I’m on strike tomorrow, feel conflicted about it. I’m interested to hear from anyone who feels strongly that the teacher strikes are a good or bad thing (that is if you don’t think it has been discussed to death already)
Stikes are a bad thing, sure. Ideally questions of pay and conditions get resolved well before this. But if a large employer is determined to ignore problems, a strike is probably the least bad way to get their attention.
(The "large employer" bit is relevant, I think. If someone has a wide choice of employers where they can ply their trade, it's much harder for employers to put their fingers in their ears. Not if they want to get the best people anyway. That doesn't work if the government essentially says "take it or leave it". Though the numbers of former doctors, care workers, teachers and so on who have chosen to leave it ought to be a red light.)
Agreed, but I think the problems are more about the broken system than about pay per se. I wish the strikes were more clearly about that.
Always said the Church of England is full of hard left cranks, time to disestablish now.
A vicar who shared an article suggesting Israel was responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks has been barred from the ministry for 12 years for antisemitism.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews made 11 allegations against the Rev Dr Stephen Sizer, which claimed his conduct in incidents between 2005 and 2018 amounted to antisemitic activity.
Sizer, the former vicar of Christ Church in Virginia Water, Surrey, admitted the “factual basis” of all allegations against him but disputed that his conduct was antisemitic.
However, a church tribunal found that he engaged in antisemitic conduct with respect to suggesting Israel’s responsibility for 9/11.
That one person out of many thousands of CoE clergy has been disqualified from office for anti semitism hardly justifies TSE's absurd suggestion about what they are like.
BTW the reason he can be disbarred in this way is because the CoE is a body established by law and subject to specific legislation which creates a just and fair path (the Clergy Discipline Tribunal) for bad and inadequate people to be removed. Keep these legal protection and keep the legal rights everyone has with regard to their parish church. Both are part of its 'Established Church' nature.
"Antidisestablishmentarainists unite". Now there's a slogan.
Now, if we shifted the discussion to why they won't marry gays despite being a body established by the state under laws which outlaw discrimination ...
A very splendid but incomplete sentiment. And nice whataboutery, at least in embryo.
As to answers, to take a parallel, and once a hot potato, now fairly cool; the civil state allows divorce and remarriage - and as of recently allows it without any limits at all in terms of reasons, frequency and amount.
That suggests that the state permits a 'free for all' on the subject - which indeed it does. Similarly the state does not ban adultery, but permits a free for all.
What the state allows and what opinion, secular and religious, approves is non identical on the subject of adultery, getting divorced and remarried on an annual basis and some other things. At the moment gay marriage is still in the hot potato stage.
And of course Vicars are able to not remarry divorcees in the Church of England if they object on a conscience basis. Same as Anglo Catholic Parishes don't have to have women priests and Bishops.
A similar compromise will be needed on homosexual marriage
Labour leads by 10% in the Blue Wall. In 2019, Labour came THIRD in these seats.
Blue Wall Voting Intention (28-29 Jan.):
Labour 42% (+2) Conservative 32% (+2) Liberal Democrat 19% (-2) Reform UK 4% (-2) Green 4% (+1) Other 0% (–)
Changes +/- 11 Jan.
Anyone have the original 2019 scores do we can see movement from then? The Con-LD swing is going to very important.
It's quite tricky in some of the Blue Wall seats. If the result last time was something like Con 40 LD 31 Lab 25, it's likely that Labour is now ahead if you go by personal preference (which is what polls mostly measure). But you can guarantee that in that sort of seats, both LDs and Lab will go hard on "Only we can win here", and the Tories could win there as a result.
That’s the worry. It’s possible that the swings are very different in different parts of the wall though - it includes more typical outer suburb and commuter town Con-Lab constituencies as well as stockbroker and green belt Con-Lib constituencies.
This is where the council elections will be important. Not the absolute results, as the LDs always do better than in general elections, but the swing from 2019 of each of the major parties. May 2019 was the high water mark if both Lib Dem and BXP fortunes, relatively poor for Labour and disastrous for Con.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
So many safe seats e.g. East Hants could go Lib Dem if Labour voters vote tactically, I think they would in such a seat, Lib Dems clearly the challenger there
Always said the Church of England is full of hard left cranks, time to disestablish now.
A vicar who shared an article suggesting Israel was responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks has been barred from the ministry for 12 years for antisemitism.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews made 11 allegations against the Rev Dr Stephen Sizer, which claimed his conduct in incidents between 2005 and 2018 amounted to antisemitic activity.
Sizer, the former vicar of Christ Church in Virginia Water, Surrey, admitted the “factual basis” of all allegations against him but disputed that his conduct was antisemitic.
However, a church tribunal found that he engaged in antisemitic conduct with respect to suggesting Israel’s responsibility for 9/11.
That one person out of many thousands of CoE clergy has been disqualified from office for anti semitism hardly justifies TSE's absurd suggestion about what they are like.
BTW the reason he can be disbarred in this way is because the CoE is a body established by law and subject to specific legislation which creates a just and fair path (the Clergy Discipline Tribunal) for bad and inadequate people to be removed. Keep these legal protection and keep the legal rights everyone has with regard to their parish church. Both are part of its 'Established Church' nature.
"Antidisestablishmentarainists unite". Now there's a slogan.
Now, if we shifted the discussion to why they won't marry gays despite being a body established by the state under laws which outlaw discrimination ...
A very splendid but incomplete sentiment. And nice whataboutery, at least in embryo.
As to answers, to take a parallel, and once a hot potato, now fairly cool; the civil state allows divorce and remarriage - and as of recently allows it without any limits at all in terms of reasons, frequency and amount.
That suggests that the state permits a 'free for all' on the subject - which indeed it does. Similarly the state does not ban adultery, but permits a free for all.
What the state allows and what opinion, secular and religious, approves is non identical on the subject of adultery, getting divorced and remarried on an annual basis and some other things. At the moment gay marriage is still in the hot potato stage.
And of course Vicars are able to not remarry divorcees in the Church of England if they object on a conscience basis. Same as Anglo Catholic Parishes don't have to have women priests and Bishops.
A similar compromise will be needed on homosexual marriage
But what about rectors and curates and canons? We ought to be told.
And how does one actively proceed "to not remarry divorcees"? Is there a special Service for the Not Remarrying of Divorced Members of the Church?
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
Always said the Church of England is full of hard left cranks, time to disestablish now.
A vicar who shared an article suggesting Israel was responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks has been barred from the ministry for 12 years for antisemitism.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews made 11 allegations against the Rev Dr Stephen Sizer, which claimed his conduct in incidents between 2005 and 2018 amounted to antisemitic activity.
Sizer, the former vicar of Christ Church in Virginia Water, Surrey, admitted the “factual basis” of all allegations against him but disputed that his conduct was antisemitic.
However, a church tribunal found that he engaged in antisemitic conduct with respect to suggesting Israel’s responsibility for 9/11.
That one person out of many thousands of CoE clergy has been disqualified from office for anti semitism hardly justifies TSE's absurd suggestion about what they are like.
BTW the reason he can be disbarred in this way is because the CoE is a body established by law and subject to specific legislation which creates a just and fair path (the Clergy Discipline Tribunal) for bad and inadequate people to be removed. Keep these legal protection and keep the legal rights everyone has with regard to their parish church. Both are part of its 'Established Church' nature.
"Antidisestablishmentarainists unite". Now there's a slogan.
Now, if we shifted the discussion to why they won't marry gays despite being a body established by the state under laws which outlaw discrimination ...
A very splendid but incomplete sentiment. And nice whataboutery, at least in embryo.
As to answers, to take a parallel, and once a hot potato, now fairly cool; the civil state allows divorce and remarriage - and as of recently allows it without any limits at all in terms of reasons, frequency and amount.
That suggests that the state permits a 'free for all' on the subject - which indeed it does. Similarly the state does not ban adultery, but permits a free for all.
What the state allows and what opinion, secular and religious, approves is non identical on the subject of adultery, getting divorced and remarried on an annual basis and some other things. At the moment gay marriage is still in the hot potato stage.
And of course Vicars are able to not remarry divorcees in the Church of England if they object on a conscience basis. Same as Anglo Catholic Parishes don't have to have women priests and Bishops.
A similar compromise will be needed on homosexual marriage
But what about rectors and curates and canons? We ought to be told.
And how does one actively proceed "to not remarry divorcees"? Is there a special Service for the Not Remarrying of Divorced Members of the Church?
To be absolutely fair, the Church of England should not only allow clergy to refuse to perform a service of blessing, but should give them to option of doing a service of cursing instead.
Perhaps something along these lines: "BRETHREN, in the primitive Church there was a godly discipline, that, at the beginning of Lent, such persons as stood convicted of notorious sin were put to open penance, and punished in this world, that their souls might be saved in the day of the Lord; and that others, admonished by their example, might be the more afraid to offend. Instead whereof, until the said discipline may be restored again, (which is much to be wished,) it is thought good that at this time (in the presence of you all) should be read the general sentences of God's cursing against impenitent sinners ..."
Always said the Church of England is full of hard left cranks, time to disestablish now.
A vicar who shared an article suggesting Israel was responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks has been barred from the ministry for 12 years for antisemitism.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews made 11 allegations against the Rev Dr Stephen Sizer, which claimed his conduct in incidents between 2005 and 2018 amounted to antisemitic activity.
Sizer, the former vicar of Christ Church in Virginia Water, Surrey, admitted the “factual basis” of all allegations against him but disputed that his conduct was antisemitic.
However, a church tribunal found that he engaged in antisemitic conduct with respect to suggesting Israel’s responsibility for 9/11.
That one person out of many thousands of CoE clergy has been disqualified from office for anti semitism hardly justifies TSE's absurd suggestion about what they are like.
BTW the reason he can be disbarred in this way is because the CoE is a body established by law and subject to specific legislation which creates a just and fair path (the Clergy Discipline Tribunal) for bad and inadequate people to be removed. Keep these legal protection and keep the legal rights everyone has with regard to their parish church. Both are part of its 'Established Church' nature.
"Antidisestablishmentarainists unite". Now there's a slogan.
Now, if we shifted the discussion to why they won't marry gays despite being a body established by the state under laws which outlaw discrimination ...
A very splendid but incomplete sentiment. And nice whataboutery, at least in embryo.
