If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
I think Barnier would be a pretty good President, and I think he'd work to increase the sovereignty of EU members at the expense of the centre, and that might work well for all concerned.
I don't think Le Pen would be great. Not because she's a fascist (she's not), but because her economic policy would be all about subsidising failing French businesses.
Melanchon would be worse, of course. And NDA is flailing around failing to get traction right now.
Note you omit Zemmour there who has a far better chance of being French president than Barnier or Melenchon at the moment and about as good a chance as Le Pen if not slightly more
I'm not as convinced by Zemmour's electability as you are. I think that he's a bit too... Macron.
They are both super smug French intellectuals, one from a "Greater Glory of France through the EU" perspective and one from a "Greater Glory of France through going back to our Nationalistic Catholic roots".
I don't think either of them speaks the forgotten voters, the people whom Johnson and Trump energized - and who see Le Pen as one of them. If Zemmour were to beat out Le Pen in the first round, I'm not convinced he would do that well.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
Zeal of the convert it seems.
Frost must have been convincing in the negotiations.
Barnier never struck me as particularly pro european, more that it was his job and he did it well
Yep I agree entirely. I said at the time of the negotiations that I felt he had played with a straight bat, had been tough but fair (and of course pretty much ran rings around the UK negotiators) and that I wished he had been on our side.
The two impressions I got from him at the time were frustration that the UK team simply did not understand and were not serious about the magnitude of what they were negotiating but also that he knew that the only workable outcome was one where both sides felt they had won something of value.
On that basis I ascribe all the failings in the process to Johnson and his team who were outmatched from start to finish.
You were entirely right until the final sentence.
The failings in the process were due to Robbins and May. Frost completely turned the tables, got everything the UK was seeking in exchange for border pedantry and a new NI Protocol, and managed to get Article 16 including into the Protocol so even that could be neutered.
Barnier just seemed to give up versus Frost in the end. All his tricks he played versus Robbins stopped working once the UK developed a backbone.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
I think Barnier would be a pretty good President, and I think he'd work to increase the sovereignty of EU members at the expense of the centre, and that might work well for all concerned.
I don't think Le Pen would be great. Not because she's a fascist (she's not), but because her economic policy would be all about subsidising failing French businesses.
Melanchon would be worse, of course. And NDA is flailing around failing to get traction right now.
Note you omit Zemmour there who has a far better chance of being French president than Barnier or Melenchon at the moment and about as good a chance as Le Pen if not slightly more
I'm not as convinced by Zemmour's electability as you are. I think that he's a bit too... Macron.
They are both super smug French intellectuals, one from a "Greater Glory of France through the EU" perspective and one from a "Greater Glory of France through going back to our Nationalistic Catholic roots".
I don't think either of them speaks the forgotten voters, the people whom Johnson and Trump energized - and who see Le Pen as one of them. If Zemmour were to beat out Le Pen in the first round, I'm not convinced he would do that well.
Johnson and Trump also won the supporters of the main traditional Conservative party though, Zemmour I think would be a more respectable choice for Les Republicains voters still than Le Pen
Booster vaccine eligibility changed. No need to wait for the NHS invite. A week after 6 months all groups 1-9 are automatically enrolled and provisioned.
That's a good outcome. Hopefully it changes overnight and all of those people who have missed the NHS invite or haven't got one will be able to book themselves in ASAP.
If Hancock was in charge we wouldn't have got this move IMO, he would have stuck rigidly to existing system.
Good, very good indeed, but why the extra week? why not allow people to book on the 6 month anniversary, or better still book a week before?
Not wanting to sound to pedantic there, its a good move and should be celebrating.
Its a good point. I was able to book my second dose online immediately after my first, so that I got it on the 8 week mark exactly which was the gap by the time I was done.
It ought to be possible to book online for the six month anniversary onwards. Not wait until 6 months, then a week, then a couple for a slot.
Booster vaccine eligibility changed. No need to wait for the NHS invite. A week after 6 months all groups 1-9 are automatically enrolled and provisioned.
That's a good outcome. Hopefully it changes overnight and all of those people who have missed the NHS invite or haven't got one will be able to book themselves in ASAP.
If Hancock was in charge we wouldn't have got this move IMO, he would have stuck rigidly to existing system.
Good, very good indeed, but why the extra week? why not allow people to book on the 6 month anniversary, or better still book a week before?
Not wanting to sound to pedantic there, its a good move and should be celebrating.
Announced just hours after our GP sent a txt saying 'wait for letter, then contact us'.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
Zeal of the convert it seems.
Frost must have been convincing in the negotiations.
Barnier never struck me as particularly pro european, more that it was his job and he did it well
Yep I agree entirely. I said at the time of the negotiations that I felt he had played with a straight bat, had been tough but fair (and of course pretty much ran rings around the UK negotiators) and that I wished he had been on our side.
The two impressions I got from him at the time were frustration that the UK team simply did not understand and were not serious about the magnitude of what they were negotiating but also that he knew that the only workable outcome was one where both sides felt they had won something of value.
On that basis I ascribe all the failings in the process to Johnson and his team who were outmatched from start to finish.
He ran rings around Olly Robbins. It has since become clear that Frost absolutely thrashed him though. We got everything we wanted out of the EU deal and all they got was border pedantry.
Any deal which relies upon us having to break it or break up our country is not exactly a win is it? I mean I am in favour of a united Ireland so I am not going to complain but last time I looked Johnson and his Government were Unionists. So I would suggest that saying we got everything we wanted when that relies upon us breaking an international treaty is not what I would regard as a good outcome for us.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
Zeal of the convert it seems.
Frost must have been convincing in the negotiations.
Barnier never struck me as particularly pro european, more that it was his job and he did it well
Yep I agree entirely. I said at the time of the negotiations that I felt he had played with a straight bat, had been tough but fair (and of course pretty much ran rings around the UK negotiators) and that I wished he had been on our side.
The two impressions I got from him at the time were frustration that the UK team simply did not understand and were not serious about the magnitude of what they were negotiating but also that he knew that the only workable outcome was one where both sides felt they had won something of value.
On that basis I ascribe all the failings in the process to Johnson and his team who were outmatched from start to finish.
You were entirely right until the final sentence.
The failings in the process were due to Robbins and May. Frost completely turned the tables, got everything the UK was seeking in exchange for border pedantry and a new NI Protocol, and managed to get Article 16 including into the Protocol so even that could be neutered.
Barnier just seemed to give up versus Frost in the end. All his tricks he played versus Robbins stopped working once the UK developed a backbone.
Hang on.
How was the deal Johnson signed materially different from the one May initially proposed, and which was vetoed by the DUP?
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
Zeal of the convert it seems.
Frost must have been convincing in the negotiations.
Barnier never struck me as particularly pro european, more that it was his job and he did it well
Yep I agree entirely. I said at the time of the negotiations that I felt he had played with a straight bat, had been tough but fair (and of course pretty much ran rings around the UK negotiators) and that I wished he had been on our side.
The two impressions I got from him at the time were frustration that the UK team simply did not understand and were not serious about the magnitude of what they were negotiating but also that he knew that the only workable outcome was one where both sides felt they had won something of value.
On that basis I ascribe all the failings in the process to Johnson and his team who were outmatched from start to finish.
He ran rings around Olly Robbins. It has since become clear that Frost absolutely thrashed him though. We got everything we wanted out of the EU deal and all they got was border pedantry.
Any deal which relies upon us having to break it or break up our country is not exactly a win is it? I mean I am in favour of a united Ireland so I am not going to complain but last time I looked Johnson and his Government were Unionists. So I would suggest that saying we got everything we wanted when that relies upon us breaking an international treaty is not what I would regard as a good outcome for us.
We don't have to either break it or break up our country, that's spin used by people who've never reconciled themselves to Brexit.
Invoking Article 16 (or threatening to) isn't breaking the Protocol any more than invoking Article 50 broke the Lisbon Treaty. Its perfectly legitimate to exercise your privileges in a Treaty even if the other party doesn't want you to do so.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
I think Barnier would be a pretty good President, and I think he'd work to increase the sovereignty of EU members at the expense of the centre, and that might work well for all concerned.
I don't think Le Pen would be great. Not because she's a fascist (she's not), but because her economic policy would be all about subsidising failing French businesses.
Melanchon would be worse, of course. And NDA is flailing around failing to get traction right now.
Note you omit Zemmour there who has a far better chance of being French president than Barnier or Melenchon at the moment and about as good a chance as Le Pen if not slightly more
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
Zeal of the convert it seems.
Frost must have been convincing in the negotiations.
Barnier never struck me as particularly pro european, more that it was his job and he did it well
Yep I agree entirely. I said at the time of the negotiations that I felt he had played with a straight bat, had been tough but fair (and of course pretty much ran rings around the UK negotiators) and that I wished he had been on our side.
The two impressions I got from him at the time were frustration that the UK team simply did not understand and were not serious about the magnitude of what they were negotiating but also that he knew that the only workable outcome was one where both sides felt they had won something of value.
On that basis I ascribe all the failings in the process to Johnson and his team who were outmatched from start to finish.
You were entirely right until the final sentence.
The failings in the process were due to Robbins and May. Frost completely turned the tables, got everything the UK was seeking in exchange for border pedantry and a new NI Protocol, and managed to get Article 16 including into the Protocol so even that could be neutered.
Barnier just seemed to give up versus Frost in the end. All his tricks he played versus Robbins stopped working once the UK developed a backbone.
Hang on.
How was the deal Johnson signed materially different from the one May initially proposed, and which was vetoed by the DUP?
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
Zeal of the convert it seems.
Frost must have been convincing in the negotiations.
Barnier never struck me as particularly pro european, more that it was his job and he did it well
Yep I agree entirely. I said at the time of the negotiations that I felt he had played with a straight bat, had been tough but fair (and of course pretty much ran rings around the UK negotiators) and that I wished he had been on our side.
The two impressions I got from him at the time were frustration that the UK team simply did not understand and were not serious about the magnitude of what they were negotiating but also that he knew that the only workable outcome was one where both sides felt they had won something of value.
On that basis I ascribe all the failings in the process to Johnson and his team who were outmatched from start to finish.
He ran rings around Olly Robbins. It has since become clear that Frost absolutely thrashed him though. We got everything we wanted out of the EU deal and all they got was border pedantry.
Any deal which relies upon us having to break it or break up our country is not exactly a win is it? I mean I am in favour of a united Ireland so I am not going to complain but last time I looked Johnson and his Government were Unionists. So I would suggest that saying we got everything we wanted when that relies upon us breaking an international treaty is not what I would regard as a good outcome for us.
We don't have to either break it or break up our country, that's spin used by people who've never reconciled themselves to Brexit.
Invoking Article 16 (or threatening to) isn't breaking the Protocol any more than invoking Article 50 broke the Lisbon Treaty. Its perfectly legitimate to exercise your privileges in a Treaty even if the other party doesn't want you to do so.
You are saying I am not reconciled to Brexit? I think you jumped the shark with that one. And we are not talking about just invoking Article 16 (Though I doubt you have considered the wider implications of even that). We are demanding they scrap the treaty and start again.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
Zeal of the convert it seems.
Frost must have been convincing in the negotiations.
Barnier never struck me as particularly pro european, more that it was his job and he did it well
Yep I agree entirely. I said at the time of the negotiations that I felt he had played with a straight bat, had been tough but fair (and of course pretty much ran rings around the UK negotiators) and that I wished he had been on our side.
The two impressions I got from him at the time were frustration that the UK team simply did not understand and were not serious about the magnitude of what they were negotiating but also that he knew that the only workable outcome was one where both sides felt they had won something of value.
On that basis I ascribe all the failings in the process to Johnson and his team who were outmatched from start to finish.
You were entirely right until the final sentence.
The failings in the process were due to Robbins and May. Frost completely turned the tables, got everything the UK was seeking in exchange for border pedantry and a new NI Protocol, and managed to get Article 16 including into the Protocol so even that could be neutered.
