I dispute your test for "is a problem" (penultimate para of my last post).
There have been things going on for years (Rotherham, Oxfam) which we didn't know about despite the fact that they necessarily generate stacks of evidence, in the form of victims. If we didn't detect them, how can we draw conclusions from the fact that we haven't detected personation which leaves not a trace of evidence? And the fact that it hasn't caused a problem yet, doesn't mean it won't in future. You can get on fine for years without ever locking your front door, until you stop getting away with it.
Which is why I'm in favour of the EC doing studies to see if it is a problem, and if it is, its scale.
Also, given the fact that majorities in most constituencies are in the thousands, how would you (if you were so inclined) arrange personation to swing the result in such a constituency? It seems much easier to do with things like postal voting (and difficult enough then).
Again, in a democracy personation is absolutely bad, independent of its effectiveness.
ake this like wealth tax, which always raises the problem (which in reality isn't one) of little old ladies on basic state pensions living alone in £25m mansions. Say you buy a house which has no front door lock; do you construct a hide and observe the door 24/7 for 6 months to assess the burglary risk, or do you put a lock in on day 1?
"Studies cost time and money, and in this instance are likely to yield false assurances."
That's rubbish.
Again, I ask: how do you see personation working at a level that would swing a constituency with a majority of (say) 400 (hence 200 votes need altering)?
Again, I answer: personation is absolutely bad, irrespective of whether it "swings constituencies" or not. It is stealing democracy from one's fellow citizens. I mean, why would I not shoplift Wispa bars from Tesco, given that however hard I work at it my individual thefts are never going to be >.0000005% of their turnover?....
The comparison, surely, is to wonder why it is that Tesco do not put security tags on their Wispa bars ?
Because they employ security staff, CCTV, train shopfloor staff to stay alert - they don't just rely on crossed fingers.
The reality is that most people don't steal - and considerably fewer commit electoral fraud.
Rumours of an illegal distillery I saw in one paper
Arrested under consiracy to cause explosions, but also proceeds of crime act.
Sounds like illegal chemistry rather terror related, but ongoing. Neither shop nor flat were muslim occupied.
The early reports were of a moonshine factory, as opposed to a bomb-making factory. Let’s hope that turns out to be the case.
I know a fair bit about this, but all I will say is that the 6 hours I spent at the scene were amongst the most stressful, yet strangely satisfying and interesting hours I've spent in the job.
You tease I’m sure it will all come out eventually, well done to all those of your job who were involved.
Cheers! Given that nearly the whole building including supermarket ended up in the cellar, and pretty much all of it has been taken out by hand, in extreme freezing conditions, I reckon everyone involved has done a hell of a job. The sheer attention to detail by the forensics people and fire/police investigation teams makes you wonder how anyone can get away with a crime at all in this country.
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
I just had a thought - Is the NI/republic of Ireland border truly frictionless at the moment ? Or are the accounts departments on the island of Ireland spared the friction of tapping out Intrastat declarations to each other. My question isn't entirely rhetorical.
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Until you come to terms with the long term structural reasons that the referendum went the way it did, hen nothing TM says will help either your grief.
Rumours of an illegal distillery I saw in one paper
Arrested under consiracy to cause explosions, but also proceeds of crime act.
Sounds like illegal chemistry rather terror related, but ongoing. Neither shop nor flat were muslim occupied.
The early reports were of a moonshine factory, as opposed to a bomb-making factory. Let’s hope that turns out to be the case.
I know a fair bit about this, but all I will say is that the 6 hours I spent at the scene were amongst the most stressful, yet strangely satisfying and interesting hours I've spent in the job.
You tease I’m sure it will all come out eventually, well done to all those of your job who were involved.
Cheers! Given that nearly the whole building including supermarket ended up in the cellar, and pretty much all of it has been taken out by hand, in extreme freezing conditions, I reckon everyone involved has done a hell of a job. The sheer attention to detail by the forensics people and fire/police investigation teams makes you wonder how anyone can get away with a crime at all in this country.
Because someone who was Home Secretary 2010-5 cut the police budgets and the relevant forensic laboritories
Rumours of an illegal distillery I saw in one paper
Arrested under consiracy to cause explosions, but also proceeds of crime act.
Sounds like illegal chemistry rather terror related, but ongoing. Neither shop nor flat were muslim occupied.
The early reports were of a moonshine factory, as opposed to a bomb-making factory. Let’s hope that turns out to be the case.
I know a fair bit about this, but all I will say is that the 6 hours I spent at the scene were amongst the most stressful, yet strangely satisfying and interesting hours I've spent in the job.
You tease I’m sure it will all come out eventually, well done to all those of your job who were involved.
Cheers! Given that nearly the whole building including supermarket ended up in the cellar, and pretty much all of it has been taken out by hand, in extreme freezing conditions, I reckon everyone involved has done a hell of a job. The sheer attention to detail by the forensics people and fire/police investigation teams makes you wonder how anyone can get away with a crime at all in this country.
Because someone who was Home Secretary 2010-5 cut the police budgets and the relevant forensic laboritories
Because the party in power 1997-2010 ran the country into too much debt.
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Until you come to terms with the long term structural reasons that the referendum went the way it did, hen nothing TM says will help either your grief.
A closed mind doesn’t travel far.
The country is going to keep going to the dogs for as long as a group of appalling golf bores who prefer ideology to inconvenient truths have control of the wheel.
I just had a thought - Is the NI/republic of Ireland border truly frictionless at the moment ? Or are the accounts departments on the island of Ireland spared the friction of tapping out Intrastat declarations to each other. My question isn't entirely rhetorical.
As far as I know, yes they would have to do their Intrastat declarations, plus their EU Sales List declarations, and of course account for any excise duty. As I've been posting for weeks, the mere existence of customs regulations and even tariffs doesn't mean you automatically have to have a hard border with routine physical inspections of goods.
I just had a thought - Is the NI/republic of Ireland border truly frictionless at the moment ? Or are the accounts departments on the island of Ireland spared the friction of tapping out Intrastat declarations to each other. My question isn't entirely rhetorical.
As far as I know, yes they would have to do their Intrastat declarations, plus their EU Sales List declarations, and of course account for any excise duty. As I've been posting for weeks, the mere existence of customs regulations and even tariffs doesn't mean you automatically have to have a hard border with routine physical inspections of goods.
A border where 5% of goods traffic is inspected is a hard border.
It is the very essence of the democratic process. Who’s your MEP?
No idea. Couldn't care less. Soon to be unemployed. Good.
I remember having this discussion with you before, when I said tthat in my experience MEPs were more willing to look at issues in depth and consider sensible amendments open-mindedly than the average British MP. Then as now, you said IIRC tha you'd never had any dealings with your MEPs and didn't want to. Fair enough - but does that give you a basis for judging if they do heir job well?
What is it; always be nice to people on the way up; you may need a hand on the way down. And even when you're at the top, be nice to the foot-soldiers; they mightb get to the top one day.
I dispute your test for "is a problem" (penultimate para of my last post).
There have been things going on for years (Rotherham, Oxfam) which we didn't know about despite the fact that they necessarily generate stacks of evidence, in the form of victims. If we didn't detect them, how can we draw conclusions from the fact that we haven't detected personation which leaves not a trace of evidence? And the fact that it hasn't caused a problem yet, doesn't mean it won't in future. You can get on fine for years without ever locking your front door, until you stop getting away with it.
Which is why I'm in favour of the EC doing studies to see if it is a problem, and if it is, its scale.
Also, given the fact that majorities in most constituencies are in the thousands, how would you (if you were so inclined) arrange personation to swing the result in such a constituency? It seems much easier to do with things like postal voting (and difficult enough then).
Again, in a democracy personation is absolutely bad, independent of its effectiveness.
ake this like wealth tax, which always raises the problem (which in reality isn't one) of little old ladies on basic state pensions living alone in £25m mansions. Say you buy a house which has no front door lock; do you construct a hide and observe the door 24/7 for 6 months to assess the burglary risk, or do you put a lock in on day 1?
"Studies cost time and money, and in this instance are likely to yield false assurances."
That's rubbish.
Again, I ask: how do you see personation working at a level that would swing a constituency with a majority of (say) 400 (hence 200 votes need altering)?
Again, I answer: personation is absolutely bad, irrespective of whether it "swings constituencies" or not. It is stealing democracy from one's fellow citizens. I mean, why would I not shoplift Wispa bars from Tesco, given that however hard I work at it my individual thefts are never going to be >.0000005% of their turnover?....
