions toward us to convince those who have bought into the pro-Russian propaganda that Russia is our enemy these days. I wish it wasn't so but it is plainly the case. I want stronger economic sanctions on Russia until their economy is so badly weakened they wake up and realise that they can't keep playing silly buggers with international politics and that having the same corrupt despot in charge of your country for 18 years with no end in sight might not be the best way to go about things.
Kilkrazy wrote: To return the topic to UK Politics, it appears that Leave.EU's main sponsor, Arron Banks, had multiple meetings with Russian officials during the run-up to the Brexit campaign.
I may be a Brexit supporter, but I'm happy to have a full investigation into Russian involvement in British politics. Our democracy is precious and needs to be defended against outside influence.
We could start by going after their dodgy money in London.
I've argued before that 40 years of Euro-Scepticism predates Putin, so I would argue that any Russian involvement would have been negligible on parts of British society that have always been hostile to the EU. Others will probably disagree.
These were never the people being targeted though. Those with passionate views one way or another are unlikely to change their views. The people targeted are the undecided and perhaps not giving it their full attention. Those that are swayed by the lies of £200m per week for the NHS, that can be swayed by "That seems a large number of people coming into the country and so forth". The people being targeted were never you or me. If there is underlying 'support' in the way Russia applied then it opens the question to the overall legitimacy of the referendum. People that were on that line that believe they were 'hoodwinked' by the establishment become more disillusioned and so forth.
And it is working. May's response to Trump at the G7 was bend over again and ask how deep he wants that special relationship to be again. It is putting a wedge between what were aligned allies and this is their strategic goal. Hence the concern of election meddling.
The thing is though, is anybody going to give two hoots for it? The world cup starts this week, and politics will be shunted aside in favour of the English football team...
Give it two weeks and it will be over and we can get back to more important things.
And in an exclusive....leaked video of Tory cabinet discussions on Wrexit!
Da Boss wrote: Woo! We get to join the Imperialist club! At last we will be real Europeans.
By we do you mean Germany? - they had their imperial past just any other nation - African and other colonies were lost after the first world war.
I am aware of Germany's imperial past. I am Irish, the flag is a lie! (I live in Nuremberg, and married a German).
(Also my comment was tongue in cheek - Irish people were certainly happy enough to exterminate the indigenous people in Australia when they were deported there. We sort of inhabit a bit of an imperial netherworld where we were servants and victims of the British Empire.)
(Also also, "any" country? Most countries did not have global Empires. That is a pretty small club, really.)
Ah right I was not sure
Pretty much every nation that exisits or existed conquered others - agreed not globally but usually locally.
Hmmm. Well I do not think that is the same as Imperialism really. But I get the sense that we will definitely not agree and probably derail the thread if we discuss it.
Let's say for argument's sake that Russia did influence the referendum, it still doesn't detract from this fact: Parliament approved the referendum, voted through A50, and ultimately, if they chose, could stop Brexit tomorrow if they wanted. Russia can't be blamed for our MPs lacking a backbone.
As I've pointed out on numerous occasions, 70% of MPs back the EU and some do so passionately. If they believe EU membership is vital for Britain, they should have the courage of their convictions and keep the UK in the EU, and Remain supporters like you should point the finger at them for not doing so.
@Da Boss.
Britain and the West, so I'm including Ireland in this, should never roll up the white flag towards Russia. We should always defend ourselves against them.
None the less, our foreign policy towards Russia since the Cold War ended has been shocking, especially with regard to NATO in Eastern Europe.
We could have handled things a whole lot better, and there's no need to look for trouble where it doesn't exist.
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Da Boss wrote: Hmmm. Well I do not think that is the same as Imperialism really. But I get the sense that we will definitely not agree and probably derail the thread if we discuss it.
I'll also add that Britain did some bad things in Ireland, no question there, but if you go back further, the Vikings and the Normans didn't exactly make themselves popular in Ireland either. Or Britain for that matter.
Da Boss wrote: Hmmm. Well I do not think that is the same as Imperialism really. But I get the sense that we will definitely not agree and probably derail the thread if we discuss it.
Its an interesting point - had a wonder online and Imperialism seems to be defined like this or similar:
Imperialism is a policy that involves a nation extending its power by the acquisition of lands by purchase, diplomacy or military force.
So pretty much every nation in history and current.
Basically ‘don’t care about Law breaking by Leave.EU, or the likely interference of a foreign nation, despite craving ‘sovereignty’, because I got what I wanted and damn the consequences, which are already being blamed on everyone except those that voted for it’.
Right. Gotcha.
Imagine how outraged you’d be right now if you’d lost, and it turned out Remain had done the shady stuff Leave did, hmm?
But no. You got what you wanted, and thanks to your casual detachment from reality, that’s enough.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Basically ‘don’t care about Law breaking by Leave.EU, or the likely interference of a foreign nation, despite craving ‘sovereignty’, because I got what I wanted and damn the consequences, which are already being blamed on everyone except those that voted for it’.
Right. Gotcha.
Imagine how outraged you’d be right now if you’d lost, and it turned out Remain had done the shady stuff Leave did, hmm?
But no. You got what you wanted, and thanks to your casual detachment from reality, that’s enough.
I'm not turning a blind eye here.
I'm calling for the full works: Royal Commissions, parliamentary inquiry, Sherlock Holmes if need be, into Russian involvement in British politics.
You and other Remain voters have long bemoaned the influence of the Daily Mail and the Sun on British politics. If agree with you that they have influence.
My argument has always been this: thanks to 40 years of media influence and Euro-Scepticism in Britain, there has always been a strong anti-EU faction in Britain, that has been around since the days before Putin had even filled in his KGB application form, never mind be Russian president.
anecdotal evidence: I've mentioned before that my elderly father and my elderly uncle voted Leave. They were around in the 1970s, and they voted against joining the EEC as well.
The idea that Putin got to people like that is, respectfully, hogwash.
Mr. Morden: OK. I think most things are more complicated than the google definition, personally, and I think that many scholars would disagree that all countries everywhere are "imperialist" but if you want to play the semantic game that is fine, and you have won.
DINLT: Perhaps NATO should have been disbanded after Russia became a democracy, but it didn`t exactly stay a democracy for long. Regardless, I have not seen the Dutch shooting down any Russian passenger jets, we have not annexed any parts of Russia, and we are not assassinating Russians or our own citizens in the streets of Russia using methods that can harm the entire public, so I reject any false equivalence between the EU and Russia. America is a different kettle of fish, there`s a lot of the pot calling the kettle black there.
Also, on the point of whether Putin "got to" anyone, okay that is impossible to conclusively prove. But it is clear he thinks the break up of the EU is in his interest, and he is happy with Brexit as an outcome because it weakens the EU and dramatically weakens the UK.
I think in the end all this bs he is going on with will rebound on Russia in an unpleasant way, though.
Da Boss wrote: Mr. Morden: OK. I think most things are more complicated than the google definition, personally, and I think that many scholars would disagree that all countries everywhere are "imperialist" but if you want to play the semantic game that is fine, and you have won.
DINLT: Perhaps NATO should have been disbanded after Russia became a democracy, but it didn`t exactly stay a democracy for long. Regardless, I have not seen the Dutch shooting down any Russian passenger jets, we have not annexed any parts of Russia, and we are not assassinating Russians or our own citizens in the streets of Russia using methods that can harm the entire public, so I reject any false equivalence between the EU and Russia. America is a different kettle of fish, there`s a lot of the pot calling the kettle black there.
If you want to find a better defination of that specfic word then fine? Might want to also look up passive agressive....
Arguing by word definition means you have won. You found that the word is defined in such a way as allows you to define all countries as Imperialist. Therefore you are correct and I am wrong.
What's wrong with me admitting that? You won because you found out that all countries are definitively imperialistic by using the google definition. There is surely no more to be said on this issue.
(I looked up Passive Aggressive! I am hoping to get installed as the new definition).
I am not sure, are you one of these people who believes the British Empire was a good thing? I don't want to waste my time arguing with you if that is the case, you see. Already too much wasted lifetime dedicated to that fruitless task.
In order to replace Billy, thirty members of 1st Battalion set off to Great Orme in Llandudno on 15 June 2009 at 03:00, hoping to catch the feral goats in a docile state.[24][25] A team led by Lieutenant-Colonel Nick Lock (Commanding Officer) included the goat major and several veterinarians.[26] Army spokesman Gavin O’Connor said, "We are looking for a goat which is calm under pressure and a team player".[26] During the selection of a replacement goat, the battalion helped to start an alternative vaccine method of birth control among the herd, since hormone implants that were previously employed to control numbers are no longer available.[27]
With some difficulty, a five-month-old was chosen, and assigned army number 25142301—which represents regiment number 2514, 23rd Regiment of Foot (the original name of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers), and 01 denoting the 1st Battalion.[25] The new goat will also be called William Windsor, beginning as a fusilier while being trained for military life.[24] He will receive a ration of two cigarettes per day, which he eats, but will not be permitted Guinness until he is older.[
The deployment to Cyprus with the 1st Battalion was Billy's first overseas posting, and despite being ordered to keep in line, he refused to obey.[13] He failed to keep in step,[16] and tried to headbutt a drummer.[17] The goat major, Lance Corporal Dai Davies, 22, from Neath, South Wales, was unable to keep him under control.[16]
Billy was charged with "unacceptable behaviour",[10] "lack of decorum" and "disobeying a direct order",[16] and had to appear before his commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Huw James.[10][18] Following a disciplinary hearing, he was demoted to fusilier.[1][16] The change meant that other fusiliers in the regiment no longer had to stand to attention when Billy walked past, as they had to when he was a lance corporal.[13]
A Canadian animal rights group protested to the British Army, stating that he was merely "acting the goat", and should be reinstated.[10] Three months later, on 20 September at the same parade ground,[10] Billy regained his rank during the Alma Day parade which celebrates the Royal Welsh victory in the Crimean War.[10] Captain Simon Clarke said, "Billy performed exceptionally well, he has had all summer to reflect on his behaviour at the Queen's birthday and clearly earned the rank he deserves".[10]
Billy received his promotion from the colonel of the Royal Welsh Regiment, Brigadier Roderick Porter.[10] As a result of regaining his rank, he also regained his membership of the corporals' mess.[10]
Billy is not the first goat in the army to have troubles. At one time a royal goat was "prostituted" by being offered for stud services by the regiment's serving goat major to a Wrexham goat breeder.[7] First charged with lèse majesté,[19] the goat major was ultimately court-martialled under the lesser charge of "disrespect to an officer" and reduced in rank.[7] The goat major claimed he did it out of compassion for the goat, but this failed to impress the court.[7] Another royal fusilier goat earned the nickname "the rebel", after he butted a colonel while he was stooped over fixing his uniform's trouser-strap.[20] The incident was described as a "disgraceful act of insubordination."
uh huh.
perfectly normal.
perhaps our armed forces are not as formidable as one had thought.
The regimental tradition is part of what gives the British Army it's esprit de corps.
Many is the fine parade involving foreigners which has been greatly enlivened by incidents of light infantry marching faster than the beat. or cavalry dismounting and taking tea when the national anthem is played. The inclusion of regimental animals can only add to the special atmosphere of the occasion.
Of course you can't spell regimental without mental.
Kilkrazy wrote: The regimental tradition is part of what gives the British Army it's esprit de corps.
Many is the fine parade involving foreigners which has been greatly enlivened by incidents of light infantry marching faster than the beat. or cavalry dismounting and taking tea when the national anthem is played. The inclusion of regimental animals can only add to the special atmosphere of the occasion.
Of course you can't spell regimental without mental.
TL/DR: Arron Banks gave £12M to the Leave.EU campaign. He said he had one meeting with Russian officials but it's now been found out that he had three.
The Leave.EU campaign was fined the maximum possible sum under election law for falsifying its spending records. (In other words they cheated.)