As to answers, to take a parallel, and once a hot potato, now fairly cool; the civil state allows divorce and remarriage - and as of recently allows it without any limits at all in terms of reasons, frequency and amount.
That suggests that the state permits a 'free for all' on the subject - which indeed it does. Similarly the state does not ban adultery, but permits a free for all.
What the state allows and what opinion, secular and religious, approves is non identical on the subject of adultery, getting divorced and remarried on an annual basis and some other things. At the moment gay marriage is still in the hot potato stage.
And of course Vicars are able to not remarry divorcees in the Church of England if they object on a conscience basis. Same as Anglo Catholic Parishes don't have to have women priests and Bishops.
A similar compromise will be needed on homosexual marriage
But what about rectors and curates and canons? We ought to be told.
And how does one actively proceed "to not remarry divorcees"? Is there a special Service for the Not Remarrying of Divorced Members of the Church?
You just refuse to remarry them and they have to find another Vicar who will
By then they will almost certainly own property themselves given the age of first property ownership is 39 and be starting to look to retirement
HYUFD I am telling you as a young person, it's not going to happen.
I own a flat, I hate the Tories for what they have done to us. You are finished.
Not many young people own a flat though
Yes because of our failure of economic policy.
Housing crash now, fuck the elderly.
Extend NI to all income. That would level things up a lot.
You might as well increase IT instead and stop messing around with NI and abolish it completely.
I've had a horrendous year trying to work out what NI I (a) should, and (b) could have paid, and (c) what it actually credits me with. And repeat that for Mrs C as well.
HMRC website and online statements are about as useful as a square table missing a leg - i. e. seriously incomplete and unreliable. And, of course, today is the last day one can correct the "could" bit as I have recently remarked.
No.
We should keep NI separate and increase it not income tax when it comes to paying for the State pension and NHS so people can actually see how much of their own income goes to fund those specific areas (pensioners should pay it too).
Virtually every other OECD nation funds most State healthcare through social insurance not income tax
NI is income tax, not insurance though. So what's your point?
As a hint, if you're still too thick to figure it out, which makes you pay more NI as an employee: Taking up smoking, or getting promoted and a pay rise?
Insurance is worried about the former, tax the latter.
No it isn't, National insurance was created by Lloyd George specifically to fund health insurance and contributory unemployment benefits. The fact it rises with income now doesn't change that.
Income tax was created by Pitt to fund war with France.
On that basis, @TSE must be delighted to pay Income Tax!
Swedish PM currently holding a meeting with all 8 leaders of the parliamentary parties, due to the serious security situation. I cannot remember such a meeting before. Meetings between the leaders are very common (Swedish politics is much less confrontational and more constructive than most other countries), but not this type of acute, urgent, all-party grouping. Something’s up.
Is this domestic gang crime or something international (ie Russia)?
Something to do with Sweden joining NATO according to a flash I saw.
It seems to be connected to concerns about links to the PKK causing problems with Turkey.
And in other thread news I see people are having a pile on @HYUFD because he holds a particular political view, states it often and politely, doesn't change it under pressure, and, moreover, the view is one with which other posters don't agree.
PB at its best.
I missed that. HY is one of the most popular posters on here. Unlike most Tories he doesn't slink into the shadows because his Party are complete crap. He's also a one man Wikipedia of relevant political opinion polls.
Tory poster of the year by a distance!
Sure, but others (not he, usually) whinging about 'pile ons' is a weird take. What's a pile on, when lots of people disagree with someone? Should people not express disagreement if they feel it? Should they only do so in very sedate fashion out of sense of fair play because the sides are not of equal proportion?
By then they will almost certainly own property themselves given the age of first property ownership is 39 and be starting to look to retirement
HYUFD I am telling you as a young person, it's not going to happen.
I own a flat, I hate the Tories for what they have done to us. You are finished.
Not many young people own a flat though
Yes because of our failure of economic policy.
Housing crash now, fuck the elderly.
As you probably know I am in favour of house prices dropping - though every time I mention it on here people tell me how it is a bad idea. And they make sense at the time. Until I forget and decide it is a good idea again.
But I would have thought that a housing crash is most likely to hit those of working age rather than the elderly. Most elderly have paid off their house by the time they get to retirement so a house price crash doesn't really affect them accept theoretically. But those of working age - particularly if they are needing to move as family expands or they need to change jobs - are the ones who would suffer from negative equity. It is debatable if this would be offset by the improved chances for those starting on the ladder but the one set of people unlikely to be 'fucked' by it are the elderly.
Far better if prices just rose very gently if at all and also the prices hav enot rocketed everywhere, it is mostly a London /South East issue other than some specific areas in the north and Scotland & Wales.
Falling house prices are important for people wanting to move. They are beneficial for people trying to get onto the housing ladder.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
Maybe you have the wrong target. Here are some decent targets for your wrath:
40 years of statesmen who got us into an EU with insufficient consultation, consent and referendums.
A parliament with a remain majority who didn't have the wit to organise a Brexit, following the narrowest of votes, on an EFTA/EEA, SM basis but let a minority of extremes go far too fast.
The EU for not offering a narrow derogation from FOM which would have saved Cameron's bacon.
The Remain campaign for vying with T May for the worst campaign ever.
Cameron for resigning when he had told us that the UK would flourish either in or out of the EU.
Politicians of all stripes have showed a pitiful lack of vision and leadership when it comes to European relations.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
I have travelled to six EU countries since the transition period ended, and have not been asked a single question. I have also travelled with a non-EU passport holder before brexit, and she was asked questions only once of five or six times - Germany I think. How scruffily are you people dressing that you're being singled out for questions?
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Sorry but it has definitely got worse since Brexit. And while eg Americans need a passport to travel to Europe, they can travel unfettered around their own continent, whereas we need to stand in line and get our passport stamped to visit a country 22 miles away. So it's not really a comparable situation.
Anyway, who cares about Europe now. The EU is the past, man.
All aboard for the Trans-Pacific Partnership ! Let's enjoy getting on the fast track to East Asian glamour, as gleamingly clean monorails wind and bend their way around London and Hull , creating a new Tokyo.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Sorry but it has definitely got worse since Brexit. And while eg Americans need a passport to travel to Europe, they can travel unfettered around their own continent, whereas we need to stand in line and get our passport stamped to visit a country 22 miles away. So it's not really a comparable situation.
US citizens need a passport to go to both Canada and Mexico, their continent. This was more lax in the past, admittedly.
Always said the Church of England is full of hard left cranks, time to disestablish now.
A vicar who shared an article suggesting Israel was responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks has been barred from the ministry for 12 years for antisemitism.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews made 11 allegations against the Rev Dr Stephen Sizer, which claimed his conduct in incidents between 2005 and 2018 amounted to antisemitic activity.
Sizer, the former vicar of Christ Church in Virginia Water, Surrey, admitted the “factual basis” of all allegations against him but disputed that his conduct was antisemitic.
However, a church tribunal found that he engaged in antisemitic conduct with respect to suggesting Israel’s responsibility for 9/11.
That one person out of many thousands of CoE clergy has been disqualified from office for anti semitism hardly justifies TSE's absurd suggestion about what they are like.
BTW the reason he can be disbarred in this way is because the CoE is a body established by law and subject to specific legislation which creates a just and fair path (the Clergy Discipline Tribunal) for bad and inadequate people to be removed. Keep these legal protection and keep the legal rights everyone has with regard to their parish church. Both are part of its 'Established Church' nature.
"Antidisestablishmentarainists unite". Now there's a slogan.
Now, if we shifted the discussion to why they won't marry gays despite being a body established by the state under laws which outlaw discrimination ...
A very splendid but incomplete sentiment. And nice whataboutery, at least in embryo.
As to answers, to take a parallel, and once a hot potato, now fairly cool; the civil state allows divorce and remarriage - and as of recently allows it without any limits at all in terms of reasons, frequency and amount.
That suggests that the state permits a 'free for all' on the subject - which indeed it does. Similarly the state does not ban adultery, but permits a free for all.
What the state allows and what opinion, secular and religious, approves is non identical on the subject of adultery, getting divorced and remarried on an annual basis and some other things. At the moment gay marriage is still in the hot potato stage.
And of course Vicars are able to not remarry divorcees in the Church of England if they object on a conscience basis. Same as Anglo Catholic Parishes don't have to have women priests and Bishops.
A similar compromise will be needed on homosexual marriage
But what about rectors and curates and canons? We ought to be told.
And how does one actively proceed "to not remarry divorcees"? Is there a special Service for the Not Remarrying of Divorced Members of the Church?
Here is the wording of the statutory provision allowing opt out. From the Matrimonial Causes Act 1965:
Section 8
Remarriage of divorced persons.
(2) No clergyman of the Church of England or the Church in Wales shall be compelled— (a) to solemnise the marriage of any person whose former marriage has been dissolved and whose former spouse is still living; or (b) to permit the marriage of such a person to be solemnised in the church or chapel of which he is the minister.
Yes, there is provision for 'blessing' civil ceremonies in these situations.
It's time for Labour to name the elephant in the room and call for us to rejoin the single market.
It's the will of the people and it's vital for this country.
Which requires free movement and hands the redwall seats back on a plate to the Conservatives
Like I say, it's time to name the elephant in the room.
You say this about FoM but the NHS is currently c. 150,000 understaffed. The entertainment and leisure industry is likewise on its knees.
Most of us are now calling out the lies about FoM. We NEED our Europeans over here. To run the fucking services that old crumblies in the red wall seats ALSO rely on.
So I call out your comment, not only because it takes an economic argument and makes it political (the hallmark of Brexit and it's only raison d'etre) but because it's bollocks.
Quoting directly from the HoC library
"In June 2016 there were 58,702 NHS staff with a recorded EU nationality, and in June 2022 there were 70,735 – an apparent rise. But to present this as the full story would be misleading, because there are over 57,000 more staff for whom nationality is known now than in 2016. It is very likely that there has been an overall increase in the number of NHS staff with EU nationality since 2016, but we can’t be sure about the scale of the change, and it would be misleading to calculate an increase based solely on the two numbers above.
Claims about changes in the number of EU staff (or other nationality groups) which don’t mention the importance of staff with unknown nationality should be regarded with due scepticism."
