Grocery price inflation reached a high 17.1 per cent this month, adding to the squeeze on households in the cost of living crisis.
Prices are rising fastest in markets such as milk, eggs and margarine, data from the market researcher Kantar showed. It said the rise in food costs would add a potential £811 to annual shopping bills.
The "Turnip King" was forced to shut his business down as Brexit shagged it. So we don't have enough turnips either.
As I noted on the last thread, Which now have food inflation at 21.6% for the cheap end stuff in supermarkets. Does depend on the supermarket, but as I recall the Ocado end showed much less inflation thanb the cheap supermarkets the last time they did a survey.
If you think about it, it looks less and less unexpected.
The super cheap stuff in the supermarkets was achieved by a combination of minimum quality, sweating the supplier, who in turn sweated the workforce.
There were some interesting revelations during COVID about labor conditions around Leicester, for example.
Since the pandemic, there has been a definite step change in bottom end employment, in many countries.
The local specialty fruit and veg places are piled high with produce. I asked, yesterday. They are all purchasing direct from various farms - there is apparently quite a good market in higher quality veg. Lots of farms going that way, lots of smaller purchasers.
Sure, it's not surprising - but the financial result is the same. And farm shops and yuppie community rabbit food shops (as opposed to food banks) are of no use at all to the poor person on the peripheral housing estate.
Note that, as with Europe including the UK, the fruit and veg follow the money.
This isn't farm shops - it's just one tier up from the "essential" ranges in the supermarkets. Think recreating the greengrocer. The one I go to recreates the greengrocer my mother used to use, in Summertown, Oxford, rather well.
Many of the supermarkets having been heading this way with their higher quality ranges.
Given the tension between quality and working conditions vs food cost, it was inevitable that something was going to have to give, in the end.
Summertown? A rather nice shopping street in a pretty upmarket inner suburb as I recall (friends live very close by)?
Oh, I don't disagree - but still the financial results are what count, especially with fewer workers in the fields as well.
It wasn't like that in the 80s. We had a scrap yard on the street corner, an abandoned factory site on the street and a building site opposite. The house, when we moved in had been converted into substandard HMO.
The place is fairly gentrified now. The greengrocer in question, there, went. Killed by supermarkets, of course.
The one I go to, in London, is actually a tuning up of the "ethnic" shops that are scattered about London. A number of people have realised that instead of just catering to their own community, they can get other people in, who are looking for quality.
There's an Iranian chap who is half way to a mini-supermarket, not far away.
EDIT: as the financial aspect - if you want non-crap veg, harvested by workers paid minimum wage+, and a bit of profit for the farmer, then there is a price to be paid. The previous prices for cheap food were a kind of lie.
Yes, North Oxford has changed - my friends moved there in the mid 80s. Noisy metal bashing factory by the canal, lots of derelict railway land, wild flowers. Now it's wall to wall commuter boxes. I was quite astonished by the changes when I visited for the first time in many years lately. Even the flower shop in a greenhouse on the main road (Banbury Road?) has become a posh-ish restaurant (nice food though).
You mean Gees? - I can just about remember the flower shop that came before that.
That's it. Very useful when visiting friends - look in en route from the railway station.
TLDR, yes it fallen behind the private sector, yes pensions are great, and while the govt has some wriggle room increases get baked into higher public spending going forward which will mean higher taxes/cuts elsewhere/ both.
"Whatever anyone may think or want I believe after today and what he has achieved on the renegotiation of the Irish protocol that @RishiSunak will more likely than not be the Prime Minister at the next General Election …"
As insights go, it wasn't as close as GardenWalker telling us that Sturgeon was about to resign 24 hours before we did.
Have we had confirmation of Harry and Megs yet?
I just can't see this myself, not so close after the Netflix 'Love Conquers All' documentary. It would make that look fake. If it was fake it follows they are cynical and therefore wouldn't split now, they'd manage it for release after a decent period had passed. The summer say. And if it wasn't fake, if it was real, there's no way things would have already gone pear. True romantic love isn't flaky like that. It lasts the course. You stay together until the kids have left home. Either way, logic says this one is not a goer.
This coming to you from the pundit who pronounced the Queen as looking 'fit and well' 48 hours before she died.
Utterly shocked to see that the left-wing Gary Lineker has been dodging taxes from his millions he milks from Licence Fee payers for years now. Truly shocked.
Almost as shocked as I was to find out the sun rose in the East this morning.
Gary is actually right there - the BBC told a whole set of people they were self employed and simply shouldn't have done.
In many cases the BBC have been presented with large tax bills to pay.
As I said earlier, self-employment has been considered the standard in the industry for decades. Jocks and presenters all self-employed contractors regardless of how many radio stations they worked for.
In this case the BBC set the contract. And the people who hate the people who like the BBC can't help but sneer and label them left-wing. Despite being wrong.
I've just saved this to use in my lectures, as an example of a misleading graphic.
Because the Y axis doesn't start at 0, or for some other reason?
I think there are times when restricting the y axis is fine, but it has to be in the context of a fairly decent amount of data. We know that inflation has been a lot lower than 8% in the not too distant past, so this is an entirely inappropriate presentation of data.
The DUP are a fxcking disgrace and clearly nothing bar a return to a hard border between NI and Ireland will satisfy them.
They fear the future, whatever it may bring, so spend their time just huddling together assuming that if they prevent anything at all that will be a good result.
The DUP is the political wing of the Free Presybterian Church of Ulster, and while it's true that they fear the future it's also true that they get off on fearing the future. They think they know what the future will bring, because they believe it's all written in the Book of Revelations. The principal factor in everything they say about the border or the Irish Sea is their belief that the Roman Catholic church is the Antichrist, that it owns both the RoI and the EU, and that it's hell-bent on coming to get them. They love "holding out" more than everything. Their whole mythos is based on it. They are far crazier than the IRA ever were. The IRA's mythos was kitsch in comparison.
I don't think a single newspaper has mentioned why it is that the DUP dislike the EU.
This view is about 30 years out of date. But, you know, some people just never move on....
I take it you mean my view rather than the view I am ascribing to the DUP. What was the reason in your view that the DUP opposed Britain's EU membership?
National Sovereignty considered more important than Supranational bodies having greater power, don't think the EU was an honest broker are probably two for a start. Take a long hard look at the make up of the party today, sure it still has its Paisleyite religious types but it is largely dominated by poeople who have fuck all interest in Free Presbyetrianism. In fact the DUP is chock full of fucking technocrats and wonks in the back offices, not people holding prayer meetings. Since Paisley they have had one leader in the deeply religious mould. It didnt protect him from being put out on his arse after a couple of months.
Whats People Before Profits Excuse for its anti EU stance at times? Are they the radical wing of Catholicism and fear the EU is full of Prods?
I hadn't heard of PBP. Three minutes of lookup on the internet suggests they don't seem to think the EU is full of Protestants or anything similar. I doubt they're any kind of wing of Catholicism. They don't seem to be about defending ethnic traditions, let alone any that date back to the 17th century.
National sovereignty considered more important than supranational bodies? That's a legitimate view, but if it's so important to the DUP do they propose that Britain should leave NATO or tell the ECHR and ICJ where to get off? Also they are Irish. I'm not telling them what identity or politics they should have, but Ulster is a province of Ireland. They're British too, and it's their British identity that's far more important to them. Why? It can't just be "because". It's to do with tradition and being Protestant and against rule by evil Dublin.
As for broker, I didn't realise the EU was a broker. Is that how they see it??
NI is a province of the United Kingdom. Its no more a province of Ireland, than Alaska is a province of Canada or Russia.
They have Irish citizenship on top, thanks to the Irish constitution and the Good Friday Agreement, but they're still a part of the UK and not Ireland. Maybe one day there'll be a single country called Ireland spanning the entire island, I hope there will be, but that day is not today.
I said Ulster was a province of Ireland, not that NI was. That's standard usage of terminology by everyone in Ireland. The DUP don't call themselves the DNIP.
"Whatever anyone may think or want I believe after today and what he has achieved on the renegotiation of the Irish protocol that @RishiSunak will more likely than not be the Prime Minister at the next General Election …"
It's a view, as they say.
15 PB Cliche Points to you, but actually the Good Lord has a point, doesn't he?
Windsor does make it much more likely Sunak fights GE2024 for a bunch of reasons, one of which that it has finally buried the ghost of the ridiculous Johnson and his moronic acolytes.
As insights go, it wasn't as close as GardenWalker telling us that Sturgeon was about to resign 24 hours before we did.
Have we had confirmation of Harry and Megs yet?