The treasurer of the campaign is facing possible criminal charges.
Arron Banks and Dominic Cummings (strategist and manager, not treasurer) have both refused to appear before a parliamentary select committee to answer questions relevant to these matters.
Is it all just a witch hunt got up by Rabid Remainers?
Whilst I think the Russian angle is deeply concerning (and could have swayed the result, given how close it was), I think it’s the wrong hill to die on. Concentrating on what influence Russia had potentially undermines the key message; Brexit is bad for the UK, bad for Europe and bad for the Western Hemisphere (which is why the Russians are supporting it).
Jadenim wrote: Whilst I think the Russian angle is deeply concerning (and could have swayed the result, given how close it was), I think it’s the wrong hill to die on. Concentrating on what influence Russia had potentially undermines the key message; Brexit is bad for the UK, bad for Europe and bad for the Western Hemisphere (which is why the Russians are supporting it).
Doing exactly what Putin Russia wants on a major geopolitical issue conveys exactly that message.
If you want to be on the same boat as Putin question your motives and double and triple check any information you've been given
Da Boss wrote: Woo! We get to join the Imperialist club! At last we will be real Europeans.
By we do you mean Germany? - they had their imperial past just any other nation - African and other colonies were lost after the first world war.
I am aware of Germany's imperial past. I am Irish, the flag is a lie! (I live in Nuremberg, and married a German).
(Also my comment was tongue in cheek - Irish people were certainly happy enough to exterminate the indigenous people in Australia when they were deported there. We sort of inhabit a bit of an imperial netherworld where we were servants and victims of the British Empire.)
(Also also, "any" country? Most countries did not have global Empires. That is a pretty small club, really.)
DINLT: I want more evidence of Russias unfriendly actions toward us to convince those who have bought into the pro-Russian propaganda that Russia is our enemy these days. I wish it wasn't so but it is plainly the case. I want stronger economic sanctions on Russia until their economy is so badly weakened they wake up and realise that they can't keep playing silly buggers with international politics and that having the same corrupt despot in charge of your country for 18 years with no end in sight might not be the best way to go about things.
Be careful what you wish for, the Russians are not nearly as "gentle" as us Americans are. You push them far enough and they will roll right over you.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: I've been doing some minor research and going over the books and notes I compiled on the EU referendum.
Three facts spring to mind:
1. Remain spent more money than Leave.
2. Banks' campaign was not the official Leave campaign.
3. David Cameron was about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.
Why do you continue to deflect and divert from any criticism of the leave campaign? Is it not true that one of the leave campaigns broke the law? Is it not true that the leave campaign told outright lies? Please answer these two honestly and without attempting to divert or avoid answering.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: I've been doing some minor research and going over the books and notes I compiled on the EU referendum.
Three facts spring to mind:
1. Remain spent more money than Leave.
2. Banks' campaign was not the official Leave campaign.
3. David Cameron was about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.
1) My shop makes considerably less money than Toys-R-Us. That doesn't make us a better business, or prove anything really. Having a lot of money and mispending it is considerably worse than having less money you spend well. Administrative competence does not a good cause make.
2) ... And?
3) Are you implying somehow that everyone on the remain side were exceptionally competent? Like T.May?
Let's say for argument's sake that Russia did influence the referendum, it still doesn't detract from this fact: Parliament approved the referendum, voted through A50, and ultimately, if they chose, could stop Brexit tomorrow if they wanted. Russia can't be blamed for our MPs lacking a backbone.
As I've pointed out on numerous occasions, 70% of MPs back the EU and some do so passionately. If they believe EU membership is vital for Britain, they should have the courage of their convictions and keep the UK in the EU, and Remain supporters like you should point the finger at them for not doing so.
To be fair Parliament approved a non-binding referendum, not a full blown hard right Theresa May wet dream. You are correct though that there are lot of 'cowardly' MPs that are putting their own careers and/or the party ahead of the good of the country. I don't vote for them and tend to point this out when anyone talks about it. However my influence is small and in our area PR is really needed to stop the endless stream of garbage Tory candidates.
However it doesn't detract from the issue that if Russia did meddle in the referendum as they likely did in the US election then we as a country are being manipulated and shouldn't there be consideration to reconsidering that decision?
I'd refer you to this New Scientist (17th Jan) article about the dangers we are traversing
Spoiler:
AH, the good old days, when predictions that “the end is nigh” were seen only on sandwich boards, and the doom-mongers who carried them were easy enough to ignore.
If only things had stayed so simple. The sandwich boards have mostly gone and the world is still here, but the gloomy predictions keep coming, and not all of them are based on creative interpretations of religious texts. Scientists, historians and politicians alike have begun to warn that Western culture is reaching a critical juncture. Cycles of inequality and resource use are heading for a tipping point that in many past civilisations precipitated political unrest, war and finally collapse.
For the most part, though, people are carrying on as usual, shopping for their next holiday or posing on social media. In fact, many people seem blissfully unaware that collapse might be imminent. Are Westerners doing the modern equivalent of sitting around eating grapes while the barbarians hammer on the doors? And more importantly, does science have any ideas about what is really going on, what might happen next and how people could turn things around?
The idea that Western power and influence is in gradual decline, perhaps as a prelude to a precipitous fall, has been around for a while. But it has gained a new urgency with recent political events, not least the election of US president Donald Trump. For some, his turning away from international commitments is part of fulfilling his promise to “make America great again” by concentrating on its own interests. For others, it’s a dangerous move that threatens to undermine the whole world order. Meanwhile, over in the old world, Europe is mired in its own problems.
Using science to predict the future isn’t easy, not least because both “collapse” and “Western civilisation” are difficult to define. We talk about the collapse of the Roman Empire in the middle of the first millennium, for example, but there is plenty of evidence that the empire existed in some form for centuries afterwards and that its influence lingers today. The end of Ancient Egypt was more of a change in the balance of power than a catastrophic event in which everyone died. So, when we talk about collapse, do we mean that people lose everything and go back to the dark ages? Or that it’s going to be socially and politically turbulent for a while?
Western civilisation is a similarly slippery concept. Roughly speaking, it covers parts of the world where the dominant cultural norms originated in Western Europe, including North America, Australia and New Zealand. Beyond that, though, the lines get blurrier. Other civilisations, such as China, were built on different sets of cultural norms, yet thanks to globalisation, defining where Western culture starts and ends is far from easy.
Despite these difficulties, some scientists and historians are analysing the rise and fall of ancient civilisations to look for patterns that might give us a heads-up on what is coming.
So is there any evidence that the West is reaching its end game? According to Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, there are certainly some worrying signs. Turchin was a population biologist studying boom-and-bust cycles in predator and prey animals when he realised that the equations he was using could also describe the rise and fall of ancient civilisations.
In the late 1990s, he began to apply these equations to historical data, looking for patterns that link social factors such as wealth and health inequality to political instability. Sure enough, in past civilisations in Ancient Egypt, China and Russia, he spotted two recurring cycles that are linked to regular era-defining periods of unrest.
“You’ve got to be very optimistic to think that this is just a blip on the screen”
One, a “secular cycle”, lasts two or three centuries. It starts with a fairly equal society, then, as the population grows, the supply of labour begins to outstrip demand and so becomes cheap. Wealthy elites form, while the living standards of the workers fall. As the society becomes more unequal, the cycle enters a more destructive phase, in which the misery of the lowest strata and infighting between elites contribute to social turbulence and, eventually, collapse. Then there is a second, shorter cycle, lasting 50 years and made up of two generations – one peaceful and one turbulent.
Looking at US history Turchin spotted peaks of unrest in 1870, 1920 and 1970. Worse, he predicts that the end of the next 50-year cycle, in around 2020, will coincide with the turbulent part of the longer cycle, causing a period of political unrest that is at least on a par with what happened around 1970, at the peak of the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam war.
This prediction echoes one made in 1997 by two amateur historians called William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their book The Fourth Turning: An American prophecy. They claimed that in about 2008 the US would enter a period of crisis that would peak in the 2020s – a claim said to have made a powerful impression on US president Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.
Turchin made his predictions in 2010, before the election of Donald Trump and the political infighting that surrounded his election, but he has since pointed out that current levels of inequality and political divisions in the US are clear signs that it is entering the downward phase of the cycle. Brexit and the Catalan crisis hint that the US is not the only part of the West to feel the strain.
As for what will happen next, Turchin can’t say. He points out that his model operates at the level of large-scale forces, and can’t predict exactly what might tip unease over into unrest and how bad things might get.
How and why turbulence sometimes turns into collapse is something that concerns Safa Motesharrei, a mathematician at the University of Maryland. He noticed that while, in nature, some prey always survive to keep the cycle going, some societies that collapsed, such as the Maya, the Minoans and the Hittites, never recovered.
To find out why, he first modelled human populations as if they were predators and natural resources were prey. Then he split the “predators” into two unequal groups, wealthy elites and less well-off commoners.
This showed that either extreme inequality or resource depletion could push a society to collapse, but collapse is irreversible only when the two coincide. “They essentially fuel each other,” says Motesharrei.
Part of the reason is that the “haves” are buffered by their wealth from the effects of resource depletion for longer than the “have-nots” and so resist calls for a change of strategy until it is too late.
This doesn’t bode well for Western societies, which are dangerously unequal. According to a recent analysis, the world’s richest 1 per cent now owns half the wealth, and the gap between the super-rich and everyone else has been growing since the financial crisis of 2008.
The West might already be living on borrowed time. Motesharrei’s group has shown that by rapidly using non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels, a society can grow by an order of magnitude beyond what would have been supported by renewables alone, and so is able to postpone its collapse. “But when the collapse happens,” they concluded, “it is much deeper.”
Joseph Tainter, an anthropologist at Utah State University, and author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, offers a similarly bleak outlook. He sees the worst-case scenario as a rupture in fossil fuel availability, causing food and water supplies to fail and millions to die within a few weeks.
That sounds disastrous. But not everyone agrees that the boom-and-bust model applies to modern society. It might have worked when societies were smaller and more isolated, critics say, but now? Can we really imagine the US dissolving in an internal war that would leave no one standing? There are armies of scientists and engineers working on solutions, and in theory we can avoid past societies’ mistakes. Plus, globalisation makes us robust, right?
This comes back to what we mean by collapse. Motesharrei’s group defines historical societies according to strict geographical limits, so that if some people survived and migrated to find new natural resources they would constitute a new society. By this criterion, even very advanced societies have collapsed irreversibly and the West could too. But it wouldn’t necessarily mean annihilation.
For that reason, many researchers avoid the word collapse, and talk instead about a rapid loss of complexity. When the Roman Empire broke up, new societies emerged, but their hierarchies, cultures and economies were less sophisticated, and people lived shorter, unhealthier lives. That kind of across-the-board loss of complexity is unlikely today, says Turchin, but he doesn’t rule out milder versions of it: the break-up of the European Union, say, or the US losing its empire in the form of NATO and close allies such as South Korea.
On the other hand, some people, such as Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Massachusetts, see this kind of global change as a shift up in complexity, with highly centralised structures such as national governments giving way to less centralised, overarching networks of control. “The world is becoming an integrated whole,” says Bar-Yam.
Some scientists, Bar-Yam included, are even predicting a future where the nation state gives way to fuzzy borders and global networks of interlocking organisations, with our cultural identity split between our immediate locality and global regulatory bodies.
However things pan out, almost nobody thinks the outlook for the West is good. “You’ve got to be very optimistic to think that the West’s current difficulties are just a blip on the screen,” says historian Ian Morris of Stanford University in California, author of Why the West Rules – For Now. So, can we do anything to soften the blow?
Turchin says that by manipulating the forces that fuel the cycles, by, for example, introducing more progressive taxes to address income equality and the exploding public debt, it might be possible to avert disaster. And Motesharrei thinks we should rein in population growth to levels his model indicates are sustainable. These exact levels vary over time, depending on how many resources are left and how sustainably – or otherwise – we use them.
