Politics

[Spider]

10 minutes ago, gonzo said:

Food rations and 3 day week by march.

Bring back the glory years.

Nah

We’ll have loads of fish

[Mounts Kipper]

1 minute ago, Spider said:

Nah

We’ll have loads of fish

No fishermen though. 😂

[Spider]

2 minutes ago, Mounts Kipper said:

No fishermen though. 😂

Just give the Navy some fishing rods, be reet.

[Mounts Kipper]

3 minutes ago, Spider said:

Just give the Navy some fishing rods, be reet.

Just offer the French fisherman British passports to defect (bleu is the colour) and wave them through. They’ll love Fleetwood.  Job sorted. 👍

Edited December 12, 2020 by Mounts Kipper

[Farrelli]

47 minutes ago, boltondiver said:

Indeed, the EU shouldn't be self-harming

We are stronger together, I've always held that view.  The UK outside the EU is weaker, the EU without the UK is weaker.  We are the ones doing the leaving though.

[Guest]

Really good aticles in the Telegraph  from Charles Moore and, esp, Matthew Lynn

 

 

[Guest]

Just now, Farrelli said:

We are stronger together, I've always held that view.  The UK outside the EU is weaker, the EU without the UK is weaker.  We are the ones doing the leaving though.

We are not "doing the leaving", we have left

[Farrelli]

5 minutes ago, boltondiver said:

We are not "doing the leaving", we have left

In transition actually

[Guest]

14 minutes ago, Farrelli said:

In transition actually

31.01.20

[Mounts Kipper]

19 minutes ago, Farrelli said:

We are stronger together, I've always held that view.  The UK outside the EU is weaker, the EU without the UK is weaker.  We are the ones doing the leaving though.

It’s over, they played silly buggers, we called their bluff, we voted and chose to leave, we will build a new future.

[Spider]

2 minutes ago, Mounts Kipper said:

It’s over, they played silly buggers, we called their bluff, we voted and chose to leave, we will build a new future.

“.....from these ruins”

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Mounts Kipper said:

It’s over, they played silly buggers, we called their bluff, we voted and chose to leave, we will build a new future.

He thinks we are still in!

Even the BBC don't think that;

Brexit happened when the UK left the European Union on 31 January 2020.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32810887

 

[Spider]

Just now, boltondiver said:

He thinks we are still in!

Even the BBC don't think that;

Brexit happened when the UK left the European Union on 31 January 2020.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32810887

 

Semantics

I thought we were still trading under the same T&C’s until the end of this month?

Otherwise, what’s all this fuss about a deal and why does it have to be now?

[Farrelli]

3 minutes ago, boltondiver said:

31.01.20

In transition (following their rules until 31/12/20).

We have fully left on 1/1/21

[Farrelli]

1 minute ago, Spider said:

Semantics

I thought we were still trading under the same T&C’s until the end of this month?

Otherwise, what’s all this fuss about a deal and why does it have to be now?

We are, anyway not the point I was making. We are stronger together.  

[Mounts Kipper]

Just now, Farrelli said:

We are, anyway not the point I was making. We are stronger together.  

That’s your view, sadly for you more thought not. 

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, Farrelli said:

We are, anyway not the point I was making. We are stronger together.  

Go on then; in what way “stronger”?

[paulhanley]

25 minutes ago, boltondiver said:

Really good aticles in the Telegraph  from Charles Moore and, esp, Matthew Lynn

 

 

Charles Moore in full. As ever he nails it. The EU and Mr Barnier are playing the ultimate game of hard-ball, but it isn't going to work, as Charles explains. We are out of the EU. In 18 days we will be free of all its tentacles and a full sovereign nation state once more. There will be bumpy elements of the transition but no change is straightforward - even if it moving house or changing jobs. The long-term future of this country is exciting. Sadly for the fine folk of the 27 historic and proud nation states that make up the EU, theirs is mired in a protectionist racket, stifling regulation and kafkaesque bureaucracy. If they want to do business for mutual economic good (ie the mindset that most rational people and nation states would adopt) great. If they want to keep us in the orbit of their self-defeating dystopian regulations the answer is "non", "nein", nao", "nie"

I am proud of the nation state I am from and wish it to prosper. My affiliations are not with an over-weening bureaucratic monolith with a pompous bureaucracy with thinly disguised imperial ambitions beyond its "borders". 

 

By Charles Moore: 

Negotiations are the way each side works out what the other really wants. That is obvious. Slightly less obvious, but equally important, is the fact that they also force each side to work out what it wants.

