Notice that there isn't an option for Leave with a deal harder than May's.
That is because May's deal IS Hard Brexit.
And it will certainly be a harder Brexit than many of those now supporting No Deal were asking for three years ago.
I wonder how many of those now supporting No Deal have considered the cost/benefit and risks/rewards of that compared to May's deal.
The backstop is not.
Do you and your family have the ability to return to Australia?
I appreciate that this is a personal question and I would not normally ask it but you are probably the most gung-ho Brexiteer currently on PB and give the impression that no price would be too great to pay to achieve it. I am always left wondering whether, unlike most of us, you have an escape route if you proved to be wrong.
No.
We were there on a temporary visa which has long-since expired. To emigrate would require starting from scratch. Plus I was there because of my dad's work not my own.
I am not a gung-ho Brexiteer in my eyes, I would be prepared to Remain which most other Brexiteers aren't. I am a gung-ho democrat.
My issue, which most others don't seem to care about, is that to me the backstop is a violation of fundamental human rights. I would no more be prepared to suspend democracy due to the backstop than I would to terminate democracy and live under a Chinese One Party state. Democracy is unquestionable for me, all other considerations come afterwards.
Logically your unusual position is in theory consistent. I think in practice it breaks down given that the NI Assembly has already been suspended for two and a half years, so the NI region would not lose democracy during the WA phase, as it doesnt have it anyway. (Of course NI gets to participate in the Westminster govt, but that would still be the case under the WA, so no loss there either.)
Notice that there isn't an option for Leave with a deal harder than May's.
That is because May's deal IS Hard Brexit.
And it will certainly be a harder Brexit than many of those now supporting No Deal were asking for three years ago.
I wonder how many of those now supporting No Deal have considered the cost/benefit and risks/rewards of that compared to May's deal.
The backstop is not.
Do you and your family have the ability to return to Australia?
I appreciate that this is a personal question and I would not normally ask it but you are probably the most gung-ho Brexiteer currently on PB and give the impression that no price would be too great to pay to achieve it. I am always left wondering whether, unlike most of us, you have an escape route if you proved to be wrong.
No.
We were there on a temporary visa which has long-since expired. To emigrate would require starting from scratch. Plus I was there because of my dad's work not my own.
I am not a gung-ho Brexiteer in my eyes, I would be prepared to Remain which most other Brexiteers aren't. I am a gung-ho democrat.
My issue, which most others don't seem to care about, is that to me the backstop is a violation of fundamental human rights. I would no more be prepared to suspend democracy due to the backstop than I would to terminate democracy and live under a Chinese One Party state. Democracy is unquestionable for me, all other considerations come afterwards.
Do you think a Norway-style Brexit would represent the same kind of violation on a UK-wide basis?
A Norway-style Brexit without any backstop would be fine with me.
Even though it also means accepting rules we don't have a say in?
It means choosing to accept rules and we could unilaterally terminate that at any time.
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
Notice that there isn't an option for Leave with a deal harder than May's.
That is because May's deal IS Hard Brexit.
And it will certainly be a harder Brexit than many of those now supporting No Deal were asking for three years ago.
I wonder how many of those now supporting No Deal have considered the cost/benefit and risks/rewards of that compared to May's deal.
The backstop is not.
Do you and your family have the ability to return to Australia?
I appreciate that this is a personal question and I would not normally ask it but you are probably the most gung-ho Brexiteer currently on PB and give the impression that no price would be too great to pay to achieve it. I am always left wondering whether, unlike most of us, you have an escape route if you proved to be wrong.
No.
We were there on a temporary visa which has long-since expired. To emigrate would require starting from scratch. Plus I was there because of my dad's work not my own.
I am not a gung-ho Brexiteer in my eyes, I would be prepared to Remain which most other Brexiteers aren't. I am a gung-ho democrat.
My issue, which most others don't seem to care about, is that to me the backstop is a violation of fundamental human rights. I would no more be prepared to suspend democracy due to the backstop than I would to terminate democracy and live under a Chinese One Party state. Democracy is unquestionable for me, all other considerations come afterwards.
Logically your unusual position is in theory consistent. I think in practice it breaks down given that the NI Assembly has already been suspended for two and a half years, so the NI region would not lose democracy during the WA phase, as it doesnt have it anyway. (Of course NI gets to participate in the Westminster govt, but that would still be the case under the WA, so no loss there either.)
The NI assembly hasn't been suspended by external powers but by those that the NI voters elected. No different to what happened in Belgium not having a government for years. NI has democracy even if those they've elected choose not to sit. At the next election if the NI voters are sick of the DUP and Sinn Fein acting the way they are they could choose to elect Alliance, SDLP, UUP or someone new.
Under the backstop there would be no future elections for matters covered by the backstop. That isn't acceptable.
Westminster won't control matters reserved to the backstop so electing MPs there is moot.
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
A referendum in 1937 or 38 possibly, by 1939 inevitable.
Thats the problem of referendums. They do not move with events.
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
Peace was popular, as delivered by Neville Chamberlain. There were regular opinion surveys carried out during the war -- see "mass observation". Standing alone was not really a myth so much as nuanced. During the first months of the war, nothing much happened, then Europe fell and it was just us for a bit. Dunkirk, Battle of Britain, Blitz, U-boats, Pearl Harbour. Generally we were on the back foot till 1942 ("the end of the beginning").
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
Winning, or at least being on the winning side when it all stopped, or at least it all being over, was very popular, as I recall.
My father, a man who was a) a pacifist (wouldn't let me have toy guns) and b) an anti-fascist (who once considered going to fight in Spain) was, my mother said, ready to 'go' when called.
Before anyone points out the illogicalities, logic wasn't always his strong point, as was made abundantly clear to myself and my sister as we grew up.
Notice that there isn't an option for Leave with a deal harder than May's.
That is because May's deal IS Hard Brexit.
And it will certainly be a harder Brexit than many of those now supporting No Deal were asking for three years ago.
I wonder how many of those now supporting No Deal have considered the cost/benefit and risks/rewards of that compared to May's deal.
The backstop is not.
Do you and your family have the ability to return to Australia?
.
No.
We were there on a temporary visa which has long-since expired. To emigrate would require starting from scratch. Plus I was there because of my dad's work not my own.
I am not a gung-ho Brexiteer in my eyes, I would be prepared to Remain which most other Brexiteers aren't. I am a gung-ho democrat.
My issue, which most others don't seem to care about, is that to me the backstop is a violation of fundamental human rights. I would no more be prepared to suspend democracy due to the backstop than I would to terminate democracy and live under a Chinese One Party state. Democracy is unquestionable for me, all other considerations come afterwards.
Logically your unusual position is in theory consistent. I think in practice it breaks down given that the NI Assembly has already been suspended for two and a half years, so the NI region would not lose democracy during the WA phase, as it doesnt have it anyway. (Of course NI gets to participate in the Westminster govt, but that would still be the case under the WA, so no loss there either.)
The NI assembly hasn't been suspended by external powers but by those that the NI voters elected. No different to what happened in Belgium not having a government for years. NI has democracy even if those they've elected choose not to sit. At the next election if the NI voters are sick of the DUP and Sinn Fein acting the way they are they could choose to elect Alliance, SDLP, UUP or someone new.
Under the backstop there would be no future elections for matters covered by the backstop. That isn't acceptable.
Westminster won't control matters reserved to the backstop so electing MPs there is moot.
