I confess it does make me warm to Sunak, a little. He looks smooth and professional. Smiling and yet firm
I doubt if it will move the polls a jot. But if he can pull it off: well done Rishi
The deal is done. He has pulled it off. He cannot repudiate it now and it will get through Parliament if there is a vote on it. The only issue is whether the ERG kicks up a fuss or not. They would be mad too. But more than a few of them are genuinely unhinged.
It will be very interesting to see how Johnson and Truss play this. If they accept the deal, they will essentially be saying Sunak got something they couldn't get. If they don't, they further stoke the Tory civil war.
I like Boris, still, and I think history will be much kinder to him than PB - for multiple reasons. He is one of the most significant postwar UK PMs, despite his short tenure
But as Boris would say, “Fuck Boris”. Enough. Haddaway and write your memoirs, and make your millions
Paragraph 1. No, he was disastrous and history will see through the bluster and bullshit. For those on here who benchmark Brown and May as the low point for British Prime Ministers, Johnson went lower, much lower. His legacy as the worst Prime Minister has been saved only by Truss, who was worse, and those following on like Sunak who are working to take the sting out of his toxic premiership.
It's odd that so many here on a political betting site describe the DUP and ERG as bonkers. They are far from that, being quite rational, calculating and disciplined in their political positioning. Where they differ from those calling them bonkers is in their values and aspirations for NI.
It helps to be bonkers. The ERG seems to have been pretty successful in terms of obtaining political goals over the last decades. (True, the DUP are both bonkers and been unsuccessful ).
Let's, e.g., compare it to politicians who are keen on reducing wealth inequality. This is a political goal that has gone backwards over the last decades (or at best stagnated). No matter who is in power, there has been pretty meagre progress.
As we are (probably) coming to an end of a period of Tory rule, it is instructive to consider how Tory Governments (first Thatcher and then the Brexiteers) have changed the UK very dramatically.
By comparison, the Labour Governments of my lifetime -- though sometimes competent and sometimes incompetent -- have not achieved any comparably lasting changes in the UK.
I'm no fan of the last Labour government, but the last Labour Government achieved some lasting changes in the UK. Notably more equality for homosexuality, although that was a global phenomenon and they fell short of legalising equality in marriage itself which fell to David Cameron to achieve.
Devolution and BoE independence too, and the Minimum Wage.
What's remarkable though is that almost everything that the last Labour Government achieved was done in 1997/98. I'd be curious if even the most ardent of Labour supporters can name any lasting changes that were introduced from 1999 onwards?
Minimum wage -- I grant you. The Tories would never introduced that. But, it has not had much effect in reducing wealth inequality. So, in my book, it falls into the category of tinkering at the edges.
Devolution has been a disaster for Wales. It is poorer now that it was before 1999. The standard of Government has been abysmally low.
I will leave our Scottish posters to describe whether devolution has been good for Scotland.
You didn't ask for changes for the better, just lasting changes. Devolution certainly is a lasting change, even if it hasn't improved things.
On the same basis, perhaps you could include our indebtedness now as a lasting change brought about by Labour, but I don't know anyone from Labour who admits that was intentional, unlike devolution.
Increase in debt under last Labour government: £681bn. Increase in debt under current Tory government: £1,543bn. And counting.
That's a legacy of the deficit that Labour bequeathed.
Unless you think the Tories could or should have implemented a form of austerity so severe they ran a neutral budget from year one?
It was a legacy of the worst global financial crisis since WW2.
Which thanks to Brown's decade of preparation we were uniquely well-placed to weather?
You think Gordon Brown should have shut down the City and dug a big hole in the Midlands to sell commodities to China? Well, it worked for Australia.
If he'd been running a budget surplus as he should have for that stage of the economic cycle, then the deficit spending would have been far less significant afterwards and purely cyclical.
I’d say that Labour’s biggest long-term failure was letting house prices rip from 1999 to 2007.
2007 was the year that levels of home ownership began falling.
Not sure Labour could have donw much about it.
Banks shifted their lending criteria from 3x+1x earnings to 4x joint earnings and prices across the country increased to reflect the additional money people could borrow (for good and bad).I watched it happen down south in 2001/2 and then up north between 2003/4....
Brown wasn't shy about regulating the banks.
The problem is, he regulated all the wrong things...
Every CDO trader had lodged a photocopy of their passport with HR.
They had all completed their multiple choice exams (or got the desk junior to do it for them) - in how not to commit fraud. “An Orc from Mordor emails you, claiming to have a large stash of Mithril, following the fall of the Barad- Dur. Do you (a) help him sell it on the metals exchange, bypassing all regulations…. (e) call compliance”
And that's who to primarily blame for crashing the financial system. Those who did it, not those who supposedly provoked it by being lax or complacent. Similar to Putin and Ukraine.
Just as those who are primarily to blame for crashing our national Treasury accounts are those who did it (ie Gordon Brown), not those who supposedly provoked it like the Americans, or the financial sector or anyone else.
Brown was responsible for the Treasury, borrowed in the good times, then when the bad times came he inevitably had to borrow more but had no room left to manoeuvre. You can try and pin the blame on anyone else if you want a scapegoat, but those who did it, are the Treasury.
Ah I see. So 'he didn't fix the roof when the sun was shining' then?
This really is the most frightful tosh but I'm minded to cut some slack - because I sense your take on the Crash derives mainly from the Tory GE campaign of 2010. You swallowed it hook line & sinker at an impressionable time of life.
A nice political slogan but the problem is much more pernicious than that.
The country had a fantastic roof in 2001/02 that the Iron Chancellor had pledged to maintain. That's part of why I voted Labour for the only and first time in my life in 2001. Had the crisis struck in 01/02 then the Treasury would have been prepared and had the wherewithal to cope.
What's worse about Gordon Brown is that he took a fixed roof and broke it. He took the roof off in 2002 and never replace it as he'd abolished winter/boom and bust.
Pure hubris.
There's your problem right there. You start with 'Brown to blame' and work backwards, trying to make things fit. End up saying bizarre things like this.
If Brown really did cause the GFC and financial markets malfunction was responsible for public spending you'd say the main problem was the GFC not public spending. So by accident you'd be right in that case.
There's nothing bizarre about what I said and Brown certainly made the Crisis worse by his awful mess of regulations as he'd been warned about in advance and Max explained.
But my problem was that blowing up the deficit pre crisis was an accident waiting to happen for any future crisis. And crises come, inevitably, as you can't abolish them. That's why I didn't vote Labour in 2005, despite not liking Howard's Tories and not "thinking what they were thinking", I could see what was coming on the budget.
In 2001/02 we had a balanced budget. When crises come, and its when not if, the budget typically deteriorates by about 6 to 7%. It did in 08, as standard. Had that happened in 2001/02 then the deficit would have been only 5 to 6% afterwards, not 10%, and wouldn't have needed austerity to fix that. It could have been absorbed as part of the economic cycle, which is exactly what it was.
We were prepared for the next crisis back then. What happened after, was inexcusable. There is no justification for the pre crisis deficit.
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The Johnson/Frost spin will no doubt be a deal was only possible because they scared the EU rigid with their hardball Protocol Cancellation bill. Nothing at all to do with us dropping the macho theatrics and behaving like mature adults.
But that will not wash. The current, grown-up UK government has made the legal advice clear: the bill was never going to work from a legal standpoint and would have exposed the UK to large compensation payments if enacted. And if the UK government knew that, the EU did too.
Course it won't. But they deal in fantasies. What this actually shows imo is the wasted opportunity to negotiate a better deal in the first place. All it needed was good faith, hard work, focus and professionalism. Instead we got all that 'No Deal is better than a Bad Deal' and 'holding all the cards' perpetual grandstanding nonsense. Then a mad rush to sign something - anything - so Johnson could win his election.
Ukraine's General Staff says that Russian proxies in Oleshky and Skadovsk in Kherson are preparing to flee to Crimea
Russian war hawks have debated the efficacy of fortifications and now they might be taking extra precautions ahead a spring Ukrainian counter-offensive
Ukraine says that the spring counter-offensive will feature more strikes on Russian arms depots and military equipment
Vadym Skibitsky singled out Belgorod as an area for more intense Ukrainian attacks …
With these remarks, Skibitsky is framing the spring counter-offensive as a potential turning point that will liberate Ukraine and expel an estimated 370,000 Russian forces from its territory
Ukraine is downplaying fears of a long war, while Russia is ramping that expectation up
People have been rumour-mongering about supposed Bakhmut counteroffensives for a while now, and there's no video or photos on twitter to show for it. I'm sorry, but I don't think it's happening. Most likely the Ukrainians are pulling the last units out of Bakhmut now, and are hopefully keeping their casualties low as they do so.
A quick look back into the archives finds this news from August 3rd, 2022:
"Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack northwest of Slovyansk and continued efforts to advance on Bakhmut from the northeast, east, and southeast."
Possibly you can find similar if you go further back, but I got bored. It will have taken Russia more than seven months of fighting to take Bakhmut, and it doesn't do them much good.
Ukraine are probably right to hold their reserves back to support counteroffensives towards Melitopol and/or Svatove, and to pull back to the next defensive line to continue wearing down Russian forces.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy (or flint knapping), and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
I confess it does make me warm to Sunak, a little. He looks smooth and professional. Smiling and yet firm
I doubt if it will move the polls a jot. But if he can pull it off: well done Rishi
The deal is done. He has pulled it off. He cannot repudiate it now and it will get through Parliament if there is a vote on it. The only issue is whether the ERG kicks up a fuss or not. They would be mad too. But more than a few of them are genuinely unhinged.
He needs some form of DUP agreement and Stormont up and running before he can say DONE
And if he achieves that, his brief premiership will have at least one impressive legacy
I confess it does make me warm to Sunak, a little. He looks smooth and professional. Smiling and yet firm
I doubt if it will move the polls a jot. But if he can pull it off: well done Rishi
The deal is done. He has pulled it off. He cannot repudiate it now and it will get through Parliament if there is a vote on it. The only issue is whether the ERG kicks up a fuss or not. They would be mad too. But more than a few of them are genuinely unhinged.
I agree with others that this agreement could be more important than the fairly limited practical impacts of the deal. It points the way to a new paradigm of constructive engagement with the EU and good faith negotiations.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
"If you believe you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere". T May 2016
Another good reason to ditch the unelected monarchy.
The King is to meet the president of the European Commission today, a decision that was immediately criticised by unionists and Brexiteer Conservatives as crass, tone deaf and antagonistic.
Buckingham Palace said the decision had been made on the advice of the prime minister and insisted that the King and Ursula von der Leyen would discuss “a range of topics” not simply the Brexit deal that she is expected to seal with Rishi Sunak in Windsor today.
“The King is pleased to meet any world leader if they are visiting Britain and it is the government’s advice that he should do so,” the palace said.
