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  • Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 63,102
    The Airbus redundancy and early retirement scheme announced to staff today is very generous and I expect quite a few will take early retirement and not look back

    I am not prepared to provide details but they really are acting responsibly in very difficult circumstances
  • ThomasNasheThomasNashe Posts: 5,331
    edited July 2020

    dixiedean said:

    Carnyx said:


    Nothing wrong with Hartlepool. I had an excellent day out there a couple of years back.

    I haven't personally had the pleasure of sampling the local guacamole, but I'm sure it's a delightful place. However, it doesn't quite have the density of interest required to make it a bucket-list tourist destination.
    Hartlepool's like the shittest part of Essex but with Geordie accents.
    Geordie accents? GEORDIE? Mate, you've not been to Pools and listened hard enough...

    Best thing about Hartlepools? A lot of roads out.

    Carnyx said:


    Nothing wrong with Hartlepool. I had an excellent day out there a couple of years back.

    I haven't personally had the pleasure of sampling the local guacamole, but I'm sure it's a delightful place. However, it doesn't quite have the density of interest required to make it a bucket-list tourist destination.
    Hartlepool's like the shittest part of Essex but with Geordie accents.
    Geordie accents? GEORDIE? Mate, you've not been to Pools and listened hard enough...

    Best thing about Hartlepools? A lot of roads out.
    Forgive him. Southerners don't know any better.
    When in my youth, I used to stand on the Holgate End at Ayresome Park, ignorant visitors from southern clubs such as West Ham, Charlton etc would regularly and predictably break into a chorus of ‘we hate geordies etc’, only to be drowned out by the home support joining in.

    To be followed by a somewhat pedantic chorus of ‘Tee, Tee, Teessider’.
    Shouldn't the Smoggies be singing "Yorkshire! Yorkshire! Yorkshire!"?
    It was during the exile years. Unlike the folk of Hull who bitterly resented not being in Yorkshire, Boro rather liked having its own county.
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,222

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    I`m not sure about the "drop in food standards" either. Sounds like a stick to beat the Americans about. I doubt there will be large demand for chlorine-washed chicken in the UK. And the small demand there is will come from people who want to buy it. So what`s the problem? No-one will be forced to buy it.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,468

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,608
    LadyG said:

    lol!


    https://twitter.com/MajorMurmer/status/1280921575143936001?s=20

    She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer

    Why didn't he go for Yvette Cooper? Knows her onions, sounds intelligent, has a presence

    Maybe she makes a lovely cup of tea?
  • HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Broadly agree, and I suspect that if we got to (say) November with No Trade Deal in sight, BoJo would find himself no longer Prime Minister. If push came to shove, and without Corbyn, I can just about imagine 40 defectors at the crunch moment.

    It's worth remembering that No Trade Deal will do at least some damage to manufacturing industry, which will stuff the Red Wall seats even more than the Southern Shires. In fact, I'm not sure that a trade deal (as opposed to a single market) will be enough; the sheer faff of the extra paperwork will tip some factories over the edge.

    So No Deal is a bluff, and not a very good one. The government should have done like 1944, building Operation Fortitude-style fake customs posts staffed by dummy customs officers. We need seamless movement of goods and services, want control of movement of people... what are we prepared to give to get these?
    The WA was a total capitulation sold as success. I foresee the trade deal following the same pattern.
    Yeah it was really amazing he got away with that.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,482
    Mortimer said:

    The government is ending free movement and it will not be called free movement. Europeans will not have the right to live and work in this country freely. However we will make the sovereign decision to set our own rules and those will allow people to freely move here because we have jobs we don't want to do. And in return we will be permitted to retire to Spain.

    Not Free Movement. Just movement that is free. Huzzah!

    The key, however, will be no entitlement to benefits.

    The British sense of fairness has always been pretty strong - they saw the system being gamed by some EU movers. It didn't go down well.
    But in fairness to the EU, that was Cameron's fault, not theirs. We could have denied the incomers benefits to which they weren't morally entitled by changing the basis of our benefits system. Universal child benefit is stupid anyway, and we all know it. Cameron could have used existing capabilities combined with his own negotiations to get an a la carte membership that would have satisfied plenty enough soft leavers. We love compromise in this country, and we all love things improving without us having to do anything. The fact is, he was a dyed in the wool Europhile, and he didn't want to get rid of the EU's bad bits, he wanted everyone to be so fearful of the alternative, they'd swallow it whole and say thank you afterwards.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,468
    Merely stopping free-movement is not enough. In most circumstances, free-movement was not having a negative impact on Brexit voters lives. Thus their frustrations still remain. The Government must actually make these people *feel* like they are happier, otherwise they are in trouble in the long term.

    That is much easier said than done.
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,222

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,468
    Stocky said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
    Yeah but then they go back home after celebrating and their problems still remain.

    Blyth is 98% British born. EU immigration had absolutely no impact whatsoever on the town. Ending free-movement will not solve any of the town’s problems.
  • Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 63,102

    LadyG said:

    lol!


    https://twitter.com/MajorMurmer/status/1280921575143936001?s=20

    She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer

    Why didn't he go for Yvette Cooper? Knows her onions, sounds intelligent, has a presence

    Maybe she makes a lovely cup of tea?
    No good on HIPS though
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    Stocky said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
    In 1997 when people were weeping and singing along to D:ream after Blair entered Downing Street - was that "Bonkers" ?
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118

    LadyG said:

    LadyG said:

    lol!


    https://twitter.com/MajorMurmer/status/1280921575143936001?s=20

    She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer

    I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.

    Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.

    On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
    See my edit. I suggested Cooper

    Yes of course a man would get this sort of mockery. See poor Ed Miliband being constantly compared to Wallace (from Wallace and Gromit)

    Or see Jacob Rees Mogg and all the brilliantly mean "Victorian undertaker" memes

    This isn't a sexist thing, nor a partisan thing. Politicians of all sides and genders get attacked for what they look like and how they talk, and fairly so: people want their leaders to look and sound confident and commanding

    I think the attack is slightly different.

