So with the massive hard-ons both Malcolm Turnbull and Dominic Cummings have for their respective governments, what’s the disgruntled ex-employees aka “The Ashes” scorecard showing right now?
I would have Turnbull slightly ahead. Always has a presence in the media, whereas Cummings appears to fade in and out showing a real lack of commitment, and it’s almost like he’s resigned to the fact the UK government is Teflon-coated, whereas Turnbull still has the fire burning bright in his eyes and looks like he’ll give it to Morrison for all eternity.
Do you think there will be a point in the future where all the factions of the Labour party will look back on the past and think “Yeah fuck. We really let them get away with fucking the country up then didn’t we?”
I would say probably not because they will probably instead be reminiscing about whether they got ‘the other faction’ back for something that was done to them. They don’t really give a toss about the country.
Knowing how the Conservatives are progressively dismantling the country and with Labour so focused internally that they aren’t pushing back, these could actually be the best days we are facing now. Conservatives can only be encouraged with what they’ve gotten away with.
Pretty much the crux of the problem with Labour is that they never really set themselves up as the party to remain in the EU. They couldn’t given the fact that their members were pretty split on it. I don’t think they’ve ever got past that while, in my opinion, UK politics has changed. It’s not about Conservative, Labour anymore. The country is still locked in those Leave / Remain camps. That is set to continue.
Labour should hang their heads in shame at the way they have opposed this Government. Months ago I lamented the fact that they were not going for the jugular, that there was no passionate opposition, that there was no inspirational leadership or direction.
I was told they were “keeping their powder dry”. What a load of nonsense, they are almost to a (wo) man as inept and incompetent as the Tories. A pathetic shambles that are letting down the people of Britain just as much as the Tories are. Could anybody reasonably stand hand on heart, cast their vote for any of them and say " I have faith in these people"?
I’ll want to see the detail but for me the EU is going in the right direction on this. As I mentioned previously, the UK can’t expect EU law to be interpreted by any competent body that isn’t the EFTA Court or the CJEU.
I think there are valid arguments as to why it shouldn’t be the CJEU but not against the EFTA Court, or equivalent bespoke arrangement.
Sure, disputes can initially be put to Arbitration as per the trade and cooperation agreement, but it is unavoidable that EEA judicial authorities are the ultimate arbiters of the rules of the Single Market (as applicable within Northern Ireland).
Getting a voice on that panel would be the best the UK could realistically hope for.
NatWest are staring at a fine of over £300m for this. That’s considerably more than it would have made from not carrying out the appropriate checks on the source of these funds.
As far as I understand it, the fines just go into the general public purse.
Frost hasn’t mentioned the CJEU until recently as if it became a concern overnight somehow.
I am starting to suspect that this is simply about maintaining a shroud over the damage that Brexit is bringing. Northern Ireland trade is flourishing with new North South links and into Europe and our government is hell bent on not letting the message out that Northern Ireland is a success story while the UK is sinking.
Well, both NI and mainland UK economies are growing and doing so faster than the Eurozone. I think we’re only 1% lower GDP now than at the start of the pandemic. We also have record numbers in employment and a buoyant labour market with rising wages.
BUT…trade between NI and mainland UK IS being disrupted more than anticipated. This is acknowledged, at least tacitly, by both sides so relaxing checks on various goods is a sensible step here.
The CJEU thing is ideological rather than something of tangible effect on the ground. It’s got NOTHING to do with the current practical difficulties.
I can totally understand why Frost/the UK government doesn’t like it but, as you say, they agreed to it. Unlike the rules governing the regulation of the movement of goods, where it was hard to predict the practical consequences, the role of the CJEU was known and perceptions about it have been given no reason to alter.
As I say, the best the UK can hope for in regard to the Protocol is an Arbitration mechanism similar to the trade and cooperation agreement but with the panel having to apply Single Market rules as interpreted by the EFTA Court (with possible limited representation/consultancy positions thereon for referrals solely under the Protocol).
I agree that there are some sensible compromises that can be made on trade between UK and NI. 100% logical although I’m sure the EU will still want some level of assurances that goods destined for NI stay in NI.
With regard to the upbeat in the UK economy I would like to point out that it is only a bounce from the extreme low we suffered during the pandemic. I don’t think Brexit has fully hit yet and we’re still not 100% where we were prior to the pandemic.
