You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I might add that I don't consider myself as European and not British, but as European and British. And English. And a South Londoner. And a variety of other identities.
It feels like a fairly normal thing. Lots of people identify strongly with their county as well as their country. So why not other scales of identity too?
Because of the Johnson et al version of "Take Back Control", meaning ultimately control to Westminster. Yes, Mayors are given packages of devolved money to spend, but they mostly don't get powers to raise their own money- it's a definite "Who's Daddy?" relationship. Similarly, repatriated powers have gone to Westminster, not Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast. Multiple overlapping loyalties seem to be a problem.
But returning to the intitial question, yes it ought to be possible to hold multiple identities. I grew up on the south coast of England, in a town that was the jumping point for the D Day landings. France is close, closer than (say) Yorkshire, and there's a shared history there. I spent seven years learning the French language. Part of my understanding of who I am is about living on the edge of a continent with a shared specific history, experience of religion, economics, climate and geography.
And no, being out of a specific bit of political arrangement doesn't negate that. But to make a point of pulling out of almost everything that pretty much all other nations are happy to be part of... it makes a difference, and not in a good way.
But apparently it's a delusion born of inferiority, and I am to be pitied.
Why, thanks guys.
I agree with much of your sentiment, but both Richard and LuckyGuy were, I think, using 'delusional', 'inferiority' and 'pity' to refer to Tim's visceral response to the passport experience, not the wider arguments.
That’s okay then! Cheers, I thought you were dismissing all remainers so it’s heartening to know it’s only me who’s really deserving of pity.
Personally, I’m saddened at how badly Brexit had gone. In some ways, it has gone worse than I imagined.
I didn’t fully predict the debauch of politics and public institutions (today’s report from Transparency International another sign of this). I actually also thought that any resultant deal would be slightly closer to the status quo ante; for example I thought we’d end up with something closer to a Swiss deal. Northern Ireland is worse than I thought, Scotland (marginally) better.
I’m astonished that nobody senior on the Brexit side has been able to construct a coherent vision and path for it.
Not May, not Johnson, not Cummings, not Rishi. Not Farage, Tice, not Hannan or Carswell. Not Rees-Mogg, Davis, or Raab. Not Sunak.
I can see *potential* opportunities from Brexit, or rather, maybe, opportunities that a Brexit would *need* to exploit in order to be successful.
It gives me no satisfaction to see the UK in such a state.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I was born with dual citizenship - just the pure luck of the birth lottery. I was raised in a time when joining the EEC (as the EU-to-be was back then) was viewed as a good thing. As I grew up the EU was just something that was there and I appreciated the ease of travel and the ease at which I could do work for companies in Paris, Frankfurt and Madrid.
Then Brexit happened and to my own surprise, I felt the loss far more keenly than I expected. But I was lucky enough to have that other passport.
My UK one expires this year. I may not bother renewing it.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
I've never got this argument.
Britons share strong linguistic, historical, geographic, cultural and institutional similarities that allow them to unite under one nationality.
I don't feel anything like the same affinities or ties with continental European countries and I think the equivalence is a false one.
The first is not true of Wales - or at least, not until within living memory - even if it is true of England, Lowland Scotland and Northern Ireland.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
Driver is an idiot.
I’m not sure what a “normal” person is, but the idea that travelling and working in Europe makes you abnormal, and, by extension, not worthy of consideration, is utterly cretinous.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I could lie and say I have a German mother and Italian father or something but no, nothing as neat as that. Why do some Scots feel British and others not? Just something I’ve grown up with. Family holidays, French exchanges, then friends, colleagues, a job involving a lot of EU law, a home in France. Just one of those things.
As for citizen of the world I realise my views on this are niche but I am not a fan of borders full stop. The more global governance the better.
I don’t see it as something to be pitied, let’s face it that’s just PB rhetoric, but certainly something to be acknowledged.
Ah, another normal person with "a home in France".
Personally, I’m saddened at how badly Brexit had gone. In some ways, it has gone worse than I imagined.
I didn’t fully predict the debauch of politics and public institutions (today’s report from Transparency International another sign of this). I actually also thought that any resultant deal would be slightly closer to the status quo ante; for example I thought we’d end up with something closer to a Swiss deal. Northern Ireland is worse than I thought, Scotland (marginally) better.
I’m astonished that nobody senior on the Brexit side has been able to construct a coherent vision and path for it.
Not May, not Johnson, not Cummings, not Rishi. Not Farage, Tice, not Hannan or Carswell. Not Rees-Mogg, Davis, or Raab. Not Sunak.
I can see *potential* opportunities from Brexit, or rather, maybe, opportunities that a Brexit would *need* to exploit in order to be successful.
It gives me no satisfaction to see the UK in such a state.
I can understand disappointed. But surprised? Look at that list of names again.
The only one who might have come up with a meaningful vision and path was Gove, and he had blotted his copybook with too many people already.
SNP politicians who oppose Holyrood’s controversial gender reform bill should resign from the party and stand as independents, an MP close to Nicola Sturgeon has said.
Alyn Smith, the MP for Stirling, said party colleagues were “obliged to defend the SNP position” on any proposal in the manifesto upon which they were elected.
Just as Ms Sturgeon does not appear to understand the implications of her own policy, she does not appear to have read her own party's manifesto, which did not contain any proposal for self-ID.
Personally, I’m saddened at how badly Brexit had gone. In some ways, it has gone worse than I imagined.
I didn’t fully predict the debauch of politics and public institutions (today’s report from Transparency International another sign of this). I actually also thought that any resultant deal would be slightly closer to the status quo ante; for example I thought we’d end up with something closer to a Swiss deal. Northern Ireland is worse than I thought, Scotland (marginally) better.
I’m astonished that nobody senior on the Brexit side has been able to construct a coherent vision and path for it.
Not May, not Johnson, not Cummings, not Rishi. Not Farage, Tice, not Hannan or Carswell. Not Rees-Mogg, Davis, or Raab. Not Sunak.
I can see *potential* opportunities from Brexit, or rather, maybe, opportunities that a Brexit would *need* to exploit in order to be successful.
It gives me no satisfaction to see the UK in such a state.
To be fair, that's a tangential result of Brexit. Europe's structures (being themselves incredibly debased) wouldn't have guaranteed higher standards in public life.
The link is that the criminals have surfed a Brexit wave to get to power, which might otherwise have been beyond them. But 'might' isn't the same as 'would.' If it hadn't been that Johnson,Raab, Patel, etc would have found another hobby horse.
I’m on strike tomorrow, feel conflicted about it. I’m interested to hear from anyone who feels strongly that the teacher strikes are a good or bad thing (that is if you don’t think it has been discussed to death already)
How do you expect the children to get you more money?
Better Christmas presents. I mean, primary teachers get Ferraris each festive season, or so I have heard.
Aka I’m not sure what you’re getting at!
They're the people you're hurting by going on strike, so presumably they're the people you expect to solve the dispute by giving you more money.
Ah, thanks for the reply and clarification. That's basically my conflict, especially as much of my work is with some of the more vulnerable kids in school.
However, I *think* I think that I'd do more harm to the kids by continuing to keep my head down in a system that is truly, truly broken.
Problem is, I don't think sorting out pay (important thought it is) will fix the system on its own.
Right, I think the last point is key. The trouble with it is that these strikes - like pretty much every strike as long as I can remember - will only end with more money.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
I'd say we're all tribal, we just choose different tribes. We can train ourselves out of this tribal identity ( maybe c.f. May's 'citizens of nowhere' though I suspect they are still members of some tribe or other) but it's not a natural thing.
On a (very) personal level I'd agree with Tim and Richard's no borders thing, but it ranks alongside anarchosyndicalism for me as a 'nice to have, not very realistic'.
Oops. Edited to remove chaff that I'd drafted then thought better of.
Personally I have a primary identity (Scottish) which for better or worse I don't feel I have to think about too much and secondary identities which come and go, and which I sometimes exert choice over - eg I quite like feeling I'm now a Glaswegian, while the 2014 referendum and its aftermath burnt out my remaining connection to Britishness. To me primary identity is a bit like family, something you're stuck with for good or ill.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
I've never got this argument.
Britons share strong linguistic, historical, geographic, cultural and institutional similarities that allow them to unite under one nationality.
I don't feel anything like the same affinities or ties with continental European countries and I think the equivalence is a false one.
The first is not true of Wales - or at least, not until within living memory - even if it is true of England, Lowland Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Quite. And the sort of person who is threatened by the sight or hearing, nay the very existence, of Cymraeg or Gaidhlig or Scots - note, *not* the same language as English, but a sister one - is very often the sort of person who voted for Brexit, and so on.
Personally, I’m saddened at how badly Brexit had gone. In some ways, it has gone worse than I imagined.
I didn’t fully predict the debauch of politics and public institutions (today’s report from Transparency International another sign of this). I actually also thought that any resultant deal would be slightly closer to the status quo ante; for example I thought we’d end up with something closer to a Swiss deal. Northern Ireland is worse than I thought, Scotland (marginally) better.
I’m astonished that nobody senior on the Brexit side has been able to construct a coherent vision and path for it.
Not May, not Johnson, not Cummings, not Rishi. Not Farage, Tice, not Hannan or Carswell. Not Rees-Mogg, Davis, or Raab. Not Sunak.
I can see *potential* opportunities from Brexit, or rather, maybe, opportunities that a Brexit would *need* to exploit in order to be successful.
It gives me no satisfaction to see the UK in such a state.
To be fair, that's a tangential result of Brexit. Europe's structures (being themselves incredibly debased) wouldn't have guaranteed higher standards in public life.
The link is that the criminals have surfed a Brexit wave to get to power, which might otherwise have been beyond them. But 'might' isn't the same as 'would.' If it hadn't been that Johnson,Raab, Patel, etc would have found another hobby horse.
Completely disagree.
The malign deceit inherent in Brexit (Johnson especially, but not just him) has contaminated the entire body politic.
It didn’t have to be this way, but it is a direct outcome of the way Brexit was sold, led, and delivered.
Pointing at EU (or European) structures is to set up a false analogy. Britain traditionally had stronger and better institutions than many/most of its neighbours.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I could lie and say I have a German mother and Italian father or something but no, nothing as neat as that. Why do some Scots feel British and others not? Just something I’ve grown up with. Family holidays, French exchanges, then friends, colleagues, a job involving a lot of EU law, a home in France. Just one of those things.
