Nigel Farage reveals private polling suggests if he led a party into the 2024 election he'd likely win 4-5 million votes --more than enough to guarantee a Tory wipeout.
That is more than he won in 2015 - just under 4m votes and zero seats. When Kipper votes shifted to May in 2007, she piled more than 20% (2.3m) votes onto Cameron's total.
Farage will be thinking of doing this for two reasons. One, there needs to be a conservative party on the ballot and currently there isn't. Two, he has an ego the size of a planet.
The game changer? Boris! Discarded and banned by the corruption party, if he wants to be a player he needs to find a way back in. If he waits for Starmer to win, he further needs to hope that the leader after Sunak lets him back in. And is then useless and needs replacing quickly. So why not?
Anybody who thinks the Tories have a chance has to factor that
1. We have the same feeling of "kick the feckers out" and "time for a change" that we had in 1997
PLUS
2. We have a looming recession, a massive debt crisis, public services struggling, mortgage rates surging, on and on and on: unlike in 1997 when economic conditions were benign
So the Tories are ultra-screwed. There is no way out of this. Meanwhile the SNP have exploded, opening the door for Starmer in Scotland, too
Labour are gonna win, big or small, they are gonna win. But I predict they will become unpopular very quickly, when their lack of ideas is exposed
Yep.
1) kick the sleazy buggers out
Combined with
2) economic chaos, strikes and division comparable to 1979
And season with:
3) widespread Bregret
4) SNP implosion
It's very hard to see anything other than a Labour working majority despite the massive seat gains required
The only counter-vailing factor is the dullness of Starmer. He is so uninspiring. However, again, Starmer is lucky in his opponents. Sunak is a squeaky sixth form trillionaire leprechaun with a tax-swerving non dom foreign wife. Hard to entirely dislike, but not exactly Abe Lincoln. Meanwhile the Nats have lost Sturgeon and put in Yousless. And I forget the name of the Lib Dem woman
Labour Win. Probably a big win
For all that Starmer isn't Blair, Sunak isn't Major either. Not even knackered broken Major, as he was in 1997.
Partly, that's down to experience; Major had been on his soapbox for more than thirty years and knew what he was doing. A bit like a retired-through-injury cricket pro brought back for one more match, he still had the instincts, even if the reactions had gone.
There was also at least some sympathy for Major as a person (everyone just wanted the Conservatives gone). My vote in 1997 was in part the electoral equivalent of a pity snog, and I don't think I'm totally freakish. Sunak, fairly or not, doesn't stir the same instincts. He can damn well go down with the rest of them.
I'm more confident of a big Conservative defeat than a big Labour win. (Nineteen months tops to go, and still sub thirty percent. There's a Starbucks full of coffee to smell here, so please wake up and get smelling.) But beyond a certain point, a sufficiently big Conservative rout requires a big Labour victory.
And it looks like even a "Britain is Booming, Don't Let Labour Blow It" strategy isn't going to work.
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Vote out your MEP and elect a new one?
Just as a Conservative supporter can get rid of their MP in Liverpool, or a Labour supporter in Norfolk….
There are plenty of people in the UK who don’t have a vote in practice.
Funny, I remember being told DeSantis wouldn't really do much different in Ukraine just because he was apeing Trump's talking points on it. Not all his fellows agree, apparently. GOP presidential candidate Tim Scott was asked to differentiate himself from Trump and DeSantis.
Nobody wants to face up to climate change. It either isn't happening because look at those Starmerite Just Stop Oil lunatics, or its too big to deal with so lets not bother.
Nigel Farage reveals private polling suggests if he led a party into the 2024 election he'd likely win 4-5 million votes --more than enough to guarantee a Tory wipeout.
That is more than he won in 2015 - just under 4m votes and zero seats. When Kipper votes shifted to May in 2007, she piled more than 20% (2.3m) votes onto Cameron's total.
Farage will be thinking of doing this for two reasons. One, there needs to be a conservative party on the ballot and currently there isn't. Two, he has an ego the size of a planet.
The game changer? Boris! Discarded and banned by the corruption party, if he wants to be a player he needs to find a way back in. If he waits for Starmer to win, he further needs to hope that the leader after Sunak lets him back in. And is then useless and needs replacing quickly. So why not?
Nigel Farage reveals private polling suggests if he led a party into the 2024 election he'd likely win 4-5 million votes --more than enough to guarantee a Tory wipeout.
That is more than he won in 2015 - just under 4m votes and zero seats. When Kipper votes shifted to May in 2007, she piled more than 20% (2.3m) votes onto Cameron's total.
Farage will be thinking of doing this for two reasons. One, there needs to be a conservative party on the ballot and currently there isn't. Two, he has an ego the size of a planet.
The game changer? Boris! Discarded and banned by the corruption party, if he wants to be a player he needs to find a way back in. If he waits for Starmer to win, he further needs to hope that the leader after Sunak lets him back in. And is then useless and needs replacing quickly. So why not?
If he wanted to do it, he'd do it. By "leaking" the news, he shows that he just wants people to talk about him doing it.
10% Tory wipe-out, Labour landslide 30% Workable Labour majority 40% Labour-led hung parliament 15% Chaotic hung parliament, Tories largest party but unable to govern - 2nd election within 6 months 5% Tory majority
Question for me is what happens to voting reform if the Labour-led hung parliament comes to pass?
I have Lab majority at 75%. And 30% that it's big. My central forecast for Lab seats is 350.
All that money which will be swallowed by bigger mortgage payments is money taken from the economy. Money no longer being spent on products and services, which will cost people jobs...
It will indeed but there are a considerable number who benefit from higher interest rates
It is a terrible time for fixed rate mortgage holders on a par with the 1990s, with repossession and negative equity beckoning and most likely a fall in house prices if it mirrors those days 30 years ago
Fixed rate mortgage holders are OK for now. It's when the fixed rate ends, and those on variable rates, who are getting clobbered.
I wonder if fixed term mortgages are actually going to force interest rates higher than they otherwise would have gone given the 'braking effect' they have on the impact of interest rate changes.
IIRC interest rate changes used to be described as 'a touch on the tiller' of the economy.
Nobody wants to face up to climate change. It either isn't happening because look at those Starmerite Just Stop Oil lunatics, or its too big to deal with so lets not bother.
The reality is that what *we* do is a drop in the ocean when billions of people are continuing to increase their carbon footprint.
Is anyone going to ground 1000 planes to offset the ones India is putting into service? Even that would just mean emissions would stand still.
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Vote out your MEP and elect a new one?
Just as a Conservative supporter can get rid of their MP in Liverpool, or a Labour supporter in Norfolk….
There are plenty of people in the UK who don’t have a vote in practice.
Steve
MEPs cannot repeal EU law. They can't even initiate it
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
As I queue up at the non EU line at Schiphol with the Russians and the Turks for my shiny blue passports to be stamped by immigration, Beverley C. breezes past me in the Schengen line jauntily waving her Irish EU passport. As she checks into the Amstel Hotel I am still heading for the airport taxi rank.
I repeat the comments detailed above. It’s a foundational argument that gets us that want to rejoin nowhere.
Anyway, Ireland’s not in Schengen.
They use the EU/Schengen line just like we used to.
You can whistle for rejoin. It isn't happening anytime this side of 2050.
All that money which will be swallowed by bigger mortgage payments is money taken from the economy. Money no longer being spent on products and services, which will cost people jobs...
It will indeed but there are a considerable number who benefit from higher interest rates
It is a terrible time for fixed rate mortgage holders on a par with the 1990s, with repossession and negative equity beckoning and most likely a fall in house prices if it mirrors those days 30 years ago
Fixed rate mortgage holders are OK for now. It's when the fixed rate ends, and those on variable rates, who are getting clobbered.
I should have qualified that at 2 year fixed rates - thank you
All that money which will be swallowed by bigger mortgage payments is money taken from the economy. Money no longer being spent on products and services, which will cost people jobs...
It will indeed but there are a considerable number who benefit from higher interest rates
It is a terrible time for fixed rate mortgage holders on a par with the 1990s, with repossession and negative equity beckoning and most likely a fall in house prices if it mirrors those days 30 years ago
Fixed rate mortgage holders are OK for now. It's when the fixed rate ends, and those on variable rates, who are getting clobbered.
Also businesses indebted by Covid costs. A lot of cheap finance ending which is already swamping businesses.
Nobody wants to face up to climate change. It either isn't happening because look at those Starmerite Just Stop Oil lunatics, or its too big to deal with so lets not bother.
The reality is that what *we* do is a drop in the ocean when billions of people are continuing to increase their carbon footprint.
Is anyone going to ground 1000 planes to offset the ones India is putting into service? Even that would just mean emissions would stand still.
We can't fix the whole world - but we can't even ask the developing world to do anything if we are not ourselves.
So focus on our own communities and our own families. We're killing our own kids, or giving them asthma and other ailments in towns and cities thanks to local pollution. But when efforts are made to do anything, you Tories throw a strop. "No to clan air, we want to choke" etc
I think we are all Spartacus in some way. Although hopefully not the "crucified on the Appian Way" way, because that would be...bad.
I am he as you are he and you are me and we are all together…..
Third Doctor: "...Jo, it's quite simple. I am he and he is me" Jo Grant: "...and we are all together, koo koo kichoo" Second Doctor: "What" Jo Grant: "It's a song by the Beatles..."
Thank you for the link, which I watched with gr...oh my goodness it was awful. Well, to be honest, it wasn't bad, and certainly not rubbish, but very of its time.
Bloody hell, Peter Gordeno is in that one ! From UFO.
I am going to grab some of these tomorrow as I am working from home. YouTube has some good stuff being posted. There’s an account called Nostalgia who posts some great one off plays and dramas.
Loved the original Mike Batt theme, there’s a TOTP that exists with him playing it and, Pans People are dancing to it.
I did watch that play for tomorrow, Crimes, I think you posted. I got it off thebox a few years ago. It was hard going apart from the lovely Sylvestra La Touzel.
I saw Peter Gordeno at Twickenham on Saturday playing keyboards and bass guitar for Depeche Mode!
Not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gordeno . The one Taz meant is the link I gave, an actor/singer/performer from the 1960/70s. The one Sunil meant is the link he gave, a musician from some years later.
I know that, it was a joke! Of course the Peter who joins DM on tour is a different Peter from the Peter you two are thinking of
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
As I queue up at the non EU line at Schiphol with the Russians and the Turks for my shiny blue passports to be stamped by immigration, Beverley C. breezes past me in the Schengen line jauntily waving her Irish EU passport. As she checks into the Amstel Hotel I am still heading for the airport taxi rank.
I repeat the comments detailed above. It’s a foundational argument that gets us that want to rejoin nowhere.
Anyway, Ireland’s not in Schengen.
I’m not sure the EU being perceived as vindictive (we let them use our e-gates, not reciprocated) is as persuasive an argument for rejoining as some hope.
Nobody wants to face up to climate change. It either isn't happening because look at those Starmerite Just Stop Oil lunatics, or its too big to deal with so lets not bother.
The reality is that what *we* do is a drop in the ocean when billions of people are continuing to increase their carbon footprint.
Is anyone going to ground 1000 planes to offset the ones India is putting into service? Even that would just mean emissions would stand still.
We can't fix the whole world - but we can't even ask the developing world to do anything if we are not ourselves.
So focus on our own communities and our own families. We're killing our own kids, or giving them asthma and other ailments in towns and cities thanks to local pollution. But when efforts are made to do anything, you Tories throw a strop. "No to clan air, we want to choke" etc
Ironically it was a misguided attempt to meet climate targets that made the problem of local air pollution worse because the government promoted diesels that produced high levels of particulates. (Also an example of the perils of being a captive market for EU industries that are vulnerable to regulatory capture.)
