Our school haven't said anything about strikes this week, so I presume the teachers there aren't striking tomorrow.
I've said it before, but I'll say it again, normally I'm very against strikes on principle but quite frankly when the Government are choosing to give double-digit inflationary pay increases to those who are not working for a living but are expecting those who go out to work to get real terms pay cuts, then I find it hard to object to people striking if that's their choice.
If the Triple Lock etc were being restrained by the same amount as the Government is expecting pay to be, then that would be one thing, but its not appropriate for those who are working for a living to be getting less than those who are not. That is about unConservative as I understood it as it can get.
Our schools are all on strike. My son says he's not going to do any schoolwork tomorrow in solidarity with the striking teachers. He'll go far, that lad.
I'm sympathetic to those wanting pay increases in line with inflation. In particular, teaching ought to be a more highly valued profession. But:
- The only way for public sector workers to have more is for others to have less.
This is not how the economy works!
Paying teachers more will require tax rises or cuts elsewhere, that will other people poorer. That is the immediate effect.
Now you may say the case for teachers or some other public sector employees being paid more is worth the (most likely) tax rise or (less likely) cuts elsewhere. The teaching unions have to lay out a business plan for it just as I do when I make the case for members of my team getting pay rises. What additional responsibilities will they be taking on, what productivity gains can we expect from them and what will the end result be from the pay rises.
For nurses, the actual numbers are pretty easy to see, pay them a bit more, increase retention rates, increase training places due to better and more reliable staffing and ease the short term healthcare crunch and get the million "sick" back into work. That the government is unable to see this means they are still beholden to treasury groupthink. For teachers the case is much, much less clear cut. Teacher salaries in the UK are comparable to similar countries across Europe and there's not exactly a huge international market for teachers as there is for healthcare workers. There's also huge quality issues surrounding teaching and education in general, the sector seems to have decided bells and whistles like interactive whiteboards and touch screen tablets will make up for not actually teaching the kids very much, that may or may not be the fault of the DoE but that's where we're at.
But come on Max, you are the one who has been saying - with some justification - that we should be taxing the elderly more (or paying them less) to try and equalise the generational differences and to support working people more. This seems to me to be a damn good example of that.
As much of a factor in teacher disgruntlement is the largely unnecessary and unproductive extra workload that has been imposed on them over the last decade.
This from Max is just garbage, IMO: ...the sector seems to have decided bells and whistles like interactive whiteboards and touch screen tablets will make up for not actually teaching the kids very much...
I'd just add that the distortions in #Ireland's #GDP data make it all the more important to compare UK growth with individual EU economies (Germany, France etc), rather than the EU (or eurozone) aggregates 🤓 Quote Tweet
Joey Politano 🏳️🌈 @JosephPolitano · Jan 29 Irish GDP data is increasingly driven by the island's status as a global tax haven, especially for tech companies.
This distortion is real and points to one of the biggest flaws in GDP: its inclusion of corporate profits as a measure of activity. It’s made more marked when companies are incentivised by the US tax system to keep and reinvest retained earnings abroad rather than repatriating them.
The UK suffers from some of the same distortions: not to the same extent as Ireland but still quite notable. A glance at GDP per capita vs median household income in a few European countries shows this up quite starkly. The UK’s GDP per head is virtually identical to France on a PPP basis (a bit lower on current exchange rates). But their median household income is about 15k higher than ours. 15k more money per year for the average household. That’s a big gap.
On the other hand we have greater median assets than France because of our high property prices, owner occupancy and private rather than state pension provision. Albeit a lot of that asset base is illiquid.
I think a mixture of median household income and net assets/debt per household is a far more meaningful measure of people’s financial wellbeing than GDP per capita. Total GDP is useful as a measure of a country’s economic and trading power.
If, as I expect from next year onwards with BEPS pillar 2 combined with the IRA (inflation reduction act not republican paramilitary) incentives we see a massive reverse flow of capital back into the US and out of Europe, Ireland’s GDP could start to look decidedly odd.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
I think rather that your ideal Brexit (with which I have a great deal of sympathy) was always impossible.
Note that many of those arguing it hasn't been done properly are implacably opposed to what you would want.
But that is always the way. Just as the vision that many (most?) Remainers had of the UKs position within the EU was always impossible. But you argue and campaign for what you see as the ideal and then settle for something less but still better than the alternative. Those who deal in absolutes on any side are, quite frankly, fools.
Thats why I favour PR. It would give pragmatists like you and me more influence (compared to the current close to nil).
Selfish, perhaps, but I think it would also benefit the country.
PR would also give RefUK at least 50 MPs now and Corbynites 50 to 100 MPs too.
Italy even has a far right PM now with PR
...and the UK has had at least three without PR, Your point is?
"at least three far right PMs"? Go on: name them.
May, Johnson, Truss. All from the right of the already fairly right wing Conservatives.
"if you are citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere, you do not know what citizenship means"-- one of the most disgraceful speeches ever given by a serving Prime Minister.
The previous generation of Tories would have given it very short shrift.
You can hardly deny that the Tories are no longer "centre-right", indeed ever since they left the EPP they have been well to the right of any of the traditionally Conservative European right-wing parties.
Cameron was probably the last "Conservative" leader.
Nah that is genuinely rubbish. It would be like me describing Starmer or Kinnock as Communists simply because they were to the left of Blair. You lack perspective. And again I say that as someone who detested May's authoritarianism, Johnson's lazy, irresponsible dishonesty and Truss's ineptitude and arrogance. But none of them were 'far right' by either British or European standards.
I thought 3 was a massive underestimate. But I did misread PM as MP...
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Although the idea itself is not a bad one. He'd still have billlions left over, afaik, which does quite illustrate the massive distortions from some of our current digital monopoly capitalism.
With all those vast resources, he could at least make those vast amazon warehouses less grim, continually-monitored places to work, I would say.
I'm sympathetic to those wanting pay increases in line with inflation. In particular, teaching ought to be a more highly valued profession. But:
- The only way for public sector workers to have more is for others to have less.
This is not how the economy works!
Paying teachers more will require tax rises or cuts elsewhere, that will other people poorer. That is the immediate effect.
Now you may say the case for teachers or some other public sector employees being paid more is worth the (most likely) tax rise or (less likely) cuts elsewhere. The teaching unions have to lay out a business plan for it just as I do when I make the case for members of my team getting pay rises. What additional responsibilities will they be taking on, what productivity gains can we expect from them and what will the end result be from the pay rises.
For nurses, the actual numbers are pretty easy to see, pay them a bit more, increase retention rates, increase training places due to better and more reliable staffing and ease the short term healthcare crunch and get the million "sick" back into work. That the government is unable to see this means they are still beholden to treasury groupthink. For teachers the case is much, much less clear cut. Teacher salaries in the UK are comparable to similar countries across Europe and there's not exactly a huge international market for teachers as there is for healthcare workers. There's also huge quality issues surrounding teaching and education in general, the sector seems to have decided bells and whistles like interactive whiteboards and touch screen tablets will make up for not actually teaching the kids very much, that may or may not be the fault of the DoE but that's where we're at.
But come on Max, you are the one who has been saying - with some justification - that we should be taxing the elderly more (or paying them less) to try and equalise the generational differences and to support working people more. This seems to me to be a damn good example of that.
But that's not what's going to happen, the cost of public sector pay rises and following pension costs will be lumped onto working age people and backloaded onto the young rather than the almost of retirement age.
Both the Tories and Labour seem incapable of standing up to my parents generation and calling them out for what they are, selfish and greedy. The next big clash will be intergenerational, one of the parties (my money is actually on the Tories, oddly) will decide to go all in on a new strategy within 5-7 years and start campaigning on how shit of a deal young people get, simply it's where the votes will be in the 2030s and 2040s.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
I think rather that your ideal Brexit (with which I have a great deal of sympathy) was always impossible.
Note that many of those arguing it hasn't been done properly are implacably opposed to what you would want.
But that is always the way. Just as the vision that many (most?) Remainers had of the UKs position within the EU was always impossible. But you argue and campaign for what you see as the ideal and then settle for something less but still better than the alternative. Those who deal in absolutes on any side are, quite frankly, fools.
Thats why I favour PR. It would give pragmatists like you and me more influence (compared to the current close to nil).
Selfish, perhaps, but I think it would also benefit the country.
PR would also give RefUK at least 50 MPs now and Corbynites 50 to 100 MPs too.
Italy even has a far right PM now with PR
...and the UK has had at least three without PR, Your point is?
"at least three far right PMs"? Go on: name them.
May, Johnson, Truss. All from the right of the already fairly right wing Conservatives.
"if you are citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere, you do not know what citizenship means"-- one of the most disgraceful speeches ever given by a serving Prime Minister.
The previous generation of Tories would have given it very short shrift.
You can hardly deny that the Tories are no longer "centre-right", indeed ever since they left the EPP they have been well to the right of any of the traditionally Conservative European right-wing parties.
Cameron was probably the last "Conservative" leader.
Nah that is genuinely rubbish. It would be like me describing Starmer or Kinnock as Communists simply because they were to the left of Blair. You lack perspective. And again I say that as someone who detested May's authoritarianism, Johnson's lazy, irresponsible dishonesty and Truss's ineptitude and arrogance. But none of them were 'far right' by either British or European standards.
I thought 3 was a massive underestimate. But I did misread PM as MP...
I would say by global wing standards May was traditionalist right wing, Johnson populist hard right and Truss free market libertarian right. None far right, but none moderate centre-right either.
Politicians on the continent (not to mention the USA) come up with all sorts of blood and soil and family values crap all the time. The difference with the UK in recent years has been the very cross border nature of the abuse, focused on the EU. More like the stuff Poland says about Germany and still somewhat short of most of Orban’s utterances.
From its the wrong type of Brexit to it will take 30 years to see the benefits the list of excuses from the Leave cabal is now very tiresome.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
Personally I find moaning from people who got what they wanted and have failed to deliver on any of the promises they made, a lot more tiresome than moaning from people on the sidelines who have been proven right.
I mean, Russia has been hit with sanctions from across the developed world, yet will be growing when we won’t. How bad is that?
From its the wrong type of Brexit to it will take 30 years to see the benefits the list of excuses from the Leave cabal is now very tiresome.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
Or fantasy brexiters banging on about how if only XXX hadn't been in charge or YYY had been in charge it would all have been so very different.