As for citizen of the world I realise my views on this are niche but I am not a fan of borders full stop. The more global governance the better.
I don’t see it as something to be pitied, let’s face it that’s just PB rhetoric, but certainly something to be acknowledged.
Ah, another normal person with "a home in France".
So what do you think of normal persons who have "a home in Wales", or "a home in Cornwall", or ...?
If the Eurosceptic side had been honest, and not peddling snake-oil for originally plutocratic reasons, it might have said something like this : we object to the constitutional implications of the european union, but we know that burning all our bridges would be a disastrous risk, both for our economy and national cohesion. We therefore propose a vote on staying in the single market at all costs, but withdrawing from the European Union's structures.
Ofcourse they never would have done this, and for two reasons ; because it would have negated the original plutocratic, and de-regulatory, reasons that the Brexit project became so politically advanced in the 1990's in the first place ; and secondly, an argument on abstruse constitutions could never be won compared to a visceral one on immigration. Now many of the original Brexiteers have the worst of both worlds ; the Singapore project can't be advanced too far, as Guy Hands said today, because there's no public support for it, and secondly immigration is now actually higher than before, but from outside the EU.
Only the relatively small number of Brexiters, like Richard Tyndall, who were more honestly only interested in the constitutional question, are happy.
We'll be back in the single market at some point, for a less palatable reason that Labour will eventually quietly assimilate, but never explicitly mention ; the populist far right is always susceptible to a <<fewer non-europeans, better economy>> argument.
I’m on strike tomorrow, feel conflicted about it. I’m interested to hear from anyone who feels strongly that the teacher strikes are a good or bad thing (that is if you don’t think it has been discussed to death already)
How do you expect the children to get you more money?
Better Christmas presents. I mean, primary teachers get Ferraris each festive season, or so I have heard.
Aka I’m not sure what you’re getting at!
They're the people you're hurting by going on strike, so presumably they're the people you expect to solve the dispute by giving you more money.
Ah, thanks for the reply and clarification. That's basically my conflict, especially as much of my work is with some of the more vulnerable kids in school.
However, I *think* I think that I'd do more harm to the kids by continuing to keep my head down in a system that is truly, truly broken.
Problem is, I don't think sorting out pay (important thought it is) will fix the system on its own.
Right, I think the last point is key. The trouble with it is that these strikes - like pretty much every strike as long as I can remember - will only end with more money.
Earlier you said it wasn't about getting more money but to get rid of the govt. Make up your mind.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
I've never got this argument.
Britons share strong linguistic, historical, geographic, cultural and institutional similarities that allow them to unite under one nationality.
I don't feel anything like the same affinities or ties with continental European countries and I think the equivalence is a false one.
"one nationality"
"British"
Not exactly a complete or accurate picture of the UK of GB and NI.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
I am in favour of breaking up the UK as well so that doesn't apply to me. In my view - though I know many disagree with me - artificial administrative constructs which cross cultural and linguistic boundaries are not a sustainable nor desirable means of governance.
Personally, I’m saddened at how badly Brexit had gone. In some ways, it has gone worse than I imagined.
I didn’t fully predict the debauch of politics and public institutions (today’s report from Transparency International another sign of this). I actually also thought that any resultant deal would be slightly closer to the status quo ante; for example I thought we’d end up with something closer to a Swiss deal. Northern Ireland is worse than I thought, Scotland (marginally) better.
I’m astonished that nobody senior on the Brexit side has been able to construct a coherent vision and path for it.
Not May, not Johnson, not Cummings, not Rishi. Not Farage, Tice, not Hannan or Carswell. Not Rees-Mogg, Davis, or Raab. Not Sunak.
I can see *potential* opportunities from Brexit, or rather, maybe, opportunities that a Brexit would *need* to exploit in order to be successful.
It gives me no satisfaction to see the UK in such a state.
To be fair, that's a tangential result of Brexit. Europe's structures (being themselves incredibly debased) wouldn't have guaranteed higher standards in public life.
The link is that the criminals have surfed a Brexit wave to get to power, which might otherwise have been beyond them. But 'might' isn't the same as 'would.' If it hadn't been that Johnson,Raab, Patel, etc would have found another hobby horse.
Completely disagree.
The malign deceit inherent in Brexit (Johnson especially, but not just him) has contaminated the entire body politic.
It didn’t have to be this way, but it is a direct outcome of the way Brexit was sold, led, and delivered.
Pointing at EU (or European) structures is to set up a false analogy. Britain traditionally had stronger and better institutions than many/most of its neighbours.
Yes, but my point is that's a cause of it, not a symptom of it. They would still have been there and causing trouble even if we were still in the EU.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
I've never got this argument.
Britons share strong linguistic, historical, geographic, cultural and institutional similarities that allow them to unite under one nationality.
I don't feel anything like the same affinities or ties with continental European countries and I think the equivalence is a false one.
The first is not true of Wales - or at least, not until within living memory - even if it is true of England, Lowland Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Personally, I’m saddened at how badly Brexit had gone. In some ways, it has gone worse than I imagined.
I didn’t fully predict the debauch of politics and public institutions (today’s report from Transparency International another sign of this). I actually also thought that any resultant deal would be slightly closer to the status quo ante; for example I thought we’d end up with something closer to a Swiss deal. Northern Ireland is worse than I thought, Scotland (marginally) better.
I’m astonished that nobody senior on the Brexit side has been able to construct a coherent vision and path for it.
Not May, not Johnson, not Cummings, not Rishi. Not Farage, Tice, not Hannan or Carswell. Not Rees-Mogg, Davis, or Raab. Not Sunak.
I can see *potential* opportunities from Brexit, or rather, maybe, opportunities that a Brexit would *need* to exploit in order to be successful.
It gives me no satisfaction to see the UK in such a state.
To be fair, that's a tangential result of Brexit. Europe's structures (being themselves incredibly debased) wouldn't have guaranteed higher standards in public life.
The link is that the criminals have surfed a Brexit wave to get to power, which might otherwise have been beyond them. But 'might' isn't the same as 'would.' If it hadn't been that Johnson,Raab, Patel, etc would have found another hobby horse.
Completely disagree.
The malign deceit inherent in Brexit (Johnson especially, but not just him) has contaminated the entire body politic.
It didn’t have to be this way, but it is a direct outcome of the way Brexit was sold, led, and delivered.
Pointing at EU (or European) structures is to set up a false analogy. Britain traditionally had stronger and better institutions than many/most of its neighbours.
Yes, but my point is that's a cause of it, not a symptom of it. They would still have been there and causing trouble even if we were still in the EU.
No they wouldn’t.
Johnson and Brexit are to some extent inseparable, at least on our timeline.
Johnson = Brexit = Johnson = corruption and worse.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
I've never got this argument.
Britons share strong linguistic, historical, geographic, cultural and institutional similarities that allow them to unite under one nationality.
I don't feel anything like the same affinities or ties with continental European countries and I think the equivalence is a false one.
Linguistic is the huge one here, of course. Without a common language, a demos is very difficult if not impossible to create. And no demos, no democracy, naturally.
Also, insofar as there were historical, geographic and cultural - and maybe institutional - similarities with the rest of the EU, these were diluted not strengthened by eastwards expansion.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
I've never got this argument.
Britons share strong linguistic, historical, geographic, cultural and institutional similarities that allow them to unite under one nationality.
I don't feel anything like the same affinities or ties with continental European countries and I think the equivalence is a false one.
"one nationality"
"British"
Not exactly a complete or accurate picture of the UK of GB and NI.
The British Social Attitudes Survey has decades of data showing that you are right and Casino is wrong.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I could lie and say I have a German mother and Italian father or something but no, nothing as neat as that. Why do some Scots feel British and others not? Just something I’ve grown up with. Family holidays, French exchanges, then friends, colleagues, a job involving a lot of EU law, a home in France. Just one of those things.
As for citizen of the world I realise my views on this are niche but I am not a fan of borders full stop. The more global governance the better.
I don’t see it as something to be pitied, let’s face it that’s just PB rhetoric, but certainly something to be acknowledged.
Ah, another normal person with "a home in France".
There are lots of normal people with houses, flats, time shares in France or Spain or Portugal, etc and others who wanted to tour in their motorhomes or just wanted to take their dog with them on holiday. Doing this is normal and not special but they have been shafted.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
The progress to 'Europe is my country' was of course vehemently denied by remainers generally, even though FoM, Euro, ECB, Potemkin parliament and 'ever closer union' made it obvious that TimS was correct.
Brexiteers were derided for thinking such thoughts. Despite all the ghastly chaos it remains by miles the most significant issue in the debate and why voting Brexit was, sadly, the less bad of two bad options.
It remains obvious that most UK people, given a choice, want a single market in goods and services and a common travel area but are absolutely opposed to political union.
And of course with the recent Franco-German proposals for making tax and Foreign/Security policy QMV, they are continuing that project to this day.
George Trefgarne, longtime Tory finance journo and investor guy, on Twitter:
1. When you meet Labour business team the first thing which is striking relative to the Conservatives is that it is orderly, well organised, well briefed and very focused on stimulating investment in the UK by being business friendly, stable and predictable
2. By contrast, Conservative meetings are a shambles. Nobody in charge. Diary chaos. Blather. Plus not really focused on business at all. There are some exceptions but not many.
3. We may be in a situation where investor sentiment towards the UK might actually strengthen if there was a Labour Government. The pound might rise.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
Driver is an idiot.
I’m not sure what a “normal” person is, but the idea that travelling and working in Europe makes you abnormal, and, by extension, not worthy of consideration, is utterly cretinous.
A normal person is someone to whom the idea of being able to afford a house in France - presumably, from the context, in addition to one in the UK - and being able to afford to travel there frequently is beyond their wildest dreams, needing a lottery win to be possible.
Ditto picking up sticks and moving from New Zealand to the UK and then to New York.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
I've never got this argument.
Britons share strong linguistic, historical, geographic, cultural and institutional similarities that allow them to unite under one nationality.
I don't feel anything like the same affinities or ties with continental European countries and I think the equivalence is a false one.