All that money which will be swallowed by bigger mortgage payments is money taken from the economy. Money no longer being spent on products and services, which will cost people jobs...
It will indeed but there are a considerable number who benefit from higher interest rates
It is a terrible time for fixed rate mortgage holders on a par with the 1990s, with repossession and negative equity beckoning and most likely a fall in house prices if it mirrors those days 30 years ago
Fixed rate mortgage holders are OK for now. It's when the fixed rate ends, and those on variable rates, who are getting clobbered.
But this is where the media are once again misleading people. They say that the cost of interest rate increases is being borne entirely by the 1.4m still on variable rates. But this is nonsense. Of the 20 odd million on fixed rates about 20%, that is more than 4 million, will have their fixed rate run out this year alone and another 4 m next. Very few have fixed rates for more than 4 years , many for only 2.
Very poor inflation figures with a 30 year high for core inflation, food inflation still extremely high, if past its peak and the headline rate not falling.
The BoE have made such a mess of this. They assumed that the UK would be in a prolonged recession by now with inflation being squeezed out by a collapse in demand. This is just not happening.
I was in Inverness on Sunday night and the first 4 restaurants I tried did not have a table for 1. I got one in the 5th because someone had failed to appear. The bars were so full they were spilling out onto the streets. All this on a Sunday night. I appreciate it is a tourist location in mid June but a good friend of mine, who owns a fair sized business with several hotels in and around the area, tells me that they are having a record season.
Not sure if a tendency to holiday at home has built up during Covid but demand is much, much stronger than the Bank expected and this is keeping prices on an upward trend. The Bank really should increase interest rates by a half point tomorrow but my guess is that they will wimp out again and stick to a quarter.
@DavidL, we have had some disagreements but I've always found you quite sensible, whether or not this feeling is reciprocated.
I am a fan of the dictum 'Anyone who can't explain something successfully in layman's terms either doesn’t understand it or doesn’t want you to.'. This inflation is not typical; it's caused by radical increases in energy costs, which are reflected in every price rise - food increases due to the power used in production, hospitality due to the increase in heating and lighting, and food etc. etc. Can you explain in layman's terms how the usual approach to attacking inflation can possibly work here? Do you think the global gas price is going to be adjusted down because they realise that British consumers aren't putting their heating on as much? Perhaps you can explain.
USCG update at 6pm our time was an Oscars acceptance speech masterpiece, but no hard info. Air expires tomorrow lunchtime.
They don't know where they are, they don't know how to get them back up, and they're running out of time.
Generally I try to be cheerful and make positive or funny responses on PB, but on this one it's just sad. I am very sad for those poor people, regardless of their wealth.
Yup. Much the most likely thing to have happened though is a catastrophic implosion 4 days ago, and they are way past running out of time. I have an interest in bicycles, and every day on the relevant reddits there's a post saying OMG is this flaw on my $5000 carbon frame just a ding, or a radical failure, and the answer is: no way to tell. This is not stuff to make submersibles out of. If I ever buy my dream bike it will be made of titanium, and so should this sub have been.
In fact having typed all that, wtf were they thinking? CF is LIGHT, that's why you use it, but a submersible isn't interested in weight. Going down it wants to be heavy, coming up its buoyancy by virtue of not being full of water makes weight of material irrelevant.
A lighter sub makes automatic return to the surface easier and simpler. Many other DSVs have large quantities of non crushable foam to achieve the same object.
It rather resembles the Virgin Galactic design - a chap obsessed with one accident in the 60s designed a rocket plane to not be vulnerable to a particular problem.
The design is vulnerable to dozens of other problems as a result of the compromises to solve a single issue.
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Odd that other EU member states don't feel it's incompatible with sovereignty or democracy. Guess we're the special one. This sceptred isle that once ruled the waves and stood alone against Nazi Germany.
We're the one whose institutions haven't completely failed at least once.
France, for example, has gone through:
Absolutist monarchy - ending in revolution Revolutionary republicanism - ending in coup Militarist imperialism - ending in disastrous defeat Absolutist monarchy - ending in revolution Reforming Monarchy - ending in revolution Second republic - ending in coup Mini me militarist imperialism - ending in disastrous defeat Attempted revolutionary republicanism - ending in civil war Third republic - ending in disastrous defeat Forth republic - ending in near civil war Fifth republic
Living in London is a bit of an echo chamber for progressive politics. Very few Tories here, and even the few that are here think Brexit is a total clusterf*ck. Does anyone actually seriously think think Brexit is beneficial? Anyone?
Norman Lamont was explaining how well it's going on Radio 4 ( or LBC?) today.
Argues that the EU is moving towards national populism and that this will lead to the left and right switching their positions on the EU (back to what they were originally - left anti; right pro)
All that money which will be swallowed by bigger mortgage payments is money taken from the economy. Money no longer being spent on products and services, which will cost people jobs...
It will indeed but there are a considerable number who benefit from higher interest rates
It is a terrible time for fixed rate mortgage holders on a par with the 1990s, with repossession and negative equity beckoning and most likely a fall in house prices if it mirrors those days 30 years ago
Fixed rate mortgage holders are OK for now. It's when the fixed rate ends, and those on variable rates, who are getting clobbered.
But this is where the media are once again misleading people. They say that the cost of interest rate increases is being borne entirely by the 1.4m still on variable rates. But this is nonsense. Of the 20 odd million on fixed rates about 20%, that is more than 4 million, will have their fixed rate run out this year alone and another 4 m next. Very few have fixed rates for more than 4 years , many for only 2.
I caught a few minutes of the BBC political programme this lunchtime and the discussion was appallingly ignorant. The presenter kept suggesting that the approach of raising interest rates to bring down inflation "isn't working" because it's only affecting mortgage holders, as if the goal of monetary policy is solely to squeeze their spending.
USCG update at 6pm our time was an Oscars acceptance speech masterpiece, but no hard info. Air expires tomorrow lunchtime.
They don't know where they are, they don't know how to get them back up, and they're running out of time.
Generally I try to be cheerful and make positive or funny responses on PB, but on this one it's just sad. I am very sad for those poor people, regardless of their wealth.
Yup. Much the most likely thing to have happened though is a catastrophic implosion 4 days ago, and they are way past running out of time. I have an interest in bicycles, and every day on the relevant reddits there's a post saying OMG is this flaw on my $5000 carbon frame just a ding, or a radical failure, and the answer is: no way to tell. This is not stuff to make submersibles out of. If I ever buy my dream bike it will be made of titanium, and so should this sub have been.
In fact having typed all that, wtf were they thinking? CF is LIGHT, that's why you use it, but a submersible isn't interested in weight. Going down it wants to be heavy, coming up its buoyancy by virtue of not being full of water makes weight of material irrelevant.
A lighter sub makes automatic return to the surface easier and simpler. Many other DSVs have large quantities of non crushable foam to achieve the same object.
It rather resembles the Virgin Galactic design - a chap obsessed with one accident in the 60s designed a rocket plane to not be vulnerable to a particular problem.
The design is vulnerable to dozens of other problems as a result of the compromises to solve a single issue.
People are very invested in the 'time is running out' scenario, but the likelihood is the vessel failed some days ago. There's very little chance of finding any wreckage.
Nobody wants to face up to climate change. It either isn't happening because look at those Starmerite Just Stop Oil lunatics, or its too big to deal with so lets not bother.
The reality is that what *we* do is a drop in the ocean when billions of people are continuing to increase their carbon footprint.
Is anyone going to ground 1000 planes to offset the ones India is putting into service? Even that would just mean emissions would stand still.
We should carry on polluting until everyone else stops polluting? That won't end well.
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Vote out your MEP and elect a new one?
Just as a Conservative supporter can get rid of their MP in Liverpool, or a Labour supporter in Norfolk….
There are plenty of people in the UK who don’t have a vote in practice.
Steve
Apart from mep's can't table legislation to do anything only vote for it. Vote out your mep all you like but the law wont get repealed unless the commission put it on the table.
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Vote out your MEP and elect a new one?
Just as a Conservative supporter can get rid of their MP in Liverpool, or a Labour supporter in Norfolk….
There are plenty of people in the UK who don’t have a vote in practice.
Steve
MEPs cannot repeal EU law. They can't even initiate it
DERRRR
Good point
You could vote in a government that appoints a Commissioner to propose a new law?
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Odd that other EU member states don't feel it's incompatible with sovereignty or democracy. Guess we're the special one. This sceptred isle that once ruled the waves and stood alone against Nazi Germany.
We're the one whose institutions haven't completely failed at least once.
France, for example, has gone through:
Absolutist monarchy - ending in revolution Revolutionary republicanism - ending in coup Militarist imperialism - ending in disastrous defeat Absolutist monarchy - ending in revolution Reforming Monarchy - ending in revolution Second republic - ending in coup Mini me militarist imperialism - ending in disastrous defeat Attempted revolutionary republicanism - ending in civil war Third republic - ending in disastrous defeat Forth republic - ending in near civil war Fifth republic
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
As I queue up at the non EU line at Schiphol with the Russians and the Turks for my shiny blue passports to be stamped by immigration, Beverley C. breezes past me in the Schengen line jauntily waving her Irish EU passport. As she checks into the Amstel Hotel I am still heading for the airport taxi rank.
I repeat the comments detailed above. It’s a foundational argument that gets us that want to rejoin nowhere.
Anyway, Ireland’s not in Schengen.
I’m not sure the EU being perceived as vindictive (we let them use our e-gates, not reciprocated) is as persuasive an argument for rejoining as some hope.
We left, you won. Treat the non-EU/Schengen queue like you own it.
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
Nobody wants to face up to climate change. It either isn't happening because look at those Starmerite Just Stop Oil lunatics, or its too big to deal with so lets not bother.
The reality is that what *we* do is a drop in the ocean when billions of people are continuing to increase their carbon footprint.
Is anyone going to ground 1000 planes to offset the ones India is putting into service? Even that would just mean emissions would stand still.
We should carry on polluting until everyone else stops polluting? That won't end well.
Nobody wants to face up to climate change. It either isn't happening because look at those Starmerite Just Stop Oil lunatics, or its too big to deal with so lets not bother.
The reality is that what *we* do is a drop in the ocean when billions of people are continuing to increase their carbon footprint.
Is anyone going to ground 1000 planes to offset the ones India is putting into service? Even that would just mean emissions would stand still.
Sure: but at the same time, how can we lecture the Indians on their CO2 emissions, when - on a per person basis - they emit so much less than us.
Right now, we're doing exactly the right thing. We're encouraging bicycling, public transport, clean electricity generation, and electrified vehicles.
And that's having an impact; it's just hard to see it immediately because the average lifespan of a car is 12 years. That means that even if every car sold was electric (and that's nowhere near the case), then it would only reduce passenger vehicle emissions by about 8% in the first year.
But that slow turnover also means that when impacts start, they keep happening for a long time. The US implemented Fuel Efficiency Standards in 1973. It took another three years for US oil consumption to drop, but drop it did. From the highs of 1976, and despite rising population and significantly more cars on the road, US oil consumption dropped 15% from its peak, and kept falling even as the oil priced fell sharply.
Vehicle electrification is the same. Around 17% of new car sales in 2022 were electric; around 22-23% will be this year. Over the next ten years, the proportion of the fleet that is either BEV (100% electric) or PHEV (where 50+% of miles are electric) is going to rise to 60%, plus, and that will have a massive impact on UK emissions.
Also, don't forget that the biggest electric car market in the world - and the biggest market for new wind installations - is China.
