With things being dominated by the American presidential election we have hardly looked at the ongoing effort by the government to come to an agreement before the the end of the Brexit transition period at the end of December. If that doesn’t happen the UK has no deal and is in very uncertain territory.
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https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1331362186543964160?s=20
As in industrial relations, you vote to send your representatives to negotiate with the bosses, only those with straw for brains vote up front to accept whatever shit they come back with.
Taking direct democracy out the box without any experience how to properly use it was the most dumbest thing UK has ever done.
Christmas bubbles for five days, then what, flat fizz for Hogmanay?
52% voted Leave only on the basis of a Deal, if Leave without a Deal had been the only option I doubt more than 40% would have voted Leave
https://twitter.com/OpiniumResearch/status/1330253907445108736?s=20
Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.
"Lockdown lifted!" is my guess. Dark times ahead, around the turn of the year.
A falsifiable prediction for you.
If I booked the holiday of a lifetime and the travel agent phoned me every other day afterward saying it was delayed/might be cancelled altogether/you’ll have to come back in and talk it over with us/just because you booked it doesn’t mean we have to let you go/the resort isn’t built/there’s a worldwide pandemic and we’re not insured, I think I’d wish I hadn’t bothered
No one in tier 1
My guess, almost no one in tier 2 either, maybe Cornwall, Devon and Norfolk.
I am so far from being a diehard remainer that I effectively abstained from voting in 2016 (I voted, but in accordance with the instructions of my 17 year old son). I thought it didn't really matter, because in the event of a Leave vote, civilised adults would negotiate a civilised EEA type arrangement that I'd be perfectly happy with. What a moron.
Opinion polls like this are pretty meaningless nonsense. We've had supposedly polls saying that the public thought Brexit was wrong for years yet the general election didn't give Jo "Fuck Brexit" Swinson the majority to become "Next Prime Minister" as she'd claimed now did it? Maybe the public doesn't really want to say Fuck Brexit?
Prior to the referendum we were consistently told that opinion polls showed the public didn't care about Europe.
I’m not a Labour voter, but their choice to give Johnson room to negotiate a deal is commendably responsible.
Whether he usefully uses it, or panders to the ‘spirit of Brexit’ crew, is another matter
You are a diehard Leadership line follower, whatever that line might be, if we’re trading diehards.
Currently on Malmesbury's table he posts here every day every single part of the country is colour-shaded red. Once they're white then Tier 1 might be considered more appropriate I imagine?
Brexit has gone much better than you were claiming it would in 2016.
Assuming there's a Deal, there's likely to be a boost for the government and for the concept of Brexit.
But.
That deal is likely to involve the UK having made concessions, in which case some parts of the Brexit coalition will be disappointed.
The sort of deal the government wants involves border frictions. I don't think many (any?) of us really understand what that looks like, and even if it goes well that's likely to be a cold shower of reality. Maybe it will be brief and invigorating. Maybe.
And the Brexit Bonus on Boris's Big Bus... it was always a bit notional- the cost of a frictiony border is going to eat up somewhere between most of the hundreds of millions a week and all of it plus some more. But even if the government does pump that cash into public services, it will get swamped by Rishi's book balancing. "Smaller cuts" is a tough sell.
And, at the end of the day, politics is a game all about ungrateful so-and-sos. Talk to any councillor or MP. In any change, there are winners and losers. The disappointment of those who lose is always stronger than the gratitude of the winners. And if you can't stand that joke, you shouldn't join up.
Should have just been Rule of Six (and people would have then stretched that!)
I’m one of the more anti lockdown types on PB, insofar as I’ve long argued that absent a vaccine we have to learn to live with the virus somehow.
Yet now we have vaccines it seems incredibly stupid to me to relax the rules over Christmas, and to pay for it with harsher rules in December and January.
I mean, we need to get over Christmas, not fetishise it in this way.
There is a lot of damage that needs to unwind and that will be upsetting for a lot of families and businesses. But there is also a lot of pent-up demand. A lot of companies may go out of business in the next six months but there will also be a lot of customers eager and waiting for businesses that survive until the summer - or new businesses that pop up from next summer onwards.
The economy has taken a battering, but after the battering will be a period of growth more considerable than any in living memory I predict. But for anyone who gets into that period having lost their business and their life's savings that won't be much sympathy to them.
Look at the foundations of brexit and foundations of what is undermining it to realise what will happen.
There is no way England’s destiny to be part of a federal Europe can be stopped. The short term and fragile brexitgasm isn’t going to halt the outcome.
Brexit doesn’t have solid foundations in such things as economics, history, culture, sovereignty, all brexit is based on is politics. And in world of politics there can be an extremely popular platform, though wind the clock forward, only a handful of years sometimes, and this same popular platform can be the most unpopular platform.
I could be speaking here from someone who bought into brexit, and voted for it. But I still recognise it’s utterly doomed, and likely take its signatories to the bottom with it.