The comparison, surely, is to wonder why it is that Tesco do not put security tags on their Wispa bars ?
Because they employ security staff, CCTV, train shopfloor staff to stay alert - they don't just rely on crossed fingers.
The reality is that most people don't steal - and considerably fewer commit electoral fraud.
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Until you come to terms with the long term structural reasons that the referendum went the way it did, hen nothing TM says will help either your grief.
A closed mind doesn’t travel far.
The country is going to keep going to the dogs for as long as a group of appalling golf bores who prefer ideology to inconvenient truths have control of the wheel.
I don’t think you’re in a position to call anyone else an appalling bore.
I just had a thought - Is the NI/republic of Ireland border truly frictionless at the moment ? Or are the accounts departments on the island of Ireland spared the friction of tapping out Intrastat declarations to each other. My question isn't entirely rhetorical.
As far as I know, yes they would have to do their Intrastat declarations, plus their EU Sales List declarations, and of course account for any excise duty. As I've been posting for weeks, the mere existence of customs regulations and even tariffs doesn't mean you automatically have to have a hard border with routine physical inspections of goods.
A border where 5% of goods traffic is inspected is a hard border.
I just had a thought - Is the NI/republic of Ireland border truly frictionless at the moment ? Or are the accounts departments on the island of Ireland spared the friction of tapping out Intrastat declarations to each other. My question isn't entirely rhetorical.
As far as I know, yes they would have to do their Intrastat declarations, plus their EU Sales List declarations, and of course account for any excise duty. As I've been posting for weeks, the mere existence of customs regulations and even tariffs doesn't mean you automatically have to have a hard border with routine physical inspections of goods.
A border where 5% of goods traffic is inspected is a hard border.
I am pretty sure that Trump is not that bothered about WTO rules. And the fact is that "free trade" has worked to the very considerable detriment of the US for the best part of 50 years now (having, in fairness, worked very substantially to their benefit before that). As we are all too painfully finding out countries who run persistent trade deficits end up belonging to other people who may not have your own best interests at heart.
I dispute your view that free trade has not worked for the US.
I'm thinking of writing a piece called "The Ties That (No Longer) Bind", which looks at the extent to which differences in outlook are fracturing traditional political groupings because we're looking to distribute losses, rather than gains.
So, if you look at Italy today, you have two groups: the old who benefit from having savings in Euros; and the young, who lose out from not having jobs because of an overvalued currency. One group's gain is the other's loss.
What's happened in the US is similar. The coasts and the major metropolitan areas have benefited enormously from free trade. Microsoft, Disney, Apple, Amazon, etc., are the huge beneficiaries who have leveraged smart, expensive people in California and Washington state, and become world leaders.
But that same free trade has not been great for middle American manufacturing. Factories in the Mid-West (many of whom were owned by Private Equity owners* who held back on investment) have shuttered.
The coastal states now, by and large, run large trade surpluses. The inland runs trade deficits.
Perhaps the US is not an optimal currency zone. The solutions for one set of states (and for the record, I don't think protectionism will bring jobs back to the small towns of Ohio), may be very different to those for others.
In small town USA you have a negative feedback loop in place every bit as serious as that in Greece, only it's less obvious. Small towns lose employers, and have to cut funding for essential services. People leave, and property prices fall, trapping those who remain. Because of pensions granted in better times, these costs take up an ever greater portion of public sector budgets. Taxes are forced to rise, discouraging new employers from coming to the town or the state. And rising unemployment and hopelessness leads to a massive, appalling, opiates issue.
* There's a fabulous book about the decline of a US town. The big employer was a glass factory, which should - due to the breakability of the product and the opportunity to increase quality - be relatively immune to cheap Chinese competition. But private equity broke it, and then that broke the town.
Rumours of an illegal distillery I saw in one paper
Arrested under consiracy to cause explosions, but also proceeds of crime act.
Sounds like illegal chemistry rather terror related, but ongoing. Neither shop nor flat were muslim occupied.
The early reports were of a moonshine factory, as opposed to a bomb-making factory. Let’s hope that turns out to be the case.
I know a fair bit about this, but all I will say is that the 6 hours I spent at the scene were amongst the most stressful, yet strangely satisfying and interesting hours I've spent in the job.
You tease I’m sure it will all come out eventually, well done to all those of your job who were involved.
Cheers! Given that nearly the whole building including supermarket ended up in the cellar, and pretty much all of it has been taken out by hand, in extreme freezing conditions, I reckon everyone involved has done a hell of a job. The sheer attention to detail by the forensics people and fire/police investigation teams makes you wonder how anyone can get away with a crime at all in this country.
Because someone who was Home Secretary 2010-5 cut the police budgets and the relevant forensic laboritories
Because the party in power 1997-2010 ran the country into too much debt.
So the people at the bottom, who hadn't been anywhere near control, had to pay and those at the top who'd profited got away not only scot free but with tax cuts.
I just had a thought - Is the NI/republic of Ireland border truly frictionless at the moment ? Or are the accounts departments on the island of Ireland spared the friction of tapping out Intrastat declarations to each other. My question isn't entirely rhetorical.
As far as I know, yes they would have to do their Intrastat declarations, plus their EU Sales List declarations, and of course account for any excise duty. As I've been posting for weeks, the mere existence of customs regulations and even tariffs doesn't mean you automatically have to have a hard border with routine physical inspections of goods.
A border where 5% of goods traffic is inspected is a hard border.
Indeed. We should aim for 0%.
0% is delivered by the solution on the table.
Correct, but the good people of the United Kingdom decided to disengage from that solution., so we need a new one.
I just had a thought - Is the NI/republic of Ireland border truly frictionless at the moment ? Or are the accounts departments on the island of Ireland spared the friction of tapping out Intrastat declarations to each other. My question isn't entirely rhetorical.
As far as I know, yes they would have to do their Intrastat declarations, plus their EU Sales List declarations, and of course account for any excise duty. As I've been posting for weeks, the mere existence of customs regulations and even tariffs doesn't mean you automatically have to have a hard border with routine physical inspections of goods.
A border where 5% of goods traffic is inspected is a hard border.
Indeed. We should aim for 0%.
0% is delivered by the solution on the table.
The duty rate on spirits is £28.57/litre (Of alcohol). In the republic it is €43.57.
How is the huge smuggling problem currently dealt with ?
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Until you come to terms with the long term structural reasons that the referendum went the way it did, hen nothing TM says will help either your grief.
A closed mind doesn’t travel far.
The country is going to keep going to the dogs for as long as a group of appalling golf bores who prefer ideology to inconvenient truths have control of the wheel.
I don’t think you’re in a position to call anyone else an appalling bore.
There was a remoaner called Meeks Who thought Brexiteers were all freaks. He couldn't believe That we'd voted to leave So he went on about it for weeks*
I am pretty sure that Trump is not that bothered about WTO rules. And the fact is that "free trade" has worked to the very considerable detriment of the US for the best part of 50 years now (having, in fairness, worked very substantially to their benefit before that). As we are all too painfully finding out countries who run persistent trade deficits end up belonging to other people who may not have your own best interests at heart.
I dispute your view that free trade has not worked for the US.
I'm thinking of writing a piece called "The Ties That (No Longer) Bind", which looks at the extent to which differences in outlook are fracturing traditional political groupings because we're looking to distribute losses, rather than gains.
So, if you look at Italy today, you have two groups: the old who benefit from having savings in Euros; and the young, who lose out from not having jobs because of an overvalued currency. One group's gain is the other's loss.
What's happened in the US is similar. The coasts and the major metropolitan areas have benefited enormously from free trade. Microsoft, Disney, Apple, Amazon, etc., are the huge beneficiaries who have leveraged smart, expensive people in California and Washington state, and become world leaders.
But that same free trade has not been great for middle American manufacturing. Factories in the Mid-West (many of whom were owned by Private Equity owners* who held back on investment) have shuttered.
The coastal states now, by and large, run large trade surpluses. The inland runs trade deficits.
Perhaps the US is not an optimal currency zone. The solutions for one set of states (and for the record, I don't think protectionism will bring jobs back to the small towns of Ohio), may be very different to those for others.
In small town USA you have a negative feedback loop in place every bit as serious as that in Greece, only it's less obvious. Small towns lose employers, and have to cut funding for essential services. People leave, and property prices fall, trapping those who remain. Because of pensions granted in better times, these costs take up an ever greater portion of public sector budgets. Taxes are forced to rise, discouraging new employers from coming to the town or the state. And rising unemployment and hopelessness leads to a massive, appalling, opiates issue.
