I'm honestly quite surprised by how well Frost and his team have done. The whole team deserve a lot of praise for what they've achieved. Getting Boris to speak to Ursula at the end to sideline Barnier for the final three issues was surely the best bit of politicking of the whole process.
This is hilarious
You do realise that "side-lining Barnier" also meant side-lining Frost, right?
That's not rain guys, BoZo really is pissing on you...
Scott, the Brexiteers have won the war. It's over. The fightback to rejoin, probably not in my lifetime starts here.
I am loving the rewriting of very recent history to confirm Johnson's triumph on here, it is laughable. Some of the comments are so monstrous, one could write them on the side of a bus.
Over and out!
There is no fight to rejoin, it's over. We're out, rejoin is going to have the support of at most 10% of the electorate, it's time to find new issues to talk about and to find consensus elsewhere. Labour has a new opportunity now to do that.
Rejoin will be a minority passion at the next GE, but may well be a growing movement after that. I expect it to be via the salami technique, until there is none of Brexit left. We have passed peak Brexit already.
I logged on this morning and to be honest it was like a remainer's wake but I do accept that this Christmas has seen an end to their dreams.
To be honest we just need to move on, some will never do so, but I suspect the vast majority will be pleased it has been brought to a deal conclusion
Of course in all deals there are wins and losses but I fully expect Boris to embrace a very pro climate change pro sustainable farming policy and through climate change strike up a relationship with Joe Biden impossible with Trump
As far as Eramus is concerned my granddaughter was due to study in Italy in 2023 but I have little doubt the Turing replacement will provide opportunities not only within Europe but world wide
And as far as Boris is concerned his detractors and enemies may have to get used to him being PM for quite a long time
You'll probably get your "moving on" wish fulfilled in most sections of the Clapham Omnibus but far less so in committed, high octane places such as here.
Re your last sentence, 100% agree. Boris "80 seat" Johnson is going precisely nowhere. My biggest current political bet is on him still being PM on 1st July 2022. I'm on at an average 1.85 and I'm treating it mentally like money in the bank. You can get 1.72 or something now and I simply cannot recommend that bet enough. It's outstanding value. If you don't want to wait 18 months for the full return it will be layable back at 1.4 or less by Easter.
I agree and of course there will always be an element of those who cannot comprehend us being outside the EU but the vast majority will move on and some like myself breath a sigh of relief we have turned the page
As for Boris he has never been stronger in his party and he does seem to be rediscovering his mojo.
The climate conference is a huge world event here in Glasgow and he is the host, so I cannot imagine he will move on before that and indeed it is even possible he may contest the 2024 election
If he had been responsible for a no deal I believe he would not have lasted long into 2021
Well "moving on" from the wild and regular overestimation of the never more than 5% probability of a No Deal is something I do very much welcome. I need a new bugbear now though.
Has anyone properly congratulated on you for being right all along?
Hello, Alex. Thanks for mention. Yes, I think I've accrued as much kudos as I could reasonably have hoped. I'm happy.
Will put a bit of it back on the table now with a prediction that the Dems, contrary to what the odds are saying, will pull off the Georgia double.
Sorry to burst your bubble but you were wrong and I was right.
You were claiming that No Deal wasn't happening because the UK couldn't let it happen and so would sign EU terms and could have done so months ago.
I said if the UK stood firm then the EU wouldn't want No Deal because we hold the Aces.
On any impartial reading of the compromises the deal is far more what the UK was asking for months ago than what the EU was. So standing firm worked and you my friend were completely and utterly wrong.
There isn't a chance on earth this compromise could have been reached months ago.
I wouldn't normally do this to you, Philip, and apologies in advance, but on this occasion it simply has to be a rather contemptuous lol.
Here's my key bit of advice and I offer it in a benign and constructive spirit. You need to replace your "card game" mental image for the negotiation with one that is not so easy to visualize but has the benefit of being accurate.
Try to picture the following - "Two sets of macro political and economic interests coming together to arrive at broadly the inevitable outcome at pretty much the inevitable time given their genuine red lines and the known modus operandi of the EU and in particular this UK Prime Minister".
I suggested the "bucket draining through 2 holes into 2 bottles" one - which I still quite like - but I'm sure it can be improved upon.
Before the inevitable long discussion the two of you may want to consider the latest odds from noneoftheabovebet.
PT convinces K that he is wrong 100/1 K convinces PT that he is wrong 100/1
Neither side can be proved right or wrong. People are very predictably simply believing what they want to believe and there will be no changing views so it really doesn't matter. What will matter is how Brexit is perceived in general over the next few years. I fear and expect that Covid will give enough cover that the Brexit impact is not understood by much of the country, especially those emotionally invested in its success.
It won't be a long discussion, don't worry.
But no, there's a false equivalence here which I must firmly reject.
(a) "Boris" wrung a great deal out of the EU by playing hardball and going to the wire and making them truly believe he'd walk away to no deal and WTO terms.
(b) The deal was broadly as expected given the respective red lines. It went to the wire because these things tend to and the optics work domestically. No Deal was never realistically happening and both sides knew this.
One of the above views is "believing what one wants to believe".
The other one is as close to objective reality as something not 100% provable can be.
I know which I think is more likely, but that may be what I want to believe....
The equivalence, imo, is not on which is more likely to be true, but in that both positions are clearly unprovable, and make sense to the originators from their world view, but have zero chance of being accepted by the other side.
FFS, there is stupid, there is Ian Blackford and then, some way down the track, there is Richard Leonard. Corbyn wanted him around so he wasn't always the stupidest man in the room.
I'm honestly quite surprised by how well Frost and his team have done. The whole team deserve a lot of praise for what they've achieved. Getting Boris to speak to Ursula at the end to sideline Barnier for the final three issues was surely the best bit of politicking of the whole process.
This is hilarious
You do realise that "side-lining Barnier" also meant side-lining Frost, right?
That's not rain guys, BoZo really is pissing on you...
Scott, the Brexiteers have won the war. It's over. The fightback to rejoin, probably not in my lifetime starts here.
I am loving the rewriting of very recent history to confirm Johnson's triumph on here, it is laughable. Some of the comments are so monstrous, one could write them on the side of a bus.
Over and out!
There is no fight to rejoin, it's over. We're out, rejoin is going to have the support of at most 10% of the electorate, it's time to find new issues to talk about and to find consensus elsewhere. Labour has a new opportunity now to do that.
Rejoin will be a minority passion at the next GE, but may well be a growing movement after that. I expect it to be via the salami technique, until there is none of Brexit left. We have passed peak Brexit already.
I don't think that's correct. After all, we are still in the transition period.
On Topic: Boris Johnson is a known serial liar. Why would anyone believe anything he says? He is a disingenuous duplicitous piece of shit! Quite simply, the worst PM this country has ever had.
Alternatively, he is this morning master of all he surveys. A very respectable deal with the EU, the first country in the world to approve and distribute a vaccine, an 80 seat majority and a very dull if worthy opponent who he is increasingly running rings around.
No doubt 2021 will bring new challenges and the efficiency of the vaccine distribution remains a very difficult challenge, but right now he looks like our most dominant PM since Blair was in his pomp wittering about the Peoples' Princess or some such junk.
I’ll be interested to see how that comment fares over the next year.
As I said, new challenges in 2021. The economy is shot to hell, the public finances are a disaster area of almost biblical proportions, our retail sector is being reshaped far more swiftly than was inevitable, the SNP are being as tedious as ever, there is the possibility of several spanners with this wretched virus and the vaccines, much to do and many opportunities for the wheels to come off, no doubt about it. But right now, he must feel as smug as he looks in that picture that OGH posted. You saw that in his Christmas message which was classic Boris.
I logged on this morning and to be honest it was like a remainer's wake but I do accept that this Christmas has seen an end to their dreams.
To be honest we just need to move on, some will never do so, but I suspect the vast majority will be pleased it has been brought to a deal conclusion
Of course in all deals there are wins and losses but I fully expect Boris to embrace a very pro climate change pro sustainable farming policy and through climate change strike up a relationship with Joe Biden impossible with Trump
As far as Eramus is concerned my granddaughter was due to study in Italy in 2023 but I have little doubt the Turing replacement will provide opportunities not only within Europe but world wide
And as far as Boris is concerned his detractors and enemies may have to get used to him being PM for quite a long time
You'll probably get your "moving on" wish fulfilled in most sections of the Clapham Omnibus but far less so in committed, high octane places such as here.
Re your last sentence, 100% agree. Boris "80 seat" Johnson is going precisely nowhere. My biggest current political bet is on him still being PM on 1st July 2022. I'm on at an average 1.85 and I'm treating it mentally like money in the bank. You can get 1.72 or something now and I simply cannot recommend that bet enough. It's outstanding value. If you don't want to wait 18 months for the full return it will be layable back at 1.4 or less by Easter.
I agree and of course there will always be an element of those who cannot comprehend us being outside the EU but the vast majority will move on and some like myself breath a sigh of relief we have turned the page
As for Boris he has never been stronger in his party and he does seem to be rediscovering his mojo.
The climate conference is a huge world event here in Glasgow and he is the host, so I cannot imagine he will move on before that and indeed it is even possible he may contest the 2024 election
If he had been responsible for a no deal I believe he would not have lasted long into 2021
Well "moving on" from the wild and regular overestimation of the never more than 5% probability of a No Deal is something I do very much welcome. I need a new bugbear now though.
Has anyone properly congratulated on you for being right all along?
Hello, Alex. Thanks for mention. Yes, I think I've accrued as much kudos as I could reasonably have hoped. I'm happy.
Will put a bit of it back on the table now with a prediction that the Dems, contrary to what the odds are saying, will pull off the Georgia double.
Sorry to burst your bubble but you were wrong and I was right.
You were claiming that No Deal wasn't happening because the UK couldn't let it happen and so would sign EU terms and could have done so months ago.
I said if the UK stood firm then the EU wouldn't want No Deal because we hold the Aces.
On any impartial reading of the compromises the deal is far more what the UK was asking for months ago than what the EU was. So standing firm worked and you my friend were completely and utterly wrong.
There isn't a chance on earth this compromise could have been reached months ago.
I wouldn't normally do this to you, Philip, and apologies in advance, but on this occasion it simply has to be a rather contemptuous lol.
Here's my key bit of advice and I offer it in a benign and constructive spirit. You need to replace your "card game" mental image for the negotiation with one that is not so easy to visualize but has the benefit of being accurate.
Try to picture the following - "Two sets of macro political and economic interests coming together to arrive at broadly the inevitable outcome at pretty much the inevitable time given their genuine red lines and the known modus operandi of the EU and in particular this UK Prime Minister".
I suggested the "bucket draining through 2 holes into 2 bottles" one - which I still quite like - but I'm sure it can be improved upon.
Except the "broadly inevitable outcome" is NOT the one you foresaw.
Did you months ago see the EU giving up on its LPF arrangements and getting such a meaningless and trivial face saving as what it has achieved?
Hey I'm good but I'm not that good!
No, but seriously, my point is mainly about No Deal and its hyping. The threat of No Deal is not what has shaped the deal in any significant way. No Deal has been used very skillfully by Johnson - as per the Header I did - for DOMESTIC political purposes. He's been doing so for years. A masterclass in fact.
