Yes, if that poll is to be believed. I'm not trying to make some kind of woke point here, to my mind I am simply stating a fact. The Britain that actually exists, that I know and have grown up with, has been shaped to a significant degree by immigration. Without immigration there'd be no Indian or Chinese restaurants or fish and chips, no George Michael or Freddie Mercury or UB40 or Dire Straits or Two Tone or Stormzy, no Mini, no John Barnes or Harry Kane, no Trevor McDonald or Amol Rajan or Lenny Henry or Meera Syal, no Bend it like Beckham, no Kazuo Ishiguro, no Zadie Smith, no Steve McQueen, no Ben Kingsley or Idris Elba, not to mention most of my work colleagues, my wife and all her family, my children, my sister in law, many of my closest friends and neighbours, most of the children at my kids' school... To my mind anyone who says they don't recognise Britain because of immigration is simply not answering the question seriously.
On topic this is one rare moment when I agree with Skyr. How can anyone sane go along with Donald’s latest demented idea when he’s still on about seizing Greenland. Ridic
It is actually a very sensible idea, non-violent and aimed at speeding negotiations to re-open the Strait.
Starmer won't do it because it would upset China, aka the gaffer.
All the resistance (all of it) is because people hate and despise Trump, and don't trust him.
That's it.
If it were Biden or Obama doing it, which is perfectly possible under an alternative scenario, we wouldn't hear half as much criticism.
Neither Biden nor Obama got themselves into a situation where they were so completely clueless as Trump is with Iran. Trump is flailing because he has no idea how to get out of the mess he created. Why would anyone want to get mixed up in that? That Trump insults you at the same time doesn't encourage any sense of owing him a favour.
It's a nonsensical argument anyway. For all his faults on foreign policy, Obama made a deal with Iran on the nuclear issue. If Trump handy simply scrapped it, it might well have been possible to contain Iran and avoided the present chaos.
But yeah, the questions are a bit pushy, which is such an old trick that it got sent up in Yes, Prime Minister.
(Though not as fishy as the bar chart in the latest Rossergram. Based on recent surveys of residents, they claim that Reform are just ahead of Labour in this bit of Romford, with a combined bar for Residents and Greens higher than the Conservatives. Lots about Rosser, Khan and Starmer, hardly anything about the candidates.)
Which ward are you in? I'm trying to decide how to cast my anti-Reform votes and haven't a clue who is best placed. In Hylands and Harrow Lodge it won't be Labour. RA or Tory (with fingers crossed behind my back and a brandy chaser)?
St Edward's (Romford Town North as it would have been called in less poetic times), and much the same here. Last time the percentages were roughly C45, RA25, L25. Flip knows what that plays out this year.
Queen Elizabeth II ‘dismayed’ by Brexit referendum, book claims
David Cameron should not have called the vote on leaving the EU, the late monarch is said to have told Barack Obama
Queen Elizabeth was “dismayed” about David Cameron’s handling of Brexit and confided in Barack Obama about her concerns over calling a referendum, according to a book.
The late Queen, who as monarch could not take a public stance on the issue, is said to have made her views known to the US president over lunch during his visit to Windsor Castle in April 2016.
The claims are made in a book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History, by the American journalist Susan Page.
Obama, who was interviewed for the book about the Queen’s relationship with America, said she did not believe that as big a decision as the UK leaving the European Union “should have been decided by plebiscite”.
Page said the lunch, which took place two months after Cameron called the referendum, was a “very rare royal critique of a prime minister, in public or private”.
Describing the conversation, Obama said: “She said, effectively, ‘It’s hard to understand why a prime minister, who presumably understands politics, would put a public referendum forward that he didn’t know what the answer would be of such importance.’”
With all due respect to our former Queen, a plebiscite is the only way to resolve such issues. She was wrong on this.
It isn't. Not even in this case, as the plebiscite did not resolve the issue, we did not Leave the EU the day after the referendum, indeed MPs and peers consistently voted down all terms for leaving the EU and we were still in the EU 3 years after the 2016 referendum result.
Only the Conservative majority at the 2019 general election delivered Brexit, not the referendum
Yes, but that is because the Remainer Parliament from 2015 to 2019 was an utter disgrace that made Trump look like a democrat. Thankfully all of the main offenders lost their seats.
There was an election in 2017, so there were 2 Remsiner Parliaments 2016-17 and 2017 to 2019..
The problem was that in 2017, Labour politicians like Sir Keir pledged to respect the referendum result "as a matter of principle" during the campaign, then blocked every attempt to get it done afterwards
there was a principled as well as an unprincipled problem about 'respecting the referendum'. This could occur via an utterly hard Brexit in which any trade relationship with the EU was entirely severed and we relied on an entirely new set of buccaneering relations, perhaps with a gunboat. Equally respecting the referendum was (as I favoured and favour) a Swiss or Norway deal where outside political EU we were still fully in the economic and trade EU. Which Starmer would do if he dared.
There was, among the principled, no course of action that commanded a real majority. There still isn't.
There is now. It's called rejoin.
Indeed. All you gotta do is put this Rejoin in a manifesto, win on that manifesto, then call the referendum (risking your entire career if you are PM), then win that referendum, THEN hope and pray that the ten years of subsequent turbulent negotiations with the EU (adding constant uncertainty to the economy) do not end with Malta, Ireland, Spain, France or Bulgaria exercising a veto, making it all pointless, as we are rejected
Re Brexit, I've never been more convinced that we made the right choice.
Yebbut you're more reliably wrong than any other contributor
Strong competition.
The key is to always equivocate, that way I, I mean, they, can never be totally wrong.
I think it helps to be able to accept that failure is inevitable, which makes it easier to recognise when one is wrong, and then, perhaps, do better next time.
The people who have to expend so much effort convincing themselves that they are always right never learn from their mistakes.
But yeah, the questions are a bit pushy, which is such an old trick that it got sent up in Yes, Prime Minister.
(Though not as fishy as the bar chart in the latest Rossergram. Based on recent surveys of residents, they claim that Reform are just ahead of Labour in this bit of Romford, with a combined bar for Residents and Greens higher than the Conservatives. Lots about Rosser, Khan and Starmer, hardly anything about the candidates.)
Which ward are you in? I'm trying to decide how to cast my anti-Reform votes and haven't a clue who is best placed. In Hylands and Harrow Lodge it won't be Labour. RA or Tory (with fingers crossed behind my back and a brandy chaser)?
Residents Association? They're probably the lads with "88" tattoos. Make Reform look like centrists.
Of course May’s biggest error was post the referendum she had a total ability to decide what Brexit meant.
If she’d decided it meant single market to match the closeness of the result nobody would have argued. Instead she went for hard Brexit even though she herself said she didn’t want one.
That 12 months in they hadn't agreed what the approach would be, leading to futher arguments and resignations, was when I started turning against it - it was clear at that point that the pessimists had been right about how it would be handled.
I think we will probably end up with basically that at some point. Out but single market type arrangement. May could have easily delivered that.
But she couldn't. Not as leader of the Conservative Party.
May's plan was several steps further away from the EU than that and she was defenestrated for that, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Eurosceptic. There is no way that Conservative MPs would have backed her signing up for anything like the single market. Had she tried, she would have been out on her ear faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg can say "vassal state". Had she tried to get it through Parliament with opposition votes, even more so.
There were at least two explosive devices locked deep in the Brexit mechanism, which would foil politicians with more cunning than we really want politicians to have.
First was that any Brexit deal had to be acceptable to a majority of MPs overall, and a majority of Conservative MPs- who by that point had been driven a bit loco by the process. Majority overall ruled out a hard Brexit, majority of Conservatives ruled out anything other than a hard Brexit.
Second was that Leave covered a range of ambitions- deregulating business, global trade deals, control of borders, spending money on other things. The only way to give everyone in the 52% what they wanted was to take control of all of those things, which meant a massive distancing.
Given those constraints, a few things follow.
First, painful as it is to say, the only way out of the maze was to give Boris and his fellow travellers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. The 2019 election result was the only mechanism that unlocked the Paliament and Party locks simultaneously. Shame it gave so much power to people so unsuited to exercise it.
Second, we had to end up where we ended up, for now. Nothing else was stable. That it has consequences that a lot of people don't like is neither here nor there.
Third, the resulting Brexit is very vulnerable to salami-slicing. Pretty much any bit of unpicking Brexit is likely to be net popular. We've seen some examples already, there are more in the pipeline. It's like I say to kids when they are stuck on a maths problem- if you can't see all the way to the answer, look for the thing you can do which might be helpful, do that and repeat. (It's quite good as life advice in general.)
Wishcasting. You can salami slice all you like, but then another government full of rightwing vigour can come and undo it all with one vote, and this will happen, indeed they can vote us much further away
To get us back in, you need to win a Rejoin referendum. No British government will ever risk it
I feel sorry for the PB Centrist Dads, they lost the biggest vote of their lives and it can never be undone
No reversal required. The CU and SM are huge cliff-edges. You can't salami slice a cliff-edge, with apologies for the mixed metaphor.
Well yes
But I'm trying to school the Centrist Dorks, they're not the smartest
To get us significantly back in, you need to win a referendum. It then becomes the irresistible will of the people, and overrules all else. We saw that in Brexit, when, despite 90% of the British establishment conspiring to scupper the vote and revoke it, nonetheless it prevailed. Because in the end we are a democracy, and the idea of ignoring the expressed will of the people,,the demos, was too appalling (and dangerous) despite several PBers and millions of others (eg Keir Starmer) advocating this insane position. I fully believe we would have seen blood on the streets if the Second Voters had got their way. A narrow escape
Sadiq Khan gets this. He knows you morallly need to win a referendum to Rejoin, and he also knows no government will ever call one (let alone win one),. Hence his advice to Starmer to make Rejoin a manifesto promise that the government can then enact, totally avoiding a plebiscite
It is the measure of the Rejoiners desperation. Not gonna happen
I don't think Rejoin is going to happen. But I think you're wrong.
It's worth remembering that Cameron only promised a referendum as a tool of party management - he never intended to actually hold the referendum, nor to actually leave the EU.
If public opinion turns against Brexit sufficiently strongly, and backbenchers in a party kick up enough of a fuss, then it's entirely possible that a PM ends up with a commitment to hold a referendum on rejoining that they never particularly wanted.
While I have no confidence in the ability of people currently advocating for EU membership to win such a referendum, there are all sorts of things that might happen in a referendum campaign, and all sorts of other questions that might get wrapped up in it.
You remind me of pro-Europeans in the late-90s who in their arrogance and naiveté could not conceive of the debate going against them. And look where they are now.
I think it will fade. Once we're going through eGates, and other surface concerns. The number of people who care about the non-surface concerns is small. Starmer cosying up to the EU - e.g the phytosanitary deal - makes rejoin less likely not more.
Of course May’s biggest error was post the referendum she had a total ability to decide what Brexit meant.
If she’d decided it meant single market to match the closeness of the result nobody would have argued. Instead she went for hard Brexit even though she herself said she didn’t want one.
That 12 months in they hadn't agreed what the approach would be, leading to futher arguments and resignations, was when I started turning against it - it was clear at that point that the pessimists had been right about how it would be handled.
I think we will probably end up with basically that at some point. Out but single market type arrangement. May could have easily delivered that.
But she couldn't. Not as leader of the Conservative Party.
May's plan was several steps further away from the EU than that and she was defenestrated for that, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Eurosceptic. There is no way that Conservative MPs would have backed her signing up for anything like the single market. Had she tried, she would have been out on her ear faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg can say "vassal state". Had she tried to get it through Parliament with opposition votes, even more so.
There were at least two explosive devices locked deep in the Brexit mechanism, which would foil politicians with more cunning than we really want politicians to have.
First was that any Brexit deal had to be acceptable to a majority of MPs overall, and a majority of Conservative MPs- who by that point had been driven a bit loco by the process. Majority overall ruled out a hard Brexit, majority of Conservatives ruled out anything other than a hard Brexit.
Second was that Leave covered a range of ambitions- deregulating business, global trade deals, control of borders, spending money on other things. The only way to give everyone in the 52% what they wanted was to take control of all of those things, which meant a massive distancing.
Given those constraints, a few things follow.
First, painful as it is to say, the only way out of the maze was to give Boris and his fellow travellers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. The 2019 election result was the only mechanism that unlocked the Paliament and Party locks simultaneously. Shame it gave so much power to people so unsuited to exercise it.
Second, we had to end up where we ended up, for now. Nothing else was stable. That it has consequences that a lot of people don't like is neither here nor there.
Third, the resulting Brexit is very vulnerable to salami-slicing. Pretty much any bit of unpicking Brexit is likely to be net popular. We've seen some examples already, there are more in the pipeline. It's like I say to kids when they are stuck on a maths problem- if you can't see all the way to the answer, look for the thing you can do which might be helpful, do that and repeat. (It's quite good as life advice in general.)
+1 to put it mildly. Absolutely the best take on it.
Once the 17 election delivered that parliamentary arithmetic the die was cast. All the various factions acted perfectly logically in accordance with their agendas. It's pointless to allocate blame or say this or that group or person shoulda coulda done this or that instead of that or this.
Risking an analogy to PBs best analogist (and ignoring quantum chaos) it's like if you know where all the atoms are, and their speed and direction, at a given time you know the future. Brexit had to happen how it did. With Boris and his duplicitous bare bones deal.
But yeah, the questions are a bit pushy, which is such an old trick that it got sent up in Yes, Prime Minister.
(Though not as fishy as the bar chart in the latest Rossergram. Based on recent surveys of residents, they claim that Reform are just ahead of Labour in this bit of Romford, with a combined bar for Residents and Greens higher than the Conservatives. Lots about Rosser, Khan and Starmer, hardly anything about the candidates.)
Which ward are you in? I'm trying to decide how to cast my anti-Reform votes and haven't a clue who is best placed. In Hylands and Harrow Lodge it won't be Labour. RA or Tory (with fingers crossed behind my back and a brandy chaser)?
St Edward's (Romford Town North as it would have been called in less poetic times), and much the same here. Last time the percentages were roughly C45, RA25, L25. Flip knows what that plays out this year.
That's curious, I was in St Edward's last time and for the previous 4 elections but moved 3 years ago. I usually scattered my vote around as the Tories were always safe anyway.
But yeah, the questions are a bit pushy, which is such an old trick that it got sent up in Yes, Prime Minister.
(Though not as fishy as the bar chart in the latest Rossergram. Based on recent surveys of residents, they claim that Reform are just ahead of Labour in this bit of Romford, with a combined bar for Residents and Greens higher than the Conservatives. Lots about Rosser, Khan and Starmer, hardly anything about the candidates.)
Which ward are you in? I'm trying to decide how to cast my anti-Reform votes and haven't a clue who is best placed. In Hylands and Harrow Lodge it won't be Labour. RA or Tory (with fingers crossed behind my back and a brandy chaser)?
Residents Association? They're probably the lads with "88" tattoos. Make Reform look like centrists.
Until the last elections, Havering had an Independent Residents Association group as well- yes, they called themselves the IRA.
Actually, some of them had very fruity pasts and opinions.
pb brains trust - does anybody lease rather than buy a car? My place of work is doing a scheme whereby you pay for your leasing costs out of your gross salary - but leasing rather than buying looks at first glance to be a preposterously expensive way of running a car. Am I wrong?
pb brains trust - does anybody lease rather than buy a car? My place of work is doing a scheme whereby you pay for your leasing costs out of your gross salary - but leasing rather than buying looks at first glance to be a preposterously expensive way of running a car. Am I wrong?
We have (had?) a similar scheme. Likewise, when I looked at the costs they looked very high.
Queen Elizabeth II ‘dismayed’ by Brexit referendum, book claims
David Cameron should not have called the vote on leaving the EU, the late monarch is said to have told Barack Obama
Queen Elizabeth was “dismayed” about David Cameron’s handling of Brexit and confided in Barack Obama about her concerns over calling a referendum, according to a book.
The late Queen, who as monarch could not take a public stance on the issue, is said to have made her views known to the US president over lunch during his visit to Windsor Castle in April 2016.
The claims are made in a book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History, by the American journalist Susan Page.
Obama, who was interviewed for the book about the Queen’s relationship with America, said she did not believe that as big a decision as the UK leaving the European Union “should have been decided by plebiscite”.
Page said the lunch, which took place two months after Cameron called the referendum, was a “very rare royal critique of a prime minister, in public or private”.
