Mr. Password, Leave would have to spell out if we'd be in the EEA/EFTA or not, whether we'd be closely aligned, far apart, or somewhere in between etc etc.
Because this was not the case, it was a lot easier to kick the EU, as politicians have not done a good job of making the case for it, the Lisbon deception did not engender voter trust, and the Leave campaign was able to make differing cases to different voters.
Mind you, if Remain had run a campaign that wasn't incredibly bad, they still would've won...
Remember that one of Johnson's guiding creeds is "you can't make me". You can't make Vote Leave come up with a realistic prospectus, it would all be "pure upside, no downside".
And if the EU said "no, we're not giving you that", then that gives VL two brilliant ripostes. The first is "look how awful Brussels is", the other is "Of course they're saying that now, they want to trap us in their web. Once we've voted to leave, they'll come running..." (See German car makers.)
All totally dishonest, of course. But this is electoral politics, and sometimes the spoils go to the campaigner prepared to cross the line that bit more.
The point would have been that Leave should agree a prospectus *before* the referendum. Now, it might have been aspirational and unachievable (cynics would say full of political promises) but at least voters would have known what they were voting for.
More importantly, the politicians behind Leave would know what sort of Brexit they are trying to deliver; back in this world, they do not.
Good on Boris Johnson. A devisive character for sure, but totally unwavering in his support for Ukraine and their people, in their time of need.
Boris is a flawed character*: but he was right to invest in Covid vaccines, he was right to "get Brexit done"**, and he was right to back Ukraine.
The country needs to move past him, but we shouldn't forget that he broadly got the big calls right.
* This may be too kind. ** Sadly, this did involve quite a lot of dissimulation *** *** Or lying, as some would call it
** Also bears much if the responsibility for the shitshow in the first place. Brexit was a call he got hugely wrong, and it resulted in a wasted decade.*
So broadly, not really.
Also, given the string life science base of the country, and the advice given to government, would any other administration not have invested in vaccines ? Seems a bit unlikely.
Ukraine I give him credit for. That was a genuine call, and a correct one.
*Polling shows most of the country agreed with me.
The country voted for Brexit. You may not like it, but they did. And it needed to be enacted, for good or for ill. Boris did that...
Boris's lies were a significant part of the country voting for Brexit, so he bears responsibility for that call. And much of the mess - the rejection of May's deal, and the subsequent dud deal - which followed.
I don't see how any of that amounts to "the right call" unless you're still one if the small band of believers in it all having worked out for the best.
And it has wasted a decade.
And to repeat, most of the country regrets the whole mess.
My own top-level views on Brexit have not changed since before the vote: *) Britain could be a success within or without the EU. *) Britain could be a failure within or without the EU.
Membership of the EU might make success easier or harder (depending on your viewpoint), but it is a small factor, not the cause.
*If* we are failing as a country, it has little to do with Brexit, but on a while host of structural issues that are firmly under our control. If we had voted to remain in 2016, we would not be much better off.
I'd also argue that pretending that all our issues are because of Brexit is singularly unhelpful, as it stops us examining those structural issues. It's the reverse of before Brexit, when Europhobes would blame all the country's failings on EU membership. That was nonsense. Likewise, it's nonsense to blame all the country's failings on the fact we left.
I don't think all our economic malaise is due to Brexit, but it is delusional to deny that Brexit has done additional damage to hurt our economy. Brexit was a self inflicted wound, and the fact we voted for that self harm doesn't make it less of a wound.
I didn't say it has not caused additional damage. That was always going to be the case; there was going to be a period of adjustment (and a precious few Brexiteers said as much beforehand, although most ignored it). That is one of the reasons I voted remain, despite some euroscepticism.
Brexit has been poorly handled, but even if it had been well handled, there would have been slight damage. But Brexit is not about the first five years after the split; it is about the next couple of decades. And sadly, the government does not appear to be addressing that.
Plenty of Brexiteers believed those sunny uplands were going to be immediate, for example:
Would Britain have really voted Leave if Brexiteers had been clear that Brexit would involve years or decades of economic damage? Even now Brexiteers struggle to name any concrete economic advantage.
I think the assumption from all voters in the Brexit referendum, remain or leave, was that leaving entailed ceasing to be subject to European law, regulation, and overall direction of policy travel. Poor Government and exceedingly damaging administration have prevented that from happening. At all. It's absurd to complain of the lack of concrete advantages from 'leaving' when there is no meaningful sense in which we have actually left - except of course leaving the privileges of membership.
You do have a rather fundamental problem with this argument though. "Scrap the EU laws and regulations and the benefits will arrive". Which is the Singapore-on-Thames Brexit argument - bin off all those EU red tape barriers which stop us making workplaces more dangerous and workers easier to exploit and we can get richer.
Problem is that Leave only won because the Workers Republic of Britain voters supported Brexit so that they could get paid more and have better workplaces. What you want directly conflicts with what they want.
Which is why "BREXIT" would always fail long after we delivered Brexit - leaving the EU. I know that Rees-Mog and the spiv class want to be able to cut nanny-state red tape and worker protections, but the workers won't vote for you in thanks...
The worst thing is that neither “Singapore-on-Thames” nor “Workers Rebuplic of Britain” have happened - thanks to a combination of Treasury orthodoxy and an unwillingness from Whitehall to take advantage of the freedoms, lest it become more difficult to rejoin the EU in the near future.
And neither extreme will *ever* happen. Nor will the middle ground mercantilists who wanted freer trade be happy. The EU/EEA/CU offered compromises which made all these groups unhappy in different ways. Now we have left all, the inherent reasons why we did things like found the EEA are clear...
Incidentally which of the freedoms do you think we should have gone for: Scrap worker's rights and protections so that Rees-Mogg types can profit more? Boost workers rights and protections so that Rees-Mogg types will have to pay more? Deregulate my bit of the market just enough so that I get cheaper access to my existing market than my foreign competitors?
Daily Mail lead story is an interesting one. I'm guessing that a lot more of their readers are getting more out of the state than they pay in (especially if they're pensioners) while few of them are among the poor benighted top 10% of earners.
While this is something to keep an eye on the calculation is a tricky one and the issue is clouded.
1) So what? is a reasonable question 2) What counts is whether the state can balance the books. (It can't) 3) What counts as a benefit? Schools, NHS, cash benefits. Yes. Defence? Police? Probably. The cost of HR in the Department of Origami? 4) What counts as paying in. Shopping in supermarkets sows essential seeds of the profits that pay Corporation Tax. Tesco's taxes are paid out of my spending. Has the report factored this in? What about VAT?
Good on Boris Johnson. A devisive character for sure, but totally unwavering in his support for Ukraine and their people, in their time of need.
Boris is a flawed character*: but he was right to invest in Covid vaccines, he was right to "get Brexit done"**, and he was right to back Ukraine.
The country needs to move past him, but we shouldn't forget that he broadly got the big calls right.
* This may be too kind. ** Sadly, this did involve quite a lot of dissimulation *** *** Or lying, as some would call it
** Also bears much if the responsibility for the shitshow in the first place. Brexit was a call he got hugely wrong, and it resulted in a wasted decade.*
So broadly, not really.
Also, given the string life science base of the country, and the advice given to government, would any other administration not have invested in vaccines ? Seems a bit unlikely.
Ukraine I give him credit for. That was a genuine call, and a correct one.
*Polling shows most of the country agreed with me.
The country voted for Brexit. You may not like it, but they did. And it needed to be enacted, for good or for ill. Boris did that...
Boris's lies were a significant part of the country voting for Brexit, so he bears responsibility for that call. And much of the mess - the rejection of May's deal, and the subsequent dud deal - which followed.
I don't see how any of that amounts to "the right call" unless you're still one if the small band of believers in it all having worked out for the best.
And it has wasted a decade.
And to repeat, most of the country regrets the whole mess.
My own top-level views on Brexit have not changed since before the vote: *) Britain could be a success within or without the EU. *) Britain could be a failure within or without the EU.
Membership of the EU might make success easier or harder (depending on your viewpoint), but it is a small factor, not the cause.
*If* we are failing as a country, it has little to do with Brexit, but on a while host of structural issues that are firmly under our control. If we had voted to remain in 2016, we would not be much better off.
I'd also argue that pretending that all our issues are because of Brexit is singularly unhelpful, as it stops us examining those structural issues. It's the reverse of before Brexit, when Europhobes would blame all the country's failings on EU membership. That was nonsense. Likewise, it's nonsense to blame all the country's failings on the fact we left.
I don't think all our economic malaise is due to Brexit, but it is delusional to deny that Brexit has done additional damage to hurt our economy. Brexit was a self inflicted wound, and the fact we voted for that self harm doesn't make it less of a wound.
I didn't say it has not caused additional damage. That was always going to be the case; there was going to be a period of adjustment (and a precious few Brexiteers said as much beforehand, although most ignored it). That is one of the reasons I voted remain, despite some euroscepticism.
Brexit has been poorly handled, but even if it had been well handled, there would have been slight damage. But Brexit is not about the first five years after the split; it is about the next couple of decades. And sadly, the government does not appear to be addressing that.
Plenty of Brexiteers believed those sunny uplands were going to be immediate, for example:
Would Britain have really voted Leave if Brexiteers had been clear that Brexit would involve years or decades of economic damage? Even now Brexiteers struggle to name any concrete economic advantage.
I think the assumption from all voters in the Brexit referendum, remain or leave, was that leaving entailed ceasing to be subject to European law, regulation, and overall direction of policy travel. Poor Government and exceedingly damaging administration have prevented that from happening. At all. It's absurd to complain of the lack of concrete advantages from 'leaving' when there is no meaningful sense in which we have actually left - except of course leaving the privileges of membership.
You do have a rather fundamental problem with this argument though. "Scrap the EU laws and regulations and the benefits will arrive". Which is the Singapore-on-Thames Brexit argument - bin off all those EU red tape barriers which stop us making workplaces more dangerous and workers easier to exploit and we can get richer.
Problem is that Leave only won because the Workers Republic of Britain voters supported Brexit so that they could get paid more and have better workplaces. What you want directly conflicts with what they want.
Which is why "BREXIT" would always fail long after we delivered Brexit - leaving the EU. I know that Rees-Mog and the spiv class want to be able to cut nanny-state red tape and worker protections, but the workers won't vote for you in thanks...
