If it was going to happen, it would have done so months ago. Confirmation yesterday that Britain would not exercise its right to request an extension to the Brexit transition period was one of the more predictable events of 2020. Despite the ravages wreaked on the UK economy by the Covid-19 pandemic and the shutdown it necessitated, the danger of a No-FTA exit creating yet more barriers to trade and growth was always one the government was going to accept.
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In political terms, yes, Covid-19 provides a good pandemic to bury bad Brexit news, and Boris has recruited the leading Brexiteer MPs into his Cabinet so it is unlikely any protests about the wrong sort of Brexits will extend beyond fringe players, and now Nigel Farage has contrived to lose his media platform.
Economic damage? Surely no Conservative believes Project Fear, the economic projections formerly known as Conservative Party policy.
And it is, sadly, unsurprising that Boris scrapped the Cabinet's pandemic committee last year in order to spend more time on Brexit. What could possibly go wrong?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8416075/Boris-Johnson-scrapped-Cabinet-Ministers-pandemic-team-six-months-coronavirus-hit-Britain.html
There's not a lot of point in arguing over the basic content of the deal, although people will. (Detail does matter). Question is whether both sides will accept it.
People are only just beginning to realise just how bureaucratic Brexit will be. Arguably bureaucracy is the whole point of Brexit. It's "taking control" made flesh. It does mean some people will in practice be prevented from doing things that they took for granted before and companies will give up on chunks of business they used to do because it will be too difficult or too expensive.
Covid-19 compounded with Brexit makes for a grim economic context. We're not talking about growth foregone any more.
One thing I am sure of is this won't be end of the long Brexit process. Even if it goes No Deal in December, the UK never having an agreement with the EU on anything at all, ever, is unrealistic in my view. In which case State Aid etc will come back onto the table. And if we do agree a deal we can look forward to years of further negotiation on things that are essential to the UK.
It is a shame that Boris has been spending his political capital faster than Rishi has been spending printed £.
Any talk that Brexit may not happen is utter bollox.
But I'm beginning to realise that some on here aren't too fussed about democracy.
Tories have fucked up the economy
Tories have fucked up Covid 19 and left us with the most per capita pandemic deaths of any major Nation
Still lead 43% to 38% though.
It is worth remembering that no government had ever increased its majority after more than eight years in power before.
And yet somehow this abject excuse for a government did.
The fourth sentence merely suggests other factors are at play.
Edit - although that said, we can’t be sure of the third one yet. And it will take time before we have reliable statistics that tell us who comes where in this grim table.
But on the information we have, it’s a reasonable statement. We’ve certainly suffered very badly when we had every advantage of geography.
And we're worried. In my case, I don't suppose it'll make an enormous difference but I have grandchildren who are young people in this country, and what does it hold for them?
I grew up in the 50's, in the shadow of WWII and in the greyness of those times. I saw, and still see, the European project as providing the opportunities for development and creativity. I don't see Brexit Britain as a land of opportunity, but one hedged about with restrictions. Opportunities for the wealthy perhaps, but not for ordinary people.
Did Boris cause the 2020 global crisis? Yes/no
See where this is leading?
Did their incompetence and hubris make matters a hundred times worse when the crisis hit? As the great Ed Miliband would say, ‘Hell, yes.’
And what you have to do now is have another vote and campaign to rejoin and we'll all decide again.
See what I mean about democracy, you're not too keen on it are you?
A sensible BREXIT
A thriving Economy
and German rates of Covid deaths
The bed sheets are all wet.
Apologies if the joke is on me I'm quite new here
PS I really hope its satirical and you don't believe what you just typed
Apologies
Look, a competent Labour leader could have beaten Theresa May in 2017. (As it happens, that’s not a helpful counterfactual as had a competent Labour leader been in place the election would never have been called, nor would the Tories have run on a hard-right manifesto. But that’s not the point.) Corbyn couldn’t. He was a transparent liar standing on a manifesto that was patently uncosted backed by a shadow cabinet whose members made Gavin Williamson look a model of talent and probity. That he ran May close says a lot about her that she doubtless found unflattering.
And if he were in charge now, things would be worse, not better. Johnson is lazy, but he’s not totally stupid. Corbyn is both. True, the current cabinet is very weak. But does anyone seriously think it’s weaker than a cabinet which would have included Burgon? As for the economy, it would have collapsed by now due to the strains imposed on it by Corbyn’s ideas. Heck, we’re seeing some of them play out with this pandemic, and it isn’t pretty to watch.