Describing the conversation, Obama said: “She said, effectively, ‘It’s hard to understand why a prime minister, who presumably understands politics, would put a public referendum forward that he didn’t know what the answer would be of such importance.’”
With all due respect to our former Queen, a plebiscite is the only way to resolve such issues. She was wrong on this.
It isn't. Not even in this case, as the plebiscite did not resolve the issue, we did not Leave the EU the day after the referendum, indeed MPs and peers consistently voted down all terms for leaving the EU and we were still in the EU 3 years after the 2016 referendum result.
Only the Conservative majority at the 2019 general election delivered Brexit, not the referendum
Yes, but that is because the Remainer Parliament from 2015 to 2019 was an utter disgrace that made Trump look like a democrat. Thankfully all of the main offenders lost their seats.
There was an election in 2017, so there were 2 Remsiner Parliaments 2016-17 and 2017 to 2019..
The problem was that in 2017, Labour politicians like Sir Keir pledged to respect the referendum result "as a matter of principle" during the campaign, then blocked every attempt to get it done afterwards
there was a principled as well as an unprincipled problem about 'respecting the referendum'. This could occur via an utterly hard Brexit in which any trade relationship with the EU was entirely severed and we relied on an entirely new set of buccaneering relations, perhaps with a gunboat. Equally respecting the referendum was (as I favoured and favour) a Swiss or Norway deal where outside political EU we were still fully in the economic and trade EU. Which Starmer would do if he dared.
There was, among the principled, no course of action that commanded a real majority. There still isn't.
There is now. It's called rejoin.
Indeed. All you gotta do is put this Rejoin in a manifesto, win on that manifesto, then call the referendum (risking your entire career if you are PM), then win that referendum, THEN hope and pray that the ten years of subsequent turbulent negotiations with the EU (adding constant uncertainty to the economy) do not end with Malta, Ireland, Spain, France or Bulgaria exercising a veto, making it all pointless, as we are rejected
Best of British luck
It won't take ten years after a vote.
Commiserations that you voted for a failure.
Commiserations that you still haven't got over being beaten by the side of a bus.
pb brains trust - does anybody lease rather than buy a car? My place of work is doing a scheme whereby you pay for your leasing costs out of your gross salary - but leasing rather than buying looks at first glance to be a preposterously expensive way of running a car. Am I wrong?
No, the but the googleable term is "Salary sacrifice". Apparently there is a special deal for electric cars thus-taken but it ends soon.
pb brains trust - does anybody lease rather than buy a car? My place of work is doing a scheme whereby you pay for your leasing costs out of your gross salary - but leasing rather than buying looks at first glance to be a preposterously expensive way of running a car. Am I wrong?
It's worth comparing the prices being offered with what is available from leasing.com and leaseloco.com - from memory the salary sacrifice schemes look expensive...
pb brains trust - does anybody lease rather than buy a car? My place of work is doing a scheme whereby you pay for your leasing costs out of your gross salary - but leasing rather than buying looks at first glance to be a preposterously expensive way of running a car. Am I wrong?
Providing it's an EV it's very tax efficient to lease via salary sacrifice. You are almost entirely paying for the lease with your gross salary, like pension contributions. Be aware however that your employer holds the lease not you, which complicates things if you leave your job mid lease.
Add leasing is not a particularly preposterously expensive way to fund a new car that you will replace in a few years. If you normally run an old banger into the ground, it will be a lot more expensive than that.
Of course May’s biggest error was post the referendum she had a total ability to decide what Brexit meant.
If she’d decided it meant single market to match the closeness of the result nobody would have argued. Instead she went for hard Brexit even though she herself said she didn’t want one.
That 12 months in they hadn't agreed what the approach would be, leading to futher arguments and resignations, was when I started turning against it - it was clear at that point that the pessimists had been right about how it would be handled.
I think we will probably end up with basically that at some point. Out but single market type arrangement. May could have easily delivered that.
But she couldn't. Not as leader of the Conservative Party.
May's plan was several steps further away from the EU than that and she was defenestrated for that, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Eurosceptic. There is no way that Conservative MPs would have backed her signing up for anything like the single market. Had she tried, she would have been out on her ear faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg can say "vassal state". Had she tried to get it through Parliament with opposition votes, even more so.
There were at least two explosive devices locked deep in the Brexit mechanism, which would foil politicians with more cunning than we really want politicians to have.
First was that any Brexit deal had to be acceptable to a majority of MPs overall, and a majority of Conservative MPs- who by that point had been driven a bit loco by the process. Majority overall ruled out a hard Brexit, majority of Conservatives ruled out anything other than a hard Brexit.
Second was that Leave covered a range of ambitions- deregulating business, global trade deals, control of borders, spending money on other things. The only way to give everyone in the 52% what they wanted was to take control of all of those things, which meant a massive distancing.
Given those constraints, a few things follow.
First, painful as it is to say, the only way out of the maze was to give Boris and his fellow travellers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. The 2019 election result was the only mechanism that unlocked the Paliament and Party locks simultaneously. Shame it gave so much power to people so unsuited to exercise it.
Second, we had to end up where we ended up, for now. Nothing else was stable. That it has consequences that a lot of people don't like is neither here nor there.
Third, the resulting Brexit is very vulnerable to salami-slicing. Pretty much any bit of unpicking Brexit is likely to be net popular. We've seen some examples already, there are more in the pipeline. It's like I say to kids when they are stuck on a maths problem- if you can't see all the way to the answer, look for the thing you can do which might be helpful, do that and repeat. (It's quite good as life advice in general.)
Wishcasting. You can salami slice all you like, but then another government full of rightwing vigour can come and undo it all with one vote, and this will happen, indeed they can vote us much further away
To get us back in, you need to win a Rejoin referendum. No British government will ever risk it
I feel sorry for the PB Centrist Dads, they lost the biggest vote of their lives and it can never be undone
No reversal required. The CU and SM are huge cliff-edges. You can't salami slice a cliff-edge, with apologies for the mixed metaphor.
Well yes
But I'm trying to school the Centrist Dorks, they're not the smartest
To get us significantly back in, you need to win a referendum. It then becomes the irresistible will of the people, and overrules all else. We saw that in Brexit, when, despite 90% of the British establishment conspiring to scupper the vote and revoke it, nonetheless it prevailed. Because in the end we are a democracy, and the idea of ignoring the expressed will of the people,,the demos, was too appalling (and dangerous) despite several PBers and millions of others (eg Keir Starmer) advocating this insane position. I fully believe we would have seen blood on the streets if the Second Voters had got their way. A narrow escape
Sadiq Khan gets this. He knows you morallly need to win a referendum to Rejoin, and he also knows no government will ever call one (let alone win one),. Hence his advice to Starmer to make Rejoin a manifesto promise that the government can then enact, totally avoiding a plebiscite
It is the measure of the Rejoiners desperation. Not gonna happen
I don't think Rejoin is going to happen. But I think you're wrong.
It's worth remembering that Cameron only promised a referendum as a tool of party management - he never intended to actually hold the referendum, nor to actually leave the EU.
If public opinion turns against Brexit sufficiently strongly, and backbenchers in a party kick up enough of a fuss, then it's entirely possible that a PM ends up with a commitment to hold a referendum on rejoining that they never particularly wanted.
While I have no confidence in the ability of people currently advocating for EU membership to win such a referendum, there are all sorts of things that might happen in a referendum campaign, and all sorts of other questions that might get wrapped up in it.
You remind me of pro-Europeans in the late-90s who in their arrogance and naiveté could not conceive of the debate going against them. And look where they are now.
I think it will fade. Once we're going through eGates, and other surface concerns. The number of people who care about the non-surface concerns is small. Starmer cosying up to the EU - e.g the phytosanitary deal - makes rejoin less likely not more.
I think the next few decades could be geopolitically interesting, waning and erratic US influence, aggressive authoritarians, severe climate change impacts, China attempting to throw its weight around while it can, etc.
Large events have a habit of creating large changes in public opinion. It's not inevitable that this will see majority story for EU membership, but it is possible.
But yeah, the questions are a bit pushy, which is such an old trick that it got sent up in Yes, Prime Minister.
(Though not as fishy as the bar chart in the latest Rossergram. Based on recent surveys of residents, they claim that Reform are just ahead of Labour in this bit of Romford, with a combined bar for Residents and Greens higher than the Conservatives. Lots about Rosser, Khan and Starmer, hardly anything about the candidates.)
Which ward are you in? I'm trying to decide how to cast my anti-Reform votes and haven't a clue who is best placed. In Hylands and Harrow Lodge it won't be Labour. RA or Tory (with fingers crossed behind my back and a brandy chaser)?
Residents Association? They're probably the lads with "88" tattoos. Make Reform look like centrists.
Until the last elections, Havering had an Independent Residents Association group as well- yes, they called themselves the IRA.
Actually, some of them had very fruity pasts and opinions.
Ah, but they'd be handy lads to have around if the town hall electrics needed some work...
Orbán Viktor @PM_ViktorOrban · 2h The work begins now. We will regroup and continue fighting for the Hungarian people!
Tisza want to change the constitution to only allow a PM to be able to serve a maximum of two terms and this will be retrospective. If they manage to do that then Orban can’t stand again .
pb brains trust - does anybody lease rather than buy a car? My place of work is doing a scheme whereby you pay for your leasing costs out of your gross salary - but leasing rather than buying looks at first glance to be a preposterously expensive way of running a car. Am I wrong?
You might save enough from salary sacrifice that you still end up ahead even while leasing.
Not sure why the government has set it up so that leasing companies can extract tax revenue from the government in this way.
Orbán Viktor @PM_ViktorOrban · 2h The work begins now. We will regroup and continue fighting for the Hungarian people!
Tisza want to change the constitution to only allow a PM to be able to serve a maximum of two terms and this will be retrospective. If they manage to do that then Orban can’t stand again .
But yeah, the questions are a bit pushy, which is such an old trick that it got sent up in Yes, Prime Minister.
(Though not as fishy as the bar chart in the latest Rossergram. Based on recent surveys of residents, they claim that Reform are just ahead of Labour in this bit of Romford, with a combined bar for Residents and Greens higher than the Conservatives. Lots about Rosser, Khan and Starmer, hardly anything about the candidates.)
Which ward are you in? I'm trying to decide how to cast my anti-Reform votes and haven't a clue who is best placed. In Hylands and Harrow Lodge it won't be Labour. RA or Tory (with fingers crossed behind my back and a brandy chaser)?
Residents Association? They're probably the lads with "88" tattoos. Make Reform look like centrists.
I've always felt the RAs were the people who felt the Conservative Party wasn't quite conservative enough. Not quite back to the 1950s. So yes they ought to be Reform in many ways. In practice there's little between any of them politically except they all strongly dislike each other!
Orbán Viktor @PM_ViktorOrban · 2h The work begins now. We will regroup and continue fighting for the Hungarian people!
Tisza want to change the constitution to only allow a PM to be able to serve a maximum of two terms and this will be retrospective. If they manage to do that then Orban can’t stand again .
pb brains trust - does anybody lease rather than buy a car? My place of work is doing a scheme whereby you pay for your leasing costs out of your gross salary - but leasing rather than buying looks at first glance to be a preposterously expensive way of running a car. Am I wrong?
Providing it's an EV it's very tax efficient to lease via salary sacrifice. You are almost entirely paying for the lease with your gross salary, like pension contributions. Be aware however that your employer holds the lease not you, which complicates things if you leave your job mid lease.
Yes, it's an EV via salary sacrifice.
Like Sandy, my initial impression is it's very expensive. I think it's because I don't nomally buy new cars. But it looks like the lease includes insurance, which seems improbable.
And you think such a party should be in charge of the country's finances? It can't even run itself properly.
It wants rent controls but has voted to abolish landlords. It voted against nationalising energy companies. It opposes taking steps to deal with racism and anti-Semitism in the NHS and its activists want to pass an anti-Zionism motion using wording identical to that last used by the National Front in the 1970's. Its activists are obsessed by Israel but have no answers to the issue facing local councillors in the U.K.. Its latest MP did not even mention the environment in her maiden speech. Its migration policies - open borders with no restrictions of any kind - with everyone fully eligible for all benefits would destroy the welfare state. But the Scottish Greens did vote for the failed euthanasia bill so maybe that's how they'll make the sums add up.
Honestly, those voting for - let alone joining - this crew are making the same mistake Reform voters and others voting for incoherent populist parties always do: believing what they would like to be true.
Look a bit more closely at what this party is actually saying and doing and at the reality of the behaviour and views of those standing for it. From the leader down, there is a wealth of evidence of highly questionable behaviour and views. The Greens are as ghastly, stupid and as dangerous as Reform. For apparently intelligent people on here to join them claiming they have fresh ideas when they are merely repeating some of the worst ideas we have seen while claiming that, of course, they don't support all their policies only proves that even the apparently intelligent can delude themselves. Though this is not news sadly.
And you think such a party should be in charge of the country's finances? It can't even run itself properly.
It wants rent controls but has voted to abolish landlords. It voted against nationalising energy companies. It opposes taking steps to deal with racism and anti-Semitism in the NHS and its activists want to pass an anti-Zionism motion using wording identical to that last used by the National Front in the 1970's. Its activists are obsessed by Israel but have no answers to the issue facing local councillors in the U.K.. Its latest MP did not even mention the environment in her maiden speech. Its migration policies - open borders with no restrictions of any kind - with everyone fully eligible for all benefits would destroy the welfare state. But the Scottish Greens did vote for the failed euthanasia bill so maybe that's how they'll make the sums add up.
Honestly, those voting for - let alone joining - this crew are making the same mistake Reform voters and others voting for incoherent populist parties always do: believing what they would like to be true.
Look a bit more closely at what this party is actually saying and doing and at the reality of the behaviour and views of those standing for it. From the leader down, there is a wealth of evidence of highly questionable behaviour and views. The Greens are as ghastly, stupid and as dangerous as Reform. For apparently intelligent people on here to join them claiming they have fresh ideas when they are merely repeating some of the worst ideas we have seen while claiming that, of course, they don't support all their policies only proves that even the apparently intelligent can delude themselves. Though this is not news sadly.
The Green ideas are not fresh really, it's just more people are actually looking at them now.
Still, it makes about as much sense as Reform claiming to be a group of outsiders, when their candidates in these locals, like last year, will almost certainly be the same sort of people who always stand in local elections - for better and worse.
pb brains trust - does anybody lease rather than buy a car? My place of work is doing a scheme whereby you pay for your leasing costs out of your gross salary - but leasing rather than buying looks at first glance to be a preposterously expensive way of running a car. Am I wrong?
Providing it's an EV it's very tax efficient to lease via salary sacrifice. You are almost entirely paying for the lease with your gross salary, like pension contributions. Be aware however that your employer holds the lease not you, which complicates things if you leave your job mid lease.
Yes, it's an EV via salary sacrifice.
Like Sandy, my initial impression is it's very expensive. I think it's because I don't nomally buy new cars. But it looks like the lease includes insurance, which seems improbable.
No, it's essential as it's the only way a company car lease works.
My check would be to compare it against a personal lease to see if the figures add up compared to your post tax income, some times it does, some times it doesn't...
Queen Elizabeth II ‘dismayed’ by Brexit referendum, book claims
David Cameron should not have called the vote on leaving the EU, the late monarch is said to have told Barack Obama
Queen Elizabeth was “dismayed” about David Cameron’s handling of Brexit and confided in Barack Obama about her concerns over calling a referendum, according to a book.
The late Queen, who as monarch could not take a public stance on the issue, is said to have made her views known to the US president over lunch during his visit to Windsor Castle in April 2016.
The claims are made in a book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History, by the American journalist Susan Page.
Obama, who was interviewed for the book about the Queen’s relationship with America, said she did not believe that as big a decision as the UK leaving the European Union “should have been decided by plebiscite”.
Page said the lunch, which took place two months after Cameron called the referendum, was a “very rare royal critique of a prime minister, in public or private”.
Describing the conversation, Obama said: “She said, effectively, ‘It’s hard to understand why a prime minister, who presumably understands politics, would put a public referendum forward that he didn’t know what the answer would be of such importance.’”
With all due respect to our former Queen, a plebiscite is the only way to resolve such issues. She was wrong on this.
It isn't. Not even in this case, as the plebiscite did not resolve the issue, we did not Leave the EU the day after the referendum, indeed MPs and peers consistently voted down all terms for leaving the EU and we were still in the EU 3 years after the 2016 referendum result.
