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What do we think of the John Rentoul Dim Sum forecast? – politicalbetting.com

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Comments

  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 35,990
    NEW: RMT members reject latest pay offer by 63.6% on an 83% turnout.

    It means strike action starting tomorrow and again throughout late December and into the new year remains will proceed, as planned.
  • Leon said:

    Positively Satanic scenes in Camden as the pathetic light fades into a dark, frigid, foreboding sky, charcoal grey, and the sleet falls on the bleakness of the empty pavements. It is 0C

    That's North London for you. It's a beautiful winter wonderland in SE14.
  • M45M45 Posts: 216
    Leon said:

    'Tis the bleak midwinter, n'est-ce-pas.

    It is the still, dull dead pivot of the year: St Lucy's Eve



    'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
    Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
    The sun is spent, and now his flasks
    Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
    The world's whole sap is sunk;
    The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
    Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
    Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
    Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.

    Study me then, you who shall lovers be
    At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
    For I am every dead thing,
    In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
    For his art did express
    A quintessence even from nothingness,
    From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
    He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
    Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

    All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
    Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
    I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
    Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
    Have we two wept, and so
    Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
    To be two chaoses, when we did show
    Care to aught else; and often absences
    Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

    But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
    Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
    Were I a man, that I were one
    I needs must know; I should prefer,
    If I were any beast,
    Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
    And love; all, all some properties invest;
    If I an ordinary nothing were,
    As shadow, a light and body must be here.

    But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
    You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
    At this time to the Goat is run
    To fetch new lust, and give it you,
    Enjoy your summer all;
    Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
    Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
    This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
    Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

    It is indeed joint equal with tomorrow, earliest sunset in London (15:53:32). Thereafter the evenings draw out till June

    Weather we are having, see your Donne and raise you the other TSE

    Midwinter spring is its own season
    Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
    Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
    When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
    The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
    In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
    Reflecting in a watery mirror
    A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
  • Scott_xP said:

    NEW: RMT members reject latest pay offer by 63.6% on an 83% turnout.

    It means strike action starting tomorrow and again throughout late December and into the new year remains will proceed, as planned.

    That is not correct

    As I understand it this is Network rail and their strikes are over Christmas
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 26,175
    Scott_xP said:

    NEW: RMT members reject latest pay offer by 63.6% on an 83% turnout.

    It means strike action starting tomorrow and again throughout late December and into the new year remains will proceed, as planned.

    So my brother-in-law who is a member of the RMT was wrong, he thought they'd accept it.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,568
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Positively Satanic scenes in Camden as the pathetic light fades into a dark, frigid, foreboding sky, charcoal grey, and the sleet falls on the bleakness of the empty pavements. It is 0C

    Truly Satanic scenes require the sound of Iranian drones overhead....

    Wake me up when Camden gets that bad. Although, no promises I won't turn over and go back to hibernating.
    I am withdrawing from a Diphenydramine addiction, so I may be prone to anxious moogswings

    I really am, btw!
    Good luck with it. You probably have more experience of withdrawing from drugs than most here, but I can't imagine it is much fun.
  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,963
    Scott_xP said:

    Driver said:

    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?

    How?

    What is the Brexiteers cunning formula for combating their lies that the remain campaign didn't try?

    Share your wisdom...
    Difficult for me to say, because when push came to shove I didn't believe in Remain.

    Then again, looking at their campaign, neither did Remainers.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 12,497
    M45 said:

    Leon said:

    'Tis the bleak midwinter, n'est-ce-pas.

    It is the still, dull dead pivot of the year: St Lucy's Eve



    'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
    Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
    The sun is spent, and now his flasks
    Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
    The world's whole sap is sunk;
    The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
    Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
    Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
    Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.

    Study me then, you who shall lovers be
    At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
    For I am every dead thing,
    In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
    For his art did express
    A quintessence even from nothingness,
    From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
    He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
    Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

    All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
    Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
    I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
    Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
    Have we two wept, and so
    Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
    To be two chaoses, when we did show
    Care to aught else; and often absences
    Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

    But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
    Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
    Were I a man, that I were one
    I needs must know; I should prefer,
    If I were any beast,
    Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
    And love; all, all some properties invest;
    If I an ordinary nothing were,
    As shadow, a light and body must be here.

    But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
    You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
    At this time to the Goat is run
    To fetch new lust, and give it you,
    Enjoy your summer all;
    Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
    Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
    This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
    Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

    It is indeed joint equal with tomorrow, earliest sunset in London (15:53:32). Thereafter the evenings draw out till June

    Weather we are having, see your Donne and raise you the other TSE

    Midwinter spring is its own season
    Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
    Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
    When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
    The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
    In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
    Reflecting in a watery mirror
    A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.


    "Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in ‘the very dead of winter.’ And these difficulties they overcame, of a wearisome, dangerous, unseasonable journey; and for all this they came. It was with them; ‘they saw,’ and ‘they came;’ no sooner saw, but they set out presently."

  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,159

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
  • Scott_xP said:

    Driver said:

    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?

    How?

    What is the Brexiteers cunning formula for combating their lies that the remain campaign didn't try?

    Share your wisdom...
    @Scott_xP

    The remain campaign were simply rubbish and arrogant

    You can howl every day about your perceived reason for brexit but it remains the case we are out of the EU and will be for a very long time but hopefully a closer relationship will develop possibly through Macron's outer EU countries proposals
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,568
    ohnotnow said:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-63947246

    "Two NHS Scotland unions accept 7.5% pay deal

    Members of two major NHS unions in Scotland have voted to accept an improved pay offer.

    This ends the risk of strike action in the health service by members of Unison and Unite but a ballot of Royal College of Nursing members is still under way.

    An improved pay offer averaging 7.5% was made to health workers threatening industrial action last month."

    Can't see any unions settling for less.

    Can't see employers/Govt. giving more.

    We might have a balance point to end industrial action.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,568

    Scott_xP said:

    Driver said:

    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?

    How?

    What is the Brexiteers cunning formula for combating their lies that the remain campaign didn't try?

    Share your wisdom...
    @Scott_xP

    The remain campaign were simply rubbish and arrogant

    You can howl every day about your perceived reason for brexit but it remains the case we are out of the EU and will be for a very long time but hopefully a closer relationship will develop possibly through Macron's outer EU countries proposals
    Oh, can he howl!
  • kjhkjh Posts: 11,789
    Driver said:

    kjh said:

    Driver said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly WillG and Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    PS Driver trying to claim the number was too low on the previous thread - would that be from Boris in the committee meeting when challenged on it? Are you really going to rely on someone who lied so often you would be better believing the opposite of what he says always?

    There's no need to tag me, I'm reading the discussion.

    I'm only defending it because people who still haven't gotten over losing more than six years later are still calling it a lie, which it was not. It's their crutch for a reason why they lost.
    It is a lie. I don't care that it is a lie, but to argue that it isn't is just bizarre. Even the people who thought it up agree with that. That is the whole point. It was a clever campaign strategy, because then Remain focused on the lie relentlessly which highlighted it. I mean there has been endless discussion on this as a campaigning strategy.

    Re tagging you. I have already covered this previously. I (as do most people) tag someone when they are not replying directly to a post. It is courtesy. I can't sit here having to remember if someone doesn't want tagging.
    It's not courteous to fill up someone's notifications. You do realise it gives a ping every time someone quotes it as well, right?
    Yep of course, but as I have not responded to a post of yours, but I am writing to you, it is only courteous for me to tell you so. I don't know if you have gone off to walk the dog (as I have just done). It is simply courteous to do so and everyone else here does it. I get a lot of them and it isn't a problem getting a notification and deleting it and I am grateful if I have missed something that was addressed to me but not in a reply to a post I made. Making far too much of it. Not a single other poster complains.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 35,990
    kinabalu said:

    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    This is indeed the subtext that was written on the side of the bus...
  • Big moment for debate over SNP gender reforms tomorrow, with judge to deliver ruling on whether trans women with gender recognition certificates are legally women.

    Ruling will impact on self-ID debate as how much legal weight GRCs carry is disputed.


    ScotGov is in a pickle. In court they have argued that a GRC changes a person's legal sex "for all purposes".....in Holyrood they have argued it won't confer additional rights on natal males.

    If they win, then people with GRC's will be able to access women's sports, women's prisons and so forth - as their critics have argued, but been dismissed as "not valid".

    If they lose, then it will seem that a lot of political capital has been expended for little benefit....
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,568
    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
    I would suggest that far, far more Brexiteers agonised about their vote an were in the somewhat surprised they voted out.

    There are few Remainers who were torn over their decision. A group more certain of their position will not be found this side of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Nor their intention to let you know it.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,339

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Positively Satanic scenes in Camden as the pathetic light fades into a dark, frigid, foreboding sky, charcoal grey, and the sleet falls on the bleakness of the empty pavements. It is 0C

    Truly Satanic scenes require the sound of Iranian drones overhead....

    Wake me up when Camden gets that bad. Although, no promises I won't turn over and go back to hibernating.
    I am withdrawing from a Diphenydramine addiction, so I may be prone to anxious moogswings

    I really am, btw!
    Good luck with it. You probably have more experience of withdrawing from drugs than most here, but I can't imagine it is much fun.
    Ah that's kind of you, but so far it is not too bad

    A few weeks back I bought a ton of Diphenhydramine in Wal Mart in Tuscon, Az - as a sleeping pill (it's an anti-histamine). I've slowly developed a dependency

    For the last two or three weeks I've had a constellation of weird symptoms. Sleeping intensely at odd hours, a very dry mouth, myoclonic jerks, blurred vision, bouts of nausea - and in the last few days some extra anxiety, disorientation, even mild hallucination. I couldn't work out what was wrong so I presumed I was dying, or getting very old, so it is now quite a relief that - having googled my symptoms - turns out they can all be explained by Diphenhydramine toxicity. I've been taking too much

    But now I've stopped taking them and I am withdrawing. The literature suggests it won't last TOO long



  • M45M45 Posts: 216
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Positively Satanic scenes in Camden as the pathetic light fades into a dark, frigid, foreboding sky, charcoal grey, and the sleet falls on the bleakness of the empty pavements. It is 0C

    Truly Satanic scenes require the sound of Iranian drones overhead....

    Wake me up when Camden gets that bad. Although, no promises I won't turn over and go back to hibernating.
    I am withdrawing from a Diphenydramine addiction, so I may be prone to anxious moogswings

    I really am, btw!
    ANXIOUS MOOGSWINGS is a brilliant name for a compilation album of obscure but intriguing 1970s prog rock
    Yes
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,568
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Positively Satanic scenes in Camden as the pathetic light fades into a dark, frigid, foreboding sky, charcoal grey, and the sleet falls on the bleakness of the empty pavements. It is 0C

    Truly Satanic scenes require the sound of Iranian drones overhead....