In most Brexit matters, Boris Johnson is guided by the principle that one should study Theresa May’s example – and then avoid it. Although she publicly stated early on that “No deal is better than a bad deal”, Mrs May accepted the framing and sequencing of negotiations which Brussels proposed. She did not know what she wanted. So the EU understood from the start that she did not mean what she said. A bad deal was therefore inevitable, and duly arrived. That is why she was forced from office.

As foreign secretary, Boris watched these events unfold, and resigned. He then became party leader and Prime Minister. He got the first half of a Brexit deal, partly by insisting that no deal was a genuine possibility. He resoundingly won the ensuing general election by saying “Get Brexit done”. That victory was a year ago today, and tomorrow is the deadline for agreement – or lack of it – between Britain and the EU over the Brexit second half, our future trading relationship after we leave the single market and customs union on December 31.

It is not credible that Boris will use the weekend of the anniversary of his victory to capitulate.

Cynical though one must be about some of his promises, doubtful though one sometimes feels about his strength of purpose, such a surrender would not make sense. It would end his political career.

I must admit that when the Prime Minister flew off for dinner with Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday, I feared he was breaking his “Don’t do a Theresa” rule. It reminded me of her embarrassing dawn flight to Brussels three years ago to “seal a deal” that could not work. Boris has additionally promised to fly anywhere – Berlin, Paris – which might help. Are such journeys really necessary? It would be better if he stayed put and avoided getting into a compromising position alone in a room with any EU leader.

His leading officials, Lord Frost and Oliver Lewis, are long-marchers from Vote Leave days. They know what they are doing. But so far, no harm has come of his journey. And he does, to be fair, have an interest in showing the wider world that he will not be the one to collapse the talks.

Compared with the latter half of 2019, Boris is, on the European issue, in an oddly strong position today. Then, he had no reliable majority in a Parliament that was trying to usurp executive power. Most MPs opposed a genuine Brexit, but his party members, and the original decision of 17.4 million voters, supported it.

He was in the tightest of corners. He got out of it with the Withdrawal Agreement which the EU – to many people’s surprise – granted him. It contained problems for the future relationship, notably about Northern Ireland, but it did the trick.

Now, the Prime Minister has an 80-strong majority. His reputation may have been dented by erratic policy over Covid-19, but no one else within or outside his party is about to take over, and it is four years until the next general election.

There has been more fuss about Ireland, and the Government’s threat to break international law to defend our customs territory; but this week, the clouds parted, revealing an Irish rainbow. The EU conceded on the Protocol: it will ensure that nearly 100 per cent of goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will pay no tariffs. As it had secretly planned, the Government duly withdrew the relevant clauses from the UK Internal Market Bill.

In the current negotiations, Boris enjoys what could almost be called a luxury. Of the three possibilities – a real deal, no deal, and the deal currently proposed by Michel Barnier – he would be happy with either of the first two. He would prefer the first, because a deal would bring more peace and less disruption than no deal at all, but he is content to accept the logic of no deal if a bad one is the alternative.

The one thing he cannot say is that he will accept automatic EU control of any new trading rules which it may decide to make, and of our fish. As both sides agree, our decision to leave the EU is a decision to diverge, not converge. We haven’t got this far out only to go back in later.

The EU negotiators, and especially the French, may have reckoned, as they hardened their positions ten days ago, that the fear of no deal would force Britain to back down at the last minute. If so, that was a psychological misreading.

Perhaps I am being oversanguine, but I think the public see this. They think – and in essence, if not in detail – they are right, that the key decision has been made. They are irritated by delay. Literally years of scare stories about no deal may have depressed the spirits, but they have also vaccinated people against what might come.

The problems are real, but not eternal. The preparations, though still not good enough, are better advanced. It is not going to be pleasant for us – or, indeed, for the French – if President Macron tries to coerce local officials in the Pas-de-Calais to impede our goods, but it is hardly going to rekindle our enthusiasm for EU membership.

Most Conservative MPs see all this. Perhaps they cannot have their cake and eat it, but they know which side their political bread is buttered. Besides, they have not got the mechanism to reject no deal, even if they wanted to. It is what will happen if nothing else does.

Politically, the situation reminds me of the miners’ strike in 1984-85. Appalling and prolonged though the contest was, the most dangerous bits for the Government were whenever it seemed to wobble on the principles at stake. It was a fight it just had to win. As in that struggle, Labour MPs today, under their fairly new leader, are visibly confused about which line to take.

Even hard-line Remainers, after years of fighting talk, are now becoming retrospective and recriminatory. In a recent article in the Guardian, Lord Mandelson lamented “the price [we] in the pro-EU camp will pay for trying, in the years following 2016, to reverse the referendum decision rather than achieve the least damaging form of Brexit”. In other words, they lost quite a long time ago.

