FWIW it seems to me the whole asylum/migration stuff, while of course there are real things to say (like our population going up 8 million since 2002 while many countries have stayed quite static), is really a proxy for something else.
That something else is the sense that almost no important government/state/state-funded institutions are run with ordinary basic competence. So that every crisis is adding to an already improperly managed country.
I think there is a lot of truth in this. But I'd say it goes beyond government, even. So much stuff in this country just doesn't seem to work very well.
Yes. State management is only the start. The image of the UK might once have been a friendly policeman and bowler hatted blokes going to work reading the Times, but the image of the UK now is things like waiting for hours on a phone line, at your expense, failing to be able to do anything to put right the mistakes of the organisation you cannot contact, both state and private.
Competence is infinitely more significant than policy at the moment.
I don't think the Tories / Tory supporters recognise or accept the general acceptance of things being largely broken. Its always whataboutery. Let me give you one example - trains. In prime red wall territory trains have largely stopped running. Somewhere like Grimsby is down to a handful of trains a day on some days, with Transpennine Express simply cancelling everything and leaving 12 hour gaps between services.
The cause of this is complicated - an onerous franchise agreement, a moron MD now departed, and right now a franchise that the DfT won't take full control of (so as not to be responsible) but also one where there is no sanction for the operator and no ability to fix the resource issues. Similar with Northern and Avanti.
So it's broken, nobody is doing anything to fix it, and buck-passing is policy. For all the people who can't get GP appointments or a dentist, this is normal. Saying "an appointment in 14 days" cements the floor of mediocrity, a system that simply has ceased functioning.
Incidentally, I dont think it is whataboutery at all.
It is more different strokes for different folks. Down here in my part of Dorset, the train system works really well. I don't drive - and even if I did, couldn't get to London or any major city faster than by train.
What is broken for some isn't for others - the consequence is that those who don't have a problem are baffled by the need for them to pay ever higher taxes for the bits that are broken, that largely don't affect them.
Its the same for education and health, IMO. I have private healthcare - and if I need to see a GP I fork out £70 or whatever when I'm in town. One of the reasons I favour the proposal (Australian system, I believe?) where those over a certain income threshold pay for insurance or pay a tax surcharge.
If you're happy to take at face value the lived experience and complaints of people not in Dorset with private healthcare then fine. But that isn't most Tories. They tend to insist that everything is fine despite people's lived experiences - and outside your bubble things are pretty shit, hence the massive poll shift.
In the run up to Brexit, whilst things were increasingly crap, most voters believed the politicians were trying. Then that dam broke, and places that elected Labour since the Danelaw said "things are shit and you're doing nothing but blame others".
That epiphany has happened again, but this time against the Tories. Brexit was supposed to fix things and has made things worse. Services are significantly worse for most people vs a decade ago. And rather than believing the government are trying to fix them, they've gone "things are shit and you're doing nothing but blame others"
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
There is no "best" Brexit
Varying degrees of shit, all the way down...
And yet all of them were better than voting to leave and not.
So voting not to leave would have been quite clever, then.
Perhaps. But then the blame needs to go entirely on the completely useless Remain campaign.
Starmer is going to start out with a joke about I'm a Celebrity and relate it to Rishi/the Cons.
I'd like to know what Starmer's solution is to the migration crisis. It's a pity it isn't Leader of the Opposition questions
The answer should be fairly simple to give. Take the bloody thing seriously and resource it properly. Clear the backlog, invest in infrastructure, work more closely with France etc. Stop playing political games and grow up. But that’s for Yvette Cooper to say, as she has - pretty much - been saying.
Great idea. What would they cut to pay for it?
Borrow money to pay for it. The investment will pay for itself fairly quickly because people waiting for asylum decisions costs us lots of money, whereas it's cheap to deport people, and those granted asylum can start contributing to the economy.
Ah, the Gordon Brown solution.
Government borrowing is just deferred taxation - "borrow money to pay for it" is not an answer to the question "how do you pay for X".
If I'm a company and I invest in some new tech that speeds up my manufacturing process, then that investment pays for itself. It is clearly possible, in some circumstances, for investment, money spent now, to save you money in the long term. This is, indeed, the entire basis of our capitalist economy.
Why should it be any different for government? It must, clearly, be possible for government to invest in such a way that it saves money in the long term. That doesn't mean that every decision to do so will be correct, but to simply rule out any possibility of government investment leading to savings is just nonsense.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
Theresa May's deal failed to go through parliament because of Remainers who thought Brexit could be stopped.
And? We left didn't we? Driver is talking about remainers who are preventing that being a success. How?
It's all the tofu they eat, it gives them superhuman powers.
Starmer is going to start out with a joke about I'm a Celebrity and relate it to Rishi/the Cons.
I'd like to know what Starmer's solution is to the migration crisis. It's a pity it isn't Leader of the Opposition questions
The answer should be fairly simple to give. Take the bloody thing seriously and resource it properly. Clear the backlog, invest in infrastructure, work more closely with France etc. Stop playing political games and grow up. But that’s for Yvette Cooper to say, as she has - pretty much - been saying.
Great idea. What would they cut to pay for it?
Borrow money to pay for it. The investment will pay for itself fairly quickly because people waiting for asylum decisions costs us lots of money, whereas it's cheap to deport people, and those granted asylum can start contributing to the economy.
Cheap to deport people?
Figure 4 shows that among the top 10 nationalities leaving detention in the year ending June 2022, in most cases the individual was bailed. Of the top 10, only Albanian, Romanian and Polish nationals saw notable numbers returned to their country of origin.
...
In the year ending March 2022, there were 3,231 enforced returns, 55% fewer than in 2019 pre-pandemic (7,198). The vast majority of enforced returns in the latest year were of Foreign National Offenders (FNOs) and 51% were EU nationals.
Not costed, but given diseconomies of lack of scale I would guess shipping a measly 3k people to places they don't wanna go is, what, £100,000 a head inc overheads?
"The Home Office reported in 2013 that the average cost of a voluntary return was £1,000, compared to £15,000 for an enforced return (Home Office, 2013, p. 4)."
Rishi is a flippity floppity u turner. The opposition and electorate will smell weakness.
The COP flip flop is not a flip flop if he came out with this decision and tweet in first place, he didn’t because he is so insecure and frightened of his party’s factions and the right wing in party and media, who are nothing more than a mouse that roars.
I’m not saying he’s remotely as lazy, talentless, useless and unlikeable as Boris and Truss, he is better than all the rest, but what does that mean for Tory fortunes if he can’t find the courage of his own convictions? It means he is struggling to be the big beast the Tory jungle currently needs.
I’m saying he needs to find a backbone and quick, or he’s going to lose the dressing room. You know what I’m saying. Letting Leaky Sue say what she likes and then standing by her in PMQs today he’s looking more like the hostage in there not the leader.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
Oh please, this is nonsense. May immediately pivoted to a hard Brexit and whipped her party to vote down any compromise.
May had to do that because the FBPE element was already set on reversal. By the time of the Lancaster House speech (seven months after the referendum) it was already clear that getting any Brexit through would be difficult. Then after the 2017 election, Labour set about making it impossible, despite their manifesto pledge without which they wouldn't have been able to get a hung parliament even after May's social care policy.
It's really important to understand who the villain of the piece is here, because of the job now held by the ringleader.
If May had embraced a milder form of Brexit that Labour supported it would have sailed through parliament. Or at the very least, she would have called Labour's bluff if - as you believe - they were set on thwarting Brexit regardless. So why didn't she do that?
She felt she couldn't. She had to get something through that could get close to unanimous support within her own party because she couldn't rely on anything outside it. And she knew that (as transpired) if she didn't get anything through she wouldn't be PM for long.
By the time of Lancaster House there should have had been several months of an EEA/EFTA campaign - but Remainers were too busy trying to overturn the result so they left the field to Leavers.
Starmer is going to start out with a joke about I'm a Celebrity and relate it to Rishi/the Cons.
I'd like to know what Starmer's solution is to the migration crisis. It's a pity it isn't Leader of the Opposition questions
The answer should be fairly simple to give. Take the bloody thing seriously and resource it properly. Clear the backlog, invest in infrastructure, work more closely with France etc. Stop playing political games and grow up. But that’s for Yvette Cooper to say, as she has - pretty much - been saying.
Great idea. What would they cut to pay for it?
Borrow money to pay for it. The investment will pay for itself fairly quickly because people waiting for asylum decisions costs us lots of money, whereas it's cheap to deport people, and those granted asylum can start contributing to the economy.
Cheap to deport people?
Figure 4 shows that among the top 10 nationalities leaving detention in the year ending June 2022, in most cases the individual was bailed. Of the top 10, only Albanian, Romanian and Polish nationals saw notable numbers returned to their country of origin.
...
In the year ending March 2022, there were 3,231 enforced returns, 55% fewer than in 2019 pre-pandemic (7,198). The vast majority of enforced returns in the latest year were of Foreign National Offenders (FNOs) and 51% were EU nationals.
Not costed, but given diseconomies of lack of scale I would guess shipping a measly 3k people to places they don't wanna go is, what, £100,000 a head inc overheads?
"The Home Office reported in 2013 that the average cost of a voluntary return was £1,000, compared to £15,000 for an enforced return (Home Office, 2013, p. 4)."
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
There is no "best" Brexit
Varying degrees of shit, all the way down...
And yet all of them were better than voting to leave and not.
So voting not to leave would have been quite clever, then.
Perhaps. But then the blame needs to go entirely on the completely useless Remain campaign.
Sure, and the blame for my severe wife-beating habit rests entirely with her. She makes me do it.
On the thread header, complete horse doings. Suffolk West is the 37th safest Tory seat. Even Kissy Hancock could defend it. If MPs expect to lose seats like this, the Tories are heading for zero.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
Oh please, this is nonsense. May immediately pivoted to a hard Brexit and whipped her party to vote down any compromise.
May had to do that because the FBPE element was already set on reversal. By the time of the Lancaster House speech (seven months after the referendum) it was already clear that getting any Brexit through would be difficult. Then after the 2017 election, Labour set about making it impossible, despite their manifesto pledge without which they wouldn't have been able to get a hung parliament even after May's social care policy.
It's really important to understand who the villain of the piece is here, because of the job now held by the ringleader.
Worth pointing out that the "FBPE element" were the MPs voted for in the 2017 General Election. Whilst I agree that parliament was chaotic, you can't say it was undemocratic - it was quite literally the latest opinion as voted for by the public.
As the Tories just whipped their MPs on pain of losing the whip to vote against a manifesto pledge, we can discard the notion that manifestos are relevant. We have a representative democracy. We vote in people who vote as they see fit. If we don't like how they vote we choose someone else. Can't describe them doing their job as "undemocratic" because you don't like how they vote.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
Brexit will never be settled.
The Eurosceptic shits made life hell from Macmillan to Cameron. Now the boot is on the other foot and we’re going to kick and kick and kick the shits in the goolies til the cows come home.
(I can mix some more metaphors if you like.)
From Sweden?
If I held the opposite opinion, would my location undermine that opinion?
Starmer is going to start out with a joke about I'm a Celebrity and relate it to Rishi/the Cons.
I'd like to know what Starmer's solution is to the migration crisis. It's a pity it isn't Leader of the Opposition questions
The answer should be fairly simple to give. Take the bloody thing seriously and resource it properly. Clear the backlog, invest in infrastructure, work more closely with France etc. Stop playing political games and grow up. But that’s for Yvette Cooper to say, as she has - pretty much - been saying.
Great idea. What would they cut to pay for it?
Borrow money to pay for it. The investment will pay for itself fairly quickly because people waiting for asylum decisions costs us lots of money, whereas it's cheap to deport people, and those granted asylum can start contributing to the economy.
Ah, the Gordon Brown solution.