Which translates as: if my own personal brexit had been implemented, the one that I and only I could possibly have designed, it would all have been a huge success.
I'm sympathetic to those wanting pay increases in line with inflation. In particular, teaching ought to be a more highly valued profession. But:
- The only way for public sector workers to have more is for others to have less.
This is not how the economy works!
Paying teachers more will require tax rises or cuts elsewhere, that will other people poorer. That is the immediate effect.
Now you may say the case for teachers or some other public sector employees being paid more is worth the (most likely) tax rise or (less likely) cuts elsewhere. The teaching unions have to lay out a business plan for it just as I do when I make the case for members of my team getting pay rises. What additional responsibilities will they be taking on, what productivity gains can we expect from them and what will the end result be from the pay rises.
For nurses, the actual numbers are pretty easy to see, pay them a bit more, increase retention rates, increase training places due to better and more reliable staffing and ease the short term healthcare crunch and get the million "sick" back into work. That the government is unable to see this means they are still beholden to treasury groupthink. For teachers the case is much, much less clear cut. Teacher salaries in the UK are comparable to similar countries across Europe and there's not exactly a huge international market for teachers as there is for healthcare workers. There's also huge quality issues surrounding teaching and education in general, the sector seems to have decided bells and whistles like interactive whiteboards and touch screen tablets will make up for not actually teaching the kids very much, that may or may not be the fault of the DoE but that's where we're at.
But come on Max, you are the one who has been saying - with some justification - that we should be taxing the elderly more (or paying them less) to try and equalise the generational differences and to support working people more. This seems to me to be a damn good example of that.
But that's not what's going to happen, the cost of public sector pay rises and following pension costs will be lumped onto working age people and backloaded onto the young rather than the almost of retirement age.
Both the Tories and Labour seem incapable of standing up to my parents generation and calling them out for what they are, selfish and greedy. The next big clash will be intergenerational, one of the parties (my money is actually on the Tories, oddly) will decide to go all in on a new strategy within 5-7 years and start campaigning on how shit of a deal young people get, simply it's where the votes will be in the 2030s and 2040s.
Yep. That’s also the LibDems’ missed opportunity, which Clegg was feeling his way toward before 2010 but trashed with his record in coalition, and now the party is stuck representing a handful of seats mostly stuffed with winners from the current economic settlement, critically hampering their ability to put forward the radical changes that are needed.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
I think rather that your ideal Brexit (with which I have a great deal of sympathy) was always impossible.
Note that many of those arguing it hasn't been done properly are implacably opposed to what you would want.
But that is always the way. Just as the vision that many (most?) Remainers had of the UKs position within the EU was always impossible. But you argue and campaign for what you see as the ideal and then settle for something less but still better than the alternative. Those who deal in absolutes on any side are, quite frankly, fools.
Thats why I favour PR. It would give pragmatists like you and me more influence (compared to the current close to nil).
Selfish, perhaps, but I think it would also benefit the country.
PR would also give RefUK at least 50 MPs now and Corbynites 50 to 100 MPs too.
Italy even has a far right PM now with PR
...and the UK has had at least three without PR, Your point is?
"at least three far right PMs"? Go on: name them.
May, Johnson, Truss. All from the right of the already fairly right wing Conservatives.
"if you are citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere, you do not know what citizenship means"-- one of the most disgraceful speeches ever given by a serving Prime Minister.
The previous generation of Tories would have given it very short shrift.
You can hardly deny that the Tories are no longer "centre-right", indeed ever since they left the EPP they have been well to the right of any of the traditionally Conservative European right-wing parties.
Cameron was probably the last "Conservative" leader.
Nah that is genuinely rubbish. It would be like me describing Starmer or Kinnock as Communists simply because they were to the left of Blair. You lack perspective. And again I say that as someone who detested May's authoritarianism, Johnson's lazy, irresponsible dishonesty and Truss's ineptitude and arrogance. But none of them were 'far right' by either British or European standards.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
I think rather that your ideal Brexit (with which I have a great deal of sympathy) was always impossible.
Note that many of those arguing it hasn't been done properly are implacably opposed to what you would want.
But that is always the way. Just as the vision that many (most?) Remainers had of the UKs position within the EU was always impossible. But you argue and campaign for what you see as the ideal and then settle for something less but still better than the alternative. Those who deal in absolutes on any side are, quite frankly, fools.
Thats why I favour PR. It would give pragmatists like you and me more influence (compared to the current close to nil).
Selfish, perhaps, but I think it would also benefit the country.
PR would also give RefUK at least 50 MPs now and Corbynites 50 to 100 MPs too.
Italy even has a far right PM now with PR
...and the UK has had at least three without PR, Your point is?
"at least three far right PMs"? Go on: name them.
May, Johnson, Truss. All from the right of the already fairly right wing Conservatives.
"if you are citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere, you do not know what citizenship means"-- one of the most disgraceful speeches ever given by a serving Prime Minister.
The previous generation of Tories would have given it very short shrift.
You can hardly deny that the Tories are no longer "centre-right", indeed ever since they left the EPP they have been well to the right of any of the traditionally Conservative European right-wing parties.
Cameron was probably the last "Conservative" leader.
Nah that is genuinely rubbish. It would be like me describing Starmer or Kinnock as Communists simply because they were to the left of Blair. You lack perspective. And again I say that as someone who detested May's authoritarianism, Johnson's lazy, irresponsible dishonesty and Truss's ineptitude and arrogance. But none of them were 'far right' by either British or European standards.
I thought 3 was a massive underestimate. But I did misread PM as MP...
I would say by global wing standards May was traditionalist right wing, Johnson populist hard right and Truss free market libertarian right. None far right, but none moderate centre-right either.
That's a reasonable analysis, except Boris was really not that far right (though populist, yes). I think Cicero was using "far right" in its abusive sense of "person on the right that I hate".
Although the idea itself is not a bad one. He'd still have billlions left over, afaik, which does quite illustrate the massive distortions from some of our current digital monopoly capitalism.
He could at least make those vast amazon warehouses less grim, continually monitored places to work, I would say.
There’s something to be said for some kind of bi-decadal global jubilee where the richest 100 people in the world are made to give up 90% of their wealth to a UN fund and then this is distributed to everybody on the planet. That would raise at least a trillion or so I think.
Actually maybe there isn’t. They’d see it coming a mile off, there would be all sorts of jockeying and avoidance, a few countries would opt out of the process, and once the money got to the centre it would kick off a massive industry of grift and corruption.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
They could have stopped it by giving us a referendum on Maastricht, the euro, or the constitution in either of its guises amongst other opportunities.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Subject: Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill and Equality Act
Witness(es): - Lord Falconer of Thoroton KC; - Robin White, Barrister, Old Square Chambers; - Naomi Cunningham, Barrister, Outer Temple Chambers; - Dr Michael Foran, Senior Fellow, Policy Exchange and Lecturer in Public Law, Glasgow University
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
It shouldn't have been an impossible thing for the losers to have accepted defeat and worked for the option that from their point of view was the less bad.
I'm sympathetic to those wanting pay increases in line with inflation. In particular, teaching ought to be a more highly valued profession. But:
- The only way for public sector workers to have more is for others to have less.
This is not how the economy works!
Paying teachers more will require tax rises or cuts elsewhere, that will other people poorer. That is the immediate effect.
Now you may say the case for teachers or some other public sector employees being paid more is worth the (most likely) tax rise or (less likely) cuts elsewhere. The teaching unions have to lay out a business plan for it just as I do when I make the case for members of my team getting pay rises. What additional responsibilities will they be taking on, what productivity gains can we expect from them and what will the end result be from the pay rises.
For nurses, the actual numbers are pretty easy to see, pay them a bit more, increase retention rates, increase training places due to better and more reliable staffing and ease the short term healthcare crunch and get the million "sick" back into work. That the government is unable to see this means they are still beholden to treasury groupthink. For teachers the case is much, much less clear cut. Teacher salaries in the UK are comparable to similar countries across Europe and there's not exactly a huge international market for teachers as there is for healthcare workers. There's also huge quality issues surrounding teaching and education in general, the sector seems to have decided bells and whistles like interactive whiteboards and touch screen tablets will make up for not actually teaching the kids very much, that may or may not be the fault of the DoE but that's where we're at.
But come on Max, you are the one who has been saying - with some justification - that we should be taxing the elderly more (or paying them less) to try and equalise the generational differences and to support working people more. This seems to me to be a damn good example of that.
But that's not what's going to happen, the cost of public sector pay rises and following pension costs will be lumped onto working age people and backloaded onto the young rather than the almost of retirement age.
Both the Tories and Labour seem incapable of standing up to my parents generation and calling them out for what they are, selfish and greedy. The next big clash will be intergenerational, one of the parties (my money is actually on the Tories, oddly) will decide to go all in on a new strategy within 5-7 years and start campaigning on how shit of a deal young people get, simply it's where the votes will be in the 2030s and 2040s.
Yep. That’s also the LibDems’ missed opportunity, which Clegg was feeling his way toward before 2010 but trashed with his record in coalition, and now the party is stuck representing a handful of seats mostly stuffed with winners from the current economic settlement, critically hampering their ability to put forward the radical changes that are needed.
Allowing fees to rise to £9k was both a disaster for the Lib Dems and the nation, in retrospect. There is no party for people under 40 (maybe even 50) to vote for that will look out for their interests, and therefore there is no party that gives any fucks about the future. It's all about solving today's problems with tomorrow's money. Borrowing for current spending should not be possible, yet the UK, along with many other countries, seems to be addicted to it and all it does is bring forwards economic activity from future years to cover for low productivity.
Although the idea itself is not a bad one. He'd still have billlions left over, afaik, which does quite illustrate the massive distortions from some of our current digital monopoly capitalism.
He could at least make those vast amazon warehouses less grim, continually monitored places to work, I would say.
There’s something to be said for some kind of bi-decadal global jubilee where the richest 100 people in the world are made to give up 90% of their wealth to a UN fund and then this is distributed to everybody on the planet. That would raise at least a trillion or so I think.
Actually maybe there isn’t. They’d see it coming a mile off, there would be all sorts of jockeying and avoidance, a few countries would opt out of the process, and once the money got to the centre it would kick off a massive industry of grift and corruption.
