Interesting but more interesting is how decisions by Cameron May Johnson and Truss have done more damage to this country than any consecutive group of Prime Ministers in history. They have all but destroyed it. In every case they put personal aggrandisement above the good of the country. Cameron was slightly less culpable and Johnson slightly more but history will judge them equally. The sooner the country is shot of the whole Party -which the surely will-the sooner the reconstruction can start.
Item 1. rejoining the EU. On our knees if necessary
How has the country been "all but destroyed?"
"The worst economic performance since records began'. BBC 5 O'Clock News.
Supply chains 'Thanks to Brexit' the worst ever and Covid is NOT the major cause.
FYI, here's a chart of UK and German #GDP, updated to include today's Q3 data for the UK.
Since Q1 2016 (the quarter before the vote to leave the EU), the UK economy has grown by around 6.7% and the German economy by about 6.2%.
Watch the Six o'clock news. We are the bottom of the G7 and the only one with deficit and if you compare the size of our economy with its pre Brexit size it has reduced significantly more than the other six. The cause is almost certainly Brexit according to Faisal Islam
"according to Faisal Islam"
He definitely wasn't listening because the idea that the UK is the only G7 nation with a deficit is laughable. Only Germany has got lower national debt and a lower deficit as a proportion of GDP than we do trailing 12 months. Even that looks like it will change in the next 5 years as UK debt continues to fall as a proportion of GDP.
Canada beats us too, don't they?
Deficit maybe, don't think so on debt. Alas, my computer is now off until Monday so we'll never know.
Both Roger and (if he is quoting him correctly) Islam are talking rubbish.
G7 debt as % GDP End 2021 according to the IMF
Germany 69.3% UK 95.1% (Latest figure for September 2022 is 98%) Canada 112.8% France 113% USA 137% Italy 151% Japan 266%
G7 Deficits end 2021 as % GDP again from IMF
Germany 3.7% Canada 4.7% UK 6% France 6.5% Italy 7.2% Japan 12.6% USA 16.7%
The IMF numbers for Canada include local government debt, but do not for everywhere else. Why, I don't know.
And their US numbers are gross: if you include the numbers the US government owes to itself (i.e. a US government entity owns US government bonds), then the debt-to-GDP numbers come down considerably (although they are still well above the UK).
Yep, I was using the IMF numbers as they are the only consolidated set I could find. I would add that if you use the UK OBR numbers then the UK debt is 102% at end 2021, not 95%. But that doesn't actually change our position in the table.
Conclusion: Sean Patrick Maloney is a worse strategist than Robbie Mook.
My "like" is more for your question (so to speak) than your conclusion.
Caveat being, personally think Mook was & still is in a league of his own, along with Mark Penn.
However, Maloney DID manage to piss away four US House seats - including his own - via moronic New York State gerrymander than never was.
IF any Democrat for US House HAD to lose their seat in 2022 midterms, then my personal vote for such a sacrifice, would definitely be soon-to-be ex-US Rep. Sean Patrick Baloney - the freaking chair of the freaking Democratic freaking Campaign freaking Committee.
Whether a deal has been done with Putin, or not, those scenes in Kherson are spellbinding. What is it about Liberation videos? They have the same power whether they come from France in 1944, or Ukraine in 2022
They must touch something primal and Freudian inside us. The beaten animal yearning to be free, the glorious overthrowing of the oppressor
Yes. And it puts much of what we worry about into perspective. 2nd May 1997 is perhaps our nearest equivalent in recent memory - but even to make such a comparison is absurd and slightly crass.
Very absurd and very crass
Yes. very crass. Actually offensive. For me, the closest comparison to the Kherson Liberation is Brexit Day, Friday 31st January, and the moment Boris won the GE in 2019, when we knew he would Ged Brexit Done
The hideous oppressor was expelled, and the tanks of free movement and the artillery of trade regulations fled across the Channel, like the soldiers across the Dnieper, and it was like having a baby as well
Even more absurdly crass. Only swiveleyed loons like you think the fools charter of Brexit is anything worth celebrating. "Ooo sovereinty sovereignty" we hear the brainwashed fuckwits cry. We already had our sovereignty you gullible thickheads.
I read your post yesterday about your Euroscepticism with some interest, but it makes your stridency about Brexit seem a bit artificial. Surely you must see arguments on both sides, even if on balance you favoured Remain or thought the disadvantages outweighed any advantages from pulling out?
If you're a William Hague-style Eurosceptic then you must think that the EU has done things and plans to do more things that we are better off steering clear of, but at the same time you are adamant that there are absolutely no benefits whatsoever from opting out of the whole lot. How can you be so sure that the line of what to opt in to was drawn in precisely the right place before 2016?
I am a right of centre pragmatist, though I must admit that my putdowns of the lunatic Brexit apologists may well make me seem like an EU enthusiast when I never have been such. I was not in favour of joining Euro, and not in favour of "ever closer union", the latter which I think is mythological, as the French in particular have zero intention of being absorbed into a full-on union with Germany. I find British EU-phobia (as opposed to Eurosceptism) to be a pernicious and dangerously stupid ideology.
Being part of an organisation whose explicit aims - Ever Closer Union - we are opposed to on the basis that we hope other members will share our opposition seems - well - a little trusting for my tastes.
It is meaningless nonsense and is seen as such by many pro-Europeans. The only people who bang on about it are the rabid Euro-federalists, who are in reality a minority, and British EU-phobes.
And yet the clear movement for the first 16 years of the century was ever closer union. When something is both an explicit aim of the organisation and is visibly happening, you can forgive people for thinking Ever Closer Union is a thing.
It is amusing that the Europhiles try to deny it when it is literally written at the start of the founding document and remains the stated aim of the organisation.
Maybe they think they are lying?
Worth adding that not all Europhiles try to deny this. The Federal Union for example is very keen on the EU as a fully Federal state and pushes this aspect of the organisation with great candour and pride. I disagree with them but you could never accuse them of being misleading.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
Whether a deal has been done with Putin, or not, those scenes in Kherson are spellbinding. What is it about Liberation videos? They have the same power whether they come from France in 1944, or Ukraine in 2022
They must touch something primal and Freudian inside us. The beaten animal yearning to be free, the glorious overthrowing of the oppressor
Yes. And it puts much of what we worry about into perspective. 2nd May 1997 is perhaps our nearest equivalent in recent memory - but even to make such a comparison is absurd and slightly crass.
Very absurd and very crass
Yes. very crass. Actually offensive. For me, the closest comparison to the Kherson Liberation is Brexit Day, Friday 31st January, and the moment Boris won the GE in 2019, when we knew he would Ged Brexit Done
The hideous oppressor was expelled, and the tanks of free movement and the artillery of trade regulations fled across the Channel, like the soldiers across the Dnieper, and it was like having a baby as well
Even more absurdly crass. Only swiveleyed loons like you think the fools charter of Brexit is anything worth celebrating. "Ooo sovereinty sovereignty" we hear the brainwashed fuckwits cry. We already had our sovereignty you gullible thickheads.
I read your post yesterday about your Euroscepticism with some interest, but it makes your stridency about Brexit seem a bit artificial. Surely you must see arguments on both sides, even if on balance you favoured Remain or thought the disadvantages outweighed any advantages from pulling out?
If you're a William Hague-style Eurosceptic then you must think that the EU has done things and plans to do more things that we are better off steering clear of, but at the same time you are adamant that there are absolutely no benefits whatsoever from opting out of the whole lot. How can you be so sure that the line of what to opt in to was drawn in precisely the right place before 2016?
I am a right of centre pragmatist, though I must admit that my putdowns of the lunatic Brexit apologists may well make me seem like an EU enthusiast when I never have been such. I was not in favour of joining Euro, and not in favour of "ever closer union", the latter which I think is mythological, as the French in particular have zero intention of being absorbed into a full-on union with Germany. I find British EU-phobia (as opposed to Eurosceptism) to be a pernicious and dangerously stupid ideology.