Government borrowing is just deferred taxation - "borrow money to pay for it" is not an answer to the question "how do you pay for X".
If I'm a company and I invest in some new tech that speeds up my manufacturing process, then that investment pays for itself. It is clearly possible, in some circumstances, for investment, money spent now, to save you money in the long term. This is, indeed, the entire basis of our capitalist economy.
Why should it be any different for government? It must, clearly, be possible for government to invest in such a way that it saves money in the long term. That doesn't mean that every decision to do so will be correct, but to simply rule out any possibility of government investment leading to savings is just nonsense.
We don't even need to think of hypothetical companies to justify it.
If we're paying billions to put people up in hotels, while also preventing them from working, then spending money now on speeding up the process is a clear win*
*unless it's in your interest for the asylum system to appear to be a "crisis".
Rishi is a flippity floppity u turner. The opposition and electorate will smell weakness.
The COP flip flop is not a flip flop if he came out with this decision and tweet in first place, he didn’t because he is so insecure and frightened of his party’s factions and the right wing in party and media, who are nothing more than a mouse that roars.
I’m not saying he’s remotely as lazy, talentless, useless and unlikeable as Boris and Truss, he is better than all the rest, but what does that mean for Tory fortunes if he can’t find the courage of his own convictions? It means he is struggling to be the big beast the Tory jungle currently needs.
I’m saying he needs to find a backbone and quick, or he’s going to lose the dressing room. You know what I’m saying. Letting Leaky Sue say what she likes and then standing by her in PMQs today he’s looking more like the hostage in there not the leader.
Starmer is going to start out with a joke about I'm a Celebrity and relate it to Rishi/the Cons.
I'd like to know what Starmer's solution is to the migration crisis. It's a pity it isn't Leader of the Opposition questions
The answer should be fairly simple to give. Take the bloody thing seriously and resource it properly. Clear the backlog, invest in infrastructure, work more closely with France etc. Stop playing political games and grow up. But that’s for Yvette Cooper to say, as she has - pretty much - been saying.
Great idea. What would they cut to pay for it?
Borrow money to pay for it. The investment will pay for itself fairly quickly because people waiting for asylum decisions costs us lots of money, whereas it's cheap to deport people, and those granted asylum can start contributing to the economy.
Ah, the Gordon Brown solution.
Government borrowing is just deferred taxation - "borrow money to pay for it" is not an answer to the question "how do you pay for X".
We are borrowing money already and spending £more for a worse solution.
TimS suggested we needed to spend more than we are now, which is why I asked how to pay for it.
We can't simultaneously need to spend more and be spending more than we could.
We *are* spending more. Whatever the operational budget was for the Home Office for this month, we're now over that mopping up the mess at Manston. And I assume provisioning for the court cases to come because of Manston.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
Oh please, this is nonsense. May immediately pivoted to a hard Brexit and whipped her party to vote down any compromise.
May had to do that because the FBPE element was already set on reversal. By the time of the Lancaster House speech (seven months after the referendum) it was already clear that getting any Brexit through would be difficult. Then after the 2017 election, Labour set about making it impossible, despite their manifesto pledge without which they wouldn't have been able to get a hung parliament even after May's social care policy.
It's really important to understand who the villain of the piece is here, because of the job now held by the ringleader.
If May had embraced a milder form of Brexit that Labour supported it would have sailed through parliament. Or at the very least, she would have called Labour's bluff if - as you believe - they were set on thwarting Brexit regardless. So why didn't she do that?
How well I remember those halcyon days on PB when Corbyn was being blamed for Leave winning because he was a Brexiteer in his heart and hadn't motivated his party or himself enough to campaign for Remain. Now I learn he's also to blame for fucking up Brexit. What with inspiring otherwise sane people to vote for the FLSOJ, the absolute boy has had a helluva lot of influence on British public life.
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
There is no "best" Brexit
Varying degrees of shit, all the way down...
And yet all of them were better than voting to leave and not.
So voting not to leave would have been quite clever, then.
Perhaps. But then the blame needs to go entirely on the completely useless Remain campaign.
Well that is true, but I'm not sure where that gets us. There is justification generally for looking at where stuff went wrong to ensure you don't repeat your failures and I guess we all feel bitter about stuff we lose when we think we should have won, but holding onto that bitterness doesn't do anyone any favours. We need to let go and move on. It's done. And on the specific of Brexit we have left and need to make the best of it.
That is why (re previous discussions with you) I say Brexit is not 'Done' and you say it is. We have 'Left', but it isn't 'Done' and it isn't done by a long way. There is a lot to sort out. Leavers need to accept that so that everyone can tie up all the loose ends. I think Steve Baker recently commented positively about that. Credit to him for doing so.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
Oh please, this is nonsense. May immediately pivoted to a hard Brexit and whipped her party to vote down any compromise.
May had to do that because the FBPE element was already set on reversal. By the time of the Lancaster House speech (seven months after the referendum) it was already clear that getting any Brexit through would be difficult. Then after the 2017 election, Labour set about making it impossible, despite their manifesto pledge without which they wouldn't have been able to get a hung parliament even after May's social care policy.
It's really important to understand who the villain of the piece is here, because of the job now held by the ringleader.
If May had embraced a milder form of Brexit that Labour supported it would have sailed through parliament. Or at the very least, she would have called Labour's bluff if - as you believe - they were set on thwarting Brexit regardless. So why didn't she do that?
She felt she couldn't. She had to get something through that could get close to unanimous support within her own party because she couldn't rely on anything outside it. And she knew that (as transpired) if she didn't get anything through she wouldn't be PM for long.
By the time of Lancaster House there should have had been several months of an EEA/EFTA campaign - but Remainers were too busy trying to overturn the result so they left the field to Leavers.
Classic victim blaming. Very similar to "if she hadn't worn a short skirt....."
I posted that they used to have these ages ago. Making a comeback! I think I had one once and it wasn't that bad. It was like an ordinary pizza with cannelloni beans on it.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
Oh please, this is nonsense. May immediately pivoted to a hard Brexit and whipped her party to vote down any compromise.
May had to do that because the FBPE element was already set on reversal. By the time of the Lancaster House speech (seven months after the referendum) it was already clear that getting any Brexit through would be difficult. Then after the 2017 election, Labour set about making it impossible, despite their manifesto pledge without which they wouldn't have been able to get a hung parliament even after May's social care policy.
It's really important to understand who the villain of the piece is here, because of the job now held by the ringleader.
If May had embraced a milder form of Brexit that Labour supported it would have sailed through parliament. Or at the very least, she would have called Labour's bluff if - as you believe - they were set on thwarting Brexit regardless. So why didn't she do that?
How well I remember those halcyon days on PB when Corbyn was being blamed for Leave winning because he was a Brexiteer in his heart and hadn't motivated his party or himself enough to campaign for Remain. Now I learn he's also to blame for fucking up Brexit. What with inspiring otherwise sane people to vote for the FLSOJ, the absolute boy has had a helluva lot of influence on British public life.
There is plenty of blame to go round. Certainly enough for him not to go hungry.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
Oh please, this is nonsense. May immediately pivoted to a hard Brexit and whipped her party to vote down any compromise.
May had to do that because the FBPE element was already set on reversal. By the time of the Lancaster House speech (seven months after the referendum) it was already clear that getting any Brexit through would be difficult. Then after the 2017 election, Labour set about making it impossible, despite their manifesto pledge without which they wouldn't have been able to get a hung parliament even after May's social care policy.
It's really important to understand who the villain of the piece is here, because of the job now held by the ringleader.
If May had embraced a milder form of Brexit that Labour supported it would have sailed through parliament. Or at the very least, she would have called Labour's bluff if - as you believe - they were set on thwarting Brexit regardless. So why didn't she do that?
She felt she couldn't. She had to get something through that could get close to unanimous support within her own party because she couldn't rely on anything outside it. And she knew that (as transpired) if she didn't get anything through she wouldn't be PM for long.
By the time of Lancaster House there should have had been several months of an EEA/EFTA campaign - but Remainers were too busy trying to overturn the result so they left the field to Leavers.
She could have tested Labour and shown them up to be the wreckers you think they were by supporting a softer version of Brexit and whipping her party to support it. Personally I have no doubt that most Labour MPs would have voted for it, plus enough Tories to get it through easily. So why didn't May go down that route? If she wasn't prepared to ask her party to support a version of Brexit they didn't like, why do you think Labour should have done it?
Rishi is a flippity floppity u turner. The opposition and electorate will smell weakness.
The COP flip flop is not a flip flop if he came out with this decision and tweet in first place, he didn’t because he is so insecure and frightened of his party’s factions and the right wing in party and media, who are nothing more than a mouse that roars.
I’m not saying he’s remotely as lazy, talentless, useless and unlikeable as Boris and Truss, he is better than all the rest, but what does that mean for Tory fortunes if he can’t find the courage of his own convictions? It means he is struggling to be the big beast the Tory jungle currently needs.
I’m saying he needs to find a backbone and quick, or he’s going to lose the dressing room. You know what I’m saying. Letting Leaky Sue say what she likes and then standing by her in PMQs today he’s looking more like the hostage in there not the leader.
He needs to dare them to try and bring him down, they'll scarper like scared kids breaking into an alleged haunted house the first time a dog barks.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
I don't agree, but I accept that argument. I like your last sentence. Nicely put, but of course whatever Brexit we had that would have been true.
But then the blame needs to go entirely on the completely useless Remain campaign.
Fuck off
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, advocated it, campaigned for it and voted for it
The Conservatives own Brexit. Why are they now attempting to suggest "it was nothing to do with us guv"? Is there a problem with our having left the EU? We should be told.
FWIW it seems to me the whole asylum/migration stuff, while of course there are real things to say (like our population going up 8 million since 2002 while many countries have stayed quite static), is really a proxy for something else.
That something else is the sense that almost no important government/state/state-funded institutions are run with ordinary basic competence. So that every crisis is adding to an already improperly managed country.
I think there is a lot of truth in this. But I'd say it goes beyond government, even. So much stuff in this country just doesn't seem to work very well.
Yes. State management is only the start. The image of the UK might once have been a friendly policeman and bowler hatted blokes going to work reading the Times, but the image of the UK now is things like waiting for hours on a phone line, at your expense, failing to be able to do anything to put right the mistakes of the organisation you cannot contact, both state and private.
Competence is infinitely more significant than policy at the moment.
I don't think the Tories / Tory supporters recognise or accept the general acceptance of things being largely broken. Its always whataboutery. Let me give you one example - trains. In prime red wall territory trains have largely stopped running. Somewhere like Grimsby is down to a handful of trains a day on some days, with Transpennine Express simply cancelling everything and leaving 12 hour gaps between services.
The cause of this is complicated - an onerous franchise agreement, a moron MD now departed, and right now a franchise that the DfT won't take full control of (so as not to be responsible) but also one where there is no sanction for the operator and no ability to fix the resource issues. Similar with Northern and Avanti.
So it's broken, nobody is doing anything to fix it, and buck-passing is policy. For all the people who can't get GP appointments or a dentist, this is normal. Saying "an appointment in 14 days" cements the floor of mediocrity, a system that simply has ceased functioning.
I've replied already on my long held beef that the running of public services hasn't been remotely on Tory radar. I've riffed on this theme ever since Cameron wrote to Oxford County Council to ask "why is everything broken", which was probably my first year posting on PB, and got pretty widespread incredulity then. I think I've been proven right.