Ultimately Westminster does control what happens in the UK regardless of our treaty obligations.
Notice that there isn't an option for Leave with a deal harder than May's.
That is because May's deal IS Hard Brexit.
And it will certainly be a harder Brexit than many of those now supporting No Deal were asking for three years ago.
I wonder how many of those now supporting No Deal have considered the cost/benefit and risks/rewards of that compared to May's deal.
The backstop is not.
Do you and your family have the ability to return to Australia?
I appreciate that this is a personal question and I would not normally ask it but you are probably the most gung-ho Brexiteer currently on PB and give the impression that no price would be too great to pay to achieve it. I am always left wondering whether, unlike most of us, you have an escape route if you proved to be wrong.
No.
We were there on a temporary visa which has long-since expired. To emigrate would require starting from scratch. Plus I was there because of my dad's work not my own.
I am not a gung-ho Brexiteer in my eyes, I would be prepared to Remain which most other Brexiteers aren't. I am a gung-ho democrat.
My issue, which most others don't seem to care about, is that to me the backstop is a violation of fundamental human rights. I would no more be prepared to suspend democracy due to the backstop than I would to terminate democracy and live under a Chinese One Party state. Democracy is unquestionable for me, all other considerations come afterwards.
Do you think a Norway-style Brexit would represent the same kind of violation on a UK-wide basis?
A Norway-style Brexit without any backstop would be fine with me.
Even though it also means accepting rules we don't have a say in?
It means choosing to accept rules and we could unilaterally terminate that at any time.
There’s no exit clause in the Good Friday Agreement.
So a majority of the country wants to still Leave the EU Deal or No Deal is Boris' policy, only 43% want to Revoke and Remain
You really are making yourself look silly. More Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf stuff. There is no mandate for no deal. Boris Johnson and his apologists are putting the final nails in the coffin of Tory economic competence, and it is all about his ego. I don't think he cares how long he is PM. Just so he can say he was, like a boy scout sowing on a badge of honour. Pathetic.
You are the one who is delusional. There is no mandate for anything other than Leaving. That is why we are in this multiple way split.
There is no mandate for Remain, none for a 2nd referendum, none for May's deal. The only mandate is for leaving and thanks to Remain MPs like Grieve the deal died.
The only mandated idea is that we must leave and the most popular form of leave is now no deal. If it happens you can thank Grieve etc for facilitating it.
MPs should act in a way that represents the best interests of their constituents, the referendum does not remove that requirement on how to act. They should stick to their conscience and do what Erskine May tells them is their duty, even if it means losing their seat.
MPs who are saying that leaving without a deal is apocalyptic but then voted against the deal haven't done that. And that is hundreds of MPs.
Leaving the EU is not good for the best interests of their constituents.
Such was the claim before the referendum. That claim was rejected.
The mandate of the MPs in the current Parliament postdates the referendum. Few, if any, MPs stood on a platform of no-deal in 2017. You can’t cherrypick your mandates. Then again, as an Australian, this shitstorm doesn’t effect you anyway.
He's yet another expat wishing calamity on us from a safe distance? I didn't realise. Shameful.
On PB, if not IRL, the probability of being a Leaver increases with distance from the UK. The further away from ground zero you are, the more likely to set the bomb off just cos it's pretty.
I do not believe in Tyranny of the Majority to strip individuals of their inalienable rights.
Except when it comes to removing the rights of UK citizens to enjoy FoM in the EU obviously,
That's not an inalienable right.
It should be. People with your irrational philosophy have removed rights that my kids were born with without any benefit to them in return. It is another reason why Brexit is immoral.
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
Winning, or at least being on the winning side when it all stopped, or at least it all being over, was very popular, as I recall.
My father, a man who was a) a pacifist (wouldn't let me have toy guns) and b) an anti-fascist (who once considered going to fight in Spain) was, my mother said, ready to 'go' when called.
Before anyone points out the illogicalities, logic wasn't always his strong point, as was made abundantly clear to myself and my sister as we grew up.
+1. Lovely story. Sounds like you were quite rightly proud of him.
On PB, if not IRL, the probability of being a Leaver increases with distance from the UK. The further away from ground zero you are, the more likely to set the bomb off just cos it's pretty.
I wonder if this also applies to the Remainiac version which is "fuck everything, go ahead and do No Deal, maximize the contradictions then rejoin later".
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
I apologise if this has already been mentioned, but this wide-ranging article by John Cruddas on the political positioning of Labour is very interesting indeed. It places the internal controversy over Brexit in a wider context:
Notice that there isn't an option for Leave with a deal harder than May's.
That is because May's deal IS Hard Brexit.
And it will certainly be a harder Brexit than many of those now supporting No Deal were asking for three years ago.
I wonder how many of those now supporting No Deal have considered the cost/benefit and risks/rewards of that compared to May's deal.
The backstop is not.
Do you and your family have the ability to return to Australia?
I appreciate that this is a personal question and I would not normally ask it but you are probably the most gung-ho Brexiteer currently on PB and give the impression that no price would be too great to pay to achieve it. I am always left wondering whether, unlike most of us, you have an escape route if you proved to be wrong.
No.
We were there on a temporary visa which has long-since expired. To emigrate would require starting from scratch. Plus I was there because of my dad's work not my own.
I am not a gung-ho Brexiteer in my eyes, I would be prepared to Remain which most other Brexiteers aren't. I am a gung-ho democrat.
My issue, which most others don't seem to care about, is that to me the backstop is a violation of fundamental human rights. I would no more be prepared to suspend democracy due to the backstop than I would to terminate democracy and live under a Chinese One Party state. Democracy is unquestionable for me, all other considerations come afterwards.
You do not think the people of Northern Ireland should have the right to decide whether they want the backstop or not because a minority might not want it. You also believe that the right to vote in a democracy is so inalienable that is perfectly legitimate to deny it to certain lawful, taxpaying residents of the UK. Your attachment to democracy is not necessarily watertight.
I do not believe in Tyranny of the Majority to strip individuals of their inalienable rights.
All lawful, taxpaying citizens of the UK should get to vote. No ifs, no buts.
No-one is advocating stripping anyone of their inalienable right to vote in Northern Ireland. However, if a right is inalienable it does not depend on citizenship. Yet you are happy for the tyranny of the majority to deprive lawfully resident taxpayers in the UK of the right to choose who governs them.
I do not believe in Tyranny of the Majority to strip individuals of their inalienable rights.
For many people (tho to be fair I'll accept that you do not have this motive) the removal of rights from other people (by means such as removal of various human rights legislation) was the actual point of Brexit. The existence of bad motives in human politics (not just Brexit) is frequently overlooked.
So a majority of the country wants to still Leave the EU Deal or No Deal is Boris' policy, only 43% want to Revoke and Remain
You long he is PM. Just so he can say he was, like a boy scout sowing on a badge of honour. Pathetic.
You are the one who is delusional. There is no mandate for anything other than Leaving. That is why we are in this multiple way split.
There is no mandate for Remain, none for a 2nd referendum, none for May's deal. The only mandate is for leaving and thanks to Remain MPs like Grieve the deal died.
The only mandated idea is that we must leave and the most popular form of leave is now no deal. If it happens you can thank Grieve etc for facilitating it.
MPs should act in a way that represents the best interests of their constituents, the referendum does not remove that requirement on how to act. They should stick to their conscience and do what Erskine May tells them is their duty, even if it means losing their seat.