The problem with these kinds of solutions, however, is that humans haven’t proved themselves to be great at playing the long game. New psychology research may help to explain why that is the case.
Cognitive scientists recognise two broad modes of thought – a fast, automatic, relatively inflexible mode, and a slower, more analytical, flexible one. Each has its uses, depending on the context, and their relative frequency in a population has long been assumed to be stable. David Rand, a psychologist at Yale University, though, argues that populations might actually cycle between the two over time.
Say a society has a transportation problem. A small group of individuals thinks analytically and invents the car. The problem is solved, not only for them but for millions of others besides, and because a far larger number of people have been relieved of thinking analytically – at least in this one domain – there is a shift in the population towards automatic thinking.
This happens every time a new technology is invented that renders the environment more hospitable. Once large numbers of people use the technology without foresight, problems start to stack up. Climate change resulting from the excess use of fossil fuels is just one example. Others include overuse of antibiotics leading to microbial resistance, and failing to save for retirement.
Jonathan Cohen, a psychologist at Princeton University who developed the theory with Rand, says it could help solve a long-standing puzzle regarding societies heading for ruin: why did they keep up their self-destructive behaviour even though the more analytical people must have seen the danger ahead? “The train had left the station,” says Cohen, and the forward-thinking folk were not steering it.
“Technological innovation may not be able to bail us out as it has in the past”
This is the first time anyone has attempted to link the evolution of societies with human psychology, and the researchers admit their model is simple, for now. And while Rand and his colleagues make no attempt to guide policy, they do think their model suggests a general direction we might look in for remedies. “Education has got to be part of the answer,” says Cohen, adding that there could be more emphasis on analytical thinking in the classroom.
But Tainter says trying to instil more forethought might be a pipe dream. If behavioural economics has taught us anything, he says, it is that human beings are much more emotional than rational when it comes to decision-making. He thinks a more pressing issue to tackle is the dwindling rate of invention relative to investment in R & D, as the world’s problems become harder to solve. “I foresee a pattern in the future where technological innovation is not going to be able to bail us out as it has in the past,” he says.
So, is the West really on the ropes? Perhaps. But ultimately its survival will depend on the speed at which people can adapt. If we don’t reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, tackle inequality and find a way to stop elites from squabbling among themselves, things will not end well. In Tainter’s view, if the West makes it through, it will be more by luck than by good judgement. “We are a species that muddles through,” he says. “That’s all we’ve ever done, and all we’ll ever do.”
In other business news there are some dire reports coming out today.
Manufacturing down 1.4% the largest fall in 5 years
Rolls Royce likely to get rid of 4000 staff
Poundworld collapses shedding 5000 jobs
Landrover Discovery manufacture moving abroad
Also more evidence that Islamophobia is rampant among the Tory party and they simply don't care. This from one of their own.
Apparently Jacob Rees Mogg joined "against his will". I doubt JRM is a dyed in the wool racist, but I imagine he may hold some "old fashioned" views about this sort of thing.
The Sun's front page today seemingly made by someone who did the first module of a photoshop course:
(Things that make Britain great, apparently: Aerobatics display teams, rollercoasters, cryptozoographical creatures, aggressive seabirds, government building/named bell combos, affordable compact cars, pointy buildings, stones arranged in a circle, sheep, nuclear power, old fashioned public transport, sport we're barely competitive in, castles, propellor-engined aeroplanes, aquatic-based fast food. No other country has any of those!)
Spoiler:
Good to see as well that one of the MPs being castigated by DNILT for not standing up for their principles has resigned from the Government, presumably to vote against Brexit today.
Apparently Jacob Rees Mogg joined "against his will". I doubt JRM is a dyed in the wool racist, but I imagine he may hold some "old fashioned" views about this sort of thing.
However, he said he was furious to find he had been signed up without his knowledge and had now left. Former minister George Freeman and MPs Glyn Davies and Andrew Rosindell were also listed as members, but all said they had no knowledge of being signed up and left after being alerted to the group’s content.
Bollocks. That’s not how Facebook groups works. That is not a reasonable excuse. They joined this group and either didn’t read what it was doing (failure to do proper checking) or agreed with it. It’s possible (probable) that someone else manages their social media accounts, but that’s not an excuse, and not one they are trying to use. They have been caught and need to own up to it. I am not saying they personally hold those views, but they clearly associate with parts of the party that do.
Riquende wrote: The Sun's front page today seemingly made by someone who did the first module of a photoshop course:
(Things that make Britain great, apparently: Aerobatics display teams, rollercoasters, cryptozoographical creatures, aggressive seabirds, government building/named bell combos, affordable compact cars, pointy buildings, stones arranged in a circle, sheep, nuclear power, old fashioned public transport, sport we're barely competitive in, castles, propellor-engined aeroplanes, aquatic-based fast food. No other country has any of those!)
Spoiler:
Good to see as well that one of the MPs being castigated by DNILT for not standing up for their principles has resigned from the Government, presumably to vote against Brexit today.
So now he's probably a traitor or something.
Windsor castle built by Norman duke
Mini designed by Greek Alec Issigonis
Shard designed by Italian Renzo Piano, 95% owned by Qatar,
Loch Ness monster - fictional like sovereignty
Alton Towers Smiler built by Gerstlauer a German firm
The Sun newspaper owned by Australian born American Rupert Murdoch
So my bins are emptied on a Monday right? Well, it’s now Tuesday, and they still aren’t done. And this is the third time in a row it’s happened. That sucks, but the good news is, I now get to call my old boss and tell him how gak he is as a person and a manager whilst sticking my councillor onto him anyway. Yay!
Oh yeah, it’s the Politics thread...it’s great being on a first name basis with your local councillor.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: Many people have criticised me before for Brexit. Fair enough, and that is their right.
But look what's going on in The Commons. Are the Remain MPs, fearless defenders of the EU, prepared to die in a ditch for the cause they believe in?
No, they meekly march through and back the government at every turn.
They are Chateau generals, defending the EU from 35 miles behind the front line.
I've said it countless times to Remain supporters and I'll say it again: if these are your 'friends' then I'd hate to see your enemies.
This is the Tories. They will try and put the party ahead of all other considerations and damn the consequences. The question is whether any will take responsibility when they look back at the mess in the future and with guilt wonder whether they could have done anything about it (I'm sure they'll delude themselves into thinking they had no choice). All for a vague promise by a PM that lies through her back teeth at the first opportunity.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: Many people have criticised me before for Brexit. Fair enough, and that is their right.
But look what's going on in The Commons. Are the Remain MPs, fearless defenders of the EU, prepared to die in a ditch for the cause they believe in?
No, they meekly march through and back the government at every turn.
They are Chateau generals, defending the EU from 35 miles behind the front line.
I've said it countless times to Remain supporters and I'll say it again: if these are your 'friends' then I'd hate to see your enemies.
This is the Tories. They will try and put the party ahead of all other considerations and damn the consequences. The question is whether any will take responsibility when they look back at the mess in the future and with guilt wonder whether they could have done anything about it (I'm sure they'll delude themselves into thinking they had no choice). All for a vague promise by a PM that lies through her back teeth at the first opportunity.
Responsibility?
I'm not laughing at you, whirlwind, I'm just laughing at the notion of them being responsible. In a few years time, they'll be miles away and making 50 grand a speech, or sitting as a director on some bank or corporation somewhere.
I'm not laughing at you, whirlwind, I'm just laughing at the notion of them being responsible. In a few years time, they'll be miles away and making 50 grand a speech, or sitting as a director on some bank or corporation somewhere.
I'll still be in Britain come what may.
Not all of them will be. I doubt many people will want to touch May with a barge pole... They don't all go on to high earning made up posts spouting nonsense for £50k per talk. It will be the back benchers that look back and realise that they kept on being allowed to slowly slip down the slide one step at a time and betrayed by vague promises.
In other news Arron Banks own quotes on his influence on the referendum...
It ran a "disruptive" campaign instead, Mr Banks told the committee, adding: "We were not above using alternative methods to punch home our message or lead people up the garden path if we had to."
Mr Wigmore, Leave.EU's director of communications, said "the piece of advice that we got, right from the beginning, was remember referendums are not about facts, it's about emotion and you have got to tap into that emotion".
He said the campaign had aimed to "make fun" of journalists and his role in it had been that of an "agent provocateur".
Asked what the difference was between provocation and lies, he said: "If you are trying to sell something or put a good case over to somebody you will tell the best story. If that's provocation - or a lie, if you want to call it that, yeah."
Frankfurt has emerged as the biggest winner in the fight for thousands of London-based jobs that will have to be relocated to new hubs inside the European Union after Brexit.
Morgan Stanley, Citigroup Inc., Standard Chartered Plc and Nomura Holdings Inc have picked the German city for their EU headquarters to ensure continued access to the single market. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and UBS Group AG are weighing a similar decision, said people familiar with the matter, asking not to be named because the plans aren’t public. HSBC Holdings Plc is the biggest non-French bank so far to opt for Paris, while Barclays Bank Plc has plumped for Dublin.
London could lose 10,000 banking jobs and 20,000 roles in financial services as clients move 1.8 trillion euros ($2.1 trillion) of assets out of the U.K. on Brexit, according to think-tank Bruegel. The implications for the U.K. are substantial: finance and related professional services bring in some £190 billion ($248 billion) a year, representing 12 percent of the British economy.
We’re tracking jobs that the banks say they plan to move, with updates to follow.
I wonder how much people care though, once they have got what they want. It will never be their responsibility, it will be those left behind trying to pick up the pieces as they "didn't work at it" or other such nonsense
hat's 15% already and we haven't even got to Wrexit it yet. My guess is there will be another wave afterwards and then an increasing trickle as London's influence wanes and others grow. People complain about what Greece did. I wonder how long it will be until we are propped up by super rich billionaires that then drive what the country is?
Automatically Appended Next Post: See, the light weight fascism being spouted by the gutter press points to one thing - sovereignty isn’t an argument.
Literally any attempt to wrest control of the process from the moronic hands of BoJo, Slugboy and Moggy is seen as an attempt to halt the entire process.
There’s a difference between leaving the EU. And a far right Five Tissue Fantasy.
I think it should be a 3 option referendum with transferable alternative voting. The questions would be:
1. Stay in the EU after all.
1. Accept whatever deal the government has worked out if there actually is one.
1. Hard Brexit to WTO rules immediately. No mucking around.
A decision has to be made, even if it is a choice between crap, arse, and bollocks.
Also, you may have a spine, shame you’ve no brain.
Brexit is going to feth us over. Big style.
But you don’t care, do you? When it all blows up in our collective faces, it’s evident you’ll accept precisely no responsibility.
Hence my post pages back, hoping you personally suffer the aftermath. That you lose your job. That you lose your home. That you end up on the scrap heap with barely a penny to your name.
Because if pricks like you emerge from this smelling like roses, there’s proof that the world has no justice.
You.
You caused this.
And it’s time you had to face up to your own personal idiocy.
The sort of mindless cretin who’d vote out, and damn the rammifications and logistics?
We.
Told.
You.
So.
You,
Shat.
The.
Bed.
Go and get your mop already, you bellend.
When people ask me for an opinion on an issue, they can't complain if they don't like the answer.
Otherwise, they should not have asked.
Nobody asked you for your opinion on remain MP's representing their constituents though, but please tell us more about how you aren't to blame for espousing your opinion.
Kilkrazy wrote: I think it should be a 3 option referendum with transferable alternative voting. The questions would be:
1. Stay in the EU after all.
1. Accept whatever deal the government has worked out if there actually is one.
1. Hard Brexit to WTO rules immediately. No mucking around.
A decision has to be made, even if it is a choice between crap, arse, and bollocks.
