"I've been to Magaluf, but this was just crazy..." LOL.
There's a point here - we've gone from forced abstinence to encouraged excess almost overnight.
Some people can't handle that.
Oddly enough, going racing with restricted crowd numbers was a real pleasure yet I'm told it's not the same without a "crowd".
No, it's much worse but I can understand why Lingfield Park want a crowd of 10,000 drinking rather than 2,000 enjoying the racing.
Indeed there is a point. And you've put your finger on it. Newcastle City centre has had a distinctly, evil air abroad in the late hours recently. Stag and hens, aren't in Prague and Amsterdam. The quayside bar staff I know reckon it has never been anything like this bad. Not local accents. Blood, urine and vomit on the Tyne is all mine.
Why and who?
Some parts of London have definitely got edgier, some are quieter than ever.
I've always found London surprisingly free of aggro. Walking through the centre of my small Scottish hometown on a Friday or Saturday night in the 1990s you would see a lot more general lariness and get more of a sense of impending violence than I've ever seen down here. Of course there is a tragic problem with knife violence here, but it isn't directed at random people on the street.
Yes, growing up in small city England in the 70s I saw nasty fights every weekend. Guaranteed
Same elsewhere in provincial Britain
The violence in London is much rarer, oddly, but when it happens it is nastier: stabbings and shootings
Staying in central London during each week for several years for work reasons, it always felt very safe and surprisingly friendly to me.
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Your second paragraph is absurd. Your stereotype applies, if at all, to a small proportion of the 48% who voted to remain, and is no better than the reverse stereotype of 'thick leavers'. And as one of the unprivileged hard-working people who voted remain, and is getting on a bit, far from "every election going (my) way until 2016", very few have done, and I've spent most of my life with governments I oppose.
There's a lot of hard truths in the second paragraphs, it's difficult to look into that mirror so I'm not surprised that remainers are so dismissive of the idea that they benefited from the impoverishment of white working class Brits by Eastern Europeans living 8 to single bedroom flats working for the minimum wage or below and turning it into an effective maximum wage for millions of people. You may have been someone who came from that background but you also pulled the ladder up.
Absolute drivel.
And yet out of the EU wage inflation at the bottom of the market has gone insane.
There’s a global labour shortage (I mean in the West), although likely worse here because of Brexit.
Check out the US data.
So the labour market does adhere to basic economic principles of supply and demand? I mean I've read about a billion papers by liberal academics suggesting otherwise and saying that EU immigration had no impact on wages. Which is it? Is Brexit having an inflationary impact on wages or did EU immigration cause have deflationary effect on wages?
Yeah the evidence is that it increased overall wages, especially for people like yourself.
I’m not sure why you are such a hysterical denialist on this subject. Your comments that Brexit is worthwhile to see other people suffer is frankly pathetic at your age.
So the rich (people like me) got richer and the wages of the not so rich and working poor got propped up by the minimum wage (which is evidenced by actual ONS data, not studies). Not exactly a great development, feels a bit like pulling up the ladder.
My view is that the people who lost could do with the experience of losing given that they (well we, given what I do for a living) had got used to always winning at life and the EU simply entrenched the advantages of the highly educated and highly paid class. Rolling that back will probably make me every so slightly poorer but if it means that people at the lower end get a decent wage and don't have their pay held down by having an unlimited pool of cheap labour to compete with then there's only ever going to be one choice to make.
In general I'm not one to get overly personal and for most people I wouldn't. There are, however, some people's bitterness that really reinforce my leave vote. On days when I wonder whether it was worth it one of them will handily pop up (not you, mind) and remind me that this is what I voted leave for, to give that class of people a loss for the first time.
Thank you for this response.
I fear you are due to be disappointed. Britain’s low wage problem is caused by a) low skills b) low productivity Indeed, the two are linked.
FDI and immigration actually both served to improve the overall skill base and indeed our productivity. FDI is now down steeply, and immigration from the EU at least has almost disappeared.
All things being equal, Brexit will keep those wages low.
One area where Brexiters *might* have a point is that for unproductive businesses, access to an “unlimited” labour pool served to disincentivise capital investment.
However, Britain’s problems in this respect are long lasting, systemic, and AIUI are not significantly impacted by this greater access to labour.
Again, I agree that the skills base has improved, it has helped people like me make more money on one side and save money on the other by making my coffee cheaper and my restaurant bills lower.
On your specific points you're absolutely underestimating the impact of having a vast pool of cheap labour on productivity and the local skills base. Employers have no need to invest in skills base improvements when they can simply throw labour at it. Why bother?
You can map the drop off in business investment to the joining of the A8 countries. I think you have an idealised version of the EU which is based on what the EU15 was, not what the EU28 was when we left.
Staying in the EU doesn't confront any of the issues facing the UK, all it does is brush it under the rug and create an effective underclass of low wage workers for whom the minimum wage is a maximum wage. So it makes me a bit poorer, so it makes you a bit poorer. The alternative would tear this nation in two as the low wage workers realise their lot in life is to exist to service people like us who want cheap coffee.
So we'll have to bother with border checks and some extra paperwork. None of that is the end of the world really, in fact escaping from EU protectionism will probably be of net benefit to the nation. Escaping the dead hand of the EU will be better than most people realise.
I just disagree with this.
I think sector by sector analysis fails to prove that large scale immigration impeded wage growth except in some limited cases. Same is true for productivity.
And FDI has fallen since 2016 as we have become a less interesting investment proposition since Brexit.
Britain’s underclass is actually it’s own white working class, where it suffers from very poor educational performance - a post industrial legacy. None of this is related to EU membership.
Where I might agree is that EU membership disguised this problem. On the other hand, there’s no real evidence the current government is really interested in confronting it either.
That's studies by the same class of people who won from EU membership. They were and still are asking the wrong questions. The actual data from the ONS shows mega wage growth at the top for people like us and the minimum wage becoming a maximum wage for those at the bottom.
Once again, you're seeing the issue but not actually putting two and two together. If the underclass is easy to ignore they will get ignored. If companies need to hire them then they won't. Educational underachievement is only one part of it, among many.
Leaving the EU forces us as a society to confront this head on, not sweep it under the rug as we did for so long.
I think one of the issues here is that you trust the experts. I don't. The experts are wrong. The people doing the studies and making the models are wrong. These are the same people telling Mrs Thatcher that she was wrong, well she wasn't and the same people are telling leavers we are wrong. We aren't. The expert class has lost it faculties to question the settled liberal agenda and so have you.
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
Also Ireland I think. And France? Or close, anyway.
We never managed to find a “vaccine dividend”.
We did. We saved tens of thousands of lives, in the UK, by our excellent early vaccination programme. Who knows how many died in the EU, unnecessarily, because they were much slower to begin?
It was entirely predictable that all western nations would end at roughly the same time and in the same way, as they all hit the walls of vaccine hesitancy
I'm not sure it was inevitable- my memory of the chatter here and elsewhere in the spring was that fortunate Brits would confidently stride out into the world with our vaccination superpowers, whilst those living in lesser nations were still cowering. Indeed, I thought that my guess, that the gap would be as small as 4-6 weeks might be a bit on the low side... most people put it way bigger than that. Denmark has now done more doses per person than the UK, Spain will probably overtake next week. Even France... 7 million doses behind, but catching up at about 0.4 million doses a day.
Part of the problem is the one you mention a bit further down; unlike most advanced countries, we've not taken a decision to vaccinate the bulk of teenagers. (It is still a not decided, rather than a decided not to, isn't it?). That does seem foolish given that infected young people can pass the virus back to vaccinated oldies. And there's nothing magic about the age 18; Covid doesn't check birth certificates any more than TV stars of the 1970's did.
My guess is a couple of things went wrong with the UK programme. One was that it generated the degree of hubris that a sometimes florid but occasionally shrewd commentator has pointed out that Covid spots and attacks. In this case, the UK didn't bother with "get a jab" PR campaigns until it was too late. Why bother- the doses were flying out of the vaccination centres? The other was the decision to try to avoid using AZ on younger people and not making the additional Pfizer order until it was a bit too late. It means we currently have enough vaccines to go down to age 18, but it's doubtful if we can go any further for now. (The other other thing the UK has got wrong is keeping the delivery data secret, so we're all guessing).
And as for Europe? Once they got over their initial embarrassing flap (yeah, that was bad), they got their act together and sorted out networks to churn out millions and millions of doses of Pfizer vaccine. It's the thing about speedboats vs supertankers. It's a pain to get a supertanker going in the right direction, and it seems to take ages. But if you want to carry a lot of stuff a long way, it's the way to go.
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Your second paragraph is absurd. Your stereotype applies, if at all, to a small proportion of the 48% who voted to remain, and is no better than the reverse stereotype of 'thick leavers'. And as one of the unprivileged hard-working people who voted remain, and is getting on a bit, far from "every election going (my) way until 2016", very few have done, and I've spent most of my life with governments I oppose.
There's a lot of hard truths in the second paragraphs, it's difficult to look into that mirror so I'm not surprised that remainers are so dismissive of the idea that they benefited from the impoverishment of white working class Brits by Eastern Europeans living 8 to single bedroom flats working for the minimum wage or below and turning it into an effective maximum wage for millions of people. You may have been someone who came from that background but you also pulled the ladder up.
Absolute drivel.
And yet out of the EU wage inflation at the bottom of the market has gone insane.
There’s a global labour shortage (I mean in the West), although likely worse here because of Brexit.
Check out the US data.
So the labour market does adhere to basic economic principles of supply and demand? I mean I've read about a billion papers by liberal academics suggesting otherwise and saying that EU immigration had no impact on wages. Which is it? Is Brexit having an inflationary impact on wages or did EU immigration cause have deflationary effect on wages?
Yeah the evidence is that it increased overall wages, especially for people like yourself.
I’m not sure why you are such a hysterical denialist on this subject. Your comments that Brexit is worthwhile to see other people suffer is frankly pathetic at your age.
So the rich (people like me) got richer and the wages of the not so rich and working poor got propped up by the minimum wage (which is evidenced by actual ONS data, not studies). Not exactly a great development, feels a bit like pulling up the ladder.
My view is that the people who lost could do with the experience of losing given that they (well we, given what I do for a living) had got used to always winning at life and the EU simply entrenched the advantages of the highly educated and highly paid class. Rolling that back will probably make me every so slightly poorer but if it means that people at the lower end get a decent wage and don't have their pay held down by having an unlimited pool of cheap labour to compete with then there's only ever going to be one choice to make.
In general I'm not one to get overly personal and for most people I wouldn't. There are, however, some people's bitterness that really reinforce my leave vote. On days when I wonder whether it was worth it one of them will handily pop up (not you, mind) and remind me that this is what I voted leave for, to give that class of people a loss for the first time.
Thank you for this response.
I fear you are due to be disappointed. Britain’s low wage problem is caused by a) low skills b) low productivity Indeed, the two are linked.
FDI and immigration actually both served to improve the overall skill base and indeed our productivity. FDI is now down steeply, and immigration from the EU at least has almost disappeared.
All things being equal, Brexit will keep those wages low.
One area where Brexiters *might* have a point is that for unproductive businesses, access to an “unlimited” labour pool served to disincentivise capital investment.
However, Britain’s problems in this respect are long lasting, systemic, and AIUI are not significantly impacted by this greater access to labour.
Again, I agree that the skills base has improved, it has helped people like me make more money on one side and save money on the other by making my coffee cheaper and my restaurant bills lower.
On your specific points you're absolutely underestimating the impact of having a vast pool of cheap labour on productivity and the local skills base. Employers have no need to invest in skills base improvements when they can simply throw labour at it. Why bother?
You can map the drop off in business investment to the joining of the A8 countries. I think you have an idealised version of the EU which is based on what the EU15 was, not what the EU28 was when we left.
Staying in the EU doesn't confront any of the issues facing the UK, all it does is brush it under the rug and create an effective underclass of low wage workers for whom the minimum wage is a maximum wage. So it makes me a bit poorer, so it makes you a bit poorer. The alternative would tear this nation in two as the low wage workers realise their lot in life is to exist to service people like us who want cheap coffee.
So we'll have to bother with border checks and some extra paperwork. None of that is the end of the world really, in fact escaping from EU protectionism will probably be of net benefit to the nation. Escaping the dead hand of the EU will be better than most people realise.
I just disagree with this.
I think sector by sector analysis fails to prove that large scale immigration impeded wage growth except in some limited cases. Same is true for productivity.
And FDI has fallen since 2016 as we have become a less interesting investment proposition since Brexit.
Britain’s underclass is actually it’s own white working class, where it suffers from very poor educational performance - a post industrial legacy. None of this is related to EU membership.
Where I might agree is that EU membership disguised this problem. On the other hand, there’s no real evidence the current government is really interested in confronting it either.
It’s basic economics. If you increase the supply of labour, wages will fall.
And @MaxPB is right re having cheap labour available is a discouragement to firms investing and thus driving down productivity. Look at farmers - wailing about how not having access to cheap E European labour would kill them and, when they realised they would n out get their way, started to invest in crop picking technology that was there all along, just they hadn’t bothered to invest in it because of the supply of...cheap labour.
There are many plus points you could argue for the EU but defying the law of economics is not one of them.
It really isn’t just “basic economics”.
Anyone who says that marks themselves as someone who either hasn’t looked into it, or is not interested in doing so. Or both.
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
Also Ireland I think. And France? Or close, anyway.
We never managed to find a “vaccine dividend”.
We did. We saved tens of thousands of lives, in the UK, by our excellent early vaccination programme. Who knows how many died in the EU, unnecessarily, because they were much slower to begin?
It was entirely predictable that all western nations would end at roughly the same time and in the same way, as they all hit the walls of vaccine hesitancy
60,000 lives in the UK have been saved due to the vaccines according to a report last week
Just a pity about the 100,000 lost thanks to government incompetence.
Do you really believe any government could have avoided a seriously high number of loses from a pandemic of this nature and of course the responsibility lies with all four administrations and no doubt the public enquiry will eventually decide just how much incompetence Boris, Sturgeon, Drakeford and Foster were responsible for
"I've been to Magaluf, but this was just crazy..." LOL.
There's a point here - we've gone from forced abstinence to encouraged excess almost overnight.
Some people can't handle that.
Oddly enough, going racing with restricted crowd numbers was a real pleasure yet I'm told it's not the same without a "crowd".
No, it's much worse but I can understand why Lingfield Park want a crowd of 10,000 drinking rather than 2,000 enjoying the racing.
Indeed there is a point. And you've put your finger on it. Newcastle City centre has had a distinctly, evil air abroad in the late hours recently. Stag and hens, aren't in Prague and Amsterdam. The quayside bar staff I know reckon it has never been anything like this bad. Not local accents. Blood, urine and vomit on the Tyne is all mine.
Why and who?
Some parts of London have definitely got edgier, some are quieter than ever.
Stag and hens for one. Sports teams starved of foreign tours. There has always been them, of course, but not in these numbers. Hotels are cheap and plentiful due to lack of business and tourist trade. Worse, they aren't diluted by local middle class theatre and restaurant goers, nor business people who are staying away. Toon, indeed the north east, has only one small, getting Pissed up centre.
In my corner of London it is open drug dealing spreading into the royal parks, especially around Primrose Hill. It comes with gangs, violence and theft, and it started during Covid
It is sporadic. Weeks can do by and it's fine, then suddenly Eeek
I was musing. Is there a glut of cocaine? Not the drug I'd choose during lockdown. There seems to be widespread anecdotal reports of it being involved now. That, and excess alcohol, would explain at least some of the behaviour.
There were certainly loads of reports of open coke taking in the euros, especially the final. A photographer friend of mine was at Wembley and he says it was an incredible bacchanal of agrression, exuberance and drugs - not all bad, some good humoured, but definitely scary
In London the drugs have followed the kids. During lockdown a lot of London youths discovered the magnificent parks, and realised what fun it is just to buy booze and go sit in the parks and party and have picnics and music (and it is fun, I do the same). They bring guitars. They sing and dance. There are tribes of pretty teenage girls. The boys naturally follow, hopefully
And so the drug dealers have come to serve this brand new market
Maybe I’m getting old. But London increasingly feels lawless, grimy, threatening. A place to leave rather than a place to go to. Went in a few weeks ago. Took mere seconds after my arrival before the station was evacuated for an Inspector Sands announcement. Very hard to avoid the urge to say “bugger this for a game of soldiers, back to the shire I go”.
My opinion shifts weekly, or even daily.
A few weeks ago I despaired, vocally, of north London, on here. It all felt very lawless at night. And dirty and run down
The other day I did basically the same route at the same time of night and it felt buoyant and dynamic and hopeful
One thing for sure is that the city is younger, much younger. The olds stay at home or they have fled. The youth have inherited The Smoke. That brings good and bad things
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Your second paragraph is absurd. Your stereotype applies, if at all, to a small proportion of the 48% who voted to remain, and is no better than the reverse stereotype of 'thick leavers'. And as one of the unprivileged hard-working people who voted remain, and is getting on a bit, far from "every election going (my) way until 2016", very few have done, and I've spent most of my life with governments I oppose.
There's a lot of hard truths in the second paragraphs, it's difficult to look into that mirror so I'm not surprised that remainers are so dismissive of the idea that they benefited from the impoverishment of white working class Brits by Eastern Europeans living 8 to single bedroom flats working for the minimum wage or below and turning it into an effective maximum wage for millions of people. You may have been someone who came from that background but you also pulled the ladder up.
Absolute drivel.
And yet out of the EU wage inflation at the bottom of the market has gone insane.
There’s a global labour shortage (I mean in the West), although likely worse here because of Brexit.
Check out the US data.
So the labour market does adhere to basic economic principles of supply and demand? I mean I've read about a billion papers by liberal academics suggesting otherwise and saying that EU immigration had no impact on wages. Which is it? Is Brexit having an inflationary impact on wages or did EU immigration cause have deflationary effect on wages?
Yeah the evidence is that it increased overall wages, especially for people like yourself.
I’m not sure why you are such a hysterical denialist on this subject. Your comments that Brexit is worthwhile to see other people suffer is frankly pathetic at your age.
So the rich (people like me) got richer and the wages of the not so rich and working poor got propped up by the minimum wage (which is evidenced by actual ONS data, not studies). Not exactly a great development, feels a bit like pulling up the ladder.
My view is that the people who lost could do with the experience of losing given that they (well we, given what I do for a living) had got used to always winning at life and the EU simply entrenched the advantages of the highly educated and highly paid class. Rolling that back will probably make me every so slightly poorer but if it means that people at the lower end get a decent wage and don't have their pay held down by having an unlimited pool of cheap labour to compete with then there's only ever going to be one choice to make.
In general I'm not one to get overly personal and for most people I wouldn't. There are, however, some people's bitterness that really reinforce my leave vote. On days when I wonder whether it was worth it one of them will handily pop up (not you, mind) and remind me that this is what I voted leave for, to give that class of people a loss for the first time.
Thank you for this response.
I fear you are due to be disappointed. Britain’s low wage problem is caused by a) low skills b) low productivity Indeed, the two are linked.
FDI and immigration actually both served to improve the overall skill base and indeed our productivity. FDI is now down steeply, and immigration from the EU at least has almost disappeared.
All things being equal, Brexit will keep those wages low.
One area where Brexiters *might* have a point is that for unproductive businesses, access to an “unlimited” labour pool served to disincentivise capital investment.
However, Britain’s problems in this respect are long lasting, systemic, and AIUI are not significantly impacted by this greater access to labour.
Again, I agree that the skills base has improved, it has helped people like me make more money on one side and save money on the other by making my coffee cheaper and my restaurant bills lower.
On your specific points you're absolutely underestimating the impact of having a vast pool of cheap labour on productivity and the local skills base. Employers have no need to invest in skills base improvements when they can simply throw labour at it. Why bother?