Only the Conservative majority at the 2019 general election delivered Brexit, not the referendum
Yes, but that is because the Remainer Parliament from 2015 to 2019 was an utter disgrace that made Trump look like a democrat. Thankfully all of the main offenders lost their seats.
There was an election in 2017, so there were 2 Remsiner Parliaments 2016-17 and 2017 to 2019..
The problem was that in 2017, Labour politicians like Sir Keir pledged to respect the referendum result "as a matter of principle" during the campaign, then blocked every attempt to get it done afterwards
there was a principled as well as an unprincipled problem about 'respecting the referendum'. This could occur via an utterly hard Brexit in which any trade relationship with the EU was entirely severed and we relied on an entirely new set of buccaneering relations, perhaps with a gunboat. Equally respecting the referendum was (as I favoured and favour) a Swiss or Norway deal where outside political EU we were still fully in the economic and trade EU. Which Starmer would do if he dared.
There was, among the principled, no course of action that commanded a real majority. There still isn't.
There is now. It's called rejoin.
Indeed. All you gotta do is put this Rejoin in a manifesto, win on that manifesto, then call the referendum (risking your entire career if you are PM), then win that referendum, THEN hope and pray that the ten years of subsequent turbulent negotiations with the EU (adding constant uncertainty to the economy) do not end with Malta, Ireland, Spain, France or Bulgaria exercising a veto, making it all pointless, as we are rejected
Of course May’s biggest error was post the referendum she had a total ability to decide what Brexit meant.
If she’d decided it meant single market to match the closeness of the result nobody would have argued. Instead she went for hard Brexit even though she herself said she didn’t want one.
That 12 months in they hadn't agreed what the approach would be, leading to futher arguments and resignations, was when I started turning against it - it was clear at that point that the pessimists had been right about how it would be handled.
I think we will probably end up with basically that at some point. Out but single market type arrangement. May could have easily delivered that.
But she couldn't. Not as leader of the Conservative Party.
May's plan was several steps further away from the EU than that and she was defenestrated for that, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Eurosceptic. There is no way that Conservative MPs would have backed her signing up for anything like the single market. Had she tried, she would have been out on her ear faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg can say "vassal state". Had she tried to get it through Parliament with opposition votes, even more so.
There were at least two explosive devices locked deep in the Brexit mechanism, which would foil politicians with more cunning than we really want politicians to have.
First was that any Brexit deal had to be acceptable to a majority of MPs overall, and a majority of Conservative MPs- who by that point had been driven a bit loco by the process. Majority overall ruled out a hard Brexit, majority of Conservatives ruled out anything other than a hard Brexit.
Second was that Leave covered a range of ambitions- deregulating business, global trade deals, control of borders, spending money on other things. The only way to give everyone in the 52% what they wanted was to take control of all of those things, which meant a massive distancing.
Given those constraints, a few things follow.
First, painful as it is to say, the only way out of the maze was to give Boris and his fellow travellers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. The 2019 election result was the only mechanism that unlocked the Paliament and Party locks simultaneously. Shame it gave so much power to people so unsuited to exercise it.
Second, we had to end up where we ended up, for now. Nothing else was stable. That it has consequences that a lot of people don't like is neither here nor there.
Third, the resulting Brexit is very vulnerable to salami-slicing. Pretty much any bit of unpicking Brexit is likely to be net popular. We've seen some examples already, there are more in the pipeline. It's like I say to kids when they are stuck on a maths problem- if you can't see all the way to the answer, look for the thing you can do which might be helpful, do that and repeat. (It's quite good as life advice in general.)
Wishcasting. You can salami slice all you like, but then another government full of rightwing vigour can come and undo it all with one vote, and this will happen, indeed they can vote us much further away
To get us back in, you need to win a Rejoin referendum. No British government will ever risk it
I feel sorry for the PB Centrist Dads, they lost the biggest vote of their lives and it can never be undone
No reversal required. The CU and SM are huge cliff-edges. You can't salami slice a cliff-edge, with apologies for the mixed metaphor.
Well yes
But I'm trying to school the Centrist Dorks, they're not the smartest
To get us significantly back in, you need to win a referendum. It then becomes the irresistible will of the people, and overrules all else. We saw that in Brexit, when, despite 90% of the British establishment conspiring to scupper the vote and revoke it, nonetheless it prevailed. Because in the end we are a democracy, and the idea of ignoring the expressed will of the people,,the demos, was too appalling (and dangerous) despite several PBers and millions of others (eg Keir Starmer) advocating this insane position. I fully believe we would have seen blood on the streets if the Second Voters had got their way. A narrow escape
Sadiq Khan gets this. He knows you morallly need to win a referendum to Rejoin, and he also knows no government will ever call one (let alone win one),. Hence his advice to Starmer to make Rejoin a manifesto promise that the government can then enact, totally avoiding a plebiscite
It is the measure of the Rejoiners desperation. Not gonna happen
I don't think Rejoin is going to happen. But I think you're wrong.
It's worth remembering that Cameron only promised a referendum as a tool of party management - he never intended to actually hold the referendum, nor to actually leave the EU.
If public opinion turns against Brexit sufficiently strongly, and backbenchers in a party kick up enough of a fuss, then it's entirely possible that a PM ends up with a commitment to hold a referendum on rejoining that they never particularly wanted.
While I have no confidence in the ability of people currently advocating for EU membership to win such a referendum, there are all sorts of things that might happen in a referendum campaign, and all sorts of other questions that might get wrapped up in it.
You remind me of pro-Europeans in the late-90s who in their arrogance and naiveté could not conceive of the debate going against them. And look where they are now.
I think it will fade. Once we're going through eGates, and other surface concerns. The number of people who care about the non-surface concerns is small. Starmer cosying up to the EU - e.g the phytosanitary deal - makes rejoin less likely not more.
I think the next few decades could be geopolitically interesting, waning and erratic US influence, aggressive authoritarians, severe climate change impacts, China attempting to throw its weight around while it can, etc.
Large events have a habit of creating large changes in public opinion. It's not inevitable that this will see majority story for EU membership, but it is possible.
It doesn't necessarily end with a return to full EU membership but there are undoubtedly factors pushing us back in that direction, in particular the possible collapse of our alliance with the US.
Trump's picture of him as Christ and attacking the Pope shows just how blasphemous these heathens are
Shame on you Trump
Just go or someone please hook him off
I don't mind people being blasphemous, but hypocritically blasphemous is another thing.
I don't know about attacking the Pope being blasphemous. It seems in the proudest Protestant traditions.
Indeed, grand old tradition for the grand old party?
The comparisons to Jesus are more of a no-no though. Puritan minded folk pilloried and branded James Naylor just for riding a horse into Bristol in imitation of Jesus.
pb brains trust - does anybody lease rather than buy a car? My place of work is doing a scheme whereby you pay for your leasing costs out of your gross salary - but leasing rather than buying looks at first glance to be a preposterously expensive way of running a car. Am I wrong?
You might save enough from salary sacrifice that you still end up ahead even while leasing.
Not sure why the government has set it up so that leasing companies can extract tax revenue from the government in this way.
Be careful how salary sacrifice schemes affect your pension etc
pb brains trust - does anybody lease rather than buy a car? My place of work is doing a scheme whereby you pay for your leasing costs out of your gross salary - but leasing rather than buying looks at first glance to be a preposterously expensive way of running a car. Am I wrong?
Providing it's an EV it's very tax efficient to lease via salary sacrifice. You are almost entirely paying for the lease with your gross salary, like pension contributions. Be aware however that your employer holds the lease not you, which complicates things if you leave your job mid lease.
Yes, it's an EV via salary sacrifice.
Like Sandy, my initial impression is it's very expensive. I think it's because I don't nomally buy new cars. But it looks like the lease includes insurance, which seems improbable.
It probably also includes servicing, breakdown cover and road tax. As noted this is your company's lease not yours. They don't want to be out of pocket on this stuff.
I am still completely baffled what it is Trump thought he was going to achieve in Iran
He had an awkward Epstein related news story that he didn't want hitting the press and the Israeli PM promising a quick win that would hide said news story.
Remember Trump has removed anyone who doesn't tell him what he wants to hear so from the meeting in the White House no-one was there telling Trump what the obvious consequences and problems were.
Yes, if that poll is to be believed. I'm not trying to make some kind of woke point here, to my mind I am simply stating a fact. The Britain that actually exists, that I know and have grown up with, has been shaped to a significant degree by immigration. Without immigration there'd be no Indian or Chinese restaurants or fish and chips, no George Michael or Freddie Mercury or UB40 or Dire Straits or Two Tone or Stormzy, no Mini, no John Barnes or Harry Kane, no Trevor McDonald or Amol Rajan or Lenny Henry or Meera Syal, no Bend it like Beckham, no Kazuo Ishiguro, no Zadie Smith, no Steve McQueen, no Ben Kingsley or Idris Elba, not to mention most of my work colleagues, my wife and all her family, my children, my sister in law, many of my closest friends and neighbours, most of the children at my kids' school... To my mind anyone who says they don't recognise Britain because of immigration is simply not answering the question seriously.
Farage’s ancestors were immigrants a few centuries back. Unlike all those you have listed above, however, I would be happy to send Farage “home” to France.
Queen Elizabeth II ‘dismayed’ by Brexit referendum, book claims
David Cameron should not have called the vote on leaving the EU, the late monarch is said to have told Barack Obama
Queen Elizabeth was “dismayed” about David Cameron’s handling of Brexit and confided in Barack Obama about her concerns over calling a referendum, according to a book.
The late Queen, who as monarch could not take a public stance on the issue, is said to have made her views known to the US president over lunch during his visit to Windsor Castle in April 2016.
The claims are made in a book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History, by the American journalist Susan Page.
Obama, who was interviewed for the book about the Queen’s relationship with America, said she did not believe that as big a decision as the UK leaving the European Union “should have been decided by plebiscite”.
Page said the lunch, which took place two months after Cameron called the referendum, was a “very rare royal critique of a prime minister, in public or private”.
Describing the conversation, Obama said: “She said, effectively, ‘It’s hard to understand why a prime minister, who presumably understands politics, would put a public referendum forward that he didn’t know what the answer would be of such importance.’”
With all due respect to our former Queen, a plebiscite is the only way to resolve such issues. She was wrong on this.
It isn't. Not even in this case, as the plebiscite did not resolve the issue, we did not Leave the EU the day after the referendum, indeed MPs and peers consistently voted down all terms for leaving the EU and we were still in the EU 3 years after the 2016 referendum result.
Only the Conservative majority at the 2019 general election delivered Brexit, not the referendum
Yes, but that is because the Remainer Parliament from 2015 to 2019 was an utter disgrace that made Trump look like a democrat. Thankfully all of the main offenders lost their seats.
There was an election in 2017, so there were 2 Remsiner Parliaments 2016-17 and 2017 to 2019..
The problem was that in 2017, Labour politicians like Sir Keir pledged to respect the referendum result "as a matter of principle" during the campaign, then blocked every attempt to get it done afterwards
there was a principled as well as an unprincipled problem about 'respecting the referendum'. This could occur via an utterly hard Brexit in which any trade relationship with the EU was entirely severed and we relied on an entirely new set of buccaneering relations, perhaps with a gunboat. Equally respecting the referendum was (as I favoured and favour) a Swiss or Norway deal where outside political EU we were still fully in the economic and trade EU. Which Starmer would do if he dared.
There was, among the principled, no course of action that commanded a real majority. There still isn't.
There is now. It's called rejoin.
Indeed. All you gotta do is put this Rejoin in a manifesto, win on that manifesto, then call the referendum (risking your entire career if you are PM), then win that referendum, THEN hope and pray that the ten years of subsequent turbulent negotiations with the EU (adding constant uncertainty to the economy) do not end with Malta, Ireland, Spain, France or Bulgaria exercising a veto, making it all pointless, as we are rejected
Best of British luck
It won't take ten years after a vote.
Commiserations that you voted for a failure.
Commiserations that you still haven't got over being beaten by the side of a bus.
It's been a decade, dude.
And the electorate seems to be coming round to my view.. Dude.
Trump's picture of him as Christ and attacking the Pope shows just how blasphemous these heathens are
Shame on you Trump
Just go or someone please hook him off
I don't mind people being blasphemous, but hypocritically blasphemous is another thing.
I don't know about attacking the Pope being blasphemous. It seems in the proudest Protestant traditions.
Indeed, grand old tradition for the grand old party?
The comparisons to Jesus are more of a no-no though. Puritan minded folk pilloried and branded James Naylor just for riding a horse into Bristol in imitation of Jesus.
The Brexiteer prognoses that the EU would collapse after we left, as everyone saw how great we were doing, were always bollocks. Brexit was bound to be painful, bloody and regretted by many, like having a baby
However there IS an issue a-coming which could split the EU asunder. Immigration and asylum. At the moment eastern Europe is largely refusing to take its share of asylum seekers and is urgently rejecting eg Muslims from other EU countries. The new guy in Hungary, by the way, is fully signed up to this, he is an Orbanite, he just promises to be an Orban without the corruption and pro-Putinism
The western Europeans are close to electing far right governments, such is the migrant and culture war crisis, the barbarians are at the gate. Somewhere along the line Paris Berlin and Brussels will, in desperation, attempt to make Warsaw, Budapest and Bratislava bend the knee and accept millions of migrants
That is the time and place where the EU might shatter
Queen Elizabeth II ‘dismayed’ by Brexit referendum, book claims
David Cameron should not have called the vote on leaving the EU, the late monarch is said to have told Barack Obama
Queen Elizabeth was “dismayed” about David Cameron’s handling of Brexit and confided in Barack Obama about her concerns over calling a referendum, according to a book.
The late Queen, who as monarch could not take a public stance on the issue, is said to have made her views known to the US president over lunch during his visit to Windsor Castle in April 2016.
The claims are made in a book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History, by the American journalist Susan Page.
Obama, who was interviewed for the book about the Queen’s relationship with America, said she did not believe that as big a decision as the UK leaving the European Union “should have been decided by plebiscite”.
Page said the lunch, which took place two months after Cameron called the referendum, was a “very rare royal critique of a prime minister, in public or private”.
Describing the conversation, Obama said: “She said, effectively, ‘It’s hard to understand why a prime minister, who presumably understands politics, would put a public referendum forward that he didn’t know what the answer would be of such importance.’”
With all due respect to our former Queen, a plebiscite is the only way to resolve such issues. She was wrong on this.
It isn't. Not even in this case, as the plebiscite did not resolve the issue, we did not Leave the EU the day after the referendum, indeed MPs and peers consistently voted down all terms for leaving the EU and we were still in the EU 3 years after the 2016 referendum result.
Only the Conservative majority at the 2019 general election delivered Brexit, not the referendum
Yes, but that is because the Remainer Parliament from 2015 to 2019 was an utter disgrace that made Trump look like a democrat. Thankfully all of the main offenders lost their seats.
There was an election in 2017, so there were 2 Remsiner Parliaments 2016-17 and 2017 to 2019..
The problem was that in 2017, Labour politicians like Sir Keir pledged to respect the referendum result "as a matter of principle" during the campaign, then blocked every attempt to get it done afterwards
there was a principled as well as an unprincipled problem about 'respecting the referendum'. This could occur via an utterly hard Brexit in which any trade relationship with the EU was entirely severed and we relied on an entirely new set of buccaneering relations, perhaps with a gunboat. Equally respecting the referendum was (as I favoured and favour) a Swiss or Norway deal where outside political EU we were still fully in the economic and trade EU. Which Starmer would do if he dared.
There was, among the principled, no course of action that commanded a real majority. There still isn't.
There is now. It's called rejoin.
Indeed. All you gotta do is put this Rejoin in a manifesto, win on that manifesto, then call the referendum (risking your entire career if you are PM), then win that referendum, THEN hope and pray that the ten years of subsequent turbulent negotiations with the EU (adding constant uncertainty to the economy) do not end with Malta, Ireland, Spain, France or Bulgaria exercising a veto, making it all pointless, as we are rejected
Best of British luck
It won't take ten years after a vote.
Commiserations that you voted for a failure.
Commiserations that you still haven't got over being beaten by the side of a bus.
It's been a decade, dude.
And the electorate seems to be coming round to my view.. Dude.
But, as I have shown you, there is fuck all you can practicably do about it. These polls are aspirations, the practical obstacles to Rejoin are immense and will never be overcome (within the realms of the politically plausible)
Of course May’s biggest error was post the referendum she had a total ability to decide what Brexit meant.