    What do you think of my other question?
    Yes, no one slaughtered Corbyn for being scruffy and unpresentable - but I bet they would have had he been, or identified as, female.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,482

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,222

    Stocky said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
    In 1997 when people were weeping and singing along to D:ream after Blair entered Downing Street - was that "Bonkers" ?
    No. I wouldn`t have sang along (though it was the only time I`ve ever voted Labour) but I wouldn`t say it was bonkers.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,468

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I’m not sure what you are arguing. I was merely demonstrating some examples of things that seem “bonkers” now but who knows what will click with the electorate. We don’t know.
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118

    https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/starmer-backlash-compulsory-racial-bias-training-498977

    Starmer made such a misstep with this, he should have just stuck to what he originally said

    So first he charged headlong into knee-jerk kneeling, then he told the press BLM was just a moment and defunding the police was nonsense, then the Wokeists forced him to apologise and declare it a 'defining moment', then he reported himself for ideological re-education, pissing off people with common sense, which turned out to be a 20-minute online course, thus pissing off the Wokeists once again.

    Forensic, indeed! :smile:
    Brilliant!

    I know there are people on here who would rather eat covid vomit off the street than agree with somebody they dislike, but how could anyone not see what a humongous ricket this was right from the off?
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,468
    isam said:

    https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/starmer-backlash-compulsory-racial-bias-training-498977

    Starmer made such a misstep with this, he should have just stuck to what he originally said

    So first he charged headlong into knee-jerk kneeling, then he told the press BLM was just a moment and defunding the police was nonsense, then the Wokeists forced him to apologise and declare it a 'defining moment', then he reported himself for ideological re-education, pissing off people with common sense, which turned out to be a 20-minute online course, thus pissing off the Wokeists once again.

    Forensic, indeed! :smile:
    Brilliant!

    I know there are people on here who would rather eat covid vomit off the street than agree with somebody they dislike, but how could anyone not see what a humongous ricket this was right from the off?
    Starmer. Rent-free. Yours and @BluestBlue ’s head.

    Boring.
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,222

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118

    The government is ending free movement and it will not be called free movement. Europeans will not have the right to live and work in this country freely. However we will make the sovereign decision to set our own rules and those will allow people to freely move here because we have jobs we don't want to do. And in return we will be permitted to retire to Spain.

    Not Free Movement. Just movement that is free. Huzzah!

    Fair enough if that is our elected governments choice. If the public aren't happy, they can vote for someone else
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 28,902
    isam said:

    LadyG said:

    LadyG said:

    lol!


    https://twitter.com/MajorMurmer/status/1280921575143936001?s=20

    She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer

    I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.

    Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.

    On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
    See my edit. I suggested Cooper

    Yes of course a man would get this sort of mockery. See poor Ed Miliband being constantly compared to Wallace (from Wallace and Gromit)

    Or see Jacob Rees Mogg and all the brilliantly mean "Victorian undertaker" memes

    This isn't a sexist thing, nor a partisan thing. Politicians of all sides and genders get attacked for what they look like and how they talk, and fairly so: people want their leaders to look and sound confident and commanding

    I think the attack is slightly different.

    What do you think of my other question?
    Yes, no one slaughtered Corbyn for being scruffy and unpresentable - but I bet they would have had he been, or identified as, female.
    Cameron did
  • There are signs of capitulation on fishing
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    Much of the chicken sold in this country is already imported from Thailand. Does it make much of a difference if we switch Thai imports to Yankee imports?
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,885
    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,468
    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    You clearly don’t understand the issue. The issue is not the chlorine itself, the issue is why it is required in the first place.

    Anyway you’re trying to argue with logic something that, like Brexit, is emotional. Some things may click with the electorate. Who knows. This is not a discussion about the merits of chlorinated chicken.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
    In 1997 when people were weeping and singing along to D:ream after Blair entered Downing Street - was that "Bonkers" ?
    No. I wouldn`t have sang along (though it was the only time I`ve ever voted Labour) but I wouldn`t say it was bonkers.
    What's the difference between people celebrating one and getting emotional for it - and the other?

    Besides the fact you voted for one and not the other?
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118
    Andy_JS said:

    Interesting point of view from the left-of-centre David Aaronovitch.

    "Sorry Keir, unconscious bias training is bunk
    We all need to confront our prejudices but this corporate bandwagon is an easy and meaningless get-out-of-jail card
    David Aaronovitch" (£)

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/starmer-is-wasting-his-time-on-unconscious-bias-training-73czvctgw

    Bet the people banged up, or the victims of those not banged up, while he was DPP are chuffed to hear he has just realised he suffers from unconcious bias
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,222

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    You clearly don’t understand the issue. The issue is not the chlorine itself, the issue is why it is required in the first place.

    Anyway you’re trying to argue with logic something that, like Brexit, is emotional. Some things may click with the electorate. Who knows. This is not a discussion about the merits of chlorinated chicken.
    I did understand that. So let`s stop calling it chlorinated chicken then. I wouldn`t buy it. Though I bet I`ve eaten it while in the States on holiday without knowing.
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118

    isam said:

    https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/starmer-backlash-compulsory-racial-bias-training-498977

    Starmer made such a misstep with this, he should have just stuck to what he originally said

    So first he charged headlong into knee-jerk kneeling, then he told the press BLM was just a moment and defunding the police was nonsense, then the Wokeists forced him to apologise and declare it a 'defining moment', then he reported himself for ideological re-education, pissing off people with common sense, which turned out to be a 20-minute online course, thus pissing off the Wokeists once again.

    Forensic, indeed! :smile:
    Brilliant!

    I know there are people on here who would rather eat covid vomit off the street than agree with somebody they dislike, but how could anyone not see what a humongous ricket this was right from the off?
    Starmer. Rent-free. Yours and @BluestBlue ’s head.