Being part of an organisation whose explicit aims - Ever Closer Union - we are opposed to on the basis that we hope other members will share our opposition seems - well - a little trusting for my tastes.
It is meaningless nonsense and is seen as such by many pro-Europeans. The only people who bang on about it are the rabid Euro-federalists, who are in reality a minority, and British EU-phobes.
And yet the clear movement for the first 16 years of the century was ever closer union. When something is both an explicit aim of the organisation and is visibly happening, you can forgive people for thinking Ever Closer Union is a thing.
It is amusing that the Europhiles try to deny it when it is literally written at the start of the founding document and remains the stated aim of the organisation.
Maybe they think they are lying?
They know it's hugely inconvenient to their case so try to belittle it.
Roger is a mysogynist as he supports Roman Polanksi who sodomized a 15 year old girl and dismisses it as hardly relevant
Roger is a racist as he dismisses tunisians as not real people
Waiting for his homophobia to surface next
He rails against people from hartlepool but I suspect he would disgust most people in hartlepool because of his views
What was the bible quote....remove the beam from your own eye first.
He's also lauded "vibrant Italy" a lot in the past, the same Italy that has just elected a nationalist government with the leading party formed out of the ashes of the Italian fascist party. He's gone quiet about "vibrant Italy" recently though.
Roger is everything he claims to despise but can't see it because he classes himself as left wing. The rest of us classify him as pond scum
Bit strong.
He's just a prejudiced left-wing snob.
When you filter everything through that he's sort of harmless and amusing.
Would you excuse anyone else for blatant mysogyny and racism? I don't know anyone else on this board that is such a blatant arsehole
Oh I don't know. I expect I may well be more so, but the competition is stiff.
I wonder where Ukraine's next breakthrough attack will be? Kharkiv Oblast and Kherson west of the Dnipro river are now secure, which had been the focus for so long.
The length of the frontline seems to offer a few different options once the Ukraine army has regrouped from its latest victory.
The Ukrainians have still been pressing, and making marginal gains, on the Svatove-Kreminna front in northern Luhansk - so a continuation of the Kharkiv offensive.
Melitopol and then Mariupol would be the most symbolic target, and the sooner the remaining civilians in Mariupol are liberated the better the chance they have of surviving the winter. It would also create the opportunity to recapture control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which would make a big difference to the electricity supply situation. And ultimately it's the only way they would be able to dislodge the Russians from the other bank of the Dnipro, and push them out of artillery range of Kherson City.
A former commander of US forces in Europe has said that he expects Ukraine to retake all the territory lost to Russia since February 24th by the end of this year. That would require rapid advances in both those directions over the next seven weeks, which seems a bit unlikely to me, but he has more subject matter knowledge than I do.
It is amusing that the Europhiles try to deny it when it is literally written at the start of the founding document and remains the stated aim of the organisation.
It is amusing, but only because it is the Europhobes who deny it
Roger is a mysogynist as he supports Roman Polanksi who sodomized a 15 year old girl and dismisses it as hardly relevant
Roger is a racist as he dismisses tunisians as not real people
Waiting for his homophobia to surface next
He rails against people from hartlepool but I suspect he would disgust most people in hartlepool because of his views
What was the bible quote....remove the beam from your own eye first.
He's also lauded "vibrant Italy" a lot in the past, the same Italy that has just elected a nationalist government with the leading party formed out of the ashes of the Italian fascist party. He's gone quiet about "vibrant Italy" recently though.
Roger is everything he claims to despise but can't see it because he classes himself as left wing. The rest of us classify him as pond scum
Bit strong.
He's just a prejudiced left-wing snob.
When you filter everything through that he's sort of harmless and amusing.
Would you excuse anyone else for blatant mysogyny and racism? I don't know anyone else on this board that is such a blatant arsehole
Oh I don't know. I expect I may well be more so, but the competition is stiff.
Conclusion: Sean Patrick Maloney is a worse strategist than Robbie Mook.
My "like" is more for your question (so to speak) than your conclusion.
Caveat being, personally think Mook was & still is in a league of his own, along with Mark Penn.
However, Maloney DID manage to piss away four US House seats - including his own - via moronic New York State gerrymander than never was.
IF any Democrat for US House HAD to lose their seat in 2022 midterms, then my personal vote for such a sacrifice, would definitely be soon-to-be ex-US Rep. Sean Patrick Baloney - the freaking chair of the freaking Democratic freaking Campaign freaking Committee.
Talk about poetic justice.
Not just the NY debacle, he ultimately made the call to cut off funding to a bunch of seats that have been lost by razor thin margins.
Whether a deal has been done with Putin, or not, those scenes in Kherson are spellbinding. What is it about Liberation videos? They have the same power whether they come from France in 1944, or Ukraine in 2022
They must touch something primal and Freudian inside us. The beaten animal yearning to be free, the glorious overthrowing of the oppressor
Yes. And it puts much of what we worry about into perspective. 2nd May 1997 is perhaps our nearest equivalent in recent memory - but even to make such a comparison is absurd and slightly crass.
Very absurd and very crass
Yes. very crass. Actually offensive. For me, the closest comparison to the Kherson Liberation is Brexit Day, Friday 31st January, and the moment Boris won the GE in 2019, when we knew he would Ged Brexit Done
The hideous oppressor was expelled, and the tanks of free movement and the artillery of trade regulations fled across the Channel, like the soldiers across the Dnieper, and it was like having a baby as well
Even more absurdly crass. Only swiveleyed loons like you think the fools charter of Brexit is anything worth celebrating. "Ooo sovereinty sovereignty" we hear the brainwashed fuckwits cry. We already had our sovereignty you gullible thickheads.
I read your post yesterday about your Euroscepticism with some interest, but it makes your stridency about Brexit seem a bit artificial. Surely you must see arguments on both sides, even if on balance you favoured Remain or thought the disadvantages outweighed any advantages from pulling out?
If you're a William Hague-style Eurosceptic then you must think that the EU has done things and plans to do more things that we are better off steering clear of, but at the same time you are adamant that there are absolutely no benefits whatsoever from opting out of the whole lot. How can you be so sure that the line of what to opt in to was drawn in precisely the right place before 2016?
I am a right of centre pragmatist, though I must admit that my putdowns of the lunatic Brexit apologists may well make me seem like an EU enthusiast when I never have been such. I was not in favour of joining Euro, and not in favour of "ever closer union", the latter which I think is mythological, as the French in particular have zero intention of being absorbed into a full-on union with Germany. I find British EU-phobia (as opposed to Eurosceptism) to be a pernicious and dangerously stupid ideology.
Being part of an organisation whose explicit aims - Ever Closer Union - we are opposed to on the basis that we hope other members will share our opposition seems - well - a little trusting for my tastes.
It is meaningless nonsense and is seen as such by many pro-Europeans. The only people who bang on about it are the rabid Euro-federalists, who are in reality a minority, and British EU-phobes.
And yet the clear movement for the first 16 years of the century was ever closer union. When something is both an explicit aim of the organisation and is visibly happening, you can forgive people for thinking Ever Closer Union is a thing.
It is amusing that the Europhiles try to deny it when it is literally written at the start of the founding document and remains the stated aim of the organisation.
Maybe they think they are lying?
Worth adding that not all Europhiles try to deny this. The Federal Union for example is very keen on the EU as a fully Federal state and pushes this aspect of the organisation with great candour and pride. I disagree with them but you could never accuse them of being misleading.
Guy Verhofstadht lays it out in black and white.
I don't see why people can object to Brexit for the many of us who object to that.
Whether a deal has been done with Putin, or not, those scenes in Kherson are spellbinding. What is it about Liberation videos? They have the same power whether they come from France in 1944, or Ukraine in 2022
They must touch something primal and Freudian inside us. The beaten animal yearning to be free, the glorious overthrowing of the oppressor
Yes. And it puts much of what we worry about into perspective. 2nd May 1997 is perhaps our nearest equivalent in recent memory - but even to make such a comparison is absurd and slightly crass.