This. Assuming that the deal will basically be something along the lines as EFTA. I accept that we have to work with Europe. That’s a fact. I just don’t want to be sucked further in to the superstate. See I genuinely believe that the bigger a democracy gets, the more detached from the voters the leaders become, and the EU is my case in point (America gets it too).
Kilkrazy wrote: I think it should be a 3 option referendum with transferable alternative voting. The questions would be:
1. Stay in the EU after all. 1. Accept whatever deal the government has worked out if there actually is one. 1. Hard Brexit to WTO rules immediately. No mucking around.
A decision has to be made, even if it is a choice between crap, arse, and bollocks.
This. Assuming that the deal will basically be something along the lines as EFTA. I accept that we have to work with Europe. That’s a fact. I just don’t want to be sucked further in to the superstate. See I genuinely believe that the bigger a democracy gets, the more detached from the voters the leaders become, and the EU is my case in point (America gets it too).
But closer and closer ties are, globally, inevitable.
Look at human history. Why resist now?
Time was, the leader of maybe 50 people was a King. Then it was 100. And so on and so forth.
A one World government is an inevitability. Why ostracise and marginalises ourselves now?
We all get carried away sometimes. I've said things I shouldn't have. My apologies to anybody I've offended. Other people have said things they shouldn't have.
Brexit is obviously an important issue. Both sides think they're right. But let's have some gentlemanly conduct here.
We joined this site for our love of miniature wargaming
I suspect we didn't join up to debate EU directives...
Yeah, I may go over the top with my views on crime, but I don't like to see ordinary people suffer.
One of my relatives was murdered some years back in the 1990s.
It's a horrible thing to happen to a family, and I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
Hope that explains why I can get a bit hardcore on crime from time to time.
Kilkrazy wrote: I think it should be a 3 option referendum with transferable alternative voting. The questions would be:
1. Stay in the EU after all.
1. Accept whatever deal the government has worked out if there actually is one.
1. Hard Brexit to WTO rules immediately. No mucking around.
A decision has to be made, even if it is a choice between crap, arse, and bollocks.
This. Assuming that the deal will basically be something along the lines as EFTA. I accept that we have to work with Europe. That’s a fact. I just don’t want to be sucked further in to the superstate. See I genuinely believe that the bigger a democracy gets, the more detached from the voters the leaders become, and the EU is my case in point (America gets it too).
I also would like EFTA as one of the options, but realistically the option will have to be whatever crock of gak the government comes up with, and that isn't going to be EFTA unless May and Corbyn completely change course.
To be realistic, we also have to remember that the EU has a part in these negotiations. They have already denied all the government customs malarkey plans as unworkable.
If the EU sticks to its guns, and the government doesn't change its plans, we will end up with two options -- Hard Brexit or Remain. That really will force a serious reconsideration of the whole thing.
So my local MP, Kelvin Hopkins, has tonight irreversibly lost my vote. He's Corbynite Labour and was one of the ones to propose him as Leader originally. His anti-EU tendencies are well-known. He is currently operating as an independent after allegations of improper conduct (#metoo) which he denies. Technically as the whip has been withdrawn he hasn't 'rebelled' against Labour so to speak, but for this self-avowed socialist to vote with a Tory government to try to force through a hard-right Brexit is unforgiveable.
Dr Lee was elected on a manifesto pledge to leave the CU.
Today he moaned about Brexit being bad and something about his conscience.
Didn't seem to bother him last year though at the general election, did it?
To be fair there were multiple votes and reasons to quit today. We don't know which of those caused him to quit.
It could be that the idea of a cabinet being able to railroad whatever Wrexism porn fantasy whilst they are j**rking off over the Daily Facism was not his cup of, milky, tea (and he might have had enough of the sticky chairs in cabinet rooms).
If you recall one of the demands for why Wrexit was a good idea was Parliamentary Sovereignty. Today they are yet again trying to bury that part of our democracy.
Also just because someone believed something one year ago does not mean they cannot change their mind. In some ways I respect someone that puts their hand up and says "I made a mistake". I have much less respect when that person puts their own interests and parties ahead of the country.
The only thing is that Corbyn's position on Brexit is so weak and ill-defined that there isn't a clear lead for Labour MPs to follow.
(For disclosure, I'm a party member.)
I think he is quite happy to watch the Tories implode over the issue and give Labour the opportunity to never let the Tories forget it. The annoying and frustrating thing is that he is willing to sacrifice the country to get that.
Devolution bill gets torn up after being given only 15 minutes debate, all of which was used up entirely by a single filibustering Tory. No Scottish, Welsh, or NI MPs were heard from on a bill that allows Westminster to take back any devolved powers without consultation. Which makes The Vow look even more laughable than it did 24 hours ago.
All SNP, Plaid, one LD, Caroline Lucas, and Dennis Skinner voted against. Remaining Labour MPs abstained.
Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t even make the politics front page of the BBC website.
Your allies in the Commons are cowards. That's the bottom line.
To hear them bleat about a newspaper calling them a nasty name is risible.
If they as MPs love the EU so much, then back the EU and answer for your decision next election.
But they don't have the guts to do that.
The nasty names in the papers cause death threats and abuse. With one MP already dead I don't blame them for backing down; both you and I would.
You're at least as much to blame as them; you and your brethren are why the MPs cant kill this off. You voted for it with no concern for the consequences.
nfe wrote: Devolution bill gets torn up after being given only 15 minutes debate, all of which was used up entirely by a single filibustering Tory. No Scottish, Welsh, or NI MPs were heard from on a bill that allows Westminster to take back any devolved powers without consultation. Which makes The Vow look even more laughable than it did 24 hours ago.
All SNP, Plaid, one LD, Caroline Lucas, and Dennis Skinner voted against. Remaining Labour MPs abstained.
Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t even make the politics front page of the BBC website.
Pretty par for the course for Unionists. Sadly. There are plenty of examples.
The funny thing is, all they have to do is govern competently in a way that treats each area fairly and they would kill off nationalism. Unfortunately, Westminster never learns.
I am more and more thinking that is what will happen.
The majority of NI are pro-EU and given a hard border their majority opinion shifts in favour of unification with Eire.
Scotland is shaping up for another referendum. This time I think the Brexit issue will swing it for them.
IDK what could happen with Wales. The last time they were consulted, it was about 84% against independence, and I don't know how much that may have changed.
Herzlos wrote: May made it clear she wants to kill off devolution and bring all the power back to Westminster, so despite promises to the contrary it was inevitable.
No, she's made clear she wants to bring all the power to the Conservative and Unionist Party. Yesterday's vote made it clear that leaving power to Westminster is the last thing the Government is interested in.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Da Boss wrote: If the United Kingdom falls apart, it will be well deserved I am afraid.
Unbelievable how tone deaf and narrow minded the Tories are on this topic.
In the Scottish referendum, I voted No. Largely because the question of Scotland's membership of the EU was unclear. I'd rather be part of both the United Kingdom and the EU, but if forced to choose only one, the EU is the better option. If Scotland goes its own way and joins the EU, then my apologies to those of you left in Airstrip One. Still, if Northumberland and Cumbria want to tag along, I'm sure that'll be OK.
The "House do sit in private" thing seems... arcane. Somebody must have been up all night looking up that little spanner to throw in the works. But at the same time it shows that the SNP (understandably) very angry about how little debate there was yesterday.
Interestingly, insofar as gov.uk parliamentary traditions factsheet goes, the speaker must call a division immediately on a sit in private request. He can’t delay it till the end of the session.
I’m sure he knew how it was going to go, and it’s a stunt, but it’s gotten the disgrace of a ‘debate’ conducted last night all over the press when it was totally ignored previously - though I note that almost everyone is reducing the grievance to ‘not enough time to debate’ which is rather less serious than what has actually happened.
“Support for Brexit is in the DNA of both the Daily Mail and, more pertinently, its readers,” said Dacre.
Yes Paul, along with bigotry, hypocrisy, and an unhealthy interest in young starlets, nearly all grown up, dressing far too provocatively for their tender years etc etc.
THEWILLOFTHEPEOPLE is being used again and again to justify whatever the government and/or Brexiteers want to get away with.
Meanwhile everyone knows that the majority of the people do not support a Hard Brexit and would rather have EFTA or similar.
How is this will to be expressed?
The will of May to be expressed? That would be ensuring anyone that disagrees with her is housed in Grenfell tower like buildings and then let lack of safety controls remove the problem for her?
And I take it they won’t be returning the money we contributed?
Honestly, if they don’t trust us anymore, maybe we should just leave NATO while we’re at it.
Well said.
They trust our money, trust our troops in Baltic EU member states, and naturally, they trust the intelligence they get from our security services, which let us not forget, receives extensive cooperation from American intelligence services.
And yet they accuse us of cherry picking, and something about cakes and eating them...
In all honesty, I would tell them to feth off, bring back our troops and end intelligence sharing and co-operation with the whole damn lot of them.
Aye. Just goes to show that countries don’t have friends. Only interests. And I don’t think it’s in our interest to pay for the defence of nations via NATO who so vehemently distrust us. Unless they agree to return the money.
EU diplomats were quick to point out that the commission is not blocking the UK’s military from access to Galileo’s secure signal, just proprietary knowledge of its codes, design and development.
Paris once said that Britain would happily fight to the last Frenchman in its conduct of the war...
Well, it seem like the EU is happy for British troops to die to protect Juncker's drinks cabinet, but is not to keen on us being involved in any other way.
As I've said before, I'll take my chances with the Yanks. They like us, or they're really good at pretending they like us. Either way, I don't care.
EU diplomats were quick to point out that the commission is not blocking the UK’s military from access to Galileo’s secure signal, just proprietary knowledge of its codes, design and development.
You realise that is the exact same situation with the US GPS system?
Delays to the project will only increase the cost. If the UK wanted access to the project it shouldn't have voted for Brexit.
This is another thing that was pointed out before by all parties involved and ignored by people like you DINLT. You cannot be angry at such developments, you voted directly for them.
EU diplomats were quick to point out that the commission is not blocking the UK’s military from access to Galileo’s secure signal, just proprietary knowledge of its codes, design and development.
You realise that is the exact same situation with the US GPS system?
Delays to the project will only increase the cost. If the UK wanted access to the project it shouldn't have voted for Brexit.
This is another thing that was pointed out before by all parties involved and ignored by people like you DINLT. You cannot be angry at such developments, you voted directly for them.
It has also been pointed on millions of occasions that the vast majority of EU members are also NATO members.
The UK is not leaving NATO.
It will be fun watching Brussels try to square this circle...
And I take it they won’t be returning the money we contributed?
Honestly, if they don’t trust us anymore, maybe we should just leave NATO while we’re at it.
Well said.
They trust our money, trust our troops in Baltic EU member states, and naturally, they trust the intelligence they get from our security services, which let us not forget, receives extensive cooperation from American intelligence services.
And yet they accuse us of cherry picking, and something about cakes and eating them...
In all honesty, I would tell them to feth off, bring back our troops and end intelligence sharing and co-operation with the whole damn lot of them.
There's no cherry picking here. They are applying the same rules that apply to every other third party that wishes to be included in the project. The US also do not allow us to have access to the details of GPS, only they have that access. There's no difference here.
This was warned about at the time of the vote. We will not have the same level of access to military secrets when outside the club. We will still be able to use it (in the same way we can use GPS) but we will simply won't have the same control over the data we receive.
I find it slightly bewildering that people that voted to Leave, said they don't care about the consequences as long as we made our own decisions because the EU wasn't democratic. Then complain that the EU made a democratic decision amongst the states that they would stick to the same rules and in the end look to supporting the EU members primarily which they are there to represent. It's almost like you still want the same access to the things you like and abandon those bits you don't like.
I repeat. *THIS WAS WARNED ABOUT AT THE TIME OF THE VOTE*.
You can't now whinge that the cake you wanted that was never there isn't there now and that those hi-tech engineers and scientists you value so highly will be leaving for more accomodating climates.
