"Pensioner forced to retire from tennis because of cashless society Leisure centres could not take cash despite many older people still unable to use the internet" (£)
BUt.. it's nothing to do with the internet. According to the article, she was told she can pay with a debit card - which she has, but doesn't want to use. For a membership, she needs an email address, but she doesn't want to be a member, just a casual user. But she is refusing to pay with a method she has access to, which they are offering.
Reminds me of the TV advert where a roadside stall-holder only accepts digital currency “for potatoes. And onions!”. What a load of malarkey!
"Less timid" sounds nice but what's the actual line?
"Brexit was a stupid idea, I plan to do nothing about it" doesn't sound great.
"Brexit was a stupid idea, I plan to renegotiate it" might be OK but it sounds a bit lame, and he'll be pressed to rule out unpopular things like restoring freedom of movement. If he rules out all the domestically unpopular things then he won't be able to actually renegotiate anything meaningful because the EU won't agree.
"Brexit was a stupid idea, I plan to reverse it" is bold and glorious and he can make massive free spending commitments with all the extra GDP it would bring. But reversing it isn't in his power, it has to be agreed by all the EU member states. His opponents will credibly claim that he'd have to join the Euro and Schengen, which are way less popular than just "rejoin".
Indeed, I voted Remain in 2016 but would have voted Leave had Remain required joining the Euro
You would have voted Leave if David Cameron had campaigned for Leave.
You just followed the party line.
Cameron would never have allowed a referendum had he thought Remain wouldn't win it, he would never have campaigned for Leave. His mistake was not getting a sufficient renegotiation, especially on free movement to reflect the fact Blair never used the transition controls on Eastern European migration we were entitled to post 2004
No Camerons mistake was in not being sufficiently pro-European and in not getting the wholehearted support of those in other parties, and in no party.
Nope, the pro Europeans in Labour, the LDs and SNP virtually all voted Remain anyway even with Cameron leading the Remain campaign. They were already in the 48%. It was the swing voters concerned over free movement from Eastern Europe with no transition controls that won it for Leave
It was previous non-voters who wanted to Take Back Control and spend the EU money on the NHS who won it for Leave. Dominic Cummings understood they were not motivated by Brexit but wanted their lives, their towns, to recover. Cummings understood the importance of Levelling Up to keep these voters onside; Rishi appears not to.
They loved the NHS, that's true, but they also hated immigration. They felt especially enjoyably angry when they were egged on to think about the Turks as well as about southern and eastern Europeans, e.g. Nigel Farage's "Romanians next door". They didn't give a toss about "levelling up". Nobody cares about that. They want better lives and their falling-apart conditions to improve, but they don't know how anybody with an income in excess of say 100K actually lives. Different worlds.
"Levelling up" means improving their conditions. That's why they voted for it. That's why they still want it. Immigration is a red herring, much as it suits woke europhiles to ally with Nigel Farage in pretending voters are a bunch of racists.
It's the same thing. Not that it is "racism" - last time I checked the Romanians next door were the same white European Christians as we are.
A lot of the red wall dislikes outsiders. Their community was proud due to cotton / steel / coal etc and quite insular. Someone from outside the area is suspicious enough, never mind foreigners.
These places have been broken economically and socially. They need levelling up as they have nothing. So their lack of services / jobs / prospects is only made worse by outsiders competing for jobs and resources.
Get rid of the outsiders, spend money on local services for local people - that's why a wall of non-voters turned out both for Brexit and then Boris.
Immigrants were not flocking to left-behind northern seaside towns; the only outsiders were jobless druggies dumped there by local authorities elsewhere.
If you look at Labour pollster Deborah Mattinson's analysis, one key marker was loss of "destination" high street stores. Perhaps the government should incentivise Marks & Spencer. Though as you imply, the underlying cause is often the loss of the one industry in one-industry towns.
We knocked an awful lot of doors. Go to somewhere like Ingleby Barwick - huge "village" full almost entirely with white Brits, and this kept being raised on the doorstep.
It didn't matter that where they lived wasn't actually being flooded with outsiders. *The country* was, and that meant it directly affected them even though it clearly didn't.
You can't stand on the doorstep and argue that people are wrong, even if they are.
The time for Labour to be less cagey about Brexit is AFTER the election imo. Let's just get that won please. Don't give the Tories a glimmer. Even then Labour should avoid 'Brexit was a mistake' sentiment in public. 17m (and a landslide majority of constituencies) voted for it and they need time to reach that conclusion themselves. Ok so some already have but most haven't. Not yet. If you go prodding them, pulling their chain, many of them will react badly. They'll double down and start coming up with increasingly exotic reasons why, no, it wasn't a mistake and they'd do it all again. We see it on here all the time. And it's fine on here, it passes the days nicely, but this isn't a dynamic you want between a fresh governing party (Labour) and a large chunk of the public. It's counterproductive. So, my advice to PM Starmer at least for his 1st term (which I doubt he needs since I'm sure this is the plan) is to forget about divisive '2016 revisited' rhetoric and instead concentrate on developing closer political, cultural and economic links with the European Union.
For me, EU membership was always about more than just economics; it was an attitude of mind. Were we at one with our neighbours or were we ourselves alone? In that sense, I think Brexit has been a total failure; I’ve got family and friends all over the world, but I still think of myself as a European, not as a citizen of some artificial grouping around the Pacific rim! So for me, Brexit is a total failure.
In that sense it was always going to be a total failure for you no matter what happened. That is hardly an argument one way or another in terms of this thread.
Of course I do not consider myself 'European' in your terms and Brexit has made no difference to my ability to have friends and family all over the world. And given that (unsurprisingly) all the dire warnings of disaster that were promulgated by the Remain campaign have failed to happen, I consider Brexit to have been a success. It achieved its aim of getting us out of the (for me) undemocratic political institutions of the EU.
It could be even more of a success were we to have a sensible Government that took us into the EEA but I am content at the moment with where we are along the road.
That of course, in a nutshell, is why we differ. In spite, perhaps, of my genetics showing me to be almost entirely from England and Wales, I’ve always thought of myself as a European. And I don’t think the EU is ‘undemocratic’; it could be, and one day will be, better but it’s on the right track. And UK could have been a force for good in that journey.
Swiss people are the archetypal Europeans - a third of them speak German, a third French, a third Italian. I don't think their sense of European-ness is diminished by being independent from the political structures of the EU, and I have always found this one of the sillier (but for some, one of the most potent) arguments for remain.
"Pensioner forced to retire from tennis because of cashless society Leisure centres could not take cash despite many older people still unable to use the internet" (£)
There are currently 14 million people in the UK who have limited or no access to the internet. The idea that we can force them into a cashless society is for the birds.
The problem is that handling cash is expensive and a very fixed cost (time taken to go to bank and deposit / cost of someone collecting the money) so as people stop paying cash it rapidly gets to the point where it can cost a fortune to handle cash.
How you resolve it in a way that allows everyone still use things is an interesting question. I suspect we need the post office or similar to create a cash card...
For this reason, if we want enterprises to accept cash, it will have to be legislated.
It also requires access to banks that handle cash for local businesses. Without that, the decline of small retailers accelerates.
"Pensioner forced to retire from tennis because of cashless society Leisure centres could not take cash despite many older people still unable to use the internet" (£)
There are currently 14 million people in the UK who have limited or no access to the internet. The idea that we can force them into a cashless society is for the birds.
The problem is that handling cash is expensive and a very fixed cost (time taken to go to bank and deposit / cost of someone collecting the money) so as people stop paying cash it rapidly gets to the point where it can cost a fortune to handle cash.
How you resolve it in a way that allows everyone still use things is an interesting question. I suspect we need the post office or similar to create a cash card...
Cashless works best when your payment processor does not have an outage. Thankfully, that has not happened for a couple of weeks at least.
Oh, and if the government has not blocked your cards because you are a terrorist paedophile serial killer on the run or have posted something disrespectful about the Prime Minister.
Or your bank decides to shut down your account with no notice, without giving a reason.
It’ll be funny as hell in say 2033 when after nearly a decade in opposition the Tories elect a leader who plans to take the Tories back into the EU.
I mean in less than a decade the Tory leadership went from being pro Section 28 to introducing same sex marriage.
Most Tory MPs voted against same sex marriage even if they backed civil unions, it was Labour and LD MPs who got it through, just now most of the Tory Party accepts it.
The Tories would never take the UK back into the EU, a future re elected Labour government might but again it would be a future Tory leader and Tory Party accepting that not the Tory Party leading on it
"Never" is a long time, and political parties can flip in a remarkably short time. Consider the journey the Conservatives have been on in the last 30 years.
(The funniest future history is the one where the next government manoevres the UK into independently agreeing with almost everything the EU does in order to allow the four freedoms so that the economy works. Then it's the Conservatives who rail against this in a "we are a great nation and should be in the room, leading not following" way. To save EEA types the time, it doesn't matter how rational or true this is. We left because of the feels, if we rejoin it will be because of the feels.)
If the Tories backed rejoining the EU anytime soon, they would not only cease to be the government they would also cease to be the main opposition. As you well know Farage would return and his party would overtake the Tories as the main party of the right. Indeed, the Tories would be virtually wiped out apart from a handful of seats in Surrey, Oxfordshire and West London at most.
The only party in the next generation who could take the UK back into the EU would be Labour with LD support
No, just as you flipped from Remain to Leave, you can flip back.
Just pretend that it never happened, like the Truss Premiership.
Like Brown didn't completely screw the economy and at the end spent madly to make it as difficult as possible for Cameron and then cut his salary as the last act of a really nasty person. A real Scumbag.
Gordon Brown did not screw the economy. That was the GFC "which started in America". Otoh, there is something a fishy about cutting the Prime Minister's salary, even if David Cameron went on to cut it further.
"Pensioner forced to retire from tennis because of cashless society Leisure centres could not take cash despite many older people still unable to use the internet" (£)
There are currently 14 million people in the UK who have limited or no access to the internet. The idea that we can force them into a cashless society is for the birds.
The problem is that handling cash is expensive and a very fixed cost (time taken to go to bank and deposit / cost of someone collecting the money) so as people stop paying cash it rapidly gets to the point where it can cost a fortune to handle cash.
How you resolve it in a way that allows everyone still use things is an interesting question. I suspect we need the post office or similar to create a cash card...
For this reason, if we want enterprises to accept cash, it will have to be legislated.
It also requires access to banks that handle cash for local businesses. Without that, the decline of small retailers accelerates.
Yes. Cash is bothersome and costly for businesses including banks. That's.why legislation is needed if we want to keep using it as a society.
"Less timid" sounds nice but what's the actual line?
"Brexit was a stupid idea, I plan to do nothing about it" doesn't sound great.
"Brexit was a stupid idea, I plan to renegotiate it" might be OK but it sounds a bit lame, and he'll be pressed to rule out unpopular things like restoring freedom of movement. If he rules out all the domestically unpopular things then he won't be able to actually renegotiate anything meaningful because the EU won't agree.
"Brexit was a stupid idea, I plan to reverse it" is bold and glorious and he can make massive free spending commitments with all the extra GDP it would bring. But reversing it isn't in his power, it has to be agreed by all the EU member states. His opponents will credibly claim that he'd have to join the Euro and Schengen, which are way less popular than just "rejoin".
Indeed, I voted Remain in 2016 but would have voted Leave had Remain required joining the Euro
You would have voted Leave if David Cameron had campaigned for Leave.
You just followed the party line.
Cameron would never have allowed a referendum had he thought Remain wouldn't win it, he would never have campaigned for Leave. His mistake was not getting a sufficient renegotiation, especially on free movement to reflect the fact Blair never used the transition controls on Eastern European migration we were entitled to post 2004
No Camerons mistake was in not being sufficiently pro-European and in not getting the wholehearted support of those in other parties, and in no party.