MPs who are saying that leaving without a deal is apocalyptic but then voted against the deal haven't done that. And that is hundreds of MPs.
Leaving the EU is not good for the best interests of their constituents.
Such was the claim before the referendum. That claim was rejected.
The mandate of the MPs in the current Parliament postdates the referendum. Few, if any, MPs stood on a platform of no-deal in 2017. You can’t cherrypick your mandates. Then again, as an Australian, this shitstorm doesn’t effect you anyway.
He's yet another expat wishing calamity on us from a safe distance? I didn't realise. Shameful.
On PB, if not IRL, the probability of being a Leaver increases with distance from the UK. The further away from ground zero you are, the more likely to set the bomb off just cos it's pretty.
and so often within the UK in terms of proximity to the Labour market.
Nevertheless the OP who stated he was Australian was wrong, so I should withdraw my specific comment in that regard.
Notice that there isn't an option for Leave with a deal harder than May's.
That is because May's deal IS Hard Brexit.
And it will certainly be a harder Brexit than many of those now supporting No Deal were asking for three years ago.
I wonder how many of those now supporting No Deal have considered the cost/benefit and risks/rewards of that compared to May's deal.
The backstop is not.
Do you and your family have the ability to return to Australia?
I appreciate that this is a personal question and I would not normally ask it but you are probably the most gung-ho Brexiteer currently on PB and give the impression that no price would be too great to pay to achieve it. I am always left wondering whether, unlike most of us, you have an escape route if you proved to be wrong.
No.
We were there on a temporary visa which has long-since expired. To emigrate would require starting from scratch. Plus I was there because of my dad's work not my own
My issue, which most others don't seem to care about, is that to me the backstop is a violation of fundamental human rights. I would no more be prepared to suspend democracy due to the backstop than I would to terminate democracy and live under a Chinese One Party state. Democracy is unquestionable for me, all other considerations come afterwards.
Logically your unusual position is in theory consistent. I think in practice it breaks down given that the NI Assembly has already been suspended for two and a half years, so the NI region would not lose democracy during the WA phase, as it doesnt have it anyway. (Of course NI gets to participate in the Westminster govt, but that would still be the case under the WA, so no loss there either.)
The NI assembly hasn't been suspended by external powers but by those that the NI voters elected. No different to what happened in Belgium not having a government for years. NI has democracy even if those they've elected choose not to sit. At the next election if the NI voters are sick of the DUP and Sinn Fein acting the way they are they could choose to elect Alliance, SDLP, UUP or someone new.
Under the backstop there would be no future elections for matters covered by the backstop. That isn't acceptable.
Westminster won't control matters reserved to the backstop so electing MPs there is moot.
Westminster retains the absolute power to resile from the backstop - which refutes your absolutist argument.
Notice that there isn't an option for Leave with a deal harder than May's.
That is because May's deal IS Hard Brexit.
And it will certainly be a harder Brexit than many of those now supporting No Deal were asking for three years ago.
I wonder how many of those now supporting No Deal have considered the cost/benefit and risks/rewards of that compared to May's deal.
The backstop is not.
The backstop is there because we are in control of part of Ireland and the Irish Government, based on nearly a millennium of experience and millions of deaths, don’t trust our government to preserve the status quo that allowed them to persuade their people to ratify a peace treaty. Those chickens are coming home to roost.
You were not here for the troubles. You were the other side of the world. You can’t blithly moan about an administrative arrangement like the backstop when lives are at stake. You have not experienced it.
Your protestations that the backstop is some sort of imperial oppression by the EU just shows how privileged you are never to have suffered the real thing. The world isn’t split into oppressors and oppressed. The backstop is there because we are not trusted, rightly, by the Irish Government to keep our word. God knows the Irish people have enough history of that happening.
The backstop is a minor inconvenience to pay for the fact we created a mess in Ireland we never sorted out. We, in that conflict, were not the good guys. Germany suffered reparations and occupation as a result of their not being the good guys in those conflicts. We should suck this one up.
I was not here for the Troubles?
I missed some of it, but I'm from Warrington. I was at the time the same age as one of the kids murdered by the IRA when my town was bombed.
We were not the bad guys. I couldn't care less if the Irish Government don't trust us to keep our word, that is not justification for stripping NI Unionists or others of their fundamental human right to elect the people who set their laws.
If it is a fundamental human right to elect the people who set your laws why are you opposed to some lawfully resident UK taxpayers having that right?
Support for No Deal and May's Deal now at 43% ie almost the same as support for Remain, most of those prefer No Deal to Revoke and Remain.
The 13% who back a soft Brexit are key to a majority but they still back Brexit.
While 81% of Remainers back Revoke and Remain 59% of Leavers back No Deal Brexit as the country polarised, with 73% of Leavers backing Leaving with No Deal or May's Deal
Support for Remain or No Deal is 80% - a MASSIVE majority of the country. As Remain is more popular than No Deal, we must Remain. Clearly.
Wrong, No Deal beat Revoke with Yougov in April.
However Yougov has also showed a Canada style FTA for GB is more popular than both No Deal and Revoke
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
Tories make up for their lack of support for Churchill beforehand and during the early part of at the time, with very enthusiastic support for him after the event.
I do not believe in Tyranny of the Majority to strip individuals of their inalienable rights.
Except when it comes to removing the rights of UK citizens to enjoy FoM in the EU obviously,
That's not an inalienable right.
Who's deciding what rights are inalienable?
I had this conversation with @Charles once. It ended up with him stating that if a right had to be granted it wasn't a right. I looked at the Ten Commandments and Magna Carta, shook my head, muttered "seriously, WTAF" and went to the shops. People are good at demanding rights for people they like, very good at removing rights from people they don't like, and extraordinarily good at wilfully refusing to acknowledge the logical contradiction.
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
But remember France was not invaded until eight months or so into the war, in May 1940. Up to then we'd had the so-called phoney war in which almost nothing happened apart from the distribution of gas masks.
On PB, if not IRL, the probability of being a Leaver increases with distance from the UK. The further away from ground zero you are, the more likely to set the bomb off just cos it's pretty.
I wonder if this also applies to the Remainiac version which is "fuck everything, go ahead and do No Deal, maximize the contradictions then rejoin later".
I find the interrogation of Philip Thompson and his right to live in Australia somewhat unnecessary.
There are tonnes of Remainers (as well as Brexiteers) posting on here who live outside the UK. There are also Scottish Nationalists who don't live in Scotland.
So what !
AFAIK, no-one has suggested the Remainer viewpoint of Edmund_in_Tokyo is somehow less valid because he is not Edmund_in_Torquay.
My point was simply whether he had an escape route if it went belly up. I think that is relevant to someone who does seem to be advocating Brexit at any cost.
He has told us that he doesn't so that's the end of it as far as I am concerned.
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
But remember France was not invaded until eight months or so into the war, in May 1940. Up to then we'd had the so-called phoney war in which almost nothing happened apart from the distribution of gas masks.
And a significant part of the Epping Tory Association trying to express no confidence in its MP, the PM.
Notice that there isn't an option for Leave with a deal harder than May's.
That is because May's deal IS Hard Brexit.
And it will certainly be a harder Brexit than many of those now supporting No Deal were asking for three years ago.
I wonder how many of those now supporting No Deal have considered the cost/benefit and risks/rewards of that compared to May's deal.
The backstop is not.