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Odd that other EU member states don't feel it's incompatible with sovereignty or democracy. Guess we're the special one. This sceptred isle that once ruled the waves and stood alone against Nazi Germany.
We're the one whose institutions haven't completely failed at least once.
France, for example, has gone through:
Absolutist monarchy - ending in revolution Revolutionary republicanism - ending in coup Militarist imperialism - ending in disastrous defeat Absolutist monarchy - ending in revolution Reforming Monarchy - ending in revolution Second republic - ending in coup Mini me militarist imperialism - ending in disastrous defeat Attempted revolutionary republicanism - ending in civil war Third republic - ending in disastrous defeat Forth republic - ending in near civil war Fifth republic
Wasn't the English Civil War a thing, or did I just imagine it (I'm no historian)?
Very poor inflation figures with a 30 year high for core inflation, food inflation still extremely high, if past its peak and the headline rate not falling.
The BoE have made such a mess of this. They assumed that the UK would be in a prolonged recession by now with inflation being squeezed out by a collapse in demand. This is just not happening.
I was in Inverness on Sunday night and the first 4 restaurants I tried did not have a table for 1. I got one in the 5th because someone had failed to appear. The bars were so full they were spilling out onto the streets. All this on a Sunday night. I appreciate it is a tourist location in mid June but a good friend of mine, who owns a fair sized business with several hotels in and around the area, tells me that they are having a record season.
Not sure if a tendency to holiday at home has built up during Covid but demand is much, much stronger than the Bank expected and this is keeping prices on an upward trend. The Bank really should increase interest rates by a half point tomorrow but my guess is that they will wimp out again and stick to a quarter.
@DavidL, we have had some disagreements but I've always found you quite sensible, whether or not this feeling is reciprocated.
I am a fan of the dictum 'Anyone who can't explain something successfully in layman's terms either doesn’t understand it or doesn’t want you to.'. This inflation is not typical; it's caused by radical increases in energy costs, which are reflected in every price rise - food increases due to the power used in production, hospitality due to the increase in heating and lighting, and food etc. etc. Can you explain in layman's terms how the usual approach to attacking inflation can possibly work here? Do you think the global gas price is going to be adjusted down because they realise that British consumers aren't putting their heating on as much? Perhaps you can explain.
Answer came there none.
Sorry, completely missed this, been out tonight. Interest rates reduce demand by increasing the cost of borrowing. That is a blunt tool because it affects all spending, not just the bit that has suffered inflation. I think we would be in agreement on that.
But the Bank has a limited tool kit and interest rates are the main tool it has. Traditionally, the Bank would restrict credit in other ways but that has got out of fashion, except in relation to mortgage affordability.
So we need to reduce demand and thus indirectly reduce our demand for gas, for example. If all western countries do this in tandem it should work. The increased prices should also improve marginal supply by encouraging US shale producers, for example.
I agree it is a blunt tool but it is the only one we have. So we need to use it judiciously which, sadly, the Bank and the MPC didn’t.
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Vote out your MEP and elect a new one?
Just as a Conservative supporter can get rid of their MP in Liverpool, or a Labour supporter in Norfolk….
There are plenty of people in the UK who don’t have a vote in practice.
Steve
Apart from mep's can't table legislation to do anything only vote for it. Vote out your mep all you like but the law wont get repealed unless the commission put it on the table.
Nobody wants to face up to climate change. It either isn't happening because look at those Starmerite Just Stop Oil lunatics, or its too big to deal with so lets not bother.
The reality is that what *we* do is a drop in the ocean when billions of people are continuing to increase their carbon footprint.
Is anyone going to ground 1000 planes to offset the ones India is putting into service? Even that would just mean emissions would stand still.
Sure: but at the same time, how can we lecture the Indians on their CO2 emissions, when - on a per person basis - they emit so much less than us.
Right now, we're doing exactly the right thing. We're encouraging bicycling, public transport, clean electricity generation, and electrified vehicles.
And that's having an impact; it's just hard to see it immediately because the average lifespan of a car is 12 years. That means that even if every car sold was electric (and that's nowhere near the case), then it would only reduce passenger vehicle emissions by about 8% in the first year.
But that slow turnover also means that when impacts start, they keep happening for a long time. The US implemented Fuel Efficiency Standards in 1973. It took another three years for US oil consumption to drop, but drop it did. From the highs of 1976, and despite rising population and significantly more cars on the road, US oil consumption dropped 15% from its peak, and kept falling even as the oil priced fell sharply.
Vehicle electrification is the same. Around 17% of new car sales in 2022 were electric; around 22-23% will be this year. Over the next ten years, the proportion of the fleet that is either BEV (100% electric) or PHEV (where 50+% of miles are electric) is going to rise to 60%, plus, and that will have a massive impact on UK emissions.
Also, don't forget that the biggest electric car market in the world - and the biggest market for new wind installations - is China.
As an aside, there's an excellent (and concise) article about just this issue here:
Off topic, and live from a dive bar in Budapest’s old Jewish Quarter, a bit of amateur reportage:
It’s a fabulous city. Full of youth, art and energy, and wears its history with grace and style. It’s the city you want Paris to be; a much sexier Vienna. Incredible coffee. Great beer. Stunning architecture at every turn, in various states of repair. London on a Wednesday evening is dullsville; here it’s an invigorating international mix drinking and dancing to the wee hours. A more cosmopolitan sensibility than Prague (the ultimate city of the petit-bourgeois), less snooty than Berlin yet with an innate cultural propriety and courtesy that suits us Brits.
As an aside, I’ve never heard more non-native English speakers speaking English to each other than here - the only place that comes close is the Dublin Google office.
Off topic, and live from a dive bar in Budapest’s old Jewish Quarter, a bit of amateur reportage:
It’s a fabulous city. Full of youth, art and energy, and wears its history with grace and style. It’s the city you want Paris to be; a much sexier Vienna. Incredible coffee. Great beer. Stunning architecture at every turn, in various states of repair. London on a Wednesday evening is dullsville; here it’s an invigorating international mix drinking and dancing to the wee hours. A more cosmopolitan sensibility than Prague (the ultimate city of the petit-bourgeois), less snooty than Berlin yet with an innate cultural propriety and courtesy that suits us Brits.
As an aside, I’ve never heard more non-native English speakers speaking English to each other than here - the only place that comes close is the Dublin Google office.
I wonder if fixed term mortgages are actually going to force interest rates higher than they otherwise would have gone given the 'braking effect' they have on the impact of interest rate changes.
IIRC interest rate changes used to be described as 'a touch on the tiller' of the economy.
Now its more of a super tanker turning circle.
The central banks seem to keep overshooting. First they overstimulated during Covid and let inflation get out of control. No they slam on the brake, which may cause a recession. Then next they'll probably be cutting again to stimulate the economy.
If pollsters want to avoid getting it as wrong in the next general election as they have in previous ones, they might take account of skews among intending voters who end up not voting because they haven't got, or haven't brought with them, an acceptable form of ID.
IANA psephologist, but - to be blunt - Tory b*stards know all the tricks, the leftwing wisdom that "Tories always vote" is correct (obviously not literally so, should anyone be sufficiently dryminded as to think that's what I meant), and anybody who thinks Labour will win by a 1997-style landslide is deluding themselves. For a substantial part of the electorate, what's most important in their sh*tty outlooks is skin colour, and guess what, often they don't admit it. The far right if one can use that expression to mean to the right of the Tory party (as if Priti Patel and Suella Braverman weren't far right) is likely to win more votes from Labour than they win from the Tories (except among 2019 Tories who in previous GEs voted Labour and in previous Euros voted UKIP - in effect, once upon a time Lab voters who have already been won for the right or far right) for this reason.
All that money which will be swallowed by bigger mortgage payments is money taken from the economy. Money no longer being spent on products and services, which will cost people jobs...
It will indeed but there are a considerable number who benefit from higher interest rates
It is a terrible time for fixed rate mortgage holders on a par with the 1990s, with repossession and negative equity beckoning and most likely a fall in house prices if it mirrors those days 30 years ago
Fixed rate mortgage holders are OK for now. It's when the fixed rate ends, and those on variable rates, who are getting clobbered.
But this is where the media are once again misleading people. They say that the cost of interest rate increases is being borne entirely by the 1.4m still on variable rates. But this is nonsense. Of the 20 odd million on fixed rates about 20%, that is more than 4 million, will have their fixed rate run out this year alone and another 4 m next. Very few have fixed rates for more than 4 years , many for only 2.
I caught a few minutes of the BBC political programme this lunchtime and the discussion was appallingly ignorant. The presenter kept suggesting that the approach of raising interest rates to bring down inflation "isn't working" because it's only affecting mortgage holders, as if the goal of monetary policy is solely to squeeze their spending.
I remember a bit of what was admittedly self analysis by the BBC over a decade ago when they acknowledged that their reporting was that every increase in interest rates was a disaster. The reason was that their staff typically had very large mortgages and hardly any savings. So it was, for them.
We are seeing a repeat of this now. Savers are being royally ripped off by interest rates which are still seriously negative in real terms. Their money plus the interest is worth less at the end of the year than it was at the start. It doesn’t exactly encourage savings.
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Odd that other EU member states don't feel it's incompatible with sovereignty or democracy. Guess we're the special one. This sceptred isle that once ruled the waves and stood alone against Nazi Germany.
We're the one whose institutions haven't completely failed at least once.
France, for example, has gone through:
Absolutist monarchy - ending in revolution Revolutionary republicanism - ending in coup Militarist imperialism - ending in disastrous defeat Absolutist monarchy - ending in revolution Reforming Monarchy - ending in revolution Second republic - ending in coup Mini me militarist imperialism - ending in disastrous defeat Attempted revolutionary republicanism - ending in civil war Third republic - ending in disastrous defeat Forth republic - ending in near civil war Fifth republic
Wasn't the English Civil War a thing, or did I just imagine it (I'm no historian)?
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Odd that other EU member states don't feel it's incompatible with sovereignty or democracy. Guess we're the special one. This sceptred isle that once ruled the waves and stood alone against Nazi Germany.
We're the one whose institutions haven't completely failed at least once.
France, for example, has gone through:
Absolutist monarchy - ending in revolution Revolutionary republicanism - ending in coup Militarist imperialism - ending in disastrous defeat Absolutist monarchy - ending in revolution Reforming Monarchy - ending in revolution Second republic - ending in coup Mini me militarist imperialism - ending in disastrous defeat Attempted revolutionary republicanism - ending in civil war Third republic - ending in disastrous defeat Forth republic - ending in near civil war Fifth republic
Wasn't the English Civil War a thing, or did I just imagine it (I'm no historian)?
It was and so was the Glorious Revolution but they were over a century earlier than all those French changes.
We've managed over three hundred years of reform within the system rather than replacing the system,
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Odd that other EU member states don't feel it's incompatible with sovereignty or democracy. Guess we're the special one. This sceptred isle that once ruled the waves and stood alone against Nazi Germany.
We're the one whose institutions haven't completely failed at least once.
France, for example, has gone through:
Absolutist monarchy - ending in revolution Revolutionary republicanism - ending in coup Militarist imperialism - ending in disastrous defeat Absolutist monarchy - ending in revolution Reforming Monarchy - ending in revolution Second republic - ending in coup Mini me militarist imperialism - ending in disastrous defeat Attempted revolutionary republicanism - ending in civil war Third republic - ending in disastrous defeat Forth republic - ending in near civil war Fifth republic
Wasn't the English Civil War a thing, or did I just imagine it (I'm no historian)?
The French list is all from after that one. We've had comparitively more stability from around 40 years after the civil wars, in terms of system change.