Very absurd and very crass
Yes. very crass. Actually offensive. For me, the closest comparison to the Kherson Liberation is Brexit Day, Friday 31st January, and the moment Boris won the GE in 2019, when we knew he would Ged Brexit Done
The hideous oppressor was expelled, and the tanks of free movement and the artillery of trade regulations fled across the Channel, like the soldiers across the Dnieper, and it was like having a baby as well
Even more absurdly crass. Only swiveleyed loons like you think the fools charter of Brexit is anything worth celebrating. "Ooo sovereinty sovereignty" we hear the brainwashed fuckwits cry. We already had our sovereignty you gullible thickheads.
I read your post yesterday about your Euroscepticism with some interest, but it makes your stridency about Brexit seem a bit artificial. Surely you must see arguments on both sides, even if on balance you favoured Remain or thought the disadvantages outweighed any advantages from pulling out?
If you're a William Hague-style Eurosceptic then you must think that the EU has done things and plans to do more things that we are better off steering clear of, but at the same time you are adamant that there are absolutely no benefits whatsoever from opting out of the whole lot. How can you be so sure that the line of what to opt in to was drawn in precisely the right place before 2016?
I am a right of centre pragmatist, though I must admit that my putdowns of the lunatic Brexit apologists may well make me seem like an EU enthusiast when I never have been such. I was not in favour of joining Euro, and not in favour of "ever closer union", the latter which I think is mythological, as the French in particular have zero intention of being absorbed into a full-on union with Germany. I find British EU-phobia (as opposed to Eurosceptism) to be a pernicious and dangerously stupid ideology.
Being part of an organisation whose explicit aims - Ever Closer Union - we are opposed to on the basis that we hope other members will share our opposition seems - well - a little trusting for my tastes.
It is meaningless nonsense and is seen as such by many pro-Europeans. The only people who bang on about it are the rabid Euro-federalists, who are in reality a minority, and British EU-phobes.
And yet the clear movement for the first 16 years of the century was ever closer union. When something is both an explicit aim of the organisation and is visibly happening, you can forgive people for thinking Ever Closer Union is a thing.
It is amusing that the Europhiles try to deny it when it is literally written at the start of the founding document and remains the stated aim of the organisation.
Maybe they think they are lying?
They know it's hugely inconvenient to their case so try to belittle it.
The vociferous denial that Turkey was joining the EU, the week before the “EU/Turkey Summit on EU Accession”, was a good one too.
It is amusing that the Europhiles try to deny it when it is literally written at the start of the founding document and remains the stated aim of the organisation.
It is amusing, but only because it is the Europhobes who deny it
"We voted for the common market, not the EU..."
Bollocks.
Like Cookie down thread I have been opposed to the EEC/EU all my adult life. It didn't matter what you called it, the intent was always clear. In case you missed it, it is the Europhiles on here who are trying to deny something that is written in black and white and repeated at each new ittaration of the treaties.
On the whole it looks like the Russian retreat across the Dnipro has gone okay, they've avoided a rout and they haven't seen lots of soldiers taken prisoner. However, somehow they've managed to leave behind a working helicopter, which you would think would be one of the easier things to evacuate.
Conclusion: Sean Patrick Maloney is a worse strategist than Robbie Mook.
My "like" is more for your question (so to speak) than your conclusion.
Caveat being, personally think Mook was & still is in a league of his own, along with Mark Penn.
However, Maloney DID manage to piss away four US House seats - including his own - via moronic New York State gerrymander than never was.
IF any Democrat for US House HAD to lose their seat in 2022 midterms, then my personal vote for such a sacrifice, would definitely be soon-to-be ex-US Rep. Sean Patrick Baloney - the freaking chair of the freaking Democratic freaking Campaign freaking Committee.
Talk about poetic justice.
Not just the NY debacle, he ultimately made the call to cut off funding to a bunch of seats that have been lost by razor thin margins.
DCCC allegedly exists to elect Democrats to US House of Represenatives.
Actual mission of Dee-Trip(e) is to enrich coterie of consultants, their cronies & sub-cronies.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
On the whole it looks like the Russian retreat across the Dnipro has gone okay, they've avoided a rout and they haven't seen lots of soldiers taken prisoner. However, somehow they've managed to leave behind a working helicopter, which you would think would be one of the easier things to evacuate.
Whether a deal has been done with Putin, or not, those scenes in Kherson are spellbinding. What is it about Liberation videos? They have the same power whether they come from France in 1944, or Ukraine in 2022
They must touch something primal and Freudian inside us. The beaten animal yearning to be free, the glorious overthrowing of the oppressor
Yes. And it puts much of what we worry about into perspective. 2nd May 1997 is perhaps our nearest equivalent in recent memory - but even to make such a comparison is absurd and slightly crass.
Very absurd and very crass
Yes. very crass. Actually offensive. For me, the closest comparison to the Kherson Liberation is Brexit Day, Friday 31st January, and the moment Boris won the GE in 2019, when we knew he would Ged Brexit Done
The hideous oppressor was expelled, and the tanks of free movement and the artillery of trade regulations fled across the Channel, like the soldiers across the Dnieper, and it was like having a baby as well
Even more absurdly crass. Only swiveleyed loons like you think the fools charter of Brexit is anything worth celebrating. "Ooo sovereinty sovereignty" we hear the brainwashed fuckwits cry. We already had our sovereignty you gullible thickheads.
I read your post yesterday about your Euroscepticism with some interest, but it makes your stridency about Brexit seem a bit artificial. Surely you must see arguments on both sides, even if on balance you favoured Remain or thought the disadvantages outweighed any advantages from pulling out?
If you're a William Hague-style Eurosceptic then you must think that the EU has done things and plans to do more things that we are better off steering clear of, but at the same time you are adamant that there are absolutely no benefits whatsoever from opting out of the whole lot. How can you be so sure that the line of what to opt in to was drawn in precisely the right place before 2016?
I am a right of centre pragmatist, though I must admit that my putdowns of the lunatic Brexit apologists may well make me seem like an EU enthusiast when I never have been such. I was not in favour of joining Euro, and not in favour of "ever closer union", the latter which I think is mythological, as the French in particular have zero intention of being absorbed into a full-on union with Germany. I find British EU-phobia (as opposed to Eurosceptism) to be a pernicious and dangerously stupid ideology.
Being part of an organisation whose explicit aims - Ever Closer Union - we are opposed to on the basis that we hope other members will share our opposition seems - well - a little trusting for my tastes.
It is meaningless nonsense and is seen as such by many pro-Europeans. The only people who bang on about it are the rabid Euro-federalists, who are in reality a minority, and British EU-phobes.
And yet the clear movement for the first 16 years of the century was ever closer union. When something is both an explicit aim of the organisation and is visibly happening, you can forgive people for thinking Ever Closer Union is a thing.
It is amusing that the Europhiles try to deny it when it is literally written at the start of the founding document and remains the stated aim of the organisation.
Maybe they think they are lying?
They know it's hugely inconvenient to their case so try to belittle it.
The vociferous denial that Turkey was joining the EU, the week before the “EU/Turkey Summit on EU Accession”, was a good one too.
The vociferous denial that Turkey was joining the EU, the week before the “EU/Turkey Summit on EU Accession”, was a good one too.
When did they join?
Oh, wait...
They haven’t yet. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t the intention, unless the EU were being very rude to the Turkish by giving them the impression that they were joining.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
I wonder where Ukraine's next breakthrough attack will be? Kharkiv Oblast and Kherson west of the Dnipro river are now secure, which had been the focus for so long.
The length of the frontline seems to offer a few different options once the Ukraine army has regrouped from its latest victory.
The Ukrainians have still been pressing, and making marginal gains, on the Svatove-Kreminna front in northern Luhansk - so a continuation of the Kharkiv offensive.
Melitopol and then Mariupol would be the most symbolic target, and the sooner the remaining civilians in Mariupol are liberated the better the chance they have of surviving the winter. It would also create the opportunity to recapture control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which would make a big difference to the electricity supply situation. And ultimately it's the only way they would be able to dislodge the Russians from the other bank of the Dnipro, and push them out of artillery range of Kherson City.
