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Michael Douglas’s defining performance remains his leading role in Falling Down. He plays the part of a man who, when his car gets stuck in an unending traffic jam, steps out on foot and strikes against the annoyances and dangers of everyday life in a way that audiences would have dreamt of but never have dared.
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However ironically free trade Leavers may find their best hope of reaching their EEA promised land lies with a PM Starmer after the next election who would surely accept an EEA style trade deal with the EU, Boris' coalition would see that as a betrayal so the Tories are now committed to hard Brexit for a generation
Apropos of nothing they do end up offering to sort out his breakfast afterall.
I should probably watch the rest of the movie at some point.
Moving on to the thesis I'm not sure "wake up suckers" is convince anyone to change their minds.
I am a free trade leaver, I don't hate the EU and I don't hate immigration. I don't agree that we're losing though - it is a long game. In order for Britain to fully engage with free trade we must have a clean slate and the chance to negotiate our own future. That means getting rid of the EU controls now.
If that means torching our existing arrangements for a bit so be it. Proper forest management requires controlled burnbacks sometimes.
a) hates EU
b) immigration
c) free trade
Problem is, this fails at the first hurdle, at least for me, because I can't fit Boris in to any of these. Boris does not hate the EU, is pro-immigration, and does not seem to have much idea on trade one way or the other, which is probably what led him to inadvertantly plonk the border down the Irish Sea.
e) careerist << Boris
Boris' polices will then be more Trump than Cameron
Boris sold his soul to Brexit, because it could deliver him number 10.
Apparently this "strategy" came out of an away day a couple of weeks ago. Thinks back to the Thick of It episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OhIdDNtSv0
Ah, Falling Down is probably the finest black comedy of all time...
We are definitely playing a long game.
I can see the uproar from all the middle.class parents bemoaning little Timmy being criminalized.
Not quite sure what they think that great job will achieve, but clearly Frost is on their team. They don't seem particularly swivel eyed. Actually rather politer than the Remainers on the thread
Edit. May need to revise my view once you get off Frost's timeline and onto theirs. Actually they are a bunch of racists. Quite shocked by this.
This is the fundamental fault line. Because of the ineptitude of Corbyn, and the Panglossian boostering of Boris, and Brexit, the Tory tent is so big it contains MPs with polar opposite views from places with equally contradictory needs.
They won on an interventionist manifesto which won new seats in areas which would benefit greatly from this.
But most of their MPs have been raised on, and imbued with, 40 years of small state dogma.
And they tend to represent places and people which don't want to pay the tax to fund the spending. Or suffer the house building.
This coalition will fracture. Probably badly.
But it will hold as long as Brexit is an issue.
But maybe it proves that Nordic social democracy works, and your right-wing dickheads are wrong about everything.
How anyone can defend mask wearing now is beyond me. Countries need to get back to social distancing, people feel too protected in masks and don’t distance.
There was a reason that the WHO didn’t recommend masks at the start of the pandemic. They don’t work because wearing one changes peoples behaviour and as they only offer very limited protection infections are rising. Forget laboratory tests of masks, look at the real world evidence. Sweden no masks very low cases, everywhere else with masks very high cases.
You don't need to agree with the political bent of the spectator to know Andrew Neal is a great interviewer and in just 2 episodes the two expert guests have been excellent.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
As we see with the Covid Marshalls.
Who will be an undertrained, under and probably unpaid bunch of volunteer busybodies overseen by some alma run by one of Dom's chums.
Night all.
This is the wrong way round IMO. They should be worried for the diametrically opposite reason: that without Thatcherite discipline being maintained on us by state aid rules, there will follow the British Leylandisation of the UK economy, leaving one of their core export markets in the kind of a structural decline we saw in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Certainly Cummings seems to want to take us back to Harold Wilson's 'white heat of technology' and Tony Benn's disastrous interventions in British industry.
Question is, if you don't like an EU law, how do you change it? Who do you vote for?
The democratic deficit at the heart of the EU hasn't gone away.
He’s merely a reckless gambler who put his money on them.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/no-boris-is-not-breaching-the-rule-of-law-here-s-why
I just read and like this article. Makes the same logical arguments I've been saying for the last few days, but probably in a much better phrased way since its by a QC. I wonder whether anyone is convinced by it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
This bullshit can’t go on much longer or everything that is great about Western democracy is going to wither and die. It’s that serious. The UK is setting an appalling example to wannabe authoritarians everywhere. And through quite unacceptable fear mongering the government is sedating the population into accepting the likely permenant erosion of civil liberties.