It may not matter anyway about anybody's satellite. Solar flares seem to be increasing these days. The Sun, that ball of fire in the sky, as opposed to the rag of a newspaper, is going through one of its periodical 'migraine' cycles.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
We will not have the same level of access to military secrets when outside the club.
Yeah, but that NATO club we're still members off, just so happens to be next door, literally, to the EU club...
If the gak hits the fan in Europe, it will be a tad tricky to coordinate defence with a UK military that's been locked out of secure communications...
Like I say, will be fun to see how the EU tries to square this circle...
Yeah, but that NATO club we're still members off, just so happens to be next door, literally, to the EU club...
If the gak hits the fan in Europe, it will be a tad tricky to coordinate defence with a UK military that's been locked out of secure communications...
Like I say, will be fun to see how the EU tries to square this circle...
You're misunderstanding the difference between what is and isn't proposed. The UK will still have access to the system if it wants. What it won't have access to is the 'inner workings' of the system because we will be a third party. That means we can't use it to improve the military or civil services by understanding the inner workings and developing new ways to exploit that. Military's don't share their technologies unless they want to already. We will have access to the generic stuff - like we have now with GPS. But that's limiting because all we can do is use that specific signal. With access to the inner workings you can better integrate your systems so that they work more accurately and effectively (for example if you want less than metre precision for a warhead you might need that code to make flight updates on the fly etc).
And lets not make the mistake that everything is OK in NATO. The US have already previously said that in any major conflict they may shoot down Galileo because it potentially gives other countries access to a service that they can then solely deny to them through removing GPS through changing the code.
You voted to downgrade the UK to 3rd country status. You can't then be upset about the UK having 3rd country status.
Any money we contributed to it is gone; we're the ones that voided our eligibility to be a part of it. So it won't be developed using UK staff, and we'll have the same access as any other 3rd country.
Regarding the US liking us - Obama openly mocked the "special relationship" the UK has with them, and trump doesn't work that way. I'd much rather throw my lot in with the EU than the US.
This is what people voted for. You can't leave the EU and stay in the EU.
By leaving the EU the UK excludes itself from all EU institutions -- Galileo, Euratom, the European Medical Agency, European City of Culture, Future 2020 science programme, etc, etc.
This is the price for getting out of the customs union, the European Court of Justice and so on.
The EU has been telling us from the beginning that we cannot cherry pick the bits of the EU that we like, and reject only the bits we don't like.
I clearly remember the members now moaning about we're being shut out of Galileo complaining about EU military integration just months ago.
This is what military integration looks like. You share the good and the bad.
Now the UK has access to both user-level GPS and Galileo, maybe BoJo can strike a deal with the Russians to user-level GLONASS and you can pick the best of three.
It has also been pointed on millions of occasions that the vast majority of EU members are also NATO members.
The UK is not leaving NATO.
It will be fun watching Brussels try to square this circle...
Again, so?
Before Galileo gets up and running, NATO uses GPS, the US military system. That doesn't mean NATO countries had access to the code, design and development of the system.
You have no idea what you're talking about, as usual.
It may not matter anyway about anybody's satellite. Solar flares seem to be increasing these days. The Sun, that ball of fire in the sky, as opposed to the rag of a newspaper, is going through one of its periodical 'migraine' cycles.
So? Again, you do not know what you are talking about.
I actually understand where the eu is coming from. Since we’re no longer members it stands to reason that we won’t be getting access to their stuff. I just thought it was cheeky of them to immediately jump to “we don’t trust you anymore”. It’s would also cheeky of them to say ‘you can’t get your money back on it’ whilst also saying ‘you still have to pay for x y and z after you leave’.
And there’s a world of difference between fellow NATO members sharing and pooling resources and what the eu wants, which is its own army answerable only to its commission.
Kilkrazy wrote: This is what people voted for. You can't leave the EU and stay in the EU.
By leaving the EU the UK excludes itself from all EU institutions -- Galileo, Euratom, the European Medical Agency, European City of Culture, Future 2020 science programme, etc, etc.
This is the price for getting out of the customs union, the European Court of Justice and so on.
The EU has been telling us from the beginning that we cannot cherry pick the bits of the EU that we like, and reject only the bits we don't like.
The only cherry-picking I see going on here is from Brussels.
Happy to have British troops in the Baltic, happy to use British intelligence services contribute to EU security, but not to keen on Britain using their satellite...
Unlike other people on this site, I'm happy to criticise my own side and have do so on numerous occasions.
Remain supporters will defend ANYTHING the EU says or does, regardless of how good or bad it is.
When Liam Fox does something dodgy, I'm the first to condemn it.
When Juncker indulges in cronyism and appoints a close friend to a plumb commission job, despite said friend's lack of qualifications,
The silence from Remain supporters on this forum was deafening...
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Future War Cultist wrote: I actually understand where the eu is coming from. Since we’re no longer members it stands to reason that we won’t be getting access to their stuff. I just thought it was cheeky of them to immediately jump to “we don’t trust you anymore”. It’s would also cheeky of them to say ‘you can’t get your money back on it’ whilst also saying ‘you still have to pay for x y and z after you leave’.
And there’s a world of difference between fellow NATO members sharing and pooling resources and what the eu wants, which is its own army answerable only to its commission.
But it's like somebody giving you the keys to their house, trusting you to look after it whilst their on holiday, letting you eat their food, drive their car, sit on their sofa etc etc
and then turning around and saying under no circumstances do not use the TV...
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Kilkrazy wrote: Even after Brexit the UK will remain a member of NATO along with nearly all the EU countries, and will have access to the GPS system.
I think they could have couched the language a lot better.
And yes, I'm happy to knock my own side for some of the stuff we have said to them the last 3 years.
Future War Cultist wrote: I actually understand where the eu is coming from. Since we’re no longer members it stands to reason that we won’t be getting access to their stuff. I just thought it was cheeky of them to immediately jump to “we don’t trust you anymore”. It’s would also cheeky of them to say ‘you can’t get your money back on it’ whilst also saying ‘you still have to pay for x y and z after you leave’.
And there’s a world of difference between fellow NATO members sharing and pooling resources and what the eu wants, which is its own army answerable only to its commission.
I understand your angle. At the same time, the system is part developed already, the money has been spent, it is a specifically EU system, and if the UK is to have public level access, it's right that we should have paid something towards development. (Much of that money will have come back to UK based developers anyway.)
But in terms of paying for stuff after we leave, the thing is that the UK made long-term committments, for example to the European Development Bank, which can't simply be abandoned. This is the kind of fallout from Brexit which people should have thought about before voting Leave.
It never was going to be simple to undo 45 years of integration and partnership.
It has also been pointed on millions of occasions that the vast majority of EU members are also NATO members.
The UK is not leaving NATO.
It will be fun watching Brussels try to square this circle...
Again, so?
Before Galileo gets up and running, NATO uses GPS, the US military system. That doesn't mean NATO countries had access to the code, design and development of the system.
You have no idea what you're talking about, as usual.
It may not matter anyway about anybody's satellite. Solar flares seem to be increasing these days. The Sun, that ball of fire in the sky, as opposed to the rag of a newspaper, is going through one of its periodical 'migraine' cycles.
So? Again, you do not know what you are talking about.
Pah! You probably think Galileo is an Italian footballer.
Except that isn't at all what is happening. It even clearly says this in the very line you quoted from the Guardian article. The UK can use the Galileo system. It will not have access to the confidential details of the system.
Kilkrazy wrote: Even after Brexit the UK will remain a member of NATO along with nearly all the EU countries, and will have access to the GPS system.
I think they could have couched the language a lot better.
Their language is fine. The issue is your reading comprehension.
Pah! You probably think Galileo is an Italian footballer.
I'm an astrophysicist. I actually bother to research my points, unlike you. Every time you post, you just make yourself look even more uninformed on just about every issue this thread discusses.
Every time you post, you just make yourself look even more uninformed on just about every issue this thread discusses.
Such as?
Negativ effects of brexit. Crime statistics in GB.
You have been proven wrong multiple times in this thread, because you "don't care about details" just about headlines and feels.
Future War Cultist wrote: I actually understand where the eu is coming from. Since we’re no longer members it stands to reason that we won’t be getting access to their stuff. I just thought it was cheeky of them to immediately jump to “we don’t trust you anymore”. It’s would also cheeky of them to say ‘you can’t get your money back on it’ whilst also saying ‘you still have to pay for x y and z after you leave’.
And there’s a world of difference between fellow NATO members sharing and pooling resources and what the eu wants, which is its own army answerable only to its commission.
The parliament (voted by everyone in the EU) votes a Commission president. The other 27 commissioners (one per country) are instead chosen by the EU Council, which is a posh way of saying "all of the EU heads of government sitting on the same room trying to decide on something".
But it's a moot point because an EU army only answerable to the Commission is tinfoil hat material.
And yes, of course there is a we don't trust you component. You decided to leave, trust needs to be gained back.
That said, this is mostly fallout from the increasingly isolationist US that has caught the UK at the worst possible time. I'm sure eventually the EU and UK will forge closer defence ties either through NATO or by other means. But again, this needs to be scaled slowy because fellow NATO member Turkey has been asking for the kind of in-and-out position the UK seems to be aiming for.
And remember, the UK voted against creating the EU common defence fund in 2013.... which should they benefit from it now they're out?
Every time you post, you just make yourself look even more uninformed on just about every issue this thread discusses.
Such as?
Negativ effects of brexit. Crime statistics in GB.
You have been proven wrong multiple times in this thread, because you "don't care about details" just about headlines and feels.
Eh?
The crime statistics I highlighted came from a BBC article that showed violent crime was up.
If I could fake webpages, I would not be commentating on dakkadakka
Future War Cultist wrote: I actually understand where the eu is coming from. Since we’re no longer members it stands to reason that we won’t be getting access to their stuff. I just thought it was cheeky of them to immediately jump to “we don’t trust you anymore”. It’s would also cheeky of them to say ‘you can’t get your money back on it’ whilst also saying ‘you still have to pay for x y and z after you leave’.
And there’s a world of difference between fellow NATO members sharing and pooling resources and what the eu wants, which is its own army answerable only to its commission.
The parliament (voted by everyone in the EU) votes a Commission president. The other 27 commissioners (one per country) are instead chosen by the EU Council, which is a posh way of saying "all of the EU heads of government sitting on the same room trying to decide on something".
But it's a moot point because an EU army only answerable to the Commission is tinfoil hat material.
And yes, of course there is a we don't trust you component. You decided to leave, trust needs to be gained back.
That said, this is mostly fallout from the increasingly isolationist US that has caught the UK at the worst possible time. I'm sure eventually the EU and UK will forge closer defence ties either through NATO or by other means. But again, this needs to be scaled slowy because fellow NATO member Turkey has been asking for the kind of in-and-out position the UK seems to be aiming for.
That sounds like a lot of layers that insulates the common man from the people who make decisions that effect his life...
Reminds me of a certain system that used to hang around Moscow between 1925-1991
Every time you post, you just make yourself look even more uninformed on just about every issue this thread discusses.
Such as?
Galileo, Europe not being a world leader because the US has Apple and Amazon, Crime (and your "solution" of gun wielding vigilantes), effects that Brexit will have on UK economy, industry, higher education funding, science, etc.
Big kick-off in Parliament yesterday, and there is potential for more aggro today as it's beginning to look like May soft-soaped the Tory Rebels a bit unrealistically, and they are getting up in arms again.
I was reading an article in which Rees-Mogg said constitutionally Parliament should not be allowed to bind the government's hands over Brexit, and so on. It occurred to me that Parliament has spent centuries gradually wrestling powers away from the crown, so there's no reason why Parliament shouldn't wrestle the power of Brext away from the government.
That certainly would be a more accurate reflection of "the will of the people" than the will of the entirely unelected cabinet is.