You can map the drop off in business investment to the joining of the A8 countries. I think you have an idealised version of the EU which is based on what the EU15 was, not what the EU28 was when we left.
Staying in the EU doesn't confront any of the issues facing the UK, all it does is brush it under the rug and create an effective underclass of low wage workers for whom the minimum wage is a maximum wage. So it makes me a bit poorer, so it makes you a bit poorer. The alternative would tear this nation in two as the low wage workers realise their lot in life is to exist to service people like us who want cheap coffee.
So we'll have to bother with border checks and some extra paperwork. None of that is the end of the world really, in fact escaping from EU protectionism will probably be of net benefit to the nation. Escaping the dead hand of the EU will be better than most people realise.
I just disagree with this.
I think sector by sector analysis fails to prove that large scale immigration impeded wage growth except in some limited cases. Same is true for productivity.
And FDI has fallen since 2016 as we have become a less interesting investment proposition since Brexit.
Britain’s underclass is actually it’s own white working class, where it suffers from very poor educational performance - a post industrial legacy. None of this is related to EU membership.
Where I might agree is that EU membership disguised this problem. On the other hand, there’s no real evidence the current government is really interested in confronting it either.
That's studies by the same class of people who won from EU membership. They were and still are asking the wrong questions. The actual data from the ONS shows mega wage growth at the top for people like us and the minimum wage becoming a maximum wage for those at the bottom.
Once again, you're seeing the issue but not actually putting two and two together. If the underclass is easy to ignore they will get ignored. If companies need to hire them then they won't. Educational underachievement is only one part of it, among many.
Leaving the EU forces us as a society to confront this head on, not sweep it under the rug as we did for so long.
I think one of the issues here is that you trust the experts. I don't. The experts are wrong. The people doing the studies and making the models are wrong. These are the same people telling Mrs Thatcher that she was wrong, well she wasn't and the same people are telling leavers we are wrong. We aren't. The expert class has lost it faculties to question the settled liberal agenda and so have you.
The ONS is picking up the same returns on human capital that every advanced economy has seen in the last 25 years.
Try to look more at the global context in support (or refutation) of your arguments.
I’m saddened that, at the end, your argument boils down to “THE EXPERTS ARE WRONG!”.
Imagine if that is how traffic signals in the Highway Code operated.
A watch list is entirely reasonable and not at all complicated. It’s “watch out this may change”
"Simple and user friendly" was Johnson's ambition for the scheme.
May be it’s just me but I find “we’re amber for now but may change to red so be thoughtful about that risk” very simple and more user friendly than being caught by surprise
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
You do realise that just makes him look somewhat endearing (and also Patel, FWIW)
I am well aware of the effect it has on his fans.
There was a whole thread about it yesterday.
His fans love him. His enemies hate him. Stunts like this change neither opinion.
But, people who hold neither view are not more likely to vote BoZo as a result.
And yes, he is an International laughing stock.
One of PBs most inexplicable fallacies, that nothing ever changes anybody's mind. A variant entails waiting for the next opinion poll and declaring that incident x can have had no possible significance because look at this opinion poll (quite often with fieldwork prior to incident x). I have news for you: Boris has semi fans who quite like him, and semi enemies who haven't much time for him, and so on all along the spectrum. The umbrella footage is, I'm afraid, extremely endearing, especially in the very clever version to which you've linked because you wrongly think it's satirical. It's not going to make me vote for him, but it will make some people who otherwise wouldn't.
May be it’s just me but I find “we’re amber for now but may change to red so be thoughtful about that risk” very simple and more user friendly than being caught by surprise
That's the problem
We know the rules for Amber. We know the rules for Red.
What are the rules for 'Amber Watch', and what do you do if they change during your stay?
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Your second paragraph is absurd. Your stereotype applies, if at all, to a small proportion of the 48% who voted to remain, and is no better than the reverse stereotype of 'thick leavers'. And as one of the unprivileged hard-working people who voted remain, and is getting on a bit, far from "every election going (my) way until 2016", very few have done, and I've spent most of my life with governments I oppose.
There's a lot of hard truths in the second paragraphs, it's difficult to look into that mirror so I'm not surprised that remainers are so dismissive of the idea that they benefited from the impoverishment of white working class Brits by Eastern Europeans living 8 to single bedroom flats working for the minimum wage or below and turning it into an effective maximum wage for millions of people. You may have been someone who came from that background but you also pulled the ladder up.
Absolute drivel.
And yet out of the EU wage inflation at the bottom of the market has gone insane.
There’s a global labour shortage (I mean in the West), although likely worse here because of Brexit.
Check out the US data.
So the labour market does adhere to basic economic principles of supply and demand? I mean I've read about a billion papers by liberal academics suggesting otherwise and saying that EU immigration had no impact on wages. Which is it? Is Brexit having an inflationary impact on wages or did EU immigration cause have deflationary effect on wages?
Yeah the evidence is that it increased overall wages, especially for people like yourself.
I’m not sure why you are such a hysterical denialist on this subject. Your comments that Brexit is worthwhile to see other people suffer is frankly pathetic at your age.
So the rich (people like me) got richer and the wages of the not so rich and working poor got propped up by the minimum wage (which is evidenced by actual ONS data, not studies). Not exactly a great development, feels a bit like pulling up the ladder.
My view is that the people who lost could do with the experience of losing given that they (well we, given what I do for a living) had got used to always winning at life and the EU simply entrenched the advantages of the highly educated and highly paid class. Rolling that back will probably make me every so slightly poorer but if it means that people at the lower end get a decent wage and don't have their pay held down by having an unlimited pool of cheap labour to compete with then there's only ever going to be one choice to make.
In general I'm not one to get overly personal and for most people I wouldn't. There are, however, some people's bitterness that really reinforce my leave vote. On days when I wonder whether it was worth it one of them will handily pop up (not you, mind) and remind me that this is what I voted leave for, to give that class of people a loss for the first time.
Thank you for this response.
I fear you are due to be disappointed. Britain’s low wage problem is caused by a) low skills b) low productivity Indeed, the two are linked.
FDI and immigration actually both served to improve the overall skill base and indeed our productivity. FDI is now down steeply, and immigration from the EU at least has almost disappeared.
All things being equal, Brexit will keep those wages low.
One area where Brexiters *might* have a point is that for unproductive businesses, access to an “unlimited” labour pool served to disincentivise capital investment.
However, Britain’s problems in this respect are long lasting, systemic, and AIUI are not significantly impacted by this greater access to labour.
Again, I agree that the skills base has improved, it has helped people like me make more money on one side and save money on the other by making my coffee cheaper and my restaurant bills lower.
On your specific points you're absolutely underestimating the impact of having a vast pool of cheap labour on productivity and the local skills base. Employers have no need to invest in skills base improvements when they can simply throw labour at it. Why bother?
You can map the drop off in business investment to the joining of the A8 countries. I think you have an idealised version of the EU which is based on what the EU15 was, not what the EU28 was when we left.
Staying in the EU doesn't confront any of the issues facing the UK, all it does is brush it under the rug and create an effective underclass of low wage workers for whom the minimum wage is a maximum wage. So it makes me a bit poorer, so it makes you a bit poorer. The alternative would tear this nation in two as the low wage workers realise their lot in life is to exist to service people like us who want cheap coffee.
So we'll have to bother with border checks and some extra paperwork. None of that is the end of the world really, in fact escaping from EU protectionism will probably be of net benefit to the nation. Escaping the dead hand of the EU will be better than most people realise.
I just disagree with this.
I think sector by sector analysis fails to prove that large scale immigration impeded wage growth except in some limited cases. Same is true for productivity.
And FDI has fallen since 2016 as we have become a less interesting investment proposition since Brexit.
Britain’s underclass is actually it’s own white working class, where it suffers from very poor educational performance - a post industrial legacy. None of this is related to EU membership.
Where I might agree is that EU membership disguised this problem. On the other hand, there’s no real evidence the current government is really interested in confronting it either.
That's studies by the same class of people who won from EU membership. They were and still are asking the wrong questions. The actual data from the ONS shows mega wage growth at the top for people like us and the minimum wage becoming a maximum wage for those at the bottom.
Once again, you're seeing the issue but not actually putting two and two together. If the underclass is easy to ignore they will get ignored. If companies need to hire them then they won't. Educational underachievement is only one part of it, among many.
Leaving the EU forces us as a society to confront this head on, not sweep it under the rug as we did for so long.
I think one of the issues here is that you trust the experts. I don't. The experts are wrong. The people doing the studies and making the models are wrong. These are the same people telling Mrs Thatcher that she was wrong, well she wasn't and the same people are telling leavers we are wrong. We aren't. The expert class has lost it faculties to question the settled liberal agenda and so have you.
The ONS is picking up the same returns on human capital that every advanced economy has seen in the last 25 years.
Try to look more at the global context in support (or refutation) of your arguments.
I’m saddened that, at the end, your argument boils down to “THE EXPERTS ARE WRONG!”.
It is anti-vaxxery-onomics.
Did the ONS have the right figures for the number of EU citizens in the UK?
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
Also Ireland I think. And France? Or close, anyway.
We never managed to find a “vaccine dividend”.
We did. We saved tens of thousands of lives, in the UK, by our excellent early vaccination programme. Who knows how many died in the EU, unnecessarily, because they were much slower to begin?
It was entirely predictable that all western nations would end at roughly the same time and in the same way, as they all hit the walls of vaccine hesitancy
I'm not sure it was inevitable- my memory of the chatter here and elsewhere in the spring was that fortunate Brits would confidently stride out into the world with our vaccination superpowers, whilst those living in lesser nations were still cowering. Indeed, I thought that my guess, that the gap would be as small as 4-6 weeks might be a bit on the low side... most people put it way bigger than that. Denmark has now done more doses per person than the UK, Spain will probably overtake next week. Even France... 7 million doses behind, but catching up at about 0.4 million doses a day.
Part of the problem is the one you mention a bit further down; unlike most advanced countries, we've not taken a decision to vaccinate the bulk of teenagers. (It is still a not decided, rather than a decided not to, isn't it?). That does seem foolish given that infected young people can pass the virus back to vaccinated oldies. And there's nothing magic about the age 18; Covid doesn't check birth certificates any more than TV stars of the 1970's did.
My guess is a couple of things went wrong with the UK programme. One was that it generated the degree of hubris that a sometimes florid but occasionally shrewd commentator has pointed out that Covid spots and attacks. In this case, the UK didn't bother with "get a jab" PR campaigns until it was too late. Why bother- the doses were flying out of the vaccination centres? The other was the decision to try to avoid using AZ on younger people and not making the additional Pfizer order until it was a bit too late. It means we currently have enough vaccines to go down to age 18, but it's doubtful if we can go any further for now. (The other other thing the UK has got wrong is keeping the delivery data secret, so we're all guessing).
And as for Europe? Once they got over their initial embarrassing flap (yeah, that was bad), they got their act together and sorted out networks to churn out millions and millions of doses of Pfizer vaccine. It's the thing about speedboats vs supertankers. It's a pain to get a supertanker going in the right direction, and it seems to take ages. But if you want to carry a lot of stuff a long way, it's the way to go.
Well I remember saying on here that predictions the UK would open up "months before" the rest of Europe were a load of bollocks. It's a matter of weeks, because all roll outs slow, and as we hit the hesitants earlier, we slowed first in Europe
But we are more open that most of Europe and we can expect one of the highest GDP growth rates this year, partly as a result, and partly as a result of such a hideous contraction last year. Good and bad
I agree with you on teens, I believe our reluctance to jab them is probably an error, but maybe they have their reasons?
The vaccine dividend was the deaths and hospitalisations avoided earlier this year, and the ability to unlockdown quite early, especially schools
It's not fantastic. Nothing is fantastic. It's a wretched plague that is rampant around the world, even now.
It is fascinating how it is now kicking shit out of Australia. The Leon Rule that Covid Always Punishes Smugness And Hubris is still true
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Your second paragraph is absurd. Your stereotype applies, if at all, to a small proportion of the 48% who voted to remain, and is no better than the reverse stereotype of 'thick leavers'. And as one of the unprivileged hard-working people who voted remain, and is getting on a bit, far from "every election going (my) way until 2016", very few have done, and I've spent most of my life with governments I oppose.
There's a lot of hard truths in the second paragraphs, it's difficult to look into that mirror so I'm not surprised that remainers are so dismissive of the idea that they benefited from the impoverishment of white working class Brits by Eastern Europeans living 8 to single bedroom flats working for the minimum wage or below and turning it into an effective maximum wage for millions of people. You may have been someone who came from that background but you also pulled the ladder up.
Absolute drivel.
And yet out of the EU wage inflation at the bottom of the market has gone insane.
There’s a global labour shortage (I mean in the West), although likely worse here because of Brexit.
Check out the US data.
So the labour market does adhere to basic economic principles of supply and demand? I mean I've read about a billion papers by liberal academics suggesting otherwise and saying that EU immigration had no impact on wages. Which is it? Is Brexit having an inflationary impact on wages or did EU immigration cause have deflationary effect on wages?
Yeah the evidence is that it increased overall wages, especially for people like yourself.
I’m not sure why you are such a hysterical denialist on this subject. Your comments that Brexit is worthwhile to see other people suffer is frankly pathetic at your age.
So the rich (people like me) got richer and the wages of the not so rich and working poor got propped up by the minimum wage (which is evidenced by actual ONS data, not studies). Not exactly a great development, feels a bit like pulling up the ladder.
My view is that the people who lost could do with the experience of losing given that they (well we, given what I do for a living) had got used to always winning at life and the EU simply entrenched the advantages of the highly educated and highly paid class. Rolling that back will probably make me every so slightly poorer but if it means that people at the lower end get a decent wage and don't have their pay held down by having an unlimited pool of cheap labour to compete with then there's only ever going to be one choice to make.
In general I'm not one to get overly personal and for most people I wouldn't. There are, however, some people's bitterness that really reinforce my leave vote. On days when I wonder whether it was worth it one of them will handily pop up (not you, mind) and remind me that this is what I voted leave for, to give that class of people a loss for the first time.
Thank you for this response.
I fear you are due to be disappointed. Britain’s low wage problem is caused by a) low skills b) low productivity Indeed, the two are linked.
FDI and immigration actually both served to improve the overall skill base and indeed our productivity. FDI is now down steeply, and immigration from the EU at least has almost disappeared.
All things being equal, Brexit will keep those wages low.
One area where Brexiters *might* have a point is that for unproductive businesses, access to an “unlimited” labour pool served to disincentivise capital investment.
However, Britain’s problems in this respect are long lasting, systemic, and AIUI are not significantly impacted by this greater access to labour.
Again, I agree that the skills base has improved, it has helped people like me make more money on one side and save money on the other by making my coffee cheaper and my restaurant bills lower.
On your specific points you're absolutely underestimating the impact of having a vast pool of cheap labour on productivity and the local skills base. Employers have no need to invest in skills base improvements when they can simply throw labour at it. Why bother?
You can map the drop off in business investment to the joining of the A8 countries. I think you have an idealised version of the EU which is based on what the EU15 was, not what the EU28 was when we left.
Staying in the EU doesn't confront any of the issues facing the UK, all it does is brush it under the rug and create an effective underclass of low wage workers for whom the minimum wage is a maximum wage. So it makes me a bit poorer, so it makes you a bit poorer. The alternative would tear this nation in two as the low wage workers realise their lot in life is to exist to service people like us who want cheap coffee.
So we'll have to bother with border checks and some extra paperwork. None of that is the end of the world really, in fact escaping from EU protectionism will probably be of net benefit to the nation. Escaping the dead hand of the EU will be better than most people realise.
I just disagree with this.
I think sector by sector analysis fails to prove that large scale immigration impeded wage growth except in some limited cases. Same is true for productivity.
And FDI has fallen since 2016 as we have become a less interesting investment proposition since Brexit.
Britain’s underclass is actually it’s own white working class, where it suffers from very poor educational performance - a post industrial legacy. None of this is related to EU membership.
Where I might agree is that EU membership disguised this problem. On the other hand, there’s no real evidence the current government is really interested in confronting it either.
That's studies by the same class of people who won from EU membership. They were and still are asking the wrong questions. The actual data from the ONS shows mega wage growth at the top for people like us and the minimum wage becoming a maximum wage for those at the bottom.
Once again, you're seeing the issue but not actually putting two and two together. If the underclass is easy to ignore they will get ignored. If companies need to hire them then they won't. Educational underachievement is only one part of it, among many.
Leaving the EU forces us as a society to confront this head on, not sweep it under the rug as we did for so long.
I think one of the issues here is that you trust the experts. I don't. The experts are wrong. The people doing the studies and making the models are wrong. These are the same people telling Mrs Thatcher that she was wrong, well she wasn't and the same people are telling leavers we are wrong. We aren't. The expert class has lost it faculties to question the settled liberal agenda and so have you.
The ONS is picking up the same returns on human capital that every advanced economy has seen in the last 25 years.
Try to look more at the global context in support (or refutation) of your arguments.
I’m saddened that, at the end, your argument boils down to “THE EXPERTS ARE WRONG!”.
It is anti-vaxxery-onomics.
Did the ONS have the right figures for the number of EU citizens in the UK?
Max was referring to the ONS figures about individual wage growth per decile or similar.
The volume of EU citizens doesn’t affect that.
It will be interesting to see what the Census says when it is finally released.
You do realise that just makes him look somewhat endearing (and also Patel, FWIW)
No one is looking at this and raging (apart from you)
It's excellent publicity for Brand Boris. He probably staged it all
Not sure about staging it but I watched it live and to be fair Boris handled it well and I do not think this incident did him any harm
I'm joking about staging, but Boris has a natural comic gift. He can turn a potentially embarrassing incident into a laugh-with-me moment
He did it with the zipwire. He made is somehow part of his shtick
He has many many faults but a lack of showmanship is not one of them. He has an instinctive knack. And this is not unimportant, politicians can be damaged by this stuff - eg Miliband and the bacon sandwich
I agree, he's definitely got a natural comic gift. It's just not what the country needs in a Prime Minister though, sadly.
You do realise that just makes him look somewhat endearing (and also Patel, FWIW)
I am well aware of the effect it has on his fans.
There was a whole thread about it yesterday.
His fans love him. His enemies hate him. Stunts like this change neither opinion.
But, people who hold neither view are not more likely to vote BoZo as a result.
And yes, he is an International laughing stock.
One of PBs most inexplicable fallacies, that nothing ever changes anybody's mind. A variant entails waiting for the next opinion poll and declaring that incident x can have had no possible significance because look at this opinion poll (quite often with fieldwork prior to incident x). I have news for you: Boris has semi fans who quite like him, and semi enemies who haven't much time for him, and so on all along the spectrum. The umbrella footage is, I'm afraid, extremely endearing, especially in the very clever version to which you've linked because you wrongly think it's satirical. It's not going to make me vote for him, but it will make some people who otherwise wouldn't.
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
Also Ireland I think. And France? Or close, anyway.
We never managed to find a “vaccine dividend”.
Ireland, yeah, France well behind (45 vs 55%). At some point these will become unfair comparisons given the different eligibility for children.
It's not an unfair comparison if our regulators are hindering our potential vaccinated %.
Vaccinating children might have an effect on cases but it doesn't on hospitalisations and deaths.
So the decision to vaccinate children depends on whether that is needed to keep new cases within a tolerable level.
Vaccinating adolescents either achieves a lower level of endemic disease or helps the push toward herd immunity, it also decreases potential morbidity effects in adolescents. Vaccinating 'kids' ( < 11) isn't yet authorised anywhere.
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
Also Ireland I think. And France? Or close, anyway.
We never managed to find a “vaccine dividend”.
We did. We saved tens of thousands of lives, in the UK, by our excellent early vaccination programme. Who knows how many died in the EU, unnecessarily, because they were much slower to begin?