If she’d decided it meant single market to match the closeness of the result nobody would have argued. Instead she went for hard Brexit even though she herself said she didn’t want one.
That 12 months in they hadn't agreed what the approach would be, leading to futher arguments and resignations, was when I started turning against it - it was clear at that point that the pessimists had been right about how it would be handled.
I think we will probably end up with basically that at some point. Out but single market type arrangement. May could have easily delivered that.
But she couldn't. Not as leader of the Conservative Party.
May's plan was several steps further away from the EU than that and she was defenestrated for that, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Eurosceptic. There is no way that Conservative MPs would have backed her signing up for anything like the single market. Had she tried, she would have been out on her ear faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg can say "vassal state". Had she tried to get it through Parliament with opposition votes, even more so.
There were at least two explosive devices locked deep in the Brexit mechanism, which would foil politicians with more cunning than we really want politicians to have.
First was that any Brexit deal had to be acceptable to a majority of MPs overall, and a majority of Conservative MPs- who by that point had been driven a bit loco by the process. Majority overall ruled out a hard Brexit, majority of Conservatives ruled out anything other than a hard Brexit.
Second was that Leave covered a range of ambitions- deregulating business, global trade deals, control of borders, spending money on other things. The only way to give everyone in the 52% what they wanted was to take control of all of those things, which meant a massive distancing.
Given those constraints, a few things follow.
First, painful as it is to say, the only way out of the maze was to give Boris and his fellow travellers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. The 2019 election result was the only mechanism that unlocked the Paliament and Party locks simultaneously. Shame it gave so much power to people so unsuited to exercise it.
Second, we had to end up where we ended up, for now. Nothing else was stable. That it has consequences that a lot of people don't like is neither here nor there.
Third, the resulting Brexit is very vulnerable to salami-slicing. Pretty much any bit of unpicking Brexit is likely to be net popular. We've seen some examples already, there are more in the pipeline. It's like I say to kids when they are stuck on a maths problem- if you can't see all the way to the answer, look for the thing you can do which might be helpful, do that and repeat. (It's quite good as life advice in general.)
Wishcasting. You can salami slice all you like, but then another government full of rightwing vigour can come and undo it all with one vote, and this will happen, indeed they can vote us much further away
To get us back in, you need to win a Rejoin referendum. No British government will ever risk it
I feel sorry for the PB Centrist Dads, they lost the biggest vote of their lives and it can never be undone
No reversal required. The CU and SM are huge cliff-edges. You can't salami slice a cliff-edge, with apologies for the mixed metaphor.
Well yes
But I'm trying to school the Centrist Dorks, they're not the smartest
To get us significantly back in, you need to win a referendum. It then becomes the irresistible will of the people, and overrules all else. We saw that in Brexit, when, despite 90% of the British establishment conspiring to scupper the vote and revoke it, nonetheless it prevailed. Because in the end we are a democracy, and the idea of ignoring the expressed will of the people,,the demos, was too appalling (and dangerous) despite several PBers and millions of others (eg Keir Starmer) advocating this insane position. I fully believe we would have seen blood on the streets if the Second Voters had got their way. A narrow escape
Sadiq Khan gets this. He knows you morallly need to win a referendum to Rejoin, and he also knows no government will ever call one (let alone win one),. Hence his advice to Starmer to make Rejoin a manifesto promise that the government can then enact, totally avoiding a plebiscite
It is the measure of the Rejoiners desperation. Not gonna happen
I don't think Rejoin is going to happen. But I think you're wrong.
It's worth remembering that Cameron only promised a referendum as a tool of party management - he never intended to actually hold the referendum, nor to actually leave the EU.
If public opinion turns against Brexit sufficiently strongly, and backbenchers in a party kick up enough of a fuss, then it's entirely possible that a PM ends up with a commitment to hold a referendum on rejoining that they never particularly wanted.
While I have no confidence in the ability of people currently advocating for EU membership to win such a referendum, there are all sorts of things that might happen in a referendum campaign, and all sorts of other questions that might get wrapped up in it.
You remind me of pro-Europeans in the late-90s who in their arrogance and naiveté could not conceive of the debate going against them. And look where they are now.
I think it will fade. Once we're going through eGates, and other surface concerns. The number of people who care about the non-surface concerns is small. Starmer cosying up to the EU - e.g the phytosanitary deal - makes rejoin less likely not more.
I think the next few decades could be geopolitically interesting, waning and erratic US influence, aggressive authoritarians, severe climate change impacts, China attempting to throw its weight around while it can, etc.
Large events have a habit of creating large changes in public opinion. It's not inevitable that this will see majority story for EU membership, but it is possible.
It doesn't necessarily end with a return to full EU membership but there are undoubtedly factors pushing us back in that direction, in particular the possible collapse of our alliance with the US.
Er - yer wot? Why should us getting fucked over by America make us more inclined to then go get fucked over by the EU?
I've heard some twisted logic about why our Rejoin is inevitable - admittedly from those STILL smarting a decade on that they got beaten by folk much dumber than them. But this?
I don’t see a return to the EU anytime soon but Starmer seems determined to forge a much closer relationship and seems more up for a fight with the Tories and Reform over that .
There’s a window of opportunity now and the right wing press droning on about a Brexit betrayal will only cause some pearl clutching in those still living on cloud cuckoo land where Brexit is a roaring success .
The trashing of the so called special relationship by Trump has done wonders for those wanting much closer ties with the EU .
So he’s at least facilitated one good thing to come out of his so far disastrous second term !
Queen Elizabeth II ‘dismayed’ by Brexit referendum, book claims
David Cameron should not have called the vote on leaving the EU, the late monarch is said to have told Barack Obama
Queen Elizabeth was “dismayed” about David Cameron’s handling of Brexit and confided in Barack Obama about her concerns over calling a referendum, according to a book.
The late Queen, who as monarch could not take a public stance on the issue, is said to have made her views known to the US president over lunch during his visit to Windsor Castle in April 2016.
The claims are made in a book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History, by the American journalist Susan Page.
Obama, who was interviewed for the book about the Queen’s relationship with America, said she did not believe that as big a decision as the UK leaving the European Union “should have been decided by plebiscite”.
Page said the lunch, which took place two months after Cameron called the referendum, was a “very rare royal critique of a prime minister, in public or private”.
Describing the conversation, Obama said: “She said, effectively, ‘It’s hard to understand why a prime minister, who presumably understands politics, would put a public referendum forward that he didn’t know what the answer would be of such importance.’”
With all due respect to our former Queen, a plebiscite is the only way to resolve such issues. She was wrong on this.
It isn't. Not even in this case, as the plebiscite did not resolve the issue, we did not Leave the EU the day after the referendum, indeed MPs and peers consistently voted down all terms for leaving the EU and we were still in the EU 3 years after the 2016 referendum result.
Only the Conservative majority at the 2019 general election delivered Brexit, not the referendum
Yes, but that is because the Remainer Parliament from 2015 to 2019 was an utter disgrace that made Trump look like a democrat. Thankfully all of the main offenders lost their seats.
There was an election in 2017, so there were 2 Remsiner Parliaments 2016-17 and 2017 to 2019..
The problem was that in 2017, Labour politicians like Sir Keir pledged to respect the referendum result "as a matter of principle" during the campaign, then blocked every attempt to get it done afterwards
there was a principled as well as an unprincipled problem about 'respecting the referendum'. This could occur via an utterly hard Brexit in which any trade relationship with the EU was entirely severed and we relied on an entirely new set of buccaneering relations, perhaps with a gunboat. Equally respecting the referendum was (as I favoured and favour) a Swiss or Norway deal where outside political EU we were still fully in the economic and trade EU. Which Starmer would do if he dared.
There was, among the principled, no course of action that commanded a real majority. There still isn't.
There is now. It's called rejoin.
Indeed. All you gotta do is put this Rejoin in a manifesto, win on that manifesto, then call the referendum (risking your entire career if you are PM), then win that referendum, THEN hope and pray that the ten years of subsequent turbulent negotiations with the EU (adding constant uncertainty to the economy) do not end with Malta, Ireland, Spain, France or Bulgaria exercising a veto, making it all pointless, as we are rejected
Best of British luck
It won't take ten years after a vote.
Commiserations that you voted for a failure.
Commiserations that you still haven't got over being beaten by the side of a bus.
It's been a decade, dude.
And the electorate seems to be coming round to my view.. Dude.
But, as I have shown you, there is fuck all you can practicably do about it. These polls are aspirations, the practical obstacles to Rejoin are immense and will never be overcome (within the realms of the politically plausible)
If we accept free movement and the single market, we will get back the biggest benefits of being in the EU.
And you think such a party should be in charge of the country's finances? It can't even run itself properly.
It wants rent controls but has voted to abolish landlords. It voted against nationalising energy companies. It opposes taking steps to deal with racism and anti-Semitism in the NHS and its activists want to pass an anti-Zionism motion using wording identical to that last used by the National Front in the 1970's. Its activists are obsessed by Israel but have no answers to the issue facing local councillors in the U.K.. Its latest MP did not even mention the environment in her maiden speech. Its migration policies - open borders with no restrictions of any kind - with everyone fully eligible for all benefits would destroy the welfare state. But the Scottish Greens did vote for the failed euthanasia bill so maybe that's how they'll make the sums add up.
Honestly, those voting for - let alone joining - this crew are making the same mistake Reform voters and others voting for incoherent populist parties always do: believing what they would like to be true.
Look a bit more closely at what this party is actually saying and doing and at the reality of the behaviour and views of those standing for it. From the leader down, there is a wealth of evidence of highly questionable behaviour and views. The Greens are as ghastly, stupid and as dangerous as Reform. For apparently intelligent people on here to join them claiming they have fresh ideas when they are merely repeating some of the worst ideas we have seen while claiming that, of course, they don't support all their policies only proves that even the apparently intelligent can delude themselves. Though this is not news sadly.
So you think it's acceptable for someone to sue a political party because they remove someone as a spokesman as said person doesn't share the policy of that party, as democratically voted for by its members?
To borrow the old phrase, it's a view...
If I joined the Labour party and became their chief spokesman for the NHS and said I was in favour of privatising it I imagine I'd be pretty quickly removed for those beliefs being way out of sync with the party line, and rightly so.
He doesn't support membership of either NATO or the EU for Ukraine (not that the former matters now). But he's evidently a vast improvement on Orban.
Magyar on Ukraine 🇭🇺🇺🇦:
"Everyone in Hungary knows that Ukraine is a victim of this war and no one should tell them under what conditions they should enter a peace or sign a peace treaty. We cannot tell any country to give up their territory.
And this is what the Fidesz politicians said. Then I would like to ask them: What would you do if Russia attacked Hungary? Which Hungarian counties would you be willing to give up?
Ukraine should receive security guarantees and territorial guarantees that can be observed and kept. Ukraine, under the Budapest Memorandum, gave up its nuclear arsenal for guarantees, but those guarantees were violated repeatedly by Russia."🔚 https://x.com/BohuslavskaKate/status/2043704747081842751
Queen Elizabeth II ‘dismayed’ by Brexit referendum, book claims
David Cameron should not have called the vote on leaving the EU, the late monarch is said to have told Barack Obama
Queen Elizabeth was “dismayed” about David Cameron’s handling of Brexit and confided in Barack Obama about her concerns over calling a referendum, according to a book.
The late Queen, who as monarch could not take a public stance on the issue, is said to have made her views known to the US president over lunch during his visit to Windsor Castle in April 2016.
The claims are made in a book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History, by the American journalist Susan Page.
Obama, who was interviewed for the book about the Queen’s relationship with America, said she did not believe that as big a decision as the UK leaving the European Union “should have been decided by plebiscite”.
Page said the lunch, which took place two months after Cameron called the referendum, was a “very rare royal critique of a prime minister, in public or private”.
Describing the conversation, Obama said: “She said, effectively, ‘It’s hard to understand why a prime minister, who presumably understands politics, would put a public referendum forward that he didn’t know what the answer would be of such importance.’”
With all due respect to our former Queen, a plebiscite is the only way to resolve such issues. She was wrong on this.
It isn't. Not even in this case, as the plebiscite did not resolve the issue, we did not Leave the EU the day after the referendum, indeed MPs and peers consistently voted down all terms for leaving the EU and we were still in the EU 3 years after the 2016 referendum result.
Only the Conservative majority at the 2019 general election delivered Brexit, not the referendum
Yes, but that is because the Remainer Parliament from 2015 to 2019 was an utter disgrace that made Trump look like a democrat. Thankfully all of the main offenders lost their seats.
There was an election in 2017, so there were 2 Remsiner Parliaments 2016-17 and 2017 to 2019..
The problem was that in 2017, Labour politicians like Sir Keir pledged to respect the referendum result "as a matter of principle" during the campaign, then blocked every attempt to get it done afterwards
there was a principled as well as an unprincipled problem about 'respecting the referendum'. This could occur via an utterly hard Brexit in which any trade relationship with the EU was entirely severed and we relied on an entirely new set of buccaneering relations, perhaps with a gunboat. Equally respecting the referendum was (as I favoured and favour) a Swiss or Norway deal where outside political EU we were still fully in the economic and trade EU. Which Starmer would do if he dared.
There was, among the principled, no course of action that commanded a real majority. There still isn't.
There is now. It's called rejoin.
Indeed. All you gotta do is put this Rejoin in a manifesto, win on that manifesto, then call the referendum (risking your entire career if you are PM), then win that referendum, THEN hope and pray that the ten years of subsequent turbulent negotiations with the EU (adding constant uncertainty to the economy) do not end with Malta, Ireland, Spain, France or Bulgaria exercising a veto, making it all pointless, as we are rejected
Best of British luck
It won't take ten years after a vote.
Commiserations that you voted for a failure.
Commiserations that you still haven't got over being beaten by the side of a bus.
It's been a decade, dude.
And the electorate seems to be coming round to my view.. Dude.
But, as I have shown you, there is fuck all you can practicably do about it. These polls are aspirations, the practical obstacles to Rejoin are immense and will never be overcome (within the realms of the politically plausible)
Queen Elizabeth II ‘dismayed’ by Brexit referendum, book claims
David Cameron should not have called the vote on leaving the EU, the late monarch is said to have told Barack Obama
Queen Elizabeth was “dismayed” about David Cameron’s handling of Brexit and confided in Barack Obama about her concerns over calling a referendum, according to a book.
The late Queen, who as monarch could not take a public stance on the issue, is said to have made her views known to the US president over lunch during his visit to Windsor Castle in April 2016.
The claims are made in a book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History, by the American journalist Susan Page.
Obama, who was interviewed for the book about the Queen’s relationship with America, said she did not believe that as big a decision as the UK leaving the European Union “should have been decided by plebiscite”.
Page said the lunch, which took place two months after Cameron called the referendum, was a “very rare royal critique of a prime minister, in public or private”.
Describing the conversation, Obama said: “She said, effectively, ‘It’s hard to understand why a prime minister, who presumably understands politics, would put a public referendum forward that he didn’t know what the answer would be of such importance.’”
With all due respect to our former Queen, a plebiscite is the only way to resolve such issues. She was wrong on this.
It isn't. Not even in this case, as the plebiscite did not resolve the issue, we did not Leave the EU the day after the referendum, indeed MPs and peers consistently voted down all terms for leaving the EU and we were still in the EU 3 years after the 2016 referendum result.
Only the Conservative majority at the 2019 general election delivered Brexit, not the referendum
Yes, but that is because the Remainer Parliament from 2015 to 2019 was an utter disgrace that made Trump look like a democrat. Thankfully all of the main offenders lost their seats.
There was an election in 2017, so there were 2 Remsiner Parliaments 2016-17 and 2017 to 2019..
The problem was that in 2017, Labour politicians like Sir Keir pledged to respect the referendum result "as a matter of principle" during the campaign, then blocked every attempt to get it done afterwards
there was a principled as well as an unprincipled problem about 'respecting the referendum'. This could occur via an utterly hard Brexit in which any trade relationship with the EU was entirely severed and we relied on an entirely new set of buccaneering relations, perhaps with a gunboat. Equally respecting the referendum was (as I favoured and favour) a Swiss or Norway deal where outside political EU we were still fully in the economic and trade EU. Which Starmer would do if he dared.
There was, among the principled, no course of action that commanded a real majority. There still isn't.
There is now. It's called rejoin.