There's enough pie charts, graphs, bar charts, and stats in that article to keep reds8n and Malus happy for a long time.
Unfortunately, they all point to the same thing: crime is up
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Kilkrazy wrote: Big kick-off in Parliament yesterday, and there is potential for more aggro today as it's beginning to look like May soft-soaped the Tory Rebels a bit unrealistically, and they are getting up in arms again.
I was reading an article in which Rees-Mogg said constitutionally Parliament should not be allowed to bind the government's hands over Brexit, and so on. It occurred to me that Parliament has spent centuries gradually wrestling powers away from the crown, so there's no reason why Parliament shouldn't wrestle the power of Brext away from the government.
That certainly would be a more accurate reflection of "the will of the people" than the will of the entirely unelected cabinet is.
When push comes to shove, the Tory rebels will forget their principals and reach for the nearest expense claims form.
And I still don't know how you can be a member of a party who's leader is a bigger EU opponent than I am...
Every time you post, you just make yourself look even more uninformed on just about every issue this thread discusses.
Such as?
Galileo, Europe not being a world leader because the US has Apple and Amazon, Crime (and your "solution" of gun wielding vigilantes), effects that Brexit will have on UK economy, industry, higher education funding, science, etc.
Your purposefully misinterpreting my argument about Apple and Amazon.
My argument was this: the tech and IT future is being shaped by American values and beliefs. Why isn't Europe having the same impact?
What I got instead from other people was shipping containers and food production. Now, both of these things are important, but my focus was on social media, tech, IT, online purchases etc etc
Future War Cultist wrote: I actually understand where the eu is coming from. Since we’re no longer members it stands to reason that we won’t be getting access to their stuff. I just thought it was cheeky of them to immediately jump to “we don’t trust you anymore”. It’s would also cheeky of them to say ‘you can’t get your money back on it’ whilst also saying ‘you still have to pay for x y and z after you leave’.
And there’s a world of difference between fellow NATO members sharing and pooling resources and what the eu wants, which is its own army answerable only to its commission.
The parliament (voted by everyone in the EU) votes a Commission president. The other 27 commissioners (one per country) are instead chosen by the EU Council, which is a posh way of saying "all of the EU heads of government sitting on the same room trying to decide on something".
But it's a moot point because an EU army only answerable to the Commission is tinfoil hat material.
And yes, of course there is a we don't trust you component. You decided to leave, trust needs to be gained back.
That said, this is mostly fallout from the increasingly isolationist US that has caught the UK at the worst possible time. I'm sure eventually the EU and UK will forge closer defence ties either through NATO or by other means. But again, this needs to be scaled slowy because fellow NATO member Turkey has been asking for the kind of in-and-out position the UK seems to be aiming for.
That sounds like a lot of layers that insulates the common man from the people who make decisions that effect his life...
Reminds me of a certain system that used to hang around Moscow between 1925-1991
I'll save this post for the next time I need a quick example of the anti-EU hyperbole-cum-misinformation that hardcore Brexiteers have been throwing around for years.
Now, let's forget this politics carry on, and head over to the world cup thread for some football banter.
I shall be spending the next 4 weeks there when I visit dakka, and will probably forget about the UK politics thread. No doubt some people will be relieved.
But it's summertime anyway, and our MPs will be off on their holidays, so it's always a quiet time for UK politics.
Every time you post, you just make yourself look even more uninformed on just about every issue this thread discusses.
Such as?
Personal favourite from a while back was you proudly boasting about how exports were going up, whilst the news story of the day was the decline in exports.
A huge chunk of all these threads is people explaining that what you are saying is in fact anti-truth.
It's been quite remarkable -- and you're far from alone in this regards -- watching the journey from everything will be better out of the Eu and we'll all be better off to the more recent claims that whilst we might be living in caves and using flint tools again, we will at least have blue passports woad skin again.
Pretty much every nation that exisits or existed conquered others - agreed not globally but usually locally.
Does conquering part count? We haven't conquered other country at least in full. We did manage to conquer part of Soviet Union though while they were too busy defending against the nazi invasion! Not that it did us much good when they finally turned half an attention toward us crushing our lines while rushing toward Berlin.
And I take it they won’t be returning the money we contributed?
Honestly, if they don’t trust us anymore, maybe we should just leave NATO while we’re at it.
You decided to go out of EU. OF COURSE you don't get benefits EU members get. What? You think you can automatically benefit from all the things EU members get without being member? Tzk tzk tzk silly you. Here's real world lesson from you. You don't get to cherry pick all the best things as you will. Don't expect to benefit from EU things without being member. Once you are out you are out and then welfare of UK isn't concern for EU unless it benefits more the EU. If it benefits EUUK can burn. You wanted out, learn to live with it and don't cry like a baby when you don't get the benefits.
Enjoy the blue passports(that you could have got anyway). Don't cry when your economy is ruined.
You KNEW this was coming. YOU VOTED FOR THIS! Don't cry when you get what you voted for! It's like baby crying stomach hurt when baby got the candy he asked even though mother told the baby it would make stomach ache.
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Future War Cultist wrote: I actually understand where the eu is coming from. Since we’re no longer members it stands to reason that we won’t be getting access to their stuff. I just thought it was cheeky of them to immediately jump to “we don’t trust you anymore”. It’s would also cheeky of them to say ‘you can’t get your money back on it’ whilst also saying ‘you still have to pay for x y and z after you leave’.
And there’s a world of difference between fellow NATO members sharing and pooling resources and what the eu wants, which is its own army answerable only to its commission.
Why would EU trust UK? You chose to become competitors rather than members. You opted to be less trustworthy than before. You don't trust competitors. You can work with them but still they are competing with you. UK decided to turn it into you vs us situation. Why are you surprised EU responding in kind?
Future War Cultist wrote: I actually understand where the eu is coming from. Since we’re no longer members it stands to reason that we won’t be getting access to their stuff. I just thought it was cheeky of them to immediately jump to “we don’t trust you anymore”. It’s would also cheeky of them to say ‘you can’t get your money back on it’ whilst also saying ‘you still have to pay for x y and z after you leave’.
And there’s a world of difference between fellow NATO members sharing and pooling resources and what the eu wants, which is its own army answerable only to its commission.
I understand your angle. At the same time, the system is part developed already, the money has been spent, it is a specifically EU system, and if the UK is to have public level access, it's right that we should have paid something towards development. (Much of that money will have come back to UK based developers anyway.)
But in terms of paying for stuff after we leave, the thing is that the UK made long-term committments, for example to the European Development Bank, which can't simply be abandoned. This is the kind of fallout from Brexit which people should have thought about before voting Leave.
It never was going to be simple to undo 45 years of integration and partnership.
Fair points.
I know we’re on different sides, and that in the past we might have been antagonistic, but I like to think that we’re now getting closer and closer to reaching a concensus. Perhaps even being friends.
Pretty much every nation that exisits or existed conquered others - agreed not globally but usually locally.
Does conquering part count? We haven't conquered other country at least in full. We did manage to conquer part of Soviet Union though while they were too busy defending against the nazi invasion! Not that it did us much good when they finally turned half an attention toward us crushing our lines while rushing toward Berlin.
And I take it they won’t be returning the money we contributed?
Honestly, if they don’t trust us anymore, maybe we should just leave NATO while we’re at it.
You decided to go out of EU. OF COURSE you don't get benefits EU members get. What? You think you can automatically benefit from all the things EU members get without being member? Tzk tzk tzk silly you. Here's real world lesson from you. You don't get to cherry pick all the best things as you will. Don't expect to benefit from EU things without being member. Once you are out you are out and then welfare of UK isn't concern for EU unless it benefits more the EU. If it benefits EUUK can burn. You wanted out, learn to live with it and don't cry like a baby when you don't get the benefits.
Enjoy the blue passports(that you could have got anyway). Don't cry when your economy is ruined.
You KNEW this was coming. YOU VOTED FOR THIS! Don't cry when you get what you voted for! It's like baby crying stomach hurt when baby got the candy he asked even though mother told the baby it would make stomach ache.
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Future War Cultist wrote: I actually understand where the eu is coming from. Since we’re no longer members it stands to reason that we won’t be getting access to their stuff. I just thought it was cheeky of them to immediately jump to “we don’t trust you anymore”. It’s would also cheeky of them to say ‘you can’t get your money back on it’ whilst also saying ‘you still have to pay for x y and z after you leave’.
And there’s a world of difference between fellow NATO members sharing and pooling resources and what the eu wants, which is its own army answerable only to its commission.
Why would EU trust UK? You chose to become competitors rather than members. You opted to be less trustworthy than before. You don't trust competitors. You can work with them but still they are competing with you. UK decided to turn it into you vs us situation. Why are you surprised EU responding in kind?
Do not speak to me or anyone else in here in that condescending tone again. Your attitude here, everywhere, is fething gak. And I reported your gak from the other thread and I’ve done so here again. Everyone was being civil-ish until you stormed in calling names and being sarcastic. Now back the feth off.
Great, my reaching out to Kilkrazy has been soiled.
We have different ideas about the best thing for the UK and we recognise there have to be compromises on various areas, for example the EFTA membership idea which gives the UK many of the advantages of EU membership with the added advantage of being able to make trade deals without the EU, but allows freedom of movement.
Whatever form of Brexit may be achieved, the EU will not vanish. It will continue to be the UK's most important trading partner for years, and also the most culturally similar region of the world, where lots of Brits want to live, work or at least go on holiday.
Therefore it's worth making some sacrifices when dealing with the EU now, in order to preserve good neighbour status for the future.
We have different ideas about the best thing for the UK and we recognise there have to be compromises on various areas, for example the EFTA membership idea which gives the UK many of the advantages of EU membership with the added advantage of being able to make trade deals without the EU, but allows freedom of movement.
Whatever form of Brexit may be achieved, the EU will not vanish. It will continue to be the UK's most important trading partner for years, and also the most culturally similar region of the world, where lots of Brits want to live, work or at least go on holiday.
Therefore it's worth making some sacrifices when dealing with the EU now, in order to preserve good neighbour status for the future.
I wish we had an applause emoticon.
But yeah, you’re absolutely right, and it’s wonderful to say that.
Every time you post, you just make yourself look even more uninformed on just about every issue this thread discusses.
Such as?
Personal favourite from a while back was you proudly boasting about how exports were going up, whilst the news story of the day was the decline in exports.
A huge chunk of all these threads is people explaining that what you are saying is in fact anti-truth.
It's been quite remarkable -- and you're far from alone in this regards -- watching the journey from everything will be better out of the Eu and we'll all be better off to the more recent claims that whilst we might be living in caves and using flint tools again, we will at least have blue passports woad skin again.
In my defence, the whole blue passport thing was comedy banter directed at yourself and Kilkrazy, and other Remain supporters. Much like Farage on the Thames, which I laughed at and thought silly, even though I was technically on the same side as Farage.
It was all tongue in cheek, good natured fun.
Hand on heart, I've never given two hoots what colour my passport is, and for what it's worth, it was the last thing on my mind when I voted Brexit.
The only cherry-picking I see going on here is from Brussels.
Happy to have British troops in the Baltic, happy to use British intelligence services contribute to EU security, but not to keen on Britain using their satellite...
I find you dissociation and cognitive dissonance from your previous comments quite staggering really.
Paraphrasing. You suggested that we should provide troops to the Balkan states directly to win greater support amongst those states directly. That you were opposed to an EU army that supported all states. Now you want to have this so you can access to Galileo.
You said there was no need for us to support or have an EU military because we have NATO which we support the Baltic states through. Now the EU continues with Galileo it suddenly becomes that we are supporting the militaries of the EU and not NATO?
You wanted less integrating military wise with the EU but now we've stopped getting high access to Galileo which would have facilitated such integration you want it back again.