At the same time there has been a very large increase in the number of Asian and African health workers in the NHS. So basically the numbers of EU staff have not changed or have risen slightly whilst the numbers of Asian and African have increased significantly. Overall the number of non British workers has risen from around 11% in 2016 to 16% now (accepting the caution mentioned by the HoC library).
*somewhat counterintuitively it is SLab that take Edinburgh West and Orkney & Shetland, not the SNP.
Typo: SLab should be (+22)
Labour voting is rather inefficient in Scotland.
Yes. An uneven spread of support is a huge advantage for a small party under FPTP (eg the LDs under Clegg), but a big disadvantage if you want to actually win. The SNP’s more even spread is exaggerated by the unexpectedly pro-SNP new boundaries.
Given the hapless Anas and the donkeys in Labour there is no hope of tehm getting 22 seats, it is a PB unionist wet dream.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
And in other thread news I see people are having a pile on @HYUFD because he holds a particular political view, states it often and politely, doesn't change it under pressure, and, moreover, the view is one with which other posters don't agree.
PB at its best.
I missed that. HY is one of the most popular posters on here. Unlike most Tories he doesn't slink into the shadows because his Party are complete crap. He's also a one man Wikipedia of relevant political opinion polls.
Tory poster of the year by a distance!
For once, I agree with you. HYUFD is one of the very few (only?) regular Tory posters to still come on here and fight the Tory corner.
Which you have to respect him for. Someone has to do it.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
There will be similar exchanges after Scottish independence too no doubt, with Nats taking the place of you in the conversation.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
There will be similar exchanges after Scottish independence too no doubt, with Nats taking the place of you in the conversation.
Given I am in favour of Scottish Independence I will not have a different view on that either.
@OldBasing your seat predicted to go Red, how does it feel on the ground?
Hi @CorrectHorseBattery3. Hope all well. Slow reply, sorry - not glued to this forum listening to the partisan nonsense from some. On Basingstoke, I don't yet feel it in my waters. Needs a combination of 2019 Lib Dem/Green vote to go Labour (some possibility there), some Tory vote to stay home (possible); and direct Tory to Labour switchers (less convinced by that). However on the new boundaries, the constitency loses some of the semi-rural hinterland, so it's more focussed on the town which at local authority level has more Lab/Lib Dem wards. However, Maria Miller is popping up everywhere at the moment esp in the local paper, so she may think there's a risk. Never see her doing anything in normal times - she's a waste of space.
Always said the Church of England is full of hard left cranks, time to disestablish now.
A vicar who shared an article suggesting Israel was responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks has been barred from the ministry for 12 years for antisemitism.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews made 11 allegations against the Rev Dr Stephen Sizer, which claimed his conduct in incidents between 2005 and 2018 amounted to antisemitic activity.
Sizer, the former vicar of Christ Church in Virginia Water, Surrey, admitted the “factual basis” of all allegations against him but disputed that his conduct was antisemitic.
However, a church tribunal found that he engaged in antisemitic conduct with respect to suggesting Israel’s responsibility for 9/11.
That one person out of many thousands of CoE clergy has been disqualified from office for anti semitism hardly justifies TSE's absurd suggestion about what they are like.
BTW the reason he can be disbarred in this way is because the CoE is a body established by law and subject to specific legislation which creates a just and fair path (the Clergy Discipline Tribunal) for bad and inadequate people to be removed. Keep these legal protection and keep the legal rights everyone has with regard to their parish church. Both are part of its 'Established Church' nature.
"Antidisestablishmentarainists unite". Now there's a slogan.
Now, if we shifted the discussion to why they won't marry gays despite being a body established by the state under laws which outlaw discrimination ...
A very splendid but incomplete sentiment. And nice whataboutery, at least in embryo.
As to answers, to take a parallel, and once a hot potato, now fairly cool; the civil state allows divorce and remarriage - and as of recently allows it without any limits at all in terms of reasons, frequency and amount.
That suggests that the state permits a 'free for all' on the subject - which indeed it does. Similarly the state does not ban adultery, but permits a free for all.
What the state allows and what opinion, secular and religious, approves is non identical on the subject of adultery, getting divorced and remarried on an annual basis and some other things. At the moment gay marriage is still in the hot potato stage.
And of course Vicars are able to not remarry divorcees in the Church of England if they object on a conscience basis. Same as Anglo Catholic Parishes don't have to have women priests and Bishops.
A similar compromise will be needed on homosexual marriage
But what about rectors and curates and canons? We ought to be told.
And how does one actively proceed "to not remarry divorcees"? Is there a special Service for the Not Remarrying of Divorced Members of the Church?
To be absolutely fair, the Church of England should not only allow clergy to refuse to perform a service of blessing, but should give them to option of doing a service of cursing instead.
Perhaps something along these lines: "BRETHREN, in the primitive Church there was a godly discipline, that, at the beginning of Lent, such persons as stood convicted of notorious sin were put to open penance, and punished in this world, that their souls might be saved in the day of the Lord; and that others, admonished by their example, might be the more afraid to offend. Instead whereof, until the said discipline may be restored again, (which is much to be wished,) it is thought good that at this time (in the presence of you all) should be read the general sentences of God's cursing against impenitent sinners ..."
Still lawful for use on Ash Wednesday, and found in the BCP 1662 to this day if you look hard enough. Though fair to say it's use is uncommon.
@OldBasing your seat predicted to go Red, how does it feel on the ground?
Hi @CorrectHorseBattery3. Hope all well. Slow reply, sorry - not glued to this forum listening to the partisan nonsense from some. On Basingstoke, I don't yet feel it in my waters. Needs a combination of 2019 Lib Dem/Green vote to go Labour (some possibility there), some Tory vote to stay home (possible); and direct Tory to Labour switchers (less convinced by that). However on the new boundaries, the constitency loses some of the semi-rural hinterland, so it's more focussed on the town which at local authority level has more Lab/Lib Dem wards. However, Maria Miller is popping up everywhere at the moment esp in the local paper, so she may think there's a risk. Never see her doing anything in normal times - she's a waste of space.
Hi mate hope you are keeping well too, thank you for the kind words.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
This is deeply odd to me. I consider myself British and would identify you as the same.
My attitude is almost the inverse of yours - the Maastrict Treaty imposed on me a citizenship that I never asked for and never wanted to.
And I have always considered European countries foreign states.
Can Leave politicians accept responsibility and stop lying .
I’d have more time for Leavers if they simply said more sovereignty is worth being poorer . Worth losing FOM for and just stopped trying to polish the economic arguments turd .
There is no good Brexit for the economy because no sane country has ever put up trade barriers to its closest and biggest market.
And in other thread news I see people are having a pile on @HYUFD because he holds a particular political view, states it often and politely, doesn't change it under pressure, and, moreover, the view is one with which other posters don't agree.
PB at its best.
I missed that. HY is one of the most popular posters on here. Unlike most Tories he doesn't slink into the shadows because his Party are complete crap. He's also a one man Wikipedia of relevant political opinion polls.
Tory poster of the year by a distance!
For once, I agree with you. HYUFD is one of the very few (only?) regular Tory posters to still come on here and fight the Tory corner.
Which you have to respect him for. Someone has to do it.
Why? They are morally and ideologically bankrupt. Fiscally too, to some extent.
We need them like we need David Icke or followers of the Heaven’s Gate cult.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I've always felt the same, and well before about 20 years ago when I also found out that one of my grandparents was born on the continent. The idea that "Europe" is a separate civilisation has just always seemed ludicrous to me.
@OldBasing your seat predicted to go Red, how does it feel on the ground?
Hi @CorrectHorseBattery3. Hope all well. Slow reply, sorry - not glued to this forum listening to the partisan nonsense from some. On Basingstoke, I don't yet feel it in my waters. Needs a combination of 2019 Lib Dem/Green vote to go Labour (some possibility there), some Tory vote to stay home (possible); and direct Tory to Labour switchers (less convinced by that). However on the new boundaries, the constitency loses some of the semi-rural hinterland, so it's more focussed on the town which at local authority level has more Lab/Lib Dem wards. However, Maria Miller is popping up everywhere at the moment esp in the local paper, so she may think there's a risk. Never see her doing anything in normal times - she's a waste of space.
Hi mate hope you are keeping well too, thank you for the kind words.
Maria Miller is useless but harmless.
But not adverse to a healthy expenses claim for a second home....
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
I have travelled to six EU countries since the transition period ended, and have not been asked a single question. I have also travelled with a non-EU passport holder before brexit, and she was asked questions only once of five or six times - Germany I think. How scruffily are you people dressing that you're being singled out for questions?
It just means they're on the secret database of Brexiteers.
I’m on strike tomorrow, feel conflicted about it. I’m interested to hear from anyone who feels strongly that the teacher strikes are a good or bad thing (that is if you don’t think it has been discussed to death already)
How do you expect the children to get you more money?
Better Christmas presents. I mean, primary teachers get Ferraris each festive season, or so I have heard.
Aka I’m not sure what you’re getting at!
They're the people you're hurting by going on strike, so presumably they're the people you expect to solve the dispute by giving you more money.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
Although I am very anti-Brexit, I agree with Richard here. Tim I think your opinions about Brexit are driving your opinions about passport control, not the other way around.
For me, the romance of getting a slightly archaically large stamp in a ludicrously non-technological piece of technology like a physical passport (that I have probably just picked out of a puddle, or run back onto the plane to grab out of the pocket in the back of the seat in front of me where I accidentally left it) is one of the few upsides of the whole sorry Brexit business.
That and the abstract idea of democratic sovereignty. If only that hadn't been a figment of our imagination.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I've always felt the same, and well before about 20 years ago when I found out one grandparent was born on the Continent. The idea that "Europe" is a separate civilisation has just always seemed ludicrous to me.
When I travel beyond Europe I don't feel like it's a different civilization either. Depends on the country, obviously - very poor countries can be different. But hanging out in a Canadian bar with Canadians and hanging out in a Norweigian bar with (impeccably English-speaking) Norweigians don't seem different to me. One doesn't feel more foreign than the other.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
The progress to 'Europe is my country' was of course vehemently denied by remainers generally, even though FoM, Euro, ECB, Potemkin parliament and 'ever closer union' made it obvious that TimS was correct.
Brexiteers were derided for thinking such thoughts. Despite all the ghastly chaos it remains by miles the most significant issue in the debate and why voting Brexit was, sadly, the less bad of two bad options.