The backstop is there because we are in control of part of Ireland and the Irish Government, based on nearly a millennium of experience and millions of deaths, don’t trust our government to preserve the status quo that allowed them to persuade their people to ratify a peace treaty. Those chickens are coming home to roost.
You were not here for the troubles. You were the other side of the world. You can’t blithly moan about an administrative arrangement like the backstop when lives are at stake. You have not experienced it.
Your protestations that the backstop is some sort of imperial oppression by the EU just shows how privileged you are never to have suffered the real thing. The world isn’t split into oppressors and oppressed. The backstop is there because we are not trusted, rightly, by the Irish Government to keep our word. God knows the Irish people have enough history of that happening.
The backstop is a minor inconvenience to pay for the fact we created a mess in Ireland we never sorted out. We, in that conflict, were not the good guys. Germany suffered reparations and occupation as a result of their not being the good guys in those conflicts. We should suck this one up.
I was not here for the Troubles?
I missed some of it, but I'm from Warrington. I was at the time the same age as one of the kids murdered by the IRA when my town was bombed.
We were not the bad guys. I couldn't care less if the Irish Government don't trust us to keep our word, that is not justification for stripping NI Unionists or others of their fundamental human right to elect the people who set their laws.
If it is a fundamental human right to elect the people who set your laws why are you opposed to some lawfully resident UK taxpayers having that right?
I am not opposed to any lawfully resident UK citizens having that right.
Being a taxpayer is neither here nor there. While restricting the franchise to taxpayers might help my party I object to any lawfully resident citizens not having the right.
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
Peace was popular, as delivered by Neville Chamberlain. There were regular opinion surveys carried out during the war -- see "mass observation". Standing alone was not really a myth so much as nuanced. During the first months of the war, nothing much happened, then Europe fell and it was just us for a bit. Dunkirk, Battle of Britain, Blitz, U-boats, Pearl Harbour. Generally we were on the back foot till 1942 ("the end of the beginning").
My father (RIP) who was 13 at the outbreak always said that he feared there plenty of people of extreme right wing views in Britain who would have enthusiastically helped the Nazis had they invaded, so no, the idea that were completely united is a bit of a myth. He was quite right wing on many things, but he hated fascists and their divisive philosophy. Like many people of his generation he did not glory in war. He watched the blitz, knew plenty that did not come back and said it should never be allowed to happen again. He would have hated the Brexit Party.
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
Tories make up for their lack of support for Churchill beforehand and during the early part of at the time, with very enthusiastic support for him after the event.
Boris is Churchill, May is Chamberlain, Hunt is Halifax.
Notice that there isn't an option for Leave with a deal harder than May's.
That is because May's deal IS Hard Brexit.
And it will certainly be a harder Brexit than many of those now supporting No Deal were asking for three years ago.
I wonder how many of those now supporting No Deal have considered the cost/benefit and risks/rewards of that compared to May's deal.
The backstop is not.
The backstop is there because we are in control of part of Ireland and the Irish Government, based on nearly a millennium of experience and millions of deaths, don’t trust our government to preserve the status quo that allowed them to persuade their people to ratify a peace treaty. Those chickens are coming home to roost.
You were not here for the troubles. You were the other side of the world. You can’t blithly moan about an administrative arrangement like the backstop when lives are at stake. You have not experienced it.
Your protestations that the backstop is some sort of imperial oppression by the EU just shows how privileged you are never to have suffered the real thing. The world isn’t split into oppressors and oppressed. The backstop is there because we are not trusted, rightly, by the Irish Government to keep our word. God knows the Irish people have enough history of that happening.
The backstop is a minor inconvenience to pay for the fact we created a mess in Ireland we never sorted out. We, in that conflict, were not the good guys. Germany suffered reparations and occupation as a result of their not being the good guys in those conflicts. We should suck this one up.
I was not here for the Troubles?
I missed some of it, but I'm from Warrington. I was at the time the same age as one of the kids murdered by the IRA when my town was bombed.
We were not the bad guys. I couldn't care less if the Irish Government don't trust us to keep our word, that is not justification for stripping NI Unionists or others of their fundamental human right to elect the people who set their laws.
If it is a fundamental human right to elect the people who set your laws why are you opposed to some lawfully resident UK taxpayers having that right?
Philip’s argument is well meaning, but, as I have quickly demonstrated, utterly specious.
Notice that there isn't an option for Leave with a deal harder than May's.
That is because May's deal IS Hard Brexit.
And it will certainly be a harder Brexit than many of those now supporting No Deal were asking for three years ago.
I wonder how many of those now supporting No Deal have considered the cost/benefit and risks/rewards of that compared to May's deal.
The backstop is not.
Do you and your family have the ability to return to Australia?
I appreciate that this is a personal question and I would not normally ask it but you are probably the most gung-ho Brexiteer currently on PB and give the impression that no price would be too great to pay to achieve it. I am always left wondering whether, unlike most of us, you have an escape route if you proved to be wrong.
No.
We were there on a temporary visa which has long-since expired. To emigrate would require starting from scratch. Plus I was there because of my dad's work not my own.
I am not a gung-ho Brexiteer in my eyes, I would be prepared to Remain which most other Brexiteers aren't. I am a gung-ho democrat.
My issue, which most others don't seem to care about, is that to me the backstop is a violation of fundamental human rights. I would no more be prepared to suspend democracy due to the backstop than I would to terminate democracy and live under a Chinese One Party state. Democracy is unquestionable for me, all other considerations come afterwards.
You do not think the people of Northern Ireland should have the right to decide whether they want the backstop or not because a minority might not want it. You also believe that the right to vote in a democracy is so inalienable that is perfectly legitimate to deny it to certain lawful, taxpaying residents of the UK. Your attachment to democracy is not necessarily watertight.
I do not believe in Tyranny of the Majority to strip individuals of their inalienable rights.
All lawful, taxpaying citizens of the UK should get to vote. No ifs, no buts.
No-one is advocating stripping anyone of their inalienable right to vote in Northern Ireland. However, if a right is inalienable it does not depend on citizenship. Yet you are happy for the tyranny of the majority to deprive lawfully resident taxpayers in the UK of the right to choose who governs them.
According to the UN Charter of Human Rights and roughly every democracy in the entire globe you are wrong.
I do not believe in Tyranny of the Majority to strip individuals of their inalienable rights.
Except when it comes to removing the rights of UK citizens to enjoy FoM in the EU obviously,
That's not an inalienable right.
Who's deciding what rights are inalienable?
I had this conversation with @Charles once. It ended up with him stating that if a right had to be granted it wasn't a right. I looked at the Ten Commandments and Magna Carta, shook my head, muttered "seriously, WTAF" and went to the shops. People are good at demanding rights for people they like, very good at removing rights from people they don't like, and extraordinarily good at wilfully refusing to acknowledge the logical contradiction.
Notice that there isn't an option for Leave with a deal harder than May's.
That is because May's deal IS Hard Brexit.
And it will certainly be a harder Brexit than many of those now supporting No Deal were asking for three years ago.
I wonder how many of those now supporting No Deal have considered the cost/benefit and risks/rewards of that compared to May's deal.
The backstop is not.
Do you and your family have the ability to return to Australia?
I appreciate that this is a personal question and I would not normally ask it but you are probably the most gung-ho Brexiteer currently on PB and give the impression that no price would be too great to pay to achieve it. I am always left wondering whether, unlike most of us, you have an escape route if you proved to be wrong.
