brexit negging when yr mandate is is trash: or further chronicles of a garbage-fire

brown sauce on a banana, ruined my own lame joke thru tired eyes and brain

So May is planning to try and end run around the whole Brexit process by convincing all the other EEA members to sign up to a have-cake-eat-it “New EEA” on Britain’s terms? It’s the most batshit attempt yet.

I’m starting to realise there are elements that *genuinely believe* they need us more than we need them and that we can dictate. This is lunacy.

Oops

1. Our intel is that May is going to announce in her speech that she's to give formal notice to leave the EEA.

— The Leave Alliance (@LeaveHQ) September 12, 2017

4. She's not going to walk away, but it will be a take it or leave it offer. Either take it or we walk.

*smart smiling guy pointing to head meme*

please let us stay in or we will force you to let us leave

okay folks, it's heads-on-pikes time - grab your fucking pitchforks and get ready to storm parliament

Jacob Rees-Mogg has described the increased prevalence of food banks as a “rather uplifting” show of charity, arguing the only reason for the rise in their use is that the former Labour government did not tell people they existed.

“I think there is good within food banks and the real reason for the rise in numbers is that people know that they’re there, and Labour deliberately wouldn’t tell them,” the Conservative backbencher told LBC radio.

[...]

Challenged by a caller about the increased use of food banks – the Trussell Trust, Britain’s biggest food bank network, said it handed out record amounts of supplies last year, in part due to increased benefit delays – Rees-Mogg argued they fulfilled a vital function.

“I don’t think the state can do everything,” he said. “It tries to provide a base of welfare that should allow people to make ends meet during the course of the week, but on some occasions that will not work.

“And to have charitable support given by people voluntarily to support their fellow citizens, I think is rather uplifting and shows what a good, compassionate country we are.”

Rees-Mogg said the reason more people were using food banks was a Conservative reversal of a previous Labour policy to stop people knowing they existed.

“Food banks pre-date the Conservative government and crucially, the change that took place was that the Conservative government allowed Jobcentre Plus to tell people that food banks existed,” he said.

“And the former Labour government would not tell them – and that was a policy decision to stop people knowing that there was help available.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/14/jacob-rees-mogg-increased-use-food-banks-rather-uplifting

he knows what he's doing, the same way Gove used to enjoy trolling the teachers

Absolutely, he's an evil Tory scumbag, after all.

Maybe if May was a bit posher and a man, she wouldn't need to hide from public debates, and could get away with talking lots of unchallenged fallacious bullshit as well. Nobody interrupts him when he goes into rinse mode, but most (especially the bbc) seem to have a lot of time for his schtick.

Friends in the press, please highlight his City/VC career whenever possible.

I expect it was some good old jolly-hockey-sticks Tory niceness and reversal of Labour conspiracy that also led to my local supermarket putting a food bank donations basket near the checkout, and positioning a food bank on my walk home where I might see it every day

not much more pernicious than the tory tactic of celebrating volunteer work or community spirit at the same time as creating circumstances in which civilian human decency must fill the hole created by the state's utter lack of the same.

"we're all in this together"

In abuse debate, Con MP Bob Stewart says his son's teacher told class no-one should talk to him because his dad's a Tory

right on!

from the mouths of babes etc

it's odd that nationalism so often goes hand in hand with an inability to identify with/take pride in welfare run by the state

Would that be 'Bonking' Bob Stewart bellyaching about his brats?

not only a philandering amoral Tory scummer, but also someone who believed torture served a good purpose in NI.

Are you fucking mental? https://t.co/H2qxjJCTAv

— Sir Lynton Crosby (@LyntonSpins) September 15, 2017

I'm going to cancel Netflix and negotiate with each film producer separately, to get the best deal for me and my family #Brexit

— David Osler (@finance_LL) September 14, 2017

https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/908790120827854848/MFwRVkhX?format=jpg&name=600x314

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Benny_Hill.JPG/640px-Benny_Hill.JPG

Brexit 'chaos' as top official Oliver Robbins quits after one year in the job

Also huge sad lols that the 350m is still a topic, let alone it still being defended by Johnson and Michael fucking Gove.