Charles and Von der Leyen will sit down to tea late this afternoon during their meeting in which a range of topics are expected to be discussed, including climate change and the situation in Ukraine.
But Arlene Foster, the former DUP first minister, tweeted: “I cannot quite believe that No 10 would ask the King to become involved in the finalising of a deal as controversial as this one. It’s crass and will go down very badly in NI. We must remember this is not the King’s decision but the government who it appears are tone deaf.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former cabinet minister, told Sky News: “It is surprising that the King will meet Ursula von der Leyen today as it antagonises the people the PM needs to conciliate. It is also constitutionally unwise to involve the King in a matter of immediate political controversy.”
Downing Street insisted the meeting with von der Leyen was a matter for Buckingham Palace. “He firmly believes it’s for the King to make those decisions,” Sunak’s spokesman said.
“It’s not uncommon for his majesty to accept invitations to meet certain leaders, he has met President Duda and President Zelensky recently. He is meeting with the president of the EU today.”
Hang on, I assumed it was the republicans who would be annoyed at the King hosting an EU leader - but its the royalists? Time for the AI or aliens to take over.....
The Queen lost all support when she agreed to Boris Johnson's unlawful prorogation.
The Queen also signed Hilary Benn's delay Brexit Bill, the monarch is neutral on Brexit
One was lawful and the will of our sovereign Parliament, the other was unlawful.
So she wasn't neutral on Brexit.
It was lawful until the SC said it wasn't
It was not.
On your logic it is OK for me to come and steal your car. You can't take me to court, because it's lawful. And you can't prove it is unlawful till you take me to court. Which you can't, because ...
False analogy. There is a law against theft of a motor vehicle. There wasn't a law against prorogation until the partisan court invented it.
The law was always there, just needing to be fished out and thumped on the head of Boris Johnson and his government.
Nope. The first thing the supreme court had to rule on was whether prorogation was even justiciable - i.e within their power to rule on. Only when they had decided that difficult thing, could they then decide the easy thing - that the prorogation was obviously dodgy.
Yep. They had to rummage around and find the applicable law. But it was there [eadit] to use once they had found it.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
As a Remainer I genuinely want what's best for Britain. I believe that being part of the EU is best, but I also think that it's best that I convince other Britons of that from a position of strength and confidence, rather than to have them cowed into rejoining by economic disaster.
The Remainers who think it is better for Britain to fail, as quickly as possible, so that we will rejoin the EU following that failure, are like the infantile Leftists in 1930s Germany, derided by Trotsky, who thought that Hitler coming to power would precipitate a crisis that would see the Communists take over soon afterwards.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
The leaders here very much do. As do those in Portugal and Spain, where they can use good weather and low taxes to cream off the lifestyle now available to the 1%, rather than just the 0.01%.
The bottom line for the DUP is that if they accept this deal they will have to accept a Sinn Fein FM for Northern Ireland - not just now but probably for always. Will they do that? Hmmmm. They need to find a way of accepting without accepting.
Or. They could find some other pretext.
On the most recent poll, they'd probably just pip Sinn Fein to the post.
TUV does not quite have enough votes to gain more than one seat, but they will all transfer to DUP.
The party that's in deep trouble is SDLP. They now poll no better than TUV, and would likely drop to just 2 or 3 seats.
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The Johnson/Frost spin will no doubt be a deal was only possible because they scared the EU rigid with their hardball Protocol Cancellation bill. Nothing at all to do with us dropping the macho theatrics and behaving like mature adults.
I thought the Johnson spin was going to be that Sunak was a closet Remainer who had surrendered to the EU?
It was - but it sounds like content of the deal will make that difficult. Can they build a surrender narrative on the basis of the ECJ having a teeny little possible role in the occasional dispute? They can try, I suppose.
I confess it does make me warm to Sunak, a little. He looks smooth and professional. Smiling and yet firm
I doubt if it will move the polls a jot. But if he can pull it off: well done Rishi
The deal is done. He has pulled it off. He cannot repudiate it now and it will get through Parliament if there is a vote on it. The only issue is whether the ERG kicks up a fuss or not. They would be mad too. But more than a few of them are genuinely unhinged.
He needs some form of DUP agreement and Stormont up and running before he can say DONE
And if he achieves that, his brief premiership will have at least one impressive legacy
He really doesn't need the DUP. And if they continue to boycott Stormont, call their bluff further.
Sunak should feel emboldened, so in the afterglow he should jettison Raab and Braverman. Now that would be good for him, the Tory Party and the nation.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
"If you believe you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere". T May 2016
A stupid, loathsome sentence from a calamitously bad prime minister. At least Truss was entertaining and wore The Necklace
TMay was a Remainer cosplaying a Leaver, and she was like me trying to be a Korean anime schoolgirl
It will be very interesting to see how Johnson and Truss play this. If they accept the deal, they will essentially be saying Sunak got something they couldn't get. If they don't, they further stoke the Tory civil war.
The biggest loser today is Johnson, and for that we should all cheer.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The voters who made the lying clown our national leader did our country no favours, at all.
The alternative was Jeremy Corbyn!
And would that really have been worse than what we got?
It would have been several times worse. Quite aside from the constant background awfulness of a Corbyn-led government and the economic shambles from day one, can you imagine Corbyn in charge during either Covid or the war?
Doubt the orgies and piss ups in Downing street would have been on
It will be very interesting to see how Johnson and Truss play this. If they accept the deal, they will essentially be saying Sunak got something they couldn't get. If they don't, they further stoke the Tory civil war.
The biggest loser today is Johnson, and for that we should all cheer.
It feels like that to me but I can't allow myself to fully believe it! He is the proverbial unflushable turd.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
The leaders here very much do. As do those in Portugal and Spain, where they can use good weather and low taxes to cream off the lifestyle now available to the 1%, rather than just the 0.01%.
AIUI UAE requires $5k a month salary and a letter of employment. Most digital nomads are freelancers. And on irregular incomes. That seems a pretty high bar to me.
It will be very interesting to see how Johnson and Truss play this. If they accept the deal, they will essentially be saying Sunak got something they couldn't get. If they don't, they further stoke the Tory civil war.
The biggest loser today is Johnson, and for that we should all cheer.
To argue the contrary point, he was a genius to leave the NI issue to a time in the future, when emotions weren’t quite so high and things could be worked through in a much more pragmatic manner.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
"If you believe you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere". T May 2016
A stupid, loathsome sentence from a calamitously bad prime minister. At least Truss was entertaining and wore The Necklace
TMay was a Remainer cosplaying a Leaver, and she was like me trying to be a Korean anime schoolgirl
I quite like your look of thigh length boots and ultra miniskirt.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
As a Remainer I genuinely want what's best for Britain. I believe that being part of the EU is best, but I also think that it's best that I convince other Britons of that from a position of strength and confidence, rather than to have them cowed into rejoining by economic disaster.
The Remainers who think it is better for Britain to fail, as quickly as possible, so that we will rejoin the EU following that failure, are like the infantile Leftists in 1930s Germany, derided by Trotsky, who thought that Hitler coming to power would precipitate a crisis that would see the Communists take over soon afterwards.
So, no surprise that I disagree with you.
If Britain is prospering, why on earth would we rejoin the EU, and submit ourselves to
1. Yet another hideous divisive referendum and
2. Political rule from Brussels?
We won’t. The only way we ever Rejoin is if we are on our knees and begging. Unlikely
It’s a version of the same dilemma that faces the Scot Nits. If they actually run Scotland well and Scots thrive, why bother breaking up the UK?
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
As a Remainer I genuinely want what's best for Britain. I believe that being part of the EU is best, but I also think that it's best that I convince other Britons of that from a position of strength and confidence, rather than to have them cowed into rejoining by economic disaster.
The Remainers who think it is better for Britain to fail, as quickly as possible, so that we will rejoin the EU following that failure, are like the infantile Leftists in 1930s Germany, derided by Trotsky, who thought that Hitler coming to power would precipitate a crisis that would see the Communists take over soon afterwards.
So, no surprise that I disagree with you.
There's an important distinction between forseeing and fearing, as opposed to wanting. That's rather got lost in recent years.
But whilst this deal is clearly a good thing, it still leaves the UK with a very hard Brexit, albeit a realistic one. That still looks like it's going to do us ongoing harm overall.
But if the politics of today mean that Big Dog is politically a Dead Dog (quick burial, close family only, no flowers), that has to be a good thing. Let's see what he does next.
It will be very interesting to see how Johnson and Truss play this. If they accept the deal, they will essentially be saying Sunak got something they couldn't get. If they don't, they further stoke the Tory civil war.
The biggest loser today is Johnson, and for that we should all cheer.
To argue the contrary point, he was a genius to leave the NI issue to a time in the future, when emotions weren’t quite so high and things could be worked through in a much more pragmatic manner.
Bingo. Today is his legacy and to his credit.
NI should have always been dealt with afterwards, putting the NI cart before the Brexit horse was what made May's negotiations such an unmitigated disaster.
It will be very interesting to see how Johnson and Truss play this. If they accept the deal, they will essentially be saying Sunak got something they couldn't get. If they don't, they further stoke the Tory civil war.
The biggest loser today is Johnson, and for that we should all cheer.
To argue the contrary point, he was a genius to leave the NI issue to a time in the future, when emotions weren’t quite so high and things could be worked through in a much more pragmatic manner.
He really wasn't. He was playing with matches in a hay barn.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
Indeed, I’ve got hundreds. But pretty much everywhere now has electronic entry and exit systems for most visitors, so only the few exceptions will see passport stamps. They’ve saved me on a couple of occasions in the past though, when an immigration officer wanted to call me an overstay, but I could show them the physical stamp out that said I wasn’t.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy (or flint knapping), and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
A world in which millions of the highest paid people can be so by producing all they produce at a distance using IT. All of them can live anywhere and by definition produce nothing you can either use or eat, and are all paid more than the people who do. What could possibly go wrong?
It will be very interesting to see how Johnson and Truss play this. If they accept the deal, they will essentially be saying Sunak got something they couldn't get. If they don't, they further stoke the Tory civil war.
The biggest loser today is Johnson, and for that we should all cheer.
To argue the contrary point, he was a genius to leave the NI issue to a time in the future, when emotions weren’t quite so high and things could be worked through in a much more pragmatic manner.
Bingo. Today is his legacy and to his credit.
NI should have always been dealt with afterwards, putting the NI cart before the Brexit horse was what made May's negotiations such an unmitigated disaster.
If today is Bozo's legacy he would be celebrating it not using it to try and undermine Sunak...
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
It’s less fun when your passport is nearly full - like mine, now, even tho it is just four years old. I don’t want the hassle of replacing it
That aside, stamps are decorative and they do allow for poignant reminiscence. The best stamp I ever got was entering “The Ecclestiastical Byzantine Republic of Mount Athos” - the quasi autonomous men-only monastic realm in north east Greece. It was a superb looking double-headed eagle of a thing
But a journalist friend of mine got a stamp for entering the FARC (Terrorist) Republic of Free Colombia, which is even more impressive
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The voters who made the lying clown our national leader did our country no favours, at all.