Yep I agree on the CJEU. I’ve been struggling to fathom why this has become " a thing" all of a sudden and why it was such a big issue. Still not 100% there other than knowing that the EU will be reluctant to move on it. Perhaps that’s why Frost has targeted it?
Yes. In fact they might be feeling it now, but they just can’t fucking help themselves.
Mind you, there is part of me that think it actually doesn’t matter what the Labour Party do. It’s stitched up. You’ve got people in this thread looking at how shit and corrupt the Tories are, and still refusing to vote Labour because Starmer is ‘vanilla’. As you’d rather eat a shit ice cream than a vanilla one.
Labour are not helping things by their various factions refusing to grow the fuck up, but this Government is so bad Labour should waltz into power with Mr Tumble as leader, but that’s where we are as a country. I keep saying it, but 150,000 people dead. Any government presiding over that should be be on the way out, not looking to increase their fucking majority.
I don’t think that’s Labour’s fault though. I blame the Conservatives for that.
Leave/Remain was clearly not divisible on party lines. There were vocal and forceful advocates for both in both the Conservatives and Labour.
What those parties should have done was to agree to respect the vote. Labour committed to doing this and then almost immediately began nibbling away at it, probably because they feared that they were leaking votes to the LibDems - which they were. This created a sense of betrayal by many of Labour’s core voters - the “red wall” if you like.
This should all have been unnecessary. This political division that basically reflected the polarised views of large parts of the electorate.
What should have happened is that there should have been a cross-party working group immediately established to draw up objectives and feed into the Brexit negotiating team. Parliament should have worked to deliver Brexit as one, imo - if it had done the constituency of the ERG would have been considerably diluted and maybe, just maybe, a more pragmatic solution could have been achieved. This is particularly so given the number of seats the Conservatives had following 2015 and more so following 2017.
Sure, there were difficulties due to the various legal challenges and the allegations of fraud and the legitimacy of the referendum result etc but these were always extremely unlikely to have succeeded. Sorry guys. Labour had the opportunity to influence the type of deal we left with but instead their internal factionalism was trying to pull in two directions at once and trying to appeal to two entirely polarised parts of their own constituency. Just not possible to come out with much credibility in those circumstances.
I predicted that were the UK to vote for Brexit, this would precede the UK electorate voting for more centre-left parties over time and I do genuinely feel that will still happen. Maybe as soon as the next election if Labour get their shit together but if not, certainly won’t be much longer.
Apart from a few MPs on obvious denial, most of the Shenanigans in parliament were framed around the notion that nobody knew what the fuck they’d voted for. No-one knew what ‘leave’ meant.
You had a cabal of hard right gammon lunatics in Parliament insisting that people had voted for a hard suicide Brexit, which was always bullshit.
You can respect the result, whatever that meant, and still fight to not let these bastards drag us of a cliff.
Very difficult this given the utter BS that was flying round from the likes of Farage and co. Stuff that has already been proven to be the BS that it was. Plus everyone on the Remain side was having a nibble. Corbyn was non committal and that left them in complete disarray. A gift for the Conservatives.
While I agree that a cross party collaboration would have been the best way forward there was no way that was going to happen. The Conservatives took ownership of the Leave side and there were numerous volunteers coming forward seeing an opportunity to further their careers. That and the fact that Corbyn sat opposite them any idea of co working didn’t have a cats chance in hell. So I don’t think Labour had any real chance of contributing to the deal.
Either way no one tackled Cummings, Farage or Johnson on the stuff they were spouting, which is an equally big mistake IMO. These people were left to run rampant by those again seeking to further careers and they ultimately won out. As soon as Boris came in, it was obvious it was going to be a disaster. I’m not in the slightest bit surprised that a lazy idiot like Johnson had no idea how the Good Friday Agreement worked and the relationship with the Withdrawal Agreement until November 2020 (according to Cummings).
I still think there was a way forward on Brexit that wouldn’t have left the country in complete disarray.
The first step should have been a national consultation/conversation around what people wanted to see happen next - not giving the option to remain in the EU, but what kind of leave people actually wanted.
The biggest problem post referendum was that some actors seized on the result to aggressively push for a destructive no deal Brexit, that I think only a tiny minority of leave voters had in mind. That forced more moderate players to adopt an oppositional stance, and the hard right nut jobs to characterise them as anti-democratic.
The whole thing post referendum was scary. Some of the rhetoric and language was decidedly fascist. Describing people trying to do the best thing for the country as enemies of the people, traitors, etc. This should have been deeply worrying for anyone, whether they voted leave or remain.