Anyway, I couldn't pass up on a whinge about TPExpress and, never mind the franchise, their shitshow seems to First corporate policy wherever they operate from Penzance to Glasgow. I'm on the core, with 6 tph each way as the full service, so lucky compared with the edges, but even so. The playbook:
1. Still run a COVID emergency timetable - removing 2 of the 4 fast tph in each direction 2. Run around 10-15% last minute scheduled cancellations of the reduced service (by 10pm.prrvious night) 3. Suffer a similar rate of unplanned cancellations 4. Use weekend works as the excuse to run a skeleton service, 1 tph total in core hours (like on a strike day). So, for instance, 2 weekends ago Piccadilly- Stalybridge was being worked on, work that needn't have affected the 2 tph via Victoria to Liverpool or Airport in any way. Yet the whole service was reduced to 1tph Victoria-York only. 5. Skeleton adjacent day services to strikes. 6. Refuse to sell tickets - on national rail, Trainline etc. the only tickets made available are Rovers, so HUD-MAN will display as costing £70 rather than the usual £16.30 off peak return. The normal fare is available walk up.
It is nothing short of a systematic attempt to run as few trains as possible.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
Oh please, this is nonsense. May immediately pivoted to a hard Brexit and whipped her party to vote down any compromise.
May had to do that because the FBPE element was already set on reversal. By the time of the Lancaster House speech (seven months after the referendum) it was already clear that getting any Brexit through would be difficult. Then after the 2017 election, Labour set about making it impossible, despite their manifesto pledge without which they wouldn't have been able to get a hung parliament even after May's social care policy.
It's really important to understand who the villain of the piece is here, because of the job now held by the ringleader.
If May had embraced a milder form of Brexit that Labour supported it would have sailed through parliament. Or at the very least, she would have called Labour's bluff if - as you believe - they were set on thwarting Brexit regardless. So why didn't she do that?
How well I remember those halcyon days on PB when Corbyn was being blamed for Leave winning because he was a Brexiteer in his heart and hadn't motivated his party or himself enough to campaign for Remain. Now I learn he's also to blame for fucking up Brexit. What with inspiring otherwise sane people to vote for the FLSOJ, the absolute boy has had a helluva lot of influence on British public life.
There is plenty of blame to go round. Certainly enough for him not to go hungry.
No doubt, but possibly even more blame avoiding.
I think I've said it before but I think Sturgeon made a mistake cuddling up to the FBPE crowd and by default attempting to thwart the democratic decision of English voters. There ya go, there's a bit of blame taking from me (on behalf of my politics if not me personally).
But then the blame needs to go entirely on the completely useless Remain campaign.
Fuck off
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, advocated it, campaigned for it and voted for it
Actually, what people call a democratic election was all shaped by remainers as a remain leave a project fear would get us voting remain “settled for a generation, so f o farage” (not that it would have worked quite like that even with a remain win) - the EU didn’t stipulate in or out, it was remainers decision not to open up debate and election to be democratic enough to open up debate of all the different things we could go back to EU and negotiate with - it was remainers secretly negotiating a so called better deal for us, and then trying to bounce us and fear us into saying remain - yes it was a type of democratic vote, but not all that democratic or fair for voters if we couldn’t say what we think Brexit means and have politicians negotiating on our behalf with that not their behalf, we had to accept someone else’s Brexit means Brexit at the end of the day not have that much say or opinion on it. You can cling to it was democratic, but it was still arse about tit type of democratic with plenty of not really democratic things going on about it.
Although I was old enough to vote in it, I didn’t I have to be open about here, I couldn’t decide at the time the best or least worst option, I come by my opinion above in retrospect.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
Oh please, this is nonsense. May immediately pivoted to a hard Brexit and whipped her party to vote down any compromise.
May had to do that because the FBPE element was already set on reversal. By the time of the Lancaster House speech (seven months after the referendum) it was already clear that getting any Brexit through would be difficult. Then after the 2017 election, Labour set about making it impossible, despite their manifesto pledge without which they wouldn't have been able to get a hung parliament even after May's social care policy.
It's really important to understand who the villain of the piece is here, because of the job now held by the ringleader.
Worth pointing out that the "FBPE element" were the MPs voted for in the 2017 General Election. Whilst I agree that parliament was chaotic, you can't say it was undemocratic - it was quite literally the latest opinion as voted for by the public.
Voted for in the 2017 General Election in the case of Labour MPs specifically on the basis of a pledge to uphold the referendum result, without which they wouldn't have got a hung parliament, and once they did get a hung parliament they immediately ignored the pledge and started obstructionism, led by the then Shadow Brexit Secretary.
FWIW it seems to me the whole asylum/migration stuff, while of course there are real things to say (like our population going up 8 million since 2002 while many countries have stayed quite static), is really a proxy for something else.
That something else is the sense that almost no important government/state/state-funded institutions are run with ordinary basic competence. So that every crisis is adding to an already improperly managed country.
I think there is a lot of truth in this. But I'd say it goes beyond government, even. So much stuff in this country just doesn't seem to work very well.
Yes. State management is only the start. The image of the UK might once have been a friendly policeman and bowler hatted blokes going to work reading the Times, but the image of the UK now is things like waiting for hours on a phone line, at your expense, failing to be able to do anything to put right the mistakes of the organisation you cannot contact, both state and private.
Competence is infinitely more significant than policy at the moment.
I don't think the Tories / Tory supporters recognise or accept the general acceptance of things being largely broken. Its always whataboutery. Let me give you one example - trains. In prime red wall territory trains have largely stopped running. Somewhere like Grimsby is down to a handful of trains a day on some days, with Transpennine Express simply cancelling everything and leaving 12 hour gaps between services.
The cause of this is complicated - an onerous franchise agreement, a moron MD now departed, and right now a franchise that the DfT won't take full control of (so as not to be responsible) but also one where there is no sanction for the operator and no ability to fix the resource issues. Similar with Northern and Avanti.
So it's broken, nobody is doing anything to fix it, and buck-passing is policy. For all the people who can't get GP appointments or a dentist, this is normal. Saying "an appointment in 14 days" cements the floor of mediocrity, a system that simply has ceased functioning.
Incidentally, I dont think it is whataboutery at all.
It is more different strokes for different folks. Down here in my part of Dorset, the train system works really well. I don't drive - and even if I did, couldn't get to London or any major city faster than by train.
What is broken for some isn't for others - the consequence is that those who don't have a problem are baffled by the need for them to pay ever higher taxes for the bits that are broken, that largely don't affect them.
Its the same for education and health, IMO. I have private healthcare - and if I need to see a GP I fork out £70 or whatever when I'm in town. One of the reasons I favour the proposal (Australian system, I believe?) where those over a certain income threshold pay for insurance or pay a tax surcharge.
If you're happy to take at face value the lived experience and complaints of people not in Dorset with private healthcare then fine. But that isn't most Tories. They tend to insist that everything is fine despite people's lived experiences - and outside your bubble things are pretty shit, hence the massive poll shift.
In the run up to Brexit, whilst things were increasingly crap, most voters believed the politicians were trying. Then that dam broke, and places that elected Labour since the Danelaw said "things are shit and you're doing nothing but blame others".
That epiphany has happened again, but this time against the Tories. Brexit was supposed to fix things and has made things worse. Services are significantly worse for most people vs a decade ago. And rather than believing the government are trying to fix them, they've gone "things are shit and you're doing nothing but blame others"
I suspect the vast majority of voters (Tory and otherwise) don't think on such terms. People vote according to their own experiences, not the reported experiences of others.
Rishi is a flippity floppity u turner. The opposition and electorate will smell weakness.
The COP flip flop is not a flip flop if he came out with this decision and tweet in first place, he didn’t because he is so insecure and frightened of his party’s factions and the right wing in party and media, who are nothing more than a mouse that roars.
I’m not saying he’s remotely as lazy, talentless, useless and unlikeable as Boris and Truss, he is better than all the rest, but what does that mean for Tory fortunes if he can’t find the courage of his own convictions? It means he is struggling to be the big beast the Tory jungle currently needs.
It's just a question of finding the right camera angle to make the tiger leaping at his throat look smaller than Sunak.
FWIW it seems to me the whole asylum/migration stuff, while of course there are real things to say (like our population going up 8 million since 2002 while many countries have stayed quite static), is really a proxy for something else.
That something else is the sense that almost no important government/state/state-funded institutions are run with ordinary basic competence. So that every crisis is adding to an already improperly managed country.
I think there is a lot of truth in this. But I'd say it goes beyond government, even. So much stuff in this country just doesn't seem to work very well.
Yes. State management is only the start. The image of the UK might once have been a friendly policeman and bowler hatted blokes going to work reading the Times, but the image of the UK now is things like waiting for hours on a phone line, at your expense, failing to be able to do anything to put right the mistakes of the organisation you cannot contact, both state and private.
Competence is infinitely more significant than policy at the moment.
I don't think the Tories / Tory supporters recognise or accept the general acceptance of things being largely broken. Its always whataboutery. Let me give you one example - trains. In prime red wall territory trains have largely stopped running. Somewhere like Grimsby is down to a handful of trains a day on some days, with Transpennine Express simply cancelling everything and leaving 12 hour gaps between services.
The cause of this is complicated - an onerous franchise agreement, a moron MD now departed, and right now a franchise that the DfT won't take full control of (so as not to be responsible) but also one where there is no sanction for the operator and no ability to fix the resource issues. Similar with Northern and Avanti.
So it's broken, nobody is doing anything to fix it, and buck-passing is policy. For all the people who can't get GP appointments or a dentist, this is normal. Saying "an appointment in 14 days" cements the floor of mediocrity, a system that simply has ceased functioning.
I've replied already on my long held beef that the running of public services hasn't been remotely on Tory radar. I've riffed on this theme ever since Cameron wrote to Oxford County Council to ask "why is everything broken", which was probably my first year posting on PB, and got pretty widespread incredulity then. I think I've been proven right.
Anyway, I couldn't pass up on a whinge about TPExpress and, never mind the franchise, their shitshow seems to First corporate policy wherever they operate from Penzance to Glasgow. I'm on the core, with 6 tph each way as the full service, so lucky compared with the edges, but even so. The playbook:
1. Still run a COVID emergency timetable - removing 2 of the 4 fast tph in each direction 2. Run around 10-15% last minute scheduled cancellations of the reduced service (by 10pm.prrvious night) 3. Suffer a similar rate of unplanned cancellations 4. Use weekend works as the excuse to run a skeleton service, 1 tph total in core hours (like on a strike day). So, for instance, 2 weekends ago Piccadilly- Stalybridge was being worked on, work that needn't have affected the 2 tph via Victoria to Liverpool or Airport in any way. Yet the whole service was reduced to 1tph Victoria-York only. 5. Skeleton adjacent day services to strikes. 6. Refuse to sell tickets - on national rail, Trainline etc. the only tickets made available are Rovers, so HUD-MAN will display as costing £70 rather than the usual £16.30 off peak return. The normal fare is available walk up.
It is nothing short of a systematic attempt to run as few trains as possible.
AIUI the DfT are happy for the franchise to remain broken because it isn't them to blame. Ludicrous decisions were made by the franchise - 4 different incompatible types of rolling stock, remove driver route knowledge so that you need 4 drivers to go Liverpool to Newcastle, impose draconian changes to rostas which ensure you have no goodwill.
What that means is that you end up with a planned driver changes in Manchester and Leeds and York, there is no driver in Leeds so cancel the whole train. Repeat that with different people missing through the day and most trains are cancelled. Meanwhile empty crew training runs are the only thing moving as DfT have dictated that all focus must be on the coming December timetable change.
Punters just need a train to run. The government not only doesn't care but is at the core of the problem. Yet even Tory MPs in places like Grimsby think everything is hunky dory.
Rishi is a flippity floppity u turner. The opposition and electorate will smell weakness.
The COP flip flop is not a flip flop if he came out with this decision and tweet in first place, he didn’t because he is so insecure and frightened of his party’s factions and the right wing in party and media, who are nothing more than a mouse that roars.
I’m not saying he’s remotely as lazy, talentless, useless and unlikeable as Boris and Truss, he is better than all the rest, but what does that mean for Tory fortunes if he can’t find the courage of his own convictions? It means he is struggling to be the big beast the Tory jungle currently needs.