The alternative was Jeremy Corbyn!
And would that really have been worse than what we got?
It would have been several times worse. Quite aside from the constant background awfulness of a Corbyn-led government and the economic shambles from day one, can you imagine Corbyn in charge during either Covid or the war?
Doubt the orgies and piss ups in Downing street would have been on
Rules would have been broken. But in a more joyless and sanctimonious way.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
The leaders here very much do. As do those in Portugal and Spain, where they can use good weather and low taxes to cream off the lifestyle now available to the 1%, rather than just the 0.01%.
AIUI UAE requires $5k a month salary and a letter of employment. Most digital nomads are freelancers. And on irregular incomes. That seems a pretty high bar to me.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
As a Remainer I genuinely want what's best for Britain. I believe that being part of the EU is best, but I also think that it's best that I convince other Britons of that from a position of strength and confidence, rather than to have them cowed into rejoining by economic disaster.
The Remainers who think it is better for Britain to fail, as quickly as possible, so that we will rejoin the EU following that failure, are like the infantile Leftists in 1930s Germany, derided by Trotsky, who thought that Hitler coming to power would precipitate a crisis that would see the Communists take over soon afterwards.
So, no surprise that I disagree with you.
If Britain is prospering, why on earth would we rejoin the EU, and submit ourselves to
1. Yet another hideous divisive referendum and
2. Political rule from Brussels?
We won’t. The only way we ever Rejoin is if we are on our knees and begging. Unlikely
It’s a version of the same dilemma that faces the Scot Nits. If they actually run Scotland well and Scots thrive, why bother breaking up the UK?
What bit of Britain is NOT prospering don't you get. Most people are struggling to survive. Come out of your fantasy world for an hour or two.
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The Johnson/Frost spin will no doubt be a deal was only possible because they scared the EU rigid with their hardball Protocol Cancellation bill. Nothing at all to do with us dropping the macho theatrics and behaving like mature adults.
But that will not wash. The current, grown-up UK government has made the legal advice clear: the bill was never going to work from a legal standpoint and would have exposed the UK to large compensation payments if enacted. And if the UK government knew that, the EU did too.
Course it won't. But they deal in fantasies. What this actually shows imo is the wasted opportunity to negotiate a better deal in the first place. All it needed was good faith, hard work, focus and professionalism. Instead we got all that 'No Deal is better than a Bad Deal' and 'holding all the cards' perpetual grandstanding nonsense. Then a mad rush to sign something - anything - so Johnson could win his election.
You can't go into a negotiation with the position that a bad deal is better than no deal, even if that's what you privately believe. And if the alternative is a Corbyn government, a deal held together with string and wishful thinking is better than whatever deal Corbyn would have cooked up. Imagine Corbyn trying to find a deal with the EU which could keep NI within the UK. It would be like all of his Christmasses had come at once (well, two of his Christmasses.)
Another good reason to ditch the unelected monarchy.
The King is to meet the president of the European Commission today, a decision that was immediately criticised by unionists and Brexiteer Conservatives as crass, tone deaf and antagonistic.
Buckingham Palace said the decision had been made on the advice of the prime minister and insisted that the King and Ursula von der Leyen would discuss “a range of topics” not simply the Brexit deal that she is expected to seal with Rishi Sunak in Windsor today.
“The King is pleased to meet any world leader if they are visiting Britain and it is the government’s advice that he should do so,” the palace said.
Charles and Von der Leyen will sit down to tea late this afternoon during their meeting in which a range of topics are expected to be discussed, including climate change and the situation in Ukraine.
But Arlene Foster, the former DUP first minister, tweeted: “I cannot quite believe that No 10 would ask the King to become involved in the finalising of a deal as controversial as this one. It’s crass and will go down very badly in NI. We must remember this is not the King’s decision but the government who it appears are tone deaf.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former cabinet minister, told Sky News: “It is surprising that the King will meet Ursula von der Leyen today as it antagonises the people the PM needs to conciliate. It is also constitutionally unwise to involve the King in a matter of immediate political controversy.”
Downing Street insisted the meeting with von der Leyen was a matter for Buckingham Palace. “He firmly believes it’s for the King to make those decisions,” Sunak’s spokesman said.
“It’s not uncommon for his majesty to accept invitations to meet certain leaders, he has met President Duda and President Zelensky recently. He is meeting with the president of the EU today.”
Hang on, I assumed it was the republicans who would be annoyed at the King hosting an EU leader - but its the royalists? Time for the AI or aliens to take over.....
The Queen lost all support when she agreed to Boris Johnson's unlawful prorogation.
The Queen also signed Hilary Benn's delay Brexit Bill, the monarch is neutral on Brexit
One was lawful and the will of our sovereign Parliament, the other was unlawful.
So she wasn't neutral on Brexit.
It was lawful until the SC said it wasn't
It was not.
On your logic it is OK for me to come and steal your car. You can't take me to court, because it's lawful. And you can't prove it is unlawful till you take me to court. Which you can't, because ...
False analogy. There is a law against theft of a motor vehicle. There wasn't a law against prorogation until the partisan court invented it.
The law was always there, just needing to be fished out and thumped on the head of Boris Johnson and his government.
Nope. The first thing the supreme court had to rule on was whether prorogation was even justiciable - i.e within their power to rule on. Only when they had decided that difficult thing, could they then decide the easy thing - that the prorogation was obviously dodgy.
Dodgy, sure, but not actually illegal until the court started with its conclusion and worked backwards.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
The leaders here very much do. As do those in Portugal and Spain, where they can use good weather and low taxes to cream off the lifestyle now available to the 1%, rather than just the 0.01%.
AIUI UAE requires $5k a month salary and a letter of employment. Most digital nomads are freelancers. And on irregular incomes. That seems a pretty high bar to me.
They have visas for both. The one you mention is the ‘remote worker’ visa, aimed at people employed by a company overseas, and on their payroll.
There’s many other visa options for the self-employed working out of here. In practice, £10k gets you a company setup and three year visa for yourself and immediate family. A £250k cash property investment gets you a 5-year visa and anyone with a masters degree can sponsor themselves for a 10-year ‘golden visa’
The Spain and Portugual ‘digital nomad’ visas are also for those in employment with a regular salary, from an overseas company.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
The leaders here very much do. As do those in Portugal and Spain, where they can use good weather and low taxes to cream off the lifestyle now available to the 1%, rather than just the 0.01%.
AIUI UAE requires $5k a month salary and a letter of employment. Most digital nomads are freelancers. And on irregular incomes. That seems a pretty high bar to me.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
As a Remainer I genuinely want what's best for Britain. I believe that being part of the EU is best, but I also think that it's best that I convince other Britons of that from a position of strength and confidence, rather than to have them cowed into rejoining by economic disaster.
The Remainers who think it is better for Britain to fail, as quickly as possible, so that we will rejoin the EU following that failure, are like the infantile Leftists in 1930s Germany, derided by Trotsky, who thought that Hitler coming to power would precipitate a crisis that would see the Communists take over soon afterwards.
So, no surprise that I disagree with you.
If Britain is prospering, why on earth would we rejoin the EU, and submit ourselves to
1. Yet another hideous divisive referendum and
2. Political rule from Brussels?
We won’t. The only way we ever Rejoin is if we are on our knees and begging. Unlikely
It’s a version of the same dilemma that faces the Scot Nits. If they actually run Scotland well and Scots thrive, why bother breaking up the UK?
I'm not saying this will happen, but this is how it could happen...
In about 2025, Starmer uses the TCA negotiations already in the diary to actually cooperate over trade. Life perks up a bit in Britain.
His sucessor (I'm imagining Labour as well, becuase I think the Conservatives are going to spend a while at the political equivalent of a health retreat) deepens that to some variant of the Swiss/Norwegian arrangement. Life perks up in Britain a bit more. And that process continues. There may be an equilbrium where the UK decides "this close but no further", but it's not clear where that might be. In which case, gravity wins.
Meanwhile, the demographic churn continues. My take is that Brexit has always been predomiantly a boomer project- old enough to pine for times before the EU, young enough to not actually remember the war. And the long era where they have run the show is coming to an end, as they go to the place where there is no Europe and there are no referendums.
And if I'm right, the process won't be hideous or divisive, because by the time the question is being asked, the answer would be obvious.
As I've said before, Brexit is a gift from an elderly relative which, in most lights, looks hideous. It would be rude to get rid of it now, and it would cause a terrible argument. But at some point, it's going down the charity shop.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
As a Remainer I genuinely want what's best for Britain. I believe that being part of the EU is best, but I also think that it's best that I convince other Britons of that from a position of strength and confidence, rather than to have them cowed into rejoining by economic disaster.
The Remainers who think it is better for Britain to fail, as quickly as possible, so that we will rejoin the EU following that failure, are like the infantile Leftists in 1930s Germany, derided by Trotsky, who thought that Hitler coming to power would precipitate a crisis that would see the Communists take over soon afterwards.
So, no surprise that I disagree with you.
If Britain is prospering, why on earth would we rejoin the EU, and submit ourselves to
1. Yet another hideous divisive referendum and
2. Political rule from Brussels?
We won’t. The only way we ever Rejoin is if we are on our knees and begging. Unlikely
It’s a version of the same dilemma that faces the Scot Nits. If they actually run Scotland well and Scots thrive, why bother breaking up the UK?
What bit of Britain is NOT prospering don't you get. Most people are struggling to survive. Come out of your fantasy world for an hour or two.
Chill Malc. If you had spent the last two months with the lady boys of Bangkok you would be as serene as Leon.
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The voters who made the lying clown our national leader did our country no favours, at all.
The alternative was Jeremy Corbyn!
And would that really have been worse than what we got?
It would have been several times worse. Quite aside from the constant background awfulness of a Corbyn-led government and the economic shambles from day one, can you imagine Corbyn in charge during either Covid or the war?
Doubt the orgies and piss ups in Downing street would have been on
Rules would have been broken. But in a more joyless and sanctimonious way.
It was joyless and sanctimonious for the majority, hard to how it could have been more.
Has Peter ever had a day of "happiness" since 1959?
"He's a font of misplaced rage. Name your cliché; mother held him too much or not enough, last picked at kickball, late night sneaky uncle, whatever. Now he's so angry moments of levity actually cause him pain; gives him headaches. Happiness, for that gentleman, hurts."
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
As a Remainer I genuinely want what's best for Britain. I believe that being part of the EU is best, but I also think that it's best that I convince other Britons of that from a position of strength and confidence, rather than to have them cowed into rejoining by economic disaster.