The worst thing is that neither “Singapore-on-Thames” nor “Workers Rebuplic of Britain” have happened - thanks to a combination of Treasury orthodoxy and an unwillingness from Whitehall to take advantage of the freedoms, lest it become more difficult to rejoin the EU in the near future.
I imagine the bigger factor is that both pure Singapore and pure Socialist Republic would both be incredibly unpopular with the public.
And then we have to wonder if marginal gains from doing things differently to those around us are worth the marginal losses from the resulting border friction.
36 million people – get more from the Government than they pay in tax, according to a study by Civitas.
This is up from 24 million, or two-fifths of households, when Tony Blair was in power at the turn of the millennium.
The top 10 per cent of earners pay 53 per cent of all income tax, turning the levy – the Treasury’s biggest single earner – into a ‘stealth wealth tax’, Civitas said.
The surge in state ‘dependency’ means the poorest fifth of households receive £17,600 more on average in welfare and non-financial benefits from the State than they pay in tax.
It is worth noting that this is a Covid year analysis - i.e. FY 2020/21 - and is therefore does not signify any major underlying shift.
In normal times, it's very simple:
- retirees are beneficiaries - people on low incomes with children are beneficiaries - households where everyone is out of work are beneficiaries - households where someone has a long-term chronic illness or disability are beneficiaries
And that's about it.
If you don't have kids and you're in work, then you are almost certainly a net contributor, even if you're on minimum wage.
It's a function of the retirement age not rising fast enough and not charging NI on retirement income. Fix those two and the numbers look a lot better.
Where would you set the retirement age relative to life expectancy at birth?
70 for women, 68 for men.
So would that be retirement for an average of one-seventh of the average lifespan, or a retirement of an average of 11 years?
And then we have to wonder if marginal gains from doing things differently to those around us are worth the marginal losses from the resulting border friction.
36 million people – get more from the Government than they pay in tax, according to a study by Civitas.
This is up from 24 million, or two-fifths of households, when Tony Blair was in power at the turn of the millennium.
The top 10 per cent of earners pay 53 per cent of all income tax, turning the levy – the Treasury’s biggest single earner – into a ‘stealth wealth tax’, Civitas said.
The surge in state ‘dependency’ means the poorest fifth of households receive £17,600 more on average in welfare and non-financial benefits from the State than they pay in tax.
It is worth noting that this is a Covid year analysis - i.e. FY 2020/21 - and is therefore does not signify any major underlying shift.
In normal times, it's very simple:
- retirees are beneficiaries - people on low incomes with children are beneficiaries - households where everyone is out of work are beneficiaries - households where someone has a long-term chronic illness or disability are beneficiaries
And that's about it.
If you don't have kids and you're in work, then you are almost certainly a net contributor, even if you're on minimum wage.
It's a function of the retirement age not rising fast enough and not charging NI on retirement income. Fix those two and the numbers look a lot better.
Where would you set the retirement age relative to life expectancy at birth?
70 for women, 68 for men.
There speaks someone whose working day includes nothing more strenuous than raising a coffee cup to his lips.
A more philosophical question is whether the system should take into account that life expectancy varies across different populations. Should Glaswegians be paid their pensions earlier? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-58118599
Mr. Password, Leave would have to spell out if we'd be in the EEA/EFTA or not, whether we'd be closely aligned, far apart, or somewhere in between etc etc.
Because this was not the case, it was a lot easier to kick the EU, as politicians have not done a good job of making the case for it, the Lisbon deception did not engender voter trust, and the Leave campaign was able to make differing cases to different voters.
Mind you, if Remain had run a campaign that wasn't incredibly bad, they still would've won...
Remember that one of Johnson's guiding creeds is "you can't make me". You can't make Vote Leave come up with a realistic prospectus, it would all be "pure upside, no downside".
And if the EU said "no, we're not giving you that", then that gives VL two brilliant ripostes. The first is "look how awful Brussels is", the other is "Of course they're saying that now, they want to trap us in their web. Once we've voted to leave, they'll come running..." (See German car makers.)
All totally dishonest, of course. But this is electoral politics, and sometimes the spoils go to the campaigner prepared to cross the line that bit more.
The point would have been that Leave should agree a prospectus *before* the referendum. Now, it might have been aspirational and unachievable (cynics would say full of political promises) but at least voters would have known what they were voting for.
More importantly, the politicians behind Leave would know what sort of Brexit they are trying to deliver; back in this world, they do not.
This is impossible. The leave deal required decisions from others besides the UK government.
It was always obvious (despite Remain pretending) that Remain or Leave was a fundamental constitutional decision requiring a referendum (just like say Scottish independence) which left parliament to decide how to follow it up.
The worst thing is that neither “Singapore-on-Thames” nor “Workers Rebuplic of Britain” have happened - thanks to a combination of Treasury orthodoxy and an unwillingness from Whitehall to take advantage of the freedoms, lest it become more difficult to rejoin the EU in the near future.
neither “Singapore-on-Thames” nor “Workers Rebuplic of Britain” have happened - because reality overcomes fantasy every time
Reality being that the permanent Whitehall blob can’t envisage why we should deviate an inch from EU law, with all its UK gold plating.
Singapore on Thames was always an odd name: an extremely heavily regulated authoritarian state where most people live in social housing is hardly the libertarian paradise the Tory free marketeers would want. There are US states with very light regulation in most areas but they’re still all covered by strict federal laws on financial conduct, and many of them have the death penalty.
Very few good examples out there of light touch regulatory regimes that are not either lawless mafia states or heavily authoritarian in one way or other.
Good on Boris Johnson. A devisive character for sure, but totally unwavering in his support for Ukraine and their people, in their time of need.
Boris is a flawed character*: but he was right to invest in Covid vaccines, he was right to "get Brexit done"**, and he was right to back Ukraine.
The country needs to move past him, but we shouldn't forget that he broadly got the big calls right.
* This may be too kind. ** Sadly, this did involve quite a lot of dissimulation *** *** Or lying, as some would call it
** Also bears much if the responsibility for the shitshow in the first place. Brexit was a call he got hugely wrong, and it resulted in a wasted decade.*
So broadly, not really.
Also, given the string life science base of the country, and the advice given to government, would any other administration not have invested in vaccines ? Seems a bit unlikely.
Ukraine I give him credit for. That was a genuine call, and a correct one.
*Polling shows most of the country agreed with me.
The country voted for Brexit. You may not like it, but they did. And it needed to be enacted, for good or for ill. Boris did that...
Boris's lies were a significant part of the country voting for Brexit, so he bears responsibility for that call. And much of the mess - the rejection of May's deal, and the subsequent dud deal - which followed.
I don't see how any of that amounts to "the right call" unless you're still one if the small band of believers in it all having worked out for the best.
And it has wasted a decade.
And to repeat, most of the country regrets the whole mess.
My own top-level views on Brexit have not changed since before the vote: *) Britain could be a success within or without the EU. *) Britain could be a failure within or without the EU.
Membership of the EU might make success easier or harder (depending on your viewpoint), but it is a small factor, not the cause.
*If* we are failing as a country, it has little to do with Brexit, but on a while host of structural issues that are firmly under our control. If we had voted to remain in 2016, we would not be much better off.
I'd also argue that pretending that all our issues are because of Brexit is singularly unhelpful, as it stops us examining those structural issues. It's the reverse of before Brexit, when Europhobes would blame all the country's failings on EU membership. That was nonsense. Likewise, it's nonsense to blame all the country's failings on the fact we left.
I don't think all our economic malaise is due to Brexit, but it is delusional to deny that Brexit has done additional damage to hurt our economy. Brexit was a self inflicted wound, and the fact we voted for that self harm doesn't make it less of a wound.
I didn't say it has not caused additional damage. That was always going to be the case; there was going to be a period of adjustment (and a precious few Brexiteers said as much beforehand, although most ignored it). That is one of the reasons I voted remain, despite some euroscepticism.
Brexit has been poorly handled, but even if it had been well handled, there would have been slight damage. But Brexit is not about the first five years after the split; it is about the next couple of decades. And sadly, the government does not appear to be addressing that.
Plenty of Brexiteers believed those sunny uplands were going to be immediate, for example:
Would Britain have really voted Leave if Brexiteers had been clear that Brexit would involve years or decades of economic damage? Even now Brexiteers struggle to name any concrete economic advantage.
I think the assumption from all voters in the Brexit referendum, remain or leave, was that leaving entailed ceasing to be subject to European law, regulation, and overall direction of policy travel. Poor Government and exceedingly damaging administration have prevented that from happening. At all. It's absurd to complain of the lack of concrete advantages from 'leaving' when there is no meaningful sense in which we have actually left - except of course leaving the privileges of membership.
You do have a rather fundamental problem with this argument though. "Scrap the EU laws and regulations and the benefits will arrive". Which is the Singapore-on-Thames Brexit argument - bin off all those EU red tape barriers which stop us making workplaces more dangerous and workers easier to exploit and we can get richer.
Problem is that Leave only won because the Workers Republic of Britain voters supported Brexit so that they could get paid more and have better workplaces. What you want directly conflicts with what they want.
Which is why "BREXIT" would always fail long after we delivered Brexit - leaving the EU. I know that Rees-Mog and the spiv class want to be able to cut nanny-state red tape and worker protections, but the workers won't vote for you in thanks...
The worst thing is that neither “Singapore-on-Thames” nor “Workers Rebuplic of Britain” have happened - thanks to a combination of Treasury orthodoxy and an unwillingness from Whitehall to take advantage of the freedoms, lest it become more difficult to rejoin the EU in the near future.
And neither extreme will *ever* happen. Nor will the middle ground mercantilists who wanted freer trade be happy. The EU/EEA/CU offered compromises which made all these groups unhappy in different ways. Now we have left all, the inherent reasons why we did things like found the EEA are clear...
Incidentally which of the freedoms do you think we should have gone for: Scrap worker's rights and protections so that Rees-Mogg types can profit more? Boost workers rights and protections so that Rees-Mogg types will have to pay more? Deregulate my bit of the market just enough so that I get cheaper access to my existing market than my foreign competitors?
Which of the freedoms attracted you to vote for it?
Re: "Daily Star" front page, do PBers think that the Great British Public can be a-peased?
The Daily Mirror has the best front page.
Wait till a few Labour MPs get caught as they surely will .......