What of EU leaders themselves? In the longer term, they would do better to be flexible. The United Kingdom, even outside, will remain a major market for the continentals. The sooner that can be maximised, you would have thought, the better. There are more intractable problems for them to consider – Covid, lack of growth, mutualised debt, quarrels with Poland and Hungary, threats from China.

At present, however, the protectionist club seems to feel it must punish the British rebel. The mood is brittle, as if the EU fears that an independent Britain could actually succeed, thus exposing its own economic and governmental model. It is acting like an empire that grows old and starts losing colonies, rather than an internationalist model for more backward nations. Which only confirms we are right to leave altogether.

[Spider]

2 minutes ago, paulhanley said:

Charles Moore in full. As ever he nails it. The EU and Mr Barnier are playing the ultimate game of hard-ball, but it isn't going to work, as Charles explains. We are out of the EU. In 18 days we will be free of all its tentacles and a full sovereign nation state once more. There will be bumpy elements of the transition but no change is straightforward - even if it moving house or changing jobs. The long-term future of this country is exciting. Sadly for the fine folk of the 27 historic and proud nation states that make up the EU, theirs is mired in a protectionist racket, stifling regulation and kafkaesque bureaucracy. If they want to do business for mutual economic good (ie the mindset that most rational people and nation states would adopt) great. If they want to keep us in the orbit of their self-defeating dystopian regulations the answer is "non", "nein", nao", "nie"

I am proud of the nation state I am from and wish it to prosper. My affiliations are not with an over-weening bureaucratic monolith with a pompous bureaucracy with thinly disguised imperial ambitions beyond its "borders". 

 

By Charles Moore: 

Negotiations are the way each side works out what the other really wants. That is obvious. Slightly less obvious, but equally important, is the fact that they also force each side to work out what it wants.

In most Brexit matters, Boris Johnson is guided by the principle that one should study Theresa May’s example – and then avoid it. Although she publicly stated early on that “No deal is better than a bad deal”, Mrs May accepted the framing and sequencing of negotiations which Brussels proposed. She did not know what she wanted. So the EU understood from the start that she did not mean what she said. A bad deal was therefore inevitable, and duly arrived. That is why she was forced from office.

As foreign secretary, Boris watched these events unfold, and resigned. He then became party leader and Prime Minister. He got the first half of a Brexit deal, partly by insisting that no deal was a genuine possibility. He resoundingly won the ensuing general election by saying “Get Brexit done”. That victory was a year ago today, and tomorrow is the deadline for agreement – or lack of it – between Britain and the EU over the Brexit second half, our future trading relationship after we leave the single market and customs union on December 31.

It is not credible that Boris will use the weekend of the anniversary of his victory to capitulate.

Cynical though one must be about some of his promises, doubtful though one sometimes feels about his strength of purpose, such a surrender would not make sense. It would end his political career.

I must admit that when the Prime Minister flew off for dinner with Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday, I feared he was breaking his “Don’t do a Theresa” rule. It reminded me of her embarrassing dawn flight to Brussels three years ago to “seal a deal” that could not work. Boris has additionally promised to fly anywhere – Berlin, Paris – which might help. Are such journeys really necessary? It would be better if he stayed put and avoided getting into a compromising position alone in a room with any EU leader.

His leading officials, Lord Frost and Oliver Lewis, are long-marchers from Vote Leave days. They know what they are doing. But so far, no harm has come of his journey. And he does, to be fair, have an interest in showing the wider world that he will not be the one to collapse the talks.

Compared with the latter half of 2019, Boris is, on the European issue, in an oddly strong position today. Then, he had no reliable majority in a Parliament that was trying to usurp executive power. Most MPs opposed a genuine Brexit, but his party members, and the original decision of 17.4 million voters, supported it.

He was in the tightest of corners. He got out of it with the Withdrawal Agreement which the EU – to many people’s surprise – granted him. It contained problems for the future relationship, notably about Northern Ireland, but it did the trick.

Now, the Prime Minister has an 80-strong majority. His reputation may have been dented by erratic policy over Covid-19, but no one else within or outside his party is about to take over, and it is four years until the next general election.

There has been more fuss about Ireland, and the Government’s threat to break international law to defend our customs territory; but this week, the clouds parted, revealing an Irish rainbow. The EU conceded on the Protocol: it will ensure that nearly 100 per cent of goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will pay no tariffs. As it had secretly planned, the Government duly withdrew the relevant clauses from the UK Internal Market Bill.

In the current negotiations, Boris enjoys what could almost be called a luxury. Of the three possibilities – a real deal, no deal, and the deal currently proposed by Michel Barnier – he would be happy with either of the first two. He would prefer the first, because a deal would bring more peace and less disruption than no deal at all, but he is content to accept the logic of no deal if a bad one is the alternative.