It remains obvious that most UK people, given a choice, want a single market in goods and services and a common travel area but are absolutely opposed to political union.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I could lie and say I have a German mother and Italian father or something but no, nothing as neat as that. Why do some Scots feel British and others not? Just something I’ve grown up with. Family holidays, French exchanges, then friends, colleagues, a job involving a lot of EU law, a home in France. Just one of those things.
As for citizen of the world I realise my views on this are niche but I am not a fan of borders full stop. The more global governance the better.
I don’t see it as something to be pitied, let’s face it that’s just PB rhetoric, but certainly something to be acknowledged.
You say this about FoM but the NHS is currently c. 150,000 understaffed. The entertainment and leisure industry is likewise on its knees.
Most of us are now calling out the lies about FoM. We NEED our Europeans over here. To run the fucking services that old crumblies in the red wall seats ALSO rely on.
Until 2004, net EU migration was negligible. Regardless of Brexit, it was never going to be possible to treat the EU as a bottomless source of cheap labour, and reversing Brexit won't change that.
You are idealising a particular point in time that simply cannot be recreated.
And in other thread news I see people are having a pile on @HYUFD because he holds a particular political view, states it often and politely, doesn't change it under pressure, and, moreover, the view is one with which other posters don't agree.
PB at its best.
I missed that. HY is one of the most popular posters on here. Unlike most Tories he doesn't slink into the shadows because his Party are complete crap. He's also a one man Wikipedia of relevant political opinion polls.
Tory poster of the year by a distance!
For once, I agree with you. HYUFD is one of the very few (only?) regular Tory posters to still come on here and fight the Tory corner.
Which you have to respect him for. Someone has to do it.
Why? They are morally and ideologically bankrupt. Fiscally too, to some extent.
We need them like we need David Icke or followers of the Heaven’s Gate cult.
The logical inference of your position is that the Tories go to zero seats, and the centre-right are entirely unrepresented in Parliament and Labour unchallenged by any real opposition.
I think, on reflection, even you'd agree that's not a sensible position.
I’m on strike tomorrow, feel conflicted about it. I’m interested to hear from anyone who feels strongly that the teacher strikes are a good or bad thing (that is if you don’t think it has been discussed to death already)
How do you expect the children to get you more money?
Better Christmas presents. I mean, primary teachers get Ferraris each festive season, or so I have heard.
Aka I’m not sure what you’re getting at!
They're the people you're hurting by going on strike, so presumably they're the people you expect to solve the dispute by giving you more money.
Ah, thanks for the reply and clarification. That's basically my conflict, especially as much of my work is with some of the more vulnerable kids in school.
However, I *think* I think that I'd do more harm to the kids by continuing to keep my head down in a system that is truly, truly broken.
Problem is, I don't think sorting out pay (important thought it is) will fix the system on its own.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I've always felt the same, and well before about 20 years ago when I found out one grandparent was born on the Continent. The idea that "Europe" is a separate civilisation has just always seemed ludicrous to me.
When I travel beyond Europe I don't feel like it's a different civilization either. Depends on the country, obviously - very poor countries can be different. But hanging out in a Canadian bar with Canadians and hanging out in a Norweigian bar with (impeccably English-speaking) Norweigians don't seem different to me. One doesn't feel more foreign than the other.
Yes, and I think that's where our natural place is ; a foot in both, not delusions of belonging to pacific east asia, which is the ridiculous situation the tories have landed us in at the moment. It will take a little time to return to this inescapable cultural and economic reality, at least as part of the single market, but I think we will.
By then they will almost certainly own property themselves given the age of first property ownership is 39 and be starting to look to retirement
HYUFD I am telling you as a young person, it's not going to happen.
I own a flat, I hate the Tories for what they have done to us. You are finished.
Not many young people own a flat though
Yes because of our failure of economic policy.
Housing crash now, fuck the elderly.
Extend NI to all income. That would level things up a lot.
And then merge income tax and NI. We don't need multiple classes of income tax.
Whilst I agree with you this would effectively be a big tax increase on anyone earning above the upper earnings threshold as well on the over 65s.
Tax would go from 32% for lower earners to 52% for higher rate earners and up to 57% for top rate earners.
You'd probably have to cut it at the same time to make the rate fair. So not sure how much extra revenue you'd raise - still makes it cleaner though.
Eh? At higher incomes the Ni rate is only 3.25%?
It's 2%. Because of the higher earnings threshold. It was 3.25% with the H&SC levy, which has now been abolished.
I'm arguing that's what happens if you mash the primary rates together.
I suppose you could reset all the income tax thresholds and recalibrate them.
You’d align the thresholds and add the core NI rate to the basic rate of tax and the higher NI rate to the higher rates. It could be tweaked by a tiny amount to allow for the effect of the slightly different thresholds if they wanted to. The key change is of course that income from savings, investments, property and pensions would be taxed at the same rate as that from employment.
If they wanted to be really generous they could reduce the tax rates to allow for the extra income, on a cost neutral basis.
And in other thread news I see people are having a pile on @HYUFD because he holds a particular political view, states it often and politely, doesn't change it under pressure, and, moreover, the view is one with which other posters don't agree.
PB at its best.
I missed that. HY is one of the most popular posters on here. Unlike most Tories he doesn't slink into the shadows because his Party are complete crap. He's also a one man Wikipedia of relevant political opinion polls.
Tory poster of the year by a distance!
For once, I agree with you. HYUFD is one of the very few (only?) regular Tory posters to still come on here and fight the Tory corner.
Which you have to respect him for. Someone has to do it.
Why? They are morally and ideologically bankrupt. Fiscally too, to some extent.
We need them like we need David Icke or followers of the Heaven’s Gate cult.
The logical inference of your position is that the Tories go to zero seats, and the centre-right are entirely unrepresented in Parliament and Labour unchallenged by any real opposition.
I think, on reflection, even you'd agree that's not a sensible position.
I’m not sure at this stage what “centre rightism” has to offer. In its current incarnation it appears quite bankrupt.
I would prefer a Liberal opposition to a Conservative one.
Of course, such a thing is not going to happen, but if it could happen it would start with the utter annihilation of Tories.
By then they will almost certainly own property themselves given the age of first property ownership is 39 and be starting to look to retirement
HYUFD I am telling you as a young person, it's not going to happen.
I own a flat, I hate the Tories for what they have done to us. You are finished.
Not many young people own a flat though
Yes because of our failure of economic policy.
Housing crash now, fuck the elderly.
Extend NI to all income. That would level things up a lot.
And then merge income tax and NI. We don't need multiple classes of income tax.
Whilst I agree with you this would effectively be a big tax increase on anyone earning above the upper earnings threshold as well on the over 65s.
Tax would go from 32% for lower earners to 52% for higher rate earners and up to 57% for top rate earners.
You'd probably have to cut it at the same time to make the rate fair. So not sure how much extra revenue you'd raise - still makes it cleaner though.
Eh? At higher incomes the Ni rate is only 3.25%?
It's 2%. Because of the higher earnings threshold. It was 3.25% with the H&SC levy, which has now been abolished.
I'm arguing that's what happens if you mash the primary rates together.
I suppose you could reset all the income tax thresholds and recalibrate them.
If you mash the primary rates (20, 40, 45 & 12, 2) together 20% becomes 32%, 40% becomes 42% and 45% becomes 47% surely?
If you adjust all the tax thresholds to suit then, yes, but it might look like a big increase in tax on lower owners with little on higher earners so think it wouldn't be that simple.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
This is deeply odd to me. I consider myself British and would identify you as the same.
My attitude is almost the inverse of yours - the Maastrict Treaty imposed on me a citizenship that I never asked for and never wanted to.
And I have always considered European countries foreign states.
To me, it must be based on a sense of inadequacy. If those suffering this devastating loss considered themselves to be equal, any extra queues would be an irritating inconvenience, but not emotionally hurtful. The EU was clearly meeting some sort of emotional need.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I could lie and say I have a German mother and Italian father or something but no, nothing as neat as that. Why do some Scots feel British and others not? Just something I’ve grown up with. Family holidays, French exchanges, then friends, colleagues, a job involving a lot of EU law, a home in France. Just one of those things.
As for citizen of the world I realise my views on this are niche but I am not a fan of borders full stop. The more global governance the better.
I don’t see it as something to be pitied, let’s face it that’s just PB rhetoric, but certainly something to be acknowledged.
You see I agree with you about borders. I am at the extreme end and get stick on here for it because I think there should be freedom of movement for everyone, everywhere. I do think we need border controls/checks which is why I oppose Schengen. But that is only for security/crime purposes.
But I don't feel any attachment to the other countries and it doesn't bother me to have to queue or go through a check. Indeed to some extent it reassures me. It certainly isn't something that registers in any way for me in the Brexit debate because the borders would still apply to the other 93% of the world's population.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I could lie and say I have a German mother and Italian father or something but no, nothing as neat as that. Why do some Scots feel British and others not? Just something I’ve grown up with. Family holidays, French exchanges, then friends, colleagues, a job involving a lot of EU law, a home in France. Just one of those things.
As for citizen of the world I realise my views on this are niche but I am not a fan of borders full stop. The more global governance the better.
I don’t see it as something to be pitied, let’s face it that’s just PB rhetoric, but certainly something to be acknowledged.
And in other thread news I see people are having a pile on @HYUFD because he holds a particular political view, states it often and politely, doesn't change it under pressure, and, moreover, the view is one with which other posters don't agree.
PB at its best.
I missed that. HY is one of the most popular posters on here. Unlike most Tories he doesn't slink into the shadows because his Party are complete crap. He's also a one man Wikipedia of relevant political opinion polls.
Tory poster of the year by a distance!
For once, I agree with you. HYUFD is one of the very few (only?) regular Tory posters to still come on here and fight the Tory corner.
Which you have to respect him for. Someone has to do it.
Why? They are morally and ideologically bankrupt. Fiscally too, to some extent.
We need them like we need David Icke or followers of the Heaven’s Gate cult.
The logical inference of your position is that the Tories go to zero seats, and the centre-right are entirely unrepresented in Parliament and Labour unchallenged by any real opposition.
I think, on reflection, even you'd agree that's not a sensible position.
I’m not sure at this stage what “centre rightism” has to offer. In its current incarnation it appears quite bankrupt.
I would prefer a Liberal opposition to a Conservative one.