If the Tories decide to try the sir beer korma tactic again they’ll find it has exactly the same effect as last time. It’ll keep the story in the news longer, and almost certainly provide good comparative data to show the Tory misdemeanours are an order of magnitude greater than Labour’s.
Sudan is one of the more unlikely providers of military aid to Ukraine.
After all the fuss about the Polish jets, North Macedonia is down as having provided four Su-25 jets last summer.
There are rumours about Dutch F16's potentially going to Ukraine, which may be a bit of a game-changer if Ukraien have enough pilots. Also a (so far false) claim that the UK will send Apaches.
The backstory to the F-16s...
The Dutch have recently transferred their training squadron's F-16s back from Arizona - they are now in storage with SABCA at Liège. Plan A was to sell them to Draken for Red Air contracting but that deal fell apart at the last minute. Their cunning plan B is to open a multi-national F-16 training unit at Constanta on the Black Sea in Romania to train Romanian (ex NoAF F-16s) and Bulgarian (new builds) crew. Roping Ukraine into this very much increases the economies of scale, gets rid of the otherwise surplus jets in Liège and holds out the tantalising prospect that somebody else (EU/USA) will pay for it. It's very much conceived as a post-SMO activity at the moment.
WAH-64 (definitely not AH-64E) to Ukraine I could see happening as it's the type of token but pugnacious gesture that Baldy Ben likes. It's win-win because after a few weeks the UkrAF will be better at maintaining them than the Royal Engineers Minus Education so they can come over and train us.
The perils of trying to get savings through technology: a US school that installed a smart lighting system has not been able to turn off any lights for well over a year:
Re: "Daily Star" front page, do PBers think that the Great British Public can be a-peased?
The Daily Mirror has the best front page.
Wait till a few Labour MPs get caught as they surely will .......
We are all aware of what dodgy Labour MPs are capable of. The current government however has taken political corruption to an industrial scale. They are not just creaming off the top, they are unashamedly ladelling out the cash, and no one much seems to care.
Good on Boris Johnson. A devisive character for sure, but totally unwavering in his support for Ukraine and their people, in their time of need.
Boris is a flawed character*: but he was right to invest in Covid vaccines, he was right to "get Brexit done"**, and he was right to back Ukraine.
The country needs to move past him, but we shouldn't forget that he broadly got the big calls right.
* This may be too kind. ** Sadly, this did involve quite a lot of dissimulation *** *** Or lying, as some would call it
** Also bears much if the responsibility for the shitshow in the first place. Brexit was a call he got hugely wrong, and it resulted in a wasted decade.*
So broadly, not really.
Also, given the string life science base of the country, and the advice given to government, would any other administration not have invested in vaccines ? Seems a bit unlikely.
Ukraine I give him credit for. That was a genuine call, and a correct one.
*Polling shows most of the country agreed with me.
The country voted for Brexit. You may not like it, but they did. And it needed to be enacted, for good or for ill. Boris did that...
Boris's lies were a significant part of the country voting for Brexit, so he bears responsibility for that call. And much of the mess - the rejection of May's deal, and the subsequent dud deal - which followed.
I don't see how any of that amounts to "the right call" unless you're still one if the small band of believers in it all having worked out for the best.
And it has wasted a decade.
And to repeat, most of the country regrets the whole mess.
My own top-level views on Brexit have not changed since before the vote: *) Britain could be a success within or without the EU. *) Britain could be a failure within or without the EU.
Membership of the EU might make success easier or harder (depending on your viewpoint), but it is a small factor, not the cause.
*If* we are failing as a country, it has little to do with Brexit, but on a while host of structural issues that are firmly under our control. If we had voted to remain in 2016, we would not be much better off.
I'd also argue that pretending that all our issues are because of Brexit is singularly unhelpful, as it stops us examining those structural issues. It's the reverse of before Brexit, when Europhobes would blame all the country's failings on EU membership. That was nonsense. Likewise, it's nonsense to blame all the country's failings on the fact we left.
I don't think all our economic malaise is due to Brexit, but it is delusional to deny that Brexit has done additional damage to hurt our economy. Brexit was a self inflicted wound, and the fact we voted for that self harm doesn't make it less of a wound.
I didn't say it has not caused additional damage. That was always going to be the case; there was going to be a period of adjustment (and a precious few Brexiteers said as much beforehand, although most ignored it). That is one of the reasons I voted remain, despite some euroscepticism.
Brexit has been poorly handled, but even if it had been well handled, there would have been slight damage. But Brexit is not about the first five years after the split; it is about the next couple of decades. And sadly, the government does not appear to be addressing that.
Plenty of Brexiteers believed those sunny uplands were going to be immediate, for example:
Would Britain have really voted Leave if Brexiteers had been clear that Brexit would involve years or decades of economic damage? Even now Brexiteers struggle to name any concrete economic advantage.
I think the assumption from all voters in the Brexit referendum, remain or leave, was that leaving entailed ceasing to be subject to European law, regulation, and overall direction of policy travel. Poor Government and exceedingly damaging administration have prevented that from happening. At all. It's absurd to complain of the lack of concrete advantages from 'leaving' when there is no meaningful sense in which we have actually left - except of course leaving the privileges of membership.
You do have a rather fundamental problem with this argument though. "Scrap the EU laws and regulations and the benefits will arrive". Which is the Singapore-on-Thames Brexit argument - bin off all those EU red tape barriers which stop us making workplaces more dangerous and workers easier to exploit and we can get richer.
Problem is that Leave only won because the Workers Republic of Britain voters supported Brexit so that they could get paid more and have better workplaces. What you want directly conflicts with what they want.
Which is why "BREXIT" would always fail long after we delivered Brexit - leaving the EU. I know that Rees-Mog and the spiv class want to be able to cut nanny-state red tape and worker protections, but the workers won't vote for you in thanks...
The worst thing is that neither “Singapore-on-Thames” nor “Workers Rebuplic of Britain” have happened - thanks to a combination of Treasury orthodoxy and an unwillingness from Whitehall to take advantage of the freedoms, lest it become more difficult to rejoin the EU in the near future.
And neither extreme will *ever* happen. Nor will the middle ground mercantilists who wanted freer trade be happy. The EU/EEA/CU offered compromises which made all these groups unhappy in different ways. Now we have left all, the inherent reasons why we did things like found the EEA are clear...
Incidentally which of the freedoms do you think we should have gone for: Scrap worker's rights and protections so that Rees-Mogg types can profit more? Boost workers rights and protections so that Rees-Mogg types will have to pay more? Deregulate my bit of the market just enough so that I get cheaper access to my existing market than my foreign competitors?
None of the above.
The problem is that people think in terms of more or less worker protections, and better or worse product standards, when different regulations - specific to the UK production, labour, import and export markets - can achieve the best of both worlds.
For too many people, the idea that UK=bad and EU=good (or vice-versa) is allowed to dominate. The future is with accepting equivalence in regulation, not alignment.
Re: "Daily Star" front page, do PBers think that the Great British Public can be a-peased?
The Daily Mirror has the best front page.
Wait till a few Labour MPs get caught as they surely will .......
Probably. Rishi's seatbelt was arguably trivial, and as I've said before, CCHQ should stop devising these silly stunts.
The Mirror, without using so many words, reminds us the common factor in all three stories is the sense that rules are for the little people. In that way, it continues the narrative set up by partygate.
More subtly, in the way the stories intertwine on closer examination, it reminds voters how narrow is the Establishment. They all know each other. They are related, or went to the same schools and universities, or worked at the same high-flyers' jobs.
Mr. Password, Leave would have to spell out if we'd be in the EEA/EFTA or not, whether we'd be closely aligned, far apart, or somewhere in between etc etc.
Because this was not the case, it was a lot easier to kick the EU, as politicians have not done a good job of making the case for it, the Lisbon deception did not engender voter trust, and the Leave campaign was able to make differing cases to different voters.
Mind you, if Remain had run a campaign that wasn't incredibly bad, they still would've won...
Remember that one of Johnson's guiding creeds is "you can't make me". You can't make Vote Leave come up with a realistic prospectus, it would all be "pure upside, no downside".
And if the EU said "no, we're not giving you that", then that gives VL two brilliant ripostes. The first is "look how awful Brussels is", the other is "Of course they're saying that now, they want to trap us in their web. Once we've voted to leave, they'll come running..." (See German car makers.)
All totally dishonest, of course. But this is electoral politics, and sometimes the spoils go to the campaigner prepared to cross the line that bit more.
"German car makers" was the truth, which is why once Frost started playing hard ball we got such a good deal for GB.
That you lot love to bitch and moan about Northern Ireland shows the extent of how fantastic the deal was.
Daily Mail lead story is an interesting one. I'm guessing that a lot more of their readers are getting more out of the state than they pay in (especially if they're pensioners) while few of them are among the poor benighted top 10% of earners.
While this is something to keep an eye on the calculation is a tricky one and the issue is clouded.
1) So what? is a reasonable question 2) What counts is whether the state can balance the books. (It can't) 3) What counts as a benefit? Schools, NHS, cash benefits. Yes. Defence? Police? Probably. The cost of HR in the Department of Origami? 4) What counts as paying in. Shopping in supermarkets sows essential seeds of the profits that pay Corporation Tax. Tesco's taxes are paid out of my spending. Has the report factored this in? What about VAT?
Indeed, the calculations are tricky. Marxists would argue that all surplus value is created by labour, so it is always the proletariat paying the taxes. Another question is lifetime versus single year contributions - I am guessing this analysis treats a pensioner as a net recipient even if they were a net contributor over their lifetime as a whole. So probably all their analysis shows is (a) there's a more unequal pretax income distribution and (b) there are more pensioners. What we really need to do is grow incomes for lower paid and middle income earners. I don't shed any tears for high earners, they are doing fine and can afford to contribute more.
The perils of trying to get savings through technology: a US school that installed a smart lighting system has not been able to turn off any lights for well over a year:
36 million people – get more from the Government than they pay in tax, according to a study by Civitas.
This is up from 24 million, or two-fifths of households, when Tony Blair was in power at the turn of the millennium.
The top 10 per cent of earners pay 53 per cent of all income tax, turning the levy – the Treasury’s biggest single earner – into a ‘stealth wealth tax’, Civitas said.
The surge in state ‘dependency’ means the poorest fifth of households receive £17,600 more on average in welfare and non-financial benefits from the State than they pay in tax.
It is worth noting that this is a Covid year analysis - i.e. FY 2020/21 - and is therefore does not signify any major underlying shift.
