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@peterrhague

It’s hard to overstate what a disaster Boris Johnson turned out to be. It’s likely none of the present tensions would be happening in the UK if he hadn’t done this. The worst thing is, I couldn’t tell you if he did it on purpose or by accident. Either is quite possible.

At the time I remember plenty of Brexiteers saying things like "it's not about the numbers, it's about control" and claiming that immigration from the Commonwealth would be less unpopular with the sort of people who don't like immigration than immigration from the EU. I have to say that both arguments seemed implausible at the time.

With the odd exception, I don't think immigration from the commonwealth is a problem. Immigration from India is very visible in my part of the world, but it isn't really a problem: these are by and large skilled immigrants whom Britain has sought and who integrate easily. The problem is illegals and dubious asylum seekers from the Middle East and North Africa.

It's the Euroopeans who have disappeared that I miss the most. You could go round towns and cities all over the UK and it was full of young attractive people speaking a multitude of languages. It's like that in the Sounth of France everywhere and it used to be like that in England. It's difficult to realise how it's changed over the last nine or ten years

You're comparing your current fantasy world with your earlier fantasy world.

Without considering which of them people who live in this country might actually prefer.

Though perhaps one reason you might think there are fewer Europeans in Britain is that many of them have integrated and now speak English.

Not at all. It was a more transitory population. My ex lives the life of a hippy in Crete and lives with a revolving population. She loves it. She's never been happier. Different people turn up at different times and they live a great life. If success is your thing she's had that. If your thing is six pints of beer on a Saturday night then little in the UK will have changed.

The Spanish have a saying about 'The smell of the paint' which is just another way of describing 'the vibe' and to a lot of people it doesn't matter at all. Leon despite his tales of derring do is one of them. I don't think there's a more MOR person on here. He swoons over Taylor swift and thinks Sydney Sweeney is the most alluring person he's seen. That's fine. That's his taste. Take a look at his room featured on here often. Enough said! Not everyone is sensitive to what goes on around them or the styling of the place they live in and that's why some like you and Leon like Brexit and others like me don't

I'm currently lying on the beach in Marbella, drinking beer and listening to Taylor Swift, so I hope that if anyone holds the vulgarity crown today it is me.

I cannot regard Howe as a villain. It is not his fault that the Tories obsessed about Europe for the subsequent 30 years to the detriment of themselves and the country. It is not is fault that Thatcher went on too long undoing some of the good that she had done with his considerable assistance.

What I am concerned about is where are the Howes of today? He was a serious intellectual heavyweight who thought deeply about public policy and the public good. Like every human he wasn't always right but he was deeply focused on that public good, ahead even of party political considerations. I cannot think of his equivalent in the House of Commons today. Instead, our most prominent politicians are interested in sound bites, social media, clickbait and, above all, themselves. They are obsessed with what sounds good rather than what is good. Gestures instead of substance. It's sad.

Edit, see this fracking nonsense this morning.

This is what concerns me when I look at the UK today: the fundamentally unserious nature of political commentary and by extension politics itself. The number of commentators with a deep and layered understanding of political realities has given way to celebrity presenters who obsess about political theatre and process but fail to understand anything about political ideologies or even the basic mechanisms of administration. The contrast between say Charles Wheeler of thirty years ago and Naga Munchetty of today is pretty astonishing. Thus when people like Gove or Johnson, or Farage for that matter, come up with superficial and even absurd ideas then their media pals do not analyse them as ideas but simply in terms of shallow political positioning, because human interest is all they (and apparently we) really understand. The result is that really bad ideas get adopted with little scrutiny and both policy making and even public administration itself are degraded. The fact that so many politicians in the current crop of Tories were media workers themselves compounded the problem. Gove may have had "enough of experts", and I think that tells you that he had lost the plot in terms of enacting reasonable or even workable legislation. It has been said that Brexit was a fundamentally unserious policy and has been executed in such a ridiculous way as to guarantee its failure: that is where this fundamental lack of seriousness in British politics brought us.

Both policies (bright ideas) and the execution of policy (actually enacting workable laws) have much lower priority than presentation and media management, and this is why Britain is failing to address the multiple crises that it faces. All is not well in Estonia, but it is not considered being a nerdy swot to have read books and to be able to engage with the various experts in policy and execution in an organised and serious way.

Basically the UK needs to get real, but apparently a few hundred flag shaggers are more important than reform of our tax code and a total overhaul of our public administration and infrastructure. That, of course is what the Mail, Murdoch etc are misdirecting you towards, and ultimately it results in the Trump world of cretins.

@peterrhague

It’s hard to overstate what a disaster Boris Johnson turned out to be. It’s likely none of the present tensions would be happening in the UK if he hadn’t done this. The worst thing is, I couldn’t tell you if he did it on purpose or by accident. Either is quite possible.

At the time I remember plenty of Brexiteers saying things like "it's not about the numbers, it's about control" and claiming that immigration from the Commonwealth would be less unpopular with the sort of people who don't like immigration than immigration from the EU. I have to say that both arguments seemed implausible at the time.

Then why didn’t Remainers use that as a campaign slogan?

“Stay in Europe so most immigrants are white and Christian”

I think we know why. Yet now they hypocritically whine

You voted for every bit of the mess.

Yet now hypocritically you whine.

I cannot regard Howe as a villain. It is not his fault that the Tories obsessed about Europe for the subsequent 30 years to the detriment of themselves and the country. It is not is fault that Thatcher went on too long undoing some of the good that she had done with his considerable assistance.

What I am concerned about is where are the Howes of today? He was a serious intellectual heavyweight who thought deeply about public policy and the public good. Like every human he wasn't always right but he was deeply focused on that public good, ahead even of party political considerations. I cannot think of his equivalent in the House of Commons today. Instead, our most prominent politicians are interested in sound bites, social media, clickbait and, above all, themselves. They are obsessed with what sounds good rather than what is good. Gestures instead of substance. It's sad.

Edit, see this fracking nonsense this morning.

@RochdalePioneers Tennents is rank - there's a reason that even Scottish pubs serve Innis & Gunn instead these days

Compared to Carling it is Nectar. Not that great in tins but ok in draught in a pub if not top class, certainly not rank as a cooking lager, only 4% so never going to be great.

I am going to the funeral of a good friend who died of cancer at 63 tomorrow. Amongst the many twists and turns of a fascinating career he was in charge of the Student Union in Edinburgh for a couple of years and very well connected on the Ibiza party scene. He always drank Tenants and, when challenged about it, he said it was reliable, tasted the same wherever you went and relatively weak so that you could drink a sociable amount of it without losing your grip if you were on duty or otherwise being responsible.

I may well have to sink a pint of the stuff in his memory tomorrow.