I just can't see this myself, not so close after the Netflix 'Love Conquers All' documentary. It would make that look fake. If it was fake it follows they are cynical and therefore wouldn't split now, they'd manage it for release after a decent period had passed. The summer say. And if it wasn't fake, if it was real, there's no way things would have already gone pear. True romantic love isn't flaky like that. It lasts the course. You stay together until the kids have left home. Either way, logic says this one is not a goer.
This coming to you from the pundit who pronounced the Queen as looking 'fit and well' 48 hours before she died.
She was healthy at that point. It was the shock of having to anoint Liz Truss as Prime Minister that got her!
Grocery price inflation reached a high 17.1 per cent this month, adding to the squeeze on households in the cost of living crisis.
Prices are rising fastest in markets such as milk, eggs and margarine, data from the market researcher Kantar showed. It said the rise in food costs would add a potential £811 to annual shopping bills.
The "Turnip King" was forced to shut his business down as Brexit shagged it. So we don't have enough turnips either.
As I noted on the last thread, Which now have food inflation at 21.6% for the cheap end stuff in supermarkets. Does depend on the supermarket, but as I recall the Ocado end showed much less inflation thanb the cheap supermarkets the last time they did a survey.
If you think about it, it looks less and less unexpected.
The super cheap stuff in the supermarkets was achieved by a combination of minimum quality, sweating the supplier, who in turn sweated the workforce.
There were some interesting revelations during COVID about labor conditions around Leicester, for example.
Since the pandemic, there has been a definite step change in bottom end employment, in many countries.
The local specialty fruit and veg places are piled high with produce. I asked, yesterday. They are all purchasing direct from various farms - there is apparently quite a good market in higher quality veg. Lots of farms going that way, lots of smaller purchasers.
Sure, it's not surprising - but the financial result is the same. And farm shops and yuppie community rabbit food shops (as opposed to food banks) are of no use at all to the poor person on the peripheral housing estate.
Note that, as with Europe including the UK, the fruit and veg follow the money.
This isn't farm shops - it's just one tier up from the "essential" ranges in the supermarkets. Think recreating the greengrocer. The one I go to recreates the greengrocer my mother used to use, in Summertown, Oxford, rather well.
Many of the supermarkets having been heading this way with their higher quality ranges.
Given the tension between quality and working conditions vs food cost, it was inevitable that something was going to have to give, in the end.
Summertown? A rather nice shopping street in a pretty upmarket inner suburb as I recall (friends live very close by)?
Oh, I don't disagree - but still the financial results are what count, especially with fewer workers in the fields as well.
It wasn't like that in the 80s. We had a scrap yard on the street corner, an abandoned factory site on the street and a building site opposite. The house, when we moved in had been converted into substandard HMO.
The place is fairly gentrified now. The greengrocer in question, there, went. Killed by supermarkets, of course.
The one I go to, in London, is actually a tuning up of the "ethnic" shops that are scattered about London. A number of people have realised that instead of just catering to their own community, they can get other people in, who are looking for quality.
There's an Iranian chap who is half way to a mini-supermarket, not far away.
EDIT: as the financial aspect - if you want non-crap veg, harvested by workers paid minimum wage+, and a bit of profit for the farmer, then there is a price to be paid. The previous prices for cheap food were a kind of lie.
Yes, North Oxford has changed - my friends moved there in the mid 80s. Noisy metal bashing factory by the canal, lots of derelict railway land, wild flowers. Now it's wall to wall commuter boxes. I was quite astonished by the changes when I visited for the first time in many years lately. Even the flower shop in a greenhouse on the main road (Banbury Road?) has become a posh-ish restaurant (nice food though).
You mean Gees? - I can just about remember the flower shop that came before that.
That's it. Very useful when visiting friends - look in en route from the railway station.
The DUP are a fxcking disgrace and clearly nothing bar a return to a hard border between NI and Ireland will satisfy them.
They fear the future, whatever it may bring, so spend their time just huddling together assuming that if they prevent anything at all that will be a good result.
The DUP is the political wing of the Free Presybterian Church of Ulster, and while it's true that they fear the future it's also true that they get off on fearing the future. They think they know what the future will bring, because they believe it's all written in the Book of Revelations. The principal factor in everything they say about the border or the Irish Sea is their belief that the Roman Catholic church is the Antichrist, that it owns both the RoI and the EU, and that it's hell-bent on coming to get them. They love "holding out" more than everything. Their whole mythos is based on it. They are far crazier than the IRA ever were. The IRA's mythos was kitsch in comparison.
I don't think a single newspaper has mentioned why it is that the DUP dislike the EU.
This view is about 30 years out of date. But, you know, some people just never move on....
I take it you mean my view rather than the view I am ascribing to the DUP. What was the reason in your view that the DUP opposed Britain's EU membership?
National Sovereignty considered more important than Supranational bodies having greater power, don't think the EU was an honest broker are probably two for a start. Take a long hard look at the make up of the party today, sure it still has its Paisleyite religious types but it is largely dominated by poeople who have fuck all interest in Free Presbyetrianism. In fact the DUP is chock full of fucking technocrats and wonks in the back offices, not people holding prayer meetings. Since Paisley they have had one leader in the deeply religious mould. It didnt protect him from being put out on his arse after a couple of months.
Whats People Before Profits Excuse for its anti EU stance at times? Are they the radical wing of Catholicism and fear the EU is full of Prods?
I hadn't heard of PBP. Three minutes of lookup on the internet suggests they don't seem to think the EU is full of Protestants or anything similar. I doubt they're any kind of wing of Catholicism. They don't seem to be about defending ethnic traditions, let alone any that date back to the 17th century.
National sovereignty considered more important than supranational bodies? That's a legitimate view, but if it's so important to the DUP do they propose that Britain should leave NATO or tell the ECHR and ICJ where to get off? Also they are Irish. I'm not telling them what identity or politics they should have, but Ulster is a province of Ireland. They're British too, and it's their British identity that's far more important to them. Why? It can't just be "because". It's to do with tradition and being Protestant and against rule by evil Dublin.
As for broker, I didn't realise the EU was a broker. Is that how they see it??
NI is a province of the United Kingdom. Its no more a province of Ireland, than Alaska is a province of Canada or Russia.
They have Irish citizenship on top, thanks to the Irish constitution and the Good Friday Agreement, but they're still a part of the UK and not Ireland. Maybe one day there'll be a single country called Ireland spanning the entire island, I hope there will be, but that day is not today.
I said Ulster was a province of Ireland, not that NI was. That's standard usage of terminology by everyone in Ireland.
And you were wrong.
EDIT: Just seen your edit, WTF, the U stands for Unionist not Ulster. 😂
And almost as high a percentage. And if you did England only I bet that would be higher too. Mrs May was a vote winning machine. It's a testament to Jeremy's appeal that he got so close in 2017.
So appealing that his candidates won a lot of votes on the basis of doorstep canvassers saying "it's safe to vote for your local Labour candidate because Corbyn can't possibly be PM"...
The bigger factor was Brexit playing for him. The opposite of 2019 when it buried him. But he did have appeal at GE17. That's a fact. Anybody who denies this, quoting only GE19 when assessing him, is not being objective and clear-sighted.
"Whatever anyone may think or want I believe after today and what he has achieved on the renegotiation of the Irish protocol that @RishiSunak will more likely than not be the Prime Minister at the next General Election …"
"Whatever anyone may think or want I believe after today and what he has achieved on the renegotiation of the Irish protocol that @RishiSunak will more likely than not be the Prime Minister at the next General Election …"
It's a view, as they say.
15 PB Cliche Points to you, but actually the Good Lord has a point, doesn't he?
Windsor does make it much more likely Sunak fights GE2024 for a bunch of reasons, one of which that it has finally buried the ghost of the ridiculous Johnson and his moronic acolytes.
I hope this is true. Sadly there is a non-zero chance that the “we’d have been more popular if we had been even more Brexity!” crowd will seize the helm after the GE. At least they won’t be able to do as much damage in opposition…
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Saw a comment on FB pointing out that if Yousuf becomes Scottish FM and achieves independence while Sunak is still UK PM then we would have a Pakistani heritage FM and Indian heritage PM negotiating the partition of Britain. I'd quite like this to happen solely on the basis of historical irony and lolz.
"Whatever anyone may think or want I believe after today and what he has achieved on the renegotiation of the Irish protocol that @RishiSunak will more likely than not be the Prime Minister at the next General Election …"
The real dividend to come out of these talks is not NI, which had some irritations but also a highly favoured position both in the SM and out of it at the same time, Schrodinger's cat style, already. The real benefit is the highly constructive and polite relationship Rishi has built with the EU as a whole. This has already paid dividends with the Horizon program but I have little doubt there will be more to come.