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Vote out your MEP and elect a new one?
Just as a Conservative supporter can get rid of their MP in Liverpool, or a Labour supporter in Norfolk….
There are plenty of people in the UK who don’t have a vote in practice.
Steve
Apart from mep's can't table legislation to do anything only vote for it. Vote out your mep all you like but the law wont get repealed unless the commission put it on the table.
Just like my Westminster MP then.
Apart from your mp is perfectly able to table legislation. It is called a private members bill. Perhaps learn how things work before talking bs
All that money which will be swallowed by bigger mortgage payments is money taken from the economy. Money no longer being spent on products and services, which will cost people jobs...
It will indeed but there are a considerable number who benefit from higher interest rates
It is a terrible time for fixed rate mortgage holders on a par with the 1990s, with repossession and negative equity beckoning and most likely a fall in house prices if it mirrors those days 30 years ago
Fixed rate mortgage holders are OK for now. It's when the fixed rate ends, and those on variable rates, who are getting clobbered.
But this is where the media are once again misleading people. They say that the cost of interest rate increases is being borne entirely by the 1.4m still on variable rates. But this is nonsense. Of the 20 odd million on fixed rates about 20%, that is more than 4 million, will have their fixed rate run out this year alone and another 4 m next. Very few have fixed rates for more than 4 years , many for only 2.
I caught a few minutes of the BBC political programme this lunchtime and the discussion was appallingly ignorant. The presenter kept suggesting that the approach of raising interest rates to bring down inflation "isn't working" because it's only affecting mortgage holders, as if the goal of monetary policy is solely to squeeze their spending.
I remember a bit of what was admittedly self analysis by the BBC over a decade ago when they acknowledged that their reporting was that every increase in interest rates was a disaster. The reason was that their staff typically had very large mortgages and hardly any savings. So it was, for them.
We are seeing a repeat of this now. Savers are being royally ripped off by interest rates which are still seriously negative in real terms. Their money plus the interest is worth less at the end of the year than it was at the start. It doesn’t exactly encourage savings.
Very poor inflation figures with a 30 year high for core inflation, food inflation still extremely high, if past its peak and the headline rate not falling.
The BoE have made such a mess of this. They assumed that the UK would be in a prolonged recession by now with inflation being squeezed out by a collapse in demand. This is just not happening.
I was in Inverness on Sunday night and the first 4 restaurants I tried did not have a table for 1. I got one in the 5th because someone had failed to appear. The bars were so full they were spilling out onto the streets. All this on a Sunday night. I appreciate it is a tourist location in mid June but a good friend of mine, who owns a fair sized business with several hotels in and around the area, tells me that they are having a record season.
Not sure if a tendency to holiday at home has built up during Covid but demand is much, much stronger than the Bank expected and this is keeping prices on an upward trend. The Bank really should increase interest rates by a half point tomorrow but my guess is that they will wimp out again and stick to a quarter.
@DavidL, we have had some disagreements but I've always found you quite sensible, whether or not this feeling is reciprocated.
I am a fan of the dictum 'Anyone who can't explain something successfully in layman's terms either doesn’t understand it or doesn’t want you to.'. This inflation is not typical; it's caused by radical increases in energy costs, which are reflected in every price rise - food increases due to the power used in production, hospitality due to the increase in heating and lighting, and food etc. etc. Can you explain in layman's terms how the usual approach to attacking inflation can possibly work here? Do you think the global gas price is going to be adjusted down because they realise that British consumers aren't putting their heating on as much? Perhaps you can explain.
Answer came there none.
Sorry, completely missed this, been out tonight. Interest rates reduce demand by increasing the cost of borrowing. That is a blunt tool because it affects all spending, not just the bit that has suffered inflation. I think we would be in agreement on that.
But the Bank has a limited tool kit and interest rates are the main tool it has. Traditionally, the Bank would restrict credit in other ways but that has got out of fashion, except in relation to mortgage affordability.
So we need to reduce demand and thus indirectly reduce our demand for gas, for example. If all western countries do this in tandem it should work. The increased prices should also improve marginal supply by encouraging US shale producers, for example.
I agree it is a blunt tool but it is the only one we have. So we need to use it judiciously which, sadly, the Bank and the MPC didn’t.
Thanks, appreciate the response.
I agree that interest rate rises are a blunt tool, and, I fear personally, an utterly ineffective one for the type of inflation we face. Like being given a claw-hammer to thread a needle. Perhaps amidst the hammer induced destruction, a threaded needle may eventually be found, but at what price?
Increasing the supply of secure, reliable, domestic energy is the obvious answer, and sadly one that both main party leaderships won't go near as they've been utterly captured by green lunacy.
All that money which will be swallowed by bigger mortgage payments is money taken from the economy. Money no longer being spent on products and services, which will cost people jobs...
It will indeed but there are a considerable number who benefit from higher interest rates
It is a terrible time for fixed rate mortgage holders on a par with the 1990s, with repossession and negative equity beckoning and most likely a fall in house prices if it mirrors those days 30 years ago
Fixed rate mortgage holders are OK for now. It's when the fixed rate ends, and those on variable rates, who are getting clobbered.
But this is where the media are once again misleading people. They say that the cost of interest rate increases is being borne entirely by the 1.4m still on variable rates. But this is nonsense. Of the 20 odd million on fixed rates about 20%, that is more than 4 million, will have their fixed rate run out this year alone and another 4 m next. Very few have fixed rates for more than 4 years , many for only 2.
I caught a few minutes of the BBC political programme this lunchtime and the discussion was appallingly ignorant. The presenter kept suggesting that the approach of raising interest rates to bring down inflation "isn't working" because it's only affecting mortgage holders, as if the goal of monetary policy is solely to squeeze their spending.
Its interesting to see the old political documentaries of the 70s and 80s as a comparison:
Very poor inflation figures with a 30 year high for core inflation, food inflation still extremely high, if past its peak and the headline rate not falling.
The BoE have made such a mess of this. They assumed that the UK would be in a prolonged recession by now with inflation being squeezed out by a collapse in demand. This is just not happening.
I was in Inverness on Sunday night and the first 4 restaurants I tried did not have a table for 1. I got one in the 5th because someone had failed to appear. The bars were so full they were spilling out onto the streets. All this on a Sunday night. I appreciate it is a tourist location in mid June but a good friend of mine, who owns a fair sized business with several hotels in and around the area, tells me that they are having a record season.
Not sure if a tendency to holiday at home has built up during Covid but demand is much, much stronger than the Bank expected and this is keeping prices on an upward trend. The Bank really should increase interest rates by a half point tomorrow but my guess is that they will wimp out again and stick to a quarter.
@DavidL, we have had some disagreements but I've always found you quite sensible, whether or not this feeling is reciprocated.
I am a fan of the dictum 'Anyone who can't explain something successfully in layman's terms either doesn’t understand it or doesn’t want you to.'. This inflation is not typical; it's caused by radical increases in energy costs, which are reflected in every price rise - food increases due to the power used in production, hospitality due to the increase in heating and lighting, and food etc. etc. Can you explain in layman's terms how the usual approach to attacking inflation can possibly work here? Do you think the global gas price is going to be adjusted down because they realise that British consumers aren't putting their heating on as much? Perhaps you can explain.
Answer came there none.
Some things can be explained in Layman’s terms. Others can only be explained by Hard Maths…
What is the social utility of allowing this? What are the disadvantages and for whom?
Because Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness includes being whatever gender you want to be. What business is it of yours what gender someone presents as? They aren’t hurting you by doing so.
The libertarians have this one right.
In some dim & distant future, medical technology will probably advance to the point that altering the gender of your physical form is a matter of dropping into the local DNA reprogramming centre, just as we can now control our fertility at will if we choose to. Exactly what point will your insistence on this kind of gender purism have then?
Because if a man calls himself a woman and is one for legal purposes it most certainly does affect me. It means that I no longer have the right to a single sex space or service, my ability to challenge discrimination on the grounds of sex is diminished, my ability to compete fairly in sports is taken away and so on.
A man can dress and call himself what he wants. But giving legal effect to such a private choice does impact others and it is only the selfish narcissism of those demanding this which fails to see this and/or attacks those who raise this. It is not libertarianism. It is a childish "I want, I get" demand.
As for your second para, I'll believe that when I see it. I'll take the view of Professor Sir Robert Winston over yours.
Oh, I’m fairly sure both you & I will be dead & buried before that comes to pass, but the arc of progress is long.
Meanwhile in the here & now you insist on referring to trans people in ever more demeaning ways & seem to be almost unable to post about them without associating them with some kind of sexual deviance. I find that a little sad: the trans people I know have never struck me as narcissistic, or particularly selfish: They just want to live their lives.
Your insistence on never having to see them in your so-called “single sex spaces” has the effect of forcing them out of public life altogether. This hardly seems a fair exchange? If I’m honest it sounds to me as if you’re projecting “I want & I get” onto them: You want them out of your spaces & you don’t care what it costs them.
Wrong on so many counts. I have never referred to people with gender dysphoria in demeaning or insulting ways. I make a distinction between someone with dysphoria and someone who does not have dysphoria but has a private sexual fetish. I see no reason why the latter should be entitled to go into the space reserved for the opposite sex - especially when they seek to do so for the purpose of humiliating or scaring women. That is what autogynephiles seek to do. They are not trans - but they seek to use the very real issues which people with dysphoria have to get their way. It is sad that you support this
Your reference to so-called single sex spaces betrays your agenda. You do not want women to have spaces where they are free from the risk of attack, where they can have privacy and dignity, as the law demands - see the EA, the ECHR and the Goodwin case. You simply do not accept that women are allowed to have boundaries.
Requiring men to go into spaces for men or unisex ones and to stay out of female only spaces does not keep men out of public life. Removing female only spaces will keep many women out of public life but you do not care about that. The EA has single and separate sex exemptions for a reason. But it is clear that you - like far too many - want to abolish them and do not care what the effect on women of this is. Men - their demands, their feelings - matter more to you, regardless of the harm this will do to women.
Those with dysphoria, those who fall under the definition of gender reassignment deserve all possible help. I have no issue with them.
But as the law permits I think that women should be entitled to have single sex spaces and single sex services for all the reasons permitted in the EA and the ECHR.
You appear not to. I find this very sad and worrying because it seems to me that there is a very real risk that women will, as a result of views like yours, lose existing rights.
All that money which will be swallowed by bigger mortgage payments is money taken from the economy. Money no longer being spent on products and services, which will cost people jobs...
It will indeed but there are a considerable number who benefit from higher interest rates
It is a terrible time for fixed rate mortgage holders on a par with the 1990s, with repossession and negative equity beckoning and most likely a fall in house prices if it mirrors those days 30 years ago
Fixed rate mortgage holders are OK for now. It's when the fixed rate ends, and those on variable rates, who are getting clobbered.
But this is where the media are once again misleading people. They say that the cost of interest rate increases is being borne entirely by the 1.4m still on variable rates. But this is nonsense. Of the 20 odd million on fixed rates about 20%, that is more than 4 million, will have their fixed rate run out this year alone and another 4 m next. Very few have fixed rates for more than 4 years , many for only 2.
I caught a few minutes of the BBC political programme this lunchtime and the discussion was appallingly ignorant. The presenter kept suggesting that the approach of raising interest rates to bring down inflation "isn't working" because it's only affecting mortgage holders, as if the goal of monetary policy is solely to squeeze their spending.
Its interesting to see the old political documentaries of the 70s and 80s as a comparison:
All that money which will be swallowed by bigger mortgage payments is money taken from the economy. Money no longer being spent on products and services, which will cost people jobs...
