Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
The war analogies are rediculous because this is not a war. It's not remotely like a war. There are no heroic tales of derring do. It's all just hassle, shortage, traffic jams, lost opportunity, lost jobs and delay caused by red tape imposed by our own side. We are not even being blockaded - just erecting barriers against a non-existent enemy.
One day we will start looking forward and thinking about the future rather than backward and maming increasingly asinine comparisons with historical conflicts - comparisons which are insulting to people that actually died in those wars BTW.
The war analogies are important though, because they highlight how this kind of thinking is baked into modern Thatcherite conservatism.
While the rest of Europe was just beginning to contemplate a wider cultural integration - Greece joined in 1981 - Britain was setting off to fight a postimperial war in the Falklands, which some people genuinely believed represented a return of some vestiges of the imperial era. The importance of that cultural disjunction should never be underestimated, if anyone wants to understand how the tabloid campaign of the later eighties until 2016 was able to gain such traction and lead us where we are now. It was a return to a warrior self-mythology just when others were turning away from it, and a crucial moment.
What a load of tosh.
Do you think we should have allowed a foreign country to seize British territory against the wishes of the inhabitants?
Indeed and let us also not forget France has 13 overseas territories and regions, almost as many as the 14 British overseas territories now
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
I think it's a big mistake to assume the nature of a nation or a people continues on unchanged for century after century.
For example, there's not much evidence of the all-conquering Romans in present day Italy. Similarly compare ancient Greece to modern Greece, or the Arabs of the Islamic Golden Age with today's mismanaged middle east.
Sadly, I suspect modern Britain has a level of grit and resilience more akin to Singapore in 1942 than the Blitz in 1940. But time will tell, I guess.
And yet look at how national identities endure, myths and self conceptions intact.
The Basque Country is identifiably itself at the end of the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. Still is.
Japan, England, China, are similar - if less antique - nation states that have never been properly conquered (more than temporarily) and maintain a very clear sense of their own identity. Language, tea, poetry, war.
I could be wrong. But my sense is the English will react to European aggression with traditional snarling enmity
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Of course most under 45s voted Remain so I doubt they will react too stoically to No Deal Brexit, even if the over 50s do
I was under 45 when the referendum happened - I'm not by a long shot now. That's how long this farce has taken to reach this inevitable denoument.
Brexit doesn’t address globalisation, deindustrialization, environmental catastrophe, the need for closer collaboration on security and energy provision, post industrial change and job losses through automation. If brexit voters feel they were sold a brexit that would - the brexit sellers will deny it.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
The war analogies are rediculous because this is not a war. It's not remotely like a war. There are no heroic tales of derring do. It's all just hassle, shortage, traffic jams, lost opportunity, lost jobs and delay caused by red tape imposed by our own side. We are not even being blockaded - just erecting barriers against a non-existent enemy.
One day we will start looking forward and thinking about the future rather than backward and maming increasingly asinine comparisons with historical conflicts - comparisons which are insulting to people that actually died in those wars BTW.
The war analogies are important though, because they highlight how this kind of thinking is baked into modern Thatcherite conservatism.
While the rest of Europe was just beginning to contemplate a wider cultural integration - Greece joined in 1981 - Britain was setting off to fight a postimperial war in the Falklands, which some people genuinely believed represented a return of some vestiges of the imperial era. The importance of that cultural disjunction should never be underestimated, if anyone wants to understand how the tabloid campaign of the later eighties until 2016 was able to gain such traction and lead us where we are now. It was a return to a warrior self-mythology just when others were turning away from it, and a crucial moment.
That reminds me of this essay from 1992 arguing that we would have been better off losing the Falklands war.
The ‘Blocked Society’, with its self-assured aristocratic or would-be aristocratic leaders, is well-suited to the conduct of war and diplomacy – in other words, the endeavours of geopolitics, once the central activity in the main arena of international life but now confined to the world’s strategic slums, where they still run around with guns. In the present era of ‘geo-economics’ (as I call it), in which the winners design, develop, finance and manage, while the losers only have menial jobs on assembly-lines, the Blocked Society becomes a society of losers, for it is the meritocratic and not the aristocratic virtues that are needed.
Waspishly clever, and possibly even correct in a utilitarian sense. But a Britain without aristocratic values would be no Britain at all.
At one point it would have been easy-peasy-Japanesy to steer the UK into the softest of softsoap Brexits, the EEA or EFTA or both and a 20 year transition deal. blah blah
A combination of Remainer stupidity, Brexiteer silliness, and arrogant overconfidence in Brussels (and Paris) has brought us to this precipice
What has this got to do with (former) Remainers? We hung up our blue, with 28 gold stars Euro trousers at the end of last year.
Blame the EU, if you must, but Remainers? We weren't there squire.
It was the push for a 2nd referendum (or just Revoke!!!)) which totally poisoned the debate and polarised everyone. Brexiteers thought they might not get any Brexit at all, so began to accept No Deal as better than nowt
Bollocks was it. It was May's failure to try and build a consensus that poisoned the debate, well before any talk of a 2nd referendum and "revoke". Brexit means Brexit.
It was both. TMay was a catastrophe with her red lines, but so was the clamour for a "2nd referendum" which came soon after the result.
I have just read Sasha Swire's diverting Diary of a Tory MP's Wife
She reveals that at one point David Cameron was supporting a 2nd referendum. He wanted to annul the result of his own referendum, before it had even be enacted, and have a new one, hoping to overturn democracy.
I find that extraordinary. The prime minister who called the referendum wanted to ignore the same vote he called, and run it again, because he didn't like the result. How does that make him any different from Trump wanting to upend the US Election?
Cameron will not come out well in the history books.
Cameron did not come out well in his own history book. A terribly dull read.
It must hurt to sit in that shepherd's hut, mulling over that he could have told the EU to "give me a meaningful deal I can sell, or fuck off and have me campaign to Leave". OK, he was surrounded by a coterie of EU-flunkies in our civil service and diplomatic service telling him nothing was achievable. But that doesn't excuse the fact that he could have stood back, grown a spine and fought - hard.
If he had campaigned to Leave, he would have won by at least 60-40. The EU would have seen that we were going, there was no possibility of us sliding into a second referendum - and overturning our decision. And then we might have got a decent and rapid divorce settlement.
He would have lost Osborne in the process of going for Leave, but he would probably still be PM if he had wanted, implementing his own distinct brand of socially liberal Conservatism. More importantly, he could probably have overseen a transition to a decent working relationship between the UK and the EU.
Instead, he will be remembered as the guy who is ultimately responsible for poisoned UK-EU relations - and has probably hastened the end of the UK by decades. That is one shit legacy.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
I think it's a big mistake to assume the nature of a nation or a people continues on unchanged for century after century.
For example, there's not much evidence of the all-conquering Romans in present day Italy. Similarly compare ancient Greece to modern Greece, or the Arabs of the Islamic Golden Age with today's mismanaged middle east.
Sadly, I suspect modern Britain has a level of grit and resilience more akin to Singapore in 1942 than the Blitz in 1940. But time will tell, I guess.
And yet look at how national identities endure, myths and self conceptions intact.
The Basque Country is identifiably itself at the end of the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. Still is.
Japan, England, China, are similar - if less antique - nation states that have never been properly conquered (more than temporarily) and maintain a very clear sense of their own identity. Language, tea, poetry, war.
I could be wrong. But my sense is the English will react to European aggression with traditional snarling enmity
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Of course most under 45s voted Remain so I doubt they will react too stoically to No Deal Brexit, even if the over 50s do
Given the vote was over four years ago, it’s probably fair to say that most under-50s voted Remain. Not that it matters much!
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
The war analogies are rediculous because this is not a war. It's not remotely like a war. There are no heroic tales of derring do. It's all just hassle, shortage, traffic jams, lost opportunity, lost jobs and delay caused by red tape imposed by our own side. We are not even being blockaded - just erecting barriers against a non-existent enemy.
One day we will start looking forward and thinking about the future rather than backward and maming increasingly asinine comparisons with historical conflicts - comparisons which are insulting to people that actually died in those wars BTW.
The war analogies are important though, because they highlight how this kind of thinking is baked into modern Thatcherite conservatism.
While the rest of Europe was just beginning to contemplate a wider cultural integration - Greece joined in 1981 - Britain was setting off to fight a postimperial war in the Falklands, which some people genuinely believed represented a return of some vestiges of the imperial era. The importance of that cultural disjunction should never be underestimated, if anyone wants to understand how the tabloid campaign of the later eighties until 2016 was able to gain such traction and lead us where we are now. It was a return to a warrior self-mythology just when others were turning away from it, and a crucial moment.
That reminds me of this essay from 1992 arguing that we would have been better off losing the Falklands war.
The ‘Blocked Society’, with its self-assured aristocratic or would-be aristocratic leaders, is well-suited to the conduct of war and diplomacy – in other words, the endeavours of geopolitics, once the central activity in the main arena of international life but now confined to the world’s strategic slums, where they still run around with guns. In the present era of ‘geo-economics’ (as I call it), in which the winners design, develop, finance and manage, while the losers only have menial jobs on assembly-lines, the Blocked Society becomes a society of losers, for it is the meritocratic and not the aristocratic virtues that are needed.
Waspishly clever, and possibly even correct in a utilitarian sense. But a Britain without aristocratic values would be no Britain at all.
Or the US, as several of its founders were in fact liberal-Lockean, monarchy-sceptic Whigs.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
The war analogies are rediculous because this is not a war. It's not remotely like a war. There are no heroic tales of derring do. It's all just hassle, shortage, traffic jams, lost opportunity, lost jobs and delay caused by red tape imposed by our own side. We are not even being blockaded - just erecting barriers against a non-existent enemy.