"one nationality"
"British"
Not exactly a complete or accurate picture of the UK of GB and NI.
The British Social Attitudes Survey has decades of data showing that you are right and Casino is wrong.
George Trefgarne, longtime Tory finance journo and investor guy, on Twitter:
1. When you meet Labour business team the first thing which is striking relative to the Conservatives is that it is orderly, well organised, well briefed and very focused on stimulating investment in the UK by being business friendly, stable and predictable
2. By contrast, Conservative meetings are a shambles. Nobody in charge. Diary chaos. Blather. Plus not really focused on business at all. There are some exceptions but not many.
3. We may be in a situation where investor sentiment towards the UK might actually strengthen if there was a Labour Government. The pound might rise.
I had honestly got to the point where I thought that was a given.
Labour leads by 10% in the Blue Wall. In 2019, Labour came THIRD in these seats.
Blue Wall Voting Intention (28-29 Jan.):
Labour 42% (+2) Conservative 32% (+2) Liberal Democrat 19% (-2) Reform UK 4% (-2) Green 4% (+1) Other 0% (–)
Changes +/- 11 Jan.
Anyone have the original 2019 scores do we can see movement from then? The Con-LD swing is going to very important.
It's quite tricky in some of the Blue Wall seats. If the result last time was something like Con 40 LD 31 Lab 25, it's likely that Labour is now ahead if you go by personal preference (which is what polls mostly measure). But you can guarantee that in that sort of seats, both LDs and Lab will go hard on "Only we can win here", and the Tories could win there as a result.
The Blue Wall polling, with change compared to GE 2019 % share for those 40 constituencies taken from the R&W report, is as follows:
Labour 42% (+21%) Con 32% (-18%) LD 19% (-8%)
I read the implications of this somewhat differently to you Nick. I don't think that there are that many seats in the list where Labour and the LDs will end up battling it out to challenge the Conservatives AND where the LDs efforts will effectively stymie Labour and rescue a Conservative MP. I think that tactical voting considerations will outweigh any such effect - it'll be fairly obvious which party is the main challenger in each seat. The Conservatives should fear a repeat of 1997, when this led to them losing many more seats than a national uniform swing would imply. The high combined Lab and LD vote (61%) means that the potential for effective tactical voting is very high.
The list of 40 Blue Wall seats, all in the South, is:
Bournemouth East Chelsea and Fulham Cheltenham Chingford and Woodford Green Chippenham Chipping Barnet Cities Of London and Westminster Colchester Esher and Walton Filton and Bradley Stoke Finchley and Golders Green Guildford Harrow East Hendon Henley Hitchin and Harpenden Lewes Milton Keynes North Milton Keynes South Mole Valley Reading West Romsey and Southampton North South Cambridgeshire South East Cambridgeshire South West Surrey St Ives Sutton and Cheam Taunton Deane Thornbury and Yate Totnes Truro and Falmouth Tunbridge Wells Uxbridge and South Ruislip Wantage Watford Wells West Dorset Wimbledon Winchester Woking Wokingham Wycombe
From 1997-2010 Labour and the LDs won Winchester, Wells, Watford, Truro, Thornbury and Yate, Taunton, Sutton and Cheam, St Ives, Romsey, Reading West, both Milton Keynes seats, Lewes,Hendon, Harrow East, Guildford, Finchley, Colchester and Cheltenham at least once from that list.
So I wouldn't call all of those seats blue wall, more lean Tory marginals
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
Driver is an idiot.
I’m not sure what a “normal” person is, but the idea that travelling and working in Europe makes you abnormal, and, by extension, not worthy of consideration, is utterly cretinous.
A normal person is someone to whom the idea of being able to afford a house in France - presumably, from the context, in addition to one in the UK - and being able to afford to travel there frequently is beyond their wildest dreams, needing a lottery win to be possible.
Ditto picking up sticks and moving from New Zealand to the UK and then to New York.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
The progress to 'Europe is my country' was of course vehemently denied by remainers generally, even though FoM, Euro, ECB, Potemkin parliament and 'ever closer union' made it obvious that TimS was correct.
Brexiteers were derided for thinking such thoughts. Despite all the ghastly chaos it remains by miles the most significant issue in the debate and why voting Brexit was, sadly, the less bad of two bad options.
It remains obvious that most UK people, given a choice, want a single market in goods and services and a common travel area but are absolutely opposed to political union.
And of course with the recent Franco-German proposals for making tax and Foreign/Security policy QMV, they are continuing that project to this day.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
Strangely, though, the majority of normal people now agree with him. You should ponder that.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I could lie and say I have a German mother and Italian father or something but no, nothing as neat as that. Why do some Scots feel British and others not? Just something I’ve grown up with. Family holidays, French exchanges, then friends, colleagues, a job involving a lot of EU law, a home in France. Just one of those things.
As for citizen of the world I realise my views on this are niche but I am not a fan of borders full stop. The more global governance the better.
I don’t see it as something to be pitied, let’s face it that’s just PB rhetoric, but certainly something to be acknowledged.
Ah, another normal person with "a home in France".
So what do you think of normal persons who have "a home in Wales", or "a home in Cornwall", or ...?
I know a few people like that, but that's their only home.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
Driver is an idiot.
I’m not sure what a “normal” person is, but the idea that travelling and working in Europe makes you abnormal, and, by extension, not worthy of consideration, is utterly cretinous.
A normal person is someone to whom the idea of being able to afford a house in France - presumably, from the context, in addition to one in the UK - and being able to afford to travel there frequently is beyond their wildest dreams, needing a lottery win to be possible.
Ditto picking up sticks and moving from New Zealand to the UK and then to New York.
Says who? Sounds like the politics of envy to me.
Family, too, to visit and stay with and so on. Doesn't need a lot of money.
And lots more people have relatives - close relatives - in what used to be another part of Europe till the UK reprised the Times on 'Channel closed, continent cut off'.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
The progress to 'Europe is my country' was of course vehemently denied by remainers generally, even though FoM, Euro, ECB, Potemkin parliament and 'ever closer union' made it obvious that TimS was correct.
Brexiteers were derided for thinking such thoughts. Despite all the ghastly chaos it remains by miles the most significant issue in the debate and why voting Brexit was, sadly, the less bad of two bad options.
It remains obvious that most UK people, given a choice, want a single market in goods and services and a common travel area but are absolutely opposed to political union.
And of course with the recent Franco-German proposals for making tax and Foreign/Security policy QMV, they are continuing that project to this day.
Snore.
Funny how you are such a Europhile but don't actually care about what they are planning or doing. I suppose that is par for the course with you. Who cares how you are governed as long as you get your bread and circuses (or croissants and Eurovision)
I’m on strike tomorrow, feel conflicted about it. I’m interested to hear from anyone who feels strongly that the teacher strikes are a good or bad thing (that is if you don’t think it has been discussed to death already)
How do you expect the children to get you more money?
Better Christmas presents. I mean, primary teachers get Ferraris each festive season, or so I have heard.
Aka I’m not sure what you’re getting at!
They're the people you're hurting by going on strike, so presumably they're the people you expect to solve the dispute by giving you more money.
Ah, thanks for the reply and clarification. That's basically my conflict, especially as much of my work is with some of the more vulnerable kids in school.
However, I *think* I think that I'd do more harm to the kids by continuing to keep my head down in a system that is truly, truly broken.
Problem is, I don't think sorting out pay (important thought it is) will fix the system on its own.
Right, I think the last point is key. The trouble with it is that these strikes - like pretty much every strike as long as I can remember - will only end with more money.
Earlier you said it wasn't about getting more money but to get rid of the govt. Make up your mind.
Union leaders on the one hand and members on the other. Do keep up.
Personally, I’m saddened at how badly Brexit had gone. In some ways, it has gone worse than I imagined.
I didn’t fully predict the debauch of politics and public institutions (today’s report from Transparency International another sign of this). I actually also thought that any resultant deal would be slightly closer to the status quo ante; for example I thought we’d end up with something closer to a Swiss deal. Northern Ireland is worse than I thought, Scotland (marginally) better.
I’m astonished that nobody senior on the Brexit side has been able to construct a coherent vision and path for it.
Not May, not Johnson, not Cummings, not Rishi. Not Farage, Tice, not Hannan or Carswell. Not Rees-Mogg, Davis, or Raab. Not Sunak.
I can see *potential* opportunities from Brexit, or rather, maybe, opportunities that a Brexit would *need* to exploit in order to be successful.
It gives me no satisfaction to see the UK in such a state.
To be fair, that's a tangential result of Brexit. Europe's structures (being themselves incredibly debased) wouldn't have guaranteed higher standards in public life.
The link is that the criminals have surfed a Brexit wave to get to power, which might otherwise have been beyond them. But 'might' isn't the same as 'would.' If it hadn't been that Johnson,Raab, Patel, etc would have found another hobby horse.
Completely disagree.
The malign deceit inherent in Brexit (Johnson especially, but not just him) has contaminated the entire body politic.
It didn’t have to be this way, but it is a direct outcome of the way Brexit was sold, led, and delivered.
Pointing at EU (or European) structures is to set up a false analogy. Britain traditionally had stronger and better institutions than many/most of its neighbours.
Yes, but my point is that's a cause of it, not a symptom of it. They would still have been there and causing trouble even if we were still in the EU.
No they wouldn’t.
Johnson and Brexit are to some extent inseparable, at least on our timeline.
Johnson = Brexit = Johnson = corruption and worse.
OK, suppose 2016 had gone the other way, and BoJo had been rewarded for having a good referendum. He'd presumably have been given a big job. But who else would be in the Cabinet- both from the current team and those who were fired into the heat of the Sun between 2016 and 2019?
(The other thing 2016 really brought into play was the "victory now, screw the future" mindset. It's a stupid thing for a normal election campaign to make stupid promises, because they will be blamed if they win and can't deliver them. See Nick Clegg. For a referendum campaign, who will melt away like snow in spring after the vote, it's much easier. Part of BoJo's triumph and disaster was running 2019 like 2016. It gets you the win, but stores up a world of pain.)
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
Driver is an idiot.
I’m not sure what a “normal” person is, but the idea that travelling and working in Europe makes you abnormal, and, by extension, not worthy of consideration, is utterly cretinous.