Quite possibly , but that would still almost automatically be socialy and economically preferable to such enormous wealth ( and still increasing, in other monopoly areas ) remaining in so few hands.
Piketty and others are quite convincing when they talk of a new and global, Gilded Age for the richest plutocrats, nowadays.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
I think rather that your ideal Brexit (with which I have a great deal of sympathy) was always impossible.
Note that many of those arguing it hasn't been done properly are implacably opposed to what you would want.
But that is always the way. Just as the vision that many (most?) Remainers had of the UKs position within the EU was always impossible. But you argue and campaign for what you see as the ideal and then settle for something less but still better than the alternative. Those who deal in absolutes on any side are, quite frankly, fools.
Thats why I favour PR. It would give pragmatists like you and me more influence (compared to the current close to nil).
Selfish, perhaps, but I think it would also benefit the country.
PR would also give RefUK at least 50 MPs now and Corbynites 50 to 100 MPs too.
Italy even has a far right PM now with PR
...and the UK has had at least three without PR, Your point is?
"at least three far right PMs"? Go on: name them.
May, Johnson, Truss. All from the right of the already fairly right wing Conservatives.
"if you are citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere, you do not know what citizenship means"-- one of the most disgraceful speeches ever given by a serving Prime Minister.
The previous generation of Tories would have given it very short shrift.
You can hardly deny that the Tories are no longer "centre-right", indeed ever since they left the EPP they have been well to the right of any of the traditionally Conservative European right-wing parties.
Cameron was probably the last "Conservative" leader.
Nah that is genuinely rubbish. It would be like me describing Starmer or Kinnock as Communists simply because they were to the left of Blair. You lack perspective. And again I say that as someone who detested May's authoritarianism, Johnson's lazy, irresponsible dishonesty and Truss's ineptitude and arrogance. But none of them were 'far right' by either British or European standards.
I thought 3 was a massive underestimate. But I did misread PM as MP...
I would say by global wing standards May was traditionalist right wing, Johnson populist hard right and Truss free market libertarian right. None far right, but none moderate centre-right either.
That's a reasonable analysis, except Boris was really not that far right (though populist, yes). I think Cicero was using "far right" in its abusive sense of "person on the right that I hate".
Hard right not far right for Johnson. Slightly different (basically less skinheady).
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard; you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
They could have stopped it by giving us a referendum on Maastricht, the euro, or the constitution in either of its guises amongst other opportunities.
They?
I couldn't have done any of those things so I feel I am perfectly at liberty to point out what a disaster Brexit is. As predicted.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
It shouldn't have been an impossible thing for the losers to have accepted defeat and worked for the option that from their point of view was the less bad.
You mean the Labour Party in 2019 should have laid down their arms and worked with the Conservatives for the great bits of the Conservative Party manifesto?
Can't imagine why political opponents don't do that.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
I think rather that your ideal Brexit (with which I have a great deal of sympathy) was always impossible.
Note that many of those arguing it hasn't been done properly are implacably opposed to what you would want.
But that is always the way. Just as the vision that many (most?) Remainers had of the UKs position within the EU was always impossible. But you argue and campaign for what you see as the ideal and then settle for something less but still better than the alternative. Those who deal in absolutes on any side are, quite frankly, fools.
Thats why I favour PR. It would give pragmatists like you and me more influence (compared to the current close to nil).
Selfish, perhaps, but I think it would also benefit the country.
PR would also give RefUK at least 50 MPs now and Corbynites 50 to 100 MPs too.
Italy even has a far right PM now with PR
...and the UK has had at least three without PR, Your point is?
"at least three far right PMs"? Go on: name them.
May, Johnson, Truss. All from the right of the already fairly right wing Conservatives.
"if you are citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere, you do not know what citizenship means"-- one of the most disgraceful speeches ever given by a serving Prime Minister.
The previous generation of Tories would have given it very short shrift.
You can hardly deny that the Tories are no longer "centre-right", indeed ever since they left the EPP they have been well to the right of any of the traditionally Conservative European right-wing parties.
Cameron was probably the last "Conservative" leader.
Nah that is genuinely rubbish. It would be like me describing Starmer or Kinnock as Communists simply because they were to the left of Blair. You lack perspective. And again I say that as someone who detested May's authoritarianism, Johnson's lazy, irresponsible dishonesty and Truss's ineptitude and arrogance. But none of them were 'far right' by either British or European standards.
I thought 3 was a massive underestimate. But I did misread PM as MP...
I would say by global wing standards May was traditionalist right wing, Johnson populist hard right and Truss free market libertarian right. None far right, but none moderate centre-right either.
That's a reasonable analysis, except Boris was really not that far right (though populist, yes). I think Cicero was using "far right" in its abusive sense of "person on the right that I hate".
Hard right not far right for Johnson. Slightly different (basically less skinheady).
He wasn't really very right at all, whatever the adjective.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
They could have stopped it by giving us a referendum on Maastricht, the euro, or the constitution in either of its guises amongst other opportunities.
In each case the democratically-elected government decided not to do so. So in effect the people, we, decided not to do so.
Not hard this democratic sovereignty thing if you take a moment to think about it.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
They could have stopped it by giving us a referendum on Maastricht, the euro, or the constitution in either of its guises amongst other opportunities.
They?
I couldn't have done any of those things so I feel I am perfectly at liberty to point out what a disaster Brexit is. As predicted.
I'm sympathetic to those wanting pay increases in line with inflation. In particular, teaching ought to be a more highly valued profession. But:
- The only way for public sector workers to have more is for others to have less.
This is not how the economy works!
Paying teachers more will require tax rises or cuts elsewhere, that will other people poorer. That is the immediate effect.
Now you may say the case for teachers or some other public sector employees being paid more is worth the (most likely) tax rise or (less likely) cuts elsewhere. The teaching unions have to lay out a business plan for it just as I do when I make the case for members of my team getting pay rises. What additional responsibilities will they be taking on, what productivity gains can we expect from them and what will the end result be from the pay rises.
For nurses, the actual numbers are pretty easy to see, pay them a bit more, increase retention rates, increase training places due to better and more reliable staffing and ease the short term healthcare crunch and get the million "sick" back into work. That the government is unable to see this means they are still beholden to treasury groupthink. For teachers the case is much, much less clear cut. Teacher salaries in the UK are comparable to similar countries across Europe and there's not exactly a huge international market for teachers as there is for healthcare workers. There's also huge quality issues surrounding teaching and education in general, the sector seems to have decided bells and whistles like interactive whiteboards and touch screen tablets will make up for not actually teaching the kids very much, that may or may not be the fault of the DoE but that's where we're at.
But come on Max, you are the one who has been saying - with some justification - that we should be taxing the elderly more (or paying them less) to try and equalise the generational differences and to support working people more. This seems to me to be a damn good example of that.
But that's not what's going to happen, the cost of public sector pay rises and following pension costs will be lumped onto working age people and backloaded onto the young rather than the almost of retirement age.
Both the Tories and Labour seem incapable of standing up to my parents generation and calling them out for what they are, selfish and greedy. The next big clash will be intergenerational, one of the parties (my money is actually on the Tories, oddly) will decide to go all in on a new strategy within 5-7 years and start campaigning on how shit of a deal young people get, simply it's where the votes will be in the 2030s and 2040s.
Yep. That’s also the LibDems’ missed opportunity, which Clegg was feeling his way toward before 2010 but trashed with his record in coalition, and now the party is stuck representing a handful of seats mostly stuffed with winners from the current economic settlement, critically hampering their ability to put forward the radical changes that are needed.
Allowing fees to rise to £9k was both a disaster for the Lib Dems and the nation, in retrospect. There is no party for people under 40 (maybe even 50) to vote for that will look out for their interests, and therefore there is no party that gives any fucks about the future. It's all about solving today's problems with tomorrow's money. Borrowing for current spending should not be possible, yet the UK, along with many other countries, seems to be addicted to it and all it does is bring forwards economic activity from future years to cover for low productivity.
The LibDems were laying the foundations of being the party for the young - not just tuition fees but their policies on housing, the first party to propose a wealth tax, their political reform agenda, votes at 16, and their liberal approach to social issues that broadly aligns with the views of the upcoming generation. The coalition blew this apart, and the party doesn’t now have the courage to advocate the changes that are needed, because radical wealth taxes probably won’t go down well in the handful of very middle class seats that is pretty much all they have left.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
It shouldn't have been an impossible thing for the losers to have accepted defeat and worked for the option that from their point of view was the less bad.
It’s telling I think that people expect - and probably with some reason - higher standards from the remainder side than the brexiteers, and are disappointed when they seem to be playing partisan political games. Whereas they expect Brexiteers to play partisan political games and don’t think any the worse of them for that.
There’s a sense that the remainers were supposed to be the sensible ones. The mothers. Whereas for the leavers, well boys will be boys.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
It shouldn't have been an impossible thing for the losers to have accepted defeat and worked for the option that from their point of view was the less bad.
You mean the Labour Party in 2019 should have laid down their arms and worked with the Conservatives for the great bits of the Conservative Party manifesto?
Can't imagine why political opponents don't do that.
Any bright ideas?
No, I mean the Labour party in the 2015 parliament should, after the referendum, have worked constructively in parliament for the best available Brexit from their point of view.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
It shouldn't have been an impossible thing for the losers to have accepted defeat and worked for the option that from their point of view was the less bad.
It shouldn't have been impossible for the victors to look at the margin of their victory and realise they had to make decisions for the whole country, not just some extremist clique of their own party.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
They could have stopped it by giving us a referendum on Maastricht, the euro, or the constitution in either of its guises amongst other opportunities.
They?
I couldn't have done any of those things so I feel I am perfectly at liberty to point out what a disaster Brexit is. As predicted.
You could have voted for a party that would have.
Which party should I have voted for to get a referendum on Maastrict? I certainly never voted for the party that signed up to it.
The euro? Remind me, when did we join the euro without a referendum?
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
I think rather that your ideal Brexit (with which I have a great deal of sympathy) was always impossible.
Note that many of those arguing it hasn't been done properly are implacably opposed to what you would want.
