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Buh bye, you won’t be missed. Go back to your slimy cave under the Misty Mountains.
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I know it’s well beyond time to be disappointed with the BBC, but I do wish they’d stop letting “journalists” like Laura Kuenssberg just act as mouthpieces for tory sources.
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Yeah, we’ve discussed on here numerous times about the lack of impartiality within the BBC and walking on eggshells around the Tory’s fillet knives. Maybe i should have linked to a Channel 4 news story instead, i prefer their take on things anyway.
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Cummmings is gone.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer, humbler, more honest etc. Etc.
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And this is what it is like now. Just wait until January.
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Taking back control. So much winning.
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Doesn’t matter - BLUE PASSPORTS !!!
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Which you can only get by leaving the EU.
Croatia: Hey, guys…
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The will of the people. The will of the fucking people.
I hope the people are happy with their diesal soaked Valhalla.
I’m gonna put a prediction from Charlie Stross behind a spoiler because while he has a tendency to engage in strong pessimism it is scarily plausible.
I don’t think I’m sticking my neck out if I predict that the political climate of England on November 1st, 2021 will be absolutely unrecognizable from where it is today (November 1st, 2020). Certainly BoZo won’t be PM by then, barring a miracle. Quite possibly Scotland will already have voted to leave the UK. But those are the predictable aspects of 2021, before the full onslaught of Disaster Capitalism strikes.
Less definite but equally possible and worrying: 250,000 to 300,000 dead from COVID19, Sterling crashing to below US dollar parity, several major regions and city councils going bankrupt, food riots, mass protests rising to the level of a general strike, resumed paramilitary bombing campaigns in NI, major banks going into public ownership (because they’re not viable without government support – see 2008), major banks going bankrupt (and by major I mean “pick any two of Lloyds, Barclays, NatWest, HSBC”) and the government cancelling the deposit protection scheme because it costs too much (so millions of people lose their savings), collapse of the London stock exchange and/or Lloyds, one or more major climate change events directly affecting the UK (e.g. a summer drought), the car industry collapsing, Airbus shutting down production in the UK, TfL being forced into bankruptcy and parted out to private equity, the Biden admin deciding the UK isn’t stable enough to be allowed to play with Trident missiles and a UNSC permanent seat, race riots and “anti-immigrant” pogroms.
I can’t quite see England going the whole distance to a military-backed coup by November 2021, but by November 2023? All bets are off.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/10/countdown-to-crazy.html#comment-2105892
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Has Croatia printed their blue passports in France, too?
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Hmm, maybe I should upgrade my boating license from ‘inland waters’ to ‘blue water’, just in case some sort of reverse Dunkirk manoeuvre is called for?
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There’s always the Principality of Sealand i suppose but we better start boning up on maintaining an almost 80 year old former oil platform.
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Replying here since it would be OT in the Trump topic:
I think you underestimate the willingness of those who voted for Brexit to accept the narrative being painted by Boris and co.
Bear in mind that as British people we’ve had at least 50 years of being told that everyone on the mainland is in some way perfidious, weak, cowardly, lazy or barbaric if not all of the aforegoing at once.
Add to that several decades of whining and outright lies about the EU and the same toxic copaganda and anti-lawyer propaganda as the US (and everywhere else I can think of) and you have a whole bunch of people for whom the basic issues of Brexit boiled down to:
- “Keep the foreigners out”.
- “Keep the foreigners out.”
- “BRITAIN!!!” By which of course they really mean “England!!!”
- “Keep those nasty foreigners from telling us what to do”
- “Keep those nasty foreign lawyers in the ECJ from telling us what to do”.
By that metric, yes Boris lied to people by telling them that the could have all that while still trading with the EU but the number of people who care about that is so minimal compared to those who think that anything is acceptable so long as it gets them out of EU free movement, out of having to comply with EU regulations and directives and not subject to the ECJ.
The eejits in the Tory Party can point to massive support for a hardline on those issues. And those are the issues that will inevitably scupper any chance of a real deal with the EU.
Oh, and fishing. Which has somehow morphed from something that 90% of the UK couldn’t give a fuck about to a major issue of national sovereignty.
Can’t have the Frogs coming and fishing all our fish. Never mind that we don’t want the stuff.
TLDR - I don’t think enough of them will care about any economic downsides to blame anyone except the people they already blame for everything.
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oops 
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So much to unpack, but I don’t disagree with most of what you’ve said.
I think that the thing to do is focus on what we do next. If it’s a WTO no-deal Brexit (which it looks like it will be), then we need to make sure that they own it. Every bit of it.
We need to be quoting their dumb quotes back at them. We need to make sure that their attempts to blame others fail.
Personally, I’ll be framing it in terms of trust. I know people who voted for Brexit. They placed their trust in the Quitling politicians, journalists, editors and business people. They have slowly come to realise that they were failed - or worse, betrayed.
Saying that they were wrong didn’t work. Not even when I knew that they knew they were wrong. But saying that they were failed or betrayed seems to work better. So it’s the narrative I’m going with for the moment…
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The problem with making the politicians accountable for what they did of course is that…they just aren’t. We have seen it over and over again that some time in the early 2000s or so politicians in the UK* discovered that if they just refuse to take responsibility they can just do whatever they want. They don’t have to resign when they were caught doing something unethical, like they used to. They can just choose not to do it and as long as the media is on their side (and in the case of the Tories it is) and as long as they can stomach being hypocritical with a straight face there’s nothing that can be done about it. It’s an infuriating shamelessness that makes them nigh invulnerable. And of course now they can blame anything that happens with the economy on Covid 19. It can be demonstrably Brexit related, all they need is a sound bite just insisting it is Covid.
* and elsewhere to some degree, but it is really obvious in the UK and the US
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