The Remainers who think it is better for Britain to fail, as quickly as possible, so that we will rejoin the EU following that failure, are like the infantile Leftists in 1930s Germany, derided by Trotsky, who thought that Hitler coming to power would precipitate a crisis that would see the Communists take over soon afterwards.
So, no surprise that I disagree with you.
If Britain is prospering, why on earth would we rejoin the EU, and submit ourselves to
1. Yet another hideous divisive referendum and
2. Political rule from Brussels?
We won’t. The only way we ever Rejoin is if we are on our knees and begging. Unlikely
It’s a version of the same dilemma that faces the Scot Nits. If they actually run Scotland well and Scots thrive, why bother breaking up the UK?
I'm not saying this will happen, but this is how it could happen...
In about 2025, Starmer uses the TCA negotiations already in the diary to actually cooperate over trade. Life perks up a bit in Britain.
His sucessor (I'm imagining Labour as well, becuase I think the Conservatives are going to spend a while at the political equivalent of a health retreat) deepens that to some variant of the Swiss/Norwegian arrangement. Life perks up in Britain a bit more. And that process continues. There may be an equilbrium where the UK decides "this close but no further", but it's not clear where that might be. In which case, gravity wins.
Meanwhile, the demographic churn continues. My take is that Brexit has always been predomiantly a boomer project- old enough to pine for times before the EU, young enough to not actually remember the war. And the long era where they have run the show is coming to an end, as they go to the place where there is no Europe and there are no referendums.
And if I'm right, the process won't be hideous or divisive, because by the time the question is being asked, the answer would be obvious.
As I've said before, Brexit is a gift from an elderly relative which, in most lights, looks hideous. It would be rude to get rid of it now, and it would cause a terrible argument. But at some point, it's going down the charity shop.
Nah. Not now. The moment is passing, and this is a milestone in that passing
Look at the polling in Norway and Switzerland etc. Absolute objection to joining the EU, so it will be in the UK
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
The leaders here very much do. As do those in Portugal and Spain, where they can use good weather and low taxes to cream off the lifestyle now available to the 1%, rather than just the 0.01%.
AIUI UAE requires $5k a month salary and a letter of employment. Most digital nomads are freelancers. And on irregular incomes. That seems a pretty high bar to me.
They have visas for both. The one you mention is the ‘remote worker’ visa, aimed at people employed by a company overseas, and on their payroll.
There’s many other visa options for the self-employed working out of here. In practice, £10k gets you a company setup and three year visa for yourself and immediate family. A £250k cash property investment gets you a 5-year visa and anyone with a masters degree can sponsor themselves for a 10-year ‘golden visa’
The Spain and Portugual ‘digital nomad’ visas are also for those in employment with a regular salary, from an overseas company.
But. Isn't the purpose of being a "digital nomad", to be nomadic? Those options seem much better suited to those planning a significant period of residency.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
As a Remainer I genuinely want what's best for Britain. I believe that being part of the EU is best, but I also think that it's best that I convince other Britons of that from a position of strength and confidence, rather than to have them cowed into rejoining by economic disaster.
The Remainers who think it is better for Britain to fail, as quickly as possible, so that we will rejoin the EU following that failure, are like the infantile Leftists in 1930s Germany, derided by Trotsky, who thought that Hitler coming to power would precipitate a crisis that would see the Communists take over soon afterwards.
So, no surprise that I disagree with you.
If Britain is prospering, why on earth would we rejoin the EU, and submit ourselves to
1. Yet another hideous divisive referendum and
2. Political rule from Brussels?
We won’t. The only way we ever Rejoin is if we are on our knees and begging. Unlikely
It’s a version of the same dilemma that faces the Scot Nits. If they actually run Scotland well and Scots thrive, why bother breaking up the UK?
I'm not saying this will happen, but this is how it could happen...
In about 2025, Starmer uses the TCA negotiations already in the diary to actually cooperate over trade. Life perks up a bit in Britain.
His sucessor (I'm imagining Labour as well, becuase I think the Conservatives are going to spend a while at the political equivalent of a health retreat) deepens that to some variant of the Swiss/Norwegian arrangement. Life perks up in Britain a bit more. And that process continues. There may be an equilbrium where the UK decides "this close but no further", but it's not clear where that might be. In which case, gravity wins.
Meanwhile, the demographic churn continues. My take is that Brexit has always been predomiantly a boomer project- old enough to pine for times before the EU, young enough to not actually remember the war. And the long era where they have run the show is coming to an end, as they go to the place where there is no Europe and there are no referendums.
And if I'm right, the process won't be hideous or divisive, because by the time the question is being asked, the answer would be obvious.
As I've said before, Brexit is a gift from an elderly relative which, in most lights, looks hideous. It would be rude to get rid of it now, and it would cause a terrible argument. But at some point, it's going down the charity shop.
Except the charity shop is going to take one look at the gift and throw it in the nearest council bin.
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The voters who made the lying clown our national leader did our country no favours, at all.
The alternative was Jeremy Corbyn!
And would that really have been worse than what we got?
It would have been several times worse. Quite aside from the constant background awfulness of a Corbyn-led government and the economic shambles from day one, can you imagine Corbyn in charge during either Covid or the war?
Doubt the orgies and piss ups in Downing street would have been on
Rules would have been broken. But in a more joyless and sanctimonious way.
It was joyless and sanctimonious for the majority, hard to how it could have been more.
See China for details.
A lot of the sanctimoniousness (is that a word?) came from the media, not the top of the government.
It's odd that so many here on a political betting site describe the DUP and ERG as bonkers. They are far from that, being quite rational, calculating and disciplined in their political positioning. Where they differ from those calling them bonkers is in their values and aspirations for NI.
It helps to be bonkers. The ERG seems to have been pretty successful in terms of obtaining political goals over the last decades. (True, the DUP are both bonkers and been unsuccessful ).
Let's, e.g., compare it to politicians who are keen on reducing wealth inequality. This is a political goal that has gone backwards over the last decades (or at best stagnated). No matter who is in power, there has been pretty meagre progress.
As we are (probably) coming to an end of a period of Tory rule, it is instructive to consider how Tory Governments (first Thatcher and then the Brexiteers) have changed the UK very dramatically.
By comparison, the Labour Governments of my lifetime -- though sometimes competent and sometimes incompetent -- have not achieved any comparably lasting changes in the UK.
I'm no fan of the last Labour government, but the last Labour Government achieved some lasting changes in the UK. Notably more equality for homosexuality, although that was a global phenomenon and they fell short of legalising equality in marriage itself which fell to David Cameron to achieve.
Devolution and BoE independence too, and the Minimum Wage.
What's remarkable though is that almost everything that the last Labour Government achieved was done in 1997/98. I'd be curious if even the most ardent of Labour supporters can name any lasting changes that were introduced from 1999 onwards?
Minimum wage -- I grant you. The Tories would never introduced that. But, it has not had much effect in reducing wealth inequality. So, in my book, it falls into the category of tinkering at the edges.
Devolution has been a disaster for Wales. It is poorer now that it was before 1999. The standard of Government has been abysmally low.
I will leave our Scottish posters to describe whether devolution has been good for Scotland.
You didn't ask for changes for the better, just lasting changes. Devolution certainly is a lasting change, even if it hasn't improved things.
On the same basis, perhaps you could include our indebtedness now as a lasting change brought about by Labour, but I don't know anyone from Labour who admits that was intentional, unlike devolution.
Increase in debt under last Labour government: £681bn. Increase in debt under current Tory government: £1,543bn. And counting.
That's a legacy of the deficit that Labour bequeathed.
Unless you think the Tories could or should have implemented a form of austerity so severe they ran a neutral budget from year one?
It was a legacy of the worst global financial crisis since WW2.
Which thanks to Brown's decade of preparation we were uniquely well-placed to weather?
You think Gordon Brown should have shut down the City and dug a big hole in the Midlands to sell commodities to China? Well, it worked for Australia.
If he'd been running a budget surplus as he should have for that stage of the economic cycle, then the deficit spending would have been far less significant afterwards and purely cyclical.
I’d say that Labour’s biggest long-term failure was letting house prices rip from 1999 to 2007.
2007 was the year that levels of home ownership began falling.
Not sure Labour could have donw much about it.
Banks shifted their lending criteria from 3x+1x earnings to 4x joint earnings and prices across the country increased to reflect the additional money people could borrow (for good and bad).I watched it happen down south in 2001/2 and then up north between 2003/4....
Brown wasn't shy about regulating the banks.
The problem is, he regulated all the wrong things...
Every CDO trader had lodged a photocopy of their passport with HR.
They had all completed their multiple choice exams (or got the desk junior to do it for them) - in how not to commit fraud. “An Orc from Mordor emails you, claiming to have a large stash of Mithril, following the fall of the Barad- Dur. Do you (a) help him sell it on the metals exchange, bypassing all regulations…. (e) call compliance”
And that's who to primarily blame for crashing the financial system. Those who did it, not those who supposedly provoked it by being lax or complacent. Similar to Putin and Ukraine.
Just as those who are primarily to blame for crashing our national Treasury accounts are those who did it (ie Gordon Brown), not those who supposedly provoked it like the Americans, or the financial sector or anyone else.
Brown was responsible for the Treasury, borrowed in the good times, then when the bad times came he inevitably had to borrow more but had no room left to manoeuvre. You can try and pin the blame on anyone else if you want a scapegoat, but those who did it, are the Treasury.
Ah I see. So 'he didn't fix the roof when the sun was shining' then?
This really is the most frightful tosh but I'm minded to cut some slack - because I sense your take on the Crash derives mainly from the Tory GE campaign of 2010. You swallowed it hook line & sinker at an impressionable time of life.
A nice political slogan but the problem is much more pernicious than that.
The country had a fantastic roof in 2001/02 that the Iron Chancellor had pledged to maintain. That's part of why I voted Labour for the only and first time in my life in 2001. Had the crisis struck in 01/02 then the Treasury would have been prepared and had the wherewithal to cope.
What's worse about Gordon Brown is that he took a fixed roof and broke it. He took the roof off in 2002 and never replace it as he'd abolished winter/boom and bust.
Pure hubris.
There's your problem right there. You start with 'Brown to blame' and work backwards, trying to make things fit. End up saying bizarre things like this.
If Brown really did cause the GFC and financial markets malfunction was responsible for public spending you'd say the main problem was the GFC not public spending. So by accident you'd be right in that case.
It was Brown's awful regulatory reform that allowed the GFC to have such a profound effect on the UK economy. Banks were leveraged at 70:1 and the FSA was mindlessly making sure that the banks had the right boxes ticked on their diversity forms.
Banks over-leveraged, cooked the books, consigned risk management to the bin, in a crazy chase for yield and remuneration. It popped and nearly brought down the financial system. Brown deserves criticism - he was there and a player, plus he took the plaudits when things were good - but it really is a mistake to overstate his contribution. The culture, a consensus here across politics, was light touch reg, markets know best, let them rock and roll so long as they pay their taxes.
