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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » It’s looking like a no-deal brexit or else an Article 50 exten

If the front pages have this right then the chances of Johnson getting his deal through look very thin indeed and so the only options remaining are a no-deal Brexit or else it’s an Article 50 extension.
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Last northbound run with the old stock before the new Mark 5s take over.
I'm pleased they picked the Germans. As external ' others ' to whip up Xenophobia against for the coming battle at least they are big, rich, powerful and able to look after themselves. It also makes the choice the country faces all the more stark. Are we really going to regress as a nation back into faux WW2 jingoism imagined by those born decades after the war ended ? If they'd picked Muslims or Romanians the choice would have been more opaque and the victims more vulnerable.
Be in no doubt a No Deal exit explicitly blamed on the Irish and Germans will reshape British society for decades and eventually end the Union. We just have to hope the Commons stays strong and the inevitable General Election sees through Johnson in the way May was seen through.
On topic. It was a condition of the extension that there would be no re-opening of the WA negotiations. It should be little surprise that BoZo is in the mess that he is.
I know the EU would say for us to sort ourselves out. Both tory and Labour wanted to renegotiate. The extension started with irreconcilable objectives.
Pointless displacement activity.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climate-environment/climate-change-siberia/
It ought to be impossible to read this and still claim climate change is not happening.
https://www.politico.eu/article/ireland-to-spend-more-than-e1b-on-no-deal-brexit-planning/
Europe were very clear that they were entirely willing to look at a rewriting of the political declaration.
For the reasons Mike points out in the header Theresa May’s deal with the Irish backstop was an elegant solution and was actually a huge compromise by the EU27 something that has not been fully appreciated in the UK.... and considering the length of time it took to negotiate, the EU were understandably unwilling to reopen it.
Still, I’m sure yesterday’s antics will have made the EU more well-disposed to Boris Johnson’s requests.
"Cummings is making the same mistake on organisational cooperation. That’s partly why he and his allies have been so startled by Ireland’s prominence during negotiations. Their entire working assumption about world politics was that international cooperation sucked power from the nation state"
https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1181607560832602112?s=19
(Or does the election date depend more on the extension date? A Jan 31st extension is going to require an early December election).
I've little time for Boris or Cummings but all the players in the Brexit games have mud and wrse on their hands - otherwise the polls in the UK would be very different.
Very good.
Most have moved on to denying other things.
Some are accepting that climate change is happening, but are now denying that the changing climate is any detriment ("look, we can now grow wine in yorkshire, splendid").
Others are accepting that climate change is happening and that it is detrimental, but are now denying that it has anything to do with human activity, so that they can now deny the fact that a change in human activity could possibly emeliorate the detriments, or even reverse the trend ("look, CO2 is plant food, the more of it, the better").
And then there are those who accept that climate change is happening, that it is detrimental and that a change in human behaviour could possibly change something about it, but have moved on to denying that the detriments of climate change will present any economic challenge, so that they can argue from the premise that doing anything against climate change will be an additional, unbearable cost, compared to doing nothing ("look, we just can't afford it").
And then there are, of course, those who say that their own, tiny country is only contributing such a small amount of the climate changing emissions, that changing anything wouldn't make an impact anyway ("look, the Chinese are emitting so much more than us, because they have stolen all those wonderful jobs in industrial production").
These people then usually seize the opportunity to deny the fact that their own prosperous, developed countries owe the largest part of their prosperity and development to that human activity which has caused climate change in the first place and that we should therefor take the first step to do something against the consequences.
So many things to choose from, and we really seem to have a penchant for denial.
The problem is that most of the evangelical activists want us to take several steps backwards. But not them, obviously, they'll still fly around the world in private jets preaching - or taking a boat that requires six other people flying to make the trip happen.
To stick, it needs to be depoliticised and made just about the science and technological solutions. Just as it was for CFCs in the late 80s.