A former commander of US forces in Europe has said that he expects Ukraine to retake all the territory lost to Russia since February 24th by the end of this year. That would require rapid advances in both those directions over the next seven weeks, which seems a bit unlikely to me, but he has more subject matter knowledge than I do.
I wonder where Ukraine's next breakthrough attack will be? Kharkiv Oblast and Kherson west of the Dnipro river are now secure, which had been the focus for so long.
The length of the frontline seems to offer a few different options once the Ukraine army has regrouped from its latest victory.
The Ukrainians have still been pressing, and making marginal gains, on the Svatove-Kreminna front in northern Luhansk - so a continuation of the Kharkiv offensive.
Melitopol and then Mariupol would be the most symbolic target, and the sooner the remaining civilians in Mariupol are liberated the better the chance they have of surviving the winter. It would also create the opportunity to recapture control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which would make a big difference to the electricity supply situation. And ultimately it's the only way they would be able to dislodge the Russians from the other bank of the Dnipro, and push them out of artillery range of Kherson City.
A former commander of US forces in Europe has said that he expects Ukraine to retake all the territory lost to Russia since February 24th by the end of this year. That would require rapid advances in both those directions over the next seven weeks, which seems a bit unlikely to me, but he has more subject matter knowledge than I do.
There have got to be a lot of demoralised and disorganised troops on the East bank of the Dniepr at the moment. I’d have thought tactically it makes sense to Harry them mercilessly for as long as possible and try to push them further away from the river, before trying other new axes.
The vociferous denial that Turkey was joining the EU, the week before the “EU/Turkey Summit on EU Accession”, was a good one too.
When did they join?
Oh, wait...
They haven’t yet. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t the intention, unless the EU were being very rude to the Turkish by giving them the impression that they were joining.
Membership is not solely in the EU's gift - it requires a Treaty of Accession signed by each of the constituent countries of the EU.
Any member state could veto Turkey joining, and Cyprus has long said that it would.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The vociferous denial that Turkey was joining the EU, the week before the “EU/Turkey Summit on EU Accession”, was a good one too.
When did they join?
Oh, wait...
They haven’t yet. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t the intention, unless the EU were being very rude to the Turkish by giving them the impression that they were joining.
Membership is not solely in the EU's gift - it requires a Treaty of Accession signed by each of the constituent countries of the EU.
Any member state could veto Turkey joining, and Cyprus has long said that it would.
Nonetheless, it's an inarguable fact that at the time of the referendum, Turkey were in the accession process.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Something that most of the Brexit side forgot the moment they had their win. We should have immediately started looking at ways to find a new relationship with Europe that satisfied the majority of the country not just the ones that voted Leave. The sadness is that the majority of the Tory party were too dumb to realise that they were supposed to lead for the whole country.
Roger is a mysogynist as he supports Roman Polanksi who sodomized a 15 year old girl and dismisses it as hardly relevant
Roger is a racist as he dismisses tunisians as not real people
Waiting for his homophobia to surface next
He rails against people from hartlepool but I suspect he would disgust most people in hartlepool because of his views
What was the bible quote....remove the beam from your own eye first.
He's also lauded "vibrant Italy" a lot in the past, the same Italy that has just elected a nationalist government with the leading party formed out of the ashes of the Italian fascist party. He's gone quiet about "vibrant Italy" recently though.
Roger is everything he claims to despise but can't see it because he classes himself as left wing. The rest of us classify him as pond scum
I don't want to cramp your style but if you want to get the approval of your fellow posters you should try to sharpen up your put-downs. Try a bit of humour? Have a word with Ishmael. He's very good at it and he doesn't end up sounding desperate
The vociferous denial that Turkey was joining the EU, the week before the “EU/Turkey Summit on EU Accession”, was a good one too.
When did they join?
Oh, wait...
They haven’t yet. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t the intention, unless the EU were being very rude to the Turkish by giving them the impression that they were joining.
The deliberate impression was made that the joining was imminent, when that was very obviously not true. I was a leaver at the time and it was clearly bullshit. Yes it is a candidate country, but that doesn't mean it was at all likely to happen anytime soon.
On the whole it looks like the Russian retreat across the Dnipro has gone okay, they've avoided a rout and they haven't seen lots of soldiers taken prisoner. However, somehow they've managed to leave behind a working helicopter, which you would think would be one of the easier things to evacuate.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Something that most of the Brexit side forgot the moment they had their win. We should have immediately started looking at ways to find a new relationship with Europe that satisfied the majority of the country not just the ones that voted Leave. The sadness is that the majority of the Tory party were too dumb to realise that they were supposed to lead for the whole country.
Wasn't possible in the face of a determined effort to overturn the referendum result.
The vociferous denial that Turkey was joining the EU, the week before the “EU/Turkey Summit on EU Accession”, was a good one too.
When did they join?
Oh, wait...
They haven’t yet. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t the intention, unless the EU were being very rude to the Turkish by giving them the impression that they were joining.
Turkiye in the EU was a Cameron project to alter the balance of power away from France and Germany. He changed position and shit all over it from a great height in 2016. After that, it was dead and exhuming it probably suits neither party at the moment.
The vociferous denial that Turkey was joining the EU, the week before the “EU/Turkey Summit on EU Accession”, was a good one too.
When did they join?
Oh, wait...
They haven’t yet. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t the intention, unless the EU were being very rude to the Turkish by giving them the impression that they were joining.
Membership is not solely in the EU's gift - it requires a Treaty of Accession signed by each of the constituent countries of the EU.
Any member state could veto Turkey joining, and Cyprus has long said that it would.
Nonetheless, it's an inarguable fact that at the time of the referendum, Turkey were in the accession process.
It was also inarguable that the British government could veto Turkish membership.
The vociferous denial that Turkey was joining the EU, the week before the “EU/Turkey Summit on EU Accession”, was a good one too.
When did they join?
Oh, wait...
They haven’t yet. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t the intention, unless the EU were being very rude to the Turkish by giving them the impression that they were joining.
Membership is not solely in the EU's gift - it requires a Treaty of Accession signed by each of the constituent countries of the EU.
Any member state could veto Turkey joining, and Cyprus has long said that it would.
Oh indeed - but it was the juxtaposition of the vociferous denials, with the fact that formal discussions on accession were taking place.
The vociferous denial that Turkey was joining the EU, the week before the “EU/Turkey Summit on EU Accession”, was a good one too.
When did they join?
Oh, wait...
They haven’t yet. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t the intention, unless the EU were being very rude to the Turkish by giving them the impression that they were joining.
Membership is not solely in the EU's gift - it requires a Treaty of Accession signed by each of the constituent countries of the EU.
Any member state could veto Turkey joining, and Cyprus has long said that it would.
Nonetheless, it's an inarguable fact that at the time of the referendum, Turkey were in the accession process.
It was also inarguable that the British government could veto Turkish membership.
And, as you know, almost anything "could" happen.
This particular thing wasn't likely as Cameron was a fan of Turkey joining...
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Something that most of the Brexit side forgot the moment they had their win. We should have immediately started looking at ways to find a new relationship with Europe that satisfied the majority of the country not just the ones that voted Leave. The sadness is that the majority of the Tory party were too dumb to realise that they were supposed to lead for the whole country.
Wasn't possible in the face of a determined effort to overturn the referendum result.
All sides were equally guilty of trying to get their own extreme ways. Blaming the Eurofanatics in Parliament whilst excusing the ERG mob is very partial thinking.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
The vociferous denial that Turkey was joining the EU, the week before the “EU/Turkey Summit on EU Accession”, was a good one too.
When did they join?
Oh, wait...
They haven’t yet. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t the intention, unless the EU were being very rude to the Turkish by giving them the impression that they were joining.