    Boring.
    Care less. Couldn't. What you think.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 123,139

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They just need to hold the voters they got in 2019 which has already given them a big majority, a free trade deal with the EU that ends free movement does that and protects the economy, so no reason for them to move to Labour, the LDs or the Brexit Party
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,468
    isam said:

    isam said:

    https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/starmer-backlash-compulsory-racial-bias-training-498977

    Starmer made such a misstep with this, he should have just stuck to what he originally said

    So first he charged headlong into knee-jerk kneeling, then he told the press BLM was just a moment and defunding the police was nonsense, then the Wokeists forced him to apologise and declare it a 'defining moment', then he reported himself for ideological re-education, pissing off people with common sense, which turned out to be a 20-minute online course, thus pissing off the Wokeists once again.

    Forensic, indeed! :smile:
    Brilliant!

    I know there are people on here who would rather eat covid vomit off the street than agree with somebody they dislike, but how could anyone not see what a humongous ricket this was right from the off?
    Starmer. Rent-free. Yours and @BluestBlue ’s head.

    Boring.
    Care less. Couldn't. What you think.
    You clearly care as you can’t stop getting wound up every time I call you out on your obsession.
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    I still believe we ultimately end up in EEA
    Very unlikely unless its a very reformed EEA.

    For one thing although its not something I care about it involves free movement.
    In terms of free movement, if the UK agreed to shadow regulations on goods and services, follow the rules to the letter, no actual say at all, and contributing to the cost of the system, that might be enough to prevent the need for checks at the UK/EEA border. Because the impracticality of controlling the border on the UK side seems to be the killer point, and that's no closer to actually being solved now than in 2016.

    To be clear, that's a pretty bad deal, though politically the end of FOM might be a manageable sell. Shadowing EEA, with even less say than Norway gets, has the potential to go wrong in the same way that shadowing ERM did in the late 1980's.

    But a kind of EEA minus, for all its dishonesty, might be the best we can hope for from here. Followed in about 20 years time, when the Brexit Generation have joined the Choir Invisible, by a rejoin campaign based on the benefits of Being In The Room.
    I would not support what you call EEA minus, I would vigorously oppose it. But I expect a great many Brexit supporters, especially for instance @isam would find EEA minus free movement to be a fantastic deal.
    Sure would
  • geoffwgeoffw Posts: 8,720
    isam said:

    https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/starmer-backlash-compulsory-racial-bias-training-498977

    Starmer made such a misstep with this, he should have just stuck to what he originally said

    So first he charged headlong into knee-jerk kneeling, then he told the press BLM was just a moment and defunding the police was nonsense, then the Wokeists forced him to apologise and declare it a 'defining moment', then he reported himself for ideological re-education, pissing off people with common sense, which turned out to be a 20-minute online course, thus pissing off the Wokeists once again.

    Forensic, indeed! :smile:
    Brilliant!

    I know there are people on here who would rather eat covid vomit off the street than agree with somebody they dislike, but how could anyone not see what a humongous ricket this was right from the off?
    He sees PL footballers and F1 drivers as his natural constituency perhaps.
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118

    isam said:

    isam said:

    https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/starmer-backlash-compulsory-racial-bias-training-498977

    Starmer made such a misstep with this, he should have just stuck to what he originally said

    So first he charged headlong into knee-jerk kneeling, then he told the press BLM was just a moment and defunding the police was nonsense, then the Wokeists forced him to apologise and declare it a 'defining moment', then he reported himself for ideological re-education, pissing off people with common sense, which turned out to be a 20-minute online course, thus pissing off the Wokeists once again.

    Forensic, indeed! :smile:
    Brilliant!

    I know there are people on here who would rather eat covid vomit off the street than agree with somebody they dislike, but how could anyone not see what a humongous ricket this was right from the off?
    Starmer. Rent-free. Yours and @BluestBlue ’s head.

    Boring.
    Care less. Couldn't. What you think.
    You clearly care as you can’t stop getting wound up every time I call you out on your obsession.
    I'm not wound up and I don't care!

    Well done on your exams, hope you have a pleasant evening
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,222

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
    In 1997 when people were weeping and singing along to D:ream after Blair entered Downing Street - was that "Bonkers" ?
    No. I wouldn`t have sang along (though it was the only time I`ve ever voted Labour) but I wouldn`t say it was bonkers.
    What's the difference between people celebrating one and getting emotional for it - and the other?

    Besides the fact you voted for one and not the other?
    Because being pleased that Blair won in 1997 was a legitimate point of view.

    Weeping about being a free country after 31/1 when we were free before then is bonkers.
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118
    edited July 2020

    isam said:

    LadyG said:

    LadyG said:

    lol!


    https://twitter.com/MajorMurmer/status/1280921575143936001?s=20

    She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer

    I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.

    Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.

    On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
    See my edit. I suggested Cooper

    Yes of course a man would get this sort of mockery. See poor Ed Miliband being constantly compared to Wallace (from Wallace and Gromit)

    Or see Jacob Rees Mogg and all the brilliantly mean "Victorian undertaker" memes

    This isn't a sexist thing, nor a partisan thing. Politicians of all sides and genders get attacked for what they look like and how they talk, and fairly so: people want their leaders to look and sound confident and commanding

    I think the attack is slightly different.

    What do you think of my other question?
    Yes, no one slaughtered Corbyn for being scruffy and unpresentable - but I bet they would have had he been, or identified as, female.
    Cameron did
    Everyone did, that's the point. They did the same to Ed Miliband, they do it to Boris now, I do it to Keir Starmer @Gallowgate :wink: about his rascal suit, all politicians get hammered for their appearance, male or female
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,468
    HYUFD said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They just need to hold the voters they got in 2019 which has already given them a big majority, a free trade deal with the EU that ends free movement does that and protects the economy, so no reason for them to move to Labour, the LDs or the Brexit Party
    So you’ve now moved from “any deal” to “ends free movement and protects the economy”. That’s quite the switch already.