It will indeed but there are a considerable number who benefit from higher interest rates
It is a terrible time for fixed rate mortgage holders on a par with the 1990s, with repossession and negative equity beckoning and most likely a fall in house prices if it mirrors those days 30 years ago
Fixed rate mortgage holders are OK for now. It's when the fixed rate ends, and those on variable rates, who are getting clobbered.
But this is where the media are once again misleading people. They say that the cost of interest rate increases is being borne entirely by the 1.4m still on variable rates. But this is nonsense. Of the 20 odd million on fixed rates about 20%, that is more than 4 million, will have their fixed rate run out this year alone and another 4 m next. Very few have fixed rates for more than 4 years , many for only 2.
I caught a few minutes of the BBC political programme this lunchtime and the discussion was appallingly ignorant. The presenter kept suggesting that the approach of raising interest rates to bring down inflation "isn't working" because it's only affecting mortgage holders, as if the goal of monetary policy is solely to squeeze their spending.
Its interesting to see the old political documentaries of the 70s and 80s as a comparison:
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Vote out your MEP and elect a new one?
Just as a Conservative supporter can get rid of their MP in Liverpool, or a Labour supporter in Norfolk….
There are plenty of people in the UK who don’t have a vote in practice.
Steve
Apart from mep's can't table legislation to do anything only vote for it. Vote out your mep all you like but the law wont get repealed unless the commission put it on the table.
Just like my Westminster MP then.
Apart from your mp is perfectly able to table legislation. It is called a private members bill. Perhaps learn how things work before talking bs
Brilliant. That’s reassuring.
Remind me: How many private members bills are submitted? How many are debated? How many become actually have become legislation without government support?
I think it’s around 1 or 2 per session on largely uncontroversial subjects, so that helps me how?
My point is that if one lives in a safe seat (of whatever colour) you have no influence over Parliament.
If pollsters want to avoid getting it as wrong in the next general election as they have in previous ones, they might take account of skews among intending voters who end up not voting because they haven't got, or haven't brought with them, an acceptable form of ID.
IANA psephologist, but - to be blunt - Tory b*stards know all the tricks, the leftwing wisdom that "Tories always vote" is correct (obviously not literally so, should anyone be sufficiently dryminded as to think that's what I meant), and anybody who thinks Labour will win by a 1997-style landslide is deluding themselves. For a substantial part of the electorate, what's most important in their sh*tty outlooks is skin colour, and guess what, often they don't admit it. The far right if one can use that expression to mean to the right of the Tory party (as if Priti Patel and Suella Braverman weren't far right) is likely to win more votes from Labour than they win from the Tories (except among 2019 Tories who in previous GEs voted Labour and in previous Euros voted UKIP - in effect, once upon a time Lab voters who have already been won for the right or far right) for this reason.
You'll forgive me for expressing that I haven't a clue what you mean. You are saying people who supported Corbyn's Labour over Johnson's Tories will move to the extreme right because of the PM's ancestry? Surely not many of them? Why not just vote Starmer?
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Vote out your MEP and elect a new one?
Just as a Conservative supporter can get rid of their MP in Liverpool, or a Labour supporter in Norfolk….
There are plenty of people in the UK who don’t have a vote in practice.
Steve
Apart from mep's can't table legislation to do anything only vote for it. Vote out your mep all you like but the law wont get repealed unless the commission put it on the table.
Just like my Westminster MP then.
Apart from your mp is perfectly able to table legislation. It is called a private members bill. Perhaps learn how things work before talking bs
Brilliant. That’s reassuring.
Remind me: How many private members bills are submitted? How many are debated? How many become actually have become legislation without government support?
I think it’s around 1 or 2 per session on largely uncontroversial subjects, so that helps me how?
My point is that if one lives in a safe seat (of whatever colour) you have no influence over Parliament.
Just like your MEP.
Steve
Well lets face it an infinite percent more than tabled by mep's as they aren't allowed in the first place. Around 7 private members bills get passed per year out of those submitted. Remind me how many mep bills have been passed since the eu parliament came to be....oh yes its precisely zero
MEPs cannot repeal EU law. They can't even initiate it. DERRRR
Oh look. It's 2015 again. And once more for the cheap seats
In the UK, MP's in Parliament (Westminster) generally do not initiate law - that's the Government (Whitehall). Government is the PM, the Cabinet, and the Civil Service. Some MPs can and do initiate law via Private Member's Bills but they are not the majority and even some MP's - the ineffably stupid Christopher Chope - dispute them.
Very poor inflation figures with a 30 year high for core inflation, food inflation still extremely high, if past its peak and the headline rate not falling.
The BoE have made such a mess of this. They assumed that the UK would be in a prolonged recession by now with inflation being squeezed out by a collapse in demand. This is just not happening.
I was in Inverness on Sunday night and the first 4 restaurants I tried did not have a table for 1. I got one in the 5th because someone had failed to appear. The bars were so full they were spilling out onto the streets. All this on a Sunday night. I appreciate it is a tourist location in mid June but a good friend of mine, who owns a fair sized business with several hotels in and around the area, tells me that they are having a record season.
Not sure if a tendency to holiday at home has built up during Covid but demand is much, much stronger than the Bank expected and this is keeping prices on an upward trend. The Bank really should increase interest rates by a half point tomorrow but my guess is that they will wimp out again and stick to a quarter.
@DavidL, we have had some disagreements but I've always found you quite sensible, whether or not this feeling is reciprocated.
I am a fan of the dictum 'Anyone who can't explain something successfully in layman's terms either doesn’t understand it or doesn’t want you to.'. This inflation is not typical; it's caused by radical increases in energy costs, which are reflected in every price rise - food increases due to the power used in production, hospitality due to the increase in heating and lighting, and food etc. etc. Can you explain in layman's terms how the usual approach to attacking inflation can possibly work here? Do you think the global gas price is going to be adjusted down because they realise that British consumers aren't putting their heating on as much? Perhaps you can explain.
Answer came there none.
Sorry, completely missed this, been out tonight. Interest rates reduce demand by increasing the cost of borrowing. That is a blunt tool because it affects all spending, not just the bit that has suffered inflation. I think we would be in agreement on that.
But the Bank has a limited tool kit and interest rates are the main tool it has. Traditionally, the Bank would restrict credit in other ways but that has got out of fashion, except in relation to mortgage affordability.
So we need to reduce demand and thus indirectly reduce our demand for gas, for example. If all western countries do this in tandem it should work. The increased prices should also improve marginal supply by encouraging US shale producers, for example.
I agree it is a blunt tool but it is the only one we have. So we need to use it judiciously which, sadly, the Bank and the MPC didn’t.
Thanks, appreciate the response.
I agree that interest rate rises are a blunt tool, and, I fear personally, an utterly ineffective one for the type of inflation we face. Like being given a claw-hammer to thread a needle. Perhaps amidst the hammer induced destruction, a threaded needle may eventually be found, but at what price?
Increasing the supply of secure, reliable, domestic energy is the obvious answer, and sadly one that both main party leaderships won't go near as they've been utterly captured by green lunacy.
Our massive investment in wind has been very welcome, even if it is not completely reliable. Our investment in nuclear is reliable but expensive. I agree that we should exploit what resources we have, provided they do not make manufacturing uncompetitive. It is crazy to import things we can produce. I also agree we need to do more.
“Are you Catholic or Protestant?” “Neither, I’m Atheist.” “Aye, but are you a Catholic Atheist or a Protestant Atheist?”
That’s the problem with ‘cis’ - it buys into the belief system, it assumes you have a ‘gender identity’……
Insisting everyone has a ‘gender identity’ is akin to insisting everyone has a ‘soul’. It’s not insulting in itself, but if you keep on about it and can’t grasp that some people don’t share your belief, then they might get narked at you.
“But ‘cis’ just means the opposite of ‘trans’!”
Great - so what does ‘trans’ mean? It can’t be defined without referring to ‘gender identity’, a metaphysical belief.
That's rubbish. Of course everyone has a gender identity. I think of myself as male. Even if you are the sort of person that thinks all trans people are mentally deluded, any everyone by rights should have the same gender and biological sex, gender identity still provably exists. In the way that a soul isn't provable.
How do you prove your gender? How do you test for it?
Your sex is in your chromosomes and for the overwhelming majority demonstrated in their reproductive organs. It’s binary in the overwhelming majority of mammals.
Unsurprisingly some are rejecting compelled belief and compelled speech.
If we accept gender is a social construct, does that mean that we should ignore gender in law? Should we support or make life difficult for people who want to change gender?
Ethnicity is a social construct. Religion is a social construct. These things have protection in law (albeit different ones). Money is a social construct. Democracy is a social construct. Lots of interesting and nice things are social constructs!
Religion certainly shouldn't be protected by law, nor ethnicity. Democracy and money aren't protected already you are free to advocate for a dictatorship or a cash free society based on barter
There's a big difference between advocating for political change and just doing stuff.
You can advocate for dictatorship. You can advocate for racist policies too.
But you can't just set yourself up as a dictator. And you can't go around enacting racist workplace policies for example. Because the laws forbid those.
Freedom to say what you think should be the case is different to acting like it's already the case.
So if I walk round with an "( insert deity of choice) is an arsehole" tshirt on do you think the likely result is a) I will get a few people shaking their head or b) I get arrested
I suspect we all know the answer is b)
So it is ok to proclaim "(deity of choice) is great" but not the opposite. Each are equally valid as opinions
Jesus is an arsehole. Mohammad is an arsehole. Abraham, Gautama Buddha, Rishabhadeva: arseholes. And any gods they tell us about: arseholes.
Not one of my favourite Radiohead songs but each to their own.
I quite like the track "God is dead" but it's a bit of a Nietzsche interest
“Are you Catholic or Protestant?” “Neither, I’m Atheist.” “Aye, but are you a Catholic Atheist or a Protestant Atheist?”
That’s the problem with ‘cis’ - it buys into the belief system, it assumes you have a ‘gender identity’……
Insisting everyone has a ‘gender identity’ is akin to insisting everyone has a ‘soul’. It’s not insulting in itself, but if you keep on about it and can’t grasp that some people don’t share your belief, then they might get narked at you.
“But ‘cis’ just means the opposite of ‘trans’!”
Great - so what does ‘trans’ mean? It can’t be defined without referring to ‘gender identity’, a metaphysical belief.
That's rubbish. Of course everyone has a gender identity. I think of myself as male. Even if you are the sort of person that thinks all trans people are mentally deluded, any everyone by rights should have the same gender and biological sex, gender identity still provably exists. In the way that a soul isn't provable.
How do you prove your gender? How do you test for it?
Your sex is in your chromosomes and for the overwhelming majority demonstrated in their reproductive organs. It’s binary in the overwhelming majority of mammals.
Unsurprisingly some are rejecting compelled belief and compelled speech.
If we accept gender is a social construct, does that mean that we should ignore gender in law? Should we support or make life difficult for people who want to change gender?
Ethnicity is a social construct. Religion is a social construct. These things have protection in law (albeit different ones). Money is a social construct. Democracy is a social construct. Lots of interesting and nice things are social constructs!
Religion certainly shouldn't be protected by law, nor ethnicity. Democracy and money aren't protected already you are free to advocate for a dictatorship or a cash free society based on barter
There's a big difference between advocating for political change and just doing stuff.
You can advocate for dictatorship. You can advocate for racist policies too.
But you can't just set yourself up as a dictator. And you can't go around enacting racist workplace policies for example. Because the laws forbid those.
Freedom to say what you think should be the case is different to acting like it's already the case.
