No, you're all wrong on Mrs May and Brexit. The main issue wasn't her rhetoric or her mindset, it was the domestic politics of it. A soft Brexit meant SM which meant FOM. No Tory PM could have got that through the Brexit parliament and stayed PM. A Labour PM could but not a Tory one.
Why? Because a deal like that would have run counter to where the party's members and voters and a critical mass of their MPs were. It would have been VONC and out. She knew that. As would any other person in her place at that time in those circumstances.
Soft Brexit = Pipedream.
But also, soft Brexit loses if it's explicitly put to the public in 2016, because it means FOM. Where May ended up was "least economically damaging Brexit that stops FOM", which was probably a reasonable take on the main strand of what the 52% wanted.
But any real deal was bound to disappoint, because what the UK really wanted was for the EU to give us exactly what we wanted in exchange for the pleasure of our company. I'm sure there was a colourful metaphor involving post-divorce relationships.
'Brexit Means Brexiit' was the line that destroyed Mrs May. She will join Farage Johnson Sunak and the rest in infamy.
Perhaps unfair but no one likes a quisling and the loathing for Leavers is still visceral
And yet the latest polls show the desire to rejoin is beginning to fall away. We are getting used to Brexit. Ok you’re not but then you still don’t understand how planes stay in the air
4a/ Are there storm clouds gathering for the ‘re-join’ voice in our Brexit tracker? The gap narrows this week for the first time in a long time.
* All * Re-join: 46% (-4) Stay Out: 34% (+1) DK or not voting: 20% (+3)
This process will continue. We will get accustomed to being outside the EU and the idea of full fat rejoin and yielding all our sovereignty will come to seem bizarre
I imagine there will be constant tweaks to our trading terms however. This is what happens with Switzerland. They have no desire to join the EU but that means they have to keep adjusting to the huge trading bloc that surrounds them
Perhaps but so will the notion of "Global Britain" (whatever that means). We might end up with the not wholly unsatisfactory situation of close economic and trading alignment without the political nuances of being in the EU club. You might almost call it a Common Market rather than a Single Market arrangement - the economic benefits of relatively aligned and loose trade without the four freedoms including FoM which caused so many problems.
A 2% shift from 60/40? I think the position has been remarkably stable for several years.
Where May ended up was "least economically damaging Brexit that stops FOM", which was probably a reasonable take on the main strand of what the 52% wanted.
The 52% wanted unicorns and magic beans and the moon on a stick.
an observation from the last thread which I was too late too participate in. I worry that we are painting pensioners as rich fat cats (I am not a pensioner as yet). The previous generation designated as boomer certainly for a lot had good pension provision and got to buy homes at a reasonable cost. However they are dying off bit by bit....my generation...generation x however largely missed out on defined benefit schemes and due to 2 decades of low interest rates most of our pots are not going to be huge and affording an index linked pension over 10k is going to be a pipe dream for most of us. In addition many of my generation like myself missed out on cheap housing as we ended up getting divorced in the late 90's to 2000's and then found a single salary wouldn't get us a mortgage even with the cash realised from our sale of half he house.
I forsee when I retire being reviled as a rich pensioner because of the attitude being inculcated while I am struggling to make ends meet. As an example I am keeping an eye on my pension pot and have worked solidly since 1987, been paying contributions, and generally been top 30 to top 20% of earners. I am told I should be looking at an annuity of 5 to 7k a year non index linked if I dont take a lump sum. Hardly going to be having my mouth stuffed with gold on that but the idea of rich pensioners will still persist I don't doubt
I think we all appreciate that not all pensioners are wealthy, and many pensioners still won't be wealthy in twenty years' time. However...
*Most boomers are outright homeowners, and most of their kids have managed to at least get a mortgage to boot
*Thus, given that our economy is so warped by the deliberate constriction of property supply (which yields huge capital gains for homeowners, as well as virtually guaranteed fat profits for most landlords,) the average oldie will continue to be comfortably off for the foreseeable future
*At this point, we remind ourselves that the average pensioner has a higher income than the average worker, after adjustment for housing costs. This doesn't mean that there aren't substantial numbers of dirt poor pensioners, especially amongst those who missed out on home ownership and/or good old fashioned final salary pensions, but most of them are reasonably well to do
*A large proportion of GenX, including some of us who may still be stuck renting, are also going to receive enormous cash windfalls when they inherit their parents' property. This is entirely untaxed save for about 3-4% of the most valuable estates, and will greatly bolster the prosperity of the next generation of olds
Thus, well to do pensioners are the norm not the exception (and dig into the stats and I bet you'll discover that a higher proportion of kids are living in poverty than are the elderly.)
This is the fundamental argument against the Triple Lock, and in favour of its replacement with a much less generous guarantee backed up by means tested payments for the genuinely hard up. Decades of compound inflation in state pension payments will, quite simply, bleed the working population and their children white. It's precisely the same reasoning behind the near-total disappearance of final salary pensions schemes in the private sector: business scrapped them because the contributions were so steep they became unaffordable.
However, Government ultimately depends on voter support, the median elector is now aged in their mid-50s, and the huge grey vote expects triple locked pensions to carry on forever. Which means they will, until the cost finally bankrupts the entire state. And thus, on we go, circling the plughole.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
I think the poorly thought through move for the second vote doomed the first.
These Woke gestural referendums (cf The Voice in Oz) are a thoroughly bad idea. Not least coz voters dislike them and vote them down, creating bitterness that didn’t exist before
They can't help themselves.
It will definitely be out turn next with Labour. Trans, returning museum artefacts, statues, BLM lectures compulsory in schools.. you name it.
The Brexiteer rewriting of history continues in vain.
The catastrofuck began the moment you voted for it.
Various flavours of bad may have had different probabilities, but it remains a bad idea, executed badly, by idiots and fools.
And let's stop pretending a Soft Brexit was possible but thrown away by Mrs May's ineptitude.
It's a fantasy but an unusual one in that it's widely shared by both Leavers and Remainers.
The only person with the chutzpah to get away with it was BoJo. But that would only have worked if he hadn't already outsourced his thinking to Cummings.
Ironically, the people he would have ended up breathing in that situation would have been his remaining fans now.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
I think the poorly thought through move for the second vote doomed the first.
These Woke gestural referendums (cf The Voice in Oz) are a thoroughly bad idea. Not least coz voters dislike them and vote them down, creating bitterness that didn’t exist before
They can't help themselves.
It will definitely be out turn next with Labour. Trans, returning museum artefacts, statues, BLM lectures compulsory in schools.. you name it.
And the people whose blood pressure will rise 30 points will be those who voted Reform.
This is another example of the importance of campaigns. There were large majorities in favour of these amendments, at least in principle, before the campaigns went into the detail of the replacement wording. But after the campaign the don't knows have gone "no", and potential yes voters have stayed at home.
The government have done so badly that you could question whether they wanted to win at all.
TMay completely fucked the Brexit process with her IDIOTIC and utterly unnecessary “red lines” and “citizens of nowhere” speech. That boxed the UK in from the start, along with her ineptly timed triggering of A50
She was a truly dreadful prime minister. The worst of my lifetime. Yes Truss was a calamity but she only lasted 5 seconds, Truss was like a burst tyre on the motorway, scary but brief. TMay’s premiership was like a long horrible motorway pile up in the fog, eventually involving 389 vehicles and a downed helicopter, when she didn’t have to drive at all
Theresa May was correct that free movement couldn't continue given the vote.
According to Heywood, Mrs M knew the right thing to do was to push through a soft, consensus Brexit, but simply didn’t have the capital, and so caved to her nutters. A shame, since her legacy would have been better for having tried to do the right thing.
I think she did try and do the right thing. But after losing the Con majority following a poor and personalised GE campaign she lacked the necessary authority.
That wasn't the time she made the error though. After that election she was likely toast whatever, as the fantasists on the Tory right both hated her for screwing up the election and knew they had her in their pocket. Plus, the likes of Boris or anyone with ambitions to become PM knew they could undermine her by rejecting any deal.
The big error was right after her acclamation by her party in 2016, when she was at her most powerful. Instead of the 'Citizens of Nowhere' speech she should have said that given the narrow but decisive result and the fact the winning side had left no plan, her priority was to bring people together and discharge the result and leave as quickly as possible by leaving the EU's political structures. So we could then decide our future by parties offering a more detailed choice of what came next.
She could have then, should see so have wished, have campaigned in an election on ending free movement by leaving the SM that were worked out, having been the person who cleaned up the Brexit mess and showed a way forward. Meanwhile, Labour/the remain side would have likely torn itself to shreds between those unreconciled to Brexit and those who wanted to support May's offer as a path to a softer Brexit.
Instead, she gave a speech that set up the Brexit conundrum that brought her down. Namely, how to get the promised deal that meets the fantasists' demands to exit everything while not screwing NI and the economy, so gets support of MPs for whom those are red lines? Furthermore, she effectively spawned the 2nd referendum movement by giving everyone who thought Brexit a terrible idea every reason to dig in against it, and vote and campaign accordingly. So you then ended up with the 2017 result, as lots voted Labour to avoid the Tories having carte blanche to pursue versions of Brexit they thought were beyond the pale.
It's impossible to know but I'd say a Tory PM with great skill and powers of persuasion might - might - have been able to get a softish but not soft Brexit through the pre GE17 parliament. But after that election, forget it. What happened from then looks inevitable with hindsight. The calculus of that impasse parliament - ie the combination of the size and motives of the various factions - was fiendish. It had to go where it did go. Another election to decide the matter. Which it did.
I've tried to make sense of the Irish constitutional referenda today - there are obviously nuances at work which escape me. Some parts of Ireland remain socially very conservative and it's clear the Catholic Church has played a big role in the rejection of the proposals. Some will argue the likes of Aontu and Independent Ireland represent a wider political future - both socially conservative but the former more interested in strong public services while Independent Ireland is more of a small state tax cutting party.
Could we see a similar evolution here?
I don't think it was a strong vote for the status quo, reflecting social conservatism. A lot of people voted no because they didn't think the replacement wording went far enough - lots of criticism that the care amendment still placed the burden of care on the family, and only committing the state to "strive" to support families in providing care.
You also had government ministers claiming that the amendments wouldn't change anything (so what's the point?) when maybe people did want to see a practical change (but the opposition made people worry it would be the courts that would decide, instead of the voters)
If you compare this with the successful same-sex marriage and abortion referendums, it was made very clear in both cases what the effect would be and how the law would change - thus preventing scare stories about allowing late-term abortions on demand, or marriages with cats. One voter claimed they voted no yesterday because the "durable relationship" between a tenant and their landlord might give the tenant a legal right to inherit their landlords property - if the wording of the amendment had been better and the government had been clearer about the changes they wanted to create, that sort of nonsense would have been minimised.
The citizens assemblies had actually produced stronger and clearer wording for both amendments, but the government ignored those recommendations, and substituted their own wording. Was this sabotage or incompetence? Possibly a combination of the two when it comes to Fine Gael and Fianna Fail.
Theresa May was correct that free movement couldn't continue given the vote.