If Rishi can continue down this path then I genuinely believe that Brexit will become a non issue for all except a tiny minority who are obsessed with it and the loss of their EU citizenship. This minority will no doubt be loud, just as the ERG nutters/Farage were loud in the past, but the vast majority will simply not care anymore. We will just have to fill our threads up with something else.
Picture living in a more complicated/interesting world where families and/or partners may live and work in say England and France. Where they have been able to move freely for forty years and now they have to calculate what they're doing almost from day to day. School holidays parents getting ill one partner in England the other in France. Work calling you from one place to the other ......... a lifestyle build over many years and circumstances.
Imagine if it was Scotland and England and you needed to stamp in your passport every time you wanted to go from one to the other and your time in each was highly regulated after years of free movement and integration?
From here in the South of France your post sounds incredibly parochial and doesn't correspond to most people's experiences at all. This isn't a 'tiny obsession' of a minority. It's affecting many many peoples lives and some quite profoundly.
I'm with Foxy on this. If Starmer doesn't reinstate our right to move freely as we could until two years ago he'll have let a lot of people down very badly.
People who can afford to have a second home in the south of France are a tiny minority.
0.13% of the U.K. population, or less than a third of the population of Hartlepool, to use Roger’s favourite metric.
If free movement of Brits to the EU was so popular why did more go to Australia - requiring visas & work permits - than to the entire EU? Yes, it’s affected some badly, but the overwhelming majority, not at all.
(Point of order: it was "entire EU, excluding Ireland".)
Since we’ve had freedom of movement with Ireland for several hundred years before there was an EU - and still do - it hasn’t been affected by BREXIT, since we’re discussing Brexit effects.
We only achieved free movement in Ireland due to war and invasion, at the least EU freedom of movement is benign.
Just wondering how long FOM to (neutral) RoI for 67 million UK residents would survive an actual NATO engaged war in Europe where deadly stuff might start landing on London and Belfast.
This was always filed under 'Can't and Won't Happen'. Is it still?
Ireland was only second on my nuclear escape list after Morocco anyway so I'd be heading there. Although one of the variables was agricultural self-sufficiency and I hadn't factored in frost damage to the tomato crop.
Why do people have the impression Ireland won't be a prime target in a nuclear exchange....it has all those lovely data centres which I would think most enemies would consider worth taking out as a way of crippling national infrastructures everywhere
1. not in NATO and no valuable military targets 2. any useful civil targets are too widely spread. Waste of nukes. They might take out Shannon Airport but I doubt more than that.
Anyway I'm going to Morocco. Ireland would be flooded with British refugees.
I heard a new phrase this morning on R4 - the lunar economy. Apparently the British Space Agency is looking at plans to build a communications network on the moon.
Could we maybe build one around chunks of Edinburgh or Angus first?
"Whatever anyone may think or want I believe after today and what he has achieved on the renegotiation of the Irish protocol that @RishiSunak will more likely than not be the Prime Minister at the next General Election …"
It's a view, as they say.
15 PB Cliche Points to you, but actually the Good Lord has a point, doesn't he?
Windsor does make it much more likely Sunak fights GE2024 for a bunch of reasons, one of which that it has finally buried the ghost of the ridiculous Johnson and his moronic acolytes.
Agreed. The Boris/Truss era was horrific for the Tories, not least because that was starting to look like the new Tory normal. Rishi must know this. If he can make that grisly episode look like some sort of bizarre aberration - similar to the whole Trump thing in the US - then he might, just might, be in with a fighting chance against Sir Keir. Otherwise it's meltdown time and he may as well just give up now.
The DUP are a fxcking disgrace and clearly nothing bar a return to a hard border between NI and Ireland will satisfy them.
They fear the future, whatever it may bring, so spend their time just huddling together assuming that if they prevent anything at all that will be a good result.
The DUP is the political wing of the Free Presybterian Church of Ulster, and while it's true that they fear the future it's also true that they get off on fearing the future. They think they know what the future will bring, because they believe it's all written in the Book of Revelations. The principal factor in everything they say about the border or the Irish Sea is their belief that the Roman Catholic church is the Antichrist, that it owns both the RoI and the EU, and that it's hell-bent on coming to get them. They love "holding out" more than everything. Their whole mythos is based on it. They are far crazier than the IRA ever were. The IRA's mythos was kitsch in comparison.
I don't think a single newspaper has mentioned why it is that the DUP dislike the EU.
This view is about 30 years out of date. But, you know, some people just never move on....
I take it you mean my view rather than the view I am ascribing to the DUP. What was the reason in your view that the DUP opposed Britain's EU membership?
National Sovereignty considered more important than Supranational bodies having greater power, don't think the EU was an honest broker are probably two for a start. Take a long hard look at the make up of the party today, sure it still has its Paisleyite religious types but it is largely dominated by poeople who have fuck all interest in Free Presbyetrianism. In fact the DUP is chock full of fucking technocrats and wonks in the back offices, not people holding prayer meetings. Since Paisley they have had one leader in the deeply religious mould. It didnt protect him from being put out on his arse after a couple of months.
Whats People Before Profits Excuse for its anti EU stance at times? Are they the radical wing of Catholicism and fear the EU is full of Prods?
I hadn't heard of PBP. Three minutes of lookup on the internet suggests they don't seem to think the EU is full of Protestants or anything similar. I doubt they're any kind of wing of Catholicism. They don't seem to be about defending ethnic traditions, let alone any that date back to the 17th century.
National sovereignty considered more important than supranational bodies? That's a legitimate view, but if it's so important to the DUP do they propose that Britain should leave NATO or tell the ECHR and ICJ where to get off? Also they are Irish. I'm not telling them what identity or politics they should have, but Ulster is a province of Ireland. They're British too, and it's their British identity that's far more important to them. Why? It can't just be "because". It's to do with tradition and being Protestant and against rule by evil Dublin.
As for broker, I didn't realise the EU was a broker. Is that how they see it??
NI is a province of the United Kingdom. Its no more a province of Ireland, than Alaska is a province of Canada or Russia.
They have Irish citizenship on top, thanks to the Irish constitution and the Good Friday Agreement, but they're still a part of the UK and not Ireland. Maybe one day there'll be a single country called Ireland spanning the entire island, I hope there will be, but that day is not today.
I said Ulster was a province of Ireland, not that NI was. That's standard usage of terminology by everyone in Ireland. The DUP don't call themselves the DNIP.
They don't call themselve the Democratic Ulster Party either...
It's now 17 days since the media first reported on @hannahsbee's book Time to Think, which chronicles in detail the medical scandal that led to the closure of the UK's only child gender clinic, GIDS. It has been covered exhaustively in virtually every paper. Except the Guardian.
Why should Belfast get a better deal than London, Cardiff and Edinburgh? Can we just get a straight answer to this.
As I said from day one, Brexit is a calamity and those that voted for it are nothing but cretins.
Straight answer: Because Belfast is treated by the Good Friday Agreement as if it were in Ireland as well as the UK, despite not being in Ireland.
So the UK is out of the Single Market, Ireland is in it, so as per the GFA Belfast is both and gets the best of both worlds.
Does this now mean that many businessess will nominally locate to NI so that they can sell goods online from NI to the EU? Will the goods even need to be sent from NI or can they be sold virtually from NI but physically shipped from a warehouse in SE England?
As insights go, it wasn't as close as GardenWalker telling us that Sturgeon was about to resign 24 hours before we did.
Have we had confirmation of Harry and Megs yet?
I just can't see this myself, not so close after the Netflix 'Love Conquers All' documentary. It would make that look fake. If it was fake it follows they are cynical and therefore wouldn't split now, they'd manage it for release after a decent period had passed. The summer say. And if it wasn't fake, if it was real, there's no way things would have already gone pear. True romantic love isn't flaky like that. It lasts the course. You stay together until the kids have left home. Either way, logic says this one is not a goer.
This coming to you from the pundit who pronounced the Queen as looking 'fit and well' 48 hours before she died.
She was healthy at that point. It was the shock of having to anoint Liz Truss as Prime Minister that got her!
In hindsight I think it's quite likely that she was holding on to do her one last duty and not have to have a PM transition and a monarch transition at the same time.
Why should Belfast get a better deal than London, Cardiff and Edinburgh? Can we just get a straight answer to this.
Because the EU has no interest in allowing GB to have the same deal as it's just been forced to concede for NI, and HMG has no leverage to force it for GB unlike for NI.
The real dividend to come out of these talks is not NI, which had some irritations but also a highly favoured position both in the SM and out of it at the same time, Schrodinger's cat style, already. The real benefit is the highly constructive and polite relationship Rishi has built with the EU as a whole. This has already paid dividends with the Horizon program but I have little doubt there will be more to come.