It's just a question of finding the right camera angle to make the tiger leaping at his throat look smaller than Sunak.
I was thinking of the Wizard of Oz actually. Needing a lion, getting a scaredy-cat.
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
There is no "best" Brexit
Varying degrees of shit, all the way down...
And yet all of them were better than voting to leave and not.
So voting not to leave would have been quite clever, then.
Perhaps. But then the blame needs to go entirely on the completely useless Remain campaign.
Well that is true, but I'm not sure where that gets us. There is justification generally for looking at where stuff went wrong to ensure you don't repeat your failures and I guess we all feel bitter about stuff we lose when we think we should have won, but holding onto that bitterness doesn't do anyone any favours. We need to let go and move on. It's done. And on the specific of Brexit we have left and need to make the best of it.
That is why (re previous discussions with you) I say Brexit is not 'Done' and you say it is. We have 'Left', but it isn't 'Done' and it isn't done by a long way. There is a lot to sort out. Leavers need to accept that so that everyone can tie up all the loose ends. I think Steve Baker recently commented positively about that. Credit to him for doing so.
I agree with pretty much all of that (and thanks for accepting my point and not making a gratuitously offensive false analogy unlike several others in the thread).
That there are loose ends to tie up isn't in dispute - the argument about whether Brexit is "done" or not only arises because Brexit haters (a small but very noisy subset of Remainers) think it's in their interest to cast Boris's 2019 slogan as not delivered on.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
Brexit will never be settled.
The Eurosceptic shits made life hell from Macmillan to Cameron. Now the boot is on the other foot and we’re going to kick and kick and kick the shits in the goolies til the cows come home.
(I can mix some more metaphors if you like.)
From Sweden?
If I held the opposite opinion, would my location undermine that opinion?
No one needs to try to undermine your opinion. I was simply pointing out that you achieve it yourself every time you rail against the British government.
Off-topic: Stirling council in Scotland are planning to install surveillance kit in 50000 houses (and there are 94000 people in the administrative district, so that's basically every single home) so they can get early information regarding "damp, mould, ventilation, and any other potential issues". As far as the underclass go, this will help the council "as a landlord (to) take intelligence-led decisions to target capital investment programmes at those properties."
Intelligence-led targeting. K'pow! Besuited po-faced freemasonic moneygrabbers at the council strike again! Into the modern battlesphere, going forward!
Probably if you actually live in social housing in Stirling and call them up about mould, they'll either play an automated message to you saying "Your call is important to us" until you hang up or else they'll talk to you as if you're a nutter and dirty scrounger wannabe scammer for expecting them to do anything about it.
But bug everyone's house? They'll be in there like a shot.
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
There is no "best" Brexit
Varying degrees of shit, all the way down...
And yet all of them were better than voting to leave and not.
So voting not to leave would have been quite clever, then.
Perhaps. But then the blame needs to go entirely on the completely useless Remain campaign.
Well that is true, but I'm not sure where that gets us. There is justification generally for looking at where stuff went wrong to ensure you don't repeat your failures and I guess we all feel bitter about stuff we lose when we think we should have won, but holding onto that bitterness doesn't do anyone any favours. We need to let go and move on. It's done. And on the specific of Brexit we have left and need to make the best of it.
That is why (re previous discussions with you) I say Brexit is not 'Done' and you say it is. We have 'Left', but it isn't 'Done' and it isn't done by a long way. There is a lot to sort out. Leavers need to accept that so that everyone can tie up all the loose ends. I think Steve Baker recently commented positively about that. Credit to him for doing so.
I agree with pretty much all of that (and thanks for accepting my point and not making a gratuitously offensive false analogy unlike several others in the thread).
That there are loose ends to tie up isn't in dispute - the argument about whether Brexit is "done" or not only arises because Brexit haters (a small but very noisy subset of Remainers) think it's in their interest to cast Boris's 2019 slogan as not delivered on.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
Oh please, this is nonsense. May immediately pivoted to a hard Brexit and whipped her party to vote down any compromise.
May had to do that because the FBPE element was already set on reversal. By the time of the Lancaster House speech (seven months after the referendum) it was already clear that getting any Brexit through would be difficult. Then after the 2017 election, Labour set about making it impossible, despite their manifesto pledge without which they wouldn't have been able to get a hung parliament even after May's social care policy.
It's really important to understand who the villain of the piece is here, because of the job now held by the ringleader.
Worth pointing out that the "FBPE element" were the MPs voted for in the 2017 General Election. Whilst I agree that parliament was chaotic, you can't say it was undemocratic - it was quite literally the latest opinion as voted for by the public.
Voted for in the 2017 General Election in the case of Labour MPs specifically on the basis of a pledge to uphold the referendum result, without which they wouldn't have got a hung parliament, and once they did get a hung parliament they immediately ignored the pledge and started obstructionism, led by the then Shadow Brexit Secretary.
The 2017 manifesto promised to scrap the Conservatives' Brexit White Paper and replace with "fresh negotiating priorities" with strong emphasis on retaining the benefits of the single market and customs union. (this is cut and paste from the BBC summary of the manifesto). This is precisely what they tried to achieve during the parliament. May refused to compromise, even though the Labour version of Brexit likely had a majority and her version didn't. Why didn't she compromise to get Brexit through?
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
I don't agree, but I accept that argument. I like your last sentence. Nicely put, but of course whatever Brexit we had that would have been true.
I think there was a possibility in June 2016 for majority support for a soft Brexit, though probably not by January 2017. Certainly if Cameron had put EEA on the ballot paper in June 2016 it would have had landslide support, but we know why he didn't do that.
Rishi is a flippity floppity u turner. The opposition and electorate will smell weakness.
The COP flip flop is not a flip flop if he came out with this decision and tweet in first place, he didn’t because he is so insecure and frightened of his party’s factions and the right wing in party and media, who are nothing more than a mouse that roars.
I’m not saying he’s remotely as lazy, talentless, useless and unlikeable as Boris and Truss, he is better than all the rest, but what does that mean for Tory fortunes if he can’t find the courage of his own convictions? It means he is struggling to be the big beast the Tory jungle currently needs.
I’m saying he needs to find a backbone and quick, or he’s going to lose the dressing room. You know what I’m saying. Letting Leaky Sue say what she likes and then standing by her in PMQs today he’s looking more like the hostage in there not the leader.
He needs to dare them to try and bring him down, they'll scarper like scared kids breaking into an alleged haunted house the first time a dog barks.
And then he’ll be stronger for it. It’s just courage he needs.
Starmer is going to start out with a joke about I'm a Celebrity and relate it to Rishi/the Cons.
I'd like to know what Starmer's solution is to the migration crisis. It's a pity it isn't Leader of the Opposition questions
The answer should be fairly simple to give. Take the bloody thing seriously and resource it properly. Clear the backlog, invest in infrastructure, work more closely with France etc. Stop playing political games and grow up. But that’s for Yvette Cooper to say, as she has - pretty much - been saying.
Great idea. What would they cut to pay for it?
Borrow money to pay for it. The investment will pay for itself fairly quickly because people waiting for asylum decisions costs us lots of money, whereas it's cheap to deport people, and those granted asylum can start contributing to the economy.
Ah, the Gordon Brown solution.
Government borrowing is just deferred taxation - "borrow money to pay for it" is not an answer to the question "how do you pay for X".
We are borrowing money already and spending £more for a worse solution.
TimS suggested we needed to spend more than we are now, which is why I asked how to pay for it.
We can't simultaneously need to spend more and be spending more than we could.
We *are* spending more. Whatever the operational budget was for the Home Office for this month, we're now over that mopping up the mess at Manston. And I assume provisioning for the court cases to come because of Manston.
Them’s the breaks. I happen to think it’s possible to spend to save (I see daily evidence of the lack of that in cuts to HMRC), but if one doesn’t believe that then there’s a trade off: you either penny pinch on refugee policy and end up with a mess, suffering and backlogs; or you invest in it properly but have to face up to higher taxation or borrowing. Politics is priorities.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
I don't agree, but I accept that argument. I like your last sentence. Nicely put, but of course whatever Brexit we had that would have been true.
I think there was a possibility in June 2016 for majority support for a soft Brexit, though probably not by January 2017. Certainly if Cameron had put EEA on the ballot paper in June 2016 it would have had landslide support, but we know why he didn't do that.
There is no soft Brexit or hard Brexit - Brexit is leaving the EU. Thats it. What we do afterwards is soft or hard or stupid or whatever.
These Russian mobilised troops aren't going to be very motivated to fight. Seems almost like a mutiny.
Russian mobiks are demanding the "promised" one-off payment of 300,00 roubles, which the military rep says was never actually promised to them 😂 They yell that the deputies should go fight themselves in this case. https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1587714068156129281
Rishi is a flippity floppity u turner. The opposition and electorate will smell weakness.
The COP flip flop is not a flip flop if he came out with this decision and tweet in first place, he didn’t because he is so insecure and frightened of his party’s factions and the right wing in party and media, who are nothing more than a mouse that roars.
I’m not saying he’s remotely as lazy, talentless, useless and unlikeable as Boris and Truss, he is better than all the rest, but what does that mean for Tory fortunes if he can’t find the courage of his own convictions? It means he is struggling to be the big beast the Tory jungle currently needs.
I’m saying he needs to find a backbone and quick, or he’s going to lose the dressing room. You know what I’m saying. Letting Leaky Sue say what she likes and then standing by her in PMQs today he’s looking more like the hostage in there not the leader.
Who would be most likely to replace him, in your opinion? Johnson? Mordaunt?
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
Oh please, this is nonsense. May immediately pivoted to a hard Brexit and whipped her party to vote down any compromise.
May had to do that because the FBPE element was already set on reversal. By the time of the Lancaster House speech (seven months after the referendum) it was already clear that getting any Brexit through would be difficult. Then after the 2017 election, Labour set about making it impossible, despite their manifesto pledge without which they wouldn't have been able to get a hung parliament even after May's social care policy.
It's really important to understand who the villain of the piece is here, because of the job now held by the ringleader.
Worth pointing out that the "FBPE element" were the MPs voted for in the 2017 General Election. Whilst I agree that parliament was chaotic, you can't say it was undemocratic - it was quite literally the latest opinion as voted for by the public.
Voted for in the 2017 General Election in the case of Labour MPs specifically on the basis of a pledge to uphold the referendum result, without which they wouldn't have got a hung parliament, and once they did get a hung parliament they immediately ignored the pledge and started obstructionism, led by the then Shadow Brexit Secretary.
The 2017 manifesto promised to scrap the Conservatives' Brexit White Paper and replace with "fresh negotiating priorities" with strong emphasis on retaining the benefits of the single market and customs union. (this is cut and paste from the BBC summary of the manifesto). This is precisely what they tried to achieve during the parliament. May refused to compromise, even though the Labour version of Brexit likely had a majority and her version didn't. Why didn't she compromise to get Brexit through?
She did compromise, her Backstop would have kept us in both the Single Market and the Customs Union. And we'd have had no unilateral way out of the Backstop either.
Even that still wasn't enough, so thankfully that got defeated and we got a proper, cleaner Brexit instead.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
Oh please, this is nonsense. May immediately pivoted to a hard Brexit and whipped her party to vote down any compromise.
May had to do that because the FBPE element was already set on reversal. By the time of the Lancaster House speech (seven months after the referendum) it was already clear that getting any Brexit through would be difficult. Then after the 2017 election, Labour set about making it impossible, despite their manifesto pledge without which they wouldn't have been able to get a hung parliament even after May's social care policy.
It's really important to understand who the villain of the piece is here, because of the job now held by the ringleader.
Worth pointing out that the "FBPE element" were the MPs voted for in the 2017 General Election. Whilst I agree that parliament was chaotic, you can't say it was undemocratic - it was quite literally the latest opinion as voted for by the public.