Free movement was less objectionable than the situation now
Well, on the one hand I believe there's good polling evidence to suggest that a nominal restoration of Britain's control over its borders led to a sharp drop-off in voter concern over immigration. On the other, the medium-term effect appears to have been to replace the stuffing of the economy and the overheated housing market with EU workers with even greater numbers of non-EU workers.
So one could say that your assertion is not entirely without merit.
This is another example of the importance of campaigns. There were large majorities in favour of these amendments, at least in principle, before the campaigns went into the detail of the replacement wording. But after the campaign the don't knows have gone "no", and potential yes voters have stayed at home.
The government have done so badly that you could question whether they wanted to win at all.
The FUD around the care referendum in particular should never have been allowed to stand.
A great example of how the perfect is the enemy of the good - people were voting "No" because "the state should be responsible for care, not the family" and so have caused the constitution to continue saying "mothers are responsible for care".
No, you're all wrong on Mrs May and Brexit. The main issue wasn't her rhetoric or her mindset, it was the domestic politics of it. A soft Brexit meant SM which meant FOM. No Tory PM could have got that through the Brexit parliament and stayed PM. A Labour PM could but not a Tory one.
Why? Because a deal like that would have run counter to where the party's members and voters and a critical mass of their MPs were. It would have been VONC and out. She knew that. As would any other Tory politician in her place at that time in those circumstances.
Soft Brexit = Pipedream.
The point is she could have decoupled the two - done a quick, and soft Brexit to get out of the political structures and told the hardcore there would be plenty of room to revisit the economic ones (like the SM) after. There was a window of opportunity when Brexit was still undefined - and you could have set out a plan that sequenced it.
It was only later, and in part due to, May's speech that Brexit became that interminable conundrum where everyone could stymie each other by demanding the impossible, but never had the numbers to carry their preferred position.
Charles Moore wields the stiletto. Older PBers will recall that Boris's pal Charles Moore gave disastrous advice about saving Owen Paterson, leading to Boris's own departure and Moore's peerage.
Executive summary: Because she wasn't a Brexiteer. (And after Brexit, things went wrong because of Covid.)
A more thorough summary would be to say that as HS for so long she learned all the wrong lessons of government. Make your decisions without even a pretense at consultation and then present everyone with a fait accompli. Worked when she had a strong PM backing her (however reluctantly) but a total disaster when she got the top job. Absolutely no idea how to build support or a consensus.
I am finding your current Cameron nostalgia quite a head-scratcher. I'm pretty sure yesterday you made a post extolling his 'grip on the issues beyond the headlines' or something similar. It was extraordinary.
The Brexiteer rewriting of history continues in vain.
The catastrofuck began the moment you voted for it.
Various flavours of bad may have had different probabilities, but it remains a bad idea, executed badly, by idiots and fools.
And let's stop pretending a Soft Brexit was possible but thrown away by Mrs May's ineptitude.
It's a fantasy but an unusual one in that it's widely shared by both Leavers and Remainers.
But, a soft Brexit without free movement (not saying that was politically credible with the EU) was essentially what Britain wanted.
Or, on the other hand, a non-political Bremain without free movement.
But frictionless goods trade without FOM or political involvement was very similar to the May plan, which a sufficient number of people hated once it was written down.
And is the "not involved in the politics" thing one where the UK still has input into decisions befitting its size and status? Or are we just waiting for them to send us their conclusions? Because if it's the first, how is that different to politics?
an observation from the last thread which I was too late too participate in. I worry that we are painting pensioners as rich fat cats (I am not a pensioner as yet). The previous generation designated as boomer certainly for a lot had good pension provision and got to buy homes at a reasonable cost. However they are dying off bit by bit....my generation...generation x however largely missed out on defined benefit schemes and due to 2 decades of low interest rates most of our pots are not going to be huge and affording an index linked pension over 10k is going to be a pipe dream for most of us. In addition many of my generation like myself missed out on cheap housing as we ended up getting divorced in the late 90's to 2000's and then found a single salary wouldn't get us a mortgage even with the cash realised from our sale of half he house.
I forsee when I retire being reviled as a rich pensioner because of the attitude being inculcated while I am struggling to make ends meet. As an example I am keeping an eye on my pension pot and have worked solidly since 1987, been paying contributions, and generally been top 30 to top 20% of earners. I am told I should be looking at an annuity of 5 to 7k a year non index linked if I dont take a lump sum. Hardly going to be having my mouth stuffed with gold on that but the idea of rich pensioners will still persist I don't doubt
I think we all appreciate that not all pensioners are wealthy, and many pensioners still won't be wealthy in twenty years' time. However...
*Most boomers are outright homeowners, and most of their kids have managed to at least get a mortgage to boot
*Thus, given that our economy is so warped by the deliberate constriction of property supply (which yields huge capital gains for homeowners, as well as virtually guaranteed fat profits for most landlords,) the average oldie will continue to be comfortably off for the foreseeable future
*At this point, we remind ourselves that the average pensioner has a higher income than the average worker, after adjustment for housing costs. This doesn't mean that there aren't substantial numbers of dirt poor pensioners, especially amongst those who missed out on home ownership and/or good old fashioned final salary pensions, but most of them are reasonably well to do
*A large proportion of GenX, including some of us who may still be stuck renting, are also going to receive enormous cash windfalls when they inherit their parents' property. This is entirely untaxed save for about 3-4% of the most valuable estates, and will greatly bolster the prosperity of the next generation of olds
Thus, well to do pensioners are the norm not the exception (and dig into the stats and I bet you'll discover that a higher proportion of kids are living in poverty than are the elderly.)
This is the fundamental argument against the Triple Lock, and in favour of its replacement with a much less generous guarantee backed up by means tested payments for the genuinely hard up. Decades of compound inflation in state pension payments will, quite simply, bleed the working population and their children white. It's precisely the same reasoning behind the near-total disappearance of final salary pensions schemes in the private sector: business scrapped them because the contributions were so steep they became unaffordable.
However, Government ultimately depends on voter support, the median elector is now aged in their mid-50s, and the huge grey vote expects triple locked pensions to carry on forever. Which means they will, until the cost finally bankrupts the entire state. And thus, on we go, circling the plughole.
Sorry I disagree with you, even those that inherit a whole house are going to be largely worse off than their boomer parents, and don't forget most of those won't be from single child households so the inheritance will be shared.
For comparison my father 83 total pension including state pension north of 30k a year
My pension high end projected including state pension to be 15k to high end 17k with everything not state pension not index linked. Even if he had a home to leave me outright and mortgage free I would hardly be living the champagne lifestyle on that and thats me being most of my life in top 30 to 20 percent of earners....most of my friends of the same age (mid 50's ) are looking at there pension projections and wondered why they ever bothered. Mostly they will get just enough to lift them over the cap where they loose a lot of freebies
The point is she could have decoupled the two - done a quick, and soft Brexit to get out of the political structures and told the hardcore there would be plenty of room to revisit the economic ones (like the SM) after.
No, that was never possible.
There is no practical version of Brexit that is substantially less shit than the one
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
Our Constitution is very lean.
On the contrary, it's extensive and widely dispersed to boot, making it much harder to simply understand.
I thought we didn't have one as such. More a mix of statute, common law, precedent, custom and etiquette etc?
We have a Constitution, what we don't have is a codified Constitution (like practically everyone else). So when people say we don't have a written constitution its not quite correct, since statute, common law etc are written, just all over the place.
Hence my saying we cannot criticise an overly long constitution, since at least theirs can still be broadly read in one document, rather than looking up various other things and trying to figure out which ones and which practices are deemed constitutionally significant.
There's a lot to be said for our sort of constitution. For one thing it doesn't have stuff in it which means that judges can rule it a constitutional right that 6 year olds wield machine guns and such nonsense. For another it doesn't tell you what our morality ought to be in 300 years time. For another, it's hard to overthrow because it disperses itself into many parts and places. For another it is able to develop by courts and statutes rather than having to go to the country in referenda. And it nicely balances its 'nuclear' weaponry, dispersing it to Commons, Lords, Civil Service, Electorate, Supreme Court, Monarch and Armed Forces in such a way that no-one in inclined to test either their own or others' ultimate powers. In this way the 'Good Chaps' theory of government clings on, despite this government's best efforts.
an observation from the last thread which I was too late too participate in. I worry that we are painting pensioners as rich fat cats (I am not a pensioner as yet). The previous generation designated as boomer certainly for a lot had good pension provision and got to buy homes at a reasonable cost. However they are dying off bit by bit....my generation...generation x however largely missed out on defined benefit schemes and due to 2 decades of low interest rates most of our pots are not going to be huge and affording an index linked pension over 10k is going to be a pipe dream for most of us. In addition many of my generation like myself missed out on cheap housing as we ended up getting divorced in the late 90's to 2000's and then found a single salary wouldn't get us a mortgage even with the cash realised from our sale of half he house.
I forsee when I retire being reviled as a rich pensioner because of the attitude being inculcated while I am struggling to make ends meet. As an example I am keeping an eye on my pension pot and have worked solidly since 1987, been paying contributions, and generally been top 30 to top 20% of earners. I am told I should be looking at an annuity of 5 to 7k a year non index linked if I dont take a lump sum. Hardly going to be having my mouth stuffed with gold on that but the idea of rich pensioners will still persist I don't doubt
I think we all appreciate that not all pensioners are wealthy, and many pensioners still won't be wealthy in twenty years' time. However...
*Most boomers are outright homeowners, and most of their kids have managed to at least get a mortgage to boot
*Thus, given that our economy is so warped by the deliberate constriction of property supply (which yields huge capital gains for homeowners, as well as virtually guaranteed fat profits for most landlords,) the average oldie will continue to be comfortably off for the foreseeable future
*At this point, we remind ourselves that the average pensioner has a higher income than the average worker, after adjustment for housing costs. This doesn't mean that there aren't substantial numbers of dirt poor pensioners, especially amongst those who missed out on home ownership and/or good old fashioned final salary pensions, but most of them are reasonably well to do
*A large proportion of GenX, including some of us who may still be stuck renting, are also going to receive enormous cash windfalls when they inherit their parents' property. This is entirely untaxed save for about 3-4% of the most valuable estates, and will greatly bolster the prosperity of the next generation of olds
Thus, well to do pensioners are the norm not the exception (and dig into the stats and I bet you'll discover that a higher proportion of kids are living in poverty than are the elderly.)
This is the fundamental argument against the Triple Lock, and in favour of its replacement with a much less generous guarantee backed up by means tested payments for the genuinely hard up. Decades of compound inflation in state pension payments will, quite simply, bleed the working population and their children white. It's precisely the same reasoning behind the near-total disappearance of final salary pensions schemes in the private sector: business scrapped them because the contributions were so steep they became unaffordable.
However, Government ultimately depends on voter support, the median elector is now aged in their mid-50s, and the huge grey vote expects triple locked pensions to carry on forever. Which means they will, until the cost finally bankrupts the entire state. And thus, on we go, circling the plughole.
A state pension of £10k per year isn't going to get you very far even if you own your own home - it is a very basic income. You can't do much to change your situation, you can't get credit or borrow money.
It is an error to speak in general terms about pensioners. The fire should be turned on the tax arrangements for pensioners on high incomes due to defined benefit pensions or savings and investments. They demand a lot from the state but as discussed earlier today they pay around half as much tax as working people (due to NI and student loan repayments) on a similar income.