If Rishi can continue down this path then I genuinely believe that Brexit will become a non issue for all except a tiny minority who are obsessed with it and the loss of their EU citizenship. This minority will no doubt be loud, just as the ERG nutters/Farage were loud in the past, but the vast majority will simply not care anymore. We will just have to fill our threads up with something else.
Picture living in a more complicated/interesting world where families and/or partners may live and work in say England and France. Where they have been able to move freely for forty years and now they have to calculate what they're doing almost from day to day. School holidays parents getting ill one partner in England the other in France. Work calling you from one place to the other ......... a lifestyle build over many years and circumstances.
Imagine if it was Scotland and England and you needed to stamp in your passport every time you wanted to go from one to the other and your time in each was highly regulated after years of free movement and integration?
From here in the South of France your post sounds incredibly parochial and doesn't correspond to most people's experiences at all. This isn't a 'tiny obsession' of a minority. It's affecting many many peoples lives and some quite profoundly.
I'm with Foxy on this. If Starmer doesn't reinstate our right to move freely as we could until two years ago he'll have let a lot of people down very badly.
People who can afford to have a second home in the south of France are a tiny minority.
0.13% of the U.K. population, or less than a third of the population of Hartlepool, to use Roger’s favourite metric.
If free movement of Brits to the EU was so popular why did more go to Australia - requiring visas & work permits - than to the entire EU? Yes, it’s affected some badly, but the overwhelming majority, not at all.
(Point of order: it was "entire EU, excluding Ireland".)
Since we’ve had freedom of movement with Ireland for several hundred years before there was an EU - and still do - it hasn’t been affected by BREXIT, since we’re discussing Brexit effects.
We only achieved free movement in Ireland due to war and invasion, at the least EU freedom of movement is benign.
Just wondering how long FOM to (neutral) RoI for 67 million UK residents would survive an actual NATO engaged war in Europe where deadly stuff might start landing on London and Belfast.
This was always filed under 'Can't and Won't Happen'. Is it still?
Ireland was only second on my nuclear escape list after Morocco anyway so I'd be heading there. Although one of the variables was agricultural self-sufficiency and I hadn't factored in frost damage to the tomato crop.
Why do people have the impression Ireland won't be a prime target in a nuclear exchange....it has all those lovely data centres which I would think most enemies would consider worth taking out as a way of crippling national infrastructures everywhere
1. not in NATO and no valuable military targets 2. any useful civil targets are too widely spread. Waste of nukes. They might take out Shannon Airport but I doubt more than that.
Anyway I'm going to Morocco. Ireland would be flooded with British refugees.
During the Cold War, Russia planned to nuke New Zealand, on the basis that its alleged neutrality must a sham*, plus why not?
*The reasoning was that the bans on nuclear vessels etc were just accepted by the US. Since the Soviet Union would have changed the government of an ally that tried that kind of stuff, the US government must have a secret deal with New Zealand. So nuke them!
I heard a new phrase this morning on R4 - the lunar economy. Apparently the British Space Agency is looking at plans to build a communications network on the moon.
Could we maybe build one around chunks of Edinburgh or Angus first?
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Why should Belfast get a better deal than London, Cardiff and Edinburgh? Can we just get a straight answer to this.
As I said from day one, Brexit is a calamity and those that voted for it are nothing but cretins.
I would respectfully respond by saying we voted to leave the EU and for better for worse we have left but Sunak has started on a journey for a closer friendlier relationship and is much in line with Starmer and unfortunately for your upset it is unlikely that this subject will play highly in the GE campaign nor will we rejoin anytime soon, that ship has sailed
"Whatever anyone may think or want I believe after today and what he has achieved on the renegotiation of the Irish protocol that @RishiSunak will more likely than not be the Prime Minister at the next General Election …"
"Whatever anyone may think or want I believe after today and what he has achieved on the renegotiation of the Irish protocol that @RishiSunak will more likely than not be the Prime Minister at the next General Election …"
It's a view, as they say.
15 PB Cliche Points to you, but actually the Good Lord has a point, doesn't he?
Windsor does make it much more likely Sunak fights GE2024 for a bunch of reasons, one of which that it has finally buried the ghost of the ridiculous Johnson and his moronic acolytes.
I hope this is true. Sadly there is a non-zero chance that the “we’d have been more popular if we had been even more Brexity!” crowd will seize the helm after the GE. At least they won’t be able to do as much damage in opposition…
Sure, but all the Good Lord seems to be saying is that Windsor makes it much more likely that Sunak fights the GE ... which he is surely right about?
I heard a new phrase this morning on R4 - the lunar economy. Apparently the British Space Agency is looking at plans to build a communications network on the moon.
Could we maybe build one around chunks of Edinburgh or Angus first?
Easy stuff first. Then Glasgow.
Slough is presumably Nobel Prize level work.
O/T but was it you who showed an interest in the Wirecard fraud/ BaFin attacking the FT a while back?
If so there is a good documentary film about it on Netflix called Skandal which shows the hell the FT went through amongst others and how the Germans refused to accept Wirecard could be a bad actor.
John Curtice on what the SNP’s travails might mean for Labour:
In truth, much now depends on the outcome and fallout from the SNP leadership contest. Perhaps - despite current doubts - the party will find a new charismatic leader who will bring the party together and promote the case for independence effectively. Labour would be wise not to count their chickens just yet…
Why should Belfast get a better deal than London, Cardiff and Edinburgh? Can we just get a straight answer to this.
As I said from day one, Brexit is a calamity and those that voted for it are nothing but cretins.
Straight answer: Because Belfast is treated by the Good Friday Agreement as if it were in Ireland as well as the UK, despite not being in Ireland.
So the UK is out of the Single Market, Ireland is in it, so as per the GFA Belfast is both and gets the best of both worlds.
Does this now mean that many businessess will nominally locate to NI so that they can sell goods online from NI to the EU? Will the goods even need to be sent from NI or can they be sold virtually from NI but physically shipped from a warehouse in SE England?
Fairly sure there'll be rules against that. Businesses will need a physical NI presence
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Scotland voted Remain and borders the sea, and England. So what deal should Edinburgh get by your geographical cipher?
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Maybe that’s the plan, use NI as a test then in a year the UK and EU start sounding out putting it into action for rUK once everyone except the headbangers see it as sensible.
Sunak wins a glorious election victory and everything returns to sanity. This might not happen.
Won't happen under the Tories because it would split the party in half. Might happen under Labour.
Lots of Tories are only pretending to be ok with it. I caught some Mogg on the tv (wasn't quite swift enough with the remote) and his face said it all. Along with the usual overpowering supercilious smuggery you could see he was not a happy bunny.
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Scotland also voted remain.
The new Northern Ireland deal is an insult to Scotland, where people voted to stay in the EU by an even wider margin. Hearing Sunak waxing lyrical about all the businesses set to locate themselves in Northern Ireland to take advantage of single market membership will go down like a bucket of cold sick North of the border.
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Maybe that’s the plan, use NI as a test then in a year the UK and EU start sounding out putting it into action for rUK once everyone except the headbangers see it as sensible.
Sunak wins a glorious election victory and everything returns to sanity. This might not happen.
Won't happen under the Tories because it would split the party in half. Might happen under Labour.
Lots of Tories are only pretending to be ok with it. I caught some Mogg on the tv (wasn't quite swift enough with the remote) and his face said it all. Along with the usual overpowering supercilious smuggery you could see he was not a happy bunny.
This conservative is not pretending and is very pleased with the deal
I expect Mogg is one of a handful that are not happy within the conservative mps
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Scotland also voted remain.
So did London, Liverpool and Manchester.
The problem for Scotland is that two years prior they declined to become an independent country so their votes are a subset of UK votes and not counted independently.
The same is true of Northern Ireland. The special arrangements there have the square root of sod all to do with how they voted in the referendum and are purely to do with the Good Friday Agreement. Scotland has no such agreement, so if it wants to be treated as an actual country it needs to actually become one, not go in via another country as NI does with the Republic.
Why should Belfast get a better deal than London, Cardiff and Edinburgh? Can we just get a straight answer to this.
As I said from day one, Brexit is a calamity and those that voted for it are nothing but cretins.
I would respectfully respond by saying we voted to leave the EU and for better for worse we have left but Sunak has started on a journey for a closer friendlier relationship and is much in line with Starmer and unfortunately for your upset it is unlikely that this subject will play highly in the GE campaign nor will we rejoin anytime soon, that ship has sailed
Scotland didn't vote to leave, but the Scots just have to lump it while the Northern Irish enjoy the best of all worlds? FTS.