    Wake me up when Camden gets that bad. Although, no promises I won't turn over and go back to hibernating.
    I am withdrawing from a Diphenydramine addiction, so I may be prone to anxious moogswings

    I really am, btw!
    ANXIOUS MOOGSWINGS is a brilliant name for a compilation album of obscure but intriguing 1970s prog rock
    Several tracks by Gentle Giant for sure.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,839

    Scott_xP said:

    NEW: RMT members reject latest pay offer by 63.6% on an 83% turnout.

    It means strike action starting tomorrow and again throughout late December and into the new year remains will proceed, as planned.

    That is not correct

    As I understand it this is Network rail and their strikes are over Christmas
    What, they are against it?
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,397
    Carnyx said:

    The southerners seem astounded by this white stuff that falls from the sky.

    "Has there been a disaster in an expanded polystyrene factory?", one asks.

    That would be a load of balls.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,339

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Positively Satanic scenes in Camden as the pathetic light fades into a dark, frigid, foreboding sky, charcoal grey, and the sleet falls on the bleakness of the empty pavements. It is 0C

    Truly Satanic scenes require the sound of Iranian drones overhead....

    Wake me up when Camden gets that bad. Although, no promises I won't turn over and go back to hibernating.
    I am withdrawing from a Diphenydramine addiction, so I may be prone to anxious moogswings

    I really am, btw!
    ANXIOUS MOOGSWINGS is a brilliant name for a compilation album of obscure but intriguing 1970s prog rock
    Several tracks by Gentle Giant for sure.
    And a long sci fi shanty by Steve Hillage's Khan
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,397
    DavidL said:

    Scott_xP said:

    NEW: RMT members reject latest pay offer by 63.6% on an 83% turnout.

    It means strike action starting tomorrow and again throughout late December and into the new year remains will proceed, as planned.

    That is not correct

    As I understand it this is Network rail and their strikes are over Christmas
    What, they are against it?
    No ho ho!
  • M45M45 Posts: 216
    algarkirk said:

    M45 said:

    Leon said:

    'Tis the bleak midwinter, n'est-ce-pas.

    It is the still, dull dead pivot of the year: St Lucy's Eve



    'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
    Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
    The sun is spent, and now his flasks
    Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
    The world's whole sap is sunk;
    The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
    Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
    Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
    Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.

    Study me then, you who shall lovers be
    At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
    For I am every dead thing,
    In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
    For his art did express
    A quintessence even from nothingness,
    From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
    He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
    Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

    All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
    Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
    I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
    Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
    Have we two wept, and so
    Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
    To be two chaoses, when we did show
    Care to aught else; and often absences
    Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

    But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
    Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
    Were I a man, that I were one
    I needs must know; I should prefer,
    If I were any beast,
    Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
    And love; all, all some properties invest;
    If I an ordinary nothing were,
    As shadow, a light and body must be here.

    But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
    You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
    At this time to the Goat is run
    To fetch new lust, and give it you,
    Enjoy your summer all;
    Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
    Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
    This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
    Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

    It is indeed joint equal with tomorrow, earliest sunset in London (15:53:32). Thereafter the evenings draw out till June

    Weather we are having, see your Donne and raise you the other TSE

    Midwinter spring is its own season
    Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
    Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
    When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
    The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
    In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
    Reflecting in a watery mirror
    A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.


    "Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in ‘the very dead of winter.’ And these difficulties they overcame, of a wearisome, dangerous, unseasonable journey; and for all this they came. It was with them; ‘they saw,’ and ‘they came;’ no sooner saw, but they set out presently."

    I had no idea Eliot was based on that

    "There were times we regretted
    The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
    And the silken girls bringing sherbet."

    *Fondles ticket to Lamu island, Kenya, end Jan.*
  • kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
    I would suggest that far, far more Brexiteers agonised about their vote an were in the somewhat surprised they voted out.

    There are few Remainers who were torn over their decision. A group more certain of their position will not be found this side of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Nor their intention to let you know it.
    That's because Remain was the status quo and a known quantity. Whereas Leave was a leap in the dark. If I had been minded to vote Leave I would certainly have found it a more anxious decision.
    We all know that Leave was a more successful campaign because they won, despite having to sell a leap in the dark which on most objective criteria for most people was going to leave them worse off. The Remain campaign was awful.
    Anyway, well done Leave. We're fucked and your project has run into the sand, but you really own the Remoaners, which seems to be important to you.
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 9,158
    edited December 2022
    Steve Hillage did a great album called "Fish Rising", although I'm not sure that's strictly relevant to Brexit.

    Gentle Giant also rather good - Jewish-Scottish, as I recall. Interesting combination of intellectualism and medievalism. Anyone who likes them may like an English medieval-psychedelic band of the same era, called the Third Ear Band.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 11,789
    Scott_xP said:

    NEW: RMT members reject latest pay offer by 63.6% on an 83% turnout.

    It means strike action starting tomorrow and again throughout late December and into the new year remains will proceed, as planned.

    I read that as a 63.6% pay offer and thought 'blimey'.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,839

    Big moment for debate over SNP gender reforms tomorrow, with judge to deliver ruling on whether trans women with gender recognition certificates are legally women.

    Ruling will impact on self-ID debate as how much legal weight GRCs carry is disputed.


    ScotGov is in a pickle. In court they have argued that a GRC changes a person's legal sex "for all purposes".....in Holyrood they have argued it won't confer additional rights on natal males.

    If they win, then people with GRC's will be able to access women's sports, women's prisons and so forth - as their critics have argued, but been dismissed as "not valid".

    If they lose, then it will seem that a lot of political capital has been expended for little benefit....

    My guess is that they will lose for the same reason they did the last time, namely that their definition of women undermines and removes rights granted by the Equality Act and those rights are a reserved matter. I am really not sure how they think that they have got around the problem that the court had with their previous effort.

    Which might just suit Nicola fine. This legislation is causing her a lot of problems within her party. She can claim that she has done her best but once again been stopped by London and the limited powers of the Scottish Parliament.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 18,362
    edited December 2022
    Cookie said:

    Interesting from Sky's climate correspondent

    Big bet on wind

    Even if the world reaches net zero soon after 2050, limiting the rise in temperature, winds will weaken significantly in the northern hemisphere. It's called global stilling. And it's caused by the rapid warming of the Arctic, which is narrowing the temperature difference with the tropics, a gap that drives wind.

    In the UK, the average wind speed is expected to drop by 2% to 3% by 2050, and 10% by the end of the century.

    That matters because the UK is taking a big bet on wind.

    We have 14.2GW of onshore wind turbines, with another 13.7GW offshore. The government has a target to increase offshore capacity to 50GW by 2030, and to turn off gas and coal power stations by 2035.

    However, having the turbines doesn't make them turn - as we are finding out now.

    Although the government also plans to expand nuclear energy to 24GW by 2050, up from about 6GW now, that would not fill the gap left by the lack of wind.

    We will need to find some way of storing vast amounts of energy, invest in new sources, such as tidal power, or import much more through long distance cables.

    Only then can we be sure the lights will stay on without fossil fuels.

    Well I don't disagree with the need to find new energy sources.

    But I'm slightly sceptical of modelling which shows a decline in wind speed. I'm sceptical climate models are accurate enough to confidently predict that. And surely wind is just a fact of life on a spinning planet?
    All other things remaining equal the reduction in wind speeds is a direct result of the Artic warming more quickly than the equator. The mid-latitudes are only windy *because* of this temperature difference, so it's a fairly simple prediction that doesn't rely on the climate models.

    However, the complication is with those first five words, "All other things remaining equal.." There are other changes which will have a contrary effect. For example, sea surface temperatures will be higher, and there will be more water vapour in the atmosphere, so there will be more energy available for storms. More energy implies stronger winds, and so more electricity from wind turbines.

    So now to get the answer we're looking for the balance between two different effects. This is immediately much more difficult, and much more likely to go awry. There are plausible reasons to expect large enough uncertainties in both effects that you couldn't say for certain which will dominate. But that still means that a weakening of the winds is a risk that one should allow for when planning.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,957
    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
  • Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    OllyT said:

    OllyT said:

    This is all fanciful. We are not going to rejoin for decades. No PM will give up Sterling

    I don't think that "saving the British pound" is quite the killer punch you believe it to be, at least with voters under 60. It didn't do much for William Hague's as I recall and that was 20 years ago.
    Watch Labour's polling crash if it ever gets traction that "Starmer would give up our pound".

    The problem before wasn't the message, but was the messenger - and a Blair still who walked on water then.
    If that were the only obstacle to rejoining in 10 years time I doubt many voters under 60 would die on a hill to keep the pound. It is only an obsession with the sort of people who can't get the hang of litres and kilometres.
    Er, sod of it, you condescending pillock. If you can't see how totemic our own currency is, you are doomed to lose the argument. Again.

    Plus, given the option of losing the pound, I suspect more Brits would choose the US dollar than the Euro.
    OTOH, it's only on UKIP bumf that the currency actually is totemic.
    Bugger off is it. UKIP is deader than its membership.

    But it is a key tenet for many Conservative voters.
    Charming.

    Who voted for the likes of the last PM but, how many is it now?
    Oh, please, less of the "Charming" pearl-clutching. You start making sweeping generalisations of one party being the same as another and you'll get called out.

    I'm sure the SNP will get pissed off at being called Alba-lite.
    Oh, so it's sweeping generalization to make two very precise and specific comments about two different political parties?
    Brexit update: Brexiteers still the angriest winners in town.
  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,963
    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 13,803
    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
    I'd politely - and I am certainly not including any of the learned voices on here in this - add that there were a lot of thick people in both camps.
    Emotionally, one of the minor things which pushed me towards leave was the sheer imbecility of the voices for Remain. "We wouldn't have the Gruffalo were it not for the EU" "The price of prosecco will go up" "Europe is about love".
    I'm confident there was just as much guff on the other side. But my online world tends to be heavily remain leaning.

    It wasn't enough to tip the balance. But neither side had a monopoly on stupidity or mendacity.