Given how things turned out, how did May become Conservative leader and Prime Minister in the summer of 2016?
My recollection was Boris Johnson was if not favourite than strongly fancied to replace Cameron but somehow from a position of strength, instead of uniting around Johnson who would probably have won, the Leavers in the Conservative Party abdicated their strength and stood a number of second-rate candidates (Andrea Leadsom, Stephen Crabb?) handing May a clear and convincing win.
This left May, a supporter of Cameron and supposedly a supporter of Remain, in charge of a party dominated by MPs and members who had likely voted the other way. Nonetheless, the 2017 election was a personal failure with a 21% lead reduced to 2.5% by polling day though that was less the fall in Conservative support (which was small) against a huge rise in Labour support from 25% to 41% which was primarily the collapse in support for UKIP (from 8% to 2%) and the LDs (from 12% to 7.5%).
Was it the "dementia tax" or the fact she was just a poor campaigner against Corbyn who caught the public wave and almosr rode it to No.10? Those who were here in 2017 will remember @david_herdson's post the night or night before polling day which made it clear the expected landlside for the Conservatives was a chimera?
No, you're all wrong on Mrs May and Brexit. The main issue wasn't her rhetoric or her mindset, it was the domestic politics of it. A soft Brexit meant SM which meant FOM. No Tory PM could have got that through the Brexit parliament and stayed PM. A Labour PM could but not a Tory one.
Why? Because a deal like that would have run counter to where the party's members and voters and a critical mass of their MPs were. It would have been VONC and out. She knew that. As would any other person in her place at that time in those circumstances.
Soft Brexit = Pipedream.
But also, soft Brexit loses if it's explicitly put to the public in 2016, because it means FOM. Where May ended up was "least economically damaging Brexit that stops FOM", which was probably a reasonable take on the main strand of what the 52% wanted.
But any real deal was bound to disappoint, because what the UK really wanted was for the EU to give us exactly what we wanted in exchange for the pleasure of our company. I'm sure there was a colourful metaphor involving post-divorce relationships.
Yes, pretty much it. FOM was totemic. We could have done better than Johnson's deal but our politics of the time precluded a soft Brexit. Still does, I'd say, but time will change that. Maybe quite soon.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
Moral: Don't do referendums if the electorate is likely to use them as a way of saying "we're grumpy". Or, if you must, make sure that the referendum isn't consequential.
Or don't have all the main political parties agree to support a change and then put it to the population in a referendum.
Is there a precedent in any country for an opinion poll fail on such a scale? A month ago, Ipsos returned 53%-15% for yes-no in the family referendum, or 78%-22% among those who said which way they'd vote. The actual result will be close to 32%-68%.
No, you're all wrong on Mrs May and Brexit. The main issue wasn't her rhetoric or her mindset, it was the domestic politics of it. A soft Brexit meant SM which meant FOM. No Tory PM could have got that through the Brexit parliament and stayed PM. A Labour PM could but not a Tory one.
Why? Because a deal like that would have run counter to where the party's members and voters and a critical mass of their MPs were. It would have been VONC and out. She knew that. As would any other Tory politician in her place at that time in those circumstances.
Soft Brexit = Pipedream.
The point is she could have decoupled the two - done a quick, and soft Brexit to get out of the political structures and told the hardcore there would be plenty of room to revisit the economic ones (like the SM) after. There was a window of opportunity when Brexit was still undefined - and you could have set out a plan that sequenced it.
It was only later, and in part due to, May's speech that Brexit became that interminable conundrum where everyone could stymie each other by demanding the impossible, but never had the numbers to carry their preferred position.
Cameron might have managed that if he had stayed. Boris might have managed it if he had become leader in 2016. But May - as a new leader, and former Remainer - had to work harder to keep the Brexiteers on side.
If she hadn't given that speech (or something very close to it), the Tory party would have become unmanageable even sooner than it did.
There's perhaps an argument to be made that she should have provoked the Brexiteers anyway, using it as an excuse to kick them out of the party and calling an election on the back of it - a reverse Boris manoeuvre if you like. But with Corbyn not yet at his 2019 nadir, that would surely have been too risky a move to contemplate.
No, you're all wrong on Mrs May and Brexit. The main issue wasn't her rhetoric or her mindset, it was the domestic politics of it. A soft Brexit meant SM which meant FOM. No Tory PM could have got that through the Brexit parliament and stayed PM. A Labour PM could but not a Tory one.
Why? Because a deal like that would have run counter to where the party's members and voters and a critical mass of their MPs were. It would have been VONC and out. She knew that. As would any other Tory politician in her place at that time in those circumstances.
Soft Brexit = Pipedream.
The point is she could have decoupled the two - done a quick, and soft Brexit to get out of the political structures and told the hardcore there would be plenty of room to revisit the economic ones (like the SM) after. There was a window of opportunity when Brexit was still undefined - and you could have set out a plan that sequenced it.
It was only later, and in part due to, May's speech that Brexit became that interminable conundrum where everyone could stymie each other by demanding the impossible, but never had the numbers to carry their preferred position.
Done that instead of calling the snap election, you mean? Interesting idea. But you really think the party would have gone along with that? I don't.
No, you're all wrong on Mrs May and Brexit. The main issue wasn't her rhetoric or her mindset, it was the domestic politics of it. A soft Brexit meant SM which meant FOM. No Tory PM could have got that through the Brexit parliament and stayed PM. A Labour PM could but not a Tory one.
Why? Because a deal like that would have run counter to where the party's members and voters and a critical mass of their MPs were. It would have been VONC and out. She knew that. As would any other Tory politician in her place at that time in those circumstances.
Soft Brexit = Pipedream.
The point is she could have decoupled the two - done a quick, and soft Brexit to get out of the political structures and told the hardcore there would be plenty of room to revisit the economic ones (like the SM) after. There was a window of opportunity when Brexit was still undefined - and you could have set out a plan that sequenced it.
It was only later, and in part due to, May's speech that Brexit became that interminable conundrum where everyone could stymie each other by demanding the impossible, but never had the numbers to carry their preferred position.
Assuming that May's intention was to bring the UK out of the EU successfully, her issue was a deliberate policy of Hunt's (and we must assume May's, though the Treasury is an odd beast and can often defy the PM), not to provide the necessary resources to prepare the UK for the ramifications of leaving the EU without an FTA, or any agreement - the 'without a deal' scenario. Without those preparations in place, she was negotiating with zero credible threat of walking out. The eventual agreement was purely a case of how nice the EU wanted to be or not. This also ruined Johnson's negotiations. They tried to mutter and hint that a no deal scenario was possible, but it was bluff and the EU knew it.
No, you're all wrong on Mrs May and Brexit. The main issue wasn't her rhetoric or her mindset, it was the domestic politics of it. A soft Brexit meant SM which meant FOM. No Tory PM could have got that through the Brexit parliament and stayed PM. A Labour PM could but not a Tory one.
Why? Because a deal like that would have run counter to where the party's members and voters and a critical mass of their MPs were. It would have been VONC and out. She knew that. As would any other Tory politician in her place at that time in those circumstances.
Soft Brexit = Pipedream.
The point is she could have decoupled the two - done a quick, and soft Brexit to get out of the political structures and told the hardcore there would be plenty of room to revisit the economic ones (like the SM) after. There was a window of opportunity when Brexit was still undefined - and you could have set out a plan that sequenced it.
It was only later, and in part due to, May's speech that Brexit became that interminable conundrum where everyone could stymie each other by demanding the impossible, but never had the numbers to carry their preferred position.
Done that instead of calling the snap election, you mean? Interesting idea. But you really think the party would have gone along with that? I don't.
And that was her problem: people talk as if, as PM, she had utter freedom to put forward any solution she wanted. She couldn't; she had to try to get the best she could that would be accepted by the Europhobic nutters and their God, Johnson.
regarding inflation in general, we are doing some building work to our block of flats. Mostly this is specialist building work but the question came up of treating and painting the wooden timber windows whilst the scaffold was up. There are some minor bits of rot so you need to dig out the damp wood, put in some wood hardener, let it dry, then fill it. And the scrape off the peeling paint and repaint the windows, 2 in total.
The quotes came through at close to £2000. In the end me and my neighbour just decided to do it ourselves over a couple of days. I've done this type of thing many times, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't; but you can't do that much harm, and the work that tradesmen do can also fail.
£2K is just way beyond the budget of the leaseholders, if it was replicated across every window in the building it would cost £16,000 just to paint the windows.
No, you're all wrong on Mrs May and Brexit. The main issue wasn't her rhetoric or her mindset, it was the domestic politics of it. A soft Brexit meant SM which meant FOM. No Tory PM could have got that through the Brexit parliament and stayed PM. A Labour PM could but not a Tory one.
Why? Because a deal like that would have run counter to where the party's members and voters and a critical mass of their MPs were. It would have been VONC and out. She knew that. As would any other Tory politician in her place at that time in those circumstances.
Soft Brexit = Pipedream.
The point is she could have decoupled the two - done a quick, and soft Brexit to get out of the political structures and told the hardcore there would be plenty of room to revisit the economic ones (like the SM) after. There was a window of opportunity when Brexit was still undefined - and you could have set out a plan that sequenced it.
It was only later, and in part due to, May's speech that Brexit became that interminable conundrum where everyone could stymie each other by demanding the impossible, but never had the numbers to carry their preferred position.
Done that instead of calling the snap election, you mean? Interesting idea. But you really think the party would have gone along with that? I don't.
And that was her problem: people talk as if, as PM, she had utter freedom to put forward any solution she wanted. She couldn't; she had to try to get the best she could that would be accepted by the Europhobic nutters and their God, Johnson.
Her room for manoeuvre was distinctly limited.
She could have had a softer Brexit if she had been willing to work with a bipartisan approach. It quite likely wouldn't have worked, but she made no attempt at cross party support at all. This was a large factor in her problems. If she was to force through a Brexit formulated just for the Tory party then she made herself a hostage to the headbanging.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
Moral: Don't do referendums if the electorate is likely to use them as a way of saying "we're grumpy". Or, if you must, make sure that the referendum isn't consequential.
Or don't have all the main political parties agree to support a change and then put it to the population in a referendum.
Is there a precedent in any country for an opinion poll fail on such a scale? A month ago, Ipsos returned 53%-15% for yes-no in the family referendum, or 78%-22% among those who said which way they'd vote. The actual result will be close to 32%-68%.
I'm not sure the opinion polls were wrong, as such. They showed high levels of don't knows, and there was a low turnout. This meant that the "no" side, who ran a much better campaign, were able to change minds during the campaign, and turn out their supporters, and the "yes" side didn't.
If they're hadn't been a campaign "yes" would probably have won.
It's actually kinda nice to see a campaign matter in politics, even though I was hoping for a "yes" vote.
The Brexiteer rewriting of history continues in vain.
The catastrofuck began the moment you voted for it.
Various flavours of bad may have had different probabilities, but it remains a bad idea, executed badly, by idiots and fools.
And let's stop pretending a Soft Brexit was possible but thrown away by Mrs May's ineptitude.
It's a fantasy but an unusual one in that it's widely shared by both Leavers and Remainers.