Voted for in the 2017 General Election in the case of Labour MPs specifically on the basis of a pledge to uphold the referendum result, without which they wouldn't have got a hung parliament, and once they did get a hung parliament they immediately ignored the pledge and started obstructionism, led by the then Shadow Brexit Secretary.
The 2017 manifesto promised to scrap the Conservatives' Brexit White Paper and replace with "fresh negotiating priorities" with strong emphasis on retaining the benefits of the single market and customs union. (this is cut and paste from the BBC summary of the manifesto). This is precisely what they tried to achieve during the parliament. May refused to compromise, even though the Labour version of Brexit likely had a majority and her version didn't. Why didn't she compromise to get Brexit through?
Because she would have been out on her ear by her own party of course.
And I'm not sure of that point. We had those 'indicitive votes' in 2019 which led to complete deadlock and the need for an election.
It almost beggars belief that this shower of Tory incompetents who've shown again and again that they couldn't lead a dog around a park think they've got some kind of meaningful popular mandate to lead the country.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
I don't agree, but I accept that argument. I like your last sentence. Nicely put, but of course whatever Brexit we had that would have been true.
I think there was a possibility in June 2016 for majority support for a soft Brexit, though probably not by January 2017. Certainly if Cameron had put EEA on the ballot paper in June 2016 it would have had landslide support, but we know why he didn't do that.
There is no soft Brexit or hard Brexit - Brexit is leaving the EU. Thats it. What we do afterwards is soft or hard or stupid or whatever.
Indeed which is why Brexit is unambiguously "done".
But its worth remembering in 2016 that both the Leave campaigns and the Remain campaign said quite explicitly that leaving the EU meant leaving the Single Market. Yet Theresa May tried to keep us in it, via her Backstop, so her deal was far softer than what anyone was discussing in 2016.
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
There is no "best" Brexit
Varying degrees of shit, all the way down...
And yet all of them were better than voting to leave and not.
So voting not to leave would have been quite clever, then.
Perhaps. But then the blame needs to go entirely on the completely useless Remain campaign.
Well that is true, but I'm not sure where that gets us. There is justification generally for looking at where stuff went wrong to ensure you don't repeat your failures and I guess we all feel bitter about stuff we lose when we think we should have won, but holding onto that bitterness doesn't do anyone any favours. We need to let go and move on. It's done. And on the specific of Brexit we have left and need to make the best of it.
That is why (re previous discussions with you) I say Brexit is not 'Done' and you say it is. We have 'Left', but it isn't 'Done' and it isn't done by a long way. There is a lot to sort out. Leavers need to accept that so that everyone can tie up all the loose ends. I think Steve Baker recently commented positively about that. Credit to him for doing so.
I agree with pretty much all of that (and thanks for accepting my point and not making a gratuitously offensive false analogy unlike several others in the thread).
That there are loose ends to tie up isn't in dispute - the argument about whether Brexit is "done" or not only arises because Brexit haters (a small but very noisy subset of Remainers) think it's in their interest to cast Boris's 2019 slogan as not delivered on.
Gratuitously offensive = exactly on point.
A false analogy, by definition, cannot be "exactly on point".
United Kingdom government official There is no long-term prosperity without action on climate change.
There is no energy security without investing in renewables.
That is why I will attend @COP27P next week: to deliver on Glasgow's legacy of building a secure and sustainable future.
Huzzah!
Still wary of Rishi on renewables. One of the first things he did at his initial PMQs was put his weight behind nuclear.
One of the big providers of steel for the super-structure of the sea walls for tidal lagoons would have been in his constituency. And still he didn't support them...
If this is true it basically means that Russia had no way of stopping the grain transports. Could be because they couldn't risk exposing their surface ships to attack or that they couldn't risk attacking Turkish ships, or both. Pretty humiliating for Russia in either case.
Russia withdrew from the grain deal 4 days ago. The UN, Turkey and Ukraine called Moscow’s bluff, continuing the ship convoys regardless. Faced with the choice of sinking third-country merchant ships or an embarrassing climbdown, Putin chose a climbdown. https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1587754247747149825
The three things that jump out are: the now traditional massive gender divide (if only women could vote or only men it would be a Dem or GOP blow out respectively); the massive gap between Oz Favourability number vs people voting for him; finally if the election was down to just people who hadn't voted in the last 4 elections then the Dems would walk it.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
Oh please, this is nonsense. May immediately pivoted to a hard Brexit and whipped her party to vote down any compromise.
May had to do that because the FBPE element was already set on reversal. By the time of the Lancaster House speech (seven months after the referendum) it was already clear that getting any Brexit through would be difficult. Then after the 2017 election, Labour set about making it impossible, despite their manifesto pledge without which they wouldn't have been able to get a hung parliament even after May's social care policy.
It's really important to understand who the villain of the piece is here, because of the job now held by the ringleader.
Worth pointing out that the "FBPE element" were the MPs voted for in the 2017 General Election. Whilst I agree that parliament was chaotic, you can't say it was undemocratic - it was quite literally the latest opinion as voted for by the public.
Voted for in the 2017 General Election in the case of Labour MPs specifically on the basis of a pledge to uphold the referendum result, without which they wouldn't have got a hung parliament, and once they did get a hung parliament they immediately ignored the pledge and started obstructionism, led by the then Shadow Brexit Secretary.
The 2017 manifesto promised to scrap the Conservatives' Brexit White Paper and replace with "fresh negotiating priorities" with strong emphasis on retaining the benefits of the single market and customs union. (this is cut and paste from the BBC summary of the manifesto). This is precisely what they tried to achieve during the parliament. May refused to compromise, even though the Labour version of Brexit likely had a majority and her version didn't. Why didn't she compromise to get Brexit through?
And by "trying to achieve it" in the way that they did, they ended up in a worse position. They were like the dog with a bone trying to get the bone its reflection held.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
I don't agree, but I accept that argument. I like your last sentence. Nicely put, but of course whatever Brexit we had that would have been true.
I think there was a possibility in June 2016 for majority support for a soft Brexit, though probably not by January 2017. Certainly if Cameron had put EEA on the ballot paper in June 2016 it would have had landslide support, but we know why he didn't do that.
There is no soft Brexit or hard Brexit - Brexit is leaving the EU. Thats it. What we do afterwards is soft or hard or stupid or whatever.
I used to believe that, but in the 2016-9 period everyone told me I was wrong.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
I don't agree, but I accept that argument. I like your last sentence. Nicely put, but of course whatever Brexit we had that would have been true.
I think there was a possibility in June 2016 for majority support for a soft Brexit, though probably not by January 2017. Certainly if Cameron had put EEA on the ballot paper in June 2016 it would have had landslide support, but we know why he didn't do that.
There is no soft Brexit or hard Brexit - Brexit is leaving the EU. Thats it. What we do afterwards is soft or hard or stupid or whatever.
Indeed which is why Brexit is unambiguously "done".
But its worth remembering in 2016 that both the Leave campaigns and the Remain campaign said quite explicitly that leaving the EU meant leaving the Single Market. Yet Theresa May tried to keep us in it, via her Backstop, so her deal was far softer than what anyone was discussing in 2016.
I have talked about Brexit - the act of leaving the EU, and BREXIT - the anticipated benefits after leaving the EU. Brexit is done, BREXIT is not.
Very few people voted to leave the EU because they wanted to leave the EU and had no concern about what happens next. Most people voted because they wanted something - freedom, sovereignty, blue passports, less foreigners, money for the NHS, better jobs etc etc etc.
As we have not really satisfied those issues for most people, BREXIT isn't done. And will never be done. Because what the three groups (there may be more groups...) wanted were completely incompatible.
There is no soft Brexit or hard Brexit - Brexit is leaving the EU. Thats it. What we do afterwards is soft or hard or stupid or whatever.
Indeed which is why Brexit is unambiguously "done".
But its worth remembering in 2016 that both the Leave campaigns and the Remain campaign said quite explicitly that leaving the EU meant leaving the Single Market. Yet Theresa May tried to keep us in it, via her Backstop, so her deal was far softer than what anyone was discussing in 2016.
Yes, to the extent that there was a "hard Brexit" before the vote, it meant not having a trade deal.
Rishi Sunak himself said that he could "see no sensible reason why we could not achieve a similar agreement" to the ones that "Canada, South Korea and South Africa" have. That's exactly what we've done.
They were policies that lost him the summer leadership election. Not really a u-turn to drop them after they were rejected in an election.
So he wasn’t proved right in everything he said in the summer, which is why he is now leader? He has actually won a leadership election to become PM without voicing a single policy?
FWIW it seems to me the whole asylum/migration stuff, while of course there are real things to say (like our population going up 8 million since 2002 while many countries have stayed quite static), is really a proxy for something else.
That something else is the sense that almost no important government/state/state-funded institutions are run with ordinary basic competence. So that every crisis is adding to an already improperly managed country.
I think there is a lot of truth in this. But I'd say it goes beyond government, even. So much stuff in this country just doesn't seem to work very well.
Yes. State management is only the start. The image of the UK might once have been a friendly policeman and bowler hatted blokes going to work reading the Times, but the image of the UK now is things like waiting for hours on a phone line, at your expense, failing to be able to do anything to put right the mistakes of the organisation you cannot contact, both state and private.
Competence is infinitely more significant than policy at the moment.
I don't think the Tories / Tory supporters recognise or accept the general acceptance of things being largely broken. Its always whataboutery. Let me give you one example - trains. In prime red wall territory trains have largely stopped running. Somewhere like Grimsby is down to a handful of trains a day on some days, with Transpennine Express simply cancelling everything and leaving 12 hour gaps between services.
The cause of this is complicated - an onerous franchise agreement, a moron MD now departed, and right now a franchise that the DfT won't take full control of (so as not to be responsible) but also one where there is no sanction for the operator and no ability to fix the resource issues. Similar with Northern and Avanti.
So it's broken, nobody is doing anything to fix it, and buck-passing is policy. For all the people who can't get GP appointments or a dentist, this is normal. Saying "an appointment in 14 days" cements the floor of mediocrity, a system that simply has ceased functioning.
I don't know where you're living, because for a lot of the country (and I'm in the North), things largely aren't broken. I don't use the trains a lot, but I had to go into central Birmingham for a meeting a couple of weeks ago - both my trains were on time, I got a seat - granted they were the awful Voyagers so noisy and uncomfortable compared to MK3 and 2 stock, but the system worked perfectly well to deposit me where and when I expected.
I had cause to see my GP a few months ago (first time in about 20 years). Rang at about 3pm, could I come in for an in person examination at 4pm? I'm sure it's bad in some places, but my occasional interactions with public services generally finds most of them pretty fast and efficient.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
Oh please, this is nonsense. May immediately pivoted to a hard Brexit and whipped her party to vote down any compromise.
May had to do that because the FBPE element was already set on reversal. By the time of the Lancaster House speech (seven months after the referendum) it was already clear that getting any Brexit through would be difficult. Then after the 2017 election, Labour set about making it impossible, despite their manifesto pledge without which they wouldn't have been able to get a hung parliament even after May's social care policy.
It's really important to understand who the villain of the piece is here, because of the job now held by the ringleader.
Worth pointing out that the "FBPE element" were the MPs voted for in the 2017 General Election. Whilst I agree that parliament was chaotic, you can't say it was undemocratic - it was quite literally the latest opinion as voted for by the public.
Voted for in the 2017 General Election in the case of Labour MPs specifically on the basis of a pledge to uphold the referendum result, without which they wouldn't have got a hung parliament, and once they did get a hung parliament they immediately ignored the pledge and started obstructionism, led by the then Shadow Brexit Secretary.