But that is always the way. Just as the vision that many (most?) Remainers had of the UKs position within the EU was always impossible. But you argue and campaign for what you see as the ideal and then settle for something less but still better than the alternative. Those who deal in absolutes on any side are, quite frankly, fools.
Thats why I favour PR. It would give pragmatists like you and me more influence (compared to the current close to nil).
Selfish, perhaps, but I think it would also benefit the country.
PR would also give RefUK at least 50 MPs now and Corbynites 50 to 100 MPs too.
Italy even has a far right PM now with PR
...and the UK has had at least three without PR, Your point is?
"at least three far right PMs"? Go on: name them.
May, Johnson, Truss. All from the right of the already fairly right wing Conservatives.
"if you are citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere, you do not know what citizenship means"-- one of the most disgraceful speeches ever given by a serving Prime Minister.
The previous generation of Tories would have given it very short shrift.
You can hardly deny that the Tories are no longer "centre-right", indeed ever since they left the EPP they have been well to the right of any of the traditionally Conservative European right-wing parties.
Cameron was probably the last "Conservative" leader.
Nah that is genuinely rubbish. It would be like me describing Starmer or Kinnock as Communists simply because they were to the left of Blair. You lack perspective. And again I say that as someone who detested May's authoritarianism, Johnson's lazy, irresponsible dishonesty and Truss's ineptitude and arrogance. But none of them were 'far right' by either British or European standards.
I thought 3 was a massive underestimate. But I did misread PM as MP...
I would say by global wing standards May was traditionalist right wing, Johnson populist hard right and Truss free market libertarian right. None far right, but none moderate centre-right either.
That's a reasonable analysis, except Boris was really not that far right (though populist, yes). I think Cicero was using "far right" in its abusive sense of "person on the right that I hate".
Hard right not far right for Johnson. Slightly different (basically less skinheady).
He wasn't really very right at all, whatever the adjective.
Right is a notably malleable concept but on traditional measures he was centre-right economically, centre-right policy wise but more noisily right on social issues (read his Soectator columns), and very right wing on matters of nationalism and identity.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
It shouldn't have been an impossible thing for the losers to have accepted defeat and worked for the option that from their point of view was the less bad.
It’s telling I think that people expect - and probably with some reason - higher standards from the remainder side than the brexiteers, and are disappointed when they seem to be playing partisan political games. Whereas they expect Brexiteers to play partisan political games and don’t think any the worse of them for that.
There’s a sense that the remainers were supposed to be the sensible ones. The mothers. Whereas for the leavers, well boys will be boys.
It's not quite as simple as that.
The ERG voted down May's deal because there was a deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
Labour (ringleader: Sir Keir Starmer) voted down May's deal even though there was no deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
It's pretty obvious that the latter deserves greater contempt.
I'm sympathetic to those wanting pay increases in line with inflation. In particular, teaching ought to be a more highly valued profession. But:
- The only way for public sector workers to have more is for others to have less.
This is not how the economy works!
Paying teachers more will require tax rises or cuts elsewhere, that will other people poorer. That is the immediate effect.
Now you may say the case for teachers or some other public sector employees being paid more is worth the (most likely) tax rise or (less likely) cuts elsewhere. The teaching unions have to lay out a business plan for it just as I do when I make the case for members of my team getting pay rises. What additional responsibilities will they be taking on, what productivity gains can we expect from them and what will the end result be from the pay rises.
For nurses, the actual numbers are pretty easy to see, pay them a bit more, increase retention rates, increase training places due to better and more reliable staffing and ease the short term healthcare crunch and get the million "sick" back into work. That the government is unable to see this means they are still beholden to treasury groupthink. For teachers the case is much, much less clear cut. Teacher salaries in the UK are comparable to similar countries across Europe and there's not exactly a huge international market for teachers as there is for healthcare workers. There's also huge quality issues surrounding teaching and education in general, the sector seems to have decided bells and whistles like interactive whiteboards and touch screen tablets will make up for not actually teaching the kids very much, that may or may not be the fault of the DoE but that's where we're at.
But come on Max, you are the one who has been saying - with some justification - that we should be taxing the elderly more (or paying them less) to try and equalise the generational differences and to support working people more. This seems to me to be a damn good example of that.
But that's not what's going to happen, the cost of public sector pay rises and following pension costs will be lumped onto working age people and backloaded onto the young rather than the almost of retirement age.
Both the Tories and Labour seem incapable of standing up to my parents generation and calling them out for what they are, selfish and greedy. The next big clash will be intergenerational, one of the parties (my money is actually on the Tories, oddly) will decide to go all in on a new strategy within 5-7 years and start campaigning on how shit of a deal young people get, simply it's where the votes will be in the 2030s and 2040s.
Yep. That’s also the LibDems’ missed opportunity, which Clegg was feeling his way toward before 2010 but trashed with his record in coalition, and now the party is stuck representing a handful of seats mostly stuffed with winners from the current economic settlement, critically hampering their ability to put forward the radical changes that are needed.
Allowing fees to rise to £9k was both a disaster for the Lib Dems and the nation, in retrospect. There is no party for people under 40 (maybe even 50) to vote for that will look out for their interests, and therefore there is no party that gives any fucks about the future. It's all about solving today's problems with tomorrow's money. Borrowing for current spending should not be possible, yet the UK, along with many other countries, seems to be addicted to it and all it does is bring forwards economic activity from future years to cover for low productivity.
The LibDems were laying the foundations of being the party for the young - not just tuition fees but their policies on housing, the first party to propose a wealth tax, their political reform agenda, votes at 16, and their liberal approach to social issues that broadly aligns with the views of the upcoming generation. The coalition blew this apart, and the party doesn’t now have the courage to advocate the changes that are needed, because radical wealth taxes probably won’t go down well in the handful of very middle class seats that is pretty much all they have left.
How different for the LD's it would all be now if Huhne rather than Clegg had won the leadership, and his wife hadn't then ratted on him.
He was by far the more intellectually impressive of the two when they both did a question and answer session, right here on PB, and about 15 years ago now in fact.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
The sweet, sweet taste of Brexitears will keep us sustained for years to come...
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
I think rather that your ideal Brexit (with which I have a great deal of sympathy) was always impossible.
Note that many of those arguing it hasn't been done properly are implacably opposed to what you would want.
But that is always the way. Just as the vision that many (most?) Remainers had of the UKs position within the EU was always impossible. But you argue and campaign for what you see as the ideal and then settle for something less but still better than the alternative. Those who deal in absolutes on any side are, quite frankly, fools.
Thats why I favour PR. It would give pragmatists like you and me more influence (compared to the current close to nil).
Selfish, perhaps, but I think it would also benefit the country.
PR would also give RefUK at least 50 MPs now and Corbynites 50 to 100 MPs too.
Italy even has a far right PM now with PR
...and the UK has had at least three without PR, Your point is?
"at least three far right PMs"? Go on: name them.
May, Johnson, Truss. All from the right of the already fairly right wing Conservatives.
"if you are citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere, you do not know what citizenship means"-- one of the most disgraceful speeches ever given by a serving Prime Minister.
The previous generation of Tories would have given it very short shrift.
You can hardly deny that the Tories are no longer "centre-right", indeed ever since they left the EPP they have been well to the right of any of the traditionally Conservative European right-wing parties.
Cameron was probably the last "Conservative" leader.
Nah that is genuinely rubbish. It would be like me describing Starmer or Kinnock as Communists simply because they were to the left of Blair. You lack perspective. And again I say that as someone who detested May's authoritarianism, Johnson's lazy, irresponsible dishonesty and Truss's ineptitude and arrogance. But none of them were 'far right' by either British or European standards.
I thought 3 was a massive underestimate. But I did misread PM as MP...
I would say by global wing standards May was traditionalist right wing, Johnson populist hard right and Truss free market libertarian right. None far right, but none moderate centre-right either.
That's a reasonable analysis, except Boris was really not that far right (though populist, yes). I think Cicero was using "far right" in its abusive sense of "person on the right that I hate".
Hard right not far right for Johnson. Slightly different (basically less skinheady).
He wasn't really very right at all, whatever the adjective.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
They could have stopped it by giving us a referendum on Maastricht, the euro, or the constitution in either of its guises amongst other opportunities.
They?
I couldn't have done any of those things so I feel I am perfectly at liberty to point out what a disaster Brexit is. As predicted.
So Farage (who was not elected by us) is the fault of the Brexiteers but Blair and Brown (who were elected by you) are not the fault of the Remainers. Interesting double standard there.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White Wine one.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
It shouldn't have been an impossible thing for the losers to have accepted defeat and worked for the option that from their point of view was the less bad.
It shouldn't have been impossible for the victors to look at the margin of their victory and realise they had to make decisions for the whole country, not just some extremist clique of their own party.
Which would have been a good point but for two things:
(a) immediately after the referendum, the most significant Remainers made clear they weren't interested in being reached out to; and
(b) May was a Remainer anyway, and it was her who decided against continuing SM membership.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
The sweet, sweet taste of Brexitears will keep us sustained for years to come...
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
They could have stopped it by giving us a referendum on Maastricht, the euro, or the constitution in either of its guises amongst other opportunities.
They?
I couldn't have done any of those things so I feel I am perfectly at liberty to point out what a disaster Brexit is. As predicted.
You could have voted for a party that would have.
Which party should I have voted for to get a referendum on Maastrict? I certainly never voted for the party that signed up to it.
The euro? Remind me, when did we join the euro without a referendum?
A referendum on the euro would have been an opportunity for the British people to make clear that they were unhappy with the direction of travel of the EU without having to pull out of the thing entirely. That could tehn have been leveraged into politial pressure against integration.
But Blair, Brown and Cameron couldn't see beyond integration.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
It shouldn't have been an impossible thing for the losers to have accepted defeat and worked for the option that from their point of view was the less bad.
It’s telling I think that people expect - and probably with some reason - higher standards from the remainder side than the brexiteers, and are disappointed when they seem to be playing partisan political games. Whereas they expect Brexiteers to play partisan political games and don’t think any the worse of them for that.
There’s a sense that the remainers were supposed to be the sensible ones. The mothers. Whereas for the leavers, well boys will be boys.
It's not quite as simple as that.
The ERG voted down May's deal because there was a deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
Labour (ringleader: Sir Keir Starmer) voted down May's deal even though there was no deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
It's pretty obvious that the latter deserves greater contempt.