Of course, such a thing is not going to happen, but if it could happen it would start with the utter annihilation of Tories.
It isn't going to happen.
The only part that could ever replace the Tories as the main party of the right is RefUK just as Labour replaced the Liberals as the main party of the liberal left 100 years ago
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
Very dismissive. You may think it deluded that people valued being part of the EU , that it wasn’t about economics . Do you not understand why Remainers are so hacked off . Joe Bloggs decided one day to vote to remove something treasured by others . You may think it’s deluded because you clearly never felt that way. People do not like having their freedoms removed by others.
And in other thread news I see people are having a pile on @HYUFD because he holds a particular political view, states it often and politely, doesn't change it under pressure, and, moreover, the view is one with which other posters don't agree.
PB at its best.
I missed that. HY is one of the most popular posters on here. Unlike most Tories he doesn't slink into the shadows because his Party are complete crap. He's also a one man Wikipedia of relevant political opinion polls.
Tory poster of the year by a distance!
For once, I agree with you. HYUFD is one of the very few (only?) regular Tory posters to still come on here and fight the Tory corner.
Which you have to respect him for. Someone has to do it.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
I could lie and say I have a German mother and Italian father or something but no, nothing as neat as that. Why do some Scots feel British and others not? Just something I’ve grown up with. Family holidays, French exchanges, then friends, colleagues, a job involving a lot of EU law, a home in France. Just one of those things.
As for citizen of the world I realise my views on this are niche but I am not a fan of borders full stop. The more global governance the better.
I don’t see it as something to be pitied, let’s face it that’s just PB rhetoric, but certainly something to be acknowledged.
And in other thread news I see people are having a pile on @HYUFD because he holds a particular political view, states it often and politely, doesn't change it under pressure, and, moreover, the view is one with which other posters don't agree.
PB at its best.
I missed that. HY is one of the most popular posters on here. Unlike most Tories he doesn't slink into the shadows because his Party are complete crap. He's also a one man Wikipedia of relevant political opinion polls.
Tory poster of the year by a distance!
For once, I agree with you. HYUFD is one of the very few (only?) regular Tory posters to still come on here and fight the Tory corner.
Which you have to respect him for. Someone has to do it.
And in other thread news I see people are having a pile on @HYUFD because he holds a particular political view, states it often and politely, doesn't change it under pressure, and, moreover, the view is one with which other posters don't agree.
PB at its best.
I missed that. HY is one of the most popular posters on here. Unlike most Tories he doesn't slink into the shadows because his Party are complete crap. He's also a one man Wikipedia of relevant political opinion polls.
Tory poster of the year by a distance!
For once, I agree with you. HYUFD is one of the very few (only?) regular Tory posters to still come on here and fight the Tory corner.
Which you have to respect him for. Someone has to do it.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I might add that I don't consider myself as European and not British, but as European and British. And English. And a South Londoner. And a variety of other identities.
It feels like a fairly normal thing. Lots of people identify strongly with their county as well as their country. So why not other scales of identity too?
Labour leads by 10% in the Blue Wall. In 2019, Labour came THIRD in these seats.
Blue Wall Voting Intention (28-29 Jan.):
Labour 42% (+2) Conservative 32% (+2) Liberal Democrat 19% (-2) Reform UK 4% (-2) Green 4% (+1) Other 0% (–)
Changes +/- 11 Jan.
Anyone have the original 2019 scores do we can see movement from then? The Con-LD swing is going to very important.
It's quite tricky in some of the Blue Wall seats. If the result last time was something like Con 40 LD 31 Lab 25, it's likely that Labour is now ahead if you go by personal preference (which is what polls mostly measure). But you can guarantee that in that sort of seats, both LDs and Lab will go hard on "Only we can win here", and the Tories could win there as a result.
The Blue Wall polling, with change compared to GE 2019 % share for those 40 constituencies taken from the R&W report, is as follows:
Labour 42% (+21%) Con 32% (-18%) LD 19% (-8%)
I read the implications of this somewhat differently to you Nick. I don't think that there are that many seats in the list where Labour and the LDs will end up battling it out to challenge the Conservatives AND where the LDs efforts will effectively stymie Labour and rescue a Conservative MP. I think that tactical voting considerations will outweigh any such effect - it'll be fairly obvious which party is the main challenger in each seat. The Conservatives should fear a repeat of 1997, when this led to them losing many more seats than a national uniform swing would imply. The high combined Lab and LD vote (61%) means that the potential for effective tactical voting is very high.
The list of 40 Blue Wall seats, all in the South, is:
Bournemouth East Chelsea and Fulham Cheltenham Chingford and Woodford Green Chippenham Chipping Barnet Cities Of London and Westminster Colchester Esher and Walton Filton and Bradley Stoke Finchley and Golders Green Guildford Harrow East Hendon Henley Hitchin and Harpenden Lewes Milton Keynes North Milton Keynes South Mole Valley Reading West Romsey and Southampton North South Cambridgeshire South East Cambridgeshire South West Surrey St Ives Sutton and Cheam Taunton Deane Thornbury and Yate Totnes Truro and Falmouth Tunbridge Wells Uxbridge and South Ruislip Wantage Watford Wells West Dorset Wimbledon Winchester Woking Wokingham Wycombe
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
Of course if Remain had campaigned on the basis "Vote Remain Because Europe is Your Country" they would have lost about 80/20. (and Remain sometimes accuses Brexiteers of underhand campaigning!!)
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I might add that I don't consider myself as European and not British, but as European and British. And English. And a South Londoner. And a variety of other identities.
It feels like a fairly normal thing. Lots of people identify strongly with their county as well as their country. So why not other scales of identity too?
Exactly. I'm in very much the same place, just switching south london for west london, and a bit north-east london, too.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Sorry but it has definitely got worse since Brexit. And while eg Americans need a passport to travel to Europe, they can travel unfettered around their own continent, whereas we need to stand in line and get our passport stamped to visit a country 22 miles away. So it's not really a comparable situation.
...and we have to clear out after 90 days. Why did we do this to ourselves?
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I might add that I don't consider myself as European and not British, but as European and British. And English. And a South Londoner. And a variety of other identities.
It feels like a fairly normal thing. Lots of people identify strongly with their county as well as their country. So why not other scales of identity too?
Exactly. I'm in very much the same place.
It's the same for everyone to a greater or lesser degree. We are all European; we can't resign being European.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Like I said, this is a perfect dress rehearsal for PB discussions post Scottish Indy if ever a unionist dare speak.
Anyway I am now settling down to dinner in what is almost certainly not the 14th best restaurant in Europe or even in the freezing cold Danish answer to the Greenwich peninsula that is Nordhavn.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Sorry but it has definitely got worse since Brexit. And while eg Americans need a passport to travel to Europe, they can travel unfettered around their own continent, whereas we need to stand in line and get our passport stamped to visit a country 22 miles away. So it's not really a comparable situation.
...and we have to clear out after 90 days. Why did we do this to ourselves?
At least in part because Brexiters falsely promised no change to the extant cake.
Labour leads by 10% in the Blue Wall. In 2019, Labour came THIRD in these seats.
Blue Wall Voting Intention (28-29 Jan.):
Labour 42% (+2) Conservative 32% (+2) Liberal Democrat 19% (-2) Reform UK 4% (-2) Green 4% (+1) Other 0% (–)
Changes +/- 11 Jan.
Anyone have the original 2019 scores do we can see movement from then? The Con-LD swing is going to very important.
It's quite tricky in some of the Blue Wall seats. If the result last time was something like Con 40 LD 31 Lab 25, it's likely that Labour is now ahead if you go by personal preference (which is what polls mostly measure). But you can guarantee that in that sort of seats, both LDs and Lab will go hard on "Only we can win here", and the Tories could win there as a result.
The Blue Wall polling, with change compared to GE 2019 % share for those 40 constituencies taken from the R&W report, is as follows:
Labour 42% (+21%) Con 32% (-18%) LD 19% (-8%)
I read the implications of this somewhat differently to you Nick. I don't think that there are that many seats in the list where Labour and the LDs will end up battling it out to challenge the Conservatives AND where the LDs efforts will effectively stymie Labour and rescue a Conservative MP. I think that tactical voting considerations will outweigh any such effect - it'll be fairly obvious which party is the main challenger in each seat. The Conservatives should fear a repeat of 1997, when this led to them losing many more seats than a national uniform swing would imply. The high combined Lab and LD vote (61%) means that the potential for effective tactical voting is very high.
The list of 40 Blue Wall seats, all in the South, is:
Bournemouth East Chelsea and Fulham Cheltenham Chingford and Woodford Green Chippenham Chipping Barnet Cities Of London and Westminster Colchester Esher and Walton Filton and Bradley Stoke Finchley and Golders Green Guildford Harrow East Hendon Henley Hitchin and Harpenden Lewes Milton Keynes North Milton Keynes South Mole Valley Reading West Romsey and Southampton North South Cambridgeshire South East Cambridgeshire South West Surrey St Ives Sutton and Cheam Taunton Deane Thornbury and Yate Totnes Truro and Falmouth Tunbridge Wells Uxbridge and South Ruislip Wantage Watford Wells West Dorset Wimbledon Winchester Woking Wokingham Wycombe
I think for Labour to win anything like a substantial majority, there has to be tactical voting on a scale never seen before, I think in certain seats this will happen, but nationwide, I'm far from convinced
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Sorry but it has definitely got worse since Brexit. And while eg Americans need a passport to travel to Europe, they can travel unfettered around their own continent, whereas we need to stand in line and get our passport stamped to visit a country 22 miles away. So it's not really a comparable situation.
...and we have to clear out after 90 days. Why did we do this to ourselves?
That’s possibly the most annoying thing of all. I was planning on retiring in France.
Wealth tax... bring it on. Have every Tory back in the fold to remove it plus every aspirational white van man.in the UK and their families. Pensioners paying NI. Bring it on. Have every pensioner voting Tory.
Loony ideas from a loony party.
Many pensioners - to their credit - support the idea of paying NI if you continue to work past retirement age. It is a strange anomaly and many can see the unfairness of stopping paying NI just because you reach a certain age.
Turkeys do not vote for an early Christmas. Whatever the polling might say, it's bollocks... unless pensioners get increased pensions as a result of extra ni.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
Labour leads by 10% in the Blue Wall. In 2019, Labour came THIRD in these seats.