    Tell me how ending free movement and protecting the economy will have a positive impact on 98% British born Blyth? If their problems still retain, they will feel betrayed.

    They are much more likely to stay at home than vote Tory under those circumstances.
  • Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
    In 1997 when people were weeping and singing along to D:ream after Blair entered Downing Street - was that "Bonkers" ?
    No. I wouldn`t have sang along (though it was the only time I`ve ever voted Labour) but I wouldn`t say it was bonkers.
    What's the difference between people celebrating one and getting emotional for it - and the other?

    Besides the fact you voted for one and not the other?
    Because being pleased that Blair won in 1997 was a legitimate point of view.

    Weeping about being a free country after 31/1 when we were free before then is bonkers.
    Especially when nothing changed that day. Because of the transition.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,695

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
    In 1997 when people were weeping and singing along to D:ream after Blair entered Downing Street - was that "Bonkers" ?
    No. I wouldn`t have sang along (though it was the only time I`ve ever voted Labour) but I wouldn`t say it was bonkers.
    What's the difference between people celebrating one and getting emotional for it - and the other?

    Besides the fact you voted for one and not the other?
    Singing "we're free" was bonkers; no one was any freer after 31st January, nor were they captive before.
  • HYUFD said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They just need to hold the voters they got in 2019 which has already given them a big majority, a free trade deal with the EU that ends free movement does that and protects the economy, so no reason for them to move to Labour, the LDs or the Brexit Party
    So you’ve now moved from “any deal” to “ends free movement and protects the economy”. That’s quite the switch already.

    Tell me how ending free movement and protecting the economy will have a positive impact on 98% British born Blyth? If their problems still retain, they will feel betrayed.

    They are much more likely to stay at home than vote Tory under those circumstances.
    I commend your efforts but you're talking to a brick wall
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
    In 1997 when people were weeping and singing along to D:ream after Blair entered Downing Street - was that "Bonkers" ?
    No. I wouldn`t have sang along (though it was the only time I`ve ever voted Labour) but I wouldn`t say it was bonkers.
    What's the difference between people celebrating one and getting emotional for it - and the other?

    Besides the fact you voted for one and not the other?
    Because being pleased that Blair won in 1997 was a legitimate point of view.

    Weeping about being a free country after 31/1 when we were free before then is bonkers.
    We weren't free before then, we were a subordinate part of the EU which was something some people spent years or decades campaigning against.

    You may have supported that situation but it is real not bonkers.
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 22,036

    dixiedean said:

    Carnyx said:


    Nothing wrong with Hartlepool. I had an excellent day out there a couple of years back.

    I haven't personally had the pleasure of sampling the local guacamole, but I'm sure it's a delightful place. However, it doesn't quite have the density of interest required to make it a bucket-list tourist destination.
    Hartlepool's like the shittest part of Essex but with Geordie accents.
    Geordie accents? GEORDIE? Mate, you've not been to Pools and listened hard enough...

    Best thing about Hartlepools? A lot of roads out.

    Carnyx said:


    Nothing wrong with Hartlepool. I had an excellent day out there a couple of years back.

    I haven't personally had the pleasure of sampling the local guacamole, but I'm sure it's a delightful place. However, it doesn't quite have the density of interest required to make it a bucket-list tourist destination.
    Hartlepool's like the shittest part of Essex but with Geordie accents.
    Geordie accents? GEORDIE? Mate, you've not been to Pools and listened hard enough...

    Best thing about Hartlepools? A lot of roads out.
    Forgive him. Southerners don't know any better.
    When in my youth, I used to stand on the Holgate End at Ayresome Park, ignorant visitors from southern clubs such as West Ham, Charlton etc would regularly and predictably break into a chorus of ‘we hate geordies etc’, only to be drowned out by the home support joining in.

    To be followed by a somewhat pedantic chorus of ‘Tee, Tee, Teessider’.
    Shouldn't the Smoggies be singing "Yorkshire! Yorkshire! Yorkshire!"?
    They might be from Stockton!
    I used to work with a Boro fan from Stockton. We used to wind him up by asking why a County Durham lad supported a Yorkshire team.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
    In 1997 when people were weeping and singing along to D:ream after Blair entered Downing Street - was that "Bonkers" ?
    No. I wouldn`t have sang along (though it was the only time I`ve ever voted Labour) but I wouldn`t say it was bonkers.
    What's the difference between people celebrating one and getting emotional for it - and the other?

    Besides the fact you voted for one and not the other?
    Singing "we're free" was bonkers; no one was any freer after 31st January, nor were they captive before.
    The UK is freer after 31/1.

    Were we free to negotiate our own trade deals in the past?
    Were we free to end freedom of movement in the past?
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,695

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
    In 1997 when people were weeping and singing along to D:ream after Blair entered Downing Street - was that "Bonkers" ?
    No. I wouldn`t have sang along (though it was the only time I`ve ever voted Labour) but I wouldn`t say it was bonkers.
    What's the difference between people celebrating one and getting emotional for it - and the other?

    Besides the fact you voted for one and not the other?
    Because being pleased that Blair won in 1997 was a legitimate point of view.

    Weeping about being a free country after 31/1 when we were free before then is bonkers.
    We weren't free before then, we were a subordinate part of the EU which was something some people spent years or decades campaigning against.

    You may have supported that situation but it is real not bonkers.
    Total nonsense of course but hey, look, you won... get over it!
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,482
    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    The chlorine isn't really the issue. The chlorine is being used to wash the bird because the poor thing has lived a filthy diseased life and is covered in harmful bacteria. Humans need a diverse set of nutrients and minerals to thrive - our best way to do that is eat animals, animal products, and vegetables, that are packed with those nutrients and minerals. The best way for that to happen is for animals we eat from to have a diet rich in those nutrients and minerals, and for the vegetables we eat (and they eat!) to be grown in richly mineralised soils not using excessive nitrogen fertilisers. Nutrients and minerals, all the way up the chain. A slab of meat isn't just a slab of meat - it matters how it got to the plate, not just because of the animal's own welfare, but in a very self-interested way. We are what they eat.