One day we will start looking forward and thinking about the future rather than backward and maming increasingly asinine comparisons with historical conflicts - comparisons which are insulting to people that actually died in those wars BTW.
The war analogies are important though, because they highlight how this kind of thinking is baked into modern Thatcherite conservatism.
While the rest of Europe was just beginning to contemplate a wider cultural integration - Greece joined in 1981 - Britain was setting off to fight a postimperial war in the Falklands, which some people genuinely believed represented a return of some vestiges of the imperial era. The importance of that cultural disjunction should never be underestimated, if anyone wants to understand how the tabloid campaign of the later eighties until 2016 was able to gain such traction and lead us where we are now. It was a return to a warrior self-mythology just when others were turning away from it, and a crucial moment.
What a load of tosh.
Do you think we should have allowed a foreign country to seize British territory against the wishes of the inhabitants?
It's only European countries that are allowed to do that sort of thing.
A close friend of the prime minister and his fiancee was given an official position at the Home Office without the role being publicly advertised, a freedom of information request has revealed.
Nimco Ali, who is reportedly godmother to the son of Carrie Symonds and Boris Johnson, was appointed adviser on tackling violence against women and girls in October.
Information released under the Freedom of Information Act to The Critic magazine revealed that she was hired via a “direct appointment process”, without open competition or advertisement for the job.
It appears the role may have been created for Ali, with no mention of it before her appointment. She is paid £350 a day and works two days a month.
Despite the sleazy appointment process, It’s a decent appointment, IMO. She’s an eloquent advocate against fgm and seems to know her stuff. She’ll be an asset to the home office. £700 a month is worth it.
The FT piece linked to has a photo where he looks to me like he is at Chequers. Illegally at his second home for the weekend even though we are all in tiered lockdowns.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
I think it's a big mistake to assume the nature of a nation or a people continues on unchanged for century after century.
For example, there's not much evidence of the all-conquering Romans in present day Italy. Similarly compare ancient Greece to modern Greece, or the Arabs of the Islamic Golden Age with today's mismanaged middle east.
Sadly, I suspect modern Britain has a level of grit and resilience more akin to Singapore in 1942 than the Blitz in 1940. But time will tell, I guess.
And yet look at how national identities endure, myths and self conceptions intact.
The Basque Country is identifiably itself at the end of the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. Still is.
Japan, England, China, are similar - if less antique - nation states that have never been properly conquered (more than temporarily) and maintain a very clear sense of their own identity. Language, tea, poetry, war.
I could be wrong. But my sense is the English will react to European aggression with traditional snarling enmity
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
The war analogies are rediculous because this is not a war. It's not remotely like a war. There are no heroic tales of derring do. It's all just hassle, shortage, traffic jams, lost opportunity, lost jobs and delay caused by red tape imposed by our own side. We are not even being blockaded - just erecting barriers against a non-existent enemy.
One day we will start looking forward and thinking about the future rather than backward and maming increasingly asinine comparisons with historical conflicts - comparisons which are insulting to people that actually died in those wars BTW.
Wars aren't just guns and bullets, they are also all about trade and blockades. See Napoleon. Or the cod war. Or indeed the Cold War.
We could be approaching a kind of tepidly Cold War with Europe. I hope not.
The UK nearly lost World War II in 1942, as nearly 10 million tons of shipping was sunk in the Atlantic by German U-boats. Technological advances in anti-submarine measures saved the day in the end. If it had gone the other way supplies to the UK would have been disrupted, including food and oil.
Logistics were also crucial in the successful Russian defence of Stalingrad, on the eastern front. In World War II Britain had lots of allies, including Canada which increased the size of its navy 50-fold (source: The World at War TV series). I am not sure that we have so many allies over Brexit.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
The war analogies are rediculous because this is not a war. It's not remotely like a war. There are no heroic tales of derring do. It's all just hassle, shortage, traffic jams, lost opportunity, lost jobs and delay caused by red tape imposed by our own side. We are not even being blockaded - just erecting barriers against a non-existent enemy.
One day we will start looking forward and thinking about the future rather than backward and maming increasingly asinine comparisons with historical conflicts - comparisons which are insulting to people that actually died in those wars BTW.
Wars aren't just guns and bullets, they are also all about trade and blockades. See Napoleon. Or the cod war. Or indeed the Cold War.
We could be approaching a kind of tepidly Cold War with Europe. I hope not.
Oh we certainly are.
Boris commons majority was achieved on promise you won’t hear brexit mentioned again, let alone year after year of dreary EU UK wrangling.
Ha! 🤣
The last four years have been mere hors d'oeuvre compared to the hour by hour bust ups, many of them petty mean spirited and just plain stupid, drizzled over the UK public in the coming years.
The Vicar Of Dibley will take the knee and deliver a sermon about Black Lives Matter when the award-winning BBC comedy returns to the screen for a series of Christmas specials.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
The war analogies are rediculous because this is not a war. It's not remotely like a war. There are no heroic tales of derring do. It's all just hassle, shortage, traffic jams, lost opportunity, lost jobs and delay caused by red tape imposed by our own side. We are not even being blockaded - just erecting barriers against a non-existent enemy.
One day we will start looking forward and thinking about the future rather than backward and maming increasingly asinine comparisons with historical conflicts - comparisons which are insulting to people that actually died in those wars BTW.
The war analogies are important though, because they highlight how this kind of thinking is baked into modern Thatcherite conservatism.
While the rest of Europe was just beginning to contemplate a wider cultural integration - Greece joined in 1981 - Britain was setting off to fight a postimperial war in the Falklands, which some people genuinely believed represented a return of some vestiges of the imperial era. The importance of that cultural disjunction should never be underestimated, if anyone wants to understand how the tabloid campaign of the later eighties until 2016 was able to gain such traction and lead us where we are now. It was a return to a warrior self-mythology just when others were turning away from it, and a crucial moment.
That reminds me of this essay from 1992 arguing that we would have been better off losing the Falklands war.
The ‘Blocked Society’, with its self-assured aristocratic or would-be aristocratic leaders, is well-suited to the conduct of war and diplomacy – in other words, the endeavours of geopolitics, once the central activity in the main arena of international life but now confined to the world’s strategic slums, where they still run around with guns. In the present era of ‘geo-economics’ (as I call it), in which the winners design, develop, finance and manage, while the losers only have menial jobs on assembly-lines, the Blocked Society becomes a society of losers, for it is the meritocratic and not the aristocratic virtues that are needed.
Though it might be pointed out that it was the aristocratic Lord Carrington who fucked up the diplomacy and the meritocratic Thatcher who sorted things out.
A close friend of the prime minister and his fiancee was given an official position at the Home Office without the role being publicly advertised, a freedom of information request has revealed.
Nimco Ali, who is reportedly godmother to the son of Carrie Symonds and Boris Johnson, was appointed adviser on tackling violence against women and girls in October.
Information released under the Freedom of Information Act to The Critic magazine revealed that she was hired via a “direct appointment process”, without open competition or advertisement for the job.
It appears the role may have been created for Ali, with no mention of it before her appointment. She is paid £350 a day and works two days a month.
Despite the sleazy appointment process, It’s a decent appointment, IMO. She’s an eloquent advocate against fgm and seems to know her stuff. She’ll be an asset to the home office. £700 a month is worth it.
Two days a month is barely enough time to read all your emails.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
The war analogies are rediculous because this is not a war. It's not remotely like a war. There are no heroic tales of derring do. It's all just hassle, shortage, traffic jams, lost opportunity, lost jobs and delay caused by red tape imposed by our own side. We are not even being blockaded - just erecting barriers against a non-existent enemy.
One day we will start looking forward and thinking about the future rather than backward and maming increasingly asinine comparisons with historical conflicts - comparisons which are insulting to people that actually died in those wars BTW.
The war analogies are important though, because they highlight how this kind of thinking is baked into modern Thatcherite conservatism.
While the rest of Europe was just beginning to contemplate a wider cultural integration - Greece joined in 1981 - Britain was setting off to fight a postimperial war in the Falklands, which some people genuinely believed represented a return of some vestiges of the imperial era. The importance of that cultural disjunction should never be underestimated, if anyone wants to understand how the tabloid campaign of the later eighties until 2016 was able to gain such traction and lead us where we are now. It was a return to a warrior self-mythology just when others were turning away from it, and a crucial moment.
That reminds me of this essay from 1992 arguing that we would have been better off losing the Falklands war.
The ‘Blocked Society’, with its self-assured aristocratic or would-be aristocratic leaders, is well-suited to the conduct of war and diplomacy – in other words, the endeavours of geopolitics, once the central activity in the main arena of international life but now confined to the world’s strategic slums, where they still run around with guns. In the present era of ‘geo-economics’ (as I call it), in which the winners design, develop, finance and manage, while the losers only have menial jobs on assembly-lines, the Blocked Society becomes a society of losers, for it is the meritocratic and not the aristocratic virtues that are needed.
Waspishly clever, and possibly even correct in a utilitarian sense. But a Britain without aristocratic values would be no Britain at all.
Then I will take no Britain. Damn the hierarchy, Paine had the right idea.
With all the bleating about how we must agree to a level playing field from certain quarters I take it that you would happily agree then that the uk should insist that the lpf include the following
...no undercutting us by eu countries having lesser standards for live stock welfare....sure Nick Palmer will confirm that one
...no undercutting us by having lower minimum wage, welfare or in work protections.
.. no undercutting us by have lesser food hygiene standards...wasnt british meat contaminated with horse meat after all.