The one thing he cannot say is that he will accept automatic EU control of any new trading rules which it may decide to make, and of our fish. As both sides agree, our decision to leave the EU is a decision to diverge, not converge. We haven’t got this far out only to go back in later.

The EU negotiators, and especially the French, may have reckoned, as they hardened their positions ten days ago, that the fear of no deal would force Britain to back down at the last minute. If so, that was a psychological misreading.

Perhaps I am being oversanguine, but I think the public see this. They think – and in essence, if not in detail – they are right, that the key decision has been made. They are irritated by delay. Literally years of scare stories about no deal may have depressed the spirits, but they have also vaccinated people against what might come.

The problems are real, but not eternal. The preparations, though still not good enough, are better advanced. It is not going to be pleasant for us – or, indeed, for the French – if President Macron tries to coerce local officials in the Pas-de-Calais to impede our goods, but it is hardly going to rekindle our enthusiasm for EU membership.

Most Conservative MPs see all this. Perhaps they cannot have their cake and eat it, but they know which side their political bread is buttered. Besides, they have not got the mechanism to reject no deal, even if they wanted to. It is what will happen if nothing else does.

Politically, the situation reminds me of the miners’ strike in 1984-85. Appalling and prolonged though the contest was, the most dangerous bits for the Government were whenever it seemed to wobble on the principles at stake. It was a fight it just had to win. As in that struggle, Labour MPs today, under their fairly new leader, are visibly confused about which line to take.

Even hard-line Remainers, after years of fighting talk, are now becoming retrospective and recriminatory. In a recent article in the Guardian, Lord Mandelson lamented “the price [we] in the pro-EU camp will pay for trying, in the years following 2016, to reverse the referendum decision rather than achieve the least damaging form of Brexit”. In other words, they lost quite a long time ago.

What of EU leaders themselves? In the longer term, they would do better to be flexible. The United Kingdom, even outside, will remain a major market for the continentals. The sooner that can be maximised, you would have thought, the better. There are more intractable problems for them to consider – Covid, lack of growth, mutualised debt, quarrels with Poland and Hungary, threats from China.

At present, however, the protectionist club seems to feel it must punish the British rebel. The mood is brittle, as if the EU fears that an independent Britain could actually succeed, thus exposing its own economic and governmental model. It is acting like an empire that grows old and starts losing colonies, rather than an internationalist model for more backward nations. Which only confirms we are right to leave altogether.

You mention dystopia

Then quote an article that directly describes how we are to be thrust into one of our own making.

How very odd.

[paulhanley]

1 minute ago, Spider said:

You mention dystopia

Then quote an article that directly describes how we are to be thrust into one of our own making.

How very odd.

When there is a very clear end goal in sight there can be nothing dystopian. We want to be a global, sovereign nation championing free trade. That way lies prosperity for everyone. The benefits won't be seen on January 2 but they will in good time. This is a historic moment. We are freeing ourselves of the last of the shackles. I only wish the hard-working people of Europe from Ireland to Poland could free themselves too.

I recommend that you read the piece and subscribe to the Telegraph were common sense and logic on this topic is dispensed on a daily basis.

[Spider]

1 minute ago, paulhanley said:

When there is a very clear end goal in sight there can be nothing dystopian. We want to be a global, sovereign nation championing free trade. That way lies prosperity for everyone. The benefits won't be seen on January 2 but they will in good time. This is a historic moment. We are freeing ourselves of the last of the shackles. I only wish the hard-working people of Europe from Ireland to Poland could free themselves too.

I recommend that you read the piece and subscribe to the Telegraph were common sense and logic on this topic is dispensed on a daily basis.

Sovereignty 

That word again.

I suggest you subscribe to a dictionary and understand we’ve always been sovereign.

[Guest]

Just now, Spider said:

Sovereignty 

That word again.

I suggest you subscribe to a dictionary and understand we’ve always been sovereign.

Read what William Waldegrave wrote and you may have cause to reconsider.

Ill try to find, sometime

[paulhanley]

Just now, Spider said:

Sovereignty 

That word again.

I suggest you subscribe to a dictionary and understand we’ve always been sovereign.

Can you please concisely explain how you can be sovereign when you do not control your own immigration, agriculture, trade and fishing policies? And pay billions each year for the privilege of not doing so?

[paulhanley]

1 minute ago, Mr Grey said:

I like Charles, easy reading and honest. 

He's fantastic. Him and Janet Daly are my go-to columnists in the Telegraph.

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, boltondiver said:

Read what William Waldegrave wrote and you may have cause to reconsider.

Ill try to find, sometime

A bit outlined here

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/09/life-beyond-brexit