  • NorthofStokeNorthofStoke Posts: 1,758
    Wokism destroys everything and everyone that engages with it.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,249
    edited July 2020

    nichomar said:

    LadyG said:

    This is such an awful story. How many more like this?

    "A man has been left fighting for his life after his cancer went undetected when the suspension of many NHS services due to the Covid-19 pandemic meant he had to wait months for a scan."

    https://inews.co.uk/news/father-terminal-coronavirus-delay-cancer-diagnosis-498126

    This has been a subject of repeated alarm calls throughout the Plague - and a wave of mortality caused by the near-collapse of non-Covid NHS services would appear, logically, to be inevitable. The only dispute concerns the scale of the damage caused.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53300784

    Delays to cancer diagnosis and treatment due to coronavirus could cause thousands of excess deaths in the UK within a year, research suggests.

    Scientists suggest there could be at least 7,000 additional deaths - but in a worst case scenario that number could be as high as 35,000.
    My treatment in Spain has gone uninterrupted, apart from the recent side effects, thank goodness.
    That is good to hear. A lot of people in this country haven't been so fortunate.
    I don't recognise that in my circumstances, so at least in part it cuts both ways. Normal treatment contacts (Db I) have continued normally, with minor tactical changes and some via phone.

    Had a bone marrow biopsy during lockdown after some previous queries wrt blood counts, diagnosed as a rare chronic leukemia named quite appropriately for current circumstances - "Hairy Cell". Fortunately it is well understood and very responsive to treatment, with no usual impact on life expectancy etc.

    After a meeting with consultant followed 1 week later, and started treatment 10 days later modified for the Corona circs - with a course of Monoclonal Antibodies (normal 2nd line) to be followed by the normal treatment when the circs calm down.

    They've actually been really, really excellent - despite operating in a temporary facility.

    And this in a hospital that was a disaster just 7 or 8 years ago and has been through a serious recovery programme itself.

    I think I would characterise the style as being more incisive than normal to reduce contact / manage risk.

    But the hospital is bloody sharp-elbowed when clearing beds, even in normal circumstances last autumn, and very reluctant with information. Probably a new broom problem that needs rough corners removing.


  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 41,999

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    It kills 'some' of the excess bacteria caused by US rearing practices.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,482

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    It kills some/most of the bacteria on the surface of the meat. It doesn't get rid of pathogens within the meat.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,695

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    Precisely. It means that lower rearing standards can be used - no need for farmers to worry about bacteria because the chickens will be chlorinated.

    Personally, I'd rather have my chicken without bacteria, dead or alive.
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,222

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    The chlorine isn't really the issue. The chlorine is being used to wash the bird because the poor thing has lived a filthy diseased life and is covered in harmful bacteria. Humans need a diverse set of nutrients and minerals to thrive - our best way to do that is eat animals, animal products, and vegetables, that are packed with those nutrients and minerals. The best way for that to happen is for animals we eat from to have a diet rich in those nutrients and minerals, and for the vegetables we eat (and they eat!) to be grown in richly mineralised soils not using excessive nitrogen fertilisers. Nutrients and minerals, all the way up the chain. A slab of meat isn't just a slab of meat - it matters how it got to the plate, not just because of the animal's own welfare, but in a very self-interested way. We are what they eat.

    I agree - I`m a fellow environmentalist - many chickens in this country also live a filthy diseased life. My beef was with the chlorine bit of the story.
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
    In 1997 when people were weeping and singing along to D:ream after Blair entered Downing Street - was that "Bonkers" ?
    No. I wouldn`t have sang along (though it was the only time I`ve ever voted Labour) but I wouldn`t say it was bonkers.
    What's the difference between people celebrating one and getting emotional for it - and the other?

    Besides the fact you voted for one and not the other?
    Singing "we're free" was bonkers; no one was any freer after 31st January, nor were they captive before.
    The UK is freer after 31/1.

    Were we free to negotiate our own trade deals in the past?
    Were we free to end freedom of movement in the past?
    Apparently, low paid British workers, who have lived in the same suburban street their whole lives, have lost the freedom to go and live in Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland or Latvia. These people are less free than they were
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,482

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    Precisely. It means that lower rearing standards can be used - no need for farmers to worry about bacteria because the chickens will be chlorinated.

    Personally, I'd rather have my chicken without bacteria, dead or alive.
    You'd have the chicken alive? :anguished:
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,222

    Wokism destroys everything and everyone that engages with it.

    That twat Trudeau is still alive and kicking though.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
    In 1997 when people were weeping and singing along to D:ream after Blair entered Downing Street - was that "Bonkers" ?
    No. I wouldn`t have sang along (though it was the only time I`ve ever voted Labour) but I wouldn`t say it was bonkers.
    What's the difference between people celebrating one and getting emotional for it - and the other?

    Besides the fact you voted for one and not the other?
    Because being pleased that Blair won in 1997 was a legitimate point of view.

    Weeping about being a free country after 31/1 when we were free before then is bonkers.
    We weren't free before then, we were a subordinate part of the EU which was something some people spent years or decades campaigning against.

    You may have supported that situation but it is real not bonkers.
    Total nonsense of course but hey, look, you won... get over it!
    Its not nonsense. We were not free to set laws that broke EU law, EU law was supreme.
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 22,036
    "We send £350 million each week to the EU.
    Let's give everyone a half price chicken tikka masala instead."

    Actually, that would have been a vote winner.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    Precisely. It means that lower rearing standards can be used - no need for farmers to worry about bacteria because the chickens will be chlorinated.