    But I agree with you that those who didn't feel strongly probably broke for remain.
    The interesting thing was how much of a surprise this came to everyone (including me). Remain was so mainstream. I'm not saying leavers didn't have a voice: clearly they did - but among the sorts of middle classes who make the conversation - among the 'top 5 million' - almost everyone was Remain, and almost everyone who everyone knew was Remain. This happens a bit at a GE, but not to the same extent. Leavers were little known and less understood, except by wild generalisations from the small number of not-particularly-typical examples that could be grasped, and the odd field trip to Clacton on Sea, as if to gawp at an exotic tribe.
  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,963
    edited December 2022
    Meanwhile, here's a visualisation of wind speed at the moment.

    I assume our wind farms are all in that blue bit off the east coast?


  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,568
    Mickey Dolenz purchased the 19th Moog modular synthesizer ever sold.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 13,803
    Driver said:

    Meanwhile, here's a visualisation of wind speed at the moment.

    I assume our wind farms are all in that blue bit off the east coast?


    Yes: offshore wind needs two things: wind, and shallow seas. Shallow seas account for our wind concentration in the North Sea.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,557
    John Rentoul has a pretty good track record when it comes to predictions IIRC.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,957
    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,957
    Driver said:

    Meanwhile, here's a visualisation of wind speed at the moment.

    I assume our wind farms are all in that blue bit off the east coast?


    Looks like The Scream's sister piece.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 12,497
    M45 said:

    algarkirk said:

    M45 said:

    Leon said:

    'Tis the bleak midwinter, n'est-ce-pas.

    It is the still, dull dead pivot of the year: St Lucy's Eve



    'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
    Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
    The sun is spent, and now his flasks
    Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
    The world's whole sap is sunk;
    The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
    Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
    Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
    Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.

    Study me then, you who shall lovers be
    At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
    For I am every dead thing,
    In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
    For his art did express
    A quintessence even from nothingness,
    From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
    He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
    Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

    All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
    Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
    I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
    Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
    Have we two wept, and so
    Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
    To be two chaoses, when we did show
    Care to aught else; and often absences
    Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

    But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
    Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
    Were I a man, that I were one
    I needs must know; I should prefer,
    If I were any beast,
    Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
    And love; all, all some properties invest;
    If I an ordinary nothing were,
    As shadow, a light and body must be here.

    But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
    You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
    At this time to the Goat is run
    To fetch new lust, and give it you,
    Enjoy your summer all;
    Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
    Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
    This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
    Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

    It is indeed joint equal with tomorrow, earliest sunset in London (15:53:32). Thereafter the evenings draw out till June

    Weather we are having, see your Donne and raise you the other TSE

    Midwinter spring is its own season
    Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
    Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
    When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
    The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
    In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
    Reflecting in a watery mirror
    A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.


    "Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in ‘the very dead of winter.’ And these difficulties they overcame, of a wearisome, dangerous, unseasonable journey; and for all this they came. It was with them; ‘they saw,’ and ‘they came;’ no sooner saw, but they set out presently."

    I had no idea Eliot was based on that

    "There were times we regretted
    The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
    And the silken girls bringing sherbet."

    *Fondles ticket to Lamu island, Kenya, end Jan.*
    I went to university so long ago that the sermons of Bishop Andrewes (from which TS Eliot pinches the famous lines) were on the syllabus. The Battle of Maldon wasn't on because it hadn't been fought yet.

    Happy days.

  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,963
    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
    Very wrong.

    What eventually swung it for me is the knowledge that Ever Closer Union is baked into the EU's treaties - therefore a federal United States of Europe is the aim whether we like it or not.

    I could have been persuaded that this would be a good thing, but the Remain campaign didn't even try. So I had to believe that they didn't believe it, and if they didn't then I couldn't vote Remain because this was likely to be our only chance.
  • FairlieredFairliered Posts: 4,931
    DavidL said:

    Big moment for debate over SNP gender reforms tomorrow, with judge to deliver ruling on whether trans women with gender recognition certificates are legally women.

    Ruling will impact on self-ID debate as how much legal weight GRCs carry is disputed.


    ScotGov is in a pickle. In court they have argued that a GRC changes a person's legal sex "for all purposes".....in Holyrood they have argued it won't confer additional rights on natal males.

    If they win, then people with GRC's will be able to access women's sports, women's prisons and so forth - as their critics have argued, but been dismissed as "not valid".

    If they lose, then it will seem that a lot of political capital has been expended for little benefit....

    My guess is that they will lose for the same reason they did the last time, namely that their definition of women undermines and removes rights granted by the Equality Act and those rights are a reserved matter. I am really not sure how they think that they have got around the problem that the court had with their previous effort.

    Which might just suit Nicola fine. This legislation is causing her a lot of problems within her party. She can claim that she has done her best but once again been stopped by London and the limited powers of the Scottish Parliament.
    Hopefully she will be defeated, spit the dummy out, and resign!
  • FairlieredFairliered Posts: 4,931
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Positively Satanic scenes in Camden as the pathetic light fades into a dark, frigid, foreboding sky, charcoal grey, and the sleet falls on the bleakness of the empty pavements. It is 0C

    Truly Satanic scenes require the sound of Iranian drones overhead....

    Wake me up when Camden gets that bad. Although, no promises I won't turn over and go back to hibernating.
    I am withdrawing from a Diphenydramine addiction, so I may be prone to anxious moogswings

    I really am, btw!
    ANXIOUS MOOGSWINGS is a brilliant name for a compilation album of obscure but intriguing 1970s prog rock
    It must surely include some tracks from Van Der Graaf Generator.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,957
    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
    Very wrong.

    What eventually swung it for me is the knowledge that Ever Closer Union is baked into the EU's treaties - therefore a federal United States of Europe is the aim whether we like it or not.

    I could have been persuaded that this would be a good thing, but the Remain campaign didn't even try. So I had to believe that they didn't believe it, and if they didn't then I couldn't vote Remain because this was likely to be our only chance.
    If only the then PM had secured an agreement which would have protected us from that ever closer union. Which would have allowed us to "do a France/Italy/Greece" and called "that is ever closer union I reject this legislation".

    But what about majority voting? Also doesn't matter. Because we are and were sovereign we could simply have rejected any proposed measure we deemed in violation of that agreement. Such as the Fiscal Compact.
  • LennonLennon Posts: 1,779
    Cookie said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
    I'd politely - and I am certainly not including any of the learned voices on here in this - add that there were a lot of thick people in both camps.
    Emotionally, one of the minor things which pushed me towards leave was the sheer imbecility of the voices for Remain. "We wouldn't have the Gruffalo were it not for the EU" "The price of prosecco will go up" "Europe is about love".
    I'm confident there was just as much guff on the other side. But my online world tends to be heavily remain leaning.

    It wasn't enough to tip the balance. But neither side had a monopoly on stupidity or mendacity.

    But I agree with you that those who didn't feel strongly probably broke for remain.
    The interesting thing was how much of a surprise this came to everyone (including me). Remain was so mainstream. I'm not saying leavers didn't have a voice: clearly they did - but among the sorts of middle classes who make the conversation - among the 'top 5 million' - almost everyone was Remain, and almost everyone who everyone knew was Remain. This happens a bit at a GE, but not to the same extent. Leavers were little known and less understood, except by wild generalisations from the small number of not-particularly-typical examples that could be grasped, and the odd field trip to Clacton on Sea, as if to gawp at an exotic tribe.
    The thing that I am still unsure about is how much of that was 'genuine' and how much was people keeping silent amongst a crowd where it was known/assumed what your vote was. I have a (non-evidenced) suspicion that actually the spiral of silence for Leave amongst the middle class was actually pretty large - and unusually so.
  • OllyTOllyT Posts: 5,006
    WillG said:

    OllyT said:

    WillG said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    PS @Driver trying to claim the number was too low on the previous thread - would that be from Boris in the committee meeting when challenged on it? Are you really going to rely on someone who lied so often you would be better believing the opposite of what he says always?

    The reason this debate comes up time and time again is because Remainers can't get over it and keep bringing it up. In this thread, it was a passing joke that inflamed one Remainer's sensitivity about it. If you actually followed my argument at all, it was that the number was inconsequential. You lost not because of some bus slogan but because voters like democracy and immigration control.
    And what a pyrrhic victory it is turning out to be. Enjoy
    It's not a pyrrhic victory because it's still better to be outside the EU with some democratic pressure to take advantage of it, rather than being inside the EU without the possibility of that. Not to mention that, if we had not had the debate, we probably would have handed over even more powers by now.
    Unfortunately for you the public are increasingly taking a different view.
  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,963
    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
    Very wrong.

    What eventually swung it for me is the knowledge that Ever Closer Union is baked into the EU's treaties - therefore a federal United States of Europe is the aim whether we like it or not.

    I could have been persuaded that this would be a good thing, but the Remain campaign didn't even try. So I had to believe that they didn't believe it, and if they didn't then I couldn't vote Remain because this was likely to be our only chance.
    If only the then PM had secured an agreement which would have protected us from that ever closer union. Which would have allowed us to "do a France/Italy/Greece" and called "that is ever closer union I reject this legislation".

    But what about majority voting? Also doesn't matter. Because we are and were sovereign we could simply have rejected any proposed measure we deemed in violation of that agreement. Such as the Fiscal Compact.
    That agreement wasn't worth the paper it was written on. Not my opinion, but that of the Remain campaign, who refused to use it.

    And as for the last bit, for the thirty five billionth time, "sovereignty" is at best suspended if you have to leave the EU to exercise it, as we did.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,568

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
    I would suggest that far, far more Brexiteers agonised about their vote an were in the somewhat surprised they voted out.

    There are few Remainers who were torn over their decision. A group more certain of their position will not be found this side of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Nor their intention to let you know it.
    That's because Remain was the status quo and a known quantity. Whereas Leave was a leap in the dark. If I had been minded to vote Leave I would certainly have found it a more anxious decision.
    We all know that Leave was a more successful campaign because they won, despite having to sell a leap in the dark which on most objective criteria for most people was going to leave them worse off. The Remain campaign was awful.
    Anyway, well done Leave. We're fucked and your project has run into the sand, but you really own the Remoaners, which seems to be important to you.
    Except - Remain wasn't really the status quo. Remain was a continuation of a sneaky acceptance of ever closer union within a federal body that had (has) aspirations to be a European rival to the USA.

    For forty years, the Europhile elite had made every effort to portray the biggest change in our status for centuries as the status quo. It was that illusion that came so spectacularly unstuck in 2016 when the voters decided "no further".
  • WillGWillG Posts: 2,366
    OllyT said:

    WillG said:

    OllyT said:

    WillG said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    PS @Driver trying to claim the number was too low on the previous thread - would that be from Boris in the committee meeting when challenged on it? Are you really going to rely on someone who lied so often you would be better believing the opposite of what he says always?