You said that you didn't care about the cost of leaving the EU (except for blood on the streets) as long as it happens, yet you object to the EU treating the UK as a third party once it leaves? Would you then stay in the EU to be part of Galileo, is that your red line?
You complain about cherry picking in the EU, without understanding what it means. The UK is getting the same access rights as any other third party non-EU country. There is no cherry picking because that implies that they want a bespoke relationship with regards Galileo which is the complete opposite of what you are suggesting.
Remain supporters will defend ANYTHING the EU says or does, regardless of how good or bad it is.
No one is defending the EU. All anyone is saying is that this is as expected. It was known at the referendum that these issues were likely to happen. That you didn't listen or didn't want to listen is not defending the EU. It is pointing out the reality of the decision and in a sense "we told you so". Those rules were there at the time and are the same to a greater extent as today. There's been no underhand decision to change the rules or so forth (which could be open to criticism); they are just actioning what we knew they would do. The best worst you can accuse us of is shrugging our shoulders and muttering about that we're not surprised.
It is becoming more apparent that you simply want to keep some bits you like and the get rid of the bits you don't. Well news flash, relationships don't work that way.
On live TV during PMQs, actually, and she referred to the fact that the colour was imposed by the EU, which as you know, it wasn't.
Agreed.
And like I said, I was never going to die in a ditch for blue passports.
I don't blame the EU for everything, and as a point of note, the Wetherspoon's boss and his banning of French and German booze is pretty absurd and petty.
The only cherry-picking I see going on here is from Brussels.
Happy to have British troops in the Baltic, happy to use British intelligence services contribute to EU security, but not to keen on Britain using their satellite...
I find you dissociation and cognitive dissonance from your previous comments quite staggering really.
Paraphrasing. You suggested that we should provide troops to the Balkan states directly to win greater support amongst those states directly. That you were opposed to an EU army that supported all states. Now you want to have this so you can access to Galileo.
You said there was no need for us to support or have an EU military because we have NATO which we support the Baltic states through. Now the EU continues with Galileo it suddenly becomes that we are supporting the militaries of the EU and not NATO?
You wanted less integrating military wise with the EU but now we've stopped getting high access to Galileo which would have facilitated such integration you want it back again.
You said that you didn't care about the cost of leaving the EU (except for blood on the streets) as long as it happens, yet you object to the EU treating the UK as a third party once it leaves? Would you then stay in the EU to be part of Galileo, is that your red line?
You complain about cherry picking in the EU, without understanding what it means. The UK is getting the same access rights as any other third party non-EU country. There is no cherry picking because that implies that they want a bespoke relationship with regards Galileo which is the complete opposite of what you are suggesting.
Remain supporters will defend ANYTHING the EU says or does, regardless of how good or bad it is.
No one is defending the EU. All anyone is saying is that this is as expected. It was known at the referendum that these issues were likely to happen. That you didn't listen or didn't want to listen is not defending the EU. It is pointing out the reality of the decision and in a sense "we told you so". Those rules were there at the time and are the same to a greater extent as today. There's been no underhand decision to change the rules or so forth (which could be open to criticism); they are just actioning what we knew they would do. The best worst you can accuse us of is shrugging our shoulders and muttering about that we're not surprised.
It is becoming more apparent that you simply want to keep some bits you like and the get rid of the bits you don't. Well news flash, relationships don't work that way.
If the Galileo satellite was pure commercial and communications, say an EU wide mobile phone network, then I wouldn't give two hoots what the EU did in this regard.
But as you know, by way of some EU members also being NATO members, Britain will for the time being be intertwined with these respective nations.
Norway and Iceland don't seem to suffer ill-effects from being out of the EU, whilst being NATO members.
But I'll defend and maintain my long standing position: a common market has no business encroaching on military matters.
In reviewing 1970s EEC referendum campaign material, Maastricht, even the Lisbon treaty, the word military is not something I've ever encountered.
If EU NATO members want out of NATO for their own Brussels led defence force, then they should be honest about it and start from scratch. But this duplication that seems to be happening makes little sense.
If the gak ever hits the fan and Europe is threatened from say, Russia, nobody in Brussels will give two hoots if Britain has paid its contributions or not. They will want the British military in there.
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A Town Called Malus wrote: I doubt that is any particular jab at the EU. If it were, he'd also be dropping Danish beer.
More likely it is due to predicted increased costs post-brexit.
None the less, it's petty behaviour, and despite him being for Brexit, he should be called out on this.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: the Wetherspoon's boss and his banning of French and German booze is pretty absurd and petty.
The one near me doesn't sell German beer that I can recall. Not on tap, anyway (if it did I'd have bought it as I'm partial to Warsteiner or Bitburger).
And I'd bet any given Wetherspoons' annual champagne sales can be counted on one hand. Has he said if he's banning prosecco? Or is that okay because the Italians are turning 'brown people' away now?
If the Galileo satellite was pure commercial and communications, say an EU wide mobile phone network, then I wouldn't give two hoots what the EU did in this regard.
But as you know, by way of some EU members also being NATO members, Britain will for the time being be intertwined with these respective nations.
Norway and Iceland don't seem to suffer ill-effects from being out of the EU, whilst being NATO members.
But I'll defend and maintain my long standing position: a common market has no business encroaching on military matters.
In reviewing 1970s EEC referendum campaign material, Maastricht, even the Lisbon treaty, the word military is not something I've ever encountered.
If EU NATO members want out of NATO for their own Brussels led defence force, then they should be honest about it and start from scratch. But this duplication that seems to be happening makes little sense.
This in no way answers any of the questions posed. It's just a waffly explanation for NATO. NATO does not give each other access to the technologies they possess. It is simply a club of mutual protection. The US doesn't give us access to the inner workings of the GPS system. Why should the EU be any different?
In my defence, the whole blue passport thing was comedy banter directed at yourself and Kilkrazy, and other Remain supporters. Much like Farage on the Thames, which I laughed at and thought silly, even though I was technically on the same side as Farage.
It was all tongue in cheek, good natured fun.
Hand on heart, I've never given two hoots what colour my passport is, and for what it's worth, it was the last thing on my mind when I voted Brexit.
I notice you say nothing about lying about the exports.
Or the reverse ferret with regards to the lowering of our economic standards.
or etc etc ad nauseam
it's really quite astonishing how the people who knew what they were voting for all along were saying pretty much the exact opposite during the entire ref.
Frankly at this point you're starting to make Dan Hannan look honest.
Kilkrazy wrote: Wetherspoons is dropping champagne and German beer.
Probably because it is too high quality for the clients. Wetherspoons prefer to suck up the overspill from all other pubs and then serve it back to unsuspecting punters at too high a price!
In my defence, the whole blue passport thing was comedy banter directed at yourself and Kilkrazy, and other Remain supporters. Much like Farage on the Thames, which I laughed at and thought silly, even though I was technically on the same side as Farage.
It was all tongue in cheek, good natured fun.
Hand on heart, I've never given two hoots what colour my passport is, and for what it's worth, it was the last thing on my mind when I voted Brexit.
Hmmmm lets just go back to some old posts shall we...
Never let it be said that leave don't uphold their campaign promises.
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Kilkrazy wrote: I actually had a blue passport, back in the day.
To be frank, the colour of your passport is irrelevant. What's important is how much freedom of travel it gives you.
The "Iconic" blue passport is another of those "Brexiteer" shibboleths. There is no EU rule that makes the UK have a red passport. We could have made it blue any time we wanted.
I've always kept my passports in a leather wallet of a different colour.
Let the good times fething roll indeed.
I have an old, expired, burgundy passport. I may burn it in an act of defiance.
I'm surprised that Farage isn't out organising a mass bonfire of burgundy passports.
Defiance of what? Of the non-existent rule that doesn't make you have a red rather than a blue passport?
Wetherspoons only buys 200k bottles of champagne per year.
The pub chain will continue to buy prosecco (1.8m bottles per year) from the EU after Brexit. English sparkling production is way too small to satiate mainstream customer spending
if you work out sales/number of pubs works out to selling one bottle per branch every 2 days.
Bet France is really scared now.
... course if the EU countries start to retaliate, say by all 27 of them not buying any of our X/Y/Z ... who do you think will win that one then ?
Going back to the affairs in the House of Commons, it seems the possibility that May overplayed her emollient hand with the Tory Rebels has become a high degree probability!
It looks like the gak really will hit the fan now.
May won the previous Brexit Bill divisions by a modest margin, 26 votes. The rebels and Labour need to swing 14 votes to break the government. Two rebels were already voting against the government.
Given the chaos in the government and in parliament, perhaps a referendum actually would be a way to give more direction to the overall process.
We're running out of time. Hard Brexit Chaos will occur by default, and only a small number of people want it.
Kilkrazy wrote: Going back to the affairs in the House of Commons, it seems the possibility that May overplayed her emollient hand with the Tory Rebels has become a high degree probability!
It looks like the gak really will hit the fan now.
May won the previous Brexit Bill divisions by a modest margin, 26 votes. The rebels and Labour need to swing 14 votes to break the government. Two rebels were already voting against the government.
Given the chaos in the government and in parliament, perhaps a referendum actually would be a way to give more direction to the overall process.
We're running out of time. Hard Brexit Chaos will occur by default, and only a small number of people want it.
Apparently this is the new amendments proposed:-
123.1 The definition of a meaningful votes means a vote in parliament that will have no binding obligations on the Government whatsoever but allows the Deluded Tory Remainers to put the Government's party before the country.
124.1 The definition of Deluded Tory Remainers means those MPs in the Conservative party that actually believe the PM is honest, caring individual.
125.1 Ha Ha I lied and you believed me you saps
126.1 Theresa May to be immediately promoted to all poweful Overseer. Under the previous Brexit legilsation because of the difficulties the UK faces no vote is needed to install her in such position. Long may she dictate everything!
In my defence, the whole blue passport thing was comedy banter directed at yourself and Kilkrazy, and other Remain supporters. Much like Farage on the Thames, which I laughed at and thought silly, even though I was technically on the same side as Farage.
It was all tongue in cheek, good natured fun.
Hand on heart, I've never given two hoots what colour my passport is, and for what it's worth, it was the last thing on my mind when I voted Brexit.
I notice you say nothing about lying about the exports.
Or the reverse ferret with regards to the lowering of our economic standards.
or etc etc ad nauseam
it's really quite astonishing how the people who knew what they were voting for all along were saying pretty much the exact opposite during the entire ref.
Frankly at this point you're starting to make Dan Hannan look honest.
...almost
It was the current or ex-boss of the CBI who said that exports were flying off the shelves. I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the CBI.
If you have a problem with the CBI, direct your complaints to their HQ.
At any rate, my exports were doing fine at the time. I sold a lot of stuff to Australia. Granted, 5 grand will hardly dent the UK's balance of payments, but I was doing my bit to help our trade deficit.
Small and medium businesses like my own are the backbone of this country.
Kilkrazy wrote: Wetherspoons is dropping champagne and German beer.
Probably because it is too high quality for the clients. Wetherspoons prefer to suck up the overspill from all other pubs and then serve it back to unsuspecting punters at too high a price!
In my defence, the whole blue passport thing was comedy banter directed at yourself and Kilkrazy, and other Remain supporters. Much like Farage on the Thames, which I laughed at and thought silly, even though I was technically on the same side as Farage.
It was all tongue in cheek, good natured fun.
Hand on heart, I've never given two hoots what colour my passport is, and for what it's worth, it was the last thing on my mind when I voted Brexit.
Hmmmm lets just go back to some old posts shall we...
Never let it be said that leave don't uphold their campaign promises.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Kilkrazy wrote: I actually had a blue passport, back in the day.
To be frank, the colour of your passport is irrelevant. What's important is how much freedom of travel it gives you.
The "Iconic" blue passport is another of those "Brexiteer" shibboleths. There is no EU rule that makes the UK have a red passport. We could have made it blue any time we wanted.
I've always kept my passports in a leather wallet of a different colour.