As for LPF, the EU considers that the agreement protects the integrity of the Single Market, their one genuine red line. But, fair enough, I will tell them that you judge otherwise - perhaps it's not too late for some tweaks.
I logged on this morning and to be honest it was like a remainer's wake but I do accept that this Christmas has seen an end to their dreams.
To be honest we just need to move on, some will never do so, but I suspect the vast majority will be pleased it has been brought to a deal conclusion
Of course in all deals there are wins and losses but I fully expect Boris to embrace a very pro climate change pro sustainable farming policy and through climate change strike up a relationship with Joe Biden impossible with Trump
As far as Eramus is concerned my granddaughter was due to study in Italy in 2023 but I have little doubt the Turing replacement will provide opportunities not only within Europe but world wide
And as far as Boris is concerned his detractors and enemies may have to get used to him being PM for quite a long time
You'll probably get your "moving on" wish fulfilled in most sections of the Clapham Omnibus but far less so in committed, high octane places such as here.
Re your last sentence, 100% agree. Boris "80 seat" Johnson is going precisely nowhere. My biggest current political bet is on him still being PM on 1st July 2022. I'm on at an average 1.85 and I'm treating it mentally like money in the bank. You can get 1.72 or something now and I simply cannot recommend that bet enough. It's outstanding value. If you don't want to wait 18 months for the full return it will be layable back at 1.4 or less by Easter.
I agree and of course there will always be an element of those who cannot comprehend us being outside the EU but the vast majority will move on and some like myself breath a sigh of relief we have turned the page
As for Boris he has never been stronger in his party and he does seem to be rediscovering his mojo.
The climate conference is a huge world event here in Glasgow and he is the host, so I cannot imagine he will move on before that and indeed it is even possible he may contest the 2024 election
If he had been responsible for a no deal I believe he would not have lasted long into 2021
Well "moving on" from the wild and regular overestimation of the never more than 5% probability of a No Deal is something I do very much welcome. I need a new bugbear now though.
Has anyone properly congratulated on you for being right all along?
Hello, Alex. Thanks for mention. Yes, I think I've accrued as much kudos as I could reasonably have hoped. I'm happy.
Will put a bit of it back on the table now with a prediction that the Dems, contrary to what the odds are saying, will pull off the Georgia double.
Sorry to burst your bubble but you were wrong and I was right.
You were claiming that No Deal wasn't happening because the UK couldn't let it happen and so would sign EU terms and could have done so months ago.
I said if the UK stood firm then the EU wouldn't want No Deal because we hold the Aces.
On any impartial reading of the compromises the deal is far more what the UK was asking for months ago than what the EU was. So standing firm worked and you my friend were completely and utterly wrong.
There isn't a chance on earth this compromise could have been reached months ago.
I wouldn't normally do this to you, Philip, and apologies in advance, but on this occasion it simply has to be a rather contemptuous lol.
Here's my key bit of advice and I offer it in a benign and constructive spirit. You need to replace your "card game" mental image for the negotiation with one that is not so easy to visualize but has the benefit of being accurate.
Try to picture the following - "Two sets of macro political and economic interests coming together to arrive at broadly the inevitable outcome at pretty much the inevitable time given their genuine red lines and the known modus operandi of the EU and in particular this UK Prime Minister".
I suggested the "bucket draining through 2 holes into 2 bottles" one - which I still quite like - but I'm sure it can be improved upon.
Before the inevitable long discussion the two of you may want to consider the latest odds from noneoftheabovebet.
PT convinces K that he is wrong 100/1 K convinces PT that he is wrong 100/1
Neither side can be proved right or wrong. People are very predictably simply believing what they want to believe and there will be no changing views so it really doesn't matter. What will matter is how Brexit is perceived in general over the next few years. I fear and expect that Covid will give enough cover that the Brexit impact is not understood by much of the country, especially those emotionally invested in its success.
Can we just agree that it’s a daft argument.
If anyone has that much surplus energy, why not go closely read the thousand or so pages of the agreement, and write a thread header telling all why it’s great/crap ?
Villiers on the lunchtime news clearly anticipating not supporting the agreement but equally clearly most of the ERG is going to let someone else do the reading for them.
I'm honestly quite surprised by how well Frost and his team have done. The whole team deserve a lot of praise for what they've achieved. Getting Boris to speak to Ursula at the end to sideline Barnier for the final three issues was surely the best bit of politicking of the whole process.
This is hilarious
You do realise that "side-lining Barnier" also meant side-lining Frost, right?
That's not rain guys, BoZo really is pissing on you...
Scott, the Brexiteers have won the war. It's over. The fightback to rejoin, probably not in my lifetime starts here.
I am loving the rewriting of very recent history to confirm Johnson's triumph on here, it is laughable. Some of the comments are so monstrous, one could write them on the side of a bus.
Over and out!
There is no fight to rejoin, it's over. We're out, rejoin is going to have the support of at most 10% of the electorate, it's time to find new issues to talk about and to find consensus elsewhere. Labour has a new opportunity now to do that.
Nah, for the next decade, whether we like it or not we are all Brexiteer Tories. Although I am still not sure how Johnson and Co survive the economic issues of the next five years, I have no doubt, they will, using smoke and mirrors survive the storm.
The hubris shown by Conservatives as a result of their Christmas Eve victory might be short lived. The magnifcent win, might yet be a false dawn.
Erasmus has fired me up (along with a number of other discarded programmes). Never say never.
I'm off (again), no really this time, have a nice Boxing Day!
FFS, there is stupid, there is Ian Blackford and then, some way down the track, there is Richard Leonard. Corbyn wanted him around so he wasn't always the stupidest man in the room.
But right now, he must feel as smug as he looks in that picture that OGH posted.
Feet on the desk.
Did Downing Street release an official picture that makes him look like such an arse?
Boris has made a phenomenally successful career out of making people like you underestimate him Scott. The work necessary for that illusion to hold is never ending.
FFS, there is stupid, there is Ian Blackford and then, some way down the track, there is Richard Leonard. Corbyn wanted him around so he wasn't always the stupidest man in the room.
So our Christmas truce has passed and we're all back to arguing about Brexit.
What next? Scottish Independence?
The arguments about Brexit will go on ad infinitum amongst those who are really exercised by it, but the country at large can move on. Most of the general population neither knows nor cares about fishing rights or the Erasmus scheme. I anticipate teething problems at the border in the New Year, but once they're sorted out the issue will fade into the background.
Scottish independence is a different matter. That pantomime will keep playing on a continuous loop until the nationalists win one of their future referendums and get away. Victory in the second one is a strong possibility for them, but even if they lose again they're so well dug in that the argument will never go away. If indyref 2 goes down then the campaign for indyref 3 starts the following morning.
No it doesn't, Yes to independence from Canada got 49% in the second Quebec referendum in 1995 and 25 years later there has still not been a third as devomax for Quebec resolved the issue.
The SNP are going nowhere, and unless they're badly weakened (and, having taken over as the dominant centre-left party, there's no sign of that happening) then they'll be in Government, either continuously or at regular intervals, until the year dot. This is the product of a very large and entrenched fraction of the electorate that has made up its mind that it wants independence, and a fragmented collection of weak, unpopular and useless opposition parties.
This isn't going to be like Quebec (besides anything else, "devomax" - whatever that turns out to be - isn't on offer, and even that wouldn't stop the loud, continuous complaints of being hard done by.) The only way anyone on either side of the border is going to get any peace is when they go.
Wait a moment. The Quebec National Assembly has been continuously controlled by nationalists since the demise of the Union Nationale.
All the parties in Quebec National Assembly (including the Liberal party) are various shades of nationalists. Apart from in the West Montreal suburbs, you just would not get many votes in Quebec if you weren't some shade of nationalist.
Quebec has far more power than Scotland, and has been allowed to go its own way in Canada with a much more generous hand by the loose central Government (which has often had a Quebecois at its helm).
I remain to be convinced that the English electorate - or, at any rate, a large enough fraction of it to make a big difference - will tolerate either a Government propped up by Scots Nats MPs, or a Prime Minister representing a Scottish seat, ever again. Certainly if there's any danger of the Conservatives losing their majority come the next General Election then the SNP will be used as a stick with which to beat Keir Starmer. But time will tell.
I think most people will have absolutely no problem with a PM representing a Scottish constituency, if that ever happens. Or Welsh.
I wonder who will emerge to take the Farage/eurosceptic role, slowly undermining the current settlement, chipping away at confidence over a period of years.
So our Christmas truce has passed and we're all back to arguing about Brexit.
What next? Scottish Independence?
The arguments about Brexit will go on ad infinitum amongst those who are really exercised by it, but the country at large can move on. Most of the general population neither knows nor cares about fishing rights or the Erasmus scheme. I anticipate teething problems at the border in the New Year, but once they're sorted out the issue will fade into the background.
Scottish independence is a different matter. That pantomime will keep playing on a continuous loop until the nationalists win one of their future referendums and get away. Victory in the second one is a strong possibility for them, but even if they lose again they're so well dug in that the argument will never go away. If indyref 2 goes down then the campaign for indyref 3 starts the following morning.
No it doesn't, Yes to independence from Canada got 49% in the second Quebec referendum in 1995 and 25 years later there has still not been a third as devomax for Quebec resolved the issue.
The SNP are going nowhere, and unless they're badly weakened (and, having taken over as the dominant centre-left party, there's no sign of that happening) then they'll be in Government, either continuously or at regular intervals, until the year dot. This is the product of a very large and entrenched fraction of the electorate that has made up its mind that it wants independence, and a fragmented collection of weak, unpopular and useless opposition parties.
This isn't going to be like Quebec (besides anything else, "devomax" - whatever that turns out to be - isn't on offer, and even that wouldn't stop the loud, continuous complaints of being hard done by.) The only way anyone on either side of the border is going to get any peace is when they go.
Wait a moment. The Quebec National Assembly has been continuously controlled by nationalists since the demise of the Union Nationale.
All the parties in Quebec National Assembly (including the Liberal party) are various shades of nationalists. Apart from in the West Montreal suburbs, you just would not get many votes in Quebec if you weren't some shade of nationalist.
Quebec has far more power than Scotland, and has been allowed to go its own way in Canada with a much more generous hand by the loose central Government (which has often had a Quebecois at its helm).
I remain to be convinced that the English electorate - or, at any rate, a large enough fraction of it to make a big difference - will tolerate either a Government propped up by Scots Nats MPs, or a Prime Minister representing a Scottish seat, ever again. Certainly if there's any danger of the Conservatives losing their majority come the next General Election then the SNP will be used as a stick with which to beat Keir Starmer. But time will tell.
I think most people will have absolutely no problem with a PM representing a Scottish constituency, if that ever happens.
One would hope so. But surely EVEL is the issue.
Edit: Because the PM is necessarily responsivble for English domestic policy. Unless that is resolved by the "UK" parliament being made a truly federal one, with England taken out of that equation by being given its own pmt or pmts.
I'm honestly quite surprised by how well Frost and his team have done. The whole team deserve a lot of praise for what they've achieved. Getting Boris to speak to Ursula at the end to sideline Barnier for the final three issues was surely the best bit of politicking of the whole process.
This is hilarious
You do realise that "side-lining Barnier" also meant side-lining Frost, right?
That's not rain guys, BoZo really is pissing on you...
Scott, the Brexiteers have won the war. It's over. The fightback to rejoin, probably not in my lifetime starts here.