...no undercutting us by looking the other ways when nations turn a blind eye to emissions standsards....germany yes I am looking at you
...no undercutting us by illegal bans on our products such as british beef....france your turn in the spotlight
...no undercutting us by sweeping your problems under the carpet and pretending they dont exist again france and bse
Farm welfare is a mixed picture - Britain is better than many EU countries, less good than a few others - in the top 25% in my view. But all of us are better than virtually everywhere else on that issue - and I don't say that because of a general belief that either Britain or Europe is best. The US in particular has virtually no federal regulations for on-farm welfare at all, so some states are pretty good while others are grim - which makes a joke of the idea of regulatory alignment, since one can't align with regulations that don't exist. New Zealand is pretty good - Australia much less so.
With all the bleating about how we must agree to a level playing field from certain quarters I take it that you would happily agree then that the uk should insist that the lpf include the following
...no undercutting us by eu countries having lesser standards for live stock welfare....sure Nick Palmer will confirm that one
...no undercutting us by having lower minimum wage, welfare or in work protections.
.. no undercutting us by have lesser food hygiene standards...wasnt british meat contaminated with horse meat after all.
...no undercutting us by looking the other ways when nations turn a blind eye to emissions standsards....germany yes I am looking at you
...no undercutting us by illegal bans on our products such as british beef....france your turn in the spotlight
...no undercutting us by sweeping your problems under the carpet and pretending they dont exist again france and bse
Farm welfare is a mixed picture - Britain is better than many EU countries, less good than a few others - in the top 25% in my view. But all of us are better than virtually everywhere else on that issue - and I don't say that because of a general belief that either Britain or Europe is best. The US in particular has virtually no federal regulations for on-farm welfare at all, so some states are pretty good while others are grim - which makes a joke of the idea of regulatory alignment, since one can't align with regulations that don't exist. New Zealand is pretty good - Australia much less so.
I wasn't aware we were just knew we were better than most of the eu. Also getting better I hope with the ban on live exports which I believe we were blocked from while in the eu
The Queen is expected to receive the Covid-19 vaccine within weeks – and then reveal she has been given it to encourage more people to take up the vital jab.
Senior sources say both the 94-year-old Monarch and Prince Philip, 99, will not get preferential treatment, but will instead 'wait in line' during the first wave of injections reserved for the over-80s and care home residents.
The FT piece linked to has a photo where he looks to me like he is at Chequers. Illegally at his second home for the weekend even though we are all in tiered lockdowns.
Why don't you report him to the police if you think he's breaking the law? I'm sure they'd enjoy a good laugh.
The Queen is expected to receive the Covid-19 vaccine within weeks – and then reveal she has been given it to encourage more people to take up the vital jab.
Senior sources say both the 94-year-old Monarch and Prince Philip, 99, will not get preferential treatment, but will instead 'wait in line' during the first wave of injections reserved for the over-80s and care home residents.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
I think it's a big mistake to assume the nature of a nation or a people continues on unchanged for century after century.
For example, there's not much evidence of the all-conquering Romans in present day Italy. Similarly compare ancient Greece to modern Greece, or the Arabs of the Islamic Golden Age with today's mismanaged middle east.
Sadly, I suspect modern Britain has a level of grit and resilience more akin to Singapore in 1942 than the Blitz in 1940. But time will tell, I guess.
And yet look at how national identities endure, myths and self conceptions intact.
The Basque Country is identifiably itself at the end of the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. Still is.
Japan, England, China, are similar - if less antique - nation states that have never been properly conquered (more than temporarily) and maintain a very clear sense of their own identity. Language, tea, poetry, war.
I could be wrong. But my sense is the English will react to European aggression with traditional snarling enmity
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
The FT piece linked to has a photo where he looks to me like he is at Chequers. Illegally at his second home for the weekend even though we are all in tiered lockdowns.
Why don't you report him to the police if you think he's breaking the law? I'm sure they'd enjoy a good laugh.
Library picture. It wouldn’t have been actual phone call it would have been video call.
The Vicar Of Dibley will take the knee and deliver a sermon about Black Lives Matter when the award-winning BBC comedy returns to the screen for a series of Christmas specials.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
I think it's a big mistake to assume the nature of a nation or a people continues on unchanged for century after century.
For example, there's not much evidence of the all-conquering Romans in present day Italy. Similarly compare ancient Greece to modern Greece, or the Arabs of the Islamic Golden Age with today's mismanaged middle east.
Sadly, I suspect modern Britain has a level of grit and resilience more akin to Singapore in 1942 than the Blitz in 1940. But time will tell, I guess.
And yet look at how national identities endure, myths and self conceptions intact.
The Basque Country is identifiably itself at the end of the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. Still is.
Japan, England, China, are similar - if less antique - nation states that have never been properly conquered (more than temporarily) and maintain a very clear sense of their own identity. Language, tea, poetry, war.
I could be wrong. But my sense is the English will react to European aggression with traditional snarling enmity
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Oh, it did. Or very close. I think that was the most bizarre week of my working life. People bursting into tears in the street, and the rest.
The Queen is expected to receive the Covid-19 vaccine within weeks – and then reveal she has been given it to encourage more people to take up the vital jab.
Senior sources say both the 94-year-old Monarch and Prince Philip, 99, will not get preferential treatment, but will instead 'wait in line' during the first wave of injections reserved for the over-80s and care home residents.
The Queen is expected to receive the Covid-19 vaccine within weeks – and then reveal she has been given it to encourage more people to take up the vital jab.
Senior sources say both the 94-year-old Monarch and Prince Philip, 99, will not get preferential treatment, but will instead 'wait in line' during the first wave of injections reserved for the over-80s and care home residents.
I wonder which GP practice she's registered with.
Does she have a NHS number?
If she gets asked for photo ID, does she just take out a £50 note?
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
I think it's a big mistake to assume the nature of a nation or a people continues on unchanged for century after century.
For example, there's not much evidence of the all-conquering Romans in present day Italy. Similarly compare ancient Greece to modern Greece, or the Arabs of the Islamic Golden Age with today's mismanaged middle east.
Sadly, I suspect modern Britain has a level of grit and resilience more akin to Singapore in 1942 than the Blitz in 1940. But time will tell, I guess.
And yet look at how national identities endure, myths and self conceptions intact.
The Basque Country is identifiably itself at the end of the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. Still is.
Japan, England, China, are similar - if less antique - nation states that have never been properly conquered (more than temporarily) and maintain a very clear sense of their own identity. Language, tea, poetry, war.
I could be wrong. But my sense is the English will react to European aggression with traditional snarling enmity
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
That sort of statement gets me peeved....yes lots of people went into overemotional stupidity.....many millions of us didn't though and most just looked at them at thought what are they like.....its no different to 500,000 thousand people joining labour under Corbyn and the rest of us shaking our heads in disbelief
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
I think it's a big mistake to assume the nature of a nation or a people continues on unchanged for century after century.
For example, there's not much evidence of the all-conquering Romans in present day Italy. Similarly compare ancient Greece to modern Greece, or the Arabs of the Islamic Golden Age with today's mismanaged middle east.
Sadly, I suspect modern Britain has a level of grit and resilience more akin to Singapore in 1942 than the Blitz in 1940. But time will tell, I guess.
And yet look at how national identities endure, myths and self conceptions intact.
The Basque Country is identifiably itself at the end of the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. Still is.
Japan, England, China, are similar - if less antique - nation states that have never been properly conquered (more than temporarily) and maintain a very clear sense of their own identity. Language, tea, poetry, war.
I could be wrong. But my sense is the English will react to European aggression with traditional snarling enmity
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
The Queen is expected to receive the Covid-19 vaccine within weeks – and then reveal she has been given it to encourage more people to take up the vital jab.
Senior sources say both the 94-year-old Monarch and Prince Philip, 99, will not get preferential treatment, but will instead 'wait in line' during the first wave of injections reserved for the over-80s and care home residents.
I wonder which GP practice she's registered with.
Does she have a NHS number?
If she gets asked for photo ID, does she just take out a £50 note?
Michael Blumenthal reputedly produced an American Bank Note when paying a restaurant bill and having his signature queried.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
I think it's a big mistake to assume the nature of a nation or a people continues on unchanged for century after century.
For example, there's not much evidence of the all-conquering Romans in present day Italy. Similarly compare ancient Greece to modern Greece, or the Arabs of the Islamic Golden Age with today's mismanaged middle east.
Sadly, I suspect modern Britain has a level of grit and resilience more akin to Singapore in 1942 than the Blitz in 1940. But time will tell, I guess.
And yet look at how national identities endure, myths and self conceptions intact.
The Basque Country is identifiably itself at the end of the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. Still is.
Japan, England, China, are similar - if less antique - nation states that have never been properly conquered (more than temporarily) and maintain a very clear sense of their own identity. Language, tea, poetry, war.
I could be wrong. But my sense is the English will react to European aggression with traditional snarling enmity
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
I wasn't in the country, but watched the scenes on TV. That was a substantial number of gay men.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
I think it's a big mistake to assume the nature of a nation or a people continues on unchanged for century after century.
For example, there's not much evidence of the all-conquering Romans in present day Italy. Similarly compare ancient Greece to modern Greece, or the Arabs of the Islamic Golden Age with today's mismanaged middle east.
Sadly, I suspect modern Britain has a level of grit and resilience more akin to Singapore in 1942 than the Blitz in 1940. But time will tell, I guess.
And yet look at how national identities endure, myths and self conceptions intact.
The Basque Country is identifiably itself at the end of the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. Still is.
Japan, England, China, are similar - if less antique - nation states that have never been properly conquered (more than temporarily) and maintain a very clear sense of their own identity. Language, tea, poetry, war.
I could be wrong. But my sense is the English will react to European aggression with traditional snarling enmity
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
It was more than that, it was quite eerie that August day as I had been on holiday with my parents in Italy and we were coming back through France and staying just outside Paris when the news came through so had almost been following her steps.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
With all the bleating about how we must agree to a level playing field from certain quarters I take it that you would happily agree then that the uk should insist that the lpf include the following
...no undercutting us by eu countries having lesser standards for live stock welfare....sure Nick Palmer will confirm that one
...no undercutting us by having lower minimum wage, welfare or in work protections.