* There's a fabulous book about the decline of a US town. The big employer was a glass factory, which should - due to the breakability of the product and the opportunity to increase quality - be relatively immune to cheap Chinese competition. But private equity broke it, and then that broke the town.
Listening to TM's lunchtime address it occurred to me that if only those who voted Brexit had heard it before the referendum 'Remain' would have won a landslide.
They only wanted to keep the foreigners out. No one told them about all the other stuff
Listening to TM's lunchtime address it occurred to me that if only those who voted Brexit had heard it before the referendum 'Remain' would have won a landslide.
They only wanted to keep the foreigners out. No one told them about all the other stuff
Rog, can't you take a foreign citizenship, so we can deport you as well?
Forty cars have been involved in a pile-up on the A38 in Devon as drivers battle adverse weather conditions.
The news is wall to wall Snowpocalypse, but where I am it has all but gone! We must be an island in a sea of madness.
Lucky you. I've just spent an hour clearing the ice/snow off our kitchen glass roof (yep, I shan't be throwing any stones....) for fear of the weight/water when it melts.
Makes the booze all the more satisfying, mind. I can see why spirits are so popular in colder climes.
Well, I should have kept my mouth shut - snowing here now and whilst I was out came across a guy who lost control on Turner road (the hill I mentioned yesterday) and his lovely Merc has slid a fair way down hill, off the road a fair bit and into some bushes - luckily he is ok and no pedestrians were hit.
Forty cars have been involved in a pile-up on the A38 in Devon as drivers battle adverse weather conditions.
The news is wall to wall Snowpocalypse, but where I am it has all but gone! We must be an island in a sea of madness.
Where are you again ?
Ah Leicester heh. North Derbyshire had a good bit of weather yesterday, and Coventry is starting to resemble the Arctic right now lol. Nottingham also had a good bit according to my friend from Beeston. As did Lincolnshire.. So yes seems Leicester is the oddly snow free lol
I just had a thought - Is the NI/republic of Ireland border truly frictionless at the moment ? Or are the accounts departments on the island of Ireland spared the friction of tapping out Intrastat declarations to each other. My question isn't entirely rhetorical.
As far as I know, yes they would have to do their Intrastat declarations, plus their EU Sales List declarations, and of course account for any excise duty. As I've been posting for weeks, the mere existence of customs regulations and even tariffs doesn't mean you automatically have to have a hard border with routine physical inspections of goods.
A border where 5% of goods traffic is inspected is a hard border.
Indeed. We should aim for 0%.
0% is delivered by the solution on the table.
The duty rate on spirits is £28.57/litre (Of alcohol). In the republic it is €43.57.
How is the huge smuggling problem currently dealt with ?
It's a problem. Google smuggling in Northern Ireland.
We've had no more snow in the last 24 hours and the gale force winds have died down. I therefore made the effort and cleared the drive and path. Expect another 6 inches overnight then.
Again, I answer: personation is absolutely bad, irrespective of whether it "swings constituencies" or not. It is stealing democracy from one's fellow citizens. I mean, why would I not shoplift Wispa bars from Tesco, given that however hard I work at it my individual thefts are never going to be >.0000005% of their turnover? (Snip)
Yes, but you are treating that bad thing as the only important issue.
In reality, our voting system is a result of a mishmash of sometimes contradictory requirements: for instance, we want the vote to be free from fraud, but also for as many eligible people to take part as possible.
These are somewhat contradictory, and it is vital that achieving one does not do undue damage to the other.
As an extreme example, a vote that was free from fraud, but disenfranchised a million people would be worse than one where there was one fraudulent vote, but everyone who could vote, and wanted to vote, did so. The former might be 'purer' from a fraud point of view, but would less represent the will of the electorate.
There is another important requirement: that people believe that the electoral system is valid. Someone might think that the risk of personation bankrupts the electoral process; someone else might consider the processes put in place to prevent it bankrupts it on other ways.
This is why my question, which you refuse to answer, is important.
I don't see why May needs to say we won't be Singapore. I think May should put some work into being Singapore and the threat of us being Singapore should be wielded whenever and wherever the EU tries to play hard ball with us.
Listening to TM's lunchtime address it occurred to me that if only those who voted Brexit had heard it before the referendum 'Remain' would have won a landslide.
They only wanted to keep the foreigners out. No one told them about all the other stuff
You often criticise the people of Hartlepool. But, they are your brothers and sisters, intellectually. They've voted Labour in every election, bar one, since 1945.
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Nothing would reconcile you, however. You just want to vent at people who voted Leave.
I don't see why May needs to say we won't be Singapore. I think May should put some work into being Singapore and the threat of us being Singapore should be wielded whenever and wherever the EU tries to play hard ball with us.
I would like us to be Singapore, but I'm not sure we've got the weather for it.
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Nothing would reconcile you, however. You just want to vent at people who voted Leave.
Im not sure Mays speech was meant to appeal to hardcore remainers or hardcore leavers.
Listening to TM's lunchtime address it occurred to me that if only those who voted Brexit had heard it before the referendum 'Remain' would have won a landslide.
They only wanted to keep the foreigners out. No one told them about all the other stuff
Rog, can't you take a foreign citizenship, so we can deport you as well?
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Nothing would reconcile you, however. You just want to vent at people who voted Leave.
I have already acknowledged that it was a good speech, if woefully late.
I have no particular beef with people who voted Leave. The people who sought their vote by frightening them with xenophobic lies, however, deserve to have a deep circle of hell awaiting them.
I am pretty sure that Trump is not that bothered about WTO rules. And the fact is that "free trade" has worked to the very considerable detriment of the US for the best part of 50 years now (having, in fairness, worked very substantially to their benefit before that). As we are all too painfully finding out countries who run persistent trade deficits end up belonging to other people who may not have your own best interests at heart.
I dispute your view that free trade has not worked for the US.
I'm thinking of writing a piece called "The Ties That (No Longer) Bind", which looks at the extent to which differences in outlook are fracturing traditional political groupings because we're looking to distribute losses, rather than gains.
So, if you look at Italy today, you have two groups: the old who benefit from having savings in Euros; and the young, who lose out from not having jobs because of an overvalued currency. One group's gain is the other's loss.
What's happened in the US is similar. The coasts and the major metropolitan areas have benefited enormously from free trade. Microsoft, Disney, Apple, Amazon, etc., are the huge beneficiaries who have leveraged smart, expensive people in California and Washington state, and become world leaders.
But that same free trade has not been great for middle American manufacturing. Factories in the Mid-West (many of whom were owned by Private Equity owners* who held back on investment) have shuttered.
The coastal states now, by and large, run large trade surpluses. The inland runs trade deficits.
Perhaps the US is not an optimal currency zone. The solutions for one set of states (and for the record, I don't think protectionism will bring jobs back to the small towns of Ohio), may be very different to those for others.
In small town USA you have a negative feedback loop in place every bit as serious as that in Greece, only it's less obvious. Small towns lose employers, and have to cut funding for essential services. People leave, and property prices fall, trapping those who remain. Because of pensions granted in better times, these costs take up an ever greater portion of public sector budgets. Taxes are forced to rise, discouraging new employers from coming to the town or the state. And rising unemployment and hopelessness leads to a massive, appalling, opiates issue.
* There's a fabulous book about the decline of a US town. The big employer was a glass factory, which should - due to the breakability of the product and the opportunity to increase quality - be relatively immune to cheap Chinese competition. But private equity broke it, and then that broke the town.
Yet, even within the Coastal areas, the gains accrue to a minority.
Yes, but you are treating that bad thing as the only important issue.
In reality, our voting system is a result of a mishmash of sometimes contradictory requirements: for instance, we want the vote to be free from fraud, but also for as many eligible people to take part as possible.
These are somewhat contradictory, and it is vital that achieving one does not do undue damage to the other.
As an extreme example, a vote that was free from fraud, but disenfranchised a million people would be worse than one where there was one fraudulent vote, but everyone who could vote, and wanted to vote, did so. The former might be 'purer' from a fraud point of view, but would less represent the will of the electorate.
There is another important requirement: that people believe that the electoral system is valid. Someone might think that the risk of personation bankrupts the electoral process; someone else might consider the processes put in place to prevent it bankrupts it on other ways.
This is why my question, which you refuse to answer, is important.
No-one is saying that personation is the only important issue in cleaning up our voting system. You keep positing extreme examples with no basis in the real world and citing problems which the evidence from existing systems using forms of voter ID shows do not exist. There is nothing contradictory in wanting all eligible people to take part and wanting a vote to be as free from fraud as possible. Nothing at all.