What governments need to do is to nurture the new technologies. Massive strides have been taken in the technology associated with solar, wind, batteries and nuclear in recent years, even more efficient gas power stations replacing old coal-fired equipment. Incentives have been provided to buy electric cars and insulate homes. Technology even appears in unusual places, modern F1 car engines for example are massively fuel-efficient, and that technology is fast moving down to regular road cars which consume a lot less fuel than they did only three or four years ago.
The two biggest challenges for the UK government are how the power grid will cope with widespread electric car use, and how to replace the 5% of total government income that comes from fuel duty and VED when we all drive electric cars.
Sure, science and reforestation are parts of the answer to climate change, but they are also excuses to do nothing used by people who want nothing to be done.
Aviation and motorsport are hotbeds of engineering excellence, constantly innovating to find efficiencies and improvements. They also provide hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs in the UK, and billions in tax revenues to the Exchequer.
Oh, and the two largest solar energy arrays in the world have opened this year - in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
Why wouldn’t that fuel ferocious resistance?
That's why the costs of acting against climate change should, at least partly, be balanced by socially fair redistributive measures, I agree.
But how "huge" exactly are the lifestyle changes?
And who exactly are the "few who can carry on as before"?
And what exactly would be the alternative? Doing nothing?
The definition is applied fairly narrowly to those who deny the scientific facts that climate change is occurring in the first place.
The rest is policy.
What won’t work is shouting in people’s faces.
Anyway it was a big positive for me to buy a house with solar on the roof, and my better half's decision to use that solar to power 2 big fish tanks.
No air con at my work, and in terms of carbon my diesel is clean enough (Thanks El Gordo/Dave for the £30 a year VED).
All the pets with their footprint I'm blaming on my fiancee
I reckon on this board Morris Dancer and/or Sunil probably have the smallest carbon footprint.
But because they're Brexiteers and occasional Tories they don't pass the woke test meaning their 1.5 tonnes of carbon per year are clearly worse than Prince Harry's 100 tonnes or whatever it is he makes with his private jet trips.
Anyway thanks to Golden Brown I'll be getting a bit more cash by next week when I give another FIT reading.
On the holidays, we do UK 1 year then foreign the next - there's much to see on these isles.
If they're in the pay of big oil, trying to make people hate climate change protestors, then it's also working.
If their goal is to get people talking, it's also working.
If it's actually to make changes happen, then it's the most disastrous failure since King Canute tampered with tidal power.
You and me. How much are we changing? Really?
(Cue PBers explaining how they have only ever been to Skeggy on holiday and recently relagged their lofts.)
Think Boris and his painting model buses hobby.
It will happen eventually, but probably rather later than it needs to.
Can't move in the first quarter of the book without him describing historic and pre historic climate change.
Do we know how much is us now and how much them?
Im not defending the poster but it seems to be the kind of thing you would expect to see as a Sun headline, similar to all the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey references you used to see about the French after Iraq.
The same may well be true of both Brexit and the climate problem.
The only difference with Brexit is that the pressure for revolution is coming from the right of the political spectrum. Something for Remainers (like myself) and those sceptical of the urgency to act to forestall climate change to reflect on.
The Queen is about to be dragged into an unprecedented constitutional crisis.
This just gets worse and worse.
https://twitter.com/Arron_banks/status/1181802838516801542
A more likely outcome of the poll not going your way would be that once again, the UK seeks painstakingly to avoid the infrastructure associated with a conventional border, to allow the people of North and South to visit, live, work, on both sides of a largely invisible border. If this would apparently be acceptable then, it should be so now.
If you don't want people to shout in your face then start doing something about it.
I know that the UK is not the worst country in the world and that we have been making some progress, but it's not enough. Allowing fracking, cutting the solar panel feed in tarriff and cancelling the tidal barrage are just three examples where we are going in the wrong direction.
So it's supporters not his opponents who fear a Brexit election.
Sun reporting this morning that Cummings thinks this is way to go.