I am loving the rewriting of very recent history to confirm Johnson's triumph on here, it is laughable. Some of the comments are so monstrous, one could write them on the side of a bus.
Over and out!
There is no fight to rejoin, it's over. We're out, rejoin is going to have the support of at most 10% of the electorate, it's time to find new issues to talk about and to find consensus elsewhere. Labour has a new opportunity now to do that.
Rejoin will be a minority passion at the next GE, but may well be a growing movement after that. I expect it to be via the salami technique, until there is none of Brexit left. We have passed peak Brexit already.
That hypothesis rests on the notion that the UK Government will bring its post-Brexit regulatory regime closer to that of the EU, rather than the opposite. AIUI they've agreed not to backslide (at least without triggering retaliatory mechanisms) on many employment and environmental measures, but it's questionable how far a populist, rather than neo-Thatcherite, platform like Johnson's would've been interested in such things anyway. In the meantime, we're going to see a complete reformation of agricultural subsidies and are also likely to witness more permissive regulation in areas such as GMOs and the digital economy. And that's without going into the terms of whatever new trade agreements the country is willing to sign up to over the next ten years, which might prove repellent to some of our more protectionist neighbours but are acceptable to us.
Having a system of farm payments completely different to the CAP (which is like crack cocaine to Club Med and a number of other EU states with powerful farm lobbies) should be enough on its own to render the UK and EU incompatible indefinitely, to say nothing of the scarring effect of the decades of arguments over Europe, or the requirement for accession states to commit in principle to joining the Euro.
So our Christmas truce has passed and we're all back to arguing about Brexit.
What next? Scottish Independence?
The arguments about Brexit will go on ad infinitum amongst those who are really exercised by it, but the country at large can move on. Most of the general population neither knows nor cares about fishing rights or the Erasmus scheme. I anticipate teething problems at the border in the New Year, but once they're sorted out the issue will fade into the background.
Scottish independence is a different matter. That pantomime will keep playing on a continuous loop until the nationalists win one of their future referendums and get away. Victory in the second one is a strong possibility for them, but even if they lose again they're so well dug in that the argument will never go away. If indyref 2 goes down then the campaign for indyref 3 starts the following morning.
No it doesn't, Yes to independence from Canada got 49% in the second Quebec referendum in 1995 and 25 years later there has still not been a third as devomax for Quebec resolved the issue.
The SNP are going nowhere, and unless they're badly weakened (and, having taken over as the dominant centre-left party, there's no sign of that happening) then they'll be in Government, either continuously or at regular intervals, until the year dot. This is the product of a very large and entrenched fraction of the electorate that has made up its mind that it wants independence, and a fragmented collection of weak, unpopular and useless opposition parties.
This isn't going to be like Quebec (besides anything else, "devomax" - whatever that turns out to be - isn't on offer, and even that wouldn't stop the loud, continuous complaints of being hard done by.) The only way anyone on either side of the border is going to get any peace is when they go.
Wait a moment. The Quebec National Assembly has been continuously controlled by nationalists since the demise of the Union Nationale.
All the parties in Quebec National Assembly (including the Liberal party) are various shades of nationalists. Apart from in the West Montreal suburbs, you just would not get many votes in Quebec if you weren't some shade of nationalist.
Quebec has far more power than Scotland, and has been allowed to go its own way in Canada with a much more generous hand by the loose central Government (which has often had a Quebecois at its helm).
I remain to be convinced that the English electorate - or, at any rate, a large enough fraction of it to make a big difference - will tolerate either a Government propped up by Scots Nats MPs, or a Prime Minister representing a Scottish seat, ever again. Certainly if there's any danger of the Conservatives losing their majority come the next General Election then the SNP will be used as a stick with which to beat Keir Starmer. But time will tell.
I think most people will have absolutely no problem with a PM representing a Scottish constituency, if that ever happens. Or Welsh.
Representing a Scottish Constituency was not Gordon Brown's problem. And boy did he have plenty problems to be going on with.
I logged on this morning and to be honest it was like a remainer's wake but I do accept that this Christmas has seen an end to their dreams.
To be honest we just need to move on, some will never do so, but I suspect the vast majority will be pleased it has been brought to a deal conclusion
Of course in all deals there are wins and losses but I fully expect Boris to embrace a very pro climate change pro sustainable farming policy and through climate change strike up a relationship with Joe Biden impossible with Trump
As far as Eramus is concerned my granddaughter was due to study in Italy in 2023 but I have little doubt the Turing replacement will provide opportunities not only within Europe but world wide
And as far as Boris is concerned his detractors and enemies may have to get used to him being PM for quite a long time
You'll probably get your "moving on" wish fulfilled in most sections of the Clapham Omnibus but far less so in committed, high octane places such as here.
Re your last sentence, 100% agree. Boris "80 seat" Johnson is going precisely nowhere. My biggest current political bet is on him still being PM on 1st July 2022. I'm on at an average 1.85 and I'm treating it mentally like money in the bank. You can get 1.72 or something now and I simply cannot recommend that bet enough. It's outstanding value. If you don't want to wait 18 months for the full return it will be layable back at 1.4 or less by Easter.
I agree and of course there will always be an element of those who cannot comprehend us being outside the EU but the vast majority will move on and some like myself breath a sigh of relief we have turned the page
As for Boris he has never been stronger in his party and he does seem to be rediscovering his mojo.
The climate conference is a huge world event here in Glasgow and he is the host, so I cannot imagine he will move on before that and indeed it is even possible he may contest the 2024 election
If he had been responsible for a no deal I believe he would not have lasted long into 2021
Well "moving on" from the wild and regular overestimation of the never more than 5% probability of a No Deal is something I do very much welcome. I need a new bugbear now though.
Has anyone properly congratulated on you for being right all along?
Hello, Alex. Thanks for mention. Yes, I think I've accrued as much kudos as I could reasonably have hoped. I'm happy.
Will put a bit of it back on the table now with a prediction that the Dems, contrary to what the odds are saying, will pull off the Georgia double.
Sorry to burst your bubble but you were wrong and I was right.
You were claiming that No Deal wasn't happening because the UK couldn't let it happen and so would sign EU terms and could have done so months ago.
I said if the UK stood firm then the EU wouldn't want No Deal because we hold the Aces.
On any impartial reading of the compromises the deal is far more what the UK was asking for months ago than what the EU was. So standing firm worked and you my friend were completely and utterly wrong.
There isn't a chance on earth this compromise could have been reached months ago.
I wouldn't normally do this to you, Philip, and apologies in advance, but on this occasion it simply has to be a rather contemptuous lol.
Here's my key bit of advice and I offer it in a benign and constructive spirit. You need to replace your "card game" mental image for the negotiation with one that is not so easy to visualize but has the benefit of being accurate.
Try to picture the following - "Two sets of macro political and economic interests coming together to arrive at broadly the inevitable outcome at pretty much the inevitable time given their genuine red lines and the known modus operandi of the EU and in particular this UK Prime Minister".
I suggested the "bucket draining through 2 holes into 2 bottles" one - which I still quite like - but I'm sure it can be improved upon.
Before the inevitable long discussion the two of you may want to consider the latest odds from noneoftheabovebet.
PT convinces K that he is wrong 100/1 K convinces PT that he is wrong 100/1
Neither side can be proved right or wrong. People are very predictably simply believing what they want to believe and there will be no changing views so it really doesn't matter. What will matter is how Brexit is perceived in general over the next few years. I fear and expect that Covid will give enough cover that the Brexit impact is not understood by much of the country, especially those emotionally invested in its success.
Can we just agree that it’s a daft argument.
If anyone has that much surplus energy, why not go closely read the thousand or so pages of the agreement, and write a thread header telling all why it’s great/crap ?
My point is exactly this. Good deal vs bad deal on the big picture is sterile. It's neither. It's just THE deal. The one the respective red lines and priorities largely dictated. Details tbc.
The bad news is there will be much "Boris crushed the EU with his hardball to-the-wire tactics and a credible threat to walk away to WTO" spin to be either ignored or rebutted depending on time & inclination & robustness of constitution.
So our Christmas truce has passed and we're all back to arguing about Brexit.
What next? Scottish Independence?
The arguments about Brexit will go on ad infinitum amongst those who are really exercised by it, but the country at large can move on. Most of the general population neither knows nor cares about fishing rights or the Erasmus scheme. I anticipate teething problems at the border in the New Year, but once they're sorted out the issue will fade into the background.
Scottish independence is a different matter. That pantomime will keep playing on a continuous loop until the nationalists win one of their future referendums and get away. Victory in the second one is a strong possibility for them, but even if they lose again they're so well dug in that the argument will never go away. If indyref 2 goes down then the campaign for indyref 3 starts the following morning.
No it doesn't, Yes to independence from Canada got 49% in the second Quebec referendum in 1995 and 25 years later there has still not been a third as devomax for Quebec resolved the issue.
The SNP are going nowhere, and unless they're badly weakened (and, having taken over as the dominant centre-left party, there's no sign of that happening) then they'll be in Government, either continuously or at regular intervals, until the year dot. This is the product of a very large and entrenched fraction of the electorate that has made up its mind that it wants independence, and a fragmented collection of weak, unpopular and useless opposition parties.
This isn't going to be like Quebec (besides anything else, "devomax" - whatever that turns out to be - isn't on offer, and even that wouldn't stop the loud, continuous complaints of being hard done by.) The only way anyone on either side of the border is going to get any peace is when they go.
Wait a moment. The Quebec National Assembly has been continuously controlled by nationalists since the demise of the Union Nationale.
All the parties in Quebec National Assembly (including the Liberal party) are various shades of nationalists. Apart from in the West Montreal suburbs, you just would not get many votes in Quebec if you weren't some shade of nationalist.
Quebec has far more power than Scotland, and has been allowed to go its own way in Canada with a much more generous hand by the loose central Government (which has often had a Quebecois at its helm).
I remain to be convinced that the English electorate - or, at any rate, a large enough fraction of it to make a big difference - will tolerate either a Government propped up by Scots Nats MPs, or a Prime Minister representing a Scottish seat, ever again. Certainly if there's any danger of the Conservatives losing their majority come the next General Election then the SNP will be used as a stick with which to beat Keir Starmer. But time will tell.
I think most people will have absolutely no problem with a PM representing a Scottish constituency, if that ever happens. Or Welsh.
Representing a Scottish Constituency was not Gordon Brown's problem. And boy did he have plenty problems to be going on with.
That was before Mr Cameron came upwith EVEL. Edit: were not there lots of moans by the Tories about having a Scots PM, even in Mr Brown's time? I can't remember clearly, but of course Mr C had not come up with EVEL, and the SNP hadn't wiped most of the board in the Westminster GEs.
Erasmus must be the biggest non-issue ever. Quite why it has garnered this much attention when it is being replaced by a similar scheme is beyond me.
I think BJ being a lying Cnut is more the issue, though I agree more and more people take that as read.
Check out the current number 5 in the charts. Straight in.
I believe the current Brexiteer mantra is that Boris Johnson is a F*cking C*nt only reaching no 5 means that the great British people have learned to love BJ and Brexit nativism.
On Topic: Boris Johnson is a known serial liar. Why would anyone believe anything he says? He is a disingenuous duplicitous piece of shit! Quite simply, the worst PM this country has ever had.