No.
We were there on a temporary visa which has long-since expired. To emigrate would require starting from scratch. Plus I was there because of my dad's work not my own.
I am not a gung-ho Brexiteer in my eyes, I would be prepared to Remain which most other Brexiteers aren't. I am a gung-ho democrat.
My issue, which most others don't seem to care about, is that to me the backstop is a violation of fundamental human rights. I would no more be prepared to suspend democracy due to the backstop than I would to terminate democracy and live under a Chinese One Party state. Democracy is unquestionable for me, all other considerations come afterwards.
Do you think a Norway-style Brexit would represent the same kind of violation on a UK-wide basis?
A Norway-style Brexit without any backstop would be fine with me.
Even though it also means accepting rules we don't have a say in?
It means choosing to accept rules and we could unilaterally terminate that at any time.
There’s no exit clause in the Good Friday Agreement.
I have no objection to honouring the GFA. The fundamental principle of the GFA was compromise and cooperation not one party forcing the other to accept laws without a say.
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
Tories make up for their lack of support for Churchill beforehand and during the early part of at the time, with very enthusiastic support for him after the event.
Boris is Churchill, May is Chamberlain, Hunt is Halifax.
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
Tories make up for their lack of support for Churchill beforehand and during the early part of at the time, with very enthusiastic support for him after the event.
Boris is Churchill, May is Chamberlain, Hunt is Halifax.
Corbyn as a Brexiteer is Attlee
By no stretch of the imagination or wishful thinking can make Boris like Churchill
Westminster retains the absolute power to resile from the backstop - which refutes your absolutist argument.
Not according to the Attorney General. If that was the case I'd have no issue. But the EU is opposed to any lawful unilateral exit.
The AG cannot limit UK sovereignty by his opinion. However loud his voice might be.
Sure, it is a treaty obligation; we retain the owner to abrogate any such treaty - not without consequences, of course. But that is no different in kind from the no deal Brexit you are entirely happy with. And in the former case, we retain the ability to argue justification for any treaty abrogation. A no deal Brexit is, by contrast, an absolute and binary decision.
Here's one for HYUFD to get his head round from today's YouGov: * 28% of respondents make No Deal their 1st choice, 39% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 54% make it their first, second, or third choice; leaving 46% making it their worst choice. * 43% of respondents make remain their 1st choice; 50% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 58% make it their 1st, 2nd or 3rd choice; leaving 42% making it their worst choice. * So, head to head, Remain is the most favoured 1st, 2nd and 3rd combination choice, while No Deal is seen as worst choice by most people. https://twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/status/1143846391095144448
A National Unity government of Remainers who lost the referendum
As opposed to your preference for a government of National Disunity and Division led by a man of dubious morals and a lack of capability that wishes to advance a policy that said referendum gave him no mandate for
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
Tories make up for their lack of support for Churchill beforehand and during the early part of at the time, with very enthusiastic support for him after the event.
Boris is Churchill, May is Chamberlain, Hunt is Halifax.
Corbyn as a Brexiteer is Attlee
Bit early for mind-bending substances isn't it?
You have provided me with the funniest moment today.
Westminster retains the absolute power to resile from the backstop - which refutes your absolutist argument.
Not according to the Attorney General. If that was the case I'd have no issue. But the EU is opposed to any lawful unilateral exit.
The attorney generals advice is that we may be unable to unilaterally exit the backstop in a manner that is consistent with international law (in highly unlikely scenarios). Parliament would still be able to choose to do it anyway. Countries break international laws all the time.
"However, the legal risk remains unchanged that if through no such demonstrable failure of either party, but simply because of intractable differences, that situation does arise, the United Kingdom would have, at least while the fundamental circumstances remained the same, no internationally lawful means of exiting the Protocol’s arrangements, save by agreement."
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
Tories make up for their lack of support for Churchill beforehand and during the early part of at the time, with very enthusiastic support for him after the event.
Boris is Churchill, May is Chamberlain, Hunt is Halifax.
Corbyn as a Brexiteer is Attlee
By no stretch of the imagination or wishful thinking can make Boris like Churchill
Never ever
I think he must mean the stupid bulldog from the insurance adverts.
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
Tories make up for their lack of support for Churchill beforehand and during the early part of at the time, with very enthusiastic support for him after the event.
Boris is Churchill, May is Chamberlain, Hunt is Halifax.
Westminster retains the absolute power to resile from the backstop - which refutes your absolutist argument.
Not according to the Attorney General. If that was the case I'd have no issue. But the EU is opposed to any lawful unilateral exit.
The AG cannot limit UK sovereignty by his opinion. However loud his voice might be.
Sure, it is a treaty obligation; we retain the owner to abrogate any such treaty - not without consequences, of course. But that is no different in kind from the no deal Brexit you are entirely happy with. And in the former case, we retain the ability to argue justification for any treaty abrogation. A no deal Brexit is, by contrast, an absolute and binary decision.
A no deal Brexit isn't a unilateral abrogation. It is the entirely lawful consequence of Article 50 of the Treaties of the European Union as inserted by the Lisbon Treaty as ratified by the Irish (but not us) at referendum.
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
Tories make up for their lack of support for Churchill beforehand and during the early part of at the time, with very enthusiastic support for him after the event.
Boris is Churchill, May is Chamberlain, Hunt is Halifax.
Corbyn as a Brexiteer is Attlee
By no stretch of the imagination or wishful thinking can make Boris like Churchill
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
Tories make up for their lack of support for Churchill beforehand and during the early part of at the time, with very enthusiastic support for him after the event.
Boris is Churchill, May is Chamberlain, Hunt is Halifax.
Corbyn as a Brexiteer is Attlee
By no stretch of the imagination or wishful thinking can make Boris like Churchill
Never ever
Whatever else Attlee was or wasn't, he was without doubt a competent chairman of a Labour Cabinet which included some powerful egos, and an effective manager.
Biden still has a big polling lead, but it's hard to shake the feeling that he's defying political gravity and won't be able to do so forever. He insults millenials, he scores 0 identity politics points by being a creepy old white man, and he doesn't have any policies to generate excitement. He has the Dem establishment on his side, but they'd happily jump ship to many of the other candidates- perhaps even Warren- if necessary. The main thing he has going for him is Obama nostalgia and a desire to get back to pre-Trump normality, both extremely strong impulses in the Dem psyche right now. I'm not convinced it's enough.
Sanders has to be disappointed with his poll numbers at the moment. He can't blame poor name recognition and has been getting a decent amount of media coverage, though a lot of it is negative. I'm not sure people have really noticed his innovative campaign which has been doing lots of (IMO very good) genuine activism alongside the traditional campaigning. He's not going to fade away- his support has a pretty hard floor compared to most of the candidates- but it looks like right now any path to victory requires three things: to achieve some sort of cut-through that he's so far lacked, to resist what will be a huge establishment force arrayed against him if his numbers start picking up, and for his opponents to help him out a bit by having inefficiently distributed vote shares. His big hope is that people haven't started paying attention yet and will be excited by his full-throated leftism when they do.
Warren seems to be a best-of-both-worlds candidate for a lot of people. Just left enough to be exciting, but not so left as to be scary. Actual socialists will never jump ship from Bernie to her, but that's hardly a fatal blow. If Biden falls back and it starts to look like she and Bernie are the frontrunners, a lot of the current establishment support for Biden will jump ship to her camp without too much complaint. Her main liability- and it's a big one- is a perception that she wouldn't win against Trump. The Pocahontas debacle really raises doubts in that regard.