Nope, the pro Europeans in Labour, the LDs and SNP virtually all voted Remain anyway even with Cameron leading the Remain campaign. They were already in the 48%. It was the swing voters concerned over free movement from Eastern Europe with no transition controls that won it for Leave
It was previous non-voters who wanted to Take Back Control and spend the EU money on the NHS who won it for Leave. Dominic Cummings understood they were not motivated by Brexit but wanted their lives, their towns, to recover. Cummings understood the importance of Levelling Up to keep these voters onside; Rishi appears not to.
They loved the NHS, that's true, but they also hated immigration. They felt especially enjoyably angry when they were egged on to think about the Turks as well as about southern and eastern Europeans, e.g. Nigel Farage's "Romanians next door". They didn't give a toss about "levelling up". Nobody cares about that. They want better lives and their falling-apart conditions to improve, but they don't know how anybody with an income in excess of say 100K actually lives. Different worlds.
"Levelling up" means improving their conditions. That's why they voted for it. That's why they still want it. Immigration is a red herring, much as it suits woke europhiles to ally with Nigel Farage in pretending voters are a bunch of racists.
It's the same thing. Not that it is "racism" - last time I checked the Romanians next door were the same white European Christians as we are.
A lot of the red wall dislikes outsiders. Their community was proud due to cotton / steel / coal etc and quite insular. Someone from outside the area is suspicious enough, never mind foreigners.
These places have been broken economically and socially. They need levelling up as they have nothing. So their lack of services / jobs / prospects is only made worse by outsiders competing for jobs and resources.
Get rid of the outsiders, spend money on local services for local people - that's why a wall of non-voters turned out both for Brexit and then Boris.
Immigrants were not flocking to left-behind northern seaside towns; the only outsiders were jobless druggies dumped there by local authorities elsewhere.
If you look at Labour pollster Deborah Mattinson's analysis, one key marker was loss of "destination" high street stores. Perhaps the government should incentivise Marks & Spencer. Though as you imply, the underlying cause is often the loss of the one industry in one-industry towns.
We knocked an awful lot of doors. Go to somewhere like Ingleby Barwick - huge "village" full almost entirely with white Brits, and this kept being raised on the doorstep.
It didn't matter that where they lived wasn't actually being flooded with outsiders. *The country* was, and that meant it directly affected them even though it clearly didn't.
You can't stand on the doorstep and argue that people are wrong, even if they are.
Clacton and district similar. Interestingly medical and pharmaceutical services there would be much less accessible if there were no immigrants.
For me, EU membership was always about more than just economics; it was an attitude of mind. Were we at one with our neighbours or were we ourselves alone? In that sense, I think Brexit has been a total failure; I’ve got family and friends all over the world, but I still think of myself as a European, not as a citizen of some artificial grouping around the Pacific rim! So for me, Brexit is a total failure.
In that sense it was always going to be a total failure for you no matter what happened. That is hardly an argument one way or another in terms of this thread.
Of course I do not consider myself 'European' in your terms and Brexit has made no difference to my ability to have friends and family all over the world. And given that (unsurprisingly) all the dire warnings of disaster that were promulgated by the Remain campaign have failed to happen, I consider Brexit to have been a success. It achieved its aim of getting us out of the (for me) undemocratic political institutions of the EU.
It could be even more of a success were we to have a sensible Government that took us into the EEA but I am content at the moment with where we are along the road.
That of course, in a nutshell, is why we differ. In spite, perhaps, of my genetics showing me to be almost entirely from England and Wales, I’ve always thought of myself as a European. And I don’t think the EU is ‘undemocratic’; it could be, and one day will be, better but it’s on the right track. And UK could have been a force for good in that journey.
Swiss people are the archetypal Europeans - a third of them speak German, a third French, a third Italian. I don't think their sense of European-ness is diminished by being independent from the political structures of the EU, and I have always found this one of the sillier (but for some, one of the most potent) arguments for remain.
I may be wrong but I don’t think the Swiss are ‘disadvantaged’ in their travels about the EU as we are. Grandson-in-law has a Swiss as well as a British passport and uses the Swiss one for travels about Europe, which he does quite extensively in the course of his employment.
I know a lot of Remainers who don’t have the appetite for another referendum . You can think Brexit is a disaster but still be reluctant to go down that route .
Re-joining would be on worse terms than the relationship the UK had before with the EU .
The issue of the Euro would become the main sticking point . The FOM less so as people have now seen post Brexit what’s happened to immigration.
The problem for a re-join campaign is explaining that you can kick joining the Euro into the long grass and effectively never join as you can set insurmountable hurdles .
This type of nuance as we’ve seen in many political debates often fails . The stay out campaign will just hammer the message that we’ll lose the pound and be unable to tackle any future crises because of the Euro restraints .
Labour should promise a closer relationship with the EU , I’d like to see a youth mobility scheme and barriers to the creative industries addressed .
I’d like to see a return to Erasmus . All these can be done without too much political capital and I don’t think are that controversial.
For me, EU membership was always about more than just economics; it was an attitude of mind. Were we at one with our neighbours or were we ourselves alone? In that sense, I think Brexit has been a total failure; I’ve got family and friends all over the world, but I still think of myself as a European, not as a citizen of some artificial grouping around the Pacific rim! So for me, Brexit is a total failure.
In that sense it was always going to be a total failure for you no matter what happened. That is hardly an argument one way or another in terms of this thread.
Of course I do not consider myself 'European' in your terms and Brexit has made no difference to my ability to have friends and family all over the world. And given that (unsurprisingly) all the dire warnings of disaster that were promulgated by the Remain campaign have failed to happen, I consider Brexit to have been a success. It achieved its aim of getting us out of the (for me) undemocratic political institutions of the EU.
It could be even more of a success were we to have a sensible Government that took us into the EEA but I am content at the moment with where we are along the road.
That of course, in a nutshell, is why we differ. In spite, perhaps, of my genetics showing me to be almost entirely from England and Wales, I’ve always thought of myself as a European. And I don’t think the EU is ‘undemocratic’; it could be, and one day will be, better but it’s on the right track. And UK could have been a force for good in that journey.
Swiss people are the archetypal Europeans - a third of them speak German, a third French, a third Italian. I don't think their sense of European-ness is diminished by being independent from the political structures of the EU, and I have always found this one of the sillier (but for some, one of the most potent) arguments for remain.
62% of Swiss are native German speakers, 22% French speakers, and 8% Italian. Modern Switzerland is a European creation, with the French cantons added after the Napoleonic period.
I know a lot of Remainers who don’t have the appetite for another referendum . You can think Brexit is a disaster but still be reluctant to go down that route .
Re-joining would be on worse terms than the relationship the UK had before with the EU .
The issue of the Euro would become the main sticking point . The FOM less so as people have now seen post Brexit what’s happened to immigration.
The problem for a re-join campaign is explaining that you can kick joining the Euro into the long grass and effectively never join as you can set insurmountable hurdles .
This type of nuance as we’ve seen in many political debates often fails . The stay out campaign will just hammer the message that we’ll lose the pound and be unable to tackle any future crises because of the Euro restraints .
Labour should promise a closer relationship with the EU , I’d like to see a youth mobility scheme and barriers to the creative industries addressed .
I’d like to see a return to Erasmus . All these can be done without too much political capital and I don’t think are that controversial.
I’d certainly like to see your last two thoughts enacted before I depart this life.
It’ll be funny as hell in say 2033 when after nearly a decade in opposition the Tories elect a leader who plans to take the Tories back into the EU.
I mean in less than a decade the Tory leadership went from being pro Section 28 to introducing same sex marriage.
Most Tory MPs voted against same sex marriage even if they backed civil unions, it was Labour and LD MPs who got it through, just now most of the Tory Party accepts it.
The Tories would never take the UK back into the EU, a future re elected Labour government might but again it would be a future Tory leader and Tory Party accepting that not the Tory Party leading on it
"Never" is a long time, and political parties can flip in a remarkably short time. Consider the journey the Conservatives have been on in the last 30 years.
(The funniest future history is the one where the next government manoevres the UK into independently agreeing with almost everything the EU does in order to allow the four freedoms so that the economy works. Then it's the Conservatives who rail against this in a "we are a great nation and should be in the room, leading not following" way. To save EEA types the time, it doesn't matter how rational or true this is. We left because of the feels, if we rejoin it will be because of the feels.)
If the Tories backed rejoining the EU anytime soon, they would not only cease to be the government they would also cease to be the main opposition. As you well know Farage would return and his party would overtake the Tories as the main party of the right. Indeed, the Tories would be virtually wiped out apart from a handful of seats in Surrey, Oxfordshire and West London at most.
The only party in the next generation who could take the UK back into the EU would be Labour with LD support
No, just as you flipped from Remain to Leave, you can flip back.
Just pretend that it never happened, like the Truss Premiership.
Like Brown didn't completely screw the economy and at the end spent madly to make it as difficult as possible for Cameron and then cut his salary as the last act of a really nasty person. A real Scumbag.
Gordon Brown did not screw the economy. That was the GFC "which started in America". Otoh, there is something a fishy about cutting the Prime Minister's salary, even if David Cameron went on to cut it further.
Brown had created a seriously unbalanced economy and thought he'd 'abolished boom and bust'.
There were already numerous red lights flashing even before the GFC started at Northern Rock - rising unemployment, falling home ownership, massive trade deficit, soaring personal debt, increasing government borrowing.
I know a lot of Remainers who don’t have the appetite for another referendum . You can think Brexit is a disaster but still be reluctant to go down that route .
Re-joining would be on worse terms than the relationship the UK had before with the EU .
The issue of the Euro would become the main sticking point . The FOM less so as people have now seen post Brexit what’s happened to immigration.
The problem for a re-join campaign is explaining that you can kick joining the Euro into the long grass and effectively never join as you can set insurmountable hurdles .
This type of nuance as we’ve seen in many political debates often fails . The stay out campaign will just hammer the message that we’ll lose the pound and be unable to tackle any future crises because of the Euro restraints .
Labour should promise a closer relationship with the EU , I’d like to see a youth mobility scheme and barriers to the creative industries addressed .
I’d like to see a return to Erasmus . All these can be done without too much political capital and I don’t think are that controversial.
With the gradual disappearance of cash, attachment to Sterling will fade too. When using electronic transactions, it matters little what currency it is in.
Both Sterling and Euro will become obsolete soon enough. It will decreasing matter which is used.
"Pensioner forced to retire from tennis because of cashless society Leisure centres could not take cash despite many older people still unable to use the internet" (£)
There are currently 14 million people in the UK who have limited or no access to the internet. The idea that we can force them into a cashless society is for the birds.
The problem is that handling cash is expensive and a very fixed cost (time taken to go to bank and deposit / cost of someone collecting the money) so as people stop paying cash it rapidly gets to the point where it can cost a fortune to handle cash.
How you resolve it in a way that allows everyone still use things is an interesting question. I suspect we need the post office or similar to create a cash card...
Cashless works best when your payment processor does not have an outage. Thankfully, that has not happened for a couple of weeks at least.
Oh, and if the government has not blocked your cards because you are a terrorist paedophile serial killer on the run or have posted something disrespectful about the Prime Minister.
Or your bank decides to shut down your account with no notice, without giving a reason.
Sounds like fraud investigation to me, my understanding is that in case the bank is forbidden from informing the customer.
This bank (tide) offer free accounts for start up businesses as it is very difficult to open a business account with an actual bank. I've used it and it was fine until I got locked out of my account and needed to access the statements to do my accounts. I was effectively held to ransom by the bank who required me to upgrade to a premium service in order to get telephone support in order to get back in to my account. I think these accounts are ok for sole traders of micro enterprises for extremely basic cashflow purposes. Not this type of massive podcast enterprise.