.. no undercutting us by have lesser food hygiene standards...wasnt british meat contaminated with horse meat after all.
...no undercutting us by looking the other ways when nations turn a blind eye to emissions standsards....germany yes I am looking at you
...no undercutting us by illegal bans on our products such as british beef....france your turn in the spotlight
...no undercutting us by sweeping your problems under the carpet and pretending they dont exist again france and bse
Farm welfare is a mixed picture - Britain is better than many EU countries, less good than a few others - in the top 25% in my view. But all of us are better than virtually everywhere else on that issue - and I don't say that because of a general belief that either Britain or Europe is best. The US in particular has virtually no federal regulations for on-farm welfare at all, so some states are pretty good while others are grim - which makes a joke of the idea of regulatory alignment, since one can't align with regulations that don't exist. New Zealand is pretty good - Australia much less so.
I wasn't aware we were just knew we were better than most of the eu. Also getting better I hope with the ban on live exports which I believe we were blocked from while in the eu
That's right - it's very positive, as is the switch from farm support basded on size of farm to farm support based on whether the farmer is maintaining high standards. I'm unambiguously pleased with the Defra Ministerial team - Eustice and Goldsmith are both genuinely concerned about welfare. The main concern is that the Department of International Trade will insist on a US trade deal that undercuts British farming (because it's a minor sector of the British economy in GDP terms, and the concessions the US might give for whisky and financial services are tempting). Not all political divisions run on party lines...
Overall, my charity is neutral on Brexit, partly 'cos we're a charity, but also because we can see pluses and minuses in our area. We'll have to see how it works out.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
I think it's a big mistake to assume the nature of a nation or a people continues on unchanged for century after century.
For example, there's not much evidence of the all-conquering Romans in present day Italy. Similarly compare ancient Greece to modern Greece, or the Arabs of the Islamic Golden Age with today's mismanaged middle east.
Sadly, I suspect modern Britain has a level of grit and resilience more akin to Singapore in 1942 than the Blitz in 1940. But time will tell, I guess.
And yet look at how national identities endure, myths and self conceptions intact.
The Basque Country is identifiably itself at the end of the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. Still is.
Japan, England, China, are similar - if less antique - nation states that have never been properly conquered (more than temporarily) and maintain a very clear sense of their own identity. Language, tea, poetry, war.
I could be wrong. But my sense is the English will react to European aggression with traditional snarling enmity
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
It was more than that, it was quite eerie that August day as I had been on holiday with my parents in Italy and we were coming back through France and staying just outside Paris when the news came through so had almost been following her steps.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
Jeez
@Mortimer - I think maybe I should backtrack on my backtrack.
The Queen is expected to receive the Covid-19 vaccine within weeks – and then reveal she has been given it to encourage more people to take up the vital jab.
Senior sources say both the 94-year-old Monarch and Prince Philip, 99, will not get preferential treatment, but will instead 'wait in line' during the first wave of injections reserved for the over-80s and care home residents.
I wonder which GP practice she's registered with.
Does she have a NHS number?
Yes, I don't quite know how they allocate which over 80s get it when, and therefore how not to preferentially treat those two.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
The war analogies are rediculous because this is not a war. It's not remotely like a war. There are no heroic tales of derring do. It's all just hassle, shortage, traffic jams, lost opportunity, lost jobs and delay caused by red tape imposed by our own side. We are not even being blockaded - just erecting barriers against a non-existent enemy.
One day we will start looking forward and thinking about the future rather than backward and maming increasingly asinine comparisons with historical conflicts - comparisons which are insulting to people that actually died in those wars BTW.
Wars aren't just guns and bullets, they are also all about trade and blockades. See Napoleon. Or the cod war. Or indeed the Cold War.
We could be approaching a kind of tepidly Cold War with Europe. I hope not.
Ah yes, the cod war. When the mighty UK took on Iceland, and lost.
It is VERY encouraging to hear the Govt finally accepting this.
As soon as granny and vulnerable aunty Mary are vaccinated, the already scant justification for arduous state coercion preventing something so fundamentally basic as having dinner with friends, having to wear a mask when you nip into a corner stop etc, closure of whole swathes of the economy, disappears entirely
Why "scant"? Look at the USA, and look again when the bulk of the Thanksgiving infections start coming through in the middle of next week. Look at Quebec and Manitoba effectively cancelling Christmas, as they have in the last couple of days. And why "finally"? Are you saying that until now the government has said that tiers will persist indefinitely irrespective of any vaccine?
There have been continual messages (largely from SAGE and in the media to be honest) that restrictions will continue well into 2021.
I've never thought that would really hold - as soon as individuals see their loved ones protected, farcical rules (eg my parents work for me, so I could see them at work, but not in my flat or at their house) will not be obeyed.
Oh and edit to add, I think 'scant' right now because it takes the onus off individual to make their own choices.
Like we shouldn't have speed limits, or blood alcohol limits, which also take the onus off individual to make their own choices. All these cases run into the selfish thoughtless twat problem, and we decide we do have to have choice-depriving rules about life and death issues after all.
Yep. How many times does it have to be repeated that the mask rule is not to protect the indivudual mask wearer but to protect others?
It doesn't need to be repeated - if people don't get it by now it's because they've chosen not to, and repeating it won't help.
The FT piece linked to has a photo where he looks to me like he is at Chequers. Illegally at his second home for the weekend even though we are all in tiered lockdowns.
Why don't you report him to the police if you think he's breaking the law? I'm sure they'd enjoy a good laugh.
Boris would doubtless call it his second office, rather than second home. Far less defensible was his earlier trip to Chequers after he left hospital, although that also gave cover to Jenrick and Cummings.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
The war analogies are rediculous because this is not a war. It's not remotely like a war. There are no heroic tales of derring do. It's all just hassle, shortage, traffic jams, lost opportunity, lost jobs and delay caused by red tape imposed by our own side. We are not even being blockaded - just erecting barriers against a non-existent enemy.
One day we will start looking forward and thinking about the future rather than backward and maming increasingly asinine comparisons with historical conflicts - comparisons which are insulting to people that actually died in those wars BTW.
Wars aren't just guns and bullets, they are also all about trade and blockades. See Napoleon. Or the cod war. Or indeed the Cold War.
We could be approaching a kind of tepidly Cold War with Europe. I hope not.
The character of nations changes. While this country was behind the Govt in WW2, the same cannot be said for the same country 150 years earlier, where Pitt the Younger and his immediate successors had to crush internal dissent through a repressive network of Riot Acts and agents provocateurs. Sometimes the change in character is quite rapid. The France that defended Paris so heroically at Verdun collapsed like a pack of cards 25 years later. The USA of Vietnam was a very different country to that which fought and won WW2 a generation prior. This country has known nothing but the relative prosperity for the last generation or more. The inaccurate and jingoistic historical analogies are beneath your normally intelligent comments.
Though I would hail the successes of national identity over the last centuries in a lot of ways, pretty sure all national identities are wildly inaccurate and ahistorical nonsense based on half remembered, invented or misinterpreted events, about as valid as a neo-druid claiming actual continuity with the druids, if not quite so extreme. Supranational identities will end up the same.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
I am very confident the national psychodrama won't come to an end any time soon, especially if it goes No Deal. The central contradiction of Brexit is that there is no viable and sustainable outcome for the UK that doesn't involve a close relationship with the EU on its terms. Yet we left the EU to stop them telling us what to do.
In fact the dilemma facing Johnson is precisely this. I believe Johnson really wants a deal, more than he is letting on and more than people think. He defines success in deals: that he had an oven ready one, that he would get Brexit done, the continuity deals with third countries. He hypocritically taunted May because he got a deal and she didn't. Deals are a crude gauge of Brexit success but that is what he measures himself by.
He wants a deal but he doesn't want to make the compromises necessary to get one. The negotiations have been stuck on that personal dilemma for the last six months and remains the sticking point this weekend. And the issues are about being told what to do by the EU.
This is the thing I really don't understand about the delusions of grandeur by former Remainers like yourself, of whom there are many on this forum. You can only imagine the One True Path: the UK allegedly needs a close deal with the EU and it needs to be on EU terms.
The simple reality is that life is complex, there is not one true path for us to follow. The UK might get a deal, we might not. We might get one on EU terms or on UK terms. There is no true single path unless you're obsessed with religious dogma.
Brexit doesn’t address globalisation, deindustrialization, environmental catastrophe, the need for closer collaboration on security and energy provision, post industrial change and job losses through automation. If brexit voters feel they were sold a brexit that would - the brexit sellers will deny it.
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
It was more than that, it was quite eerie that August day as I had been on holiday with my parents in Italy and we were coming back through France and staying just outside Paris when the news came through so had almost been following her steps.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
I was in London on the Sunday and I saw nobody in tears.
I did see some Japanese tourists having their photos taken while holding up newspapers reporting Diana's death.
To compare it with JFK is more than a little silly and might only be justified if you think she was deliberately killed.
A close friend of the prime minister and his fiancee was given an official position at the Home Office without the role being publicly advertised, a freedom of information request has revealed.
Nimco Ali, who is reportedly godmother to the son of Carrie Symonds and Boris Johnson, was appointed adviser on tackling violence against women and girls in October.
Information released under the Freedom of Information Act to The Critic magazine revealed that she was hired via a “direct appointment process”, without open competition or advertisement for the job.
It appears the role may have been created for Ali, with no mention of it before her appointment. She is paid £350 a day and works two days a month.
Despite the sleazy appointment process, It’s a decent appointment, IMO. She’s an eloquent advocate against fgm and seems to know her stuff. She’ll be an asset to the home office. £700 a month is worth it.