[insert picture of the titanic]
https://twitter.com/AndrewE_Dunn/status/1331279131695263744
70% effective
All that will disappear overnight on Dec 31st.
And there are no working computer systems, no customs agents in place, no detailed administrative processes established, nowhere for the lorries to wait, no vets to fill in the forms, and companies are completely unprepared for the change - unsurprisingly, because not only are they kiboshed by a global pandemic, but even more importantly they don't have a clue what is going to be required in 8 weeks time, or what tariffs will apply, or what forms they will have to fill in.
There has never, in living memory, been a self-inflicted disaster on this scale. It is absolutely staggering - far, far worse than the worst scenarios anyone was contemplating in 2016.
Every Christmas normally I would see all my relatives that we could, touring around houses and stopping at them each for an hour or so then moving on to the next one.
What has been announced today is barely more than a "support bubble". If I wanted to go and see my family (which I'd already decided I wasn't going to do) then the rules actually make it clear that even with the so-called relaxation of the rules that still is NOT allowed.
What is allowed is a very limited, non-exchangeable bubble. So after seeing that we're thinking of maybe seeing my wife's sister for Christmas and that is it. No big family gathering, no seeing parents or grandparents or great grandparents. Just the one visit.
I was a bit more favourably inclined to our continued membership than you, but that’s pretty well my position.
So no, that is not a solution.
This time next year when life hasn't collapsed and we aren't in a catastrophe, what is your excuse reason going to be for disaster still being over the horizon?
You sound exactly like a Faragist.
The 70% figure is perfectly practicable, though, and there is a lot more data to come.
We can do review the degree of collapse at the end of January/early February.
My view is that I couldn’t care less about Brexit anymore - I’m bored of the whole thing and just want something - anything - sorted so we don’t need to hear about it anymore.
Yet I fear we will be in state of perjury for ever more, with hardcore Brexiteers arguing we have never left, and hardcore Remainers saying the battle goes on.
It’s fucking exhausting.
Tesla To Build Massive 100+ GWh Battery Plant At Giga Berlin
https://insideevs.com/news/456347/tesla-massive-100-gwh-battery-plant-germany/
Its like being in a house-share and giving notice that you're quitting so you cease to be a tenant with the rest of your housemates, only to say to your former house mates that since you have nowhere to live and they have a spare home would they mind if you sublet that room for a year?
Is that really leaving?
Do you think if we'd voted Remain then cars wouldn't have been built in Germany anymore? 😕
I'm putting my colours on the mast. There will be disruption in H1 2021 but by this time next year (Q3 and Q4 2021) we will be growing fast starting a period of sustained economic growth.
And four years after the vote you’re still trading meaningless metaphors.
Sounds like peanuts after the year we've had to be honest.
We have left de jure but we have not left de facto - that is about the only thing that @Richard_Nabavi and I agree on I believe.
The hardcore Brexiteers are those who wanted to leave in the 90s over things that most of the public don’t really care about (metric system etc). Most people voted Leave because of Blair’s A8 accession policy, but those people have more on their plate now with the economic crisis caused by the pandemic, so they probably don’t care either now.
The pandemic is perfect cover for this to be happening - trade and transport is suppressed and support exists that would not normally. We are lucky this is occuring during a pandemic.
Negotiations with the EU were always going to go until 23:59 metaphorically. Anyone who didn't expect that hasn't paid any attention whatsoever to any talks within Europe within my lifetime at least.
It could have been much worse. Its going as well as I could have hoped for so far.
EDIT: "lucky with a pandemic" sounds awful, wish I hadn't phrased it that way. I mean if you're going to have Brexit and going to have a pandemic then lucky they coincidentally came together so can be over and done with together. Having one after the other would be worse.
And do we really think that the German playing-card manufacturers will allow the neoliberalcapitalosocialist fascist-communist anarchy dictatorship to stop trade when we already hold all the 4D chess pieces?
It's just like the Roman-Aztec war all over again, except this time no victory is better than a bad victory, which is why Churchill wanted to keep us out of the War of the Second Coalition in the first place. He knew better than most that the unelected Joan of Arc never had her accounts audited.
There is a difference between being part of Nato to contain Putin and doing trade deals and joining the Euro so Frankfurt and Berlin decide your economic policy as Greece discovered
It's important that he can batter Johnson with it for the next four years. The Red bus should be to Johnson what the poll tax was to Maggie.
That would be a real gift to Johnson if he did that!
https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/1123/1180052-connelly-brexit-latest/
One official familiar with the issue said: "It’s becoming clearer that this would be a two-way thing.
"If the ban [on such foods entering Northern Ireland] is a consequence of EU law, and the Brits are going to say, we're going to apply the same rules in the opposite direction - which people would say was reasonable.
All very well Sunak spending money to help the unemployed. But he’s part of a government whose policy on lockdown with inadequate support will inevitably increase unemployment and that’s before we get to whatever shocks Brexit causes.
And the knock on effects in areas where tourism, leisure and hospitality are a large part of the economy will be grim.
I see no reason to be optimistic about the economy at all.