Brexit slowly becoming a Farce.

[NotThePars]

Blessed paywalls

[John Lambies Doos]

Wouldn't listen to a thing that untrustworthy Clegg says

[Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadoo]

Clegg gets a bit of a bad press IMO. He delivered a huge increase on the tax free allowance and a referendum on PR on the back of 57 seats. Obviously he was never going to get all the Lib Dem manifesto implemented.

[NotThePars]

Can’t imagine feeling anything other than visceral joy at seeing Clegg utterly miserable in June.

 

[Highlandmagyar 2nd String]

3 hours ago, Peppino Impastato said:

Read the claim of right champ.  The people of Scotland are sovereign.  They voted to stay in the EU.

Indeed Scotland did vote to staying in the EU, as I did, but we voted as the UK. And as we are still part of that union we come out of the EU as part of that union. Sorry to break it to you mate.

[Granny Danger]

10 minutes ago, Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadoo said:

Clegg gets a bit of a bad press IMO. He delivered a huge increase on the tax free allowance and a referendum on PR on the back of 57 seats. Obviously he was never going to get all the Lib Dem manifesto implemented.

You should feel totally ashamed of yourself.  Clegg was an enabler to a Tory government.

[Highlandmagyar 2nd String]

20 hours ago, John Lambies Doos said:

22 hours ago, Highlandmagyar 2nd String said:

A Unionist certainly. A typical britnat? Define that. Regards getting off before it happens. I'm afraid not. We voted to stay part of the union, so we go as a union. 

Imagine being a unionist and calling yourself Scottish. Minter

Minter? How original of you. Well, that makes the majority of people in Scotland a minter. Doesn't it make your heart burst with pride to live in Minterland.

[Ira Gaines]

2 minutes ago, Granny Danger said:

You should feel totally ashamed of yourself.  Clegg was an enabler to a Tory government.

And in turn, also played a part in helping them towards a majority next time out, which May hilariously threw away.

[Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadoo]

1 minute ago, Granny Danger said:

You should feel totally ashamed of yourself.  Clegg was an enabler to a Tory government.

My conscience is clear. He got the referendum which would have been the game changer (look at the election arithmetic from 2010, for example), but then we didn't vote for it. Because, as a country, we're all fucking idiots. This has been proven subsequently on at least two separate occasions since.

[welshbairn]

44 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

Blessed paywalls

 

    This week’s marathon meeting of ministers at Chequers was designed to produce the final blueprint for Brexit, or so we were told. Now the message is that UK prime minister Theresa May will reveal all in a speech next week. The future that our children and grandchildren will inhabit will — finally — become clear.

Given the historical significance of these events, it was underwhelming, to say the least, to learn that ministers had spent much of their time in the run-up to the Chequers meeting arguing over . . . baskets.

Three baskets, to be precise.

First, one that represents all those industries, such as aerospace and automotive, that ministers believe might wish to preserve full alignment with EU rules.

Second, a basket in which ministers will seek an agreement with the bloc on shared goals, possibly affecting consumer rights, animal welfare and environmental protection, but where those goals will be reached by different means.

And finally, one that covers those sectors that the government wants to distance sharply from EU regulation, such as fisheries or agriculture.

This, we are now informed, is part of a strategy of “managed divergence”.

There were echoes of the 1970s TV show Dad’s Army as key players in the British state gathered in the quaint Buckinghamshire countryside to grapple with some of the most existential questions the UK has faced in a generation, immersing themselves in the political equivalent of basket weaving instead.

Brexit has caused the Conservative party to adopt a pettifogging, bureaucratic and unworkable approach to the British economy

We already know what the rest of the EU thinks of the government’s basketry: they regard it as a non-starter. Picking and choosing the bits of the bloc’s regulatory fabric that Britain wants to keep, while seeking to bypass Brussels’ standards in other sectors, amounts to a cake-and-eat-it Brexit they could not possibly accept.

The European Commission even released a document on the eve of the Chequers meeting declaring starkly that “UK views on regulatory issues in the future relationship including the ‘three-basket approach’ are not compatible with the principles” espoused by the EU27.

British ministers are persuading themselves that emollient noises made in private by some European ministers will, in the end, thwart the procedural punctiliousness of the EU institutions in Brussels. But the bloc was, is and will remain a supranational construct built on clear legal foundations. It would not survive if it were just a whimsical political arrangement.

It is not nearly as susceptible to the nudge-and-wink deals struck between British politicians in Westminster tea rooms as UK Brexit secretary David Davis appears to imagine. Britain, uniquely in the bloc, does not have a written constitution. As a result, British negotiators consistently underestimate the importance of law and process in the minds of their EU counterparts.

But what is perhaps most surprising is that a Conservative cabinet, in devising a strategy of economic basketry, is following a course that is profoundly un-Conservative. Divvying up the British economy according to different sectoral preferences smacks of the discredited “picking winners” industrial policies of the 1970s.

It is a return to a statist, top-down approach to the economy for which Conservative Brexiters always used to criticise the EU. In the highly unlikely event that the government’s strategy is accepted by the bloc, it will spawn a wave of bureaucracy, red tape and complexity the likes of which even the most dirigiste Eurocrat would never dare propose.

