Westministenders: Boris and God Knows what next. (I'm all out of ideas!)

[RedToothBrush]

Still a week until Stoke and Copeland. (Labour Hold/Con Gain unless something strange happens) QT is from Stoke next week.

A50 hits the Lords next week. Melania is being lined up to do something for the women. (God help us all).

Will UKIP survive? Will Nuttall survive? Will Labour survive? Will Trump survive? Will CNN survive? Will the Lords survive? Will Theresa May survive a class room of children?

All these questions and more

There now appears to be a plan: bribery:

"On Sunday, it was reported that Downing Street officials and senior cabinet ministers wanted to divert part of the annual aid budget to eastern European countries in the hope of winning their support for a good trade deal."

So, aid will be taken from the poorest developing countries - making them suck up part of the Brexit costs - would be quite popular among a substantial section of voters

Indeed BigChoc. My point exactly.

Its quite something that even people who are up to speed on what Brexit are often not aware of just how bad the worst case scenario is and have believed the government position on WTO because the possibilities are even worse than people opposed to Brexit envisage it could get!

People are believing the government even when they are opposed to it, and believe the government is lying over just about every other aspect of Brexit.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/19/populist-correctness-new-pc-culture-trump-america-brexit-britain?CMP=share_btn_tw
Populist correctness: the new PC culture of Trump's America and Brexit Britain

Political Correctness is dead. Long live Populist Correctness and the Right Wing Snowflake.

The most dangerous thing about populist correctness is the way liberals have been swept into it. Always keen for a little self-flagellation, the triumph of Trump and Brexit triggered a crisis of liberal confidence. Perhaps we have been out-of-touch and elitist, wrote columnist after columnist. Perhaps political correctness did go too far. Perhaps we shouldn’t say “racist”, perhaps we should say “alt-right”. Populist correctness isn’t just making us question our right to dissent, it’s quite literally putting words in our mouths.

You are right, Badders Many just want to be rid of the UK now - the contributions (well under 1% GDP) are no longer worth the aggro for the EU.

That's why I think there would be no rejoining the EU after Brexi, even if things go badly wrong; at most rejoining EEA / EFTA could be possible.

It is important that if Brexit hammers the economy that we make sure it is owned by the Brexiters, so that rejoining EEA / EFTA sometime after 2020 can remain a politically possible rescue option - and without demanding special terms that a returning prodigal is unlikely to get.

The uk will end up as a Bolt hole for countries and regimes that want cheap labour with no workers rights or legislation and become a dodgy tax haven.

This green and pleasant land indeed.....

We are all Preppers now.

We need a plan.

What do we need to do in Jan/Feb 2019?
What do we need to stock up on?
Any gardeners out there? When do we need to start operation 'Dig For Britain'?
Do we need to treat build defences against to protect our stocks?
Do we need to make plans to protect our immigrant friends from a violent backlash?
Which areas do we need to avoid due to port blockages?
Candles? Batteries? Wind up torch? Wind up radio?

I'm not even sure if I'm joking anymore or whether we'll seriously need to consider some of these.

Rejoin?
Ha!
They would make us crawl on our hands and knees.
And I don't bloody blame them.
The UK has always wanted the FT agreements with Europe and the subsidies but just didn't want to be truly united as that would mean we would lose our "sovereignty"
do any of the people bleating about it actually know what it means?
We ALWAYS had sovereignty!
"Ah, but it didn't feel like we did so we are right to leave"

The EU is so much more to its European member states than simply a trading bloc - its an ideological socio economic bloc That formed from the ashes of WW2 and during the Cold War.

Cash Euros for the black market?

Dh won't discuss it red but I'm making plans...
Dc and I are dual citizenship so I can get us EU passports.
I'm making financial plans for the next 10 years (mortgage etc)
We are saving more.

I will keep writing letters, keep being engaged with the process.
What more can one do?

🙄😡😞

Louise Mensch ‏*@LouiseMensch*
"Russian Ambassador to..." is the new "Drummer of Spinal Tap"

Is there any country in the world who is NOT part of WTO??
I agree that some countries won't be kind in the uk but I'm wondering if they would/could stop the uk to go in altogether iyswim.

The other question of course is if we can start negociating with the WTO before leaving the EU
Because if we can't, then we have nothing to fall back on for a while. (How long?)
And if we can, it would be like bidding on two houses with both sellers aware of the other bidding process. Somehow I don't think it would help the uk or it's negociations with the EU or WTO.

Is there any country in the world who is NOT part of WTO?
Not yet

I'm sorting out Italian passports for me and the children (I've offered to get Italian nationality for my husband but he's weirdly reluctant). If push comes to shove, we'll move to Italy for a few months and sit out the worst bit - but I'm hoping that everyone will have come to their senses by then...