Turkiye in the EU was a Cameron project to alter the balance of power away from France and Germany. He changed position and shit all over it from a great height in 2016. After that, it was dead and exhuming it probably suits neither party at the moment.
Oh indeed. I didn’t have a particular view on Turkey’s relationship with the EU - but I did know that Cameron was lying through his teeth.
🍅 An insider told The Sun: “Raab wasn't happy with the way he was being briefed. He began a tirade, opened his Pret salad and threw three tomatoes out into a bag across the table making a loud noise.”
🍅 The Deputy PM has tonight been nicknamed "rocket man". One former MoJ staff member said: “I just hope he can turn over a new leaf.”
A spokesman for the Deputy PM said it was “complete nonsense” he chucked around parts of his Pret salad in front of horrified officials.
I wonder where Ukraine's next breakthrough attack will be? Kharkiv Oblast and Kherson west of the Dnipro river are now secure, which had been the focus for so long.
The length of the frontline seems to offer a few different options once the Ukraine army has regrouped from its latest victory.
The Ukrainians have still been pressing, and making marginal gains, on the Svatove-Kreminna front in northern Luhansk - so a continuation of the Kharkiv offensive.
Melitopol and then Mariupol would be the most symbolic target, and the sooner the remaining civilians in Mariupol are liberated the better the chance they have of surviving the winter. It would also create the opportunity to recapture control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which would make a big difference to the electricity supply situation. And ultimately it's the only way they would be able to dislodge the Russians from the other bank of the Dnipro, and push them out of artillery range of Kherson City.
A former commander of US forces in Europe has said that he expects Ukraine to retake all the territory lost to Russia since February 24th by the end of this year. That would require rapid advances in both those directions over the next seven weeks, which seems a bit unlikely to me, but he has more subject matter knowledge than I do.
There have got to be a lot of demoralised and disorganised troops on the East bank of the Dniepr at the moment. I’d have thought tactically it makes sense to Harry them mercilessly for as long as possible and try to push them further away from the river, before trying other new axes.
I would be surprised if there were not intense artillery duels across the river, but it's really pretty wide, and the Russians have gone to a lot of effort to fortify the opposite bank. I don't think it's worth the effort trying to cross it.
🍅 An insider told The Sun: “Raab wasn't happy with the way he was being briefed. He began a tirade, opened his Pret salad and threw three tomatoes out into a bag across the table making a loud noise.”
🍅 The Deputy PM has tonight been nicknamed "rocket man". One former MoJ staff member said: “I just hope he can turn over a new leaf.”
A spokesman for the Deputy PM said it was “complete nonsense” he chucked around parts of his Pret salad in front of horrified officials.
🍅 An insider told The Sun: “Raab wasn't happy with the way he was being briefed. He began a tirade, opened his Pret salad and threw three tomatoes out into a bag across the table making a loud noise.”
🍅 The Deputy PM has tonight been nicknamed "rocket man". One former MoJ staff member said: “I just hope he can turn over a new leaf.”
A spokesman for the Deputy PM said it was “complete nonsense” he chucked around parts of his Pret salad in front of horrified officials.
Yes, and Brown never threw a stapler.
What is it with how petty some of these top MPs are, engaging in adolescent fits of pique and unprofessionalism that we are supposed to excuse on the basis of their being MPs? Next we'll get the 'grown men and women cannot be bullied' excuses like Bercow defenders.
The vociferous denial that Turkey was joining the EU, the week before the “EU/Turkey Summit on EU Accession”, was a good one too.
When did they join?
Oh, wait...
They haven’t yet. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t the intention, unless the EU were being very rude to the Turkish by giving them the impression that they were joining.
Turkiye in the EU was a Cameron project to alter the balance of power away from France and Germany. He changed position and shit all over it from a great height in 2016. After that, it was dead and exhuming it probably suits neither party at the moment.
It may come back into fashion as part of Turkey's current embrace to the bossom of the West.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Something that most of the Brexit side forgot the moment they had their win. We should have immediately started looking at ways to find a new relationship with Europe that satisfied the majority of the country not just the ones that voted Leave. The sadness is that the majority of the Tory party were too dumb to realise that they were supposed to lead for the whole country.
Wasn't possible in the face of a determined effort to overturn the referendum result.
All sides were equally guilty of trying to get their own extreme ways. Blaming the Eurofanatics in Parliament whilst excusing the ERG mob is very partial thinking.
True, but I'm talking about moderate Leavers who were firced to accept a harder Brexit than they might have liked because there was nobody on the other side to work with in the crucial weeks immediately after the vote.
🍅 An insider told The Sun: “Raab wasn't happy with the way he was being briefed. He began a tirade, opened his Pret salad and threw three tomatoes out into a bag across the table making a loud noise.”
🍅 The Deputy PM has tonight been nicknamed "rocket man". One former MoJ staff member said: “I just hope he can turn over a new leaf.”
A spokesman for the Deputy PM said it was “complete nonsense” he chucked around parts of his Pret salad in front of horrified officials.
Yes, and Brown never threw a stapler.
What is it with how petty some of these top MPs are, engaging in adolescent fits of pique and unprofessionalism that we are supposed to excuse on the basis of their being MPs? Next we'll get the 'grown men and women cannot be bullied' excuses like Bercow defenders.
I hate tomatoes in my salad too, so I do have some sympathy. How do they sneak into everything? Sandwiches never mention them on a menu, but when it arrives it's full of the slimy buggers.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
It’s rather telling that the referendum winners are still trying to define what happened in the past. If Brexit were a success, why would it matter ?
I wonder where Ukraine's next breakthrough attack will be? Kharkiv Oblast and Kherson west of the Dnipro river are now secure, which had been the focus for so long.
The length of the frontline seems to offer a few different options once the Ukraine army has regrouped from its latest victory.
The Ukrainians have still been pressing, and making marginal gains, on the Svatove-Kreminna front in northern Luhansk - so a continuation of the Kharkiv offensive.
Melitopol and then Mariupol would be the most symbolic target, and the sooner the remaining civilians in Mariupol are liberated the better the chance they have of surviving the winter. It would also create the opportunity to recapture control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which would make a big difference to the electricity supply situation. And ultimately it's the only way they would be able to dislodge the Russians from the other bank of the Dnipro, and push them out of artillery range of Kherson City.
A former commander of US forces in Europe has said that he expects Ukraine to retake all the territory lost to Russia since February 24th by the end of this year. That would require rapid advances in both those directions over the next seven weeks, which seems a bit unlikely to me, but he has more subject matter knowledge than I do.
There have got to be a lot of demoralised and disorganised troops on the East bank of the Dniepr at the moment. I’d have thought tactically it makes sense to Harry them mercilessly for as long as possible and try to push them further away from the river, before trying other new axes.
I would be surprised if there were not intense artillery duels across the river, but it's really pretty wide, and the Russians have gone to a lot of effort to fortify the opposite bank. I don't think it's worth the effort trying to cross it.
They’re already across further North, so I was thinking of movement Southwards from there.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Something that most of the Brexit side forgot the moment they had their win. We should have immediately started looking at ways to find a new relationship with Europe that satisfied the majority of the country not just the ones that voted Leave. The sadness is that the majority of the Tory party were too dumb to realise that they were supposed to lead for the whole country.
Wasn't possible in the face of a determined effort to overturn the referendum result.
All sides were equally guilty of trying to get their own extreme ways. Blaming the Eurofanatics in Parliament whilst excusing the ERG mob is very partial thinking.
True, but I'm talking about moderate Leavers who were firced to accept a harder Brexit than they might have liked because there was nobody on the other side to work with in the crucial weeks immediately after the vote.
I don't think the fault lies in a single place. I would point the finger at least four different groups/people:
(1) The EU itself, who did nothing to encourage constructive discourse with the massive early arguments over money.
(2) Ms May, who felt that as an ex-Remainer, she needed to demonstrate that she took the referendum result very seriously.
(3) Nigel Farage and Aaron Banks and Dominic Cumming: all of whom shouted from the rooftops about how anything less that diamond Brexit wasn't really Brexit.