So if I walk round with an "( insert deity of choice) is an arsehole" tshirt on do you think the likely result is a) I will get a few people shaking their head or b) I get arrested
I suspect we all know the answer is b)
So it is ok to proclaim "(deity of choice) is great" but not the opposite. Each are equally valid as opinions
Jesus is an arsehole. Mohammad is an arsehole. Abraham, Gautama Buddha, Rishabhadeva: arseholes. And any gods they tell us about: arseholes.
Not one of my favourite Radiohead songs but each to their own.
I quite like the track "God is dead" but it's a bit of a Nietzsche interest
What is the social utility of allowing this? What are the disadvantages and for whom?
Because Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness includes being whatever gender you want to be. What business is it of yours what gender someone presents as? They aren’t hurting you by doing so.
The libertarians have this one right.
In some dim & distant future, medical technology will probably advance to the point that altering the gender of your physical form is a matter of dropping into the local DNA reprogramming centre, just as we can now control our fertility at will if we choose to. Exactly what point will your insistence on this kind of gender purism have then?
Because if a man calls himself a woman and is one for legal purposes it most certainly does affect me. It means that I no longer have the right to a single sex space or service, my ability to challenge discrimination on the grounds of sex is diminished, my ability to compete fairly in sports is taken away and so on.
A man can dress and call himself what he wants. But giving legal effect to such a private choice does impact others and it is only the selfish narcissism of those demanding this which fails to see this and/or attacks those who raise this. It is not libertarianism. It is a childish "I want, I get" demand.
As for your second para, I'll believe that when I see it. I'll take the view of Professor Sir Robert Winston over yours.
Oh, I’m fairly sure both you & I will be dead & buried before that comes to pass, but the arc of progress is long.
Meanwhile in the here & now you insist on referring to trans people in ever more demeaning ways & seem to be almost unable to post about them without associating them with some kind of sexual deviance. I find that a little sad: the trans people I know have never struck me as narcissistic, or particularly selfish: They just want to live their lives.
Your insistence on never having to see them in your so-called “single sex spaces” has the effect of forcing them out of public life altogether. This hardly seems a fair exchange? If I’m honest it sounds to me as if you’re projecting “I want & I get” onto them: You want them out of your spaces & you don’t care what it costs them.
Wrong on so many counts. I have never referred to people with gender dysphoria in demeaning or insulting ways. I make a distinction between someone with dysphoria and someone who does not have dysphoria but has a private sexual fetish. I see no reason why the latter should be entitled to go into the space reserved for the opposite sex - especially when they seek to do so for the purpose of humiliating or scaring women. That is what autogynephiles seek to do. They are not trans - but they seek to use the very real issues which people with dysphoria have to get their way. It is sad that you support this
Your reference to so-called single sex spaces betrays your agenda. You do not want women to have spaces where they are free from the risk of attack, where they can have privacy and dignity, as the law demands - see the EA, the ECHR and the Goodwin case. You simply do not accept that women are allowed to have boundaries.
Requiring men to go into spaces for men or unisex ones and to stay out of female only spaces does not keep men out of public life. Removing female only spaces will keep many women out of public life but you do not care about that. The EA has single and separate sex exemptions for a reason. But it is clear that you - like far too many - want to abolish them and do not care what the effect on women of this is. Men - their demands, their feelings - matter more to you, regardless of the harm this will do to women.
Those with dysphoria, those who fall under the definition of gender reassignment deserve all possible help. I have no issue with them.
But as the law permits I think that women should be entitled to have single sex spaces and single sex services for all the reasons permitted in the EA and the ECHR.
You appear not to. I find this very sad and worrying because it seems to me that there is a very real risk that women will, as a result of views like yours, lose existing rights.
See, there you go again: Your insistence on dividing trans people according to a theory of sexual arousal that Ray Blanchard made up & remains entirely unproven just demonstrates how far into the GC cult you are.
Blanchard’s research most notably fails to ask cis women whether they experience self-arousal at seeing themselves. Turns out that many cis women do & score highly on the same scales used by Blanchard to diagnose autogynephilia. Are these women deviants to be feared? It seems unlikely! This lack of any kind of non-trans controls in Blanchard’s studies make the entirely thing extremely suspect - it’s practically junk science. Even if it turned out to be true observationally, it is still entirely unclear which is cause & which effect.
So we end up back where we started: with you projecting sexual deviance onto trans people in order to justify your desires. You are entirely uninterested in examining the actual studies & whether they have any predictive power behind them because you don’t really care - Blanchard’s trans typology is little more than a useful frame in which you can paint trans women as being fundamentally sexual deviants & a danger to others so that you can justify your actions.
MEPs cannot repeal EU law. They can't even initiate it. DERRRR
Oh look. It's 2015 again. And once more for the cheap seats
In the UK, MP's in Parliament (Westminster) generally do not initiate law - that's the Government (Whitehall). Government is the PM, the Cabinet, and the Civil Service. Some MPs can and do initiate law via Private Member's Bills but they are not the majority and even some MP's - the ineffably stupid Christopher Chope - dispute them.
I'm going to have to draw a diagram, aren't I.
Look on average about 7 private members bills get passed a year.
So since the start of the eu parliament in 1958 we have a score of mp's getting bills considered and passed of 455 to mep's getting bills considered and passed of 0.
You may mock private members bills but at least our mp's can table them if they feel strongly. Mep's cant even initiate one. They merely get to vote on what is proposed by council and commision. The EU brings in a bad law and there is no chance of revocation unless the commission decides to put it up for repeal.
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Vote out your MEP and elect a new one?
Just as a Conservative supporter can get rid of their MP in Liverpool, or a Labour supporter in Norfolk….
There are plenty of people in the UK who don’t have a vote in practice.
Steve
Apart from mep's can't table legislation to do anything only vote for it. Vote out your mep all you like but the law wont get repealed unless the commission put it on the table.
Just like my Westminster MP then.
Apart from your mp is perfectly able to table legislation. It is called a private members bill. Perhaps learn how things work before talking bs
Brilliant. That’s reassuring.
Remind me: How many private members bills are submitted? How many are debated? How many become actually have become legislation without government support?
I think it’s around 1 or 2 per session on largely uncontroversial subjects, so that helps me how?
My point is that if one lives in a safe seat (of whatever colour) you have no influence over Parliament.
Just like your MEP.
Steve
Well lets face it an infinite percent more than tabled by mep's as they aren't allowed in the first place. Around 7 private members bills get passed per year out of those submitted. Remind me how many mep bills have been passed since the eu parliament came to be....oh yes its precisely zero
Fair point. Well made. Do you fancy a little wager? You suggest a proposal and both of us will do our best to try and get our MP to get it into legislation by the next election.
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Vote out your MEP and elect a new one?
Just as a Conservative supporter can get rid of their MP in Liverpool, or a Labour supporter in Norfolk….
There are plenty of people in the UK who don’t have a vote in practice.
Steve
Apart from mep's can't table legislation to do anything only vote for it. Vote out your mep all you like but the law wont get repealed unless the commission put it on the table.
Just like my Westminster MP then.
Apart from your mp is perfectly able to table legislation. It is called a private members bill. Perhaps learn how things work before talking bs
Brilliant. That’s reassuring.
Remind me: How many private members bills are submitted? How many are debated? How many become actually have become legislation without government support?
I think it’s around 1 or 2 per session on largely uncontroversial subjects, so that helps me how?
My point is that if one lives in a safe seat (of whatever colour) you have no influence over Parliament.
Just like your MEP.
Steve
Well lets face it an infinite percent more than tabled by mep's as they aren't allowed in the first place. Around 7 private members bills get passed per year out of those submitted. Remind me how many mep bills have been passed since the eu parliament came to be....oh yes its precisely zero
Fair point. Well made. Do you fancy a little wager? You suggest a proposal and both of us will do our best to try and get our MP to get it into legislation by the next election.
I’m happy to put a grand up if you are?
Steve.
Considering I no longer consider our parliament fit for purpose I wouldn't even bother, the law is pretty much pointless these days so why bother getting another passed.
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Vote out your MEP and elect a new one?
Just as a Conservative supporter can get rid of their MP in Liverpool, or a Labour supporter in Norfolk….
There are plenty of people in the UK who don’t have a vote in practice.
Steve
Apart from mep's can't table legislation to do anything only vote for it. Vote out your mep all you like but the law wont get repealed unless the commission put it on the table.
Just like my Westminster MP then.
Apart from your mp is perfectly able to table legislation. It is called a private members bill. Perhaps learn how things work before talking bs
Brilliant. That’s reassuring.
Remind me: How many private members bills are submitted? How many are debated? How many become actually have become legislation without government support?
I think it’s around 1 or 2 per session on largely uncontroversial subjects, so that helps me how?
My point is that if one lives in a safe seat (of whatever colour) you have no influence over Parliament.
Just like your MEP.
Steve
Well lets face it an infinite percent more than tabled by mep's as they aren't allowed in the first place. Around 7 private members bills get passed per year out of those submitted. Remind me how many mep bills have been passed since the eu parliament came to be....oh yes its precisely zero
The crocodile tears about fewer EU laws is a bit of an act, though, from the people who wanted Sunak to put the books in a shredder. And have you checked out the typical EU law? Product regulation in 28 languages - I can see why it may not be ideal to have it initiated by the member for Budapest on his lonesome.
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Vote out your MEP and elect a new one?
Just as a Conservative supporter can get rid of their MP in Liverpool, or a Labour supporter in Norfolk….
There are plenty of people in the UK who don’t have a vote in practice.
Steve
Apart from mep's can't table legislation to do anything only vote for it. Vote out your mep all you like but the law wont get repealed unless the commission put it on the table.
Just like my Westminster MP then.
Apart from your mp is perfectly able to table legislation. It is called a private members bill. Perhaps learn how things work before talking bs
Brilliant. That’s reassuring.
Remind me: How many private members bills are submitted? How many are debated? How many become actually have become legislation without government support?
I think it’s around 1 or 2 per session on largely uncontroversial subjects, so that helps me how?
My point is that if one lives in a safe seat (of whatever colour) you have no influence over Parliament.
Just like your MEP.
Steve
Well lets face it an infinite percent more than tabled by mep's as they aren't allowed in the first place. Around 7 private members bills get passed per year out of those submitted. Remind me how many mep bills have been passed since the eu parliament came to be....oh yes its precisely zero
The crocodile tears about fewer EU laws is a bit of an act, though, from the people who wanted Sunak to put the books in a shredder. And have you checked out the typical EU law? Product regulation in 28 languages - I can see why it may not be ideal to have it initiated by the member for Budapest on his lonesome.
Its not about fewer eu laws though the whole point is Mep's are powerless, vote them in or out all you like its not going to change a single eu law unless the commission decides to put repeal on the menu. At least there is an option however slim if parliament passes a bad law that you can talk to your mp and get him to table a bill to repeal it.
Does it happen often no not nearly often enough but better a small chance than no chance is the point
If you believe the wikiworm, there was a small but genuine uptick in Conservative fortunes from around Christmas (25% or so) to around late April/early May (29% or so);
Had that trend continued, game might not have been on, but it would have been out of its cupboard and on the table. But it flattened out and now looks like reversing. Question is whether it is a temporary scandal blip or the start of something longer term.
To days news is wall to wall financial crisis with the elephant in the room being Brexit. Now that Johnson has gone commentators and others seem much less restrained in mentioning the great unmentionable. There's hardly anyone still talking it up or even prepared to defend it.
Surely someone has got to mobilise the 17,000,000 (Now more likely to be 25,000,000) or they're going to get bounced around by this economic storm like everyone else and without even a loin cloth.
Time for someone with courage or ambition to go for it.
Personally, I have given up on the UK rejoining. I found it a lot easier to let my UK passport expire and just start using my Irish one.