Apparently the reason Johnson was not present yesterday is that he has gone off to Capri
He is an utter disgrace
Perhaps this is to create the time & space he needs - away from the SW1 bubble - to read through the NI agreement, so that when he comments he has a good detailed understanding of all the key issues?
The DUP are a fxcking disgrace and clearly nothing bar a return to a hard border between NI and Ireland will satisfy them.
They fear the future, whatever it may bring, so spend their time just huddling together assuming that if they prevent anything at all that will be a good result.
The DUP is the political wing of the Free Presybterian Church of Ulster, and while it's true that they fear the future it's also true that they get off on fearing the future. They think they know what the future will bring, because they believe it's all written in the Book of Revelations. The principal factor in everything they say about the border or the Irish Sea is their belief that the Roman Catholic church is the Antichrist, that it owns both the RoI and the EU, and that it's hell-bent on coming to get them. They love "holding out" more than everything. Their whole mythos is based on it. They are far crazier than the IRA ever were. The IRA's mythos was kitsch in comparison.
I don't think a single newspaper has mentioned why it is that the DUP dislike the EU.
This view is about 30 years out of date. But, you know, some people just never move on....
I take it you mean my view rather than the view I am ascribing to the DUP. What was the reason in your view that the DUP opposed Britain's EU membership?
National Sovereignty considered more important than Supranational bodies having greater power, don't think the EU was an honest broker are probably two for a start. Take a long hard look at the make up of the party today, sure it still has its Paisleyite religious types but it is largely dominated by poeople who have fuck all interest in Free Presbyetrianism. In fact the DUP is chock full of fucking technocrats and wonks in the back offices, not people holding prayer meetings. Since Paisley they have had one leader in the deeply religious mould. It didnt protect him from being put out on his arse after a couple of months.
Whats People Before Profits Excuse for its anti EU stance at times? Are they the radical wing of Catholicism and fear the EU is full of Prods?
I hadn't heard of PBP. Three minutes of lookup on the internet suggests they don't seem to think the EU is full of Protestants or anything similar. I doubt they're any kind of wing of Catholicism. They don't seem to be about defending ethnic traditions, let alone any that date back to the 17th century.
National sovereignty considered more important than supranational bodies? That's a legitimate view, but if it's so important to the DUP do they propose that Britain should leave NATO or tell the ECHR and ICJ where to get off? Also they are Irish. I'm not telling them what identity or politics they should have, but Ulster is a province of Ireland. They're British too, and it's their British identity that's far more important to them. Why? It can't just be "because". It's to do with tradition and being Protestant and against rule by evil Dublin.
As for broker, I didn't realise the EU was a broker. Is that how they see it??
NI is a province of the United Kingdom. Its no more a province of Ireland, than Alaska is a province of Canada or Russia.
They have Irish citizenship on top, thanks to the Irish constitution and the Good Friday Agreement, but they're still a part of the UK and not Ireland. Maybe one day there'll be a single country called Ireland spanning the entire island, I hope there will be, but that day is not today.
I said Ulster was a province of Ireland, not that NI was. That's standard usage of terminology by everyone in Ireland.
And you were wrong.
EDIT: Just seen your edit, WTF, the U stands for Unionist not Ulster. 😂
The island of Ireland has four provinces, of which Ulster is one. The governance of Ulster is complicated because three of the counties of the province are in one country and the other six counties of the province are in another, but that doesn't change the fact that there is a province in Ireland (the island) called Ulster that consists of nine counties.
Northern Ireland isn't a province. It's a gerrymander and a constituent part of the UK until it chooses otherwise, but it's not a province.
It's now 17 days since the media first reported on @hannahsbee's book Time to Think, which chronicles in detail the medical scandal that led to the closure of the UK's only child gender clinic, GIDS. It has been covered exhaustively in virtually every paper. Except the Guardian.
The Guardian are being held to ransom by the children who work there aren't they? This may be a stupid question, but does the Observer have a different staff? I've never understood to what extent the Sundays are separate beasts from their weekday equivalents.
As insights go, it wasn't as close as GardenWalker telling us that Sturgeon was about to resign 24 hours before we did.
Have we had confirmation of Harry and Megs yet?
I just can't see this myself, not so close after the Netflix 'Love Conquers All' documentary. It would make that look fake. If it was fake it follows they are cynical and therefore wouldn't split now, they'd manage it for release after a decent period had passed. The summer say. And if it wasn't fake, if it was real, there's no way things would have already gone pear. True romantic love isn't flaky like that. It lasts the course. You stay together until the kids have left home. Either way, logic says this one is not a goer.
This coming to you from the pundit who pronounced the Queen as looking 'fit and well' 48 hours before she died.
She was healthy at that point. It was the shock of having to anoint Liz Truss as Prime Minister that got her!
In hindsight I think it's quite likely that she was holding on to do her one last duty and not have to have a PM transition and a monarch transition at the same time.
One thing was clear - she wanted to die at Balmoral. It was rather special that we ended up with so much ceremonial activity in Scotland, not just the London based ceremonial events.
"Whatever anyone may think or want I believe after today and what he has achieved on the renegotiation of the Irish protocol that @RishiSunak will more likely than not be the Prime Minister at the next General Election …"
It's a view, as they say.
15 PB Cliche Points to you, but actually the Good Lord has a point, doesn't he?
Windsor does make it much more likely Sunak fights GE2024 for a bunch of reasons, one of which that it has finally buried the ghost of the ridiculous Johnson and his moronic acolytes.
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Scotland also voted remain.
The new Northern Ireland deal is an insult to Scotland, where people voted to stay in the EU by an even wider margin. Hearing Sunak waxing lyrical about all the businesses set to locate themselves in Northern Ireland to take advantage of single market membership will go down like a bucket of cold sick North of the border.
Scotland doesn't border an EU nation like Northern Ireland and didn't have a terrorist war lasting decades like Northern Ireland either.
Scotland voted to stay in the UK in 2014 and will therefore take what the rest of GB's deal with the EU is.
Otherwise what next? Remain voting London stays in the single market? What about Remain voting Manchester, Bristol, Bath, Tunbridge Wells, Elmbridge, Guildford, Oxford and Cambridge, Maidenhead etc. Are they all staying in the single market too?
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Scotland also voted remain.
So did London, Liverpool and Manchester.
The problem for Scotland is that two years prior they declined to become an independent country so their votes are a subset of UK votes and not counted independently.
The same is true of Northern Ireland. The special arrangements there have the square root of sod all to do with how they voted in the referendum and are purely to do with the Good Friday Agreement. Scotland has no such agreement, so if it wants to be treated as an actual country it needs to actually become one, not go in via another country as NI does with the Republic.
I'm sure many people in Scotland will be drawing that conclusion. Especially now we know that "hard" trade borders can be finessed in various ways.
The DUP are a fxcking disgrace and clearly nothing bar a return to a hard border between NI and Ireland will satisfy them.
They fear the future, whatever it may bring, so spend their time just huddling together assuming that if they prevent anything at all that will be a good result.
The DUP is the political wing of the Free Presybterian Church of Ulster, and while it's true that they fear the future it's also true that they get off on fearing the future. They think they know what the future will bring, because they believe it's all written in the Book of Revelations. The principal factor in everything they say about the border or the Irish Sea is their belief that the Roman Catholic church is the Antichrist, that it owns both the RoI and the EU, and that it's hell-bent on coming to get them. They love "holding out" more than everything. Their whole mythos is based on it. They are far crazier than the IRA ever were. The IRA's mythos was kitsch in comparison.
I don't think a single newspaper has mentioned why it is that the DUP dislike the EU.
This view is about 30 years out of date. But, you know, some people just never move on....
I take it you mean my view rather than the view I am ascribing to the DUP. What was the reason in your view that the DUP opposed Britain's EU membership?
National Sovereignty considered more important than Supranational bodies having greater power, don't think the EU was an honest broker are probably two for a start. Take a long hard look at the make up of the party today, sure it still has its Paisleyite religious types but it is largely dominated by poeople who have fuck all interest in Free Presbyetrianism. In fact the DUP is chock full of fucking technocrats and wonks in the back offices, not people holding prayer meetings. Since Paisley they have had one leader in the deeply religious mould. It didnt protect him from being put out on his arse after a couple of months.
Whats People Before Profits Excuse for its anti EU stance at times? Are they the radical wing of Catholicism and fear the EU is full of Prods?
I hadn't heard of PBP. Three minutes of lookup on the internet suggests they don't seem to think the EU is full of Protestants or anything similar. I doubt they're any kind of wing of Catholicism. They don't seem to be about defending ethnic traditions, let alone any that date back to the 17th century.