    The reason this debate comes up time and time again is because Remainers can't get over it and keep bringing it up. In this thread, it was a passing joke that inflamed one Remainer's sensitivity about it. If you actually followed my argument at all, it was that the number was inconsequential. You lost not because of some bus slogan but because voters like democracy and immigration control.
    And what a pyrrhic victory it is turning out to be. Enjoy
    It's not a pyrrhic victory because it's still better to be outside the EU with some democratic pressure to take advantage of it, rather than being inside the EU without the possibility of that. Not to mention that, if we had not had the debate, we probably would have handed over even more powers by now.
    Unfortunately for you the public are increasingly taking a different view.
    Sure, when the debate isn't being actively had. But we still have them on our side when it comes to immigration, which is what any rejoin debate would be fought and won on.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,957
    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
    Very wrong.

    What eventually swung it for me is the knowledge that Ever Closer Union is baked into the EU's treaties - therefore a federal United States of Europe is the aim whether we like it or not.

    I could have been persuaded that this would be a good thing, but the Remain campaign didn't even try. So I had to believe that they didn't believe it, and if they didn't then I couldn't vote Remain because this was likely to be our only chance.
    If only the then PM had secured an agreement which would have protected us from that ever closer union. Which would have allowed us to "do a France/Italy/Greece" and called "that is ever closer union I reject this legislation".

    But what about majority voting? Also doesn't matter. Because we are and were sovereign we could simply have rejected any proposed measure we deemed in violation of that agreement. Such as the Fiscal Compact.
    That agreement wasn't worth the paper it was written on. Not my opinion, but that of the Remain campaign, who refused to use it.

    And as for the last bit, for the thirty five billionth time, "sovereignty" is at best suspended if you have to leave the EU to exercise it, as we did.
    Well we'll never know if it was worth anything. It fulfilled the requirements of 99.993% of people who objected to the EU including you.

    And for the thirty five billionth and first time - of course we were sovereign before, during and after our time in the EU. And if you want to push your point, in those terms the only truly sovereign nation on earth is North Korea. If that's the model you are after I would respect you very much. But I suspect it isn't and I suspect "Be more like North Korea" would have looked strange on the side of a bus and not have attracted so many willing voters.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,957

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
    I would suggest that far, far more Brexiteers agonised about their vote an were in the somewhat surprised they voted out.

    There are few Remainers who were torn over their decision. A group more certain of their position will not be found this side of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Nor their intention to let you know it.
    That's because Remain was the status quo and a known quantity. Whereas Leave was a leap in the dark. If I had been minded to vote Leave I would certainly have found it a more anxious decision.
    We all know that Leave was a more successful campaign because they won, despite having to sell a leap in the dark which on most objective criteria for most people was going to leave them worse off. The Remain campaign was awful.
    Anyway, well done Leave. We're fucked and your project has run into the sand, but you really own the Remoaners, which seems to be important to you.
    Except - Remain wasn't really the status quo. Remain was a continuation of a sneaky acceptance of ever closer union within a federal body that had (has) aspirations to be a European rival to the USA.

    For forty years, the Europhile elite had made every effort to portray the biggest change in our status for centuries as the status quo. It was that illusion that came so spectacularly unstuck in 2016 when the voters decided "no further".
    If only if only if only the PM at the time had managed to agree a document which exempted us from that.

    Or are you a "a legal agreement with the EU is not worth the paper it's printed on" type. In which case why didn't the UK just ignore all EU legislation it didn't like in the first place.
  • FairlieredFairliered Posts: 4,931
    Cyclefree said:

    Well my journey north has proved more exciting than I planned.

    My rear tyre decided to blow out spectacularly at the junction of the M6 & M42 and scatter itself across several lanes. I managed to get to the hard shoulder - thank God there was one! - and was about to wonder what the hell I would do next when two lovely men came from their car and, in their words, rescued "a damsel in distress". They put the spare wheel on, gave me lots of hugs and sent me on my way.

    A HUGE thank you to Steven and Mark, two CCTV engineers from Tamworth, for their help, kindness and cheery humour. People can be so kind.

    Of course, as I have been driving below the 50 mph recommendation for the spare I've been flashed and hooted at by every lorry driver on the M6. But hey. I've reached Lancaster so only another 60 miles or so to go. DV.

    Safe journey home, and hopefully no more scares.
  • kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
    I would suggest that far, far more Brexiteers agonised about their vote an were in the somewhat surprised they voted out.

    There are few Remainers who were torn over their decision. A group more certain of their position will not be found this side of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Nor their intention to let you know it.
    That's because Remain was the status quo and a known quantity. Whereas Leave was a leap in the dark. If I had been minded to vote Leave I would certainly have found it a more anxious decision.
    We all know that Leave was a more successful campaign because they won, despite having to sell a leap in the dark which on most objective criteria for most people was going to leave them worse off. The Remain campaign was awful.
    Anyway, well done Leave. We're fucked and your project has run into the sand, but you really own the Remoaners, which seems to be important to you.
    Except - Remain wasn't really the status quo. Remain was a continuation of a sneaky acceptance of ever closer union within a federal body that had (has) aspirations to be a European rival to the USA.

    For forty years, the Europhile elite had made every effort to portray the biggest change in our status for centuries as the status quo. It was that illusion that came so spectacularly unstuck in 2016 when the voters decided "no further".
    Funny I thought you got what you wanted, but it sounds as though you are still trying to convince yourself? Why? My guess is that as an intelligent person you now realise that Brexit was utterly pointless.

    PS. Ever closer union was never and is never going to result in what the most ardent Euro-enthusiasts hope. A compromise position for the UK, or possibly even full on membership is inevitable in the next 25 years. Personally I would be happy with the former, but I suspect we will get the latter.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,568
    TOPPING said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
    I would suggest that far, far more Brexiteers agonised about their vote an were in the somewhat surprised they voted out.

    There are few Remainers who were torn over their decision. A group more certain of their position will not be found this side of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Nor their intention to let you know it.
    That's because Remain was the status quo and a known quantity. Whereas Leave was a leap in the dark. If I had been minded to vote Leave I would certainly have found it a more anxious decision.
    We all know that Leave was a more successful campaign because they won, despite having to sell a leap in the dark which on most objective criteria for most people was going to leave them worse off. The Remain campaign was awful.
    Anyway, well done Leave. We're fucked and your project has run into the sand, but you really own the Remoaners, which seems to be important to you.
    Except - Remain wasn't really the status quo. Remain was a continuation of a sneaky acceptance of ever closer union within a federal body that had (has) aspirations to be a European rival to the USA.

    For forty years, the Europhile elite had made every effort to portray the biggest change in our status for centuries as the status quo. It was that illusion that came so spectacularly unstuck in 2016 when the voters decided "no further".
    "why didn't the UK just ignore all EU legislation it didn't like in the first place."
    Because, thank God, we aren't the French....
  • CookieCookie Posts: 13,803
    Lennon said:

    Cookie said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
    I'd politely - and I am certainly not including any of the learned voices on here in this - add that there were a lot of thick people in both camps.
    Emotionally, one of the minor things which pushed me towards leave was the sheer imbecility of the voices for Remain. "We wouldn't have the Gruffalo were it not for the EU" "The price of prosecco will go up" "Europe is about love".
    I'm confident there was just as much guff on the other side. But my online world tends to be heavily remain leaning.

    It wasn't enough to tip the balance. But neither side had a monopoly on stupidity or mendacity.

    But I agree with you that those who didn't feel strongly probably broke for remain.
    The interesting thing was how much of a surprise this came to everyone (including me). Remain was so mainstream. I'm not saying leavers didn't have a voice: clearly they did - but among the sorts of middle classes who make the conversation - among the 'top 5 million' - almost everyone was Remain, and almost everyone who everyone knew was Remain. This happens a bit at a GE, but not to the same extent. Leavers were little known and less understood, except by wild generalisations from the small number of not-particularly-typical examples that could be grasped, and the odd field trip to Clacton on Sea, as if to gawp at an exotic tribe.
    The thing that I am still unsure about is how much of that was 'genuine' and how much was people keeping silent amongst a crowd where it was known/assumed what your vote was. I have a (non-evidenced) suspicion that actually the spiral of silence for Leave amongst the middle class was actually pretty large - and unusually so.
    Yes, interesting point. If an acquaintance sets off on a bold rant about the stupidity of a decision you personally support - that acquaintance seemingly making the assumption that you agree with them, because they don't know anyone who does not - do you take issue with them, or do you simply politely move the conversation on to more agreeable matters? You have to either know them pretty well or be pretty strong-minded or unusually confrontational to do the former.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,339
    Cyclefree said:

    Well my journey north has proved more exciting than I planned.

    My rear tyre decided to blow out spectacularly at the junction of the M6 & M42 and scatter itself across several lanes. I managed to get to the hard shoulder - thank God there was one! - and was about to wonder what the hell I would do next when two lovely men came from their car and, in their words, rescued "a damsel in distress". They put the spare wheel on, gave me lots of hugs and sent me on my way.

    A HUGE thank you to Steven and Mark, two CCTV engineers from Tamworth, for their help, kindness and cheery humour. People can be so kind.

    Of course, as I have been driving below the 50 mph recommendation for the spare I've been flashed and hooted at by every lorry driver on the M6. But hey. I've reached Lancaster so only another 60 miles or so to go. DV.

    Yikes! Good that you're safe
  • OllyTOllyT Posts: 5,006
    WillG said:

    OllyT said:

    WillG said:

    OllyT said:

    WillG said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    PS @Driver trying to claim the number was too low on the previous thread - would that be from Boris in the committee meeting when challenged on it? Are you really going to rely on someone who lied so often you would be better believing the opposite of what he says always?

    The reason this debate comes up time and time again is because Remainers can't get over it and keep bringing it up. In this thread, it was a passing joke that inflamed one Remainer's sensitivity about it. If you actually followed my argument at all, it was that the number was inconsequential. You lost not because of some bus slogan but because voters like democracy and immigration control.
    And what a pyrrhic victory it is turning out to be. Enjoy
    It's not a pyrrhic victory because it's still better to be outside the EU with some democratic pressure to take advantage of it, rather than being inside the EU without the possibility of that. Not to mention that, if we had not had the debate, we probably would have handed over even more powers by now.
    Unfortunately for you the public are increasingly taking a different view.
    Sure, when the debate isn't being actively had. But we still have them on our side when it comes to immigration, which is what any rejoin debate would be fought and won on.
    Even once folks realise that immigration is not one jot smaller now than it was before Brexit?
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,648
    TOPPING said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
    I would suggest that far, far more Brexiteers agonised about their vote an were in the somewhat surprised they voted out.