Do you agree with the following?
1 - There should be an electoral register that is only open to those with the legal right to vote at a given election. Processes should be in place to ensure that this register is clean.
2 - Only those registered to vote should be given a ballot paper and allowed to complete it in the polling station. Processes should be in place to ensure that the person seeking to vote is the person they say they are and that they are on the register of eligible voters.
Surely these two things are a necessary part of a free and fair electoral system.
To deny that there should be all reasonable steps taken to ensure that ballot papers are only issued to those people claiming the right to vote just seems incredible to me.
If you want to participate in our electoral system you have to register and then you should also have to demonstrate that you are the person you say you are when it comes to the actual voting part.
Voter ID works in many places - why should it be different here.
It works in Northern Ireland - and no-one is citing any of the potential problems you are claiming will happen if we establish a system for the rest of the UK.
Why are you so opposed to the cleanest possible system?
I don't see why May needs to say we won't be Singapore. I think May should put some work into being Singapore and the threat of us being Singapore should be wielded whenever and wherever the EU tries to play hard ball with us.
Singapore's GDP per head is nearly 30 per cent higher than the UKs. It is a relatively harmonious multi cultural prosperous place with almost no crime. There is also extensive goverment intervention to provide affordable housing to buy for its citizens.
I don't see why May needs to say we won't be Singapore. I think May should put some work into being Singapore and the threat of us being Singapore should be wielded whenever and wherever the EU tries to play hard ball with us.
Singapore's GDP per head is nearly 30 per cent higher than the UKs. It is a relatively harmonious multi cultural prosperous place with almost no crime. There is also extensive goverment intervention to provide affordable housing to buy for its citizens.
What exactly is so bad about being Singapore?
Their record when it comes to LGBT rights for a start....
Listening to TM's lunchtime address it occurred to me that if only those who voted Brexit had heard it before the referendum 'Remain' would have won a landslide.
They only wanted to keep the foreigners out. No one told them about all the other stuff
You often criticise the people of Hartlepool. But, they are your brothers and sisters, intellectually. They've voted Labour in every election, bar one, since 1945.
May’s scheme, by contrast, just seems unreasonable. When the EU has accused the UK of wanting to cherry-pick, I’ve usually shouted at my TV or radio or newspaper “We’re not cherry-picking!” Well, today Theresa May has made me a liar, because cherry-picking, of a sort liable to unravel the Single Market, has now become exactly what the UK government is proposing.
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Until you come to terms with the long term structural reasons that the referendum went the way it did, hen nothing TM says will help either your grief.
A closed mind doesn’t travel far.
The country is going to keep going to the dogs for as long as a group of appalling golf bores who prefer ideology to inconvenient truths have control of the wheel.
You can almost hear that stamping of feet from here
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Nothing would reconcile you, however. You just want to vent at people who voted Leave.
I dispute your view that free trade has not worked for the US.
I'm thinking of writing a piece called "The Ties That (No Longer) Bind", which looks at the extent to which differences in outlook are fracturing traditional political groupings because we're looking to distribute losses, rather than gains.
So, if you look at Italy today, you have two groups: the old who benefit from having savings in Euros; and the young, who lose out from not having jobs because of an overvalued currency. One group's gain is the other's loss.
What's happened in the US is similar. The coasts and the major metropolitan areas have benefited enormously from free trade. Microsoft, Disney, Apple, Amazon, etc., are the huge beneficiaries who have leveraged smart, expensive people in California and Washington state, and become world leaders.
But that same free trade has not been great for middle American manufacturing. Factories in the Mid-West (many of whom were owned by Private Equity owners* who held back on investment) have shuttered.
The coastal states now, by and large, run large trade surpluses. The inland runs trade deficits.
Perhaps the US is not an optimal currency zone. The solutions for one set of states (and for the record, I don't think protectionism will bring jobs back to the small towns of Ohio), may be very different to those for others.
In small town USA you have a negative feedback loop in place every bit as serious as that in Greece, only it's less obvious. Small towns lose employers, and have to cut funding for essential services. People leave, and property prices fall, trapping those who remain. Because of pensions granted in better times, these costs take up an ever greater portion of public sector budgets. Taxes are forced to rise, discouraging new employers from coming to the town or the state. And rising unemployment and hopelessness leads to a massive, appalling, opiates issue.
* There's a fabulous book about the decline of a US town. The big employer was a glass factory, which should - due to the breakability of the product and the opportunity to increase quality - be relatively immune to cheap Chinese competition. But private equity broke it, and then that broke the town.
Not all US glass companies have failed.
"Corning Glass Inc has a rich history of innovation starting with lightbulb glass in the late 19th century to modern cell phone glass today. Our investors experience a reliable dividend and explosive growth with each new invention. We have approximately 35000 employees worldwide and $10B in sales."
Rumours of an illegal distillery I saw in one paper
Arrested under consiracy to cause explosions, but also proceeds of crime act.
Sounds like illegal chemistry rather terror related, but ongoing. Neither shop nor flat were muslim occupied.
The early reports were of a moonshine factory, as opposed to a bomb-making factory. Let’s hope that turns out to be the case.
I know a fair bit about this, but all I will say is that the 6 hours I spent at the scene were amongst the most stressful, yet strangely satisfying and interesting hours I've spent in the job.
You tease I’m sure it will all come out eventually, well done to all those of your job who were involved.
Cheers! Given that nearly the whole building including supermarket ended up in the cellar, and pretty much all of it has been taken out by hand, in extreme freezing conditions, I reckon everyone involved has done a hell of a job. The sheer attention to detail by the forensics people and fire/police investigation teams makes you wonder how anyone can get away with a crime at all in this country.
If only the police were as good at looking at mobile phone records
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Nothing would reconcile you, however. You just want to vent at people who voted Leave.
I have already acknowledged that it was a good speech, if woefully late.
I have no particular beef with people who voted Leave. The people who sought their vote by frightening them with xenophobic lies, however, deserve to have a deep circle of hell awaiting them.
There is a chance it will turn out that May might actually have played this brilliantly - she could not possibly have gone faster without risking the fracturing of the Tory Party and possibly the country, but by tripping Article 50 early she has created a ticking clock to help her inch her party and maybe even the majority of Remainers and Leavers generally towards a compromise position where fewer and fewer will feel horrified by the result?
For 2016, these were the changes in median family income by state. (I've only done a few because it's laborious manually typing, but you can look at the data yourself on page 3 of the doc I've linked.)
May’s scheme, by contrast, just seems unreasonable. When the EU has accused the UK of wanting to cherry-pick, I’ve usually shouted at my TV or radio or newspaper “We’re not cherry-picking!” Well, today Theresa May has made me a liar, because cherry-picking, of a sort liable to unravel the Single Market, has now become exactly what the UK government is proposing.
May’s scheme, by contrast, just seems unreasonable. When the EU has accused the UK of wanting to cherry-pick, I’ve usually shouted at my TV or radio or newspaper “We’re not cherry-picking!” Well, today Theresa May has made me a liar, because cherry-picking, of a sort liable to unravel the Single Market, has now become exactly what the UK government is proposing.
I don't see why May needs to say we won't be Singapore. I think May should put some work into being Singapore and the threat of us being Singapore should be wielded whenever and wherever the EU tries to play hard ball with us.
Singapore's GDP per head is nearly 30 per cent higher than the UKs. It is a relatively harmonious multi cultural prosperous place with almost no crime. There is also extensive goverment intervention to provide affordable housing to buy for its citizens.
What exactly is so bad about being Singapore?
Their record when it comes to LGBT rights for a start....
And more broadly their human rights record.
We don't want to be Singapore
Their position on LGBT rights is cultural though - and it is a lot less reactionary than It's neighbours. It's more a don't ask don't tell approach whereas in Indonesia and Malaysia there is active persecution. Singapore actually has a quite extensive gay scene. You are far more likely to be the victim of a gay bashing incident in London these days than there.
Is population is contented as its government provides for its own citizens. Our voters are angry because despite their votes successive governments are failing many of them. If people don't feel their votes matter and change things they may well say what is the point.
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Nothing would reconcile you, however. You just want to vent at people who voted Leave.
I have already acknowledged that it was a good speech, if woefully late.
I have no particular beef with people who voted Leave. The people who sought their vote by frightening them with xenophobic lies, however, deserve to have a deep circle of hell awaiting them.
Do you refer to Camerons reference to the risk of a Third World War if we left the EU?