A normal person is someone to whom the idea of being able to afford a house in France - presumably, from the context, in addition to one in the UK - and being able to afford to travel there frequently is beyond their wildest dreams, needing a lottery win to be possible.
Ditto picking up sticks and moving from New Zealand to the UK and then to New York.
Says who? Sounds like the politics of envy to me.
Family, too, to visit and stay with and so on. Doesn't need a lot of money.
And lots more people have relatives - close relatives - in what used to be another part of Europe till the UK reprised the Times on 'Channel closed, continent cut off'.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I could lie and say I have a German mother and Italian father or something but no, nothing as neat as that. Why do some Scots feel British and others not? Just something I’ve grown up with. Family holidays, French exchanges, then friends, colleagues, a job involving a lot of EU law, a home in France. Just one of those things.
As for citizen of the world I realise my views on this are niche but I am not a fan of borders full stop. The more global governance the better.
I don’t see it as something to be pitied, let’s face it that’s just PB rhetoric, but certainly something to be acknowledged.
Ah, another normal person with "a home in France".
There are lots of normal people with houses, flats, time shares in France or Spain or Portugal, etc and others who wanted to tour in their motorhomes or just wanted to take their dog with them on holiday. Doing this is normal and not special but they have been shafted.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
I've never got this argument.
Britons share strong linguistic, historical, geographic, cultural and institutional similarities that allow them to unite under one nationality.
I don't feel anything like the same affinities or ties with continental European countries and I think the equivalence is a false one.
"one nationality"
"British"
Not exactly a complete or accurate picture of the UK of GB and NI.
PS "Institutional similarities". Just try asking some C of E person what they think of Presbyterianism outwith an Established church, or some English lawyers what they think of Scots law.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
Driver is an idiot.
I’m not sure what a “normal” person is, but the idea that travelling and working in Europe makes you abnormal, and, by extension, not worthy of consideration, is utterly cretinous.
A normal person is someone to whom the idea of being able to afford a house in France - presumably, from the context, in addition to one in the UK - and being able to afford to travel there frequently is beyond their wildest dreams, needing a lottery win to be possible.
Ditto picking up sticks and moving from New Zealand to the UK and then to New York.
Says who? Sounds like the politics of envy to me.
Family, too, to visit and stay with and so on. Doesn't need a lot of money.
And lots more people have relatives - close relatives - in what used to be another part of Europe till the UK reprised the Times on 'Channel closed, continent cut off'.
That's even more hurtful.
I doubt he has ever left Scunthorpe.
Too difficult buying tickets online. The net nanny will insist on kicking in.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
Driver is an idiot.
I’m not sure what a “normal” person is, but the idea that travelling and working in Europe makes you abnormal, and, by extension, not worthy of consideration, is utterly cretinous.
A normal person is someone to whom the idea of being able to afford a house in France - presumably, from the context, in addition to one in the UK - and being able to afford to travel there frequently is beyond their wildest dreams, needing a lottery win to be possible.
Ditto picking up sticks and moving from New Zealand to the UK and then to New York.
Says who? Sounds like the politics of envy to me.
Family, too, to visit and stay with and so on. Doesn't need a lot of money.
And lots more people have relatives - close relatives - in what used to be another part of Europe till the UK reprised the Times on 'Channel closed, continent cut off'.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
The progress to 'Europe is my country' was of course vehemently denied by remainers generally, even though FoM, Euro, ECB, Potemkin parliament and 'ever closer union' made it obvious that TimS was correct.
Brexiteers were derided for thinking such thoughts. Despite all the ghastly chaos it remains by miles the most significant issue in the debate and why voting Brexit was, sadly, the less bad of two bad options.
It remains obvious that most UK people, given a choice, want a single market in goods and services and a common travel area but are absolutely opposed to political union.
And of course with the recent Franco-German proposals for making tax and Foreign/Security policy QMV, they are continuing that project to this day.
Snore.
Funny how you are such a Europhile but don't actually care about what they are planning or doing. I suppose that is par for the course with you. Who cares how you are governed as long as you get your bread and circuses (or croissants and Eurovision)
I do care.
Or, at least, I read the press release from the Elysee.
I just don’t run to the same conclusions as you do.
By the way, did you ever read Perry Anderson’s two part essay in the LRB on Europe? Skeptical, but properly informed, in my view. You‘d like it.
SNP politicians who oppose Holyrood’s controversial gender reform bill should resign from the party and stand as independents, an MP close to Nicola Sturgeon has said.
Alyn Smith, the MP for Stirling, said party colleagues were “obliged to defend the SNP position” on any proposal in the manifesto upon which they were elected.
The manifesto doesn't include putting rapists in Womens' prisons though
I don't know how this is not a bigger story, if the tories had done this it would be headlines for days.
Indeed. This story is all I am hearing about in every bar, cafe, restaurant, supermarket, shop, etc. No one is talking about the economy, corrupt govt or running out of money. No one cares if they freeze or starve, just how we must vote Tory to thwart the SNP and the trans pervs. It is totally amazing how the population is coming together on this....
Not!
It has actually made quite a few front page headlines, FWIW (which makes Nerys' comments seem a bit odd.). But the idea it's going to be a game changer for the Tories is just silly.
They do cling to the idea, though. The activists interviewed on PM last night were adamant that Labour was in "a shambles". When pressed for details, literally all they could come up with was Starmer's "confusion on the trans issue".
I heard that interview. They were utterly delusional. If those two are in any way representative, then I think there is a very real chance the Tories could be obliterated at the next election.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
Strangely, though, the majority of normal people now agree with him. You should ponder that.
I must be a normal person, since I haven’t, nor ever have had, a home on the continent or indeed any sort of second home at all. They’ve invented these things called hotels or self-catering flats which you can visit and only pay for the days you use; amazingly convenient, compared to all the taxes, maintenance, purchase costs and admin hassle of keeping another home empty for most of the time!
Nevertheless I share the sentiments about a European identity. For proof, go travel to the US, and come back feeling European.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
Driver is an idiot.
I’m not sure what a “normal” person is, but the idea that travelling and working in Europe makes you abnormal, and, by extension, not worthy of consideration, is utterly cretinous.
A normal person is someone to whom the idea of being able to afford a house in France - presumably, from the context, in addition to one in the UK - and being able to afford to travel there frequently is beyond their wildest dreams, needing a lottery win to be possible.
Ditto picking up sticks and moving from New Zealand to the UK and then to New York.
Says who? Sounds like the politics of envy to me.
Family, too, to visit and stay with and so on. Doesn't need a lot of money.
And lots more people have relatives - close relatives - in what used to be another part of Europe till the UK reprised the Times on 'Channel closed, continent cut off'.
That's even more hurtful.
I doubt he has ever left Scunthorpe.
Lol. I have family in an EU country.
I wouldn’t know them, though, right? They go to another school?
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
The progress to 'Europe is my country' was of course vehemently denied by remainers generally, even though FoM, Euro, ECB, Potemkin parliament and 'ever closer union' made it obvious that TimS was correct.
Brexiteers were derided for thinking such thoughts. Despite all the ghastly chaos it remains by miles the most significant issue in the debate and why voting Brexit was, sadly, the less bad of two bad options.
It remains obvious that most UK people, given a choice, want a single market in goods and services and a common travel area but are absolutely opposed to political union.
And of course with the recent Franco-German proposals for making tax and Foreign/Security policy QMV, they are continuing that project to this day.
Snore.
Funny how you are such a Europhile but don't actually care about what they are planning or doing. I suppose that is par for the course with you. Who cares how you are governed as long as you get your bread and circuses (or croissants and Eurovision)
If our own democracy were any sort of shining example of anything, then just perhaps you might have a little patch of solid ground on which to attempt an argument.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Sorry but it has definitely got worse since Brexit. And while eg Americans need a passport to travel to Europe, they can travel unfettered around their own continent, whereas we need to stand in line and get our passport stamped to visit a country 22 miles away. So it's not really a comparable situation.
...and we have to clear out after 90 days. Why did we do this to ourselves?
That’s possibly the most annoying thing of all. I was planning on retiring in France.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
Driver is an idiot.
I’m not sure what a “normal” person is, but the idea that travelling and working in Europe makes you abnormal, and, by extension, not worthy of consideration, is utterly cretinous.
A normal person is someone to whom the idea of being able to afford a house in France - presumably, from the context, in addition to one in the UK - and being able to afford to travel there frequently is beyond their wildest dreams, needing a lottery win to be possible.
Ditto picking up sticks and moving from New Zealand to the UK and then to New York.
Says who? Sounds like the politics of envy to me.
Family, too, to visit and stay with and so on. Doesn't need a lot of money.
And lots more people have relatives - close relatives - in what used to be another part of Europe till the UK reprised the Times on 'Channel closed, continent cut off'.
That's even more hurtful.
I doubt he has ever left Scunthorpe.
Too difficult buying tickets online. The net nanny will insist on kicking in.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
Driver is an idiot.
I’m not sure what a “normal” person is, but the idea that travelling and working in Europe makes you abnormal, and, by extension, not worthy of consideration, is utterly cretinous.
A normal person is someone to whom the idea of being able to afford a house in France - presumably, from the context, in addition to one in the UK - and being able to afford to travel there frequently is beyond their wildest dreams, needing a lottery win to be possible.
Ditto picking up sticks and moving from New Zealand to the UK and then to New York.
Says who? Sounds like the politics of envy to me.
Family, too, to visit and stay with and so on. Doesn't need a lot of money.
And lots more people have relatives - close relatives - in what used to be another part of Europe till the UK reprised the Times on 'Channel closed, continent cut off'.
That's even more hurtful.
I doubt he has ever left Scunthorpe.
Too difficult buying tickets online. The net nanny will insist on kicking in.
Don’t think Trainline.com accepts crypto yet.
Er, I was making a joke about the name Scunthorpe. The problem is similar to the one which residents in Penistone have, or had anyway for some years.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
The progress to 'Europe is my country' was of course vehemently denied by remainers generally, even though FoM, Euro, ECB, Potemkin parliament and 'ever closer union' made it obvious that TimS was correct.
Brexiteers were derided for thinking such thoughts. Despite all the ghastly chaos it remains by miles the most significant issue in the debate and why voting Brexit was, sadly, the less bad of two bad options.