Two days a month is barely enough time to read all your emails.
And submit your expenses.
She can hire someone to do the email and administration, then claim back the cost perhaps.
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
It was more than that, it was quite eerie that August day as I had been on holiday with my parents in Italy and we were coming back through France and staying just outside Paris when the news came through so had almost been following her steps.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
I was in London on the Sunday and I saw nobody in tears.
I did see some Japanese tourists having their photos taken while holding up newspapers reporting Diana's death.
To compare it with JFK is more than a little silly and might only be justified if you think she was deliberately killed.
The Vicar Of Dibley will take the knee and deliver a sermon about Black Lives Matter when the award-winning BBC comedy returns to the screen for a series of Christmas specials.
Vicar character sermonises is not much of a story. I like Vicar of Dibley, hopefully it will remember to at least try to be funny and not get too caught up in their Very Special Episode topic. Many shows have done poorly when they try too hard.
I'm more worried about all the cop shows I watch. Most are probably pretty lefty anyway (Blue Bloods always felt a bit more right wing to me, the main characters are even called Reagan), but Brooklyn Nine Nine worries me - it's one of my favourite shows and has not shied away from episodes about race and policing and so on, and been great, but might feel the need to push it really really hard this season.
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
It was more than that, it was quite eerie that August day as I had been on holiday with my parents in Italy and we were coming back through France and staying just outside Paris when the news came through so had almost been following her steps.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
I was in London on the Sunday and I saw nobody in tears.
I did see some Japanese tourists having their photos taken while holding up newspapers reporting Diana's death.
To compare it with JFK is more than a little silly and might only be justified if you think she was deliberately killed.
You obviously avoided Hyde Park and Kensington Palace then and no I will stick to my point without apology, Diana was a global icon on the JFK scale and former wife and mother to a future King, her death was one of the biggest news events of my lifetime and in terms of death of an individual Briton of greater impact than any other in the last century globally in terms of news coverage
The Vicar Of Dibley will take the knee and deliver a sermon about Black Lives Matter when the award-winning BBC comedy returns to the screen for a series of Christmas specials.
Vicar character sermonises is not much of a story. I like Vicar of Dibley, hopefully it will remember to at least try to be funny and not get too caught up in their Very Special Episode topic. Many shows have done poorly when they try too hard.
I'm more worried about all the cop shows I watch. Most are probably pretty lefty anyway (Blue Bloods always felt a bit more right wing to me, the main characters are even called Reagan), but Brooklyn Nine Nine worries me - it's one of my favourite shows and has not shied away from episodes about race and policing and so on, and been great, but might feel the need to push it really really hard this season.
The good wife spin off suffered from this. Rather than touching on issues at it did during the Good Wife, it was crowbar Orange Man bad every episode. It soon became tiresome.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
The war analogies are rediculous because this is not a war. It's not remotely like a war. There are no heroic tales of derring do. It's all just hassle, shortage, traffic jams, lost opportunity, lost jobs and delay caused by red tape imposed by our own side. We are not even being blockaded - just erecting barriers against a non-existent enemy.
One day we will start looking forward and thinking about the future rather than backward and maming increasingly asinine comparisons with historical conflicts - comparisons which are insulting to people that actually died in those wars BTW.
The war analogies are important though, because they highlight how this kind of thinking is baked into modern Thatcherite conservatism.
While the rest of Europe was just beginning to contemplate a wider cultural integration - Greece joined in 1981 - Britain was setting off to fight a postimperial war in the Falklands, which some people genuinely believed represented a return of some vestiges of the imperial era. The importance of that cultural disjunction should never be underestimated, if anyone wants to understand how the tabloid campaign of the later eighties until 2016 was able to gain such traction and lead us where we are now. It was a return to a warrior self-mythology just when others were turning away from it, and a crucial moment.
That reminds me of this essay from 1992 arguing that we would have been better off losing the Falklands war.
The ‘Blocked Society’, with its self-assured aristocratic or would-be aristocratic leaders, is well-suited to the conduct of war and diplomacy – in other words, the endeavours of geopolitics, once the central activity in the main arena of international life but now confined to the world’s strategic slums, where they still run around with guns. In the present era of ‘geo-economics’ (as I call it), in which the winners design, develop, finance and manage, while the losers only have menial jobs on assembly-lines, the Blocked Society becomes a society of losers, for it is the meritocratic and not the aristocratic virtues that are needed.
Though it might be pointed out that it was the aristocratic Lord Carrington who fucked up the diplomacy and the meritocratic Thatcher who sorted things out.
It was the meritocratic Thatcher who withdrew HMS Endeavour, which encouraged the Argentine junta to invade. After the Falklands had been recaptured, her government made more cuts to the navy which meant we'd not be able to repeat the exercise.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
The war analogies are rediculous because this is not a war. It's not remotely like a war. There are no heroic tales of derring do. It's all just hassle, shortage, traffic jams, lost opportunity, lost jobs and delay caused by red tape imposed by our own side. We are not even being blockaded - just erecting barriers against a non-existent enemy.
One day we will start looking forward and thinking about the future rather than backward and maming increasingly asinine comparisons with historical conflicts - comparisons which are insulting to people that actually died in those wars BTW.
The war analogies are important though, because they highlight how this kind of thinking is baked into modern Thatcherite conservatism.
While the rest of Europe was just beginning to contemplate a wider cultural integration - Greece joined in 1981 - Britain was setting off to fight a postimperial war in the Falklands, which some people genuinely believed represented a return of some vestiges of the imperial era. The importance of that cultural disjunction should never be underestimated, if anyone wants to understand how the tabloid campaign of the later eighties until 2016 was able to gain such traction and lead us where we are now. It was a return to a warrior self-mythology just when others were turning away from it, and a crucial moment.
That reminds me of this essay from 1992 arguing that we would have been better off losing the Falklands war.
The ‘Blocked Society’, with its self-assured aristocratic or would-be aristocratic leaders, is well-suited to the conduct of war and diplomacy – in other words, the endeavours of geopolitics, once the central activity in the main arena of international life but now confined to the world’s strategic slums, where they still run around with guns. In the present era of ‘geo-economics’ (as I call it), in which the winners design, develop, finance and manage, while the losers only have menial jobs on assembly-lines, the Blocked Society becomes a society of losers, for it is the meritocratic and not the aristocratic virtues that are needed.
Though it might be pointed out that it was the aristocratic Lord Carrington who fucked up the diplomacy and the meritocratic Thatcher who sorted things out.
It was the meritocratic Thatcher who withdrew HMS Endeavour, which encouraged the Argentine junta to invade. After the Falklands had been recaptured, her government made more cuts to the navy which meant we'd not be able to repeat the exercise.
We still have 2 aircraft carriers, of course if necessary it could be repeated
The FT piece linked to has a photo where he looks to me like he is at Chequers. Illegally at his second home for the weekend even though we are all in tiered lockdowns.
What law does it break?
As far as I know the ban on going to second homes only existed during lockdown until the 2nd December. We aren't in lockdown now. As far as I can tell there is no law and you're making that up.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
The war analogies are rediculous because this is not a war. It's not remotely like a war. There are no heroic tales of derring do. It's all just hassle, shortage, traffic jams, lost opportunity, lost jobs and delay caused by red tape imposed by our own side. We are not even being blockaded - just erecting barriers against a non-existent enemy.
One day we will start looking forward and thinking about the future rather than backward and maming increasingly asinine comparisons with historical conflicts - comparisons which are insulting to people that actually died in those wars BTW.
The war analogies are important though, because they highlight how this kind of thinking is baked into modern Thatcherite conservatism.
While the rest of Europe was just beginning to contemplate a wider cultural integration - Greece joined in 1981 - Britain was setting off to fight a postimperial war in the Falklands, which some people genuinely believed represented a return of some vestiges of the imperial era. The importance of that cultural disjunction should never be underestimated, if anyone wants to understand how the tabloid campaign of the later eighties until 2016 was able to gain such traction and lead us where we are now. It was a return to a warrior self-mythology just when others were turning away from it, and a crucial moment.
That reminds me of this essay from 1992 arguing that we would have been better off losing the Falklands war.
The ‘Blocked Society’, with its self-assured aristocratic or would-be aristocratic leaders, is well-suited to the conduct of war and diplomacy – in other words, the endeavours of geopolitics, once the central activity in the main arena of international life but now confined to the world’s strategic slums, where they still run around with guns. In the present era of ‘geo-economics’ (as I call it), in which the winners design, develop, finance and manage, while the losers only have menial jobs on assembly-lines, the Blocked Society becomes a society of losers, for it is the meritocratic and not the aristocratic virtues that are needed.
Though it might be pointed out that it was the aristocratic Lord Carrington who fucked up the diplomacy and the meritocratic Thatcher who sorted things out.
It was the meritocratic Thatcher who withdrew HMS Endeavour, which encouraged the Argentine junta to invade [...]
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
It was more than that, it was quite eerie that August day as I had been on holiday with my parents in Italy and we were coming back through France and staying just outside Paris when the news came through so had almost been following her steps.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
I was in London on the Sunday and I saw nobody in tears.
I did see some Japanese tourists having their photos taken while holding up newspapers reporting Diana's death.
To compare it with JFK is more than a little silly and might only be justified if you think she was deliberately killed.
You obviously avoided Hyde Park and Kensington Palace then and no I will stick to my point without apology, Diana was a global icon on the JFK scale and former wife and mother to a future King, her death was one of the biggest news events of my lifetime and in terms of death of an individual Briton of greater impact than any other in the last century globally in terms of news coverage
But still more than silly to compare it with the assassination of JFK.
JFK was President of the USA and 'leader of the free world' at the height of the Cold War.
Diana was ex-wife and mother to people of minute importance by comparison.