National sovereignty considered more important than supranational bodies? That's a legitimate view, but if it's so important to the DUP do they propose that Britain should leave NATO or tell the ECHR and ICJ where to get off? Also they are Irish. I'm not telling them what identity or politics they should have, but Ulster is a province of Ireland. They're British too, and it's their British identity that's far more important to them. Why? It can't just be "because". It's to do with tradition and being Protestant and against rule by evil Dublin.
As for broker, I didn't realise the EU was a broker. Is that how they see it??
NI is a province of the United Kingdom. Its no more a province of Ireland, than Alaska is a province of Canada or Russia.
They have Irish citizenship on top, thanks to the Irish constitution and the Good Friday Agreement, but they're still a part of the UK and not Ireland. Maybe one day there'll be a single country called Ireland spanning the entire island, I hope there will be, but that day is not today.
I said Ulster was a province of Ireland, not that NI was. That's standard usage of terminology by everyone in Ireland.
And you were wrong.
EDIT: Just seen your edit, WTF, the U stands for Unionist not Ulster. 😂
The island of Ireland has four provinces, of which Ulster is one. The governance of Ulster is complicated because three of the counties of the province are in one country and the other six counties of the province are in another, but that didn't change the fact that there is a province in Ireland called Ulster that consists of nine counties.
It has four historical provinces just as England has historical counties. My local town was historically in Lancashire but is now in Cheshire, so would you say it is in Cheshire or Lancashire?
The term is obsolete and has no legal bearing in either the UK or the Republic today. It is of historic interest, but it is no more a fact than the few weirdos who write Lancashire on their post instead of Cheshire are factually correct.
The DUP are a fxcking disgrace and clearly nothing bar a return to a hard border between NI and Ireland will satisfy them.
They fear the future, whatever it may bring, so spend their time just huddling together assuming that if they prevent anything at all that will be a good result.
The DUP is the political wing of the Free Presybterian Church of Ulster, and while it's true that they fear the future it's also true that they get off on fearing the future. They think they know what the future will bring, because they believe it's all written in the Book of Revelations. The principal factor in everything they say about the border or the Irish Sea is their belief that the Roman Catholic church is the Antichrist, that it owns both the RoI and the EU, and that it's hell-bent on coming to get them. They love "holding out" more than everything. Their whole mythos is based on it. They are far crazier than the IRA ever were. The IRA's mythos was kitsch in comparison.
I don't think a single newspaper has mentioned why it is that the DUP dislike the EU.
This view is about 30 years out of date. But, you know, some people just never move on....
I take it you mean my view rather than the view I am ascribing to the DUP. What was the reason in your view that the DUP opposed Britain's EU membership?
National Sovereignty considered more important than Supranational bodies having greater power, don't think the EU was an honest broker are probably two for a start. Take a long hard look at the make up of the party today, sure it still has its Paisleyite religious types but it is largely dominated by poeople who have fuck all interest in Free Presbyetrianism. In fact the DUP is chock full of fucking technocrats and wonks in the back offices, not people holding prayer meetings. Since Paisley they have had one leader in the deeply religious mould. It didnt protect him from being put out on his arse after a couple of months.
Whats People Before Profits Excuse for its anti EU stance at times? Are they the radical wing of Catholicism and fear the EU is full of Prods?
I hadn't heard of PBP. Three minutes of lookup on the internet suggests they don't seem to think the EU is full of Protestants or anything similar. I doubt they're any kind of wing of Catholicism. They don't seem to be about defending ethnic traditions, let alone any that date back to the 17th century.
National sovereignty considered more important than supranational bodies? That's a legitimate view, but if it's so important to the DUP do they propose that Britain should leave NATO or tell the ECHR and ICJ where to get off? Also they are Irish. I'm not telling them what identity or politics they should have, but Ulster is a province of Ireland. They're British too, and it's their British identity that's far more important to them. Why? It can't just be "because". It's to do with tradition and being Protestant and against rule by evil Dublin.
As for broker, I didn't realise the EU was a broker. Is that how they see it??
NI is a province of the United Kingdom. Its no more a province of Ireland, than Alaska is a province of Canada or Russia.
They have Irish citizenship on top, thanks to the Irish constitution and the Good Friday Agreement, but they're still a part of the UK and not Ireland. Maybe one day there'll be a single country called Ireland spanning the entire island, I hope there will be, but that day is not today.
I said Ulster was a province of Ireland, not that NI was. That's standard usage of terminology by everyone in Ireland.
And you were wrong.
EDIT: Just seen your edit, WTF, the U stands for Unionist not Ulster. 😂
The island of Ireland has four provinces, of which Ulster is one. The governance of Ulster is complicated because three of the counties of the province are in one country and the other six counties of the province are in another, but that doesn't change the fact that there is a province in Ireland (the island) called Ulster that consists of nine counties.
Northern Ireland isn't a province. It's a gerrymander and a constituent part of the UK until it chooses otherwise, but it's not a province.
We were discussing the issue recently on PB and one of us pointed out that the provinces are actively used today eg in Gaelic football leagues.
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Scotland also voted remain.
The new Northern Ireland deal is an insult to Scotland, where people voted to stay in the EU by an even wider margin. Hearing Sunak waxing lyrical about all the businesses set to locate themselves in Northern Ireland to take advantage of single market membership will go down like a bucket of cold sick North of the border.
Scotland doesn't border an EU nation like Northern Ireland and didn't have a terrorist war lasting decades like Northern Ireland either.
Scotland voted to stay in the UK in 2014 and will therefore take what the rest of GB's deal with the EU is.
Otherwise what next? Remain voting London stays in the single market? What about Remain voting Manchester, Bristol, Bath, Tunbridge Wells, Elmbridge, Guildford, Oxford and Cambridge, Maidenhead etc. Are they all staying in the single market too?
Saw a comment on FB pointing out that if Yousuf becomes Scottish FM and achieves independence while Sunak is still UK PM then we would have a Pakistani heritage FM and Indian heritage PM negotiating the partition of Britain. I'd quite like this to happen solely on the basis of historical irony and lolz.
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Scotland also voted remain.
So did London, Liverpool and Manchester.
The problem for Scotland is that two years prior they declined to become an independent country so their votes are a subset of UK votes and not counted independently.
The same is true of Northern Ireland. The special arrangements there have the square root of sod all to do with how they voted in the referendum and are purely to do with the Good Friday Agreement. Scotland has no such agreement, so if it wants to be treated as an actual country it needs to actually become one, not go in via another country as NI does with the Republic.
The indyref was won by No on the basis of *remaining* in the EU, as their campaign repeatedly promised.
Why should Belfast get a better deal than London, Cardiff and Edinburgh? Can we just get a straight answer to this.
As I said from day one, Brexit is a calamity and those that voted for it are nothing but cretins.
I would respectfully respond by saying we voted to leave the EU and for better for worse we have left but Sunak has started on a journey for a closer friendlier relationship and is much in line with Starmer and unfortunately for your upset it is unlikely that this subject will play highly in the GE campaign nor will we rejoin anytime soon, that ship has sailed
Scotland didn't vote to leave, but the Scots just have to lump it while the Northern Irish enjoy the best of all worlds? FTS.
The Northern Irish get British Citizenship and Irish citizenship via the GFA.
So they're out of the Single Market via the UK, they're in it via Ireland. Schrodinger's Brexit. And given history and their small size everyone sane can live with that quantum state.
Scotland is not in Ireland. If it wants to be treated as a real country it needs to actually become one and not just self identify as one.
Saw a comment on FB pointing out that if Yousuf becomes Scottish FM and achieves independence while Sunak is still UK PM then we would have a Pakistani heritage FM and Indian heritage PM negotiating the partition of Britain. I'd quite like this to happen solely on the basis of historical irony and lolz.
So where would be our version of Kashmir ?
Berwick.
No: the Debatable Lands. And that was settled in 1570 or something.
Why should Belfast get a better deal than London, Cardiff and Edinburgh? Can we just get a straight answer to this.
As I said from day one, Brexit is a calamity and those that voted for it are nothing but cretins.
I would respectfully respond by saying we voted to leave the EU and for better for worse we have left but Sunak has started on a journey for a closer friendlier relationship and is much in line with Starmer and unfortunately for your upset it is unlikely that this subject will play highly in the GE campaign nor will we rejoin anytime soon, that ship has sailed
Scotland didn't vote to leave, but the Scots just have to lump it while the Northern Irish enjoy the best of all worlds? FTS.
The Northern Irish get British Citizenship and Irish citizenship via the GFA.
So they're out of the Single Market via the UK, they're in it via Ireland. Schrodinger's Brexit. And given history and their small size everyone sane can live with that quantum state.