Barnier just seemed to give up versus Frost in the end. All his tricks he played versus Robbins stopped working once the UK developed a backbone.
Hang on.
How was the deal Johnson signed materially different from the one May initially proposed, and which was vetoed by the DUP?
Was that the one Boris said no British Prime Minister could agree to?
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
Zeal of the convert it seems.
Frost must have been convincing in the negotiations.
Barnier never struck me as particularly pro european, more that it was his job and he did it well
Yep I agree entirely. I said at the time of the negotiations that I felt he had played with a straight bat, had been tough but fair (and of course pretty much ran rings around the UK negotiators) and that I wished he had been on our side.
The two impressions I got from him at the time were frustration that the UK team simply did not understand and were not serious about the magnitude of what they were negotiating but also that he knew that the only workable outcome was one where both sides felt they had won something of value.
On that basis I ascribe all the failings in the process to Johnson and his team who were outmatched from start to finish.
You were entirely right until the final sentence.
The failings in the process were due to Robbins and May. Frost completely turned the tables, got everything the UK was seeking in exchange for border pedantry and a new NI Protocol, and managed to get Article 16 including into the Protocol so even that could be neutered.
Barnier just seemed to give up versus Frost in the end. All his tricks he played versus Robbins stopped working once the UK developed a backbone.
Hang on.
How was the deal Johnson signed materially different from the one May initially proposed, and which was vetoed by the DUP?
May's deal had no exit to it.
Boris's deal had two unilateral exits from it: Article 16 which could be triggered unilaterally by the UK, or another one that could be triggered by Stormont.
The inclusion of exit mechanisms is a gamechanger. If May had negotiated an exit mechanism from the backstop she would have won the third meaningful vote, it was Geoffrey Cox saying that her renegotiations before MV3 had not included a legal exit mechanism that made that vote fail.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
Zeal of the convert it seems.
Frost must have been convincing in the negotiations.
Barnier never struck me as particularly pro european, more that it was his job and he did it well
Yep I agree entirely. I said at the time of the negotiations that I felt he had played with a straight bat, had been tough but fair (and of course pretty much ran rings around the UK negotiators) and that I wished he had been on our side.
The two impressions I got from him at the time were frustration that the UK team simply did not understand and were not serious about the magnitude of what they were negotiating but also that he knew that the only workable outcome was one where both sides felt they had won something of value.
On that basis I ascribe all the failings in the process to Johnson and his team who were outmatched from start to finish.
He ran rings around Olly Robbins. It has since become clear that Frost absolutely thrashed him though. We got everything we wanted out of the EU deal and all they got was border pedantry.
Any deal which relies upon us having to break it or break up our country is not exactly a win is it? I mean I am in favour of a united Ireland so I am not going to complain but last time I looked Johnson and his Government were Unionists. So I would suggest that saying we got everything we wanted when that relies upon us breaking an international treaty is not what I would regard as a good outcome for us.
Was ‘last time’ more than five minutes ago? If so, be aware it may have changed.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
Zeal of the convert it seems.
Frost must have been convincing in the negotiations.
Barnier never struck me as particularly pro european, more that it was his job and he did it well
Yep I agree entirely. I said at the time of the negotiations that I felt he had played with a straight bat, had been tough but fair (and of course pretty much ran rings around the UK negotiators) and that I wished he had been on our side.
The two impressions I got from him at the time were frustration that the UK team simply did not understand and were not serious about the magnitude of what they were negotiating but also that he knew that the only workable outcome was one where both sides felt they had won something of value.
On that basis I ascribe all the failings in the process to Johnson and his team who were outmatched from start to finish.
He ran rings around Olly Robbins. It has since become clear that Frost absolutely thrashed him though. We got everything we wanted out of the EU deal and all they got was border pedantry.
Any deal which relies upon us having to break it or break up our country is not exactly a win is it? I mean I am in favour of a united Ireland so I am not going to complain but last time I looked Johnson and his Government were Unionists. So I would suggest that saying we got everything we wanted when that relies upon us breaking an international treaty is not what I would regard as a good outcome for us.
The NI Protocol now contains article 16 which allows us to suspend, without any repercussions, the protocol for an diversion of trade to an undefined level. It was a masterpiece of negotiation to have it included and it's forced the EU back to the table to fix the whole thing.
You might not like it but that is how good negotiation works. There is simply no such thing as good will in this kind of entanglement and the minute our stance changed to reflect that we got a properly governed deal with no dynamic alignment and zero tariffs and quotas.
Remember that A16 is included in the NI protocol, we are well within our rights to trigger it to suspend the deal. We wouldn't need to break any international laws. One of the reasons the Irish are so upset is that they've realised how badly it's worked out for them.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
Well regardless of his politics (he’s well to the right of me, and seemingly now much more eurosceptic), he’s clearly a very intelligent, able guy. I doubt he will win, but he is a formidable candidate.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
Zeal of the convert it seems.
Frost must have been convincing in the negotiations.
Barnier never struck me as particularly pro european, more that it was his job and he did it well
Yep I agree entirely. I said at the time of the negotiations that I felt he had played with a straight bat, had been tough but fair (and of course pretty much ran rings around the UK negotiators) and that I wished he had been on our side.
The two impressions I got from him at the time were frustration that the UK team simply did not understand and were not serious about the magnitude of what they were negotiating but also that he knew that the only workable outcome was one where both sides felt they had won something of value.
On that basis I ascribe all the failings in the process to Johnson and his team who were outmatched from start to finish.
He ran rings around Olly Robbins. It has since become clear that Frost absolutely thrashed him though. We got everything we wanted out of the EU deal and all they got was border pedantry.
Any deal which relies upon us having to break it or break up our country is not exactly a win is it? I mean I am in favour of a united Ireland so I am not going to complain but last time I looked Johnson and his Government were Unionists. So I would suggest that saying we got everything we wanted when that relies upon us breaking an international treaty is not what I would regard as a good outcome for us.
We don't have to either break it or break up our country, that's spin used by people who've never reconciled themselves to Brexit.
Invoking Article 16 (or threatening to) isn't breaking the Protocol any more than invoking Article 50 broke the Lisbon Treaty. Its perfectly legitimate to exercise your privileges in a Treaty even if the other party doesn't want you to do so.
You are saying I am not reconciled to Brexit? I think you jumped the shark with that one. And we are not talking about just invoking Article 16 (Though I doubt you have considered the wider implications of even that). We are demanding they scrap the treaty and start again.
No I'm saying you're using their spin.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with demanding they scrap the treaty and start again, the Treaty itself in Article 13 part 8 provides the provisions for how that can be done.
Renegotiating a Treaty isn't breaking it, we've only broken the Treaty if we unilaterally cease to follow it but nobody is proposing that. Considering the Protocol was negotiated before the Trade Deal, it always made sense that it should be replaced with a new arrangement once a Trade Deal was agreed.
I've been trying to work out why the vaccination of the 12-15 year olds is going so slowly.
any ideas would be interesting, but one I just thought of was that number of Booster jabs, 199,000 in a day somebody posted a few hours ago. if correct then are all the people/places that can give Jabs full of booster shots not first doses for the kids?
I assume its not the supply of the jabs as I understand that we have lots of them in a where house.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
Zeal of the convert it seems.
Frost must have been convincing in the negotiations.
Barnier never struck me as particularly pro european, more that it was his job and he did it well
Yep I agree entirely. I said at the time of the negotiations that I felt he had played with a straight bat, had been tough but fair (and of course pretty much ran rings around the UK negotiators) and that I wished he had been on our side.
The two impressions I got from him at the time were frustration that the UK team simply did not understand and were not serious about the magnitude of what they were negotiating but also that he knew that the only workable outcome was one where both sides felt they had won something of value.
On that basis I ascribe all the failings in the process to Johnson and his team who were outmatched from start to finish.
He ran rings around Olly Robbins. It has since become clear that Frost absolutely thrashed him though. We got everything we wanted out of the EU deal and all they got was border pedantry.
Any deal which relies upon us having to break it or break up our country is not exactly a win is it? I mean I am in favour of a united Ireland so I am not going to complain but last time I looked Johnson and his Government were Unionists. So I would suggest that saying we got everything we wanted when that relies upon us breaking an international treaty is not what I would regard as a good outcome for us.
We don't have to either break it or break up our country, that's spin used by people who've never reconciled themselves to Brexit.
Invoking Article 16 (or threatening to) isn't breaking the Protocol any more than invoking Article 50 broke the Lisbon Treaty. Its perfectly legitimate to exercise your privileges in a Treaty even if the other party doesn't want you to do so.
You are saying I am not reconciled to Brexit? I think you jumped the shark with that one. And we are not talking about just invoking Article 16 (Though I doubt you have considered the wider implications of even that). We are demanding they scrap the treaty and start again.
What of it? It's our right to ask and they've agreed. We're not unilaterally changing the deal, we've tried and succeeded in getting renegotiations on a bilateral basis.
I struggle to see why you're so exercised by this? Frost smartly included a unilateral mechanism to indefinitely suspend the deal, they agreed to the mechanism, the terms to trigger said mechanism have been met, we've said that rather than trigger it and upset everyone let's sit down and fix the deal so we don't need to do that. It's an example of why Frost did a much better job than Robbins, he's put a self correction mechanism in the deal to maintain the status quo in NI allowing for the peace to be kept.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
I think Barnier would be a pretty good President, and I think he'd work to increase the sovereignty of EU members at the expense of the centre, and that might work well for all concerned.
I don't think Le Pen would be great. Not because she's a fascist (she's not), but because her economic policy would be all about subsidising failing French businesses.
Melanchon would be worse, of course. And NDA is flailing around failing to get traction right now.
Note you omit Zemmour there who has a far better chance of being French president than Barnier or Melenchon at the moment and about as good a chance as Le Pen if not slightly more
Cop26: Glasgow braced for 'humiliation on world stage' over shambolic preparation for summit Rubbish-strewn streets, protests and hotel rooms for £1,400 a night set to cast shadow over UN Climate Change Conference
I've been trying to work out why the vaccination of the 12-15 year olds is going so slowly.
any ideas would be interesting, but one I just thought of was that number of Booster jabs, 199,000 in a day somebody posted a few hours ago. if correct then are all the people/places that can give Jabs full of booster shots not first doses for the kids?
I assume its not the supply of the jabs as I understand that we have lots of them in a where house.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
I think Barnier would be a pretty good President, and I think he'd work to increase the sovereignty of EU members at the expense of the centre, and that might work well for all concerned.
I don't think Le Pen would be great. Not because she's a fascist (she's not), but because her economic policy would be all about subsidising failing French businesses.
Melanchon would be worse, of course. And NDA is flailing around failing to get traction right now.
Note you omit Zemmour there who has a far better chance of being French president than Barnier or Melenchon at the moment and about as good a chance as Le Pen if not slightly more
I'm not as convinced by Zemmour's electability as you are. I think that he's a bit too... Macron.
They are both super smug French intellectuals, one from a "Greater Glory of France through the EU" perspective and one from a "Greater Glory of France through going back to our Nationalistic Catholic roots".
I don't think either of them speaks the forgotten voters, the people whom Johnson and Trump energized - and who see Le Pen as one of them. If Zemmour were to beat out Le Pen in the first round, I'm not convinced he would do that well.
Johnson and Trump also won the supporters of the main traditional Conservative party though, Zemmour I think would be a more respectable choice for Les Republicains voters still than Le Pen
That might be so, but I think it's more that Le Pen (like Trump, Johnson and Brexit) enthuses non-voters. She's not just another member of the establishment. She feels their pain.
Will those people come out to vote for another snappily dressed intellectual, who lives a life nothing like theirs, and appears to care nothing for the things they care about?
I'm not convinced.
On the other hand, I think Le Pen snaps up all Zemmour's support if she's in the top two.