"Pensioner forced to retire from tennis because of cashless society Leisure centres could not take cash despite many older people still unable to use the internet" (£)
It’ll be funny as hell in say 2033 when after nearly a decade in opposition the Tories elect a leader who plans to take the Tories back into the EU.
I mean in less than a decade the Tory leadership went from being pro Section 28 to introducing same sex marriage.
Most Tory MPs voted against same sex marriage even if they backed civil unions, it was Labour and LD MPs who got it through, just now most of the Tory Party accepts it.
The Tories would never take the UK back into the EU, a future re elected Labour government might but again it would be a future Tory leader and Tory Party accepting that not the Tory Party leading on it
"Never" is a long time, and political parties can flip in a remarkably short time. Consider the journey the Conservatives have been on in the last 30 years.
(The funniest future history is the one where the next government manoevres the UK into independently agreeing with almost everything the EU does in order to allow the four freedoms so that the economy works. Then it's the Conservatives who rail against this in a "we are a great nation and should be in the room, leading not following" way. To save EEA types the time, it doesn't matter how rational or true this is. We left because of the feels, if we rejoin it will be because of the feels.)
If the Tories backed rejoining the EU anytime soon, they would not only cease to be the government they would also cease to be the main opposition. As you well know Farage would return and his party would overtake the Tories as the main party of the right. Indeed, the Tories would be virtually wiped out apart from a handful of seats in Surrey, Oxfordshire and West London at most.
The only party in the next generation who could take the UK back into the EU would be Labour with LD support
No, just as you flipped from Remain to Leave, you can flip back.
Just pretend that it never happened, like the Truss Premiership.
Like Brown didn't completely screw the economy and at the end spent madly to make it as difficult as possible for Cameron and then cut his salary as the last act of a really nasty person. A real Scumbag.
Gordon Brown did not screw the economy. That was the GFC "which started in America". Otoh, there is something a fishy about cutting the Prime Minister's salary, even if David Cameron went on to cut it further.
Brown had created a seriously unbalanced economy and thought he'd 'abolished boom and bust'.
There were already numerous red lights flashing even before the GFC started at Northern Rock - rising unemployment, falling home ownership, massive trade deficit, soaring personal debt, increasing government borrowing.
To a limited extent, boom and bust was counteracted by counter-cyclical spending which is how we escaped the busts on our doorstep. The rest seems to be saying that if it were not for the GFC something else bad probably would have happened sooner or later but the GFC did happen so the rest is just partisan spin. What Brown should be excoriated for is PPI.
"Brexit will shrink our economy because a lack of imported labour will stop us growing." Net immigration a record.
"Brexit will cause Sterling to go into a tail spin boosting inflation". Sterling one of the stronger currencies in 2023.
"The UK will have a year long recession because of Brexit." Nope, it won't.
"The UK will be the slowest growing of the G7." Nope. About average actually.
Every day there is more nonsense blaming Brexit for some ill. Its exactly the same nonsense that we used to get in reverse when the EU was blamed for all our ills when we were members. Maybe, just maybe, Starmer, Sunak and, nah Davie is a completely lost cause, well, some of our politicians might start to address our real problems. A horrendous balance of payments deficit that built up whilst we were in the single market. A serious training gap that arose because freedom of movement disincentivised training of our own people. A disconnect between our education system and the skills actually needed.
Or we can just keep blaming the bogey man. I suppose its easier.
Its noticeable that the people who predicted mass unemployment after Brexit are now bewailing full employment.
It was also predicted that house prices would collapse and pensioners would be made destitute.
"Brexit will shrink our economy because a lack of imported labour will stop us growing." Net immigration a record.
"Brexit will cause Sterling to go into a tail spin boosting inflation". Sterling one of the stronger currencies in 2023.
"The UK will have a year long recession because of Brexit." Nope, it won't.
"The UK will be the slowest growing of the G7." Nope. About average actually.
Every day there is more nonsense blaming Brexit for some ill. Its exactly the same nonsense that we used to get in reverse when the EU was blamed for all our ills when we were members. Maybe, just maybe, Starmer, Sunak and, nah Davie is a completely lost cause, well, some of our politicians might start to address our real problems. A horrendous balance of payments deficit that built up whilst we were in the single market. A serious training gap that arose because freedom of movement disincentivised training of our own people. A disconnect between our education system and the skills actually needed.
Or we can just keep blaming the bogey man. I suppose its easier.
Point of order: Sterling fell ~10% upon the announcement EU referendum result and has never been back to the height it was at on June 22 2016. [Comparison against US$ and €] Indeed, following the slump in the pound, a common argument from Brexiters was that this was good news because "Sterling has been overvalued for some time".
In 2023 the pound is up around 2% from the January 1st figure, but down from the level just a couple of weeks before Christmas 2022, since there was a downward movement just at the end of the year. I'd be cautious about specifying arbitrary timespans such as since the turn of the year unless there's a particular event or policy announcement that makes that start point important in a narrative. Otherwise we could cherry pick time points to our heart's content and not really cast any light on the situation.
"our heart's content" - do you and David share a heart?
"Less timid" sounds nice but what's the actual line?
"Brexit was a stupid idea, I plan to do nothing about it" doesn't sound great.
"Brexit was a stupid idea, I plan to renegotiate it" might be OK but it sounds a bit lame, and he'll be pressed to rule out unpopular things like restoring freedom of movement. If he rules out all the domestically unpopular things then he won't be able to actually renegotiate anything meaningful because the EU won't agree.
"Brexit was a stupid idea, I plan to reverse it" is bold and glorious and he can make massive free spending commitments with all the extra GDP it would bring. But reversing it isn't in his power, it has to be agreed by all the EU member states. His opponents will credibly claim that he'd have to join the Euro and Schengen, which are way less popular than just "rejoin".
Indeed, I voted Remain in 2016 but would have voted Leave had Remain required joining the Euro
You would have voted Leave if David Cameron had campaigned for Leave.
You just followed the party line.
Cameron would never have allowed a referendum had he thought Remain wouldn't win it, he would never have campaigned for Leave. His mistake was not getting a sufficient renegotiation, especially on free movement to reflect the fact Blair never used the transition controls on Eastern European migration we were entitled to post 2004
No Camerons mistake was in not being sufficiently pro-European and in not getting the wholehearted support of those in other parties, and in no party.
Nope, the pro Europeans in Labour, the LDs and SNP virtually all voted Remain anyway even with Cameron leading the Remain campaign. They were already in the 48%. It was the swing voters concerned over free movement from Eastern Europe with no transition controls that won it for Leave
It was previous non-voters who wanted to Take Back Control and spend the EU money on the NHS who won it for Leave. Dominic Cummings understood they were not motivated by Brexit but wanted their lives, their towns, to recover. Cummings understood the importance of Levelling Up to keep these voters onside; Rishi appears not to.
They loved the NHS, that's true, but they also hated immigration. They felt especially enjoyably angry when they were egged on to think about the Turks as well as about southern and eastern Europeans, e.g. Nigel Farage's "Romanians next door". They didn't give a toss about "levelling up". Nobody cares about that. They want better lives and their falling-apart conditions to improve, but they don't know how anybody with an income in excess of say 100K actually lives. Different worlds.
"Levelling up" means improving their conditions. That's why they voted for it. That's why they still want it. Immigration is a red herring, much as it suits woke europhiles to ally with Nigel Farage in pretending voters are a bunch of racists.
‘Levelling up’, along with immigration and the NHS were the levers Cummings, and the super rich rootless cosmopolitans who funded him, alighted on to fleece a few million people to vote Leave, just enough to tip the balance.
Johnson was a hapless figurehead. We now know that on in the early hours of the day after the referendum, when it was clear that Leave had won, he was panicking because he thought there wasn’t a plan.
Well, of course there was a plan. The plan was to lever this country out of the EU on a campaign of lies so that those same rootless cosmopolitan super rich can more effectively loot this country.
That’s why many millions of people will never be reconciled to Brexit. Because it’s a massive con trick. And even those who bought the con are reluctantly beginning to recognise that they were conned. Never mind all the million people who weren’t conned in the first place.
This is why Brexit will continue to be a cancer on Britain for a couple of decades to come.
And it’s all the Tory’s fault. They wanted it, they headed both leave campaigns and the lacklustre remain campaign, they inflicted their psychodrama on the country. They deserve what is coming.
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
They’d just want to be assured that Johnson and the ERG morons were kept away from power for good, but it’s already pretty clear they’ve been utterly vanquished.
Though just to add, as others have said, best to leave all this until the election has been won.
"Brexit will shrink our economy because a lack of imported labour will stop us growing." Net immigration a record.
"Brexit will cause Sterling to go into a tail spin boosting inflation". Sterling one of the stronger currencies in 2023.
"The UK will have a year long recession because of Brexit." Nope, it won't.
"The UK will be the slowest growing of the G7." Nope. About average actually.
Every day there is more nonsense blaming Brexit for some ill. Its exactly the same nonsense that we used to get in reverse when the EU was blamed for all our ills when we were members. Maybe, just maybe, Starmer, Sunak and, nah Davie is a completely lost cause, well, some of our politicians might start to address our real problems. A horrendous balance of payments deficit that built up whilst we were in the single market. A serious training gap that arose because freedom of movement disincentivised training of our own people. A disconnect between our education system and the skills actually needed.
Or we can just keep blaming the bogey man. I suppose its easier.
Point of order: Sterling fell ~10% upon the announcement EU referendum result and has never been back to the height it was at on June 22 2016. [Comparison against US$ and €] Indeed, following the slump in the pound, a common argument from Brexiters was that this was good news because "Sterling has been overvalued for some time".
In 2023 the pound is up around 2% from the January 1st figure, but down from the level just a couple of weeks before Christmas 2022, since there was a downward movement just at the end of the year. I'd be cautious about specifying arbitrary timespans such as since the turn of the year unless there's a particular event or policy announcement that makes that start point important in a narrative. Otherwise we could cherry pick time points to our heart's content and not really cast any light on the situation.
"our heart's content" - do you and David share a heart?
That Times article on Brexit and the services industry is bloody grim.
As it proceeds through a litany of self-inflicted wounds, it notes that the reform of Solvency II - supposedly a rare Brexit win for the insurance industry - is actually happening “further and faster” inside the EU!
Brexit, and the way Brexit has happened, has totally fucked the UK.
"Pensioner forced to retire from tennis because of cashless society Leisure centres could not take cash despite many older people still unable to use the internet" (£)
There are currently 14 million people in the UK who have limited or no access to the internet. The idea that we can force them into a cashless society is for the birds.
The problem is that handling cash is expensive and a very fixed cost (time taken to go to bank and deposit / cost of someone collecting the money) so as people stop paying cash it rapidly gets to the point where it can cost a fortune to handle cash.
How you resolve it in a way that allows everyone still use things is an interesting question. I suspect we need the post office or similar to create a cash card...
For this reason, if we want enterprises to accept cash, it will have to be legislated.
It also requires access to banks that handle cash for local businesses. Without that, the decline of small retailers accelerates.
The answer is surely to mandate branches doing basic transactions for any bank, with the branch hosting bank taking a small percentage from the "freeloading" bank, which could be higher in less populated areas.
That Times article on Brexit and the services industry is bloody grim.
As it proceeds through a litany of self-inflicted wounds, it notes that the reform of Solvency II - supposedly a rare Brexit win for the insurance industry - is actually happening “further and faster” inside the EU!
Brexit, and the way Brexit has happened, has totally fucked the UK.
The problem with Brexit now is that anyone who wants to try and improve it is accused of taking us back in.
So if that is the position from which people start, how will this situation ever get better? The people who wanted it have failed to deliver it but are incapable of letting anyone else have a go and instead accuse them of being Remainers or traitors - Remainers no longer exist since we left last time I checked and having an opinion does not make you a traitor. We do not live in North Korea.