In normal times, it's very simple:
- retirees are beneficiaries - people on low incomes with children are beneficiaries - households where everyone is out of work are beneficiaries - households where someone has a long-term chronic illness or disability are beneficiaries
And that's about it.
If you don't have kids and you're in work, then you are almost certainly a net contributor, even if you're on minimum wage.
The calculations for those in work on reduced hours and benefits would be interesting.
Especially as we have in place a system that pays them not to work more hours! This is a literal benefit trap.
I have met people in this situation. They want to work more hours - if they will make more money.
Mr. Password, Leave would have to spell out if we'd be in the EEA/EFTA or not, whether we'd be closely aligned, far apart, or somewhere in between etc etc.
Because this was not the case, it was a lot easier to kick the EU, as politicians have not done a good job of making the case for it, the Lisbon deception did not engender voter trust, and the Leave campaign was able to make differing cases to different voters.
Mind you, if Remain had run a campaign that wasn't incredibly bad, they still would've won...
Remember that one of Johnson's guiding creeds is "you can't make me". You can't make Vote Leave come up with a realistic prospectus, it would all be "pure upside, no downside".
And if the EU said "no, we're not giving you that", then that gives VL two brilliant ripostes. The first is "look how awful Brussels is", the other is "Of course they're saying that now, they want to trap us in their web. Once we've voted to leave, they'll come running..." (See German car makers.)
All totally dishonest, of course. But this is electoral politics, and sometimes the spoils go to the campaigner prepared to cross the line that bit more.
"German car makers" was the truth, which is why once Frost started playing hard ball we got such a good deal for GB.
That you lot love to bitch and moan about Northern Ireland shows the extent of how fantastic the deal was.
"Fantastic" ... yes, I think we can agree on that.
Britain has “not ruled out” supplying Ukraine with missiles with sufficient range to destroy missile systems in Russia which may be targeting civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.
Mr. Password, Leave would have to spell out if we'd be in the EEA/EFTA or not, whether we'd be closely aligned, far apart, or somewhere in between etc etc.
Because this was not the case, it was a lot easier to kick the EU, as politicians have not done a good job of making the case for it, the Lisbon deception did not engender voter trust, and the Leave campaign was able to make differing cases to different voters.
Mind you, if Remain had run a campaign that wasn't incredibly bad, they still would've won...
Remember that one of Johnson's guiding creeds is "you can't make me". You can't make Vote Leave come up with a realistic prospectus, it would all be "pure upside, no downside".
And if the EU said "no, we're not giving you that", then that gives VL two brilliant ripostes. The first is "look how awful Brussels is", the other is "Of course they're saying that now, they want to trap us in their web. Once we've voted to leave, they'll come running..." (See German car makers.)
All totally dishonest, of course. But this is electoral politics, and sometimes the spoils go to the campaigner prepared to cross the line that bit more.
The point would have been that Leave should agree a prospectus *before* the referendum. Now, it might have been aspirational and unachievable (cynics would say full of political promises) but at least voters would have known what they were voting for.
More importantly, the politicians behind Leave would know what sort of Brexit they are trying to deliver; back in this world, they do not.
Vote Leave did come up with a manifesto/prospectus, and by and large the deal agreed honoured it in full. As well as any manifesto is ever honoured at least.
Which major commitments did Vote Leave pledge and honour or not honour? At least for GB that is. They said:
We would leave the Single Market ✔ We would control our own laws.✔ We would control our own borders. ✔ We would control our money. ✔ We would leave the European Court of Justice. ✔ We would get a free trade deal with the EU. ✔
Theresa May's deal would have breached the Vote Leave pledges, but Boris's honoured it, which is unsurprising since it was negotiated primarily by Vote Leave people. Hence why the critics now love to harp on incessantly about Northern Ireland rather than Dover or the ECJ or anything else we debated in 2016.
Not sabotage or cyberwarfare by the look of things but in any case, let us hope our own national grid is more resilient. It seems like just last year it was calling for more investment.
Mr. Password, Leave would have to spell out if we'd be in the EEA/EFTA or not, whether we'd be closely aligned, far apart, or somewhere in between etc etc.
Because this was not the case, it was a lot easier to kick the EU, as politicians have not done a good job of making the case for it, the Lisbon deception did not engender voter trust, and the Leave campaign was able to make differing cases to different voters.
Mind you, if Remain had run a campaign that wasn't incredibly bad, they still would've won...
Remember that one of Johnson's guiding creeds is "you can't make me". You can't make Vote Leave come up with a realistic prospectus, it would all be "pure upside, no downside".
And if the EU said "no, we're not giving you that", then that gives VL two brilliant ripostes. The first is "look how awful Brussels is", the other is "Of course they're saying that now, they want to trap us in their web. Once we've voted to leave, they'll come running..." (See German car makers.)
All totally dishonest, of course. But this is electoral politics, and sometimes the spoils go to the campaigner prepared to cross the line that bit more.
The point would have been that Leave should agree a prospectus *before* the referendum. Now, it might have been aspirational and unachievable (cynics would say full of political promises) but at least voters would have known what they were voting for.
More importantly, the politicians behind Leave would know what sort of Brexit they are trying to deliver; back in this world, they do not.
Vote Leave did come up with a manifesto/prospectus, and by and large the deal agreed honoured it in full. As well as any manifesto is ever honoured at least.
Which major commitments did Vote Leave pledge and honour or not honour? At least for GB that is. They said:
We would leave the Single Market ✔ We would control our own laws.✔ We would control our own borders. ✔ We would control our money. ✔ We would leave the European Court of Justice. ✔ We would get a free trade deal with the EU. ✔
Theresa May's deal would have breached the Vote Leave pledges, but Boris's honoured it, which is unsurprising since it was negotiated primarily by Vote Leave people. Hence why the critics now love to harp on incessantly about Northern Ireland rather than Dover or the ECJ or anything else we debated in 2016.
Most of those aren't pledges, they are just what it means to leave the EU.
The future is with accepting equivalence in regulation, not alignment.
Double the expense for no benefit
Democracy is a benefit.
Being in control of our own laws is a benefit.
Ramble alert:
On cynical days, I increasingly think that democracy itself makes no difference in this country* and certainly any incremental gain in democracy achieved through leaving the EU is irrelevant.
Freedom of belief and expression, I value - fairness and the rule of law, respect for the individual etc... and maybe those things are not possible without democracy (I can't think of any examples of non-democratic society's where they exist). But all those things were present and arguably are better protected when we were in the EU.
I seriously doubt whether the ebb and flow between Conservative and Labour governments has made much difference during my lifetime. What did the social conservatism of Thathcer and Major years achieve? Nothing. Did Blair and Brown's Labour roll back the inequalities of free-market capitalism? No.
The best we can hope for is competent government and I suppose democracy does offer the chance to kick out an incompetent one.
(*I will of course continue to argue for the Tories to lose every GE though!)
36 million people – get more from the Government than they pay in tax, according to a study by Civitas.
This is up from 24 million, or two-fifths of households, when Tony Blair was in power at the turn of the millennium.
The top 10 per cent of earners pay 53 per cent of all income tax, turning the levy – the Treasury’s biggest single earner – into a ‘stealth wealth tax’, Civitas said.
The surge in state ‘dependency’ means the poorest fifth of households receive £17,600 more on average in welfare and non-financial benefits from the State than they pay in tax.
It is worth noting that this is a Covid year analysis - i.e. FY 2020/21 - and is therefore does not signify any major underlying shift.
In normal times, it's very simple:
- retirees are beneficiaries - people on low incomes with children are beneficiaries - households where everyone is out of work are beneficiaries - households where someone has a long-term chronic illness or disability are beneficiaries
And that's about it.
If you don't have kids and you're in work, then you are almost certainly a net contributor, even if you're on minimum wage.
It's a function of the retirement age not rising fast enough and not charging NI on retirement income. Fix those two and the numbers look a lot better.
Where would you set the retirement age relative to life expectancy at birth?
70 for women, 68 for men.
So would that be retirement for an average of one-seventh of the average lifespan, or a retirement of an average of 11 years?
Yes, retirement benefits valued at around 40 years of median wage employee contributions plus a small accrual.
And Dover. That was a great success! It turned out the problems blamed on the EU are homegrown, with consequences for all politicians to come but particularly the authors of Brexit.
Re that Daily Mail story. About 32 million people pay income tax, which is about half (just under) - so it would be fair to estimate that most of the remainder get more out than they pay in, as do some of those taxpayers.
The report says "But this definition includes the amount individuals receive from 'benefits in kind', such as use of the NHS and state education". Add in pensions, and it is easy to see how you come up with the numbers and headline they do.
I would have thought you will end up with similar numbers across any western state.
Mr. Password, Leave would have to spell out if we'd be in the EEA/EFTA or not, whether we'd be closely aligned, far apart, or somewhere in between etc etc.
Because this was not the case, it was a lot easier to kick the EU, as politicians have not done a good job of making the case for it, the Lisbon deception did not engender voter trust, and the Leave campaign was able to make differing cases to different voters.
Mind you, if Remain had run a campaign that wasn't incredibly bad, they still would've won...
Remember that one of Johnson's guiding creeds is "you can't make me". You can't make Vote Leave come up with a realistic prospectus, it would all be "pure upside, no downside".
And if the EU said "no, we're not giving you that", then that gives VL two brilliant ripostes. The first is "look how awful Brussels is", the other is "Of course they're saying that now, they want to trap us in their web. Once we've voted to leave, they'll come running..." (See German car makers.)
All totally dishonest, of course. But this is electoral politics, and sometimes the spoils go to the campaigner prepared to cross the line that bit more.
The point would have been that Leave should agree a prospectus *before* the referendum. Now, it might have been aspirational and unachievable (cynics would say full of political promises) but at least voters would have known what they were voting for.
More importantly, the politicians behind Leave would know what sort of Brexit they are trying to deliver; back in this world, they do not.
Vote Leave did come up with a manifesto/prospectus, and by and large the deal agreed honoured it in full. As well as any manifesto is ever honoured at least.
Which major commitments did Vote Leave pledge and honour or not honour? At least for GB that is. They said:
We would leave the Single Market ✔ We would control our own laws.✔ We would control our own borders. ✔ We would control our money. ✔ We would leave the European Court of Justice. ✔ We would get a free trade deal with the EU. ✔
Theresa May's deal would have breached the Vote Leave pledges, but Boris's honoured it, which is unsurprising since it was negotiated primarily by Vote Leave people. Hence why the critics now love to harp on incessantly about Northern Ireland rather than Dover or the ECJ or anything else we debated in 2016.
