I dunno, I think he does enjoy fleecing people, and having people bite on the first piece of bait does save him from having to invent new “world beating” analogies…
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This won’t make any sense if either of you change your avatars, but right now, watching you and @politeruin debate here is adorable, regardless of the topic. It looks like two corgis in debate club.
Who’s a good boy?
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Ein is, of course, a Welsh Corgi. 
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You would have liked Kiwi… that was him on a very sunny day in April in Edinburgh (though he’s a Shiba Inu, and terribly missed).
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I want one!
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The fun fact is that the EU’s cabbage rules, just like the shellfish rules and the meat-sandwich rules that people are getting worked up about these days, were probably if not originally proposed then at least enthusiastically approved by the UK contingent in Brussels.
For the last 25 years or so before Brexit, the UK’s voting record in favour of EU directives and regulations has been, like, 98%. In view of this, the argument that Britain was chafing under an oppressive and stifling regulatory regime imposed by Brussels and desperately needed to break free to regain its sovereignty is utterly silly.
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What I don’t get about Cameron was, he held the vote, “knowing” all along he’d lose (ie, Brexit vote would fail). Brilliant strategy, that.
And the £350,000,000-per-week-that-goes-to-NHS lie. Which, amazingly, Nigel Farage immediately backtracked on after the vote. What a poor shyster. Any con man worth his grift knows, you stay in character after you’ve duped the mark.
Classic Kobayashi Maru. And Cameron was no Kirk.
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Cameron’s faulty “knowing” starts a lot earlier – the only reason he floated the Brexit vote in the first place was to win the election – which he was counting on winning without a majority in Parliament. He “knew” that he could quietly kill the referendum promise as part of the coalition process. But the Brexit carrot was just too alluring, and the Tories won an outright majority. Suddenly he was on the hook. When his promises finally got called to account, there was no exit – his political career would have been dead if he had played the “nonbinding” card after the vote went Leave. Little did he know it was dead either way.
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Or in many cases just made up by the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, (checks notes) a Mr Borris Johnson.
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Nigel never said it. That was Boris. Nigel was always careful to be vague about that kind of thing. He was always a far better political operator than most other politicians.
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What a horible thought, Nigel being a more competent politician than the current crop of griftmuppets.
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With respect, you are wrong.
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Well to be fair, who wouldn’t have been cross about the great Brussels Sprout force feeding incident of 2016, when due to an altogether unavoidable mixup in agricultural subsidy programmes, the EU was faced with a shortage of all other vegetables and a crushing oversupply of sprouts, resulting in edicts from Brussels that all patriotic European citizens would be required to eat 32 kilos of sprouts during November or be banished to Latvia.
I, myself, was lucky to escape the fate of my European neighbors, because of Switzerland’s special relationship with Brussels. On the other hand, due to a concurrent mishap with my own country’s subsidies, I was forced to wallpaper my salon with leeks, and I’m still trying to get the smell out of my couch.
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D candidates and pols quite regularly release very detailed, multipoint plans to address things. R pols, (or whatever the local term for the populist party is) generally, do not.
Brexit didn’t go down party lines (before the vote at least). The Tories and Labour both backed Remain (which arguably is why some people voted against it), with the other parties picking their own sides.
This led to the situation of Theresa May, who had backed Remain, having to act as the Prime Minister who took the UK out of the EU, and having to argue in Parliament against Jeremy Corbyn who’s party was by that point anti-brexit, even though he himself is more ambivalent about the EU (it’s a bit too neo-liberal capitalist for him).
Still, there is good news. Scottish whiskey exports have dropped because of brexit, so at least there’s more booze around for the rest of us to get shitfaced and forget about this whole mess (until tomorrow at least).
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Oh, so wrong. I think there’s a huge bias against the euro in the anglophone world because most news about it comes from England where there is a tradition of denigrating what has been an astonishingly successful currency even among those that otherwise support the EU.
That’s not an attack on you @bobtato, but rather a lament of reporting on the EU when most international media relies on English speaking sources.
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That’s not entirely true. At least part of what happened was that Cameron was basically bounced into giving government members and, importantly, cabinet ministers, a ‘free vote’ - they were allowed to speak for either position (normally, the principle of ‘collective responsibility’ holds that if you are a member of the government, you always toe the government line and are expected to resign if you do not.) And I believe that all the other parties followed a similar route, so there were at least a couple of prominent LibDem ‘Leaver’ MPs in a party that had always been staunchly pro-EU* and so on.
So that while the formal government position was Remain (as it was for Labour), it was clear that this was an issue which was not only not “party political” but that even the Cabinet were divided; I think that may have had more of an effect than perhaps was obvious at the time. Of course, May’s subsequent utter uselessness in failing to realise that this wasn’t a ‘party political’ thing made things infinitely worse but that’s a whole different problem.
But yes, the consequence of May vs Corbyn was enjoyably surreal and will merit a few footnotes in future history books.
*I’ve seen an argument that said that Nick Clegg was pretty much a Tory but he was too pro-EU which is why he ended up in the LibDems, and that David Cameron was pretty much a LibDem but he was too anti-EU which is why he ended up in the Tory party. Obviously that’s an unfair simplification but there’s probably some truth in it.
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Well he has entirely taken over the utterly dominant party in England without even being in it. They have taken his positions (and the old BNP’s) in that hilarious right wing move known as stopping the far right eating your lunch by becoming them. It’s a move which the American Republican party also did when facing a loony fascist insurgent.
Also, his party handed the Tories the last election and I don’t really know what leverage he has on them now, but I don’t doubt it’s significant. As for his competence, he’s definitely got competencies but we will never know if government is one of them. He’s never tried. I know the narrative which was in the media was labour constituencies voted Tory but we were looking at the map at the time and it was stark. Everywhere we looked in the north that went Tory had the same pattern: labour down X votes. Brexit party X votes, Tory round the same. I genuinely believe that the brexit party would have balanced that by turning Tory seats for labour down south of they hadn’t agreed to hand the election to the Tories. And that is a bill which must be paid.
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The Euro is a big problem for countries that aren’t Germany, France and Holland, mostly because it decimated spending power for average citizens by exposing how poorly they ran their economies when compared to those big three. I moved to Italy just before the Euro came in, and my salary in Lira was pretty good, when it became Euro, it was ok while the 1 Euro == 2000 Lira held fort, about a year and a half later it was 1 Euro ~= 4000 Lira, which halved salaries, and the inflationary pressure did in lots of businesses.
Quite a few anti EU politicians in Italy use getting out of the Euro front and center. Right or wrong, they blame the Euro for lots of hardship.
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If I’m understanding what The Guardian is saying… The government writes a draft bill, decides for itself if it requires the Crown’s consent, sends it to the Crown for consent, and then allows it to proceed through Parliament if it gets it. Not all bills require the Crown’s consent, and the Crown has no say in which ones do or do not (Parliament or the Government does). Generally, only bills which directly affect the Royal family or their estates are even considered for requiring Crown consent. And this process has been standard for over 300 years.
And this is “meddling in parliament”? This is a threat to UK democracy?
To me, it sounds like the Guardian is being extremely republican more than anything.
Kind of undecided between him having a right time, right place moment, or it being his political acumen.
He’s been an anti-EU guy for as long as he was an MEP, and before, so the fact that the UK was eventually dumbed down enough, and sick of London centric policy, that his piping finally attracted enough rats could just be explained with a terrier analogy (if I haven’t exhausted my quota of poor ones already).
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