Scotland is not in Ireland. If it wants to be treated as a real country it needs to actually become one and not just self identify as one.
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Scotland also voted remain.
So did London, Liverpool and Manchester.
The problem for Scotland is that two years prior they declined to become an independent country so their votes are a subset of UK votes and not counted independently.
The same is true of Northern Ireland. The special arrangements there have the square root of sod all to do with how they voted in the referendum and are purely to do with the Good Friday Agreement. Scotland has no such agreement, so if it wants to be treated as an actual country it needs to actually become one, not go in via another country as NI does with the Republic.
The indyref was won by No on the basis of *remaining* in the EU, as their campaign repeatedly promised.
And the Yes campaign repeatedly said that the UK could leave and drag Scotland out with it.
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Scotland also voted remain.
So did London, Liverpool and Manchester.
The problem for Scotland is that two years prior they declined to become an independent country so their votes are a subset of UK votes and not counted independently.
The same is true of Northern Ireland. The special arrangements there have the square root of sod all to do with how they voted in the referendum and are purely to do with the Good Friday Agreement. Scotland has no such agreement, so if it wants to be treated as an actual country it needs to actually become one, not go in via another country as NI does with the Republic.
I'm sure many people in Scotland will be drawing that conclusion. Especially now we know that "hard" trade borders can be finessed in various ways.
On current polls there will actually be almost as big a swing from SNP to Labour as Tory to Labour at the next election
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Scotland also voted remain.
So did London, Liverpool and Manchester.
The problem for Scotland is that two years prior they declined to become an independent country so their votes are a subset of UK votes and not counted independently.
The same is true of Northern Ireland. The special arrangements there have the square root of sod all to do with how they voted in the referendum and are purely to do with the Good Friday Agreement. Scotland has no such agreement, so if it wants to be treated as an actual country it needs to actually become one, not go in via another country as NI does with the Republic.
The indyref was won by No on the basis of *remaining* in the EU, as their campaign repeatedly promised.
And the Yes campaign repeatedly said that the UK could leave and drag Scotland out with it.
The Yes campaign were correct.
"We were lying bastards and it doesn't matter because someone else said we were lying."
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Scotland also voted remain.
So did London, Liverpool and Manchester.
The problem for Scotland is that two years prior they declined to become an independent country so their votes are a subset of UK votes and not counted independently.
The same is true of Northern Ireland. The special arrangements there have the square root of sod all to do with how they voted in the referendum and are purely to do with the Good Friday Agreement. Scotland has no such agreement, so if it wants to be treated as an actual country it needs to actually become one, not go in via another country as NI does with the Republic.
I'm sure many people in Scotland will be drawing that conclusion. Especially now we know that "hard" trade borders can be finessed in various ways.
On current polls there will actually be almost as big a swing from SNP to Labour as Tory to Labour at the next election
None of the polls came after this agreement. You're not thinking it through.
Saw a comment on FB pointing out that if Yousuf becomes Scottish FM and achieves independence while Sunak is still UK PM then we would have a Pakistani heritage FM and Indian heritage PM negotiating the partition of Britain. I'd quite like this to happen solely on the basis of historical irony and lolz.
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Scotland also voted remain.
So did London, Liverpool and Manchester.
The problem for Scotland is that two years prior they declined to become an independent country so their votes are a subset of UK votes and not counted independently.
The same is true of Northern Ireland. The special arrangements there have the square root of sod all to do with how they voted in the referendum and are purely to do with the Good Friday Agreement. Scotland has no such agreement, so if it wants to be treated as an actual country it needs to actually become one, not go in via another country as NI does with the Republic.
The indyref was won by No on the basis of *remaining* in the EU, as their campaign repeatedly promised.
And the Yes campaign repeatedly said that the UK could leave and drag Scotland out with it.
The Yes campaign were correct.
"We were lying bastards and it doesn't matter because someone else said we were lying."
Hey I was on the side of the Yes campaign. And I think there should be another referendum.
But either way the Scots voted in 2014 knowing that David Cameron was planning an EU referendum and chose No anyway.
Why should Belfast get a better deal than London, Cardiff and Edinburgh? Can we just get a straight answer to this.
As I said from day one, Brexit is a calamity and those that voted for it are nothing but cretins.
I would respectfully respond by saying we voted to leave the EU and for better for worse we have left but Sunak has started on a journey for a closer friendlier relationship and is much in line with Starmer and unfortunately for your upset it is unlikely that this subject will play highly in the GE campaign nor will we rejoin anytime soon, that ship has sailed
Scotland didn't vote to leave, but the Scots just have to lump it while the Northern Irish enjoy the best of all worlds? FTS.
The Northern Irish get British Citizenship and Irish citizenship via the GFA.
So they're out of the Single Market via the UK, they're in it via Ireland. Schrodinger's Brexit. And given history and their small size everyone sane can live with that quantum state.
Scotland is not in Ireland. If it wants to be treated as a real country it needs to actually become one and not just self identify as one.
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Scotland also voted remain.
So did London, Liverpool and Manchester.
The problem for Scotland is that two years prior they declined to become an independent country so their votes are a subset of UK votes and not counted independently.
The same is true of Northern Ireland. The special arrangements there have the square root of sod all to do with how they voted in the referendum and are purely to do with the Good Friday Agreement. Scotland has no such agreement, so if it wants to be treated as an actual country it needs to actually become one, not go in via another country as NI does with the Republic.
The indyref was won by No on the basis of *remaining* in the EU, as their campaign repeatedly promised.
And the Yes campaign repeatedly said that the UK could leave and drag Scotland out with it.
The Yes campaign were correct.
"We were lying bastards and it doesn't matter because someone else said we were lying."
Hey I was on the side of the Yes campaign. And I think there should be another referendum.
But either way the Scots voted in 2014 knowing that David Cameron was planning an EU referendum and chose No anyway.
Oh, sure, to your first sentence - wasn't including you in that 'bastards;, but sorry, should have made that clear.
But yoy are forgettingt hat *everyone* expected Mr C to win the EU rseferendum, and that the fronters of No in induref were Messrs Cameron, Clegg, Darling, Brown, ... and in fairness they didn't think *they* were lying. So better
"We were idiots and completely wrong in what we said, but it doesn't matter because a few folk thought we were probably wrong anyway"
It's now 17 days since the media first reported on @hannahsbee's book Time to Think, which chronicles in detail the medical scandal that led to the closure of the UK's only child gender clinic, GIDS. It has been covered exhaustively in virtually every paper. Except the Guardian.
The Guardian are being held to ransom by the children who work there aren't they? This may be a stupid question, but does the Observer have a different staff? I've never understood to what extent the Sundays are separate beasts from their weekday equivalents.
Almost totally different from the editor down, though there is some crossover in sports reporting, I think. The Observer's great misfortune is to share a website with the Guardian that carries the Guardian name. The Observer is a far better newspaper and has been for at least 30 years.
I heard a new phrase this morning on R4 - the lunar economy. Apparently the British Space Agency is looking at plans to build a communications network on the moon.
Could we maybe build one around chunks of Edinburgh or Angus first?
Easy stuff first. Then Glasgow.
Slough is presumably Nobel Prize level work.
O/T but was it you who showed an interest in the Wirecard fraud/ BaFin attacking the FT a while back?
If so there is a good documentary film about it on Netflix called Skandal which shows the hell the FT went through amongst others and how the Germans refused to accept Wirecard could be a bad actor.
I wasn’t the first here. Can’t remember who was.
I generally shit on Douche Bank when it comes to German (lack of) regulation in finance.
Wirecard is fascinating in that it showed that the German regulators had become an active problem. Bit like the scene in Boiler Room, where the compliance guy is the nuts-and-bolts guy for the fraud.
I'd say he was delusional, but it seems he did realise he'd been unwise in asking what was wrong with Scott Adams's plea for apartheid, as he deleted his question.
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Scotland also voted remain.
So did London, Liverpool and Manchester.
The problem for Scotland is that two years prior they declined to become an independent country so their votes are a subset of UK votes and not counted independently.
The same is true of Northern Ireland. The special arrangements there have the square root of sod all to do with how they voted in the referendum and are purely to do with the Good Friday Agreement. Scotland has no such agreement, so if it wants to be treated as an actual country it needs to actually become one, not go in via another country as NI does with the Republic.
I'm sure many people in Scotland will be drawing that conclusion. Especially now we know that "hard" trade borders can be finessed in various ways.
On current polls there will actually be almost as big a swing from SNP to Labour as Tory to Labour at the next election
None of the polls came after this agreement. You're not thinking it through.
When either the hapless Yousaf or Gilead Forbes succeed Sturgeon you can be sure the swing from the SNP will be even bigger.