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The voters who made the lying clown our national leader did our country no favours, at all.
The alternative was Jeremy Corbyn!
Other choices were available….
In theory, but not in practice.
Under our [...] voting system, voters can only make their own best choices.
At the last election the effective choice for PM was between Boris and Corbyn, and would have been under any voting system.
Neither were on the ballot paper where I voted.
No, but people who you knew would make one or the other PM were.
57% of voters did NOT vote for Boris's party. 70% of voters did NOT vote for Team Corbyn.
And?
Shows you what a crap system FPTP is.
Same in India with Modi's lot.
No electoral system can invent a majority where one doesn't exist.
Remind me. What was the percentage total for the Conservatives in 2019 or Labour in 1997? Or the US Presidential Elections in 2000 and 2016.
Exactly my point. Even the US system, which is as close to a pure two-party system as exists, has only had the winner getting a majority of the popular vote in four of the last presidential elections.
It's odd that so many here on a political betting site describe the DUP and ERG as bonkers. They are far from that, being quite rational, calculating and disciplined in their political positioning. Where they differ from those calling them bonkers is in their values and aspirations for NI.
It helps to be bonkers. The ERG seems to have been pretty successful in terms of obtaining political goals over the last decades. (True, the DUP are both bonkers and been unsuccessful ).
Let's, e.g., compare it to politicians who are keen on reducing wealth inequality. This is a political goal that has gone backwards over the last decades (or at best stagnated). No matter who is in power, there has been pretty meagre progress.
As we are (probably) coming to an end of a period of Tory rule, it is instructive to consider how Tory Governments (first Thatcher and then the Brexiteers) have changed the UK very dramatically.
By comparison, the Labour Governments of my lifetime -- though sometimes competent and sometimes incompetent -- have not achieved any comparably lasting changes in the UK.
I'm no fan of the last Labour government, but the last Labour Government achieved some lasting changes in the UK. Notably more equality for homosexuality, although that was a global phenomenon and they fell short of legalising equality in marriage itself which fell to David Cameron to achieve.
Devolution and BoE independence too, and the Minimum Wage.
What's remarkable though is that almost everything that the last Labour Government achieved was done in 1997/98. I'd be curious if even the most ardent of Labour supporters can name any lasting changes that were introduced from 1999 onwards?
Minimum wage -- I grant you. The Tories would never introduced that. But, it has not had much effect in reducing wealth inequality. So, in my book, it falls into the category of tinkering at the edges.
Devolution has been a disaster for Wales. It is poorer now that it was before 1999. The standard of Government has been abysmally low.
I will leave our Scottish posters to describe whether devolution has been good for Scotland.
You didn't ask for changes for the better, just lasting changes. Devolution certainly is a lasting change, even if it hasn't improved things.
On the same basis, perhaps you could include our indebtedness now as a lasting change brought about by Labour, but I don't know anyone from Labour who admits that was intentional, unlike devolution.
Increase in debt under last Labour government: £681bn. Increase in debt under current Tory government: £1,543bn. And counting.
That's a legacy of the deficit that Labour bequeathed.
Unless you think the Tories could or should have implemented a form of austerity so severe they ran a neutral budget from year one?
It was a legacy of the worst global financial crisis since WW2.
Which thanks to Brown's decade of preparation we were uniquely well-placed to weather?
You think Gordon Brown should have shut down the City and dug a big hole in the Midlands to sell commodities to China? Well, it worked for Australia.
If he'd been running a budget surplus as he should have for that stage of the economic cycle, then the deficit spending would have been far less significant afterwards and purely cyclical.
I’d say that Labour’s biggest long-term failure was letting house prices rip from 1999 to 2007.
2007 was the year that levels of home ownership began falling.
Not sure Labour could have donw much about it.
Banks shifted their lending criteria from 3x+1x earnings to 4x joint earnings and prices across the country increased to reflect the additional money people could borrow (for good and bad).I watched it happen down south in 2001/2 and then up north between 2003/4....
Brown wasn't shy about regulating the banks.
The problem is, he regulated all the wrong things...
Every CDO trader had lodged a photocopy of their passport with HR.
They had all completed their multiple choice exams (or got the desk junior to do it for them) - in how not to commit fraud. “An Orc from Mordor emails you, claiming to have a large stash of Mithril, following the fall of the Barad- Dur. Do you (a) help him sell it on the metals exchange, bypassing all regulations…. (e) call compliance”
And that's who to primarily blame for crashing the financial system. Those who did it, not those who supposedly provoked it by being lax or complacent. Similar to Putin and Ukraine.
Just as those who are primarily to blame for crashing our national Treasury accounts are those who did it (ie Gordon Brown), not those who supposedly provoked it like the Americans, or the financial sector or anyone else.
Brown was responsible for the Treasury, borrowed in the good times, then when the bad times came he inevitably had to borrow more but had no room left to manoeuvre. You can try and pin the blame on anyone else if you want a scapegoat, but those who did it, are the Treasury.
Ah I see. So 'he didn't fix the roof when the sun was shining' then?
This really is the most frightful tosh but I'm minded to cut some slack - because I sense your take on the Crash derives mainly from the Tory GE campaign of 2010. You swallowed it hook line & sinker at an impressionable time of life.
A nice political slogan but the problem is much more pernicious than that.
The country had a fantastic roof in 2001/02 that the Iron Chancellor had pledged to maintain. That's part of why I voted Labour for the only and first time in my life in 2001. Had the crisis struck in 01/02 then the Treasury would have been prepared and had the wherewithal to cope.
What's worse about Gordon Brown is that he took a fixed roof and broke it. He took the roof off in 2002 and never replace it as he'd abolished winter/boom and bust.
Pure hubris.
There's your problem right there. You start with 'Brown to blame' and work backwards, trying to make things fit. End up saying bizarre things like this.
If Brown really did cause the GFC and financial markets malfunction was responsible for public spending you'd say the main problem was the GFC not public spending. So by accident you'd be right in that case.
It was Brown's awful regulatory reform that allowed the GFC to have such a profound effect on the UK economy. Banks were leveraged at 70:1 and the FSA was mindlessly making sure that the banks had the right boxes ticked on their diversity forms.
Banks over-leveraged, cooked the books, consigned risk management to the bin, in a crazy chase for yield and remuneration. It popped and nearly brought down the financial system. Brown deserves criticism - he was there and a player, plus he took the plaudits when things were good - but it really is a mistake to overstate his contribution. The culture, a consensus here across politics, was light touch reg, markets know best, let them rock and roll so long as they pay their taxes.
He was the Chancellor - he was responsible. The buck stops there.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
As a Remainer I genuinely want what's best for Britain. I believe that being part of the EU is best, but I also think that it's best that I convince other Britons of that from a position of strength and confidence, rather than to have them cowed into rejoining by economic disaster.
The Remainers who think it is better for Britain to fail, as quickly as possible, so that we will rejoin the EU following that failure, are like the infantile Leftists in 1930s Germany, derided by Trotsky, who thought that Hitler coming to power would precipitate a crisis that would see the Communists take over soon afterwards.
So, no surprise that I disagree with you.
If Britain is prospering, why on earth would we rejoin the EU, and submit ourselves to
1. Yet another hideous divisive referendum and
2. Political rule from Brussels?
We won’t. The only way we ever Rejoin is if we are on our knees and begging. Unlikely
It’s a version of the same dilemma that faces the Scot Nits. If they actually run Scotland well and Scots thrive, why bother breaking up the UK?
I'm not saying this will happen, but this is how it could happen...
In about 2025, Starmer uses the TCA negotiations already in the diary to actually cooperate over trade. Life perks up a bit in Britain.
His sucessor (I'm imagining Labour as well, becuase I think the Conservatives are going to spend a while at the political equivalent of a health retreat) deepens that to some variant of the Swiss/Norwegian arrangement. Life perks up in Britain a bit more. And that process continues. There may be an equilbrium where the UK decides "this close but no further", but it's not clear where that might be. In which case, gravity wins.
Meanwhile, the demographic churn continues. My take is that Brexit has always been predomiantly a boomer project- old enough to pine for times before the EU, young enough to not actually remember the war. And the long era where they have run the show is coming to an end, as they go to the place where there is no Europe and there are no referendums.
And if I'm right, the process won't be hideous or divisive, because by the time the question is being asked, the answer would be obvious.
As I've said before, Brexit is a gift from an elderly relative which, in most lights, looks hideous. It would be rude to get rid of it now, and it would cause a terrible argument. But at some point, it's going down the charity shop.
Nah. Not now. The moment is passing, and this is a milestone in that passing
Look at the polling in Norway and Switzerland etc. Absolute objection to joining the EU, so it will be in the UK
If Britain is prospering, there won't be the desire to change things up. If Britain is struggling, the topic of reintroduction of unlimited migration from Europe will destroy the Rejoin campaign. Especially as the card of linking migration to house prices has never really been played.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
As a Remainer I genuinely want what's best for Britain. I believe that being part of the EU is best, but I also think that it's best that I convince other Britons of that from a position of strength and confidence, rather than to have them cowed into rejoining by economic disaster.
The Remainers who think it is better for Britain to fail, as quickly as possible, so that we will rejoin the EU following that failure, are like the infantile Leftists in 1930s Germany, derided by Trotsky, who thought that Hitler coming to power would precipitate a crisis that would see the Communists take over soon afterwards.
So, no surprise that I disagree with you.
If Britain is prospering, why on earth would we rejoin the EU, and submit ourselves to
1. Yet another hideous divisive referendum and
2. Political rule from Brussels?
We won’t. The only way we ever Rejoin is if we are on our knees and begging. Unlikely
It’s a version of the same dilemma that faces the Scot Nits. If they actually run Scotland well and Scots thrive, why bother breaking up the UK?
I'm not saying this will happen, but this is how it could happen...
In about 2025, Starmer uses the TCA negotiations already in the diary to actually cooperate over trade. Life perks up a bit in Britain.
His sucessor (I'm imagining Labour as well, becuase I think the Conservatives are going to spend a while at the political equivalent of a health retreat) deepens that to some variant of the Swiss/Norwegian arrangement. Life perks up in Britain a bit more. And that process continues. There may be an equilbrium where the UK decides "this close but no further", but it's not clear where that might be. In which case, gravity wins.
Meanwhile, the demographic churn continues. My take is that Brexit has always been predomiantly a boomer project- old enough to pine for times before the EU, young enough to not actually remember the war. And the long era where they have run the show is coming to an end, as they go to the place where there is no Europe and there are no referendums.
And if I'm right, the process won't be hideous or divisive, because by the time the question is being asked, the answer would be obvious.
As I've said before, Brexit is a gift from an elderly relative which, in most lights, looks hideous. It would be rude to get rid of it now, and it would cause a terrible argument. But at some point, it's going down the charity shop.