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
It was more than that, it was quite eerie that August day as I had been on holiday with my parents in Italy and we were coming back through France and staying just outside Paris when the news came through so had almost been following her steps.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
I was in London on the Sunday and I saw nobody in tears.
I did see some Japanese tourists having their photos taken while holding up newspapers reporting Diana's death.
To compare it with JFK is more than a little silly and might only be justified if you think she was deliberately killed.
You obviously avoided Hyde Park and Kensington Palace then and no I will stick to my point without apology, Diana was a global icon on the JFK scale and former wife and mother to a future King, her death was one of the biggest news events of my lifetime and in terms of death of an individual Briton of greater impact than any other in the last century globally in terms of news coverage
But still more than silly to compare it with the assassination of JFK.
JFK was President of the USA and 'leader of the free world' at the height of the Cold War.
Diana was ex-wife and mother to people of minute importance by comparison.
The assassination of JFK, the car crash of Princess Diana and the death of Elvis Presley were the 3 biggest celebrity deaths in terms of news coverage of the 20th century.
The FT piece linked to has a photo where he looks to me like he is at Chequers. Illegally at his second home for the weekend even though we are all in tiered lockdowns.
What law does it break?
As far as I know the ban on going to second homes only existed during lockdown until the 2nd December. We aren't in lockdown now. As far as I can tell there is no law and you're making that up.
I believe there's a guideline about travelling to a lower tier without good reason. However, Downing Street and Chequers are the same tier now anyways.
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
It was more than that, it was quite eerie that August day as I had been on holiday with my parents in Italy and we were coming back through France and staying just outside Paris when the news came through so had almost been following her steps.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
I was in London on the Sunday and I saw nobody in tears.
I did see some Japanese tourists having their photos taken while holding up newspapers reporting Diana's death.
To compare it with JFK is more than a little silly and might only be justified if you think she was deliberately killed.
You obviously avoided Hyde Park and Kensington Palace then and no I will stick to my point without apology, Diana was a global icon on the JFK scale and former wife and mother to a future King, her death was one of the biggest news events of my lifetime and in terms of death of an individual Briton of greater impact than any other in the last century globally in terms of news coverage
But still more than silly to compare it with the assassination of JFK.
JFK was President of the USA and 'leader of the free world' at the height of the Cold War.
Diana was ex-wife and mother to people of minute importance by comparison.
The assassination of JFK, the car crash of Princess Diana and the death of Elvis Presley were the 3 biggest celebrity deaths in terms of news coverage of the 20th century.
JFK and Elvis achieved things while Diana was ex-wife and mother to people who haven't.
The FT piece linked to has a photo where he looks to me like he is at Chequers. Illegally at his second home for the weekend even though we are all in tiered lockdowns.
What law does it break?
As far as I know the ban on going to second homes only existed during lockdown until the 2nd December. We aren't in lockdown now. As far as I can tell there is no law and you're making that up.
I believe there's a guideline about travelling to a lower tier without good reason. However, Downing Street and Chequers are the same tier now anyways.
So neither against the law, nor against guidelines?
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
It was more than that, it was quite eerie that August day as I had been on holiday with my parents in Italy and we were coming back through France and staying just outside Paris when the news came through so had almost been following her steps.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
I was in London on the Sunday and I saw nobody in tears.
I did see some Japanese tourists having their photos taken while holding up newspapers reporting Diana's death.
To compare it with JFK is more than a little silly and might only be justified if you think she was deliberately killed.
You obviously avoided Hyde Park and Kensington Palace then and no I will stick to my point without apology, Diana was a global icon on the JFK scale and former wife and mother to a future King, her death was one of the biggest news events of my lifetime and in terms of death of an individual Briton of greater impact than any other in the last century globally in terms of news coverage
But still more than silly to compare it with the assassination of JFK.
JFK was President of the USA and 'leader of the free world' at the height of the Cold War.
Diana was ex-wife and mother to people of minute importance by comparison.
The assassination of JFK, the car crash of Princess Diana and the death of Elvis Presley were the 3 biggest celebrity deaths in terms of news coverage of the 20th century.
JFK and Elvis achieved things while Diana was ex-wife and mother to people who haven't.
That gives the relative level of importance.
No it doesn't and Diana also achieved things from Land Mines to Aids in terms of initiating change, like the other 2 she was a global icon, one of the biggest global icons our country has ever produced
The FT piece linked to has a photo where he looks to me like he is at Chequers. Illegally at his second home for the weekend even though we are all in tiered lockdowns.
What law does it break?
As far as I know the ban on going to second homes only existed during lockdown until the 2nd December. We aren't in lockdown now. As far as I can tell there is no law and you're making that up.
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
It was more than that, it was quite eerie that August day as I had been on holiday with my parents in Italy and we were coming back through France and staying just outside Paris when the news came through so had almost been following her steps.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
I was in London on the Sunday and I saw nobody in tears.
I did see some Japanese tourists having their photos taken while holding up newspapers reporting Diana's death.
To compare it with JFK is more than a little silly and might only be justified if you think she was deliberately killed.
You obviously avoided Hyde Park and Kensington Palace then and no I will stick to my point without apology, Diana was a global icon on the JFK scale and former wife and mother to a future King, her death was one of the biggest news events of my lifetime and in terms of death of an individual Briton of greater impact than any other in the last century globally in terms of news coverage
But still more than silly to compare it with the assassination of JFK.
JFK was President of the USA and 'leader of the free world' at the height of the Cold War.
Diana was ex-wife and mother to people of minute importance by comparison.
The assassination of JFK, the car crash of Princess Diana and the death of Elvis Presley were the 3 biggest celebrity deaths in terms of news coverage of the 20th century.
JFK and Elvis achieved things while Diana was ex-wife and mother to people who haven't.
That gives the relative level of importance.
She was famous for being famous most people didn't give a shit and many more millions didn't turn out and be emotional than did
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
It was more than that, it was quite eerie that August day as I had been on holiday with my parents in Italy and we were coming back through France and staying just outside Paris when the news came through so had almost been following her steps.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
I was in London on the Sunday and I saw nobody in tears.
I did see some Japanese tourists having their photos taken while holding up newspapers reporting Diana's death.
To compare it with JFK is more than a little silly and might only be justified if you think she was deliberately killed.
You obviously avoided Hyde Park and Kensington Palace then and no I will stick to my point without apology, Diana was a global icon on the JFK scale and former wife and mother to a future King, her death was one of the biggest news events of my lifetime and in terms of death of an individual Briton of greater impact than any other in the last century globally in terms of news coverage
I'm inclined to agree with you. At the time of her funeral (6/9/97) I lived in a northern city and went out to do my normal Saturday shopping in the morning. The streets were absolutely deserted; only a handful with little interest (like me) were out and about, most folk were glued to their television.
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
It was more than that, it was quite eerie that August day as I had been on holiday with my parents in Italy and we were coming back through France and staying just outside Paris when the news came through so had almost been following her steps.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
I was in London on the Sunday and I saw nobody in tears.
I did see some Japanese tourists having their photos taken while holding up newspapers reporting Diana's death.
To compare it with JFK is more than a little silly and might only be justified if you think she was deliberately killed.
You obviously avoided Hyde Park and Kensington Palace then and no I will stick to my point without apology, Diana was a global icon on the JFK scale and former wife and mother to a future King, her death was one of the biggest news events of my lifetime and in terms of death of an individual Briton of greater impact than any other in the last century globally in terms of news coverage
But still more than silly to compare it with the assassination of JFK.
JFK was President of the USA and 'leader of the free world' at the height of the Cold War.
Diana was ex-wife and mother to people of minute importance by comparison.
The assassination of JFK, the car crash of Princess Diana and the death of Elvis Presley were the 3 biggest celebrity deaths in terms of news coverage of the 20th century.
The murder of John Lennon was pretty big as well - had the biggest effect on me at the time.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
The war analogies are rediculous because this is not a war. It's not remotely like a war. There are no heroic tales of derring do. It's all just hassle, shortage, traffic jams, lost opportunity, lost jobs and delay caused by red tape imposed by our own side. We are not even being blockaded - just erecting barriers against a non-existent enemy.
One day we will start looking forward and thinking about the future rather than backward and maming increasingly asinine comparisons with historical conflicts - comparisons which are insulting to people that actually died in those wars BTW.
The war analogies are important though, because they highlight how this kind of thinking is baked into modern Thatcherite conservatism.
While the rest of Europe was just beginning to contemplate a wider cultural integration - Greece joined in 1981 - Britain was setting off to fight a postimperial war in the Falklands, which some people genuinely believed represented a return of some vestiges of the imperial era. The importance of that cultural disjunction should never be underestimated, if anyone wants to understand how the tabloid campaign of the later eighties until 2016 was able to gain such traction and lead us where we are now. It was a return to a warrior self-mythology just when others were turning away from it, and a crucial moment.
That reminds me of this essay from 1992 arguing that we would have been better off losing the Falklands war.
The ‘Blocked Society’, with its self-assured aristocratic or would-be aristocratic leaders, is well-suited to the conduct of war and diplomacy – in other words, the endeavours of geopolitics, once the central activity in the main arena of international life but now confined to the world’s strategic slums, where they still run around with guns. In the present era of ‘geo-economics’ (as I call it), in which the winners design, develop, finance and manage, while the losers only have menial jobs on assembly-lines, the Blocked Society becomes a society of losers, for it is the meritocratic and not the aristocratic virtues that are needed.
Though it might be pointed out that it was the aristocratic Lord Carrington who fucked up the diplomacy and the meritocratic Thatcher who sorted things out.
It was the meritocratic Thatcher who withdrew HMS Endeavour, which encouraged the Argentine junta to invade [...]