    There are few Remainers who were torn over their decision. A group more certain of their position will not be found this side of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Nor their intention to let you know it.
    That's because Remain was the status quo and a known quantity. Whereas Leave was a leap in the dark. If I had been minded to vote Leave I would certainly have found it a more anxious decision.
    We all know that Leave was a more successful campaign because they won, despite having to sell a leap in the dark which on most objective criteria for most people was going to leave them worse off. The Remain campaign was awful.
    Anyway, well done Leave. We're fucked and your project has run into the sand, but you really own the Remoaners, which seems to be important to you.
    Except - Remain wasn't really the status quo. Remain was a continuation of a sneaky acceptance of ever closer union within a federal body that had (has) aspirations to be a European rival to the USA.

    For forty years, the Europhile elite had made every effort to portray the biggest change in our status for centuries as the status quo. It was that illusion that came so spectacularly unstuck in 2016 when the voters decided "no further".
    If only if only if only the PM at the time had managed to agree a document which exempted us from that.

    Or are you a "a legal agreement with the EU is not worth the paper it's printed on" type. In which case why didn't the UK just ignore all EU legislation it didn't like in the first place.
    Some people I debated with at the time explicitly argued that it was precisely because they didn't trust the British political elite to do that that they saw Brexit as necessary. Being part of a transnational political architecture was too tempting a way to circumvent national democracy.
  • felixfelix Posts: 15,164
    Labour 46% (-2)
    Conservative 29% (+3)
    Liberal Democrat 9% (-1)
    Reform UK 7% (+2)
    Green 5% (-1)
    SNP 3% (–)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 4 Dec.
    Redfield Wilton
  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,963
    Cyclefree said:

    Well my journey north has proved more exciting than I planned.

    My rear tyre decided to blow out spectacularly at the junction of the M6 & M42 and scatter itself across several lanes. I managed to get to the hard shoulder - thank God there was one! - and was about to wonder what the hell I would do next when two lovely men came from their car and, in their words, rescued "a damsel in distress". They put the spare wheel on, gave me lots of hugs and sent me on my way.

    A HUGE thank you to Steven and Mark, two CCTV engineers from Tamworth, for their help, kindness and cheery humour. People can be so kind.

    Of course, as I have been driving below the 50 mph recommendation for the spare I've been flashed and hooted at by every lorry driver on the M6. But hey. I've reached Lancaster so only another 60 miles or so to go. DV.

    You aren't supposed to drive more than 50 miles on a spare tyre - best get to a Kwik Fit or similar PDQ.

    (https://blog.halfords.com/all-you-need-to-know-about-driving-on-a-spare-tyre/)
  • pingping Posts: 3,805
    Cyclefree said:

    Well my journey north has proved more exciting than I planned.

    My rear tyre decided to blow out spectacularly at the junction of the M6 & M42 and scatter itself across several lanes. I managed to get to the hard shoulder - thank God there was one! - and was about to wonder what the hell I would do next when two lovely men came from their car and, in their words, rescued "a damsel in distress". They put the spare wheel on, gave me lots of hugs and sent me on my way.

    A HUGE thank you to Steven and Mark, two CCTV engineers from Tamworth, for their help, kindness and cheery humour. People can be so kind.

    Of course, as I have been driving below the 50 mph recommendation for the spare I've been flashed and hooted at by every lorry driver on the M6. But hey. I've reached Lancaster so only another 60 miles or so to go. DV.

    Ouch.

    I know that bit of the motorway quite well.

    Us West Midlands folk are generally rather nice people.

    Good luck getting home.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 35,990
    Rishi Sunak's approval rating is -3%.

    Rishi Sunak Approval Rating (11 December):

    Disapprove: 33% (–)
    Approve: 30% (–)
    Net: -3% (–)

    Changes +/- 4 December

    https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voting-intention-11-december-2022 https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1602350122142208003/photo/1
  • Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
    Very wrong.

    What eventually swung it for me is the knowledge that Ever Closer Union is baked into the EU's treaties - therefore a federal United States of Europe is the aim whether we like it or not.

    I could have been persuaded that this would be a good thing, but the Remain campaign didn't even try. So I had to believe that they didn't believe it, and if they didn't then I couldn't vote Remain because this was likely to be our only chance.
    The sad thing is that most Europhobes dont even understand what "Ever Closer Union" was designed to achieve because they want to see the furriners as those dastardly men who wish to take away our FREEDOMMM.

    It is about as fictitious as Mel Gibson's William Wallace. The phrase was designed to be a fudge. Sure there are a few fanatics that would like a genuine United States of Europe, even today, but France will never allow it. It is a bogeyman that is used by crypto-fascists like Farage to scare the swivel-eyed europhobe children. You keep believing in it though if it makes you feel better about voting for self harm lol.

    By the way, Father Christmas is fighting to prevent ever closer union with the kingdom of the fairies.
  • felixfelix Posts: 15,164
    OllyT said:

    WillG said:

    OllyT said:

    WillG said:

    OllyT said:

    WillG said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    PS @Driver trying to claim the number was too low on the previous thread - would that be from Boris in the committee meeting when challenged on it? Are you really going to rely on someone who lied so often you would be better believing the opposite of what he says always?

    The reason this debate comes up time and time again is because Remainers can't get over it and keep bringing it up. In this thread, it was a passing joke that inflamed one Remainer's sensitivity about it. If you actually followed my argument at all, it was that the number was inconsequential. You lost not because of some bus slogan but because voters like democracy and immigration control.
    And what a pyrrhic victory it is turning out to be. Enjoy
    It's not a pyrrhic victory because it's still better to be outside the EU with some democratic pressure to take advantage of it, rather than being inside the EU without the possibility of that. Not to mention that, if we had not had the debate, we probably would have handed over even more powers by now.
    Unfortunately for you the public are increasingly taking a different view.
    Sure, when the debate isn't being actively had. But we still have them on our side when it comes to immigration, which is what any rejoin debate would be fought and won on.
    Even once folks realise that immigration is not one jot smaller now than it was before Brexit?
    Free movement is something upon which the EU was unwilling to move. Until they do I doubt the UK would vote to rejoin.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,310
    edited December 2022
    Right, off again- once more into the breach. I left the house this morning at 8:45 precisely so that I would not be driving in the dark. 😨

    "Uomo propone. Dio dispone."
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 17,220
    edited December 2022
    TOPPING said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
    I would suggest that far, far more Brexiteers agonised about their vote an were in the somewhat surprised they voted out.

    There are few Remainers who were torn over their decision. A group more certain of their position will not be found this side of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Nor their intention to let you know it.
    That's because Remain was the status quo and a known quantity. Whereas Leave was a leap in the dark. If I had been minded to vote Leave I would certainly have found it a more anxious decision.
    We all know that Leave was a more successful campaign because they won, despite having to sell a leap in the dark which on most objective criteria for most people was going to leave them worse off. The Remain campaign was awful.
    Anyway, well done Leave. We're fucked and your project has run into the sand, but you really own the Remoaners, which seems to be important to you.
    Except - Remain wasn't really the status quo. Remain was a continuation of a sneaky acceptance of ever closer union within a federal body that had (has) aspirations to be a European rival to the USA.

    For forty years, the Europhile elite had made every effort to portray the biggest change in our status for centuries as the status quo. It was that illusion that came so spectacularly unstuck in 2016 when the voters decided "no further".
    If only if only if only the PM at the time had managed to agree a document which exempted us from that.

    Or are you a "a legal agreement with the EU is not worth the paper it's printed on" type. In which case why didn't the UK just ignore all EU legislation it didn't like in the first place.
    I suspect that it wasn't Eurocrats that the average Leaver feared would sell Britain down the river, so much as the woke children of Britain. Hence the ongoing anxiety that future UK will attempt a Brapprochment or worse.
  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,963

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly WillG and Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
    Very wrong.

    What eventually swung it for me is the knowledge that Ever Closer Union is baked into the EU's treaties - therefore a federal United States of Europe is the aim whether we like it or not.

    I could have been persuaded that this would be a good thing, but the Remain campaign didn't even try. So I had to believe that they didn't believe it, and if they didn't then I couldn't vote Remain because this was likely to be our only chance.
    The sad thing is that most Europhobes dont even understand what "Ever Closer Union" was designed to achieve because they want to see the furriners as those dastardly men who wish to take away our FREEDOMMM.

    It is about as fictitious as Mel Gibson's William Wallace. The phrase was designed to be a fudge. Sure there are a few fanatics that would like a genuine United States of Europe, even today, but France will never allow it. It is a bogeyman that is used by crypto-fascists like Farage to scare the swivel-eyed europhobe children. You keep believing in it though if it makes you feel better about voting for self harm lol.

    By the way, Father Christmas is fighting to prevent ever closer union with the kingdom of the fairies.
    "The EU is lying about its founding principle" doesn't exactly make me look favourably on it either!
  • TOPPING said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
    I would suggest that far, far more Brexiteers agonised about their vote an were in the somewhat surprised they voted out.

    There are few Remainers who were torn over their decision. A group more certain of their position will not be found this side of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Nor their intention to let you know it.
    That's because Remain was the status quo and a known quantity. Whereas Leave was a leap in the dark. If I had been minded to vote Leave I would certainly have found it a more anxious decision.
    We all know that Leave was a more successful campaign because they won, despite having to sell a leap in the dark which on most objective criteria for most people was going to leave them worse off. The Remain campaign was awful.
    Anyway, well done Leave. We're fucked and your project has run into the sand, but you really own the Remoaners, which seems to be important to you.
    Except - Remain wasn't really the status quo. Remain was a continuation of a sneaky acceptance of ever closer union within a federal body that had (has) aspirations to be a European rival to the USA.

    For forty years, the Europhile elite had made every effort to portray the biggest change in our status for centuries as the status quo. It was that illusion that came so spectacularly unstuck in 2016 when the voters decided "no further".
    If only if only if only the PM at the time had managed to agree a document which exempted us from that.