Except the charity shop is going to take one look at the gift and throw it in the nearest council bin.
You know that, I know that, but it's not yet polite to say it.
After all, for some people, Brexit is their only chance to go down in history.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
As a Remainer I genuinely want what's best for Britain. I believe that being part of the EU is best, but I also think that it's best that I convince other Britons of that from a position of strength and confidence, rather than to have them cowed into rejoining by economic disaster.
The Remainers who think it is better for Britain to fail, as quickly as possible, so that we will rejoin the EU following that failure, are like the infantile Leftists in 1930s Germany, derided by Trotsky, who thought that Hitler coming to power would precipitate a crisis that would see the Communists take over soon afterwards.
So, no surprise that I disagree with you.
If Britain is prospering, why on earth would we rejoin the EU, and submit ourselves to
1. Yet another hideous divisive referendum and
2. Political rule from Brussels?
We won’t. The only way we ever Rejoin is if we are on our knees and begging. Unlikely
It’s a version of the same dilemma that faces the Scot Nits. If they actually run Scotland well and Scots thrive, why bother breaking up the UK?
I'm not saying this will happen, but this is how it could happen...
In about 2025, Starmer uses the TCA negotiations already in the diary to actually cooperate over trade. Life perks up a bit in Britain.
His sucessor (I'm imagining Labour as well, becuase I think the Conservatives are going to spend a while at the political equivalent of a health retreat) deepens that to some variant of the Swiss/Norwegian arrangement. Life perks up in Britain a bit more. And that process continues. There may be an equilbrium where the UK decides "this close but no further", but it's not clear where that might be. In which case, gravity wins.
Meanwhile, the demographic churn continues. My take is that Brexit has always been predomiantly a boomer project- old enough to pine for times before the EU, young enough to not actually remember the war. And the long era where they have run the show is coming to an end, as they go to the place where there is no Europe and there are no referendums.
And if I'm right, the process won't be hideous or divisive, because by the time the question is being asked, the answer would be obvious.
As I've said before, Brexit is a gift from an elderly relative which, in most lights, looks hideous. It would be rude to get rid of it now, and it would cause a terrible argument. But at some point, it's going down the charity shop.
Except the charity shop is going to take one look at the gift and throw it in the nearest council bin.
You know that, I know that, but it's not yet polite to say it.
After all, for some people, Brexit is their only chance to go down in history.
Von der Leyen confirms immediate negotiation to join Horizon
Excellent news
The terms were negotiated in the Withdrawal agreement and TCA, and the EU then changed their mind. The UK sued at the ECJ. Presumably that case will now be withdrawn, and we will not discover whether the EU's actions were illegal.
Wonder what the Swiss will have to do to get back in. They have been excluded twice now. Will the UK find itself excluded again the next time EU negotiations get testy?
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
The leaders here very much do. As do those in Portugal and Spain, where they can use good weather and low taxes to cream off the lifestyle now available to the 1%, rather than just the 0.01%.
AIUI UAE requires $5k a month salary and a letter of employment. Most digital nomads are freelancers. And on irregular incomes. That seems a pretty high bar to me.
They have visas for both. The one you mention is the ‘remote worker’ visa, aimed at people employed by a company overseas, and on their payroll.
There’s many other visa options for the self-employed working out of here. In practice, £10k gets you a company setup and three year visa for yourself and immediate family. A £250k cash property investment gets you a 5-year visa and anyone with a masters degree can sponsor themselves for a 10-year ‘golden visa’
The Spain and Portugual ‘digital nomad’ visas are also for those in employment with a regular salary, from an overseas company.
But. Isn't the purpose of being a "digital nomad", to be nomadic? Those options seem much better suited to those planning a significant period of residency.
Which is what they’re trying to encourage, people seeing the UAE as a place to settle and but property, rather than just a place you work for a few years, saving money that ends up overseas. The ‘digital nomad’ is something quite specific, someone who wants a residency, but works for an overseas company and draws a salary (of more than $60k).
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
YOU are a Remainer. You want to remain outside the EU. Brexit ended on 31 January 2020. Rejoin began the day after. Yet you are too dumb to grasp or notice that fundamental fact. This no more cements our status outside EU than Maastricht cemented us in it.
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The voters who made the lying clown our national leader did our country no favours, at all.
The alternative was Jeremy Corbyn!
Other choices were available….
In theory, but not in practice.
Under our [...] voting system, voters can only make their own best choices.
At the last election the effective choice for PM was between Boris and Corbyn, and would have been under any voting system.
Neither were on the ballot paper where I voted.
No, but people who you knew would make one or the other PM were.
57% of voters did NOT vote for Boris's party. 70% of voters did NOT vote for Team Corbyn.
And?
Shows you what a crap system FPTP is.
Same in India with Modi's lot.
No electoral system can invent a majority where one doesn't exist.
Remind me. What was the percentage total for the Conservatives in 2019 or Labour in 1997? Or the US Presidential Elections in 2000 and 2016.
Exactly my point. Even the US system, which is as close to a pure two-party system as exists, has only had the winner getting a majority of the popular vote in four of the last presidential elections.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
YOU are a Remainer. You want to remain outside the EU. Brexit ended on 31 January 2020. Rejoin began the day after. Yet you are too dumb to grasp or notice that fundamental fact. This no more cements our status outside EU than Maastricht cemented us in it.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
As a Remainer I genuinely want what's best for Britain. I believe that being part of the EU is best, but I also think that it's best that I convince other Britons of that from a position of strength and confidence, rather than to have them cowed into rejoining by economic disaster.
The Remainers who think it is better for Britain to fail, as quickly as possible, so that we will rejoin the EU following that failure, are like the infantile Leftists in 1930s Germany, derided by Trotsky, who thought that Hitler coming to power would precipitate a crisis that would see the Communists take over soon afterwards.
So, no surprise that I disagree with you.
If Britain is prospering, why on earth would we rejoin the EU, and submit ourselves to
1. Yet another hideous divisive referendum and
2. Political rule from Brussels?
We won’t. The only way we ever Rejoin is if we are on our knees and begging. Unlikely
It’s a version of the same dilemma that faces the Scot Nits. If they actually run Scotland well and Scots thrive, why bother breaking up the UK?
I'm not saying this will happen, but this is how it could happen...
In about 2025, Starmer uses the TCA negotiations already in the diary to actually cooperate over trade. Life perks up a bit in Britain.
His sucessor (I'm imagining Labour as well, becuase I think the Conservatives are going to spend a while at the political equivalent of a health retreat) deepens that to some variant of the Swiss/Norwegian arrangement. Life perks up in Britain a bit more. And that process continues. There may be an equilbrium where the UK decides "this close but no further", but it's not clear where that might be. In which case, gravity wins.
Meanwhile, the demographic churn continues. My take is that Brexit has always been predomiantly a boomer project- old enough to pine for times before the EU, young enough to not actually remember the war. And the long era where they have run the show is coming to an end, as they go to the place where there is no Europe and there are no referendums.
And if I'm right, the process won't be hideous or divisive, because by the time the question is being asked, the answer would be obvious.
As I've said before, Brexit is a gift from an elderly relative which, in most lights, looks hideous. It would be rude to get rid of it now, and it would cause a terrible argument. But at some point, it's going down the charity shop.
Except the charity shop is going to take one look at the gift and throw it in the nearest council bin.
You know that, I know that, but it's not yet polite to say it.
After all, for some people, Brexit is their only chance to go down in history.
Again, you are falling into the trap of thinking Brexit is A Thing. It isn't. It's an event that, good or bad, is in the rearview mirror. You aren't going to win a future Rejoin referendum on Brexit being shit.
The debate will immediately be about the EU, and the EU joining package. The flaws and problems of that will be the ones mercilessly examined, not recriminations over what happened a decade or two earlier.
Well done Sunak for showing some pragmatism and acting in good faith . Ursula was really good in the news conference and it’s clear they have a very good relationship.
And great news for UK scientists . As expected part of this agreement was that issue on Horizon .
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
The leaders here very much do. As do those in Portugal and Spain, where they can use good weather and low taxes to cream off the lifestyle now available to the 1%, rather than just the 0.01%.
AIUI UAE requires $5k a month salary and a letter of employment. Most digital nomads are freelancers. And on irregular incomes. That seems a pretty high bar to me.
They have visas for both. The one you mention is the ‘remote worker’ visa, aimed at people employed by a company overseas, and on their payroll.
There’s many other visa options for the self-employed working out of here. In practice, £10k gets you a company setup and three year visa for yourself and immediate family. A £250k cash property investment gets you a 5-year visa and anyone with a masters degree can sponsor themselves for a 10-year ‘golden visa’
The Spain and Portugual ‘digital nomad’ visas are also for those in employment with a regular salary, from an overseas company.
But. Isn't the purpose of being a "digital nomad", to be nomadic? Those options seem much better suited to those planning a significant period of residency.
Which is what they’re trying to encourage, people seeing the UAE as a place to settle and but property, rather than just a place you work for a few years, saving money that ends up overseas. The ‘digital nomad’ is something quite specific, someone who wants a residency, but works for an overseas company and draws a salary (of more than $60k).
Ah OK. That's different from the kind of thing I understood it to be. Which was a way of extensively travelling the world with no ties whilst working exclusively Online. The modern equivalent of a PADI or TEFL qualification. Surely what you are describing is a fancy term for well-paid immigrant?
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
YOU are a Remainer. You want to remain outside the EU. Brexit ended on 31 January 2020. Rejoin began the day after. Yet you are too dumb to grasp or notice that fundamental fact. This no more cements our status outside EU than Maastricht cemented us in it.
TBF, it's mostly the ex-Remainers who have failed to notice that, as they still mostly cast themseleves as anti-Brexit not pro-Rejoin.
It's odd that so many here on a political betting site describe the DUP and ERG as bonkers. They are far from that, being quite rational, calculating and disciplined in their political positioning. Where they differ from those calling them bonkers is in their values and aspirations for NI.
It helps to be bonkers. The ERG seems to have been pretty successful in terms of obtaining political goals over the last decades. (True, the DUP are both bonkers and been unsuccessful ).
Let's, e.g., compare it to politicians who are keen on reducing wealth inequality. This is a political goal that has gone backwards over the last decades (or at best stagnated). No matter who is in power, there has been pretty meagre progress.
As we are (probably) coming to an end of a period of Tory rule, it is instructive to consider how Tory Governments (first Thatcher and then the Brexiteers) have changed the UK very dramatically.
By comparison, the Labour Governments of my lifetime -- though sometimes competent and sometimes incompetent -- have not achieved any comparably lasting changes in the UK.
I'm no fan of the last Labour government, but the last Labour Government achieved some lasting changes in the UK. Notably more equality for homosexuality, although that was a global phenomenon and they fell short of legalising equality in marriage itself which fell to David Cameron to achieve.