It was the junior ministers at the FO under Carrington who fucked things up by predicting that the Argentines would not invade and that if they did we should be ready to negotiate joint sovereignty. The even bigger fuck up was to say so in public. Carrington's resignation was primarily because of the failure of those ministers. Nick Ridley and Richard Luce had a lot to answer for.
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
It was more than that, it was quite eerie that August day as I had been on holiday with my parents in Italy and we were coming back through France and staying just outside Paris when the news came through so had almost been following her steps.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
I was in London on the Sunday and I saw nobody in tears.
I did see some Japanese tourists having their photos taken while holding up newspapers reporting Diana's death.
To compare it with JFK is more than a little silly and might only be justified if you think she was deliberately killed.
You obviously avoided Hyde Park and Kensington Palace then and no I will stick to my point without apology, Diana was a global icon on the JFK scale and former wife and mother to a future King, her death was one of the biggest news events of my lifetime and in terms of death of an individual Briton of greater impact than any other in the last century globally in terms of news coverage
I'm inclined to agree with you. At the time of her funeral (6/9/97) I lived in a northern city and went out to do my normal Saturday shopping in the morning. The streets were absolutely deserted; only a handful with little interest (like me) were out and about, most folk were glued to their television.
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
It was more than that, it was quite eerie that August day as I had been on holiday with my parents in Italy and we were coming back through France and staying just outside Paris when the news came through so had almost been following her steps.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
I was in London on the Sunday and I saw nobody in tears.
I did see some Japanese tourists having their photos taken while holding up newspapers reporting Diana's death.
To compare it with JFK is more than a little silly and might only be justified if you think she was deliberately killed.
You obviously avoided Hyde Park and Kensington Palace then and no I will stick to my point without apology, Diana was a global icon on the JFK scale and former wife and mother to a future King, her death was one of the biggest news events of my lifetime and in terms of death of an individual Briton of greater impact than any other in the last century globally in terms of news coverage
I'm inclined to agree with you. At the time of her funeral (6/9/97) I lived in a northern city and went out to do my normal Saturday shopping in the morning. The streets were absolutely deserted; only a handful with little interest (like me) were out and about, most folk were glued to their television.
The death of Churchill in 1965 - though no great shock - received massive coverage. Doubtless the same happened in 1952 on the sudden death of George VI.
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Fair point - I put my hand up to exaggeration there. However, the whole episode hardly spoke volumes about British grit and reslience.
I'll head deep into stereotyping by suggesting that the people affected by the death of Diana were predominantly celebrity obsessed women or gay men.
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
It was more than that, it was quite eerie that August day as I had been on holiday with my parents in Italy and we were coming back through France and staying just outside Paris when the news came through so had almost been following her steps.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
I was in London on the Sunday and I saw nobody in tears.
I did see some Japanese tourists having their photos taken while holding up newspapers reporting Diana's death.
To compare it with JFK is more than a little silly and might only be justified if you think she was deliberately killed.
You obviously avoided Hyde Park and Kensington Palace then and no I will stick to my point without apology, Diana was a global icon on the JFK scale and former wife and mother to a future King, her death was one of the biggest news events of my lifetime and in terms of death of an individual Briton of greater impact than any other in the last century globally in terms of news coverage
I'm inclined to agree with you. At the time of her funeral (6/9/97) I lived in a northern city and went out to do my normal Saturday shopping in the morning. The streets were absolutely deserted; only a handful with little interest (like me) were out and about, most folk were glued to their television.
I lived down under at the time. It was major news, probably the most shocking celebrity death of my lifetime.
Leavers wanted this and their poster boy, Johnson, is finally delivering it.
Unless he doesn't...
I'm pretty confident we will leave without a deal. One way or another this national psychodrama will come to an end by either (1) discretiting Remainers when things don't turn out that bad or (2) discrediting Brexiteers when things turn out catastrophic. One of those things will happen. This psychodrama cannot go on indefinately.
On that I agree. We are about to see the denouement, and the ultimate villain will be exposed
Where I disagree with many on here is the presumption that No Deal will be so catastrophic the fall will be taken by Boris and Farage et al
This is not a sophisticated analysis of human nature. If No Deal happens Europe will be divided between the UK (and its mutinous provinces) and a hostile, bullying EU. The instinct then (particularly in insular, bellicose, not-used-to-being-conquered Great Britain) will be to say F You and knuckle down for the long haul. It is what we have always done (for good and bad). It is in our DNA. From the Armada to Napoleon, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
This is neither virtue nor vice. It us just what we are. A cussed island nation, sometimes wilfully blind, sometimes oddly heroic, often extremely aggressive.
I think it's a big mistake to assume the nature of a nation or a people continues on unchanged for century after century.
For example, there's not much evidence of the all-conquering Romans in present day Italy. Similarly compare ancient Greece to modern Greece, or the Arabs of the Islamic Golden Age with today's mismanaged middle east.
Sadly, I suspect modern Britain has a level of grit and resilience more akin to Singapore in 1942 than the Blitz in 1940. But time will tell, I guess.
And yet look at how national identities endure, myths and self conceptions intact.
The Basque Country is identifiably itself at the end of the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. Still is.
Japan, England, China, are similar - if less antique - nation states that have never been properly conquered (more than temporarily) and maintain a very clear sense of their own identity. Language, tea, poetry, war.
I could be wrong. But my sense is the English will react to European aggression with traditional snarling enmity
I'm not questioning the endurance of national identities, far from it. I'm suggesting that the collective qualities of a nation or people do not necessarily persist from one generation to another, and certainly not over multiple generations.
A couple of unrelated observations:
I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's 'New Elizabethans' series the other night - it was a startling reminder of how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the 50s.
I struggle to believe that a country that went into total melt-down over the death of Pricess Diana will show any resilience at all in the face of any shortages, job-losses etc arising from No Deal Brexit.
Well I'm not making any forecasts about upcoming months.
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Oh, it did. Or very close. I think that was the most bizarre week of my working life. People bursting into tears in the street, and the rest.
I agree. It was the first time I realised how intolerant a lot of people in this country are if you don't agree with them.
The name is misleading to a point. The Centre Party in Norway is the new name for the old Farmers' Party set up in 1920.
It is strongly opposed to Norway joining the EU and is protectionist and nationalist. It has in recent times supported Labour as a "Red-Green Coalition" (Centre's colour, confusingly, is green). Before that, it never supported Labour and always supported centre-right Government.
The current Centre leader is playing the populist card and the party's slogan is "Naer til folk" (close to people). The next election to the Storting is September next year.
We still have 2 aircraft carriers, of course if necessary it could be repeated
This is absolute shit.
There is a 2,600m runway on the FI now. If the UK careless loses them then they aren't getting them back. The forces of occupation would find it much easier to supply, reinforce and defend.
The other factor is that all current and planned RN ships use VLS missile systems that cannot be replenished at sea. The USN have tried and failed. Believe me, if they can't do it, the RN have no chance. This makes them uniquely ill suited expenditionary warfare in the South Atlantic. Once a T31 has winchester'ed its battery (only 12 missiles to save a few quid) the only way it can be replenished is dockside in the UK.
The logistics issues are compounded by the fact that standardisation has completely gone out of the window in search of cost savings. We now have 3 different surface combatants with 3 different main gun calibres, 4.5″, 5″, 57mm and 3 different secondary calibres, 40mm, 30mm, 20mm, with no two ships featuring identical combinations of guns. Not to mention 3 different VLS systems, Sylver A50, GWS.35 canisters, and Mk 41s with no weapons in our inventory cleared for use or any in the immediate future. Then 2 different families of SAM with Type 45 carrying Aster/Sea Viper and frigates carrying Sea Ceptor/CAMM(M). Type 45/31 only able to carry canister launched ASuW missiles and the Type 26 only able to carry VL.
How the fuck do you keep that logistics tail intact at 50°S? Especially given the tories' criminal neglect of the RFA FSS replacement program.
You know the tory part inside out, I'll give you that. You know nothing about what retaking the FI would entail.
With all the bleating about how we must agree to a level playing field from certain quarters I take it that you would happily agree then that the uk should insist that the lpf include the following
...no undercutting us by eu countries having lesser standards for live stock welfare....sure Nick Palmer will confirm that one
...no undercutting us by having lower minimum wage, welfare or in work protections.
.. no undercutting us by have lesser food hygiene standards...wasnt british meat contaminated with horse meat after all.
...no undercutting us by looking the other ways when nations turn a blind eye to emissions standsards....germany yes I am looking at you
...no undercutting us by illegal bans on our products such as british beef....france your turn in the spotlight
...no undercutting us by sweeping your problems under the carpet and pretending they dont exist again france and bse
Farm welfare is a mixed picture - Britain is better than many EU countries, less good than a few others - in the top 25% in my view. But all of us are better than virtually everywhere else on that issue - and I don't say that because of a general belief that either Britain or Europe is best. The US in particular has virtually no federal regulations for on-farm welfare at all, so some states are pretty good while others are grim - which makes a joke of the idea of regulatory alignment, since one can't align with regulations that don't exist. New Zealand is pretty good - Australia much less so.
I wasn't aware we were just knew we were better than most of the eu. Also getting better I hope with the ban on live exports which I believe we were blocked from while in the eu
We are: broadly we're (and this probably won't surprise) better than southern and eastern europe, and a little worse than Scandinavia.
A close friend of the prime minister and his fiancee was given an official position at the Home Office without the role being publicly advertised, a freedom of information request has revealed.
Nimco Ali, who is reportedly godmother to the son of Carrie Symonds and Boris Johnson, was appointed adviser on tackling violence against women and girls in October.
Information released under the Freedom of Information Act to The Critic magazine revealed that she was hired via a “direct appointment process”, without open competition or advertisement for the job.
It appears the role may have been created for Ali, with no mention of it before her appointment. She is paid £350 a day and works two days a month.