There was a much better deal available from almost all remainers’ point of view, but any combination of customs union and single market was regularly voted down by the Tories including in the indicative votes. What’s more that was actually a real “oven ready” option unlike the cakeist dreams of the ERG.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
The sweet, sweet taste of Brexitears will keep us sustained for years to come...
Funny, I thought from all the whining that it was you who were crying Scott.
I'm sympathetic to those wanting pay increases in line with inflation. In particular, teaching ought to be a more highly valued profession. But:
- The only way for public sector workers to have more is for others to have less.
This is not how the economy works!
Paying teachers more will require tax rises or cuts elsewhere, that will other people poorer. That is the immediate effect.
Now you may say the case for teachers or some other public sector employees being paid more is worth the (most likely) tax rise or (less likely) cuts elsewhere. The teaching unions have to lay out a business plan for it just as I do when I make the case for members of my team getting pay rises. What additional responsibilities will they be taking on, what productivity gains can we expect from them and what will the end result be from the pay rises.
For nurses, the actual numbers are pretty easy to see, pay them a bit more, increase retention rates, increase training places due to better and more reliable staffing and ease the short term healthcare crunch and get the million "sick" back into work. That the government is unable to see this means they are still beholden to treasury groupthink. For teachers the case is much, much less clear cut. Teacher salaries in the UK are comparable to similar countries across Europe and there's not exactly a huge international market for teachers as there is for healthcare workers. There's also huge quality issues surrounding teaching and education in general, the sector seems to have decided bells and whistles like interactive whiteboards and touch screen tablets will make up for not actually teaching the kids very much, that may or may not be the fault of the DoE but that's where we're at.
But come on Max, you are the one who has been saying - with some justification - that we should be taxing the elderly more (or paying them less) to try and equalise the generational differences and to support working people more. This seems to me to be a damn good example of that.
But that's not what's going to happen, the cost of public sector pay rises and following pension costs will be lumped onto working age people and backloaded onto the young rather than the almost of retirement age.
Both the Tories and Labour seem incapable of standing up to my parents generation and calling them out for what they are, selfish and greedy. The next big clash will be intergenerational, one of the parties (my money is actually on the Tories, oddly) will decide to go all in on a new strategy within 5-7 years and start campaigning on how shit of a deal young people get, simply it's where the votes will be in the 2030s and 2040s.
Yep. That’s also the LibDems’ missed opportunity, which Clegg was feeling his way toward before 2010 but trashed with his record in coalition, and now the party is stuck representing a handful of seats mostly stuffed with winners from the current economic settlement, critically hampering their ability to put forward the radical changes that are needed.
Allowing fees to rise to £9k was both a disaster for the Lib Dems and the nation, in retrospect. There is no party for people under 40 (maybe even 50) to vote for that will look out for their interests, and therefore there is no party that gives any fucks about the future. It's all about solving today's problems with tomorrow's money. Borrowing for current spending should not be possible, yet the UK, along with many other countries, seems to be addicted to it and all it does is bring forwards economic activity from future years to cover for low productivity.
The LibDems were laying the foundations of being the party for the young - not just tuition fees but their policies on housing, the first party to propose a wealth tax, their political reform agenda, votes at 16, and their liberal approach to social issues that broadly aligns with the views of the upcoming generation. The coalition blew this apart, and the party doesn’t now have the courage to advocate the changes that are needed, because radical wealth taxes probably won’t go down well in the handful of very middle class seats that is pretty much all they have left.
It might also be said, pace MaxPB, that the SNP (and, in Holyrood, the Scottish Greens) are very much a party of the young, as shown in their policies on student fees . the franchise, and social issues such as trans (which is, in very large part, a woke young woke vs reactionarly old conflict). It's also interesting that the Scottish Labour Party does make noises about this sort of thing - e.g. they are agin tuition fees as well, and their position on trans is very much in conflict with the High Central Leadership in London.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
It shouldn't have been an impossible thing for the losers to have accepted defeat and worked for the option that from their point of view was the less bad.
You mean the Labour Party in 2019 should have laid down their arms and worked with the Conservatives for the great bits of the Conservative Party manifesto?
Can't imagine why political opponents don't do that.
Any bright ideas?
No, I mean the Labour party in the 2015 parliament should, after the referendum, have worked constructively in parliament for the best available Brexit from their point of view.
Why? If it was their political view that Brexit was wrong, like it is their political view that private schools are wrong, why should they not put that policy forward? They were in opposition after all, and the country, in 2017, said that they didn't want the overwhelmingly Brexit government that they did want two years later in 2019.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
It shouldn't have been an impossible thing for the losers to have accepted defeat and worked for the option that from their point of view was the less bad.
It’s telling I think that people expect - and probably with some reason - higher standards from the remainder side than the brexiteers, and are disappointed when they seem to be playing partisan political games. Whereas they expect Brexiteers to play partisan political games and don’t think any the worse of them for that.
There’s a sense that the remainers were supposed to be the sensible ones. The mothers. Whereas for the leavers, well boys will be boys.
It's not quite as simple as that.
The ERG voted down May's deal because there was a deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
Labour (ringleader: Sir Keir Starmer) voted down May's deal even though there was no deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
It's pretty obvious that the latter deserves greater contempt.
There was a much better deal available from almost all remainers’ point of view, but any combination of customs union and single market was regularly voted down by the Tories including in the indicative votes. What’s more that was actually a real “oven ready” option unlike the cakeist dreams of the ERG.
CU/SM weren't available options post Lancaster House.
"More than 2,000 roles are at risk at Tesco as it announces more changes to the way it runs its supermarkets. ... Tesco also announced it will close its counters and hot delis, with staff offered alternative jobs elsewhere."
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
It shouldn't have been an impossible thing for the losers to have accepted defeat and worked for the option that from their point of view was the less bad.
You mean the Labour Party in 2019 should have laid down their arms and worked with the Conservatives for the great bits of the Conservative Party manifesto?
Can't imagine why political opponents don't do that.
Any bright ideas?
No, I mean the Labour party in the 2015 parliament should, after the referendum, have worked constructively in parliament for the best available Brexit from their point of view.
Why? If it was their political view that Brexit was wrong, like it is their political view that private schools are wrong, why should they not put that policy forward?
Because they had been specifically instructed by the British people to leave.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
Well of course I disagree. In theory. In practice the country by 2019 absolutely wanted Brexit and they wanted it good and hard. And their wishes have been granted.
But staying in the EU was not as unimaginable as you maintain. Especially with Dave's Deal which protected against many of the federalist elements of the EU. And even without it we have been able, as with the Fiscal Compact, and the Euro for that matter, to decline to participate in various elements of that ever closer union.
"More than 2,000 roles are at risk at Tesco as it announces more changes to the way it runs its supermarkets. ... Tesco also announced it will close its counters and hot delis, with staff offered alternative jobs elsewhere."
Wonder if the others will follow...
Most such counters have, at least in this part of the country, already been closed. I think only Asda still has them.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
They could have stopped it by giving us a referendum on Maastricht, the euro, or the constitution in either of its guises amongst other opportunities.
They?
I couldn't have done any of those things so I feel I am perfectly at liberty to point out what a disaster Brexit is. As predicted.
You could have voted for a party that would have.
Which party should I have voted for to get a referendum on Maastrict? I certainly never voted for the party that signed up to it.
The euro? Remind me, when did we join the euro without a referendum?
Most members of the EU seemed to use referenda to get approval for closer integration e,g. Lisbon. We never had the chance. Big mistake. If you didn’t trust the public to give the ‘right’ answer then, why would they after Cameron’s epic failed renegotiation?
I think you should be sympathetic to the Remainers. Their anger shows their helpless fury.
They know Cameron dropped a bollock by allowing democracy to rule, and they know the Government won't make that mistake again. Even if they tried, the French would make the terms impossible.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
That's rubbish, there was nothing inevitable or necessary about it.
I think you should be sympathetic to the Remainers. Their anger shows their helpless fury.
They know Cameron dropped a bollock by allowing democracy to rule, and they know the Government won't make that mistake again. Even if they tried, the French would make the terms impossible.
Not so. We are just remarking upon the self-harm that has been inflicted upon the country by the brexiters.
As I noted this morning, the IMF forecast this morning should be a reason for joy for brexiters as it is their famed price worth paying for (the) sovereignty (that we always had anyway).
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
Well of course I disagree. In theory. In practice the country by 2019 absolutely wanted Brexit and they wanted it good and hard. And their wishes have been granted.
But staying in the EU was not as unimaginable as you maintain. Especially with Dave's Deal which protected against many of the federalist elements of the EU. And even without it we have been able, as with the Fiscal Compact, and the Euro for that matter, to decline to participate in various elements of that ever closer union.
Cameron's deal did noting to protect us in such the same way that Major's opt outs turned out to be useless. Again reference his anguished letter to the Commission President in 1996 bemoaning the fact that various opt outs had been circumvented by the ECJ. Cameron got his smokescreen but he was not clever enough to sell it to the British people. Had he done so we would have been in a far worse position than we are now.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
It shouldn't have been an impossible thing for the losers to have accepted defeat and worked for the option that from their point of view was the less bad.
It’s telling I think that people expect - and probably with some reason - higher standards from the remainder side than the brexiteers, and are disappointed when they seem to be playing partisan political games. Whereas they expect Brexiteers to play partisan political games and don’t think any the worse of them for that.
There’s a sense that the remainers were supposed to be the sensible ones. The mothers. Whereas for the leavers, well boys will be boys.
It's not quite as simple as that.
The ERG voted down May's deal because there was a deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
Labour (ringleader: Sir Keir Starmer) voted down May's deal even though there was no deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
It's pretty obvious that the latter deserves greater contempt.
I am loving the rewriting of Brexit history by the regretful Brexiteers. The Conservatives are thus absolved of Johnson's catastrophic deal because Opposition parties didn't support May's deal.
At the time, May's deal was poor. It didn't have to be, but it was. There was no attempt at consensus, and I would have thought such an arch-Brexiteer like Corbyn would have been open to leaving on reasonable terms. There was no contrition at each moment the deal failed in the HoC. It just kept being put back to the (HoC) electorate until it passed. The very thing the Brexiteer justices of democracy were denying to second referenda advocates.