Cop26: Glasgow braced for 'humiliation on world stage' over shambolic preparation for summit Rubbish-strewn streets, protests and hotel rooms for £1,400 a night set to cast shadow over UN Climate Change Conference
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
Zeal of the convert it seems.
Frost must have been convincing in the negotiations.
Barnier never struck me as particularly pro european, more that it was his job and he did it well
Yep I agree entirely. I said at the time of the negotiations that I felt he had played with a straight bat, had been tough but fair (and of course pretty much ran rings around the UK negotiators) and that I wished he had been on our side.
The two impressions I got from him at the time were frustration that the UK team simply did not understand and were not serious about the magnitude of what they were negotiating but also that he knew that the only workable outcome was one where both sides felt they had won something of value.
On that basis I ascribe all the failings in the process to Johnson and his team who were outmatched from start to finish.
He ran rings around Olly Robbins. It has since become clear that Frost absolutely thrashed him though. We got everything we wanted out of the EU deal and all they got was border pedantry.
Any deal which relies upon us having to break it or break up our country is not exactly a win is it? I mean I am in favour of a united Ireland so I am not going to complain but last time I looked Johnson and his Government were Unionists. So I would suggest that saying we got everything we wanted when that relies upon us breaking an international treaty is not what I would regard as a good outcome for us.
We don't have to either break it or break up our country, that's spin used by people who've never reconciled themselves to Brexit.
Invoking Article 16 (or threatening to) isn't breaking the Protocol any more than invoking Article 50 broke the Lisbon Treaty. Its perfectly legitimate to exercise your privileges in a Treaty even if the other party doesn't want you to do so.
You are saying I am not reconciled to Brexit? I think you jumped the shark with that one. And we are not talking about just invoking Article 16 (Though I doubt you have considered the wider implications of even that). We are demanding they scrap the treaty and start again.
What of it? It's our right to ask and they've agreed. We're not unilaterally changing the deal, we've tried and succeeded in getting renegotiations on a bilateral basis.
I struggle to see why you're so exercised by this? Frost smartly included a unilateral mechanism to indefinitely suspend the deal, they agreed to the mechanism, the terms to trigger said mechanism have been met, we've said that rather than trigger it and upset everyone let's sit down and fix the deal so we don't need to do that. It's an example of why Frost did a much better job than Robbins, he's put a self correction mechanism in the deal to maintain the status quo in NI allowing for the peace to be kept.
The clever thing is that Frost got the self-correction mechanisms in, with the first set of negotiations, and now he knows what and where they are and how to use them in this new set.
Article 13 provides provision for how either part of the Protocol or even the entire Protocol can be superseded with a new UK/EU agreement. Article 16 provides safeguards in writing the conditions of which have been met.
The EU understands and accepts the safeguarding conditions have been met, so now they're open to new negotiations as per Article 13. That's the Protocol as negotiated working as it should be, even if they're not happy with it, that's not breaking anything.
Booster vaccine eligibility changed. No need to wait for the NHS invite. A week after 6 months all groups 1-9 are automatically enrolled and provisioned.
That's a good outcome. Hopefully it changes overnight and all of those people who have missed the NHS invite or haven't got one will be able to book themselves in ASAP.
If Hancock was in charge we wouldn't have got this move IMO, he would have stuck rigidly to existing system.
Is there any evidence that people haven't been able to get a booster vaccination as opposed to cannot be bothered or don't think its necessary (especially likely among those who will have been infected during the last six months) ?
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
I think Barnier would be a pretty good President, and I think he'd work to increase the sovereignty of EU members at the expense of the centre, and that might work well for all concerned.
I don't think Le Pen would be great. Not because she's a fascist (she's not), but because her economic policy would be all about subsidising failing French businesses.
Melanchon would be worse, of course. And NDA is flailing around failing to get traction right now.
Note you omit Zemmour there who has a far better chance of being French president than Barnier or Melenchon at the moment and about as good a chance as Le Pen if not slightly more
I'm not as convinced by Zemmour's electability as you are. I think that he's a bit too... Macron.
They are both super smug French intellectuals, one from a "Greater Glory of France through the EU" perspective and one from a "Greater Glory of France through going back to our Nationalistic Catholic roots".
I don't think either of them speaks the forgotten voters, the people whom Johnson and Trump energized - and who see Le Pen as one of them. If Zemmour were to beat out Le Pen in the first round, I'm not convinced he would do that well.
Johnson and Trump also won the supporters of the main traditional Conservative party though, Zemmour I think would be a more respectable choice for Les Republicains voters still than Le Pen
That might be so, but I think it's more that Le Pen (like Trump, Johnson and Brexit) enthuses non-voters. She's not just another member of the establishment. She feels their pain.
Will those people come out to vote for another snappily dressed intellectual, who lives a life nothing like theirs, and appears to care nothing for the things they care about?
I'm not convinced.
On the other hand, I think Le Pen snaps up all Zemmour's support if she's in the top two.
Aren’t all French politicians (including Le Pen) well dressed? I’ve never seen a scruffy one. What they must make of Bozza, I don’t know…
"Analysis by the Italian National Health Institute, which looked at deaths in the country between Feb 1 and Oct 5, showed major disparities in people who were dying from Covid after being fully jabbed.
It found the average age of death in the vaccinated was 85, and that on average each person had five underlying illnesses when they caught Covid"
COVID is going to flush out death's waiting room over the next couple of years while we build up natural immunity and get better vaccines.
Cop26: Glasgow braced for 'humiliation on world stage' over shambolic preparation for summit Rubbish-strewn streets, protests and hotel rooms for £1,400 a night set to cast shadow over UN Climate Change Conference
Cop26: Glasgow braced for 'humiliation on world stage' over shambolic preparation for summit Rubbish-strewn streets, protests and hotel rooms for £1,400 a night set to cast shadow over UN Climate Change Conference
From the Guardian confirmation of what we already knew:
People who are vaccinated against coronavirus are extremely unlikely to die of the disease unless they are very old or already severely sick, a new Italian study has found.
The research by the National Health Institute (ISS) found the average age of vaccinated people who died was 85 and that on average they had five underlying illnesses, reports Reuters.
The average age of death for those who were not vaccinated was 78 and with an average of four pre-existing conditions.
Its a death cake of sick oldies with an icing of younger anti-vaxxers.
Cop26: Glasgow braced for 'humiliation on world stage' over shambolic preparation for summit Rubbish-strewn streets, protests and hotel rooms for £1,400 a night set to cast shadow over UN Climate Change Conference
"Analysis by the Italian National Health Institute, which looked at deaths in the country between Feb 1 and Oct 5, showed major disparities in people who were dying from Covid after being fully jabbed.
It found the average age of death in the vaccinated was 85, and that on average each person had five underlying illnesses when they caught Covid"
COVID is going to flush out death's waiting room over the next couple of years while we build up natural immunity and get better vaccines.
I’ve no doubt that many of our current Covid deaths will be similar.
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
"Analysis by the Italian National Health Institute, which looked at deaths in the country between Feb 1 and Oct 5, showed major disparities in people who were dying from Covid after being fully jabbed.
It found the average age of death in the vaccinated was 85, and that on average each person had five underlying illnesses when they caught Covid"
COVID is going to flush out death's waiting room over the next couple of years while we build up natural immunity and get better vaccines.
Bloody hell mate - I've be waiting all day to post the Guardian's version of that story and then you go and beat me by two minutes
Cop26: Glasgow braced for 'humiliation on world stage' over shambolic preparation for summit Rubbish-strewn streets, protests and hotel rooms for £1,400 a night set to cast shadow over UN Climate Change Conference
"Analysis by the Italian National Health Institute, which looked at deaths in the country between Feb 1 and Oct 5, showed major disparities in people who were dying from Covid after being fully jabbed.
It found the average age of death in the vaccinated was 85, and that on average each person had five underlying illnesses when they caught Covid"
COVID is going to flush out death's waiting room over the next couple of years while we build up natural immunity and get better vaccines.
I’ve no doubt that many of our current Covid deaths will be similar.
Indeed, we're just going at a much faster rate because there's no NPIs.
"Analysis by the Italian National Health Institute, which looked at deaths in the country between Feb 1 and Oct 5, showed major disparities in people who were dying from Covid after being fully jabbed.
It found the average age of death in the vaccinated was 85, and that on average each person had five underlying illnesses when they caught Covid"
COVID is going to flush out death's waiting room over the next couple of years while we build up natural immunity and get better vaccines.
One cold, dark stat I heard once is that treating smoking-related illnesses costs the NHS more than the tobacco duties that smokers pay. However smokers are good for the Exchequer because they die sooner, so lower pension payments and lower care costs later on too.
While COVID has been devastating to the public finances, I wonder what the impact will actually be in the next couple of years. Could it be a cold, dark positive to the finances instead of a negative going forwards?
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
Or Frost saw it what a pile of shite Robbins had left for him, stuck in A16 and decided that dealing with it after the main deal made more sense than holding up the whole lot. And Robbins really did leave behind a complete steaming shitpile across the whole negotiation, not just wrt NI.
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
It was brilliant precisely because it could be binned now.
Any NI arrangement was always terrible as far as the UK was concerned but was something the EU wanted, and they were adamant there could never be a unilateral exit. Until Frost got them to get one in and that changed everything.
May's negotiations never contained an exit mechanism. "A backstop with an exit is not a backstop" remember? So to get an exit into it rendering the whole thing able to be binned was absolute genius.
An update on Emma Raducanu watch. Bromley Council took 40 minutes on Monday to decide not to make her a freeman (freewoman?) of Bromley Borough, seemingly on the basis that it was proposed by the Labour group and the Tories therefore refused to support it.
Should we lay Emma for SPotY then, if she will receive no votes from Conservatives south of the river?
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
Or Frost saw it what a pile of shite Robbins had left for him, stuck in A16 and decided that dealing with it after the main deal made more sense than holding up the whole lot. And Robbins really did leave behind a complete steaming shitpile across the whole negotiation, not just wrt NI.
I believe the correct term is oven ready steaming shitpile.
"Analysis by the Italian National Health Institute, which looked at deaths in the country between Feb 1 and Oct 5, showed major disparities in people who were dying from Covid after being fully jabbed.
It found the average age of death in the vaccinated was 85, and that on average each person had five underlying illnesses when they caught Covid"
COVID is going to flush out death's waiting room over the next couple of years while we build up natural immunity and get better vaccines.
One cold, dark stat I heard once is that treating smoking-related illnesses costs the NHS more than the tobacco duties that smokers pay. However smokers are good for the Exchequer because they die sooner, so lower pension payments and lower care costs later on too.
While COVID has been devastating to the public finances, I wonder what the impact will actually be in the next couple of years. Could it be a cold, dark positive to the finances instead of a negative going forwards?
On smoking when my 18 year old granddaughter was born my daughter told me that if I continued smoking I could not hold her
Harsh but I did stop smoking which was one of the hardest things I have ever done, and just two years ago my practice nurse treating my breathing problems told me her act had saved my life
Sounds dramatic, but it's so true and my son in law stopped at the same time
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
I think Barnier would be a pretty good President, and I think he'd work to increase the sovereignty of EU members at the expense of the centre, and that might work well for all concerned.
I don't think Le Pen would be great. Not because she's a fascist (she's not), but because her economic policy would be all about subsidising failing French businesses.
Melanchon would be worse, of course. And NDA is flailing around failing to get traction right now.
Note you omit Zemmour there who has a far better chance of being French president than Barnier or Melenchon at the moment and about as good a chance as Le Pen if not slightly more
I'm not as convinced by Zemmour's electability as you are. I think that he's a bit too... Macron.
They are both super smug French intellectuals, one from a "Greater Glory of France through the EU" perspective and one from a "Greater Glory of France through going back to our Nationalistic Catholic roots".
I don't think either of them speaks the forgotten voters, the people whom Johnson and Trump energized - and who see Le Pen as one of them. If Zemmour were to beat out Le Pen in the first round, I'm not convinced he would do that well.