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
They’d just want to be assured that Johnson and the ERG morons were kept away from power for good, but it’s already pretty clear they’ve been utterly vanquished.
Though just to add, as others have said, best to leave all this until the election has been won.
What this misses is a large part of the cost of Brexit has been the internal division within the country. Rejoin and we go through that again however good the deal, with little guarantee we don't end up in a perpetual self harming hokey cokey.
That Times article on Brexit and the services industry is bloody grim.
As it proceeds through a litany of self-inflicted wounds, it notes that the reform of Solvency II - supposedly a rare Brexit win for the insurance industry - is actually happening “further and faster” inside the EU!
Brexit, and the way Brexit has happened, has totally fucked the UK.
The problem with Brexit now is that anyone who wants to try and improve it is accused of taking us back in.
So if that is the position from which people start, how will this situation ever get better? The people who wanted it have failed to deliver it but are incapable of letting anyone else have a go and instead accuse them of being Remainers or traitors - Remainers no longer exist since we left last time I checked and having an opinion does not make you a traitor. We do not live in North Korea.
I don’t think this is so much of a problem anymore. People like @another_richard are increasingly a fringe minority who are literally dying off.
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
This is true. Brejoin would be the ultimate validation of The Project and the EU would do a lot, and have reasons to do a lot, to engineer and enable it.
"Pensioner forced to retire from tennis because of cashless society Leisure centres could not take cash despite many older people still unable to use the internet" (£)
There are currently 14 million people in the UK who have limited or no access to the internet. The idea that we can force them into a cashless society is for the birds.
The problem is that handling cash is expensive and a very fixed cost (time taken to go to bank and deposit / cost of someone collecting the money) so as people stop paying cash it rapidly gets to the point where it can cost a fortune to handle cash.
How you resolve it in a way that allows everyone still use things is an interesting question. I suspect we need the post office or similar to create a cash card...
For this reason, if we want enterprises to accept cash, it will have to be legislated.
It also requires access to banks that handle cash for local businesses. Without that, the decline of small retailers accelerates.
The answer is surely to mandate branches doing basic transactions for any bank, with the branch hosting bank taking a small percentage from the "freeloading" bank, which could be higher in less populated areas.
It is not quite that simple because it is not just about staff, there is also physical infrastructure. For a bank branch to handle large cash sums from businesses, it must have safes and strongrooms, which not all branches have or ever did. (Wasn't this the basis of a sitcom once?)
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
They’d just want to be assured that Johnson and the ERG morons were kept away from power for good, but it’s already pretty clear they’ve been utterly vanquished.
Though just to add, as others have said, best to leave all this until the election has been won.
What this misses is a large part of the cost of Brexit has been the internal division within the country. Rejoin and we go through that again however good the deal, with little guarantee we don't end up in a perpetual self harming hokey cokey.
I think it 7-8 more years until it is back on the table and viable, there needs to be a bit more 'die off'.
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
They’d just want to be assured that Johnson and the ERG morons were kept away from power for good, but it’s already pretty clear they’ve been utterly vanquished.
Though just to add, as others have said, best to leave all this until the election has been won.
What this misses is a large part of the cost of Brexit has been the internal division within the country. Rejoin and we go through that again however good the deal, with little guarantee we don't end up in a perpetual self harming hokey cokey.
I think it 7-8 more years until it is back on the table and viable, there needs to be a bit more 'die off'.
This die off - does it include my wife and I who voted remain or are we excused?
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
This is true. Brejoin would be the ultimate validation of The Project and the EU would do a lot, and have reasons to do a lot, to engineer and enable it.
Plus the bonus that concerned reasonableness from the EU would be much more galling to the EUrophobes than having their own bovine rage reflected back at them.
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
They’d just want to be assured that Johnson and the ERG morons were kept away from power for good, but it’s already pretty clear they’ve been utterly vanquished.
Though just to add, as others have said, best to leave all this until the election has been won.
What this misses is a large part of the cost of Brexit has been the internal division within the country. Rejoin and we go through that again however good the deal, with little guarantee we don't end up in a perpetual self harming hokey cokey.
I think it 7-8 more years until it is back on the table and viable, there needs to be a bit more 'die off'.
This die off - does it include my wife and I who voted remain or are we excused?
Though Streeting has promised to double the size of our Medical Schools, he doesn't seem to have considered how that will be physically possible in terms of space and placements. So far as I can find out there has been no discussion with our Medical School.
Then there is the small matter of finding time to have more postgraduate training places ("junior doctors") in appropriate specialities and enough grognards like myself with enough protected time to actually train these rookies.
I dont know whether brexit has anything to do with it but my car ins policy has increased by 20.pc (LV) and other quotes from other insurance sites such as Confused, Compare the market, Money supermarket etc are all infinitely and shockingly worse. Wtf is going on?
FPT regarding Storm Shadow numbers... The UK bought 700+ but the tories only MLUed 400+ as an efficiency saving. The un-upgraded ones are being STOROBed for parts for the others.
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
They’d just want to be assured that Johnson and the ERG morons were kept away from power for good, but it’s already pretty clear they’ve been utterly vanquished.
Though just to add, as others have said, best to leave all this until the election has been won.
What this misses is a large part of the cost of Brexit has been the internal division within the country. Rejoin and we go through that again however good the deal, with little guarantee we don't end up in a perpetual self harming hokey cokey.
I think it 7-8 more years until it is back on the table and viable, there needs to be a bit more 'die off'.
This die off - does it include my wife and I who voted remain or are we excused?
You're excused. You're not getting off this site that easily.
Come Rejoin, Big G and his fragrant wife will be all in favour anyway.
That Times article on Brexit and the services industry is bloody grim.
As it proceeds through a litany of self-inflicted wounds, it notes that the reform of Solvency II - supposedly a rare Brexit win for the insurance industry - is actually happening “further and faster” inside the EU!
Brexit, and the way Brexit has happened, has totally fucked the UK.
The problem with Brexit now is that anyone who wants to try and improve it is accused of taking us back in.
So if that is the position from which people start, how will this situation ever get better? The people who wanted it have failed to deliver it but are incapable of letting anyone else have a go and instead accuse them of being Remainers or traitors - Remainers no longer exist since we left last time I checked and having an opinion does not make you a traitor. We do not live in North Korea.
I don’t think this is so much of a problem anymore. People like @another_richard are increasingly a fringe minority who are literally dying off.
I hope to be around for a few decades more.
And to continue with the full employment it has brought.
I dont know whether brexit has anything to do with it but my car ins policy has increased by 20.pc (LV) and other quotes from other insurance sites such as Confused, Compare the market, Money supermarket etc are all infinitely and shockingly worse. Wtf is going on?
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
This is true. Brejoin would be the ultimate validation of The Project and the EU would do a lot, and have reasons to do a lot, to engineer and enable it.
I agree.
However, it still won't happen. Being shit at Brexiting is one of the few things that our civil service are still good at, but I dare say they will fail at holding that line in due course too.
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
They’d just want to be assured that Johnson and the ERG morons were kept away from power for good, but it’s already pretty clear they’ve been utterly vanquished.
Though just to add, as others have said, best to leave all this until the election has been won.
What this misses is a large part of the cost of Brexit has been the internal division within the country. Rejoin and we go through that again however good the deal, with little guarantee we don't end up in a perpetual self harming hokey cokey.
I think it 7-8 more years until it is back on the table and viable, there needs to be a bit more 'die off'.
I would just caution those who predict a return to the EU at sometime in the future
Nobody knows just where international trading will be in the future, not least with Macron's European Political Community proposals and the expanding CPTPP
Nostalgia for the EU as it was prior to Brexit assumes that we would rejoin the same organisation with the same benefits and return to the previous status quo but it will be very different in the years to come
Sunak has started the evolution to a closer relationship with the EU , particularly cultivating his friendship with Macron and UVDL helped in no small part by the WF and seeking agreements on various mutually beneficial matters including the use of e gates
Starmer will no doubt carry on this improving relationship, but he will need to accept the reality of EPC and CPTPP as will many others
Change happens and seeking to reverse change rarely succeeds, but adopting the change and improving it should be the way for all governments
That Times article on Brexit and the services industry is bloody grim.
As it proceeds through a litany of self-inflicted wounds, it notes that the reform of Solvency II - supposedly a rare Brexit win for the insurance industry - is actually happening “further and faster” inside the EU!
Brexit, and the way Brexit has happened, has totally fucked the UK.
The problem with Brexit now is that anyone who wants to try and improve it is accused of taking us back in.
So if that is the position from which people start, how will this situation ever get better? The people who wanted it have failed to deliver it but are incapable of letting anyone else have a go and instead accuse them of being Remainers or traitors - Remainers no longer exist since we left last time I checked and having an opinion does not make you a traitor. We do not live in North Korea.
I don’t think this is so much of a problem anymore. People like @another_richard are increasingly a fringe minority who are literally dying off.
I hope to be around for a few decades more.
And to continue with the full employment it has brought.
For me, EU membership was always about more than just economics; it was an attitude of mind. Were we at one with our neighbours or were we ourselves alone? In that sense, I think Brexit has been a total failure; I’ve got family and friends all over the world, but I still think of myself as a European, not as a citizen of some artificial grouping around the Pacific rim! So for me, Brexit is a total failure.
For me, the economics were virtually irrelevant. The issues were (a) were we a good fit and (b) did people in this country like the direction it was heading in?
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
They’d just want to be assured that Johnson and the ERG morons were kept away from power for good, but it’s already pretty clear they’ve been utterly vanquished.
Though just to add, as others have said, best to leave all this until the election has been won.
What this misses is a large part of the cost of Brexit has been the internal division within the country. Rejoin and we go through that again however good the deal, with little guarantee we don't end up in a perpetual self harming hokey cokey.
I think it 7-8 more years until it is back on the table and viable, there needs to be a bit more 'die off'.
This die off - does it include my wife and I who voted remain or are we excused?
Behave.
You're smart enough to know the difference between acknowledging that something will happen (in this case, that a lot of those who voted Leave in 2016 will soon be going to that happy place where there are no referendums) and wanting something to happen.
Unless something persuades a lot of people to change their mind (and that hasn't happened so far), we are heading for a point where a large majority of UK people will be people who wanted and still want EU membership. It won't be close, so it won't be divisive.
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
They’d just want to be assured that Johnson and the ERG morons were kept away from power for good, but it’s already pretty clear they’ve been utterly vanquished.
Though just to add, as others have said, best to leave all this until the election has been won.
What this misses is a large part of the cost of Brexit has been the internal division within the country. Rejoin and we go through that again however good the deal, with little guarantee we don't end up in a perpetual self harming hokey cokey.
I think it 7-8 more years until it is back on the table and viable, there needs to be a bit more 'die off'.
I would just caution those who predict a return to the EU at sometime in the future
Nobody knows just where international trading will be in the future, not least with Macron's European Political Community proposals and the expanding CPTPP
Nostalgia for the EU as it was prior to Brexit assumes that we would rejoin the same organisation with the same benefits and return to the previous status quo but it will be very different in the years to come
Sunak has started the evolution to a closer relationship with the EU , particularly cultivating his friendship with Macron and UVDL helped in no small part by the WF and seeking agreements on various mutually beneficial matters including the use of e gates
Starmer will no doubt carry on this improving relationship, but he will need to accept the reality of EPC and CPTPP as will many others
Change happens and seeking to reverse change rarely succeeds, but adopting the change and improving it should be the way for all governments
If some of the AI projections are correct in a couple of decades the big trading blocks might be Amazon vs Microsoft vs Google rather than EU v US v China.