Most of those aren't pledges, they are just what it means to leave the EU.
Or meaningless and misleading in the case of “we would control our money”.
“Nadhim Zahawi, Tory chair & former chancellor, has agreed a settlement, said to be around £5m, to HMRC over unpaid taxes. He has stated the mistake was ‘careless & not deliberate’. Should PM dismiss him from cabinet? Yes: 59% No: 14% Don’t know: 28%
Mr. Password, Leave would have to spell out if we'd be in the EEA/EFTA or not, whether we'd be closely aligned, far apart, or somewhere in between etc etc.
Because this was not the case, it was a lot easier to kick the EU, as politicians have not done a good job of making the case for it, the Lisbon deception did not engender voter trust, and the Leave campaign was able to make differing cases to different voters.
Mind you, if Remain had run a campaign that wasn't incredibly bad, they still would've won...
Remember that one of Johnson's guiding creeds is "you can't make me". You can't make Vote Leave come up with a realistic prospectus, it would all be "pure upside, no downside".
And if the EU said "no, we're not giving you that", then that gives VL two brilliant ripostes. The first is "look how awful Brussels is", the other is "Of course they're saying that now, they want to trap us in their web. Once we've voted to leave, they'll come running..." (See German car makers.)
All totally dishonest, of course. But this is electoral politics, and sometimes the spoils go to the campaigner prepared to cross the line that bit more.
The point would have been that Leave should agree a prospectus *before* the referendum. Now, it might have been aspirational and unachievable (cynics would say full of political promises) but at least voters would have known what they were voting for.
More importantly, the politicians behind Leave would know what sort of Brexit they are trying to deliver; back in this world, they do not.
Vote Leave did come up with a manifesto/prospectus, and by and large the deal agreed honoured it in full. As well as any manifesto is ever honoured at least.
Which major commitments did Vote Leave pledge and honour or not honour? At least for GB that is. They said:
We would leave the Single Market ✔ We would control our own laws.✔ We would control our own borders. ✔ We would control our money. ✔ We would leave the European Court of Justice. ✔ We would get a free trade deal with the EU. ✔
Theresa May's deal would have breached the Vote Leave pledges, but Boris's honoured it, which is unsurprising since it was negotiated primarily by Vote Leave people. Hence why the critics now love to harp on incessantly about Northern Ireland rather than Dover or the ECJ or anything else we debated in 2016.
Most of those aren't pledges, they are just what it means to leave the EU.
That's not what erstwhile Remainers were saying when they started banging on about a "Soft Brexit" which would have gone against those pledge.
They could have said we would stay in the Single Market [if we were to join the EEA] but they explicitly said we would leave it.
Not sabotage or cyberwarfare by the look of things but in any case, let us hope our own national grid is more resilient. It seems like just last year it was calling for more investment.
National Grid Demand Flexibility Service to be activated today 5pm to 6pm. I'll be knocking off work at 5, switching everything off and either going for a walk or taking a nap.
Re that Daily Mail story. About 32 million people pay income tax, which is about half (just under) - so it would be fair to estimate that most of the remainder get more out than they pay in, as do some of those taxpayers.
The report says "But this definition includes the amount individuals receive from 'benefits in kind', such as use of the NHS and state education". Add in pensions, and it is easy to see how you come up with the numbers and headline they do.
I would have thought you will end up with similar numbers across any western state.
Add me to the "so what" camp.
It is also largely a result of an ageing population, as those DM writers will have learned in geography lessons back in the 90s and noughties, pepped up a little by the pensions triple lock and an obesity epidemic.
I would love to see the analysis of how many of those the Mail is clearly dogwhistling as scroungers and layabouts are pensioners dependent on the NHS, or children of school age. The vast majority I expect.
The obvious AI generated policy response (not from ChatGPT, that would give some moderate flannel about various options) would be to raise the pension age to 75 and increase tax on pensioners.
Mr. Password, Leave would have to spell out if we'd be in the EEA/EFTA or not, whether we'd be closely aligned, far apart, or somewhere in between etc etc.
Because this was not the case, it was a lot easier to kick the EU, as politicians have not done a good job of making the case for it, the Lisbon deception did not engender voter trust, and the Leave campaign was able to make differing cases to different voters.
Mind you, if Remain had run a campaign that wasn't incredibly bad, they still would've won...
Remember that one of Johnson's guiding creeds is "you can't make me". You can't make Vote Leave come up with a realistic prospectus, it would all be "pure upside, no downside".
And if the EU said "no, we're not giving you that", then that gives VL two brilliant ripostes. The first is "look how awful Brussels is", the other is "Of course they're saying that now, they want to trap us in their web. Once we've voted to leave, they'll come running..." (See German car makers.)
All totally dishonest, of course. But this is electoral politics, and sometimes the spoils go to the campaigner prepared to cross the line that bit more.
The point would have been that Leave should agree a prospectus *before* the referendum. Now, it might have been aspirational and unachievable (cynics would say full of political promises) but at least voters would have known what they were voting for.
More importantly, the politicians behind Leave would know what sort of Brexit they are trying to deliver; back in this world, they do not.
Vote Leave did come up with a manifesto/prospectus, and by and large the deal agreed honoured it in full. As well as any manifesto is ever honoured at least.
Which major commitments did Vote Leave pledge and honour or not honour? At least for GB that is. They said:
We would leave the Single Market ✔ We would control our own laws.✔ We would control our own borders. ✔ We would control our money. ✔ We would leave the European Court of Justice. ✔ We would get a free trade deal with the EU. ✔
Theresa May's deal would have breached the Vote Leave pledges, but Boris's honoured it, which is unsurprising since it was negotiated primarily by Vote Leave people. Hence why the critics now love to harp on incessantly about Northern Ireland rather than Dover or the ECJ or anything else we debated in 2016.
Most of those aren't pledges, they are just what it means to leave the EU.
That's not what erstwhile Remainers were saying when they started banging on about a "Soft Brexit" which would have gone against those pledge.
They could have said we would stay in the Single Market [if we were to join the EEA] but they explicitly said we would leave it.
Well, yes, they didn't want to leave the EU. What did you expect? It's not one of those 16th-17th century changes of state religion; people are allowed openly disagree with policies.
The worst thing is that neither “Singapore-on-Thames” nor “Workers Rebuplic of Britain” have happened - thanks to a combination of Treasury orthodoxy and an unwillingness from Whitehall to take advantage of the freedoms, lest it become more difficult to rejoin the EU in the near future.
neither “Singapore-on-Thames” nor “Workers Rebuplic of Britain” have happened - because reality overcomes fantasy every time
Reality being that the permanent Whitehall blob can’t envisage why we should deviate an inch from EU law, with all its UK gold plating.
Singapore on Thames was always an odd name: an extremely heavily regulated authoritarian state where most people live in social housing is hardly the libertarian paradise the Tory free marketeers would want. There are US states with very light regulation in most areas but they’re still all covered by strict federal laws on financial conduct, and many of them have the death penalty.
Very few good examples out there of light touch regulatory regimes that are not either lawless mafia states or heavily authoritarian in one way or other.
Agreed. The really worrying thing though, is that the conversation is not even happening.
The only person who tried was Liz Truss, and she got shut down the day after Her Majesty’s funeral, by the inevitable forces of the status quo.
Mr. Password, Leave would have to spell out if we'd be in the EEA/EFTA or not, whether we'd be closely aligned, far apart, or somewhere in between etc etc.
Because this was not the case, it was a lot easier to kick the EU, as politicians have not done a good job of making the case for it, the Lisbon deception did not engender voter trust, and the Leave campaign was able to make differing cases to different voters.
Mind you, if Remain had run a campaign that wasn't incredibly bad, they still would've won...
Remember that one of Johnson's guiding creeds is "you can't make me". You can't make Vote Leave come up with a realistic prospectus, it would all be "pure upside, no downside".
And if the EU said "no, we're not giving you that", then that gives VL two brilliant ripostes. The first is "look how awful Brussels is", the other is "Of course they're saying that now, they want to trap us in their web. Once we've voted to leave, they'll come running..." (See German car makers.)
All totally dishonest, of course. But this is electoral politics, and sometimes the spoils go to the campaigner prepared to cross the line that bit more.
The point would have been that Leave should agree a prospectus *before* the referendum. Now, it might have been aspirational and unachievable (cynics would say full of political promises) but at least voters would have known what they were voting for.
More importantly, the politicians behind Leave would know what sort of Brexit they are trying to deliver; back in this world, they do not.
Vote Leave did come up with a manifesto/prospectus, and by and large the deal agreed honoured it in full. As well as any manifesto is ever honoured at least.
Which major commitments did Vote Leave pledge and honour or not honour? At least for GB that is. They said:
We would leave the Single Market ✔ We would control our own laws.✔ We would control our own borders. ✔ We would control our money. ✔ We would leave the European Court of Justice. ✔ We would get a free trade deal with the EU. ✔
Theresa May's deal would have breached the Vote Leave pledges, but Boris's honoured it, which is unsurprising since it was negotiated primarily by Vote Leave people. Hence why the critics now love to harp on incessantly about Northern Ireland rather than Dover or the ECJ or anything else we debated in 2016.
Most of those aren't pledges, they are just what it means to leave the EU.
Or meaningless and misleading in the case of “we would control our money”.
Perhaps the we was explicitly the likes of Johnson and Zahawi rather than the country at large......
Not sabotage or cyberwarfare by the look of things but in any case, let us hope our own national grid is more resilient. It seems like just last year it was calling for more investment.
National Grid Demand Flexibility Service to be activated today 5pm to 6pm. I'll be knocking off work at 5, switching everything off and either going for a walk or taking a nap.
In the next few years I expect we may move more back towards dynamic pricing of electricity rather than fixed tariffs. Already starting to happen for EV charging in some cases.
Not sabotage or cyberwarfare by the look of things but in any case, let us hope our own national grid is more resilient. It seems like just last year it was calling for more investment.
South Africa is the crazy one. They will, quite possibly, have their grid go down and not come back.