Plus Northern Ireland only has an open border with GB as well as the EU now as it is still in the UK
Er, he is saying that the Russians are about to launch another offensive. A number of people are predicting that - spring quagmire at the moment, followed by the ground drying…
I heard a new phrase this morning on R4 - the lunar economy. Apparently the British Space Agency is looking at plans to build a communications network on the moon.
Could we maybe build one around chunks of Edinburgh or Angus first?
Easy stuff first. Then Glasgow.
Slough is presumably Nobel Prize level work.
O/T but was it you who showed an interest in the Wirecard fraud/ BaFin attacking the FT a while back?
If so there is a good documentary film about it on Netflix called Skandal which shows the hell the FT went through amongst others and how the Germans refused to accept Wirecard could be a bad actor.
I wasn’t the first here. Can’t remember who was.
I generally shit on Douche Bank when it comes to German (lack of) regulation in finance.
Wirecard is fascinating in that it showed that the German regulators had become an active problem. Bit like the scene in Boiler Room, where the compliance guy is the nuts-and-bolts guy for the fraud.
I have so many bad stories re DB I can’t tell on here so am no fan either. The doc is well worth watching though as it’s a bit like a doc version of The Big Short with lots of parties independently seeing through Wirecard and it all coming together.
Saw a comment on FB pointing out that if Yousuf becomes Scottish FM and achieves independence while Sunak is still UK PM then we would have a Pakistani heritage FM and Indian heritage PM negotiating the partition of Britain. I'd quite like this to happen solely on the basis of historical irony and lolz.
So where would be our version of Kashmir ?
Berwick.
"Oh let the rain beat down upon my face, the hail to fill my dreams. I am a traveller of both ScotRail and LNER. To be where I have been."
The more Sunak extols the virtues of Northern Ireland's single market membership, the harder it gets for him to explain why the rest of the UK shouldn't have it too.
Northern Ireland voted Remain and borders the Irish Republic, GB voted Leave and borders the sea
Scotland also voted remain.
The new Northern Ireland deal is an insult to Scotland, where people voted to stay in the EU by an even wider margin. Hearing Sunak waxing lyrical about all the businesses set to locate themselves in Northern Ireland to take advantage of single market membership will go down like a bucket of cold sick North of the border.
Scotland doesn't border an EU nation like Northern Ireland and didn't have a terrorist war lasting decades like Northern Ireland either.
Scotland voted to stay in the UK in 2014 and will therefore take what the rest of GB's deal with the EU is.
Otherwise what next? Remain voting London stays in the single market? What about Remain voting Manchester, Bristol, Bath, Tunbridge Wells, Elmbridge, Guildford, Oxford and Cambridge, Maidenhead etc. Are they all staying in the single market too?
Comments
https://twitter.com/BenZaranko/status/1630469685291384832?s=20
TLDR, yes it fallen behind the private sector, yes pensions are great, and while the govt has some wriggle room increases get baked into higher public spending going forward which will mean higher taxes/cuts elsewhere/ both.
He is an utter disgrace
"Whatever anyone may think or want I believe after today and what he has achieved on the renegotiation of the Irish protocol that @RishiSunak will more likely than not be the Prime Minister at the next General Election …"
It's a view, as they say.
This coming to you from the pundit who pronounced the Queen as looking 'fit and well' 48 hours before she died.
If FM, there could be a lot of shy Forbesers in the 49% DK.
If SNP leader, maybe mostly a case of "I don't care - I don't vote SNP."
DK 49
Forbes 23
Yousaf 15
Regan 7
Why would you go to Capri in feb/early March?
Dismal. There is fuck all to do in Capri in the rain
That's standard usage of terminology by everyone in Ireland.
The DUP don't call themselves the DNIP.
Windsor does make it much more likely Sunak fights GE2024 for a bunch of reasons, one of which that it has finally buried the ghost of the ridiculous Johnson and his moronic acolytes.
As I said from day one, Brexit is a calamity and those that voted for it are nothing but cretins.
EDIT: Just seen your edit, WTF, the U stands for Unionist not Ulster. 😂
So the UK is out of the Single Market, Ireland is in it, so as per the GFA Belfast is both and gets the best of both worlds.
I hope this is true. Sadly there is a non-zero chance that the “we’d have been more popular if we had been even more Brexity!” crowd will seize the helm after the GE. At least they won’t be able to do as much damage in opposition…
https://i.insider.com/5339b4a569bedde960b675c5?width=700&format=jpeg&auto=webp
which is a much worse and blatant case, but it's quite dated now.
2. any useful civil targets are too widely spread. Waste of nukes. They might take out Shannon Airport but I doubt more than that.
Anyway I'm going to Morocco. Ireland would be flooded with British refugees.
https://twitter.com/simonjedge/status/1630513859965378560
Odd, because the Observer (different editor) had it as their “Book of the Week”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/19/time-to-think-by-hannah-barnes-review-what-went-wrong-at-gids
And there being nothing to do will enable him to put in some serious hours studying Rishi's deal.
Or write his book.
God forbid he actually do his job representing his constituency.
Simples.
Next!
*The reasoning was that the bans on nuclear vessels etc were just accepted by the US. Since the Soviet Union would have changed the government of an ally that tried that kind of stuff, the US government must have a secret deal with New Zealand. So nuke them!
Slough is presumably Nobel Prize level work.
If so there is a good documentary film about it on Netflix called Skandal which shows the hell the FT went through amongst others and how the Germans refused to accept Wirecard could be a bad actor.
In truth, much now depends on the outcome and fallout from the SNP leadership contest. Perhaps - despite current doubts - the party will find a new charismatic leader who will bring the party together and promote the case for independence effectively. Labour would be wise not to count their chickens just yet…
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/will-the-snps-chaotic-leadership-race-ease-keir-starmers-path-to-downing-street/
The EU doesn't want to concede that.
HMG has no way to force it.
https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.f1-power-rankings-all-10-teams-ranked-after-2023-pre-season-testing.7144c6F6PdlxC07WLxZeEV.html
Implies Red Bull ahead by a clear margin and while (Ferrari 2nd) Mercedes pip Aston Martin to 3rd there's an admission others see that order switched.
I expect Mogg is one of a handful that are not happy within the conservative mps
The problem for Scotland is that two years prior they declined to become an independent country so their votes are a subset of UK votes and not counted independently.
The same is true of Northern Ireland. The special arrangements there have the square root of sod all to do with how they voted in the referendum and are purely to do with the Good Friday Agreement. Scotland has no such agreement, so if it wants to be treated as an actual country it needs to actually become one, not go in via another country as NI does with the Republic.
Northern Ireland isn't a province. It's a gerrymander and a constituent part of the UK until it chooses otherwise, but it's not a province.
Helpful to whom?
Scotland voted to stay in the UK in 2014 and will therefore take what the rest of GB's deal with the EU is.
Otherwise what next? Remain voting London stays in the single market? What about Remain voting Manchester, Bristol, Bath, Tunbridge Wells, Elmbridge, Guildford, Oxford and Cambridge, Maidenhead etc. Are they all staying in the single market too?
The term is obsolete and has no legal bearing in either the UK or the Republic today. It is of historic interest, but it is no more a fact than the few weirdos who write Lancashire on their post instead of Cheshire are factually correct.
Bleh
So they're out of the Single Market via the UK, they're in it via Ireland. Schrodinger's Brexit. And given history and their small size everyone sane can live with that quantum state.
Scotland is not in Ireland. If it wants to be treated as a real country it needs to actually become one and not just self identify as one.
The Yes campaign were correct.
@JohnRentoul: Ed Miliband tells Johnson: "It's important to not want your old job back" https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1630544157759397889/photo/1
But either way the Scots voted in 2014 knowing that David Cameron was planning an EU referendum and chose No anyway.
https://twitter.com/apmassaro3/status/1630533152782286848
So the whole UK could be ‘world’s most exciting economic zone’ if we joined the single market.
Got it...
But yoy are forgettingt hat *everyone* expected Mr C to win the EU rseferendum, and that the fronters of No in induref were Messrs Cameron, Clegg, Darling, Brown, ... and in fairness they didn't think *they* were lying. So better
"We were idiots and completely wrong in what we said, but it doesn't matter because a few folk thought we were probably wrong anyway"
I generally shit on Douche Bank when it comes to German (lack of) regulation in finance.
Wirecard is fascinating in that it showed that the German regulators had become an active problem. Bit like the scene in Boiler Room, where the compliance guy is the nuts-and-bolts guy for the fraud.
Could it be "substance abuse"?
Plus Northern Ireland only has an open border with GB as well as the EU now as it is still in the UK
It's better than I thought it would be
(C) Led Zeppelin