The 2017 manifesto promised to scrap the Conservatives' Brexit White Paper and replace with "fresh negotiating priorities" with strong emphasis on retaining the benefits of the single market and customs union. (this is cut and paste from the BBC summary of the manifesto). This is precisely what they tried to achieve during the parliament. May refused to compromise, even though the Labour version of Brexit likely had a majority and her version didn't. Why didn't she compromise to get Brexit through?
She did compromise, her Backstop would have kept us in both the Single Market and the Customs Union. And we'd have had no unilateral way out of the Backstop either.
Even that still wasn't enough, so thankfully that got defeated and we got a proper, cleaner Brexit instead.
This "Proper, cleaner Brexit" has cost us a lot and inspired Liz Truss' "mini budget".
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
I don't agree, but I accept that argument. I like your last sentence. Nicely put, but of course whatever Brexit we had that would have been true.
I think there was a possibility in June 2016 for majority support for a soft Brexit, though probably not by January 2017. Certainly if Cameron had put EEA on the ballot paper in June 2016 it would have had landslide support, but we know why he didn't do that.
There is no soft Brexit or hard Brexit - Brexit is leaving the EU. Thats it. What we do afterwards is soft or hard or stupid or whatever.
Indeed which is why Brexit is unambiguously "done".
But its worth remembering in 2016 that both the Leave campaigns and the Remain campaign said quite explicitly that leaving the EU meant leaving the Single Market. Yet Theresa May tried to keep us in it, via her Backstop, so her deal was far softer than what anyone was discussing in 2016.
I have talked about Brexit - the act of leaving the EU, and BREXIT - the anticipated benefits after leaving the EU. Brexit is done, BREXIT is not.
Very few people voted to leave the EU because they wanted to leave the EU and had no concern about what happens next. Most people voted because they wanted something - freedom, sovereignty, blue passports, less foreigners, money for the NHS, better jobs etc etc etc.
As we have not really satisfied those issues for most people, BREXIT isn't done. And will never be done. Because what the three groups (there may be more groups...) wanted were completely incompatible.
Not sure what you mean by 3 groups, there's more than 3 issues there, though there's quite a bit of overlap between them.
The sovereignty issue is resolved for Britain. Parliament has taken back control from the EU.
For those who want specific policies addressed, that's politics not Brexit, and those politics can be debated at General Elections which was the entire point of Brexit. So politics not being done is precisely why Brexit is done and was done - if politics was done, there'd be no reason to leave, since there'd be no reason to take back control.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
Oh please, this is nonsense. May immediately pivoted to a hard Brexit and whipped her party to vote down any compromise.
May had to do that because the FBPE element was already set on reversal. By the time of the Lancaster House speech (seven months after the referendum) it was already clear that getting any Brexit through would be difficult. Then after the 2017 election, Labour set about making it impossible, despite their manifesto pledge without which they wouldn't have been able to get a hung parliament even after May's social care policy.
It's really important to understand who the villain of the piece is here, because of the job now held by the ringleader.
Worth pointing out that the "FBPE element" were the MPs voted for in the 2017 General Election. Whilst I agree that parliament was chaotic, you can't say it was undemocratic - it was quite literally the latest opinion as voted for by the public.
Voted for in the 2017 General Election in the case of Labour MPs specifically on the basis of a pledge to uphold the referendum result, without which they wouldn't have got a hung parliament, and once they did get a hung parliament they immediately ignored the pledge and started obstructionism, led by the then Shadow Brexit Secretary.
The 2017 manifesto promised to scrap the Conservatives' Brexit White Paper and replace with "fresh negotiating priorities" with strong emphasis on retaining the benefits of the single market and customs union. (this is cut and paste from the BBC summary of the manifesto). This is precisely what they tried to achieve during the parliament. May refused to compromise, even though the Labour version of Brexit likely had a majority and her version didn't. Why didn't she compromise to get Brexit through?
She did compromise, her Backstop would have kept us in both the Single Market and the Customs Union. And we'd have had no unilateral way out of the Backstop either.
Even that still wasn't enough, so thankfully that got defeated and we got a proper, cleaner Brexit instead.
This "Proper, cleaner Brexit" has cost us a lot and inspired Liz Truss' "mini budget".
In the decade pre-pandemic 2010-2019 Britain grew faster than the Eurozone both nominally and per capita. "Despite Brexit" being voted for in 2016 and dominating the latter half of that decade.
It is pure hubris to think that we would have outgrown the Eurozone by even more had we not voted for Brexit.
These Russian mobilised troops aren't going to be very motivated to fight. Seems almost like a mutiny.
Russian mobiks are demanding the "promised" one-off payment of 300,00 roubles, which the military rep says was never actually promised to them 😂 They yell that the deputies should go fight themselves in this case. https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1587714068156129281
300,000 x 800 = 240 million roubles saved by Putin yesterday alone....
The Ukrainian armed forces are saving him a mountain of money. (Although not sure if dead conscripts still qualify their family for a free Lada?)
If this is true it basically means that Russia had no way of stopping the grain transports. Could be because they couldn't risk exposing their surface ships to attack or that they couldn't risk attacking Turkish ships, or both. Pretty humiliating for Russia in either case.
Russia withdrew from the grain deal 4 days ago. The UN, Turkey and Ukraine called Moscow’s bluff, continuing the ship convoys regardless. Faced with the choice of sinking third-country merchant ships or an embarrassing climbdown, Putin chose a climbdown. https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1587754247747149825
Expect a grain ship or two to hit "Ukrainian mines" in coming days though.
FWIW it seems to me the whole asylum/migration stuff, while of course there are real things to say (like our population going up 8 million since 2002 while many countries have stayed quite static), is really a proxy for something else.
That something else is the sense that almost no important government/state/state-funded institutions are run with ordinary basic competence. So that every crisis is adding to an already improperly managed country.
I think there is a lot of truth in this. But I'd say it goes beyond government, even. So much stuff in this country just doesn't seem to work very well.
Yes. State management is only the start. The image of the UK might once have been a friendly policeman and bowler hatted blokes going to work reading the Times, but the image of the UK now is things like waiting for hours on a phone line, at your expense, failing to be able to do anything to put right the mistakes of the organisation you cannot contact, both state and private.
Competence is infinitely more significant than policy at the moment.
I don't think the Tories / Tory supporters recognise or accept the general acceptance of things being largely broken. Its always whataboutery. Let me give you one example - trains. In prime red wall territory trains have largely stopped running. Somewhere like Grimsby is down to a handful of trains a day on some days, with Transpennine Express simply cancelling everything and leaving 12 hour gaps between services.
The cause of this is complicated - an onerous franchise agreement, a moron MD now departed, and right now a franchise that the DfT won't take full control of (so as not to be responsible) but also one where there is no sanction for the operator and no ability to fix the resource issues. Similar with Northern and Avanti.
So it's broken, nobody is doing anything to fix it, and buck-passing is policy. For all the people who can't get GP appointments or a dentist, this is normal. Saying "an appointment in 14 days" cements the floor of mediocrity, a system that simply has ceased functioning.
I don't know where you're living, because for a lot of the country (and I'm in the North), things largely aren't broken. I don't use the trains a lot, but I had to go into central Birmingham for a meeting a couple of weeks ago - both my trains were on time, I got a seat - granted they were the awful Voyagers so noisy and uncomfortable compared to MK3 and 2 stock, but the system worked perfectly well to deposit me where and when I expected.
I had cause to see my GP a few months ago (first time in about 20 years). Rang at about 3pm, could I come in for an in person examination at 4pm? I'm sure it's bad in some places, but my occasional interactions with public services generally finds most of them pretty fast and efficient.
So you're in "the north" and took a Cross Country train to Birmingham. So Yorkshire? Sheffield / Wakeyvegas / Donny / Leeds area? Transpennine is properly fucked, Northern is fucked in pockets. That your trains were ok (and that isn't how anyone voluntarily describes SC Voyagers) doesn't mean that the trains where you are aren't broken. As you said, you don't use them.
Similarly your GP - who you also don't use ("first time in 20 years"). When I was on Teesside we had two GP practices in the same building. Mine was largely ok - a few days delay at most. The other was a lottery. I didn't deny the widely-publicised experience of the poor sods at that practice because mine was less bad.
This is my point. Things are increasingly falling to pieces. Telling the people who live with this that they are wrong is a significant driver of the Tories 25 point deficits.
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
There is no "best" Brexit
Varying degrees of shit, all the way down...
And yet all of them were better than voting to leave and not.
So voting not to leave would have been quite clever, then.
Perhaps. But then the blame needs to go entirely on the completely useless Remain campaign.
Well that is true, but I'm not sure where that gets us. There is justification generally for looking at where stuff went wrong to ensure you don't repeat your failures and I guess we all feel bitter about stuff we lose when we think we should have won, but holding onto that bitterness doesn't do anyone any favours. We need to let go and move on. It's done. And on the specific of Brexit we have left and need to make the best of it.
That is why (re previous discussions with you) I say Brexit is not 'Done' and you say it is. We have 'Left', but it isn't 'Done' and it isn't done by a long way. There is a lot to sort out. Leavers need to accept that so that everyone can tie up all the loose ends. I think Steve Baker recently commented positively about that. Credit to him for doing so.
I agree with pretty much all of that (and thanks for accepting my point and not making a gratuitously offensive false analogy unlike several others in the thread).
That there are loose ends to tie up isn't in dispute - the argument about whether Brexit is "done" or not only arises because Brexit haters (a small but very noisy subset of Remainers) think it's in their interest to cast Boris's 2019 slogan as not delivered on.
I've enjoyed the discussion. I also apologise for being somewhat aggressive in my argument from the off (although you don't accuse me of doing so - thank you) and in some I have had with you previously. I did feel in previous comments that you might be an extreme right winger coming in just making snide comments. I can see from our discussion I was mistaken. I should not jump to conclusions before even starting the discussion and at least I should start more politely. So sorry about that. I am normally less aggressive.
Re the loose ends it is a case of degrees. Of course there were going to be loose ends in such a huge negotiation and of course as each one arose us remainers were going to go 'I told you so'. That is life. But one does feel that what has been negotiated is just a huge mass of loose ends and Northern Ireland was such a massive lie by Boris which is just left hanging there. And of course there are so many more whopping loose ends that do neither the UK or the EU any favours.
Rishi is a flippity floppity u turner. The opposition and electorate will smell weakness.
The COP flip flop is not a flip flop if he came out with this decision and tweet in first place, he didn’t because he is so insecure and frightened of his party’s factions and the right wing in party and media, who are nothing more than a mouse that roars.
I’m not saying he’s remotely as lazy, talentless, useless and unlikeable as Boris and Truss, he is better than all the rest, but what does that mean for Tory fortunes if he can’t find the courage of his own convictions? It means he is struggling to be the big beast the Tory jungle currently needs.
I’m saying he needs to find a backbone and quick, or he’s going to lose the dressing room. You know what I’m saying. Letting Leaky Sue say what she likes and then standing by her in PMQs today he’s looking more like the hostage in there not the leader.
Who would be most likely to replace him, in your opinion? Johnson? Mordaunt?
It’s becoming unguessable now - the first two lazy greasy pole climbers had too much brass neck not enough talent, the party didn’t hope Rishi would win the election just limit the damage when they turned to him, but it turns out he has no backbone so how is that going to improve the polls?
Why blame the leaders? The problem is the MPs have become factionalised and ill disciplined not just around personalities, but as we see and will certainly see more with Truss and her supporters around a very different economic approach than Boris/Rishi.
What can a leader do if a party refuses to be disciplined and support the leaders lines and policies.
They just have to hope Sunak gets better and the party more disciplined, not have another change, to answer your question.
If this is true it basically means that Russia had no way of stopping the grain transports. Could be because they couldn't risk exposing their surface ships to attack or that they couldn't risk attacking Turkish ships, or both. Pretty humiliating for Russia in either case.