Red if things carry on like this, I would actually suggest that anyone who isn't fully British (so not even those who are naturalised TBH) to leave the country and settle somewhere else.
That's certainly our way of thinking in our house. Hoping for the best, putting all we can in place so we don't have to move (I'm thinking there British citizenship for me, french citizenship fo r DH as soon as he will have managed a better mastery of french. Both passports for the dcs already organised) but being very aware that we might have to anyway.

I had planned to do some investment for my business here but obviously that's on hold. I'm taking the business in a different route now and just hope that what I am trying to do will be lucrative enough if we need to move. (And yes it doesn't rely on the uk....).

Maybe one our plan should be to take my PIL farm over in two years time so we can grow crops and have our animals to live on....

I'm 100% British. Married to someone so English he makes Kippers look foreign. Our garden is the size of a postage stamp with concrete from the builders under the lawn so its no suitable to grow food in.

I'm screwed aren't I?

Red.

We did have a veg patch but I made Dh get rid of it so I could have a magnolia tree!
The magnolia might have to go...
We could get an allotment I suppose...
I would move tomorrow tbh but Dh is not one for change and his job is quite niche in the industry.

We are equally screwed. I do have an allotment, but a couple of years experience of the work to produce ratio has left me with no illusions that it's going to save us.

There's nothing like an allotment to make you really appreciate modern agriculture.

If our old veg patch is anything to go by a marrow and a few strawberries won't feed us for long...

This is what you need:

www.emergencyfoodstorage.co.uk/

Time to find a mate who is a local farmer... and do some favours for them now.

You need a lot of space to grow food for a family. And storage/ the spring gap are problems. We were mostly self-sufficient in veg for a few years but it's a lot of work.

I'm a bit less depressed than you lot because we have already escaped and the kids have their dual nationalities. Still need to sort out me and DH though (I'm not that worried about this yet).

Dh's business is growing but is potentially affected by the move of the EMA, so we will need to make a decision this year whether he changes his business statutes or not.

It's a day for Guardian info-graphics. This one shows in horrifying detail the cost to each of our almost-5000 discrete industries of falling back onto WTO rules. With a few exceptions, it's going to be very expensive (vehicle industry = $33bn; tariffs $2.1bn - textiles = $11bn; customs = $1.1bn )

red, woman afaik, the only country not in the WTO is North Korea.
They've still got sovereignty and nukes too, because when a famine killed up to 3.5 million of their citizens, they knew they were on the right track.

WTO (gulp, it's really complicated)

The Uk membership of the WTO is bundled together with that of the EU.
So the UK and the EU would have to negotiate simultaneously with all the other countries and trading blocs to extract their separate membership terms.

They would have to agree tariffs, quotas, farm subsidies and much else
BUT the current EU commitments on these are unclear - the only confirmed commitments are from before 2004, when the EU had only 15 members, not 27 or 28.
So, the UK will be negotiating a share of unknown amounts

AND it would take only one objection to hold up the talks, because the WTO operates by consensus, not voting and moves far more slowly than the EU.

The EU might not agree to cooperate in this highly complex undertaking, which would monopolise many of its most skilled trading specialists.
The current agreement (for the old 15 members) works for the EU and would hold until they try to change it.

HELLLLLP !

http://www.ictsd.org/opinion/nothing-simple-about-uk-regaining-wto-status-post-brexit

WTO director- general warning to UK:
“If you need to complete a deal quickly when the other side can wait, you are negotiating from a very weak position:”

https://tradebetablog.wordpress.com/2016/08/17/2nd-bite-how-simple-uk-eu-wto/

btw, the WTO, like individual countries - Australia, India etc - would probably be prepared to hold preliminary discussions during the 2 year A50 period.
BUT
Legally, noone can actually sign a trade deal with the UK before Brexit actually happens.
AND
Australia & other countries have said they can't negotiate in detail until the A50 terms under which the UK is leaving have been fixed.
So, basically, serious negotiations start AFTER Brexit

So we are talking food riots and need to defend supplies then BigChoc. (takes notes).

Lets pencil in 'famine' or 'grovelling' for Winter 2019/2020 then. Or think about how we have a few months to coordinate locally into a growers cooperative. (Can sort that one I think. Also works for the formation of local militia to keep out the starving hoards). Must stock pile seeds during 2018.

How long do you think a couple of big bags of rice will last? I hear they stockpile things like flour and biscuits in Russia.

Someone needs to write a Brexit Preppers Manual in time for Christmas 2017. (Hmmm now there's an idea...)