Alternatively, he is this morning master of all he surveys. A very respectable deal with the EU, the first country in the world to approve and distribute a vaccine, an 80 seat majority and a very dull if worthy opponent who he is increasingly running rings around.
No doubt 2021 will bring new challenges and the efficiency of the vaccine distribution remains a very difficult challenge, but right now he looks like our most dominant PM since Blair was in his pomp wittering about the Peoples' Princess or some such junk.
I’ll be interested to see how that comment fares over the next year.
As I said, new challenges in 2021. The economy is shot to hell, the public finances are a disaster area of almost biblical proportions, our retail sector is being reshaped far more swiftly than was inevitable, the SNP are being as tedious as ever, there is the possibility of several spanners with this wretched virus and the vaccines, much to do and many opportunities for the wheels to come off, no doubt about it. But right now, he must feel as smug as he looks in that picture that OGH posted. You saw that in his Christmas message which was classic Boris.
No doubt. None of that will help in governing, though.
I wonder who will emerge to take the Farage/eurosceptic role, slowly undermining the current settlement, chipping away at confidence over a period of years.
So our Christmas truce has passed and we're all back to arguing about Brexit.
What next? Scottish Independence?
The arguments about Brexit will go on ad infinitum amongst those who are really exercised by it, but the country at large can move on. Most of the general population neither knows nor cares about fishing rights or the Erasmus scheme. I anticipate teething problems at the border in the New Year, but once they're sorted out the issue will fade into the background.
Scottish independence is a different matter. That pantomime will keep playing on a continuous loop until the nationalists win one of their future referendums and get away. Victory in the second one is a strong possibility for them, but even if they lose again they're so well dug in that the argument will never go away. If indyref 2 goes down then the campaign for indyref 3 starts the following morning.
No it doesn't, Yes to independence from Canada got 49% in the second Quebec referendum in 1995 and 25 years later there has still not been a third as devomax for Quebec resolved the issue.
The SNP are going nowhere, and unless they're badly weakened (and, having taken over as the dominant centre-left party, there's no sign of that happening) then they'll be in Government, either continuously or at regular intervals, until the year dot. This is the product of a very large and entrenched fraction of the electorate that has made up its mind that it wants independence, and a fragmented collection of weak, unpopular and useless opposition parties.
This isn't going to be like Quebec (besides anything else, "devomax" - whatever that turns out to be - isn't on offer, and even that wouldn't stop the loud, continuous complaints of being hard done by.) The only way anyone on either side of the border is going to get any peace is when they go.
Wait a moment. The Quebec National Assembly has been continuously controlled by nationalists since the demise of the Union Nationale.
All the parties in Quebec National Assembly (including the Liberal party) are various shades of nationalists. Apart from in the West Montreal suburbs, you just would not get many votes in Quebec if you weren't some shade of nationalist.
Quebec has far more power than Scotland, and has been allowed to go its own way in Canada with a much more generous hand by the loose central Government (which has often had a Quebecois at its helm).
I remain to be convinced that the English electorate - or, at any rate, a large enough fraction of it to make a big difference - will tolerate either a Government propped up by Scots Nats MPs, or a Prime Minister representing a Scottish seat, ever again. Certainly if there's any danger of the Conservatives losing their majority come the next General Election then the SNP will be used as a stick with which to beat Keir Starmer. But time will tell.
I think most people will have absolutely no problem with a PM representing a Scottish constituency, if that ever happens. Or Welsh.
Representing a Scottish Constituency was not Gordon Brown's problem. And boy did he have plenty problems to be going on with.
That was before Mr Cameron came upwith EVEL. Edit: were not there lots of moans by the Tories about having a Scots PM, even in Mr Brown's time? I can't remember clearly, but of course Mr C had not come up with EVEL, and the SNP hadn't wiped most of the board in the Westminster GEs.
I still don't think representing a Welsh or Scottish seat would be a problem, tbh.
For this to be tested, though, we would need to identify a Welsh or Scottish Labour / Tory MP who looks like they are Prime Minister material
There are no obvious contenders from what HYUD would call Western England.
Erasmus must be the biggest non-issue ever. Quite why it has garnered this much attention when it is being replaced by a similar scheme is beyond me.
I think BJ being a lying Cnut is more the issue, though I agree more and more people take that as read.
Check out the current number 5 in the charts. Straight in.
I believe the current Brexiteer mantra is that Boris Johnson is a F*cking C*nt only reaching no 5 means that the great British people have learned to love BJ and Brexit nativism.
So our Christmas truce has passed and we're all back to arguing about Brexit.
What next? Scottish Independence?
The arguments about Brexit will go on ad infinitum amongst those who are really exercised by it, but the country at large can move on. Most of the general population neither knows nor cares about fishing rights or the Erasmus scheme. I anticipate teething problems at the border in the New Year, but once they're sorted out the issue will fade into the background.
Scottish independence is a different matter. That pantomime will keep playing on a continuous loop until the nationalists win one of their future referendums and get away. Victory in the second one is a strong possibility for them, but even if they lose again they're so well dug in that the argument will never go away. If indyref 2 goes down then the campaign for indyref 3 starts the following morning.
No it doesn't, Yes to independence from Canada got 49% in the second Quebec referendum in 1995 and 25 years later there has still not been a third as devomax for Quebec resolved the issue.
The SNP are going nowhere, and unless they're badly weakened (and, having taken over as the dominant centre-left party, there's no sign of that happening) then they'll be in Government, either continuously or at regular intervals, until the year dot. This is the product of a very large and entrenched fraction of the electorate that has made up its mind that it wants independence, and a fragmented collection of weak, unpopular and useless opposition parties.
This isn't going to be like Quebec (besides anything else, "devomax" - whatever that turns out to be - isn't on offer, and even that wouldn't stop the loud, continuous complaints of being hard done by.) The only way anyone on either side of the border is going to get any peace is when they go.
Wait a moment. The Quebec National Assembly has been continuously controlled by nationalists since the demise of the Union Nationale.
All the parties in Quebec National Assembly (including the Liberal party) are various shades of nationalists. Apart from in the West Montreal suburbs, you just would not get many votes in Quebec if you weren't some shade of nationalist.
Quebec has far more power than Scotland, and has been allowed to go its own way in Canada with a much more generous hand by the loose central Government (which has often had a Quebecois at its helm).
I remain to be convinced that the English electorate - or, at any rate, a large enough fraction of it to make a big difference - will tolerate either a Government propped up by Scots Nats MPs, or a Prime Minister representing a Scottish seat, ever again. Certainly if there's any danger of the Conservatives losing their majority come the next General Election then the SNP will be used as a stick with which to beat Keir Starmer. But time will tell.
I think most people will have absolutely no problem with a PM representing a Scottish constituency, if that ever happens. Or Welsh.
Representing a Scottish Constituency was not Gordon Brown's problem. And boy did he have plenty problems to be going on with.
That was before Mr Cameron came upwith EVEL. Edit: were not there lots of moans by the Tories about having a Scots PM, even in Mr Brown's time? I can't remember clearly, but of course Mr C had not come up with EVEL, and the SNP hadn't wiped most of the board in the Westminster GEs.
I still don't think representing a Welsh or Scottish seat would be a problem, tbh.
For this to be tested, though, we would need to identify a Welsh or Scottish Labour / Tory MP who looks like they are Prime Minister material
There are no obvious contenders from what HYUD would call Western England.
I wonder who will emerge to take the Farage/eurosceptic role, slowly undermining the current settlement, chipping away at confidence over a period of years.
Farage, he's got nowt else to do.
You know, you might be right. No doubt he’ll discover an angle soon enough.
I'm honestly quite surprised by how well Frost and his team have done. The whole team deserve a lot of praise for what they've achieved. Getting Boris to speak to Ursula at the end to sideline Barnier for the final three issues was surely the best bit of politicking of the whole process.
This is hilarious
You do realise that "side-lining Barnier" also meant side-lining Frost, right?
That's not rain guys, BoZo really is pissing on you...
Scott, the Brexiteers have won the war. It's over. The fightback to rejoin, probably not in my lifetime starts here.
I am loving the rewriting of very recent history to confirm Johnson's triumph on here, it is laughable. Some of the comments are so monstrous, one could write them on the side of a bus.
Over and out!
There is no fight to rejoin, it's over. We're out, rejoin is going to have the support of at most 10% of the electorate, it's time to find new issues to talk about and to find consensus elsewhere. Labour has a new opportunity now to do that.
Rejoin will be a minority passion at the next GE, but may well be a growing movement after that. I expect it to be via the salami technique, until there is none of Brexit left. We have passed peak Brexit already.
I don't think that's correct. After all, we are still in the transition period.
This may well be the big political question of the UK short term, and the answer is that ‘it depends’.
Having won their victory, sensible Brexiters would welcome the accommodation reached with the EU, and pivot back towards the common ground in the centre in order to consolidate their new reality, and ensure we have the best chance of making a good fist of our new economic circumstances.
History, however, suggests that having won a victory based on waging a culture war, the responsible politicians will find it ever so tempting to pick at new cultural divides in order to lever further political successes.
The latter course, while quite possibly unlocking new short term victories will, sooner or later, generate a counter-reaction that risks sweeping the whole lot away.
So our Christmas truce has passed and we're all back to arguing about Brexit.
What next? Scottish Independence?
The arguments about Brexit will go on ad infinitum amongst those who are really exercised by it, but the country at large can move on. Most of the general population neither knows nor cares about fishing rights or the Erasmus scheme. I anticipate teething problems at the border in the New Year, but once they're sorted out the issue will fade into the background.
Scottish independence is a different matter. That pantomime will keep playing on a continuous loop until the nationalists win one of their future referendums and get away. Victory in the second one is a strong possibility for them, but even if they lose again they're so well dug in that the argument will never go away. If indyref 2 goes down then the campaign for indyref 3 starts the following morning.
No it doesn't, Yes to independence from Canada got 49% in the second Quebec referendum in 1995 and 25 years later there has still not been a third as devomax for Quebec resolved the issue.
The SNP are going nowhere, and unless they're badly weakened (and, having taken over as the dominant centre-left party, there's no sign of that happening) then they'll be in Government, either continuously or at regular intervals, until the year dot. This is the product of a very large and entrenched fraction of the electorate that has made up its mind that it wants independence, and a fragmented collection of weak, unpopular and useless opposition parties.
This isn't going to be like Quebec (besides anything else, "devomax" - whatever that turns out to be - isn't on offer, and even that wouldn't stop the loud, continuous complaints of being hard done by.) The only way anyone on either side of the border is going to get any peace is when they go.
Wait a moment. The Quebec National Assembly has been continuously controlled by nationalists since the demise of the Union Nationale.
All the parties in Quebec National Assembly (including the Liberal party) are various shades of nationalists. Apart from in the West Montreal suburbs, you just would not get many votes in Quebec if you weren't some shade of nationalist.
Quebec has far more power than Scotland, and has been allowed to go its own way in Canada with a much more generous hand by the loose central Government (which has often had a Quebecois at its helm).
I remain to be convinced that the English electorate - or, at any rate, a large enough fraction of it to make a big difference - will tolerate either a Government propped up by Scots Nats MPs, or a Prime Minister representing a Scottish seat, ever again. Certainly if there's any danger of the Conservatives losing their majority come the next General Election then the SNP will be used as a stick with which to beat Keir Starmer. But time will tell.