Binance’s banking partner, a bank called Signature, has banned Crypto-to-fiat transactions under $100,000 on the Binance platform, as it seeks to “decrease its exposure to digital-asset markets”
The worst thing is that neither “Singapore-on-Thames” nor “Workers Rebuplic of Britain” have happened - thanks to a combination of Treasury orthodoxy and an unwillingness from Whitehall to take advantage of the freedoms, lest it become more difficult to rejoin the EU in the near future.
neither “Singapore-on-Thames” nor “Workers Rebuplic of Britain” have happened - because reality overcomes fantasy every time
Reality being that the permanent Whitehall blob can’t envisage why we should deviate an inch from EU law, with all its UK gold plating.
Singapore on Thames was always an odd name: an extremely heavily regulated authoritarian state where most people live in social housing is hardly the libertarian paradise the Tory free marketeers would want. There are US states with very light regulation in most areas but they’re still all covered by strict federal laws on financial conduct, and many of them have the death penalty.
Very few good examples out there of light touch regulatory regimes that are not either lawless mafia states or heavily authoritarian in one way or other.
Agreed. The really worrying thing though, is that the conversation is not even happening.
The only person who tried was Liz Truss, and she got shut down the day after Her Majesty’s funeral, by the inevitable forces of the status quo.
By the people she wanted to borrow hundreds of billions from and didn't believe her payback plan. It is a very strange free market politician who cannot grasp this basic part of capitalism and instead blames the shadowy establishment and status quo.
Mr. Password, Leave would have to spell out if we'd be in the EEA/EFTA or not, whether we'd be closely aligned, far apart, or somewhere in between etc etc.
Because this was not the case, it was a lot easier to kick the EU, as politicians have not done a good job of making the case for it, the Lisbon deception did not engender voter trust, and the Leave campaign was able to make differing cases to different voters.
Mind you, if Remain had run a campaign that wasn't incredibly bad, they still would've won...
Remember that one of Johnson's guiding creeds is "you can't make me". You can't make Vote Leave come up with a realistic prospectus, it would all be "pure upside, no downside".
And if the EU said "no, we're not giving you that", then that gives VL two brilliant ripostes. The first is "look how awful Brussels is", the other is "Of course they're saying that now, they want to trap us in their web. Once we've voted to leave, they'll come running..." (See German car makers.)
All totally dishonest, of course. But this is electoral politics, and sometimes the spoils go to the campaigner prepared to cross the line that bit more.
The point would have been that Leave should agree a prospectus *before* the referendum. Now, it might have been aspirational and unachievable (cynics would say full of political promises) but at least voters would have known what they were voting for.
More importantly, the politicians behind Leave would know what sort of Brexit they are trying to deliver; back in this world, they do not.
Vote Leave did come up with a manifesto/prospectus, and by and large the deal agreed honoured it in full. As well as any manifesto is ever honoured at least.
Which major commitments did Vote Leave pledge and honour or not honour? At least for GB that is. They said:
We would leave the Single Market ✔ We would control our own laws.✔ We would control our own borders. ✔ We would control our money. ✔ We would leave the European Court of Justice. ✔ We would get a free trade deal with the EU. ✔
Theresa May's deal would have breached the Vote Leave pledges, but Boris's honoured it, which is unsurprising since it was negotiated primarily by Vote Leave people. Hence why the critics now love to harp on incessantly about Northern Ireland rather than Dover or the ECJ or anything else we debated in 2016.
Most of those aren't pledges, they are just what it means to leave the EU.
Not quite. Leaving the EU and joining EFTA/EEA (the right answer) would not achieve all this.
Zahawi claims his tax error was "careless and not deliberate". Why is it that careless mistakes always seem to result in wealthy taxpayers paying less tax than they should? Surely carelessness would sometimes result in overpaying tax - but for some reason that never seems to happen.
Not sabotage or cyberwarfare by the look of things but in any case, let us hope our own national grid is more resilient. It seems like just last year it was calling for more investment.
National Grid Demand Flexibility Service to be activated today 5pm to 6pm. I'll be knocking off work at 5, switching everything off and either going for a walk or taking a nap.
In the next few years I expect we may move more back towards dynamic pricing of electricity rather than fixed tariffs. Already starting to happen for EV charging in some cases.
Yes, there are already tariffs like Octopus Agile that do this, but I don't think it's widely available yet. Demand management will be an essential part of the shift to renewables though, so I expect variable tariffs to become much more widespread in the future. There will surely be a big market for home and business automation systems to optimise the use of electricity according to need and cost.
Zahawi claims his tax error was "careless and not deliberate". Why is it that careless mistakes always seem to result in wealthy taxpayers paying less tax than they should? Surely carelessness would sometimes result in overpaying tax - but for some reason that never seems to happen.
Did he carelessly instruct his lawyers to threaten journalists with libel actions? These things happen, one minute your having breakfast, then your fingers accidentally slip on the keyboard and instruct your lawyer to financially ruin someone for exposing your earlier accidental "error".
Mr. Password, Leave would have to spell out if we'd be in the EEA/EFTA or not, whether we'd be closely aligned, far apart, or somewhere in between etc etc.
Because this was not the case, it was a lot easier to kick the EU, as politicians have not done a good job of making the case for it, the Lisbon deception did not engender voter trust, and the Leave campaign was able to make differing cases to different voters.
Mind you, if Remain had run a campaign that wasn't incredibly bad, they still would've won...
Remember that one of Johnson's guiding creeds is "you can't make me". You can't make Vote Leave come up with a realistic prospectus, it would all be "pure upside, no downside".
And if the EU said "no, we're not giving you that", then that gives VL two brilliant ripostes. The first is "look how awful Brussels is", the other is "Of course they're saying that now, they want to trap us in their web. Once we've voted to leave, they'll come running..." (See German car makers.)
All totally dishonest, of course. But this is electoral politics, and sometimes the spoils go to the campaigner prepared to cross the line that bit more.
The point would have been that Leave should agree a prospectus *before* the referendum. Now, it might have been aspirational and unachievable (cynics would say full of political promises) but at least voters would have known what they were voting for.
More importantly, the politicians behind Leave would know what sort of Brexit they are trying to deliver; back in this world, they do not.
Vote Leave did come up with a manifesto/prospectus, and by and large the deal agreed honoured it in full. As well as any manifesto is ever honoured at least.
Which major commitments did Vote Leave pledge and honour or not honour? At least for GB that is. They said:
We would leave the Single Market ✔ We would control our own laws.✔ We would control our own borders. ✔ We would control our money. ✔ We would leave the European Court of Justice. ✔ We would get a free trade deal with the EU. ✔
Theresa May's deal would have breached the Vote Leave pledges, but Boris's honoured it, which is unsurprising since it was negotiated primarily by Vote Leave people. Hence why the critics now love to harp on incessantly about Northern Ireland rather than Dover or the ECJ or anything else we debated in 2016.
Most of those aren't pledges, they are just what it means to leave the EU.
Not quite. Leaving the EU and joining EFTA/EEA (the right answer) would not achieve all this.
None of which means that China’s failure to supply arms to Russia, isn’t the single biggest political decision of this entire war. Well done China.
The Keil institute's chart is one of those crappy shaded maps where it's almost impossible to tell the difference between the various bands - is China's contribution <0.05% of GDP or 0.05% -0.15%? Presumably the former.
Edit: I see from the charts below that china has contributed fewer $ than Cyprus, so a very small proportion of China's GDP (!) But still... not what Putin would have wanted.
Ukraine wanted to sell a controlling interest in their aircraft engine plant (Motor Sich in Zaporeezheeya) to China and but Trump told Ukraine to tell China to get fucked. Sino-Ukraine relations then cooled off considerably despite years of military co-operation. (Ukraine helped China build their bootleg Flanker, the J-11).
Zahawi claims his tax error was "careless and not deliberate". Why is it that careless mistakes always seem to result in wealthy taxpayers paying less tax than they should? Surely carelessness would sometimes result in overpaying tax - but for some reason that never seems to happen.
That wouldn't be much of a defence for Hailey Bailey, a single mum from Raileigh, who carelessly and not deliberately continued collecting unemployment benefits whilst cleaning someone's home for twenty in cash one morning a week.
Not sabotage or cyberwarfare by the look of things but in any case, let us hope our own national grid is more resilient. It seems like just last year it was calling for more investment.
South Africa is the crazy one. They will, quite possibly, have their grid go down and not come back.
Incidentally, there are allegations that South Africa is giving military aid to Russia. They have certainly sided with Russia diplomatically.
Work out when the absolute worst time for Sunak to sack Zahawi is and that's when it'll probably happen - when the damage is maxmised and he gets no credit for the sacking.
Work out when the absolute worst time for Sunak to sack Zahawi is and that's when it'll probably happen - when the damage is maxmised and he gets no credit for the sacking.
Shapps being sent out to breakfast TV to say Zahawi absolutely has the 100% confidence of Sunak is normally the signal he will be gone by lunchtime.
Zahawi claims his tax error was "careless and not deliberate". Why is it that careless mistakes always seem to result in wealthy taxpayers paying less tax than they should? Surely carelessness would sometimes result in overpaying tax - but for some reason that never seems to happen.
Did he carelessly instruct his lawyers to threaten journalists with libel actions? These things happen, one minute your having breakfast, then your fingers accidentally slip on the keyboard and instruct your lawyer to financially ruin someone for exposing your earlier accidental "error".
A sacking is too soft an outcome really - should have been prosecuted. Anyone carelessly claiming benefit erroneously would have been.
Work out when the absolute worst time for Sunak to sack Zahawi is and that's when it'll probably happen - when the damage is maxmised and he gets no credit for the sacking.
That might be now, if there is a clamour (is there?) for Boris to take over as party chair, which in Conservative governments is for some mysterious reason a Cabinet position.
Not sabotage or cyberwarfare by the look of things but in any case, let us hope our own national grid is more resilient. It seems like just last year it was calling for more investment.
South Africa is the crazy one. They will, quite possibly, have their grid go down and not come back.
Incidentally, there are allegations that South Africa is giving military aid to Russia. They have certainly sided with Russia diplomatically.
Is there any substance to those allegations? With the support from Iran people have tracked flights between Iran and Russia. If South Africa have provided any material support there would have to be cargo vessels or flights that could be pointed to.
Zahawi claims his tax error was "careless and not deliberate". Why is it that careless mistakes always seem to result in wealthy taxpayers paying less tax than they should? Surely carelessness would sometimes result in overpaying tax - but for some reason that never seems to happen.