    Or are you a "a legal agreement with the EU is not worth the paper it's printed on" type. In which case why didn't the UK just ignore all EU legislation it didn't like in the first place.
    Some people I debated with at the time explicitly argued that it was precisely because they didn't trust the British political elite to do that that they saw Brexit as necessary. Being part of a transnational political architecture was too tempting a way to circumvent national democracy.
    Do we have democracy in the UK? Discuss.

    Spoiler: We are probably the least democratic country in Western Europe on most measures by some margin.
  • felixfelix Posts: 15,164
    Scott_xP said:

    Rishi Sunak's approval rating is -3%.

    Rishi Sunak Approval Rating (11 December):

    Disapprove: 33% (–)
    Approve: 30% (–)
    Net: -3% (–)

    Changes +/- 4 December

    https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voting-intention-11-december-2022 https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1602350122142208003/photo/1

    So that would be no change while the party is up 3 and Labour down 2.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,839
    felix said:

    Labour 46% (-2)
    Conservative 29% (+3)
    Liberal Democrat 9% (-1)
    Reform UK 7% (+2)
    Green 5% (-1)
    SNP 3% (–)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 4 Dec.
    Redfield Wilton

    That's very low for the SNP, they are often at 5% and have been polling well recently. Curious.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,270
    Lennon said:

    Cookie said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
    I'd politely - and I am certainly not including any of the learned voices on here in this - add that there were a lot of thick people in both camps.
    Emotionally, one of the minor things which pushed me towards leave was the sheer imbecility of the voices for Remain. "We wouldn't have the Gruffalo were it not for the EU" "The price of prosecco will go up" "Europe is about love".
    I'm confident there was just as much guff on the other side. But my online world tends to be heavily remain leaning.

    It wasn't enough to tip the balance. But neither side had a monopoly on stupidity or mendacity.

    But I agree with you that those who didn't feel strongly probably broke for remain.
    The interesting thing was how much of a surprise this came to everyone (including me). Remain was so mainstream. I'm not saying leavers didn't have a voice: clearly they did - but among the sorts of middle classes who make the conversation - among the 'top 5 million' - almost everyone was Remain, and almost everyone who everyone knew was Remain. This happens a bit at a GE, but not to the same extent. Leavers were little known and less understood, except by wild generalisations from the small number of not-particularly-typical examples that could be grasped, and the odd field trip to Clacton on Sea, as if to gawp at an exotic tribe.
    The thing that I am still unsure about is how much of that was 'genuine' and how much was people keeping silent amongst a crowd where it was known/assumed what your vote was. I have a (non-evidenced) suspicion that actually the spiral of silence for Leave amongst the middle class was actually pretty large - and unusually so.
    Yes. I do wonder
    OllyT said:

    WillG said:

    OllyT said:

    WillG said:

    OllyT said:

    WillG said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    PS @Driver trying to claim the number was too low on the previous thread - would that be from Boris in the committee meeting when challenged on it? Are you really going to rely on someone who lied so often you would be better believing the opposite of what he says always?

    The reason this debate comes up time and time again is because Remainers can't get over it and keep bringing it up. In this thread, it was a passing joke that inflamed one Remainer's sensitivity about it. If you actually followed my argument at all, it was that the number was inconsequential. You lost not because of some bus slogan but because voters like democracy and immigration control.
    And what a pyrrhic victory it is turning out to be. Enjoy
    It's not a pyrrhic victory because it's still better to be outside the EU with some democratic pressure to take advantage of it, rather than being inside the EU without the possibility of that. Not to mention that, if we had not had the debate, we probably would have handed over even more powers by now.
    Unfortunately for you the public are increasingly taking a different view.
    Sure, when the debate isn't being actively had. But we still have them on our side when it comes to immigration, which is what any rejoin debate would be fought and won on.
    Even once folks realise that immigration is not one jot smaller now than it was before Brexit?
    Which leads us to an interesting point -

    1) the immigrants aren’t, apparently, pouring into the low skilled/semi skilled jobs
    2) they aren’t all doing high skill jobs - haven’t seen a tidal wave of lawyers, doctors and dentists, have you?
    3) can’t claim much, if any benefits….

    What are they doing?
  • Andy_JS said:

    John Rentoul has a pretty good track record when it comes to predictions IIRC.

    I predict that next year John Rentoul will still be a twat.
  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,963
    felix said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Rishi Sunak's approval rating is -3%.

    Rishi Sunak Approval Rating (11 December):

    Disapprove: 33% (–)
    Approve: 30% (–)
    Net: -3% (–)

    Changes +/- 4 December

    https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voting-intention-11-december-2022 https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1602350122142208003/photo/1

    So that would be no change while the party is up 3 and Labour down 2.
    There isn't usually a strong relationship between intra-poll changes in leader ratings and VI in mid-term. In fact, we always used to be told to look in mid-term at leader ratings as more predictive of the ensuing GE than VI.

    Whether this will hold or not this time is a matter of opinion, but -3 in the circumstances looks surprisingly strong for Sunak. Still an awful lot of undecideds, though.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,339

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
    Very wrong.

    What eventually swung it for me is the knowledge that Ever Closer Union is baked into the EU's treaties - therefore a federal United States of Europe is the aim whether we like it or not.

    I could have been persuaded that this would be a good thing, but the Remain campaign didn't even try. So I had to believe that they didn't believe it, and if they didn't then I couldn't vote Remain because this was likely to be our only chance.
    The sad thing is that most Europhobes dont even understand what "Ever Closer Union" was designed to achieve because they want to see the furriners as those dastardly men who wish to take away our FREEDOMMM.

    It is about as fictitious as Mel Gibson's William Wallace. The phrase was designed to be a fudge. Sure there are a few fanatics that would like a genuine United States of Europe, even today, but France will never allow it. It is a bogeyman that is used by crypto-fascists like Farage to scare the swivel-eyed europhobe children. You keep believing in it though if it makes you feel better about voting for self harm lol.

    By the way, Father Christmas is fighting to prevent ever closer union with the kingdom of the fairies.
    You constantly repeat this and you are constantly wrong. The EU is making giant strides towards a real Federal Union. Just the latest is mutualisation of debt to pay for Covid, another thing we were assured would never happen

    https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/debt-mutualization/

    Coming down the line are special EU taxes, probably harmonised taxes, some foreign policy by qualified majority voting, and much else. The EU advances on all fronts in extending its powers, that is what it does. Ever Closer Union. You are either deluded or stupid
  • Driver said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly WillG and Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
    Very wrong.

    What eventually swung it for me is the knowledge that Ever Closer Union is baked into the EU's treaties - therefore a federal United States of Europe is the aim whether we like it or not.

    I could have been persuaded that this would be a good thing, but the Remain campaign didn't even try. So I had to believe that they didn't believe it, and if they didn't then I couldn't vote Remain because this was likely to be our only chance.
    The sad thing is that most Europhobes dont even understand what "Ever Closer Union" was designed to achieve because they want to see the furriners as those dastardly men who wish to take away our FREEDOMMM.

    It is about as fictitious as Mel Gibson's William Wallace. The phrase was designed to be a fudge. Sure there are a few fanatics that would like a genuine United States of Europe, even today, but France will never allow it. It is a bogeyman that is used by crypto-fascists like Farage to scare the swivel-eyed europhobe children. You keep believing in it though if it makes you feel better about voting for self harm lol.

    By the way, Father Christmas is fighting to prevent ever closer union with the kingdom of the fairies.
    "The EU is lying about its founding principle" doesn't exactly make me look favourably on it either!
    Nooo. That statement can be interpreted in so many ways, you just want to interpret it negatively.

    f I were friends with you, I could say to you;

    "Driver, every year our friendship and understanding of each other gets ever closer. However I do want to make it very plain I have no designs on your very shapely bubble shaped backside"

    Understand now?
  • M45M45 Posts: 216

    Andy_JS said:

    John Rentoul has a pretty good track record when it comes to predictions IIRC.

    I predict that next year John Rentoul will still be a twat.
    He is an exceptionally nice bloke, and a reader of this site.
  • XtrainXtrain Posts: 341

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
    Very wrong.

    What eventually swung it for me is the knowledge that Ever Closer Union is baked into the EU's treaties - therefore a federal United States of Europe is the aim whether we like it or not.

    I could have been persuaded that this would be a good thing, but the Remain campaign didn't even try. So I had to believe that they didn't believe it, and if they didn't then I couldn't vote Remain because this was likely to be our only chance.
    The sad thing is that most Europhobes dont even understand what "Ever Closer Union" was designed to achieve because they want to see the furriners as those dastardly men who wish to take away our FREEDOMMM.

    It is about as fictitious as Mel Gibson's William Wallace. The phrase was designed to be a fudge. Sure there are a few fanatics that would like a genuine United States of Europe, even today, but France will never allow it. It is a bogeyman that is used by crypto-fascists like Farage to scare the swivel-eyed europhobe children. You keep believing in it though if it makes you feel better about voting for self harm lol.

    By the way, Father Christmas is fighting to prevent ever closer union with the kingdom of the fairies.
    Your argument that "France would never allow it" merely proves the leavers point.
  • M45 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    John Rentoul has a pretty good track record when it comes to predictions IIRC.

    I predict that next year John Rentoul will still be a twat.
    He is an exceptionally nice bloke, and a reader of this site.
    Sorry I didn't realise you were his Mum.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,840
    edited December 2022
    DavidL said:

    felix said:

    Labour 46% (-2)
    Conservative 29% (+3)
    Liberal Democrat 9% (-1)
    Reform UK 7% (+2)
    Green 5% (-1)
    SNP 3% (–)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 4 Dec.
    Redfield Wilton

    That's very low for the SNP, they are often at 5% and have been polling well recently. Curious.
    I wondered too, but nc implies that poller's methodology rather than anything else, probably with a dollop of rounding.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,103

    Andy_JS said:

    John Rentoul has a pretty good track record when it comes to predictions IIRC.

    I predict that next year John Rentoul will still be a twat.
    People can have any opinion they like about anyone else, but what's your reason for thinking he is a twat?
  • TazTaz Posts: 14,405

    Andy_JS said:

    John Rentoul has a pretty good track record when it comes to predictions IIRC.

    I predict that next year John Rentoul will still be a twat.
    How is he ?

    I follow him on Twitter. He comes across as a decent guy. Many people who post politics on Twitter aren’t.
  • Xtrain said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
    Very wrong.

    What eventually swung it for me is the knowledge that Ever Closer Union is baked into the EU's treaties - therefore a federal United States of Europe is the aim whether we like it or not.