It remains obvious that most UK people, given a choice, want a single market in goods and services and a common travel area but are absolutely opposed to political union.
And of course with the recent Franco-German proposals for making tax and Foreign/Security policy QMV, they are continuing that project to this day.
Snore.
Funny how you are such a Europhile but don't actually care about what they are planning or doing. I suppose that is par for the course with you. Who cares how you are governed as long as you get your bread and circuses (or croissants and Eurovision)
I do care.
Or, at least, I read the press release from the Elysee.
I just don’t run to the same conclusions as you do.
By the way, did you ever read Perry Anderson’s two part essay in the LRB on Europe? Skeptical, but properly informed, in my view. You‘d like it.
PS, I have never seen Eurovision.
There is no 'drawing of conclusions'. It is stated exactly as I said. They believe that there should be much closer political unity and are explicit, as part of that, about the desire to remove the veto on tax and Foreign/Security policy. They even outline the best way to do it using the passerelle clauses from the Lisbon treaty.
I could understand you saying you either agree or disagree with these plans. But denying them when they are right there in the statement seems perverse.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
It may be a good export earner but no-one really cares about the advertising industry do they?
I’m on strike tomorrow, feel conflicted about it. I’m interested to hear from anyone who feels strongly that the teacher strikes are a good or bad thing (that is if you don’t think it has been discussed to death already)
How do you expect the children to get you more money?
Better Christmas presents. I mean, primary teachers get Ferraris each festive season, or so I have heard.
Aka I’m not sure what you’re getting at!
They're the people you're hurting by going on strike, so presumably they're the people you expect to solve the dispute by giving you more money.
Ah, thanks for the reply and clarification. That's basically my conflict, especially as much of my work is with some of the more vulnerable kids in school.
However, I *think* I think that I'd do more harm to the kids by continuing to keep my head down in a system that is truly, truly broken.
Problem is, I don't think sorting out pay (important thought it is) will fix the system on its own.
Right, I think the last point is key. The trouble with it is that these strikes - like pretty much every strike as long as I can remember - will only end with more money.
Earlier you said it wasn't about getting more money but to get rid of the govt. Make up your mind.
Union leaders on the one hand and members on the other. Do keep up.
Now you are telling lies because earlier we were specifically talking about both. Go and check the discussion. I suggest you keep up instead.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Sorry but it has definitely got worse since Brexit. And while eg Americans need a passport to travel to Europe, they can travel unfettered around their own continent, whereas we need to stand in line and get our passport stamped to visit a country 22 miles away. So it's not really a comparable situation.
...and we have to clear out after 90 days. Why did we do this to ourselves?
That’s possibly the most annoying thing of all. I was planning on retiring in France.
Can you do so by taking French citizenship?
Not easily without working there first. Which might be an option. France doesn’t do the old golden ticket type arrangements like some other countries.
Anyway after the disappointment of Brexit decided to double down on the opportunities afforded here in Blighty and planted a vineyard in Kent.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
Driver is an idiot.
I’m not sure what a “normal” person is, but the idea that travelling and working in Europe makes you abnormal, and, by extension, not worthy of consideration, is utterly cretinous.
A normal person is someone to whom the idea of being able to afford a house in France - presumably, from the context, in addition to one in the UK - and being able to afford to travel there frequently is beyond their wildest dreams, needing a lottery win to be possible.
Ditto picking up sticks and moving from New Zealand to the UK and then to New York.
Says who? Sounds like the politics of envy to me.
Family, too, to visit and stay with and so on. Doesn't need a lot of money.
And lots more people have relatives - close relatives - in what used to be another part of Europe till the UK reprised the Times on 'Channel closed, continent cut off'.
That's even more hurtful.
I doubt he has ever left Scunthorpe.
Too difficult buying tickets online. The net nanny will insist on kicking in.
Don’t think Trainline.com accepts crypto yet.
Er, the problems is similar to the one which residents in Penistone have, or had anyway.
I believe the poster’s actual name is S. Cunthorpe, so it wouldn’t matter where he moved to.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
The progress to 'Europe is my country' was of course vehemently denied by remainers generally, even though FoM, Euro, ECB, Potemkin parliament and 'ever closer union' made it obvious that TimS was correct.
Brexiteers were derided for thinking such thoughts. Despite all the ghastly chaos it remains by miles the most significant issue in the debate and why voting Brexit was, sadly, the less bad of two bad options.
It remains obvious that most UK people, given a choice, want a single market in goods and services and a common travel area but are absolutely opposed to political union.
And of course with the recent Franco-German proposals for making tax and Foreign/Security policy QMV, they are continuing that project to this day.
Snore.
Funny how you are such a Europhile but don't actually care about what they are planning or doing. I suppose that is par for the course with you. Who cares how you are governed as long as you get your bread and circuses (or croissants and Eurovision)
If our own democracy were any sort of shining example of anything, then just perhaps you might have a little patch of solid ground on which to attempt an argument.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
It may be a good export earner but no-one really cares about the advertising industry do they?
Well they should, if they want to pay for food and energy, ditto any other export industry.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I might add that I don't consider myself as European and not British, but as European and British. And English. And a South Londoner. And a variety of other identities.
It feels like a fairly normal thing. Lots of people identify strongly with their county as well as their country. So why not other scales of identity too?
Because of the Johnson et al version of "Take Back Control", meaning ultimately control to Westminster. Yes, Mayors are given packages of devolved money to spend, but they mostly don't get powers to raise their own money- it's a definite "Who's Daddy?" relationship. Similarly, repatriated powers have gone to Westminster, not Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast. Multiple overlapping loyalties seem to be a problem.
But returning to the intitial question, yes it ought to be possible to hold multiple identities. I grew up on the south coast of England, in a town that was the jumping point for the D Day landings. France is close, closer than (say) Yorkshire, and there's a shared history there. I spent seven years learning the French language. Part of my understanding of who I am is about living on the edge of a continent with a shared specific history, experience of religion, economics, climate and geography.
And no, being out of a specific bit of political arrangement doesn't negate that. But to make a point of pulling out of almost everything that pretty much all other nations are happy to be part of... it makes a difference, and not in a good way.
But apparently it's a delusion born of inferiority, and I am to be pitied.
Why, thanks guys.
I agree with much of your sentiment, but both Richard and LuckyGuy were, I think, using 'delusional', 'inferiority' and 'pity' to refer to Tim's visceral response to the passport experience, not the wider arguments.
That’s okay then! Cheers, I thought you were dismissing all remainers so it’s heartening to know it’s only me who’s really deserving of pity.
Sorry Tim! Didn't mean to imply that I agreed with their use of these terms - as I hope I made clear earlier, I am just as much a romantic about passports, just the other way (I love stamps, basically). I don't agree with your feelings about passport control, but I also don't pity them...
To be clear, I think 'pitying' is a really unpleasant sentiment in many cases, including in this one.
Personally, I’m saddened at how badly Brexit had gone. In some ways, it has gone worse than I imagined.
I didn’t fully predict the debauch of politics and public institutions (today’s report from Transparency International another sign of this). I actually also thought that any resultant deal would be slightly closer to the status quo ante; for example I thought we’d end up with something closer to a Swiss deal. Northern Ireland is worse than I thought, Scotland (marginally) better.
I’m astonished that nobody senior on the Brexit side has been able to construct a coherent vision and path for it.
Not May, not Johnson, not Cummings, not Rishi. Not Farage, Tice, not Hannan or Carswell. Not Rees-Mogg, Davis, or Raab. Not Sunak.
I can see *potential* opportunities from Brexit, or rather, maybe, opportunities that a Brexit would *need* to exploit in order to be successful.
It gives me no satisfaction to see the UK in such a state.
To be fair, that's a tangential result of Brexit. Europe's structures (being themselves incredibly debased) wouldn't have guaranteed higher standards in public life.
The link is that the criminals have surfed a Brexit wave to get to power, which might otherwise have been beyond them. But 'might' isn't the same as 'would.' If it hadn't been that Johnson,Raab, Patel, etc would have found another hobby horse.
Completely disagree.
The malign deceit inherent in Brexit (Johnson especially, but not just him) has contaminated the entire body politic.
It didn’t have to be this way, but it is a direct outcome of the way Brexit was sold, led, and delivered.
Pointing at EU (or European) structures is to set up a false analogy. Britain traditionally had stronger and better institutions than many/most of its neighbours.
Yes, but my point is that's a cause of it, not a symptom of it. They would still have been there and causing trouble even if we were still in the EU.
No they wouldn’t.
Johnson and Brexit are to some extent inseparable, at least on our timeline.
Johnson = Brexit = Johnson = corruption and worse.
But that's because he made it his cause.
If it hadn't been that, it would have been levelling up. Or education. Or zero carbon power generation.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
The progress to 'Europe is my country' was of course vehemently denied by remainers generally, even though FoM, Euro, ECB, Potemkin parliament and 'ever closer union' made it obvious that TimS was correct.
Brexiteers were derided for thinking such thoughts. Despite all the ghastly chaos it remains by miles the most significant issue in the debate and why voting Brexit was, sadly, the less bad of two bad options.
It remains obvious that most UK people, given a choice, want a single market in goods and services and a common travel area but are absolutely opposed to political union.
And of course with the recent Franco-German proposals for making tax and Foreign/Security policy QMV, they are continuing that project to this day.
Snore.
Funny how you are such a Europhile but don't actually care about what they are planning or doing. I suppose that is par for the course with you. Who cares how you are governed as long as you get your bread and circuses (or croissants and Eurovision)
I do care.
Or, at least, I read the press release from the Elysee.
I just don’t run to the same conclusions as you do.
By the way, did you ever read Perry Anderson’s two part essay in the LRB on Europe? Skeptical, but properly informed, in my view. You‘d like it.
PS, I have never seen Eurovision.
There is no 'drawing of conclusions'. It is stated exactly as I said. They believe that there should be much closer political unity and are explicit, as part of that, about the desire to remove the veto on tax and Foreign/Security policy. They even outline the best way to do it using the passerelle clauses from the Lisbon treaty.
I could understand you saying you either agree or disagree with these plans. But denying them when they are right there in the statement seems perverse.