Harris... Harris who? She's totally slipped under the radar recently, and other than some demographic factors I don't really see what her USP is. Where is she on the political spectrum compared to the others? What's her pitch? Her time as DA is a liability too. Her main hope at the moment seems to be that some other candidates fall away and she mops up their support as an acceptable default option, but unless her campaign finds a way to raise her profile and get some buzz I don't think she's going to have much success.
The shine has started to come off Buttigieg. In a time where everything is defined against Trump, his intelligentsia credentials got him some attention. "Why couldn't we have somebody like that leading us, instead of this boorish oaf?" people sighed. But the buzz faded away, and now his response to the South Bend shooting has starkly reminded people that there's more to politics than competence- values matter. And, while we're at it, there's more to competence than booksmarts- as a young mayor, he lacks the level of experience many would want in a president. Perhaps getting more airtime will remind centrist democrats of that warm tingly feeling they get when politicians speak eloquently and make historical references, but I don't see how he gets to the nomination.
O'Rourke also seems to have failed to turn initial buzz into anything sustained. His recent war tax announcement is a desperate grab for attention and I really don't understand the strategy behind it. Maybe he's hoping to be where the right flank of the party goes after Biden gets photographed pinching a gold star mother's ass? I think the media is still willing to pay attention to him if his campaign reinvents itself, but right now I don't know a path to victory for him.
Here's one for HYUFD to get his head round from today's YouGov: * 28% of respondents make No Deal their 1st choice, 39% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 54% make it their first, second, or third choice; leaving 46% making it their worst choice. * 43% of respondents make remain their 1st choice; 50% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 58% make it their 1st, 2nd or 3rd choice; leaving 42% making it their worst choice. * So, head to head, Remain is the most favoured 1st, 2nd and 3rd combination choice, while No Deal is seen as worst choice by most people. https://twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/status/1143846391095144448
So leaving with the CU & SM gives two thirds of the country one of their top two choices and only 5% their worst case scenario. So by any means a good solution from the current mess. How on earth do we get there?
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
Tories make up for their lack of support for Churchill beforehand and during the early part of at the time, with very enthusiastic support for him after the event.
Boris is Churchill, May is Chamberlain, Hunt is Halifax.
Corbyn as a Brexiteer is Attlee
Boy are you going to be disappointed.
Diehard Remainers certainly will be when Boris wins
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
Tories make up for their lack of support for Churchill beforehand and during the early part of at the time, with very enthusiastic support for him after the event.
Boris is Churchill, May is Chamberlain, Hunt is Halifax.
Corbyn as a Brexiteer is Attlee
By no stretch of the imagination or wishful thinking can make Boris like Churchill
Never ever
He has made some absurd suggestions that are worthy of Comical Ali, but that is the most absurd to date. He still hasn't told me what Boris has achieved. Churchill achieved more in his worst alcoholic blurred black dog days than Boris has achieved in his best.
I suppose we should laugh. Brexit fanatics are so obsessed with the war it is pathetic. WW2 was fought to oppose fascism, not nurture it. It was a war against a hostile foreign power, not a swiveleyed Colonel Blimp movement that advances the foreign policy agenda of a hostile foreign power ffs!
Back on-topic. Unless you are planning to watch the debates, think about any open backs or lays you might have on Betfair. (Other way round if you are watching.)
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
Tories make up for their lack of support for Churchill beforehand and during the early part of at the time, with very enthusiastic support for him after the event.
Boris is Churchill, May is Chamberlain, Hunt is Halifax.
Corbyn as a Brexiteer is Attlee
Boy are you going to be disappointed.
Diehard Remainers certainly will be when Boris suns9
Here's one for HYUFD to get his head round from today's YouGov: * 28% of respondents make No Deal their 1st choice, 39% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 54% make it their first, second, or third choice; leaving 46% making it their worst choice. * 43% of respondents make remain their 1st choice; 50% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 58% make it their 1st, 2nd or 3rd choice; leaving 42% making it their worst choice. * So, head to head, Remain is the most favoured 1st, 2nd and 3rd combination choice, while No Deal is seen as worst choice by most people. https://twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/status/1143846391095144448
All the Brexit options combined beat Remain at every stage.
Remain is not over 50% as a 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th choice.
54% of voters do not rank No Deal last and as their 4th choice
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
Tories make up for their lack of support for Churchill beforehand and during the early part of at the time, with very enthusiastic support for him after the event.
Boris is Churchill, May is Chamberlain, Hunt is Halifax.
Corbyn as a Brexiteer is Attlee
Bit early for mind-bending substances isn't it?
You have provided me with the funniest moment today.
A young lady once said 'always happy to oblige a gentleman.'
In my hearing, I hasten to add, not to me.
And now I must get ready for the Wine Appreciation Group to which I belong. Italian wines this month.
Westminster retains the absolute power to resile from the backstop - which refutes your absolutist argument.
Not according to the Attorney General. If that was the case I'd have no issue. But the EU is opposed to any lawful unilateral exit.
The as yet unsigned Withdrawal Agreement prevents the UK from unilateral exit from the backstop. If we are OK with never having a deal with the EU in anything at all, we can dispense with the backstop. Personally I think this overreach, but it's there because the UK has refused to engage seriously on a real problem.
Westminster retains the absolute power to resile from the backstop - which refutes your absolutist argument.
Not according to the Attorney General. If that was the case I'd have no issue. But the EU is opposed to any lawful unilateral exit.
The as yet unsigned Withdrawal Agreement prevents the UK from unilateral exit from the backstop. If we are OK with never having a deal with the EU in anything at all, we can dispense with the backstop. Personally I think this overreach, but it's there because the UK has refused to engage seriously on a real problem.
My preference is a backstop-less deal. Failing that I'm ok with no deal. Is that hard to understand?
Remain is not over 50% as a 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th choice.
That's hardly a meaningful point. If Remain were the first choice of 49%, the second choice of 49%, the third choice of 1% and the fourth choice of 1%, your statement would still be true.
I apologise if this has already been mentioned, but this wide-ranging article by John Cruddas on the political positioning of Labour is very interesting indeed. It places the internal controversy over Brexit in a wider context:
Stronger on the problem than on the answer. But he is right that Labour cannot escape or abandon its history and culture. Hence its logical future is as a minority Left party, tied to the unions and working classes, of the sort found across Europe. Its difficulty is that the power in the party and most of its members come from the educated middle classes, which logically should (and may well) become the base for a LibDem social democratic party.
If the extremists infesting the Tory party go off and team up with Farage, leaving the rest to run some sort of Christian Democrat outfit, we’d have more sensible politics.
Here's one for HYUFD to get his head round from today's YouGov: * 28% of respondents make No Deal their 1st choice, 39% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 54% make it their first, second, or third choice; leaving 46% making it their worst choice. * 43% of respondents make remain their 1st choice; 50% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 58% make it their 1st, 2nd or 3rd choice; leaving 42% making it their worst choice. * So, head to head, Remain is the most favoured 1st, 2nd and 3rd combination choice, while No Deal is seen as worst choice by most people. https://twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/status/1143846391095144448
No Deal is the first preference of a majority of Leavers and No Deal and May's Deal combined the first choice of a majority of Tories.