(4) The FBPE (or whatever they're called) bunch, who preferred to try and overturn the result rather than seek compromise.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Something that most of the Brexit side forgot the moment they had their win. We should have immediately started looking at ways to find a new relationship with Europe that satisfied the majority of the country not just the ones that voted Leave. The sadness is that the majority of the Tory party were too dumb to realise that they were supposed to lead for the whole country.
Wasn't possible in the face of a determined effort to overturn the referendum result.
All sides were equally guilty of trying to get their own extreme ways. Blaming the Eurofanatics in Parliament whilst excusing the ERG mob is very partial thinking.
True, but I'm talking about moderate Leavers who were firced to accept a harder Brexit than they might have liked because there was nobody on the other side to work with in the crucial weeks immediately after the vote.
I think May is as much to blame as anyone. Her Lancaster House speech back in early 2017 created a whole list of red lines that were incompatible with any reasonable compromise with the remainers, and guaranteed a problematic position in NI. That and triggering article 50 before she needed to.
🍅 An insider told The Sun: “Raab wasn't happy with the way he was being briefed. He began a tirade, opened his Pret salad and threw three tomatoes out into a bag across the table making a loud noise.”
🍅 The Deputy PM has tonight been nicknamed "rocket man". One former MoJ staff member said: “I just hope he can turn over a new leaf.”
A spokesman for the Deputy PM said it was “complete nonsense” he chucked around parts of his Pret salad in front of horrified officials.
Whether a deal has been done with Putin, or not, those scenes in Kherson are spellbinding. What is it about Liberation videos? They have the same power whether they come from France in 1944, or Ukraine in 2022
They must touch something primal and Freudian inside us. The beaten animal yearning to be free, the glorious overthrowing of the oppressor
Yes. And it puts much of what we worry about into perspective. 2nd May 1997 is perhaps our nearest equivalent in recent memory - but even to make such a comparison is absurd and slightly crass.
This is a classic example of the opinions are like arseholes genre.
Stick to the betting.
Thank goodness you have resiled from ever giving an opinion,
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Something that most of the Brexit side forgot the moment they had their win. We should have immediately started looking at ways to find a new relationship with Europe that satisfied the majority of the country not just the ones that voted Leave. The sadness is that the majority of the Tory party were too dumb to realise that they were supposed to lead for the whole country.
Wasn't possible in the face of a determined effort to overturn the referendum result.
All sides were equally guilty of trying to get their own extreme ways. Blaming the Eurofanatics in Parliament whilst excusing the ERG mob is very partial thinking.
True, but I'm talking about moderate Leavers who were firced to accept a harder Brexit than they might have liked because there was nobody on the other side to work with in the crucial weeks immediately after the vote.
I think May is as much to blame as anyone. Her Lancaster House speech back in early 2017 created a whole list of red lines that were incompatible with any reasonable compromise with the remainers, and guaranteed a problematic position in NI. That and triggering article 50 before she needed to.
True enough, but by the time of Lancaster House, the FBPEers had made clear that compromise was impossible.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Something that most of the Brexit side forgot the moment they had their win. We should have immediately started looking at ways to find a new relationship with Europe that satisfied the majority of the country not just the ones that voted Leave. The sadness is that the majority of the Tory party were too dumb to realise that they were supposed to lead for the whole country.
Wasn't possible in the face of a determined effort to overturn the referendum result.
All sides were equally guilty of trying to get their own extreme ways. Blaming the Eurofanatics in Parliament whilst excusing the ERG mob is very partial thinking.
True, but I'm talking about moderate Leavers who were firced to accept a harder Brexit than they might have liked because there was nobody on the other side to work with in the crucial weeks immediately after the vote.
The challenge for anyone writing an alternate history of 2016-19 leading to a softer Brexit is getting it past the ERG wing of the Conservative Party.
One of the reasons that the years after 2016 were so painful is that there was a double lock to open. Any Brexit deal had to have a majority in the Commons and a (separate) majority in the Conservative Party. The first was needed to get the thing through Parliament, the second was needed to stop the PM being VONCed by their own party.
Maybe there was an arrangement that could do that. But I'm not sure what. But anything EEA-like certainly wasn't that arrangement. (Go on, imagine a lineup of the people in Vote Leave and Leave.EU. How many of them went to all that trouble to stay in the single market?)
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Something that most of the Brexit side forgot the moment they had their win. We should have immediately started looking at ways to find a new relationship with Europe that satisfied the majority of the country not just the ones that voted Leave. The sadness is that the majority of the Tory party were too dumb to realise that they were supposed to lead for the whole country.
Wasn't possible in the face of a determined effort to overturn the referendum result.
All sides were equally guilty of trying to get their own extreme ways. Blaming the Eurofanatics in Parliament whilst excusing the ERG mob is very partial thinking.
True, but I'm talking about moderate Leavers who were firced to accept a harder Brexit than they might have liked because there was nobody on the other side to work with in the crucial weeks immediately after the vote.
The challenge for anyone writing an alternate history of 2016-19 leading to a softer Brexit is getting it past the ERG wing of the Conservative Party.
One of the reasons that the years after 2016 were so painful is that there was a double lock to open. Any Brexit deal had to have a majority in the Commons and a (separate) majority in the Conservative Party. The first was needed to get the thing through Parliament, the second was needed to stop the PM being VONCed by their own party.
Maybe there was an arrangement that could do that. But I'm not sure what. But anything EEA-like certainly wasn't that arrangement. (Go on, imagine a lineup of the people in Vote Leave and Leave.EU. How many of them went to all that trouble to stay in the single market?)
Oh, that's quite easy. You just have to understand that at the point of the referendum, the ERG wing of the parliamentary Conservative party was a minority.
As for the single market: Cameron should have put it on the ballot paper.
🍅 An insider told The Sun: “Raab wasn't happy with the way he was being briefed. He began a tirade, opened his Pret salad and threw three tomatoes out into a bag across the table making a loud noise.”
🍅 The Deputy PM has tonight been nicknamed "rocket man". One former MoJ staff member said: “I just hope he can turn over a new leaf.”
A spokesman for the Deputy PM said it was “complete nonsense” he chucked around parts of his Pret salad in front of horrified officials.
That's a very specific denial.
Raab is, after all, a proven lawyer.
It does seem to be "stories about Raab" day;
5 years ago at a do with civil servants was told by someone in his private office that there was a secret contest so see who could smuggle the most a's into his name in official docs
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Something that most of the Brexit side forgot the moment they had their win. We should have immediately started looking at ways to find a new relationship with Europe that satisfied the majority of the country not just the ones that voted Leave. The sadness is that the majority of the Tory party were too dumb to realise that they were supposed to lead for the whole country.
Wasn't possible in the face of a determined effort to overturn the referendum result.
All sides were equally guilty of trying to get their own extreme ways. Blaming the Eurofanatics in Parliament whilst excusing the ERG mob is very partial thinking.
True, but I'm talking about moderate Leavers who were firced to accept a harder Brexit than they might have liked because there was nobody on the other side to work with in the crucial weeks immediately after the vote.
I think May is as much to blame as anyone. Her Lancaster House speech back in early 2017 created a whole list of red lines that were incompatible with any reasonable compromise with the remainers, and guaranteed a problematic position in NI. That and triggering article 50 before she needed to.
True enough, but by the time of Lancaster House, the FBPEers had made clear that compromise was impossible.
“FBPErs” were by no means a significant faction in parliament at the time - limited essentially to the Lib Dems, SNP and a few labour backbenchers. Even those were mostly cowed and dared not admit they supported remaining for the first few months. Even the likes of Chukka Umunna. And we had a Corbyn Labour front bench avowedly in favour of pressing in with Brexit, plus a comfortable conservative majority. Back then even the ERG were fairly on board and not yet creating too much trouble.
May created the parliamentary impasse to follow with her Ill judged election.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Something that most of the Brexit side forgot the moment they had their win. We should have immediately started looking at ways to find a new relationship with Europe that satisfied the majority of the country not just the ones that voted Leave. The sadness is that the majority of the Tory party were too dumb to realise that they were supposed to lead for the whole country.