Are you allowed to have both? A friend has just got herself an Austrian passport which they'll give to any family of Austrian refugees from WW2 however many generations down the line and they can keep their UK one. You're very fortunate. In France people with properties are trying to invent the most crazy schemes to circumvent the rules. The French are now bringing in a non dom property tax which you can't blame them for doing. If Boris ever finds his way to the Cote d'Azur he'll be strung up
The Irish do not mind their citizens being dual passport holders - and a lot of other countries are the same.
The blue UK passport is much devalued since we left. And that was allegedly our key to sovereignty and the reason for leaving. What a joke!
I wouldn’t say the U.K. passport power ranked as 3rd in the world was “much devalued” - ahead of the USA, Canada and on a par with Ireland….
People tend to confuse a passport with citizenship. They are connected but not at all the same thing.
True. I have had dual citizenship all my life, but Brexit made me apply for my Irish passport.
Jesus. Yes, we know, you have Irish Citizenship, you never cease to tell is, like every other Remainer with at least one Hibernian grandparent. Would you like a medal as well? You all bang on about it so often it sounds as if you’d like some special prize for your accident of birth.
The rest of us have to try and fix this situation and listening to your “I’m all right Jack” tales isn’t helping and doesn’t help. Sure, you don’t think Brexit will be reversed, but you (as you keep reminding us) don’t have to worry about it do you? It’s not helpful, it just fights the last battle, and proudly proclaims an abstention from the next.
i think Rejoiners have not focused on the reality of the EU as it is now. It has already moved on from Brexit. Legislation is now pouring out of Brussels (see the journalism spyware stuff below). Brussels is trying to intrusively regulate everything from AI to crypto to the care of dormice, and it is still constantly expanding its powers. eg They have now pooled debt to pay for Covid
We don't notice this precisely because we are no longer in it. If we'd had a narrow Remain win the clamour for Brexit would now be defeaning, and the demands for a second vote would be overwhelming the Tory Party
On that basis I do not believe we will Rejoin. The other reason is that if we are ever so desperate that we ask to rejoin, the French and the Irish (and maybe others) will threaten us with a veto until we agree to terms so invidious we will abandon the task
Your analysis is only cogent if the “legislation pouring out of Brussels”, as you inelegantly put it, fails to make the lives of citizens in the EU better than the “legislation seeping out of Westminster”, as I inelegantly put it, makes us. For example, your journalism spyware story can be countered with the possibility that WhatsApp will pull out of the U.K. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-whatsapp-could-quit-the-uk-over-the-online-safety-bill/) over the Online Safety Bill. Which of those legislative digital intrusions impacts people more?
People link Brexit less to legislation pouring out of the Belgian capital as they do shit pouring onto our beaches.
But that's it. If you are angry that British legislation has made WhatsApp pull out, then you sack the government at the next election, and get a new govrnment which will reverse the stupid law
That's democracy. That's why and how it works
What do you do, as an EU citizen, if you hate an EU law?
*tumbleweed*
Vote out your MEP and elect a new one?
Just as a Conservative supporter can get rid of their MP in Liverpool, or a Labour supporter in Norfolk….
There are plenty of people in the UK who don’t have a vote in practice.
Steve
Apart from mep's can't table legislation to do anything only vote for it. Vote out your mep all you like but the law wont get repealed unless the commission put it on the table.
Just like my Westminster MP then.
Apart from your mp is perfectly able to table legislation. It is called a private members bill. Perhaps learn how things work before talking bs
Brilliant. That’s reassuring.
Remind me: How many private members bills are submitted? How many are debated? How many become actually have become legislation without government support?
I think it’s around 1 or 2 per session on largely uncontroversial subjects, so that helps me how?
My point is that if one lives in a safe seat (of whatever colour) you have no influence over Parliament.
Just like your MEP.
Steve
Well lets face it an infinite percent more than tabled by mep's as they aren't allowed in the first place. Around 7 private members bills get passed per year out of those submitted. Remind me how many mep bills have been passed since the eu parliament came to be....oh yes its precisely zero
Fair point. Well made. Do you fancy a little wager? You suggest a proposal and both of us will do our best to try and get our MP to get it into legislation by the next election.
I’m happy to put a grand up if you are?
Steve.
Considering I no longer consider our parliament fit for purpose I wouldn't even bother, the law is pretty much pointless these days so why bother getting another passed.
Haha. Fair enough. I guess my point is that all those people complaining that the EU is undemocratic miss the point that most people votining is Westminster elections don’t have an effective vote and it seems we agree?
If you believe the wikiworm, there was a small but genuine uptick in Conservative fortunes from around Christmas (25% or so) to around late April/early May (29% or so);
Had that trend continued, game might not have been on, but it would have been out of its cupboard and on the table. But it flattened out and now looks like reversing. Question is whether it is a temporary scandal blip or the start of something longer term.
Okay thanks. Seems like small beer but I guess theoretically it could have continued on the same trajectory.
MEPs cannot repeal EU law. They can't even initiate it. DERRRR
Oh look. It's 2015 again. And once more for the cheap seats
In the UK, MP's in Parliament (Westminster) generally do not initiate law - that's the Government (Whitehall). Government is the PM, the Cabinet, and the Civil Service. Some MPs can and do initiate law via Private Member's Bills but they are not the majority and even some MP's - the ineffably stupid Christopher Chope - dispute them.
I'm going to have to draw a diagram, aren't I?
That’s the government we elect, via elections. If we want to repeal a law, we elect a different government that promises to repeal the law
Remind me, how do EU voters repeal EU laws? Ah, wait, they can’t.
Nobody wants to face up to climate change. It either isn't happening because look at those Starmerite Just Stop Oil lunatics, or its too big to deal with so lets not bother.
The reality is that what *we* do is a drop in the ocean when billions of people are continuing to increase their carbon footprint.
Is anyone going to ground 1000 planes to offset the ones India is putting into service? Even that would just mean emissions would stand still.
We should carry on polluting until everyone else stops polluting? That won't end well.
We aren't setting a terrible example.
I'd love to see that figure updated - the last year in it is pretty old now. I think the UK might look even better with more recent years included. The last few years have had some large increases in wind capacity added.
Nobody wants to face up to climate change. It either isn't happening because look at those Starmerite Just Stop Oil lunatics, or its too big to deal with so lets not bother.
The reality is that what *we* do is a drop in the ocean when billions of people are continuing to increase their carbon footprint.
Is anyone going to ground 1000 planes to offset the ones India is putting into service? Even that would just mean emissions would stand still.
We should carry on polluting until everyone else stops polluting? That won't end well.
We aren't setting a terrible example.
I'd love to see that figure updated - the last year in it is pretty old now. I think the UK might look even better with more recent years included. The last few years have had some large increases in wind capacity added.
I've used figures from the OECD, which don't yet have 2022. Obviously you can see the pandemic year for all the countries, and the major development over the extra years is that Germany has pretty much matched the UK's declines in emissions over the last few years, which isn't what I was expecting given the nuclear shutdown there.
MEPs cannot repeal EU law. They can't even initiate it. DERRRR
Oh look. It's 2015 again. And once more for the cheap seats
In the UK, MP's in Parliament (Westminster) generally do not initiate law - that's the Government (Whitehall). Government is the PM, the Cabinet, and the Civil Service. Some MPs can and do initiate law via Private Member's Bills but they are not the majority and even some MP's - the ineffably stupid Christopher Chope - dispute them.
I'm going to have to draw a diagram, aren't I.
Look on average about 7 private members bills get passed a year.
So since the start of the eu parliament in 1958 we have a score of mp's getting bills considered and passed of 455 to mep's getting bills considered and passed of 0.
You may mock private members bills but at least our mp's can table them if they feel strongly. Mep's cant even initiate one. They merely get to vote on what is proposed by council and commision. The EU brings in a bad law and there is no chance of revocation unless the commission decides to put it up for repeal.
Understood, and it's a fair point: as you say, hundreds of Private Member's bills have been tabled and thus the meaning of "initiate law" is met. So yes you are correct.
My point was based on my assumption that @Leon thinks that laws are generated by parliament generally, and that Leon was making a common mistake in eliding Parliament and Government - see also "we elect a Prime Minister" for another.
Incidentally (and why is everybody assuming bad faith today?) I was not mocking private Member's Bills: quite the contrary, and see The Abortion Act 1967 for an example of one that succeeded.
MEPs cannot repeal EU law. They can't even initiate it. DERRRR
Oh look. It's 2015 again. And once more for the cheap seats
In the UK, MP's in Parliament (Westminster) generally do not initiate law - that's the Government (Whitehall). Government is the PM, the Cabinet, and the Civil Service. Some MPs can and do initiate law via Private Member's Bills but they are not the majority and even some MP's - the ineffably stupid Christopher Chope - dispute them.
I'm going to have to draw a diagram, aren't I?
That’s the government we elect, via elections. If we want to repeal a law, we elect a different government that promises to repeal the law
Remind me, how do EU voters repeal EU laws? Ah, wait, they can’t.
I was referring to your second sentence, not your first.
MEPs cannot repeal EU law. They can't even initiate it. DERRRR
Oh look. It's 2015 again. And once more for the cheap seats
In the UK, MP's in Parliament (Westminster) generally do not initiate law - that's the Government (Whitehall). Government is the PM, the Cabinet, and the Civil Service. Some MPs can and do initiate law via Private Member's Bills but they are not the majority and even some MP's - the ineffably stupid Christopher Chope - dispute them.
I'm going to have to draw a diagram, aren't I?
That’s the government we elect, via elections. If we want to repeal a law, we elect a different government that promises to repeal the law
Remind me, how do EU voters repeal EU laws? Ah, wait, they can’t.
I was referring to your second sentence, not your first.
It’s a pointless argument. The EU is not democratic, it has no demos. Let alone democratic levers they can pull
The UK is democratic. It has a demos. There are multiple democratic levers we can pull. And we do
Nonetheless it is still very arguable that Brexit was an act of foolish self harm, destroying our trade links, upsetting our neighbours, diminishing our influence. I don’t argue with that. It’s a valid position
I just valued democracy more even if others value different things
MEPs cannot repeal EU law. They can't even initiate it. DERRRR
Oh look. It's 2015 again. And once more for the cheap seats
In the UK, MP's in Parliament (Westminster) generally do not initiate law - that's the Government (Whitehall). Government is the PM, the Cabinet, and the Civil Service. Some MPs can and do initiate law via Private Member's Bills but they are not the majority and even some MP's - the ineffably stupid Christopher Chope - dispute them.
I'm going to have to draw a diagram, aren't I?
That’s the government we elect, via elections. If we want to repeal a law, we elect a different government that promises to repeal the law
Remind me, how do EU voters repeal EU laws? Ah, wait, they can’t.
I was referring to your second sentence, not your first.
It’s a pointless argument. The EU is not democratic, it has no demos. Let alone democratic levers they can pull
The UK is democratic. It has a demos. There are multiple democratic levers we can pull. And we do
Nonetheless it is still very arguable that Brexit was an act of foolish self harm, destroying our trade links, upsetting our neighbours, diminishing our influence. I don’t argue with that. It’s a valid position
I just valued democracy more even if others value different things
Comments
Farage will be thinking of doing this for two reasons. One, there needs to be a conservative party on the ballot and currently there isn't. Two, he has an ego the size of a planet.
The game changer? Boris! Discarded and banned by the corruption party, if he wants to be a player he needs to find a way back in. If he waits for Starmer to win, he further needs to hope that the leader after Sunak lets him back in. And is then useless and needs replacing quickly. So why not?