I know not who I want to replace the PM, as there has been such an abject lack of leadership from the political class. For now I shall settle with the immediate sacking of Johnson, Hancock, Cummings and importantly Witty, Van Tam and Valance. Let us get on with our lives and balance our own risk tolerances.
Yours
A sometime Conservative voter
ETA from the Telegraph:
A no-deal Brexit could clear the way to allowing the Government to directly invest into technology businesses
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/09/10/cummings-sees-no-deal-brexit-chance-uk-create-1-trillion-tech/
This also works for EU laws.
Update to post. It’s cases that Denmark have overtaken Sweden in, not deaths. But the Danes aren’t going to lockdown again
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-10/new-covid-cases-soar-in-denmark-surpassing-no-lockdown-sweden
As many many seats have huge majorities.
I'm not saying corbyn was a good leader, Benn was a much better politician than Corbyn, but if the Johnson-cummings team is Bennite then you can't turn round and criticise corbyn for being too left wing.
https://twitter.com/anandmenon1/status/1304170006851223554?s=21
Sounded like a prison camp.
Not sure how well horny freshers will stick to it, and if they do sounds like it wont be much fun.
The Falling Down analogy doesn’t quite.... stand up, though, as the film was about someone driven mad by his powerlessness and irrelevance.
We, in contrast, have voluntarily abandoned a position of some power and influence, to flounder around ineffectually, inflicting damage mainly on ourselves.
In the UK with have UK parties debating the UK issues on our UK news channels and getting watched and then voted on by the voters. We also have a good voting system that ensures every area of the UK is represented by their most popular party in that area. Our MPs get together and can pass, change or repeal any law. Change of government happens at the ballot box.
In the EU none of that is true. There are no real EU parties - yes there exists EU labels that badge on existing national parties but its not the same thing. The EU news isn't debated on EU news channels. They also have a dodgy voting system that takes power away from the voters and towards post-election political horsetrading. MEPs lack the power to pass, change or repeal any law they want to.
There was a chunk of pro-Brexit opinion that was convinced that the UK really could get a Better Trade Deal. All upside, no downside, cake and eat it. Canada obligations, plus plus plus rights. David Davis was another to push that line.
It was obviously tosh all along. The EU's menu of alignment and access has been on public display all along, even as the UK kept saying "yes, yes, but we can do a special arrangement, know what I mean?"
And as the clock runs down, and the feeble deal on the table becomes clearly the only deal on offer, and the lack of preparation by the UK to make that deal work more obvious, the frustration at being conned is becoming more palpable.
But you can't cheat an honest man, and the easiest person to con is yourself.
The NI Protocol was designed for a no deal scenario, not something that could be ditched if no deal occurred!
You don't sit there going FFS he has got this and this and this wrong before even asking a question.
Sometimes you just need to blow up what you have, clear away the rubble and rebuild.
Do voters in Northern Ireland not have a democracy?
Because it doesn't make good TV or radio.
However, we see it on here quite often.
""After careful consideration I shall be writing to my MP asking him to lodge a vote of no confidence in the prime minister as leader of the Conservative Party.
This bullshit can’t go on much longer or everything that is great about Western democracy is going to wither and die. It’s that serious. The UK is setting an appalling example to wannabe authoritarians everywhere. And through quite unacceptable fear mongering the government is sedating the population into accepting the likely permenant erosion of civil liberties.
I know not who I want to replace the PM, as there has been such an abject lack of leadership from the political class. For now I shall settle with the immediate sacking of Johnson, Hancock, Cummings and importantly Witty, Van Tam and Valance. Let us get on with our lives and balance our own risk tolerances.
Yours
ITV local news [East Midlands] interviewed 2 former labour voters who said they would carry on voting tory and one undecided who would carry on voting tory - they had done a poll on Boris in Worksop [I think] p poll to come out on later programme
But if the voters of Northern Ireland dislike any UK law, lets say the NI Protocol of the EU Withdrawal Act as an example, and then the MPs representing Northern Ireland constituencies work with a majority of MPs across the UK and vote to repeal the law then the law is gone. That is democracy.
If the voters of Northern Ireland want a new law and then convince a majority of MPs from across the country to back it then it becomes the law. That is democracy.
Does the same thing happen with MEPs? If a majority of MEPs vote to remove a law does it go? Can an MEP introduce a proposed new law and see it become the law because a majority of MEPs backed it?
No, because law changes aren't simply decided by the Parliament. The European Parliament is not sovereign like ours is.