The only person with the chutzpah to get away with it was BoJo. But that would only have worked if he hadn't already outsourced his thinking to Cummings.
Ironically, the people he would have ended up breathing in that situation would have been his remaining fans now.
Ha yes. The one politician who could have lied and cheated his way to a good deal. Sadly he chose to lie and cheat his way to a bad one.
No, you're all wrong on Mrs May and Brexit. The main issue wasn't her rhetoric or her mindset, it was the domestic politics of it. A soft Brexit meant SM which meant FOM. No Tory PM could have got that through the Brexit parliament and stayed PM. A Labour PM could but not a Tory one.
Why? Because a deal like that would have run counter to where the party's members and voters and a critical mass of their MPs were. It would have been VONC and out. She knew that. As would any other Tory politician in her place at that time in those circumstances.
Soft Brexit = Pipedream.
The point is she could have decoupled the two - done a quick, and soft Brexit to get out of the political structures and told the hardcore there would be plenty of room to revisit the economic ones (like the SM) after. There was a window of opportunity when Brexit was still undefined - and you could have set out a plan that sequenced it.
It was only later, and in part due to, May's speech that Brexit became that interminable conundrum where everyone could stymie each other by demanding the impossible, but never had the numbers to carry their preferred position.
Done that instead of calling the snap election, you mean? Interesting idea. But you really think the party would have gone along with that? I don't.
And that was her problem: people talk as if, as PM, she had utter freedom to put forward any solution she wanted. She couldn't; she had to try to get the best she could that would be accepted by the Europhobic nutters and their God, Johnson.
Her room for manoeuvre was distinctly limited.
She could have had a softer Brexit if she had been willing to work with a bipartisan approach. It quite likely wouldn't have worked, but she made no attempt at cross party support at all. This was a large factor in her problems. If she was to force through a Brexit formulated just for the Tory party then she made herself a hostage to the headbanging.
A whiff of that and the party would have VONCed her. The double lock of needing to satisfy party (smelling Europhile blood after 2016) and parliament is what doomed her.
The Brexiteer rewriting of history continues in vain.
The catastrofuck began the moment you voted for it.
Various flavours of bad may have had different probabilities, but it remains a bad idea, executed badly, by idiots and fools.
And let's stop pretending a Soft Brexit was possible but thrown away by Mrs May's ineptitude.
It's a fantasy but an unusual one in that it's widely shared by both Leavers and Remainers.
The only person with the chutzpah to get away with it was BoJo. But that would only have worked if he hadn't already outsourced his thinking to Cummings.
Ironically, the people he would have ended up breathing in that situation would have been his remaining fans now.
Ha yes. The one politician who could have lied and cheated his way to a good deal. Sadly he chose to lie and cheat his way to a bad one.
It's such a bad deal that Starmer will make no substantive changes to it.
'“core behaviours” that could constitute extremism include attempts to “overturn, exploit or undermine the UK’s system of liberal democracy to confer advantages or disadvantages on specific groups” or threatening individual rights or enabling the spread of extremism."
On this definition Keir could proscribe the Conservative party and GB news and the Telegraph and most of the country's golf clubs.
an observation from the last thread which I was too late too participate in. I worry that we are painting pensioners as rich fat cats (I am not a pensioner as yet). The previous generation designated as boomer certainly for a lot had good pension provision and got to buy homes at a reasonable cost. However they are dying off bit by bit....my generation...generation x however largely missed out on defined benefit schemes and due to 2 decades of low interest rates most of our pots are not going to be huge and affording an index linked pension over 10k is going to be a pipe dream for most of us. In addition many of my generation like myself missed out on cheap housing as we ended up getting divorced in the late 90's to 2000's and then found a single salary wouldn't get us a mortgage even with the cash realised from our sale of half he house.
I forsee when I retire being reviled as a rich pensioner because of the attitude being inculcated while I am struggling to make ends meet. As an example I am keeping an eye on my pension pot and have worked solidly since 1987, been paying contributions, and generally been top 30 to top 20% of earners. I am told I should be looking at an annuity of 5 to 7k a year non index linked if I dont take a lump sum. Hardly going to be having my mouth stuffed with gold on that but the idea of rich pensioners will still persist I don't doubt
I think we all appreciate that not all pensioners are wealthy, and many pensioners still won't be wealthy in twenty years' time. However...
*Most boomers are outright homeowners, and most of their kids have managed to at least get a mortgage to boot
*Thus, given that our economy is so warped by the deliberate constriction of property supply (which yields huge capital gains for homeowners, as well as virtually guaranteed fat profits for most landlords,) the average oldie will continue to be comfortably off for the foreseeable future
*At this point, we remind ourselves that the average pensioner has a higher income than the average worker, after adjustment for housing costs. This doesn't mean that there aren't substantial numbers of dirt poor pensioners, especially amongst those who missed out on home ownership and/or good old fashioned final salary pensions, but most of them are reasonably well to do
*A large proportion of GenX, including some of us who may still be stuck renting, are also going to receive enormous cash windfalls when they inherit their parents' property. This is entirely untaxed save for about 3-4% of the most valuable estates, and will greatly bolster the prosperity of the next generation of olds
Thus, well to do pensioners are the norm not the exception (and dig into the stats and I bet you'll discover that a higher proportion of kids are living in poverty than are the elderly.)
This is the fundamental argument against the Triple Lock, and in favour of its replacement with a much less generous guarantee backed up by means tested payments for the genuinely hard up. Decades of compound inflation in state pension payments will, quite simply, bleed the working population and their children white. It's precisely the same reasoning behind the near-total disappearance of final salary pensions schemes in the private sector: business scrapped them because the contributions were so steep they became unaffordable.
However, Government ultimately depends on voter support, the median elector is now aged in their mid-50s, and the huge grey vote expects triple locked pensions to carry on forever. Which means they will, until the cost finally bankrupts the entire state. And thus, on we go, circling the plughole.
A state pension of £10k per year isn't going to get you very far even if you own your own home - it is a very basic income. You can't do much to change your situation, you can't get credit or borrow money.
It is an error to speak in general terms about pensioners. The fire should be turned on the tax arrangements for pensioners on high incomes due to defined benefit pensions or savings and investments. They demand a lot from the state but as discussed earlier today they pay around half as much tax as working people (due to NI and student loan repayments) on a similar income.
Of course you can't treat all pensioners as being well off. But, again, most of them are, either in absolute terms or at least relative to workers, many of whom are struggling badly yet are still expected to fund the vast cost of the state pension ratchet.
The terms of the triple lock mean that recipient payments are ramped at a rate either equal to or greater than the wages of the working population, and in practice this going to mean the latter in most years. If pensioners constituted 1% of the population we could put up with that, but they're 20% and climbing, which makes it totally unsustainable.
It's also worth remembering firstly that housing costs (either rent or mortgage) are the largest fraction of the typical household budget for most people obliged to pay them - so the majority of pensioners who own outright do indeed enjoy a large advantage - and that the state pension is not the only source of income for the typical pensioner either. Most will have both savings and occupational pensions, paid according to terms vastly preferential to those available to younger workers.
Thus, hosing down the entire pensioner population with triple locked pensions forever simply isn't sustainable, and it's unfair to the rest of the population to boot. The money to solve our omnicrisis of health and social care provision, child poverty and homelessness, rivers and seas saturated with millions of tonnes of shit and all the rest of the problems has to come from somewhere. It won't come out of excessively generous pensioner handouts paid to people living mortgage free in hugely expensive houses, because there are too many of them and they protest loudly the nanosecond their privileges are threatened (witness the caterwauling when the Chancellor cut NI rather than Income Tax, because the retired didn't share in the benefit.) But it would be a good place to start.
'Brexit Means Brexiit' was the line that destroyed Mrs May. She will join Farage Johnson Sunak and the rest in infamy.
Perhaps unfair but no one likes a quisling and the loathing for Leavers is still visceral
And yet the latest polls show the desire to rejoin is beginning to fall away. We are getting used to Brexit. Ok you’re not but then you still don’t understand how planes stay in the air
4a/ Are there storm clouds gathering for the ‘re-join’ voice in our Brexit tracker? The gap narrows this week for the first time in a long time.
* All * Re-join: 46% (-4) Stay Out: 34% (+1) DK or not voting: 20% (+3)
This process will continue. We will get accustomed to being outside the EU and the idea of full fat rejoin and yielding all our sovereignty will come to seem bizarre
I imagine there will be constant tweaks to our trading terms however. This is what happens with Switzerland. They have no desire to join the EU but that means they have to keep adjusting to the huge trading bloc that surrounds them
Perhaps but so will the notion of "Global Britain" (whatever that means). We might end up with the not wholly unsatisfactory situation of close economic and trading alignment without the political nuances of being in the EU club. You might almost call it a Common Market rather than a Single Market arrangement - the economic benefits of relatively aligned and loose trade without the four freedoms including FoM which caused so many problems.
Did FoM really cause so many problems?
If so, it doesn't seem to me that Brexit has fixed any of them:
And, of course, there were substantial benefits from FoM - not least enabling many more UK citizens to work and study abroad. Removing FoM is perhaps the most painful Brexit loss for a large number of people.
FoM is probably the best thing about being in the EU. One of the mistakes Remain made was acting as if it was something that we had to endure, instead of promoting it as a great benefit.
The Brexiteer rewriting of history continues in vain.
The catastrofuck began the moment you voted for it.
Various flavours of bad may have had different probabilities, but it remains a bad idea, executed badly, by idiots and fools.
And let's stop pretending a Soft Brexit was possible but thrown away by Mrs May's ineptitude.
It's a fantasy but an unusual one in that it's widely shared by both Leavers and Remainers.
The only person with the chutzpah to get away with it was BoJo. But that would only have worked if he hadn't already outsourced his thinking to Cummings.
Ironically, the people he would have ended up breathing in that situation would have been his remaining fans now.
Ha yes. The one politician who could have lied and cheated his way to a good deal. Sadly he chose to lie and cheat his way to a bad one.
It's such a bad deal that Starmer will make no substantive changes to it.
That's a political calculation to leave the B word alone for now. It isn't a thumbs up for the deal.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
Moral: Don't do referendums if the electorate is likely to use them as a way of saying "we're grumpy". Or, if you must, make sure that the referendum isn't consequential.
Or don't have all the main political parties agree to support a change and then put it to the population in a referendum.
Is there a precedent in any country for an opinion poll fail on such a scale? A month ago, Ipsos returned 53%-15% for yes-no in the family referendum, or 78%-22% among those who said which way they'd vote. The actual result will be close to 32%-68%.
It just goes to show how unpredictable and risky referendums can be.
an observation from the last thread which I was too late too participate in. I worry that we are painting pensioners as rich fat cats (I am not a pensioner as yet). The previous generation designated as boomer certainly for a lot had good pension provision and got to buy homes at a reasonable cost. However they are dying off bit by bit....my generation...generation x however largely missed out on defined benefit schemes and due to 2 decades of low interest rates most of our pots are not going to be huge and affording an index linked pension over 10k is going to be a pipe dream for most of us. In addition many of my generation like myself missed out on cheap housing as we ended up getting divorced in the late 90's to 2000's and then found a single salary wouldn't get us a mortgage even with the cash realised from our sale of half he house.