I would not, and could not support May's deal. With the benefit of hindsight it was less bad than what came next, but that's not my fault. It was the responsibility of the Prime Minister who claimed there would be no Border in the Irish Sea and duly stuck one in the middle of the North Channel.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
Well of course I disagree. In theory. In practice the country by 2019 absolutely wanted Brexit and they wanted it good and hard. And their wishes have been granted.
But staying in the EU was not as unimaginable as you maintain. Especially with Dave's Deal which protected against many of the federalist elements of the EU. And even without it we have been able, as with the Fiscal Compact, and the Euro for that matter, to decline to participate in various elements of that ever closer union.
Once the referendum result had been declared, staying in the EU was unimaginable.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
They could have stopped it by giving us a referendum on Maastricht, the euro, or the constitution in either of its guises amongst other opportunities.
They?
I couldn't have done any of those things so I feel I am perfectly at liberty to point out what a disaster Brexit is. As predicted.
You could have voted for a party that would have.
Which party should I have voted for to get a referendum on Maastrict? I certainly never voted for the party that signed up to it.
The euro? Remind me, when did we join the euro without a referendum?
A referendum on the euro would have been an opportunity for the British people to make clear that they were unhappy with the direction of travel of the EU without having to pull out of the thing entirely. That could tehn have been leveraged into politial pressure against integration.
But Blair, Brown and Cameron couldn't see beyond integration.
I suspect the UK will be back in the EU in time, 'maybe not in my lifetime but in yours'.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
Well of course I disagree. In theory. In practice the country by 2019 absolutely wanted Brexit and they wanted it good and hard. And their wishes have been granted.
But staying in the EU was not as unimaginable as you maintain. Especially with Dave's Deal which protected against many of the federalist elements of the EU. And even without it we have been able, as with the Fiscal Compact, and the Euro for that matter, to decline to participate in various elements of that ever closer union.
Cameron's deal did noting to protect us in such the same way that Major's opt outs turned out to be useless. Again reference his anguished letter to the Commission President in 1996 bemoaning the fact that various opt outs had been circumvented by the ECJ. Cameron got his smokescreen but he was not clever enough to sell it to the British people. Had he done so we would have been in a far worse position than we are now.
You have no basis to state that. It is pure supposition. We signed a deal with the EU and even without it, as with the Fiscal Compact, we could have opted out of stuff. Because we are and were sovereign.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
Well of course I disagree. In theory. In practice the country by 2019 absolutely wanted Brexit and they wanted it good and hard. And their wishes have been granted.
But staying in the EU was not as unimaginable as you maintain. Especially with Dave's Deal which protected against many of the federalist elements of the EU. And even without it we have been able, as with the Fiscal Compact, and the Euro for that matter, to decline to participate in various elements of that ever closer union.
Once the referendum result had been declared, staying in the EU was unimaginable.
I agree it was too late then. But leaving could have been to a Swiss or Norway style arrangement. That would have deflated the Remainder opposition.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
Well of course I disagree. In theory. In practice the country by 2019 absolutely wanted Brexit and they wanted it good and hard. And their wishes have been granted.
But staying in the EU was not as unimaginable as you maintain. Especially with Dave's Deal which protected against many of the federalist elements of the EU. And even without it we have been able, as with the Fiscal Compact, and the Euro for that matter, to decline to participate in various elements of that ever closer union.
Once the referendum result had been declared, staying in the EU was unimaginable.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
It shouldn't have been an impossible thing for the losers to have accepted defeat and worked for the option that from their point of view was the less bad.
It’s telling I think that people expect - and probably with some reason - higher standards from the remainder side than the brexiteers, and are disappointed when they seem to be playing partisan political games. Whereas they expect Brexiteers to play partisan political games and don’t think any the worse of them for that.
There’s a sense that the remainers were supposed to be the sensible ones. The mothers. Whereas for the leavers, well boys will be boys.
It's not quite as simple as that.
The ERG voted down May's deal because there was a deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
Labour (ringleader: Sir Keir Starmer) voted down May's deal even though there was no deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
It's pretty obvious that the latter deserves greater contempt.
There was a much better deal available from almost all remainers’ point of view, but any combination of customs union and single market was regularly voted down by the Tories including in the indicative votes. What’s more that was actually a real “oven ready” option unlike the cakeist dreams of the ERG.
CU/SM weren't available options post Lancaster House.
Well there you have it. A Tory politician decides, in an ill thought out and self-defeating speech, to unilaterally rule out the most sensible forms of Brexit and everyone else must fall into line with her folly or be held in contempt.
This falls into the all too common genre of “what’s good for the Tory party must be in the national interest”. It’s why they’re going to lose the next election.
Lancaster House was the beginning of the real rot. She set herself an impossible riddle that nobody could solve.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
They could have stopped it by giving us a referendum on Maastricht, the euro, or the constitution in either of its guises amongst other opportunities.
They?
I couldn't have done any of those things so I feel I am perfectly at liberty to point out what a disaster Brexit is. As predicted.
You could have voted for a party that would have.
Which party should I have voted for to get a referendum on Maastrict? I certainly never voted for the party that signed up to it.
The euro? Remind me, when did we join the euro without a referendum?
A referendum on the euro would have been an opportunity for the British people to make clear that they were unhappy with the direction of travel of the EU without having to pull out of the thing entirely. That could tehn have been leveraged into politial pressure against integration.
But Blair, Brown and Cameron couldn't see beyond integration.
I suspect the UK will be back in the EU in time, 'maybe not in my lifetime but in yours'.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
They could have stopped it by giving us a referendum on Maastricht, the euro, or the constitution in either of its guises amongst other opportunities.
They?
I couldn't have done any of those things so I feel I am perfectly at liberty to point out what a disaster Brexit is. As predicted.
You could have voted for a party that would have.
Which party should I have voted for to get a referendum on Maastrict? I certainly never voted for the party that signed up to it.
The euro? Remind me, when did we join the euro without a referendum?
A referendum on the euro would have been an opportunity for the British people to make clear that they were unhappy with the direction of travel of the EU without having to pull out of the thing entirely. That could tehn have been leveraged into politial pressure against integration.
But Blair, Brown and Cameron couldn't see beyond integration.
I suspect the UK will be back in the EU in time, 'maybe not in my lifetime but in yours'.
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of you younger chaps and ladies' lives.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
Well of course I disagree. In theory. In practice the country by 2019 absolutely wanted Brexit and they wanted it good and hard. And their wishes have been granted.
But staying in the EU was not as unimaginable as you maintain. Especially with Dave's Deal which protected against many of the federalist elements of the EU. And even without it we have been able, as with the Fiscal Compact, and the Euro for that matter, to decline to participate in various elements of that ever closer union.
Once the referendum result had been declared, staying in the EU was unimaginable.
Yes and no. I think government would have been pretty difficult to have a vote every three weeks on this but a second vote is not imo undemocratic. And hence not unimaginable.
"More than 2,000 roles are at risk at Tesco as it announces more changes to the way it runs its supermarkets. ... Tesco also announced it will close its counters and hot delis, with staff offered alternative jobs elsewhere."
Wonder if the others will follow...
Most such counters have, at least in this part of the country, already been closed. I think only Asda still has them.
Ah - didn't realise that. I'm rarely in a bigger supermarket as the nearest one is a bit of a trek and the little 'Sainsburys Local' never had any counters anyway. It used to always be a draw to Waitrose when I was in the vicinity though as their butchers counter actually felt like a decent butchers.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
It shouldn't have been an impossible thing for the losers to have accepted defeat and worked for the option that from their point of view was the less bad.
It’s telling I think that people expect - and probably with some reason - higher standards from the remainder side than the brexiteers, and are disappointed when they seem to be playing partisan political games. Whereas they expect Brexiteers to play partisan political games and don’t think any the worse of them for that.
There’s a sense that the remainers were supposed to be the sensible ones. The mothers. Whereas for the leavers, well boys will be boys.
It's not quite as simple as that.
The ERG voted down May's deal because there was a deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
Labour (ringleader: Sir Keir Starmer) voted down May's deal even though there was no deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
It's pretty obvious that the latter deserves greater contempt.
I am loving the rewriting of Brexit history by the regretful Brexiteers. The Conservatives are thus absolved of Johnson's catastrophic deal because Opposition parties didn't support May's deal.
At the time, May's deal was poor. It didn't have to be, but it was. There was no attempt at consensus, and I would have thought such an arch-Brexiteer like Corbyn would have been open to leaving on reasonable terms. There was no contrition at each moment the deal failed in the HoC. It just kept being put back to the (HoC) electorate until it passed. The very thing the Brexiteer justices of democracy were denying to second referenda advocates.
I would not, and could not support May's deal. With the benefit of hindsight it was less bad than what came next, but that's not my fault. It was the responsibility of the Prime Minister who claimed there would be no Border in the Irish Sea and duly stuck one in the middle of the North Channel.
Not rewriting of history at all. It was clear at the time that rejecting the deal would lead to May's replacement by someone intent on getting a looser deal, and that the public were fed up of the delay in implemeting their clear instruction.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
They could have stopped it by giving us a referendum on Maastricht, the euro, or the constitution in either of its guises amongst other opportunities.
They?
I couldn't have done any of those things so I feel I am perfectly at liberty to point out what a disaster Brexit is. As predicted.
You could have voted for a party that would have.
Which party should I have voted for to get a referendum on Maastrict? I certainly never voted for the party that signed up to it.
The euro? Remind me, when did we join the euro without a referendum?
A referendum on the euro would have been an opportunity for the British people to make clear that they were unhappy with the direction of travel of the EU without having to pull out of the thing entirely. That could tehn have been leveraged into politial pressure against integration.
But Blair, Brown and Cameron couldn't see beyond integration.
I suspect the UK will be back in the EU in time, 'maybe not in my lifetime but in yours'.
Possibly. But at least if we are it will be as a full member, which will be an improvement on the previous status.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
I think rather that your ideal Brexit (with which I have a great deal of sympathy) was always impossible.
Note that many of those arguing it hasn't been done properly are implacably opposed to what you would want.
But that is always the way. Just as the vision that many (most?) Remainers had of the UKs position within the EU was always impossible. But you argue and campaign for what you see as the ideal and then settle for something less but still better than the alternative. Those who deal in absolutes on any side are, quite frankly, fools.