Remain is the choice of most Remainers, Labour and LD voters but 36% of Labour voters put a Brexit option as their first choice compared to only 20% of Tory voters who put Remain as their first choice
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on Thornberry. Time to get your hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
When the LibDem contest is over we can go back to ignoring Ed Davey. We last had a government of national unity to fight the second world war. Not all of the war, just the middle bit. Winning the war was a popular cause. On Brexit, we cannot even achieve Cabinet unity or ERG unity.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
Tories make up for their lack of support for Churchill beforehand and during the early part of at the time, with very enthusiastic support for him after the event.
Boris is Churchill, May is Chamberlain, Hunt is Halifax.
Corbyn as a Brexiteer is Attlee
Bit early for mind-bending substances isn't it?
You have provided me with the funniest moment today.
A young lady once said 'always happy to oblige a gentleman.'
In my hearing, I hasten to add, not to me.
And now I must get ready for the Wine Appreciation Group to which I belong. Italian wines this month.
Notice that there isn't an option for Leave with a deal harder than May's.
That is because May's deal IS Hard Brexit.
And it will certainly be a harder Brexit than many of those now supporting No Deal were asking for three years ago.
I wonder how many of those now supporting No Deal have considered the cost/benefit and risks/rewards of that compared to May's deal.
The backstop is not.
Do you and your family have the ability to return to Australia?
I appreciate that this is a personal question and I would not normally ask it but you are probably the most gung-ho Brexiteer currently on PB and give the impression that no price would be too great to pay to achieve it. I am always left wondering whether, unlike most of us, you have an escape route if you proved to be wrong.
No.
We were there on a temporary visa which has long-since expired. To emigrate would require starting from scratch. Plus I was there because of my dad's work not my own.
I am not a gung-ho Brexiteer in my eyes, I would be prepared to Remain which most other Brexiteers aren't. I am a gung-ho democrat.
My afterwards.
You watertight.
I do not believe in Tyranny of the Majority to strip individuals of their inalienable rights.
All lawful, taxpaying citizens of the UK should get to vote. No ifs, no buts.
No-one is advocating stripping anyone of their inalienable right to vote in Northern Ireland. However, if a right is inalienable it does not depend on citizenship. Yet you are happy for the tyranny of the majority to deprive lawfully resident taxpayers in the UK of the right to choose who governs them.
According to the UN Charter of Human Rights and roughly every democracy in the entire globe you are wrong.
Not according to the UNCHR. The wording it uses it entirely ambiguous. But, yes, the tyranny of the majority in most countries deems that certain law-abiding, taxpaying residents should not have a say in who decides the laws they live under or the taxes they pay. And you are fine with that. As am I. The difference between us is that I don't claim that the right to vote is an inalienable human right that in all circumstances should prevent a majority getting what it wants.
Hardly. He would have had a lower salary when running his business as more tax efficient using dividends. Indeed according to the Guarding his company broke the law in order to further reduce his tax by £100k
Brexit or no Brexit the only thing that would create the chain reaction necessary to bring sanity back to our politics would be for Corbyn to fall under the proverbial bus. He can't win because his appeal is too limited but fear of him means the Tories are panicked into accepting the poisonous Johnson. We are stuck either side of a U-bend which is so clogged up no normal solvents will clear it.
Come on hands dirty
Thornberry is probably the worst of all outcomes - narrow minded, selfrighteous and vindictive,
I agree. But our politics aren't ready for nice guys yet. The zeitgeist might change and in a year or two we'll have Milliband D V Greening V Swinson and we'll all live happily ever after.
They’ll all be in the same party by then.
Ed Davey floating possibility of Gov of National Unity - maybe under Cooper or Benn.
I wonder if the war really was as popular, especilly in the early years, as today's "standing alone" mythologists claim.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
After Poland was invades and certainly France was invades the move has shifted to war
Tories make up for their lack of support for Churchill beforehand and during the early part of at the time, with very enthusiastic support for him after the event.
Boris is Churchill, May is Chamberlain, Hunt is Halifax.
Corbyn as a Brexiteer is Attlee
By no stretch of the imagination or wishful thinking can make Boris like Churchill
Never ever
He has made some absurd suggestions that are worthy of Comical Ali, but that is the most absurd to date. He still hasn't told me what Boris has achieved. Churchill achieved more in his worst alcoholic blurred black dog days than Boris has achieved in his best.
I suppose we should laugh. Brexit fanatics are so obsessed with the war it is pathetic. WW2 was fought to oppose fascism, not nurture it. It was a war against a hostile foreign power, not a swiveleyed Colonel Blimp movement that advances the foreign policy agenda of a hostile foreign power ffs!
+1 i think the porkies about painting and making buses were a crude attempt to channel Churchill and his painting and bricklaying. Next Boris will be telling us he too has a siren suit!
How anyone can believe a word Boris says is beyond words...
Here's one for HYUFD to get his head round from today's YouGov: * 28% of respondents make No Deal their 1st choice, 39% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 54% make it their first, second, or third choice; leaving 46% making it their worst choice. * 43% of respondents make remain their 1st choice; 50% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 58% make it their 1st, 2nd or 3rd choice; leaving 42% making it their worst choice. * So, head to head, Remain is the most favoured 1st, 2nd and 3rd combination choice, while No Deal is seen as worst choice by most people. https://twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/status/1143846391095144448
No Deal is the first preference of a majority of Leavers and No Deal and May's Deal combined the first choice of a majority of Tories.
Remain is the choice of most Remainers, Labour and LD voters but 30% of Labour voters put a Brexit option as their first choice compared to only 20% of Tory voters who put Remain as their first choice
Head to head, among all voters, No Deal is less popular than Remaining.
Remain is not over 50% as a 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th choice.
That's hardly a meaningful point. If Remain were the first choice of 49%, the second choice of 49%, the third choice of 1% and the fourth choice of 1%, your statement would still be true.
A doubt is forming in my mind that HY might be seeing polls not as an objective measure of opinion but as a crude weapon to manipulate in order to justify whatever he happens to think at the time?
Remain is not over 50% as a 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th choice.
That's hardly a meaningful point. If Remain were the first choice of 49%, the second choice of 49%, the third choice of 1% and the fourth choice of 1%, your statement would still be true.
I don't think that's what he meant (though it's how I interpreted it at first). If I understand correctly, he's saying that if you did a cumulative score for 1st choices, 1st+2nd choices, and 1st+2nd+3rd choices, then Remain wouldn't have 50% of the share for any of those. Remember if you add up all the 1st choices for different options the total will be 100, but then if you add up the cumulative 1st and 2nd choices, the total will be 200, so Remain would need 100 to have an overall majority.
That last sentence should also show pretty clearly why it's a bogus analysis by HYUFD. Because for any option on any kind of ranked voting to have an overall majority by the second choice it'd have to get 100% of people ranking it first or second, and beyond the second choice it'd be impossible. Total garbage, but it's impressive how fast he came up with a plausible-sounding nonsense methodology to spin the results.
Here's one for HYUFD to get his head round from today's YouGov: * 28% of respondents make No Deal their 1st choice, 39% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 54% make it their first, second, or third choice; leaving 46% making it their worst choice. * 43% of respondents make remain their 1st choice; 50% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 58% make it their 1st, 2nd or 3rd choice; leaving 42% making it their worst choice. * So, head to head, Remain is the most favoured 1st, 2nd and 3rd combination choice, while No Deal is seen as worst choice by most people. https://twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/status/1143846391095144448
So leaving with the CU & SM gives two thirds of the country one of their top two choices and only 5% their worst case scenario. So by any means a good solution from the current mess. How on earth do we get there?