    I could have been persuaded that this would be a good thing, but the Remain campaign didn't even try. So I had to believe that they didn't believe it, and if they didn't then I couldn't vote Remain because this was likely to be our only chance.
    The sad thing is that most Europhobes dont even understand what "Ever Closer Union" was designed to achieve because they want to see the furriners as those dastardly men who wish to take away our FREEDOMMM.

    It is about as fictitious as Mel Gibson's William Wallace. The phrase was designed to be a fudge. Sure there are a few fanatics that would like a genuine United States of Europe, even today, but France will never allow it. It is a bogeyman that is used by crypto-fascists like Farage to scare the swivel-eyed europhobe children. You keep believing in it though if it makes you feel better about voting for self harm lol.

    By the way, Father Christmas is fighting to prevent ever closer union with the kingdom of the fairies.
    Your argument that "France would never allow it" merely proves the leavers point.
    Really? Which point precisely? If we had still been part of it, we wouldn't have allowed it either, nor the Netherlands, nor Greece, nor Poland, nor probably any of the sovereign nations that make up the 27.

    Have you written to Santa this year? By the way, if you have the cash, I have a bridge to sell you.
  • TOPPING said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
    I would suggest that far, far more Brexiteers agonised about their vote an were in the somewhat surprised they voted out.

    There are few Remainers who were torn over their decision. A group more certain of their position will not be found this side of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Nor their intention to let you know it.
    That's because Remain was the status quo and a known quantity. Whereas Leave was a leap in the dark. If I had been minded to vote Leave I would certainly have found it a more anxious decision.
    We all know that Leave was a more successful campaign because they won, despite having to sell a leap in the dark which on most objective criteria for most people was going to leave them worse off. The Remain campaign was awful.
    Anyway, well done Leave. We're fucked and your project has run into the sand, but you really own the Remoaners, which seems to be important to you.
    Except - Remain wasn't really the status quo. Remain was a continuation of a sneaky acceptance of ever closer union within a federal body that had (has) aspirations to be a European rival to the USA.

    For forty years, the Europhile elite had made every effort to portray the biggest change in our status for centuries as the status quo. It was that illusion that came so spectacularly unstuck in 2016 when the voters decided "no further".
    If only if only if only the PM at the time had managed to agree a document which exempted us from that.

    Or are you a "a legal agreement with the EU is not worth the paper it's printed on" type. In which case why didn't the UK just ignore all EU legislation it didn't like in the first place.
    Some people I debated with at the time explicitly argued that it was precisely because they didn't trust the British political elite to do that that they saw Brexit as necessary. Being part of a transnational political architecture was too tempting a way to circumvent national democracy.
    Do we have democracy in the UK? Discuss.

    Spoiler: We are probably the least democratic country in Western Europe on most measures by some margin.
    Since it is the runup to Christmas, and we're talkling about Europe, how about we adopt Jim Hacker's greatest triumph, and call it a British Sausage Democracy?
  • M45M45 Posts: 216

    M45 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    John Rentoul has a pretty good track record when it comes to predictions IIRC.

    I predict that next year John Rentoul will still be a twat.
    He is an exceptionally nice bloke, and a reader of this site.
    Sorry I didn't realise you were his Mum.
    I am not.

    OTOH the site owner is a friend of his.

    Carry on.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,661
    edited December 2022
    Get this for a completely deranged Russian State TV analysis of Portugal vs Morocco:

    https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1602323518305325056?t=orAUHwNXfHWGBh2apxs29Q&s=19
  • eekeek Posts: 28,370
    edited December 2022
    Cyclefree said:

    Right, off again- once more into the breach. I left the house this morning at 8:45 precisely so that I would not be driving in the dark. 😨

    "Uomo propone. Dio dispone."

    Be careful

    You are only supposed to go a maximum of 50 miles or so on a spare tyre - the purpose is to get you to a garage and get a replacement - not to allow you to travel 100s of miles further. https://www.goodyear.eu/en_gb/consumer/learn/spare-tires.html
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,103
    Foxy said:

    Get this for a completely deranged Russian State TV analysis of Portugal vs Morocco:

    https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1602323518305325056?t=orAUHwNXfHWGBh2apxs29Q&s=19

    Careful not to be russophobic by criticising their media culture now.
  • DavidL said:

    Big moment for debate over SNP gender reforms tomorrow, with judge to deliver ruling on whether trans women with gender recognition certificates are legally women.

    Ruling will impact on self-ID debate as how much legal weight GRCs carry is disputed.


    ScotGov is in a pickle. In court they have argued that a GRC changes a person's legal sex "for all purposes".....in Holyrood they have argued it won't confer additional rights on natal males.

    If they win, then people with GRC's will be able to access women's sports, women's prisons and so forth - as their critics have argued, but been dismissed as "not valid".

    If they lose, then it will seem that a lot of political capital has been expended for little benefit....

    My guess is that they will lose for the same reason they did the last time, namely that their definition of women undermines and removes rights granted by the Equality Act and those rights are a reserved matter. I am really not sure how they think that they have got around the problem that the court had with their previous effort.

    Which might just suit Nicola fine. This legislation is causing her a lot of problems within her party. She can claim that she has done her best but once again been stopped by London and the limited powers of the Scottish Parliament.
    Hopefully she will be defeated, spit the dummy out, and resign!
    Which of the Cavalcade of Wit & Beauty on the SNP benches do you see replacing her?

    About the only SNP politician I rate is Cherry & she's in Westminster - which has just elected a 34 year old Dundonian who does not appear to have worked outside academe or politics.....
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,648

    Xtrain said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
    Very wrong.

    What eventually swung it for me is the knowledge that Ever Closer Union is baked into the EU's treaties - therefore a federal United States of Europe is the aim whether we like it or not.

    I could have been persuaded that this would be a good thing, but the Remain campaign didn't even try. So I had to believe that they didn't believe it, and if they didn't then I couldn't vote Remain because this was likely to be our only chance.
    The sad thing is that most Europhobes dont even understand what "Ever Closer Union" was designed to achieve because they want to see the furriners as those dastardly men who wish to take away our FREEDOMMM.

    It is about as fictitious as Mel Gibson's William Wallace. The phrase was designed to be a fudge. Sure there are a few fanatics that would like a genuine United States of Europe, even today, but France will never allow it. It is a bogeyman that is used by crypto-fascists like Farage to scare the swivel-eyed europhobe children. You keep believing in it though if it makes you feel better about voting for self harm lol.

    By the way, Father Christmas is fighting to prevent ever closer union with the kingdom of the fairies.
    Your argument that "France would never allow it" merely proves the leavers point.
    Really? Which point precisely? If we had still been part of it, we wouldn't have allowed it either, nor the Netherlands, nor Greece, nor Poland, nor probably any of the sovereign nations that make up the 27.

    Have you written to Santa this year? By the way, if you have the cash, I have a bridge to sell you.
    This is only true if you define the "it" that won't be allowed in a very specific way. There might not be a prospect of a unitary state called Europe, but what's emerging is a state-like confederation.

    There's already a linguistic shift where people talk about it the way they would about a state, for example "travelling to the EU". This distinguishes it from the kind of vanilla multilateral organisation that you pretend it is.
  • Leon said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
    Very wrong.

    What eventually swung it for me is the knowledge that Ever Closer Union is baked into the EU's treaties - therefore a federal United States of Europe is the aim whether we like it or not.

    I could have been persuaded that this would be a good thing, but the Remain campaign didn't even try. So I had to believe that they didn't believe it, and if they didn't then I couldn't vote Remain because this was likely to be our only chance.
    The sad thing is that most Europhobes dont even understand what "Ever Closer Union" was designed to achieve because they want to see the furriners as those dastardly men who wish to take away our FREEDOMMM.

    It is about as fictitious as Mel Gibson's William Wallace. The phrase was designed to be a fudge. Sure there are a few fanatics that would like a genuine United States of Europe, even today, but France will never allow it. It is a bogeyman that is used by crypto-fascists like Farage to scare the swivel-eyed europhobe children. You keep believing in it though if it makes you feel better about voting for self harm lol.

    By the way, Father Christmas is fighting to prevent ever closer union with the kingdom of the fairies.
    You constantly repeat this and you are constantly wrong. The EU is making giant strides towards a real Federal Union. Just the latest is mutualisation of debt to pay for Covid, another thing we were assured would never happen

    https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/debt-mutualization/

    Coming down the line are special EU taxes, probably harmonised taxes, some foreign policy by qualified majority voting, and much else. The EU advances on all fronts in extending its powers, that is what it does. Ever Closer Union. You are either deluded or stupid
    Deluded or stupid? OK! How is your alien obsession dear chap? Do you think it was maybe aliens that shagged a bat in Wuhan? What other conspiracy theories do you believe in? Maybe it was EU bureaucrats in league with the Chinese who are preparing us all for the inevitable invasion of the lizard people?

    Oh, btw, in spite of your warning relating to nuclear Armageddon, I have still booked another ski holiday. I am an optimist, whereas you are a gloom mongering swivel-eyed nutjob who believes every conspiracy theory you read on Facebook that your paranoid unscientific brain is unable to discount.

    You are both deluded and stupid, and that is why you are one of the few slightly educated people who is still desperately trying to justify your idiocy in voting Leave lol.
  • M45 said:

    M45 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    John Rentoul has a pretty good track record when it comes to predictions IIRC.

    I predict that next year John Rentoul will still be a twat.
    He is an exceptionally nice bloke, and a reader of this site.
    Sorry I didn't realise you were his Mum.
    I am not.

    OTOH the site owner is a friend of his.

    Carry on.
    Sorry, I got that wrong. You are John Rentoul and I claim my £5

    "OTOH the site owner is a friend of his" - sad silly comment. Mike is not that small minded.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 59,930

    TOPPING said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    In which case, it should have been really easy to defeat.

    Or just perhaps, there's a lot more behind Brexit than Remainer simpletons ever understood?
    There's lots of thick people sadly. Add in the xenophobes, fantasists, shallows and nostalgics, and even eliminating the substantial venn overlap of those you get a winning coalition.

    And it wasn't really close. The 52/48 is misleading because the passion was on the Leave side, most of those on the fence or not fussed would have gone with Remain, plus the 48 were highly concentrated in London, the big cities and Scotland.

    In FPTP constituency terms - for England - it was a Leave landslide. Maybe there's some rethink going on now but as of the Vote the spirit of England was overwhelmingly Leave.