Indeed. All you gotta do is put this Rejoin in a manifesto, win on that manifesto, then call the referendum (risking your entire career if you are PM), then win that referendum, THEN hope and pray that the ten years of subsequent turbulent negotiations with the EU (adding constant uncertainty to the economy) do not end with Malta, Ireland, Spain, France or Bulgaria exercising a veto, making it all pointless, as we are rejected
Best of British luck
It won't take ten years after a vote.
Commiserations that you voted for a failure.
Commiserations that you still haven't got over being beaten by the side of a bus.
It's been a decade, dude.
And the electorate seems to be coming round to my view.. Dude.
But, as I have shown you, there is fuck all you can practicably do about it. These polls are aspirations, the practical obstacles to Rejoin are immense and will never be overcome (within the realms of the politically plausible)
If we accept free movement and the single market, we will get back the biggest benefits of being in the EU.
I don't think we will quite end up with FoM and the SM as we knew it. But once the present generation of politicians have moved on - taking their bitterness, regret and triumphalism with them (and I refer to all sides here) I can see a more emollient compromise emerging. The Remainers will accept we really are out, the Brexiteers will accept not everything is betrayal, it will all become transactional, as it is with Switzerland, and it benefits everyone to make trade and movement as frictionless as possible
At the same time, I think such huge changes in human society are hurtling towards us, the entire argument will soon seem as relevant as Establishmentarianism and its opposite, in about five-ten years
Queen Elizabeth II ‘dismayed’ by Brexit referendum, book claims
David Cameron should not have called the vote on leaving the EU, the late monarch is said to have told Barack Obama
Queen Elizabeth was “dismayed” about David Cameron’s handling of Brexit and confided in Barack Obama about her concerns over calling a referendum, according to a book.
The late Queen, who as monarch could not take a public stance on the issue, is said to have made her views known to the US president over lunch during his visit to Windsor Castle in April 2016.
The claims are made in a book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History, by the American journalist Susan Page.
Obama, who was interviewed for the book about the Queen’s relationship with America, said she did not believe that as big a decision as the UK leaving the European Union “should have been decided by plebiscite”.
Page said the lunch, which took place two months after Cameron called the referendum, was a “very rare royal critique of a prime minister, in public or private”.
Describing the conversation, Obama said: “She said, effectively, ‘It’s hard to understand why a prime minister, who presumably understands politics, would put a public referendum forward that he didn’t know what the answer would be of such importance.’”
With all due respect to our former Queen, a plebiscite is the only way to resolve such issues. She was wrong on this.
It isn't. Not even in this case, as the plebiscite did not resolve the issue, we did not Leave the EU the day after the referendum, indeed MPs and peers consistently voted down all terms for leaving the EU and we were still in the EU 3 years after the 2016 referendum result.
Only the Conservative majority at the 2019 general election delivered Brexit, not the referendum
Yes, but that is because the Remainer Parliament from 2015 to 2019 was an utter disgrace that made Trump look like a democrat. Thankfully all of the main offenders lost their seats.
There was an election in 2017, so there were 2 Remsiner Parliaments 2016-17 and 2017 to 2019..
The problem was that in 2017, Labour politicians like Sir Keir pledged to respect the referendum result "as a matter of principle" during the campaign, then blocked every attempt to get it done afterwards
there was a principled as well as an unprincipled problem about 'respecting the referendum'. This could occur via an utterly hard Brexit in which any trade relationship with the EU was entirely severed and we relied on an entirely new set of buccaneering relations, perhaps with a gunboat. Equally respecting the referendum was (as I favoured and favour) a Swiss or Norway deal where outside political EU we were still fully in the economic and trade EU. Which Starmer would do if he dared.
There was, among the principled, no course of action that commanded a real majority. There still isn't.
There is now. It's called rejoin.
Indeed. All you gotta do is put this Rejoin in a manifesto, win on that manifesto, then call the referendum (risking your entire career if you are PM), then win that referendum, THEN hope and pray that the ten years of subsequent turbulent negotiations with the EU (adding constant uncertainty to the economy) do not end with Malta, Ireland, Spain, France or Bulgaria exercising a veto, making it all pointless, as we are rejected
Best of British luck
It won't take ten years after a vote.
Commiserations that you voted for a failure.
Commiserations that you still haven't got over being beaten by the side of a bus.
It's been a decade, dude.
And the electorate seems to be coming round to my view.. Dude.
Keep whistling in the darkness.
Show me some polling where a deal SPELLING OUT THE COST OF OUR RETURN TO THE EU - you know, membership fees (and the resultant hospital closures to pay for them), joining the Euro, joining a Federal Army (including handing over our nukes), handing over effective veto on our being members of the EU itself to Brussels, plus other stuff they will make us do for the shitz and gigglez BECAUSE THEY CAN - show me polling that signs up to that.
You can't.
And you never will in my lifetime. Which is at most 20-25 years. After that, do what you like.
Queen Elizabeth II ‘dismayed’ by Brexit referendum, book claims
David Cameron should not have called the vote on leaving the EU, the late monarch is said to have told Barack Obama
Queen Elizabeth was “dismayed” about David Cameron’s handling of Brexit and confided in Barack Obama about her concerns over calling a referendum, according to a book.
The late Queen, who as monarch could not take a public stance on the issue, is said to have made her views known to the US president over lunch during his visit to Windsor Castle in April 2016.
The claims are made in a book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History, by the American journalist Susan Page.
Obama, who was interviewed for the book about the Queen’s relationship with America, said she did not believe that as big a decision as the UK leaving the European Union “should have been decided by plebiscite”.
Page said the lunch, which took place two months after Cameron called the referendum, was a “very rare royal critique of a prime minister, in public or private”.
Describing the conversation, Obama said: “She said, effectively, ‘It’s hard to understand why a prime minister, who presumably understands politics, would put a public referendum forward that he didn’t know what the answer would be of such importance.’”
With all due respect to our former Queen, a plebiscite is the only way to resolve such issues. She was wrong on this.
It isn't. Not even in this case, as the plebiscite did not resolve the issue, we did not Leave the EU the day after the referendum, indeed MPs and peers consistently voted down all terms for leaving the EU and we were still in the EU 3 years after the 2016 referendum result.
Only the Conservative majority at the 2019 general election delivered Brexit, not the referendum
Yes, but that is because the Remainer Parliament from 2015 to 2019 was an utter disgrace that made Trump look like a democrat. Thankfully all of the main offenders lost their seats.
There was an election in 2017, so there were 2 Remsiner Parliaments 2016-17 and 2017 to 2019..
The problem was that in 2017, Labour politicians like Sir Keir pledged to respect the referendum result "as a matter of principle" during the campaign, then blocked every attempt to get it done afterwards
there was a principled as well as an unprincipled problem about 'respecting the referendum'. This could occur via an utterly hard Brexit in which any trade relationship with the EU was entirely severed and we relied on an entirely new set of buccaneering relations, perhaps with a gunboat. Equally respecting the referendum was (as I favoured and favour) a Swiss or Norway deal where outside political EU we were still fully in the economic and trade EU. Which Starmer would do if he dared.
There was, among the principled, no course of action that commanded a real majority. There still isn't.
There is now. It's called rejoin.
Indeed. All you gotta do is put this Rejoin in a manifesto, win on that manifesto, then call the referendum (risking your entire career if you are PM), then win that referendum, THEN hope and pray that the ten years of subsequent turbulent negotiations with the EU (adding constant uncertainty to the economy) do not end with Malta, Ireland, Spain, France or Bulgaria exercising a veto, making it all pointless, as we are rejected
Best of British luck
It won't take ten years after a vote.
Commiserations that you voted for a failure.
Commiserations that you still haven't got over being beaten by the side of a bus.
It's been a decade, dude.
And the electorate seems to be coming round to my view.. Dude.
But, as I have shown you, there is fuck all you can practicably do about it. These polls are aspirations, the practical obstacles to Rejoin are immense and will never be overcome (within the realms of the politically plausible)
I'm not trying to persuade you.
But I AM trying to emotionally assist you, in talking you down from an aspiration which can never be met, and will therefore only cause you angst
So Labour or Tories are around 7 points below Reform.
Doesn’t really ring as a landslide majority incoming for Reform to me.
Perhaps I am mistaken?
2024 UK general election
Lab: 33.7%
Con: 23.7%
Ref: 14.3%
7 Apr 2026 YouGov opinion poll
Lab: 16%
Con: 19%
Ref: 25%
You tell me who wins with that? Compare them to the SDP/Lib alliance in 1983
8 June 1983 Harris opinion poll
Lab: 26%
Con: 47%
Lib: 25%
We are in a world where Lab and Con are under 20% three years before the election. There's a little person inside my head going "eeeeeeeee" whilst running in circles because I don't know what the hell is going on.
Yes, if that poll is to be believed. I'm not trying to make some kind of woke point here, to my mind I am simply stating a fact. The Britain that actually exists, that I know and have grown up with, has been shaped to a significant degree by immigration. Without immigration there'd be no Indian or Chinese restaurants or fish and chips, no George Michael or Freddie Mercury or UB40 or Dire Straits or Two Tone or Stormzy, no Mini, no John Barnes or Harry Kane, no Trevor McDonald or Amol Rajan or Lenny Henry or Meera Syal, no Bend it like Beckham, no Kazuo Ishiguro, no Zadie Smith, no Steve McQueen, no Ben Kingsley or Idris Elba, not to mention most of my work colleagues, my wife and all her family, my children, my sister in law, many of my closest friends and neighbours, most of the children at my kids' school... To my mind anyone who says they don't recognise Britain because of immigration is simply not answering the question seriously.
Farage’s ancestors were immigrants a few centuries back. Unlike all those you have listed above, however, I would be happy to send Farage “home” to France.
Come on, even the French don't deserve that. I suspect most respondents to the polling question see it as asking whether recent levels of immigration (the so called Boriswave) were too high. Since even I would agree with that, I think it's unsurprising so many answer in the affirmative. Otherwise the question makes no sense, as historical immigration has shaped what Britain is like now, hence making it recognizable not unrecognizable, while recent levels of immigration, while too high, are not big enough to have fundamentally changed the country over so short a period of time.
Queen Elizabeth II ‘dismayed’ by Brexit referendum, book claims
David Cameron should not have called the vote on leaving the EU, the late monarch is said to have told Barack Obama
Queen Elizabeth was “dismayed” about David Cameron’s handling of Brexit and confided in Barack Obama about her concerns over calling a referendum, according to a book.
The late Queen, who as monarch could not take a public stance on the issue, is said to have made her views known to the US president over lunch during his visit to Windsor Castle in April 2016.
The claims are made in a book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History, by the American journalist Susan Page.
Obama, who was interviewed for the book about the Queen’s relationship with America, said she did not believe that as big a decision as the UK leaving the European Union “should have been decided by plebiscite”.
Page said the lunch, which took place two months after Cameron called the referendum, was a “very rare royal critique of a prime minister, in public or private”.
Describing the conversation, Obama said: “She said, effectively, ‘It’s hard to understand why a prime minister, who presumably understands politics, would put a public referendum forward that he didn’t know what the answer would be of such importance.’”
With all due respect to our former Queen, a plebiscite is the only way to resolve such issues. She was wrong on this.
It isn't. Not even in this case, as the plebiscite did not resolve the issue, we did not Leave the EU the day after the referendum, indeed MPs and peers consistently voted down all terms for leaving the EU and we were still in the EU 3 years after the 2016 referendum result.
Only the Conservative majority at the 2019 general election delivered Brexit, not the referendum
Yes, but that is because the Remainer Parliament from 2015 to 2019 was an utter disgrace that made Trump look like a democrat. Thankfully all of the main offenders lost their seats.
There was an election in 2017, so there were 2 Remsiner Parliaments 2016-17 and 2017 to 2019..
The problem was that in 2017, Labour politicians like Sir Keir pledged to respect the referendum result "as a matter of principle" during the campaign, then blocked every attempt to get it done afterwards
there was a principled as well as an unprincipled problem about 'respecting the referendum'. This could occur via an utterly hard Brexit in which any trade relationship with the EU was entirely severed and we relied on an entirely new set of buccaneering relations, perhaps with a gunboat. Equally respecting the referendum was (as I favoured and favour) a Swiss or Norway deal where outside political EU we were still fully in the economic and trade EU. Which Starmer would do if he dared.
There was, among the principled, no course of action that commanded a real majority. There still isn't.
There is now. It's called rejoin.
Indeed. All you gotta do is put this Rejoin in a manifesto, win on that manifesto, then call the referendum (risking your entire career if you are PM), then win that referendum, THEN hope and pray that the ten years of subsequent turbulent negotiations with the EU (adding constant uncertainty to the economy) do not end with Malta, Ireland, Spain, France or Bulgaria exercising a veto, making it all pointless, as we are rejected
Best of British luck
It won't take ten years after a vote.
Commiserations that you voted for a failure.
Commiserations that you still haven't got over being beaten by the side of a bus.
It's been a decade, dude.
And the electorate seems to be coming round to my view.. Dude.
Keep whistling in the darkness.
Show me some polling where a deal SPELLING OUT THE COST OF OUR RETURN TO THE EU - you know, membership fees (and the resultant hospital closures to pay for them), joining the Euro, joining a Federal Army (including handing over our nukes), handing over effective veto on our being members of the EU itself to Brussels, plus other stuff they will make us do for the shitz and gigglez BECAUSE THEY CAN - show me polling that signs up to that.
You can't.
And you never will in my lifetime. Which is at most 20-25 years. After that, do what you like.
Queen Elizabeth II ‘dismayed’ by Brexit referendum, book claims
David Cameron should not have called the vote on leaving the EU, the late monarch is said to have told Barack Obama
Queen Elizabeth was “dismayed” about David Cameron’s handling of Brexit and confided in Barack Obama about her concerns over calling a referendum, according to a book.
The late Queen, who as monarch could not take a public stance on the issue, is said to have made her views known to the US president over lunch during his visit to Windsor Castle in April 2016.
The claims are made in a book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History, by the American journalist Susan Page.
Obama, who was interviewed for the book about the Queen’s relationship with America, said she did not believe that as big a decision as the UK leaving the European Union “should have been decided by plebiscite”.
Page said the lunch, which took place two months after Cameron called the referendum, was a “very rare royal critique of a prime minister, in public or private”.
Describing the conversation, Obama said: “She said, effectively, ‘It’s hard to understand why a prime minister, who presumably understands politics, would put a public referendum forward that he didn’t know what the answer would be of such importance.’”
With all due respect to our former Queen, a plebiscite is the only way to resolve such issues. She was wrong on this.
It isn't. Not even in this case, as the plebiscite did not resolve the issue, we did not Leave the EU the day after the referendum, indeed MPs and peers consistently voted down all terms for leaving the EU and we were still in the EU 3 years after the 2016 referendum result.
Only the Conservative majority at the 2019 general election delivered Brexit, not the referendum
Yes, but that is because the Remainer Parliament from 2015 to 2019 was an utter disgrace that made Trump look like a democrat. Thankfully all of the main offenders lost their seats.
There was an election in 2017, so there were 2 Remsiner Parliaments 2016-17 and 2017 to 2019..
The problem was that in 2017, Labour politicians like Sir Keir pledged to respect the referendum result "as a matter of principle" during the campaign, then blocked every attempt to get it done afterwards
there was a principled as well as an unprincipled problem about 'respecting the referendum'. This could occur via an utterly hard Brexit in which any trade relationship with the EU was entirely severed and we relied on an entirely new set of buccaneering relations, perhaps with a gunboat. Equally respecting the referendum was (as I favoured and favour) a Swiss or Norway deal where outside political EU we were still fully in the economic and trade EU. Which Starmer would do if he dared.
There was, among the principled, no course of action that commanded a real majority. There still isn't.
There is now. It's called rejoin.
Indeed. All you gotta do is put this Rejoin in a manifesto, win on that manifesto, then call the referendum (risking your entire career if you are PM), then win that referendum, THEN hope and pray that the ten years of subsequent turbulent negotiations with the EU (adding constant uncertainty to the economy) do not end with Malta, Ireland, Spain, France or Bulgaria exercising a veto, making it all pointless, as we are rejected
Best of British luck
It won't take ten years after a vote.
Commiserations that you voted for a failure.
Commiserations that you still haven't got over being beaten by the side of a bus.
It's been a decade, dude.
And the electorate seems to be coming round to my view.. Dude.