You are exaggerating the import and impact. You are also avoiding the argument that Europe WITH Britain would have been less likely to go down to the road you are (in my opinion) shroud-waving about.
Wake me up when the Germans and French actually agree on tax rates, foreign policy, and, indeed, who and how to pay for defence.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
It may be a good export earner but no-one really cares about the advertising industry do they?
Well they should, if they want to pay for food and energy, ditto any other export industry.
I'm just saying it would be nice to have more focus on genuinely productive activity.
Not easily without working there first. Which might be an option. France doesn’t do the old golden ticket type arrangements like some other countries.
Anyway after the disappointment of Brexit decided to double down on the opportunities afforded here in Blighty and planted a vineyard in Kent.
There is a specific residents permit for those non EU nationals who wish to retire to France. There is an income requirement equivalent to the minimum wage but getting the visa costs a fraction of the equivalent for a foreigner coming to live in the UK.
Indeed there are a whole range of visa and work permits available which plenty of people have been taking advantage of. If you already have a property in France the minimum income requirement is reduced or waived as well. I have done a lot of work in France and other parts of Europe since Brexit and as long as you are sensible and get your paperwork sorted out in advance it really isn't a problem. The only country making it difficult to settle and work in is the UK.
Personally, I’m saddened at how badly Brexit had gone. In some ways, it has gone worse than I imagined.
I didn’t fully predict the debauch of politics and public institutions (today’s report from Transparency International another sign of this). I actually also thought that any resultant deal would be slightly closer to the status quo ante; for example I thought we’d end up with something closer to a Swiss deal. Northern Ireland is worse than I thought, Scotland (marginally) better.
I’m astonished that nobody senior on the Brexit side has been able to construct a coherent vision and path for it.
Not May, not Johnson, not Cummings, not Rishi. Not Farage, Tice, not Hannan or Carswell. Not Rees-Mogg, Davis, or Raab. Not Sunak.
I can see *potential* opportunities from Brexit, or rather, maybe, opportunities that a Brexit would *need* to exploit in order to be successful.
It gives me no satisfaction to see the UK in such a state.
To be fair, that's a tangential result of Brexit. Europe's structures (being themselves incredibly debased) wouldn't have guaranteed higher standards in public life.
The link is that the criminals have surfed a Brexit wave to get to power, which might otherwise have been beyond them. But 'might' isn't the same as 'would.' If it hadn't been that Johnson,Raab, Patel, etc would have found another hobby horse.
Completely disagree.
The malign deceit inherent in Brexit (Johnson especially, but not just him) has contaminated the entire body politic.
It didn’t have to be this way, but it is a direct outcome of the way Brexit was sold, led, and delivered.
Pointing at EU (or European) structures is to set up a false analogy. Britain traditionally had stronger and better institutions than many/most of its neighbours.
Yes, but my point is that's a cause of it, not a symptom of it. They would still have been there and causing trouble even if we were still in the EU.
No they wouldn’t.
Johnson and Brexit are to some extent inseparable, at least on our timeline.
Johnson = Brexit = Johnson = corruption and worse.
But that's because he made it his cause.
If it hadn't been that, it would have been levelling up. Or education. Or zero carbon power generation.
(Not that they're in noticeably better shape.)
No. Those other things don’t have the talismanic significance. Johnson was a gadfly until Brexit, an inconsequential “Minister for Fun”.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I could lie and say I have a German mother and Italian father or something but no, nothing as neat as that. Why do some Scots feel British and others not? Just something I’ve grown up with. Family holidays, French exchanges, then friends, colleagues, a job involving a lot of EU law, a home in France. Just one of those things.
As for citizen of the world I realise my views on this are niche but I am not a fan of borders full stop. The more global governance the better.
I don’t see it as something to be pitied, let’s face it that’s just PB rhetoric, but certainly something to be acknowledged.
Ah, another normal person with "a home in France".
So what do you think of normal persons who have "a home in Wales", or "a home in Cornwall", or ...?
I’d be interested to know how many people have second homes, which is I think what driver is er driving at. Half a million?
SNP politicians who oppose Holyrood’s controversial gender reform bill should resign from the party and stand as independents, an MP close to Nicola Sturgeon has said.
Alyn Smith, the MP for Stirling, said party colleagues were “obliged to defend the SNP position” on any proposal in the manifesto upon which they were elected.
Just as Ms Sturgeon does not appear to understand the implications of her own policy, she does not appear to have read her own party's manifesto, which did not contain any proposal for self-ID.
Unless there is a change at the top of the SNP, not just the leader, there is a danger that the MPs and MSPs that oppose gender reform will be deselected before the next elections.
I see others have chewed over the latest R&W Blue Wall polling. Again, it's a misnomer to assume the Blue Wall is simply or wholly Conservative vs LD. A number of seats in said wall are actually Con-Lab marginals.
It's also worth stating, contrary to the "wisdom" imparted by others, the Conservatives are doing worse in the Blue Wall than the Red Wall. The England swing in their UK poll was 18% and in the Blue Wall it's nearer 20% whereas in the Red Wall the swing is 17.5%.
This means the Conservatives are doing worse in their core seats (which they can afford to) than in their marginals but only marginally (sorry). Either way, we're down at between 240 and 280 on the list of Conservative seats which suggests (currently) a surviving Conservative Party of 80-120 seats.
That wouldn't be an extinction event (six seats didn't end the Liberals) but it would be the worst result for the Conservatives since 1997 and a feature of FPTP is a bad result for the Conservatives can be worse than a bad result for Labour.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Sorry but it has definitely got worse since Brexit. And while eg Americans need a passport to travel to Europe, they can travel unfettered around their own continent, whereas we need to stand in line and get our passport stamped to visit a country 22 miles away. So it's not really a comparable situation.
...and we have to clear out after 90 days. Why did we do this to ourselves?
That’s possibly the most annoying thing of all. I was planning on retiring in France.
"I was supposed to die in France. I never ever saw France!"
Personally, I’m saddened at how badly Brexit had gone. In some ways, it has gone worse than I imagined.
I didn’t fully predict the debauch of politics and public institutions (today’s report from Transparency International another sign of this). I actually also thought that any resultant deal would be slightly closer to the status quo ante; for example I thought we’d end up with something closer to a Swiss deal. Northern Ireland is worse than I thought, Scotland (marginally) better.
I’m astonished that nobody senior on the Brexit side has been able to construct a coherent vision and path for it.
Not May, not Johnson, not Cummings, not Rishi. Not Farage, Tice, not Hannan or Carswell. Not Rees-Mogg, Davis, or Raab. Not Sunak.
I can see *potential* opportunities from Brexit, or rather, maybe, opportunities that a Brexit would *need* to exploit in order to be successful.
It gives me no satisfaction to see the UK in such a state.
To be fair, that's a tangential result of Brexit. Europe's structures (being themselves incredibly debased) wouldn't have guaranteed higher standards in public life.
The link is that the criminals have surfed a Brexit wave to get to power, which might otherwise have been beyond them. But 'might' isn't the same as 'would.' If it hadn't been that Johnson,Raab, Patel, etc would have found another hobby horse.
Completely disagree.
The malign deceit inherent in Brexit (Johnson especially, but not just him) has contaminated the entire body politic.
It didn’t have to be this way, but it is a direct outcome of the way Brexit was sold, led, and delivered.
Pointing at EU (or European) structures is to set up a false analogy. Britain traditionally had stronger and better institutions than many/most of its neighbours.
Yes, but my point is that's a cause of it, not a symptom of it. They would still have been there and causing trouble even if we were still in the EU.
No they wouldn’t.
Johnson and Brexit are to some extent inseparable, at least on our timeline.
Johnson = Brexit = Johnson = corruption and worse.
But that's because he made it his cause.
If it hadn't been that, it would have been levelling up. Or education. Or zero carbon power generation.
(Not that they're in noticeably better shape.)
No. Those other things don’t have the talismanic significance. Johnson was a gadfly until Brexit, an inconsequential “Minister for Fun”.
Yes, I'm aware of that.
I am just saying that if it hadn't been this he would found some other cause to fuck up and pervert.
Brexit was perfect but it wasn't his only option.
So the debauch of politics is due to him and his allies, not to the causes they espouse. No matter how unwise.
Trump, Modi, Maduro and Netanyahu don't have Brexit as an excuse but they've managed just fine in debasing their countries' political systems. So would he have done.
I’m on strike tomorrow, feel conflicted about it. I’m interested to hear from anyone who feels strongly that the teacher strikes are a good or bad thing (that is if you don’t think it has been discussed to death already)
How do you expect the children to get you more money?
Better Christmas presents. I mean, primary teachers get Ferraris each festive season, or so I have heard.
Aka I’m not sure what you’re getting at!
They're the people you're hurting by going on strike, so presumably they're the people you expect to solve the dispute by giving you more money.
Ah, thanks for the reply and clarification. That's basically my conflict, especially as much of my work is with some of the more vulnerable kids in school.
However, I *think* I think that I'd do more harm to the kids by continuing to keep my head down in a system that is truly, truly broken.
Problem is, I don't think sorting out pay (important thought it is) will fix the system on its own.
Right, I think the last point is key. The trouble with it is that these strikes - like pretty much every strike as long as I can remember - will only end with more money.
Agreed, I think. Which is my frustration. Though I do like the messaging the NEU has been feeding me (copiously, I might add) since the strike was announced. Top line:
"Our schools need increased funding. No child deserves to be educated in an underfunded school. No parent wants their child being shortchanged. The government has decided that a child in 2023 is entitled to 9% less funding than a child in 2010."
I also think better pay with solve some parts of the problem, and not make the rest of it worse.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Like I said, this is a perfect dress rehearsal for PB discussions post Scottish Indy if ever a unionist dare speak.
Anyway I am now settling down to dinner in what is almost certainly not the 14th best restaurant in Europe or even in the freezing cold Danish answer to the Greenwich peninsula that is Nordhavn.
No it isn't. My emotions if a border were to be erected between England and Scotland wouldn't be anything like yours because I wouldn't be sobbing into my hanky about being 'made a foreigner'. My sense of who I am is a lot stronger than that.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
It may be a good export earner but no-one really cares about the advertising industry do they?
Well they should, if they want to pay for food and energy, ditto any other export industry.