Though Streeting has promised to double the size of our Medical Schools, he doesn't seem to have considered how that will be physically possible in terms of space and placements. So far as I can find out there has been no discussion with our Medical School.
Then there is the small matter of finding time to have more postgraduate training places ("junior doctors") in appropriate specialities and enough grognards like myself with enough protected time to actually train these rookies.
The Conservatives opened five new medical schools, so it cannot be that hard. There are already two more ready to go for whom the government has declined funding for home students.
That Times article on Brexit and the services industry is bloody grim.
As it proceeds through a litany of self-inflicted wounds, it notes that the reform of Solvency II - supposedly a rare Brexit win for the insurance industry - is actually happening “further and faster” inside the EU!
Brexit, and the way Brexit has happened, has totally fucked the UK.
The problem with Brexit now is that anyone who wants to try and improve it is accused of taking us back in.
So if that is the position from which people start, how will this situation ever get better? The people who wanted it have failed to deliver it but are incapable of letting anyone else have a go and instead accuse them of being Remainers or traitors - Remainers no longer exist since we left last time I checked and having an opinion does not make you a traitor. We do not live in North Korea.
I don’t think this is so much of a problem anymore. People like @another_richard are increasingly a fringe minority who are literally dying off.
I hope to be around for a few decades more.
And to continue with the full employment it has brought.
Has it?
Full employment was there before Brexit, and the mass immigration of the post Brexit years would suggest that full employment is unrelated to Brexit.
Full employment and labour shortages seem to be a post covid phenomenon in a lot of other countries too, in EU or out of it. I think mostly due to demographic shifts in population structure, mass unemployment in developed countries is history.
For me, EU membership was always about more than just economics; it was an attitude of mind. Were we at one with our neighbours or were we ourselves alone? In that sense, I think Brexit has been a total failure; I’ve got family and friends all over the world, but I still think of myself as a European, not as a citizen of some artificial grouping around the Pacific rim! So for me, Brexit is a total failure.
In that sense it was always going to be a total failure for you no matter what happened. That is hardly an argument one way or another in terms of this thread.
Of course I do not consider myself 'European' in your terms and Brexit has made no difference to my ability to have friends and family all over the world. And given that (unsurprisingly) all the dire warnings of disaster that were promulgated by the Remain campaign have failed to happen, I consider Brexit to have been a success. It achieved its aim of getting us out of the (for me) undemocratic political institutions of the EU.
It could be even more of a success were we to have a sensible Government that took us into the EEA but I am content at the moment with where we are along the road.
That is pretty much my position.
That we no longer have entirely frictionless trade is the small downside of leaving.
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
They’d just want to be assured that Johnson and the ERG morons were kept away from power for good, but it’s already pretty clear they’ve been utterly vanquished.
Though just to add, as others have said, best to leave all this until the election has been won.
What this misses is a large part of the cost of Brexit has been the internal division within the country. Rejoin and we go through that again however good the deal, with little guarantee we don't end up in a perpetual self harming hokey cokey.
I think it 7-8 more years until it is back on the table and viable, there needs to be a bit more 'die off'.
This die off - does it include my wife and I who voted remain or are we excused?
You're excused. You're not getting off this site that easily.
Come Rejoin, Big G and his fragrant wife will be all in favour anyway.
Genuinely I want a closer relationship and have said so for a long time
I doubt rejoin as we knew it will happen in my wife or my remaining lifespan
I wonder if full employment is something that is most appreciated by people of a certain age and from a certain location.
Those whose formative years were somewhere between 1975 and 2000 and in particular lived in old industrial areas.
The 'Labour isn't working' sign The news dominated by factory closures The discussions about the future on Grange Hill The soap opera storylines - remember Arthur Fowler's breakdown The endless documentaries about unemployment:
"Brexit will shrink our economy because a lack of imported labour will stop us growing." Net immigration a record.
"Brexit will cause Sterling to go into a tail spin boosting inflation". Sterling one of the stronger currencies in 2023.
"The UK will have a year long recession because of Brexit." Nope, it won't.
"The UK will be the slowest growing of the G7." Nope. About average actually.
Every day there is more nonsense blaming Brexit for some ill. Its exactly the same nonsense that we used to get in reverse when the EU was blamed for all our ills when we were members. Maybe, just maybe, Starmer, Sunak and, nah Davie is a completely lost cause, well, some of our politicians might start to address our real problems. A horrendous balance of payments deficit that built up whilst we were in the single market. A serious training gap that arose because freedom of movement disincentivised training of our own people. A disconnect between our education system and the skills actually needed.
Or we can just keep blaming the bogey man. I suppose its easier.
Its noticeable that the people who predicted mass unemployment after Brexit are now bewailing full employment.
It was also predicted that house prices would collapse and pensioners would be made destitute.
I have the impression that some people would welcome house prices crashing and pensioners being made destiture.
FPT regarding Storm Shadow numbers... The UK bought 700+ but the tories only MLUed 400+ as an efficiency saving. The un-upgraded ones are being STOROBed for parts for the others.
I dont know whether brexit has anything to do with it but my car ins policy has increased by 20.pc (LV) and other quotes from other insurance sites such as Confused, Compare the market, Money supermarket etc are all infinitely and shockingly worse. Wtf is going on?
"Pensioner forced to retire from tennis because of cashless society Leisure centres could not take cash despite many older people still unable to use the internet" (£)
"Brexit will shrink our economy because a lack of imported labour will stop us growing." Net immigration a record.
"Brexit will cause Sterling to go into a tail spin boosting inflation". Sterling one of the stronger currencies in 2023.
"The UK will have a year long recession because of Brexit." Nope, it won't.
"The UK will be the slowest growing of the G7." Nope. About average actually.
Every day there is more nonsense blaming Brexit for some ill. Its exactly the same nonsense that we used to get in reverse when the EU was blamed for all our ills when we were members. Maybe, just maybe, Starmer, Sunak and, nah Davie is a completely lost cause, well, some of our politicians might start to address our real problems. A horrendous balance of payments deficit that built up whilst we were in the single market. A serious training gap that arose because freedom of movement disincentivised training of our own people. A disconnect between our education system and the skills actually needed.
Or we can just keep blaming the bogey man. I suppose its easier.
Its noticeable that the people who predicted mass unemployment after Brexit are now bewailing full employment.
It was also predicted that house prices would collapse and pensioners would be made destitute.
I have the impression that some people would welcome house prices crashing and pensioners being made destiture.
House prices crashing would not render pensioners destitute, although it might be tough on their middle-aged offspring hoping to inherit their way to early retirement.
Though Streeting has promised to double the size of our Medical Schools, he doesn't seem to have considered how that will be physically possible in terms of space and placements. So far as I can find out there has been no discussion with our Medical School.
Then there is the small matter of finding time to have more postgraduate training places ("junior doctors") in appropriate specialities and enough grognards like myself with enough protected time to actually train these rookies.
The Conservatives opened five new medical schools, so it cannot be that hard. There are already two more ready to go for whom the government has declined funding for home students.
Doubling medical school entrance won't impact on our medical workforce in less than a decade, so Streeting needs to start his plan in the first year of a Labour government. He may find the money, but without the physical and human infrastructure the plan is doomed.
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
They’d just want to be assured that Johnson and the ERG morons were kept away from power for good, but it’s already pretty clear they’ve been utterly vanquished.
Though just to add, as others have said, best to leave all this until the election has been won.
What this misses is a large part of the cost of Brexit has been the internal division within the country. Rejoin and we go through that again however good the deal, with little guarantee we don't end up in a perpetual self harming hokey cokey.
I think it 7-8 more years until it is back on the table and viable, there needs to be a bit more 'die off'.
This die off - does it include my wife and I who voted remain or are we excused?
Behave.
You're smart enough to know the difference between acknowledging that something will happen (in this case, that a lot of those who voted Leave in 2016 will soon be going to that happy place where there are no referendums) and wanting something to happen.
Unless something persuades a lot of people to change their mind (and that hasn't happened so far), we are heading for a point where a large majority of UK people will be people who wanted and still want EU membership. It won't be close, so it won't be divisive.
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
They’d just want to be assured that Johnson and the ERG morons were kept away from power for good, but it’s already pretty clear they’ve been utterly vanquished.
Though just to add, as others have said, best to leave all this until the election has been won.
What this misses is a large part of the cost of Brexit has been the internal division within the country. Rejoin and we go through that again however good the deal, with little guarantee we don't end up in a perpetual self harming hokey cokey.
I think it 7-8 more years until it is back on the table and viable, there needs to be a bit more 'die off'.
I would just caution those who predict a return to the EU at sometime in the future
Nobody knows just where international trading will be in the future, not least with Macron's European Political Community proposals and the expanding CPTPP
Nostalgia for the EU as it was prior to Brexit assumes that we would rejoin the same organisation with the same benefits and return to the previous status quo but it will be very different in the years to come
Sunak has started the evolution to a closer relationship with the EU , particularly cultivating his friendship with Macron and UVDL helped in no small part by the WF and seeking agreements on various mutually beneficial matters including the use of e gates
Starmer will no doubt carry on this improving relationship, but he will need to accept the reality of EPC and CPTPP as will many others
Change happens and seeking to reverse change rarely succeeds, but adopting the change and improving it should be the way for all governments
If some of the AI projections are correct in a couple of decades the big trading blocks might be Amazon vs Microsoft vs Google rather than EU v US v China.
I dont know whether brexit has anything to do with it but my car ins policy has increased by 20.pc (LV) and other quotes from other insurance sites such as Confused, Compare the market, Money supermarket etc are all infinitely and shockingly worse. Wtf is going on?
That Times article on Brexit and the services industry is bloody grim.
As it proceeds through a litany of self-inflicted wounds, it notes that the reform of Solvency II - supposedly a rare Brexit win for the insurance industry - is actually happening “further and faster” inside the EU!
Brexit, and the way Brexit has happened, has totally fucked the UK.
The problem with Brexit now is that anyone who wants to try and improve it is accused of taking us back in.
So if that is the position from which people start, how will this situation ever get better? The people who wanted it have failed to deliver it but are incapable of letting anyone else have a go and instead accuse them of being Remainers or traitors - Remainers no longer exist since we left last time I checked and having an opinion does not make you a traitor. We do not live in North Korea.
I don’t think this is so much of a problem anymore. People like @another_richard are increasingly a fringe minority who are literally dying off.
I hope to be around for a few decades more.
And to continue with the full employment it has brought.
Has it?
Full employment was there before Brexit, and the mass immigration of the post Brexit years would suggest that full employment is unrelated to Brexit.
Full employment and labour shortages seem to be a post covid phenomenon in a lot of other countries too, in EU or out of it. I think mostly to demographic shifts in population, mass unemployment in developed countries is history.
The forecasts of millions unemployed because of Brexit were complete BS, whereas your forecast of needing more people has yet to face the AI hit
I never used to think Britain would Brejoin, but now I think it increasingly likely.
Part of the reason is the utter intellectual void in the Brexit side. There’s nothing there, no vision for the future, no credible policy making, no smart young things in Brexity think-thanks.
I think the moment Polish GDP PP surpasses the UK will be a psychological shock that helps secure consensus for Brejoin.
Polish GDP by PPP is $1.7 trillion, UK GDP by PPP is $3.85 trillion, so the ‘moment Poland surpasses the UK’ exists either in the 22nd century, or in your deluded and tiny brain, or, more likely, it won’t ever happen before the aliens invade
I never used to think Britain would Brejoin, but now I think it increasingly likely.
Part of the reason is the utter intellectual void in the Brexit side. There’s nothing there, no vision for the future, no credible policy making, no smart young things in Brexity think-thanks.
