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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » From the Commons library a treasure trove of data for election geeks and its FREE to download
To mark the 100th anniversary today of the 1918 election, the first one in which women were able to vote, the Commons library has produced an extraordinarily good document with just about every detail that you would want from every General Election over the past century.
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GIN doesn’t like or understand Parliamentary sovereignty.
I wish it wasn't so, but it is.
Even I am thoroughly sick of it. Let's either do her deal and leave or remain. But get on with it.
You have to admire the EU considering we held all the aces and they needed us more than we need them.
https://twitter.com/liamfox/status/1073298501746991104?s=21
But the reality is that Mays deal is dead and her premiership with it. The choice facing the UK is no deal or remain.
We could choose not to enforce a hard border but another nation could bring a complaint which could force a hard border.
“There is nothing in WTO rules that forces anyone to put up border posts,” said WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell on a visit to Dublin last week.
“Someone has to bring a complaint and say that their interests have been hurt.”
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/wto-says-its-rules-would-not-force-eu-or-uk-to-erect-hard-irish-border-1.3710136?mode=amp
Given how many nations are looking to use the WTO to get a better deal from the UK a successful complaint is inevitable.
So what happens if Labour/LibDem/SNP/DUP force one in the near future.
If there is/was no substantial rider possible why not simply tell her MPs that.
How long would this process take? I'm sure we could stall it long enough to come up with a better arrangement with Ireland and the EU (and after we've left the EU they won't have the incentive to try and bully us into staying).
I also think it would reflect very badly on any country trying to enforce this, so I'm not sure this would be inevitable anyway.
https://twitter.com/philipsime/status/1073516384095739904?s=21
To allow two looks like Theresa May.
One note, though: the supporting spreadsheet doesn't appear to behave too well in libreoffice (for me at least).
My sense is that the party is holding up in the seats it currently holds, and has realistic ambitions for a few more, but only that. Unless something drastic changes, 15-16ish seems a likely figure for Lib Dem seats at the next GE. In my neck of the woods, both Oxford West & Abingdon and Oxford City are strong local parties and performing well.
Elsewhere the position is pretty dire. My constituency (nominally in the top 50 LD targets) has just had a very underwhelming PPC selection process and I think it's likely that the Lib Dems will be third next time round, despite coming a very creditable second within recent memory.
The activists I know at national level (generally from the social liberal wing) are very underwhelmed with Cable's "reforms" - I found myself laughing out loud at the critique one of them posted to Facebook the other day.
One interesting angle is that there's an on-going informal pact between the Greens and Lib Dems around Oxford, which has led to some electoral success (Layla Moran probably owes her seat to it) and could conceivably work well on a national scale.
https://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/1073526065346301952
Juncker: "Have you got any lager?"
There have been national security exceptions to WTO rules that have been accepted. But that usually (or maybe even always) related to countries in armed conflict; I can't think of anything analagous.
The issue here is that if the Chilean government complained that Ireland - with whom we had a WTO/MFN relationship with - was given preferential access, and was effectively excluded from tariffs, then they might very well rule against us. (This is why the technology solution works longer term: British (and Irish) firms are still paying tariffs, it's just that enforcement takes place away from the border.
Now, we could of course just ignore the WTO ruling. The US (and China) ignore WTO rulings all the time. But if we're going to not pay any attention to treaties with international bodies, then we might as well just sign up to the backstop and abrogate anyway.
I am really dubious that this would ever happen.
The DUP were quite clear they didn't want a customs barrier in the Irish Sea.
https://twitter.com/RCorbettMEP/status/1073521199869816832
Simples
Do people really believe that they will?
The remedy the WTO would insist on would not be a border in Northern Ireland, but that the Uruguayan meat exporter was allowed to send their produce to the UK tariff free.
Which, by the way, means that the Professor Minford policy of "zero tariffs" would be a sensible way forward, except that it would be a disaster for rural seats in the rest of the UK.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/14/inclusion-health-an-irish-answer-to-the-homelessness-crisis
Could such an approach be scaled up and applied widely?
https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2018/12/13/full-speech-sir-ivan-rogers-on-brexit/
https://torrentfreak.com/rightsholders-say-latest-article-13-text-wont-close-the-value-gap-181214/
FFS its 2018. Why do people still argue tariffs work?
Tariff free trade with new countries doesn't sound such a frightening prospect, which is why I suspect they never tried this argument first.
They have already been making noises.
Conservative MPs, a great number of whom are from rural constituencies, are not going to vote to eliminate tariffs on the imports of agricultural produce from places with much lower costs of production. (And New Zealand land costs are perhaps 10% of that of the UK, so that would include NZ.)
A hard border is not going to happen.
MFN is a misnomer. It's really just lowest common denominator.
It is the British who want the border. The trouble is there is nowhere to put it. It can't go on the Ireland border because of the GFA and related considerations dating back 100 years, and it can't go down the Irish Sea because the DUP won't tolerate it and nor would the thinking unionist once it's been thought about.
The options are: unify Ireland; stay in the CU/Single Market/EU; or the Brexiteer's preferred option, technological magic (with emphasis on the magic rather than the technology).
As we’ve seen the ERG aren’t interested in compromise and welcome No Deal.
No need for magic as a trade deal trumps other considerations. The problem is the EU don't want to be bound into needing to give us a deal but it's the only solution that respects everyone.