I'm just saying it would be nice to have more focus on genuinely productive activity.
Well sadly, you came across as an idiot who dismisses whole sectors in which Britain retains a global reputation and a competitive advantage.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I could lie and say I have a German mother and Italian father or something but no, nothing as neat as that. Why do some Scots feel British and others not? Just something I’ve grown up with. Family holidays, French exchanges, then friends, colleagues, a job involving a lot of EU law, a home in France. Just one of those things.
As for citizen of the world I realise my views on this are niche but I am not a fan of borders full stop. The more global governance the better.
I don’t see it as something to be pitied, let’s face it that’s just PB rhetoric, but certainly something to be acknowledged.
Ah, another normal person with "a home in France".
There are lots of normal people with houses, flats, time shares in France or Spain or Portugal, etc and others who wanted to tour in their motorhomes or just wanted to take their dog with them on holiday. Doing this is normal and not special but they have been shafted.
Ah so to you rich is "normal". Right. Got it.
You don't have to be rich to take your dog on holiday to France. It is a real pain now. Plenty of people used to on French campsites. You don't have to be rich to have an apartment on the Costas. A friend of mine on retiring sold his bungalow and bought a motorhome to tour Europe. Brexit stopped him doing that and he was stuck on his son's drive instead. Plenty of really very ordinary people bought very modest properties in Spain, Portugal, Eastern Europe and France.
You really seem to have no clue. Have you actually been abroad because you seem to think only rich people can manage it and you seem very envious of those that do and want to stop them.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Like I said, this is a perfect dress rehearsal for PB discussions post Scottish Indy if ever a unionist dare speak.
Anyway I am now settling down to dinner in what is almost certainly not the 14th best restaurant in Europe or even in the freezing cold Danish answer to the Greenwich peninsula that is Nordhavn.
No it isn't. My emotions if a border were to be erected between England and Scotland wouldn't be anything like yours because I wouldn't be sobbing into my hanky about being 'made a foreigner'. My sense of who I am is a lot stronger than that.
Personally, I’m saddened at how badly Brexit had gone. In some ways, it has gone worse than I imagined.
I didn’t fully predict the debauch of politics and public institutions (today’s report from Transparency International another sign of this). I actually also thought that any resultant deal would be slightly closer to the status quo ante; for example I thought we’d end up with something closer to a Swiss deal. Northern Ireland is worse than I thought, Scotland (marginally) better.
I’m astonished that nobody senior on the Brexit side has been able to construct a coherent vision and path for it.
Not May, not Johnson, not Cummings, not Rishi. Not Farage, Tice, not Hannan or Carswell. Not Rees-Mogg, Davis, or Raab. Not Sunak.
I can see *potential* opportunities from Brexit, or rather, maybe, opportunities that a Brexit would *need* to exploit in order to be successful.
It gives me no satisfaction to see the UK in such a state.
To be fair, that's a tangential result of Brexit. Europe's structures (being themselves incredibly debased) wouldn't have guaranteed higher standards in public life.
The link is that the criminals have surfed a Brexit wave to get to power, which might otherwise have been beyond them. But 'might' isn't the same as 'would.' If it hadn't been that Johnson,Raab, Patel, etc would have found another hobby horse.
Completely disagree.
The malign deceit inherent in Brexit (Johnson especially, but not just him) has contaminated the entire body politic.
It didn’t have to be this way, but it is a direct outcome of the way Brexit was sold, led, and delivered.
Pointing at EU (or European) structures is to set up a false analogy. Britain traditionally had stronger and better institutions than many/most of its neighbours.
Yes, but my point is that's a cause of it, not a symptom of it. They would still have been there and causing trouble even if we were still in the EU.
No they wouldn’t.
Johnson and Brexit are to some extent inseparable, at least on our timeline.
Johnson = Brexit = Johnson = corruption and worse.
But that's because he made it his cause.
If it hadn't been that, it would have been levelling up. Or education. Or zero carbon power generation.
(Not that they're in noticeably better shape.)
No. Those other things don’t have the talismanic significance. Johnson was a gadfly until Brexit, an inconsequential “Minister for Fun”.
Yes, I'm aware of that.
I am just saying that if it hadn't been this he would found some other cause to fuck up and pervert.
Brexit was perfect but it wasn't his only option.
So the debauch of politics is due to him and his allies, not to the causes they espouse. No matter how unwise.
Trump, Modi, Maduro and Netanyahu don't have Brexit as an excuse but they've managed just fine in debasing their countries' political systems. So would he have done.
For every Modi there is a non-Modi. It was not pre-ordained for Britain. Brexit has been a cancer to the body politic.
By then they will almost certainly own property themselves given the age of first property ownership is 39 and be starting to look to retirement
HYUFD I am telling you as a young person, it's not going to happen.
I own a flat, I hate the Tories for what they have done to us. You are finished.
Not many young people own a flat though
Yes because of our failure of economic policy.
Housing crash now, fuck the elderly.
If there is a housing crash the young will be rogered big time, .
Exactly! The elderly with paid off mortgages will simply have less to pass on to their younger heirs. The young who have mortgages will be totally screwed!
Most people with mortgages will be screwed - including many landlords.
Most young people haven't got mortgages. Inheriting half as much isn't any kind of a problem if they were going to buy a house with it and houses have halved in value.
I'm with Horse. Bring on the housing market crash. (I don't share his attitude towards the elderly, though.)
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I could lie and say I have a German mother and Italian father or something but no, nothing as neat as that. Why do some Scots feel British and others not? Just something I’ve grown up with. Family holidays, French exchanges, then friends, colleagues, a job involving a lot of EU law, a home in France. Just one of those things.
As for citizen of the world I realise my views on this are niche but I am not a fan of borders full stop. The more global governance the better.
I don’t see it as something to be pitied, let’s face it that’s just PB rhetoric, but certainly something to be acknowledged.
Ah, another normal person with "a home in France".
So what do you think of normal persons who have "a home in Wales", or "a home in Cornwall", or ...?
I’d be interested to know how many people have second homes, which is I think what driver is er driving at. Half a million?
There’s almost that many private landlords renting out UK property, almost all of whom will own more than one home (a few with first homes abroad). That’s before you get to the folks with a second home elsewhere in the world.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
It may be a good export earner but no-one really cares about the advertising industry do they?
Well they should, if they want to pay for food and energy, ditto any other export industry.
I'm just saying it would be nice to have more focus on genuinely productive activity.
Well sadly, you came across as an idiot who dismisses whole sectors in which Britain retains a global reputation and a competitive advantage.
The oomph has gone out of it a bit though, from the golden age. TV adverts are very derivative now. Nothing like our Roger's work.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Like I said, this is a perfect dress rehearsal for PB discussions post Scottish Indy if ever a unionist dare speak.
Anyway I am now settling down to dinner in what is almost certainly not the 14th best restaurant in Europe or even in the freezing cold Danish answer to the Greenwich peninsula that is Nordhavn.
No it isn't. My emotions if a border were to be erected between England and Scotland wouldn't be anything like yours because I wouldn't be sobbing into my hanky about being 'made a foreigner'. My sense of who I am is a lot stronger than that.
Yes. Tinfoil hat wearers of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our brains!
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Like I said, this is a perfect dress rehearsal for PB discussions post Scottish Indy if ever a unionist dare speak.
Anyway I am now settling down to dinner in what is almost certainly not the 14th best restaurant in Europe or even in the freezing cold Danish answer to the Greenwich peninsula that is Nordhavn.
No it isn't. My emotions if a border were to be erected between England and Scotland wouldn't be anything like yours because I wouldn't be sobbing into my hanky about being 'made a foreigner'. My sense of who I am is a lot stronger than that.
Yes. Tinfoil hat wearers of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our brains!
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I could lie and say I have a German mother and Italian father or something but no, nothing as neat as that. Why do some Scots feel British and others not? Just something I’ve grown up with. Family holidays, French exchanges, then friends, colleagues, a job involving a lot of EU law, a home in France. Just one of those things.
As for citizen of the world I realise my views on this are niche but I am not a fan of borders full stop. The more global governance the better.
I don’t see it as something to be pitied, let’s face it that’s just PB rhetoric, but certainly something to be acknowledged.
Ah, another normal person with "a home in France".
There are lots of normal people with houses, flats, time shares in France or Spain or Portugal, etc and others who wanted to tour in their motorhomes or just wanted to take their dog with them on holiday. Doing this is normal and not special but they have been shafted.
Ah so to you rich is "normal". Right. Got it.
You don't have to be rich to take your dog on holiday to France. It is a real pain now. Plenty of people used to on French campsites. You don't have to be rich to have an apartment on the Costas. A friend of mine on retiring sold his bungalow and bought a motorhome to tour Europe. Brexit stopped him doing that and he was stuck on his son's drive instead. Plenty of really very ordinary people bought very modest properties in Spain, Portugal, Eastern Europe and France.
You really seem to have no clue. Have you actually been abroad because you seem to think only rich people can manage it and you seem very envious of those that do and want to stop them.
I’d suggest Driver is a troll; the only thing he is driving is us, to distraction.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
The progress to 'Europe is my country' was of course vehemently denied by remainers generally, even though FoM, Euro, ECB, Potemkin parliament and 'ever closer union' made it obvious that TimS was correct.
Brexiteers were derided for thinking such thoughts. Despite all the ghastly chaos it remains by miles the most significant issue in the debate and why voting Brexit was, sadly, the less bad of two bad options.
It remains obvious that most UK people, given a choice, want a single market in goods and services and a common travel area but are absolutely opposed to political union.
And of course with the recent Franco-German proposals for making tax and Foreign/Security policy QMV, they are continuing that project to this day.
Snore.
Funny how you are such a Europhile but don't actually care about what they are planning or doing. I suppose that is par for the course with you. Who cares how you are governed as long as you get your bread and circuses (or croissants and Eurovision)
I do care.
Or, at least, I read the press release from the Elysee.
I just don’t run to the same conclusions as you do.
By the way, did you ever read Perry Anderson’s two part essay in the LRB on Europe? Skeptical, but properly informed, in my view. You‘d like it.
PS, I have never seen Eurovision.