It depends on people accepting that Brexit has failed and so we can accept damage limitation. A bigger issue for Leavers than Remainers, I think, although Remainers will be pretty sore about accepting a failed policy they opposed.
Here's one for HYUFD to get his head round from today's YouGov: * 28% of respondents make No Deal their 1st choice, 39% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 54% make it their first, second, or third choice; leaving 46% making it their worst choice. * 43% of respondents make remain their 1st choice; 50% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 58% make it their 1st, 2nd or 3rd choice; leaving 42% making it their worst choice. * So, head to head, Remain is the most favoured 1st, 2nd and 3rd combination choice, while No Deal is seen as worst choice by most people. https://twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/status/1143846391095144448
All the Brexit options combined beat Remain at every stage.
Remain is not over 50% as a 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th choice.
54% of voters do not rank No Deal last and as their 4th choice
Dangerous to conflate Brexit and No Deal in your answer. People want to respect the democratic mandate, but that's very different to a (non-elected) PM pushing through No Deal against the wishes of the HoC and 72% of the country.
Comments
Clearly an international statesman, bestriding the world stage.
I doubt we would have gone to war in 1939 if the issue had been put to a referendum.
Under the backstop there would be no future elections for matters covered by the backstop. That isn't acceptable.
Westminster won't control matters reserved to the backstop so electing MPs there is moot.
Thats the problem of referendums. They do not move with events.
My father, a man who was a) a pacifist (wouldn't let me have toy guns) and b) an anti-fascist (who once considered going to fight in Spain) was, my mother said, ready to 'go' when called.
Before anyone points out the illogicalities, logic wasn't always his strong point, as was made abundantly clear to myself and my sister as we grew up.
PS Good luck guys
Illegal ones
And Sting
Buttigieg a close 4th, everyone else nowhere
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/26/labour-working-class-heartlands-remain-brexit
Adding Warren and Sanders together is err errm..
Nevertheless the OP who stated he was Australian was wrong, so I should withdraw my specific comment in that regard.
However Yougov has also showed a Canada style FTA for GB is more popular than both No Deal and Revoke
He has told us that he doesn't so that's the end of it as far as I am concerned.
Being a taxpayer is neither here nor there. While restricting the franchise to taxpayers might help my party I object to any lawfully resident citizens not having the right.
Corbyn as a Brexiteer is Attlee
Never ever
Sure, it is a treaty obligation; we retain the owner to abrogate any such treaty - not without consequences, of course. But that is no different in kind from the no deal Brexit you are entirely happy with.
And in the former case, we retain the ability to argue justification for any treaty abrogation. A no deal Brexit is, by contrast, an absolute and binary decision.
* 28% of respondents make No Deal their 1st choice, 39% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 54% make it their first, second, or third choice; leaving 46% making it their worst choice.
* 43% of respondents make remain their 1st choice; 50% make it their 1st or 2nd choice; 58% make it their 1st, 2nd or 3rd choice; leaving 42% making it their worst choice.
* So, head to head, Remain is the most favoured 1st, 2nd and 3rd combination choice, while No Deal is seen as worst choice by most people.
https://twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/status/1143846391095144448
"However, the legal risk remains unchanged that if through no such demonstrable failure of either party, but simply because of intractable differences, that situation does arise, the United Kingdom would have, at least while the fundamental circumstances remained the same, no internationally lawful means of exiting the Protocol’s arrangements, save by agreement."
Biden still has a big polling lead, but it's hard to shake the feeling that he's defying political gravity and won't be able to do so forever. He insults millenials, he scores 0 identity politics points by being a creepy old white man, and he doesn't have any policies to generate excitement. He has the Dem establishment on his side, but they'd happily jump ship to many of the other candidates- perhaps even Warren- if necessary. The main thing he has going for him is Obama nostalgia and a desire to get back to pre-Trump normality, both extremely strong impulses in the Dem psyche right now. I'm not convinced it's enough.
Sanders has to be disappointed with his poll numbers at the moment. He can't blame poor name recognition and has been getting a decent amount of media coverage, though a lot of it is negative. I'm not sure people have really noticed his innovative campaign which has been doing lots of (IMO very good) genuine activism alongside the traditional campaigning. He's not going to fade away- his support has a pretty hard floor compared to most of the candidates- but it looks like right now any path to victory requires three things: to achieve some sort of cut-through that he's so far lacked, to resist what will be a huge establishment force arrayed against him if his numbers start picking up, and for his opponents to help him out a bit by having inefficiently distributed vote shares. His big hope is that people haven't started paying attention yet and will be excited by his full-throated leftism when they do.
Warren seems to be a best-of-both-worlds candidate for a lot of people. Just left enough to be exciting, but not so left as to be scary. Actual socialists will never jump ship from Bernie to her, but that's hardly a fatal blow. If Biden falls back and it starts to look like she and Bernie are the frontrunners, a lot of the current establishment support for Biden will jump ship to her camp without too much complaint. Her main liability- and it's a big one- is a perception that she wouldn't win against Trump. The Pocahontas debacle really raises doubts in that regard.
Harris... Harris who? She's totally slipped under the radar recently, and other than some demographic factors I don't really see what her USP is. Where is she on the political spectrum compared to the others? What's her pitch? Her time as DA is a liability too. Her main hope at the moment seems to be that some other candidates fall away and she mops up their support as an acceptable default option, but unless her campaign finds a way to raise her profile and get some buzz I don't think she's going to have much success.
cont.
O'Rourke also seems to have failed to turn initial buzz into anything sustained. His recent war tax announcement is a desperate grab for attention and I really don't understand the strategy behind it. Maybe he's hoping to be where the right flank of the party goes after Biden gets photographed pinching a gold star mother's ass? I think the media is still willing to pay attention to him if his campaign reinvents itself, but right now I don't know a path to victory for him.
I suppose we should laugh. Brexit fanatics are so obsessed with the war it is pathetic. WW2 was fought to oppose fascism, not nurture it. It was a war against a hostile foreign power, not a swiveleyed Colonel Blimp movement that advances the foreign policy agenda of a hostile foreign power ffs!
Remain is not over 50% as a 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th choice.
54% of voters do not rank No Deal last and as their 4th choice
In my hearing, I hasten to add, not to me.
And now I must get ready for the Wine Appreciation Group to which I belong. Italian wines this month.
FFS - the entire world heard it.
If the extremists infesting the Tory party go off and team up with Farage, leaving the rest to run some sort of Christian Democrat outfit, we’d have more sensible politics.
the first choice of a majority of Tories.
Remain is the choice of most Remainers, Labour and LD voters but 36% of Labour voters put a Brexit option as their first choice compared to only 20% of Tory voters who put Remain as their first choice
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jun/26/firm-co-founded-by-jeremy-hunt-broke-law
Earnings very different to salary.
That last sentence should also show pretty clearly why it's a bogus analysis by HYUFD. Because for any option on any kind of ranked voting to have an overall majority by the second choice it'd have to get 100% of people ranking it first or second, and beyond the second choice it'd be impossible. Total garbage, but it's impressive how fast he came up with a plausible-sounding nonsense methodology to spin the results.