    I'm cool with it now. Just so long as Tory rule ends at the next GE.
    I would suggest that far, far more Brexiteers agonised about their vote an were in the somewhat surprised they voted out.

    There are few Remainers who were torn over their decision. A group more certain of their position will not be found this side of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Nor their intention to let you know it.
    That's because Remain was the status quo and a known quantity. Whereas Leave was a leap in the dark. If I had been minded to vote Leave I would certainly have found it a more anxious decision.
    We all know that Leave was a more successful campaign because they won, despite having to sell a leap in the dark which on most objective criteria for most people was going to leave them worse off. The Remain campaign was awful.
    Anyway, well done Leave. We're fucked and your project has run into the sand, but you really own the Remoaners, which seems to be important to you.
    Except - Remain wasn't really the status quo. Remain was a continuation of a sneaky acceptance of ever closer union within a federal body that had (has) aspirations to be a European rival to the USA.

    For forty years, the Europhile elite had made every effort to portray the biggest change in our status for centuries as the status quo. It was that illusion that came so spectacularly unstuck in 2016 when the voters decided "no further".
    If only if only if only the PM at the time had managed to agree a document which exempted us from that.

    Or are you a "a legal agreement with the EU is not worth the paper it's printed on" type. In which case why didn't the UK just ignore all EU legislation it didn't like in the first place.
    Some people I debated with at the time explicitly argued that it was precisely because they didn't trust the British political elite to do that that they saw Brexit as necessary. Being part of a transnational political architecture was too tempting a way to circumvent national democracy.
    Do we have democracy in the UK? Discuss.

    Spoiler: We are probably the least democratic country in Western Europe on most measures by some margin.
    Between the Nordics and continental Europe:

    https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-state-of-global-democracy-2022/
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,339

    Xtrain said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
    Very wrong.

    What eventually swung it for me is the knowledge that Ever Closer Union is baked into the EU's treaties - therefore a federal United States of Europe is the aim whether we like it or not.

    I could have been persuaded that this would be a good thing, but the Remain campaign didn't even try. So I had to believe that they didn't believe it, and if they didn't then I couldn't vote Remain because this was likely to be our only chance.
    The sad thing is that most Europhobes dont even understand what "Ever Closer Union" was designed to achieve because they want to see the furriners as those dastardly men who wish to take away our FREEDOMMM.

    It is about as fictitious as Mel Gibson's William Wallace. The phrase was designed to be a fudge. Sure there are a few fanatics that would like a genuine United States of Europe, even today, but France will never allow it. It is a bogeyman that is used by crypto-fascists like Farage to scare the swivel-eyed europhobe children. You keep believing in it though if it makes you feel better about voting for self harm lol.

    By the way, Father Christmas is fighting to prevent ever closer union with the kingdom of the fairies.
    Your argument that "France would never allow it" merely proves the leavers point.
    Really? Which point precisely? If we had still been part of it, we wouldn't have allowed it either, nor the Netherlands, nor Greece, nor Poland, nor probably any of the sovereign nations that make up the 27.

    Have you written to Santa this year? By the way, if you have the cash, I have a bridge to sell you.
    This is only true if you define the "it" that won't be allowed in a very specific way. There might not be a prospect of a unitary state called Europe, but what's emerging is a state-like confederation.

    There's already a linguistic shift where people talk about it the way they would about a state, for example "travelling to the EU". This distinguishes it from the kind of vanilla multilateral organisation that you pretend it is.
    Yes, there's a definite lexical shift as you say. It's possibly more noticeable now we are out

    When I hear a phrase like the "EU Foreign Minister" (and you hear it with increasing frequency), I feel myself reacting with the mindset: Ah this is about that other country, the EU

    "EU Foreign Minister: War in Ukraine 'sends shockwaves' around the world"

    https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/09/20/ukraine-dominate-unga-eu-josep-borrell-vo-church-ovn-intl-ldn-vpx.cnn

    The EU is morphing into a quite tightly knit confederal state. It is now over halfway to its destination. It will be done by 2050
  • kle4 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    John Rentoul has a pretty good track record when it comes to predictions IIRC.

    I predict that next year John Rentoul will still be a twat.
    People can have any opinion they like about anyone else, but what's your reason for thinking he is a twat?
    Well it was meant to be a joke, but I guess it fell flat! The prediction was obviously wrong, possibly like his.
  • Xtrain said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
    Very wrong.

    What eventually swung it for me is the knowledge that Ever Closer Union is baked into the EU's treaties - therefore a federal United States of Europe is the aim whether we like it or not.

    I could have been persuaded that this would be a good thing, but the Remain campaign didn't even try. So I had to believe that they didn't believe it, and if they didn't then I couldn't vote Remain because this was likely to be our only chance.
    The sad thing is that most Europhobes dont even understand what "Ever Closer Union" was designed to achieve because they want to see the furriners as those dastardly men who wish to take away our FREEDOMMM.

    It is about as fictitious as Mel Gibson's William Wallace. The phrase was designed to be a fudge. Sure there are a few fanatics that would like a genuine United States of Europe, even today, but France will never allow it. It is a bogeyman that is used by crypto-fascists like Farage to scare the swivel-eyed europhobe children. You keep believing in it though if it makes you feel better about voting for self harm lol.

    By the way, Father Christmas is fighting to prevent ever closer union with the kingdom of the fairies.
    Your argument that "France would never allow it" merely proves the leavers point.
    Really? Which point precisely? If we had still been part of it, we wouldn't have allowed it either, nor the Netherlands, nor Greece, nor Poland, nor probably any of the sovereign nations that make up the 27.

    Have you written to Santa this year? By the way, if you have the cash, I have a bridge to sell you.
    This is only true if you define the "it" that won't be allowed in a very specific way. There might not be a prospect of a unitary state called Europe, but what's emerging is a state-like confederation.

    There's already a linguistic shift where people talk about it the way they would about a state, for example "travelling to the EU". This distinguishes it from the kind of vanilla multilateral organisation that you pretend it is.
    I can honestly say I have never heard anyone saying they are "travelling to the EU". I probably never will. The dreams you have been having on that road to Damascus are really quite something.
  • M45M45 Posts: 216

    M45 said:

    M45 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    John Rentoul has a pretty good track record when it comes to predictions IIRC.

    I predict that next year John Rentoul will still be a twat.
    He is an exceptionally nice bloke, and a reader of this site.
    Sorry I didn't realise you were his Mum.
    I am not.

    OTOH the site owner is a friend of his.

    Carry on.
    Sorry, I got that wrong. You are John Rentoul and I claim my £5

    "OTOH the site owner is a friend of his" - sad silly comment. Mike is not that small minded.
    Dig away

    Wake Duncan with thy digging
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,839
    Carnyx said:

    DavidL said:

    felix said:

    Labour 46% (-2)
    Conservative 29% (+3)
    Liberal Democrat 9% (-1)
    Reform UK 7% (+2)
    Green 5% (-1)
    SNP 3% (–)
    Other 2% (+1)

    Changes +/- 4 Dec.
    Redfield Wilton

    That's very low for the SNP, they are often at 5% and have been polling well recently. Curious.
    I wondered too, but nc implies that poller's methodology rather than anything else, probably with a dollop of rounding.
    You're probably right. I think that the bubble caused by the SC case will deflate eventually but not yet.
  • Xtrain said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    TOPPING said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    kjh said:

    Honestly @WillG and @Driver trying to defend the amount on the side of the bus is pathetic. Look you won. The side of the bus was an excellent bit of campaigning. It got Remain up in arms on the amount being inaccurate and hence just highlighted it a bit more. So job done. It's in the past. You don't need to defend it. It was a lie, just like all politicians tell and it worked. Let it go.

    The problem is that most opponents of Brexit don't treat it as just a normal piece of political campaigning but as a Goebbelsesque Big Lie that is responsible for opening the gates of hell. It's an example of them trying to delegitimise the outcome of the original referendum rather than accepting it and moving on.
    No, it's the banal bovine stupidity of it that rankles.
    If it was that banal and stupid, surely the Remain campaign should have been able to counter it effectively?
    More people than you think fall for 419 Fraud. And other fraud for that matter. Lies work because they prey on people's insecurity, fear and desire.

    Which of the three was responsible for your vote?
    Knowledge.
    OK I should have added GSOH.

    It is one of the three - for you I'm guessing (apropos of nothing in particular) insecurity. You aren't secure enough in your own opinions or your place in the world so you needed to hitch your trailer to other people's cartoon view of what that was to confirm it to you.

    amiright?
    Very wrong.

    What eventually swung it for me is the knowledge that Ever Closer Union is baked into the EU's treaties - therefore a federal United States of Europe is the aim whether we like it or not.

    I could have been persuaded that this would be a good thing, but the Remain campaign didn't even try. So I had to believe that they didn't believe it, and if they didn't then I couldn't vote Remain because this was likely to be our only chance.
    The sad thing is that most Europhobes dont even understand what "Ever Closer Union" was designed to achieve because they want to see the furriners as those dastardly men who wish to take away our FREEDOMMM.

    It is about as fictitious as Mel Gibson's William Wallace. The phrase was designed to be a fudge. Sure there are a few fanatics that would like a genuine United States of Europe, even today, but France will never allow it. It is a bogeyman that is used by crypto-fascists like Farage to scare the swivel-eyed europhobe children. You keep believing in it though if it makes you feel better about voting for self harm lol.

    By the way, Father Christmas is fighting to prevent ever closer union with the kingdom of the fairies.
    Your argument that "France would never allow it" merely proves the leavers point.
    Really? Which point precisely? If we had still been part of it, we wouldn't have allowed it either, nor the Netherlands, nor Greece, nor Poland, nor probably any of the sovereign nations that make up the 27.

    Have you written to Santa this year? By the way, if you have the cash, I have a bridge to sell you.
    This is only true if you define the "it" that won't be allowed in a very specific way. There might not be a prospect of a unitary state called Europe, but what's emerging is a state-like confederation.

    There's already a linguistic shift where people talk about it the way they would about a state, for example "travelling to the EU". This distinguishes it from the kind of vanilla multilateral organisation that you pretend it is.
    I can honestly say I have never heard anyone saying they are "travelling to the EU". I probably never will. The dreams you have been having on that road to Damascus are really quite something.
    I can imagine people saying it in the sense of "travelling to/selling things to the EU is an utter ballsache since Brexit" as a talking point, but not as a place. Sort of a bureaucratic shorthand.

    But there's a gap between that and a Place Called The EU, unless you have a small brain or a smaller degree of honesty.
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