Yesterday I heard F Boyle describing Gove as "a possessed ventriloquist's dummy, carved out of the Yew Tree they named operation Yew Tree after". Or something similar, well it made me laugh at the time.

the 350m should be a topic now and forever

the national statistics people have accused Boris of pulling figures out of his arse, again.

I can't believe BJ thought bringing up the 350m again would help his cause, tho. But the fucker seems be unravelling, or maybe seeing an insipid idiot like Mogg getting touted as leader emboldens him. Whatever the case, the stop Boris clique is too big, and he ought to know that by now.

I can't believe BJ thought bringing up the 350m again would help his cause, tho.

Just to clarify, this is what I meant, Tracer. Obv it needs to forever stay a topic to shove it in their fat faces.

Yesterday I heard F Boyle describing Gove as "a possessed ventriloquist's dummy, carved out of the Yew Tree they named operation Yew Tree after". Or something similar, well it made me laugh at the time.

I don't generally enjoy F Boyle but that's excellent

I enjoy F Boyle more than I should; *thumbs*

FWIW 350m a week extra for the NHS is about a 13% increase on the planned NHS budget for 2017 if I maths did good. Also known as 18.2 "Arlenes"..

I can't believe BJ thought bringing up the 350m again would help his cause, tho.

Stephen Bush suggesting earlier that it's actually about him feeling a bit cut out of the whole Brexit process, and also hating that the £350m is turning into a laughing-stock easy-jibe line to hang around him. While everyone else who sold it is more or less happy to privately go "yep, bollocks, but what a lie, wow!" he is all "no, no, if you squint just right, it's totally true".

Basically being too craven to own his lie.

I think he's getting his retaliation in early, I can see a battle looming to get rid of May once and for all.

ffs even farage had the savvy to say 'naw that was all bollocks haw haw' the day after the referendum

*sheds tears of joy*

5 Live just moved seamlessly from report on a lack of transparency in the undercover policing inquiry to May calling for websites to block extremist propaganda with no apparent sense of irony

you need to cut that shit outta your life man

only knock it on in the kitchen/for football commentary

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/20/nincompoopolis-the-follies-of-boris-johnson-by-douglas-murphy-review?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks

a review of Nincompoopolis, the BJ demolition book. I'm not sure I could find the time for a Boris book, even if it is one ripping the shit out of his mayoral legacy.

xp + Danny Baker on Saturday morning

Top trolling by IKEA. pic.twitter.com/gLmwbuQkZo

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) September 20, 2017

https://www.centrism.biz/

bit trenchant but largely indistinguishable from the real thing

Linda Burnip, co-founder of Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), said Field’s suggestion was “grossly offensive and totally unacceptable”.

She said: “Field is a disgrace as both chair of the work and pensions select committee and a so-called Labour MP, and DPAC believe that he must resign his select committee post with immediate effect.”

In response to Frank Field suggesting employers should be allowed to pay some disabled people less than minimum wage. This "so-called Labour Mp" has to be deselected, it's not like the fucker looks like retiring or dying soon enough.

no killing what can't be killed

why stop with disabled people tho? obviously employers are being held back by this Tory minimum wage, Labour needs to reconnect with the people by giving them the right to work for less than subsistence wages

Well yeah, he is only disseminating that type of borderline Nazi thought that they keep hearing out there on the doorsteps.

This is great from the FT today. It's paywalled so I'll paste it:

Brexit
Brexit is Britain’s gift to the world
‘The UK is now experimenting on itself for the benefit of humanity’

September 21, 2017 4:01 am by Simon Kuper

The British chemist Sir Humphry Davy (born 1778) liked dangerous experiments. He was fired from his job as an apothecary for causing constant explosions. Later, as a chemist, he enjoyed inhaling the gases he worked with. This helped him discover that nitrous oxide (laughing gas) was a potent anaesthetic. “Unfortunately,” notes a short guide to his career from Oxford University Press, “the same habit led him to nearly kill himself on many occasions and the frequent poisonings left him an invalid for the last two decades of his life.” It was probably worth it: Davy isolated substances including calcium and strontium, identified the element iodine and made the first electric light.