For me, EU membership was always about more than just economics; it was an attitude of mind. Were we at one with our neighbours or were we ourselves alone? In that sense, I think Brexit has been a total failure; I’ve got family and friends all over the world, but I still think of myself as a European, not as a citizen of some artificial grouping around the Pacific rim! So for me, Brexit is a total failure.
In that sense it was always going to be a total failure for you no matter what happened. That is hardly an argument one way or another in terms of this thread.
Of course I do not consider myself 'European' in your terms and Brexit has made no difference to my ability to have friends and family all over the world. And given that (unsurprisingly) all the dire warnings of disaster that were promulated by the Remain campaign have failed to happen, I consider Brexit to have been a success. It achieved its aim of getting us out of the (for me) undemocratic political institutions of the EU.
It could be even more of a success were we to have a sensible Government that took us into the EEA but I am content at the moment with where we are along the road.
A sensible Government delivering that policy would have been called traitors by your side, Richard.
I agree. And as so often those promoting the revolution are destroyed by it even as it succeeds. But that doesn't bother me in the least. Especially when those who are destroyed are politicians I have no time for anyway. Indeed in some cases I see the destruction of political careers to be a bonus when some of those being destroyed were only promoting the revolution for their own personal political aggrandisement.
For me, EU membership was always about more than just economics; it was an attitude of mind. Were we at one with our neighbours or were we ourselves alone? In that sense, I think Brexit has been a total failure; I’ve got family and friends all over the world, but I still think of myself as a European, not as a citizen of some artificial grouping around the Pacific rim! So for me, Brexit is a total failure.
In that sense it was always going to be a total failure for you no matter what happened. That is hardly an argument one way or another in terms of this thread.
Of course I do not consider myself 'European' in your terms and Brexit has made no difference to my ability to have friends and family all over the world. And given that (unsurprisingly) all the dire warnings of disaster that were promulgated by the Remain campaign have failed to happen, I consider Brexit to have been a success. It achieved its aim of getting us out of the (for me) undemocratic political institutions of the EU.
It could be even more of a success were we to have a sensible Government that took us into the EEA but I am content at the moment with where we are along the road.
That of course, in a nutshell, is why we differ. In spite, perhaps, of my genetics showing me to be almost entirely from England and Wales, I’ve always thought of myself as a European. And I don’t think the EU is ‘undemocratic’; it could be, and one day will be, better but it’s on the right track. And UK could have been a force for good in that journey.
We tried to be a force for good (as we saw it) for 40 years and failed. The old saying about doing the same thing and expecting different results springs to mind.
That Times article on Brexit and the services industry is bloody grim.
As it proceeds through a litany of self-inflicted wounds, it notes that the reform of Solvency II - supposedly a rare Brexit win for the insurance industry - is actually happening “further and faster” inside the EU!
Brexit, and the way Brexit has happened, has totally fucked the UK.
The problem with Brexit now is that anyone who wants to try and improve it is accused of taking us back in.
So if that is the position from which people start, how will this situation ever get better? The people who wanted it have failed to deliver it but are incapable of letting anyone else have a go and instead accuse them of being Remainers or traitors - Remainers no longer exist since we left last time I checked and having an opinion does not make you a traitor. We do not live in North Korea.
I don’t think this is so much of a problem anymore. People like @another_richard are increasingly a fringe minority who are literally dying off.
I hope to be around for a few decades more.
And to continue with the full employment it has brought.
Has it?
Full employment was there before Brexit, and the mass immigration of the post Brexit years would suggest that full employment is unrelated to Brexit.
Full employment and labour shortages seem to be a post covid phenomenon in a lot of other countries too, in EU or out of it. I think mostly due to demographic shifts in population structure, mass unemployment in developed countries is history.
Unemployment seems to be:
UK 3.9% Germany 5.6% France 7.1% Italy 7.8% Spain 13.2%
So significantly higher in comparable European countries.
We're not in the world of 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' anymore - another 1980s unemployment reference (see my previous post).
You're right that there are various reasons for it - I'd add a shift to lower productivity servicer sector jobs as well - but its certainly not what was predicted in 2016 or, looking further back, to those GenX formative years when "there will never be full employment again" was a universal assumption.
I never used to think Britain would Brejoin, but now I think it increasingly likely.
Part of the reason is the utter intellectual void in the Brexit side. There’s nothing there, no vision for the future, no credible policy making, no smart young things in Brexity think-thanks.
No Brexitist hegemony can hold without it.
Brexit is over, it’s just now a clean-up job.
But, you never even liked the EU when we were in it.
And, that's what I find so odd about so much of the bewailment about leaving it here. Hardly anyone enjoyed being a part of it. It's just, they like the current government even less, but the current govenrment won't be in office for much longer.
I wonder if full employment is something that is most appreciated by people of a certain age and from a certain location.
Those whose formative years were somewhere between 1975 and 2000 and in particular lived in old industrial areas.
The 'Labour isn't working' sign The news dominated by factory closures The discussions about the future on Grange Hill The soap opera storylines - remember Arthur Fowler's breakdown The endless documentaries about unemployment:
And for many, many millions their own personal experiences.
Yes, but that deindustrialisation of employment has now taken place. While manufacturing is still a big part of the economy, it is no longer a big employer.
De-industrialisation was a big factor in Brexitism (and Trumpism) but is more or less complete. The persisting problem is that for many citizens is that service employment is available but not well paid, nore stable, nor the foundation of community in the way that old industries were.
I think the moment Polish GDP PP surpasses the UK will be a psychological shock that helps secure consensus for Brejoin.
Polish GDP by PPP is $1.7 trillion, UK GDP by PPP is $3.85 trillion, so the ‘moment Poland surpasses the UK’ exists either in the 22nd century, or in your deluded and tiny brain, or, more likely, it won’t ever happen before the aliens invade
Q: What's the difference between PB and SKS? A: Unlike PB, SKS does everything he can to avoid using the word 'Brexit', let alone going on about it ad infinitum.
SKS will continue his monastic silence on Brexit until after GE 24. If there's one thing we've learnt about him, it's that he will do nothing that he thinks would jeopardise a Labour victory. Criticising Brexit, and by extension those that voted for it, would be a disastrous error at this stage of the cycle.
"Pensioner forced to retire from tennis because of cashless society Leisure centres could not take cash despite many older people still unable to use the internet" (£)
I think the rejoin agreement could be one of the easiest negotiations in history. It’s so much in the EU’s interest to be able to show that the only country that ever left the EU came back as soon as it had a sensible government in place, that I think they’d be quite willing to allow the UK to come back under the old terms, rebate and all.
They’d just want to be assured that Johnson and the ERG morons were kept away from power for good, but it’s already pretty clear they’ve been utterly vanquished.
Though just to add, as others have said, best to leave all this until the election has been won.
What this misses is a large part of the cost of Brexit has been the internal division within the country. Rejoin and we go through that again however good the deal, with little guarantee we don't end up in a perpetual self harming hokey cokey.
I think it 7-8 more years until it is back on the table and viable, there needs to be a bit more 'die off'.
I would just caution those who predict a return to the EU at sometime in the future
Nobody knows just where international trading will be in the future, not least with Macron's European Political Community proposals and the expanding CPTPP
Nostalgia for the EU as it was prior to Brexit assumes that we would rejoin the same organisation with the same benefits and return to the previous status quo but it will be very different in the years to come
Sunak has started the evolution to a closer relationship with the EU , particularly cultivating his friendship with Macron and UVDL helped in no small part by the WF and seeking agreements on various mutually beneficial matters including the use of e gates
Starmer will no doubt carry on this improving relationship, but he will need to accept the reality of EPC and CPTPP as will many others
Change happens and seeking to reverse change rarely succeeds, but adopting the change and improving it should be the way for all governments
If some of the AI projections are correct in a couple of decades the big trading blocks might be Amazon vs Microsoft vs Google rather than EU v US v China.
Yes. This entire Brexit debate is bizarrely irrelevant given what A.I. is about to do to human society
It’s like arguing about the provision of car parks in Warsaw in 1938
I think the moment Polish GDP PP surpasses the UK will be a psychological shock that helps secure consensus for Brejoin.
Polish GDP by PPP is $1.7 trillion, UK GDP by PPP is $3.85 trillion, so the ‘moment Poland surpasses the UK’ exists either in the 22nd century, or in your deluded and tiny brain, or, more likely, it won’t ever happen before the aliens invade
Bear in mind that communism kept Eastern Europe artificially poor. Pre WWII, the Baltic States, Czechoslovakia, what is now Western Poland all had living stanards similar to those of the UK.
That Times article on Brexit and the services industry is bloody grim.
As it proceeds through a litany of self-inflicted wounds, it notes that the reform of Solvency II - supposedly a rare Brexit win for the insurance industry - is actually happening “further and faster” inside the EU!
Brexit, and the way Brexit has happened, has totally fucked the UK.
The problem with Brexit now is that anyone who wants to try and improve it is accused of taking us back in.
So if that is the position from which people start, how will this situation ever get better? The people who wanted it have failed to deliver it but are incapable of letting anyone else have a go and instead accuse them of being Remainers or traitors - Remainers no longer exist since we left last time I checked and having an opinion does not make you a traitor. We do not live in North Korea.
I don’t think this is so much of a problem anymore. People like @another_richard are increasingly a fringe minority who are literally dying off.
I hope to be around for a few decades more.
And to continue with the full employment it has brought.
Has it?
Full employment was there before Brexit, and the mass immigration of the post Brexit years would suggest that full employment is unrelated to Brexit.
Full employment and labour shortages seem to be a post covid phenomenon in a lot of other countries too, in EU or out of it. I think mostly due to demographic shifts in population structure, mass unemployment in developed countries is history.
Unemployment seems to be:
UK 3.9% Germany 5.6% France 7.1% Italy 7.8% Spain 13.2%
So significantly higher in comparable European countries.
We're not in the world of 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' anymore - another 1980s unemployment reference (see my previous post).
You're right that there are various reasons for it - I'd add a shift to lower productivity servicer sector jobs as well - but its certainly not what was predicted in 2016 or, looking further back, to those GenX formative years when "there will never be full employment again" was a universal assumption.
Britain had lower unemployment than European peers before Brexit.
I think the moment Polish GDP PP surpasses the UK will be a psychological shock that helps secure consensus for Brejoin.
Polish GDP by PPP is $1.7 trillion, UK GDP by PPP is $3.85 trillion, so the ‘moment Poland surpasses the UK’ exists either in the 22nd century, or in your deluded and tiny brain, or, more likely, it won’t ever happen before the aliens invade
Per capita on current projections the average Pole is better off than the average Briton by 2030.
Though Streeting has promised to double the size of our Medical Schools, he doesn't seem to have considered how that will be physically possible in terms of space and placements. So far as I can find out there has been no discussion with our Medical School.
Then there is the small matter of finding time to have more postgraduate training places ("junior doctors") in appropriate specialities and enough grognards like myself with enough protected time to actually train these rookies.
The Conservatives opened five new medical schools, so it cannot be that hard. There are already two more ready to go for whom the government has declined funding for home students.
We would be in a far better position on this if the BMA membership had not voted to stop the opening of new Medical schools 15 years ago.
Have they changed their position on this since? I assume so but I can't find any reference to votes in favour at subsequent conferences.
I never used to think Britain would Brejoin, but now I think it increasingly likely.
Part of the reason is the utter intellectual void in the Brexit side. There’s nothing there, no vision for the future, no credible policy making, no smart young things in Brexity think-thanks.
No Brexitist hegemony can hold without it.
Brexit is over, it’s just now a clean-up job.
But, you never even liked the EU when we were in it.
And, that's what I find so odd about so much of the bewailment about leaving it here. Hardly anyone enjoyed being a part of it. It's just, they like the current government even less, but the current govenrment won't be in office for much longer.
Its yearning for a magic wand.
Leave the EU and all our problems will go away. Rejoin the EU and all our problems will go away.