    Personally, I'd rather have my chicken without bacteria, dead or alive.
    Personally I couldn't care less. I know full well my raw food has bacteria, that's why I cook it properly.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 60,216
    edited July 2020
    I think they mean English, Welsh & Northern Irish

    https://twitter.com/DailyMirror/status/1280953802733035521?s=20

    Nipoleon has other plans...
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,695
    This article gives an interesting insight into the different philosophies applied to food hygiene between Europe and the US, in this case eggs:

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/25/why-american-eggs-would-be-illegal-in-a-british-supermarket-and-vice-versa/#3b902a6d4050
  • state_go_awaystate_go_away Posts: 5,816

    "We send £350 million each week to the EU.
    Let's give everyone a half price chicken tikka masala instead."

    Actually, that would have been a vote winner.

    Not if it is chlorinated
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,222

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    Precisely. It means that lower rearing standards can be used - no need for farmers to worry about bacteria because the chickens will be chlorinated.

    Personally, I'd rather have my chicken without bacteria, dead or alive.
    Personally I couldn't care less. I know full well my raw food has bacteria, that's why I cook it properly.
    Yes, but for me it`s not all about the health aspect. I don`t find poor quality food appetising.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,482
    I'm not sure why the UK Government would funnel financial support through the Scottish Government (that is actively campaigning to leave the UK) rather than aiming to give it directly to UK citizens living in Scotland? She seems to be upset that the UK Government isn't thick.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,413

    dixiedean said:

    dixiedean said:

    Carnyx said:


    Nothing wrong with Hartlepool. I had an excellent day out there a couple of years back.

    I haven't personally had the pleasure of sampling the local guacamole, but I'm sure it's a delightful place. However, it doesn't quite have the density of interest required to make it a bucket-list tourist destination.
    Hartlepool's like the shittest part of Essex but with Geordie accents.
    Geordie accents? GEORDIE? Mate, you've not been to Pools and listened hard enough...

    Best thing about Hartlepools? A lot of roads out.

    Carnyx said:


    Nothing wrong with Hartlepool. I had an excellent day out there a couple of years back.

    I haven't personally had the pleasure of sampling the local guacamole, but I'm sure it's a delightful place. However, it doesn't quite have the density of interest required to make it a bucket-list tourist destination.
    Hartlepool's like the shittest part of Essex but with Geordie accents.
    Geordie accents? GEORDIE? Mate, you've not been to Pools and listened hard enough...

    Best thing about Hartlepools? A lot of roads out.
    Forgive him. Southerners don't know any better.
    Since when has Yorkshire been in the south?
    University friends from Bolton and Leeds considered Sheffield to be the gateway to the South.
    There is a sign in my village directing people to Darlington and the South.
    Anything Lancashire or Yorkshire is "Down South".
    I live at a more northerly latitude than Darlington, whist still being in Yorkshire. So am I dahn sarf or not?
    DMZ.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    America has much higher incidence of food poisoning than we do.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,695

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    Precisely. It means that lower rearing standards can be used - no need for farmers to worry about bacteria because the chickens will be chlorinated.

    Personally, I'd rather have my chicken without bacteria, dead or alive.
    Personally I couldn't care less. I know full well my raw food has bacteria, that's why I cook it properly.
    Depends whether you care about how healthy a life the animal you are eating has had I guess. You obviously couldn't care less.
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,222

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    Precisely. It means that lower rearing standards can be used - no need for farmers to worry about bacteria because the chickens will be chlorinated.

    Personally, I'd rather have my chicken without bacteria, dead or alive.
    Personally I couldn't care less. I know full well my raw food has bacteria, that's why I cook it properly.
    Dip your drumstick in turps just to make sure
  • MortimerMortimer Posts: 14,127
    Various groups I belong to have all started talking about second waves recently.

    On what sort of timeline do PBers expect this to happen, if at all?
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 41,999

    She seems to be upset that the UK Government isn't thick.

    Let's not get carried away.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,482

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    Precisely. It means that lower rearing standards can be used - no need for farmers to worry about bacteria because the chickens will be chlorinated.

    Personally, I'd rather have my chicken without bacteria, dead or alive.
    Personally I couldn't care less. I know full well my raw food has bacteria, that's why I cook it properly.
    Depends whether you care about how healthy a life the animal you are eating has had I guess. You obviously couldn't care less.
    Yes - and that lack of care (as I've shown) actively denies our own body the benefit of eating richly nourishing food. So in time will result in poorer health.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,249
    Another pesky dog food salesman identifying another dog's breakfast.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,720

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    Not a plus to 80% of us.

    https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1280429625529839617?s=09

    Go ahead Brexiteers, make my day....
  • BluestBlueBluestBlue Posts: 4,556

    isam said:

    https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/starmer-backlash-compulsory-racial-bias-training-498977

    Starmer made such a misstep with this, he should have just stuck to what he originally said

    So first he charged headlong into knee-jerk kneeling, then he told the press BLM was just a moment and defunding the police was nonsense, then the Wokeists forced him to apologise and declare it a 'defining moment', then he reported himself for ideological re-education, pissing off people with common sense, which turned out to be a 20-minute online course, thus pissing off the Wokeists once again.

    Forensic, indeed! :smile:
    Brilliant!

    I know there are people on here who would rather eat covid vomit off the street than agree with somebody they dislike, but how could anyone not see what a humongous ricket this was right from the off?
    Starmer. Rent-free. Yours and @BluestBlue ’s head.

    Boring.
    Extreme dullness and unoriginality are clearly living rent-free in yours...
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,600
    Trump needs a swing of about 3.3% in his favour between now and November if the latest polling averages on here are reliable.

    https://www.realclearpolitics.com
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,249
    edited July 2020
    ..
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    Alistair said:

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    America has much higher incidence of food poisoning than we do.
    It does, but not because of chicken as far as I'm aware, yet its chicken that people always bang on about.
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 17,240

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
    In 1997 when people were weeping and singing along to D:ream after Blair entered Downing Street - was that "Bonkers" ?
    No. I wouldn`t have sang along (though it was the only time I`ve ever voted Labour) but I wouldn`t say it was bonkers.
    What's the difference between people celebrating one and getting emotional for it - and the other?