That wouldn't be much of a defence for Hailey Bailey, a single mum from Raileigh, who carelessly and not deliberately continued collecting unemployment benefits whilst cleaning someone's home for twenty in cash one morning a week.
Go to jail and do not pass "Go".
Its a fair point but in the hypothetical case more likely would be a requirement to repay the benefits that she was not entitled too, possibly with a fine.
At the heart of this is tax being far too complicated. Tax minimisation vs avoidance vs evasion. Schemes set up to boost certain parts of the economy (such as film making) getting used to help celebs reduce their tax (see Jimmy Carr). Make tax simpler. Get rid of tiers - flat tax all the way. You still pay more tax if you earn more. Thats progressive enough for me.
Work out when the absolute worst time for Sunak to sack Zahawi is and that's when it'll probably happen - when the damage is maxmised and he gets no credit for the sacking.
That might be now, if there is a clamour (is there?) for Boris to take over as party chair, which in Conservative governments is for some mysterious reason a Cabinet position.
Gives donors confidence that their purely philanthropic donations result in the correct policies.....
Work out when the absolute worst time for Sunak to sack Zahawi is and that's when it'll probably happen - when the damage is maxmised and he gets no credit for the sacking.
Wednesday afternoon. Starmer has his ducks in a row, and maybe a bit of additional stuff, for PMQs, and Sunak's responses are pathetic. After lunch, either he decides Zahawi has to go, or, more likely, Zahawi resigns with the famous sign off: "I think my honesty is a distraction to the government, and therefore I am moving offshore".
Re: "Daily Star" front page, do PBers think that the Great British Public can be a-peased?
The Daily Mirror has the best front page.
Wait till a few Labour MPs get caught as they surely will .......
If the Tories decide to try the sir beer korma tactic again they’ll find it has exactly the same effect as last time. It’ll keep the story in the news longer, and almost certainly provide good comparative data to show the Tory misdemeanours are an order of magnitude greater than Labour’s.
Zahawi claims his tax error was "careless and not deliberate". Why is it that careless mistakes always seem to result in wealthy taxpayers paying less tax than they should? Surely carelessness would sometimes result in overpaying tax - but for some reason that never seems to happen.
That wouldn't be much of a defence for Hailey Bailey, a single mum from Raileigh, who carelessly and not deliberately continued collecting unemployment benefits whilst cleaning someone's home for twenty in cash one morning a week.
Go to jail and do not pass "Go".
Its a fair point but in the hypothetical case more likely would be a requirement to repay the benefits that she was not entitled too, possibly with a fine.
At the heart of this is tax being far too complicated. Tax minimisation vs avoidance vs evasion. Schemes set up to boost certain parts of the economy (such as film making) getting used to help celebs reduce their tax (see Jimmy Carr). Make tax simpler. Get rid of tiers - flat tax all the way. You still pay more tax if you earn more. Thats progressive enough for me.
Zahawi claims his tax error was "careless and not deliberate". Why is it that careless mistakes always seem to result in wealthy taxpayers paying less tax than they should? Surely carelessness would sometimes result in overpaying tax - but for some reason that never seems to happen.
Boris is probably the exception that proves the rule there.
Zahawi claims his tax error was "careless and not deliberate". Why is it that careless mistakes always seem to result in wealthy taxpayers paying less tax than they should? Surely carelessness would sometimes result in overpaying tax - but for some reason that never seems to happen.
Did he carelessly instruct his lawyers to threaten journalists with libel actions? These things happen, one minute your having breakfast, then your fingers accidentally slip on the keyboard and instruct your lawyer to financially ruin someone for exposing your earlier accidental "error".
A sacking is too soft an outcome really - should have been prosecuted. Anyone carelessly claiming benefit erroneously would have been.
Mr. Password, Leave would have to spell out if we'd be in the EEA/EFTA or not, whether we'd be closely aligned, far apart, or somewhere in between etc etc.
Because this was not the case, it was a lot easier to kick the EU, as politicians have not done a good job of making the case for it, the Lisbon deception did not engender voter trust, and the Leave campaign was able to make differing cases to different voters.
Mind you, if Remain had run a campaign that wasn't incredibly bad, they still would've won...
Remember that one of Johnson's guiding creeds is "you can't make me". You can't make Vote Leave come up with a realistic prospectus, it would all be "pure upside, no downside".
And if the EU said "no, we're not giving you that", then that gives VL two brilliant ripostes. The first is "look how awful Brussels is", the other is "Of course they're saying that now, they want to trap us in their web. Once we've voted to leave, they'll come running..." (See German car makers.)
All totally dishonest, of course. But this is electoral politics, and sometimes the spoils go to the campaigner prepared to cross the line that bit more.
The point would have been that Leave should agree a prospectus *before* the referendum. Now, it might have been aspirational and unachievable (cynics would say full of political promises) but at least voters would have known what they were voting for.
More importantly, the politicians behind Leave would know what sort of Brexit they are trying to deliver; back in this world, they do not.
Vote Leave did come up with a manifesto/prospectus, and by and large the deal agreed honoured it in full. As well as any manifesto is ever honoured at least.
Which major commitments did Vote Leave pledge and honour or not honour? At least for GB that is. They said:
We would leave the Single Market ✔ We would control our own laws.✔ We would control our own borders. ✔ We would control our money. ✔ We would leave the European Court of Justice. ✔ We would get a free trade deal with the EU. ✔
Theresa May's deal would have breached the Vote Leave pledges, but Boris's honoured it, which is unsurprising since it was negotiated primarily by Vote Leave people. Hence why the critics now love to harp on incessantly about Northern Ireland rather than Dover or the ECJ or anything else we debated in 2016.
Most of those aren't pledges, they are just what it means to leave the EU.
That's not what erstwhile Remainers were saying when they started banging on about a "Soft Brexit" which would have gone against those pledge.
They could have said we would stay in the Single Market [if we were to join the EEA] but they explicitly said we would leave it.
Well, yes, they didn't want to leave the EU. What did you expect? It's not one of those 16th-17th century changes of state religion; people are allowed openly disagree with policies.
I have no qualms about Remainers not wanting to leave the EU, but its a bit rich to complain that Vote Leave didn't make clear what leaving the EU would entail when they did precisely that. A series of promises were made, including leaving the Single Market (not something that had to be said, as EEA could have been a leave option) and those promises were kept in the end - had we ended up in Theresa May's backstop they wouldn't have all been, so not all versions of Brexit are the same.
Zahawi claims his tax error was "careless and not deliberate". Why is it that careless mistakes always seem to result in wealthy taxpayers paying less tax than they should? Surely carelessness would sometimes result in overpaying tax - but for some reason that never seems to happen.
Did he carelessly instruct his lawyers to threaten journalists with libel actions? These things happen, one minute your having breakfast, then your fingers accidentally slip on the keyboard and instruct your lawyer to financially ruin someone for exposing your earlier accidental "error".
A sacking is too soft an outcome really - should have been prosecuted. Anyone carelessly claiming benefit erroneously would have been.
No they wouldn't. It depends on the amount.
Well, that's true. Several £m would likely be over any threshold though.
Not sabotage or cyberwarfare by the look of things but in any case, let us hope our own national grid is more resilient. It seems like just last year it was calling for more investment.
South Africa is the crazy one. They will, quite possibly, have their grid go down and not come back.
Incidentally, there are allegations that South Africa is giving military aid to Russia. They have certainly sided with Russia diplomatically.
Is there any substance to those allegations? With the support from Iran people have tracked flights between Iran and Russia. If South Africa have provided any material support there would have to be cargo vessels or flights that could be pointed to.
There were some stories in the autumn, that appear to have gone nowhere, about a handful of ZA ships being rather ‘unlucky’ when it came to the ‘Somali’ pirates. The suspicion is that a bunch of ZA weapons heading for Russia, were sent to Davy Jones’s Locker by the Seals and SBS.
It may equally be a tall story concocted by the South Africans, to hide the fact that they’re not actually sending weapons to Putin’s army.
The future is with accepting equivalence in regulation, not alignment.
Double the expense for no benefit
Democracy is a benefit.
Being in control of our own laws is a benefit.
Ramble alert:
On cynical days, I increasingly think that democracy itself makes no difference in this country* and certainly any incremental gain in democracy achieved through leaving the EU is irrelevant.
Freedom of belief and expression, I value - fairness and the rule of law, respect for the individual etc... and maybe those things are not possible without democracy (I can't think of any examples of non-democratic society's where they exist). But all those things were present and arguably are better protected when we were in the EU.
I seriously doubt whether the ebb and flow between Conservative and Labour governments has made much difference during my lifetime. What did the social conservatism of Thathcer and Major years achieve? Nothing. Did Blair and Brown's Labour roll back the inequalities of free-market capitalism? No.
The best we can hope for is competent government and I suppose democracy does offer the chance to kick out an incompetent one.
(*I will of course continue to argue for the Tories to lose every GE though!)
I worry that other people think as you do and could not be more vehemently in disagreement with you.
The idea of an "enlightened dictator" or similar is one that many people can be tempted by, but its not a good thing at all and ends up with situations like we see in Russia where what 20 years ago seemed like a competent government [versus what came before] has evolved into a corrupt, warmongering and oppressive one.
Democracy doesn't just let you kick out incompetent governments, it keeps a check on competent ones too. It allows you to remove formerly competent governments who are now stale or otherwise looking after themselves more than the voter.
Zahawi claims his tax error was "careless and not deliberate". Why is it that careless mistakes always seem to result in wealthy taxpayers paying less tax than they should? Surely carelessness would sometimes result in overpaying tax - but for some reason that never seems to happen.
Boris is probably the exception that proves the rule there.
Fair point. Probably explains why Boris has to keep cadging huge wadges of money from his many mates.
Zahawi claims his tax error was "careless and not deliberate". Why is it that careless mistakes always seem to result in wealthy taxpayers paying less tax than they should? Surely carelessness would sometimes result in overpaying tax - but for some reason that never seems to happen.
That wouldn't be much of a defence for Hailey Bailey, a single mum from Raileigh, who carelessly and not deliberately continued collecting unemployment benefits whilst cleaning someone's home for twenty in cash one morning a week.
Go to jail and do not pass "Go".
Its a fair point but in the hypothetical case more likely would be a requirement to repay the benefits that she was not entitled too, possibly with a fine.