Blue Wall Voting Intention (28-29 Jan.):
Labour 42% (+2) Conservative 32% (+2) Liberal Democrat 19% (-2) Reform UK 4% (-2) Green 4% (+1) Other 0% (–)
Changes +/- 11 Jan.
Anyone have the original 2019 scores do we can see movement from then? The Con-LD swing is going to very important.
It's quite tricky in some of the Blue Wall seats. If the result last time was something like Con 40 LD 31 Lab 25, it's likely that Labour is now ahead if you go by personal preference (which is what polls mostly measure). But you can guarantee that in that sort of seats, both LDs and Lab will go hard on "Only we can win here", and the Tories could win there as a result.
The Blue Wall polling, with change compared to GE 2019 % share for those 40 constituencies taken from the R&W report, is as follows:
Labour 42% (+21%) Con 32% (-18%) LD 19% (-8%)
I read the implications of this somewhat differently to you Nick. I don't think that there are that many seats in the list where Labour and the LDs will end up battling it out to challenge the Conservatives AND where the LDs efforts will effectively stymie Labour and rescue a Conservative MP. I think that tactical voting considerations will outweigh any such effect - it'll be fairly obvious which party is the main challenger in each seat. The Conservatives should fear a repeat of 1997, when this led to them losing many more seats than a national uniform swing would imply. The high combined Lab and LD vote (61%) means that the potential for effective tactical voting is very high.
The list of 40 Blue Wall seats, all in the South, is:
Bournemouth East Chelsea and Fulham Cheltenham Chingford and Woodford Green Chippenham Chipping Barnet Cities Of London and Westminster Colchester Esher and Walton Filton and Bradley Stoke Finchley and Golders Green Guildford Harrow East Hendon Henley Hitchin and Harpenden Lewes Milton Keynes North Milton Keynes South Mole Valley Reading West Romsey and Southampton North South Cambridgeshire South East Cambridgeshire South West Surrey St Ives Sutton and Cheam Taunton Deane Thornbury and Yate Totnes Truro and Falmouth Tunbridge Wells Uxbridge and South Ruislip Wantage Watford Wells West Dorset Wimbledon Winchester Woking Wokingham Wycombe
From 1997-2010 Labour and the LDs won Winchester, Wells, Watford, Truro, Thornbury and Yate, Taunton, Sutton and Cheam, St Ives, Romsey, Reading West, both Milton Keynes seats, Lewes,Hendon, Harrow East, Guildford, Finchley, Colchester and Cheltenham at least once from that list.
So I wouldn't call all of those seats blue wall, more lean Tory marginals
Labour leads by 10% in the Blue Wall. In 2019, Labour came THIRD in these seats.
Blue Wall Voting Intention (28-29 Jan.):
Labour 42% (+2) Conservative 32% (+2) Liberal Democrat 19% (-2) Reform UK 4% (-2) Green 4% (+1) Other 0% (–)
Changes +/- 11 Jan.
Anyone have the original 2019 scores do we can see movement from then? The Con-LD swing is going to very important.
It's quite tricky in some of the Blue Wall seats. If the result last time was something like Con 40 LD 31 Lab 25, it's likely that Labour is now ahead if you go by personal preference (which is what polls mostly measure). But you can guarantee that in that sort of seats, both LDs and Lab will go hard on "Only we can win here", and the Tories could win there as a result.
The Blue Wall polling, with change compared to GE 2019 % share for those 40 constituencies taken from the R&W report, is as follows:
Labour 42% (+21%) Con 32% (-18%) LD 19% (-8%)
I read the implications of this somewhat differently to you Nick. I don't think that there are that many seats in the list where Labour and the LDs will end up battling it out to challenge the Conservatives AND where the LDs efforts will effectively stymie Labour and rescue a Conservative MP. I think that tactical voting considerations will outweigh any such effect - it'll be fairly obvious which party is the main challenger in each seat. The Conservatives should fear a repeat of 1997, when this led to them losing many more seats than a national uniform swing would imply. The high combined Lab and LD vote (61%) means that the potential for effective tactical voting is very high.
The list of 40 Blue Wall seats, all in the South, is:
Bournemouth East Chelsea and Fulham Cheltenham Chingford and Woodford Green Chippenham Chipping Barnet Cities Of London and Westminster Colchester Esher and Walton Filton and Bradley Stoke Finchley and Golders Green Guildford Harrow East Hendon Henley Hitchin and Harpenden Lewes Milton Keynes North Milton Keynes South Mole Valley Reading West Romsey and Southampton North South Cambridgeshire South East Cambridgeshire South West Surrey St Ives Sutton and Cheam Taunton Deane Thornbury and Yate Totnes Truro and Falmouth Tunbridge Wells Uxbridge and South Ruislip Wantage Watford Wells West Dorset Wimbledon Winchester Woking Wokingham Wycombe
I think for Labour to win anything like a substantial majority, there has to be tactical voting on a scale never seen before, I think in certain seats this will happen, but nationwide, I'm far from convinced
I think they can get a substantial majority without tactical voting. That’s what the UNS models show after all.
For a truly epochal wipeout they probably need tactical voting on an unprecedented scale though.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
I'd say we're all tribal, we just choose different tribes. We can train ourselves out of this tribal identity ( maybe c.f. May's 'citizens of nowhere' though I suspect they are still members of some tribe or other) but it's not a natural thing.
On a (very) personal level I'd agree with Tim and Richard's no borders thing, but it ranks alongside anarchosyndicalism for me as a 'nice to have, not very realistic'.
Oops. Edited to remove chaff that I'd drafted then thought better of.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
Indeed. I was always very happy being English, British, European and “global”. And a Londoner, though I’m not native to London.
By then they will almost certainly own property themselves given the age of first property ownership is 39 and be starting to look to retirement
HYUFD I am telling you as a young person, it's not going to happen.
I own a flat, I hate the Tories for what they have done to us. You are finished.
Not many young people own a flat though
Yes because of our failure of economic policy.
Housing crash now, fuck the elderly.
Extend NI to all income. That would level things up a lot.
And then merge income tax and NI. We don't need multiple classes of income tax.
Whilst I agree with you this would effectively be a big tax increase on anyone earning above the upper earnings threshold as well on the over 65s.
Tax would go from 32% for lower earners to 52% for higher rate earners and up to 57% for top rate earners.
You'd probably have to cut it at the same time to make the rate fair. So not sure how much extra revenue you'd raise - still makes it cleaner though.
No it wouldn't, NI has an upper limit, you just incorporate it into new tax bands. Start off with those and then simplify into two new bands of 30% until £60k and 45% over £60k or something like that once people are used to seeing their tax rate at 32%, 42% and 47% and understand how high that actually.
By then they will almost certainly own property themselves given the age of first property ownership is 39 and be starting to look to retirement
HYUFD I am telling you as a young person, it's not going to happen.
I own a flat, I hate the Tories for what they have done to us. You are finished.
Not many young people own a flat though
Yes because of our failure of economic policy.
Housing crash now, fuck the elderly.
Extend NI to all income. That would level things up a lot.
You might as well increase IT instead and stop messing around with NI and abolish it completely.
I've had a horrendous year trying to work out what NI I (a) should, and (b) could have paid, and (c) what it actually credits me with. And repeat that for Mrs C as well.
HMRC website and online statements are about as useful as a square table missing a leg - i. e. seriously incomplete and unreliable. And, of course, today is the last day one can correct the "could" bit as I have recently remarked.
No.
We should keep NI separate and increase it not income tax when it comes to paying for the State pension and NHS so people can actually see how much of their own income goes to fund those specific areas (pensioners should pay it too).
Virtually every other OECD nation funds most State healthcare through social insurance not income tax
NI is income tax, not insurance though. So what's your point?
As a hint, if you're still too thick to figure it out, which makes you pay more NI as an employee: Taking up smoking, or getting promoted and a pay rise?
Insurance is worried about the former, tax the latter.
No it isn't, National insurance was created by Lloyd George specifically to fund health insurance and contributory unemployment benefits. The fact it rises with income now doesn't change that.
Income tax was created by Pitt to fund war with France.
If we should only use NI for what it was intended for does that mean we should also have stopped paying Income Tax when we stopped fighting France, or do you think we should declare war on them again?
So as we are paying income tax (made a transfer to HMRC over the weekend) we must still be at war with France!
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Like I said, this is a perfect dress rehearsal for PB discussions post Scottish Indy if ever a unionist dare speak.
Anyway I am now settling down to dinner in what is almost certainly not the 14th best restaurant in Europe or even in the freezing cold Danish answer to the Greenwich peninsula that is Nordhavn.
Yes, was there in 2019. Just around the corner from the Dutch tax authority headquarters.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I might add that I don't consider myself as European and not British, but as European and British. And English. And a South Londoner. And a variety of other identities.
It feels like a fairly normal thing. Lots of people identify strongly with their county as well as their country. So why not other scales of identity too?
Because of the Johnson et al version of "Take Back Control", meaning ultimately control to Westminster. Yes, Mayors are given packages of devolved money to spend, but they mostly don't get powers to raise their own money- it's a definite "Who's Daddy?" relationship. Similarly, repatriated powers have gone to Westminster, not Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast. Multiple overlapping loyalties seem to be a problem.
But returning to the intitial question, yes it ought to be possible to hold multiple identities. I grew up on the south coast of England, in a town that was the jumping point for the D Day landings. France is close, closer than (say) Yorkshire, and there's a shared history there. I spent seven years learning the French language. Part of my understanding of who I am is about living on the edge of a continent with a shared specific history, experience of religion, economics, climate and geography.
And no, being out of a specific bit of political arrangement doesn't negate that. But to make a point of pulling out of almost everything that pretty much all other nations are happy to be part of... it makes a difference, and not in a good way.
But apparently it's a delusion born of inferiority, and I am to be pitied.
By then they will almost certainly own property themselves given the age of first property ownership is 39 and be starting to look to retirement
HYUFD I am telling you as a young person, it's not going to happen.
I own a flat, I hate the Tories for what they have done to us. You are finished.
Not many young people own a flat though
Yes because of our failure of economic policy.
Housing crash now, fuck the elderly.
Extend NI to all income. That would level things up a lot.
You might as well increase IT instead and stop messing around with NI and abolish it completely.
I've had a horrendous year trying to work out what NI I (a) should, and (b) could have paid, and (c) what it actually credits me with. And repeat that for Mrs C as well.