I forsee when I retire being reviled as a rich pensioner because of the attitude being inculcated while I am struggling to make ends meet. As an example I am keeping an eye on my pension pot and have worked solidly since 1987, been paying contributions, and generally been top 30 to top 20% of earners. I am told I should be looking at an annuity of 5 to 7k a year non index linked if I dont take a lump sum. Hardly going to be having my mouth stuffed with gold on that but the idea of rich pensioners will still persist I don't doubt
I think we all appreciate that not all pensioners are wealthy, and many pensioners still won't be wealthy in twenty years' time. However...
*Most boomers are outright homeowners, and most of their kids have managed to at least get a mortgage to boot
*Thus, given that our economy is so warped by the deliberate constriction of property supply (which yields huge capital gains for homeowners, as well as virtually guaranteed fat profits for most landlords,) the average oldie will continue to be comfortably off for the foreseeable future
*At this point, we remind ourselves that the average pensioner has a higher income than the average worker, after adjustment for housing costs. This doesn't mean that there aren't substantial numbers of dirt poor pensioners, especially amongst those who missed out on home ownership and/or good old fashioned final salary pensions, but most of them are reasonably well to do
*A large proportion of GenX, including some of us who may still be stuck renting, are also going to receive enormous cash windfalls when they inherit their parents' property. This is entirely untaxed save for about 3-4% of the most valuable estates, and will greatly bolster the prosperity of the next generation of olds
Thus, well to do pensioners are the norm not the exception (and dig into the stats and I bet you'll discover that a higher proportion of kids are living in poverty than are the elderly.)
This is the fundamental argument against the Triple Lock, and in favour of its replacement with a much less generous guarantee backed up by means tested payments for the genuinely hard up. Decades of compound inflation in state pension payments will, quite simply, bleed the working population and their children white. It's precisely the same reasoning behind the near-total disappearance of final salary pensions schemes in the private sector: business scrapped them because the contributions were so steep they became unaffordable.
However, Government ultimately depends on voter support, the median elector is now aged in their mid-50s, and the huge grey vote expects triple locked pensions to carry on forever. Which means they will, until the cost finally bankrupts the entire state. And thus, on we go, circling the plughole.
A state pension of £10k per year isn't going to get you very far even if you own your own home - it is a very basic income. You can't do much to change your situation, you can't get credit or borrow money.
It is an error to speak in general terms about pensioners. The fire should be turned on the tax arrangements for pensioners on high incomes due to defined benefit pensions or savings and investments. They demand a lot from the state but as discussed earlier today they pay around half as much tax as working people (due to NI and student loan repayments) on a similar income.
On the other hand, a pensioner on £10k tax free is likely to be no worse off than a person of working age on median earnings paying NICs, Income Tax, Student Loan, and rent... and that's before you consider that they should be putting something aside for their own retirement.
But I don't disagree - people on the state pension aren't well off by any means. The real problem is housing costs, and the inability to get on the housing ladder or to build up capital by any other means. Expecting people on median earnings to pay half - or more - of their salary in rent is completely unsustainable.
No, you're all wrong on Mrs May and Brexit. The main issue wasn't her rhetoric or her mindset, it was the domestic politics of it. A soft Brexit meant SM which meant FOM. No Tory PM could have got that through the Brexit parliament and stayed PM. A Labour PM could but not a Tory one.
Why? Because a deal like that would have run counter to where the party's members and voters and a critical mass of their MPs were. It would have been VONC and out. She knew that. As would any other Tory politician in her place at that time in those circumstances.
Soft Brexit = Pipedream.
The point is she could have decoupled the two - done a quick, and soft Brexit to get out of the political structures and told the hardcore there would be plenty of room to revisit the economic ones (like the SM) after. There was a window of opportunity when Brexit was still undefined - and you could have set out a plan that sequenced it.
It was only later, and in part due to, May's speech that Brexit became that interminable conundrum where everyone could stymie each other by demanding the impossible, but never had the numbers to carry their preferred position.
Done that instead of calling the snap election, you mean? Interesting idea. But you really think the party would have gone along with that? I don't.
And that was her problem: people talk as if, as PM, she had utter freedom to put forward any solution she wanted. She couldn't; she had to try to get the best she could that would be accepted by the Europhobic nutters and their God, Johnson.
Her room for manoeuvre was distinctly limited.
Yep. Cramped to start with and post GE17 in a shoebox.
And so the shortlist for tonight’s Working Dog group competition is…the Alaskan Malemute, the Bernese Mountain Dog, the Boxer, the Bull Mastiff, the Doberman (last year’s group winner), the Leonberger, the Newfoundland, the Tibetan mastiff. The last a remarkable looking dog, popular in the arena.
And the winner is…Neville the Leonberger! Tibetan Mastiff is second, as last year.
Meets the Papillon, Weimeraner, French Bulldog, and two more to be chosen, in tomorrow evening’s climactic final.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
Moral: Don't do referendums if the electorate is likely to use them as a way of saying "we're grumpy". Or, if you must, make sure that the referendum isn't consequential.
Or don't have all the main political parties agree to support a change and then put it to the population in a referendum.
Is there a precedent in any country for an opinion poll fail on such a scale? A month ago, Ipsos returned 53%-15% for yes-no in the family referendum, or 78%-22% among those who said which way they'd vote. The actual result will be close to 32%-68%.
It just goes to show how unpredictable and risky referendums can be.
Yes
No UK prime minister will ever call a referendum ever again, unless they are forced (eg in Ulster, or by ten SNP holyrood wins on the trot)
The political leason of referendums everywhere is: don’t have them
No, you're all wrong on Mrs May and Brexit. The main issue wasn't her rhetoric or her mindset, it was the domestic politics of it. A soft Brexit meant SM which meant FOM. No Tory PM could have got that through the Brexit parliament and stayed PM. A Labour PM could but not a Tory one.
Why? Because a deal like that would have run counter to where the party's members and voters and a critical mass of their MPs were. It would have been VONC and out. She knew that. As would any other Tory politician in her place at that time in those circumstances.
Soft Brexit = Pipedream.
The point is she could have decoupled the two - done a quick, and soft Brexit to get out of the political structures and told the hardcore there would be plenty of room to revisit the economic ones (like the SM) after. There was a window of opportunity when Brexit was still undefined - and you could have set out a plan that sequenced it.
It was only later, and in part due to, May's speech that Brexit became that interminable conundrum where everyone could stymie each other by demanding the impossible, but never had the numbers to carry their preferred position.
Assuming that May's intention was to bring the UK out of the EU successfully, her issue was a deliberate policy of Hunt's (and we must assume May's, though the Treasury is an odd beast and can often defy the PM), not to provide the necessary resources to prepare the UK for the ramifications of leaving the EU without an FTA, or any agreement - the 'without a deal' scenario. Without those preparations in place, she was negotiating with zero credible threat of walking out. The eventual agreement was purely a case of how nice the EU wanted to be or not. This also ruined Johnson's negotiations. They tried to mutter and hint that a no deal scenario was possible, but it was bluff and the EU knew it.
'Necessary resources' or not it wasn't credible, because people don't vote to become poorer or go through national disasters. Blowing off your own foot isn't a credible threat whether or not you supply the bandages beforehand.
I am coming round to the view that if referendums are used they should at least have an in built supermajority requirement. Say 60+%.
On major constitutional topics it is just not appropriate to have a 50+1 style vote. There are enough people on the margins of the debate who won’t sufficiently grasp the magnitude of the changes and their votes shouldn’t be sufficient to swing the result. A supermajority goes some way of guarding against this.
Our political debate would be much less toxic if a Scottish independence or Brexit referendum needed 60% of the voters to endorse it.
One strand of American conservatism - once waning but much in evidence since 2020 - firmly believes (or at least purports to believe) that the United States is a REPUBLIC and NOT underline not a DEMOCRACY.
Fact that it can be and indeed is BOTH being immaterial to the question, at least in their own heads.
Thus efforts to overturn popular voting results, in favor of legislative override in election of POTUS electors.
What these reactionaries desire, is an OLIGARCH. With themselves the Oligarchs.
Their model being Federalist Party circa 1800.
Of course England > Great Britain > United Kingdom pioneered this approach. Aided & abetted by dodges such as "virtual representation". However, started to die out circa 1880 and has been (as far as I can tell) dead as practical political proposition since circa 1914.
However, is a section of (what passes these days for) the Tory Party, now starting to semi-publicly embrace oligarchy? With themselves - (un)naturally - as the Oligarchs.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
Moral: Don't do referendums if the electorate is likely to use them as a way of saying "we're grumpy". Or, if you must, make sure that the referendum isn't consequential.
Or don't have all the main political parties agree to support a change and then put it to the population in a referendum.
Is there a precedent in any country for an opinion poll fail on such a scale? A month ago, Ipsos returned 53%-15% for yes-no in the family referendum, or 78%-22% among those who said which way they'd vote. The actual result will be close to 32%-68%.
It just goes to show how unpredictable and risky referendums can be.
Yes
No UK prime minister will ever call a referendum ever again, unless they are forced (eg in Ulster, or by ten SNP holyrood wins on the trot)
The political leason of referendums everywhere is: don’t have them
That's what people said after the European Constitution referenda failed in France and the Netherlands, and the first Lisbon referendum failed in Ireland.
And yet, only a couple of years later, we waded back into the fray with AV and Indyref.
I suspect that the real lesson is that referendums can be ignored after a suitable period of time. See the current government's change to the Mayoral voting system, in direct contravention of the 1998 Greater London Authority referendum.
And so the shortlist for tonight’s Working Dog group competition is…the Alaskan Malemute, the Bernese Mountain Dog, the Boxer, the Bull Mastiff, the Doberman (last year’s group winner), the Leonberger, the Newfoundland, the Tibetan mastiff. The last a remarkable looking dog, popular in the arena.
And the winner is…Neville the Leonberger! Tibetan Mastiff is second, as last year.
Meets the Papillon, Weimeraner, French Bulldog, and two more to be chosen, in tomorrow evening’s climactic final.
Personally always root for the Schnitzelhund. OR the Strudlepoodle.
an observation from the last thread which I was too late too participate in. I worry that we are painting pensioners as rich fat cats (I am not a pensioner as yet). The previous generation designated as boomer certainly for a lot had good pension provision and got to buy homes at a reasonable cost. However they are dying off bit by bit....my generation...generation x however largely missed out on defined benefit schemes and due to 2 decades of low interest rates most of our pots are not going to be huge and affording an index linked pension over 10k is going to be a pipe dream for most of us. In addition many of my generation like myself missed out on cheap housing as we ended up getting divorced in the late 90's to 2000's and then found a single salary wouldn't get us a mortgage even with the cash realised from our sale of half he house.
I forsee when I retire being reviled as a rich pensioner because of the attitude being inculcated while I am struggling to make ends meet. As an example I am keeping an eye on my pension pot and have worked solidly since 1987, been paying contributions, and generally been top 30 to top 20% of earners. I am told I should be looking at an annuity of 5 to 7k a year non index linked if I dont take a lump sum. Hardly going to be having my mouth stuffed with gold on that but the idea of rich pensioners will still persist I don't doubt
I think we all appreciate that not all pensioners are wealthy, and many pensioners still won't be wealthy in twenty years' time. However...