I think most people will have absolutely no problem with a PM representing a Scottish constituency, if that ever happens.
One would hope so. But surely EVEL is the issue.
Edit: Because the PM is necessarily responsivble for English domestic policy. Unless that is resolved by the "UK" parliament being made a truly federal one, with England taken out of that equation by being given its own pmt or pmts.
It always comes back to the Big Train Set problem. A federal settlement with an English Parliament is the necessary condition to try to hold the UK together, but the leaders of the main political parties want to play with the whole train set. They don't want to be made to choose between being PM or FM.
I mean, I think the Scottish situation is so far advanced that the Union is beyond saving anyway, but they don't even want to try.
I logged on this morning and to be honest it was like a remainer's wake but I do accept that this Christmas has seen an end to their dreams.
To be honest we just need to move on, some will never do so, but I suspect the vast majority will be pleased it has been brought to a deal conclusion
Of course in all deals there are wins and losses but I fully expect Boris to embrace a very pro climate change pro sustainable farming policy and through climate change strike up a relationship with Joe Biden impossible with Trump
As far as Eramus is concerned my granddaughter was due to study in Italy in 2023 but I have little doubt the Turing replacement will provide opportunities not only within Europe but world wide
And as far as Boris is concerned his detractors and enemies may have to get used to him being PM for quite a long time
You'll probably get your "moving on" wish fulfilled in most sections of the Clapham Omnibus but far less so in committed, high octane places such as here.
Re your last sentence, 100% agree. Boris "80 seat" Johnson is going precisely nowhere. My biggest current political bet is on him still being PM on 1st July 2022. I'm on at an average 1.85 and I'm treating it mentally like money in the bank. You can get 1.72 or something now and I simply cannot recommend that bet enough. It's outstanding value. If you don't want to wait 18 months for the full return it will be layable back at 1.4 or less by Easter.
I agree and of course there will always be an element of those who cannot comprehend us being outside the EU but the vast majority will move on and some like myself breath a sigh of relief we have turned the page
As for Boris he has never been stronger in his party and he does seem to be rediscovering his mojo.
The climate conference is a huge world event here in Glasgow and he is the host, so I cannot imagine he will move on before that and indeed it is even possible he may contest the 2024 election
If he had been responsible for a no deal I believe he would not have lasted long into 2021
Well "moving on" from the wild and regular overestimation of the never more than 5% probability of a No Deal is something I do very much welcome. I need a new bugbear now though.
Has anyone properly congratulated on you for being right all along?
Hello, Alex. Thanks for mention. Yes, I think I've accrued as much kudos as I could reasonably have hoped. I'm happy.
Will put a bit of it back on the table now with a prediction that the Dems, contrary to what the odds are saying, will pull off the Georgia double.
Sorry to burst your bubble but you were wrong and I was right.
You were claiming that No Deal wasn't happening because the UK couldn't let it happen and so would sign EU terms and could have done so months ago.
I said if the UK stood firm then the EU wouldn't want No Deal because we hold the Aces.
On any impartial reading of the compromises the deal is far more what the UK was asking for months ago than what the EU was. So standing firm worked and you my friend were completely and utterly wrong.
There isn't a chance on earth this compromise could have been reached months ago.
It's one interpretation. Another is that the EU are quite content with the final outcome and always knew what they were prepared to give way on. But needed to be sure that the UK actually wanted a deal in order to do so (and didn't just get overconfident and start pushing for more beyond where the EU would go). It appears that the last few months, with the constant threats to walk away, setting deadlines and then ditching them rapidly, convinced them that there would be a deal and they just had to be careful to ensure their end state was secured.
And that is not in any way to say that they "won". Maybe the deal genuinely gives both sides what they wanted/are content with. Maybe they were just very good at keeping their real red lines secret, leaving what they were ok to give way on for public consumption.
Spot on. They didn't win or lose and nor did we. It resolved. The "card game" thing is a nonsense. So is stuff like "buying a house" or "corporate deal". People only think and speak of it like this because they've played card games and bought houses, or been involved in private business transactions, but have not done a great deal of big ticket macro geopolitics. Or at least not recently.
In any case my (almost) USP was specifically the insight - which it blooming well it was! - that No Deal was a Plan Z for the EU and just not an option at all for the UK under any PM bar a true Britnat headbanger. And both sides knew this. The No Deal hyping was for domestic consumption.
What surprised me what the extent it was swallowed by the betting (going No Deal 75% at one point) and on the Remain side of the commentariat. Leavers can be quite gullible, we know this, but bettors and Remainers are meant to be a bit more detached and rational.
I think there was a touch of "Boris Derangement Syndrome" going on with some of the Remainers. Conversely on the Leave side, believing that big bad Boris was "facing the EU down", there was the opposite. It was "Borisophilia" mixed up with inappropriate card game mental imagery.
Except you were wrong. 🤦🏻♂️
There is a reason that it was UvDL rather than Johnson that blinked and moved considerably more. Which wasn't possible under your hypothesis.
If you're struggling to understand my points as to why there's been excellent contributions from Mark, Max, David and CR explaining this well on this thread. Apologies if I forgot others.
If you were to surprise and make a point which deviates from the risible "blinking in a card game" fantasy that is strictly for the more gullible of the true beleavers I promise to take it seriously.
Mistake for Lab to bang on about Erasmus I suspect. Not relevant to most people's lives.
Nor is fishing.
But the Tories have been banging on about little else for months.
Yes, the EU certainly haven't banged on about it for months as well. Only the Tories, as long as you ignore reality, so clearly only they are to blame for it taking up so much attention.
So our Christmas truce has passed and we're all back to arguing about Brexit.
What next? Scottish Independence?
The arguments about Brexit will go on ad infinitum amongst those who are really exercised by it, but the country at large can move on. Most of the general population neither knows nor cares about fishing rights or the Erasmus scheme. I anticipate teething problems at the border in the New Year, but once they're sorted out the issue will fade into the background.
Scottish independence is a different matter. That pantomime will keep playing on a continuous loop until the nationalists win one of their future referendums and get away. Victory in the second one is a strong possibility for them, but even if they lose again they're so well dug in that the argument will never go away. If indyref 2 goes down then the campaign for indyref 3 starts the following morning.
No it doesn't, Yes to independence from Canada got 49% in the second Quebec referendum in 1995 and 25 years later there has still not been a third as devomax for Quebec resolved the issue.
The SNP are going nowhere, and unless they're badly weakened (and, having taken over as the dominant centre-left party, there's no sign of that happening) then they'll be in Government, either continuously or at regular intervals, until the year dot. This is the product of a very large and entrenched fraction of the electorate that has made up its mind that it wants independence, and a fragmented collection of weak, unpopular and useless opposition parties.
This isn't going to be like Quebec (besides anything else, "devomax" - whatever that turns out to be - isn't on offer, and even that wouldn't stop the loud, continuous complaints of being hard done by.) The only way anyone on either side of the border is going to get any peace is when they go.
Wait a moment. The Quebec National Assembly has been continuously controlled by nationalists since the demise of the Union Nationale.
All the parties in Quebec National Assembly (including the Liberal party) are various shades of nationalists. Apart from in the West Montreal suburbs, you just would not get many votes in Quebec if you weren't some shade of nationalist.
Quebec has far more power than Scotland, and has been allowed to go its own way in Canada with a much more generous hand by the loose central Government (which has often had a Quebecois at its helm).
I remain to be convinced that the English electorate - or, at any rate, a large enough fraction of it to make a big difference - will tolerate either a Government propped up by Scots Nats MPs, or a Prime Minister representing a Scottish seat, ever again. Certainly if there's any danger of the Conservatives losing their majority come the next General Election then the SNP will be used as a stick with which to beat Keir Starmer. But time will tell.
I think most people will have absolutely no problem with a PM representing a Scottish constituency, if that ever happens. Or Welsh.
Representing a Scottish Constituency was not Gordon Brown's problem. And boy did he have plenty problems to be going on with.
That was before Mr Cameron came upwith EVEL. Edit: were not there lots of moans by the Tories about having a Scots PM, even in Mr Brown's time? I can't remember clearly, but of course Mr C had not come up with EVEL, and the SNP hadn't wiped most of the board in the Westminster GEs.
I still don't think representing a Welsh or Scottish seat would be a problem, tbh.
For this to be tested, though, we would need to identify a Welsh or Scottish Labour / Tory MP who looks like they are Prime Minister material
There are no obvious contenders from what HYUD would call Western England.
Or a LD or SNP MP in a coalition, remember.
Edit: Or a peer. Ruth Davidson for PM?
True.
Canada had absolutely no difficulty in electing 5 Canadian PMs from Quebec (P. Trudeau, Mulroney, Martin, Chretien, J. Trudeau) all whilst Quebec was trying to leave the Federation of Canada. Admittedly, all 5 were federalists.
And the Quebec question had become very bitter by the Second Referendum.
I logged on this morning and to be honest it was like a remainer's wake but I do accept that this Christmas has seen an end to their dreams.
To be honest we just need to move on, some will never do so, but I suspect the vast majority will be pleased it has been brought to a deal conclusion
Of course in all deals there are wins and losses but I fully expect Boris to embrace a very pro climate change pro sustainable farming policy and through climate change strike up a relationship with Joe Biden impossible with Trump
As far as Eramus is concerned my granddaughter was due to study in Italy in 2023 but I have little doubt the Turing replacement will provide opportunities not only within Europe but world wide
And as far as Boris is concerned his detractors and enemies may have to get used to him being PM for quite a long time
You'll probably get your "moving on" wish fulfilled in most sections of the Clapham Omnibus but far less so in committed, high octane places such as here.
Re your last sentence, 100% agree. Boris "80 seat" Johnson is going precisely nowhere. My biggest current political bet is on him still being PM on 1st July 2022. I'm on at an average 1.85 and I'm treating it mentally like money in the bank. You can get 1.72 or something now and I simply cannot recommend that bet enough. It's outstanding value. If you don't want to wait 18 months for the full return it will be layable back at 1.4 or less by Easter.
I agree and of course there will always be an element of those who cannot comprehend us being outside the EU but the vast majority will move on and some like myself breath a sigh of relief we have turned the page
As for Boris he has never been stronger in his party and he does seem to be rediscovering his mojo.
The climate conference is a huge world event here in Glasgow and he is the host, so I cannot imagine he will move on before that and indeed it is even possible he may contest the 2024 election
If he had been responsible for a no deal I believe he would not have lasted long into 2021
Well "moving on" from the wild and regular overestimation of the never more than 5% probability of a No Deal is something I do very much welcome. I need a new bugbear now though.
Has anyone properly congratulated on you for being right all along?
Hello, Alex. Thanks for mention. Yes, I think I've accrued as much kudos as I could reasonably have hoped. I'm happy.
Will put a bit of it back on the table now with a prediction that the Dems, contrary to what the odds are saying, will pull off the Georgia double.
Sorry to burst your bubble but you were wrong and I was right.
You were claiming that No Deal wasn't happening because the UK couldn't let it happen and so would sign EU terms and could have done so months ago.
I said if the UK stood firm then the EU wouldn't want No Deal because we hold the Aces.
On any impartial reading of the compromises the deal is far more what the UK was asking for months ago than what the EU was. So standing firm worked and you my friend were completely and utterly wrong.