At the heart of this is tax being far too complicated. Tax minimisation vs avoidance vs evasion. Schemes set up to boost certain parts of the economy (such as film making) getting used to help celebs reduce their tax (see Jimmy Carr). Make tax simpler. Get rid of tiers - flat tax all the way. You still pay more tax if you earn more. Thats progressive enough for me.
It does not seem relevant to this case. Not a question of tiers but of who owned which company shares.
"The obvious question is: why does the founder of a company hold less than 1% of the shares in his company, but his parents hold 19% (and originally 42.5%)? The obvious inference is that they were holding the shares on his behalf, to avoid the tax that would have been paid had he held directly."
Not sabotage or cyberwarfare by the look of things but in any case, let us hope our own national grid is more resilient. It seems like just last year it was calling for more investment.
South Africa is the crazy one. They will, quite possibly, have their grid go down and not come back.
Incidentally, there are allegations that South Africa is giving military aid to Russia. They have certainly sided with Russia diplomatically.
Is there any substance to those allegations? With the support from Iran people have tracked flights between Iran and Russia. If South Africa have provided any material support there would have to be cargo vessels or flights that could be pointed to.
Not sabotage or cyberwarfare by the look of things but in any case, let us hope our own national grid is more resilient. It seems like just last year it was calling for more investment.
South Africa is the crazy one. They will, quite possibly, have their grid go down and not come back.
Incidentally, there are allegations that South Africa is giving military aid to Russia. They have certainly sided with Russia diplomatically.
Is there any substance to those allegations? With the support from Iran people have tracked flights between Iran and Russia. If South Africa have provided any material support there would have to be cargo vessels or flights that could be pointed to.
Every 1* and up SADF officer is ex-MK who had very close and fraternal relations with the Soviet Union. Plenty of them will have trained in Russia and the GDR. They are also fabulously corrupt and Russian has a lot of money. Put all that together and it would be amazing if they weren't helping.
Comments
More importantly, the politicians behind Leave would know what sort of Brexit they are trying to deliver; back in this world, they do not.
Incidentally which of the freedoms do you think we should have gone for:
Scrap worker's rights and protections so that Rees-Mogg types can profit more?
Boost workers rights and protections so that Rees-Mogg types will have to pay more?
Deregulate my bit of the market just enough so that I get cheaper access to my existing market than my foreign competitors?
1) So what? is a reasonable question
2) What counts is whether the state can balance the books. (It can't)
3) What counts as a benefit? Schools, NHS, cash benefits. Yes. Defence? Police? Probably. The cost of HR in the Department of Origami?
4) What counts as paying in. Shopping in supermarkets sows essential seeds of the profits that pay Corporation Tax. Tesco's taxes are paid out of my spending. Has the report factored this in? What about VAT?
And then we have to wonder if marginal gains from doing things differently to those around us are worth the marginal losses from the resulting border friction.
We knew it before the vote
A more philosophical question is whether the system should take into account that life expectancy varies across different populations. Should Glaswegians be paid their pensions earlier?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-58118599
It was always obvious (despite Remain pretending) that Remain or Leave was a fundamental constitutional decision requiring a referendum (just like say Scottish independence) which left parliament to decide how to follow it up.
Very few good examples out there of light touch regulatory regimes that are not either lawless mafia states or heavily authoritarian in one way or other.
The Dutch have recently transferred their training squadron's F-16s back from Arizona - they are now in storage with SABCA at Liège. Plan A was to sell them to Draken for Red Air contracting but that deal fell apart at the last minute. Their cunning plan B is to open a multi-national F-16 training unit at Constanta on the Black Sea in Romania to train Romanian (ex NoAF F-16s) and Bulgarian (new builds) crew. Roping Ukraine into this very much increases the economies of scale, gets rid of the otherwise surplus jets in Liège and holds out the tantalising prospect that somebody else (EU/USA) will pay for it. It's very much conceived as a post-SMO activity at the moment.
WAH-64 (definitely not AH-64E) to Ukraine I could see happening as it's the type of token but pugnacious gesture that Baldy Ben likes. It's win-win because after a few weeks the UkrAF will be better at maintaining them than the Royal Engineers Minus Education so they can come over and train us.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/us-school-runs-lights-24-7-365-the-smart-lights-have-been-broken-since-2021/
The problem is that people think in terms of more or less worker protections, and better or worse product standards, when different regulations - specific to the UK production, labour, import and export markets - can achieve the best of both worlds.
For too many people, the idea that UK=bad and EU=good (or vice-versa) is allowed to dominate. The future is with accepting equivalence in regulation, not alignment.
The Mirror, without using so many words, reminds us the common factor in all three stories is the sense that rules are for the little people. In that way, it continues the narrative set up by partygate.
More subtly, in the way the stories intertwine on closer examination, it reminds voters how narrow is the Establishment. They all know each other. They are related, or went to the same schools and universities, or worked at the same high-flyers' jobs.
That you lot love to bitch and moan about Northern Ireland shows the extent of how fantastic the deal was.
Especially as we have in place a system that pays them not to work more hours! This is a literal benefit trap.
I have met people in this situation. They want to work more hours - if they will make more money.
Build them a ladder to climb out of the trap.
Being in control of our own laws is a benefit.
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/?cookieLevel=not-set
Most of the wiki page is scrounged from there.
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/uk-not-ruling-out-giving-ukraine-missiles-to-reach-russia/
Includes list of kit promised/supplied so far.
Boris Johnson wouldn't need to borrow £800,000 if he cooked from scratch and cancelled Netflix
https://twitter.com/David__Osland/status/1617093515607179264?s=20&t=lLp2Mw_S5IyWV6srQBMg-Q
Which major commitments did Vote Leave pledge and honour or not honour? At least for GB that is. They said:
We would leave the Single Market ✔
We would control our own laws.✔
We would control our own borders. ✔
We would control our money. ✔
We would leave the European Court of Justice. ✔
We would get a free trade deal with the EU. ✔
Theresa May's deal would have breached the Vote Leave pledges, but Boris's honoured it, which is unsurprising since it was negotiated primarily by Vote Leave people. Hence why the critics now love to harp on incessantly about Northern Ireland rather than Dover or the ECJ or anything else we debated in 2016.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-64369144
Not sabotage or cyberwarfare by the look of things but in any case, let us hope our own national grid is more resilient. It seems like just last year it was calling for more investment.
On cynical days, I increasingly think that democracy itself makes no difference in this country* and certainly any incremental gain in democracy achieved through leaving the EU is irrelevant.
Freedom of belief and expression, I value - fairness and the rule of law, respect for the individual etc... and maybe those things are not possible without democracy (I can't think of any examples of non-democratic society's where they exist). But all those things were present and arguably are better protected when we were in the EU.
I seriously doubt whether the ebb and flow between Conservative and Labour governments has made much difference during my lifetime. What did the social conservatism of Thathcer and Major years achieve? Nothing. Did Blair and Brown's Labour roll back the inequalities of free-market capitalism? No.
The best we can hope for is competent government and I suppose democracy does offer the chance to kick out an incompetent one.
(*I will of course continue to argue for the Tories to lose every GE though!)
Sunak promise… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1617458872171565056
The report says "But this definition includes the amount individuals receive from 'benefits in kind', such as use of the NHS and state education". Add in pensions, and it is easy to see how you come up with the numbers and headline they do.
I would have thought you will end up with similar numbers across any western state.
Add me to the "so what" camp.
Yes: 59%
No: 14%
Don’t know: 28%
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1617459734923165697?s=20&t=HYP7RxfZGXUDXzn8ydqDBg
They could have said we would stay in the Single Market [if we were to join the EEA] but they explicitly said we would leave it.
I would love to see the analysis of how many of those the Mail is clearly dogwhistling as scroungers and layabouts are pensioners dependent on the NHS, or children of school age. The vast majority I expect.
The obvious AI generated policy response (not from ChatGPT, that would give some moderate flannel about various options) would be to raise the pension age to 75 and increase tax on pensioners.
The only person who tried was Liz Truss, and she got shut down the day after Her Majesty’s funeral, by the inevitable forces of the status quo.
Binance’s banking partner, a bank called Signature, has banned Crypto-to-fiat transactions under $100,000 on the Binance platform, as it seeks to “decrease its exposure to digital-asset markets”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-22/binance-says-signature-sets-transaction-minimum-amid-pullback?srnd=premium-middle-east
None of which means that China’s failure to supply arms to Russia, isn’t the single biggest political decision of this entire war. Well done China.
Edit: I see from the charts below that china has contributed fewer $ than Cyprus, so a very small proportion of China's GDP (!) But still... not what Putin would have wanted.
Go to jail and do not pass "Go".
At the heart of this is tax being far too complicated. Tax minimisation vs avoidance vs evasion. Schemes set up to boost certain parts of the economy (such as film making) getting used to help celebs reduce their tax (see Jimmy Carr). Make tax simpler. Get rid of tiers - flat tax all the way. You still pay more tax if you earn more. Thats progressive enough for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1eZvC2ZDGc
Former PM tells Sky Ne… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1617470049123708929
It may equally be a tall story concocted by the South Africans, to hide the fact that they’re not actually sending weapons to Putin’s army.
The idea of an "enlightened dictator" or similar is one that many people can be tempted by, but its not a good thing at all and ends up with situations like we see in Russia where what 20 years ago seemed like a competent government [versus what came before] has evolved into a corrupt, warmongering and oppressive one.
Democracy doesn't just let you kick out incompetent governments, it keeps a check on competent ones too. It allows you to remove formerly competent governments who are now stale or otherwise looking after themselves more than the voter.
https://www.taxpolicy.org.uk/2022/07/10/zahawi/
"The obvious question is: why does the founder of a company hold less than 1% of the shares in his company, but his parents hold 19% (and originally 42.5%)? The obvious inference is that they were holding the shares on his behalf, to avoid the tax that would have been paid had he held directly."
https://www.businessinsider.com/sanctioned-russian-ship-moved-unknown-cargo-south-africa-report-2023-1
It may be rubbish, but there is a certain smell about it.
Richard Sharp has ***publicly acknowledged*** that he introduced Sam Blyth to Simon Ca… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1617471815198056448
'Reeves vows Labour would ‘drain the swamp’ amid Tory scandals'
https://tinyurl.com/5b53jbs2
As little affection as I now feel towards the Labour party, I still think this is an unfortunate turn in the mindset of said party.
Who'd a thunk it...