The real story of 2019 probably wasn’t the bizarre landslide for a paralysed government of clowns. It was reflecting that with a slightly different approach in 2017 May could have hit 400 seats.
PS - incidentally, Formby was political director of Unite and a member of Labour’s NEC in 2017. She did play a big role in Corbynite politics that was little more than formalised by being general secretary.
Many of the industries which hated Brexit with a passion are among those suffering most from Covid-19 anyway and a great many of the threatened job losses will now be lost, not because of Brexit but because Covid-19 will have changed the way we live permanently.
In addition the EU including Germany has borrowed up to the hilt just as we have, in order to cope with Covid-19. No matter what the EU says, individual EU member states will do what is in its best interests. In the case of Malta, Cyprus, Portugal, Greece and Spain that will mean what is needed to keep British people coming on holiday once holidays start once more. For Germany it will be engine parts. For France it will be their farmers.
This is no longer a one-sided negotiation, for anyone who thought it was.
As for Keir Starmer and the leader ratings, he is bound to have good ratings because he is a) not Jeremy Corbyn and b) hasn't had to do anything yet. I would not be surprised if the British public (well the pro Brexit non Metropolitan public) will grow to dislike his slightly robotic personality, much needed for forensic cross-examination but not exactly making someone the life and soul of the party.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000gpbv/panorama-scandal-at-the-post-office
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
SNP lead 30 points for Westminster VI, and 32 points for Holyrood VI.
Why can Scots see through the charlatan Johnson and his cronies, but the English are caught like bunnies in the headlights?
But in a sense, that only makes the rubbish he spouted about ‘fully costed manifestoes’ all the more reprehensible.
(I also doubt if he would have become PM, given his illness. Indeed, youwould have expected CV19 to kill him if he were exposed to it. I think he’d have been more likely to nominate somebody to be his puppet, as in effect he did with Corbyn. Maybe Trickett or Lavery.)
Yebbut dimmocracee innit, you reply. No, it's ochlocracy.
She is playing the game better than the Tories at the moment (admittedly a phrase of mine about limbo dancing mice springs to mind). We none of us know how this will play out in the next twelve months though.
We are an interconnected globalised nation with one of the highest rates of urbanisation and population density of major developed nations. That certainly has a role to play.
No
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Whether Davey can do better remains to be seen.
The young are overwhelmingly pro-independence, especially younger women (under 35): 69% are pro-sovereignty.
Astonishingly, 40% of SLab voters (2019) are pro-independence. This confirms my theory that the Labour block is absolutely key to winning back our independence.
8% of Yes voters from 2014 have now changed their minds and would vote No today, but a whopping 20% of 2014 No voters have switched in the other direction.
60% want Scotland to re-join the European Union, and that is the baseline before the shit has hit the fan.
https://www.drg.global/wp-content/uploads/W15247-ScotGoesPop-for-publication-v2-050620.pdf
For context.
The irony is that Eastern European landlocked nations back in February were probably more of an island in hindsight.
Do unfulfilled political ambitions perhaps lie behind George Osborne's decision yesterday to quit as editor of the London Evening Standard? Certainly if there was ever a time for him to commence manoeuvres, that time is probably now.
From a betting perspective, those nice folk at Ladbrokes are offering to boost their odds against him being the next Conservative Leader from 100/1 to 130/1. Of course to further his cause, he would first need to secure a seat in the HOC.
DYOR.
There’s no marmite in Sainsbury’s.
In fact, scientific nomenclature needs a deep clean.
Removing the Nazi sympathisers alone is a big, big job (the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, the Stark effect, the Bieberbach conjecture, Teichmuller theory).
There is a whole new continent of wokeful renaming waiting to be discovered.
I know you can't see past Scotland but I didn't realise you were so blinkered you couldn't see past the Scottish Highlands alone.
Ishmael, excellent new word of the day there, first time I have ever seen it.
Any other questions?
Cheers for that, Mr. Putney. Put a small sum on.
FPTP is very cruel to non-regional minor parties
The other half was interconnected and globalised. Do you really think that's bollocks? You think we aren't an interconnected or globalised nation?
Eugenics was very prevalent in left-wing circles, of course. As well as right-wing circles.
So, if you go hunting for eugenicists to rename, you will end up with most of the famous academics, writers & intellectuals of the early twentieth century.
Of course, you will also end up with a lot of Liberal MPs in your net, as the Darwins were Liberals.