Russia withdrew from the grain deal 4 days ago. The UN, Turkey and Ukraine called Moscow’s bluff, continuing the ship convoys regardless. Faced with the choice of sinking third-country merchant ships or an embarrassing climbdown, Putin chose a climbdown. https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1587754247747149825
Expect a grain ship or two to hit "Ukrainian mines" in coming days though.
Moscow has blinked because Turkiye called their bluff and have been escorting the grain ships haven't they? If Russia attacks a Turkish ship, then that brings NATO Article 5 into the war.
Not to forget that the Turkish navy is far superior to the Russian one in the Black Sea.
Russia is f***ed and has no hope here, just like in most things. Completely outplayed and they know it.
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
Oh please, this is nonsense. May immediately pivoted to a hard Brexit and whipped her party to vote down any compromise.
May had to do that because the FBPE element was already set on reversal. By the time of the Lancaster House speech (seven months after the referendum) it was already clear that getting any Brexit through would be difficult. Then after the 2017 election, Labour set about making it impossible, despite their manifesto pledge without which they wouldn't have been able to get a hung parliament even after May's social care policy.
It's really important to understand who the villain of the piece is here, because of the job now held by the ringleader.
Worth pointing out that the "FBPE element" were the MPs voted for in the 2017 General Election. Whilst I agree that parliament was chaotic, you can't say it was undemocratic - it was quite literally the latest opinion as voted for by the public.
Voted for in the 2017 General Election in the case of Labour MPs specifically on the basis of a pledge to uphold the referendum result, without which they wouldn't have got a hung parliament, and once they did get a hung parliament they immediately ignored the pledge and started obstructionism, led by the then Shadow Brexit Secretary.
The 2017 manifesto promised to scrap the Conservatives' Brexit White Paper and replace with "fresh negotiating priorities" with strong emphasis on retaining the benefits of the single market and customs union. (this is cut and paste from the BBC summary of the manifesto). This is precisely what they tried to achieve during the parliament. May refused to compromise, even though the Labour version of Brexit likely had a majority and her version didn't. Why didn't she compromise to get Brexit through?
She did compromise, her Backstop would have kept us in both the Single Market and the Customs Union. And we'd have had no unilateral way out of the Backstop either.
Even that still wasn't enough, so thankfully that got defeated and we got a proper, cleaner Brexit instead.
This "Proper, cleaner Brexit" has cost us a lot and inspired Liz Truss' "mini budget".
In the decade pre-pandemic 2010-2019 Britain grew faster than the Eurozone both nominally and per capita. "Despite Brexit" being voted for in 2016 and dominating the latter half of that decade.
It is pure hubris to think that we would have outgrown the Eurozone by even more had we not voted for Brexit.
Let me see 'Barty Roberts' argument ("Bollocks") or the Financial Times carefully argued Youtube film complete with graphs and interviews?
"Austerity in the Treasury; a hostile environment at the Home Office. After 12 years and four prime ministers, British politics has cycled back to where it started, but that much meaner and poorer. All for what? Where did the journey take us? To Brexit, to rage, to division and economic downgrade. A dozen years wasted. A crusade whipped up by nationalist zealots to a holy land that doesn’t exist to fight an enemy that was actually our friend, defeating no one but ourselves."
Hmm. Becajuse there is no inflation or energy crisis in the EU. There are no EU countries with immigration policies like the UK. The EU central bank is not raising interest rates. There are no riots in France, or protests in Spain......No EU country has far right parties snapping at the heels of power.....
First class whataboutery. Try reading the article. The point it is making isn't that the EU is better than us. It is that leaving the EU hasn't helped the UK in any way, while stoking division and distracting policymakers from our real problems - a point that voters seem to agree with.
Brexit happened. You need to move on. As does the Guardian.
The only way to move on is to accept the damage that Brexit has caused and seek to mitigate that damage. You need to realise that, accept responsibility for the division and harm you’ve caused, and work with the people to remedy it.
Felix voted Remain.
It's stunningly hypocritical for people who still haven't accepted the result of a democratic vote to demand atonement for the creation of division from the people who have.
Six years ago, longer than the lifetime of a Parliament, and you got what you wanted. But I've never seen a group of winners more bitter at the shitness of the prize they won, while also insisting it be treated as an irreversible state religion.
I also voted Remain.
It may be hard to remember now, but many people genuinely did think that by voting for Brexit, they would put an end to the interminable debate about the European question in British politics. The primary reason this has not happened is because of Remainers not accepting the outcome.
It will only be true to say that people who voted for Brexit got what they wanted when the issue is regarded as settled.
That’s ridiculous. The debate would have been settled years ago if Brexit were even remotely a success.
The Eurosceptics fought a long, bitter and for the most part lonely battle against our membership for decades. They finally got what they wanted, and it’s shit. Now they want everyone to shut up about it - just like they did (not).
Total nonsense, I'm afraid. The FBPE crowd never accepted that they had lost and, insofar as Brexit isn't a success, a significant share of the blame falls on those who spent years trying to overturn the referendum result rather than working to make it a success.
What bollocks. How do those who tried to overturn it prevent it being a success? They have no powers to do so. Have they completely screwed the Northern Ireland situation? Have they created the nightmare for our exporters? No they haven't because they don't have one iota of power to do so even if they wanted to.
Do you honestly think there are remainer business people going 'I'm just going to refuse to export to the EU to teach those leavers a lesson'?
So how does a single remainer prevent it from being a success?
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
If they had started in June 2016 by saying "we lost, but only narrowly, there's a mandate to leave the political structures of the EU but no mandate for a hard Brexit" and actually worked for a soft Brexit from day one then that's what we would have got. Instead they left the choice of Brexit to a majority of a majority, which is still a minority.
I don't agree, but I accept that argument. I like your last sentence. Nicely put, but of course whatever Brexit we had that would have been true.
I think there was a possibility in June 2016 for majority support for a soft Brexit, though probably not by January 2017. Certainly if Cameron had put EEA on the ballot paper in June 2016 it would have had landslide support, but we know why he didn't do that.
There is no soft Brexit or hard Brexit - Brexit is leaving the EU. Thats it. What we do afterwards is soft or hard or stupid or whatever.
Indeed which is why Brexit is unambiguously "done".
But its worth remembering in 2016 that both the Leave campaigns and the Remain campaign said quite explicitly that leaving the EU meant leaving the Single Market. Yet Theresa May tried to keep us in it, via her Backstop, so her deal was far softer than what anyone was discussing in 2016.
I have talked about Brexit - the act of leaving the EU, and BREXIT - the anticipated benefits after leaving the EU. Brexit is done, BREXIT is not.
Very few people voted to leave the EU because they wanted to leave the EU and had no concern about what happens next. Most people voted because they wanted something - freedom, sovereignty, blue passports, less foreigners, money for the NHS, better jobs etc etc etc.
As we have not really satisfied those issues for most people, BREXIT isn't done. And will never be done. Because what the three groups (there may be more groups...) wanted were completely incompatible.
Not sure what you mean by 3 groups, there's more than 3 issues there, though there's quite a bit of overlap between them.
The sovereignty issue is resolved for Britain. Parliament has taken back control from the EU.
For those who want specific policies addressed, that's politics not Brexit, and those politics can be debated at General Elections which was the entire point of Brexit. So politics not being done is precisely why Brexit is done and was done - if politics was done, there'd be no reason to leave, since there'd be no reason to take back control.
3 groups: Singapore-on-Thames. A deregulated free for all where workers have fewer rights and lower wages. Hard right Tories mainly. Mercantilists. Open trade without EU red tape. Farming, fishing, some industrialists Socialist Republic of Britain. Get the migrants out. Better jobs with better conditions and more pay, money for schools and hospitals
Those are broad bucket groups - may be more. As SoT want the opposite of SRB they were never going to be happy. And the free traders now have more red tape and barriers than they had before and they aren't happy.
I agree though - these can all be resolved in elections. The problem is that when people propose resolving them, its decried as a "Betrayal of Brexit" or a "reomaner coup". So despite you and being able to amicably agree that Brexit and BREXIT are different things, we appear to be different to most politicians and a decreasing number of voters.
These Russian mobilised troops aren't going to be very motivated to fight. Seems almost like a mutiny.
Russian mobiks are demanding the "promised" one-off payment of 300,00 roubles, which the military rep says was never actually promised to them 😂 They yell that the deputies should go fight themselves in this case. https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1587714068156129281
300,000 x 800 = 240 million roubles saved by Putin yesterday alone....
The Ukrainian armed forces are saving him a mountain of money. (Although not sure if dead conscripts still qualify their family for a free Lada?)
Same situation, different part of Russia but this time even angrier. These are the people they are meant to be giving guns to!
They stopped us having a better Brexit in the 2017-9 parliament, because all the energy had to be spent on getting any Brexit through in the face of their anti-democratic obstructionism, leaving no bandwidth to work on getting the best Brexit.
There is no "best" Brexit
Varying degrees of shit, all the way down...
And yet all of them were better than voting to leave and not.
So voting not to leave would have been quite clever, then.
Perhaps. But then the blame needs to go entirely on the completely useless Remain campaign.
Well that is true, but I'm not sure where that gets us. There is justification generally for looking at where stuff went wrong to ensure you don't repeat your failures and I guess we all feel bitter about stuff we lose when we think we should have won, but holding onto that bitterness doesn't do anyone any favours. We need to let go and move on. It's done. And on the specific of Brexit we have left and need to make the best of it.
That is why (re previous discussions with you) I say Brexit is not 'Done' and you say it is. We have 'Left', but it isn't 'Done' and it isn't done by a long way. There is a lot to sort out. Leavers need to accept that so that everyone can tie up all the loose ends. I think Steve Baker recently commented positively about that. Credit to him for doing so.
I agree with pretty much all of that (and thanks for accepting my point and not making a gratuitously offensive false analogy unlike several others in the thread).
That there are loose ends to tie up isn't in dispute - the argument about whether Brexit is "done" or not only arises because Brexit haters (a small but very noisy subset of Remainers) think it's in their interest to cast Boris's 2019 slogan as not delivered on.
I've enjoyed the discussion. I also apologise for being somewhat aggressive in my argument from the off (although you don't accuse me of doing so - thank you) and in some I have had with you previously. I did feel in previous comments that you might be an extreme right winger coming in just making snide comments. I can see from our discussion I was mistaken. I should not jump to conclusions before even starting the discussion and at least I should start more politely. So sorry about that. I am normally less aggressive.
Re the loose ends it is a case of degrees. Of course there were going to be loose ends in such a huge negotiation and of course as each one arose us remainers were going to go 'I told you so'. That is life. But one does feel that what has been negotiated is just a huge mass of loose ends and Northern Ireland was such a massive lie by Boris which is just left hanging there. And of course there are so many more whopping loose ends that do neither the UK or the EU any favours.
Thanks, I appreciate it. The key thing about my politics is that I only very marginally voted Leave - but once Leave won, not to implement the result would have been unconscionable. The antics of the Remainers, particularly in the 2017-19 parliament - tended to radicalise my expression of my opinions if not those opinions themselves because an axiom was under threat.
This leads naturally to my scepticism about Sir Keir and constant calls for him to announce polices.
As for the loose ends, again this is an inevitable consequence of the need to get something - anything - over the line. It really hasn't helped that so much time that should have been spent on tidying them up was lost to Covid.
If this is true it basically means that Russia had no way of stopping the grain transports. Could be because they couldn't risk exposing their surface ships to attack or that they couldn't risk attacking Turkish ships, or both. Pretty humiliating for Russia in either case.
Russia withdrew from the grain deal 4 days ago. The UN, Turkey and Ukraine called Moscow’s bluff, continuing the ship convoys regardless. Faced with the choice of sinking third-country merchant ships or an embarrassing climbdown, Putin chose a climbdown. https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1587754247747149825
And we're supposed to believe that someone not prepared to sink grain ships is going to use a nuclear weapon. Give me a break.
