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

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.

not sure that any british politicians had given it any thought either, if the panicked flapping that ensued over the issue right after the referendum is anything to go by

that's true, tho I think he ham-fistedly kind of tried to make that point - "this thing became an issue because it was politically forced to become an issue". I used to make the same point to my dad - if most voters cared that much about the EU, UKIP wd've had a stack of MPs a decade ago. referendums distort opinions.

the stuff he writes about the innate problems of representative democracies is interesting because true, wilfully ignored and maybe unsolveable. "our" system and "our" values are built on an underlying apathy and willingness to be ruled, as long as we maintain the veneer of representation. and maybe there's no other way to run modern states at this level of complexity. the difference between parliamentary democracy and Augustus's Rome looks fairly trivial to me.

wonder if the food was better in augustus' rome

I'm sure it was all organic

it was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_dormouse#Cuisine

and they used every part of the dormouse

Long-lost Roman flavours:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170907-the-mystery-of-the-lost-roman-herb

Apathy and willingness to be ruled need to be backed, at least to some extent, by a trust that the leaders have some idea of what they're doing.

I'm not sure lying quite covers it. People expect to be lied to by politicians but they have also, again to some extent, expect those lies to be backed by an underlying competence. Lose that perception of competence, as Labour did in the 70s and 00s and the Tories did in the 90s and you are punished.

The global crash and wider period of wage stagnation, in combination with the perception that the developing world is going to take a bigger share of a finite pie, has massively undermined that though. Rather than being seen as useless, which get you turfed out and replaced, the role of the government is increasingly seen as almost irrelevant. The economy governs itself.

I think that's partly why 'cultural' / racial issues have come back to the forefront, why people were willing to choose a loose cannon businessman over a career politician in the US, why the Tory attacks on Corbyn's economic competence failed to land in the way they expected, etc.

That combination of a belief that the economy will be bad / fine whatever political decisions are made and the vague notion of wanting to regain some kind of control over the world (not necessarily even in the context of the EU) probably drove the referendum outcome in part as well.

I don't think people have the ability to evaluate relative competence anymore, or have given up trying. Thus.

it's very difficult to assess competence that appears to be functioning against your own best interests, for one thing

"trust these people, they know what they're doing" is not comforting if you feel your socioeconomic status is low or lowering

how many people distrust doctors ffs?

When I was at university there was a dormouse and ouzo night, for the classics. Obviously I wouldn't eat it now, but I don't remember it being very interesting. Vinegary chicken? (I think it was pickled).

how many people distrust doctors ffs?

...lots and lots?

Is what I mean, Tom. People have no faith in professionals who are obviously more competent to manage them than they are themselves, so this is magnified a lot in a field like "politics" which might appear to require no more qualification to do than common sense and some degree of probity