Wasn't possible in the face of a determined effort to overturn the referendum result.
All sides were equally guilty of trying to get their own extreme ways. Blaming the Eurofanatics in Parliament whilst excusing the ERG mob is very partial thinking.
True, but I'm talking about moderate Leavers who were firced to accept a harder Brexit than they might have liked because there was nobody on the other side to work with in the crucial weeks immediately after the vote.
I think May is as much to blame as anyone. Her Lancaster House speech back in early 2017 created a whole list of red lines that were incompatible with any reasonable compromise with the remainers, and guaranteed a problematic position in NI. That and triggering article 50 before she needed to.
True enough, but by the time of Lancaster House, the FBPEers had made clear that compromise was impossible.
“FBPErs” were by no means a significant faction in parliament at the time - limited essentially to the Lib Dems, SNP and a few labour backbenchers. Even those were mostly cowed and dared not admit they supported remaining for the first few months. Even the likes of Chukka Umunna. And we had a Corbyn Labour front bench avowedly in favour of pressing in with Brexit, plus a comfortable conservative majority. Back then even the ERG were fairly on board and not yet creating too much trouble.
May created the parliamentary impasse to follow with her Ill judged election.
We were never happy members of the EU. So, that's why we left it. There's no point in being a sullen, resentful, unhappy member of a club. We didn't like being part of it, and they didn't like having an unhappy resentful member.
Most people here who complain about leaving the EU, were complaining about the EU, prior to 2016.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Something that most of the Brexit side forgot the moment they had their win. We should have immediately started looking at ways to find a new relationship with Europe that satisfied the majority of the country not just the ones that voted Leave. The sadness is that the majority of the Tory party were too dumb to realise that they were supposed to lead for the whole country.
Wasn't possible in the face of a determined effort to overturn the referendum result.
All sides were equally guilty of trying to get their own extreme ways. Blaming the Eurofanatics in Parliament whilst excusing the ERG mob is very partial thinking.
True, but I'm talking about moderate Leavers who were firced to accept a harder Brexit than they might have liked because there was nobody on the other side to work with in the crucial weeks immediately after the vote.
I think May is as much to blame as anyone. Her Lancaster House speech back in early 2017 created a whole list of red lines that were incompatible with any reasonable compromise with the remainers, and guaranteed a problematic position in NI. That and triggering article 50 before she needed to.
True enough, but by the time of Lancaster House, the FBPEers had made clear that compromise was impossible.
“FBPErs” were by no means a significant faction in parliament at the time - limited essentially to the Lib Dems, SNP and a few labour backbenchers. Even those were mostly cowed and dared not admit they supported remaining for the first few months. Even the likes of Chukka Umunna. And we had a Corbyn Labour front bench avowedly in favour of pressing in with Brexit, plus a comfortable conservative majority. Back then even the ERG were fairly on board and not yet creating too much trouble.
May created the parliamentary impasse to follow with her Ill judged election.
In the Commons, perhaps. Not in the country.
And therefore irrelevant and ignored, as all Brexit policy since 2016 testifies. One faction of British life that’s had zero influence on government in the last few years is the “FBPErs”. This is like “our enemies are weak, and strong”.
I wonder where Ukraine's next breakthrough attack will be? Kharkiv Oblast and Kherson west of the Dnipro river are now secure, which had been the focus for so long.
The length of the frontline seems to offer a few different options once the Ukraine army has regrouped from its latest victory.
The Ukrainians have still been pressing, and making marginal gains, on the Svatove-Kreminna front in northern Luhansk - so a continuation of the Kharkiv offensive.
Melitopol and then Mariupol would be the most symbolic target, and the sooner the remaining civilians in Mariupol are liberated the better the chance they have of surviving the winter. It would also create the opportunity to recapture control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which would make a big difference to the electricity supply situation. And ultimately it's the only way they would be able to dislodge the Russians from the other bank of the Dnipro, and push them out of artillery range of Kherson City.
A former commander of US forces in Europe has said that he expects Ukraine to retake all the territory lost to Russia since February 24th by the end of this year. That would require rapid advances in both those directions over the next seven weeks, which seems a bit unlikely to me, but he has more subject matter knowledge than I do.
There have got to be a lot of demoralised and disorganised troops on the East bank of the Dniepr at the moment. I’d have thought tactically it makes sense to Harry them mercilessly for as long as possible and try to push them further away from the river, before trying other new axes.
I would be surprised if there were not intense artillery duels across the river, but it's really pretty wide, and the Russians have gone to a lot of effort to fortify the opposite bank. I don't think it's worth the effort trying to cross it.
They’re already across further North, so I was thinking of movement Southwards from there.
On the Melitopol / Mariupol axis, the front line seems to have been static for months along a straightish line between the point where the Dnieper turns sharply westwards between Zaporzhizhia and Enerhodar at one end and west of Donetsk at the other.
Those maps now seem to be showing the slightest smidge of a couple of bows south on that line and the merest hint of lilac re-taken territory, Here's hoping.
Lesson learned: docnot go on Twitter and criticise Trafalgar.
Nate Silver fan boys do not take it well.
I've literally got one saying it doesn't matter if its fraudulent the numbers are good!
I recall someone on here saying something similar about them(or some other similar 'pollster') in 2018 supposedly being pretty spot on even if they were not actually polling and were only close by power of a random guess.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
Rancid tosh
They have Federalised and shared some of their debt, for a start, to fund Covid revival. One of the most explicit steps imaginable towards a Federal Union
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
Tell that to Greece where Brussels and Berlin effectively dictated terms to it.
However yes we probably would have stayed in the EU outer core while the inner core pushed further towards an EU superstate
We were never happy members of the EU. So, that's why we left it. There's no point in being a sullen, resentful, unhappy member of a club. We didn't like being part of it, and they didn't like having an unhappy resentful member.
Most people here who complain about leaving the EU, were complaining about the EU, prior to 2016.
Not sure that’s true. Plenty of people were prett happy with the EU overall and appreciated the freedoms it brought.
That’s not to say people didn’t complain (though I generally didn’t, I was at the more federalist enthusiast end). But complaining about the EU is different from complaining about being in the EU. Just like complaining about the state of Britain or the government is different from complaining about being part of Britain - see London and Londoners, plenty of moaning but no secessionist movement.
We were never happy members of the EU. So, that's why we left it. There's no point in being a sullen, resentful, unhappy member of a club. We didn't like being part of it, and they didn't like having an unhappy resentful member.
Most people here who complain about leaving the EU, were complaining about the EU, prior to 2016.
Not sure that’s true. Plenty of people were prett happy with the EU overall and appreciated the freedoms it brought.
That’s not to say people didn’t complain (though I generally didn’t, I was at the more federalist enthusiast end). But complaining about the EU is different from complaining about being in the EU. Just like complaining about the state of Britain or the government is different from complaining about being part of Britain - see London and Londoners, plenty of moaning but no secessionist movement.
Agree. I was a pretty happy member of the EU. Doesn't mean I thought it was perfect. It wasn't. Similarly I am a member of several organisations. Don't think any of them are perfect, but agree with enough of their objectives to be a member.
We were never happy members of the EU. So, that's why we left it. There's no point in being a sullen, resentful, unhappy member of a club. We didn't like being part of it, and they didn't like having an unhappy resentful member.
Most people here who complain about leaving the EU, were complaining about the EU, prior to 2016.
Not sure that’s true. Plenty of people were prett happy with the EU overall and appreciated the freedoms it brought.
That’s not to say people didn’t complain (though I generally didn’t, I was at the more federalist enthusiast end). But complaining about the EU is different from complaining about being in the EU. Just like complaining about the state of Britain or the government is different from complaining about being part of Britain - see London and Londoners, plenty of moaning but no secessionist movement.
I think that's rewriting history. Staunchly pro-EU parties were performing dismally, in European elections, from 1999 onwards.