Who is to say which sectors and which issues belong to which basket? If the chemicals industry is put in the first basket to remain fully aligned to the EU’s Reach chemicals regime, what does that mean for all those ancillary sectors, from fabrics to cosmetics, that rely heavily on chemicals?

Given that the manufacturing industry and services are increasingly joined at the hip, how will they operate in separate baskets? What happens as the British economy evolves and some sectors fade while new ones rise? Will new baskets have to be invented?

And why should other governments allow the UK to undercut or alter the rules of the game while retaining significant access to their markets? Danish pork producers, German wind turbine manufacturers, Czech toy makers, Italian clothes designers or Polish furniture manufacturers are entitled to expect a continued level playing field for themselves if one is provided for the car and aerospace sectors.

The whole point of the remarkable outburst of economic liberalisation enshrined in the EU’s single market was precisely to create a framework in which industries could operate in a vast consumer market free of haphazard interference from politicians. That is why former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher championed the idea in the first place.

It is a measure of quite how much Brexit is usurping conventional ideological distinctions that a Conservative party is now adopting such a pettifogging, bureaucratic and unworkable approach to the British economy.

 

 

[Granny Danger]

3 minutes ago, Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadoo said:

My conscience is clear. He got the referendum which would have been the game changer (look at the election arithmetic from 2010, for example), but then we didn't vote for it. Because, as a country, we're all fucking idiots. This has been proven subsequently on at least two separate occasions since.

What referendum?

[Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadoo]

Just now, Granny Danger said:

What referendum?

PR. That would have ensured the Tories weren't going to f**k us over for evermore by getting about 35% of the vote but 60% of the seats. Lib Dems got 25% of the vote in that election and heehaw seats to show for it.

[welshbairn]

3 minutes ago, Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadoo said:

My conscience is clear. He got the referendum which would have been the game changer (look at the election arithmetic from 2010, for example), but then we didn't vote for it. Because, as a country, we're all fucking idiots. This has been proven subsequently on at least two separate occasions since.

That referendum campaign was the weakest of any in the history of campaigns, for anything. The sheer incompetence of it put me off the Libdems more than collaborating with the Tories to get it.

[Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadoo]

Just now, welshbairn said:

That referendum campaign was the weakest of any in the history of campaigns, for anything. The sheer incompetence of it put me off the Libdems more than collaborating with the Tories to get it.

It obviously didn't help that the Labour Party would have lost out handsomely by a change to the system too.

[Granny Danger]

1 minute ago, Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadoo said:

PR. That would have ensured the Tories weren't going to f**k us over for evermore by getting about 35% of the vote but 60% of the seats. Lib Dems got 25% of the vote in that election and heehaw seats to show for it.

Christ on a bike it was a sop; the reason they got that was a sop.  It was never going to get support.  Everyone knows that; there’s folk who have been dead for 50 years that know that.

”Yeah Nick you can have your unwinnable referendum so long as you support our cuntish Tory government with its cuntish Tory policies”.

Aye, Nick was a hero.

 

[Peppino Impastato]

18 minutes ago, Highlandmagyar 2nd String said:

Indeed Scotland did vote to staying in the EU, as I did, but we voted as the UK. And as we are still part of that union we come out of the EU as part of that union. Sorry to break it to you mate.

That's not up to you or me champ. The people of Scotland will decide.

[Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadoo]

Just now, Granny Danger said:

Christ on a bike it was a sop; the reason they got that was a sop.  It was never going to get support.  Everyone knows that; there’s folk who have been dead for 50 years that know that.

”Yeah Nick you can have your unwinnable referendum so long as you support our cuntish Tory government with its cuntish Tory policies”.

Aye, Nick was a hero.

 

I never said he was a hero. He got what would have been a vitally important referendum on changing the stupid system that we have in place. Sop or not, if we voted for it then we wouldn't be in the situation we are now. There wouldn't have been a referendum on the EU to appease internal wranglings in the Tory Party for a start. This thread wouldn't even exist.

[welshbairn]

2 minutes ago, Granny Danger said:

Christ on a bike it was a sop; the reason they got that was a sop.  It was never going to get support.  Everyone knows that; there’s folk who have been dead for 50 years that know that.

”Yeah Nick you can have your unwinnable referendum so long as you support our cuntish Tory government with its cuntish Tory policies”.

Aye, Nick was a hero.

 

It was totally winnable. They just didn't bother campaigning for it, whereas the No campaign was well financed and plastered all over. It didn't help that it was a watered down version of PR that was difficult to get excited about.

[topcat(The most tip top)]

I think if Theresa May was a car salesman (or salesperson if you insist) then not only is she trying to sell a car that hasn't been made yet, they haven't even agreed where the engine is going to go or how many wheels it will have.

It will however be red

And white

It will also be blue

[Granny Danger]

36 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

It was totally winnable. They just didn't bother campaigning for it, whereas the No campaign was well financed and plastered all over. It didn't help that it was a watered down version of PR that was difficult to get excited about.

It was totally unwinnable with the two political parties that had dominated U.K. politics for years against it.