Neither is true and nor is any other magic wand solution.
I never used to think Britain would Brejoin, but now I think it increasingly likely.
Part of the reason is the utter intellectual void in the Brexit side. There’s nothing there, no vision for the future, no credible policy making, no smart young things in Brexity think-thanks.
No Brexitist hegemony can hold without it.
Brexit is over, it’s just now a clean-up job.
But, you never even liked the EU when we were in it.
And, that's what I find so odd about so much of the bewailment about leaving it here. Hardly anyone enjoyed being a part of it. It's just, they like the current government even less, but the current govenrment won't be in office for much longer.
It's just entitled middle age men howling at the moon. Lots of noise but no actual action.
I think the moment Polish GDP PP surpasses the UK will be a psychological shock that helps secure consensus for Brejoin.
Polish GDP by PPP is $1.7 trillion, UK GDP by PPP is $3.85 trillion, so the ‘moment Poland surpasses the UK’ exists either in the 22nd century, or in your deluded and tiny brain, or, more likely, it won’t ever happen before the aliens invade
Per capita on current projections the average Pole is better off than the average Briton by 2030.
I think the moment Polish GDP PP surpasses the UK will be a psychological shock that helps secure consensus for Brejoin.
Polish GDP by PPP is $1.7 trillion, UK GDP by PPP is $3.85 trillion, so the ‘moment Poland surpasses the UK’ exists either in the 22nd century, or in your deluded and tiny brain, or, more likely, it won’t ever happen before the aliens invade
Per capita on current projections the average Pole is better off than the average Briton by 2030.
We were right to leave. The Tories have made an arse of it. Hopefully the next government will do a better job of it.
That's where I sit.
I don't think Starmer can polish a turd any more than Sunak can.
Sooner or later one or both PM and LOTO will have to follow the public in their opinion of Brexit.
The problem for the Conservatives and Labour is that, at the moment, 31% thinking Brexit was the right decision is still higher than most estimates of Conservative support. It's a problem for the Conservatives because of the huge overlap between the Brexit 31 and the Conservative support; they can't afford to lose anyone by apostasy on Brexit. It's a problem for Labour because their moving faster on Brapprochment would help Sunak get the old gang back together and Starmer can't risk a "Brexit is in peril" election.
The interesting bit is if (and I emphasise if) the numbers continue to drift. Labour are reasonable to fear 30% of the electorate, especially with FPTP. But there's some threshold where the democratic thing is to ignore the minority. Twenty percent? Fifteen percent?
And then, if Norwayish is the next thing to try... What aspects of life is the UK going to tag along with the EU on, and where are we taking a different path? And if nearly all the rest of the continent is involved in one political setup, do we really want to be outside that? You might say "we don't want the politics", but how do you get democracy without politics?
After the inevitable disruption of our departure from the EU there is a lot of room to improve relations and cooperation with them again where we have common interests. That will happen under Labour or Tory governments. It started with this government with the Windsor accords.
The EU will also change. Poland is a coming power in the EU and will build a group that will shape the EU more to their liking. Our good relations with Poland over the Ukraine will make this another opportunity. The French will be unhappy about how things are going but we might just cope with that as well.
I’ve had comments from French and German friends having second thoughts about Ukrainian membership of the EU - a block consisting of Poland, Ukraine and the Baltics would be a major power its own right.
Given the rapidity of the growth of Poland and the Baltics, if Ukraine can replicate that, it would be challenging for a top spot in the EU economies in a decade or 2.
This would transform the dynamics of Eastern Europe in the EU.
I dont know whether brexit has anything to do with it but my car ins policy has increased by 20.pc (LV) and other quotes from other insurance sites such as Confused, Compare the market, Money supermarket etc are all infinitely and shockingly worse. Wtf is going on?
That Times article on Brexit and the services industry is bloody grim.
As it proceeds through a litany of self-inflicted wounds, it notes that the reform of Solvency II - supposedly a rare Brexit win for the insurance industry - is actually happening “further and faster” inside the EU!
Brexit, and the way Brexit has happened, has totally fucked the UK.
The problem with Brexit now is that anyone who wants to try and improve it is accused of taking us back in.
So if that is the position from which people start, how will this situation ever get better? The people who wanted it have failed to deliver it but are incapable of letting anyone else have a go and instead accuse them of being Remainers or traitors - Remainers no longer exist since we left last time I checked and having an opinion does not make you a traitor. We do not live in North Korea.
I don’t think this is so much of a problem anymore. People like @another_richard are increasingly a fringe minority who are literally dying off.
I hope to be around for a few decades more.
And to continue with the full employment it has brought.
Has it?
Full employment was there before Brexit, and the mass immigration of the post Brexit years would suggest that full employment is unrelated to Brexit.
Full employment and labour shortages seem to be a post covid phenomenon in a lot of other countries too, in EU or out of it. I think mostly due to demographic shifts in population structure, mass unemployment in developed countries is history.
Unemployment seems to be:
UK 3.9% Germany 5.6% France 7.1% Italy 7.8% Spain 13.2%
So significantly higher in comparable European countries.
We're not in the world of 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' anymore - another 1980s unemployment reference (see my previous post).
You're right that there are various reasons for it - I'd add a shift to lower productivity servicer sector jobs as well - but its certainly not what was predicted in 2016 or, looking further back, to those GenX formative years when "there will never be full employment again" was a universal assumption.
Britain had lower unemployment than European peers before Brexit.
I think the moment Polish GDP PP surpasses the UK will be a psychological shock that helps secure consensus for Brejoin.
Polish GDP by PPP is $1.7 trillion, UK GDP by PPP is $3.85 trillion, so the ‘moment Poland surpasses the UK’ exists either in the 22nd century, or in your deluded and tiny brain, or, more likely, it won’t ever happen before the aliens invade
Per capita on current projections the average Pole is better off than the average Briton by 2030.
I think the moment Polish GDP PP surpasses the UK will be a psychological shock that helps secure consensus for Brejoin.
Polish GDP by PPP is $1.7 trillion, UK GDP by PPP is $3.85 trillion, so the ‘moment Poland surpasses the UK’ exists either in the 22nd century, or in your deluded and tiny brain, or, more likely, it won’t ever happen before the aliens invade
Per capita on current projections the average Pole is better off than the average Briton by 2030.
I remember in the late 1980s when the Italians celebrated ‘sorpasso’ - the moment Italy’s GDP overtook the UK for the first time in several centuries. There was actual celebration in Rome, and much lamenting in the British press, especially from the Left, as the Tories were in office, and further decline was eagerly expected
That Times article on Brexit and the services industry is bloody grim.
As it proceeds through a litany of self-inflicted wounds, it notes that the reform of Solvency II - supposedly a rare Brexit win for the insurance industry - is actually happening “further and faster” inside the EU!
Brexit, and the way Brexit has happened, has totally fucked the UK.
The problem with Brexit now is that anyone who wants to try and improve it is accused of taking us back in.
So if that is the position from which people start, how will this situation ever get better? The people who wanted it have failed to deliver it but are incapable of letting anyone else have a go and instead accuse them of being Remainers or traitors - Remainers no longer exist since we left last time I checked and having an opinion does not make you a traitor. We do not live in North Korea.
I don’t think this is so much of a problem anymore. People like @another_richard are increasingly a fringe minority who are literally dying off.
I hope to be around for a few decades more.
And to continue with the full employment it has brought.
Has it?
Full employment was there before Brexit, and the mass immigration of the post Brexit years would suggest that full employment is unrelated to Brexit.
Full employment and labour shortages seem to be a post covid phenomenon in a lot of other countries too, in EU or out of it. I think mostly due to demographic shifts in population structure, mass unemployment in developed countries is history.
Unemployment seems to be:
UK 3.9% Germany 5.6% France 7.1% Italy 7.8% Spain 13.2%
So significantly higher in comparable European countries.
We're not in the world of 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' anymore - another 1980s unemployment reference (see my previous post).
You're right that there are various reasons for it - I'd add a shift to lower productivity servicer sector jobs as well - but its certainly not what was predicted in 2016 or, looking further back, to those GenX formative years when "there will never be full employment again" was a universal assumption.
Britain had lower unemployment than European peers before Brexit.
Why are Brexiters so stupid?
It's had full employment post brexit.
Another_dickhead claims that Brexit has *caused* full employment.
For me, EU membership was always about more than just economics; it was an attitude of mind. Were we at one with our neighbours or were we ourselves alone? In that sense, I think Brexit has been a total failure; I’ve got family and friends all over the world, but I still think of myself as a European, not as a citizen of some artificial grouping around the Pacific rim! So for me, Brexit is a total failure.
In that sense it was always going to be a total failure for you no matter what happened. That is hardly an argument one way or another in terms of this thread.
Of course I do not consider myself 'European' in your terms and Brexit has made no difference to my ability to have friends and family all over the world. And given that (unsurprisingly) all the dire warnings of disaster that were promulgated by the Remain campaign have failed to happen, I consider Brexit to have been a success. It achieved its aim of getting us out of the (for me) undemocratic political institutions of the EU.
It could be even more of a success were we to have a sensible Government that took us into the EEA but I am content at the moment with where we are along the road.
That of course, in a nutshell, is why we differ. In spite, perhaps, of my genetics showing me to be almost entirely from England and Wales, I’ve always thought of myself as a European. And I don’t think the EU is ‘undemocratic’; it could be, and one day will be, better but it’s on the right track. And UK could have been a force for good in that journey.
We tried to be a force for good (as we saw it) for 40 years and failed. The old saying about doing the same thing and expecting different results springs to mind.
For me, EU membership was always about more than just economics; it was an attitude of mind. Were we at one with our neighbours or were we ourselves alone? In that sense, I think Brexit has been a total failure; I’ve got family and friends all over the world, but I still think of myself as a European, not as a citizen of some artificial grouping around the Pacific rim! So for me, Brexit is a total failure.
In that sense it was always going to be a total failure for you no matter what happened. That is hardly an argument one way or another in terms of this thread.
Of course I do not consider myself 'European' in your terms and Brexit has made no difference to my ability to have friends and family all over the world. And given that (unsurprisingly) all the dire warnings of disaster that were promulgated by the Remain campaign have failed to happen, I consider Brexit to have been a success. It achieved its aim of getting us out of the (for me) undemocratic political institutions of the EU.
It could be even more of a success were we to have a sensible Government that took us into the EEA but I am content at the moment with where we are along the road.
That of course, in a nutshell, is why we differ. In spite, perhaps, of my genetics showing me to be almost entirely from England and Wales, I’ve always thought of myself as a European. And I don’t think the EU is ‘undemocratic’; it could be, and one day will be, better but it’s on the right track. And UK could have been a force for good in that journey.
We tried to be a force for good (as we saw it) for 40 years and failed. The old saying about doing the same thing and expecting different results springs to mind.
That’s not right, is it. We encouraged, promoted, supported all sorts of things.
That Times article on Brexit and the services industry is bloody grim.
As it proceeds through a litany of self-inflicted wounds, it notes that the reform of Solvency II - supposedly a rare Brexit win for the insurance industry - is actually happening “further and faster” inside the EU!
Brexit, and the way Brexit has happened, has totally fucked the UK.
The problem with Brexit now is that anyone who wants to try and improve it is accused of taking us back in.
So if that is the position from which people start, how will this situation ever get better? The people who wanted it have failed to deliver it but are incapable of letting anyone else have a go and instead accuse them of being Remainers or traitors - Remainers no longer exist since we left last time I checked and having an opinion does not make you a traitor. We do not live in North Korea.
I don’t think this is so much of a problem anymore. People like @another_richard are increasingly a fringe minority who are literally dying off.
I hope to be around for a few decades more.
And to continue with the full employment it has brought.
Has it?