There isn't a chance on earth this compromise could have been reached months ago.
I wouldn't normally do this to you, Philip, and apologies in advance, but on this occasion it simply has to be a rather contemptuous lol.
Here's my key bit of advice and I offer it in a benign and constructive spirit. You need to replace your "card game" mental image for the negotiation with one that is not so easy to visualize but has the benefit of being accurate.
Try to picture the following - "Two sets of macro political and economic interests coming together to arrive at broadly the inevitable outcome at pretty much the inevitable time given their genuine red lines and the known modus operandi of the EU and in particular this UK Prime Minister".
I suggested the "bucket draining through 2 holes into 2 bottles" one - which I still quite like - but I'm sure it can be improved upon.
Before the inevitable long discussion the two of you may want to consider the latest odds from noneoftheabovebet.
PT convinces K that he is wrong 100/1 K convinces PT that he is wrong 100/1
Neither side can be proved right or wrong. People are very predictably simply believing what they want to believe and there will be no changing views so it really doesn't matter. What will matter is how Brexit is perceived in general over the next few years. I fear and expect that Covid will give enough cover that the Brexit impact is not understood by much of the country, especially those emotionally invested in its success.
It won't be a long discussion, don't worry.
But no, there's a false equivalence here which I must firmly reject.
(a) "Boris" wrung a great deal out of the EU by playing hardball and going to the wire and making them truly believe he'd walk away to no deal and WTO terms.
(b) The deal was broadly as expected given the respective red lines. It went to the wire because these things tend to and the optics work domestically. No Deal was never realistically happening and both sides knew this.
One of the above views is "believing what one wants to believe".
The other one is as close to objective reality as something not 100% provable can be.
I know which I think is more likely, but that may be what I want to believe....
The equivalence, imo, is not on which is more likely to be true, but in that both positions are clearly unprovable, and make sense to the originators from their world view, but have zero chance of being accepted by the other side.
I logged on this morning and to be honest it was like a remainer's wake but I do accept that this Christmas has seen an end to their dreams.
To be honest we just need to move on, some will never do so, but I suspect the vast majority will be pleased it has been brought to a deal conclusion
Of course in all deals there are wins and losses but I fully expect Boris to embrace a very pro climate change pro sustainable farming policy and through climate change strike up a relationship with Joe Biden impossible with Trump
As far as Eramus is concerned my granddaughter was due to study in Italy in 2023 but I have little doubt the Turing replacement will provide opportunities not only within Europe but world wide
And as far as Boris is concerned his detractors and enemies may have to get used to him being PM for quite a long time
You'll probably get your "moving on" wish fulfilled in most sections of the Clapham Omnibus but far less so in committed, high octane places such as here.
Re your last sentence, 100% agree. Boris "80 seat" Johnson is going precisely nowhere. My biggest current political bet is on him still being PM on 1st July 2022. I'm on at an average 1.85 and I'm treating it mentally like money in the bank. You can get 1.72 or something now and I simply cannot recommend that bet enough. It's outstanding value. If you don't want to wait 18 months for the full return it will be layable back at 1.4 or less by Easter.
I agree and of course there will always be an element of those who cannot comprehend us being outside the EU but the vast majority will move on and some like myself breath a sigh of relief we have turned the page
As for Boris he has never been stronger in his party and he does seem to be rediscovering his mojo.
The climate conference is a huge world event here in Glasgow and he is the host, so I cannot imagine he will move on before that and indeed it is even possible he may contest the 2024 election
If he had been responsible for a no deal I believe he would not have lasted long into 2021
Well "moving on" from the wild and regular overestimation of the never more than 5% probability of a No Deal is something I do very much welcome. I need a new bugbear now though.
Has anyone properly congratulated on you for being right all along?
Hello, Alex. Thanks for mention. Yes, I think I've accrued as much kudos as I could reasonably have hoped. I'm happy.
Will put a bit of it back on the table now with a prediction that the Dems, contrary to what the odds are saying, will pull off the Georgia double.
Sorry to burst your bubble but you were wrong and I was right.
You were claiming that No Deal wasn't happening because the UK couldn't let it happen and so would sign EU terms and could have done so months ago.
I said if the UK stood firm then the EU wouldn't want No Deal because we hold the Aces.
On any impartial reading of the compromises the deal is far more what the UK was asking for months ago than what the EU was. So standing firm worked and you my friend were completely and utterly wrong.
There isn't a chance on earth this compromise could have been reached months ago.
I wouldn't normally do this to you, Philip, and apologies in advance, but on this occasion it simply has to be a rather contemptuous lol.
Here's my key bit of advice and I offer it in a benign and constructive spirit. You need to replace your "card game" mental image for the negotiation with one that is not so easy to visualize but has the benefit of being accurate.
Try to picture the following - "Two sets of macro political and economic interests coming together to arrive at broadly the inevitable outcome at pretty much the inevitable time given their genuine red lines and the known modus operandi of the EU and in particular this UK Prime Minister".
I suggested the "bucket draining through 2 holes into 2 bottles" one - which I still quite like - but I'm sure it can be improved upon.
Before the inevitable long discussion the two of you may want to consider the latest odds from noneoftheabovebet.
PT convinces K that he is wrong 100/1 K convinces PT that he is wrong 100/1
Neither side can be proved right or wrong. People are very predictably simply believing what they want to believe and there will be no changing views so it really doesn't matter. What will matter is how Brexit is perceived in general over the next few years. I fear and expect that Covid will give enough cover that the Brexit impact is not understood by much of the country, especially those emotionally invested in its success.
It won't be a long discussion, don't worry.
But no, there's a false equivalence here which I must firmly reject.
(a) "Boris" wrung a great deal out of the EU by playing hardball and going to the wire and making them truly believe he'd walk away to no deal and WTO terms.
(b) The deal was broadly as expected given the respective red lines. It went to the wire because these things tend to and the optics work domestically. No Deal was never realistically happening and both sides knew this.
One of the above views is "believing what one wants to believe".
The other one is as close to objective reality as something not 100% provable can be.
Agreed. A.
Because you yourself were saying the UK was going to compromise more on LPF etc, which was objectively provably wrong.
Erasmus must be the biggest non-issue ever. Quite why it has garnered this much attention when it is being replaced by a similar scheme is beyond me.
It's clearly of symbolic importance, but while at this time I have no idea if the similar scheme will be anywhere near as good, the very fact that it is being replaced, not simply erased, does make it a less impactful symbol. There is a simple retort that the positives of the scheme will be replicated, which at this time cannot be refuted.
Surely there are things that definitely have been lost forever that would make for a better symbol?
So our Christmas truce has passed and we're all back to arguing about Brexit.
What next? Scottish Independence?
The arguments about Brexit will go on ad infinitum amongst those who are really exercised by it, but the country at large can move on. Most of the general population neither knows nor cares about fishing rights or the Erasmus scheme. I anticipate teething problems at the border in the New Year, but once they're sorted out the issue will fade into the background.
Scottish independence is a different matter. That pantomime will keep playing on a continuous loop until the nationalists win one of their future referendums and get away. Victory in the second one is a strong possibility for them, but even if they lose again they're so well dug in that the argument will never go away. If indyref 2 goes down then the campaign for indyref 3 starts the following morning.
No it doesn't, Yes to independence from Canada got 49% in the second Quebec referendum in 1995 and 25 years later there has still not been a third as devomax for Quebec resolved the issue.
The SNP are going nowhere, and unless they're badly weakened (and, having taken over as the dominant centre-left party, there's no sign of that happening) then they'll be in Government, either continuously or at regular intervals, until the year dot. This is the product of a very large and entrenched fraction of the electorate that has made up its mind that it wants independence, and a fragmented collection of weak, unpopular and useless opposition parties.
This isn't going to be like Quebec (besides anything else, "devomax" - whatever that turns out to be - isn't on offer, and even that wouldn't stop the loud, continuous complaints of being hard done by.) The only way anyone on either side of the border is going to get any peace is when they go.
Wait a moment. The Quebec National Assembly has been continuously controlled by nationalists since the demise of the Union Nationale.
All the parties in Quebec National Assembly (including the Liberal party) are various shades of nationalists. Apart from in the West Montreal suburbs, you just would not get many votes in Quebec if you weren't some shade of nationalist.
Quebec has far more power than Scotland, and has been allowed to go its own way in Canada with a much more generous hand by the loose central Government (which has often had a Quebecois at its helm).
I remain to be convinced that the English electorate - or, at any rate, a large enough fraction of it to make a big difference - will tolerate either a Government propped up by Scots Nats MPs, or a Prime Minister representing a Scottish seat, ever again. Certainly if there's any danger of the Conservatives losing their majority come the next General Election then the SNP will be used as a stick with which to beat Keir Starmer. But time will tell.
I think most people will have absolutely no problem with a PM representing a Scottish constituency, if that ever happens.
One would hope so. But surely EVEL is the issue.
Edit: Because the PM is necessarily responsivble for English domestic policy. Unless that is resolved by the "UK" parliament being made a truly federal one, with England taken out of that equation by being given its own pmt or pmts.
It always comes back to the Big Train Set problem. A federal settlement with an English Parliament is the necessary condition to try to hold the UK together, but the leaders of the main political parties want to play with the whole train set. They don't want to be made to choose between being PM or FM.
I mean, I think the Scottish situation is so far advanced that the Union is beyond saving anyway, but they don't even want to try.
That's the trouble. Can you possibly imagine any non-Tory Scottish PM - or potential PM - whom the Tories wouldn't monster with every possible angle? It'd be like Mr Miliband in Mr Salmond's pocket, only ten times worse. And yet the Tories are supposed to be Unionists. With EVEL and then the Miliband/Salmomnd posters, the Tories didn't so much not try as positively to reject the idea of an equal union with all MPs counting together - tear it up and then widdle all over it (and that's quite separate from the known asymmetries of the Blairite devolution settlement, which we all know about).
Boris has been on camera saying that it is a useful tactic in life to give the slight impression you are deliberately pretending not to know what is going on, as the reality may be that you don't know what is going on but people won't be able to tell the difference.
He is a bit too cavalier in testing that out for my liking.
So our Christmas truce has passed and we're all back to arguing about Brexit.
What next? Scottish Independence?
The arguments about Brexit will go on ad infinitum amongst those who are really exercised by it, but the country at large can move on. Most of the general population neither knows nor cares about fishing rights or the Erasmus scheme. I anticipate teething problems at the border in the New Year, but once they're sorted out the issue will fade into the background.
Scottish independence is a different matter. That pantomime will keep playing on a continuous loop until the nationalists win one of their future referendums and get away. Victory in the second one is a strong possibility for them, but even if they lose again they're so well dug in that the argument will never go away. If indyref 2 goes down then the campaign for indyref 3 starts the following morning.
No it doesn't, Yes to independence from Canada got 49% in the second Quebec referendum in 1995 and 25 years later there has still not been a third as devomax for Quebec resolved the issue.
The SNP are going nowhere, and unless they're badly weakened (and, having taken over as the dominant centre-left party, there's no sign of that happening) then they'll be in Government, either continuously or at regular intervals, until the year dot. This is the product of a very large and entrenched fraction of the electorate that has made up its mind that it wants independence, and a fragmented collection of weak, unpopular and useless opposition parties.