I ask that because my answer would be that we are less interconnected and / or globalised then we were then, the world has moved against our globalised nation plan.
Of course the government has also ruled out indyref2 for a generation anyway, respecting the 'once in a generation' 2014 vote
How has the ES survived thus far without an Editor in Chief?
That would probably be enough for the median voter now Brexit has been delivered but not the Leave diehards, who might return to the Brexit Party, or diehards on the Tory backbenches
Pretending that we don’t have to negotiate trade arrangements as a result is just silly.
The tricky bits are the LPF conditions and the status of NI. The UK cannot accept restrictions on State aid when Rishi has already lent £20bn and counting to businesses to help with Covid. The EU are of course doing the same. Its possible that there might be an agreement that State aid limitations are suspended for 5 years or so and this is looked at again later.
NI remains tricky because there is a strong Irish desire not to have any conditionality on the movement of goods in the island. That either means no conditionality anywhere (possible but unlikely) or different rules. This problem has not gone away.
The Brexit process will not end but it will reach another key stage. Future agreements, co-operation and equivalents to what we had as members are all too likely but they will be third party agreements negotiated at arms length.
Science is only advising on a part of the political decision, in any case. Responsibility for weighing up the many other aspects of the equation, including economics, behaviour, international and public opinion sits with the politicians, as does actual accountability.
When the crisis began it seemed encouraging that the government was letting us hear from the leading scientists directly. But now things are going pear-shaped it is shabby the way our political leaders are trying to offload the blame.
If people want to rejoin the single market they can vote for Starmer or the LDs in 2024
There is clearly a shit-storm of blame coming, and both the scientists and the politicians are positioning themselves.
Or rather re-positioning themselves.
It is an interesting question as to how accountable a scientist is if the advice proferred leads to poor decisions.
However, I think it is usually accepted that scientists do have a duty to retract mistakes. That is part of the code of science.
Amazing that the bunch of sacked liars we call the government couldn't figure out that blah blah blah we hold all the cards let's force them was bollocks.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
There has been clear signs that models were amateurish and simplistic not taking advantage of modern statistical methods, there was the fact that the WHO (who seem to be in the chocolate teapot category) seemed to be using modelling based on work done in the 1930s post Spanish flu. There seems to have been little appreciation of the absolutely massive increase in the movement of people since that time and the implications for transmission. There seemed to be very little thought put into how a trace and search system was ever going to work, a problem we are yet to solve.
Some countries, who have had more recent experience such as SARS, do seem to have addressed these issues and therefore had a much better idea about where to start. SK had a tracing system on a public website based on phone data in February, for example. Despite the exercise undertaken under Hunt we seem to have given this little thought.
I wonder was this just money or resources or lack of real world examples making it boring?
Yes we have left. Some on here of the Brexit persuasion still seem to think we haven't.
For someone unashamedly partisan you can still see the wood from the trees. A post stating the obvious, but of a view some others obviously can't see.
Use, or misuse, of social media played a large part in BLM, in the war against statues, and in recent elections and referenda. When the outcome is one we approve of, we downplay its importance. My vote was not changed by Twitter. My shopping is not influenced by advertising. Inconvenient questions about the influence of hostile foreign powers using the same techniques as our main political parties is locked in the Downing Street safe. Are we sure Boaty McBoatface is not ploughing the same seas as 19th Century slavers?
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Beijing-district-in-wartime-emergency-mode-after-virus-spike
... Chu Junwei, an official of Beijing's southwestern Fengtai district, told a briefing on Saturday that the district was in "wartime emergency mode".
Throat swabs from 45 people, out of 517 tested at the district's Xinfadi wholesale market, had tested positive for the new coronavirus, though none of them showed symptoms of COVID-19, Chu said.
A city spokesman told the briefing that all six COVID-19 patients confirmed in Beijing on Friday had visited the Xinfadi market. The capital will suspend sports events and inter-provincial tourism effective immediately, he said.
One person at an agricultural market in the city's northwestern Haidian district also tested positive for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 without showing symptoms, Chu said.
As part of measures to curb the spread of the virus, Fengtai district said it had locked down 11 neighbourhoods in the vicinity of the market.
Authorities closed the Xinfadi market at 3 a.m. on Saturday (1900 GMT on Friday), after two men working at a meat research centre who had recently visited the market were reported on Friday to have been infected. It was not immediately clear how the men had been infected...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.