They were policies that lost him the summer leadership election. Not really a u-turn to drop them after they were rejected in an election.
So he wasn’t proved right in everything he said in the summer, which is why he is now leader? He has actually won a leadership election to become PM without voicing a single policy?
Seems pretty clear that the party wants a period of stability without major policy changes given that their recent experience with major radical policy change was a little underwhelming.
Comments
In the run up to Brexit, whilst things were increasingly crap, most voters believed the politicians were trying. Then that dam broke, and places that elected Labour since the Danelaw said "things are shit and you're doing nothing but blame others".
That epiphany has happened again, but this time against the Tories. Brexit was supposed to fix things and has made things worse. Services are significantly worse for most people vs a decade ago. And rather than believing the government are trying to fix them, they've gone "things are shit and you're doing nothing but blame others"
Why should it be any different for government? It must, clearly, be possible for government to invest in such a way that it saves money in the long term. That doesn't mean that every decision to do so will be correct, but to simply rule out any possibility of government investment leading to savings is just nonsense.
"The Home Office reported in 2013 that the average cost of a voluntary return was £1,000, compared to £15,000 for an enforced return (Home Office, 2013, p. 4)."
I’m not saying he’s remotely as lazy, talentless, useless and unlikeable as Boris and Truss, he is better than all the rest, but what does that mean for Tory fortunes if he can’t find the courage of his own convictions? It means he is struggling to be the big beast the Tory jungle currently needs.
I’m saying he needs to find a backbone and quick, or he’s going to lose the dressing room. You know what I’m saying. Letting Leaky Sue say what she likes and then standing by her in PMQs today he’s looking more like the hostage in there not the leader.
By the time of Lancaster House there should have had been several months of an EEA/EFTA campaign - but Remainers were too busy trying to overturn the result so they left the field to Leavers.
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, advocated it, campaigned for it and voted for it
As the Tories just whipped their MPs on pain of losing the whip to vote against a manifesto pledge, we can discard the notion that manifestos are relevant. We have a representative democracy. We vote in people who vote as they see fit. If we don't like how they vote we choose someone else. Can't describe them doing their job as "undemocratic" because you don't like how they vote.
If we're paying billions to put people up in hotels, while also preventing them from working, then spending money now on speeding up the process is a clear win*
*unless it's in your interest for the asylum system to appear to be a "crisis".
That is why (re previous discussions with you) I say Brexit is not 'Done' and you say it is. We have 'Left', but it isn't 'Done' and it isn't done by a long way. There is a lot to sort out. Leavers need to accept that so that everyone can tie up all the loose ends. I think Steve Baker recently commented positively about that. Credit to him for doing so.
Heinz Beanz Pizza set to make comeback to supermarket shelves after near 20-year absence
https://twitter.com/GBNEWS/status/1587758533004726274
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/when-the-government-does-a-u-turn
Anyway, I couldn't pass up on a whinge about TPExpress and, never mind the franchise, their shitshow seems to First corporate policy wherever they operate from Penzance to Glasgow. I'm on the core, with 6 tph each way as the full service, so lucky compared with the edges, but even so. The playbook:
1. Still run a COVID emergency timetable - removing 2 of the 4 fast tph in each direction
2. Run around 10-15% last minute scheduled cancellations of the reduced service (by 10pm.prrvious night)
3. Suffer a similar rate of unplanned cancellations
4. Use weekend works as the excuse to run a skeleton service, 1 tph total in core hours (like on a strike day). So, for instance, 2 weekends ago Piccadilly- Stalybridge was being worked on, work that needn't have affected the 2 tph via Victoria to Liverpool or Airport in any way. Yet the whole service was reduced to 1tph Victoria-York only.
5. Skeleton adjacent day services to strikes.
6. Refuse to sell tickets - on national rail, Trainline etc. the only tickets made available are Rovers, so HUD-MAN will display as costing £70 rather than the usual £16.30 off peak return. The normal fare is available walk up.
It is nothing short of a systematic attempt to run as few trains as possible.
I think I've said it before but I think Sturgeon made a mistake cuddling up to the FBPE crowd and by default attempting to thwart the democratic decision of English voters. There ya go, there's a bit of blame taking from me (on behalf of my politics if not me personally).
Although I was old enough to vote in it, I didn’t I have to be open about here, I couldn’t decide at the time the best or least worst option, I come by my opinion above in retrospect.
Eat Bollocks
Spout Bollocks
And Bollocks to my constituents I am taking the money
What that means is that you end up with a planned driver changes in Manchester and Leeds and York, there is no driver in Leeds so cancel the whole train. Repeat that with different people missing through the day and most trains are cancelled. Meanwhile empty crew training runs are the only thing moving as DfT have dictated that all focus must be on the coming December timetable change.
Punters just need a train to run. The government not only doesn't care but is at the core of the problem. Yet even Tory MPs in places like Grimsby think everything is hunky dory.
That there are loose ends to tie up isn't in dispute - the argument about whether Brexit is "done" or not only arises because Brexit haters (a small but very noisy subset of Remainers) think it's in their interest to cast Boris's 2019 slogan as not delivered on.
The Leave campaign deserves credit for Leave winning. All blame for Leave winning belongs to the Remain campaign.
If Liverpool lose to Leeds then Liverpool are to blame for letting Leeds win, not Leeds to blame for being taking their opportunities to score.
Intelligence-led targeting. K'pow! Besuited po-faced freemasonic moneygrabbers at the council strike again! Into the modern battlesphere, going forward!
Probably if you actually live in social housing in Stirling and call them up about mould, they'll either play an automated message to you saying "Your call is important to us" until you hang up or else they'll talk to you as if you're a nutter and dirty scrounger wannabe scammer for expecting them to do anything about it.
But bug everyone's house? They'll be in there like a shot.
- plan to charge for missed GP appts
- promise for a separate energy dept
- pledge to house asylum seekers on cruise ships
Most of the policies he promised in his summer leadership campaign are in the bin (for now)
https://twitter.com/alexwickham/status/1587753994612531200
Russian mobiks are demanding the "promised" one-off payment of 300,00 roubles, which the military rep says was never actually promised to them 😂 They yell that the deputies should go fight themselves in this case.
https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1587714068156129281
Even that still wasn't enough, so thankfully that got defeated and we got a proper, cleaner Brexit instead.
And I'm not sure of that point. We had those 'indicitive votes' in 2019 which led to complete deadlock and the need for an election.
But its worth remembering in 2016 that both the Leave campaigns and the Remain campaign said quite explicitly that leaving the EU meant leaving the Single Market. Yet Theresa May tried to keep us in it, via her Backstop, so her deal was far softer than what anyone was discussing in 2016.
One of the big providers of steel for the super-structure of the sea walls for tidal lagoons would have been in his constituency. And still he didn't support them...
Russia withdrew from the grain deal 4 days ago. The UN, Turkey and Ukraine called Moscow’s bluff, continuing the ship convoys regardless. Faced with the choice of sinking third-country merchant ships or an embarrassing climbdown, Putin chose a climbdown.
https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1587754247747149825
co/efficient have some very interesting cross tabs for their Pennsylvania poll
https://coefficient.org/pennsengovpostdebate/
The three things that jump out are: the now traditional massive gender divide (if only women could vote or only men it would be a Dem or GOP blow out respectively); the massive gap between Oz Favourability number vs people voting for him; finally if the election was down to just people who hadn't voted in the last 4 elections then the Dems would walk it.
Now even the Albanians blame the Home Office for not stopping the crossings
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/02/albania-criticises-uks-lack-of-cooperation-over-channel-crossings
Very few people voted to leave the EU because they wanted to leave the EU and had no concern about what happens next. Most people voted because they wanted something - freedom, sovereignty, blue passports, less foreigners, money for the NHS, better jobs etc etc etc.
As we have not really satisfied those issues for most people, BREXIT isn't done. And will never be done. Because what the three groups (there may be more groups...) wanted were completely incompatible.
Rishi Sunak himself said that he could "see no sensible reason why we could not achieve a similar agreement" to the ones that "Canada, South Korea and South Africa" have. That's exactly what we've done.
https://www.rishisunak.com/news/why-i-will-vote-britain-leave-eu-0
I had cause to see my GP a few months ago (first time in about 20 years). Rang at about 3pm, could I come in for an in person examination at 4pm? I'm sure it's bad in some places, but my occasional interactions with public services generally finds most of them pretty fast and efficient.
The Brexit effect: how leaving the EU hit the UK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO2lWmgEK1Y&t=280s
The sovereignty issue is resolved for Britain. Parliament has taken back control from the EU.
For those who want specific policies addressed, that's politics not Brexit, and those politics can be debated at General Elections which was the entire point of Brexit. So politics not being done is precisely why Brexit is done and was done - if politics was done, there'd be no reason to leave, since there'd be no reason to take back control.
In the decade pre-pandemic 2010-2019 Britain grew faster than the Eurozone both nominally and per capita. "Despite Brexit" being voted for in 2016 and dominating the latter half of that decade.
It is pure hubris to think that we would have outgrown the Eurozone by even more had we not voted for Brexit.
The Ukrainian armed forces are saving him a mountain of money. (Although not sure if dead conscripts still qualify their family for a free Lada?)
Similarly your GP - who you also don't use ("first time in 20 years"). When I was on Teesside we had two GP practices in the same building. Mine was largely ok - a few days delay at most. The other was a lottery. I didn't deny the widely-publicised experience of the poor sods at that practice because mine was less bad.
This is my point. Things are increasingly falling to pieces. Telling the people who live with this that they are wrong is a significant driver of the Tories 25 point deficits.
Re the loose ends it is a case of degrees. Of course there were going to be loose ends in such a huge negotiation and of course as each one arose us remainers were going to go 'I told you so'. That is life. But one does feel that what has been negotiated is just a huge mass of loose ends and Northern Ireland was such a massive lie by Boris which is just left hanging there. And of course there are so many more whopping loose ends that do neither the UK or the EU any favours.
Why blame the leaders? The problem is the MPs have become factionalised and ill disciplined not just around personalities, but as we see and will certainly see more with Truss and her supporters around a very different economic approach than Boris/Rishi.
What can a leader do if a party refuses to be disciplined and support the leaders lines and policies.
They just have to hope Sunak gets better and the party more disciplined, not have another change, to answer your question.
Not to forget that the Turkish navy is far superior to the Russian one in the Black Sea.
Russia is f***ed and has no hope here, just like in most things. Completely outplayed and they know it.
or the Financial Times carefully argued Youtube film complete with graphs and interviews?
It's a tricky choice.
Now even the ALBANIANS blame the Home OFFICE for not stopping the CROSSINGS
Singapore-on-Thames. A deregulated free for all where workers have fewer rights and lower wages. Hard right Tories mainly.
Mercantilists. Open trade without EU red tape. Farming, fishing, some industrialists
Socialist Republic of Britain. Get the migrants out. Better jobs with better conditions and more pay, money for schools and hospitals
Those are broad bucket groups - may be more. As SoT want the opposite of SRB they were never going to be happy. And the free traders now have more red tape and barriers than they had before and they aren't happy.
I agree though - these can all be resolved in elections. The problem is that when people propose resolving them, its decried as a "Betrayal of Brexit" or a "reomaner coup". So despite you and being able to amicably agree that Brexit and BREXIT are different things, we appear to be different to most politicians and a decreasing number of voters.
In Chuvashia, cannon fodder is dissatisfied with the lack of promised payments of 300 thousand rubles.
https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1587769792823525379
This leads naturally to my scepticism about Sir Keir and constant calls for him to announce polices.
As for the loose ends, again this is an inevitable consequence of the need to get something - anything - over the line. It really hasn't helped that so much time that should have been spent on tidying them up was lost to Covid.