It was entirely predictable that all western nations would end at roughly the same time and in the same way, as they all hit the walls of vaccine hesitancy
60,000 lives in the UK have been saved due to the vaccines according to a report last week
Just a pity about the 100,000 lost thanks to government incompetence.
Is that the cause in all the other countries with similar or higher death rates?
Our government is not unique in its mishandling of the pandemic. The fact that an additional couple of million have died needlessly across Europe and the Americas is hardly a consolation for the bereaved families here.
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
Also Ireland I think. And France? Or close, anyway.
We never managed to find a “vaccine dividend”.
We did. We saved tens of thousands of lives, in the UK, by our excellent early vaccination programme. Who knows how many died in the EU, unnecessarily, because they were much slower to begin?
It was entirely predictable that all western nations would end at roughly the same time and in the same way, as they all hit the walls of vaccine hesitancy
60,000 lives in the UK have been saved due to the vaccines according to a report last week
Just a pity about the 100,000 lost thanks to government incompetence.
Do you really believe any government could have avoided a seriously high number of loses from a pandemic of this nature and of course the responsibility lies with all four administrations and no doubt the public enquiry will eventually decide just how much incompetence Boris, Sturgeon, Drakeford and Foster were responsible for
Yes, with the superb vaccine procurement strategy the UK had a golden opportunity to have a great pandemic. Unfortunately failure to restrict international travel and "it will all be over by Christmas" ruined us.
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Your second paragraph is absurd. Your stereotype applies, if at all, to a small proportion of the 48% who voted to remain, and is no better than the reverse stereotype of 'thick leavers'. And as one of the unprivileged hard-working people who voted remain, and is getting on a bit, far from "every election going (my) way until 2016", very few have done, and I've spent most of my life with governments I oppose.
There's a lot of hard truths in the second paragraphs, it's difficult to look into that mirror so I'm not surprised that remainers are so dismissive of the idea that they benefited from the impoverishment of white working class Brits by Eastern Europeans living 8 to single bedroom flats working for the minimum wage or below and turning it into an effective maximum wage for millions of people. You may have been someone who came from that background but you also pulled the ladder up.
Absolute drivel.
And yet out of the EU wage inflation at the bottom of the market has gone insane.
There’s a global labour shortage (I mean in the West), although likely worse here because of Brexit.
Check out the US data.
So the labour market does adhere to basic economic principles of supply and demand? I mean I've read about a billion papers by liberal academics suggesting otherwise and saying that EU immigration had no impact on wages. Which is it? Is Brexit having an inflationary impact on wages or did EU immigration cause have deflationary effect on wages?
Yeah the evidence is that it increased overall wages, especially for people like yourself.
I’m not sure why you are such a hysterical denialist on this subject. Your comments that Brexit is worthwhile to see other people suffer is frankly pathetic at your age.
So the rich (people like me) got richer and the wages of the not so rich and working poor got propped up by the minimum wage (which is evidenced by actual ONS data, not studies). Not exactly a great development, feels a bit like pulling up the ladder.
My view is that the people who lost could do with the experience of losing given that they (well we, given what I do for a living) had got used to always winning at life and the EU simply entrenched the advantages of the highly educated and highly paid class. Rolling that back will probably make me every so slightly poorer but if it means that people at the lower end get a decent wage and don't have their pay held down by having an unlimited pool of cheap labour to compete with then there's only ever going to be one choice to make.
In general I'm not one to get overly personal and for most people I wouldn't. There are, however, some people's bitterness that really reinforce my leave vote. On days when I wonder whether it was worth it one of them will handily pop up (not you, mind) and remind me that this is what I voted leave for, to give that class of people a loss for the first time.
Thank you for this response.
I fear you are due to be disappointed. Britain’s low wage problem is caused by a) low skills b) low productivity Indeed, the two are linked.
FDI and immigration actually both served to improve the overall skill base and indeed our productivity. FDI is now down steeply, and immigration from the EU at least has almost disappeared.
All things being equal, Brexit will keep those wages low.
One area where Brexiters *might* have a point is that for unproductive businesses, access to an “unlimited” labour pool served to disincentivise capital investment.
However, Britain’s problems in this respect are long lasting, systemic, and AIUI are not significantly impacted by this greater access to labour.
Again, I agree that the skills base has improved, it has helped people like me make more money on one side and save money on the other by making my coffee cheaper and my restaurant bills lower.
On your specific points you're absolutely underestimating the impact of having a vast pool of cheap labour on productivity and the local skills base. Employers have no need to invest in skills base improvements when they can simply throw labour at it. Why bother?
You can map the drop off in business investment to the joining of the A8 countries. I think you have an idealised version of the EU which is based on what the EU15 was, not what the EU28 was when we left.
Staying in the EU doesn't confront any of the issues facing the UK, all it does is brush it under the rug and create an effective underclass of low wage workers for whom the minimum wage is a maximum wage. So it makes me a bit poorer, so it makes you a bit poorer. The alternative would tear this nation in two as the low wage workers realise their lot in life is to exist to service people like us who want cheap coffee.
So we'll have to bother with border checks and some extra paperwork. None of that is the end of the world really, in fact escaping from EU protectionism will probably be of net benefit to the nation. Escaping the dead hand of the EU will be better than most people realise.
I just disagree with this.
I think sector by sector analysis fails to prove that large scale immigration impeded wage growth except in some limited cases. Same is true for productivity.
And FDI has fallen since 2016 as we have become a less interesting investment proposition since Brexit.
Britain’s underclass is actually it’s own white working class, where it suffers from very poor educational performance - a post industrial legacy. None of this is related to EU membership.
Where I might agree is that EU membership disguised this problem. On the other hand, there’s no real evidence the current government is really interested in confronting it either.
That's studies by the same class of people who won from EU membership. They were and still are asking the wrong questions. The actual data from the ONS shows mega wage growth at the top for people like us and the minimum wage becoming a maximum wage for those at the bottom.
Once again, you're seeing the issue but not actually putting two and two together. If the underclass is easy to ignore they will get ignored. If companies need to hire them then they won't. Educational underachievement is only one part of it, among many.
Leaving the EU forces us as a society to confront this head on, not sweep it under the rug as we did for so long.
I think one of the issues here is that you trust the experts. I don't. The experts are wrong. The people doing the studies and making the models are wrong. These are the same people telling Mrs Thatcher that she was wrong, well she wasn't and the same people are telling leavers we are wrong. We aren't. The expert class has lost it faculties to question the settled liberal agenda and so have you.
I’m saddened that, at the end, your argument boils down to “THE EXPERTS ARE WRONG!”.
It is anti-vaxxery-onomics.
If that's what you want to class it as then so be it. Your unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of something as variable and politicised as economics is worrying. Vaccines are a science. There is safety and efficacy data that is simply immutable. These are independently verified by multiple regulators and peer reviewed by other scientists. Economics is a completely woolly discipline, there are only varying degrees of wrongness.
What my old manager used to tell me was that if the economics professors knew what they were talking about they'd all be millionaires because they could predict the future. Unsurprisingly they aren't.
You're treating economic research papers as some kind of fact, ultimately it's just someone's opinion. Well written and argued from their perspective, I'm sure, but it's still just someone's opinion.
What we actually have is real ONS data that shows a collapse in business investment and wage growth at the bottom of the market which is then covered by a bigger rise at the top. What happened is that the top 10% of wage earners (people like us) saw our wages rise to a very large degree and the bottom 25% saw their wages stay the same. That can be seen in household wealth as well with the top 10% of households now having more wealth than ever before.
Sadly a lot of the liberal economists see it as their duty to explain away this real data but it doesn't make it go away. The poor in the UK are still poor and the rich are richer than ever.
May be it’s just me but I find “we’re amber for now but may change to red so be thoughtful about that risk” very simple and more user friendly than being caught by surprise
That's the problem
We know the rules for Amber. We know the rules for Red.
What are the rules for 'Amber Watch', and what do you do if they change during your stay?
The rules for amber watch are amber. And if they change you apply the rules for red.
That’s why it’s helpful to have a sense of how likely (with no guarantee) they are to change
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
Also Ireland I think. And France? Or close, anyway.
We never managed to find a “vaccine dividend”.
We did. We saved tens of thousands of lives, in the UK, by our excellent early vaccination programme. Who knows how many died in the EU, unnecessarily, because they were much slower to begin?
It was entirely predictable that all western nations would end at roughly the same time and in the same way, as they all hit the walls of vaccine hesitancy
60,000 lives in the UK have been saved due to the vaccines according to a report last week
Just a pity about the 100,000 lost thanks to government incompetence.
Do you really believe any government could have avoided a seriously high number of loses from a pandemic of this nature and of course the responsibility lies with all four administrations and no doubt the public enquiry will eventually decide just how much incompetence Boris, Sturgeon, Drakeford and Foster were responsible for
Locked down too late. Three times over. No border controls. Half baked test, trace and don't bother to isolate programme that cost an absolute fortune. Inadequate PPE for front line staff. Seeding Covid into care homes. Taking an eternity to tell people to wear face coverings. Fixation on hand hygiene when the virus is in the air. The list goes on and on.
You do realise that just makes him look somewhat endearing (and also Patel, FWIW)
No one is looking at this and raging (apart from you)
It's excellent publicity for Brand Boris. He probably staged it all
Not sure about staging it but I watched it live and to be fair Boris handled it well and I do not think this incident did him any harm
"Boris handled it well"? He couldn't open an umbrella for goodness sake. It's not like it was some new fangled electronic wizardry that old folks like me need the assistance of a ten year old to operate. It was an umbrella!
If it was staged it was a work of comedic genius, unfortunately there is a time and a place for comedic genius, and a memorial to fallen police officers wasn't the time, or the place.
So no it wasn't staged which means the greatest living Englishman is unable to operate a rather basic piece of apparatus. But as you say "Boris handled it well".
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
Also Ireland I think. And France? Or close, anyway.
We never managed to find a “vaccine dividend”.
Ireland, yeah, France well behind (45 vs 55%). At some point these will become unfair comparisons given the different eligibility for children.
It's not an unfair comparison if our regulators are hindering our potential vaccinated %.
Vaccinating children might have an effect on cases but it doesn't on hospitalisations and deaths.
So the decision to vaccinate children depends on whether that is needed to keep new cases within a tolerable level.
Vaccinating adolescents either achieves a lower level of endemic disease or helps the push toward herd immunity, it also decreases potential morbidity effects in adolescents. Vaccinating 'kids' ( < 11) isn't yet authorised anywhere.
I'd vaccinate 16-17s - not that I'm an expert on this issue.
But if we assume that everyone is going to come into contact with Delta at some point then the only issue once all adults have been vaccinated is ensuring that everyone doesn't come into contact with Delta in too short a time period.
There might be an advantage relating to school disruption as well but only if the policy of one infection and the whole class has to isolate is stopped.
Given the seemingly low level of vaccinations among the 17.75s since they became eligible I'm not sure that extending vaccination to 12+ would have that much of an effect in any case.
You do realise that just makes him look somewhat endearing (and also Patel, FWIW)
I am well aware of the effect it has on his fans.
There was a whole thread about it yesterday.
His fans love him. His enemies hate him. Stunts like this change neither opinion.
But, people who hold neither view are not more likely to vote BoZo as a result.
And yes, he is an International laughing stock.
One of PBs most inexplicable fallacies, that nothing ever changes anybody's mind. A variant entails waiting for the next opinion poll and declaring that incident x can have had no possible significance because look at this opinion poll (quite often with fieldwork prior to incident x). I have news for you: Boris has semi fans who quite like him, and semi enemies who haven't much time for him, and so on all along the spectrum. The umbrella footage is, I'm afraid, extremely endearing, especially in the very clever version to which you've linked because you wrongly think it's satirical. It's not going to make me vote for him, but it will make some people who otherwise wouldn't.
I don't wish to over analyse, but one of the reasons the video is - for some - endearing, is that he clearly offers the umbrella to Priti Patel, and apologises for possibly spearing the guy behind him
That appears both kind and gallant, not things you always see in national leaders, so it makes you feel warmer to him
There's a brilliant story in Al Campbell's diaries about Blair's narcissism and arrogance. Blair arrived at some event and it was raining and he had no umbrella, and some humble aide offered to share hers, so Blair just took it and walked off with it, leaving her without any protection. Pure entitlement, the arrogance of power
Those who say Boris is some monster of selfishness are somewhat confounded by videos like this, of him NOT behaving selfishly or arrogantly
A proposal to create an "amber watch-list" of countries at risk of moving to red in the travel traffic light system has been abandoned, a government source has told the BBC.
Government sources said no new categories would now be added.
"I've been to Magaluf, but this was just crazy..." LOL.
There's a point here - we've gone from forced abstinence to encouraged excess almost overnight.
Some people can't handle that.
Oddly enough, going racing with restricted crowd numbers was a real pleasure yet I'm told it's not the same without a "crowd".
No, it's much worse but I can understand why Lingfield Park want a crowd of 10,000 drinking rather than 2,000 enjoying the racing.
Indeed there is a point. And you've put your finger on it. Newcastle City centre has had a distinctly, evil air abroad in the late hours recently. Stag and hens, aren't in Prague and Amsterdam. The quayside bar staff I know reckon it has never been anything like this bad. Not local accents. Blood, urine and vomit on the Tyne is all mine.
Why and who?
Some parts of London have definitely got edgier, some are quieter than ever.
Stag and hens for one. Sports teams starved of foreign tours. There has always been them, of course, but not in these numbers. Hotels are cheap and plentiful due to lack of business and tourist trade. Worse, they aren't diluted by local middle class theatre and restaurant goers, nor business people who are staying away. Toon, indeed the north east, has only one small, getting Pissed up centre.
In my corner of London it is open drug dealing spreading into the royal parks, especially around Primrose Hill. It comes with gangs, violence and theft, and it started during Covid
It is sporadic. Weeks can do by and it's fine, then suddenly Eeek
I was musing. Is there a glut of cocaine? Not the drug I'd choose during lockdown. There seems to be widespread anecdotal reports of it being involved now. That, and excess alcohol, would explain at least some of the behaviour.
There were certainly loads of reports of open coke taking in the euros, especially the final. A photographer friend of mine was at Wembley and he says it was an incredible bacchanal of agrression, exuberance and drugs - not all bad, some good humoured, but definitely scary
In London the drugs have followed the kids. During lockdown a lot of London youths discovered the magnificent parks, and realised what fun it is just to buy booze and go sit in the parks and party and have picnics and music (and it is fun, I do the same). They bring guitars. They sing and dance. There are tribes of pretty teenage girls. The boys naturally follow, hopefully
And so the drug dealers have come to serve this brand new market
Maybe I’m getting old. But London increasingly feels lawless, grimy, threatening. A place to leave rather than a place to go to. Went in a few weeks ago. Took mere seconds after my arrival before the station was evacuated for an Inspector Sands announcement. Very hard to avoid the urge to say “bugger this for a game of soldiers, back to the shire I go”.
My opinion shifts weekly, or even daily.
A few weeks ago I despaired, vocally, of north London, on here. It all felt very lawless at night. And dirty and run down
The other day I did basically the same route at the same time of night and it felt buoyant and dynamic and hopeful
One thing for sure is that the city is younger, much younger. The olds stay at home or they have fled. The youth have inherited The Smoke. That brings good and bad things
It’s a fascinating experiment for sure.
The next few months will be interesting. Quite a few big employers are now trying to push the big return, “we expect it in Sept”. But most people I know are totally cool on the idea.
There’s enough anecdotes floating about of double vaxxed middle aged people getting pretty sick, even hospitalised. And so they think fuck that, what’s even the point in going in? I’ll go in the absolute bare minimum required and not a day more.
Meanwhile the kids are already going back with gusto.
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
The Commission, in particular Ursula von der Leyen, was handed the job of vaccine procurement and distribution for the whole EU. They badly fucked it up, despite having immense advantages - lots of money, big influence, major pharma companies and factories inside the EU
Probably quite a few thousand EU citizens died simply because of Ursula's personal incompetence. So she does matter, a lot, and she and her fellow commissioners are only gaining more power every year (as we see here)
But if you're an EU citizen and your granny died coz of Ursula's fuck up, what can you do to make her pay the price for her errors? Nothing. She is unelected, She is entirely insulated from your anger. You are powerless, she is powerful
Boris, by contrast, lives in fear of the voters, as we see every day. And that is how it should be. Those in power over us should live in fear of our votes.
Hence, Brexit. That's the entire argument for Brexit and it is irrefutable.
It is manifestly refutable. You have picked out possibly the only practical benefit to Brexit, despite which the UK has ended up with a higher per population Covid death rate than the EU. You have ignored other benefits of the EU. If you don't think there are any, the decision to leave the EU is logical but has nothing to do with sovereignty, as I have already proposed. Arguably, but refutably, if it weren't for Brexit the UK would have had a more competent prime minister and fewer people dying from Covid.
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
Also Ireland I think. And France? Or close, anyway.
We never managed to find a “vaccine dividend”.
We did. We saved tens of thousands of lives, in the UK, by our excellent early vaccination programme. Who knows how many died in the EU, unnecessarily, because they were much slower to begin?
It was entirely predictable that all western nations would end at roughly the same time and in the same way, as they all hit the walls of vaccine hesitancy
60,000 lives in the UK have been saved due to the vaccines according to a report last week
Just a pity about the 100,000 lost thanks to government incompetence.
Do you really believe any government could have avoided a seriously high number of loses from a pandemic of this nature and of course the responsibility lies with all four administrations and no doubt the public enquiry will eventually decide just how much incompetence Boris, Sturgeon, Drakeford and Foster were responsible for
Locked down too late. Three times over. No border controls. Half baked test, trace and don't bother to isolate programme that cost an absolute fortune. Inadequate PPE for front line staff. Seeding Covid into care homes. Taking an eternity to tell people to wear face coverings. Fixation on hand hygiene when the virus is in the air. The list goes on and on.
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Your second paragraph is absurd. Your stereotype applies, if at all, to a small proportion of the 48% who voted to remain, and is no better than the reverse stereotype of 'thick leavers'. And as one of the unprivileged hard-working people who voted remain, and is getting on a bit, far from "every election going (my) way until 2016", very few have done, and I've spent most of my life with governments I oppose.
There's a lot of hard truths in the second paragraphs, it's difficult to look into that mirror so I'm not surprised that remainers are so dismissive of the idea that they benefited from the impoverishment of white working class Brits by Eastern Europeans living 8 to single bedroom flats working for the minimum wage or below and turning it into an effective maximum wage for millions of people. You may have been someone who came from that background but you also pulled the ladder up.
Absolute drivel.
And yet out of the EU wage inflation at the bottom of the market has gone insane.
There’s a global labour shortage (I mean in the West), although likely worse here because of Brexit.
Check out the US data.
So the labour market does adhere to basic economic principles of supply and demand? I mean I've read about a billion papers by liberal academics suggesting otherwise and saying that EU immigration had no impact on wages. Which is it? Is Brexit having an inflationary impact on wages or did EU immigration cause have deflationary effect on wages?
Yeah the evidence is that it increased overall wages, especially for people like yourself.
I’m not sure why you are such a hysterical denialist on this subject. Your comments that Brexit is worthwhile to see other people suffer is frankly pathetic at your age.
So the rich (people like me) got richer and the wages of the not so rich and working poor got propped up by the minimum wage (which is evidenced by actual ONS data, not studies). Not exactly a great development, feels a bit like pulling up the ladder.
My view is that the people who lost could do with the experience of losing given that they (well we, given what I do for a living) had got used to always winning at life and the EU simply entrenched the advantages of the highly educated and highly paid class. Rolling that back will probably make me every so slightly poorer but if it means that people at the lower end get a decent wage and don't have their pay held down by having an unlimited pool of cheap labour to compete with then there's only ever going to be one choice to make.