This isn't going to be like Quebec (besides anything else, "devomax" - whatever that turns out to be - isn't on offer, and even that wouldn't stop the loud, continuous complaints of being hard done by.) The only way anyone on either side of the border is going to get any peace is when they go.
Wait a moment. The Quebec National Assembly has been continuously controlled by nationalists since the demise of the Union Nationale.
All the parties in Quebec National Assembly (including the Liberal party) are various shades of nationalists. Apart from in the West Montreal suburbs, you just would not get many votes in Quebec if you weren't some shade of nationalist.
Quebec has far more power than Scotland, and has been allowed to go its own way in Canada with a much more generous hand by the loose central Government (which has often had a Quebecois at its helm).
I remain to be convinced that the English electorate - or, at any rate, a large enough fraction of it to make a big difference - will tolerate either a Government propped up by Scots Nats MPs, or a Prime Minister representing a Scottish seat, ever again. Certainly if there's any danger of the Conservatives losing their majority come the next General Election then the SNP will be used as a stick with which to beat Keir Starmer. But time will tell.
I think most people will have absolutely no problem with a PM representing a Scottish constituency, if that ever happens.
One would hope so. But surely EVEL is the issue.
Edit: Because the PM is necessarily responsivble for English domestic policy. Unless that is resolved by the "UK" parliament being made a truly federal one, with England taken out of that equation by being given its own pmt or pmts.
It always comes back to the Big Train Set problem. A federal settlement with an English Parliament is the necessary condition to try to hold the UK together, but the leaders of the main political parties want to play with the whole train set. They don't want to be made to choose between being PM or FM.
I mean, I think the Scottish situation is so far advanced that the Union is beyond saving anyway, but they don't even want to try.
That's the trouble. Can you possibly imagine any non-Tory Scottish PM - or potential PM - whom the Tories wouldn't monster with every possible angle? It'd be like Mr Miliband in Mr Salmond's pocket, only ten times worse. And yet the Tories are supposed to be Unionists. With EVEL and then the Miliband/Salmomnd posters, the Tories didn't so much not try as positively to reject the idea of an equal union with all MPs counting together - tear it up and then widdle all over it (and that's quite separate from the known asymmetries of the Blairite devolution settlement, which we all know about).
I think the Salmond posters coudl quite easily make the point that being in the pocket of nationalists, not merely scots, would be a problem. However I do think you are right that there are far too many people who object to a Scottish PM as an issue in itself. No it hasn't been that long since we had one, but it does feel different to me now, and that is hugely problematic for the Union.
I logged on this morning and to be honest it was like a remainer's wake but I do accept that this Christmas has seen an end to their dreams.
To be honest we just need to move on, some will never do so, but I suspect the vast majority will be pleased it has been brought to a deal conclusion
Of course in all deals there are wins and losses but I fully expect Boris to embrace a very pro climate change pro sustainable farming policy and through climate change strike up a relationship with Joe Biden impossible with Trump
As far as Eramus is concerned my granddaughter was due to study in Italy in 2023 but I have little doubt the Turing replacement will provide opportunities not only within Europe but world wide
And as far as Boris is concerned his detractors and enemies may have to get used to him being PM for quite a long time
You'll probably get your "moving on" wish fulfilled in most sections of the Clapham Omnibus but far less so in committed, high octane places such as here.
Re your last sentence, 100% agree. Boris "80 seat" Johnson is going precisely nowhere. My biggest current political bet is on him still being PM on 1st July 2022. I'm on at an average 1.85 and I'm treating it mentally like money in the bank. You can get 1.72 or something now and I simply cannot recommend that bet enough. It's outstanding value. If you don't want to wait 18 months for the full return it will be layable back at 1.4 or less by Easter.
I agree and of course there will always be an element of those who cannot comprehend us being outside the EU but the vast majority will move on and some like myself breath a sigh of relief we have turned the page
As for Boris he has never been stronger in his party and he does seem to be rediscovering his mojo.
The climate conference is a huge world event here in Glasgow and he is the host, so I cannot imagine he will move on before that and indeed it is even possible he may contest the 2024 election
If he had been responsible for a no deal I believe he would not have lasted long into 2021
Well "moving on" from the wild and regular overestimation of the never more than 5% probability of a No Deal is something I do very much welcome. I need a new bugbear now though.
Has anyone properly congratulated on you for being right all along?
Hello, Alex. Thanks for mention. Yes, I think I've accrued as much kudos as I could reasonably have hoped. I'm happy.
Will put a bit of it back on the table now with a prediction that the Dems, contrary to what the odds are saying, will pull off the Georgia double.
Sorry to burst your bubble but you were wrong and I was right.
You were claiming that No Deal wasn't happening because the UK couldn't let it happen and so would sign EU terms and could have done so months ago.
I said if the UK stood firm then the EU wouldn't want No Deal because we hold the Aces.
On any impartial reading of the compromises the deal is far more what the UK was asking for months ago than what the EU was. So standing firm worked and you my friend were completely and utterly wrong.
There isn't a chance on earth this compromise could have been reached months ago.
I wouldn't normally do this to you, Philip, and apologies in advance, but on this occasion it simply has to be a rather contemptuous lol.
Here's my key bit of advice and I offer it in a benign and constructive spirit. You need to replace your "card game" mental image for the negotiation with one that is not so easy to visualize but has the benefit of being accurate.
Try to picture the following - "Two sets of macro political and economic interests coming together to arrive at broadly the inevitable outcome at pretty much the inevitable time given their genuine red lines and the known modus operandi of the EU and in particular this UK Prime Minister".
I suggested the "bucket draining through 2 holes into 2 bottles" one - which I still quite like - but I'm sure it can be improved upon.
Before the inevitable long discussion the two of you may want to consider the latest odds from noneoftheabovebet.
PT convinces K that he is wrong 100/1 K convinces PT that he is wrong 100/1
Neither side can be proved right or wrong. People are very predictably simply believing what they want to believe and there will be no changing views so it really doesn't matter. What will matter is how Brexit is perceived in general over the next few years. I fear and expect that Covid will give enough cover that the Brexit impact is not understood by much of the country, especially those emotionally invested in its success.
It won't be a long discussion, don't worry.
But no, there's a false equivalence here which I must firmly reject.
(a) "Boris" wrung a great deal out of the EU by playing hardball and going to the wire and making them truly believe he'd walk away to no deal and WTO terms.
(b) The deal was broadly as expected given the respective red lines. It went to the wire because these things tend to and the optics work domestically. No Deal was never realistically happening and both sides knew this.
One of the above views is "believing what one wants to believe".
The other one is as close to objective reality as something not 100% provable can be.
Agreed. A.
Because you yourself were saying the UK was going to compromise more on LPF etc, which was objectively provably wrong.
What I've said is that the ongoing integrity of the SM was the EU's ultimate sine qua non red line. And ours were FOM and fish. Hence there was a deal to be done on this basis. Which it has been. Well done Johnson. Well done the EU. Just drop the silly "Boris is a negotiating god" spin, and in particular the incorrect assessment of how realistic No Deal ever was, and we are there.
I think the photograph posted on here this morning of Boris with a used nappy by his feet is a real low point for this site.
I think it's meant to be takeaway chips, but the point stands.
Some people just want a fight on Boxing Day...
Yeah, CR is always looking for a grievance to get on his high horse about.
You need to get over your obsession with me. And possibly do some work too since, for a highly specialised and "busy" NHS consultant, you seem to always be on here.
Merry Christmas x
Nah, I worked Christmas last year, so off this year. Its the way we work it in my dept.
You mean your department do the work, and you have the time off?
Stay as classy as you can Casino, you are sounding pretty pathetic and juvenile.
Says the man who posted a used nappy next to a man with his trousers round his ankles.
You need to boil another turnip for your boxing day dinner.
You halfwit, given the amount of people who have told you it is a box of french fries, grow up.
On Topic: Boris Johnson is a known serial liar. Why would anyone believe anything he says? He is a disingenuous duplicitous piece of shit! Quite simply, the worst PM this country has ever had.
Alternatively, he is this morning master of all he surveys. A very respectable deal with the EU, the first country in the world to approve and distribute a vaccine, an 80 seat majority and a very dull if worthy opponent who he is increasingly running rings around.
No doubt 2021 will bring new challenges and the efficiency of the vaccine distribution remains a very difficult challenge, but right now he looks like our most dominant PM since Blair was in his pomp wittering about the Peoples' Princess or some such junk.
I’ll be interested to see how that comment fares over the next year.
One to keep for sure , it looks like fantasy thinking to me.
I think what seals this as a pretty good deal is how little remainer crowing there is about how Boris has capitulated or how the EU has smashed the UK or how the UK will never really be free etc...
That all the remainers can talk about is Erasmus and fish is quite telling as to the quality of this deal for the UK.
It's basically exactly what I envisioned a good deal would be a year ago after the election and talks started. I didn't think we'd get there because Barnier was still in charge, but to Frost's credit he clearly recognised where the deal needed to end up and what the roadblock was so created the conditions to get there by getting Barnier out of the room.
So our Christmas truce has passed and we're all back to arguing about Brexit.
What next? Scottish Independence?
The arguments about Brexit will go on ad infinitum amongst those who are really exercised by it, but the country at large can move on. Most of the general population neither knows nor cares about fishing rights or the Erasmus scheme. I anticipate teething problems at the border in the New Year, but once they're sorted out the issue will fade into the background.
Scottish independence is a different matter. That pantomime will keep playing on a continuous loop until the nationalists win one of their future referendums and get away. Victory in the second one is a strong possibility for them, but even if they lose again they're so well dug in that the argument will never go away. If indyref 2 goes down then the campaign for indyref 3 starts the following morning.
No it doesn't, Yes to independence from Canada got 49% in the second Quebec referendum in 1995 and 25 years later there has still not been a third as devomax for Quebec resolved the issue.
The SNP are going nowhere, and unless they're badly weakened (and, having taken over as the dominant centre-left party, there's no sign of that happening) then they'll be in Government, either continuously or at regular intervals, until the year dot. This is the product of a very large and entrenched fraction of the electorate that has made up its mind that it wants independence, and a fragmented collection of weak, unpopular and useless opposition parties.
This isn't going to be like Quebec (besides anything else, "devomax" - whatever that turns out to be - isn't on offer, and even that wouldn't stop the loud, continuous complaints of being hard done by.) The only way anyone on either side of the border is going to get any peace is when they go.
Wait a moment. The Quebec National Assembly has been continuously controlled by nationalists since the demise of the Union Nationale.
All the parties in Quebec National Assembly (including the Liberal party) are various shades of nationalists. Apart from in the West Montreal suburbs, you just would not get many votes in Quebec if you weren't some shade of nationalist.
Quebec has far more power than Scotland, and has been allowed to go its own way in Canada with a much more generous hand by the loose central Government (which has often had a Quebecois at its helm).
I remain to be convinced that the English electorate - or, at any rate, a large enough fraction of it to make a big difference - will tolerate either a Government propped up by Scots Nats MPs, or a Prime Minister representing a Scottish seat, ever again. Certainly if there's any danger of the Conservatives losing their majority come the next General Election then the SNP will be used as a stick with which to beat Keir Starmer. But time will tell.
I think most people will have absolutely no problem with a PM representing a Scottish constituency, if that ever happens.
One would hope so. But surely EVEL is the issue.