"Corning Glass Inc has a rich history of innovation starting with lightbulb glass in the late 19th century to modern cell phone glass today. Our investors experience a reliable dividend and explosive growth with each new invention. We have approximately 35000 employees worldwide and $10B in sales."
Corning invested, and prospered.
Other companies got owned by private equity, who dramatically reduced investment to pay themselves dividends. This doomed the plants to early obsolescence.
It was not Free Trade that fucked Lancaster, Ohio, but the short sightedness and greed of financiers with NetJets subscriptions.
I decided to read the Prime Minister's speech on The Spectator blog. I was struck by this comment:
"And in other areas like workers’ rights or the environment, the EU should be confident that we will not engage in a race to the bottom in the standards and protections we set. There is no serious political constituency in the UK which would support this – quite the opposite."
Interesting she writes off many on the Conservative side as "no serious political constituency" - on that at least we agree. It remains classic May-ism, the tent is all-encompassing, there's room for everyone.
The content is interesting and not devoid of some interesting ideas and observations. It's lacking a little in specifics and to this observer a "softer" Brexit than some might prefer in terms of maintaining a regulatory relationship with the EU. Clearly, trying to resolve the "border" issues while maintaining integrated supply chains and frictionless border controls is exercising a lot of minds in Whitehall.
The mood of the speech was "unifying" - whether that spirit of unity permeates as far as the Conservative Party remains to be seen.
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Nothing would reconcile you, however. You just want to vent at people who voted Leave.
I have already acknowledged that it was a good speech, if woefully late.
I have no particular beef with people who voted Leave. The people who sought their vote by frightening them with xenophobic lies, however, deserve to have a deep circle of hell awaiting them.
There is a chance it will turn out that May might actually have played this brilliantly - she could not possibly have gone faster without risking the fracturing of the Tory Party and possibly the country, but by tripping Article 50 early she has created a ticking clock to help her inch her party and maybe even the majority of Remainers and Leavers generally towards a compromise position where fewer and fewer will feel horrified by the result?
No, I don't think that's true. If she had led her party's opinion, forcing them to follow in her wake owing to the speed at which she moved, she could have established a party consensus quickly and effectively.
Now everyone is parsing her every last word for purity.
May’s scheme, by contrast, just seems unreasonable. When the EU has accused the UK of wanting to cherry-pick, I’ve usually shouted at my TV or radio or newspaper “We’re not cherry-picking!” Well, today Theresa May has made me a liar, because cherry-picking, of a sort liable to unravel the Single Market, has now become exactly what the UK government is proposing.
No-one is saying that personation is the only important issue in cleaning up our voting system. You keep positing extreme examples with no basis in the real world and citing problems which the evidence from existing systems using forms of voter ID shows do not exist. There is nothing contradictory in wanting all eligible people to take part and wanting a vote to be as free from fraud as possible. Nothing at all.
Do you agree with the following?
1 - There should be an electoral register that is only open to those with the legal right to vote at a given election. Processes should be in place to ensure that this register is clean.
2 - Only those registered to vote should be given a ballot paper and allowed to complete it in the polling station. Processes should be in place to ensure that the person seeking to vote is the person they say they are and that they are on the register of eligible voters.
Surely these two things are a necessary part of a free and fair electoral system.
To deny that there should be all reasonable steps taken to ensure that ballot papers are only issued to those people claiming the right to vote just seems incredible to me.
If you want to participate in our electoral system you have to register and then you should also have to demonstrate that you are the person you say you are when it comes to the actual voting part.
Voter ID works in many places - why should it be different here.
It works in Northern Ireland - and no-one is citing any of the potential problems you are claiming will happen if we establish a system for the rest of the UK.
Why are you so opposed to the cleanest possible system?
People who go on about personation without acknowledging the other conflicting requirements are saying it is the most important issue.
That's where this move is crass: it is addressing a problem that may not be a major issue, and is being done without due consideration of the consequences of the move.
As for your questions: yes, those are important. But can I add: 3 - The system should allow as many people who are registered to vote, to vote, as possible. 4 - The system should disenfranchise as few people who are registered to vote as possible.
Do you agree with these? (And there are others, as well). Any system needs to balance out all these requirements.
"Why are you so opposed to the cleanest possible system?"
I'm unsure you've considered that the 'cleanest possible system' would be, and further doubt that you've considered what that would mean for the electoral system.
May’s scheme, by contrast, just seems unreasonable. When the EU has accused the UK of wanting to cherry-pick, I’ve usually shouted at my TV or radio or newspaper “We’re not cherry-picking!” Well, today Theresa May has made me a liar, because cherry-picking, of a sort liable to unravel the Single Market, has now become exactly what the UK government is proposing.
May set out the government's opening positions. We will move further to the EU ones over the coming months - especially on customs. This is going to be a very soft Brexit. We will have the theoretical right to do trade deals at the end of this process, but in practice we are going to be so aligned to the EU that there will be no incentive for anyone serious to negotiate with us separately. What will happen is that there will be UK follow-ons to the deals the EU does. It really is going to be pretty symbolic and not much more. A line in the sand to all intents and purposes what the Leave vote will have achieved is a line in the sand in terms of the UK's integration into the European project at the expense of some ability to influence a decision-making which will still affect us. I suspect most folk will be happy with it. I'd make the Tories strong favourites to win the GE from here - unless the loons kick off.
I don't see why May needs to say we won't be Singapore. I think May should put some work into being Singapore and the threat of us being Singapore should be wielded whenever and wherever the EU tries to play hard ball with us.
Singapore's GDP per head is nearly 30 per cent higher than the UKs. It is a relatively harmonious multi cultural prosperous place with almost no crime. There is also extensive goverment intervention to provide affordable housing to buy for its citizens.
What exactly is so bad about being Singapore?
It is worth remembering that City States will tend to have higher GDPs than places that contain mixtures of small towns, countryside, and cities. Unless you plan on concreting over the rest of the UK to make it all Greater London, we'll never be a City State.
Again, I answer: personation is absolutely bad, irrespective of whether it "swings constituencies" or not. It is stealing democracy from one's fellow citizens. I mean, why would I not shoplift Wispa bars from Tesco, given that however hard I work at it my individual thefts are never going to be >.0000005% of their turnover? (Snip)
Yes, but you are treating that bad thing as the only important issue.
In reality, our voting system is a result of a mishmash of sometimes contradictory requirements: for instance, we want the vote to be free from fraud, but also for as many eligible people to take part as possible.
These are somewhat contradictory, and it is vital that achieving one does not do undue damage to the other.
As an extreme example, a vote that was free from fraud, but disenfranchised a million people would be worse than one where there was one fraudulent vote, but everyone who could vote, and wanted to vote, did so. The former might be 'purer' from a fraud point of view, but would less represent the will of the electorate.
There is another important requirement: that people believe that the electoral system is valid. Someone might think that the risk of personation bankrupts the electoral process; someone else might consider the processes put in place to prevent it bankrupts it on other ways.
This is why my question, which you refuse to answer, is important.
I don't refuse to answer it. I just don't know what the answer is. I don't even have any sort of intuitive feel for it, and intuition is in any case generally useless, and in all other cases of criminal activity I can think of the answer tends to be, there's a lot more of it than you'd think. I am certain that serious attempts are made, and I'd say it was a slightly better than evens chance that a minimum of one parliamentary election has been swung by personation in the past 50 years. Much greater probability in local elections, where low turnout reduces the risk of being rumbled by the genuine article turning up to vote. Certainly, and what is important, the dangers are such that taking the minimum necessary measures to make personation very much more difficult, would be a proportionate and sensible thing to do.
Listening to TM's lunchtime address it occurred to me that if only those who voted Brexit had heard it before the referendum 'Remain' would have won a landslide.
They only wanted to keep the foreigners out. No one told them about all the other stuff
Rog, can't you take a foreign citizenship, so we can deport you as well?
"Corning Glass Inc has a rich history of innovation starting with lightbulb glass in the late 19th century to modern cell phone glass today. Our investors experience a reliable dividend and explosive growth with each new invention. We have approximately 35000 employees worldwide and $10B in sales."
Corning invested, and prospered.
Other companies got owned by private equity, who dramatically reduced investment to pay themselves dividends. This doomed the plants to early obsolescence.
It was not Free Trade that fucked Lancaster, Ohio, but the short sightedness and greed of financiers with NetJets subscriptions.
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Nothing would reconcile you, however. You just want to vent at people who voted Leave.
I have already acknowledged that it was a good speech, if woefully late.
I have no particular beef with people who voted Leave. The people who sought their vote by frightening them with xenophobic lies, however, deserve to have a deep circle of hell awaiting them.