Johnson and Trump also won the supporters of the main traditional Conservative party though, Zemmour I think would be a more respectable choice for Les Republicains voters still than Le Pen
Zemmour respectable? I'm not sure about that. I've been doing some reading on him. He's undoubtedly an intellectual (though I thought those were out of fashion these days). And he's difficult to pigeonhole, combining elements of the far right with a soupcon of classical Marxism. But there are also strong whiffs of misogyny in his stuff about 'virile masculinity' and the evils of feminism, of very reactionary views on homosexuality, and of outright racism (for which he has two convictions, I believe).
An update on Emma Raducanu watch. Bromley Council took 40 minutes on Monday to decide not to make her a freeman (freewoman?) of Bromley Borough, seemingly on the basis that it was proposed by the Labour group and the Tories therefore refused to support it.
Should we lay Emma for SPotY then, if she will receive no votes from Conservatives south of the river?
As good as her win was at the US open, and it was, Cameron Norrie’s win at the ‘fifth slam’ runs it pretty close.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
I think Barnier would be a pretty good President, and I think he'd work to increase the sovereignty of EU members at the expense of the centre, and that might work well for all concerned.
I don't think Le Pen would be great. Not because she's a fascist (she's not), but because her economic policy would be all about subsidising failing French businesses.
Melanchon would be worse, of course. And NDA is flailing around failing to get traction right now.
Note you omit Zemmour there who has a far better chance of being French president than Barnier or Melenchon at the moment and about as good a chance as Le Pen if not slightly more
I'm not as convinced by Zemmour's electability as you are. I think that he's a bit too... Macron.
They are both super smug French intellectuals, one from a "Greater Glory of France through the EU" perspective and one from a "Greater Glory of France through going back to our Nationalistic Catholic roots".
I don't think either of them speaks the forgotten voters, the people whom Johnson and Trump energized - and who see Le Pen as one of them. If Zemmour were to beat out Le Pen in the first round, I'm not convinced he would do that well.
Johnson and Trump also won the supporters of the main traditional Conservative party though, Zemmour I think would be a more respectable choice for Les Republicains voters still than Le Pen
That might be so, but I think it's more that Le Pen (like Trump, Johnson and Brexit) enthuses non-voters. She's not just another member of the establishment. She feels their pain.
Will those people come out to vote for another snappily dressed intellectual, who lives a life nothing like theirs, and appears to care nothing for the things they care about?
I'm not convinced.
On the other hand, I think Le Pen snaps up all Zemmour's support if she's in the top two.
Did Boris and Trump appeal to non voters? Turnout in 2019 was lower than 2017, just Boris united the right behind him and won over some Labour leavers.
Turnout in 2016 when Trump won was less than 1% more than in 2012, just Trump got the traditional GOP vote behind him, added a few working class Democrats and some independents went Libertarian not for Hillary (but then switched to Biden in 2020).
It is Les Republicains voters who voted for Macron in the runoff in 2017 either Zemmour or Le Pen have to win to have any chance of victory in the runoff in 2022
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
I think Barnier would be a pretty good President, and I think he'd work to increase the sovereignty of EU members at the expense of the centre, and that might work well for all concerned.
I don't think Le Pen would be great. Not because she's a fascist (she's not), but because her economic policy would be all about subsidising failing French businesses.
Melanchon would be worse, of course. And NDA is flailing around failing to get traction right now.
Note you omit Zemmour there who has a far better chance of being French president than Barnier or Melenchon at the moment and about as good a chance as Le Pen if not slightly more
I'm not as convinced by Zemmour's electability as you are. I think that he's a bit too... Macron.
They are both super smug French intellectuals, one from a "Greater Glory of France through the EU" perspective and one from a "Greater Glory of France through going back to our Nationalistic Catholic roots".
I don't think either of them speaks the forgotten voters, the people whom Johnson and Trump energized - and who see Le Pen as one of them. If Zemmour were to beat out Le Pen in the first round, I'm not convinced he would do that well.
Johnson and Trump also won the supporters of the main traditional Conservative party though, Zemmour I think would be a more respectable choice for Les Republicains voters still than Le Pen
Zemmour respectable? I'm not sure about that. I've been doing some reading on him. He's undoubtedly an intellectual (though I thought those were out of fashion these days). And he's difficult to pigeonhole, combining elements of the far right with a soupcon of classical Marxism. But there are also strong whiffs of misogyny in his stuff about 'virile masculinity' and the evils of feminism, of very reactionary views on homosexuality, and of outright racism (for which he has two convictions, I believe).
So interesting, yes. But respectable, no.
Respectable to socialists and liberals no, respectable to Les Republicains voters, many of whom are Gaullist social conservatives like him, potentially yes.
Zemmour is no neoliberal on economics, much more Gaullist but he is a social conservative with traditional views on gender and hostile to what he sees as the radical elements of Islam
Getting a really bad dose of deja vu looking at FT front page. Are we being softened up yet again for winter lockdown?
Some on here think not as Sunak will never sign off on more furlough.
We'll know in a month or so.
Javid seems to have set a threshold of 100k/day — which seems unlikely to be reached. That was my inference anyway.
It seems impossible that the kids cases carry on at current rates for much longer, so that will reduce overall rates. And Israel showed big falls after their boosters kicked in, so I think we will too. We may need to boost everyone eventually if we want to crush the cases.
"Analysis by the Italian National Health Institute, which looked at deaths in the country between Feb 1 and Oct 5, showed major disparities in people who were dying from Covid after being fully jabbed.
It found the average age of death in the vaccinated was 85, and that on average each person had five underlying illnesses when they caught Covid"
COVID is going to flush out death's waiting room over the next couple of years while we build up natural immunity and get better vaccines.
One cold, dark stat I heard once is that treating smoking-related illnesses costs the NHS more than the tobacco duties that smokers pay. However smokers are good for the Exchequer because they die sooner, so lower pension payments and lower care costs later on too.
While COVID has been devastating to the public finances, I wonder what the impact will actually be in the next couple of years. Could it be a cold, dark positive to the finances instead of a negative going forwards?
On smoking when my 18 year old granddaughter was born my daughter told me that if I continued smoking I could not hold her
Harsh but I did stop smoking which was one of the hardest things I have ever done, and just two years ago my practice nurse treating my breathing problems told me her act had saved my life
Sounds dramatic, but it's so true and my son in law stopped at the same time
When I was young, about 6 or 7, my granddad got throat cancer. He was incredibly lucky because of where it was it affected him immediately, he basically woke up one day and couldn't speak. The cancer was still tiny and was able to be removed (and his voice returned). He and my dad both quit smoking when he got the diagnosis and I never started.
If the cancer had been a bit any other direction it may not have been detected until it was too late. That was in the eighties, he's now about to have his 92nd birthday and still going strong. ❤️
Getting a really bad dose of deja vu looking at FT front page. Are we being softened up yet again for winter lockdown?
Some on here think not as Sunak will never sign off on more furlough.
We'll know in a month or so.
Javid seems to have set a threshold of 100k/day — which seems unlikely to be reached. That was my inference anyway.
It seems impossible that the kids cases carry on at current rates for much longer, so that will reduce overall rates. And Israel showed big falls after their boosters kicked in, so I think we will too. We may need to boost everyone eventually if we want to crush the cases.
I think all under 50s should be made eligible in December. It's a good insurance policy and we've got the doses so let's use them.
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
Or Frost saw it what a pile of shite Robbins had left for him, stuck in A16 and decided that dealing with it after the main deal made more sense than holding up the whole lot. And Robbins really did leave behind a complete steaming shitpile across the whole negotiation, not just wrt NI.
Poppycock. Boris had boxed himself in with an entirely self-inflicted and stupid deadline, and wriggled out of it at the last moment by going back to exactly the EU's opening negotiating position which Theresa May had rightly rejected (as had Boris, of course). There are no words strong enough to capture the utter ludicrousness of claiming an agreement is s triumph and then a few months later, having presumably read a summary of it, claiming it's a disaster.
Of course it IS a disaster. All the grown-ups pointed that out at the time, and were reviled for it. To improve things now, we need above all else to rebuild trust and improve relations. Boris and Frost are doing the opposite.
I did wonder earlier in the thread (or was it the last one?) if it was more than coincidence that everything stared to go wrong when the man who had built up a degree of knowledge and experience of the vaccination drives was moved on too quickly.
I understand the first vaccination drive had the involvement of military planning as well (am I right on that). Have they been too complacent and not bothered with getting expert planning in place this time?
I got a text from the NHS this evening inviting me for a flu jab.Given that I had mine a month ago, this does not speak well of their record-keeping and competence.
Still I read that the requirements for the booster jab have been changed and since, on 25th October, it is six months and one day after my second jab I will see whether it will indeed be possible to book it.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
I think Barnier would be a pretty good President, and I think he'd work to increase the sovereignty of EU members at the expense of the centre, and that might work well for all concerned.
I don't think Le Pen would be great. Not because she's a fascist (she's not), but because her economic policy would be all about subsidising failing French businesses.
Melanchon would be worse, of course. And NDA is flailing around failing to get traction right now.
Note you omit Zemmour there who has a far better chance of being French president than Barnier or Melenchon at the moment and about as good a chance as Le Pen if not slightly more
I'm not as convinced by Zemmour's electability as you are. I think that he's a bit too... Macron.
They are both super smug French intellectuals, one from a "Greater Glory of France through the EU" perspective and one from a "Greater Glory of France through going back to our Nationalistic Catholic roots".
I don't think either of them speaks the forgotten voters, the people whom Johnson and Trump energized - and who see Le Pen as one of them. If Zemmour were to beat out Le Pen in the first round, I'm not convinced he would do that well.
Johnson and Trump also won the supporters of the main traditional Conservative party though, Zemmour I think would be a more respectable choice for Les Republicains voters still than Le Pen
Zemmour respectable? I'm not sure about that. I've been doing some reading on him. He's undoubtedly an intellectual (though I thought those were out of fashion these days). And he's difficult to pigeonhole, combining elements of the far right with a soupcon of classical Marxism. But there are also strong whiffs of misogyny in his stuff about 'virile masculinity' and the evils of feminism, of very reactionary views on homosexuality, and of outright racism (for which he has two convictions, I believe).
So interesting, yes. But respectable, no.
Respectable to socialists and liberals no, respectable to Les Republicains voters, many of whom are Gaullist social conservatives like him, potentially yes.
Zemmour is no neoliberal on economics, much more Gaullist but he is a social conservative with traditional views on gender and hostile to what he sees as the radical elements of Islam
I'm not persuaded that his 'traditional views on gender' will go down well with most of the women (of all political persuasions) of modern France, or many men. And the evidence suggests he's pretty hostile to Islam as a whole, not just its radical elements.
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
Or Frost saw it what a pile of shite Robbins had left for him, stuck in A16 and decided that dealing with it after the main deal made more sense than holding up the whole lot. And Robbins really did leave behind a complete steaming shitpile across the whole negotiation, not just wrt NI.
Poppycock. Boris had boxed himself in with an entirely self-inflicted and stupid deadline, and wriggled out of it at the last moment by going back to exactly the EU's opening negotiating position which Theresa May had rightly rejected (as had Boris, of course). There are no words strong enough to capture the utter ludicrousness of claiming an agreement is s triumph and then a few months later, having presumably read a summary of it, claiming it's a disaster.
Of course it IS a disaster. All the grown-ups pointed that out at the time, and were reviled for it. To improve things now, we need above all else to rebuild trust and improve relations. Boris and Frost are doing the opposite.
May's opening negotiating position didn't have an exit mechanism in it. If we'd signed May's deal the EU would be laughing away suggestions of renegotiations right now.
We don't need trust, we need strength and realpolitik.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
I think Barnier would be a pretty good President, and I think he'd work to increase the sovereignty of EU members at the expense of the centre, and that might work well for all concerned.