Edit: Because the PM is necessarily responsivble for English domestic policy. Unless that is resolved by the "UK" parliament being made a truly federal one, with England taken out of that equation by being given its own pmt or pmts.
It always comes back to the Big Train Set problem. A federal settlement with an English Parliament is the necessary condition to try to hold the UK together, but the leaders of the main political parties want to play with the whole train set. They don't want to be made to choose between being PM or FM.
I mean, I think the Scottish situation is so far advanced that the Union is beyond saving anyway, but they don't even want to try.
That's the trouble. Can you possibly imagine any non-Tory Scottish PM - or potential PM - whom the Tories wouldn't monster with every possible angle? It'd be like Mr Miliband in Mr Salmond's pocket, only ten times worse. And yet the Tories are supposed to be Unionists. With EVEL and then the Miliband/Salmomnd posters, the Tories didn't so much not try as positively to reject the idea of an equal union with all MPs counting together - tear it up and then widdle all over it (and that's quite separate from the known asymmetries of the Blairite devolution settlement, which we all know about).
If there was a non-Tory PM, Scottish or otherwise, wouldn't it be the Tories' job to monster them? I am not sure I see the point you're making.
So our Christmas truce has passed and we're all back to arguing about Brexit.
What next? Scottish Independence?
The arguments about Brexit will go on ad infinitum amongst those who are really exercised by it, but the country at large can move on. Most of the general population neither knows nor cares about fishing rights or the Erasmus scheme. I anticipate teething problems at the border in the New Year, but once they're sorted out the issue will fade into the background.
Scottish independence is a different matter. That pantomime will keep playing on a continuous loop until the nationalists win one of their future referendums and get away. Victory in the second one is a strong possibility for them, but even if they lose again they're so well dug in that the argument will never go away. If indyref 2 goes down then the campaign for indyref 3 starts the following morning.
No it doesn't, Yes to independence from Canada got 49% in the second Quebec referendum in 1995 and 25 years later there has still not been a third as devomax for Quebec resolved the issue.
The SNP are going nowhere, and unless they're badly weakened (and, having taken over as the dominant centre-left party, there's no sign of that happening) then they'll be in Government, either continuously or at regular intervals, until the year dot. This is the product of a very large and entrenched fraction of the electorate that has made up its mind that it wants independence, and a fragmented collection of weak, unpopular and useless opposition parties.
This isn't going to be like Quebec (besides anything else, "devomax" - whatever that turns out to be - isn't on offer, and even that wouldn't stop the loud, continuous complaints of being hard done by.) The only way anyone on either side of the border is going to get any peace is when they go.
Wait a moment. The Quebec National Assembly has been continuously controlled by nationalists since the demise of the Union Nationale.
All the parties in Quebec National Assembly (including the Liberal party) are various shades of nationalists. Apart from in the West Montreal suburbs, you just would not get many votes in Quebec if you weren't some shade of nationalist.
Quebec has far more power than Scotland, and has been allowed to go its own way in Canada with a much more generous hand by the loose central Government (which has often had a Quebecois at its helm).
I remain to be convinced that the English electorate - or, at any rate, a large enough fraction of it to make a big difference - will tolerate either a Government propped up by Scots Nats MPs, or a Prime Minister representing a Scottish seat, ever again. Certainly if there's any danger of the Conservatives losing their majority come the next General Election then the SNP will be used as a stick with which to beat Keir Starmer. But time will tell.
I think most people will have absolutely no problem with a PM representing a Scottish constituency, if that ever happens.
One would hope so. But surely EVEL is the issue.
Edit: Because the PM is necessarily responsivble for English domestic policy. Unless that is resolved by the "UK" parliament being made a truly federal one, with England taken out of that equation by being given its own pmt or pmts.
It always comes back to the Big Train Set problem. A federal settlement with an English Parliament is the necessary condition to try to hold the UK together, but the leaders of the main political parties want to play with the whole train set. They don't want to be made to choose between being PM or FM.
I mean, I think the Scottish situation is so far advanced that the Union is beyond saving anyway, but they don't even want to try.
That's the trouble. Can you possibly imagine any non-Tory Scottish PM - or potential PM - whom the Tories wouldn't monster with every possible angle? It'd be like Mr Miliband in Mr Salmond's pocket, only ten times worse. And yet the Tories are supposed to be Unionists. With EVEL and then the Miliband/Salmomnd posters, the Tories didn't so much not try as positively to reject the idea of an equal union with all MPs counting together - tear it up and then widdle all over it (and that's quite separate from the known asymmetries of the Blairite devolution settlement, which we all know about).
I think the Salmond posters coudl quite easily make the point that being in the pocket of nationalists, not merely scots, would be a problem. However I do think you are right that there are far too many people who object to a Scottish PM as an issue in itself. No it hasn't been that long since we had one, but it does feel different to me now, and that is hugely problematic for the Union.
Really? I don't get that impression at all. Granted, you probably speak to a lot more people who live in England during the course of your week.
So our Christmas truce has passed and we're all back to arguing about Brexit.
What next? Scottish Independence?
The arguments about Brexit will go on ad infinitum amongst those who are really exercised by it, but the country at large can move on. Most of the general population neither knows nor cares about fishing rights or the Erasmus scheme. I anticipate teething problems at the border in the New Year, but once they're sorted out the issue will fade into the background.
Scottish independence is a different matter. That pantomime will keep playing on a continuous loop until the nationalists win one of their future referendums and get away. Victory in the second one is a strong possibility for them, but even if they lose again they're so well dug in that the argument will never go away. If indyref 2 goes down then the campaign for indyref 3 starts the following morning.
No it doesn't, Yes to independence from Canada got 49% in the second Quebec referendum in 1995 and 25 years later there has still not been a third as devomax for Quebec resolved the issue.
The SNP are going nowhere, and unless they're badly weakened (and, having taken over as the dominant centre-left party, there's no sign of that happening) then they'll be in Government, either continuously or at regular intervals, until the year dot. This is the product of a very large and entrenched fraction of the electorate that has made up its mind that it wants independence, and a fragmented collection of weak, unpopular and useless opposition parties.
This isn't going to be like Quebec (besides anything else, "devomax" - whatever that turns out to be - isn't on offer, and even that wouldn't stop the loud, continuous complaints of being hard done by.) The only way anyone on either side of the border is going to get any peace is when they go.
Wait a moment. The Quebec National Assembly has been continuously controlled by nationalists since the demise of the Union Nationale.
All the parties in Quebec National Assembly (including the Liberal party) are various shades of nationalists. Apart from in the West Montreal suburbs, you just would not get many votes in Quebec if you weren't some shade of nationalist.
Quebec has far more power than Scotland, and has been allowed to go its own way in Canada with a much more generous hand by the loose central Government (which has often had a Quebecois at its helm).
I remain to be convinced that the English electorate - or, at any rate, a large enough fraction of it to make a big difference - will tolerate either a Government propped up by Scots Nats MPs, or a Prime Minister representing a Scottish seat, ever again. Certainly if there's any danger of the Conservatives losing their majority come the next General Election then the SNP will be used as a stick with which to beat Keir Starmer. But time will tell.
I think that if the SNP had the imagination & vision to set up an English/Welsh party, with high quality candidates who themselves had the imagination & vision for a way forward for England/Wales given an independent Scotland, they could very well find themselves with a majority of their own in Westminster.
Whatever your politics, Ms Sturgeon is an impressive operator. I think people would welcome a genuine alternative.
so having left Council and the Commission - this trade and cooperation agreement has something called a “Partnership Council” with 19 sub committees eg on Trade, energy, and four working groups on organic, cars etc, a Parliamentary Partnership assembly, Civil Society Forum etc
example of why its not Canada
There is something called an “arbitration tribunal” with wide ranging powers to allow say retaliatory tariffs or more in “rebalancing” of future divergence... also referred to in eg fishing annexe..in fact 324 mentions in agreement text. Not in CETA
CETA has a thing called the CETA Tribunals to do the similar job...
Comments
The equivalence, imo, is not on which is more likely to be true, but in that both positions are clearly unprovable, and make sense to the originators from their world view, but have zero chance of being accepted by the other side.
For 40 years...
No, but seriously, my point is mainly about No Deal and its hyping. The threat of No Deal is not what has shaped the deal in any significant way. No Deal has been used very skillfully by Johnson - as per the Header I did - for DOMESTIC political purposes. He's been doing so for years. A masterclass in fact.
As for LPF, the EU considers that the agreement protects the integrity of the Single Market, their one genuine red line. But, fair enough, I will tell them that you judge otherwise - perhaps it's not too late for some tweaks.
Did Downing Street release an official picture that makes him look like such an arse?
The hubris shown by Conservatives as a result of their Christmas Eve victory might be short lived. The magnifcent win, might yet be a false dawn.
Erasmus has fired me up (along with a number of other discarded programmes). Never say never.
I'm off (again), no really this time, have a nice Boxing Day!
Edit: by "those" I mean the population in general, not just bus drivers.
Edit: Because the PM is necessarily responsivble for English domestic policy. Unless that is resolved by the "UK" parliament being made a truly federal one, with England taken out of that equation by being given its own pmt or pmts.
Having a system of farm payments completely different to the CAP (which is like crack cocaine to Club Med and a number of other EU states with powerful farm lobbies) should be enough on its own to render the UK and EU incompatible indefinitely, to say nothing of the scarring effect of the decades of arguments over Europe, or the requirement for accession states to commit in principle to joining the Euro.
The bad news is there will be much "Boris crushed the EU with his hardball to-the-wire tactics and a credible threat to walk away to WTO" spin to be either ignored or rebutted depending on time & inclination & robustness of constitution.
*for Rob
None of that will help in governing, though.
For this to be tested, though, we would need to identify a Welsh or Scottish Labour / Tory MP who looks like they are Prime Minister material
There are no obvious contenders from what HYUD would call Western England.
Edit: Or a peer. Ruth Davidson for PM?
Having won their victory, sensible Brexiters would welcome the accommodation reached with the EU, and pivot back towards the common ground in the centre in order to consolidate their new reality, and ensure we have the best chance of making a good fist of our new economic circumstances.
History, however, suggests that having won a victory based on waging a culture war, the responsible politicians will find it ever so tempting to pick at new cultural divides in order to lever further political successes.
The latter course, while quite possibly unlocking new short term victories will, sooner or later, generate a counter-reaction that risks sweeping the whole lot away.
I mean, I think the Scottish situation is so far advanced that the Union is beyond saving anyway, but they don't even want to try.
Canada had absolutely no difficulty in electing 5 Canadian PMs from Quebec (P. Trudeau, Mulroney, Martin, Chretien, J. Trudeau) all whilst Quebec was trying to leave the Federation of Canada. Admittedly, all 5 were federalists.
And the Quebec question had become very bitter by the Second Referendum.
Because you yourself were saying the UK was going to compromise more on LPF etc, which was objectively provably wrong.
Surely there are things that definitely have been lost forever that would make for a better symbol?
He is a bit too cavalier in testing that out for my liking.
NEW THREAD
If Erasmus is continuing in NI, who will be funding it? Approx cost is £3k per head.
Though if the new scheme is similar, there may not be much of an issue unless they try to do both.
Whatever your politics, Ms Sturgeon is an impressive operator. I think people would welcome a genuine alternative.
Good evening, everyone.