In general I'm not one to get overly personal and for most people I wouldn't. There are, however, some people's bitterness that really reinforce my leave vote. On days when I wonder whether it was worth it one of them will handily pop up (not you, mind) and remind me that this is what I voted leave for, to give that class of people a loss for the first time.
Thank you for this response.
I fear you are due to be disappointed. Britain’s low wage problem is caused by a) low skills b) low productivity Indeed, the two are linked.
FDI and immigration actually both served to improve the overall skill base and indeed our productivity. FDI is now down steeply, and immigration from the EU at least has almost disappeared.
All things being equal, Brexit will keep those wages low.
One area where Brexiters *might* have a point is that for unproductive businesses, access to an “unlimited” labour pool served to disincentivise capital investment.
However, Britain’s problems in this respect are long lasting, systemic, and AIUI are not significantly impacted by this greater access to labour.
Again, I agree that the skills base has improved, it has helped people like me make more money on one side and save money on the other by making my coffee cheaper and my restaurant bills lower.
On your specific points you're absolutely underestimating the impact of having a vast pool of cheap labour on productivity and the local skills base. Employers have no need to invest in skills base improvements when they can simply throw labour at it. Why bother?
You can map the drop off in business investment to the joining of the A8 countries. I think you have an idealised version of the EU which is based on what the EU15 was, not what the EU28 was when we left.
Staying in the EU doesn't confront any of the issues facing the UK, all it does is brush it under the rug and create an effective underclass of low wage workers for whom the minimum wage is a maximum wage. So it makes me a bit poorer, so it makes you a bit poorer. The alternative would tear this nation in two as the low wage workers realise their lot in life is to exist to service people like us who want cheap coffee.
So we'll have to bother with border checks and some extra paperwork. None of that is the end of the world really, in fact escaping from EU protectionism will probably be of net benefit to the nation. Escaping the dead hand of the EU will be better than most people realise.
I just disagree with this.
I think sector by sector analysis fails to prove that large scale immigration impeded wage growth except in some limited cases. Same is true for productivity.
And FDI has fallen since 2016 as we have become a less interesting investment proposition since Brexit.
Britain’s underclass is actually it’s own white working class, where it suffers from very poor educational performance - a post industrial legacy. None of this is related to EU membership.
Where I might agree is that EU membership disguised this problem. On the other hand, there’s no real evidence the current government is really interested in confronting it either.
That's studies by the same class of people who won from EU membership. They were and still are asking the wrong questions. The actual data from the ONS shows mega wage growth at the top for people like us and the minimum wage becoming a maximum wage for those at the bottom.
Once again, you're seeing the issue but not actually putting two and two together. If the underclass is easy to ignore they will get ignored. If companies need to hire them then they won't. Educational underachievement is only one part of it, among many.
Leaving the EU forces us as a society to confront this head on, not sweep it under the rug as we did for so long.
I think one of the issues here is that you trust the experts. I don't. The experts are wrong. The people doing the studies and making the models are wrong. These are the same people telling Mrs Thatcher that she was wrong, well she wasn't and the same people are telling leavers we are wrong. We aren't. The expert class has lost it faculties to question the settled liberal agenda and so have you.
I’m saddened that, at the end, your argument boils down to “THE EXPERTS ARE WRONG!”.
It is anti-vaxxery-onomics.
If that's what you want to class it as then so be it. You're unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of something as variable and politicised as economics is worrying. Vaccines are a science. There is safety and efficacy data that is simply immutable. These are independently verified by multiple regulators and peer reviewed by other scientists. Economics is a completely woolly discipline, there are only varying degrees of wrongness.
What my old manager used to tell me was that if the economics professors knew what they were talking about they'd all be millionaires because they could predict the future. Unsurprisingly they aren't.
You're treating economic research papers as some kind of fact, ultimately it's just someone's opinion. Well written and argued from their perspective, I'm sure, but it's still just someone's opinion.
What we actually have is real ONS data that shows a collapse in business investment and wage growth at the bottom of the market which is then covered by a bigger rise at the top. What happened is that the top 10% of wage earners (people like us) saw our wages rise to a very large degree and the bottom 25% saw their wages stay the same. That can be seen in household wealth as well with the top 10% of households now having more wealth than ever before.
Sadly a lot of the liberal economists see it as their duty to explain away this real data but it doesn't make it go away. The poor in the UK are still poor and the rich are richer than ever.
I am not disputing that data (except maybe the business investment point).
However your interpretation I think is wrong, since this effect has been seen in most major economies in the last 25 years.
Regardless of whether they are EU members or not. In fact, it’s the same in NZ. About as far away from EU membership as you can imagine.
I’ll leave aside your belief that the finance industry is smarter than the economics industry.
Boris haters who claim that his brolly mishaps make him unqualified to be PM?
Or Boris lovers who claim that his superb comic flair makes him the perfect leader for our times?
Or posters who fail to read what people wrote? All anyone has said its that his superb comic flair tends to get him votes. See the difference?
Are you more likely to vote for him because of his “superb comic flair”?
No, but then I am not one of the millions of people who are potential switchers in the next election. The things which motivate those potential switchers are multitudinous and unknowable, but many of them vote for Boris because he is a bit of a card. They may be more likely to stay with him or switch to him as a result of this incident.
"I've been to Magaluf, but this was just crazy..." LOL.
There's a point here - we've gone from forced abstinence to encouraged excess almost overnight.
Some people can't handle that.
Oddly enough, going racing with restricted crowd numbers was a real pleasure yet I'm told it's not the same without a "crowd".
No, it's much worse but I can understand why Lingfield Park want a crowd of 10,000 drinking rather than 2,000 enjoying the racing.
Indeed there is a point. And you've put your finger on it. Newcastle City centre has had a distinctly, evil air abroad in the late hours recently. Stag and hens, aren't in Prague and Amsterdam. The quayside bar staff I know reckon it has never been anything like this bad. Not local accents. Blood, urine and vomit on the Tyne is all mine.
Why and who?
Some parts of London have definitely got edgier, some are quieter than ever.
Stag and hens for one. Sports teams starved of foreign tours. There has always been them, of course, but not in these numbers. Hotels are cheap and plentiful due to lack of business and tourist trade. Worse, they aren't diluted by local middle class theatre and restaurant goers, nor business people who are staying away. Toon, indeed the north east, has only one small, getting Pissed up centre.
In my corner of London it is open drug dealing spreading into the royal parks, especially around Primrose Hill. It comes with gangs, violence and theft, and it started during Covid
It is sporadic. Weeks can do by and it's fine, then suddenly Eeek
I was musing. Is there a glut of cocaine? Not the drug I'd choose during lockdown. There seems to be widespread anecdotal reports of it being involved now. That, and excess alcohol, would explain at least some of the behaviour.
There were certainly loads of reports of open coke taking in the euros, especially the final. A photographer friend of mine was at Wembley and he says it was an incredible bacchanal of agrression, exuberance and drugs - not all bad, some good humoured, but definitely scary
In London the drugs have followed the kids. During lockdown a lot of London youths discovered the magnificent parks, and realised what fun it is just to buy booze and go sit in the parks and party and have picnics and music (and it is fun, I do the same). They bring guitars. They sing and dance. There are tribes of pretty teenage girls. The boys naturally follow, hopefully
And so the drug dealers have come to serve this brand new market
Maybe I’m getting old. But London increasingly feels lawless, grimy, threatening. A place to leave rather than a place to go to. Went in a few weeks ago. Took mere seconds after my arrival before the station was evacuated for an Inspector Sands announcement. Very hard to avoid the urge to say “bugger this for a game of soldiers, back to the shire I go”.
My opinion shifts weekly, or even daily.
A few weeks ago I despaired, vocally, of north London, on here. It all felt very lawless at night. And dirty and run down
The other day I did basically the same route at the same time of night and it felt buoyant and dynamic and hopeful
One thing for sure is that the city is younger, much younger. The olds stay at home or they have fled. The youth have inherited The Smoke. That brings good and bad things
It’s a fascinating experiment for sure.
The next few months will be interesting. Quite a few big employers are now trying to push the big return, “we expect it in Sept”. But most people I know are totally cool on the idea.
There’s enough anecdotes floating about of double vaxxed middle aged people getting pretty sick, even hospitalised. And so they think fuck that, what’s even the point in going in? I’ll go in the absolute bare minimum required and not a day more.
Meanwhile the kids are already going back with gusto.
Soho has always been young but today it had an average age of about 23. Extremely vigorous - and busy
On the whole I believe this is good. London was becoming (like Paris and NYC) a gated community for the old and rich. But there will be a price to pay - crime and drugs and people having sex in bus stops
You do realise that just makes him look somewhat endearing (and also Patel, FWIW)
No one is looking at this and raging (apart from you)
It's excellent publicity for Brand Boris. He probably staged it all
Not sure about staging it but I watched it live and to be fair Boris handled it well and I do not think this incident did him any harm
"Boris handled it well"? He couldn't open an umbrella for goodness sake. It's not like it was some new fangled electronic wizardry that old folks like me need the assistance of a ten year old to operate. It was an umbrella!
If it was staged it was a work of comedic genius, unfortunately there is a time and a place for comedic genius, and a memorial to fallen police officers wasn't the time, or the place.
So no it wasn't staged which means the greatest living Englishman is unable to operate a rather basic piece of apparatus. But as you say "Boris handled it well".
To be honest this Welsh-Englishman has experienced the same problem with umbrellas as must many more
"I've been to Magaluf, but this was just crazy..." LOL.
There's a point here - we've gone from forced abstinence to encouraged excess almost overnight.
Some people can't handle that.
Oddly enough, going racing with restricted crowd numbers was a real pleasure yet I'm told it's not the same without a "crowd".
No, it's much worse but I can understand why Lingfield Park want a crowd of 10,000 drinking rather than 2,000 enjoying the racing.
Indeed there is a point. And you've put your finger on it. Newcastle City centre has had a distinctly, evil air abroad in the late hours recently. Stag and hens, aren't in Prague and Amsterdam. The quayside bar staff I know reckon it has never been anything like this bad. Not local accents. Blood, urine and vomit on the Tyne is all mine.
Why and who?
Some parts of London have definitely got edgier, some are quieter than ever.
Stag and hens for one. Sports teams starved of foreign tours. There has always been them, of course, but not in these numbers. Hotels are cheap and plentiful due to lack of business and tourist trade. Worse, they aren't diluted by local middle class theatre and restaurant goers, nor business people who are staying away. Toon, indeed the north east, has only one small, getting Pissed up centre.
In my corner of London it is open drug dealing spreading into the royal parks, especially around Primrose Hill. It comes with gangs, violence and theft, and it started during Covid
It is sporadic. Weeks can do by and it's fine, then suddenly Eeek
I was musing. Is there a glut of cocaine? Not the drug I'd choose during lockdown. There seems to be widespread anecdotal reports of it being involved now. That, and excess alcohol, would explain at least some of the behaviour.
There were certainly loads of reports of open coke taking in the euros, especially the final. A photographer friend of mine was at Wembley and he says it was an incredible bacchanal of agrression, exuberance and drugs - not all bad, some good humoured, but definitely scary
In London the drugs have followed the kids. During lockdown a lot of London youths discovered the magnificent parks, and realised what fun it is just to buy booze and go sit in the parks and party and have picnics and music (and it is fun, I do the same). They bring guitars. They sing and dance. There are tribes of pretty teenage girls. The boys naturally follow, hopefully
And so the drug dealers have come to serve this brand new market
Maybe I’m getting old. But London increasingly feels lawless, grimy, threatening. A place to leave rather than a place to go to. Went in a few weeks ago. Took mere seconds after my arrival before the station was evacuated for an Inspector Sands announcement. Very hard to avoid the urge to say “bugger this for a game of soldiers, back to the shire I go”.
My opinion shifts weekly, or even daily.
A few weeks ago I despaired, vocally, of north London, on here. It all felt very lawless at night. And dirty and run down
The other day I did basically the same route at the same time of night and it felt buoyant and dynamic and hopeful
One thing for sure is that the city is younger, much younger. The olds stay at home or they have fled. The youth have inherited The Smoke. That brings good and bad things
It’s a fascinating experiment for sure.
The next few months will be interesting. Quite a few big employers are now trying to push the big return, “we expect it in Sept”. But most people I know are totally cool on the idea.
There’s enough anecdotes floating about of double vaxxed middle aged people getting pretty sick, even hospitalised. And so they think fuck that, what’s even the point in going in? I’ll go in the absolute bare minimum required and not a day more.
Meanwhile the kids are already going back with gusto.
Soho has always been young but today it had an average age of about 23. Extremely vigorous - and busy
On the whole I believe this is good. London was becoming (like Paris and NYC) a gated community for the old and rich. But there will be a price to pay - crime and drugs and people having sex in bus stops
What is the price for drugs and sex in bustops now? Asking for a friend :-)
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
Also Ireland I think. And France? Or close, anyway.
We never managed to find a “vaccine dividend”.
We did. We saved tens of thousands of lives, in the UK, by our excellent early vaccination programme. Who knows how many died in the EU, unnecessarily, because they were much slower to begin?
It was entirely predictable that all western nations would end at roughly the same time and in the same way, as they all hit the walls of vaccine hesitancy
60,000 lives in the UK have been saved due to the vaccines according to a report last week
Just a pity about the 100,000 lost thanks to government incompetence.
Do you really believe any government could have avoided a seriously high number of loses from a pandemic of this nature and of course the responsibility lies with all four administrations and no doubt the public enquiry will eventually decide just how much incompetence Boris, Sturgeon, Drakeford and Foster were responsible for
Locked down too late. Three times over. No border controls. Half baked test, trace and don't bother to isolate programme that cost an absolute fortune. Inadequate PPE for front line staff. Seeding Covid into care homes. Taking an eternity to tell people to wear face coverings. Fixation on hand hygiene when the virus is in the air. The list goes on and on.
That adds up to 100,000, give or take.
The biggest mistake the government made was making decisions assuming that the population wouldn't stand for restrictions over a long period of time. Most of the other failings came from that.
"I've been to Magaluf, but this was just crazy..." LOL.
There's a point here - we've gone from forced abstinence to encouraged excess almost overnight.
Some people can't handle that.
Oddly enough, going racing with restricted crowd numbers was a real pleasure yet I'm told it's not the same without a "crowd".
No, it's much worse but I can understand why Lingfield Park want a crowd of 10,000 drinking rather than 2,000 enjoying the racing.
Indeed there is a point. And you've put your finger on it. Newcastle City centre has had a distinctly, evil air abroad in the late hours recently. Stag and hens, aren't in Prague and Amsterdam. The quayside bar staff I know reckon it has never been anything like this bad. Not local accents. Blood, urine and vomit on the Tyne is all mine.
Why and who?
Some parts of London have definitely got edgier, some are quieter than ever.
Stag and hens for one. Sports teams starved of foreign tours. There has always been them, of course, but not in these numbers. Hotels are cheap and plentiful due to lack of business and tourist trade. Worse, they aren't diluted by local middle class theatre and restaurant goers, nor business people who are staying away. Toon, indeed the north east, has only one small, getting Pissed up centre.
In my corner of London it is open drug dealing spreading into the royal parks, especially around Primrose Hill. It comes with gangs, violence and theft, and it started during Covid
It is sporadic. Weeks can do by and it's fine, then suddenly Eeek
I was musing. Is there a glut of cocaine? Not the drug I'd choose during lockdown. There seems to be widespread anecdotal reports of it being involved now. That, and excess alcohol, would explain at least some of the behaviour.
There were certainly loads of reports of open coke taking in the euros, especially the final. A photographer friend of mine was at Wembley and he says it was an incredible bacchanal of agrression, exuberance and drugs - not all bad, some good humoured, but definitely scary
In London the drugs have followed the kids. During lockdown a lot of London youths discovered the magnificent parks, and realised what fun it is just to buy booze and go sit in the parks and party and have picnics and music (and it is fun, I do the same). They bring guitars. They sing and dance. There are tribes of pretty teenage girls. The boys naturally follow, hopefully
And so the drug dealers have come to serve this brand new market
Maybe I’m getting old. But London increasingly feels lawless, grimy, threatening. A place to leave rather than a place to go to. Went in a few weeks ago. Took mere seconds after my arrival before the station was evacuated for an Inspector Sands announcement. Very hard to avoid the urge to say “bugger this for a game of soldiers, back to the shire I go”.
My opinion shifts weekly, or even daily.
A few weeks ago I despaired, vocally, of north London, on here. It all felt very lawless at night. And dirty and run down
The other day I did basically the same route at the same time of night and it felt buoyant and dynamic and hopeful
One thing for sure is that the city is younger, much younger. The olds stay at home or they have fled. The youth have inherited The Smoke. That brings good and bad things
It’s a fascinating experiment for sure.
The next few months will be interesting. Quite a few big employers are now trying to push the big return, “we expect it in Sept”. But most people I know are totally cool on the idea.
There’s enough anecdotes floating about of double vaxxed middle aged people getting pretty sick, even hospitalised. And so they think fuck that, what’s even the point in going in? I’ll go in the absolute bare minimum required and not a day more.
Meanwhile the kids are already going back with gusto.
Soho has always been young but today it had an average age of about 23. Extremely vigorous - and busy
On the whole I believe this is good. London was becoming (like Paris and NYC) a gated community for the old and rich. But there will be a price to pay - crime and drugs and people having sex in bus stops
What is the price for drugs and sex in bustops now? Asking for a friend :-)
I checked. £7
Also the students are back. Bloomsbury was alive with young people, and that was REALLY good. I'm not sure why. Should they not be at home for the hols?
Nonetheless there they were, Obvious students. Filling the pubs, arguing at cafes, carrying books into noble buildings. Great to see. Properly uplifting. London needs it students, it is one of the great student cities of the world. Perhaps the greatest
Who don't instigate laws, and who sit in a ludicrous parliament in a foreign country and for which the turnout in the last 5 elections has been about 45%, a parliament which moves every three weeks at vast expense for reasons too insane to elaborate
Juncker to be fair to him was indirectly elected like Boris after the 2014 EU Parliament elections by being the Spitzenkandidat of the EPP who ended up the largest party in the European Parliament. Just as Boris became PM as leader of the largest party in the House of Commons. The European Council then nominated Juncker to be European Commission President and the European Parliament confirmed it.
However the idea was dumped after the 2019 elections when the EPP picked Manfred Weber as their Spitzenkandidat and the EPP again won most seats but the European Council picked Ursuala von der Leyen instead, then German defence minister
The casual dumping of Spitzenkandidat - without a vote, without consultation, without a care - just to please various parties - was a particularly egregious example of the EU's rotten dysfunctionality
Spitzenfuckit was meant to be a brilliant innovation making the EU so much more democratic, at last doing something about the democratic deficit. But, nah, they just dumped it 5 years later
Incredible
There's an example directly applicable to Brexit. Earlier in the year, the EU parliament issued an ultimatum to the UK that they wouldn't ratify the Brexit trade agreement until we implemented the NI protocol. We didn't react so they did as they were told and ratified it anyway.
It's a Potemkin Parliament
To be fair, a lot of honest EU Federalists (not Brits like Scott) know this and admit it, they want it to have real powers, to be able to write laws, to have an elected president, demote the Commission to a civil service, in other words be the normal parliament of a normal polity
But the nation states are jealously guarding what remains of the "sovereignty" - see, it matters to them as well as Leavers - and this final step is proving hard. Which means that for the meantime the European Parliament is left as this pitiful, powerless, creepy, non-democratic hybrid.
The only answer is either dissolve it, or go for full on Federalism, give the parliament real legislative powers, finally taken from the member states - and do it soon. I bet they will do this eventually. Which makes it even less likely we will ever rejoin
The world will want a counter to China, and if the USA can't do it because it's century is over, it will have to be a federal EU. Right now it's powerless to do anything about say, Erdogan living his best life infringing multiple borders, so it's got a lot of work to do and it's better if we're not holding it back.