HMRC website and online statements are about as useful as a square table missing a leg - i. e. seriously incomplete and unreliable. And, of course, today is the last day one can correct the "could" bit as I have recently remarked.
No.
We should keep NI separate and increase it not income tax when it comes to paying for the State pension and NHS so people can actually see how much of their own income goes to fund those specific areas (pensioners should pay it too).
Virtually every other OECD nation funds most State healthcare through social insurance not income tax
NI is income tax, not insurance though. So what's your point?
As a hint, if you're still too thick to figure it out, which makes you pay more NI as an employee: Taking up smoking, or getting promoted and a pay rise?
Insurance is worried about the former, tax the latter.
No it isn't, National insurance was created by Lloyd George specifically to fund health insurance and contributory unemployment benefits. The fact it rises with income now doesn't change that.
Income tax was created by Pitt to fund war with France.
If we should only use NI for what it was intended for does that mean we should also have stopped paying Income Tax when we stopped fighting France, or do you think we should declare war on them again?
So as we are paying income tax (made a transfer to HMRC over the weekend) we must still be at war with France!
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Like I said, this is a perfect dress rehearsal for PB discussions post Scottish Indy if ever a unionist dare speak.
Anyway I am now settling down to dinner in what is almost certainly not the 14th best restaurant in Europe or even in the freezing cold Danish answer to the Greenwich peninsula that is Nordhavn.
Yes, was there in 2019. Just around the corner from the Dutch tax authority headquarters.
Tangential question: Skat/Skatt (ie the tax authority name in the Scandinavian countries) autocorrects to Zakat. I wonder if there is some long distant joint etymology.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I might add that I don't consider myself as European and not British, but as European and British. And English. And a South Londoner. And a variety of other identities.
It feels like a fairly normal thing. Lots of people identify strongly with their county as well as their country. So why not other scales of identity too?
Because of the Johnson et al version of "Take Back Control", meaning ultimately control to Westminster. Yes, Mayors are given packages of devolved money to spend, but they mostly don't get powers to raise their own money- it's a definite "Who's Daddy?" relationship. Similarly, repatriated powers have gone to Westminster, not Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast. Multiple overlapping loyalties seem to be a problem.
But returning to the intitial question, yes it ought to be possible to hold multiple identities. I grew up on the south coast of England, in a town that was the jumping point for the D Day landings. France is close, closer than (say) Yorkshire, and there's a shared history there. I spent seven years learning the French language. Part of my understanding of who I am is about living on the edge of a continent with a shared specific history, experience of religion, economics, climate and geography.
And no, being out of a specific bit of political arrangement doesn't negate that. But to make a point of pulling out of almost everything that pretty much all other nations are happy to be part of... it makes a difference, and not in a good way.
But apparently it's a delusion born of inferiority, and I am to be pitied.
Why, thanks guys.
I agree with much of your sentiment, but both Richard and LuckyGuy were, I think, using 'delusional', 'inferiority' and 'pity' to refer to Tim's visceral response to the passport experience, not the wider arguments.
Labour leads by 10% in the Blue Wall. In 2019, Labour came THIRD in these seats.
Blue Wall Voting Intention (28-29 Jan.):
Labour 42% (+2) Conservative 32% (+2) Liberal Democrat 19% (-2) Reform UK 4% (-2) Green 4% (+1) Other 0% (–)
Changes +/- 11 Jan.
Anyone have the original 2019 scores do we can see movement from then? The Con-LD swing is going to very important.
It's quite tricky in some of the Blue Wall seats. If the result last time was something like Con 40 LD 31 Lab 25, it's likely that Labour is now ahead if you go by personal preference (which is what polls mostly measure). But you can guarantee that in that sort of seats, both LDs and Lab will go hard on "Only we can win here", and the Tories could win there as a result.
The Blue Wall polling, with change compared to GE 2019 % share for those 40 constituencies taken from the R&W report, is as follows:
Labour 42% (+21%) Con 32% (-18%) LD 19% (-8%)
I read the implications of this somewhat differently to you Nick. I don't think that there are that many seats in the list where Labour and the LDs will end up battling it out to challenge the Conservatives AND where the LDs efforts will effectively stymie Labour and rescue a Conservative MP. I think that tactical voting considerations will outweigh any such effect - it'll be fairly obvious which party is the main challenger in each seat. The Conservatives should fear a repeat of 1997, when this led to them losing many more seats than a national uniform swing would imply. The high combined Lab and LD vote (61%) means that the potential for effective tactical voting is very high.
The list of 40 Blue Wall seats, all in the South, is:
Bournemouth East Chelsea and Fulham Cheltenham Chingford and Woodford Green Chippenham Chipping Barnet Cities Of London and Westminster Colchester Esher and Walton Filton and Bradley Stoke Finchley and Golders Green Guildford Harrow East Hendon Henley Hitchin and Harpenden Lewes Milton Keynes North Milton Keynes South Mole Valley Reading West Romsey and Southampton North South Cambridgeshire South East Cambridgeshire South West Surrey St Ives Sutton and Cheam Taunton Deane Thornbury and Yate Totnes Truro and Falmouth Tunbridge Wells Uxbridge and South Ruislip Wantage Watford Wells West Dorset Wimbledon Winchester Woking Wokingham Wycombe
I think for Labour to win anything like a substantial majority, there has to be tactical voting on a scale never seen before, I think in certain seats this will happen, but nationwide, I'm far from convinced
I think they can get a substantial majority without tactical voting. That’s what the UNS models show after all.
For a truly epochal wipeout they probably need tactical voting on an unprecedented scale though.
That's not impossible, though. There was a hefty tactical squeeze in 1997, and that was on top of a sustantial tactical vote in 1992. For 2024, the starting point is 2019, when the tactical position was neutral-to-anti Labour (thanks Jez, thez.)
The squeeze has the potential to be immense. It may not happen, but the space is there.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
I've never got this argument.
Britons share strong linguistic, historical, geographic, cultural and institutional similarities that allow them to unite under one nationality.
I don't feel anything like the same affinities or ties with continental European countries and I think the equivalence is a false one.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
Very dismissive. You may think it deluded that people valued being part of the EU , that it wasn’t about economics . Do you not understand why Remainers are so hacked off . Joe Bloggs decided one day to vote to remove something treasured by others . You may think it’s deluded because you clearly never felt that way. People do not like having their freedoms removed by others.
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. .
My neighbour is tearing his hair out. Runs a business which involved a lot of trade on the continent, shipping of parts both ways, and travelling to work on machinery.
He's in despair. It's now a total utter disaster. Business ruined by fucking Brexit.
Those of us with a property in the EU (France in my case) have gone from many years of being able to work from there and come and go as we please to having our time severely restricted. It has changed my life and many others I know for considerably and for the worse. I am unforgiving. I just heard Lord Frost on radio cheerily saying how successful it would be. I felt like throttling him.
You don't have any idea how you sound to a normal person, do you?
80% of my work was in Europe. I don't know whether or not I sound normal but I've always paid tax on my European earnings in the UK and many in my profession do the same. Advertising/Media is one of the UK biggest earners so a bit of an own goal. Maybe you're still at school?
You don’t really feel Brexit directly until you travel in Europe. Most of the rest of the time it’s just a thing, out there in the media and in the trade stats.
I’ve just had my periodic reminder: the mini-indignity, the self imposed micro-aggression, of the passport control experience arriving in Copenhagen.
First the two queues, one empty the other full and slow moving. That very visible record of the 2016 vote.
Then the polite but firm interrogation: why am I here, what is my business, how long am I staying?
Finally the increasingly difficult search for spare pages to put that pointless stamp on. What happens when I run out of pages? Do I then need to get a second, black passport?
I leave the airport feeling a foreigner in a way I never did before Brexit. I suppose for my children’s generation this will just seem normal.
Sorry but I just don't get this. I probably travelled more around Europe and the rest of the world than the vast majority of people on here - Leon and a few others accepted. Certainly I have been back and forth around both EU and non EU countries continuously for the last 35 years. As far as queues go I see no difference. Arriving at CDG or Schipol or Copenhagen was always a pain with long, long queues because we weren't in Schengen. I have seen no change at all in that since Brexit. Yes you now have to answer questions and yes you get a stamp but so what? These ARE foreign countries so claiming you didn't feel like a foreigner before and do now is just deluded.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
Of course you wouldn’t get it and I wouldn’t expect you to. You voted Brexit. You saw the EU as a bunch of foreign countries, and the relationship as transactional.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
In that case I pity you. I genuinely consider that to be a deluded attitude.
I'm fascinated by it: I think 90% of the "I've always felt european" people are show offs or liars, but I know TimS isn't. So can you explain it to us? Did you always feel like this? Come to feel that way? Why european and not "Citizen of the world" etc?
Speaking for myself, my grandmother was a refugee from Vienna and my grandparents lived in Vienna until I was eleven, and we often visited them in Austria. Much more often then we ever visited Scotland, Wales or Ireland.
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
I had a Dutch/Belgian grandmother. And I could not give a f**k. Maybe I'm reading too much into TimS's post, but to toy with the idea of inventing some continental ancestors just reiterates to me that this could be a bit of an inferiority thing?
Not really. It seemed a very natural extension to the way Britain is organised, where we're one United Kingdom, and yet we still have separate national football teams, a Scottish legal system, etc.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
There is an overlooked problem here.
I am happy to be a citizen of the world, but that does not mean I am happy either to share political decision making with the current government of North Korea or Mr Putin.
Brexit was partly about identity - cultural and all that, but was mostly about power. About who decides and where. At what level are some key decisions made.
The reality of sovereignty is shown by various means. Among top ones might be: UN membership, currency, central bank, governance, legislative power, legal system, border control, armed forces, capacity to treat with other powers.
By 2016 the UK was in a hybrid state over a number of these aspects. Other EU countries were (and are) even more so. They all seem pleased with it. Fine. "Ever closer union" is the goal, and that is what they are getting. I do not think the UK will ever be reconciled to either the process or the hybrid nature of key powers. It may be irrational, but it is still true.
Comments
A similar compromise will be needed on homosexual marriage
This is where the council elections will be important. Not the absolute results, as the LDs always do better than in general elections, but the swing from 2019 of each of the major parties. May 2019 was the high water mark if both Lib Dem and BXP fortunes, relatively poor for Labour and disastrous for Con.