Devolution and BoE independence too, and the Minimum Wage.
What's remarkable though is that almost everything that the last Labour Government achieved was done in 1997/98. I'd be curious if even the most ardent of Labour supporters can name any lasting changes that were introduced from 1999 onwards?
Minimum wage -- I grant you. The Tories would never introduced that. But, it has not had much effect in reducing wealth inequality. So, in my book, it falls into the category of tinkering at the edges.
Devolution has been a disaster for Wales. It is poorer now that it was before 1999. The standard of Government has been abysmally low.
I will leave our Scottish posters to describe whether devolution has been good for Scotland.
You didn't ask for changes for the better, just lasting changes. Devolution certainly is a lasting change, even if it hasn't improved things.
On the same basis, perhaps you could include our indebtedness now as a lasting change brought about by Labour, but I don't know anyone from Labour who admits that was intentional, unlike devolution.
Increase in debt under last Labour government: £681bn. Increase in debt under current Tory government: £1,543bn. And counting.
That's a legacy of the deficit that Labour bequeathed.
Unless you think the Tories could or should have implemented a form of austerity so severe they ran a neutral budget from year one?
It was a legacy of the worst global financial crisis since WW2.
Which thanks to Brown's decade of preparation we were uniquely well-placed to weather?
You think Gordon Brown should have shut down the City and dug a big hole in the Midlands to sell commodities to China? Well, it worked for Australia.
If he'd been running a budget surplus as he should have for that stage of the economic cycle, then the deficit spending would have been far less significant afterwards and purely cyclical.
I’d say that Labour’s biggest long-term failure was letting house prices rip from 1999 to 2007.
2007 was the year that levels of home ownership began falling.
Not sure Labour could have donw much about it.
Banks shifted their lending criteria from 3x+1x earnings to 4x joint earnings and prices across the country increased to reflect the additional money people could borrow (for good and bad).I watched it happen down south in 2001/2 and then up north between 2003/4....
Brown wasn't shy about regulating the banks.
The problem is, he regulated all the wrong things...
Every CDO trader had lodged a photocopy of their passport with HR.
They had all completed their multiple choice exams (or got the desk junior to do it for them) - in how not to commit fraud. “An Orc from Mordor emails you, claiming to have a large stash of Mithril, following the fall of the Barad- Dur. Do you (a) help him sell it on the metals exchange, bypassing all regulations…. (e) call compliance”
And that's who to primarily blame for crashing the financial system. Those who did it, not those who supposedly provoked it by being lax or complacent. Similar to Putin and Ukraine.
Just as those who are primarily to blame for crashing our national Treasury accounts are those who did it (ie Gordon Brown), not those who supposedly provoked it like the Americans, or the financial sector or anyone else.
Brown was responsible for the Treasury, borrowed in the good times, then when the bad times came he inevitably had to borrow more but had no room left to manoeuvre. You can try and pin the blame on anyone else if you want a scapegoat, but those who did it, are the Treasury.
Ah I see. So 'he didn't fix the roof when the sun was shining' then?
This really is the most frightful tosh but I'm minded to cut some slack - because I sense your take on the Crash derives mainly from the Tory GE campaign of 2010. You swallowed it hook line & sinker at an impressionable time of life.
A nice political slogan but the problem is much more pernicious than that.
The country had a fantastic roof in 2001/02 that the Iron Chancellor had pledged to maintain. That's part of why I voted Labour for the only and first time in my life in 2001. Had the crisis struck in 01/02 then the Treasury would have been prepared and had the wherewithal to cope.
What's worse about Gordon Brown is that he took a fixed roof and broke it. He took the roof off in 2002 and never replace it as he'd abolished winter/boom and bust.
Pure hubris.
There's your problem right there. You start with 'Brown to blame' and work backwards, trying to make things fit. End up saying bizarre things like this.
If Brown really did cause the GFC and financial markets malfunction was responsible for public spending you'd say the main problem was the GFC not public spending. So by accident you'd be right in that case.
It was Brown's awful regulatory reform that allowed the GFC to have such a profound effect on the UK economy. Banks were leveraged at 70:1 and the FSA was mindlessly making sure that the banks had the right boxes ticked on their diversity forms.
Banks over-leveraged, cooked the books, consigned risk management to the bin, in a crazy chase for yield and remuneration. It popped and nearly brought down the financial system. Brown deserves criticism - he was there and a player, plus he took the plaudits when things were good - but it really is a mistake to overstate his contribution. The culture, a consensus here across politics, was light touch reg, markets know best, let them rock and roll so long as they pay their taxes.
That's bullshit, it was Brown that removed the Bank from its liquidity and capital regulation role and handed it to the FSA. The severity of the UK downturn is entirely because banks were running at 50:1 leverage and they spent the following 7-10 years bringing that down to 8:1, it was Brown that oversaw it and his regulatory framework that completely missed it where the old one had specific checks on ensuring liquidity and capital were in check.
So no, it's nothing to do with what you call City culture and all down to poor regulation. Regulation that Brown created and implemented.
It's odd that so many here on a political betting site describe the DUP and ERG as bonkers. They are far from that, being quite rational, calculating and disciplined in their political positioning. Where they differ from those calling them bonkers is in their values and aspirations for NI.
It helps to be bonkers. The ERG seems to have been pretty successful in terms of obtaining political goals over the last decades. (True, the DUP are both bonkers and been unsuccessful ).
Let's, e.g., compare it to politicians who are keen on reducing wealth inequality. This is a political goal that has gone backwards over the last decades (or at best stagnated). No matter who is in power, there has been pretty meagre progress.
As we are (probably) coming to an end of a period of Tory rule, it is instructive to consider how Tory Governments (first Thatcher and then the Brexiteers) have changed the UK very dramatically.
By comparison, the Labour Governments of my lifetime -- though sometimes competent and sometimes incompetent -- have not achieved any comparably lasting changes in the UK.
I'm no fan of the last Labour government, but the last Labour Government achieved some lasting changes in the UK. Notably more equality for homosexuality, although that was a global phenomenon and they fell short of legalising equality in marriage itself which fell to David Cameron to achieve.
Devolution and BoE independence too, and the Minimum Wage.
What's remarkable though is that almost everything that the last Labour Government achieved was done in 1997/98. I'd be curious if even the most ardent of Labour supporters can name any lasting changes that were introduced from 1999 onwards?
Minimum wage -- I grant you. The Tories would never introduced that. But, it has not had much effect in reducing wealth inequality. So, in my book, it falls into the category of tinkering at the edges.
Devolution has been a disaster for Wales. It is poorer now that it was before 1999. The standard of Government has been abysmally low.
I will leave our Scottish posters to describe whether devolution has been good for Scotland.
You didn't ask for changes for the better, just lasting changes. Devolution certainly is a lasting change, even if it hasn't improved things.
On the same basis, perhaps you could include our indebtedness now as a lasting change brought about by Labour, but I don't know anyone from Labour who admits that was intentional, unlike devolution.
Increase in debt under last Labour government: £681bn. Increase in debt under current Tory government: £1,543bn. And counting.
That's a legacy of the deficit that Labour bequeathed.
Unless you think the Tories could or should have implemented a form of austerity so severe they ran a neutral budget from year one?
It was a legacy of the worst global financial crisis since WW2.
Which thanks to Brown's decade of preparation we were uniquely well-placed to weather?
You think Gordon Brown should have shut down the City and dug a big hole in the Midlands to sell commodities to China? Well, it worked for Australia.
If he'd been running a budget surplus as he should have for that stage of the economic cycle, then the deficit spending would have been far less significant afterwards and purely cyclical.
I’d say that Labour’s biggest long-term failure was letting house prices rip from 1999 to 2007.
2007 was the year that levels of home ownership began falling.
Not sure Labour could have donw much about it.
Banks shifted their lending criteria from 3x+1x earnings to 4x joint earnings and prices across the country increased to reflect the additional money people could borrow (for good and bad).I watched it happen down south in 2001/2 and then up north between 2003/4....
Brown wasn't shy about regulating the banks.
The problem is, he regulated all the wrong things...
Every CDO trader had lodged a photocopy of their passport with HR.
They had all completed their multiple choice exams (or got the desk junior to do it for them) - in how not to commit fraud. “An Orc from Mordor emails you, claiming to have a large stash of Mithril, following the fall of the Barad- Dur. Do you (a) help him sell it on the metals exchange, bypassing all regulations…. (e) call compliance”
And that's who to primarily blame for crashing the financial system. Those who did it, not those who supposedly provoked it by being lax or complacent. Similar to Putin and Ukraine.
Just as those who are primarily to blame for crashing our national Treasury accounts are those who did it (ie Gordon Brown), not those who supposedly provoked it like the Americans, or the financial sector or anyone else.
Brown was responsible for the Treasury, borrowed in the good times, then when the bad times came he inevitably had to borrow more but had no room left to manoeuvre. You can try and pin the blame on anyone else if you want a scapegoat, but those who did it, are the Treasury.
Ah I see. So 'he didn't fix the roof when the sun was shining' then?
This really is the most frightful tosh but I'm minded to cut some slack - because I sense your take on the Crash derives mainly from the Tory GE campaign of 2010. You swallowed it hook line & sinker at an impressionable time of life.
A nice political slogan but the problem is much more pernicious than that.
The country had a fantastic roof in 2001/02 that the Iron Chancellor had pledged to maintain. That's part of why I voted Labour for the only and first time in my life in 2001. Had the crisis struck in 01/02 then the Treasury would have been prepared and had the wherewithal to cope.
What's worse about Gordon Brown is that he took a fixed roof and broke it. He took the roof off in 2002 and never replace it as he'd abolished winter/boom and bust.
Pure hubris.
There's your problem right there. You start with 'Brown to blame' and work backwards, trying to make things fit. End up saying bizarre things like this.
If Brown really did cause the GFC and financial markets malfunction was responsible for public spending you'd say the main problem was the GFC not public spending. So by accident you'd be right in that case.
It was Brown's awful regulatory reform that allowed the GFC to have such a profound effect on the UK economy. Banks were leveraged at 70:1 and the FSA was mindlessly making sure that the banks had the right boxes ticked on their diversity forms.
Banks over-leveraged, cooked the books, consigned risk management to the bin, in a crazy chase for yield and remuneration. It popped and nearly brought down the financial system. Brown deserves criticism - he was there and a player, plus he took the plaudits when things were good - but it really is a mistake to overstate his contribution. The culture, a consensus here across politics, was light touch reg, markets know best, let them rock and roll so long as they pay their taxes.
He was the Chancellor - he was responsible. The buck stops there.
On the politics, yes. And it happened - it's why he was kicked out in 2010. Slogans like 'not fixing the roof' etc worked for the Cons. No problem with that. But it's nice to get beyond that here in 2023. It's a shame to glean your entire understanding of such an important event as the GFC, its causes and its impact on the UK, from the Tory 2010 election manifesto. I think so anyway.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
The leaders here very much do. As do those in Portugal and Spain, where they can use good weather and low taxes to cream off the lifestyle now available to the 1%, rather than just the 0.01%.
