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

Yes deficit elimination is just based on nonsense - but its an aim that has been there for a very long time.

This should be thrown back at the Tories as much as "350m a week" has been.

If they want to decrease the cost of housing they need to increase the supply /asmithtruths

And not 'let's give housing agencies money to build houses we won't own'.

Circling back to the LM stuff from earlier in the week, there is a select committee on whether freedom of speech is overly restricted at universities and, of the four witnesses, three work for Spiked:

https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/joint-select/human-rights-committee/news-parliament-2017/freedom-of-speech-uni-17-19/

Legit impressive how they have managed to weasel their way in to so many things.

scottish budget is in 3/4 weeks time. LBTT is the scots SDLT equivalent. as tim says, this change will inflate prices on its own and will also inflate demand, inflating prices further. it increased prices 0.3% last time when darling did it in 2009. the economic landscape is a touch more robust now than it was then so would expect 0.3% increase to be on the low end........

scariest prospect is that the levers that we’re pulled during the GFC are still in the same position 10 years on so if there’s a correction (or some near term event which causes economic dislocation) (hmmm) we’re probably fucked wahey

what is kez doing. seriously

how is this website free

A question I've encountered to which I don't have a good answer. Perhaps twitter can help me out? "Is teenagers' use of 'sick' to mean 'brilliant' any more (or less) pro-ill people than the use of 'gay' to mean 'rubbish' is anti-homosexual people? If so, why?"

— Andrew Lilico (@andrew_lilico) November 23, 2017

a profound exploration of epistemology there

or some dickwitted homophobic SJW-baiting, can't decide

Loved the BBC's unbiased selling of Hammond's stamp duty policy to a 'representative group of voters' on Newsnight last night. Well done for trying so hard to win round the younger voters, in particular, Central Office will be delighted.

Anyone receiving certain benefits might qualify for warm home one-off payment of £140 this winter (if I qualified, that would pay for an entire quarter of electricity). Check it out here:

https://www.gov.uk/the-warm-home-discount-scheme/energy-suppliers

Ken Clarke on the influence of Rebekah Brooks 10-13 years ago.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/ken-clarke-says-david-cameron-did-some-sort-of-deal-to-win?utm_term=.xmXWRJDNR#.yjMbyGJ4y

"When I became the lord chancellor responsible for prisons I was rung up first of all by the prime minister, then by the chancellor of the exchequer, then by the home secretary, separately, all asking me why in the face of the prison crisis [and The Sun's campaign] I was not considering prison ships. That was 2007."

xp
I'm sure if more people knew how simple it is to link-out your electric meter for free power, then a coordinated mass hit on the greedy energy industry would be a fun possibility. But obv don't ever get caught linking out your meter - you do time for that shit!

xp

second quote is from lord falconer, which makes the whole story even more barmy... I mean... prison ships... 🤔

More Brexit LOLz.

it feels like we have begun to turn the corner when the realities are beginning to actually become real.

all we need is one big financial inst. to declare they are leaving london, and then all hell will break loose.

as they used to say in macgyver : 'let the countdown begin .. '

Feel like the EU should give us some sort of special aw diddums award just in recognition of the fact that we’ve really gone and pissed on our sandwiches in so many different spheres

Since 1603 u mean?

Goldman Sachs has basically already said they're upping and leaving. I'm not sure that would have as big an impact, politically, as a big car plant in a medium-sized town closing down while explicitly citing Brexit as the reason.

We've handed may a golden fuckin ticket here unless the main parties here make a U-turn today

A succession of stories in which a major employer in a Leave-voting area just disappears could have a major impact on the political debate in this country. That doesn't mean everyone turning into Remainers overnight, but more an explosion of anger, perhaps another rightward shift, demands for public money that the government won't provide, etc.

A major employer I can see from my office window, MINI, meets most of these criteria....I can well imagine BMW moving them out. Oxford voted Remain though.

I've seen ppl arguing that banking orgs fleeing london is actually no loss since what have they ever done for us etc and a london greatly reduced in wealth and heft will be a needed rebalancing

there's an element of truth in the last bit -- the uk is ludicrously unbalanced towards its hugely over-large main city in all kinds of ways (and the freeing up of finance in the 80s contributed a lot to this; the london population was actually shrinking between ww2 and the 1970s)

but a merely market-driven rebalancing, esp.one in a significantly down-sized economy, is not going to go well, is not going to be an equitable rebalancing

In a saner world the financial sector would be a key agent of that rebalancing though, by investing long-term in the kind of productive industries that would allow other parts of the country to grow. But a lot of the City resists that - you need very long-term and high-risk lending - and government has had no real interest in making them do it because the City was generating so much tax in and of itself. The upshot is that, over a period of decades, the government has become dangerously over-reliant on the financial sector for revenue - financial services are a relatively small part of the economy but account for a huge slice of the exchequer.

The result of this is probably going to be that, when push comes to shove, the govt will do pretty much anything to keep the banks here even at the expense of enraging their more Brexit fundamentalist backbenchers. If we don't crash out on WTO rules, I'm not sure the impact on the financial sector is going to be that pronounced.