It is also wildly parochial. This is how the other 93% of the world works.
There are legitimate arguments made by Remainers about Brexit. Passport control and queues aren't one of them.
And how does one actively proceed "to not remarry divorcees"? Is there a special Service for the Not Remarrying of Divorced Members of the Church?
Tax would go from 32% for lower earners to 52% for higher rate earners and up to 57% for top rate earners.
You'd probably have to cut it at the same time to make the rate fair. So not sure how much extra revenue you'd raise - still makes it cleaner though.
Perhaps something along these lines:
"BRETHREN, in the primitive Church there was a godly discipline, that, at the beginning of Lent, such persons as stood convicted of notorious sin were put to open penance, and punished in this world, that their souls might be saved in the day of the Lord; and that others, admonished by their example, might be the more afraid to offend.
Instead whereof, until the said discipline may be restored again, (which is much to be wished,) it is thought good that at this time (in the presence of you all) should be read the general sentences of God's cursing against impenitent sinners ..."
Horse wankerer in Ankara.
All aboard for the Trans-Pacific Partnership ! Let's enjoy getting on the fast track to East Asian glamour, as gleamingly clean monorails wind and bend their way around London and Hull , creating a new Tokyo.
I voted remain, I saw Europe as my country, and the relationship as something other than transactional. The passport control process is the moment that visceral loss is most felt.
Because so many of his Russian acquaintances has had their yachts seized…
Section 8
Remarriage of divorced persons.
(2) No clergyman of the Church of England or the Church in Wales shall be compelled—
(a) to solemnise the marriage of any person whose former marriage has been dissolved and whose former spouse is still living; or
(b) to permit the marriage of such a person to be solemnised in the church or chapel of which he is the minister.
Yes, there is provision for 'blessing' civil ceremonies in these situations.
Lots of clergy use both of these provisions.
"In June 2016 there were 58,702 NHS staff with a recorded EU nationality, and in June 2022 there were 70,735 – an apparent rise. But to present this as the full story would be misleading, because there are over 57,000 more staff for whom nationality is known now than in 2016. It is very likely that there has been an overall increase in the number of NHS staff with EU nationality since 2016, but we can’t be sure about the scale of the change, and it would be misleading to calculate an increase based solely on the two numbers above.
Claims about changes in the number of EU staff (or other nationality groups) which don’t mention the importance of staff with unknown nationality should be regarded with due scepticism."
At the same time there has been a very large increase in the number of Asian and African health workers in the NHS. So basically the numbers of EU staff have not changed or have risen slightly whilst the numbers of Asian and African have increased significantly. Overall the number of non British workers has risen from around 11% in 2016 to 16% now (accepting the caution mentioned by the HoC library).
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7783/
I think you are right however that probably a bigger effect is seen in social care.
Which you have to respect him for. Someone has to do it.
Maria Miller is useless but harmless.
My attitude is almost the inverse of yours - the Maastrict Treaty imposed on me a citizenship that I never asked for and never wanted to.
And I have always considered European countries foreign states.
I'm arguing that's what happens if you mash the primary rates together.
I suppose you could reset all the income tax thresholds and recalibrate them.
I’d have more time for Leavers if they simply said more sovereignty is worth being poorer . Worth losing FOM for and just stopped trying to polish the economic arguments turd .
There is no good Brexit for the economy because no sane country has ever put up trade barriers to its closest and biggest market.
They are morally and ideologically bankrupt.
Fiscally too, to some extent.
We need them like we need David Icke or followers of the Heaven’s Gate cult.
I confess I never self-identified as “European”, but I treasured the freedoms associated with European Union membership.
Britain is richer and freer inside the EU.
For me, the romance of getting a slightly archaically large stamp in a ludicrously non-technological piece of technology like a physical passport (that I have probably just picked out of a puddle, or run back onto the plane to grab out of the pocket in the back of the seat in front of me where I accidentally left it) is one of the few upsides of the whole sorry Brexit business.
That and the abstract idea of democratic sovereignty. If only that hadn't been a figment of our imagination.
Brexiteers were derided for thinking such thoughts. Despite all the ghastly chaos it remains by miles the most significant issue in the debate and why voting Brexit was, sadly, the less bad of two bad options.
It remains obvious that most UK people, given a choice, want a single market in goods and services and a common travel area but are absolutely opposed to political union.
Just one of those things.
As for citizen of the world I realise my views on this are niche but I am not a fan of borders full stop. The more global governance the better.
I don’t see it as something to be pitied,
let’s face it that’s just PB rhetoric, but certainly something to be acknowledged.
You are idealising a particular point in time that simply cannot be recreated.
I think, on reflection, even you'd agree that's not a sensible position.
However, I *think* I think that I'd do more harm to the kids by continuing to keep my head down in a system that is truly, truly broken.
Problem is, I don't think sorting out pay (important thought it is) will fix the system on its own.
If they wanted to be really generous they could reduce the tax rates to allow for the extra income, on a cost neutral basis.
I would prefer a Liberal opposition to a Conservative one.
Of course, such a thing is not going to happen, but if it could happen it would start with the utter annihilation of Tories.
Wasn't the best written of my posts. Long day.
But I don't feel any attachment to the other countries and it doesn't bother me to have to queue or go through a check. Indeed to some extent it reassures me. It certainly isn't something that registers in any way for me in the Brexit debate because the borders would still apply to the other 93% of the world's population.
The only part that could ever replace the Tories as the main party of the right is RefUK just as Labour replaced the Liberals as the main party of the liberal left 100 years ago
It’s not fxcken rocket science !
That said, although I'm disappointed by Britain leaving the EU, I'm finding that this sense of my identity is not dependent on British membership of EU institutions. That might be different for someone who doesn't have such familial connections, and I'm on track for two EU passports by the middle of the decade too, which somewhat takes the edge off.
It feels like a fairly normal thing. Lots of people identify strongly with their county as well as their country. So why not other scales of identity too?
Labour 42% (+21%)
Con 32% (-18%)
LD 19% (-8%)
I read the implications of this somewhat differently to you Nick. I don't think that there are that many seats in the list where Labour and the LDs will end up battling it out to challenge the Conservatives AND where the LDs efforts will effectively stymie Labour and rescue a Conservative MP. I think that tactical voting considerations will outweigh any such effect - it'll be fairly obvious which party is the main challenger in each seat. The Conservatives should fear a repeat of 1997, when this led to them losing many more seats than a national uniform swing would imply. The high combined Lab and LD vote (61%) means that the potential for effective tactical voting is very high.
The list of 40 Blue Wall seats, all in the South, is:
Bournemouth East
Chelsea and Fulham
Cheltenham
Chingford and Woodford Green
Chippenham
Chipping Barnet
Cities Of London and Westminster
Colchester
Esher and Walton
Filton and Bradley Stoke
Finchley and Golders Green
Guildford
Harrow East
Hendon
Henley
Hitchin and Harpenden
Lewes
Milton Keynes North
Milton Keynes South
Mole Valley
Reading West
Romsey and Southampton North
South Cambridgeshire
South East Cambridgeshire
South West Surrey
St Ives
Sutton and Cheam
Taunton Deane
Thornbury and Yate
Totnes
Truro and Falmouth
Tunbridge Wells
Uxbridge and South Ruislip
Wantage
Watford
Wells
West Dorset
Wimbledon
Winchester
Woking
Wokingham
Wycombe
Anyway I am now settling down to dinner in what is almost certainly not the 14th best restaurant in Europe or even in the freezing cold Danish answer to the Greenwich peninsula that is Nordhavn.
This has always struck me as a sign of confidence, that we are comfortable with holding multiple identities simultaneously, and so to have an additional European identity is a simple natural progression.
It's one of the things that I have always understood least about Eurosceptics and Leavers, because they seemed to regard being part of a European Union as a threat to their British identity, while not seeing being part of a United Kingdom to be a threat to their English/Cornish/Yorkshire/Welsh/Scottish identity (unless they were similarly afflicted Welsh or Scottish nationalists I suppose). Perhaps you could think of that as a lack of confidence in British identity, or a sense of inferiority of not being able to retain that identity as part of a larger whole.
So I wouldn't call all of those seats blue wall, more lean Tory marginals
For a truly epochal wipeout they probably need tactical voting on an unprecedented scale though.
We can train ourselves out of this tribal identity ( maybe c.f. May's 'citizens of nowhere' though I suspect they are still members of some tribe or other) but it's not a natural thing.
On a (very) personal level I'd agree with Tim and Richard's no borders thing, but it ranks alongside anarchosyndicalism for me as a 'nice to have, not very realistic'.
Oops. Edited to remove chaff that I'd drafted then thought better of.
That explains Brexit. Yes, was there in 2019. Just around the corner from the Dutch tax authority headquarters.
But returning to the intitial question, yes it ought to be possible to hold multiple identities. I grew up on the south coast of England, in a town that was the jumping point for the D Day landings. France is close, closer than (say) Yorkshire, and there's a shared history there. I spent seven years learning the French language. Part of my understanding of who I am is about living on the edge of a continent with a shared specific history, experience of religion, economics, climate and geography.
And no, being out of a specific bit of political arrangement doesn't negate that. But to make a point of pulling out of almost everything that pretty much all other nations are happy to be part of... it makes a difference, and not in a good way.
But apparently it's a delusion born of inferiority, and I am to be pitied.
Why, thanks guys.
The squeeze has the potential to be immense. It may not happen, but the space is there.
Britons share strong linguistic, historical, geographic, cultural and institutional similarities that allow them to unite under one nationality.
I don't feel anything like the same affinities or ties with continental European countries and I think the equivalence is a false one.
I am happy to be a citizen of the world, but that does not mean I am happy either to share political decision making with the current government of North Korea or Mr Putin.
Brexit was partly about identity - cultural and all that, but was mostly about power. About who decides and where. At what level are some key decisions made.
The reality of sovereignty is shown by various means. Among top ones might be: UN membership, currency, central bank, governance, legislative power, legal system, border control, armed forces, capacity to treat with other powers.
By 2016 the UK was in a hybrid state over a number of these aspects. Other EU countries were (and are) even more so. They all seem pleased with it. Fine. "Ever closer union" is the goal, and that is what they are getting. I do not think the UK will ever be reconciled to either the process or the hybrid nature of key powers. It may be irrational, but it is still true.