Much like Davy, the UK is now experimenting on itself for the benefit of humanity. Advanced societies rarely do anything so reckless, which is why the Brexit experiment is so valuable. In between self-poisonings, Brexit keeps producing discoveries that surprise both Leavers and Remainers. Here are some early lessons for other countries:
When you focus on a wedge issue, you divide society. The Brexit vote has introduced unprecedented rancour into a traditionally apolitical country. Insults such as “enemies of the people”, “saboteurs”, “racists” and “go home to where you came from” are now daily British fare. Brexit rows split generations at family weddings and Christmas. All this was avoidable: until the referendum, few Britons had strong views on the EU, just as few Americans thought about transgender bathroom habits until their politicians discovered the issue. If you have to address wedge issues, best to aim for compromise rather than a winner-take-all solution such as a referendum.

All countries need real-time election regulators. There have always been people who lied to win votes. But now they have social media. Every slow, understaffed, 20th-century election regulator must therefore retool itself into a kind of courtroom judge who can call out falsehoods instantly. The model is the UK Statistics Authority’s reprimand of Boris Johnson last Sunday, after he repeated the nonsense that leaving the EU would free up £350m a week for the National Health Service.
Revolutionaries invariably underestimate transition costs. Maybe if you have a blank slate, being out of the EU is better than being in it. But the calculation changes once you’ve been in the EU for 43 years. All your arrangements are then predicated on being in, and suddenly they become redundant. The cost of change is a classic conservative insight, though it’s been forgotten by the Conservative party.

Almost every system is more complex than it looks. Most people can’t describe the workings of a toilet, writes Steven Sloman, cognitive scientist at Brown University. The EU is even more complicated, and so leaving it has countless unforeseen ramifications. Most Britons had no idea last year that voting Leave could mean closing the Irish border, or giving ministers dictatorial powers to rewrite law. Because of complexity, so-called common sense is a bad guide to policy making. Complexity is also an argument against direct democracy.

Immigrants fulfil a role. Any society in which they live comes to depend on them. Britain’s NHS and the City of London would buckle without them. You may calculate that your distaste for immigrants is worth some lost functioning, but you have to acknowledge the trade-off.

You have to choose who to surrender your sovereignty to. Brexiters are right to say that the EU has usurped some of British sovereignty. But as John Major, former British prime minister, remarks, in a connected world the only fully sovereign state is North Korea. All other countries are forever trading away bits of sovereignty. For instance, the trade deal that the UK hopes to sign one day with the EU will entail adopting the EU’s standards on everything from cars to toys. You can decide to give away your sovereignty in new ways but, in practice, you can’t decide to keep it.

A government can only handle one massive project at a time. This is at best, and only if the whole government agrees on it. There simply isn’t the staff or head space to do much more. Carrying out Brexit means not fixing what Johnson in February 2016 called “the real problems of this country — low skills, low social mobility, low investment etc — that have nothing to do with Europe”. (See my colleague Martin Sandbu’s recent demolition of Johnson’s inconsistencies.)

Negotiations get harder when you lose your counter-party’s trust. That’s what Greece discovered during its negotiations with the EU, says Greek economic analyst Paris Mantzavras of Pantelakis Securities. Mocking the other side in public — as Greece’s Yanis Varoufakis did, and as British politicians now do regularly — is therefore a losing tactic.

There is no reset button in human affairs. The UK cannot return to its imagined pre-EU idyll, because the world has changed since 1973. Nor can Britons simply discard the Brexit experiment if it goes wrong, and revert to June 22 2016. The past is over, so it’s a poor guide to policymaking.
These lessons come too late for the UK itself, so please consider them our selfless gift to the world, like football.

si✧✧✧.ku✧✧✧@f✧.c✧✧ @KuperSimon

They might be correct that Brexit will fuck up the economy. But fuck the FT forever!

"Most people can’t describe the workings of a toilet"

Very complicated: a combination of water pressure, gravity and shit rolling downhill!

To make it more trenchant. I should have added... oh forget it!

A government can only handle one massive project at a time.

speak for yourselves yo

Simon Kuper doesn't seem to be a typical FT staff columnist. he's mostly into football and being the token liberal

"he's mostly into football and being the token liberal"

well if that had of been in his byline, I'd have judged his work completely differently ;)

Most Britons had no idea last year that voting Leave could mean closing the Irish border, or giving ministers dictatorial powers to rewrite law.

No, most Britons (whether by voting Leave or not voting at all) just didn't give a shit.