I don't think Le Pen would be great. Not because she's a fascist (she's not), but because her economic policy would be all about subsidising failing French businesses.
Melanchon would be worse, of course. And NDA is flailing around failing to get traction right now.
Note you omit Zemmour there who has a far better chance of being French president than Barnier or Melenchon at the moment and about as good a chance as Le Pen if not slightly more
I'm not as convinced by Zemmour's electability as you are. I think that he's a bit too... Macron.
They are both super smug French intellectuals, one from a "Greater Glory of France through the EU" perspective and one from a "Greater Glory of France through going back to our Nationalistic Catholic roots".
I don't think either of them speaks the forgotten voters, the people whom Johnson and Trump energized - and who see Le Pen as one of them. If Zemmour were to beat out Le Pen in the first round, I'm not convinced he would do that well.
Johnson and Trump also won the supporters of the main traditional Conservative party though, Zemmour I think would be a more respectable choice for Les Republicains voters still than Le Pen
Zemmour respectable? I'm not sure about that. I've been doing some reading on him. He's undoubtedly an intellectual (though I thought those were out of fashion these days). And he's difficult to pigeonhole, combining elements of the far right with a soupcon of classical Marxism. But there are also strong whiffs of misogyny in his stuff about 'virile masculinity' and the evils of feminism, of very reactionary views on homosexuality, and of outright racism (for which he has two convictions, I believe).
So interesting, yes. But respectable, no.
Respectable to socialists and liberals no, respectable to Les Republicains voters, many of whom are Gaullist social conservatives like him, potentially yes.
Zemmour is no neoliberal on economics, much more Gaullist but he is a social conservative with traditional views on gender and hostile to what he sees as the radical elements of Islam
I'm not persuaded that his 'traditional views on gender' will go down well with most of the women (of all political persuasions) of modern France, or many men. And the evidence suggests he's pretty hostile to Islam as a whole, not just its radical elements.
There is no doubt many of his social views would go down well in the US right not just France but there is a market for some of it in conservative France too combined with his distinctive French nationalism.
"The legalization of abortion was a “collective suicide,” because the demographic heft of the French children who were never to be born amounted to “lost power, gone forever more.” The emergence of “triumphant homosexuality” is tied to “the decisive evolution of capitalism,” because Western capitalism has an insatiable need for consumerism, and “the homosexual universe, especially the male one, embodies the temple of unbridled pleasure, sexuality without restraint, hedonism without limit.” The sexual revolution led to a “feminine Bovaryism that is sanctified as a supreme value in relations between the sexes.”
The normalization of divorce revealed the “paradoxical destiny of feminists to accomplish the dream of absolute irresponsibility, for which they railed against generations of predatory males.” Zemmour goes on and on: the rise in delinquency in the nineteen-eighties and nineties came mostly from “immigrant families that France had welcomed,” and has been so twisted around by the left that “gangs of traffickers, thieves, and rapists are sanctified, eternal victims of a neocolonial and racist order. What we call delinquency, they call victims; what we call victims, they call guilty parties.” And, of course, once de Gaulle was gone, France was faced with the choice of “bowing down before the American empire or drowning itself in Europe.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/frances-frenzy-discourse-decline-zemmour
To beat Macron he would need to unite both Les Republicains voters and Le Pen voters behind him and his first round voters in the runoff
I regret to inform you all that I am 47 likes short of 6k for my tweet.
Wasn't even funny!
Empirically 5955 people disagree with you.
Not necessarily, @kinabalu has used the PB like feature previously to put people like me on notice. He's weaponised it against the anti-wokes.
I would be a bit worried if I started getting too many likes. It would indicate that I wrong about 'wokeness' and its takeover of the liberal elite, that I am so concerned about.
"We have ways of making you like me," hissed the villain...
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
Or Frost saw it what a pile of shite Robbins had left for him, stuck in A16 and decided that dealing with it after the main deal made more sense than holding up the whole lot. And Robbins really did leave behind a complete steaming shitpile across the whole negotiation, not just wrt NI.
Poppycock. Boris had boxed himself in with an entirely self-inflicted and stupid deadline, and wriggled out of it at the last moment by going back to exactly the EU's opening negotiating position which Theresa May had rightly rejected (as had Boris, of course). There are no words strong enough to capture the utter ludicrousness of claiming an agreement is s triumph and then a few months later, having presumably read a summary of it, claiming it's a disaster.
Of course it IS a disaster. All the grown-ups pointed that out at the time, and were reviled for it. To improve things now, we need above all else to rebuild trust and improve relations. Boris and Frost are doing the opposite.
‘All the grown ups’. Jesus. Listen to yourself you pompous old prick
You told us George Osborne was a ‘near perfect chancellor’. You told us Cameron would win his EU referendum 70/30
It turns out the near-perfect Cameron and Osborne were so clever they steered the country into an entirely unnecessary catastrophe (for a europhile like you), born entirely from their arrogant complacent stupidity, and the sense that they were ‘the grown ups’
You are of their ilk. Completely. If you were prime minister you’d probably call an unlose-able referendum on culling 50% of all children and you would campaign against this culling, and somehow you’d be so off-puttingly up yourself, you’d lose it
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
Or Frost saw it what a pile of shite Robbins had left for him, stuck in A16 and decided that dealing with it after the main deal made more sense than holding up the whole lot. And Robbins really did leave behind a complete steaming shitpile across the whole negotiation, not just wrt NI.
Poppycock. Boris had boxed himself in with an entirely self-inflicted and stupid deadline, and wriggled out of it at the last moment by going back to exactly the EU's opening negotiating position which Theresa May had rightly rejected (as had Boris, of course). There are no words strong enough to capture the utter ludicrousness of claiming an agreement is s triumph and then a few months later, having presumably read a summary of it, claiming it's a disaster.
Of course it IS a disaster. All the grown-ups pointed that out at the time, and were reviled for it. To improve things now, we need above all else to rebuild trust and improve relations. Boris and Frost are doing the opposite.
May's opening negotiating position didn't have an exit mechanism in it. If we'd signed May's deal the EU would be laughing away suggestions of renegotiations right now.
We don't need trust, we need strength and realpolitik.
The exact opposite is the case. We'd have had all the advantages of the Single Market without any of the financial obligations, and been under zero time pressure. The EU would have been the ones under pressure to do a deal. It was a spectacular triumph of British diplomacy. Thrown away to further the career of a charlatan.
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
Or Frost saw it what a pile of shite Robbins had left for him, stuck in A16 and decided that dealing with it after the main deal made more sense than holding up the whole lot. And Robbins really did leave behind a complete steaming shitpile across the whole negotiation, not just wrt NI.
Poppycock. Boris had boxed himself in with an entirely self-inflicted and stupid deadline, and wriggled out of it at the last moment by going back to exactly the EU's opening negotiating position which Theresa May had rightly rejected (as had Boris, of course). There are no words strong enough to capture the utter ludicrousness of claiming an agreement is s triumph and then a few months later, having presumably read a summary of it, claiming it's a disaster.
Of course it IS a disaster. All the grown-ups pointed that out at the time, and were reviled for it. To improve things now, we need above all else to rebuild trust and improve relations. Boris and Frost are doing the opposite.
May's opening negotiating position didn't have an exit mechanism in it. If we'd signed May's deal the EU would be laughing away suggestions of renegotiations right now.
We don't need trust, we need strength and realpolitik.
That last sentence seems to be an excellent summary of your political philosophy. Sone of us think the concept of trust is rather important, though.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
I think Barnier would be a pretty good President, and I think he'd work to increase the sovereignty of EU members at the expense of the centre, and that might work well for all concerned.
I don't think Le Pen would be great. Not because she's a fascist (she's not), but because her economic policy would be all about subsidising failing French businesses.
Melanchon would be worse, of course. And NDA is flailing around failing to get traction right now.
Note you omit Zemmour there who has a far better chance of being French president than Barnier or Melenchon at the moment and about as good a chance as Le Pen if not slightly more
I'm not as convinced by Zemmour's electability as you are. I think that he's a bit too... Macron.
They are both super smug French intellectuals, one from a "Greater Glory of France through the EU" perspective and one from a "Greater Glory of France through going back to our Nationalistic Catholic roots".
I don't think either of them speaks the forgotten voters, the people whom Johnson and Trump energized - and who see Le Pen as one of them. If Zemmour were to beat out Le Pen in the first round, I'm not convinced he would do that well.
Johnson and Trump also won the supporters of the main traditional Conservative party though, Zemmour I think would be a more respectable choice for Les Republicains voters still than Le Pen
Zemmour respectable? I'm not sure about that. I've been doing some reading on him. He's undoubtedly an intellectual (though I thought those were out of fashion these days). And he's difficult to pigeonhole, combining elements of the far right with a soupcon of classical Marxism. But there are also strong whiffs of misogyny in his stuff about 'virile masculinity' and the evils of feminism, of very reactionary views on homosexuality, and of outright racism (for which he has two convictions, I believe).
So interesting, yes. But respectable, no.
Respectable to socialists and liberals no, respectable to Les Republicains voters, many of whom are Gaullist social conservatives like him, potentially yes.
Zemmour is no neoliberal on economics, much more Gaullist but he is a social conservative with traditional views on gender and hostile to what he sees as the radical elements of Islam
I'm not persuaded that his 'traditional views on gender' will go down well with most of the women (of all political persuasions) of modern France, or many men. And the evidence suggests he's pretty hostile to Islam as a whole, not just its radical elements.
What do you mean by "hostile to Islam"?
More than just its "radical elements" are problematic.
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
Or Frost saw it what a pile of shite Robbins had left for him, stuck in A16 and decided that dealing with it after the main deal made more sense than holding up the whole lot. And Robbins really did leave behind a complete steaming shitpile across the whole negotiation, not just wrt NI.
Poppycock. Boris had boxed himself in with an entirely self-inflicted and stupid deadline, and wriggled out of it at the last moment by going back to exactly the EU's opening negotiating position which Theresa May had rightly rejected (as had Boris, of course). There are no words strong enough to capture the utter ludicrousness of claiming an agreement is s triumph and then a few months later, having presumably read a summary of it, claiming it's a disaster.
Of course it IS a disaster. All the grown-ups pointed that out at the time, and were reviled for it. To improve things now, we need above all else to rebuild trust and improve relations. Boris and Frost are doing the opposite.
May's opening negotiating position didn't have an exit mechanism in it. If we'd signed May's deal the EU would be laughing away suggestions of renegotiations right now.
We don't need trust, we need strength and realpolitik.
That last sentence seems to be an excellent summary of your political philosophy. Sone of us think the concept of trust is rather important, though.
No trust has been broken.
We agreed the Protocol saying if it didn't cause any diversion of trade, or other problems, then the Protocol would be OK.
The Protocol has caused diversion of trade, and other problems, so Article 16 applies. No trust broken.
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
It was brilliant precisely because it could be binned now.
Any NI arrangement was always terrible as far as the UK was concerned but was something the EU wanted, and they were adamant there could never be a unilateral exit. Until Frost got them to get one in and that changed everything.
May's negotiations never contained an exit mechanism. "A backstop with an exit is not a backstop" remember? So to get an exit into it rendering the whole thing able to be binned was absolute genius.
I'm not sure that the NI protocol is that bad for the people and businesses of NI. They didn't seem to have fuel distribution problems and their supermarkets seem to be well stocked due to HGV deliveries from the Republic. Businesses in NI can still sell their goods in both The Republic and GB. I'm sure they can get their sausages from Ireland as well. I am sure the NI Assembly still gets their UK government grants from London as well. I think the only people who are upset by the system seem to be the bowler hatted orange faced Unionists who seem to have some empathy for UK right wingers/DUP weirdos. The sooner NI goes back to The rest of Ireland the better in my opinion.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
I think Barnier would be a pretty good President, and I think he'd work to increase the sovereignty of EU members at the expense of the centre, and that might work well for all concerned.