Thats why I favour PR. It would give pragmatists like you and me more influence (compared to the current close to nil).
Selfish, perhaps, but I think it would also benefit the country.
PR would also give RefUK at least 50 MPs now and Corbynites 50 to 100 MPs too.
Italy even has a far right PM now with PR
...and the UK has had at least three without PR, Your point is?
"at least three far right PMs"? Go on: name them.
May, Johnson, Truss. All from the right of the already fairly right wing Conservatives.
"if you are citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere, you do not know what citizenship means"-- one of the most disgraceful speeches ever given by a serving Prime Minister.
The previous generation of Tories would have given it very short shrift.
You can hardly deny that the Tories are no longer "centre-right", indeed ever since they left the EPP they have been well to the right of any of the traditionally Conservative European right-wing parties.
Cameron was probably the last "Conservative" leader.
Nah that is genuinely rubbish. It would be like me describing Starmer or Kinnock as Communists simply because they were to the left of Blair. You lack perspective. And again I say that as someone who detested May's authoritarianism, Johnson's lazy, irresponsible dishonesty and Truss's ineptitude and arrogance. But none of them were 'far right' by either British or European standards.
I thought 3 was a massive underestimate. But I did misread PM as MP...
I would say by global wing standards May was traditionalist right wing, Johnson populist hard right and Truss free market libertarian right. None far right, but none moderate centre-right either.
That's a reasonable analysis, except Boris was really not that far right (though populist, yes). I think Cicero was using "far right" in its abusive sense of "person on the right that I hate".
Hard right not far right for Johnson. Slightly different (basically less skinheady).
He wasn't really very right at all, whatever the adjective.
True. He was hard wrong - although I wouldn't argue too much with far wrong or very wrong of centre.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
Well of course I disagree. In theory. In practice the country by 2019 absolutely wanted Brexit and they wanted it good and hard. And their wishes have been granted.
But staying in the EU was not as unimaginable as you maintain. Especially with Dave's Deal which protected against many of the federalist elements of the EU. And even without it we have been able, as with the Fiscal Compact, and the Euro for that matter, to decline to participate in various elements of that ever closer union.
Cameron's deal did noting to protect us in such the same way that Major's opt outs turned out to be useless. Again reference his anguished letter to the Commission President in 1996 bemoaning the fact that various opt outs had been circumvented by the ECJ. Cameron got his smokescreen but he was not clever enough to sell it to the British people. Had he done so we would have been in a far worse position than we are now.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
Well of course I disagree. In theory. In practice the country by 2019 absolutely wanted Brexit and they wanted it good and hard. And their wishes have been granted.
But staying in the EU was not as unimaginable as you maintain. Especially with Dave's Deal which protected against many of the federalist elements of the EU. And even without it we have been able, as with the Fiscal Compact, and the Euro for that matter, to decline to participate in various elements of that ever closer union.
Once the referendum result had been declared, staying in the EU was unimaginable.
I agree it was too late then. But leaving could have been to a Swiss or Norway style arrangement. That would have deflated the Remainder opposition.
The problem is, that would have needed either it being officially made clear that was a possibility before the referendum (vetoed by Cameron as it would have made the referendum harder to win) of an immediate move in the last week of June by the most prominent Remainers and the prominent Leavers who would have been happy with such an arrangement to make that the default - which would have given May the cover to do it.
"More than 2,000 roles are at risk at Tesco as it announces more changes to the way it runs its supermarkets. ... Tesco also announced it will close its counters and hot delis, with staff offered alternative jobs elsewhere."
Wonder if the others will follow...
It's actually really good, IMO. In my parents area Sainsbury's closed down their fish and meat counters within a few months there was a local butcher and fish monger that opened up and both are always really busy. People with these skills will not lack for work and it will create opportunities without supermarkets crowding out the market.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
Well of course I disagree. In theory. In practice the country by 2019 absolutely wanted Brexit and they wanted it good and hard. And their wishes have been granted.
But staying in the EU was not as unimaginable as you maintain. Especially with Dave's Deal which protected against many of the federalist elements of the EU. And even without it we have been able, as with the Fiscal Compact, and the Euro for that matter, to decline to participate in various elements of that ever closer union.
Once the referendum result had been declared, staying in the EU was unimaginable.
Not half as tiresome as the whining from the irreconcilable remoaners.
You are getting off lightly. Europhiles had to put with the antics and whining of Farage et al for several decades. The Brexit vote was not even a decade ago.
They could have stopped it by giving us a referendum on Maastricht, the euro, or the constitution in either of its guises amongst other opportunities.
They?
I couldn't have done any of those things so I feel I am perfectly at liberty to point out what a disaster Brexit is. As predicted.
You could have voted for a party that would have.
Which party should I have voted for to get a referendum on Maastrict? I certainly never voted for the party that signed up to it.
The euro? Remind me, when did we join the euro without a referendum?
A referendum on the euro would have been an opportunity for the British people to make clear that they were unhappy with the direction of travel of the EU without having to pull out of the thing entirely. That could tehn have been leveraged into politial pressure against integration.
But Blair, Brown and Cameron couldn't see beyond integration.
I suspect the UK will be back in the EU in time, 'maybe not in my lifetime but in yours'.
Possibly. But at least if we are it will be as a full member, which will be an improvement on the previous status.
Not a "full member"? Here you go again rewriting history.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
Well of course I disagree. In theory. In practice the country by 2019 absolutely wanted Brexit and they wanted it good and hard. And their wishes have been granted.
But staying in the EU was not as unimaginable as you maintain. Especially with Dave's Deal which protected against many of the federalist elements of the EU. And even without it we have been able, as with the Fiscal Compact, and the Euro for that matter, to decline to participate in various elements of that ever closer union.
Cameron's deal did noting to protect us in such the same way that Major's opt outs turned out to be useless. Again reference his anguished letter to the Commission President in 1996 bemoaning the fact that various opt outs had been circumvented by the ECJ. Cameron got his smokescreen but he was not clever enough to sell it to the British people. Had he done so we would have been in a far worse position than we are now.
You have no basis to state that. It is pure supposition. We signed a deal with the EU and even without it, as with the Fiscal Compact, we could have opted out of stuff. Because we are and were sovereign.
John Major thought the same and was proved completely wrong. His letter of pleading complaint to Jacques Santer would have been amusing if it were not so tragic.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
That's rubbish, there was nothing inevitable or necessary about it.
Worth remembering that the European Union Referendum Act 2015 was voted for 544 to 53. Why would the Europhile MPs among the 544 vote for it when they had no intention of respecting the result? Because they were frightened of their own electorates and thought remain would win. Only the SNP voted against - credit to them.
If the Tories want Brexit to succeed for them they have to go nuclear: elect Rees-Mogg as their leader - or ideally even Nigel Farage - and then go back to the EU with a laundry list of stringent demands. If that fails then at least no one could say they didn't try. All the time they are led by crypto-Remainers such as Rishi or Boris the doubts will linger that not enough effort was made for it to work.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
Well of course I disagree. In theory. In practice the country by 2019 absolutely wanted Brexit and they wanted it good and hard. And their wishes have been granted.
But staying in the EU was not as unimaginable as you maintain. Especially with Dave's Deal which protected against many of the federalist elements of the EU. And even without it we have been able, as with the Fiscal Compact, and the Euro for that matter, to decline to participate in various elements of that ever closer union.
Once the referendum result had been declared, staying in the EU was unimaginable.
To the winners.
To any democrat.
If there was a clamour from the public to correct the error by means of a new democratic vote, what's undemocratic in asking for the public's second opinion once they had more information available to them as to what Brexit meant before it was too late?
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
It shouldn't have been an impossible thing for the losers to have accepted defeat and worked for the option that from their point of view was the less bad.
It’s telling I think that people expect - and probably with some reason - higher standards from the remainder side than the brexiteers, and are disappointed when they seem to be playing partisan political games. Whereas they expect Brexiteers to play partisan political games and don’t think any the worse of them for that.
There’s a sense that the remainers were supposed to be the sensible ones. The mothers. Whereas for the leavers, well boys will be boys.
It's not quite as simple as that.
The ERG voted down May's deal because there was a deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
Labour (ringleader: Sir Keir Starmer) voted down May's deal even though there was no deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
It's pretty obvious that the latter deserves greater contempt.
I am loving the rewriting of Brexit history by the regretful Brexiteers. The Conservatives are thus absolved of Johnson's catastrophic deal because Opposition parties didn't support May's deal.
At the time, May's deal was poor. It didn't have to be, but it was. There was no attempt at consensus, and I would have thought such an arch-Brexiteer like Corbyn would have been open to leaving on reasonable terms. There was no contrition at each moment the deal failed in the HoC. It just kept being put back to the (HoC) electorate until it passed. The very thing the Brexiteer justices of democracy were denying to second referenda advocates.
I would not, and could not support May's deal. With the benefit of hindsight it was less bad than what came next, but that's not my fault. It was the responsibility of the Prime Minister who claimed there would be no Border in the Irish Sea and duly stuck one in the middle of the North Channel.
I agree with all of this - but of course I am not regretful. The only point at which I differ is I could and would have supported May's deal - though it was too hard a Brexit in my mind. I lay the bulk of the blame for the Brexit we got at the feet of those negotiating it and making decisions under the influence of the ERG. Though I do think the Remainers made a massive error by not rising above the politics (something the Brexit supporters mostly failed to do) and going for (in their eyes) the least harmful form of Brexit possible. They had the votes. They just misplayed their hand.
I sense it will be sellable, the tide against Brexit is one way and it is powerful. You can feel it
The Tories have blown it. Blown Brexit
Not at all.
This version of Brexit is plausibly the best version there ever could be.
We told you before you voted for it, it would be a shitshow.
And now here we are...
Clearly bollocks from you as even most Remainers admit.
Richard is right. I bow to nobody in my loathing for Brexit and its proponents.
I still gnash my teeth when I remember how Gisela Stuart dissembled in the televised pre referendum debate about the effect on Northern Ireland.
But the truth is we have had a lowest decile Brexit. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Brexiteers has gone wrong - no US FTA, Trump lost to Biden, the EU played hardball (talking about Swexit and Italexit during negotiations was an own goal by Farage).