AIUI UAE requires $5k a month salary and a letter of employment. Most digital nomads are freelancers. And on irregular incomes. That seems a pretty high bar to me.
They have visas for both. The one you mention is the ‘remote worker’ visa, aimed at people employed by a company overseas, and on their payroll.
There’s many other visa options for the self-employed working out of here. In practice, £10k gets you a company setup and three year visa for yourself and immediate family. A £250k cash property investment gets you a 5-year visa and anyone with a masters degree can sponsor themselves for a 10-year ‘golden visa’
The Spain and Portugual ‘digital nomad’ visas are also for those in employment with a regular salary, from an overseas company.
But. Isn't the purpose of being a "digital nomad", to be nomadic? Those options seem much better suited to those planning a significant period of residency.
Which is what they’re trying to encourage, people seeing the UAE as a place to settle and but property, rather than just a place you work for a few years, saving money that ends up overseas. The ‘digital nomad’ is something quite specific, someone who wants a residency, but works for an overseas company and draws a salary (of more than $60k).
Who'd want to settle in the gulf? Unless you're a drug dealer or political exile, what's the appeal?
I voted Leave mainly because I blamed Blair for us getting to that stage. It was never necessary. He was so gung-ho for the EU, he couldn't wait to persuade people. He wanted to force people to go full-fat.
What's wrong in waving the blue and green quartered flag for a while?
The EU has it's faults. Number one is its rush to produce one country out of 27 and counting. Softly-softly and all that. The remainer attitude of you're all racists and the anti-democratuc reaction to the result means I'd vote NO again.
I would gently suggest to all those who have underrated Sunak, suggests he hides in a fridge, or is weak have been confounded today by a grown up PM who does detail and in this agreement has achieved a legacy that will long outlast his tenure
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
As a Remainer I genuinely want what's best for Britain. I believe that being part of the EU is best, but I also think that it's best that I convince other Britons of that from a position of strength and confidence, rather than to have them cowed into rejoining by economic disaster.
The Remainers who think it is better for Britain to fail, as quickly as possible, so that we will rejoin the EU following that failure, are like the infantile Leftists in 1930s Germany, derided by Trotsky, who thought that Hitler coming to power would precipitate a crisis that would see the Communists take over soon afterwards.
So, no surprise that I disagree with you.
If Britain is prospering, why on earth would we rejoin the EU, and submit ourselves to
1. Yet another hideous divisive referendum and
2. Political rule from Brussels?
We won’t. The only way we ever Rejoin is if we are on our knees and begging. Unlikely
It’s a version of the same dilemma that faces the Scot Nits. If they actually run Scotland well and Scots thrive, why bother breaking up the UK?
What bit of Britain is NOT prospering don't you get. Most people are struggling to survive. Come out of your fantasy world for an hour or two.
Chill Malc. If you had spent the last two months with the lady boys of Bangkok you would be as serene as Leon.
Comments
But my problem was that blowing up the deficit pre crisis was an accident waiting to happen for any future crisis. And crises come, inevitably, as you can't abolish them. That's why I didn't vote Labour in 2005, despite not liking Howard's Tories and not "thinking what they were thinking", I could see what was coming on the budget.
In 2001/02 we had a balanced budget. When crises come, and its when not if, the budget typically deteriorates by about 6 to 7%. It did in 08, as standard. Had that happened in 2001/02 then the deficit would have been only 5 to 6% afterwards, not 10%, and wouldn't have needed austerity to fix that. It could have been absorbed as part of the economic cycle, which is exactly what it was.
We were prepared for the next crisis back then. What happened after, was inexcusable. There is no justification for the pre crisis deficit.
A quick look back into the archives finds this news from August 3rd, 2022:
"Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack northwest of Slovyansk and continued efforts to advance on Bakhmut from the northeast, east, and southeast."
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/1936
Possibly you can find similar if you go further back, but I got bored. It will have taken Russia more than seven months of fighting to take Bakhmut, and it doesn't do them much good.
Ukraine are probably right to hold their reserves back to support counteroffensives towards Melitopol and/or Svatove, and to pull back to the next defensive line to continue wearing down Russian forces.
And if he achieves that, his brief premiership will have at least one impressive legacy
The Remainers who think it is better for Britain to fail, as quickly as possible, so that we will rejoin the EU following that failure, are like the infantile Leftists in 1930s Germany, derided by Trotsky, who thought that Hitler coming to power would precipitate a crisis that would see the Communists take over soon afterwards.
So, no surprise that I disagree with you.
TUV does not quite have enough votes to gain more than one seat, but they will all transfer to DUP.
The party that's in deep trouble is SDLP. They now poll no better than TUV, and would likely drop to just 2 or 3 seats.
Sunak should feel emboldened, so in the afterglow he should jettison Raab and Braverman. Now that would be good for him, the Tory Party and the nation.
TMay was a Remainer cosplaying a Leaver, and she was like me trying to be a Korean anime schoolgirl
Most digital nomads are freelancers. And on irregular incomes. That seems a pretty high bar to me.
1. Yet another hideous divisive referendum and
2. Political rule from Brussels?
We won’t. The only way we ever Rejoin is if we are on our knees and begging. Unlikely
It’s a version of the same dilemma that faces the Scot Nits. If they actually run Scotland well and Scots thrive, why bother breaking up the UK?
But whilst this deal is clearly a good thing, it still leaves the UK with a very hard Brexit, albeit a realistic one. That still looks like it's going to do us ongoing harm overall.
But if the politics of today mean that Big Dog is politically a Dead Dog (quick burial, close family only, no flowers), that has to be a good thing. Let's see what he does next.
NI should have always been dealt with afterwards, putting the NI cart before the Brexit horse was what made May's negotiations such an unmitigated disaster.
https://twitter.com/CNNAfrica/status/1630208228842778624?t=mPZzykTpFoscOmZIuZDu7A&s=19
Lots of electoral skullduggery to come. When he made governor it had to go to the Supreme Court.
We need a new Karl Marx.
That aside, stamps are decorative and they do allow for poignant reminiscence. The best stamp I ever got was entering “The Ecclestiastical Byzantine Republic of Mount Athos” - the quasi autonomous men-only monastic realm in north east Greece. It was a superb looking double-headed eagle of a thing
But a journalist friend of mine got a stamp for entering the FARC (Terrorist) Republic of Free Colombia, which is even more impressive
Presumably. No sitting Stormont, no brake to apply?
https://www.businessinsider.com/spain-digital-nomad-visa-january-2023-tax-income-requirements-2022-11
Johnson must be spitting feathers.
And if the alternative is a Corbyn government, a deal held together with string and wishful thinking is better than whatever deal Corbyn would have cooked up. Imagine Corbyn trying to find a deal with the EU which could keep NI within the UK. It would be like all of his Christmasses had come at once (well, two of his Christmasses.)
There’s many other visa options for the self-employed working out of here. In practice, £10k gets you a company setup and three year visa for yourself and immediate family. A £250k cash property investment gets you a 5-year visa and anyone with a masters degree can sponsor themselves for a 10-year ‘golden visa’
The Spain and Portugual ‘digital nomad’ visas are also for those in employment with a regular salary, from an overseas company.
In about 2025, Starmer uses the TCA negotiations already in the diary to actually cooperate over trade. Life perks up a bit in Britain.
His sucessor (I'm imagining Labour as well, becuase I think the Conservatives are going to spend a while at the political equivalent of a health retreat) deepens that to some variant of the Swiss/Norwegian arrangement. Life perks up in Britain a bit more. And that process continues. There may be an equilbrium where the UK decides "this close but no further", but it's not clear where that might be. In which case, gravity wins.
Meanwhile, the demographic churn continues. My take is that Brexit has always been predomiantly a boomer project- old enough to pine for times before the EU, young enough to not actually remember the war. And the long era where they have run the show is coming to an end, as they go to the place where there is no Europe and there are no referendums.
And if I'm right, the process won't be hideous or divisive, because by the time the question is being asked, the answer would be obvious.
As I've said before, Brexit is a gift from an elderly relative which, in most lights, looks hideous. It would be rude to get rid of it now, and it would cause a terrible argument. But at some point, it's going down the charity shop.
Can't see the DUP or ERG accepting this Deal. Sunak will likely need Labour votes to get it through if a vote on it
Look at the polling in Norway and Switzerland etc. Absolute objection to joining the EU, so it will be in the UK
Those options seem much better suited to those planning a significant period of residency.
A few ERG dinosaurs may vote against but the vast majority of conservative mps will vote for it
A lot of the sanctimoniousness (is that a word?) came from the media, not the top of the government.
YAY FOR RISHI
Take the gloves off Rishi. Show Johnson who is boss.
There must come a point when they are as sick to the back teeth of it as everyone else.
He might get a majority of Tory MPs behind it but probably no more than 2/3, same as for May's Deal on MV1.
However he will get it through as Starmer is backing it while Corbyn opposed May's Deal
Excellent news
Less than 30 if indeed that many
After all, for some people, Brexit is their only chance to go down in history.
If only someone had told me we had a monopoly on those.
Wonder what the Swiss will have to do to get back in. They have been excluded twice now. Will the UK find itself excluded again the next time EU negotiations get testy?
It looks as if Sunak is moving us much closer to the EU and apart from the hard right ERG this should be welcomed by the vast majority
The debate will immediately be about the EU, and the EU joining package. The flaws and problems of that will be the ones mercilessly examined, not recriminations over what happened a decade or two earlier.
And great news for UK scientists . As expected part of this agreement was that issue on Horizon .
That's different from the kind of thing I understood it to be.
Which was a way of extensively travelling the world with no ties whilst working exclusively Online.
The modern equivalent of a PADI or TEFL qualification.
Surely what you are describing is a fancy term for well-paid immigrant?
And I'm a scientist who in the past held FP7 (programme before Horizon) funding.
Coffee time, methinks.
So no, it's nothing to do with what you call City culture and all down to poor regulation. Regulation that Brown created and implemented.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mgxf/episodes/player
Tonight we have an "are we there yet?" #Peston #Brexit special - with @SteveBakerHW
@Jacob_Rees_Mogg
@ArleneFosterUK
@jayrayner1
. If you want to know what #Protocol means for NI and whole UK, watch ITV 10.45 and here via @itvpeston
also 10.45
What's wrong in waving the blue and green quartered flag for a while?
The EU has it's faults. Number one is its rush to produce one country out of 27 and counting. Softly-softly and all that. The remainer attitude of you're all racists and the anti-democratuc reaction to the result means I'd vote NO again.
Silly and unnecessary.
A small bonus for Rishi, and a big f-off to Bojo.
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