There is no 'drawing of conclusions'. It is stated exactly as I said. They believe that there should be much closer political unity and are explicit, as part of that, about the desire to remove the veto on tax and Foreign/Security policy. They even outline the best way to do it using the passerelle clauses from the Lisbon treaty.
I could understand you saying you either agree or disagree with these plans. But denying them when they are right there in the statement seems perverse.
You are exaggerating the import and impact. You are also avoiding the argument that Europe WITH Britain would have been less likely to go down to the road you are (in my opinion) shroud-waving about.
Wake me up when the Germans and French actually agree on tax rates, foreign policy, and, indeed, who and how to pay for defence.
I am reminded of Yes Prime Minster
Sir Richard Wharton: Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis. Sir Richard Wharton: In stage one we say nothing is going to happen. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it. Sir Richard Wharton: In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we *can* do. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.
The Europhile British have been past masters of this system when it comes to EU integration.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
The progress to 'Europe is my country' was of course vehemently denied by remainers generally, even though FoM, Euro, ECB, Potemkin parliament and 'ever closer union' made it obvious that TimS was correct.
Brexiteers were derided for thinking such thoughts. Despite all the ghastly chaos it remains by miles the most significant issue in the debate and why voting Brexit was, sadly, the less bad of two bad options.
It remains obvious that most UK people, given a choice, want a single market in goods and services and a common travel area but are absolutely opposed to political union.
And of course with the recent Franco-German proposals for making tax and Foreign/Security policy QMV, they are continuing that project to this day.
Snore.
Funny how you are such a Europhile but don't actually care about what they are planning or doing. I suppose that is par for the course with you. Who cares how you are governed as long as you get your bread and circuses (or croissants and Eurovision)
If our own democracy were any sort of shining example of anything, then just perhaps you might have a little patch of solid ground on which to attempt an argument.
At least it's ours though.
Is it? I dunno, sometimes feels like Zahawi's and his ilk at the moment.
Comments
I didn’t fully predict the debauch of politics and public institutions (today’s report from Transparency International another sign of this). I actually also thought that any resultant deal would be slightly closer to the status quo ante; for example I thought we’d end up with something closer to a Swiss deal. Northern Ireland is worse than I thought, Scotland (marginally) better.
I’m astonished that nobody senior on the Brexit side has been able to construct a coherent vision and path for it.
Not May, not Johnson, not Cummings, not Rishi. Not Farage, Tice, not Hannan or Carswell. Not Rees-Mogg, Davis, or Raab. Not Sunak.
I can see *potential* opportunities from Brexit, or rather, maybe, opportunities that a Brexit would *need* to exploit in order to be successful.
It gives me no satisfaction to see the UK in such a state.
Then Brexit happened and to my own surprise, I felt the loss far more keenly than I expected. But I was lucky enough to have that other passport.
My UK one expires this year. I may not bother renewing it.
I’m not sure what a “normal” person is, but the idea that travelling and working in Europe makes you abnormal, and, by extension, not worthy of consideration, is utterly cretinous.
The only one who might have come up with a meaningful vision and path was Gove, and he had blotted his copybook with too many people already.
He will tell them about his heroic dump at Waterloo and urge them to think again.
The link is that the criminals have surfed a Brexit wave to get to power, which might otherwise have been beyond them. But 'might' isn't the same as 'would.' If it hadn't been that Johnson,Raab, Patel, etc would have found another hobby horse.
The malign deceit inherent in Brexit (Johnson especially, but not just him) has contaminated the entire body politic.
It didn’t have to be this way, but it is a direct outcome of the way Brexit was sold, led, and delivered.
Pointing at EU (or European) structures is to set up a false analogy. Britain traditionally had stronger and better institutions than many/most of its neighbours.
Ofcourse they never would have done this, and for two reasons ; because it would have negated the original plutocratic, and de-regulatory, reasons that the Brexit project became so politically advanced in the 1990's in the first place ; and secondly, an argument on abstruse constitutions could never be won compared to a visceral one on immigration. Now many of the original Brexiteers have the worst of both worlds ; the Singapore project can't be advanced too far, as Guy Hands said today, because there's no public support for it, and secondly immigration is now actually higher than before, but from outside the EU.
Only the relatively small number of Brexiters, like Richard Tyndall, who were more honestly only interested in the constitutional question, are happy.
We'll be back in the single market at some point, for a less palatable reason that Labour will eventually quietly assimilate, but never explicitly mention ; the populist far right is always susceptible to a <<fewer non-europeans, better economy>> argument.
Oh, the arrogance of the BBC. Know your place plebs.
Loving the heckling of the mendacious Rees Mogg.
"British"
Not exactly a complete or accurate picture of the UK of GB and NI.
Johnson and Brexit are to some extent inseparable, at least on our timeline.
Johnson = Brexit = Johnson = corruption and worse.
Also, insofar as there were historical, geographic and cultural - and maybe institutional - similarities with the rest of the EU, these were diluted not strengthened by eastwards expansion.
1. When you meet Labour business team the first thing which is striking relative to the Conservatives is that it is orderly, well organised, well briefed and very focused on stimulating investment in the UK by being business friendly, stable and predictable
2. By contrast, Conservative meetings are a shambles. Nobody in charge. Diary chaos. Blather. Plus not really focused on business at all. There are some exceptions but not many.
3. We may be in a situation where investor sentiment towards the UK might actually strengthen if there was a Labour Government. The pound might rise.
Ditto picking up sticks and moving from New Zealand to the UK and then to New York.
Sounds like the politics of envy to me.
You should ponder that.
And lots more people have relatives - close relatives - in what used to be another part of Europe till the UK reprised the Times on 'Channel closed, continent cut off'.
That's even more hurtful.
(The other thing 2016 really brought into play was the "victory now, screw the future" mindset. It's a stupid thing for a normal election campaign to make stupid promises, because they will be blamed if they win and can't deliver them. See Nick Clegg. For a referendum campaign, who will melt away like snow in spring after the vote, it's much easier. Part of BoJo's triumph and disaster was running 2019 like 2016. It gets you the win, but stores up a world of pain.)
Or, at least, I read the press release from the Elysee.
I just don’t run to the same conclusions as you do.
By the way, did you ever read Perry Anderson’s two part essay in the LRB on Europe? Skeptical, but properly informed, in my view. You‘d like it.
PS, I have never seen Eurovision.
Nevertheless I share the sentiments about a European identity. For proof, go travel to the US, and come back feeling European.
They go to another school?
Cue mass road closures for his twenty car motorcade or whatever the fuck. Makes school pick-ups a nightmare.
Yes, am aware this makes me “not normal”.
I could understand you saying you either agree or disagree with these plans. But denying them when they are right there in the statement seems perverse.
Not easily without working there first. Which might be an option. France doesn’t do the old golden ticket type arrangements like some other countries.
Anyway after the disappointment of Brexit decided to double down on the opportunities afforded here in Blighty and planted a vineyard in Kent.
Rishi Sunak (CON): 37% (-5)
Keir Starmer (LAB): 37% (+3)
via @RedfieldWilton, 28-29 Jan
(Changes with 11 Jan)
To be clear, I think 'pitying' is a really unpleasant sentiment in many cases, including in this one.
If it hadn't been that, it would have been levelling up. Or education. Or zero carbon power generation.
(Not that they're in noticeably better shape.)
You are also avoiding the argument that Europe WITH Britain would have been less likely to go down to the road you are (in my opinion) shroud-waving about.
Wake me up when the Germans and French actually agree on tax rates, foreign policy, and, indeed, who and how to pay for defence.
Indeed there are a whole range of visa and work permits available which plenty of people have been taking advantage of. If you already have a property in France the minimum income requirement is reduced or waived as well. I have done a lot of work in France and other parts of Europe since Brexit and as long as you are sensible and get your paperwork sorted out in advance it really isn't a problem. The only country making it difficult to settle and work in is the UK.
I see others have chewed over the latest R&W Blue Wall polling. Again, it's a misnomer to assume the Blue Wall is simply or wholly Conservative vs LD. A number of seats in said wall are actually Con-Lab marginals.
It's also worth stating, contrary to the "wisdom" imparted by others, the Conservatives are doing worse in the Blue Wall than the Red Wall. The England swing in their UK poll was 18% and in the Blue Wall it's nearer 20% whereas in the Red Wall the swing is 17.5%.
This means the Conservatives are doing worse in their core seats (which they can afford to) than in their marginals but only marginally (sorry). Either way, we're down at between 240 and 280 on the list of Conservative seats which suggests (currently) a surviving Conservative Party of 80-120 seats.
That wouldn't be an extinction event (six seats didn't end the Liberals) but it would be the worst result for the Conservatives since 1997 and a feature of FPTP is a bad result for the Conservatives can be worse than a bad result for Labour.
I am just saying that if it hadn't been this he would found some other cause to fuck up and pervert.
Brexit was perfect but it wasn't his only option.
So the debauch of politics is due to him and his allies, not to the causes they espouse. No matter how unwise.
Trump, Modi, Maduro and Netanyahu don't have Brexit as an excuse but they've managed just fine in debasing their countries' political systems. So would he have done.
"Our schools need increased funding. No child deserves to be educated in an underfunded school. No parent wants their child being shortchanged. The government has decided that a child in 2023 is entitled to 9% less funding than a child in 2010."
I also think better pay with solve some parts of the problem, and not make the rest of it worse.
https://twitter.com/c8linberg/status/1620114010229313536?s=46&t=zQAClpO-Yg5xKa7jRAJ9tA
You really seem to have no clue. Have you actually been abroad because you seem to think only rich people can manage it and you seem very envious of those that do and want to stop them.
https://twitter.com/nocontextusa/status/1620517355267981312?s=46&t=4VXHiAXpi_CyWLmWUywltw
It was not pre-ordained for Britain.
Brexit has been a cancer to the body politic.
Can we talk about something pleasantly neutral like trains?
Most young people haven't got mortgages. Inheriting half as much isn't any kind of a problem if they were going to buy a house with it and houses have halved in value.
I'm with Horse. Bring on the housing market crash. (I don't share his attitude towards the elderly, though.)
Sir Richard Wharton: Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.
Sir Richard Wharton: In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
Sir Richard Wharton: In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we *can* do.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.
The Europhile British have been past masters of this system when it comes to EU integration.