The argument by pro-EU people prior to 2016 was that "nobody cares". Not that people think EU membership is a good thing.
I would call it but and various pundits have but in the networks defence 5% deficit with 20% to go is not outside the bounds of possibility. I expect they will call it if it is still 5% at 15% to go.
If this war ends soon (God willing) what are relations going to be like between Russia and Ukraine?
Hateful, I imagine. Ukrainians will HATE Russia and Russians for decades, maybe generations. So another byproduct of Putin's Crazy War has been to turn a neighbouring country with often warm, fraternal feelings towards Russia into a sworn enemy, of 40 million people, who will loathe Russia with every atom
Genius
Decades, generations, or maybe just a couple of years. Look at Germany, France and the low countries after the war. We humans have a remarkable capacity to get over dreadful experiences.
Yes, indeed, but as I have argued before, it was much easier to forgive Germany because Germany was utterly vanquished, its cities laid to waste, its regime brutally toppled, its women raped by the Red Army, and its people left starving (those that didn't die in firestorms). It is easier to forgive an enemy that has been bludgeoned into total submission
Post-war Russia will not be like that. Russia will seem largely untouched, even as Ukraine has to rebuild half of its cities and all of its infrastructure. So the hateful resentment will, I suggest, fester and ferment
You might ask the Dutch if they forgave Germany easily and quickly.
After the IRA started targeting British forces and families in Germany in the early 80s, the MOD advised all British families to switch their numberplates from British to German to make it more difficult for them to be identified.
One interesting side effect of this was that after the switch, when the British drove their cars over the border into the Netherlands at the weekend, they would come back to find they had been keyed or smashed up. It never happened to their cars when they had British plates.
The Dutch did not quickly or easily forget or forgive the Germans.
In the summer after Heysel my Dad had a holiday booked for us to drive down from where he was based in Germany to Italy. We did it as planned in his car with the BFG black with white type plates. While we were staying in Ventimiglia the car windows got smashed
Comments
Caveat being, personally think Mook was & still is in a league of his own, along with Mark Penn.
However, Maloney DID manage to piss away four US House seats - including his own - via moronic New York State gerrymander than never was.
IF any Democrat for US House HAD to lose their seat in 2022 midterms, then my personal vote for such a sacrifice, would definitely be soon-to-be ex-US Rep. Sean Patrick Baloney - the freaking chair of the freaking Democratic freaking Campaign freaking Committee.
Talk about poetic justice.
@KariLake
BOMBSHELL NEWS
STAY TUNED 👀
https://twitter.com/KariLake/status/1591151554601816064
Melitopol and then Mariupol would be the most symbolic target, and the sooner the remaining civilians in Mariupol are liberated the better the chance they have of surviving the winter. It would also create the opportunity to recapture control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which would make a big difference to the electricity supply situation. And ultimately it's the only way they would be able to dislodge the Russians from the other bank of the Dnipro, and push them out of artillery range of Kherson City.
A former commander of US forces in Europe has said that he expects Ukraine to retake all the territory lost to Russia since February 24th by the end of this year. That would require rapid advances in both those directions over the next seven weeks, which seems a bit unlikely to me, but he has more subject matter knowledge than I do.
"We voted for the common market, not the EU..."
Bollocks.
I don't see why people can object to Brexit for the many of us who object to that.
https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1591152733704556544
Oh, wait...
Actual mission of Dee-Trip(e) is to enrich coterie of consultants, their cronies & sub-cronies.
The 50k is avout +12k to Masto.
Bombshell, no.
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Any member state could veto Turkey joining, and Cyprus has long said that it would.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
This particular thing wasn't likely as Cameron was a fan of Turkey joining...
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
Fake blue tick wiped 16 billion off the market cap
https://twitter.com/EmmaKennedy/status/1591150821110321152?t=lgyhh3b0K8EFOCVLUws-xw&s=19
🍅 An insider told The Sun: “Raab wasn't happy with the way he was being briefed. He began a tirade, opened his Pret salad and threw three tomatoes out into a bag across the table making a loud noise.”
🍅 The Deputy PM has tonight been nicknamed "rocket man". One former MoJ staff member said: “I just hope he can turn over a new leaf.”
A spokesman for the Deputy PM said it was “complete nonsense” he chucked around parts of his Pret salad in front of horrified officials.
What is it with how petty some of these top MPs are, engaging in adolescent fits of pique and unprofessionalism that we are supposed to excuse on the basis of their being MPs? Next we'll get the 'grown men and women cannot be bullied' excuses like Bercow defenders.
(1) The EU itself, who did nothing to encourage constructive discourse with the massive early arguments over money.
(2) Ms May, who felt that as an ex-Remainer, she needed to demonstrate that she took the referendum result very seriously.
(3) Nigel Farage and Aaron Banks and Dominic Cumming: all of whom shouted from the rooftops about how anything less that diamond Brexit wasn't really Brexit.
(4) The FBPE (or whatever they're called) bunch, who preferred to try and overturn the result rather than seek compromise.
The fault for everything Brexit related lies with those who wanted it, advocated it, campaigned for it and voted for it.
Pokemon's Ash Ketchum wins world championship
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-63599287
I’m strangely affected by this news.
The battle for Kherson, I recon, will go down as a key moment in Ukrainian history for generations to come.
Perhaps it’s the point that the rumbling ambiguity over Ukraines independent status was finally resolved?
The early 90’s referendum didn’t do it. The orange revolution didn’t do it. It required symbolic - and actual - military defeat of Russia.
And that’s happening right now.
A big moment.
And some of us were spotty pre-teens growing up with Pokemon, thank you very much.
One of the reasons that the years after 2016 were so painful is that there was a double lock to open. Any Brexit deal had to have a majority in the Commons and a (separate) majority in the Conservative Party. The first was needed to get the thing through Parliament, the second was needed to stop the PM being VONCed by their own party.
Maybe there was an arrangement that could do that. But I'm not sure what. But anything EEA-like certainly wasn't that arrangement. (Go on, imagine a lineup of the people in Vote Leave and Leave.EU. How many of them went to all that trouble to stay in the single market?)
Not my circus, not my monkeys...
As for the single market: Cameron should have put it on the ballot paper.
It does seem to be "stories about Raab" day;
5 years ago at a do with civil servants was told by someone in his private office that there was a secret contest so see who could smuggle the most a's into his name in official docs
The (then) winner had managed Raaaaab
https://twitter.com/gordonguthrie/status/1591108248371093505
May not be true, but it's blooming funny.
May created the parliamentary impasse to
follow with her Ill judged election.
There has been a few flashes of truly top notch mawkish nationalism though.
Most people here who complain about leaving the EU, were complaining about the EU, prior to 2016.
Clever.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
Nate Silver fan boys do not take it well.
I've literally got one saying it doesn't matter if its fraudulent the numbers are good!
Those maps now seem to be showing the slightest smidge of a couple of bows south on that line and the merest hint of lilac re-taken territory, Here's hoping.
We were generally quite happy members. Most people were quite happy. Most people would still be happy to be members.
The vote was narrowly won when the swivel eyed loons and xenophobes clubbed together to give the Government a kicking.
Most people think leaving was a bad idea...
They have Federalised and shared some of their debt, for a start, to fund Covid revival. One of the most explicit steps imaginable towards a Federal Union
However yes we probably would have stayed in the EU outer core while the inner core pushed further towards an EU superstate
That’s not to say people didn’t complain (though I generally didn’t, I was at the more federalist enthusiast end). But complaining about the EU is different from complaining about being in the EU. Just like complaining about the state of Britain or the government is
different from complaining about being part of Britain - see London and Londoners, plenty of moaning but no secessionist movement.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2022/us/results
The judge said Trump’s lawyers pressed on with claims that were farcical or false, even after being put on notice that they were erroneous.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/10/trump-lawyers-clinton-lawsuit-00066381
The argument by pro-EU people prior to 2016 was that "nobody cares". Not that people think EU membership is a good thing.