Do you refer to Camerons reference to the risk of a Third World War if we left the EU?
Ah, a perfect example of Leavers believing their own lies. David Cameron never mentioned World War Three.
I realise Leavers are desperate to evade the consequences of their xenophobic lies, but they need to start owning up and considering the effect that they have had on the nation's politics before the country can move on.
I don't see why May needs to say we won't be Singapore. I think May should put some work into being Singapore and the threat of us being Singapore should be wielded whenever and wherever the EU tries to play hard ball with us.
I would like us to be Singapore, but I'm not sure we've got the weather for it.
We'd need to quadruple our electricity generation for all the aircon if we had Singapore's climate.
"Corning Glass Inc has a rich history of innovation starting with lightbulb glass in the late 19th century to modern cell phone glass today. Our investors experience a reliable dividend and explosive growth with each new invention. We have approximately 35000 employees worldwide and $10B in sales."
Corning invested, and prospered.
Other companies got owned by private equity, who dramatically reduced investment to pay themselves dividends. This doomed the plants to early obsolescence.
It was not Free Trade that fucked Lancaster, Ohio, but the short sightedness and greed of financiers with NetJets subscriptions.
Private equity may chose to risk investment or to milk their earlier investment depending on the prospects for the business. Private equity are currently investing vast billions in the likes of Airbnb, Tesla and Uber for example.
I dispute your view that free trade has not worked for the US.
(Snip)
What's happened in the US is similar. The coasts and the major metropolitan areas have benefited enormously from free trade. Microsoft, Disney, Apple, Amazon, etc., are the huge beneficiaries who have leveraged smart, expensive people in California and Washington state, and become world leaders.
But that same free trade has not been great for middle American manufacturing. Factories in the Mid-West (many of whom were owned by Private Equity owners* who held back on investment) have shuttered.
The coastal states now, by and large, run large trade surpluses. The inland runs trade deficits.
Perhaps the US is not an optimal currency zone. The solutions for one set of states (and for the record, I don't think protectionism will bring jobs back to the small towns of Ohio), may be very different to those for others.
In small town USA you have a negative feedback loop in place every bit as serious as that in Greece, only it's less obvious. Small towns lose employers, and have to cut funding for essential services. People leave, and property prices fall, trapping those who remain. Because of pensions granted in better times, these costs take up an ever greater portion of public sector budgets. Taxes are forced to rise, discouraging new employers from coming to the town or the state. And rising unemployment and hopelessness leads to a massive, appalling, opiates issue.
* There's a fabulous book about the decline of a US town. The big employer was a glass factory, which should - due to the breakability of the product and the opportunity to increase quality - be relatively immune to cheap Chinese competition. But private equity broke it, and then that broke the town.
The United States has been running serious deficits for decades. Much of this is because those on the west coast in particular sought to offshore manufacturing to enhance their profits. They were able to do this because of “free trade”. The result was the hollowing out of significant parts of the US , in particular the rust bucket states that swung the election Trump’s way. It has also massively undermined US power. The geeks of California have done incredibly well out of free trade and have bought politicians to promote it. But they have done terrible damage to the US.
I decided to read the Prime Minister's speech on The Spectator blog. I was struck by this comment:
"And in other areas like workers’ rights or the environment, the EU should be confident that we will not engage in a race to the bottom in the standards and protections we set. There is no serious political constituency in the UK which would support this – quite the opposite."
Interesting she writes off many on the Conservative side as "no serious political constituency" - on that at least we agree. It remains classic May-ism, the tent is all-encompassing, there's room for everyone.
The content is interesting and not devoid of some interesting ideas and observations. It's lacking a little in specifics and to this observer a "softer" Brexit than some might prefer in terms of maintaining a regulatory relationship with the EU. Clearly, trying to resolve the "border" issues while maintaining integrated supply chains and frictionless border controls is exercising a lot of minds in Whitehall.
The mood of the speech was "unifying" - whether that spirit of unity permeates as far as the Conservative Party remains to be seen.
It's Mascarpone Brexit; soft, vanilla and distinctly European.
I dispute your view that free trade has not worked for the US.
(Snip)
What's happened in the US is similar. The coasts and the major metropolitan areas have benefited enormously from free trade. Microsoft, Disney, Apple, Amazon, etc., are the huge beneficiaries who have leveraged smart, expensive people in California and Washington state, and become world leaders.
But that same free trade has not been great for middle American manufacturing. Factories in the Mid-West (many of whom were owned by Private Equity owners* who held back on investment) have shuttered.
The coastal states now, by and large, run large trade surpluses. The inland runs trade deficits.
Perhaps the US is not an optimal currency zone. The solutions for one set of states (and for the record, I don't think protectionism will bring jobs back to the small towns of Ohio), may be very different to those for others.
In small town USA you have a negative feedback loop in place every bit as serious as that in Greece, only it's less obvious. Small towns lose employers, and have to cut funding for essential services. People leave, and property prices fall, trapping those who remain. Because of pensions granted in better times, these costs take up an ever greater portion of public sector budgets. Taxes are forced to rise, discouraging new employers from coming to the town or the state. And rising unemployment and hopelessness leads to a massive, appalling, opiates issue.
* There's a fabulous book about the decline of a US town. The big employer was a glass factory, which should - due to the breakability of the product and the opportunity to increase quality - be relatively immune to cheap Chinese competition. But private equity broke it, and then that broke the town.
The United States has been running serious deficits for decades. Much of this is because those on the west coast in particular sought to offshore manufacturing to enhance their profits. They were able to do this because of “free trade”. The result was the hollowing out of significant parts of the US , in particular the rust bucket states that swung the election Trump’s way. It has also massively undermined US power. The geeks of California have done incredibly well out of free trade and have bought politicians to promote it. But they have done terrible damage to the US.
"Much of this is because those on the west coast in particular sought to offshore manufacturing to enhance their profits."
Offshoring reduced costs which means companies can sell products at more competitive prices (or higher quality for the same price). Better for customers and in turn better for shareholders.
Again, I answer: personation is absolutely bad, irrespective of whether it "swings constituencies" or not. It is stealing democracy from one's fellow citizens. I mean, why would I not shoplift Wispa bars from Tesco, given that however hard I work at it my individual thefts are never going to be >.0000005% of their turnover? (Snip)
Yes, but you are treating that bad thing as the only important issue.
In reality, our voting system is a result of a mishmash of sometimes contradictory requirements: for instance, we want the vote to be free from fraud, but also for as many eligible people to take part as possible.
These are somewhat contradictory, and it is vital that achieving one does not do undue damage to the other.
As an extreme example, a vote that was free from fraud, but disenfranchised a million people would be worse than one where there was one fraudulent vote, but everyone who could vote, and wanted to vote, did so. The former might be 'purer' from a fraud point of view, but would less represent the will of the electorate.
There is another important requirement: that people believe that the electoral system is valid. Someone might think that the risk of personation bankrupts the electoral process; someone else might consider the processes put in place to prevent it bankrupts it on other ways.
This is why my question, which you refuse to answer, is important.
I don't refuse to answer it. I just don't know what the answer is. I don't even have any sort of intuitive feel for it, and intuition is in any case generally useless, and in all other cases of criminal activity I can think of the answer tends to be, there's a lot more of it than you'd think. I am certain that serious attempts are made, and I'd say it was a slightly better than evens chance that a minimum of one parliamentary election has been swung by personation in the past 50 years. Much greater probability in local elections, where low turnout reduces the risk of being rumbled by the genuine article turning up to vote. Certainly, and what is important, the dangers are such that taking the minimum necessary measures to make personation very much more difficult, would be a proportionate and sensible thing to do.
So you are going on assumptions, and not evidence. Never a good way to change the electoral process.
The electoral process is a balance between sometimes-contradictory requirements. If you change one thing, you need to consider who that change will affect the other requirements. That's what I'm concerned has not been done.
You may take the 'minimum necessary measures' to make personation more difficult, and prevent many registered voters from voting. That'd be worse for the electoral process in many ways. We need to get the balance right.
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Nothing would reconcile you, however. You just want to vent at people who voted Leave.
I have already acknowledged that it was a good speech, if woefully late.
I have no particular beef with people who voted Leave. The people who sought their vote by frightening them with xenophobic lies, however, deserve to have a deep circle of hell awaiting them.
There is a chance it will turn out that May might actually have played this brilliantly - she could not possibly have gone faster without risking the fracturing of the Tory Party and possibly the country, but by tripping Article 50 early she has created a ticking clock to help her inch her party and maybe even the majority of Remainers and Leavers generally towards a compromise position where fewer and fewer will feel horrified by the result?