*Most boomers are outright homeowners, and most of their kids have managed to at least get a mortgage to boot
*Thus, given that our economy is so warped by the deliberate constriction of property supply (which yields huge capital gains for homeowners, as well as virtually guaranteed fat profits for most landlords,) the average oldie will continue to be comfortably off for the foreseeable future
*At this point, we remind ourselves that the average pensioner has a higher income than the average worker, after adjustment for housing costs. This doesn't mean that there aren't substantial numbers of dirt poor pensioners, especially amongst those who missed out on home ownership and/or good old fashioned final salary pensions, but most of them are reasonably well to do
*A large proportion of GenX, including some of us who may still be stuck renting, are also going to receive enormous cash windfalls when they inherit their parents' property. This is entirely untaxed save for about 3-4% of the most valuable estates, and will greatly bolster the prosperity of the next generation of olds
Thus, well to do pensioners are the norm not the exception (and dig into the stats and I bet you'll discover that a higher proportion of kids are living in poverty than are the elderly.)
This is the fundamental argument against the Triple Lock, and in favour of its replacement with a much less generous guarantee backed up by means tested payments for the genuinely hard up. Decades of compound inflation in state pension payments will, quite simply, bleed the working population and their children white. It's precisely the same reasoning behind the near-total disappearance of final salary pensions schemes in the private sector: business scrapped them because the contributions were so steep they became unaffordable.
However, Government ultimately depends on voter support, the median elector is now aged in their mid-50s, and the huge grey vote expects triple locked pensions to carry on forever. Which means they will, until the cost finally bankrupts the entire state. And thus, on we go, circling the plughole.
A state pension of £10k per year isn't going to get you very far even if you own your own home - it is a very basic income. You can't do much to change your situation, you can't get credit or borrow money.
It is an error to speak in general terms about pensioners. The fire should be turned on the tax arrangements for pensioners on high incomes due to defined benefit pensions or savings and investments. They demand a lot from the state but as discussed earlier today they pay around half as much tax as working people (due to NI and student loan repayments) on a similar income.
On the other hand, a pensioner on £10k tax free is likely to be no worse off than a person of working age on median earnings paying NICs, Income Tax, Student Loan, and rent... and that's before you consider that they should be putting something aside for their own retirement.
But I don't disagree - people on the state pension aren't well off by any means. The real problem is housing costs, and the inability to get on the housing ladder or to build up capital by any other means. Expecting people on median earnings to pay half - or more - of their salary in rent is completely unsustainable.
Pensioners are getting about £900 per month. If you are on the minimum wage, you get to take home around £1500 after deductions, so it is much the same after rent/housing costs are factored in. Plus not all pensioners will be outright homeowners.
If people don't acquire housing, there is going to be another crisis building up as they will retire without being a homeowner meaning the state pension will need to be closer to the minimum wage for these people in retirement.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
Moral: Don't do referendums if the electorate is likely to use them as a way of saying "we're grumpy". Or, if you must, make sure that the referendum isn't consequential.
Or don't have all the main political parties agree to support a change and then put it to the population in a referendum.
Is there a precedent in any country for an opinion poll fail on such a scale? A month ago, Ipsos returned 53%-15% for yes-no in the family referendum, or 78%-22% among those who said which way they'd vote. The actual result will be close to 32%-68%.
It just goes to show how unpredictable and risky referendums can be.
Yes
No UK prime minister will ever call a referendum ever again, unless they are forced (eg in Ulster, or by ten SNP holyrood wins on the trot)
The political leason of referendums everywhere is: don’t have them
I think you can only safely call them once the decision has already been made.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
Moral: Don't do referendums if the electorate is likely to use them as a way of saying "we're grumpy". Or, if you must, make sure that the referendum isn't consequential.
Or don't have all the main political parties agree to support a change and then put it to the population in a referendum.
Is there a precedent in any country for an opinion poll fail on such a scale? A month ago, Ipsos returned 53%-15% for yes-no in the family referendum, or 78%-22% among those who said which way they'd vote. The actual result will be close to 32%-68%.
It just goes to show how unpredictable and risky referendums can be.
Yes
No UK prime minister will ever call a referendum ever again, unless they are forced (eg in Ulster, or by ten SNP holyrood wins on the trot)
The political leason of referendums everywhere is: don’t have them
Unless you happen to be Swiss. Otherwise, no thanks.
No, you're all wrong on Mrs May and Brexit. The main issue wasn't her rhetoric or her mindset, it was the domestic politics of it. A soft Brexit meant SM which meant FOM. No Tory PM could have got that through the Brexit parliament and stayed PM. A Labour PM could but not a Tory one.
Why? Because a deal like that would have run counter to where the party's members and voters and a critical mass of their MPs were. It would have been VONC and out. She knew that. As would any other Tory politician in her place at that time in those circumstances.
Soft Brexit = Pipedream.
The point is she could have decoupled the two - done a quick, and soft Brexit to get out of the political structures and told the hardcore there would be plenty of room to revisit the economic ones (like the SM) after. There was a window of opportunity when Brexit was still undefined - and you could have set out a plan that sequenced it.
It was only later, and in part due to, May's speech that Brexit became that interminable conundrum where everyone could stymie each other by demanding the impossible, but never had the numbers to carry their preferred position.
Assuming that May's intention was to bring the UK out of the EU successfully, her issue was a deliberate policy of Hunt's (and we must assume May's, though the Treasury is an odd beast and can often defy the PM), not to provide the necessary resources to prepare the UK for the ramifications of leaving the EU without an FTA, or any agreement - the 'without a deal' scenario. Without those preparations in place, she was negotiating with zero credible threat of walking out. The eventual agreement was purely a case of how nice the EU wanted to be or not. This also ruined Johnson's negotiations. They tried to mutter and hint that a no deal scenario was possible, but it was bluff and the EU knew it.
'Necessary resources' or not it wasn't credible, because people don't vote to become poorer or go through national disasters. Blowing off your own foot isn't a credible threat whether or not you supply the bandages beforehand.
I you read your post through, you'll notice it's more emotional than logical. You dislike the idea of leaving the EU, so you have a tendency, as do so many like you, to talk about it in apocalyptical and really rather meaningless terms.
The UK is a global trading nation - in the vanishingly unlikely scenario that the EU would have deprived us of their exports (and foregone their extremely large divorce settlement, without which their finances would have gone south very quickly), we would have been completely fine. I also don't think there's any no deal preparation activity that would not also have proven useful in other ways, like making our borders more secure against illegal immigration. Not to prepare was an act of profound folly, and May deserved what happened to her premiership as an indirect result.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
Moral: Don't do referendums if the electorate is likely to use them as a way of saying "we're grumpy". Or, if you must, make sure that the referendum isn't consequential.
Or don't have all the main political parties agree to support a change and then put it to the population in a referendum.
Is there a precedent in any country for an opinion poll fail on such a scale? A month ago, Ipsos returned 53%-15% for yes-no in the family referendum, or 78%-22% among those who said which way they'd vote. The actual result will be close to 32%-68%.
It just goes to show how unpredictable and risky referendums can be.
Yes
No UK prime minister will ever call a referendum ever again, unless they are forced (eg in Ulster, or by ten SNP holyrood wins on the trot)
The political leason of referendums everywhere is: don’t have them
On the contrary, it's 'have them all the time, then people won't make such a big hairy deal about them'. The Swiss, as ever, show the way.
It has been a superb tournament. Come on Scotland. England gonna win it in Lyon 😉
When it flows there's no more exciting game on earth.
Sometimes it doesn't flow.
I've always said that a good game of Rugby is better than a good game of Football. But a bad game of Rugby can be much worse than a bad game of Football.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
Moral: Don't do referendums if the electorate is likely to use them as a way of saying "we're grumpy". Or, if you must, make sure that the referendum isn't consequential.
Or don't have all the main political parties agree to support a change and then put it to the population in a referendum.
Is there a precedent in any country for an opinion poll fail on such a scale? A month ago, Ipsos returned 53%-15% for yes-no in the family referendum, or 78%-22% among those who said which way they'd vote. The actual result will be close to 32%-68%.
It just goes to show how unpredictable and risky referendums can be.
Yes
No UK prime minister will ever call a referendum ever again, unless they are forced (eg in Ulster, or by ten SNP holyrood wins on the trot)
The political leason of referendums everywhere is: don’t have them
Unless you happen to be Swiss. Otherwise, no thanks.
Given that the Swiss are French, German, Italian and Romansch, therefore don't really share a common cultural hinterland, I think it's far more likely that they can handle popular democracy because they have popular democracy, not because of some bred-in characteristic.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
Moral: Don't do referendums if the electorate is likely to use them as a way of saying "we're grumpy". Or, if you must, make sure that the referendum isn't consequential.
Or don't have all the main political parties agree to support a change and then put it to the population in a referendum.
Is there a precedent in any country for an opinion poll fail on such a scale? A month ago, Ipsos returned 53%-15% for yes-no in the family referendum, or 78%-22% among those who said which way they'd vote. The actual result will be close to 32%-68%.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
Moral: Don't do referendums if the electorate is likely to use them as a way of saying "we're grumpy". Or, if you must, make sure that the referendum isn't consequential.
Or don't have all the main political parties agree to support a change and then put it to the population in a referendum.
Is there a precedent in any country for an opinion poll fail on such a scale? A month ago, Ipsos returned 53%-15% for yes-no in the family referendum, or 78%-22% among those who said which way they'd vote. The actual result will be close to 32%-68%.
It just goes to show how unpredictable and risky referendums can be.
Yes
No UK prime minister will ever call a referendum ever again, unless they are forced (eg in Ulster, or by ten SNP holyrood wins on the trot)
The political leason of referendums everywhere is: don’t have them
That's what people said after the European Constitution referenda failed in France and the Netherlands, and the first Lisbon referendum failed in Ireland.
And yet, only a couple of years later, we waded back into the fray with AV and Indyref.
I suspect that the real lesson is that referendums can be ignored after a suitable period of time. See the current government's change to the Mayoral voting system, in direct contravention of the 1998 Greater London Authority referendum.
For what it's worth (perhaps less than 2-cents worth re: UK) in WA State, initiatives are same as statutes enacted via legislative process EXCEPT the legislature can NOT repeal or amend then for three years. After that, no problem legal.
Though still MIGHT be politically and electorally. Depends.
The concept of carving the results of any particular ballot referendum, initiative, etc. into stone for time eternal, is inherently ridiculous.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
Moral: Don't do referendums if the electorate is likely to use them as a way of saying "we're grumpy". Or, if you must, make sure that the referendum isn't consequential.
Or don't have all the main political parties agree to support a change and then put it to the population in a referendum.
Is there a precedent in any country for an opinion poll fail on such a scale? A month ago, Ipsos returned 53%-15% for yes-no in the family referendum, or 78%-22% among those who said which way they'd vote. The actual result will be close to 32%-68%.
It just goes to show how unpredictable and risky referendums can be.