Partly, that's down to experience; Major had been on his soapbox for more than thirty years and knew what he was doing. A bit like a retired-through-injury cricket pro brought back for one more match, he still had the instincts, even if the reactions had gone.
There was also at least some sympathy for Major as a person (everyone just wanted the Conservatives gone). My vote in 1997 was in part the electoral equivalent of a pity snog, and I don't think I'm totally freakish. Sunak, fairly or not, doesn't stir the same instincts. He can damn well go down with the rest of them.
I'm more confident of a big Conservative defeat than a big Labour win. (Nineteen months tops to go, and still sub thirty percent. There's a Starbucks full of coffee to smell here, so please wake up and get smelling.) But beyond a certain point, a sufficiently big Conservative rout requires a big Labour victory.
And it looks like even a "Britain is Booming, Don't Let Labour Blow It" strategy isn't going to work.
Just as a Conservative supporter can get rid of their MP in Liverpool, or a Labour supporter in Norfolk….
There are plenty of people in the UK who don’t have a vote in practice.
Steve
GOP presidential candidate Tim Scott was asked to differentiate himself from Trump and DeSantis.
Scott: “I do care who wins the Ukrainian conflict... I believe Ukrainians are willing to put their lives on the line, and I hope Zelensky pulls it out”
https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1671599881352273933
I suspect a 20 year mortgage at 7% taken out in 2007 might have been something to regret.
IIRC interest rate changes used to be described as 'a touch on the tiller' of the economy.
Now its more of a super tanker turning circle.
Is anyone going to ground 1000 planes to offset the ones India is putting into service? Even that would just mean emissions would stand still.
DERRRR
used to.
You can whistle for rejoin. It isn't happening anytime this side of 2050.
So focus on our own communities and our own families. We're killing our own kids, or giving them asthma and other ailments in towns and cities thanks to local pollution. But when efforts are made to do anything, you Tories throw a strop. "No to clan air, we want to choke" etc
It rather resembles the Virgin Galactic design - a chap obsessed with one accident in the 60s designed a rocket plane to not be vulnerable to a particular problem.
The design is vulnerable to dozens of other problems as a result of the compromises to solve a single issue.
France, for example, has gone through:
Absolutist monarchy - ending in revolution
Revolutionary republicanism - ending in coup
Militarist imperialism - ending in disastrous defeat
Absolutist monarchy - ending in revolution
Reforming Monarchy - ending in revolution
Second republic - ending in coup
Mini me militarist imperialism - ending in disastrous defeat
Attempted revolutionary republicanism - ending in civil war
Third republic - ending in disastrous defeat
Forth republic - ending in near civil war
Fifth republic
For some reason I just pictured Julian Clary.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/21/britains-right-will-soon-be-clamouring-to-rejoin-the-eu/
Argues that the EU is moving towards national populism and that this will lead to the left and right switching their positions on the EU (back to what they were originally - left anti; right pro)
You could vote in a government that appoints a Commissioner to propose a new law?
A bit like the Lords I suppose.
Steve
Right now, we're doing exactly the right thing. We're encouraging bicycling, public transport, clean electricity generation, and electrified vehicles.
And that's having an impact; it's just hard to see it immediately because the average lifespan of a car is 12 years. That means that even if every car sold was electric (and that's nowhere near the case), then it would only reduce passenger vehicle emissions by about 8% in the first year.
But that slow turnover also means that when impacts start, they keep happening for a long time. The US implemented Fuel Efficiency Standards in 1973. It took another three years for US oil consumption to drop, but drop it did. From the highs of 1976, and despite rising population and significantly more cars on the road, US oil consumption dropped 15% from its peak, and kept falling even as the oil priced fell sharply.
Vehicle electrification is the same. Around 17% of new car sales in 2022 were electric; around 22-23% will be this year. Over the next ten years, the proportion of the fleet that is either BEV (100% electric) or PHEV (where 50+% of miles are electric) is going to rise to 60%, plus, and that will have a massive impact on UK emissions.
Also, don't forget that the biggest electric car market in the world - and the biggest market for new wind installations - is China.
Interest rates reduce demand by increasing the cost of borrowing. That is a blunt tool because it affects all spending, not just the bit that has suffered inflation. I think we would be in agreement on that.
But the Bank has a limited tool kit and interest rates are the main tool it has. Traditionally, the Bank would restrict credit in other ways but that has got out of fashion, except in relation to mortgage affordability.
So we need to reduce demand and thus indirectly reduce our demand for gas, for example. If all western countries do this in tandem it should work. The increased prices should also improve marginal supply by encouraging US shale producers, for example.
I agree it is a blunt tool but it is the only one we have. So we need to use it judiciously which, sadly, the Bank and the MPC didn’t.
http://theoildrum.com/node/2899
It’s a fabulous city. Full of youth, art and energy, and wears its history with grace and style. It’s the city you want Paris to be; a much sexier Vienna. Incredible coffee. Great beer. Stunning architecture at every turn, in various states of repair. London on a Wednesday evening is dullsville; here it’s an invigorating international mix drinking and dancing to the wee hours. A more cosmopolitan sensibility than Prague (the ultimate city of the petit-bourgeois), less snooty than Berlin yet with an innate cultural propriety and courtesy that suits us Brits.
As an aside, I’ve never heard more non-native English speakers speaking English to each other than here - the only place that comes close is the Dublin Google office.
It’s a Place To Be.
IANA psephologist, but - to be blunt - Tory b*stards know all the tricks, the leftwing wisdom that "Tories always vote" is correct (obviously not literally so, should anyone be sufficiently dryminded as to think that's what I meant), and anybody who thinks Labour will win by a 1997-style landslide is deluding themselves. For a substantial part of the electorate, what's most important in their sh*tty outlooks is skin colour, and guess what, often they don't admit it. The far right if one can use that expression to mean to the right of the Tory party (as if Priti Patel and Suella Braverman weren't far right) is likely to win more votes from Labour than they win from the Tories (except among 2019 Tories who in previous GEs voted Labour and in previous Euros voted UKIP - in effect, once upon a time Lab voters who have already been won for the right or far right) for this reason.
was a disaster. The reason was that their staff typically had very large mortgages and hardly any savings. So it was, for them.
We are seeing a repeat of this now. Savers are being royally ripped off by interest rates which are still seriously negative in real terms. Their money plus the interest is worth less at the end of the year than it was at the start. It doesn’t exactly encourage savings.
We've managed over three hundred years of reform within the system rather than replacing the system,
Net debt is now over 100% of GDP.
Economically credible my arse.
I agree that interest rate rises are a blunt tool, and, I fear personally, an utterly ineffective one for the type of inflation we face. Like being given a claw-hammer to thread a needle. Perhaps amidst the hammer induced destruction, a threaded needle may eventually be found, but at what price?
Increasing the supply of secure, reliable, domestic energy is the obvious answer, and sadly one that both main party leaderships won't go near as they've been utterly captured by green lunacy.
Starmer catching BoJo lying at the despatch box and documenting it on the record took a while to ripen, but was a sweet fruit when it did.
Sunak and Co are probably blundering into further heffalump traps even as we speak.
https://www.youtube.com/@ThamesTv/playlists
Dangerous to always assume the former.
Steve
Your reference to so-called single sex spaces betrays your agenda. You do not want women to have spaces where they are free from the risk of attack, where they can have privacy and dignity, as the law demands - see the EA, the ECHR and the Goodwin case. You simply do not accept that women are allowed to have boundaries.
Requiring men to go into spaces for men or unisex ones and to stay out of female only spaces does not keep men out of public life. Removing female only spaces will keep many women out of public life but you do not care about that. The EA has single and separate sex exemptions for a reason. But it is clear that you - like far too many - want to abolish them and do not care what the effect on women of this is. Men - their demands, their feelings - matter more to you, regardless of the harm this will do to women.
Those with dysphoria, those who fall under the definition of gender reassignment deserve all possible help. I have no issue with them.
But as the law permits I think that women should be entitled to have single sex spaces and single sex services for all the reasons permitted in the EA and the ECHR.
You appear not to. I find this very sad and worrying because it seems to me that there is a very real risk that women will, as a result of views like yours, lose existing rights.
It turns out he knows a lot more about politics than most.
https://youtu.be/CuZrzwm6CJs
And which you'll be paying back for the rest of your life.
I do have sympathy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksJeJp6aOJk&list=PL7WD0g9dS3jkHesmDKPRA4ZVl_JtO4w6s&index=3
Winter of Discontent - Labour Party - Denis Healey - 1979
Remind me: How many private members bills are submitted? How many are debated? How many become actually have become legislation without government support?
I think it’s around 1 or 2 per session on largely uncontroversial subjects, so that helps me how?
My point is that if one lives in a safe seat (of whatever colour) you have no influence over Parliament.
Just like your MEP.
Steve
In the UK, MP's in Parliament (Westminster) generally do not initiate law - that's the Government (Whitehall). Government is the PM, the Cabinet, and the Civil Service. Some MPs can and do initiate law via Private Member's Bills but they are not the majority and even some MP's - the ineffably stupid Christopher Chope - dispute them.
I'm going to have to draw a diagram, aren't I?
I also agree we need to do more.
Was there ever a Tory polling recovery?
I must have missed it.
Apologies if so (genuinely).
Blanchard’s research most notably fails to ask cis women whether they experience self-arousal at seeing themselves. Turns out that many cis women do & score highly on the same scales used by Blanchard to diagnose autogynephilia. Are these women deviants to be feared? It seems unlikely! This lack of any kind of non-trans controls in Blanchard’s studies make the entirely thing extremely suspect - it’s practically junk science. Even if it turned out to be true observationally, it is still entirely unclear which is cause & which effect.
So we end up back where we started: with you projecting sexual deviance onto trans people in order to justify your desires. You are entirely uninterested in examining the actual studies & whether they have any predictive power behind them because you don’t really care - Blanchard’s trans typology is little more than a useful frame in which you can paint trans women as being fundamentally sexual deviants & a danger to others so that you can justify your actions.
So since the start of the eu parliament in 1958 we have a score of mp's getting bills considered and passed of 455 to mep's getting bills considered and passed of 0.
You may mock private members bills but at least our mp's can table them if they feel strongly. Mep's cant even initiate one. They merely get to vote on what is proposed by council and commision. The EU brings in a bad law and there is no chance of revocation unless the commission decides to put it up for repeal.
I’m happy to put a grand up if you are?
Steve.
Does it happen often no not nearly often enough but better a small chance than no chance is the point
Had that trend continued, game might not have been on, but it would have been out of its cupboard and on the table. But it flattened out and now looks like reversing. Question is whether it is a temporary scandal blip or the start of something longer term.
In a reversal of historical trends those of northern working class background will have the better relative prospects.
They'll also be likely less at risk from AI and further globalisation.
Steve
Presumably it’s not restricted to trans women though?
Remind me, how do EU voters repeal EU laws? Ah, wait, they can’t.
No 10 has called in the right wing attack dogs to try and deflect from the governments record.
Data from OECD.
My point was based on my assumption that @Leon thinks that laws are generated by parliament generally, and that Leon was making a common mistake in eliding Parliament and Government - see also "we elect a Prime Minister" for another.
Incidentally (and why is everybody assuming bad faith today?) I was not mocking private Member's Bills: quite the contrary, and see The Abortion Act 1967 for an example of one that succeeded.
The UK is democratic. It has a demos. There are multiple democratic levers we can pull. And we do
Nonetheless it is still very arguable that Brexit was an act of foolish self harm, destroying our trade links, upsetting our neighbours, diminishing our influence. I don’t argue with that. It’s a valid position
I just valued democracy more even if others value different things