For context, how much would a process of open competiton and advertisements have cost? Would that have been a great use of public money for a £700 a month cost?
A close friend of the prime minister and his fiancee was given an official position at the Home Office without the role being publicly advertised, a freedom of information request has revealed.
Nimco Ali, who is reportedly godmother to the son of Carrie Symonds and Boris Johnson, was appointed adviser on tackling violence against women and girls in October.
Information released under the Freedom of Information Act to The Critic magazine revealed that she was hired via a “direct appointment process”, without open competition or advertisement for the job.
It appears the role may have been created for Ali, with no mention of it before her appointment. She is paid £350 a day and works two days a month.
For context, how much would a process of open competiton and advertisements have cost? Would that have been a great use of public money for a £700 a month cost?
That's not really the point.
The chumocracy is one thing, the friend-of-my-girlfriend-ocracy, ratchets the idea of low-level, almost-corruption up a notch.
At one point it would have been easy-peasy-Japanesy to steer the UK into the softest of softsoap Brexits, the EEA or EFTA or both and a 20 year transition deal. blah blah
A combination of Remainer stupidity, Brexiteer silliness, and arrogant overconfidence in Brussels (and Paris) has brought us to this precipice
What has this got to do with (former) Remainers? We hung up our blue, with 28 gold stars Euro trousers at the end of last year.
Blame the EU, if you must, but Remainers? We weren't there squire.
It was the push for a 2nd referendum (or just Revoke!!!)) which totally poisoned the debate and polarised everyone. Brexiteers thought they might not get any Brexit at all, so began to accept No Deal as better than nowt
Bollocks was it. It was May's failure to try and build a consensus that poisoned the debate, well before any talk of a 2nd referendum and "revoke". Brexit means Brexit.
It was both. TMay was a catastrophe with her red lines, but so was the clamour for a "2nd referendum" which came soon after the result.
I have just read Sasha Swire's diverting Diary of a Tory MP's Wife
She reveals that at one point David Cameron was supporting a 2nd referendum. He wanted to annul the result of his own referendum, before it had even be enacted, and have a new one, hoping to overturn democracy.
I find that extraordinary. The prime minister who called the referendum wanted to ignore the same vote he called, and run it again, because he didn't like the result. How does that make him any different from Trump wanting to upend the US Election?
Cameron will not come out well in the history books.
Cameron did not come out well in his own history book. A terribly dull read.
It must hurt to sit in that shepherd's hut, mulling over that he could have told the EU to "give me a meaningful deal I can sell, or fuck off and have me campaign to Leave". OK, he was surrounded by a coterie of EU-flunkies in our civil service and diplomatic service telling him nothing was achievable. But that doesn't excuse the fact that he could have stood back, grown a spine and fought - hard.
If he had campaigned to Leave, he would have won by at least 60-40. The EU would have seen that we were going, there was no possibility of us sliding into a second referendum - and overturning our decision. And then we might have got a decent and rapid divorce settlement.
He would have lost Osborne in the process of going for Leave, but he would probably still be PM if he had wanted, implementing his own distinct brand of socially liberal Conservatism. More importantly, he could probably have overseen a transition to a decent working relationship between the UK and the EU.
Instead, he will be remembered as the guy who is ultimately responsible for poisoned UK-EU relations - and has probably hastened the end of the UK by decades. That is one shit legacy.
That overlooks the rather significant point that he thought leaving the EU would be a very bad thing indeed.
Cameron's three options were:
1. Have no Referendum, despite his Manifesto pledge. The resulting rise of UKIP would have been spectacular - and end up spiting his every political sensibility. It could also quite possibly have destroyed the Conservative Party. Not really an option.
2. Get a meaningful renegotiation of the UK's relationship with Brussels. That required them to believe he would walk - and support Leave.
3. Get a meaningless renegotiation of the UK's relationship with Brussels. That risked pissing off enough people to lose the referendum - and his own political demise.
He chose 3. Or rather, it was the inevitable outcome of the EU knowing he thought leaving the EU would be a very bad thing indeed. Which he did little or nothing to counter.
People are always happy to claim Boris is lazy. But at least his strategic thinking got him into Number 10. Cameron's lack of it got him out of Number 10.
I like your options, but not convinced by your analysis of (1). Modern politics has shown that if you’re brave you can survive almost anything. If Cameron had adopted Boris’s approach of you’re either with me or you lose the whip, I wonder what the result would have been?
Brady would have had the letters to vote to remove Cameron by tea-time. Boris would have been PM by 2016 - with a handy working majority.
Boris might have tried for a meaningful renegotation. Which the EU might have given him. In which case we'd still be in the EU, even after a Referendum. Or they might have given him the same treatment Cameron got. In which case, Boris would have campaigned to Leave - and would have got 60% in favour of that decision to Leave. Cutting off the second referendum talk at the knees.
Comments
"Too much of a faff" wasn't it ?
But I will point out that the country did not go into total melt down over the death of Diana.
Logistics were also crucial in the successful Russian defence of Stalingrad, on the eastern front. In World War II Britain had lots of allies, including Canada which increased the size of its navy 50-fold (source: The World at War TV series). I am not sure that we have so many allies over Brexit.
Boris commons majority was achieved on promise you won’t hear brexit mentioned again, let alone year after year of dreary EU UK wrangling.
Ha! 🤣
The last four years have been mere hors d'oeuvre compared to the hour by hour bust ups, many of them petty mean spirited and just plain stupid, drizzled over the UK public in the coming years.
Didn’t know that was coming?
The Vicar Of Dibley will take the knee and deliver a sermon about Black Lives Matter when the award-winning BBC comedy returns to the screen for a series of Christmas specials.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9022023/Vicar-Dibley-takes-knee-Dawn-French-deliver-BLM-sermon-BBC-show.html
And submit your expenses.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9021981/Hundreds-young-people-try-enter-Harrods-chaotic-scenes-police-make-four-arrests.html
Senior sources say both the 94-year-old Monarch and Prince Philip, 99, will not get preferential treatment, but will instead 'wait in line' during the first wave of injections reserved for the over-80s and care home residents.
Does she have a NHS number?
As in "One will see the doctor now".
Second question, what is that badge quite a few of those lads have on their coats?
With most people getting on with their lives as normal but with varying levels of temporary sadness.
Michael Blumenthal reputedly produced an American Bank Note when paying a restaurant bill and having his signature queried.
They do some nice/expensive clothing.
That was a substantial number of gay men.
It'll help with logo awareness.
When we got back to Dover I remember a grown man openly weeping in the car next to ours, Diana's fatal car crash was our JFK assassination
Overall, my charity is neutral on Brexit, partly 'cos we're a charity, but also because we can see pluses and minuses in our area. We'll have to see how it works out.
@Mortimer - I think maybe I should backtrack on my backtrack.
You could do a quiz.
The simple reality is that life is complex, there is not one true path for us to follow. The UK might get a deal, we might not. We might get one on EU terms or on UK terms. There is no true single path unless you're obsessed with religious dogma.
I did see some Japanese tourists having their photos taken while holding up newspapers reporting Diana's death.
To compare it with JFK is more than a little silly and might only be justified if you think she was deliberately killed.
I'm more worried about all the cop shows I watch. Most are probably pretty lefty anyway (Blue Bloods always felt a bit more right wing to me, the main characters are even called Reagan), but Brooklyn Nine Nine worries me - it's one of my favourite shows and has not shied away from episodes about race and policing and so on, and been great, but might feel the need to push it really really hard this season.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1335351633459310593?s=20
As far as I know the ban on going to second homes only existed during lockdown until the 2nd December. We aren't in lockdown now. As far as I can tell there is no law and you're making that up.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/30/thatcher-warned-defence-cuts-falklands
JFK was President of the USA and 'leader of the free world' at the height of the Cold War.
Diana was ex-wife and mother to people of minute importance by comparison.
However, Downing Street and Chequers are the same tier now anyways.
That gives the relative level of importance.
Some "illegally".
There is a 2,600m runway on the FI now. If the UK careless loses them then they aren't getting them back. The forces of occupation would find it much easier to supply, reinforce and defend.
The other factor is that all current and planned RN ships use VLS missile systems that cannot be replenished at sea. The USN have tried and failed. Believe me, if they can't do it, the RN have no chance. This makes them uniquely ill suited expenditionary warfare in the South Atlantic. Once a T31 has winchester'ed its battery (only 12 missiles to save a few quid) the only way it can be replenished is dockside in the UK.
The logistics issues are compounded by the fact that standardisation has completely gone out of the window in search of cost savings. We now have 3 different surface combatants with 3 different main gun calibres, 4.5″, 5″, 57mm and 3 different secondary calibres, 40mm, 30mm, 20mm, with no two ships featuring identical combinations of guns. Not to mention 3 different VLS systems, Sylver A50, GWS.35 canisters, and Mk 41s with no weapons in our inventory cleared for use or any in the immediate future. Then 2 different families of SAM with Type 45 carrying Aster/Sea Viper and frigates carrying Sea Ceptor/CAMM(M). Type 45/31 only able to carry canister launched ASuW missiles and the Type 26 only able to carry VL.
How the fuck do you keep that logistics tail intact at 50°S? Especially given the tories' criminal neglect of the RFA FSS replacement program.
You know the tory part inside out, I'll give you that. You know nothing about what retaking the FI would entail.
The chumocracy is one thing, the friend-of-my-girlfriend-ocracy, ratchets the idea of low-level, almost-corruption up a notch.
Boris might have tried for a meaningful renegotation. Which the EU might have given him. In which case we'd still be in the EU, even after a Referendum. Or they might have given him the same treatment Cameron got. In which case, Boris would have campaigned to Leave - and would have got 60% in favour of that decision to Leave. Cutting off the second referendum talk at the knees.