I don't think Le Pen would be great. Not because she's a fascist (she's not), but because her economic policy would be all about subsidising failing French businesses.
Melanchon would be worse, of course. And NDA is flailing around failing to get traction right now.
Note you omit Zemmour there who has a far better chance of being French president than Barnier or Melenchon at the moment and about as good a chance as Le Pen if not slightly more
I'm not as convinced by Zemmour's electability as you are. I think that he's a bit too... Macron.
They are both super smug French intellectuals, one from a "Greater Glory of France through the EU" perspective and one from a "Greater Glory of France through going back to our Nationalistic Catholic roots".
I don't think either of them speaks the forgotten voters, the people whom Johnson and Trump energized - and who see Le Pen as one of them. If Zemmour were to beat out Le Pen in the first round, I'm not convinced he would do that well.
Johnson and Trump also won the supporters of the main traditional Conservative party though, Zemmour I think would be a more respectable choice for Les Republicains voters still than Le Pen
Zemmour respectable? I'm not sure about that. I've been doing some reading on him. He's undoubtedly an intellectual (though I thought those were out of fashion these days). And he's difficult to pigeonhole, combining elements of the far right with a soupcon of classical Marxism. But there are also strong whiffs of misogyny in his stuff about 'virile masculinity' and the evils of feminism, of very reactionary views on homosexuality, and of outright racism (for which he has two convictions, I believe).
So interesting, yes. But respectable, no.
Respectable to socialists and liberals no, respectable to Les Republicains voters, many of whom are Gaullist social conservatives like him, potentially yes.
Zemmour is no neoliberal on economics, much more Gaullist but he is a social conservative with traditional views on gender and hostile to what he sees as the radical elements of Islam
I'm not persuaded that his 'traditional views on gender' will go down well with most of the women (of all political persuasions) of modern France, or many men. And the evidence suggests he's pretty hostile to Islam as a whole, not just its radical elements.
There is no doubt many of his social views would go down well in the US right not just France but there is a market for some of it in conservative France too combined with his distinctive French nationalism.
"The legalization of abortion was a “collective suicide,” because the demographic heft of the French children who were never to be born amounted to “lost power, gone forever more.” The emergence of “triumphant homosexuality” is tied to “the decisive evolution of capitalism,” because Western capitalism has an insatiable need for consumerism, and “the homosexual universe, especially the male one, embodies the temple of unbridled pleasure, sexuality without restraint, hedonism without limit.” The sexual revolution led to a “feminine Bovaryism that is sanctified as a supreme value in relations between the sexes.”
The normalization of divorce revealed the “paradoxical destiny of feminists to accomplish the dream of absolute irresponsibility, for which they railed against generations of predatory males.” Zemmour goes on and on: the rise in delinquency in the nineteen-eighties and nineties came mostly from “immigrant families that France had welcomed,” and has been so twisted around by the left that “gangs of traffickers, thieves, and rapists are sanctified, eternal victims of a neocolonial and racist order. What we call delinquency, they call victims; what we call victims, they call guilty parties.” And, of course, once de Gaulle was gone, France was faced with the choice of “bowing down before the American empire or drowning itself in Europe.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/frances-frenzy-discourse-decline-zemmour
To beat Macron he would need to unite both Les Republicains voters and Le Pen voters behind him and his first round voters in the runoff
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
I think Barnier would be a pretty good President, and I think he'd work to increase the sovereignty of EU members at the expense of the centre, and that might work well for all concerned.
I don't think Le Pen would be great. Not because she's a fascist (she's not), but because her economic policy would be all about subsidising failing French businesses.
Melanchon would be worse, of course. And NDA is flailing around failing to get traction right now.
Note you omit Zemmour there who has a far better chance of being French president than Barnier or Melenchon at the moment and about as good a chance as Le Pen if not slightly more
I'm not as convinced by Zemmour's electability as you are. I think that he's a bit too... Macron.
They are both super smug French intellectuals, one from a "Greater Glory of France through the EU" perspective and one from a "Greater Glory of France through going back to our Nationalistic Catholic roots".
I don't think either of them speaks the forgotten voters, the people whom Johnson and Trump energized - and who see Le Pen as one of them. If Zemmour were to beat out Le Pen in the first round, I'm not convinced he would do that well.
Johnson and Trump also won the supporters of the main traditional Conservative party though, Zemmour I think would be a more respectable choice for Les Republicains voters still than Le Pen
Zemmour respectable? I'm not sure about that. I've been doing some reading on him. He's undoubtedly an intellectual (though I thought those were out of fashion these days). And he's difficult to pigeonhole, combining elements of the far right with a soupcon of classical Marxism. But there are also strong whiffs of misogyny in his stuff about 'virile masculinity' and the evils of feminism, of very reactionary views on homosexuality, and of outright racism (for which he has two convictions, I believe).
So interesting, yes. But respectable, no.
Respectable to socialists and liberals no, respectable to Les Republicains voters, many of whom are Gaullist social conservatives like him, potentially yes.
Zemmour is no neoliberal on economics, much more Gaullist but he is a social conservative with traditional views on gender and hostile to what he sees as the radical elements of Islam
I'm not persuaded that his 'traditional views on gender' will go down well with most of the women (of all political persuasions) of modern France, or many men. And the evidence suggests he's pretty hostile to Islam as a whole, not just its radical elements.
There is no doubt many of his social views would go down well in the US right not just France but there is a market for some of it in conservative France too combined with his distinctive French nationalism.
"The legalization of abortion was a “collective suicide,” because the demographic heft of the French children who were never to be born amounted to “lost power, gone forever more.” The emergence of “triumphant homosexuality” is tied to “the decisive evolution of capitalism,” because Western capitalism has an insatiable need for consumerism, and “the homosexual universe, especially the male one, embodies the temple of unbridled pleasure, sexuality without restraint, hedonism without limit.” The sexual revolution led to a “feminine Bovaryism that is sanctified as a supreme value in relations between the sexes.”
The normalization of divorce revealed the “paradoxical destiny of feminists to accomplish the dream of absolute irresponsibility, for which they railed against generations of predatory males.” Zemmour goes on and on: the rise in delinquency in the nineteen-eighties and nineties came mostly from “immigrant families that France had welcomed,” and has been so twisted around by the left that “gangs of traffickers, thieves, and rapists are sanctified, eternal victims of a neocolonial and racist order. What we call delinquency, they call victims; what we call victims, they call guilty parties.” And, of course, once de Gaulle was gone, France was faced with the choice of “bowing down before the American empire or drowning itself in Europe.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/frances-frenzy-discourse-decline-zemmour
To beat Macron he would need to unite both Les Republicains voters and Le Pen voters behind him and his first round voters in the runoff
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
Or Frost saw it what a pile of shite Robbins had left for him, stuck in A16 and decided that dealing with it after the main deal made more sense than holding up the whole lot. And Robbins really did leave behind a complete steaming shitpile across the whole negotiation, not just wrt NI.
Poppycock. Boris had boxed himself in with an entirely self-inflicted and stupid deadline, and wriggled out of it at the last moment by going back to exactly the EU's opening negotiating position which Theresa May had rightly rejected (as had Boris, of course). There are no words strong enough to capture the utter ludicrousness of claiming an agreement is s triumph and then a few months later, having presumably read a summary of it, claiming it's a disaster.
Of course it IS a disaster. All the grown-ups pointed that out at the time, and were reviled for it. To improve things now, we need above all else to rebuild trust and improve relations. Boris and Frost are doing the opposite.
May's opening negotiating position didn't have an exit mechanism in it. If we'd signed May's deal the EU would be laughing away suggestions of renegotiations right now.
We don't need trust, we need strength and realpolitik.
The exact opposite is the case. We'd have had all the advantages of the Single Market without any of the financial obligations, and been under zero time pressure. The EU would have been the ones under pressure to do a deal. It was a spectacular triumph of British diplomacy. Thrown away to further the career of a charlatan.
Absolute codswallop. Pure nosnsense.
We'd have been still stuck within the Single Market, but without any Article 50 or any other unilateral exit mechanism to get out of it.
The EU would have had a blank cheque to demand we sign whatever they wanted, or they could keep us trapped within their sphere of influence as a supplicant state stuck in their Market without any say in their rules and any unilateral way out of the trap.
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
Or Frost saw it what a pile of shite Robbins had left for him, stuck in A16 and decided that dealing with it after the main deal made more sense than holding up the whole lot. And Robbins really did leave behind a complete steaming shitpile across the whole negotiation, not just wrt NI.
Poppycock. Boris had boxed himself in with an entirely self-inflicted and stupid deadline, and wriggled out of it at the last moment by going back to exactly the EU's opening negotiating position which Theresa May had rightly rejected (as had Boris, of course). There are no words strong enough to capture the utter ludicrousness of claiming an agreement is s triumph and then a few months later, having presumably read a summary of it, claiming it's a disaster.
Of course it IS a disaster. All the grown-ups pointed that out at the time, and were reviled for it. To improve things now, we need above all else to rebuild trust and improve relations. Boris and Frost are doing the opposite.
Hold on, if Boris had boxed himself in then how do you reconcile that with the EU agreeing to renegotiate the NI Protocol?
Those views are mutually exclusive, either he boxed himself in and we're stuck with what we have or he didn't and we're able to renegotiate. Given what's going on I'm going to go with the latter. When that renegotiation happens is immaterial, delaying the Brexit deal wasn't viable back then and it would have achieved precisely zero. Only those ardent remainers who wanted to lock the UK into the EU's orbit permanently wanted to keep extending, hoping that Labour would win.
There's no harm in admitting that Frost played the hand he got given very well. He proved in the main deal negotiation that we wouldn't easily settle for the same old repackaged rubbish that Barnier kept going back to like he did with Robbins. Now with the NI protocol he's got a full renegotiation of what everyone agrees was a subpar deal that Robbins signed us up to.
I've been trying to work out why the vaccination of the 12-15 year olds is going so slowly.
any ideas would be interesting, but one I just thought of was that number of Booster jabs, 199,000 in a day somebody posted a few hours ago. if correct then are all the people/places that can give Jabs full of booster shots not first doses for the kids?
I assume its not the supply of the jabs as I understand that we have lots of them in a where house.
There's no excuse for the slowness of it. Children in school is almost the perfect situation for doing the vaccinations.
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
Or Frost saw it what a pile of shite Robbins had left for him, stuck in A16 and decided that dealing with it after the main deal made more sense than holding up the whole lot. And Robbins really did leave behind a complete steaming shitpile across the whole negotiation, not just wrt NI.
Poppycock. Boris had boxed himself in with an entirely self-inflicted and stupid deadline, and wriggled out of it at the last moment by going back to exactly the EU's opening negotiating position which Theresa May had rightly rejected (as had Boris, of course). There are no words strong enough to capture the utter ludicrousness of claiming an agreement is s triumph and then a few months later, having presumably read a summary of it, claiming it's a disaster.
Of course it IS a disaster. All the grown-ups pointed that out at the time, and were reviled for it. To improve things now, we need above all else to rebuild trust and improve relations. Boris and Frost are doing the opposite.
May's opening negotiating position didn't have an exit mechanism in it. If we'd signed May's deal the EU would be laughing away suggestions of renegotiations right now.
We don't need trust, we need strength and realpolitik.
The exact opposite is the case. We'd have had all the advantages of the Single Market without any of the financial obligations, and been under zero time pressure. The EU would have been the ones under pressure to do a deal. It was a spectacular triumph of British diplomacy. Thrown away to further the career of a charlatan.
Absolute codswallop. Pure nosnsense.
We'd have been still stuck within the Single Market, but without any Article 50 or any other unilateral exit mechanism to get out of it.
The EU would have had a blank cheque to demand we sign whatever they wanted, or they could keep us trapped within their sphere of influence as a supplicant state stuck in their Market without any say in their rules and any unilateral way out of the trap.