On the other hand it might be a lot harder for them to recruit internationally and that may cause some banks to just go "fuck this". But London has a cultural cache internationally that a lot of the mooted alternatives just don't have. A tech exodus to Berlin is one thing but London is still likely to be more attractive to individual bankers than Frankfurt or Switzerland.

We're much more likely to lose what remains of manufacturing and that's going to have a massive impact on a lot of places that voted for Brexit.

financial services are a relatively small part of the economy but account for a huge slice of the exchequer

7.2% of the economy and 11.5% of total government receipts according to a crafty google - that's a difference but maybe not such a big difference?

(I agree with your overall point, mind.)

Q. is what proportion of the London economy is FS?

http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06193/SN06193.pdf

says 16.3%

7.2% of the economy and 11.5% of total government receipts according to a crafty google - that's a difference but maybe not such a big difference?

Ah right, I thought the gap was bigger than that. Still big enough for the government not to want to take chance on it (especially when it also means donations + votes).

says 16.3%

I'm guessing that's not including the various companies (software, information, restaurants, whatever) that also depend on it. An issue the government will presumably factor in, in a way they never did when thinking about the knock-on effects of public spending cuts on the private sector.

Maybe they'll be prepared to let the whole thing go to the wall, but you don't rebalance an economy by tanking one part of it, you do it by building up the other parts as quickly as possible. It doesn't look like "the market" as they currently understand it is going to be capable of doing that post-Brexit, especially as it hasn't really done so up until now.

We're much more likely to lose what remains of manufacturing and that's going to have a massive impact on a lot of places that voted for Brexit.

― Matt DC, Friday, 24 November 2017 10:44 (thirty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

precisely. this will not be pretty.

Kate Hoey everybody.

"We’re not the ones who are going to be putting up the physical border. If it ends up with a no deal we won’t be putting up the border - they’ll have to pay for it, because it doesn’t need to happen.

Hoey also said that Switzerland and Norway provided examples of how countries outside the EU could operate relatively soft border arrangements with the EU. She suggested that the Irish government was being unduly negative about the problem.

A lot of the technology, at the Swiss border and in Norway, is done actually away from the border - and of course the prime minister has said that she doesn’t want cameras at the border.

There are ways of doing this. Why don’t the Irish government actually become more positive about this and start looking at solutions with their closest neighbour and closest partner? After all, we are a friend of the Republic of Ireland, the relations have never been as good.

And yet on this issue it seems like they are more concerned to keep the rest of the EU satisfied than actually looking at concrete positive proposals."

lmao

She is awful.

I have no idea how this circle can be squared. You can’t have a border between ROI and NI, logically you can’t have a customs border between NI and the rest of the UK and you can’t really have hard Brexit without one or the other. Good to know we have the finest minds on it though.

i mean.. norway is an EEA country. switzerland is in the single market. this is the entire point.

yeah i am far from au fait with the technical details but on the surface it does look entirely irreconcilable.

the only thing standing in the way of the UK staying in the single market though is theresa may and her foot-shooting red lines, right? the uk can still leave the EU, can still implement the border controls that tony blair chose not to, and remain part of single market / customs union.

I was going to post yesterday to say that surely Liam Fox isn't threatening the peace and security of Ireland by using the border as a trading chip because only a maniac would do that but of course I forgot Labour's very own house maniac.

customs border between NI and the UK might have difficulties but feels like the most likely solution at the moment afaict

DUP says no

I'm sure they do but it's not like they're in oh wait

Just to point out that you can have a border between NI and ourselves we had one before and it was fine iirc

I mean sure look there was the thing but cmon we're beyond that now aren't we? Chuckle brothers! Paisley dead, McGuinness dead? I just can't see the problem here.

*starts investing in Semtex*

"DUP says no"

isn't this their usual obstinate position on just about everything - apart from "mo' marching, mo' bibles" and "fancy a billion?".

You're forgetting "if they get one we want one too" and "I'm on my side I never touched her side she's lying"

not that i'm an expert by any means but putting a hard border between NI and the rest of the UK seems to me like something the DUP would be willing to go to the wall on. it's like the whole reason they exist.

well that and flexing their muscles at catholics

I think that the comforts enjoyed by most voters along all stripes since peace broke out might make a full return to previous stock positions difficult, but to even start back along the path would encourage all the wrong individuals, groups and instincts and there's a reason "they haven't gone away, you know" is an oft-repeated truism.

ie I think leaders of any calibre could take the voting masses in the right direction from here, but there aren't any, and all environmental inputs would appear to be pointing backwards

This was an issue even during the campaign, I'm sure they'll have thought of something by now...

DUP aims as of this June (ie two days before the election, acc.the BB):

— frictionless border with the Irish Republic; assisting those working or travelling in the other jurisdiction
— Northern Ireland established as a hub for trade from the Irish Republic into the broader UK market
— comprehensive free trade and customs agreement with the EU
— arrangements to facilitate ease of movement of people, goods and services