For 24 hours, I have had a runny nose & a persistent cough. Seem to have caught it from my son. No fever.
Lateral flow test is negative.
Hmmm.
A long time ago, I can dimly remember, we used to have something like that from time to time. We called it 'a cold' I believe.
Anyway - I hope it's nothing serious and you have a speedy recovery!
This is my assumption. But I believe the new delta symptoms are pretty much the same as a cold’s.
It’s a measure of how well we’ve progressed though that I hardly care whether it is a cold or delta; the latter would be an inconvenience rather than a health emergency.
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
Also Ireland I think. And France? Or close, anyway.
We never managed to find a “vaccine dividend”.
We did. We saved tens of thousands of lives, in the UK, by our excellent early vaccination programme. Who knows how many died in the EU, unnecessarily, because they were much slower to begin?
It was entirely predictable that all western nations would end at roughly the same time and in the same way, as they all hit the walls of vaccine hesitancy
60,000 lives in the UK have been saved due to the vaccines according to a report last week
Just a pity about the 100,000 lost thanks to government incompetence.
Do you really believe any government could have avoided a seriously high number of loses from a pandemic of this nature and of course the responsibility lies with all four administrations and no doubt the public enquiry will eventually decide just how much incompetence Boris, Sturgeon, Drakeford and Foster were responsible for
Locked down too late. Three times over. No border controls. Half baked test, trace and don't bother to isolate programme that cost an absolute fortune. Inadequate PPE for front line staff. Seeding Covid into care homes. Taking an eternity to tell people to wear face coverings. Fixation on hand hygiene when the virus is in the air. The list goes on and on.
That adds up to 100,000, give or take.
I think you'd prefer to see us living under a regime that is highly authoritarian.
@Sandy Rentool, you're arguing that we could have escaped with 29,000 deaths from COVID? Seriously?
How would we have achieved this miracle?
We've had just over 150,000 deaths in the UK. I remember when it was announced that 40,000 would be a good result. Allowing a 10,000 margin on top of that, and 100,000 is the excess resulting from government incompetence.
"I've been to Magaluf, but this was just crazy..." LOL.
There's a point here - we've gone from forced abstinence to encouraged excess almost overnight.
Some people can't handle that.
Oddly enough, going racing with restricted crowd numbers was a real pleasure yet I'm told it's not the same without a "crowd".
No, it's much worse but I can understand why Lingfield Park want a crowd of 10,000 drinking rather than 2,000 enjoying the racing.
Indeed there is a point. And you've put your finger on it. Newcastle City centre has had a distinctly, evil air abroad in the late hours recently. Stag and hens, aren't in Prague and Amsterdam. The quayside bar staff I know reckon it has never been anything like this bad. Not local accents. Blood, urine and vomit on the Tyne is all mine.
Why and who?
Some parts of London have definitely got edgier, some are quieter than ever.
Stag and hens for one. Sports teams starved of foreign tours. There has always been them, of course, but not in these numbers. Hotels are cheap and plentiful due to lack of business and tourist trade. Worse, they aren't diluted by local middle class theatre and restaurant goers, nor business people who are staying away. Toon, indeed the north east, has only one small, getting Pissed up centre.
In my corner of London it is open drug dealing spreading into the royal parks, especially around Primrose Hill. It comes with gangs, violence and theft, and it started during Covid
It is sporadic. Weeks can do by and it's fine, then suddenly Eeek
I was musing. Is there a glut of cocaine? Not the drug I'd choose during lockdown. There seems to be widespread anecdotal reports of it being involved now. That, and excess alcohol, would explain at least some of the behaviour.
There were certainly loads of reports of open coke taking in the euros, especially the final. A photographer friend of mine was at Wembley and he says it was an incredible bacchanal of agrression, exuberance and drugs - not all bad, some good humoured, but definitely scary
In London the drugs have followed the kids. During lockdown a lot of London youths discovered the magnificent parks, and realised what fun it is just to buy booze and go sit in the parks and party and have picnics and music (and it is fun, I do the same). They bring guitars. They sing and dance. There are tribes of pretty teenage girls. The boys naturally follow, hopefully
And so the drug dealers have come to serve this brand new market
Maybe I’m getting old. But London increasingly feels lawless, grimy, threatening. A place to leave rather than a place to go to. Went in a few weeks ago. Took mere seconds after my arrival before the station was evacuated for an Inspector Sands announcement. Very hard to avoid the urge to say “bugger this for a game of soldiers, back to the shire I go”.
My opinion shifts weekly, or even daily.
A few weeks ago I despaired, vocally, of north London, on here. It all felt very lawless at night. And dirty and run down
The other day I did basically the same route at the same time of night and it felt buoyant and dynamic and hopeful
One thing for sure is that the city is younger, much younger. The olds stay at home or they have fled. The youth have inherited The Smoke. That brings good and bad things
It’s a fascinating experiment for sure.
The next few months will be interesting. Quite a few big employers are now trying to push the big return, “we expect it in Sept”. But most people I know are totally cool on the idea.
There’s enough anecdotes floating about of double vaxxed middle aged people getting pretty sick, even hospitalised. And so they think fuck that, what’s even the point in going in? I’ll go in the absolute bare minimum required and not a day more.
Meanwhile the kids are already going back with gusto.
Soho has always been young but today it had an average age of about 23. Extremely vigorous - and busy
On the whole I believe this is good. London was becoming (like Paris and NYC) a gated community for the old and rich. But there will be a price to pay - crime and drugs and people having sex in bus stops
What is the price for drugs and sex in bustops now? Asking for a friend :-)
I checked. £7
Also the students are back. Bloomsbury was alive with young people, and that was REALLY good. I'm not sure why. Should they not be at home for the hols?
Nonetheless there they were, Obvious students. Filling the pubs, arguing at cafes, carrying books into noble buildings. Great to see. Properly uplifting. London needs it students, it is one of the great student cities of the world. Perhaps the greatest
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Your second paragraph is absurd. Your stereotype applies, if at all, to a small proportion of the 48% who voted to remain, and is no better than the reverse stereotype of 'thick leavers'. And as one of the unprivileged hard-working people who voted remain, and is getting on a bit, far from "every election going (my) way until 2016", very few have done, and I've spent most of my life with governments I oppose.
There's a lot of hard truths in the second paragraphs, it's difficult to look into that mirror so I'm not surprised that remainers are so dismissive of the idea that they benefited from the impoverishment of white working class Brits by Eastern Europeans living 8 to single bedroom flats working for the minimum wage or below and turning it into an effective maximum wage for millions of people. You may have been someone who came from that background but you also pulled the ladder up.
Absolute drivel.
And yet out of the EU wage inflation at the bottom of the market has gone insane.
There’s a global labour shortage (I mean in the West), although likely worse here because of Brexit.
Check out the US data.
So the labour market does adhere to basic economic principles of supply and demand? I mean I've read about a billion papers by liberal academics suggesting otherwise and saying that EU immigration had no impact on wages. Which is it? Is Brexit having an inflationary impact on wages or did EU immigration cause have deflationary effect on wages?
Yeah the evidence is that it increased overall wages, especially for people like yourself.
I’m not sure why you are such a hysterical denialist on this subject. Your comments that Brexit is worthwhile to see other people suffer is frankly pathetic at your age.
So the rich (people like me) got richer and the wages of the not so rich and working poor got propped up by the minimum wage (which is evidenced by actual ONS data, not studies). Not exactly a great development, feels a bit like pulling up the ladder.
My view is that the people who lost could do with the experience of losing given that they (well we, given what I do for a living) had got used to always winning at life and the EU simply entrenched the advantages of the highly educated and highly paid class. Rolling that back will probably make me every so slightly poorer but if it means that people at the lower end get a decent wage and don't have their pay held down by having an unlimited pool of cheap labour to compete with then there's only ever going to be one choice to make.
In general I'm not one to get overly personal and for most people I wouldn't. There are, however, some people's bitterness that really reinforce my leave vote. On days when I wonder whether it was worth it one of them will handily pop up (not you, mind) and remind me that this is what I voted leave for, to give that class of people a loss for the first time.
Thank you for this response.
I fear you are due to be disappointed. Britain’s low wage problem is caused by a) low skills b) low productivity Indeed, the two are linked.
FDI and immigration actually both served to improve the overall skill base and indeed our productivity. FDI is now down steeply, and immigration from the EU at least has almost disappeared.
All things being equal, Brexit will keep those wages low.
One area where Brexiters *might* have a point is that for unproductive businesses, access to an “unlimited” labour pool served to disincentivise capital investment.
However, Britain’s problems in this respect are long lasting, systemic, and AIUI are not significantly impacted by this greater access to labour.
Again, I agree that the skills base has improved, it has helped people like me make more money on one side and save money on the other by making my coffee cheaper and my restaurant bills lower.
On your specific points you're absolutely underestimating the impact of having a vast pool of cheap labour on productivity and the local skills base. Employers have no need to invest in skills base improvements when they can simply throw labour at it. Why bother?
You can map the drop off in business investment to the joining of the A8 countries. I think you have an idealised version of the EU which is based on what the EU15 was, not what the EU28 was when we left.
Staying in the EU doesn't confront any of the issues facing the UK, all it does is brush it under the rug and create an effective underclass of low wage workers for whom the minimum wage is a maximum wage. So it makes me a bit poorer, so it makes you a bit poorer. The alternative would tear this nation in two as the low wage workers realise their lot in life is to exist to service people like us who want cheap coffee.
So we'll have to bother with border checks and some extra paperwork. None of that is the end of the world really, in fact escaping from EU protectionism will probably be of net benefit to the nation. Escaping the dead hand of the EU will be better than most people realise.
I just disagree with this.
I think sector by sector analysis fails to prove that large scale immigration impeded wage growth except in some limited cases. Same is true for productivity.
And FDI has fallen since 2016 as we have become a less interesting investment proposition since Brexit.
Britain’s underclass is actually it’s own white working class, where it suffers from very poor educational performance - a post industrial legacy. None of this is related to EU membership.
Where I might agree is that EU membership disguised this problem. On the other hand, there’s no real evidence the current government is really interested in confronting it either.
That's studies by the same class of people who won from EU membership. They were and still are asking the wrong questions. The actual data from the ONS shows mega wage growth at the top for people like us and the minimum wage becoming a maximum wage for those at the bottom.
Once again, you're seeing the issue but not actually putting two and two together. If the underclass is easy to ignore they will get ignored. If companies need to hire them then they won't. Educational underachievement is only one part of it, among many.
Leaving the EU forces us as a society to confront this head on, not sweep it under the rug as we did for so long.
I think one of the issues here is that you trust the experts. I don't. The experts are wrong. The people doing the studies and making the models are wrong. These are the same people telling Mrs Thatcher that she was wrong, well she wasn't and the same people are telling leavers we are wrong. We aren't. The expert class has lost it faculties to question the settled liberal agenda and so have you.
I’m saddened that, at the end, your argument boils down to “THE EXPERTS ARE WRONG!”.
It is anti-vaxxery-onomics.
If that's what you want to class it as then so be it. You're unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of something as variable and politicised as economics is worrying. Vaccines are a science. There is safety and efficacy data that is simply immutable. These are independently verified by multiple regulators and peer reviewed by other scientists. Economics is a completely woolly discipline, there are only varying degrees of wrongness.
What my old manager used to tell me was that if the economics professors knew what they were talking about they'd all be millionaires because they could predict the future. Unsurprisingly they aren't.
You're treating economic research papers as some kind of fact, ultimately it's just someone's opinion. Well written and argued from their perspective, I'm sure, but it's still just someone's opinion.
What we actually have is real ONS data that shows a collapse in business investment and wage growth at the bottom of the market which is then covered by a bigger rise at the top. What happened is that the top 10% of wage earners (people like us) saw our wages rise to a very large degree and the bottom 25% saw their wages stay the same. That can be seen in household wealth as well with the top 10% of households now having more wealth than ever before.
Sadly a lot of the liberal economists see it as their duty to explain away this real data but it doesn't make it go away. The poor in the UK are still poor and the rich are richer than ever.
I am not disputing that data (except maybe the business investment point).
However your interpretation I think is wrong, since this effect has been seen in most major economies in the last 25 years.
Regardless of whether they are EU members or not. In fact, it’s the same in NZ. About as far away from EU membership as you can imagine.
I’ll leave aside your belief that the finance industry is smarter than the economics industry.
A lot of it is China exporting deflation to the rest of the world, our issues are related but in excess of that. I'd genuinely love to catch up over a beer at some point because right now my wife is probably wondering why I'm sitting on my phone when she told me it was, err, bed time ten minutes ago.
I'm very grateful, living in Spain, to be double jabbed 2 weeks ago at age 67 - around 3 months later than my younger sister. You really don't get it do you.
Exactly. The whole point of what the UK did with investing in production, buying multiple vaccines, early approval, and stretching dosing intervals was to GO FASTER. Catching up 8 months later is not success, the UK has had literally millions, maybe tens of millions, of extra days of protection for the UK population from the virus by GOING FASTER.
Anyone who doesn't understand this should simply stop posting on this topic forever.
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
Also Ireland I think. And France? Or close, anyway.
We never managed to find a “vaccine dividend”.
We did. We saved tens of thousands of lives, in the UK, by our excellent early vaccination programme. Who knows how many died in the EU, unnecessarily, because they were much slower to begin?
It was entirely predictable that all western nations would end at roughly the same time and in the same way, as they all hit the walls of vaccine hesitancy
60,000 lives in the UK have been saved due to the vaccines according to a report last week
Just a pity about the 100,000 lost thanks to government incompetence.
Do you really believe any government could have avoided a seriously high number of loses from a pandemic of this nature and of course the responsibility lies with all four administrations and no doubt the public enquiry will eventually decide just how much incompetence Boris, Sturgeon, Drakeford and Foster were responsible for
Locked down too late. Three times over. No border controls. Half baked test, trace and don't bother to isolate programme that cost an absolute fortune. Inadequate PPE for front line staff. Seeding Covid into care homes. Taking an eternity to tell people to wear face coverings. Fixation on hand hygiene when the virus is in the air. The list goes on and on.
That adds up to 100,000, give or take.
I think much of that can be blamed on 'following the science' and a 'world beating' pandemic plan which turned out to be crap.
The lack of PPE initially is from globalisation and has, at least for now, been rectified.
Border controls have been atrocious and there's been a general complacent lethargy.
A lack of a general health and fitness campaign has been a disgrace together with an obsession about whether activities were 'essential' instead of 'risky'.
Test and trace I doubt would ever have worked well but like many things developed its own momentum.
Incidentally why do governments promise 'world beating' things ? Few people have 'world beating' things in their lives because 'world beating' things cost a lot and/or involve a lot of hard work. In the real world people don't chose 'world beating' things but things which are 'good enough' and/or good value.
You do realise that just makes him look somewhat endearing (and also Patel, FWIW)
No one is looking at this and raging (apart from you)
It's excellent publicity for Brand Boris. He probably staged it all
Not sure about staging it but I watched it live and to be fair Boris handled it well and I do not think this incident did him any harm
"Boris handled it well"? He couldn't open an umbrella for goodness sake. It's not like it was some new fangled electronic wizardry that old folks like me need the assistance of a ten year old to operate. It was an umbrella!
If it was staged it was a work of comedic genius, unfortunately there is a time and a place for comedic genius, and a memorial to fallen police officers wasn't the time, or the place.
So no it wasn't staged which means the greatest living Englishman is unable to operate a rather basic piece of apparatus. But as you say "Boris handled it well".
If you were considering employing somebody in a job not requiring manual dexterity, would that footage of them seriously affect your decision?
On thread - I notice that over time OGH - in common with many who share his antipathy - has shifted from referring to Boris Johnson as 'Boris' to 'BoJo' and now to 'Johnson'. Mildly reminiscent of my Man City supporting friends on the 90s whose contempt for Manchester United was such that they couldn't bring themselves to utter the words 'Manchester United and would habitually refer to them as 'Trafford Rangers', to the slight disbenefit of the casual observer trying to follow the conversation.
he clearly offers the umbrella to Priti Patel, and apologises for possibly spearing the guy behind him
Looks like he was asking her how to open it
Jesus. He really doesn't
Here it is complete with Benny Hill soundtrack
It happens at 0:17, when he thinks he has finally opened it. He realises he might have hit the guy behind and then he also realises he looks a bit selfish as no one else has a brolly, so he offers it to Patel and she declines, then the genius comedy moment happens and the brolly inverts
Your Strasbourg Syndrome has got so bad you are unable to watch a video of a man with an umbrella without your eyes creasing into a rictus of hate which prevents you seeing a man offering an umbrella to a woman
You do realise that just makes him look somewhat endearing (and also Patel, FWIW)
No one is looking at this and raging (apart from you)
It's excellent publicity for Brand Boris. He probably staged it all
Not sure about staging it but I watched it live and to be fair Boris handled it well and I do not think this incident did him any harm
"Boris handled it well"? He couldn't open an umbrella for goodness sake. It's not like it was some new fangled electronic wizardry that old folks like me need the assistance of a ten year old to operate. It was an umbrella!
If it was staged it was a work of comedic genius, unfortunately there is a time and a place for comedic genius, and a memorial to fallen police officers wasn't the time, or the place.
So no it wasn't staged which means the greatest living Englishman is unable to operate a rather basic piece of apparatus. But as you say "Boris handled it well".
To be honest this Welsh-Englishman has experienced the same problem with umbrellas as must many more
In anything less than a gale force wind I am surprised people have so much trouble with basic umbrella operation.
I am guessing if YouGov conducted an opinion poll there would be more people having umbrella difficulties than I would have anticipated. Come to think of it, maybe as much as 52% to 48%
"I've been to Magaluf, but this was just crazy..." LOL.
There's a point here - we've gone from forced abstinence to encouraged excess almost overnight.
Some people can't handle that.
Oddly enough, going racing with restricted crowd numbers was a real pleasure yet I'm told it's not the same without a "crowd".
No, it's much worse but I can understand why Lingfield Park want a crowd of 10,000 drinking rather than 2,000 enjoying the racing.
Indeed there is a point. And you've put your finger on it. Newcastle City centre has had a distinctly, evil air abroad in the late hours recently. Stag and hens, aren't in Prague and Amsterdam. The quayside bar staff I know reckon it has never been anything like this bad. Not local accents. Blood, urine and vomit on the Tyne is all mine.
Why and who?
Some parts of London have definitely got edgier, some are quieter than ever.
Stag and hens for one. Sports teams starved of foreign tours. There has always been them, of course, but not in these numbers. Hotels are cheap and plentiful due to lack of business and tourist trade. Worse, they aren't diluted by local middle class theatre and restaurant goers, nor business people who are staying away. Toon, indeed the north east, has only one small, getting Pissed up centre.
In my corner of London it is open drug dealing spreading into the royal parks, especially around Primrose Hill. It comes with gangs, violence and theft, and it started during Covid
It is sporadic. Weeks can do by and it's fine, then suddenly Eeek
I was musing. Is there a glut of cocaine? Not the drug I'd choose during lockdown. There seems to be widespread anecdotal reports of it being involved now. That, and excess alcohol, would explain at least some of the behaviour.
There were certainly loads of reports of open coke taking in the euros, especially the final. A photographer friend of mine was at Wembley and he says it was an incredible bacchanal of agrression, exuberance and drugs - not all bad, some good humoured, but definitely scary
In London the drugs have followed the kids. During lockdown a lot of London youths discovered the magnificent parks, and realised what fun it is just to buy booze and go sit in the parks and party and have picnics and music (and it is fun, I do the same). They bring guitars. They sing and dance. There are tribes of pretty teenage girls. The boys naturally follow, hopefully
And so the drug dealers have come to serve this brand new market
Maybe I’m getting old. But London increasingly feels lawless, grimy, threatening. A place to leave rather than a place to go to. Went in a few weeks ago. Took mere seconds after my arrival before the station was evacuated for an Inspector Sands announcement. Very hard to avoid the urge to say “bugger this for a game of soldiers, back to the shire I go”.