Err, you totally missed the point Do you really think that the EU would be happy to have us as full members of the Single Market without paying a Euro for the privilege?
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
Or Frost saw it what a pile of shite Robbins had left for him, stuck in A16 and decided that dealing with it after the main deal made more sense than holding up the whole lot. And Robbins really did leave behind a complete steaming shitpile across the whole negotiation, not just wrt NI.
Poppycock. Boris had boxed himself in with an entirely self-inflicted and stupid deadline, and wriggled out of it at the last moment by going back to exactly the EU's opening negotiating position which Theresa May had rightly rejected (as had Boris, of course). There are no words strong enough to capture the utter ludicrousness of claiming an agreement is s triumph and then a few months later, having presumably read a summary of it, claiming it's a disaster.
Of course it IS a disaster. All the grown-ups pointed that out at the time, and were reviled for it. To improve things now, we need above all else to rebuild trust and improve relations. Boris and Frost are doing the opposite.
May's opening negotiating position didn't have an exit mechanism in it. If we'd signed May's deal the EU would be laughing away suggestions of renegotiations right now.
We don't need trust, we need strength and realpolitik.
That last sentence seems to be an excellent summary of your political philosophy. Sone of us think the concept of trust is rather important, though.
No trust has been broken.
We agreed the Protocol saying if it didn't cause any diversion of trade, or other problems, then the Protocol would be OK.
The Protocol has caused diversion of trade, and other problems, so Article 16 applies. No trust broken.
I don't want to get entangled, but you said 'we don't need trust'. So what does if matter if no trust has been broken?
We have now reached a trade agreement in principle with New Zealand It will: - cut costs & red tape for businesses - open doors for UK services companies - boost our £2.3bn trade relationship
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
Or Frost saw it what a pile of shite Robbins had left for him, stuck in A16 and decided that dealing with it after the main deal made more sense than holding up the whole lot. And Robbins really did leave behind a complete steaming shitpile across the whole negotiation, not just wrt NI.
Poppycock. Boris had boxed himself in with an entirely self-inflicted and stupid deadline, and wriggled out of it at the last moment by going back to exactly the EU's opening negotiating position which Theresa May had rightly rejected (as had Boris, of course). There are no words strong enough to capture the utter ludicrousness of claiming an agreement is s triumph and then a few months later, having presumably read a summary of it, claiming it's a disaster.
Of course it IS a disaster. All the grown-ups pointed that out at the time, and were reviled for it. To improve things now, we need above all else to rebuild trust and improve relations. Boris and Frost are doing the opposite.
May's opening negotiating position didn't have an exit mechanism in it. If we'd signed May's deal the EU would be laughing away suggestions of renegotiations right now.
We don't need trust, we need strength and realpolitik.
The exact opposite is the case. We'd have had all the advantages of the Single Market without any of the financial obligations, and been under zero time pressure. The EU would have been the ones under pressure to do a deal. It was a spectacular triumph of British diplomacy. Thrown away to further the career of a charlatan.
And this is why you're so very, very upset. You wanted to tie the UK into the EU's orbit permanently. Frost has smashed your dreams, permanently. We've left the EU and left its orbit entirely. Brexit has seen an end to any real EU influence over the UK. The EU would have been under precisely zero pressure to deal. It would have got everything it wanted from the UK which would be permanently tied into its rules and regulations with zero say in them with no way out.
Over time the EU will simply become a less important place, it's already started and the French outbursts against the UK and other countries is their realisation of how irrelevant they are becoming. The EU diminishes the countries inside it, it isn't a force multiplier, it's a detractor.
If this has been mentioned already, apologies, but a number of polls from France are showing a Zemmour candidacy outpolling Marine Le Pen in the first round of voting.
This would be extraordinary if it happened - I've not seen any polling on a Macron-Zemmour runoff in round two. It seems to make little difference who the centre-right put up as a candidate - every option is behind Zemmour be it Pecresse, Barnier or Bertrand. The last named does the best at 14% in one poll, two points behind Le Pen and three points behind Zemmour.
Macron seems a bit short (no pun intended )
In what way?
I've neither seen a single poll where any other candidate gets near him on the second round nor a poll where he isn't leading the first round.
He beats Le Pen on every run off poll and I suspect he would beat Zemmour by a larger margin. The only hope for those opposed to Macron is for Bertrand perhaps to get past the warring Zemmour and Le Pen candidacies and snatch second - it's feasible.
Zemmour gets 43% in the latest runoff poll against Macron, Le Pen gets 46%, compared to the just 33% Le Pen got in the 2017 runoff against Macron.
So Macron might survive this time but if there is the same swing again to the populist right candidate in 2027 they could actually win the French Presidency
I think it is very wrong to write off the chances of Le Pen (if she gets through).
The French are in a state of despair. Macron was elected last time not only because he wasn’t Le Pen but because voters thought he would be a break from the past. He wasn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised in a run-off if the French didn’t decide let’s give it a spin and see how Le Pen goes.
I agree.
But it's important to realise as well how much Le Pen has moved the FN: for example Barnier (from LR) and Zemmour are both openly Eurosceptic, while Le Pen now sounds more like a LibDem on the subject of Europe. (Her previous pledge for a referendum on the membership of the Euro has been dumped.)
It's hard to see much in the Le Pen policy book that looks very different to Cameron (except perhaps more aggressive government spending), and that's why she has gained from traditional LR voters, and lost them to her Right.
Barnier is a eurosceptic?
There are at least four serious French Presidential candidates who are more Eurosceptic than Le Pen:
- Barnier (who seems to have had a Damascene conversion being involved with Brexit) - Zemmour - Melanchon - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
The only difference between Le Pen and a mainstream Europhile is that she describes her vision for the EU as a Christian club designed to keep out the Muslim hordes. (She might not actually use the word 'hordes'.)
A Eurosceptic French President Barnier could just break Twitter.
So we should all hope he wins.
I think Barnier would be a pretty good President, and I think he'd work to increase the sovereignty of EU members at the expense of the centre, and that might work well for all concerned.
I don't think Le Pen would be great. Not because she's a fascist (she's not), but because her economic policy would be all about subsidising failing French businesses.
Melanchon would be worse, of course. And NDA is flailing around failing to get traction right now.
Note you omit Zemmour there who has a far better chance of being French president than Barnier or Melenchon at the moment and about as good a chance as Le Pen if not slightly more
I'm not as convinced by Zemmour's electability as you are. I think that he's a bit too... Macron.
They are both super smug French intellectuals, one from a "Greater Glory of France through the EU" perspective and one from a "Greater Glory of France through going back to our Nationalistic Catholic roots".
I don't think either of them speaks the forgotten voters, the people whom Johnson and Trump energized - and who see Le Pen as one of them. If Zemmour were to beat out Le Pen in the first round, I'm not convinced he would do that well.
Johnson and Trump also won the supporters of the main traditional Conservative party though, Zemmour I think would be a more respectable choice for Les Republicains voters still than Le Pen
Zemmour respectable? I'm not sure about that. I've been doing some reading on him. He's undoubtedly an intellectual (though I thought those were out of fashion these days). And he's difficult to pigeonhole, combining elements of the far right with a soupcon of classical Marxism. But there are also strong whiffs of misogyny in his stuff about 'virile masculinity' and the evils of feminism, of very reactionary views on homosexuality, and of outright racism (for which he has two convictions, I believe).
So interesting, yes. But respectable, no.
Respectable to socialists and liberals no, respectable to Les Republicains voters, many of whom are Gaullist social conservatives like him, potentially yes.
Zemmour is no neoliberal on economics, much more Gaullist but he is a social conservative with traditional views on gender and hostile to what he sees as the radical elements of Islam
I'm not persuaded that his 'traditional views on gender' will go down well with most of the women (of all political persuasions) of modern France, or many men. And the evidence suggests he's pretty hostile to Islam as a whole, not just its radical elements.
There is no doubt many of his social views would go down well in the US right not just France but there is a market for some of it in conservative France too combined with his distinctive French nationalism.
"The legalization of abortion was a “collective suicide,” because the demographic heft of the French children who were never to be born amounted to “lost power, gone forever more.” The emergence of “triumphant homosexuality” is tied to “the decisive evolution of capitalism,” because Western capitalism has an insatiable need for consumerism, and “the homosexual universe, especially the male one, embodies the temple of unbridled pleasure, sexuality without restraint, hedonism without limit.” The sexual revolution led to a “feminine Bovaryism that is sanctified as a supreme value in relations between the sexes.”
The normalization of divorce revealed the “paradoxical destiny of feminists to accomplish the dream of absolute irresponsibility, for which they railed against generations of predatory males.” Zemmour goes on and on: the rise in delinquency in the nineteen-eighties and nineties came mostly from “immigrant families that France had welcomed,” and has been so twisted around by the left that “gangs of traffickers, thieves, and rapists are sanctified, eternal victims of a neocolonial and racist order. What we call delinquency, they call victims; what we call victims, they call guilty parties.” And, of course, once de Gaulle was gone, France was faced with the choice of “bowing down before the American empire or drowning itself in Europe.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/frances-frenzy-discourse-decline-zemmour
To beat Macron he would need to unite both Les Republicains voters and Le Pen voters behind him and his first round voters in the runoff
Excellent long quotation, thanks.
Zemmour really isn't very woke, is he?
One day someone like Zemmour will win in a big western country. Brexit can be seen as britain’s way of heading this off at the pass, so it didn’t happen to us
Imagine if the Remoaners had succeeded in cancelling the 2016 referendum. Britain would either have toppled into civil strife, or we would have elected our own Zemmour
Did we establish whether, at least in some places, people are being given flu and booster jabs on same visit?
My mum got both.
I hot my flu jab today at the D checkup.
I think my surgery will be offering both when people turn up for their booster COVID doses.
One advantage to communcicate is that this year's flu jab is not severe in its impact. There was one 4 or 5 years ago that seemed to knock a lot of people out for about a week.
Zemmour has zero chance of winning the Presidency and his stunt today together with calling for more people to be armed will go down very badly . Barniers views seem to have been deliberately misreported by some Brexiters in an effort to paint him as some new convert .
He fully supports freedom of movement and would never push for a Frexit .
Amusing to see the logical contortions of those arguing that the Northern Ireland Protocol was indeed a triumph, as claimed at the time by Boris and Frost, precisely because it was so disastrous that it has to be binned now. Chapeau, Brexiteers, that's brilliant
Or Frost saw it what a pile of shite Robbins had left for him, stuck in A16 and decided that dealing with it after the main deal made more sense than holding up the whole lot. And Robbins really did leave behind a complete steaming shitpile across the whole negotiation, not just wrt NI.
Poppycock. Boris had boxed himself in with an entirely self-inflicted and stupid deadline, and wriggled out of it at the last moment by going back to exactly the EU's opening negotiating position which Theresa May had rightly rejected (as had Boris, of course). There are no words strong enough to capture the utter ludicrousness of claiming an agreement is s triumph and then a few months later, having presumably read a summary of it, claiming it's a disaster.
Of course it IS a disaster. All the grown-ups pointed that out at the time, and were reviled for it. To improve things now, we need above all else to rebuild trust and improve relations. Boris and Frost are doing the opposite.
May's opening negotiating position didn't have an exit mechanism in it. If we'd signed May's deal the EU would be laughing away suggestions of renegotiations right now.
We don't need trust, we need strength and realpolitik.
That last sentence seems to be an excellent summary of your political philosophy. Sone of us think the concept of trust is rather important, though.
No trust has been broken.
We agreed the Protocol saying if it didn't cause any diversion of trade, or other problems, then the Protocol would be OK.
The Protocol has caused diversion of trade, and other problems, so Article 16 applies. No trust broken.
I don't want to get entangled, but you said 'we don't need trust'. So what does if matter if no trust has been broken?