No, I don't think that's true. If she had led her party's opinion, forcing them to follow in her wake owing to the speed at which she moved, she could have established a party consensus quickly and effectively.
Now everyone is parsing her every last word for purity.
Maybe, but as a (submarine) Remainer the only direction she could have gone 'at speed' and not been dumped and replaced by a Leave candidate would have been towards a more populist Leave position. To take the party post a Leave victory towards a soft Brexit and not be culled en route needed some time and some guile.
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Nothing would reconcile you, however. You just want to vent at people who voted Leave.
I have already acknowledged that it was a good speech, if woefully late.
I have no particular beef with people who voted Leave. The people who sought their vote by frightening them with xenophobic lies, however, deserve to have a deep circle of hell awaiting them.
Do you refer to Camerons reference to the risk of a Third World War if we left the EU?
Ah, a perfect example of Leavers believing their own lies. David Cameron never mentioned World War Three.
I realise Leavers are desperate to evade the consequences of their xenophobic lies, but they need to start owning up and considering the effect that they have had on the nation's politics before the country can move on.
I decided to read the Prime Minister's speech on The Spectator blog. I was struck by this comment:
"And in other areas like workers’ rights or the environment, the EU should be confident that we will not engage in a race to the bottom in the standards and protections we set. There is no serious political constituency in the UK which would support this – quite the opposite."
Interesting she writes off many on the Conservative side as "no serious political constituency" - on that at least we agree. It remains classic May-ism, the tent is all-encompassing, there's room for everyone.
The content is interesting and not devoid of some interesting ideas and observations. It's lacking a little in specifics and to this observer a "softer" Brexit than some might prefer in terms of maintaining a regulatory relationship with the EU. Clearly, trying to resolve the "border" issues while maintaining integrated supply chains and frictionless border controls is exercising a lot of minds in Whitehall.
The mood of the speech was "unifying" - whether that spirit of unity permeates as far as the Conservative Party remains to be seen.
I read the text on the OrderOrder site (someone kindly posted a link to it downthread). I found the comments section hilarious - universal apoplexy at her abject sell-out to the EU... I presume nothing short of a declaration of war would satisfy the OrderOrder Brexit stormtroopers!
No, I don't think that's true. If she had led her party's opinion, forcing them to follow in her wake owing to the speed at which she moved, she could have established a party consensus quickly and effectively.
Now everyone is parsing her every last word for purity.
Well, to be fair to her she did start off by establishing a party (and indeed parliamentary) consensus quickly, with strong support from the electorate. Her problems came when she tried to consolidate it with a big election victory. Had she achieved that, she'd have been in a superb position to lead the consensus and face down the ultras.
It was a good plan, until she tried to execute it...
If Theresa May had used this as her conference speech in October 2016 instead of her wretched citizens of the world effort, there would be an outside chance that by now Britain would be starting to reach some form of reconciliation over Brexit. Instead, it is heading for 29 March 2019 from the EU confused, angry, divided and with no sign of the exit wounds healing over. Moreover, options that the speech canvasses are in practice now closed off, which they would not have been 18 months ago.
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
Nothing would reconcile you, however. You just want to vent at people who voted Leave.
I have already acknowledged that it was a good speech, if woefully late.
I have no particular beef with people who voted Leave. The people who sought their vote by frightening them with xenophobic lies, however, deserve to have a deep circle of hell awaiting them.
Do you refer to Camerons reference to the risk of a Third World War if we left the EU?
Ah, a perfect example of Leavers believing their own lies. David Cameron never mentioned World War Three.
I realise Leavers are desperate to evade the consequences of their xenophobic lies, but they need to start owning up and considering the effect that they have had on the nation's politics before the country can move on.
People who go on about personation without acknowledging the other conflicting requirements are saying it is the most important issue.
That's where this move is crass: it is addressing a problem that may not be a major issue, and is being done without due consideration of the consequences of the move.
As for your questions: yes, those are important. But can I add: 3 - The system should allow as many people who are registered to vote, to vote, as possible. 4 - The system should disenfranchise as few people who are registered to vote as possible.
Do you agree with these? (And there are others, as well). Any system needs to balance out all these requirements.
"Why are you so opposed to the cleanest possible system?"
I'm unsure you've considered that the 'cleanest possible system' would be, and further doubt that you've considered what that would mean for the electoral system.
3 - nothing I have suggested would stop that 4 - you have not presented any evidence that a reasonable Voter ID system would result in mass disenfranchisement of any sort
You have presented scare stories, exaggerations and misdirection.
You also have no idea as to my thought processes with regards to this topic. I have looked at evidence from other Voter ID systems, I have looked at how it has worked in Northern Ireland over a 30 year period.
A clean electoral system is one where all of those who are eligible to vote are able to register to vote and then can vote. Setting in place checks to ensure that only those who are registered can vote and that the person presenting to vote is actually entitled to do so. And yes, that means major reform of the absentee voting system - particularly with regards to unrestricted access to postal votes - as well as Voter ID checks at polling stations. Voting shouldn't be difficult. But it is also shouldn't be without some basic checks.
These are not dangerous ideas. They would not destroy democracy - they would reinforce it.
What scares you so much about taking along a piece of ID when you go to vote?
May’s scheme, by contrast, just seems unreasonable. When the EU has accused the UK of wanting to cherry-pick, I’ve usually shouted at my TV or radio or newspaper “We’re not cherry-picking!” Well, today Theresa May has made me a liar, because cherry-picking, of a sort liable to unravel the Single Market, has now become exactly what the UK government is proposing.
Finally catching up on the speech.
It felt like May at her best: comprehensive, detailed, and hitting all the One Nation notes. Of course, this should have happened a year ago but it seems that she’s had to wait for the thicker Brexiters (most of them, to be fair) to educate themselves on the reality of the situation.
However - and there is a however - I’m not clear on the dynamics. What this *looks* like is an offer to mirror the EU customs union and trading regulations almost entirely in order to retain very close access to the single market. FS and digital services were the only areas where she suggested the U.K. would want to deviate.
Let’s be honest, first, that this amounts to a recognition that a properly hard Brexit would be very economically damaging.
But some questions do follow, and I think Lilico gets this. - What happens when the EU creates new rules? Presumably we are forced to mirror, or lose access to a particular market sector. - If we are so closely aligned to the EU, what else do we have to trade in potential FTAs? If we want to allow in lesser-regulated hairdryers from China, say, then we’d be undercutting our own hairdryer manufacturers who are forced to follow regulations mirroring EU ones.
Surely Brexit can’t mean a kind of fictional sovereignty, based on no deviation from a EU we no longer have a voice in, and with no other FTAs to compensate...
Comments
Nothing good is coming of Brexit and the harm is much greater than it need have been. Theresa May's slowness is a major cause of that.
https://twitter.com/jamesmb/status/969567276017029120
My question isn't entirely rhetorical.
A closed mind doesn’t travel far.
Because the party in power 1997-2010 ran the country into too much debt.
I'm thinking of writing a piece called "The Ties That (No Longer) Bind", which looks at the extent to which differences in outlook are fracturing traditional political groupings because we're looking to distribute losses, rather than gains.
So, if you look at Italy today, you have two groups: the old who benefit from having savings in Euros; and the young, who lose out from not having jobs because of an overvalued currency. One group's gain is the other's loss.
What's happened in the US is similar. The coasts and the major metropolitan areas have benefited enormously from free trade. Microsoft, Disney, Apple, Amazon, etc., are the huge beneficiaries who have leveraged smart, expensive people in California and Washington state, and become world leaders.
But that same free trade has not been great for middle American manufacturing. Factories in the Mid-West (many of whom were owned by Private Equity owners* who held back on investment) have shuttered.
The coastal states now, by and large, run large trade surpluses. The inland runs trade deficits.
Perhaps the US is not an optimal currency zone. The solutions for one set of states (and for the record, I don't think protectionism will bring jobs back to the small towns of Ohio), may be very different to those for others.
In small town USA you have a negative feedback loop in place every bit as serious as that in Greece, only it's less obvious. Small towns lose employers, and have to cut funding for essential services. People leave, and property prices fall, trapping those who remain. Because of pensions granted in better times, these costs take up an ever greater portion of public sector budgets. Taxes are forced to rise, discouraging new employers from coming to the town or the state. And rising unemployment and hopelessness leads to a massive, appalling, opiates issue.