My opinion shifts weekly, or even daily.
A few weeks ago I despaired, vocally, of north London, on here. It all felt very lawless at night. And dirty and run down
The other day I did basically the same route at the same time of night and it felt buoyant and dynamic and hopeful
One thing for sure is that the city is younger, much younger. The olds stay at home or they have fled. The youth have inherited The Smoke. That brings good and bad things
It’s a fascinating experiment for sure.
The next few months will be interesting. Quite a few big employers are now trying to push the big return, “we expect it in Sept”. But most people I know are totally cool on the idea.
There’s enough anecdotes floating about of double vaxxed middle aged people getting pretty sick, even hospitalised. And so they think fuck that, what’s even the point in going in? I’ll go in the absolute bare minimum required and not a day more.
Meanwhile the kids are already going back with gusto.
Soho has always been young but today it had an average age of about 23. Extremely vigorous - and busy
On the whole I believe this is good. London was becoming (like Paris and NYC) a gated community for the old and rich. But there will be a price to pay - crime and drugs and people having sex in bus stops
What is the price for drugs and sex in bustops now? Asking for a friend :-)
I checked. £7
Also the students are back. Bloomsbury was alive with young people, and that was REALLY good. I'm not sure why. Should they not be at home for the hols?
Nonetheless there they were, Obvious students. Filling the pubs, arguing at cafes, carrying books into noble buildings. Great to see. Properly uplifting. London needs it students, it is one of the great student cities of the world. Perhaps the greatest
You are so full of it.
Er, you think I am lying about seeing students in Bloomsbury?!
"I've been to Magaluf, but this was just crazy..." LOL.
There's a point here - we've gone from forced abstinence to encouraged excess almost overnight.
Some people can't handle that.
Oddly enough, going racing with restricted crowd numbers was a real pleasure yet I'm told it's not the same without a "crowd".
No, it's much worse but I can understand why Lingfield Park want a crowd of 10,000 drinking rather than 2,000 enjoying the racing.
Indeed there is a point. And you've put your finger on it. Newcastle City centre has had a distinctly, evil air abroad in the late hours recently. Stag and hens, aren't in Prague and Amsterdam. The quayside bar staff I know reckon it has never been anything like this bad. Not local accents. Blood, urine and vomit on the Tyne is all mine.
Why and who?
Some parts of London have definitely got edgier, some are quieter than ever.
Stag and hens for one. Sports teams starved of foreign tours. There has always been them, of course, but not in these numbers. Hotels are cheap and plentiful due to lack of business and tourist trade. Worse, they aren't diluted by local middle class theatre and restaurant goers, nor business people who are staying away. Toon, indeed the north east, has only one small, getting Pissed up centre.
In my corner of London it is open drug dealing spreading into the royal parks, especially around Primrose Hill. It comes with gangs, violence and theft, and it started during Covid
It is sporadic. Weeks can do by and it's fine, then suddenly Eeek
I was musing. Is there a glut of cocaine? Not the drug I'd choose during lockdown. There seems to be widespread anecdotal reports of it being involved now. That, and excess alcohol, would explain at least some of the behaviour.
There were certainly loads of reports of open coke taking in the euros, especially the final. A photographer friend of mine was at Wembley and he says it was an incredible bacchanal of agrression, exuberance and drugs - not all bad, some good humoured, but definitely scary
In London the drugs have followed the kids. During lockdown a lot of London youths discovered the magnificent parks, and realised what fun it is just to buy booze and go sit in the parks and party and have picnics and music (and it is fun, I do the same). They bring guitars. They sing and dance. There are tribes of pretty teenage girls. The boys naturally follow, hopefully
And so the drug dealers have come to serve this brand new market
Maybe I’m getting old. But London increasingly feels lawless, grimy, threatening. A place to leave rather than a place to go to. Went in a few weeks ago. Took mere seconds after my arrival before the station was evacuated for an Inspector Sands announcement. Very hard to avoid the urge to say “bugger this for a game of soldiers, back to the shire I go”.
My opinion shifts weekly, or even daily.
A few weeks ago I despaired, vocally, of north London, on here. It all felt very lawless at night. And dirty and run down
The other day I did basically the same route at the same time of night and it felt buoyant and dynamic and hopeful
One thing for sure is that the city is younger, much younger. The olds stay at home or they have fled. The youth have inherited The Smoke. That brings good and bad things
It’s a fascinating experiment for sure.
The next few months will be interesting. Quite a few big employers are now trying to push the big return, “we expect it in Sept”. But most people I know are totally cool on the idea.
There’s enough anecdotes floating about of double vaxxed middle aged people getting pretty sick, even hospitalised. And so they think fuck that, what’s even the point in going in? I’ll go in the absolute bare minimum required and not a day more.
Meanwhile the kids are already going back with gusto.
Soho has always been young but today it had an average age of about 23. Extremely vigorous - and busy
On the whole I believe this is good. London was becoming (like Paris and NYC) a gated community for the old and rich. But there will be a price to pay - crime and drugs and people having sex in bus stops
What is the price for drugs and sex in bustops now? Asking for a friend :-)
I checked. £7
Also the students are back. Bloomsbury was alive with young people, and that was REALLY good. I'm not sure why. Should they not be at home for the hols?
Nonetheless there they were, Obvious students. Filling the pubs, arguing at cafes, carrying books into noble buildings. Great to see. Properly uplifting. London needs it students, it is one of the great student cities of the world. Perhaps the greatest
You are so full of it.
Er, you think I am lying about seeing students in Bloomsbury?!
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Your second paragraph is absurd. Your stereotype applies, if at all, to a small proportion of the 48% who voted to remain, and is no better than the reverse stereotype of 'thick leavers'. And as one of the unprivileged hard-working people who voted remain, and is getting on a bit, far from "every election going (my) way until 2016", very few have done, and I've spent most of my life with governments I oppose.
There's a lot of hard truths in the second paragraphs, it's difficult to look into that mirror so I'm not surprised that remainers are so dismissive of the idea that they benefited from the impoverishment of white working class Brits by Eastern Europeans living 8 to single bedroom flats working for the minimum wage or below and turning it into an effective maximum wage for millions of people. You may have been someone who came from that background but you also pulled the ladder up.
Absolute drivel.
And yet out of the EU wage inflation at the bottom of the market has gone insane.
There’s a global labour shortage (I mean in the West), although likely worse here because of Brexit.
Check out the US data.
So the labour market does adhere to basic economic principles of supply and demand? I mean I've read about a billion papers by liberal academics suggesting otherwise and saying that EU immigration had no impact on wages. Which is it? Is Brexit having an inflationary impact on wages or did EU immigration cause have deflationary effect on wages?
Yeah the evidence is that it increased overall wages, especially for people like yourself.
I’m not sure why you are such a hysterical denialist on this subject. Your comments that Brexit is worthwhile to see other people suffer is frankly pathetic at your age.
So the rich (people like me) got richer and the wages of the not so rich and working poor got propped up by the minimum wage (which is evidenced by actual ONS data, not studies). Not exactly a great development, feels a bit like pulling up the ladder.
My view is that the people who lost could do with the experience of losing given that they (well we, given what I do for a living) had got used to always winning at life and the EU simply entrenched the advantages of the highly educated and highly paid class. Rolling that back will probably make me every so slightly poorer but if it means that people at the lower end get a decent wage and don't have their pay held down by having an unlimited pool of cheap labour to compete with then there's only ever going to be one choice to make.
In general I'm not one to get overly personal and for most people I wouldn't. There are, however, some people's bitterness that really reinforce my leave vote. On days when I wonder whether it was worth it one of them will handily pop up (not you, mind) and remind me that this is what I voted leave for, to give that class of people a loss for the first time.
Thank you for this response.
I fear you are due to be disappointed. Britain’s low wage problem is caused by a) low skills b) low productivity Indeed, the two are linked.
FDI and immigration actually both served to improve the overall skill base and indeed our productivity. FDI is now down steeply, and immigration from the EU at least has almost disappeared.
All things being equal, Brexit will keep those wages low.
One area where Brexiters *might* have a point is that for unproductive businesses, access to an “unlimited” labour pool served to disincentivise capital investment.
However, Britain’s problems in this respect are long lasting, systemic, and AIUI are not significantly impacted by this greater access to labour.
Again, I agree that the skills base has improved, it has helped people like me make more money on one side and save money on the other by making my coffee cheaper and my restaurant bills lower.
On your specific points you're absolutely underestimating the impact of having a vast pool of cheap labour on productivity and the local skills base. Employers have no need to invest in skills base improvements when they can simply throw labour at it. Why bother?
You can map the drop off in business investment to the joining of the A8 countries. I think you have an idealised version of the EU which is based on what the EU15 was, not what the EU28 was when we left.
Staying in the EU doesn't confront any of the issues facing the UK, all it does is brush it under the rug and create an effective underclass of low wage workers for whom the minimum wage is a maximum wage. So it makes me a bit poorer, so it makes you a bit poorer. The alternative would tear this nation in two as the low wage workers realise their lot in life is to exist to service people like us who want cheap coffee.
So we'll have to bother with border checks and some extra paperwork. None of that is the end of the world really, in fact escaping from EU protectionism will probably be of net benefit to the nation. Escaping the dead hand of the EU will be better than most people realise.
I just disagree with this.
I think sector by sector analysis fails to prove that large scale immigration impeded wage growth except in some limited cases. Same is true for productivity.
And FDI has fallen since 2016 as we have become a less interesting investment proposition since Brexit.
Britain’s underclass is actually it’s own white working class, where it suffers from very poor educational performance - a post industrial legacy. None of this is related to EU membership.
Where I might agree is that EU membership disguised this problem. On the other hand, there’s no real evidence the current government is really interested in confronting it either.
That's studies by the same class of people who won from EU membership. They were and still are asking the wrong questions. The actual data from the ONS shows mega wage growth at the top for people like us and the minimum wage becoming a maximum wage for those at the bottom.
Once again, you're seeing the issue but not actually putting two and two together. If the underclass is easy to ignore they will get ignored. If companies need to hire them then they won't. Educational underachievement is only one part of it, among many.
Leaving the EU forces us as a society to confront this head on, not sweep it under the rug as we did for so long.
I think one of the issues here is that you trust the experts. I don't. The experts are wrong. The people doing the studies and making the models are wrong. These are the same people telling Mrs Thatcher that she was wrong, well she wasn't and the same people are telling leavers we are wrong. We aren't. The expert class has lost it faculties to question the settled liberal agenda and so have you.
I’m saddened that, at the end, your argument boils down to “THE EXPERTS ARE WRONG!”.
It is anti-vaxxery-onomics.
If that's what you want to class it as then so be it. You're unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of something as variable and politicised as economics is worrying. Vaccines are a science. There is safety and efficacy data that is simply immutable. These are independently verified by multiple regulators and peer reviewed by other scientists. Economics is a completely woolly discipline, there are only varying degrees of wrongness.
What my old manager used to tell me was that if the economics professors knew what they were talking about they'd all be millionaires because they could predict the future. Unsurprisingly they aren't.
You're treating economic research papers as some kind of fact, ultimately it's just someone's opinion. Well written and argued from their perspective, I'm sure, but it's still just someone's opinion.
What we actually have is real ONS data that shows a collapse in business investment and wage growth at the bottom of the market which is then covered by a bigger rise at the top. What happened is that the top 10% of wage earners (people like us) saw our wages rise to a very large degree and the bottom 25% saw their wages stay the same. That can be seen in household wealth as well with the top 10% of households now having more wealth than ever before.
Sadly a lot of the liberal economists see it as their duty to explain away this real data but it doesn't make it go away. The poor in the UK are still poor and the rich are richer than ever.
I am not disputing that data (except maybe the business investment point).
However your interpretation I think is wrong, since this effect has been seen in most major economies in the last 25 years.
Regardless of whether they are EU members or not. In fact, it’s the same in NZ. About as far away from EU membership as you can imagine.
I’ll leave aside your belief that the finance industry is smarter than the economics industry.
A lot of it is China exporting deflation to the rest of the world, our issues are related but in excess of that. I'd genuinely love to catch up over a beer at some point because right now my wife is probably wondering why I'm sitting on my phone when she told me it was, err, bed time ten minutes ago.
Ah yes, me too! The wife has actually called me on my phone and insisting I go upstairs…
"I've been to Magaluf, but this was just crazy..." LOL.
There's a point here - we've gone from forced abstinence to encouraged excess almost overnight.
Some people can't handle that.
Oddly enough, going racing with restricted crowd numbers was a real pleasure yet I'm told it's not the same without a "crowd".
No, it's much worse but I can understand why Lingfield Park want a crowd of 10,000 drinking rather than 2,000 enjoying the racing.
Indeed there is a point. And you've put your finger on it. Newcastle City centre has had a distinctly, evil air abroad in the late hours recently. Stag and hens, aren't in Prague and Amsterdam. The quayside bar staff I know reckon it has never been anything like this bad. Not local accents. Blood, urine and vomit on the Tyne is all mine.
Why and who?
Some parts of London have definitely got edgier, some are quieter than ever.
Stag and hens for one. Sports teams starved of foreign tours. There has always been them, of course, but not in these numbers. Hotels are cheap and plentiful due to lack of business and tourist trade. Worse, they aren't diluted by local middle class theatre and restaurant goers, nor business people who are staying away. Toon, indeed the north east, has only one small, getting Pissed up centre.
In my corner of London it is open drug dealing spreading into the royal parks, especially around Primrose Hill. It comes with gangs, violence and theft, and it started during Covid
It is sporadic. Weeks can do by and it's fine, then suddenly Eeek
I was musing. Is there a glut of cocaine? Not the drug I'd choose during lockdown. There seems to be widespread anecdotal reports of it being involved now. That, and excess alcohol, would explain at least some of the behaviour.
There were certainly loads of reports of open coke taking in the euros, especially the final. A photographer friend of mine was at Wembley and he says it was an incredible bacchanal of agrression, exuberance and drugs - not all bad, some good humoured, but definitely scary
In London the drugs have followed the kids. During lockdown a lot of London youths discovered the magnificent parks, and realised what fun it is just to buy booze and go sit in the parks and party and have picnics and music (and it is fun, I do the same). They bring guitars. They sing and dance. There are tribes of pretty teenage girls. The boys naturally follow, hopefully
And so the drug dealers have come to serve this brand new market
Maybe I’m getting old. But London increasingly feels lawless, grimy, threatening. A place to leave rather than a place to go to. Went in a few weeks ago. Took mere seconds after my arrival before the station was evacuated for an Inspector Sands announcement. Very hard to avoid the urge to say “bugger this for a game of soldiers, back to the shire I go”.
My opinion shifts weekly, or even daily.
A few weeks ago I despaired, vocally, of north London, on here. It all felt very lawless at night. And dirty and run down
The other day I did basically the same route at the same time of night and it felt buoyant and dynamic and hopeful
One thing for sure is that the city is younger, much younger. The olds stay at home or they have fled. The youth have inherited The Smoke. That brings good and bad things
It’s a fascinating experiment for sure.
The next few months will be interesting. Quite a few big employers are now trying to push the big return, “we expect it in Sept”. But most people I know are totally cool on the idea.
There’s enough anecdotes floating about of double vaxxed middle aged people getting pretty sick, even hospitalised. And so they think fuck that, what’s even the point in going in? I’ll go in the absolute bare minimum required and not a day more.
Meanwhile the kids are already going back with gusto.
Soho has always been young but today it had an average age of about 23. Extremely vigorous - and busy
On the whole I believe this is good. London was becoming (like Paris and NYC) a gated community for the old and rich. But there will be a price to pay - crime and drugs and people having sex in bus stops
What is the price for drugs and sex in bustops now? Asking for a friend :-)
I checked. £7
Also the students are back. Bloomsbury was alive with young people, and that was REALLY good. I'm not sure why. Should they not be at home for the hols?
Nonetheless there they were, Obvious students. Filling the pubs, arguing at cafes, carrying books into noble buildings. Great to see. Properly uplifting. London needs it students, it is one of the great student cities of the world. Perhaps the greatest
You are so full of it.
Er, you think I am lying about seeing students in Bloomsbury?!
A proposal to create an "amber watch-list" of countries at risk of moving to red in the travel traffic light system has been abandoned, a government source has told the BBC.
Government sources said no new categories would now be added.
Slightly OT, Greece is in danger of moving to red just in temperature terms at the moment. Some family friends told us it felt even worse than the 'eighties heatwaves in Athens over the weekend. The highest temperature ever recorded in Europe was in Athens around then, as I remember, and it might get up to near that in Central Greece tomorrow. The islands and so most of the tourist areas are cooler and so relatively more tolerable for the moment, though.
"I've been to Magaluf, but this was just crazy..." LOL.
There's a point here - we've gone from forced abstinence to encouraged excess almost overnight.
Some people can't handle that.
Oddly enough, going racing with restricted crowd numbers was a real pleasure yet I'm told it's not the same without a "crowd".
No, it's much worse but I can understand why Lingfield Park want a crowd of 10,000 drinking rather than 2,000 enjoying the racing.
Indeed there is a point. And you've put your finger on it. Newcastle City centre has had a distinctly, evil air abroad in the late hours recently. Stag and hens, aren't in Prague and Amsterdam. The quayside bar staff I know reckon it has never been anything like this bad. Not local accents. Blood, urine and vomit on the Tyne is all mine.
Why and who?
Some parts of London have definitely got edgier, some are quieter than ever.
I've always found London surprisingly free of aggro. Walking through the centre of my small Scottish hometown on a Friday or Saturday night in the 1990s you would see a lot more general lariness and get more of a sense of impending violence than I've ever seen down here. Of course there is a tragic problem with knife violence here, but it isn't directed at random people on the street.
Yes the London violent world exists as a largely seperate entity to the one that norms like us inhabit.
@Sandy Rentool, you're arguing that we could have escaped with 29,000 deaths from COVID? Seriously?
How would we have achieved this miracle?
We've had just over 150,000 deaths in the UK. I remember when it was announced that 40,000 would be a good result. Allowing a 10,000 margin on top of that, and 100,000 is the excess resulting from government incompetence.
Nope, they died from Covid. A novel disease first known in 2019, that has killed millions round the world. You can rage and shout at the sun that the government got everything wrong, and if they had only done this and that, then no one would have died. I’m sure some decisions were wrong, but they were made at the time, not with the benefit of hindsight. I’ve said before that if we knew for certain that the vaccines would work and would start going into arms in December 2020, we could have locked down for much of the autumn and winter. We didn’t know. How many posts on here claimed that the vaccines would always be ‘coming’ and never arrive, like Christmas in Narnia? At the time we tried to balance risk of Covid and staying open, the tiers. My belief is that they were working until the Kent variant came and screwed it over. Counter factual is great fun. Military history buffs love it. I’d suggest waiting for the inquiry to see how we’ll spread the ‘blame’ goes.
"I've been to Magaluf, but this was just crazy..." LOL.
There's a point here - we've gone from forced abstinence to encouraged excess almost overnight.
Some people can't handle that.
Oddly enough, going racing with restricted crowd numbers was a real pleasure yet I'm told it's not the same without a "crowd".
No, it's much worse but I can understand why Lingfield Park want a crowd of 10,000 drinking rather than 2,000 enjoying the racing.
Indeed there is a point. And you've put your finger on it. Newcastle City centre has had a distinctly, evil air abroad in the late hours recently. Stag and hens, aren't in Prague and Amsterdam. The quayside bar staff I know reckon it has never been anything like this bad. Not local accents. Blood, urine and vomit on the Tyne is all mine.