It matters in abstract only for the UK's reputation as a nation which keeps its word (which we have done here, entirely legally following the agreement to the letter).
The solution going forwards though isn't trust, it is who can wield the power in the negotiations and what I have always said for years now has been revealed to be true: The EU has no choice but to agree a deal to our terms, because they can't force an alternative and no deal is worse for them than signing a deal.
They're not prepared to have a border in Ireland, and they can't compel us to compromise, so they need a deal more than we do. As I said three years ago. They were bluffing then, and we've called their bluff.
Zemmour has zero chance of winning the Presidency and his stunt today together with calling for more people to be armed will go down very badly . Barniers views seem to have been deliberately misreported by some Brexiters in an effort to paint him as some new convert .
He fully supports freedom of movement and would never push for a Frexit .
Zemmour is Farage a la Francaise. His job is to push l’Overton window to the right
Comments
They are both super smug French intellectuals, one from a "Greater Glory of France through the EU" perspective and one from a "Greater Glory of France through going back to our Nationalistic Catholic roots".
I don't think either of them speaks the forgotten voters, the people whom Johnson and Trump energized - and who see Le Pen as one of them. If Zemmour were to beat out Le Pen in the first round, I'm not convinced he would do that well.
The failings in the process were due to Robbins and May. Frost completely turned the tables, got everything the UK was seeking in exchange for border pedantry and a new NI Protocol, and managed to get Article 16 including into the Protocol so even that could be neutered.
Barnier just seemed to give up versus Frost in the end. All his tricks he played versus Robbins stopped working once the UK developed a backbone.
It ought to be possible to book online for the six month anniversary onwards. Not wait until 6 months, then a week, then a couple for a slot.
Shambles.
How was the deal Johnson signed materially different from the one May initially proposed, and which was vetoed by the DUP?
Invoking Article 16 (or threatening to) isn't breaking the Protocol any more than invoking Article 50 broke the Lisbon Treaty. Its perfectly legitimate to exercise your privileges in a Treaty even if the other party doesn't want you to do so.
Boris's deal had two unilateral exits from it: Article 16 which could be triggered unilaterally by the UK, or another one that could be triggered by Stormont.
The inclusion of exit mechanisms is a gamechanger. If May had negotiated an exit mechanism from the backstop she would have won the third meaningful vote, it was Geoffrey Cox saying that her renegotiations before MV3 had not included a legal exit mechanism that made that vote fail.
You might not like it but that is how good negotiation works. There is simply no such thing as good will in this kind of entanglement and the minute our stance changed to reflect that we got a properly governed deal with no dynamic alignment and zero tariffs and quotas.
Remember that A16 is included in the NI protocol, we are well within our rights to trigger it to suspend the deal. We wouldn't need to break any international laws. One of the reasons the Irish are so upset is that they've realised how badly it's worked out for them.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with demanding they scrap the treaty and start again, the Treaty itself in Article 13 part 8 provides the provisions for how that can be done.
Renegotiating a Treaty isn't breaking it, we've only broken the Treaty if we unilaterally cease to follow it but nobody is proposing that. Considering the Protocol was negotiated before the Trade Deal, it always made sense that it should be replaced with a new arrangement once a Trade Deal was agreed.
any ideas would be interesting, but one I just thought of was that number of Booster jabs, 199,000 in a day somebody posted a few hours ago. if correct then are all the people/places that can give Jabs full of booster shots not first doses for the kids?
I assume its not the supply of the jabs as I understand that we have lots of them in a where house.
I struggle to see why you're so exercised by this? Frost smartly included a unilateral mechanism to indefinitely suspend the deal, they agreed to the mechanism, the terms to trigger said mechanism have been met, we've said that rather than trigger it and upset everyone let's sit down and fix the deal so we don't need to do that. It's an example of why Frost did a much better job than Robbins, he's put a self correction mechanism in the deal to maintain the status quo in NI allowing for the peace to be kept.
Edit - sorry, beaten to it.
Rubbish-strewn streets, protests and hotel rooms for £1,400 a night set to cast shadow over UN Climate Change Conference
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/15/cop26-glasgow-braced-humiliation-world-stage-shambolic-preparation/
Will those people come out to vote for another snappily dressed intellectual, who lives a life nothing like theirs, and appears to care nothing for the things they care about?
I'm not convinced.
On the other hand, I think Le Pen snaps up all Zemmour's support if she's in the top two.
Article 13 provides provision for how either part of the Protocol or even the entire Protocol can be superseded with a new UK/EU agreement.
Article 16 provides safeguards in writing the conditions of which have been met.
The EU understands and accepts the safeguarding conditions have been met, so now they're open to new negotiations as per Article 13. That's the Protocol as negotiated working as it should be, even if they're not happy with it, that's not breaking anything.
"Analysis by the Italian National Health Institute, which looked at deaths in the country between Feb 1 and Oct 5, showed major disparities in people who were dying from Covid after being fully jabbed.
It found the average age of death in the vaccinated was 85, and that on average each person had five underlying illnesses when they caught Covid"
COVID is going to flush out death's waiting room over the next couple of years while we build up natural immunity and get better vaccines.
People who are vaccinated against coronavirus are extremely unlikely to die of the disease unless they are very old or already severely sick, a new Italian study has found.
The research by the National Health Institute (ISS) found the average age of vaccinated people who died was 85 and that on average they had five underlying illnesses, reports Reuters.
The average age of death for those who were not vaccinated was 78 and with an average of four pre-existing conditions.
Its a death cake of sick oldies with an icing of younger anti-vaxxers.
While COVID has been devastating to the public finances, I wonder what the impact will actually be in the next couple of years. Could it be a cold, dark positive to the finances instead of a negative going forwards?
Some on here think not as Sunak will never sign off on more furlough.
We'll know in a month or so.
Any NI arrangement was always terrible as far as the UK was concerned but was something the EU wanted, and they were adamant there could never be a unilateral exit. Until Frost got them to get one in and that changed everything.
May's negotiations never contained an exit mechanism. "A backstop with an exit is not a backstop" remember? So to get an exit into it rendering the whole thing able to be binned was absolute genius.
Harsh but I did stop smoking which was one of the hardest things I have ever done, and just two years ago my practice nurse treating my breathing problems told me her act had saved my life
Sounds dramatic, but it's so true and my son in law stopped at the same time
So interesting, yes. But respectable, no.
Turnout in 2016 when Trump won was less than 1% more than in 2012, just Trump got the traditional GOP vote behind him, added a few working class Democrats and some independents went Libertarian not for Hillary (but then switched to Biden in 2020).
It is Les Republicains voters who voted for Macron in the runoff in 2017 either Zemmour or Le Pen have to win to have any chance of victory in the runoff in 2022
Zemmour is no neoliberal on economics, much more Gaullist but he is a social conservative with traditional views on gender and hostile to what he sees as the radical elements of Islam
If the cancer had been a bit any other direction it may not have been detected until it was too late. That was in the eighties, he's now about to have his 92nd birthday and still going strong. ❤️
Of course it IS a disaster. All the grown-ups pointed that out at the time, and were reviled for it. To improve things now, we need above all else to rebuild trust and improve relations. Boris and Frost are doing the opposite.
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/word-spooky-banned-national-theatre-25230669
London is like a covid-dove island.
Buzzing. And almost no sense of a pandemic.
Still I read that the requirements for the booster jab have been changed and since, on 25th October, it is six months and one day after my second jab I will see whether it will indeed be possible to book it.
We don't need trust, we need strength and realpolitik.
The caves contain occupation layers with evidence of flint tools from the Mousterian, proto-Solutrean, Creswellian and Maglemosian cultures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creswell_Crags
"The legalization of abortion was a “collective suicide,” because the demographic heft of the French children who were never to be born amounted to “lost power, gone forever more.” The emergence of “triumphant homosexuality” is tied to “the decisive evolution of capitalism,” because Western capitalism has an insatiable need for consumerism, and “the homosexual universe, especially the male one, embodies the temple of unbridled pleasure, sexuality without restraint, hedonism without limit.” The sexual revolution led to a “feminine Bovaryism that is sanctified as a supreme value in relations between the sexes.”
The normalization of divorce revealed the “paradoxical destiny of feminists to accomplish the dream of absolute irresponsibility, for which they railed against generations of predatory males.” Zemmour goes on and on: the rise in delinquency in the nineteen-eighties and nineties came mostly from “immigrant families that France had welcomed,” and has been so twisted around by the left that “gangs of traffickers, thieves, and rapists are sanctified, eternal victims of a neocolonial and racist order. What we call delinquency, they call victims; what we call victims, they call guilty parties.” And, of course, once de Gaulle was gone, France was faced with the choice of “bowing down before the American empire or drowning itself in Europe.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/frances-frenzy-discourse-decline-zemmour
To beat Macron he would need to unite both Les Republicains voters and Le Pen voters behind him and his first round voters in the runoff
You told us George Osborne was a ‘near perfect chancellor’. You told us Cameron would win his EU referendum 70/30
It turns out the near-perfect Cameron and Osborne were so clever they steered the country into an entirely unnecessary catastrophe (for a europhile like you), born entirely from their arrogant complacent stupidity, and the sense that they were ‘the grown ups’
You are of their ilk. Completely. If you were prime minister you’d probably call an unlose-able referendum on culling 50% of all children and you would campaign against this culling, and somehow you’d be so off-puttingly up yourself, you’d lose it
Sone of us think the concept of trust is rather important, though.
More than just its "radical elements" are problematic.
We agreed the Protocol saying if it didn't cause any diversion of trade, or other problems, then the Protocol would be OK.
The Protocol has caused diversion of trade, and other problems, so Article 16 applies. No trust broken.
Zemmour really isn't very woke, is he?
We'd have been still stuck within the Single Market, but without any Article 50 or any other unilateral exit mechanism to get out of it.
The EU would have had a blank cheque to demand we sign whatever they wanted, or they could keep us trapped within their sphere of influence as a supplicant state stuck in their Market without any say in their rules and any unilateral way out of the trap.
Those views are mutually exclusive, either he boxed himself in and we're stuck with what we have or he didn't and we're able to renegotiate. Given what's going on I'm going to go with the latter. When that renegotiation happens is immaterial, delaying the Brexit deal wasn't viable back then and it would have achieved precisely zero. Only those ardent remainers who wanted to lock the UK into the EU's orbit permanently wanted to keep extending, hoping that Labour would win.
There's no harm in admitting that Frost played the hand he got given very well. He proved in the main deal negotiation that we wouldn't easily settle for the same old repackaged rubbish that Barnier kept going back to like he did with Robbins. Now with the NI protocol he's got a full renegotiation of what everyone agrees was a subpar deal that Robbins signed us up to.
I suspect this shortage of good staff is worldwide, why should it not be?
It will:
- cut costs & red tape for businesses
- open doors for UK services companies
- boost our £2.3bn trade relationship
https://twitter.com/annietrev/status/1450937549929779205?s=20
Over time the EU will simply become a less important place, it's already started and the French outbursts against the UK and other countries is their realisation of how irrelevant they are becoming. The EU diminishes the countries inside it, it isn't a force multiplier, it's a detractor.
Imagine if the Remoaners had succeeded in cancelling the 2016 referendum. Britain would either have toppled into civil strife, or we would have elected our own Zemmour
I think my surgery will be offering both when people turn up for their booster COVID doses.
One advantage to communcicate is that this year's flu jab is not severe in its impact. There was one 4 or 5 years ago that seemed to knock a lot of people out for about a week.
He fully supports freedom of movement and would never push for a Frexit .
The solution going forwards though isn't trust, it is who can wield the power in the negotiations and what I have always said for years now has been revealed to be true: The EU has no choice but to agree a deal to our terms, because they can't force an alternative and no deal is worse for them than signing a deal.
They're not prepared to have a border in Ireland, and they can't compel us to compromise, so they need a deal more than we do. As I said three years ago. They were bluffing then, and we've called their bluff.