Let the good times fething roll indeed.
I have an old, expired, burgundy passport. I may burn it in an act of defiance.
I'm surprised that Farage isn't out organising a mass bonfire of burgundy passports.
Defiance of what? Of the non-existent rule that doesn't make you have a red rather than a blue passport?
Small and medium businesses, whilst the backbone of the UK are going to get screwed the worst. The big ones can move stuff offshore and pool resources.
You may be OK because you're selling gaming stuff to Australia which is used to paying much higher prices and the dropping pound makes you even cheaper.
It'll really suck for the gaming manufacturers who are going to see materials go up in price, EU sales slow down, and buyers with less money.
Whirlwind wrote: Or are you saying you were deliberately trolling us...
I'm surprised it took you this long to come to that realization...
Harsh. Very harsh.
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Herzlos wrote: Small and medium businesses, whilst the backbone of the UK are going to get screwed the worst. The big ones can move stuff offshore and pool resources.
You may be OK because you're selling gaming stuff to Australia which is used to paying much higher prices and the dropping pound makes you even cheaper.
It'll really suck for the gaming manufacturers who are going to see materials go up in price, EU sales slow down, and buyers with less money.
I'm fortunate because I still have a stockpile of niche, collectible stuff that is always an interest to somebody, somewhere.
My biggest concern though has always been video games diluting interest in wargaming and 3D printers taking away customers.
I would say to anybody on dakka that running or starting a business is not easy, but it's not hard either, if you know what I mean. IMO it's mostly hardwork in the sense of having to put a lot of time in rather than any great difficulty to solve. There's tons of clever people on dakka, and if they ever feel the need to be their own boss, I would say go for it.
The Euro is down against the GBP, so UK exports to Eurozone are more expensive.
The Daily Mail is angry that the immigration cap on medical workers has been lifted.
Local councils have called on the government to replace the funding they will no longer get from the European Investment Bank, used to build council houses and other infrastructure projects.
The Lewisham by-election gave the Lib-Dems a big vote hike in an anti-Brexit mood. Labour still won but lost 18% of the votes compared to the general election.
Kilkrazy wrote: Going back to the affairs in the House of Commons, it seems the possibility that May overplayed her emollient hand with the Tory Rebels has become a high degree probability!
It looks like the gak really will hit the fan now.
May won the previous Brexit Bill divisions by a modest margin, 26 votes. The rebels and Labour need to swing 14 votes to break the government. Two rebels were already voting against the government.
Given the chaos in the government and in parliament, perhaps a referendum actually would be a way to give more direction to the overall process.
We're running out of time. Hard Brexit Chaos will occur by default, and only a small number of people want it.
Apparently this is the new amendments proposed:-
123.1 The definition of a meaningful votes means a vote in parliament that will have no binding obligations on the Government whatsoever but allows the Deluded Tory Remainers to put the Government's party before the country.
124.1 The definition of Deluded Tory Remainers means those MPs in the Conservative party that actually believe the PM is honest, caring individual.
125.1 Ha Ha I lied and you believed me you saps
126.1 Theresa May to be immediately promoted to all poweful Overseer. Under the previous Brexit legilsation because of the difficulties the UK faces no vote is needed to install her in such position. Long may she dictate everything!
Labour may be more disorganised than the Tories and that's saying somthing.
The £1.9bn Universal Credit system may end up costing more to administer than the benefits system it is replacing, according to the National Audit Office.
Ministers will never know if their aim of putting 200,000 extra people in work, or saving £2.1bn in fraud and error, will work, the watchdog says.
It adds some claimants waited eight months for payment amid the switch to UC, which rolls six benefits into one.
The government said UC will bring a £34bn return over 10 years.
It said more people would get into work - and stay there longer - and that it had taken a "listen and learn" approach to the introduction of the system.
The move to the UC system has long been criticised for its delayed and flawed implementation, with more than 110,000 people paid late in 2017 alone.
Rebecca Smidmore, a full-time carer for her disabled son, said the system was confusing and had taken more than a year to understand.
One of the problems, she said, was that if her husband's pay day came one or two days early, the UC system calculated that he had earned double the amount for that month.
"In that case our universal credit is heavily reduced," she told Radio 4's Today programme.
"We don't qualify for free prescriptions or dental treatment which we would do normally."
Meg Hillier, chair of the Public Accounts Committee said the introduction of UC had been "one long catalogue of delay with huge impact on people's lives".
Shadow work and pensions secretary Margaret Greenwood said: "This report shows just how disastrously wrong the Conservatives have got the roll out of Universal Credit."
And the Child Poverty Action Group questioned whether the government should push on with a programme that was "demonstrably failing".
But the public spending watchdog's report found that so many changes had been made to job centres and working practices that there was no "alternative but to continue".
Eight years after work began on UC, only 10% of the total number of people expected to claim are on the system, the NAO says.
And one in five do not receive their full payment on time, the report adds.
A significant minority of those paid late, some 20% - these are usually the more needy and complicated cases - are waiting five months or more to be paid.
And yet the Department for Work and Pensions does not accept that UC has caused hardship among claimants, the report says.
The report points to a recent internal departmental report showing 40% of claimants are experiencing financial difficulties.
It says the DWP has not shown sufficient sensitivity towards some claimants as it will not accept late payments have caused hardship to people, because advances are available.
It argues if claimants take up these opportunities, hardship should not occur.
This approach had led the DWP to "dismiss evidence of claimants' difficulties and hardship instead of working with these bodies to establish an evidence base for what is actually happening".
"The result has been a dialogue of claim and counter-claim and gives the unhelpful impression of a department that is unsympathetic to claimants."
Analysis of DWP payment data revealed that in 2017, around one-quarter (113,000) of new claims were not paid in full on time.
Late payments were delayed on average by four weeks, but from January to October 2017, 40% of those affected by late payments waited in total around 11 weeks or more.
Some 20% waited almost five months and about 8% had to wait for eight months.
Despite recent improvements, one-fifth of new claimants in March 2018 did not receive their full entitlement on time. Some 13% received no payment on time.
'Financial misery'
A spokesman for the DWP said: "We are building a benefit system fit for the 21st Century, providing flexible, person-centred support with evidence showing Universal Credit claimants getting into work faster and staying in work longer."
He insisted Universal Credit was good value for money and repeated the forecast that it will realise a return on investment of £34bn over 10 years against a cost of £2bn, with 200,000 more people in work.
"Furthermore, 83% of claimants are satisfied with the service and the majority agree that it 'financially motivates' them to work," he said.
Jane Ahrends, of the Child Poverty Action Group, said the NAO presented a "justifiably bleak" picture.
"Today's report must give ministers pause for thought," she said.
"Will the government press on with a programme that is demonstrably failing - causing financial misery for families - or will it restore the money that's been taken out of Universal Credit in an effort to rehabilitate it for struggling families."
Emma Revie, chief executive of food bank charity The Trussell Trust, called for more support to be put in place for "groups of people most likely to need a food bank, and debt advice to be offered to everyone moving on to the new system".
yet another upwards fail by Duncan-Smith -- still he can celebrate with another £39 tax payer funded breakfast.
Eight years after work began on UC, only 10% of the total number of people expected to claim are on the system, the NAO says.
And one in five do not receive their full payment on time, the report adds.
A significant minority of those paid late, some 20% - these are usually the more needy and complicated cases - are waiting five months or more to be paid.
Same people pushing this debacle are claiming we can have the technology based easy peasy border control when we leave the Eu in less than 2 years.
. “The EU tariff on wine from Australia is €0.099 ltr for wine <13 abv="" aus="" bulk="" by="" in="" of="" or="" shipped="" to="" uk="" vol="" wine="">13% abv. That’s 6.5p to 8p a bottle in EU tariff. UK wine duty, charged by HM Govt, is 27 TIMES higher at £2.16 a bottle + VAT on duty and the wine”
Finally we can save .. maybe 8 pence off of a bottle of wine.
The three largest producers of wine in the world are France, Italy and Spain. Portugal, Germany, Greece, Romania and Hungary are other EU countries making decent stuff.
I'm a big fan of the New World including South America and South Africa, but it costs a lot more to ship their wine than from Europe.
Saving 8p a bottle isn't going to make any difference at all. Retailers price everything into bands, that's why you've got your £5.99 wine, your £7.99 wine and so on. Marketing and consumer preference does the rest.
It might help Tim Marting to save 8p a bottle of the 1 million bottles he imports a year, but he won't be passing that on to pub-goers.
So the private members bill about upskirting being blocked is rightly getting lots of attention and rage. Apparently the twonk of a Tory MP(surprise surprise) didn't really know what it was about and makes a point of objecting to as many private members bills as he can on "principle" In some ways that seems worse than if he genuinely believed there was nothing wrong with being a creepy perv.
"What is the current law?
There is no law specifically naming and banning upskirting in England and Wales, victims and police are currently only able to pursue offences of outraging public decency or as a crime of voyeurism
Upskirting has been an offence in Scotland since 2010 when it was listed under the broadened definition of voyeurism
What are the limitations of the current situation in England and Wales?
Voyeurism only applies to filming actions taking place in private
Outraging public decency usually requires someone to have witnessed the action but upskirting is often unobserved
Unlike other sexual offences, people don't have automatic right to anonymity"
Whilst this is totally unacceptable conduct, if women
assumed some responsibility for their attire, they would not be in jeopardy. Prosecutions will only utilise valuable police and CPS resources that should be prioritised elsewhere
uuhh hhuuhh
Spoiler:
.. classy guy !
On the plus side next time you worry that our political situation is getting a bit weird :
Czech President Milos Zeman called a press conference on Thursday to set a giant pair of red underpants on fire.
The president arranged the impromptu event without giving a reason, prompting widespread speculation.
He then burned the giant pair of red underpants, once used by an artist group to criticise him, in a makeshift fire pit.
"I'm sorry to make you look like little idiots, you really don't deserve it," he told reporters before leaving.
The AFP news agency characterised the press conference as a "bizarre event" which took the assembled journalists by surprise.
The enormous underpants were made by artist collective Ztohoven, which flew the metre-long boxer shorts above the presidential palace in 2015.
Czech media said the president had purchased the same boxer shorts from the state property office - for the price of one Czech crown.
In recent months, Ztohoven has produced shirts and badges of the red boxer shorts to protest against Mr Zeman's campaign for re-election - which he narrowly won in January.
Radio Praha said the demonstration supposedly symbolised the "time to end the era of dirty laundry in politics".
Mr Zeman's political opponents failed to see the humour in Thursday's fiery stunt.
One, Petr Gazdík of the Stan party, wrote that if he did not have respect for the presidency, he "would say that the President has gone mad" and that the spectacle "reduces the dignity of the presidential office".
Mr Zeman's unusual press conference was not the first time he had taken aim at the press.
In October last year, he attended a press conference brandishing a fake rifle labelled "for journalists". In May, he said that journalists should be "liquidated" - a comment characterised as a joke.
He also made another joke in January that the Czech prime minister could be removed either by elections or by "Kalashnikov" - a popular type of automatic rifle.
The 73-year-old president won his second term of office in January in a tight run-off, emerging with 52% of the vote and beating his pro-EU rival.
Mr Zeman, meanwhile, supports his country's membership of both the EU and Nato - but with reservations. He opposes sanctions imposed by the EU against Russia, and is critical of the EU's system for distributing migrants among member states.
..but we're only about half way through the year so who knows what we still might see ?!
Whilst this is totally unacceptable conduct, if women
assumed some responsibility for their attire, they would not be in jeopardy. Prosecutions will only utilise valuable police and CPS resources that should be prioritised elsewhere
uuhh hhuuhh
You have to wonder about some people don't you. Perhaps he expects all women to dress like this?
Spoiler:
.. classy guy !
More worryingly is the number of people that actually vote for him in Christchurch? Is it voyeurism central?
uh huh.