Why and who?
Some parts of London have definitely got edgier, some are quieter than ever.
Stag and hens for one. Sports teams starved of foreign tours. There has always been them, of course, but not in these numbers. Hotels are cheap and plentiful due to lack of business and tourist trade. Worse, they aren't diluted by local middle class theatre and restaurant goers, nor business people who are staying away. Toon, indeed the north east, has only one small, getting Pissed up centre.
In my corner of London it is open drug dealing spreading into the royal parks, especially around Primrose Hill. It comes with gangs, violence and theft, and it started during Covid
It is sporadic. Weeks can do by and it's fine, then suddenly Eeek
I was musing. Is there a glut of cocaine? Not the drug I'd choose during lockdown. There seems to be widespread anecdotal reports of it being involved now. That, and excess alcohol, would explain at least some of the behaviour.
There were certainly loads of reports of open coke taking in the euros, especially the final. A photographer friend of mine was at Wembley and he says it was an incredible bacchanal of agrression, exuberance and drugs - not all bad, some good humoured, but definitely scary
In London the drugs have followed the kids. During lockdown a lot of London youths discovered the magnificent parks, and realised what fun it is just to buy booze and go sit in the parks and party and have picnics and music (and it is fun, I do the same). They bring guitars. They sing and dance. There are tribes of pretty teenage girls. The boys naturally follow, hopefully
And so the drug dealers have come to serve this brand new market
Maybe I’m getting old. But London increasingly feels lawless, grimy, threatening. A place to leave rather than a place to go to. Went in a few weeks ago. Took mere seconds after my arrival before the station was evacuated for an Inspector Sands announcement. Very hard to avoid the urge to say “bugger this for a game of soldiers, back to the shire I go”.
My opinion shifts weekly, or even daily.
A few weeks ago I despaired, vocally, of north London, on here. It all felt very lawless at night. And dirty and run down
The other day I did basically the same route at the same time of night and it felt buoyant and dynamic and hopeful
One thing for sure is that the city is younger, much younger. The olds stay at home or they have fled. The youth have inherited The Smoke. That brings good and bad things
It’s a fascinating experiment for sure.
The next few months will be interesting. Quite a few big employers are now trying to push the big return, “we expect it in Sept”. But most people I know are totally cool on the idea.
There’s enough anecdotes floating about of double vaxxed middle aged people getting pretty sick, even hospitalised. And so they think fuck that, what’s even the point in going in? I’ll go in the absolute bare minimum required and not a day more.
Meanwhile the kids are already going back with gusto.
Soho has always been young but today it had an average age of about 23. Extremely vigorous - and busy
On the whole I believe this is good. London was becoming (like Paris and NYC) a gated community for the old and rich. But there will be a price to pay - crime and drugs and people having sex in bus stops
What is the price for drugs and sex in bustops now? Asking for a friend :-)
I checked. £7
Also the students are back. Bloomsbury was alive with young people, and that was REALLY good. I'm not sure why. Should they not be at home for the hols?
Nonetheless there they were, Obvious students. Filling the pubs, arguing at cafes, carrying books into noble buildings. Great to see. Properly uplifting. London needs it students, it is one of the great student cities of the world. Perhaps the greatest
You are so full of it.
Er, you think I am lying about seeing students in Bloomsbury?!
I think you're lying about "I checked, £7"
Ah, OK, lol yes. It's £5
You see things in London well Lean. You're a good observer, and I enjoy reading your observations. To some degree you interact with Londoners too, and I enjoy reading those observations too. However talking complete bollocks isn't so readable.
According to this thread, Brexit was in fact a chance to kick out the elite. Thank fuck for that... Over 170 people applied to a position on the independent committee responsible for upholding ethics and integrity in our politics and public life.
Boris Johnson appointed his chum from the Bullingdon Club instead. A total joke.
"I've been to Magaluf, but this was just crazy..." LOL.
There's a point here - we've gone from forced abstinence to encouraged excess almost overnight.
Some people can't handle that.
Oddly enough, going racing with restricted crowd numbers was a real pleasure yet I'm told it's not the same without a "crowd".
No, it's much worse but I can understand why Lingfield Park want a crowd of 10,000 drinking rather than 2,000 enjoying the racing.
Indeed there is a point. And you've put your finger on it. Newcastle City centre has had a distinctly, evil air abroad in the late hours recently. Stag and hens, aren't in Prague and Amsterdam. The quayside bar staff I know reckon it has never been anything like this bad. Not local accents. Blood, urine and vomit on the Tyne is all mine.
Why and who?
Some parts of London have definitely got edgier, some are quieter than ever.
Stag and hens for one. Sports teams starved of foreign tours. There has always been them, of course, but not in these numbers. Hotels are cheap and plentiful due to lack of business and tourist trade. Worse, they aren't diluted by local middle class theatre and restaurant goers, nor business people who are staying away. Toon, indeed the north east, has only one small, getting Pissed up centre.
In my corner of London it is open drug dealing spreading into the royal parks, especially around Primrose Hill. It comes with gangs, violence and theft, and it started during Covid
It is sporadic. Weeks can do by and it's fine, then suddenly Eeek
I was musing. Is there a glut of cocaine? Not the drug I'd choose during lockdown. There seems to be widespread anecdotal reports of it being involved now. That, and excess alcohol, would explain at least some of the behaviour.
There were certainly loads of reports of open coke taking in the euros, especially the final. A photographer friend of mine was at Wembley and he says it was an incredible bacchanal of agrression, exuberance and drugs - not all bad, some good humoured, but definitely scary
In London the drugs have followed the kids. During lockdown a lot of London youths discovered the magnificent parks, and realised what fun it is just to buy booze and go sit in the parks and party and have picnics and music (and it is fun, I do the same). They bring guitars. They sing and dance. There are tribes of pretty teenage girls. The boys naturally follow, hopefully
And so the drug dealers have come to serve this brand new market
Maybe I’m getting old. But London increasingly feels lawless, grimy, threatening. A place to leave rather than a place to go to. Went in a few weeks ago. Took mere seconds after my arrival before the station was evacuated for an Inspector Sands announcement. Very hard to avoid the urge to say “bugger this for a game of soldiers, back to the shire I go”.
My opinion shifts weekly, or even daily.
A few weeks ago I despaired, vocally, of north London, on here. It all felt very lawless at night. And dirty and run down
The other day I did basically the same route at the same time of night and it felt buoyant and dynamic and hopeful
One thing for sure is that the city is younger, much younger. The olds stay at home or they have fled. The youth have inherited The Smoke. That brings good and bad things
It’s a fascinating experiment for sure.
The next few months will be interesting. Quite a few big employers are now trying to push the big return, “we expect it in Sept”. But most people I know are totally cool on the idea.
There’s enough anecdotes floating about of double vaxxed middle aged people getting pretty sick, even hospitalised. And so they think fuck that, what’s even the point in going in? I’ll go in the absolute bare minimum required and not a day more.
Meanwhile the kids are already going back with gusto.
Soho has always been young but today it had an average age of about 23. Extremely vigorous - and busy
On the whole I believe this is good. London was becoming (like Paris and NYC) a gated community for the old and rich. But there will be a price to pay - crime and drugs and people having sex in bus stops
What is the price for drugs and sex in bustops now? Asking for a friend :-)
I checked. £7
Also the students are back. Bloomsbury was alive with young people, and that was REALLY good. I'm not sure why. Should they not be at home for the hols?
Nonetheless there they were, Obvious students. Filling the pubs, arguing at cafes, carrying books into noble buildings. Great to see. Properly uplifting. London needs it students, it is one of the great student cities of the world. Perhaps the greatest
You are so full of it.
Er, you think I am lying about seeing students in Bloomsbury?!
I think you're lying about "I checked, £7"
Ah, OK, lol yes. It's £5
You see things in London well Lean. You're a good observer, and I enjoy reading your observations. To some degree you interact with Londoners too, and I enjoy reading those observations too. However talking complete bollocks isn't so readable.
"I've been to Magaluf, but this was just crazy..." LOL.
There's a point here - we've gone from forced abstinence to encouraged excess almost overnight.
Some people can't handle that.
Oddly enough, going racing with restricted crowd numbers was a real pleasure yet I'm told it's not the same without a "crowd".
No, it's much worse but I can understand why Lingfield Park want a crowd of 10,000 drinking rather than 2,000 enjoying the racing.
Indeed there is a point. And you've put your finger on it. Newcastle City centre has had a distinctly, evil air abroad in the late hours recently. Stag and hens, aren't in Prague and Amsterdam. The quayside bar staff I know reckon it has never been anything like this bad. Not local accents. Blood, urine and vomit on the Tyne is all mine.
Why and who?
Some parts of London have definitely got edgier, some are quieter than ever.
Stag and hens for one. Sports teams starved of foreign tours. There has always been them, of course, but not in these numbers. Hotels are cheap and plentiful due to lack of business and tourist trade. Worse, they aren't diluted by local middle class theatre and restaurant goers, nor business people who are staying away. Toon, indeed the north east, has only one small, getting Pissed up centre.
In my corner of London it is open drug dealing spreading into the royal parks, especially around Primrose Hill. It comes with gangs, violence and theft, and it started during Covid
It is sporadic. Weeks can do by and it's fine, then suddenly Eeek
I was musing. Is there a glut of cocaine? Not the drug I'd choose during lockdown. There seems to be widespread anecdotal reports of it being involved now. That, and excess alcohol, would explain at least some of the behaviour.
There were certainly loads of reports of open coke taking in the euros, especially the final. A photographer friend of mine was at Wembley and he says it was an incredible bacchanal of agrression, exuberance and drugs - not all bad, some good humoured, but definitely scary
In London the drugs have followed the kids. During lockdown a lot of London youths discovered the magnificent parks, and realised what fun it is just to buy booze and go sit in the parks and party and have picnics and music (and it is fun, I do the same). They bring guitars. They sing and dance. There are tribes of pretty teenage girls. The boys naturally follow, hopefully
And so the drug dealers have come to serve this brand new market
Maybe I’m getting old. But London increasingly feels lawless, grimy, threatening. A place to leave rather than a place to go to. Went in a few weeks ago. Took mere seconds after my arrival before the station was evacuated for an Inspector Sands announcement. Very hard to avoid the urge to say “bugger this for a game of soldiers, back to the shire I go”.
I came to uni here in early Thatch days. It was much more grimy then.
Off thread - now away on my annual family trip to the West Country. First few days by Dartmoor. First day today: 5am start from home, otter sanctuary, steam railway, climbing wall, ten pin bowling, and post-prandial yomp up Yes Tor in the hope of seeing the sunset ( too cloudy but still rather fine.) Now sat in the bar with a pint of Exmoor Gold. I've slept for three hours in the last 40 and am feeling somewhat lightheaded. All of which is a preamble to Cookie's mask report. Pleasing from my point of view that masks are worn by less than 5% of guests at this hotel. Pandemic feels pleasingly historical. Gloucester services - the Waitrose of service stations - was also largely mask free (less than a quarter, I'd say). All as I hoped but not that surprising to me ( at least, not surprising to the me of two weeks ago - quite surprising to theme of 6 months ago). BUT surprising to me that this was all surprising to my mother in law from small town West Cheshire, who has been nowhere since freedom day where masks did not predominate. Apparently thy of you go to Tesco in Helsby or Sainsburys in Ellesmere Port or any of the small shops in Frodsham.people look at you with First surprise, then hate. While in suburban South Manchester mask observation even where it is half-heartedly requested is slipping rapidly below 50% and no-one seems to mind. I thought it would be the opposite - small town England would rapidly demask while the cities would continue to.wear them. Seemingly not, or at least not from my small sample. Masks do however seem almost universally now shunned in leisure contexts.
"I've been to Magaluf, but this was just crazy..." LOL.
There's a point here - we've gone from forced abstinence to encouraged excess almost overnight.
Some people can't handle that.
Oddly enough, going racing with restricted crowd numbers was a real pleasure yet I'm told it's not the same without a "crowd".
No, it's much worse but I can understand why Lingfield Park want a crowd of 10,000 drinking rather than 2,000 enjoying the racing.
Indeed there is a point. And you've put your finger on it. Newcastle City centre has had a distinctly, evil air abroad in the late hours recently. Stag and hens, aren't in Prague and Amsterdam. The quayside bar staff I know reckon it has never been anything like this bad. Not local accents. Blood, urine and vomit on the Tyne is all mine.
Why and who?
Some parts of London have definitely got edgier, some are quieter than ever.
Stag and hens for one. Sports teams starved of foreign tours. There has always been them, of course, but not in these numbers. Hotels are cheap and plentiful due to lack of business and tourist trade. Worse, they aren't diluted by local middle class theatre and restaurant goers, nor business people who are staying away. Toon, indeed the north east, has only one small, getting Pissed up centre.
In my corner of London it is open drug dealing spreading into the royal parks, especially around Primrose Hill. It comes with gangs, violence and theft, and it started during Covid
It is sporadic. Weeks can do by and it's fine, then suddenly Eeek
I was musing. Is there a glut of cocaine? Not the drug I'd choose during lockdown. There seems to be widespread anecdotal reports of it being involved now. That, and excess alcohol, would explain at least some of the behaviour.
There were certainly loads of reports of open coke taking in the euros, especially the final. A photographer friend of mine was at Wembley and he says it was an incredible bacchanal of agrression, exuberance and drugs - not all bad, some good humoured, but definitely scary
In London the drugs have followed the kids. During lockdown a lot of London youths discovered the magnificent parks, and realised what fun it is just to buy booze and go sit in the parks and party and have picnics and music (and it is fun, I do the same). They bring guitars. They sing and dance. There are tribes of pretty teenage girls. The boys naturally follow, hopefully
And so the drug dealers have come to serve this brand new market
Maybe I’m getting old. But London increasingly feels lawless, grimy, threatening. A place to leave rather than a place to go to. Went in a few weeks ago. Took mere seconds after my arrival before the station was evacuated for an Inspector Sands announcement. Very hard to avoid the urge to say “bugger this for a game of soldiers, back to the shire I go”.
My opinion shifts weekly, or even daily.
A few weeks ago I despaired, vocally, of north London, on here. It all felt very lawless at night. And dirty and run down
The other day I did basically the same route at the same time of night and it felt buoyant and dynamic and hopeful
One thing for sure is that the city is younger, much younger. The olds stay at home or they have fled. The youth have inherited The Smoke. That brings good and bad things
It’s a fascinating experiment for sure.
The next few months will be interesting. Quite a few big employers are now trying to push the big return, “we expect it in Sept”. But most people I know are totally cool on the idea.
There’s enough anecdotes floating about of double vaxxed middle aged people getting pretty sick, even hospitalised. And so they think fuck that, what’s even the point in going in? I’ll go in the absolute bare minimum required and not a day more.
Meanwhile the kids are already going back with gusto.
Soho has always been young but today it had an average age of about 23. Extremely vigorous - and busy
On the whole I believe this is good. London was becoming (like Paris and NYC) a gated community for the old and rich. But there will be a price to pay - crime and drugs and people having sex in bus stops
What is the price for drugs and sex in bustops now? Asking for a friend :-)
I checked. £7
Also the students are back. Bloomsbury was alive with young people, and that was REALLY good. I'm not sure why. Should they not be at home for the hols?
Nonetheless there they were, Obvious students. Filling the pubs, arguing at cafes, carrying books into noble buildings. Great to see. Properly uplifting. London needs it students, it is one of the great student cities of the world. Perhaps the greatest
You are so full of it.
Er, you think I am lying about seeing students in Bloomsbury?!
I think you're lying about "I checked, £7"
Ah, OK, lol yes. It's £5
You see things in London well Lean. You're a good observer, and I enjoy reading your observations. To some degree you interact with Londoners too, and I enjoy reading those observations too. However talking complete bollocks isn't so readable.
It was an obvious joke! (I thought)
Well in that case you have my apologies as a slow-poke.
You do realise that just makes him look somewhat endearing (and also Patel, FWIW)
No one is looking at this and raging (apart from you)
It's excellent publicity for Brand Boris. He probably staged it all
Not sure about staging it but I watched it live and to be fair Boris handled it well and I do not think this incident did him any harm
I'm joking about staging, but Boris has a natural comic gift. He can turn a potentially embarrassing incident into a laugh-with-me moment
He did it with the zipwire. He made is somehow part of his shtick
He has many many faults but a lack of showmanship is not one of them. He has an instinctive knack. And this is not unimportant, politicians can be damaged by this stuff - eg Miliband and the bacon sandwich
Miliband wasn't trying for a golden comedy moment with the bacon sandwich. He was simply eating it.
For 24 hours, I have had a runny nose & a persistent cough. Seem to have caught it from my son. No fever.
Lateral flow test is negative.
Hmmm.
A long time ago, I can dimly remember, we used to have something like that from time to time. We called it 'a cold' I believe.
Anyway - I hope it's nothing serious and you have a speedy recovery!
This is my assumption. But I believe the new delta symptoms are pretty much the same as a cold’s.
It’s a measure of how well we’ve progressed though that I hardly care whether it is a cold or delta; the latter would be an inconvenience rather than a health emergency.
Speaking to some friends who have booked to go away on holiday they were terrified of Delta. Not the illness but the embuggerance of isolation/cancellations if they tested positive.
You do realise that just makes him look somewhat endearing (and also Patel, FWIW)
No one is looking at this and raging (apart from you)
It's excellent publicity for Brand Boris. He probably staged it all
Not sure about staging it but I watched it live and to be fair Boris handled it well and I do not think this incident did him any harm
I'm joking about staging, but Boris has a natural comic gift. He can turn a potentially embarrassing incident into a laugh-with-me moment
He did it with the zipwire. He made is somehow part of his shtick
He has many many faults but a lack of showmanship is not one of them. He has an instinctive knack. And this is not unimportant, politicians can be damaged by this stuff - eg Miliband and the bacon sandwich
Miliband wasn't trying for a golden comedy moment with the bacon sandwich. He was simply eating it.
The 88% net favourability rating for Liz Truss is as preposterous as the woman herself. A reflection of the Conservative Party and the times we live in, I guess.
Your bitterness over the UK having an independent trade policy is one of the best rewards of Brexit. Thank you.
Hate to ask, but if FF43's (alleged) bitterness really is one of the best rewards of Brexit, was it really worth all the hassle? What are the other top five say, for context?
It's probably spaces 1-3, personally along with the bitterness from other EU supporting fifth columnists.
If "remainers" are fifth columnists for the EU are Leavers fifth columnists for Putin? Which would be worse? I think as Brexit is now "done" people trading insults over it just make themselves look a little silly. There are many on both sides of the argument who have done service for their country, and often much more than the people from the opposing side that suggest they are "traitors" perhaps?
The trouble is that, for some, this was their Great Patriotic War to save democracy. Not all, but some. And rather than being saluted for their sacrifices in victory, they are being moaned at or- worse- ignored.
For while, my theory has been that the internal logic of Brexit makes most sense to those born in the 50's and 60's. The most Eurosceptic generation in both 1975 and 2016. Always lived in the shadow of the generation who actually experienced WW2. Too old to see the benefits of a continent without borders for work and play as anything other than a dangerous novelty.
And deep down, some of them suspect that it will all get reversed the minute their backs are turned. Their great achievement down the swannee. And slowly, by a thousand accommodations, chips and cuts, they're probably right.
Johnson understandably won in 2019 on "Brexit is in Peril. Defend it with All Your Might." Unless things change in a way that they haven't so far, there will come a point where the considered response of the public is "Brexit is in Peril? Good".
Meanwhile, time passes.
Although I think Brexit was the biggest foreign policy folly since Suez, I think it would be a mistake to try and re-join. That said I can't help wondering whether in my dotage I will have a good old titter at all those Brexity Col. Blimps when re do regain membership. It will be very funny.