    Besides the fact you voted for one and not the other?
    Singing "we're free" was bonkers; no one was any freer after 31st January, nor were they captive before.
    The UK is freer after 31/1.

    Were we free to negotiate our own trade deals in the past?
    Were we free to end freedom of movement in the past?
    Except, if my prognosis plays out, those freedoms may turn out to be ornamental not functional. The conversation I can imagine happening goes something like this.

    "Of course, the Single Market is happy to have an open border with the UK. The condition we require for this is that goods produced and sold in the UK are produced or imported on the same terms as for the rest of the EEA, including a financial contribution to the European System.

    We may change our rules from time to time; we are happy to keep an open border provided UK goods yada yada...

    We recognise that the UK has the sovereign right to change the way it manufactures goods, or negotiates trade deals with the rest of the world. However, it's only fair to point out that this will (stifled snigger) require checks at the border..."

    This is not a scenario which will necessarily play out to the UK's advantage.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,599
    Andy_JS said:

    "Leftists Turn Against Marxist Lecturer Noam Chomsky After He And Others Pen Letter Encouraging Open Debate And Dialogue"

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/07/leftists-turn-marxist-lecturer-noam-chomsky-others-pen-letter-encouraging-open-debate-dialogue/

    LOL, can definitely now never be too woke.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    Stocky said:

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    Precisely. It means that lower rearing standards can be used - no need for farmers to worry about bacteria because the chickens will be chlorinated.

    Personally, I'd rather have my chicken without bacteria, dead or alive.
    Personally I couldn't care less. I know full well my raw food has bacteria, that's why I cook it properly.
    Dip your drumstick in turps just to make sure
    I think I'll stick to cooking it to an internal temperate of 73C plus, works for me.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 41,999
    Stocky said:

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    Precisely. It means that lower rearing standards can be used - no need for farmers to worry about bacteria because the chickens will be chlorinated.

    Personally, I'd rather have my chicken without bacteria, dead or alive.
    Personally I couldn't care less. I know full well my raw food has bacteria, that's why I cook it properly.
    Dip your drumstick in turps just to make sure
    Or just drink it, before, during and after.
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 22,036
    Mortimer said:

    Various groups I belong to have all started talking about second waves recently.

    On what sort of timeline do PBers expect this to happen, if at all?

    Started last Saturday.
  • It's nice to be on the objective side of the Brexit debate. To this day, there is no reason to have voted to Leave.

    Regardless, we are where we are. I pray for EEA.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    Precisely. It means that lower rearing standards can be used - no need for farmers to worry about bacteria because the chickens will be chlorinated.

    Personally, I'd rather have my chicken without bacteria, dead or alive.
    Personally I couldn't care less. I know full well my raw food has bacteria, that's why I cook it properly.
    Depends whether you care about how healthy a life the animal you are eating has had I guess. You obviously couldn't care less.
    Actually I do. I wouldn't have argued if that was the argument made, it is going on about chlorine that I disagree with.

    If you wish to say America has lower animal welfare standards just say that.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,695

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
    In 1997 when people were weeping and singing along to D:ream after Blair entered Downing Street - was that "Bonkers" ?
    No. I wouldn`t have sang along (though it was the only time I`ve ever voted Labour) but I wouldn`t say it was bonkers.
    What's the difference between people celebrating one and getting emotional for it - and the other?

    Besides the fact you voted for one and not the other?
    Because being pleased that Blair won in 1997 was a legitimate point of view.

    Weeping about being a free country after 31/1 when we were free before then is bonkers.
    We weren't free before then, we were a subordinate part of the EU which was something some people spent years or decades campaigning against.

    You may have supported that situation but it is real not bonkers.
    Total nonsense of course but hey, look, you won... get over it!
    Its not nonsense. We were not free to set laws that broke EU law, EU law was supreme.
    Dear God... I am not free to set my own laws but I have a (vanishingly small) influence over them via my vote. The UK had a much more significant ability to influence EU laws (which it generally squandered).

    Does anyone dispute we were always free to leave? Pretending we were like some subjugated colony is a load of bollocks and frankly insulting to those parts of the world that genuinely are subjugated.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,482
    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    Not a plus to 80% of us.

    https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1280429625529839617?s=09

    Go ahead Brexiteers, make my day....
    Do you think most people know where the chicken on their pizza comes from? Where the processed chicken on their subway comes from? Where the chicken in their tikka masala comes from? Of course if you ask people whether they would eat chlorinated chicken they will say no. The effects of this story are all in the appearance of it. There isn't a 'later' effect of it actually being enacted, because it doesn't lessen the availability of nice chicken that nice people buy, it just makes shitty chicken cheaper. It has no negative impact*

    *until it starts affecting people's overall health in the long term, which is untraceable.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,695

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    Precisely. It means that lower rearing standards can be used - no need for farmers to worry about bacteria because the chickens will be chlorinated.

    Personally, I'd rather have my chicken without bacteria, dead or alive.
    Personally I couldn't care less. I know full well my raw food has bacteria, that's why I cook it properly.
    Depends whether you care about how healthy a life the animal you are eating has had I guess. You obviously couldn't care less.
    Actually I do. I wouldn't have argued if that was the argument made, it is going on about chlorine that I disagree with.

    If you wish to say America has lower animal welfare standards just say that.
    America has lower animal welfare standards. Chlorinating chicken is both a symptom and an enabler of that.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,482
    edited July 2020

    She seems to be upset that the UK Government isn't thick.

    Let's not get carried away.
    :lol: *That* thick.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 60,216
    Yeah.....maybe.....

    https://twitter.com/ScotNational/status/1280956571057418240?s=20

    Just what the EU wants two land borders within the British Isles.....
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118
    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    Not a plus to 80% of us.

    https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1280429625529839617?s=09

    Go ahead Brexiteers, make my day....
    I wonder what score "Healthy animals whose throats and windpipes have been slashed" would get in such a survey
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,222

    Mortimer said:

    Various groups I belong to have all started talking about second waves recently.

    On what sort of timeline do PBers expect this to happen, if at all?