* There's a fabulous book about the decline of a US town. The big employer was a glass factory, which should - due to the breakability of the product and the opportunity to increase quality - be relatively immune to cheap Chinese competition. But private equity broke it, and then that broke the town.
How is the huge smuggling problem currently dealt with ?
Who thought Brexiteers were all freaks.
He couldn't believe
That we'd voted to leave
So he went on about it for weeks*
* Sadly aeons doesn't rhyme with Meeks
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/02/isis-follower-umar-haque-jihadist-child-army-east-london--radicalise
I've just ordered it through amazon!
They only wanted to keep the foreigners out. No one told them about all the other stuff
He hasn't a clue and very much doubt he understood much of TM's extensive and detailed speech as it was obviously way beyond him
That would require effort.
Makes the booze all the more satisfying, mind. I can see why spirits are so popular in colder climes.
Nottingham also had a good bit according to my friend from Beeston. As did Lincolnshire..
So yes seems Leicester is the oddly snow free lol
In reality, our voting system is a result of a mishmash of sometimes contradictory requirements: for instance, we want the vote to be free from fraud, but also for as many eligible people to take part as possible.
These are somewhat contradictory, and it is vital that achieving one does not do undue damage to the other.
As an extreme example, a vote that was free from fraud, but disenfranchised a million people would be worse than one where there was one fraudulent vote, but everyone who could vote, and wanted to vote, did so. The former might be 'purer' from a fraud point of view, but would less represent the will of the electorate.
There is another important requirement: that people believe that the electoral system is valid. Someone might think that the risk of personation bankrupts the electoral process; someone else might consider the processes put in place to prevent it bankrupts it on other ways.
This is why my question, which you refuse to answer, is important.
I have no particular beef with people who voted Leave. The people who sought their vote by frightening them with xenophobic lies, however, deserve to have a deep circle of hell awaiting them.
Do you agree with the following?
1 - There should be an electoral register that is only open to those with the legal right to vote at a given election. Processes should be in place to ensure that this register is clean.
2 - Only those registered to vote should be given a ballot paper and allowed to complete it in the polling station. Processes should be in place to ensure that the person seeking to vote is the person they say they are and that they are on the register of eligible voters.
Surely these two things are a necessary part of a free and fair electoral system.
To deny that there should be all reasonable steps taken to ensure that ballot papers are only issued to those people claiming the right to vote just seems incredible to me.
If you want to participate in our electoral system you have to register and then you should also have to demonstrate that you are the person you say you are when it comes to the actual voting part.
Voter ID works in many places - why should it be different here.
It works in Northern Ireland - and no-one is citing any of the potential problems you are claiming will happen if we establish a system for the rest of the UK.
Why are you so opposed to the cleanest possible system?
What exactly is so bad about being Singapore?
And more broadly their human rights record.
We don't want to be Singapore
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/two-women-fight-at-ukip-rally-outside-pub-in-hartlepool-a3527061.html
https://capx.co/mays-unrealistic-speech-showed-she-really-is-cherry-picking-now/
May’s scheme, by contrast, just seems unreasonable. When the EU has accused the UK of wanting to cherry-pick, I’ve usually shouted at my TV or radio or newspaper “We’re not cherry-picking!” Well, today Theresa May has made me a liar, because cherry-picking, of a sort liable to unravel the Single Market, has now become exactly what the UK government is proposing.
Not all US glass companies have failed.
"Corning Glass Inc has a rich history of innovation starting with lightbulb glass in the late 19th century to modern cell phone glass today. Our investors experience a reliable dividend and explosive growth with each new invention. We have approximately 35000 employees worldwide and $10B in sales."
"In small town USA you have a negative feedback loop in place every bit as serious as that in Greece etc"
– You mean positive feedback loop. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback
For 2016, these were the changes in median family income by state. (I've only done a few because it's laborious manually typing, but you can look at the data yourself on page 3 of the doc I've linked.) Median (i.e. average) incomes rose very strongly on the West Coast, and were weak in the Rust Belt and the Deep South. The East Coast was more mixed.
Is population is contented as its government provides for its own citizens. Our voters are angry because despite their votes successive governments are failing many of them. If people don't feel their votes matter and change things they may well say what is the point.
Other companies got owned by private equity, who dramatically reduced investment to pay themselves dividends. This doomed the plants to early obsolescence.
It was not Free Trade that fucked Lancaster, Ohio, but the short sightedness and greed of financiers with NetJets subscriptions.
I decided to read the Prime Minister's speech on The Spectator blog. I was struck by this comment:
"And in other areas like workers’ rights or the environment, the EU should be confident that we will not engage in a race to the bottom in the standards and protections we set. There is no serious political constituency in the UK which would support this – quite the opposite."
Interesting she writes off many on the Conservative side as "no serious political constituency" - on that at least we agree. It remains classic May-ism, the tent is all-encompassing, there's room for everyone.
The content is interesting and not devoid of some interesting ideas and observations. It's lacking a little in specifics and to this observer a "softer" Brexit than some might prefer in terms of maintaining a regulatory relationship with the EU. Clearly, trying to resolve the "border" issues while maintaining integrated supply chains and frictionless border controls is exercising a lot of minds in Whitehall.
The mood of the speech was "unifying" - whether that spirit of unity permeates as far as the Conservative Party remains to be seen.
Now everyone is parsing her every last word for purity.
That's where this move is crass: it is addressing a problem that may not be a major issue, and is being done without due consideration of the consequences of the move.
As for your questions: yes, those are important. But can I add:
3 - The system should allow as many people who are registered to vote, to vote, as possible.
4 - The system should disenfranchise as few people who are registered to vote as possible.
Do you agree with these? (And there are others, as well). Any system needs to balance out all these requirements.
"Why are you so opposed to the cleanest possible system?"
I'm unsure you've considered that the 'cleanest possible system' would be, and further doubt that you've considered what that would mean for the electoral system.
I do hope you write that article!
I realise Leavers are desperate to evade the consequences of their xenophobic lies, but they need to start owning up and considering the effect that they have had on the nation's politics before the country can move on.
Offshoring reduced costs which means companies can sell products at more competitive prices (or higher quality for the same price). Better for customers and in turn better for shareholders.
NEW THREAD
The electoral process is a balance between sometimes-contradictory requirements. If you change one thing, you need to consider who that change will affect the other requirements. That's what I'm concerned has not been done.
You may take the 'minimum necessary measures' to make personation more difficult, and prevent many registered voters from voting. That'd be worse for the electoral process in many ways. We need to get the balance right.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/may/09/is-david-cameron-right-leaving-eu-brexit-increase-risk-war
It was a good plan, until she tried to execute it...
4 - you have not presented any evidence that a reasonable Voter ID system would result in mass disenfranchisement of any sort
You have presented scare stories, exaggerations and misdirection.
You also have no idea as to my thought processes with regards to this topic. I have looked at evidence from other Voter ID systems, I have looked at how it has worked in Northern Ireland over a 30 year period.
A clean electoral system is one where all of those who are eligible to vote are able to register to vote and then can vote. Setting in place checks to ensure that only those who are registered can vote and that the person presenting to vote is actually entitled to do so. And yes, that means major reform of the absentee voting system - particularly with regards to unrestricted access to postal votes - as well as Voter ID checks at polling stations. Voting shouldn't be difficult. But it is also shouldn't be without some basic checks.
These are not dangerous ideas. They would not destroy democracy - they would reinforce it.
What scares you so much about taking along a piece of ID when you go to vote?
It felt like May at her best: comprehensive, detailed, and hitting all the One Nation notes. Of course, this should have happened a year ago but it seems that she’s had to wait for the thicker Brexiters (most of them, to be fair) to educate themselves on the reality of the situation.
However - and there is a however - I’m not clear on the dynamics. What this *looks* like is an offer to mirror the EU customs union and trading regulations almost entirely in order to retain very close access to the single market.
FS and digital services were the only areas where she suggested the U.K. would want to deviate.
Let’s be honest, first, that this amounts to a recognition that a properly hard Brexit would be very economically damaging.
But some questions do follow, and I think Lilico gets this.
- What happens when the EU creates new rules? Presumably we are forced to mirror, or lose access to a particular market sector.
- If we are so closely aligned to the EU, what else do we have to trade in potential FTAs? If we want to allow in lesser-regulated hairdryers from China, say, then we’d be undercutting our own hairdryer manufacturers who are forced to follow regulations mirroring EU ones.
Surely Brexit can’t mean a kind of fictional sovereignty, based on no deviation from a EU we no longer have a voice in, and with no other FTAs to compensate...
Or can it?