What is funny is how Remainers always insist their vindication is coming. No matter the evidence, the great moment when the up-to-now foolish public suddenly turns around and embraces their Europhile betters. Not only will they regret the decision that has been made, they will actually seek to go back to an even worse membership status than we had before. And to do that when the EU is even more integrated in the years and decades to come. When the UK's economy and trade profile has been restructured completely and status quo bias works in the opposite direction. When the EU is an even smaller share of the world economy than ever.
I suppose it is the only way they can psychologically deal with it. As an upper middle class professional group, they have never really learnt how to accept defeat. They got sent to nice schools, had the way padded to nice universities, and went into nice jobs, where their living standards were padded by the benefits of cheap immigrant and outsourced labour. And they had every election go their way until 2016.
Then they lost, and have been looking for cope ever since. Part of that is the religious certainty that deliverance will arrive in the end. Part of that is the need to assure each other of their moral superiority, with snide comments about how ghastily white, middle aged and - horrors of horrors - *British* those damn Brexiters are. Don't they know how culturally superior Provence and Tuscany are?
Yep. Brexit is essentially about the humbling of social & financial elites (exactly as you explain here) but what's strange is that almost all its leading proponents in public life are reactionary right wing Conservatives. It seems these chaps have all got the wrong end of the stick. I know when it comes to politics that Right doesn't equal Bright, but still, it's a puzzle.
Brexit was also a massive great Fuck You from Provincial Britain to London. You can't blame the yokels, they spent 30 years watching property owning Londoners get insanely wealthy, through no personal merit, while also enjoying all the restaurants, bars, girls, boys, fun, parties, better weather and nice shiny new trains
Brexit was regional Britain saying "this is our country as well": to arrogant Londoners
Talking of which I can report back from my Groucho lunch. The restaurant was jammed, the menu was oddly truncated (lack of staff?) but delicious, the new decor is beautiful, and central London as a whole - the bits of Soho, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Marylebone that I walked through - definitely feels a whole lot better. Many places are shut but many are reopening. The pavements are busier than I have seen since 2019.
And I don't think it is just the effect of a nice sunny day: it isn't. It's overcast, quite cool.
Central London might be reviving, for real.
That's great news that the Groucho is buzzing. Can't wait to get myself there and see what all the fuss is about.
As for Brexit being a cry from the provinces for a more equitable split of power, wealth and opportunity in early 21st century Britain, it's a nice thought, but I wonder if it's accurate.
Reason I'm skeptical is that I very much want that, whereas you very much don't, and I very much voted Remain whereas you very much voted Leave. That's close to being a disprove when you think about it - given both you and I are astuties who know what we want and know how to get it.
My extended family in Cornwall - a large bunch of people - is generally pro-Leave (like the rest of Cornwall). Get them a bit tipsy and ask them about their Brexit vote, and a general resentment at London having all the fun and money emerges. I am sure it is a driver across provincial Britain
And you are simply wrong that I "very much voted Leave" - tho I can see why you might think that, so this is not a critique
My vote was finely balanced. My head and heart were both split. I liked aspects of the EU very much - FOM the most of all. Tho I respect voters who wanted an end to it, as it was damaging their lives. This was a real issue. I also strongly suspected Brexit would damage the country economically (but not grievously), and be bad for London property owners - eg me
But the sovereignty argument won out, on the morning of the vote. I do believe we will be better off governing ourselves, in the end, and more prosperous too, and there are just too many repulsive aspects to the EU. The fraud of the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution was an unforgivable outrage against the European people
So there you are, I actually voted UNSELFISHLY. I voted against my own perceived financial interests, and for the betterment of the country and the country my daughters will inherit. But it was a close call
Well, as I think I've mentioned before, if you thought we were governed by Brussels rather than Westminster - truly thought it, I mean, rather than just embraced it as a talking point - you'd have been relaxed about the election of a left wing Labour government. Course you would since such a government would be toothless, the real power residing with unelected Eurocrats. Yet you weren't relaxed about this at all. You tended to shit bricks at such a prospect. Ditto all the other right wing Brexiter pundits, on PB or elsewhere, who make the most play of this "sovereignty' point. So I conclude it's a red herring. It's a bit of self-aiding doublethink.
No attempt to engage with the argument, just a retreat to your comforting shibboleths. As ever
I'm homing onto the very crux of your argument. You say it was about sovereignty - I'm showing that it really wasn't. The question therefore begged is what was it about. And there, I will not tread. I think I know but I'm not 100% sure and I need to be before going to press with it. You throw up just enough dust to get in my eyes sometimes and prevent a firm read.
Sovereignty is fundamental to the question of immigration, which nobody would deny played a part in the vote. Do we as a political community have the right to set conditions on migration, or do we merely elect people to administer the province of the UK?
Yep, in the EU debate sovereignty is largely Leaver code for immigration. EU membership entailed the free movement of people within the EU. Given we had - in the true rather than Leaver sense of the word - sovereignty, we could leave the EU if we were so unhappy with this that it made us feel oppressed and violated. And that is precisely what has happened.
While I think this is true for most Brexiters, there *is* a principled case for greater U.K. sovreignty outside the EU and the ECJ.
I guess this appeals to maybe 5% of the population?
Maybe less, because even those who major on this seem completely unworried by Boris’s “executive” power grab versus Parliament which has a much more tangible impact on sovreignty.
Because Boris can be ejected by the voters
Voters can't eject the Secretary General of NATO either. I think the point is if you don't think the EU has any value you might as well leave, but if it does do useful things you really don't care about Ursula von der Leyen.
I despise Boris Johnson but I don't see him as a reason for leaving the UK. There's more to the Union than the sleazebag occupying No 10.
The early vaccine fiasco in the EU (now largely remedied, but it still happened) is proof that your argument is entirely wrong
[SNIP]
Spain has now fully vaccinated a higher proportion of its population then the UK according to OWID.
Also Ireland I think. And France? Or close, anyway.
We never managed to find a “vaccine dividend”.
We did. We saved tens of thousands of lives, in the UK, by our excellent early vaccination programme. Who knows how many died in the EU, unnecessarily, because they were much slower to begin?
It was entirely predictable that all western nations would end at roughly the same time and in the same way, as they all hit the walls of vaccine hesitancy
60,000 lives in the UK have been saved due to the vaccines according to a report last week
Just a pity about the 100,000 lost thanks to government incompetence.
Do you really believe any government could have avoided a seriously high number of loses from a pandemic of this nature and of course the responsibility lies with all four administrations and no doubt the public enquiry will eventually decide just how much incompetence Boris, Sturgeon, Drakeford and Foster were responsible for
Locked down too late. Three times over. No border controls. Half baked test, trace and don't bother to isolate programme that cost an absolute fortune. Inadequate PPE for front line staff. Seeding Covid into care homes. Taking an eternity to tell people to wear face coverings. Fixation on hand hygiene when the virus is in the air. The list goes on and on.
That adds up to 100,000, give or take.
So Boris is personally responsible for almost every death in the UK? Despite the fact that we have done broadly the same as most other similar countries?
You do realise that just makes him look somewhat endearing (and also Patel, FWIW)
No one is looking at this and raging (apart from you)
It's excellent publicity for Brand Boris. He probably staged it all
Not sure about staging it but I watched it live and to be fair Boris handled it well and I do not think this incident did him any harm
I'm joking about staging, but Boris has a natural comic gift. He can turn a potentially embarrassing incident into a laugh-with-me moment
He did it with the zipwire. He made is somehow part of his shtick
He has many many faults but a lack of showmanship is not one of them. He has an instinctive knack. And this is not unimportant, politicians can be damaged by this stuff - eg Miliband and the bacon sandwich
Miliband wasn't trying for a golden comedy moment with the bacon sandwich. He was simply eating it.
I don't know about his flint knapping capabilities, but Leon has polished this particular Johnson t**d to gleaming perfection.
You do realise that just makes him look somewhat endearing (and also Patel, FWIW)
No one is looking at this and raging (apart from you)
It's excellent publicity for Brand Boris. He probably staged it all
Not sure about staging it but I watched it live and to be fair Boris handled it well and I do not think this incident did him any harm
I'm joking about staging, but Boris has a natural comic gift. He can turn a potentially embarrassing incident into a laugh-with-me moment
He did it with the zipwire. He made is somehow part of his shtick
He has many many faults but a lack of showmanship is not one of them. He has an instinctive knack. And this is not unimportant, politicians can be damaged by this stuff - eg Miliband and the bacon sandwich
I agree, he's definitely got a natural comic gift. It's just not what the country needs in a Prime Minister though, sadly.
Particularly considering the sombre nature of the event, opening a police memorial.
Comments
Once again, you're seeing the issue but not actually putting two and two together. If the underclass is easy to ignore they will get ignored. If companies need to hire them then they won't. Educational underachievement is only one part of it, among many.
Leaving the EU forces us as a society to confront this head on, not sweep it under the rug as we did for so long.
I think one of the issues here is that you trust the experts. I don't. The experts are wrong. The people doing the studies and making the models are wrong. These are the same people telling Mrs Thatcher that she was wrong, well she wasn't and the same people are telling leavers we are wrong. We aren't. The expert class has lost it faculties to question the settled liberal agenda and so have you.
Part of the problem is the one you mention a bit further down; unlike most advanced countries, we've not taken a decision to vaccinate the bulk of teenagers. (It is still a not decided, rather than a decided not to, isn't it?). That does seem foolish given that infected young people can pass the virus back to vaccinated oldies. And there's nothing magic about the age 18; Covid doesn't check birth certificates any more than TV stars of the 1970's did.
My guess is a couple of things went wrong with the UK programme. One was that it generated the degree of hubris that a sometimes florid but occasionally shrewd commentator has pointed out that Covid spots and attacks.
In this case, the UK didn't bother with "get a jab" PR campaigns until it was too late. Why bother- the doses were flying out of the vaccination centres? The other was the decision to try to avoid using AZ on younger people and not making the additional Pfizer order until it was a bit too late. It means we currently have enough vaccines to go down to age 18, but it's doubtful if we can go any further for now. (The other other thing the UK has got wrong is keeping the delivery data secret, so we're all guessing).
And as for Europe? Once they got over their initial embarrassing flap (yeah, that was bad), they got their act together and sorted out networks to churn out millions and millions of doses of Pfizer vaccine. It's the thing about speedboats vs supertankers. It's a pain to get a supertanker going in the right direction, and it seems to take ages. But if you want to carry a lot of stuff a long way, it's the way to go.
Anyone who says that marks themselves as someone who either hasn’t looked into it, or is not interested in doing so. Or both.
A few weeks ago I despaired, vocally, of north London, on here. It all felt very lawless at night. And dirty and run down
The other day I did basically the same route at the same time of night and it felt buoyant and dynamic and hopeful
One thing for sure is that the city is younger, much younger. The olds stay at home or they have fled. The youth have inherited The Smoke. That brings good and bad things
Try to look more at the global context in support (or refutation) of your arguments.
I’m saddened that, at the end, your argument boils down to “THE EXPERTS ARE WRONG!”.
It is anti-vaxxery-onomics.
So the decision to vaccinate children depends on whether that is needed to keep new cases within a tolerable level.
It appeared to be the first time in his life that he had handled an umbrella.
We know the rules for Amber. We know the rules for Red.
What are the rules for 'Amber Watch', and what do you do if they change during your stay?
But we are more open that most of Europe and we can expect one of the highest GDP growth rates this year, partly as a result, and partly as a result of such a hideous contraction last year. Good and bad
I agree with you on teens, I believe our reluctance to jab them is probably an error, but maybe they have their reasons?
The vaccine dividend was the deaths and hospitalisations avoided earlier this year, and the ability to unlockdown quite early, especially schools
It's not fantastic. Nothing is fantastic. It's a wretched plague that is rampant around the world, even now.
It is fascinating how it is now kicking shit out of Australia. The Leon Rule that Covid Always Punishes Smugness And Hubris is still true
Posted by a satirical TV show, who broadcast satire.
Maybe you don't understand the word?
The volume of EU citizens doesn’t affect that.
It will be interesting to see what the Census says when it is finally released.
This was no stunt, it happened in real time and he was actually offering the umbrella to others at the time
Vaccinating 'kids' ( < 11) isn't yet authorised anywhere.
Boris haters who claim that his brolly mishaps make him unqualified to be PM?
Or Boris lovers who claim that his superb comic flair makes him the perfect leader for our times?
What is driving your obsession?
It was not and so putting the record straight
No fever.
Lateral flow test is negative.
Hmmm.
How would we have achieved this miracle?
You didn't even read the thread properly, and posted my username.
This stalking behaviour is frankly creepy.
What my old manager used to tell me was that if the economics professors knew what they were talking about they'd all be millionaires because they could predict the future. Unsurprisingly they aren't.
You're treating economic research papers as some kind of fact, ultimately it's just someone's opinion. Well written and argued from their perspective, I'm sure, but it's still just someone's opinion.
What we actually have is real ONS data that shows a collapse in business investment and wage growth at the bottom of the market which is then covered by a bigger rise at the top. What happened is that the top 10% of wage earners (people like us) saw our wages rise to a very large degree and the bottom 25% saw their wages stay the same. That can be seen in household wealth as well with the top 10% of households now having more wealth than ever before.
Sadly a lot of the liberal economists see it as their duty to explain away this real data but it doesn't make it go away. The poor in the UK are still poor and the rich are richer than ever.
That’s why it’s helpful to have a sense of how likely (with no guarantee) they are to change
No border controls.
Half baked test, trace and don't bother to isolate programme that cost an absolute fortune.
Inadequate PPE for front line staff.
Seeding Covid into care homes.
Taking an eternity to tell people to wear face coverings.
Fixation on hand hygiene when the virus is in the air.
The list goes on and on.
That adds up to 100,000, give or take.
These are your comments
'I am well aware of the effect it has on his fans.
There was a whole thread about it yesterday.
His fans love him. His enemies hate him. Stunts like this change neither opinion.
But, people who hold neither view are not more likely to vote BoZo as a result.
And yes, he is an International laughing stock'
If it was staged it was a work of comedic genius, unfortunately there is a time and a place for comedic genius, and a memorial to fallen police officers wasn't the time, or the place.
So no it wasn't staged which means the greatest living Englishman is unable to operate a rather basic piece of apparatus. But as you say "Boris handled it well".
But if we assume that everyone is going to come into contact with Delta at some point then the only issue once all adults have been vaccinated is ensuring that everyone doesn't come into contact with Delta in too short a time period.
There might be an advantage relating to school disruption as well but only if the policy of one infection and the whole class has to isolate is stopped.
Given the seemingly low level of vaccinations among the 17.75s since they became eligible I'm not sure that extending vaccination to 12+ would have that much of an effect in any case.
That appears both kind and gallant, not things you always see in national leaders, so it makes you feel warmer to him
There's a brilliant story in Al Campbell's diaries about Blair's narcissism and arrogance. Blair arrived at some event and it was raining and he had no umbrella, and some humble aide offered to share hers, so Blair just took it and walked off with it, leaving her without any protection. Pure entitlement, the arrogance of power
Those who say Boris is some monster of selfishness are somewhat confounded by videos like this, of him NOT behaving selfishly or arrogantly
Government sources said no new categories would now be added.
Today I saw my second episode. It's an astonishing incitement to violence. Everything is about violence.
What on earth is the BBC thinking?
I think I now understand why knife-crime is so prevalent. I think I now understand why our society is divided. It's the stupid BBC
The next few months will be interesting. Quite a few big employers are now trying to push the big return, “we expect it in Sept”. But most people I know are totally cool on the idea.
There’s enough anecdotes floating about of double vaxxed middle aged people getting pretty sick, even hospitalised. And so they think fuck that, what’s even the point in going in? I’ll go in the absolute bare minimum required and not a day more.
Meanwhile the kids are already going back with gusto.
Anyway - I hope it's nothing serious and you have a speedy recovery!
However your interpretation I think is wrong, since this effect has been seen in most major economies in the last 25 years.
Regardless of whether they are EU members or not. In fact, it’s the same in NZ. About as far away from EU membership as you can imagine.
I’ll leave aside your belief that the finance industry is smarter than the economics industry.
On the whole I believe this is good. London was becoming (like Paris and NYC) a gated community for the old and rich. But there will be a price to pay - crime and drugs and people having sex in bus stops
What colour was the umbrella again?
Also the students are back. Bloomsbury was alive with young people, and that was REALLY good. I'm not sure why. Should they not be at home for the hols?
Nonetheless there they were, Obvious students. Filling the pubs, arguing at cafes, carrying books into noble buildings. Great to see. Properly uplifting. London needs it students, it is one of the great student cities of the world. Perhaps the greatest
But I believe the new delta symptoms are pretty much the same as a cold’s.
It’s a measure of how well we’ve progressed though that I hardly care whether it is a cold or delta; the latter would be an inconvenience rather than a health emergency.
Anyone who doesn't understand this should simply stop posting on this topic forever.
The lack of PPE initially is from globalisation and has, at least for now, been rectified.
Border controls have been atrocious and there's been a general complacent lethargy.
A lack of a general health and fitness campaign has been a disgrace together with an obsession about whether activities were 'essential' instead of 'risky'.
Test and trace I doubt would ever have worked well but like many things developed its own momentum.
Incidentally why do governments promise 'world beating' things ? Few people have 'world beating' things in their lives because 'world beating' things cost a lot and/or involve a lot of hard work. In the real world people don't chose 'world beating' things but things which are 'good enough' and/or good value.
Here it is complete with Benny Hill soundtrack
It happens at 0:17, when he thinks he has finally opened it. He realises he might have hit the guy behind and then he also realises he looks a bit selfish as no one else has a brolly, so he offers it to Patel and she declines, then the genius comedy moment happens and the brolly inverts
https://twitter.com/wyliewithers/status/1420946508736724994?s=20
Your Strasbourg Syndrome has got so bad you are unable to watch a video of a man with an umbrella without your eyes creasing into a rictus of hate which prevents you seeing a man offering an umbrella to a woman
I am guessing if YouGov conducted an opinion poll there would be more people having umbrella difficulties than I would have anticipated. Come to think of it, maybe as much as 52% to 48%
The wife has actually called me on my phone and insisting I go upstairs…
At the time we tried to balance risk of Covid and staying open, the tiers. My belief is that they were working until the Kent variant came and screwed it over. Counter factual is great fun. Military history buffs love it. I’d suggest waiting for the inquiry to see how we’ll spread the ‘blame’ goes.
All of which is a preamble to Cookie's mask report. Pleasing from my point of view that masks are worn by less than 5% of guests at this hotel. Pandemic feels pleasingly historical. Gloucester services - the Waitrose of service stations - was also largely mask free (less than a quarter, I'd say). All as I hoped but not that surprising to me ( at least, not surprising to the me of two weeks ago - quite surprising to theme of 6 months ago). BUT surprising to me that this was all surprising to my mother in law from small town West Cheshire, who has been nowhere since freedom day where masks did not predominate. Apparently thy of you go to Tesco in Helsby or Sainsburys in Ellesmere Port or any of the small shops in Frodsham.people look at you with First surprise, then hate. While in suburban South Manchester mask observation even where it is half-heartedly requested is slipping rapidly below 50% and no-one seems to mind. I thought it would be the opposite - small town England would rapidly demask while the cities would continue to.wear them. Seemingly not, or at least not from my small sample. Masks do however seem almost universally now shunned in leisure contexts.
Alasdair Munro
@apsmunro
·
Jul 30
Replying to
@apsmunro
Eradication of SARS-CoV-2 (no more left on the planet) is impossible, for many reasons
We know there are massive animal reservoirs of the virus
It is here to stay forever, whether we like it or not
https://aphis.usda.gov/aphis/newsroom/stakeholder-info/stakeholder-messages/wildlife-damage-news/deer-sars
2/
Much appreciated.
Poor Australia at <15%.
It’s a view I guess