But, as I have shown you, there is fuck all you can practicably do about it. These polls are aspirations, the practical obstacles to Rejoin are immense and will never be overcome (within the realms of the politically plausible)
I'm not trying to persuade you.
But I AM trying to emotionally assist you, in talking you down from an aspiration which can never be met, and will therefore only cause you angst
Passengers forced to spend thousands of pounds to return to the UK after their EasyJet flight left without them said border control delays caused by the European Union's new entry-exit system had been a "nightmare".
More than 100 people missed their flight to Manchester from Milan's Linate airport on Sunday while stuck in what the airline described as "unacceptable" passport control queues.
Some travellers reported vomiting and passing out as they tried to get through biometric and facial recognition checks rolled out under the new European Entry-Exit System (EES) on Friday.
Carol Boon said the experience was "just horrible", while Max Hume said he had been forced to spend £1,800 to get home.
He doesn't support membership of either NATO or the EU for Ukraine (not that the former matters now). But he's evidently a vast improvement on Orban.
Magyar on Ukraine 🇭🇺🇺🇦:
"Everyone in Hungary knows that Ukraine is a victim of this war and no one should tell them under what conditions they should enter a peace or sign a peace treaty. We cannot tell any country to give up their territory.
And this is what the Fidesz politicians said. Then I would like to ask them: What would you do if Russia attacked Hungary? Which Hungarian counties would you be willing to give up?
Ukraine should receive security guarantees and territorial guarantees that can be observed and kept. Ukraine, under the Budapest Memorandum, gave up its nuclear arsenal for guarantees, but those guarantees were violated repeatedly by Russia."🔚 https://x.com/BohuslavskaKate/status/2043704747081842751
Another interesting thing about the election is that the parties of the left didn't field candidates, in order to concentrate the anti-Orbán vote behind a single party. It will be fascinating to see whether normal democratic politics resumes, and what Magyar does with his supermajority.
The signs are encouraging, for now, but it's worth keeping an eye on.
Of course May’s biggest error was post the referendum she had a total ability to decide what Brexit meant.
If she’d decided it meant single market to match the closeness of the result nobody would have argued. Instead she went for hard Brexit even though she herself said she didn’t want one.
That 12 months in they hadn't agreed what the approach would be, leading to futher arguments and resignations, was when I started turning against it - it was clear at that point that the pessimists had been right about how it would be handled.
I think we will probably end up with basically that at some point. Out but single market type arrangement. May could have easily delivered that.
But she couldn't. Not as leader of the Conservative Party.
May's plan was several steps further away from the EU than that and she was defenestrated for that, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Eurosceptic. There is no way that Conservative MPs would have backed her signing up for anything like the single market. Had she tried, she would have been out on her ear faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg can say "vassal state". Had she tried to get it through Parliament with opposition votes, even more so.
There were at least two explosive devices locked deep in the Brexit mechanism, which would foil politicians with more cunning than we really want politicians to have.
First was that any Brexit deal had to be acceptable to a majority of MPs overall, and a majority of Conservative MPs- who by that point had been driven a bit loco by the process. Majority overall ruled out a hard Brexit, majority of Conservatives ruled out anything other than a hard Brexit.
Second was that Leave covered a range of ambitions- deregulating business, global trade deals, control of borders, spending money on other things. The only way to give everyone in the 52% what they wanted was to take control of all of those things, which meant a massive distancing.
Given those constraints, a few things follow.
First, painful as it is to say, the only way out of the maze was to give Boris and his fellow travellers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. The 2019 election result was the only mechanism that unlocked the Paliament and Party locks simultaneously. Shame it gave so much power to people so unsuited to exercise it.
Second, we had to end up where we ended up, for now. Nothing else was stable. That it has consequences that a lot of people don't like is neither here nor there.
Third, the resulting Brexit is very vulnerable to salami-slicing. Pretty much any bit of unpicking Brexit is likely to be net popular. We've seen some examples already, there are more in the pipeline. It's like I say to kids when they are stuck on a maths problem- if you can't see all the way to the answer, look for the thing you can do which might be helpful, do that and repeat. (It's quite good as life advice in general.)
Wishcasting. You can salami slice all you like, but then another government full of rightwing vigour can come and undo it all with one vote, and this will happen, indeed they can vote us much further away
To get us back in, you need to win a Rejoin referendum. No British government will ever risk it
I feel sorry for the PB Centrist Dads, they lost the biggest vote of their lives and it can never be undone
Not necessarily, a Labour government with a manifesto commitment to rejoin the EU which had won a general election with a majority or with enough seats with LD and Green support could rejoin the EU without a referendum.
Just as we left the EU in reality in 2019 after the Conservatives won a majority with a manifesto commitment to leave, not after the 2016 EU referendum itself
Of course May’s biggest error was post the referendum she had a total ability to decide what Brexit meant.
If she’d decided it meant single market to match the closeness of the result nobody would have argued. Instead she went for hard Brexit even though she herself said she didn’t want one.
That 12 months in they hadn't agreed what the approach would be, leading to futher arguments and resignations, was when I started turning against it - it was clear at that point that the pessimists had been right about how it would be handled.
I think we will probably end up with basically that at some point. Out but single market type arrangement. May could have easily delivered that.
But she couldn't. Not as leader of the Conservative Party.
May's plan was several steps further away from the EU than that and she was defenestrated for that, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Eurosceptic. There is no way that Conservative MPs would have backed her signing up for anything like the single market. Had she tried, she would have been out on her ear faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg can say "vassal state". Had she tried to get it through Parliament with opposition votes, even more so.
There were at least two explosive devices locked deep in the Brexit mechanism, which would foil politicians with more cunning than we really want politicians to have.
First was that any Brexit deal had to be acceptable to a majority of MPs overall, and a majority of Conservative MPs- who by that point had been driven a bit loco by the process. Majority overall ruled out a hard Brexit, majority of Conservatives ruled out anything other than a hard Brexit.
Second was that Leave covered a range of ambitions- deregulating business, global trade deals, control of borders, spending money on other things. The only way to give everyone in the 52% what they wanted was to take control of all of those things, which meant a massive distancing.
Given those constraints, a few things follow.
First, painful as it is to say, the only way out of the maze was to give Boris and his fellow travellers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. The 2019 election result was the only mechanism that unlocked the Paliament and Party locks simultaneously. Shame it gave so much power to people so unsuited to exercise it.
Second, we had to end up where we ended up, for now. Nothing else was stable. That it has consequences that a lot of people don't like is neither here nor there.
Third, the resulting Brexit is very vulnerable to salami-slicing. Pretty much any bit of unpicking Brexit is likely to be net popular. We've seen some examples already, there are more in the pipeline. It's like I say to kids when they are stuck on a maths problem- if you can't see all the way to the answer, look for the thing you can do which might be helpful, do that and repeat. (It's quite good as life advice in general.)
Wishcasting. You can salami slice all you like, but then another government full of rightwing vigour can come and undo it all with one vote, and this will happen, indeed they can vote us much further away
To get us back in, you need to win a Rejoin referendum. No British government will ever risk it
I feel sorry for the PB Centrist Dads, they lost the biggest vote of their lives and it can never be undone
No reversal required. The CU and SM are huge cliff-edges. You can't salami slice a cliff-edge, with apologies for the mixed metaphor.
Well yes
But I'm trying to school the Centrist Dorks, they're not the smartest
To get us significantly back in, you need to win a referendum. It then becomes the irresistible will of the people, and overrules all else. We saw that in Brexit, when, despite 90% of the British establishment conspiring to scupper the vote and revoke it, nonetheless it prevailed. Because in the end we are a democracy, and the idea of ignoring the expressed will of the people,,the demos, was too appalling (and dangerous) despite several PBers and millions of others (eg Keir Starmer) advocating this insane position. I fully believe we would have seen blood on the streets if the Second Voters had got their way. A narrow escape
Sadiq Khan gets this. He knows you morallly need to win a referendum to Rejoin, and he also knows no government will ever call one (let alone win one),. Hence his advice to Starmer to make Rejoin a manifesto promise that the government can then enact, totally avoiding a plebiscite
It is the measure of the Rejoiners desperation. Not gonna happen
I don't think Rejoin is going to happen. But I think you're wrong.
It's worth remembering that Cameron only promised a referendum as a tool of party management - he never intended to actually hold the referendum, nor to actually leave the EU.
If public opinion turns against Brexit sufficiently strongly, and backbenchers in a party kick up enough of a fuss, then it's entirely possible that a PM ends up with a commitment to hold a referendum on rejoining that they never particularly wanted.
While I have no confidence in the ability of people currently advocating for EU membership to win such a referendum, there are all sorts of things that might happen in a referendum campaign, and all sorts of other questions that might get wrapped up in it.
You remind me of pro-Europeans in the late-90s who in their arrogance and naiveté could not conceive of the debate going against them. And look where they are now.
I think it will fade. Once we're going through eGates, and other surface concerns. The number of people who care about the non-surface concerns is small. Starmer cosying up to the EU - e.g the phytosanitary deal - makes rejoin less likely not more.
I think the next few decades could be geopolitically interesting, waning and erratic US influence, aggressive authoritarians, severe climate change impacts, China attempting to throw its weight around while it can, etc.
Large events have a habit of creating large changes in public opinion. It's not inevitable that this will see majority story for EU membership, but it is possible.
It doesn't necessarily end with a return to full EU membership but there are undoubtedly factors pushing us back in that direction, in particular the possible collapse of our alliance with the US.
Er - yer wot? Why should us getting fucked over by America make us more inclined to then go get fucked over by the EU?
I've heard some twisted logic about why our Rejoin is inevitable - admittedly from those STILL smarting a decade on that they got beaten by folk much dumber than them. But this?
Nah...
You seem to have put your brain in a jar for some reason. A loosening of ties with America makes stronger ones with Europe more important and more likely.
And I'm not smarting btw. I'm just happy not to have been dumb or sloppy enough to vote Leave. It's a nice feeling. Shame it's unavailable to you.
Trump's picture of him as Christ and attacking the Pope shows just how blasphemous these heathens are
Shame on you Trump
Just go or someone please hook him off
I don't mind people being blasphemous, but hypocritically blasphemous is another thing.
I don't know about attacking the Pope being blasphemous. It seems in the proudest Protestant traditions.
Yes, you don't know. Trump wasn't accused of blasphemy for attacking the Pope. Just stupidity in that particular case.
It wasn't a sensible move by him, Roman Catholics are key swing voters in the US. Atheists and Jews and Muslims vote mainly Democrat, Protestants, especially Protestant evangelicals, vote mainly Republican.
Roman Catholics though swing their vote, most Roman Catholics voting for Bush in 2004 for instance, Obama in 2008 and 2012, Trump in 2016, Democrat for Congress in 2018, for Biden in 2020, Republican for Congress in 2022 and for Trump again in 2024
And you think such a party should be in charge of the country's finances? It can't even run itself properly.
It wants rent controls but has voted to abolish landlords. It voted against nationalising energy companies. It opposes taking steps to deal with racism and anti-Semitism in the NHS and its activists want to pass an anti-Zionism motion using wording identical to that last used by the National Front in the 1970's. Its activists are obsessed by Israel but have no answers to the issue facing local councillors in the U.K.. Its latest MP did not even mention the environment in her maiden speech. Its migration policies - open borders with no restrictions of any kind - with everyone fully eligible for all benefits would destroy the welfare state. But the Scottish Greens did vote for the failed euthanasia bill so maybe that's how they'll make the sums add up.
Honestly, those voting for - let alone joining - this crew are making the same mistake Reform voters and others voting for incoherent populist parties always do: believing what they would like to be true.
Look a bit more closely at what this party is actually saying and doing and at the reality of the behaviour and views of those standing for it. From the leader down, there is a wealth of evidence of highly questionable behaviour and views. The Greens are as ghastly, stupid and as dangerous as Reform. For apparently intelligent people on here to join them claiming they have fresh ideas when they are merely repeating some of the worst ideas we have seen while claiming that, of course, they don't support all their policies only proves that even the apparently intelligent can delude themselves. Though this is not news sadly.
Here's an interesting fact: Anti-Zionism is protected speech. It didn't receive as much coverage as gender-critical speech, but there it is. So consider the following hypothetical
"...There is a Labour candidate for Finchley and Golders Green. He decides to stand under the slogan "Death to Israel" and "From the River to the Sea". The constituency population is over 20% Jewish people. The Labour Party, in horror, attempts to remove him but he claims that anti-Zionism is protected speech and he is not antisemitic because he does not wish harm on Jewish people per se, and sues the Labour Party to keep his position.
What should the Labour Party do? What should the judge decide? Does the Labour Party's right to decide its own policies override the right of their candidate to express themselves legally?..."
News: Sec Wright tells me around 150 million barrels of Venezuela oil have been sold since January 3, and that five US firms are currently in the country — with an announcement coming soon about another US firm in Venezuela that will be “ramping up their production meaningfully.”
News: Sec Wright tells me around 150 million barrels of Venezuela oil have been sold since January 3, and that five US firms are currently in the country — with an announcement coming soon about another US firm in Venezuela that will be “ramping up their production meaningfully.”
Of course May’s biggest error was post the referendum she had a total ability to decide what Brexit meant.
If she’d decided it meant single market to match the closeness of the result nobody would have argued. Instead she went for hard Brexit even though she herself said she didn’t want one.
That 12 months in they hadn't agreed what the approach would be, leading to futher arguments and resignations, was when I started turning against it - it was clear at that point that the pessimists had been right about how it would be handled.
I think we will probably end up with basically that at some point. Out but single market type arrangement. May could have easily delivered that.
But she couldn't. Not as leader of the Conservative Party.
May's plan was several steps further away from the EU than that and she was defenestrated for that, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Eurosceptic. There is no way that Conservative MPs would have backed her signing up for anything like the single market. Had she tried, she would have been out on her ear faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg can say "vassal state". Had she tried to get it through Parliament with opposition votes, even more so.
There were at least two explosive devices locked deep in the Brexit mechanism, which would foil politicians with more cunning than we really want politicians to have.
First was that any Brexit deal had to be acceptable to a majority of MPs overall, and a majority of Conservative MPs- who by that point had been driven a bit loco by the process. Majority overall ruled out a hard Brexit, majority of Conservatives ruled out anything other than a hard Brexit.
Second was that Leave covered a range of ambitions- deregulating business, global trade deals, control of borders, spending money on other things. The only way to give everyone in the 52% what they wanted was to take control of all of those things, which meant a massive distancing.
Given those constraints, a few things follow.
First, painful as it is to say, the only way out of the maze was to give Boris and his fellow travellers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. The 2019 election result was the only mechanism that unlocked the Paliament and Party locks simultaneously. Shame it gave so much power to people so unsuited to exercise it.
Second, we had to end up where we ended up, for now. Nothing else was stable. That it has consequences that a lot of people don't like is neither here nor there.
Third, the resulting Brexit is very vulnerable to salami-slicing. Pretty much any bit of unpicking Brexit is likely to be net popular. We've seen some examples already, there are more in the pipeline. It's like I say to kids when they are stuck on a maths problem- if you can't see all the way to the answer, look for the thing you can do which might be helpful, do that and repeat. (It's quite good as life advice in general.)
Wishcasting. You can salami slice all you like, but then another government full of rightwing vigour can come and undo it all with one vote, and this will happen, indeed they can vote us much further away
To get us back in, you need to win a Rejoin referendum. No British government will ever risk it
I feel sorry for the PB Centrist Dads, they lost the biggest vote of their lives and it can never be undone
No reversal required. The CU and SM are huge cliff-edges. You can't salami slice a cliff-edge, with apologies for the mixed metaphor.
Well yes
But I'm trying to school the Centrist Dorks, they're not the smartest
To get us significantly back in, you need to win a referendum. It then becomes the irresistible will of the people, and overrules all else. We saw that in Brexit, when, despite 90% of the British establishment conspiring to scupper the vote and revoke it, nonetheless it prevailed. Because in the end we are a democracy, and the idea of ignoring the expressed will of the people,,the demos, was too appalling (and dangerous) despite several PBers and millions of others (eg Keir Starmer) advocating this insane position. I fully believe we would have seen blood on the streets if the Second Voters had got their way. A narrow escape
Sadiq Khan gets this. He knows you morallly need to win a referendum to Rejoin, and he also knows no government will ever call one (let alone win one),. Hence his advice to Starmer to make Rejoin a manifesto promise that the government can then enact, totally avoiding a plebiscite
It is the measure of the Rejoiners desperation. Not gonna happen
I don't think Rejoin is going to happen. But I think you're wrong.