There have been almost no economic benefits from Brexit to talk about - and our post-Brexit trade deals under Truss were to our disadvantage.
Even the political mood music - continued political confrontation with the Citizens of Nowhere as part of a misguided Red Wall strategy - was ill chosen.
None of this was certain in 2016.
The worst thing is that I feel deep sympathy for committed Brexiteers. To work for something for decades and to see it mishandled so grievously must be really upsetting.
I hear kids in primary schools are now using Brexit as shorthand for screwed up. Not good.
And .ore widely - not good for the country. A period of competent administration is desperately needed.
This of course is the Brexit as socialism view. Brexit is pure and wonderful just that it hasn't been tried properly yet.
So the logical conclusion of your claim is that May, Johnson and Truss were top notch politicians and leaders who made no mistakes, created the best possible Brexit and were only bought low by the project rather than by their own incompetence and ineptitude? Its a 'courageous' theory at least.
But, like communism, it is no good having a world view that requires five impossible things before breakfast in order to work. If you support radical change it has to survive contact with the real, messy world - including the shortcomings of our rulers - otherwise when you are old you’ll just be sitting there, repeating over and over, “it would have worked, if only…if only….”
Not at all. If we only made changes that were 100% bound to work in the any we wanted and were proofed against any possible abuse, irrespective of how much the system we were seeking to change had failed, then we would still all be living under the feudal system. All change has its shortcomings. And the idea of the status quo over any length of time is, in itself, ether possible or desirable is another of those 'impossible things'.
Your political antenna let you down, Richard, you let your idealism get the better of you.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
Not at all. Unless you are claiming that all possible candidates for PM were ignorant, dishonest incompetents. Which, given that until that point this was your party (and note, not mine) would be a remarkable claim. Bear in mind May was a Remainer and previous Home Secretary in a Government you supported.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
Your position of any flavour of Brexit is better than having stayed in is consistent. But it slightly throws those who are in a less fortunate position than you are to the dogs. As we are seeing with the IMF forecast.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White one.
It was not an experiment but an inevitable necessity.
Well of course I disagree. In theory. In practice the country by 2019 absolutely wanted Brexit and they wanted it good and hard. And their wishes have been granted.
But staying in the EU was not as unimaginable as you maintain. Especially with Dave's Deal which protected against many of the federalist elements of the EU. And even without it we have been able, as with the Fiscal Compact, and the Euro for that matter, to decline to participate in various elements of that ever closer union.
Once the referendum result had been declared, staying in the EU was unimaginable.
To the winners.
To any democrat.
If there was a clamour from the public to correct the error by means of a new democratic vote, what's undemocratic in asking for the public's second opinion once they had more information available to them as to what Brexit meant before it was too late?
Like a good European. Keep asking the question until you get the answer you want. It is a shame you fail to see that this attitude was part of the reason people voted to leave in the first place.
Comments
https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england
As much of a factor in teacher disgruntlement is the largely unnecessary and unproductive extra workload that has been imposed on them over the last decade.
This from Max is just garbage, IMO:
...the sector seems to have decided bells and whistles like interactive whiteboards and touch screen tablets will make up for not actually teaching the kids very much...
The UK suffers from some of the same distortions: not to the same extent as Ireland but still quite notable. A glance at GDP per capita vs median household income in a few European countries shows this up quite starkly. The UK’s GDP per head is virtually identical to France on a PPP basis (a bit lower on current exchange rates). But their median household income is about 15k higher than ours. 15k more money per year for the average household. That’s a big gap.
On the other hand we have greater median assets than France because of our high property prices, owner occupancy and private rather than state pension provision. Albeit a lot of that asset base is illiquid.
I think a mixture of median household income and net assets/debt per household is a far more meaningful measure of people’s financial wellbeing than GDP per capita. Total GDP is useful as a measure of a country’s economic and trading power.
If, as I expect from next year onwards with BEPS pillar 2 combined with the IRA (inflation reduction act not republican paramilitary) incentives we see a massive reverse flow of capital back into the US and out of Europe, Ireland’s GDP could start to look decidedly odd.
https://twitter.com/fullfact/status/1620026539403255809?s=61&t=19BXCNo86RDJ21wNQ1U0rQ
But I did misread PM as MP...
With all those vast resources, he could at least make those vast amazon warehouses less grim, continually-monitored places to work, I would say.
Both the Tories and Labour seem incapable of standing up to my parents generation and calling them out for what they are, selfish and greedy. The next big clash will be intergenerational, one of the parties (my money is actually on the Tories, oddly) will decide to go all in on a new strategy within 5-7 years and start campaigning on how shit of a deal young people get, simply it's where the votes will be in the 2030s and 2040s.
Politicians on the continent (not to mention the USA) come up with all sorts of blood and soil and family values crap all the time. The difference with the UK in recent years has been the very cross border nature of the abuse, focused on the EU. More like the stuff Poland says about Germany and still somewhat short of most of Orban’s utterances.
Mr L,
"Not entirely suitable for work but this is just a superb piece of polemical writing."
She's not for sitting on the fence, is she?
I mean, Russia has been hit with sanctions from across the developed world, yet will be growing when we won’t. How bad is that?
Which translates as: if my own personal brexit had been implemented, the one that I and only I could possibly have designed, it would all have been a huge success.
And you say that we are the whiners.
Actually maybe there isn’t. They’d see it coming a mile off, there would be all sorts of jockeying and avoidance, a few countries would opt out of the process, and once the money got to the centre it would kick off a massive industry of grift and corruption.
Isn't she just another established and recognised nutter of the Corbynite tendency - just like say Laura Pidcock and various similar others.
In this case of Sultana she has some quite nasty politics in her background whilst at the NUS iirc around antisemitism.
(Suspect there is considerable irony in the Taz post, however.)
irony in her post.
Women & Equalities Committee:
Subject: Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill and Equality Act
Witness(es):
- Lord Falconer of Thoroton KC;
- Robin White, Barrister, Old Square Chambers;
- Naomi Cunningham, Barrister, Outer Temple Chambers;
- Dr Michael Foran, Senior Fellow, Policy Exchange and Lecturer in Public Law, Glasgow University
https://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/51327088-eab0-4bf7-ad5e-35e472b969f8
Witnesses from both sides of the debate? What ever next?
Piketty and others are quite convincing when they talk of a new and global, Gilded Age for the richest plutocrats, nowadays.
You should have taken a look at all the politicians you rightly excoriate and asked yourself the question: "are these people likely not to make a complete hash of it?"
The answer after the briefest moment of contemplation is of course that they would be guaranteed to make a hash of it yet you still voted for it.
Now that is weird.
I couldn't have done any of those things so I feel I am perfectly at liberty to point out what a disaster Brexit is. As predicted.
Can't imagine why political opponents don't do that.
Any bright ideas?
Not hard this democratic sovereignty thing if you take a moment to think about it.
and are disappointed when they seem to be playing partisan political games. Whereas they expect Brexiteers to play partisan political
games and don’t think any the worse of them for that.
There’s a sense that the remainers were supposed to be the sensible ones. The mothers. Whereas for the leavers, well boys will be boys.
Brexit was necessary no matter who was going to be running the country afterwards. There was no status quo and the longer we waited to leave the more difficult it would have been. You only have to look at the recent Elysee statement to see it is filled with the sorts of things Remain supporters said would not happen.
And, as I say, had we voted the other way we would have been having exactly the same arguments now in reverse.
The euro? Remind me, when did we join the euro without a referendum?
The ERG voted down May's deal because there was a deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
Labour (ringleader: Sir Keir Starmer) voted down May's deal even though there was no deal available that, from their point of view, was better.
It's pretty obvious that the latter deserves greater contempt.
He was by far the more intellectually impressive of the two when they both did a question and answer session, right here on PB, and about 15 years ago now in fact.
Your idealism meant that you would rather conduct a huge experiment with the country, suspecting that it would fail but at least we tried, than opt for a more moderate course which would likely have protected a greater number of needy people.
You were in that fortunate position to be able to conduct that experiment and hence again the similarity to socialism.
I couldn't possibly call you a Champagne Brexiter, but perhaps a Medium Sweet English Sparkling White Wine one.
(a) immediately after the referendum, the most significant Remainers made clear they weren't interested in being reached out to; and
(b) May was a Remainer anyway, and it was her who decided against continuing SM membership.
But Blair, Brown and Cameron couldn't see beyond integration.
"More than 2,000 roles are at risk at Tesco as it announces more changes to the way it runs its supermarkets.
...
Tesco also announced it will close its counters and hot delis, with staff offered alternative jobs elsewhere."
Wonder if the others will follow...
But staying in the EU was not as unimaginable as you maintain. Especially with Dave's Deal which protected against many of the federalist elements of the EU. And even without it we have been able, as with the Fiscal Compact, and the Euro for that matter, to decline to participate in various elements of that ever closer union.
I think you should be sympathetic to the Remainers. Their anger shows their helpless fury.
They know Cameron dropped a bollock by allowing democracy to rule, and they know the Government won't make that mistake again. Even if they tried, the French would make the terms impossible.
And it's working in that sense.
The longer and harder the public exposure to Brexit, the more they become immune to its appeal
As I noted this morning, the IMF forecast this morning should be a reason for joy for brexiters as it is their famed price worth paying for (the) sovereignty (that we always had anyway).
At the time, May's deal was poor. It didn't have to be, but it was. There was no attempt at consensus, and I would have thought such an arch-Brexiteer like Corbyn would have been open to leaving on reasonable terms. There was no contrition at each moment the deal failed in the HoC. It just kept being put back to the (HoC) electorate until it passed. The very thing the Brexiteer justices of democracy were denying to second referenda advocates.
I would not, and could not support May's deal. With the benefit of hindsight it was less bad than what came next, but that's not my fault. It was the responsibility of the Prime Minister who claimed there would be no Border in the Irish Sea and duly stuck one in the middle of the North Channel.
This falls into the all too common genre of “what’s good for the Tory party must be in the national interest”. It’s why they’re going to lose the next election.
Lancaster House was the beginning of the real rot. She set herself an impossible riddle that nobody could solve.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-64458511
in Dutch, the title of this chart is: WELCOME TO THE BREXIT
https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1620430606470643712?s=20&t=7hQJ3-RSjGjvK0e67gtHVg