Yes
No UK prime minister will ever call a referendum ever again, unless they are forced (eg in Ulster, or by ten SNP holyrood wins on the trot)
The political leason of referendums everywhere is: don’t have them
On the contrary, it's 'have them all the time, then people won't make such a big hairy deal about them'. The Swiss, as ever, show the way.
That's quite a case of Swissophilia you have there. Haven't you seen The Third Man?
an observation from the last thread which I was too late too participate in. I worry that we are painting pensioners as rich fat cats (I am not a pensioner as yet). The previous generation designated as boomer certainly for a lot had good pension provision and got to buy homes at a reasonable cost. However they are dying off bit by bit....my generation...generation x however largely missed out on defined benefit schemes and due to 2 decades of low interest rates most of our pots are not going to be huge and affording an index linked pension over 10k is going to be a pipe dream for most of us. In addition many of my generation like myself missed out on cheap housing as we ended up getting divorced in the late 90's to 2000's and then found a single salary wouldn't get us a mortgage even with the cash realised from our sale of half he house.
I forsee when I retire being reviled as a rich pensioner because of the attitude being inculcated while I am struggling to make ends meet. As an example I am keeping an eye on my pension pot and have worked solidly since 1987, been paying contributions, and generally been top 30 to top 20% of earners. I am told I should be looking at an annuity of 5 to 7k a year non index linked if I dont take a lump sum. Hardly going to be having my mouth stuffed with gold on that but the idea of rich pensioners will still persist I don't doubt
I think we all appreciate that not all pensioners are wealthy, and many pensioners still won't be wealthy in twenty years' time. However...
*Most boomers are outright homeowners, and most of their kids have managed to at least get a mortgage to boot
*Thus, given that our economy is so warped by the deliberate constriction of property supply (which yields huge capital gains for homeowners, as well as virtually guaranteed fat profits for most landlords,) the average oldie will continue to be comfortably off for the foreseeable future
*At this point, we remind ourselves that the average pensioner has a higher income than the average worker, after adjustment for housing costs. This doesn't mean that there aren't substantial numbers of dirt poor pensioners, especially amongst those who missed out on home ownership and/or good old fashioned final salary pensions, but most of them are reasonably well to do
*A large proportion of GenX, including some of us who may still be stuck renting, are also going to receive enormous cash windfalls when they inherit their parents' property. This is entirely untaxed save for about 3-4% of the most valuable estates, and will greatly bolster the prosperity of the next generation of olds
Thus, well to do pensioners are the norm not the exception (and dig into the stats and I bet you'll discover that a higher proportion of kids are living in poverty than are the elderly.)
This is the fundamental argument against the Triple Lock, and in favour of its replacement with a much less generous guarantee backed up by means tested payments for the genuinely hard up. Decades of compound inflation in state pension payments will, quite simply, bleed the working population and their children white. It's precisely the same reasoning behind the near-total disappearance of final salary pensions schemes in the private sector: business scrapped them because the contributions were so steep they became unaffordable.
However, Government ultimately depends on voter support, the median elector is now aged in their mid-50s, and the huge grey vote expects triple locked pensions to carry on forever. Which means they will, until the cost finally bankrupts the entire state. And thus, on we go, circling the plughole.
A state pension of £10k per year isn't going to get you very far even if you own your own home - it is a very basic income. You can't do much to change your situation, you can't get credit or borrow money.
It is an error to speak in general terms about pensioners. The fire should be turned on the tax arrangements for pensioners on high incomes due to defined benefit pensions or savings and investments. They demand a lot from the state but as discussed earlier today they pay around half as much tax as working people (due to NI and student loan repayments) on a similar income.
On the other hand, a pensioner on £10k tax free is likely to be no worse off than a person of working age on median earnings paying NICs, Income Tax, Student Loan, and rent... and that's before you consider that they should be putting something aside for their own retirement.
But I don't disagree - people on the state pension aren't well off by any means. The real problem is housing costs, and the inability to get on the housing ladder or to build up capital by any other means. Expecting people on median earnings to pay half - or more - of their salary in rent is completely unsustainable.
Pensioners are getting about £900 per month. If you are on the minimum wage, you get to take home around £1500 after deductions, so it is much the same after rent/housing costs are factored in. Plus not all pensioners will be outright homeowners.
If people don't acquire housing, there is going to be another crisis building up as they will retire without being a homeowner meaning the state pension will need to be closer to the minimum wage for these people in retirement.
But average rent of a single room in a shared house in England is now over £750 - and around twice that in Greater London.
A pensioner with no other income will have housing benefit to pay their rent, or mortgage interest support if they're owner occupiers with an outstanding mortgage. And remember, 50% of the working population will earn less than the median salary - whereas only 12% of pensioners don't have any other source of income.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
Moral: Don't do referendums if the electorate is likely to use them as a way of saying "we're grumpy". Or, if you must, make sure that the referendum isn't consequential.
Or don't have all the main political parties agree to support a change and then put it to the population in a referendum.
Is there a precedent in any country for an opinion poll fail on such a scale? A month ago, Ipsos returned 53%-15% for yes-no in the family referendum, or 78%-22% among those who said which way they'd vote. The actual result will be close to 32%-68%.
It just goes to show how unpredictable and risky referendums can be.
Yes
No UK prime minister will ever call a referendum ever again, unless they are forced (eg in Ulster, or by ten SNP holyrood wins on the trot)
The political leason of referendums everywhere is: don’t have them
Unless you happen to be Swiss. Otherwise, no thanks.
Argument may be made, that referendum system of Switzerland, was a significant factor in denial of vote to Swiss women until they were finally enfranchised in 1971 . . . per Referendum natürlich.
Wasn't aware of the event, but a quick look suggests the Irish constitution must contain some rather woolly, unnecessary fluff. A lean constitution wouldn't have this stuff to start with (not that the UK is in a position to judge constitutional leanness).
de Valera decided women should stay in the home. Oddly the vote says Ireland agrees with him.
Moral: Don't do referendums if the electorate is likely to use them as a way of saying "we're grumpy". Or, if you must, make sure that the referendum isn't consequential.
Or don't have all the main political parties agree to support a change and then put it to the population in a referendum.
Is there a precedent in any country for an opinion poll fail on such a scale? A month ago, Ipsos returned 53%-15% for yes-no in the family referendum, or 78%-22% among those who said which way they'd vote. The actual result will be close to 32%-68%.
It just goes to show how unpredictable and risky referendums can be.
Yes
No UK prime minister will ever call a referendum ever again, unless they are forced (eg in Ulster, or by ten SNP holyrood wins on the trot)
The political leason of referendums everywhere is: don’t have them
On the contrary, it's 'have them all the time, then people won't make such a big hairy deal about them'. The Swiss, as ever, show the way.
That's quite a case of Swissophilia you have there. Haven't you seen The Third Man?
Yes, I love it, and the quote, but I know where I'd rather be a common citizen.
No, you're all wrong on Mrs May and Brexit. The main issue wasn't her rhetoric or her mindset, it was the domestic politics of it. A soft Brexit meant SM which meant FOM. No Tory PM could have got that through the Brexit parliament and stayed PM. A Labour PM could but not a Tory one.
Why? Because a deal like that would have run counter to where the party's members and voters and a critical mass of their MPs were. It would have been VONC and out. She knew that. As would any other Tory politician in her place at that time in those circumstances.
Soft Brexit = Pipedream.
The point is she could have decoupled the two - done a quick, and soft Brexit to get out of the political structures and told the hardcore there would be plenty of room to revisit the economic ones (like the SM) after. There was a window of opportunity when Brexit was still undefined - and you could have set out a plan that sequenced it.
It was only later, and in part due to, May's speech that Brexit became that interminable conundrum where everyone could stymie each other by demanding the impossible, but never had the numbers to carry their preferred position.
Assuming that May's intention was to bring the UK out of the EU successfully, her issue was a deliberate policy of Hunt's (and we must assume May's, though the Treasury is an odd beast and can often defy the PM), not to provide the necessary resources to prepare the UK for the ramifications of leaving the EU without an FTA, or any agreement - the 'without a deal' scenario. Without those preparations in place, she was negotiating with zero credible threat of walking out. The eventual agreement was purely a case of how nice the EU wanted to be or not. This also ruined Johnson's negotiations. They tried to mutter and hint that a no deal scenario was possible, but it was bluff and the EU knew it.
'Necessary resources' or not it wasn't credible, because people don't vote to become poorer or go through national disasters. Blowing off your own foot isn't a credible threat whether or not you supply the bandages beforehand.
I you read your post through, you'll notice it's more emotional than logical. You dislike the idea of leaving the EU, so you have a tendency, as do so many like you, to talk about it in apocalyptical and really rather meaningless terms.
The UK is a global trading nation - in the vanishingly unlikely scenario that the EU would have deprived us of their exports (and foregone their extremely large divorce settlement, without which their finances would have gone south very quickly), we would have been completely fine. I also don't think there's any no deal preparation activity that would not also have proven useful in other ways, like making our borders more secure against illegal immigration. Not to prepare was an act of profound folly, and May deserved what happened to her premiership as an indirect result.
That's another fantasy. No Deal and No Deal preparation. Neither was ever happening. People tend to craft a load of nonsense onto how Brexit coulda shoulda turned out based on their own Brexit view going in. I'm quite unusual in not doing this.
No, you're all wrong on Mrs May and Brexit. The main issue wasn't her rhetoric or her mindset, it was the domestic politics of it. A soft Brexit meant SM which meant FOM. No Tory PM could have got that through the Brexit parliament and stayed PM. A Labour PM could but not a Tory one.
Why? Because a deal like that would have run counter to where the party's members and voters and a critical mass of their MPs were. It would have been VONC and out. She knew that. As would any other person in her place at that time in those circumstances.
Soft Brexit = Pipedream.
But also, soft Brexit loses if it's explicitly put to the public in 2016, because it means FOM. Where May ended up was "least economically damaging Brexit that stops FOM", which was probably a reasonable take on the main strand of what the 52% wanted.
But any real deal was bound to disappoint, because what the UK really wanted was for the EU to give us exactly what we wanted in exchange for the pleasure of our company. I'm sure there was a colourful metaphor involving post-divorce relationships.
How would people have voted if they’d known that immigration post-Brexit would be substantially higher?
Comments
But any real deal was bound to disappoint, because what the UK really wanted was for the EU to give us exactly what we wanted in exchange for the pleasure of our company. I'm sure there was a colourful metaphor involving post-divorce relationships.
https://wethink.report/data-hub/brexit-sentiment-all-respondents/
*Most boomers are outright homeowners, and most of their kids have managed to at least get a mortgage to boot
*Thus, given that our economy is so warped by the deliberate constriction of property supply (which yields huge capital gains for homeowners, as well as virtually guaranteed fat profits for most landlords,) the average oldie will continue to be comfortably off for the foreseeable future
*At this point, we remind ourselves that the average pensioner has a higher income than the average worker, after adjustment for housing costs. This doesn't mean that there aren't substantial numbers of dirt poor pensioners, especially amongst those who missed out on home ownership and/or good old fashioned final salary pensions, but most of them are reasonably well to do
*A large proportion of GenX, including some of us who may still be stuck renting, are also going to receive enormous cash windfalls when they inherit their parents' property. This is entirely untaxed save for about 3-4% of the most valuable estates, and will greatly bolster the prosperity of the next generation of olds
Thus, well to do pensioners are the norm not the exception (and dig into the stats and I bet you'll discover that a higher proportion of kids are living in poverty than are the elderly.)