    Started last Saturday.
    I suspect there won`t be one. I think the majority have integrated sufficient safety procedures into their lives to prevent one - particularly regularly and thoroughly washing hands and increased social distancing which has, I think, become a subconscious thing.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    Carnyx said:

    Stocky said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    We don’t know that. Who knows what sort of campaigns might capture the public’s imagination? “Poor people forced eat chlorine chicken” advertising? Who knows. That’s what I’m saying - unforeseeable consequences. Thus predicting the next election based on a “deal” now is crazy-talk.
    Even Americans aren't forced to eat chlorine chicken. They eat it because it's cheaper and they can get bigger portions of good tasting chicken for less. You can't sell that as a drawback to someone, because until they come down with a dose of gastroenteritis, it isn't a drawback. If it isn't popular, it won't sell, so no issue there. If it is popular, it's just more consumer choice. I say that as someone who wouldn't touch the filthy stuff with a ten foot pole.
    I think many forget that chlorine is in our drinking water. We consume it every day. The chlorinated chicken thing is a media scare story.
    It's not the chlorine but the bacteria which it sort of covers up which comprise the real problem, thanks to bad keeping practices.
    It doesn't cover it up, it kills the bacteria. That's why its used.
    Precisely. It means that lower rearing standards can be used - no need for farmers to worry about bacteria because the chickens will be chlorinated.

    Personally, I'd rather have my chicken without bacteria, dead or alive.
    Personally I couldn't care less. I know full well my raw food has bacteria, that's why I cook it properly.
    Depends whether you care about how healthy a life the animal you are eating has had I guess. You obviously couldn't care less.
    Actually I do. I wouldn't have argued if that was the argument made, it is going on about chlorine that I disagree with.

    If you wish to say America has lower animal welfare standards just say that.
    America has lower animal welfare standards. Chlorinating chicken is both a symptom and an enabler of that.
    While the animal welfare standards in the rest of the countries around the globe we import from is absolutely perfect? There's never any animal welfare issues in Thailand for instance?

    https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/animal-welfare-campaigners-attack-tesco-15025000

    If we wish to make animal welfare an issue then make animal welfare an issue. Don't hide behind other things.
  • BluestBlueBluestBlue Posts: 4,556
    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    "Leftists Turn Against Marxist Lecturer Noam Chomsky After He And Others Pen Letter Encouraging Open Debate And Dialogue"

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/07/leftists-turn-marxist-lecturer-noam-chomsky-others-pen-letter-encouraging-open-debate-dialogue/

    LOL, can definitely now never be too woke.
    But when you look at the vile content of that awful letter... I mean, who could possibly agree with this kind of hate speech?

    'The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.'

    I feel aggressed against just exposing my eyes to it!
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.

    The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.

    They already have improved Brexit voters lives. By leaving the EU - that is the gain in utility. It`s emotional not tangible. I was in Parliament Square on 31 Jan with the crazies. Some were weeping, saying "We`re free". Bonkers.
    In 1997 when people were weeping and singing along to D:ream after Blair entered Downing Street - was that "Bonkers" ?
    No. I wouldn`t have sang along (though it was the only time I`ve ever voted Labour) but I wouldn`t say it was bonkers.
    What's the difference between people celebrating one and getting emotional for it - and the other?

    Besides the fact you voted for one and not the other?
    Because being pleased that Blair won in 1997 was a legitimate point of view.

    Weeping about being a free country after 31/1 when we were free before then is bonkers.
    We weren't free before then, we were a subordinate part of the EU which was something some people spent years or decades campaigning against.

    You may have supported that situation but it is real not bonkers.
    Total nonsense of course but hey, look, you won... get over it!
    Its not nonsense. We were not free to set laws that broke EU law, EU law was supreme.
    Dear God... I am not free to set my own laws but I have a (vanishingly small) influence over them via my vote. The UK had a much more significant ability to influence EU laws (which it generally squandered).

    Does anyone dispute we were always free to leave? Pretending we were like some subjugated colony is a load of bollocks and frankly insulting to those parts of the world that genuinely are subjugated.
    We were always free to leave, but that doesn't make us as free as we are having left.

    You may not like our extra freedoms but we have them.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 41,999

    Yeah.....maybe.....

    https://twitter.com/ScotNational/status/1280956571057418240?s=20

    Just what the EU wants two land borders within the British Isles.....

    Border posts at NI ports and the Scottish-Wangland border, one border more or less?
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,720

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    justin124 said:

    kinabalu said:


    I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.

    The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.

    Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
    The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
    Virtual certainty imo.
    Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.

    Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.

    Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?

    Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?

    Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?

    It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
    It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
    That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.

    His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.

    Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
    He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.

    Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
    Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.

    It’s a risk.
    I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.

    Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
    Not a plus to 80% of us.

    https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1280429625529839617?s=09

    Go ahead Brexiteers, make my day....
    Do you think most people know where the chicken on their pizza comes from? Where the processed chicken on their subway comes from? Where the chicken in their tikka masala comes from? Of course if you ask people whether they would eat chlorinated chicken they will say no. The effects of this story are all in the appearance of it. There isn't a 'later' effect of it actually being enacted, because it doesn't lessen the availability of nice chicken that nice people buy, it just makes shitty chicken cheaper. It has no negative impact*

    *until it starts affecting people's overall health in the long term, which is untraceable.
    A whole chicken is £3 in my co op. How much cheaper do you expect the lower standards to be?

    I won't be touching that stuff, and anyone who tries to sell it as an advantage is going to find it as popular as a turd in a swimming pool.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,249
    Mortimer said:

    Various groups I belong to have all started talking about second waves recently.

    On what sort of timeline do PBers expect this to happen, if at all?

    A serious second wave will imo be over winter - due to usual extra weakness amongst usual more vulnerable groups and normal trends such as flu. This from a conversation with a PHE person when it started.

    Possible also extra waves or ripples due to changing social mixing such as school return etc.
This discussion has been closed.