It's worth remembering that Cameron only promised a referendum as a tool of party management - he never intended to actually hold the referendum, nor to actually leave the EU.
If public opinion turns against Brexit sufficiently strongly, and backbenchers in a party kick up enough of a fuss, then it's entirely possible that a PM ends up with a commitment to hold a referendum on rejoining that they never particularly wanted.
While I have no confidence in the ability of people currently advocating for EU membership to win such a referendum, there are all sorts of things that might happen in a referendum campaign, and all sorts of other questions that might get wrapped up in it.
You remind me of pro-Europeans in the late-90s who in their arrogance and naiveté could not conceive of the debate going against them. And look where they are now.
I think it will fade. Once we're going through eGates, and other surface concerns. The number of people who care about the non-surface concerns is small. Starmer cosying up to the EU - e.g the phytosanitary deal - makes rejoin less likely not more.
I think the next few decades could be geopolitically interesting, waning and erratic US influence, aggressive authoritarians, severe climate change impacts, China attempting to throw its weight around while it can, etc.
Large events have a habit of creating large changes in public opinion. It's not inevitable that this will see majority story for EU membership, but it is possible.
It doesn't necessarily end with a return to full EU membership but there are undoubtedly factors pushing us back in that direction, in particular the possible collapse of our alliance with the US.
Er - yer wot? Why should us getting fucked over by America make us more inclined to then go get fucked over by the EU?
I've heard some twisted logic about why our Rejoin is inevitable - admittedly from those STILL smarting a decade on that they got beaten by folk much dumber than them. But this?
Nah...
You seem to have put your brain in a jar for some reason. A loosening of ties with America makes stronger ones with Europe more important and more likely.
And I'm not smarting btw. I'm just happy not to have been dumb or sloppy enough to vote Leave. It's a nice feeling. Shame it's unavailable to you.
Queen Elizabeth II ‘dismayed’ by Brexit referendum, book claims
David Cameron should not have called the vote on leaving the EU, the late monarch is said to have told Barack Obama
Queen Elizabeth was “dismayed” about David Cameron’s handling of Brexit and confided in Barack Obama about her concerns over calling a referendum, according to a book.
The late Queen, who as monarch could not take a public stance on the issue, is said to have made her views known to the US president over lunch during his visit to Windsor Castle in April 2016.
The claims are made in a book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History, by the American journalist Susan Page.
Obama, who was interviewed for the book about the Queen’s relationship with America, said she did not believe that as big a decision as the UK leaving the European Union “should have been decided by plebiscite”.
Page said the lunch, which took place two months after Cameron called the referendum, was a “very rare royal critique of a prime minister, in public or private”.
Describing the conversation, Obama said: “She said, effectively, ‘It’s hard to understand why a prime minister, who presumably understands politics, would put a public referendum forward that he didn’t know what the answer would be of such importance.’”
With all due respect to our former Queen, a plebiscite is the only way to resolve such issues. She was wrong on this.
It isn't. Not even in this case, as the plebiscite did not resolve the issue, we did not Leave the EU the day after the referendum, indeed MPs and peers consistently voted down all terms for leaving the EU and we were still in the EU 3 years after the 2016 referendum result.
Only the Conservative majority at the 2019 general election delivered Brexit, not the referendum
Yes, but that is because the Remainer Parliament from 2015 to 2019 was an utter disgrace that made Trump look like a democrat. Thankfully all of the main offenders lost their seats.
There was an election in 2017, so there were 2 Remsiner Parliaments 2016-17 and 2017 to 2019..
The problem was that in 2017, Labour politicians like Sir Keir pledged to respect the referendum result "as a matter of principle" during the campaign, then blocked every attempt to get it done afterwards
there was a principled as well as an unprincipled problem about 'respecting the referendum'. This could occur via an utterly hard Brexit in which any trade relationship with the EU was entirely severed and we relied on an entirely new set of buccaneering relations, perhaps with a gunboat. Equally respecting the referendum was (as I favoured and favour) a Swiss or Norway deal where outside political EU we were still fully in the economic and trade EU. Which Starmer would do if he dared.
There was, among the principled, no course of action that commanded a real majority. There still isn't.
There is now. It's called rejoin.
Indeed. All you gotta do is put this Rejoin in a manifesto, win on that manifesto, then call the referendum (risking your entire career if you are PM), then win that referendum, THEN hope and pray that the ten years of subsequent turbulent negotiations with the EU (adding constant uncertainty to the economy) do not end with Malta, Ireland, Spain, France or Bulgaria exercising a veto, making it all pointless, as we are rejected
Best of British luck
It won't take ten years after a vote.
Commiserations that you voted for a failure.
Commiserations that you still haven't got over being beaten by the side of a bus.
It's been a decade, dude.
And the electorate seems to be coming round to my view.. Dude.
Keep whistling in the darkness.
Show me some polling where a deal SPELLING OUT THE COST OF OUR RETURN TO THE EU - you know, membership fees (and the resultant hospital closures to pay for them), joining the Euro, joining a Federal Army (including handing over our nukes), handing over effective veto on our being members of the EU itself to Brussels, plus other stuff they will make us do for the shitz and gigglez BECAUSE THEY CAN - show me polling that signs up to that.
You can't.
And you never will in my lifetime. Which is at most 20-25 years. After that, do what you like.
Yes, if that poll is to be believed. I'm not trying to make some kind of woke point here, to my mind I am simply stating a fact. The Britain that actually exists, that I know and have grown up with, has been shaped to a significant degree by immigration. Without immigration there'd be no Indian or Chinese restaurants or fish and chips, no George Michael or Freddie Mercury or UB40 or Dire Straits or Two Tone or Stormzy, no Mini, no John Barnes or Harry Kane, no Trevor McDonald or Amol Rajan or Lenny Henry or Meera Syal, no Bend it like Beckham, no Kazuo Ishiguro, no Zadie Smith, no Steve McQueen, no Ben Kingsley or Idris Elba, not to mention most of my work colleagues, my wife and all her family, my children, my sister in law, many of my closest friends and neighbours, most of the children at my kids' school... To my mind anyone who says they don't recognise Britain because of immigration is simply not answering the question seriously.
The Bond films: Cubby Broccoli (American), Harry Saltzman (Canadian), Ken Adam (German)
The Archers[1]: Emric Pressburger (Hungarian)
Dr Who: Waris Hussein (Indian), Sydney Newman (Canadian)
Of course May’s biggest error was post the referendum she had a total ability to decide what Brexit meant.
If she’d decided it meant single market to match the closeness of the result nobody would have argued. Instead she went for hard Brexit even though she herself said she didn’t want one.
That 12 months in they hadn't agreed what the approach would be, leading to futher arguments and resignations, was when I started turning against it - it was clear at that point that the pessimists had been right about how it would be handled.
I think we will probably end up with basically that at some point. Out but single market type arrangement. May could have easily delivered that.
But she couldn't. Not as leader of the Conservative Party.
May's plan was several steps further away from the EU than that and she was defenestrated for that, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Eurosceptic. There is no way that Conservative MPs would have backed her signing up for anything like the single market. Had she tried, she would have been out on her ear faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg can say "vassal state". Had she tried to get it through Parliament with opposition votes, even more so.
There were at least two explosive devices locked deep in the Brexit mechanism, which would foil politicians with more cunning than we really want politicians to have.
First was that any Brexit deal had to be acceptable to a majority of MPs overall, and a majority of Conservative MPs- who by that point had been driven a bit loco by the process. Majority overall ruled out a hard Brexit, majority of Conservatives ruled out anything other than a hard Brexit.
Second was that Leave covered a range of ambitions- deregulating business, global trade deals, control of borders, spending money on other things. The only way to give everyone in the 52% what they wanted was to take control of all of those things, which meant a massive distancing.
Given those constraints, a few things follow.
First, painful as it is to say, the only way out of the maze was to give Boris and his fellow travellers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. The 2019 election result was the only mechanism that unlocked the Paliament and Party locks simultaneously. Shame it gave so much power to people so unsuited to exercise it.
Second, we had to end up where we ended up, for now. Nothing else was stable. That it has consequences that a lot of people don't like is neither here nor there.
Third, the resulting Brexit is very vulnerable to salami-slicing. Pretty much any bit of unpicking Brexit is likely to be net popular. We've seen some examples already, there are more in the pipeline. It's like I say to kids when they are stuck on a maths problem- if you can't see all the way to the answer, look for the thing you can do which might be helpful, do that and repeat. (It's quite good as life advice in general.)
Wishcasting. You can salami slice all you like, but then another government full of rightwing vigour can come and undo it all with one vote, and this will happen, indeed they can vote us much further away
To get us back in, you need to win a Rejoin referendum. No British government will ever risk it
I feel sorry for the PB Centrist Dads, they lost the biggest vote of their lives and it can never be undone
No reversal required. The CU and SM are huge cliff-edges. You can't salami slice a cliff-edge, with apologies for the mixed metaphor.
Well yes
But I'm trying to school the Centrist Dorks, they're not the smartest
To get us significantly back in, you need to win a referendum. It then becomes the irresistible will of the people, and overrules all else. We saw that in Brexit, when, despite 90% of the British establishment conspiring to scupper the vote and revoke it, nonetheless it prevailed. Because in the end we are a democracy, and the idea of ignoring the expressed will of the people,,the demos, was too appalling (and dangerous) despite several PBers and millions of others (eg Keir Starmer) advocating this insane position. I fully believe we would have seen blood on the streets if the Second Voters had got their way. A narrow escape
Sadiq Khan gets this. He knows you morallly need to win a referendum to Rejoin, and he also knows no government will ever call one (let alone win one),. Hence his advice to Starmer to make Rejoin a manifesto promise that the government can then enact, totally avoiding a plebiscite
It is the measure of the Rejoiners desperation. Not gonna happen
I don't think Rejoin is going to happen. But I think you're wrong.
It's worth remembering that Cameron only promised a referendum as a tool of party management - he never intended to actually hold the referendum, nor to actually leave the EU.
If public opinion turns against Brexit sufficiently strongly, and backbenchers in a party kick up enough of a fuss, then it's entirely possible that a PM ends up with a commitment to hold a referendum on rejoining that they never particularly wanted.
While I have no confidence in the ability of people currently advocating for EU membership to win such a referendum, there are all sorts of things that might happen in a referendum campaign, and all sorts of other questions that might get wrapped up in it.
You remind me of pro-Europeans in the late-90s who in their arrogance and naiveté could not conceive of the debate going against them. And look where they are now.
I think it will fade. Once we're going through eGates, and other surface concerns. The number of people who care about the non-surface concerns is small. Starmer cosying up to the EU - e.g the phytosanitary deal - makes rejoin less likely not more.
I think the next few decades could be geopolitically interesting, waning and erratic US influence, aggressive authoritarians, severe climate change impacts, China attempting to throw its weight around while it can, etc.
Large events have a habit of creating large changes in public opinion. It's not inevitable that this will see majority story for EU membership, but it is possible.
It doesn't necessarily end with a return to full EU membership but there are undoubtedly factors pushing us back in that direction, in particular the possible collapse of our alliance with the US.
Er - yer wot? Why should us getting fucked over by America make us more inclined to then go get fucked over by the EU?
I've heard some twisted logic about why our Rejoin is inevitable - admittedly from those STILL smarting a decade on that they got beaten by folk much dumber than them. But this?
Nah...
You seem to have put your brain in a jar for some reason. A loosening of ties with America makes stronger ones with Europe more important and more likely.
And I'm not smarting btw. I'm just happy not to have been dumb or sloppy enough to vote Leave. It's a nice feeling. Shame it's unavailable to you.
Yebbut, I've had a decade of being a winner.
It's great. A feeling you'll never know.
Queuing up at passport control is being a winner, of course!
Of course May’s biggest error was post the referendum she had a total ability to decide what Brexit meant.
If she’d decided it meant single market to match the closeness of the result nobody would have argued. Instead she went for hard Brexit even though she herself said she didn’t want one.
That 12 months in they hadn't agreed what the approach would be, leading to futher arguments and resignations, was when I started turning against it - it was clear at that point that the pessimists had been right about how it would be handled.
I think we will probably end up with basically that at some point. Out but single market type arrangement. May could have easily delivered that.
But she couldn't. Not as leader of the Conservative Party.
May's plan was several steps further away from the EU than that and she was defenestrated for that, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Eurosceptic. There is no way that Conservative MPs would have backed her signing up for anything like the single market. Had she tried, she would have been out on her ear faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg can say "vassal state". Had she tried to get it through Parliament with opposition votes, even more so.
There were at least two explosive devices locked deep in the Brexit mechanism, which would foil politicians with more cunning than we really want politicians to have.
First was that any Brexit deal had to be acceptable to a majority of MPs overall, and a majority of Conservative MPs- who by that point had been driven a bit loco by the process. Majority overall ruled out a hard Brexit, majority of Conservatives ruled out anything other than a hard Brexit.
Second was that Leave covered a range of ambitions- deregulating business, global trade deals, control of borders, spending money on other things. The only way to give everyone in the 52% what they wanted was to take control of all of those things, which meant a massive distancing.
Given those constraints, a few things follow.
First, painful as it is to say, the only way out of the maze was to give Boris and his fellow travellers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. The 2019 election result was the only mechanism that unlocked the Paliament and Party locks simultaneously. Shame it gave so much power to people so unsuited to exercise it.
Second, we had to end up where we ended up, for now. Nothing else was stable. That it has consequences that a lot of people don't like is neither here nor there.
Third, the resulting Brexit is very vulnerable to salami-slicing. Pretty much any bit of unpicking Brexit is likely to be net popular. We've seen some examples already, there are more in the pipeline. It's like I say to kids when they are stuck on a maths problem- if you can't see all the way to the answer, look for the thing you can do which might be helpful, do that and repeat. (It's quite good as life advice in general.)
Wishcasting. You can salami slice all you like, but then another government full of rightwing vigour can come and undo it all with one vote, and this will happen, indeed they can vote us much further away
To get us back in, you need to win a Rejoin referendum. No British government will ever risk it
I feel sorry for the PB Centrist Dads, they lost the biggest vote of their lives and it can never be undone
No reversal required. The CU and SM are huge cliff-edges. You can't salami slice a cliff-edge, with apologies for the mixed metaphor.
Well yes
But I'm trying to school the Centrist Dorks, they're not the smartest
To get us significantly back in, you need to win a referendum. It then becomes the irresistible will of the people, and overrules all else. We saw that in Brexit, when, despite 90% of the British establishment conspiring to scupper the vote and revoke it, nonetheless it prevailed. Because in the end we are a democracy, and the idea of ignoring the expressed will of the people,,the demos, was too appalling (and dangerous) despite several PBers and millions of others (eg Keir Starmer) advocating this insane position. I fully believe we would have seen blood on the streets if the Second Voters had got their way. A narrow escape
Sadiq Khan gets this. He knows you morallly need to win a referendum to Rejoin, and he also knows no government will ever call one (let alone win one),. Hence his advice to Starmer to make Rejoin a manifesto promise that the government can then enact, totally avoiding a plebiscite
It is the measure of the Rejoiners desperation. Not gonna happen
I don't think Rejoin is going to happen. But I think you're wrong.
It's worth remembering that Cameron only promised a referendum as a tool of party management - he never intended to actually hold the referendum, nor to actually leave the EU.
If public opinion turns against Brexit sufficiently strongly, and backbenchers in a party kick up enough of a fuss, then it's entirely possible that a PM ends up with a commitment to hold a referendum on rejoining that they never particularly wanted.
While I have no confidence in the ability of people currently advocating for EU membership to win such a referendum, there are all sorts of things that might happen in a referendum campaign, and all sorts of other questions that might get wrapped up in it.
You remind me of pro-Europeans in the late-90s who in their arrogance and naiveté could not conceive of the debate going against them. And look where they are now.
I think it will fade. Once we're going through eGates, and other surface concerns. The number of people who care about the non-surface concerns is small. Starmer cosying up to the EU - e.g the phytosanitary deal - makes rejoin less likely not more.
I think the next few decades could be geopolitically interesting, waning and erratic US influence, aggressive authoritarians, severe climate change impacts, China attempting to throw its weight around while it can, etc.
Large events have a habit of creating large changes in public opinion. It's not inevitable that this will see majority story for EU membership, but it is possible.