This is the fundamental argument against the Triple Lock, and in favour of its replacement with a much less generous guarantee backed up by means tested payments for the genuinely hard up. Decades of compound inflation in state pension payments will, quite simply, bleed the working population and their children white. It's precisely the same reasoning behind the near-total disappearance of final salary pensions schemes in the private sector: business scrapped them because the contributions were so steep they became unaffordable.
However, Government ultimately depends on voter support, the median elector is now aged in their mid-50s, and the huge grey vote expects triple locked pensions to carry on forever. Which means they will, until the cost finally bankrupts the entire state. And thus, on we go, circling the plughole.
It's a fantasy but an unusual one in that it's widely shared by both Leavers and Remainers.
It will definitely be out turn next with Labour. Trans, returning museum artefacts, statues, BLM lectures compulsory in schools.. you name it.
Ironically, the people he would have ended up breathing in that situation would have been his remaining fans now.
Muppets.
The government have done so badly that you could question whether they wanted to win at all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_2024_Irish_constitutional_referendums
Sweet Dreams are made of this.
Or, on the other hand, a non-political Bremain without free movement.
You also had government ministers claiming that the amendments wouldn't change anything (so what's the point?) when maybe people did want to see a practical change (but the opposition made people worry it would be the courts that would decide, instead of the voters)
If you compare this with the successful same-sex marriage and abortion referendums, it was made very clear in both cases what the effect would be and how the law would change - thus preventing scare stories about allowing late-term abortions on demand, or marriages with cats. One voter claimed they voted no yesterday because the "durable relationship" between a tenant and their landlord might give the tenant a legal right to inherit their landlords property - if the wording of the amendment had been better and the government had been clearer about the changes they wanted to create, that sort of nonsense would have been minimised.
The citizens assemblies had actually produced stronger and clearer wording for both amendments, but the government ignored those recommendations, and substituted their own wording. Was this sabotage or incompetence? Possibly a combination of the two when it comes to Fine Gael and Fianna Fail.
So one could say that your assertion is not entirely without merit.
A great example of how the perfect is the enemy of the good - people were voting "No" because "the state should be responsible for care, not the family" and so have caused the constitution to continue saying "mothers are responsible for care".
A truly shocking failure of the Yes campaigns.
It was only later, and in part due to, May's speech that Brexit became that interminable conundrum where everyone could stymie each other by demanding the impossible, but never had the numbers to carry their preferred position.
And is the "not involved in the politics" thing one where the UK still has input into decisions befitting its size and status? Or are we just waiting for them to send us their conclusions? Because if it's the first, how is that different to politics?
For comparison my father 83 total pension including state pension north of 30k a year
My pension high end projected including state pension to be 15k to high end 17k with everything not state pension not index linked. Even if he had a home to leave me outright and mortgage free I would hardly be living the champagne lifestyle on that and thats me being most of my life in top 30 to 20 percent of earners....most of my friends of the same age (mid 50's ) are looking at there pension projections and wondered why they ever bothered. Mostly they will get just enough to lift them over the cap where they loose a lot of freebies
There is no practical version of Brexit that is substantially less shit than the one
Hahahahahaha Scotland,
For another it doesn't tell you what our morality ought to be in 300 years time.
For another, it's hard to overthrow because it disperses itself into many parts and places.
For another it is able to develop by courts and statutes rather than having to go to the country in referenda. And it nicely balances its 'nuclear' weaponry, dispersing it to Commons, Lords, Civil Service, Electorate, Supreme Court, Monarch and Armed Forces in such a way that no-one in inclined to test either their own or others' ultimate powers.
In this way the 'Good Chaps' theory of government clings on, despite this government's best efforts.
It is an error to speak in general terms about pensioners. The fire should be turned on the tax arrangements for pensioners on high incomes due to defined benefit pensions or savings and investments. They demand a lot from the state but as discussed earlier today they pay around half as much tax as working people (due to NI and student loan repayments) on a similar income.
My recollection was Boris Johnson was if not favourite than strongly fancied to replace Cameron but somehow from a position of strength, instead of uniting around Johnson who would probably have won, the Leavers in the Conservative Party abdicated their strength and stood a number of second-rate candidates (Andrea Leadsom, Stephen Crabb?) handing May a clear and convincing win.
This left May, a supporter of Cameron and supposedly a supporter of Remain, in charge of a party dominated by MPs and members who had likely voted the other way. Nonetheless, the 2017 election was a personal failure with a 21% lead reduced to 2.5% by polling day though that was less the fall in Conservative support (which was small) against a huge rise in Labour support from 25% to 41% which was primarily the collapse in support for UKIP (from 8% to 2%) and the LDs (from 12% to 7.5%).
Was it the "dementia tax" or the fact she was just a poor campaigner against Corbyn who caught the public wave and almosr rode it to No.10? Those who were here in 2017 will remember @david_herdson's post the night or night before polling day which made it clear the expected landlside for the Conservatives was a chimera?
Is there a precedent in any country for an opinion poll fail on such a scale? A month ago, Ipsos returned 53%-15% for yes-no in the family referendum, or 78%-22% among those who said which way they'd vote. The actual result will be close to 32%-68%.
So much talent available. If we could just get arundell back as well
If she hadn't given that speech (or something very close to it), the Tory party would have become unmanageable even sooner than it did.
There's perhaps an argument to be made that she should have provoked the Brexiteers anyway, using it as an excuse to kick them out of the party and calling an election on the back of it - a reverse Boris manoeuvre if you like. But with Corbyn not yet at his 2019 nadir, that would surely have been too risky a move to contemplate.
Sometimes it doesn't flow.
Her room for manoeuvre was distinctly limited.
The quotes came through at close to £2000. In the end me and my neighbour just decided to do it ourselves over a couple of days. I've done this type of thing many times, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't; but you can't do that much harm, and the work that tradesmen do can also fail.
£2K is just way beyond the budget of the leaseholders, if it was replicated across every window in the building it would cost £16,000 just to paint the windows.
Saturday night's alright for arguing about Brexit, Saturday night's alright.
If they're hadn't been a campaign "yes" would probably have won.
It's actually kinda nice to see a campaign matter in politics, even though I was hoping for a "yes" vote.
'“core behaviours” that could constitute extremism include attempts to “overturn, exploit or undermine the UK’s system of liberal democracy to confer advantages or disadvantages on specific groups” or threatening individual rights or enabling the spread of extremism."
On this definition Keir could proscribe the Conservative party and GB news and the Telegraph and most of the country's golf clubs.
The terms of the triple lock mean that recipient payments are ramped at a rate either equal to or greater than the wages of the working population, and in practice this going to mean the latter in most years. If pensioners constituted 1% of the population we could put up with that, but they're 20% and climbing, which makes it totally unsustainable.
It's also worth remembering firstly that housing costs (either rent or mortgage) are the largest fraction of the typical household budget for most people obliged to pay them - so the majority of pensioners who own outright do indeed enjoy a large advantage - and that the state pension is not the only source of income for the typical pensioner either. Most will have both savings and occupational pensions, paid according to terms vastly preferential to those available to younger workers.
Thus, hosing down the entire pensioner population with triple locked pensions forever simply isn't sustainable, and it's unfair to the rest of the population to boot. The money to solve our omnicrisis of health and social care provision, child poverty and homelessness, rivers and seas saturated with millions of tonnes of shit and all the rest of the problems has to come from somewhere. It won't come out of excessively generous pensioner handouts paid to people living mortgage free in hugely expensive houses, because there are too many of them and they protest loudly the nanosecond their privileges are threatened (witness the caterwauling when the Chancellor cut NI rather than Income Tax, because the retired didn't share in the benefit.) But it would be a good place to start.
But I don't disagree - people on the state pension aren't well off by any means. The real problem is housing costs, and the inability to get on the housing ladder or to build up capital by any other means. Expecting people on median earnings to pay half - or more - of their salary in rent is completely unsustainable.
And the winner is…Neville the Leonberger! Tibetan Mastiff is second, as last year.
Meets the Papillon, Weimeraner, French Bulldog, and two more to be chosen, in tomorrow evening’s climactic final.
No UK prime minister will ever call a referendum ever again, unless they are forced (eg in Ulster, or by ten SNP holyrood wins on the trot)
The political leason of referendums everywhere is: don’t have them
On major constitutional topics it is just not appropriate to have a 50+1 style vote. There are enough people on the margins of the debate who won’t sufficiently grasp the magnitude of the changes and their votes shouldn’t be sufficient to swing the result. A supermajority goes some way of guarding against this.
Our political debate would be much less toxic if a Scottish independence or Brexit referendum needed 60% of the voters to endorse it.
Fact that it can be and indeed is BOTH being immaterial to the question, at least in their own heads.
Thus efforts to overturn popular voting results, in favor of legislative override in election of POTUS electors.
What these reactionaries desire, is an OLIGARCH. With themselves the Oligarchs.
Their model being Federalist Party circa 1800.
Of course England > Great Britain > United Kingdom pioneered this approach. Aided & abetted by dodges such as "virtual representation". However, started to die out circa 1880 and has been (as far as I can tell) dead as practical political proposition since circa 1914.
However, is a section of (what passes these days for) the Tory Party, now starting to semi-publicly embrace oligarchy? With themselves - (un)naturally - as the Oligarchs.
And yet, only a couple of years later, we waded back into the fray with AV and Indyref.
I suspect that the real lesson is that referendums can be ignored after a suitable period of time. See the current government's change to the Mayoral voting system, in direct contravention of the 1998 Greater London Authority referendum.
If people don't acquire housing, there is going to be another crisis building up as they will retire without being a homeowner meaning the state pension will need to be closer to the minimum wage for these people in retirement.
Not to make the decision.
https://x.com/gabriel_pogrund/status/1766536426168914134
Boris Johnson secretly flew to Venezuela last month for unofficial talks with Nicolás Maduro
Johnson texted David Cameron en route to notify him
He pressed autocratic leader on Ukraine, Western demands for democratic reform
The UK is a global trading nation - in the vanishingly unlikely scenario that the EU would have deprived us of their exports (and foregone their extremely large divorce settlement, without which their finances would have gone south very quickly), we would have been completely fine. I also don't think there's any no deal preparation activity that would not also have proven useful in other ways, like making our borders more secure against illegal immigration. Not to prepare was an act of profound folly, and May deserved what happened to her premiership as an indirect result.
Sunak had a chance to reset the dial and demonstrate he could do grown up government, which could very easily have led him to a small defeat.
But he flubbed it by flip-flopping, weak leadership and appalling political judgement.
He has all the self preservation skills of a lemming.
Though still MIGHT be politically and electorally. Depends.
The concept of carving the results of any particular ballot referendum, initiative, etc. into stone for time eternal, is inherently ridiculous.
A pensioner with no other income will have housing benefit to pay their rent, or mortgage interest support if they're owner occupiers with an outstanding mortgage. And remember, 50% of the working population will earn less than the median salary - whereas only 12% of pensioners don't have any other source of income.
Rents need to fall by half to prevent disaster.