Full employment was there before Brexit, and the mass immigration of the post Brexit years would suggest that full employment is unrelated to Brexit.
Full employment and labour shortages seem to be a post covid phenomenon in a lot of other countries too, in EU or out of it. I think mostly due to demographic shifts in population structure, mass unemployment in developed countries is history.
Unemployment seems to be:
UK 3.9% Germany 5.6% France 7.1% Italy 7.8% Spain 13.2%
So significantly higher in comparable European countries.
We're not in the world of 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' anymore - another 1980s unemployment reference (see my previous post).
You're right that there are various reasons for it - I'd add a shift to lower productivity servicer sector jobs as well - but its certainly not what was predicted in 2016 or, looking further back, to those GenX formative years when "there will never be full employment again" was a universal assumption.
Britain had lower unemployment than European peers before Brexit.
Why are Brexiters so stupid?
It's had full employment post brexit.
Another_dickhead claims that Brexit has *caused* full employment.
I didnt say that you moron. Its a statement of fact.
I think the moment Polish GDP PP surpasses the UK will be a psychological shock that helps secure consensus for Brejoin.
Polish GDP by PPP is $1.7 trillion, UK GDP by PPP is $3.85 trillion, so the ‘moment Poland surpasses the UK’ exists either in the 22nd century, or in your deluded and tiny brain, or, more likely, it won’t ever happen before the aliens invade
Per capita on current projections the average Pole is better off than the average Briton by 2030.
I remember in the late 1980s when the Italians celebrated ‘sorpasso’ - the moment Italy’s GDP overtook the UK for the first time in several centuries. There was actual celebration in Rome, and much lamenting in the British press, especially from the Left, as the Tories were in office, and further decline was eagerly expected
Today?
Italy’s nominal GDP is $2.1trn
UK’s nominal GDP is $3.1trn
The UK is a vastly bigger economy than Italy
I remember it well. Along with predictions that Japanese incomes per head would soon surpass Americans’.
We were right to leave. The Tories have made an arse of it. Hopefully the next government will do a better job of it.
That's where I sit.
I don't think Starmer can polish a turd any more than Sunak can.
Sooner or later one or both PM and LOTO will have to follow the public in their opinion of Brexit.
The problem for the Conservatives and Labour is that, at the moment, 31% thinking Brexit was the right decision is still higher than most estimates of Conservative support. It's a problem for the Conservatives because of the huge overlap between the Brexit 31 and the Conservative support; they can't afford to lose anyone by apostasy on Brexit. It's a problem for Labour because their moving faster on Brapprochment would help Sunak get the old gang back together and Starmer can't risk a "Brexit is in peril" election.
The interesting bit is if (and I emphasise if) the numbers continue to drift. Labour are reasonable to fear 30% of the electorate, especially with FPTP. But there's some threshold where the democratic thing is to ignore the minority. Twenty percent? Fifteen percent?
And then, if Norwayish is the next thing to try... What aspects of life is the UK going to tag along with the EU on, and where are we taking a different path? And if nearly all the rest of the continent is involved in one political setup, do we really want to be outside that? You might say "we don't want the politics", but how do you get democracy without politics?
After the inevitable disruption of our departure from the EU there is a lot of room to improve relations and cooperation with them again where we have common interests. That will happen under Labour or Tory governments. It started with this government with the Windsor accords.
The EU will also change. Poland is a coming power in the EU and will build a group that will shape the EU more to their liking. Our good relations with Poland over the Ukraine will make this another opportunity. The French will be unhappy about how things are going but we might just cope with that as well.
I’ve had comments from French and German friends having second thoughts about Ukrainian membership of the EU - a block consisting of Poland, Ukraine and the Baltics would be a major power its own right.
Given the rapidity of the growth of Poland and the Baltics, if Ukraine can replicate that, it would be challenging for a top spot in the EU economies in a decade or 2.
This would transform the dynamics of Eastern Europe in the EU.
Ukraine was the poorest country in Europe by some distance before the SMO. Now it's even significantly poorer than that, a demographic disaster due to emigration and completely fucked up. It'll be many, many years before they can satisfy the acquis communautaire for full membership. There are also quite a few veto wielding member states who would have to be bought off or threatened somehow.
Comments
What a load of malarkey!
It didn't matter that where they lived wasn't actually being flooded with outsiders. *The country* was, and that meant it directly affected them even though it clearly didn't.
You can't stand on the doorstep and argue that people are wrong, even if they are.
Re-joining would be on worse terms than the relationship the UK had before with the EU .
The issue of the Euro would become the main sticking point . The FOM less so as people have now seen post Brexit what’s happened to immigration.
The problem for a re-join campaign is explaining that you can kick joining the Euro into the long grass and effectively never join as you can set insurmountable hurdles .
This type of nuance as we’ve seen in many political debates often fails . The stay out campaign will just hammer the message that we’ll lose the pound and be unable to tackle any future crises because of the Euro restraints .
Labour should promise a closer relationship with the EU , I’d like to see a youth mobility scheme and barriers to the creative industries addressed .
I’d like to see a return to Erasmus . All these can be done without too much political capital and I don’t think are that controversial.
There were already numerous red lights flashing even before the GFC started at Northern Rock - rising unemployment, falling home ownership, massive trade deficit, soaring personal debt, increasing government borrowing.
Both Sterling and Euro will become obsolete soon enough. It will decreasing matter which is used.
"WES STREETING: The real reason immigration is out of control? The country's obsession with cheap labour from overseas"
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-12132385/WES-STREETING-real-reason-immigration-control.html
KS has firmly put Labour's immigration policy on the Tory lawn.
It was also predicted that house prices would collapse and pensioners would be made destitute.
Johnson was a hapless figurehead. We now know that on in the early hours of the day after the referendum, when it was clear that Leave had won, he was panicking because he thought there wasn’t a plan.
Well, of course there was a plan. The plan was to lever this country out of the EU on a campaign of lies so that those same rootless cosmopolitan super rich can more effectively loot this country.
That’s why many millions of people will never be reconciled to Brexit. Because it’s a massive con trick. And even those who bought the con are reluctantly beginning to recognise that they were conned. Never mind all the million people who weren’t conned in the first place.
This is why Brexit will continue to be a cancer on Britain for a couple of decades to come.
And it’s all the Tory’s fault. They wanted it, they headed both leave campaigns and the lacklustre remain campaign, they inflicted their psychodrama on the country. They deserve what is coming.
They’d just want to be assured that Johnson and the ERG morons were kept away from power for good, but it’s already pretty clear they’ve been utterly vanquished.
Though just to add, as others have said, best to leave all this until the election has been won.
As it proceeds through a litany of self-inflicted wounds, it notes that the reform of Solvency II - supposedly a rare Brexit win for the insurance industry - is actually happening “further and faster” inside the EU!
Brexit, and the way Brexit has happened, has totally fucked the UK.
So if that is the position from which people start, how will this situation ever get better? The people who wanted it have failed to deliver it but are incapable of letting anyone else have a go and instead accuse them of being Remainers or traitors - Remainers no longer exist since we left last time I checked and having an opinion does not make you a traitor. We do not live in North Korea.
People like @another_richard are increasingly a fringe minority who are literally dying off.
Then there is the small matter of finding time to have more postgraduate training places ("junior doctors") in appropriate specialities and enough grognards like myself with enough protected time to actually train these rookies.
Wtf is going on?
And to continue with the full employment it has brought.
Inflation, innit.
However, it still won't happen. Being shit at Brexiting is one of the few things that our civil service are still good at, but I dare say they will fail at holding that line in due course too.
Nobody knows just where international trading will be in the future, not least with Macron's European Political Community proposals and the expanding CPTPP
Nostalgia for the EU as it was prior to Brexit assumes that we would rejoin the same organisation with the same benefits and return to the previous status quo but it will be very different in the years to come
Sunak has started the evolution to a closer relationship with the EU , particularly cultivating his friendship with Macron and UVDL helped in no small part by the WF and seeking agreements on various mutually beneficial matters including the use of e gates
Starmer will no doubt carry on this improving relationship, but he will need to accept the reality of EPC and CPTPP as will many others
Change happens and seeking to reverse change rarely succeeds, but adopting the change and improving it should be the way for all governments
I never felt Europe was my homeland.
You're smart enough to know the difference between acknowledging that something will happen (in this case, that a lot of those who voted Leave in 2016 will soon be going to that happy place where there are no referendums) and wanting something to happen.
Unless something persuades a lot of people to change their mind (and that hasn't happened so far), we are heading for a point where a large majority of UK people will be people who wanted and still want EU membership. It won't be close, so it won't be divisive.
What the hell happens then?
Full employment was there before Brexit, and the mass immigration of the post Brexit years would suggest that full employment is unrelated to Brexit.
Full employment and labour shortages seem to be a post covid phenomenon in a lot of other countries too, in EU or out of it. I think mostly due to demographic shifts in population structure, mass unemployment in developed countries is history.
That we no longer have entirely frictionless trade is the small downside of leaving.
I doubt rejoin as we knew it will happen in my wife or my remaining lifespan
Those whose formative years were somewhere between 1975 and 2000 and in particular lived in old industrial areas.
The 'Labour isn't working' sign
The news dominated by factory closures
The discussions about the future on Grange Hill
The soap opera storylines - remember Arthur Fowler's breakdown
The endless documentaries about unemployment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbT0FwJnqLk
And for many, many millions their own personal experiences.
MLU - mid life update
STOROB - stores robbery
Part of the reason is the utter intellectual void in the Brexit side. There’s nothing there, no vision for the future, no credible policy making, no smart young things in Brexity think-thanks.
No Brexitist hegemony can hold without it.
Brexit is over, it’s just now a clean-up job.
Yes I am looking at you Mr Johnson.
UK 3.9%
Germany 5.6%
France 7.1%
Italy 7.8%
Spain 13.2%
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/unemployment-rate?continent=europe
So significantly higher in comparable European countries.
We're not in the world of 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' anymore - another 1980s unemployment reference (see my previous post).
You're right that there are various reasons for it - I'd add a shift to lower productivity servicer sector jobs as well - but its certainly not what was predicted in 2016 or, looking further back, to those GenX formative years when "there will never be full employment again" was a universal assumption.
And, that's what I find so odd about so much of the bewailment about leaving it here. Hardly anyone enjoyed being a part of it. It's just, they like the current government even less, but the current govenrment won't be in office for much longer.
De-industrialisation was a big factor in Brexitism (and Trumpism) but is more or less complete. The persisting problem is that for many citizens is that service employment is available but not well paid, nore stable, nor the foundation of community in the way that old industries were.
A: Unlike PB, SKS does everything he can to avoid using the word 'Brexit', let alone going on about it ad infinitum.
SKS will continue his monastic silence on Brexit until after GE 24. If there's one thing we've learnt about him, it's that he will do nothing that he thinks would jeopardise a Labour victory. Criticising Brexit, and by extension those that voted for it, would be a disastrous error at this stage of the cycle.
It’s like arguing about the provision of car parks in Warsaw in 1938
Why are Brexiters so stupid?
https://news.sky.com/story/britains-economic-trajectory-will-soon-see-it-overtaken-by-poland-labour-to-warn-12821152
Have they changed their position on this since? I assume so but I can't find any reference to votes in favour at subsequent conferences.
Leave the EU and all our problems will go away.
Rejoin the EU and all our problems will go away.
Neither is true and nor is any other magic wand solution.
This will not happen
Given the rapidity of the growth of Poland and the Baltics, if Ukraine can replicate that, it would be challenging for a top spot in the EU economies in a decade or 2.
This would transform the dynamics of Eastern Europe in the EU.
Today?
Italy’s nominal GDP is $2.1trn
UK’s nominal GDP is $3.1trn
The UK is a vastly bigger economy than Italy