It doesn't necessarily end with a return to full EU membership but there are undoubtedly factors pushing us back in that direction, in particular the possible collapse of our alliance with the US.
Er - yer wot? Why should us getting fucked over by America make us more inclined to then go get fucked over by the EU?
I've heard some twisted logic about why our Rejoin is inevitable - admittedly from those STILL smarting a decade on that they got beaten by folk much dumber than them. But this?
Nah...
You seem to have put your brain in a jar for some reason. A loosening of ties with America makes stronger ones with Europe more important and more likely.
And I'm not smarting btw. I'm just happy not to have been dumb or sloppy enough to vote Leave. It's a nice feeling. Shame it's unavailable to you.
Yebbut, I've had a decade of being a winner.
It's great. A feeling you'll never know.
Queuing up at passport control is being a winner, of course!
Well, if you WANT to take their punishment beating, go to Europe then.
(It is hardly to the EU's credit that they can't make a simple technological advance work... Does that look promising for a pan-EU army?)
Yes, if that poll is to be believed. I'm not trying to make some kind of woke point here, to my mind I am simply stating a fact. The Britain that actually exists, that I know and have grown up with, has been shaped to a significant degree by immigration. Without immigration there'd be no Indian or Chinese restaurants or fish and chips, no George Michael or Freddie Mercury or UB40 or Dire Straits or Two Tone or Stormzy, no Mini, no John Barnes or Harry Kane, no Trevor McDonald or Amol Rajan or Lenny Henry or Meera Syal, no Bend it like Beckham, no Kazuo Ishiguro, no Zadie Smith, no Steve McQueen, no Ben Kingsley or Idris Elba, not to mention most of my work colleagues, my wife and all her family, my children, my sister in law, many of my closest friends and neighbours, most of the children at my kids' school... To my mind anyone who says they don't recognise Britain because of immigration is simply not answering the question seriously.
As always it’s the rate of immigration - the feeling that the pace change has accelerated - that has pushed people beyond their comfort zone. (That plus multiculturalism). Very few people want to go back to an insular zero immigrant world
Trump's picture of him as Christ and attacking the Pope shows just how blasphemous these heathens are
Shame on you Trump
Just go or someone please hook him off
I don't mind people being blasphemous, but hypocritically blasphemous is another thing.
I don't know about attacking the Pope being blasphemous. It seems in the proudest Protestant traditions.
Indeed, grand old tradition for the grand old party?
The comparisons to Jesus are more of a no-no though. Puritan minded folk pilloried and branded James Naylor just for riding a horse into Bristol in imitation of Jesus.
Good reference. It was a bit more than that.
Nayler was one of Fox's original Quaker "Valiant 60" (whilst they were still often a variety of Evangelical, as they still are in the USA sometimes). He was a bit of a loose cannon.
[Fox] showed [Nayler] how dangerous was the path of pride and how awful it was to turn light into darkness, but the frank, well-meant words of warning fell on deaf ears. Nayler tried to make a show of love and would have kissed Fox, but the latter would receive no sham kisses from one whose spirit was plainly wrong. "James," he said, "it will be harder for thee to get down thy rude company [of followers] than it was for thee to set them up." ... (He staged a Psalm Sunday procession into Bristol during Cromwell's time.) ... On 16 December 1656 he was convicted of blasphemy in a highly publicised trial before the Second Protectorate Parliament. Narrowly escaping execution, he was sentenced to be put in the pillory and on there to have a red-hot iron bored through his tongue, and also to be branded with the letter B for Blasphemer on his forehead, and other public humiliations. Subsequently he was imprisoned for two years of hard labour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nayler
Loads new oil and gas production...new Gold, Copper, Urainium and Rare Earth mines coming inc Potash and finally some Nuclear stations out East..
Tbh Canada could supply Asia and the EU and will / is to increasing amounts
My long-lost acquaintance on Vancouver Island (last emailed him in the late 1990s) who's videos I sometimes post is running his (self-organised volunteer) event called Nanaimo Infusion in a fortnight aimed mainly at recruiting USA health workers for their city of 100k people, hosted and talked to by volunteers. They have 700 total of them and tourists booked in to visit at present for the weekend, and have a group of people who have already moved from the USA to Canada over the last 12 months. Since they set up the informal one last year (that drew several hundred) there are now about 40-50 chapters nationwide, self-organised.
I'll put the 'family photo' on here when it is out.
Comments
For all his faults on foreign policy, Obama made a deal with Iran on the nuclear issue. If Trump handy simply scrapped it, it might well have been possible to contain Iran and avoided the present chaos.
Trump is simply not a serious person.
Commiserations that you voted for a failure.
The people who have to expend so much effort convincing themselves that they are always right never learn from their mistakes.
Shame on you Trump
Just go or someone please hook him off
Once the 17 election delivered that parliamentary arithmetic the die was cast. All the various factions acted perfectly logically in accordance with their agendas. It's pointless to allocate blame or say this or that group or person shoulda coulda done this or that instead of that or this.
Risking an analogy to PBs best analogist (and ignoring quantum chaos) it's like if you know where all the atoms are, and their speed and direction, at a given time you know the future. Brexit had to happen how it did. With Boris and his duplicitous bare bones deal.
Actually, some of them had very fruity pasts and opinions.
Orbán Viktor
@PM_ViktorOrban
·
2h
The work begins now. We will regroup and continue fighting for the Hungarian people!
Canada has so much going for it
Loads new oil and gas production...new Gold, Copper, Urainium and Rare Earth mines coming inc Potash and finally some Nuclear stations out East..
Tbh Canada could supply Asia and the EU and will / is to increasing amounts
It's been a decade, dude.
Add leasing is not a particularly preposterously expensive way to fund a new car that you will replace in a few years. If you normally run an old banger into the ground, it will be a lot more expensive than that.
Large events have a habit of creating large changes in public opinion. It's not inevitable that this will see majority story for EU membership, but it is possible.
Hope you did nothing wrong in those 16 years.
Not sure why the government has set it up so that leasing companies can extract tax revenue from the government in this way.
Maybe he can get asylum in Trump's America?
Aaron Rupar
@atrupar
Trump is still trying to bullshit his way through it: "I can tell you we've been called by the other side. They'd like to make a deal very badly."
http://x.com/atrupar/status/2043732088327749869
Yeh, but that's enough about the Pope, what about Iran?
He's been a good little lapdog for years.
Like Sandy, my initial impression is it's very expensive. I think it's because I don't nomally buy new cars. But it looks like the lease includes insurance, which seems improbable.
https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/green-party-spend-1m-legal-fees-four-years-gender-rows-continue
And you think such a party should be in charge of the country's finances? It can't even run itself properly.
It wants rent controls but has voted to abolish landlords. It voted against nationalising energy companies. It opposes taking steps to deal with racism and anti-Semitism in the NHS and its activists want to pass an anti-Zionism motion using wording identical to that last used by the National Front in the 1970's. Its activists are obsessed by Israel but have no answers to the issue facing local councillors in the U.K.. Its latest MP did not even mention the environment in her maiden speech. Its migration policies - open borders with no restrictions of any kind - with everyone fully eligible for all benefits would destroy the welfare state. But the Scottish Greens did vote for the failed euthanasia bill so maybe that's how they'll make the sums add up.
Honestly, those voting for - let alone joining - this crew are making the same mistake Reform voters and others voting for incoherent populist parties always do: believing what they would like to be true.
Look a bit more closely at what this party is actually saying and doing and at the reality of the behaviour and views of those standing for it. From the leader down, there is a wealth of evidence of highly questionable behaviour and views. The Greens are as ghastly, stupid and as dangerous as Reform. For apparently intelligent people on here to join them claiming they have fresh ideas when they are merely repeating some of the worst ideas we have seen while claiming that, of course, they don't support all their policies only proves that even the apparently intelligent can delude themselves. Though this is not news sadly.
Still, it makes about as much sense as Reform claiming to be a group of outsiders, when their candidates in these locals, like last year, will almost certainly be the same sort of people who always stand in local elections - for better and worse.
My check would be to compare it against a personal lease to see if the figures add up compared to your post tax income, some times it does, some times it doesn't...
Heh
The comparisons to Jesus are more of a no-no though. Puritan minded folk pilloried and branded James Naylor just for riding a horse into Bristol in imitation of Jesus.
Remember Trump has removed anyone who doesn't tell him what he wants to hear so from the meeting in the White House no-one was there telling Trump what the obvious consequences and problems were.
Dude.
The Brexiteer prognoses that the EU would collapse after we left, as everyone saw how great we were doing, were always bollocks. Brexit was bound to be painful, bloody and regretted by many, like having a baby
However there IS an issue a-coming which could split the EU asunder. Immigration and asylum. At the moment eastern Europe is largely refusing to take its share of asylum seekers and is urgently rejecting eg Muslims from other EU countries. The new guy in Hungary, by the way, is fully signed up to this, he is an Orbanite, he just promises to be an Orban without the corruption and pro-Putinism
The western Europeans are close to electing far right governments, such is the migrant and culture war crisis, the barbarians are at the gate. Somewhere along the line Paris Berlin and Brussels will, in desperation, attempt to make Warsaw, Budapest and Bratislava bend the knee and accept millions of migrants
That is the time and place where the EU might shatter
Trump wasn't accused of blasphemy for attacking the Pope. Just stupidity in that particular case.
I've heard some twisted logic about why our Rejoin is inevitable - admittedly from those STILL smarting a decade on that they got beaten by folk much dumber than them. But this?
Nah...
There’s a window of opportunity now and the right wing press droning on about a Brexit betrayal will only cause some pearl clutching in those still living on cloud cuckoo land where Brexit is a roaring success .
The trashing of the so called special relationship by Trump has done wonders for those wanting much closer ties with the EU .
So he’s at least facilitated one good thing to come out of his so far disastrous second term !
To borrow the old phrase, it's a view...
If I joined the Labour party and became their chief spokesman for the NHS and said I was in favour of privatising it I imagine I'd be pretty quickly removed for those beliefs being way out of sync with the party line, and rightly so.
But he's evidently a vast improvement on Orban.
Magyar on Ukraine 🇭🇺🇺🇦:
"Everyone in Hungary knows that Ukraine is a victim of this war and no one should tell them under what conditions they should enter a peace or sign a peace treaty. We cannot tell any country to give up their territory.
And this is what the Fidesz politicians said. Then I would like to ask them: What would you do if Russia attacked Hungary? Which Hungarian counties would you be willing to give up?
Ukraine should receive security guarantees and territorial guarantees that can be observed and kept. Ukraine, under the Budapest Memorandum, gave up its nuclear arsenal for guarantees, but those guarantees were violated repeatedly by Russia."🔚
https://x.com/BohuslavskaKate/status/2043704747081842751
EU and TPPA together would cause Trump to combust
(if communists can be trusted to tell the truth on this or any other matter)
BREAKING: Your Party Scotland 'over' as leadership resigns en mass
All 12 members of the interim Scottish executive had resigned and said they will start a rival party to Jeremy Corbyn's outfit
Good news for this dead end project. Corbyn is a busted flush.
https://nitter.poast.org/CPGBML/status/2043694847882637432#m
At the same time, I think such huge changes in human society are hurtling towards us, the entire argument will soon seem as relevant as Establishmentarianism and its opposite, in about five-ten years
Show me some polling where a deal SPELLING OUT THE COST OF OUR RETURN TO THE EU - you know, membership fees (and the resultant hospital closures to pay for them), joining the Euro, joining a Federal Army (including handing over our nukes), handing over effective veto on our being members of the EU itself to Brussels, plus other stuff they will make us do for the shitz and gigglez BECAUSE THEY CAN - show me polling that signs up to that.
You can't.
And you never will in my lifetime. Which is at most 20-25 years. After that, do what you like.
You can thank me later
- Lab: 33.7%
- Con: 23.7%
- Ref: 14.3%
7 Apr 2026 YouGov opinion poll- Lab: 16%
- Con: 19%
- Ref: 25%
You tell me who wins with that? Compare them to the SDP/Lib alliance in 19838 June 1983 Harris opinion poll
- Lab: 26%
- Con: 47%
- Lib: 25%
We are in a world where Lab and Con are under 20% three years before the election. There's a little person inside my head going "eeeeeeeee" whilst running in circles because I don't know what the hell is going on.I suspect most respondents to the polling question see it as asking whether recent levels of immigration (the so called Boriswave) were too high. Since even I would agree with that, I think it's unsurprising so many answer in the affirmative. Otherwise the question makes no sense, as historical immigration has shaped what Britain is like now, hence making it recognizable not unrecognizable, while recent levels of immigration, while too high, are not big enough to have fundamentally changed the country over so short a period of time.
2024 Presidential Estimates:
🔴 Ages 18–22: R+2
🔵 Ages 23–29: D+6
2026 Generic Ballot (@YalePolling):
🔵 Ages 18–22: D+23
🔵 Ages 23–29: D+30
https://x.com/ZacharyDonnini/status/2043705111621341513
More than 100 people missed their flight to Manchester from Milan's Linate airport on Sunday while stuck in what the airline described as "unacceptable" passport control queues.
Some travellers reported vomiting and passing out as they tried to get through biometric and facial recognition checks rolled out under the new European Entry-Exit System (EES) on Friday.
Carol Boon said the experience was "just horrible", while Max Hume said he had been forced to spend £1,800 to get home.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn897e8280do
I mean, it's only a matter of time before Hegseth publicly recognises the Trump is the Second Coming.
It will be fascinating to see whether normal democratic politics resumes, and what Magyar does with his supermajority.
The signs are encouraging, for now, but it's worth keeping an eye on.
Just as we left the EU in reality in 2019 after the Conservatives won a majority with a manifesto commitment to leave, not after the 2016 EU referendum itself
And I'm not smarting btw. I'm just happy not to have been dumb or sloppy enough to vote Leave. It's a nice feeling. Shame it's unavailable to you.
https://x.com/atrupar/status/2043818957388370416
JD Vance advises the Vatican to stay out of US politics
Roman Catholics though swing their vote, most Roman Catholics voting for Bush in 2004 for instance, Obama in 2008 and 2012, Trump in 2016, Democrat for Congress in 2018, for Biden in 2020, Republican for Congress in 2022 and for Trump again in 2024
"...There is a Labour candidate for Finchley and Golders Green. He decides to stand under the slogan "Death to Israel" and "From the River to the Sea". The constituency population is over 20% Jewish people. The Labour Party, in horror, attempts to remove him but he claims that anti-Zionism is protected speech and he is not antisemitic because he does not wish harm on Jewish people per se, and sues the Labour Party to keep his position.
What should the Labour Party do? What should the judge decide? Does the Labour Party's right to decide its own policies override the right of their candidate to express themselves legally?..."
https://x.com/iraninsa/status/2043757392010076666
News: Sec Wright tells me around 150 million barrels of Venezuela oil have been sold since January 3, and that five US firms are currently in the country — with an announcement coming soon about another US firm in Venezuela that will be “ramping up their production meaningfully.”
It's great. A feeling you'll never know.
- The Bond films: Cubby Broccoli (American), Harry Saltzman (Canadian), Ken Adam (German)
- The Archers[1]: Emric Pressburger (Hungarian)
- Dr Who: Waris Hussein (Indian), Sydney Newman (Canadian)
- Other: Cliff Richard (Anglo-Indian)
[1] Not the radio show, the...oh, look it up(It is hardly to the EU's credit that they can't make a simple technological advance work... Does that look promising for a pan-EU army?)
Nayler was one of Fox's original Quaker "Valiant 60" (whilst they were still often a variety of Evangelical, as they still are in the USA sometimes). He was a bit of a loose cannon.
[Fox] showed [Nayler] how dangerous was the path of pride and how awful it was to turn light into darkness, but the frank, well-meant words of warning fell on deaf ears. Nayler tried to make a show of love and would have kissed Fox, but the latter would receive no sham kisses from one whose spirit was plainly wrong. "James," he said, "it will be harder for thee to get down thy rude company [of followers] than it was for thee to set them up."
...
(He staged a Psalm Sunday procession into Bristol during Cromwell's time.)
...
On 16 December 1656 he was convicted of blasphemy in a highly publicised trial before the Second Protectorate Parliament. Narrowly escaping execution, he was sentenced to be put in the pillory and on there to have a red-hot iron bored through his tongue, and also to be branded with the letter B for Blasphemer on his forehead, and other public humiliations. Subsequently he was imprisoned for two years of hard labour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nayler
I'll put the 'family photo' on here when it is out.