Westminstenders: The wheels on bus start to fall off, start to fall off…

[RedToothBrush]

The wheels on bus start to fall off, start to fall off…

Since Article 50 has been triggered – 8 days ago:

1. A week after a terror attack in London, the government threatened to stop co-operation over security issues with the EU. This was quickly retracted as ‘not being a threat’. Except it was.

2. The ‘Great’ Repeal Act White Paper was published. Its vague, lacks detail, does not have a draft bill and there is no plan for a public consultation over it. It proposes sweeping powers for the government without parliamentary scrutiny using Henry VIII powers.

3. HMRC have said the new computer system planned for launch in 2019, won’t be able to cope with the additional work which leaving the Customs Union would produce. It would be five times the work load which sounds like a lot more red tape.

4. Spain have said they would not oppose an Independent Scotland being in the EU.

5. May’s article 50 letter did not mention Gibraltar and after the publication of the EU draft document on how the Brexit process would be handled, this looks like a massive error and oversight. One of the clauses was that any future arrangements with regard to Gibraltar had to be settled with Spain bi-laterally rather than by the EU and the UK’s agreement with the EU would not apply to Gibraltar, unless Spain agreed. This has been taken as an affront to Gibraltar’s sovereignty, although the document says nothing about sovereignty. Michael Howard, however, decided this was sufficient grounds to threaten our ally Spain with war.

May has not condemned his comments, and laughed it off. Though she was happy to get worked up about the word ‘Easter’ a couple of days later.

Of course, this situation was entirely predictable and was predicted yet this situation seems to have taken the government by surprise. Our reaction, in the context of everything else, has made the UK look like a basket case.

6. The government’s plan to run talks on the UK’s settlement on leaving the EU in parallel with talks on the UK’s future relationship with the EU has been rejected by the EU. Instead we must do things in stages, with advancement to the next stage only possible after completing the last: Stage 1 – Exit, Stage 2 – Preliminary agreement on future relation, Stage 3 – Exit/Transition Deal, Stage 4 – As third country status enter a new deal.

The effect of this also means that deals we currently have with counties like South Korea through the EU need to be revisited. There is no guarantee these countries will want to continue trading with us on the same terms, if they do not want to.

7. The EU has set out its own red lines. Our deal 'must encompass safeguards against...fiscal, social & environmental dumping'. Our transition deal must not last longer than three years and individual sectors, like banking, should not get special treatment.

Donald Tusk has said we don’t need a punishment deal as we are doing a good job of shooting ourselves in the foot, whilst Guy Verhofstadt said Brexit is Brexit is a 'catfight in Conservative party that got out of hand” and hoped future generations would reverse it.

8. May has admitted that we might well have no deal in place by the time we leave the EU. Until now we have been told we would have a deal in two years. She has also admitted an extension of free movement of people beyond Brexit.

9. The Brexit Select Committee published their report which warned about the dangers of exit without any deal, as well as talking about problems relating to the ‘Great’ Repeal Act, Gibraltar and NI. This is sensible and you’d think uncontroversial, but the Brexiteers threw the toys out of their pram saying it was too pessimistic. The government’s job is, of course, to plan for problems no matter how unlikely – such as disasters – and to hope that never happens. It seems that these Brexiteers don’t want to act responsibility or do their job.

10. Questions at the WTO have been asked about how Brexit will affect them. Interest in the subject came initially from Indonesia about Tariff Rate Quotas, but other parties who were watching closely were Argentina, China, Russia and the United States.

11. Phillip Hammond has openly said that there are a number of Tory MPs who want us to not make any agreement with the EU and to crash out in a chaotic exit.

12. Polling has suggested that people want Brexit to be quick and cheap. Not only that, but the word ‘Brexit’ has started to poll badly. Instead the Brexit department are advising officials to use the phrase “new partnership with Europe”. Lynton Crosby, the mastermind behind 2015’s Conservative victory has also warned that the Tories would probably lose 30 seats they gained from the LDs at an early election.

Of course, even a 2020 election might prove challenging with a transition deal still likely to be unresolved as Brexit drags on. Government strategy is, apparently, to hope that Remainer's anger will have dissolved by 2020.

Eight days in, and the Brexit Bus looks like it strayed into 1980's Toxeth and got torched, its wheels nicked, and graffitied with obscenities over its £350million pledge.

prettybird thanks, and this:
March for science:
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/london-march-for-science-tickets-32229648747

It truly is hitting the fan time.

Losing banking and medicine agencies. Petrol and food clicking up daily. Children getting deportation letters. NI in silent paroxysms. ROI cannot and should not clear up Brexit's mess. May cosying up to Trump and Erdogan but tories allegedly on a 21% lead.

One puts the Cons 21 points ahead of Labour. The other puts it just 9 points ahead

What's this 12 point discrepancy all about?.

Re reading your post RTB, I see who's causing the 12 point discrepancy.

The FT article on Nick Timothy and Martin Selmayr confirms that a coup has in fact taken place within the Conservative Party, and that the cabal now on top of the heap is a band of revolutionaries intent on making the UK a congenial place for people like Hilton and his mates want the sell-off of public assets, grammar schools for the lucky few and a de-regulated labour market. Meanwhile pretending that somehow they are "for" the people and against the elite [HPFA]

I suspect the very rich Brexiters and Tories are champing at the bit to get rid of obstacles in the way of making obscene amounts of money - worker protection, investor protection, tax load, financial regulation, H&S concerns and environmental regulation. I suspect they are very much libertarian or corporatist at heart. They are not afraid or ashamed to stoke the fire of racism and xenophobia and the love affair with the misty past that were features of the populist Brexit campaign, by means of financial contributions, but this is not what they are about.

From that Guardian article on the crown jewels, and also on trade talks:
Senior EU sources claimed that Britain’s aggressive approach to the talks, including threats of becoming a low-tax, low-regulation state unless it was given a good deal, had backfired. “However realistic the threats were, or not, they were noticed,” one senior EU source said. “The future prosperity of the single market was challenged. That had an impact – it pushed people together.”

Another senior diplomat said initial sympathy with Britain had fallen away in many capitals, due to the approach of Theresa May’s government. “Of course, we want to protect trade with Britain, but maintaining the single market, keeping trade flowing there, is the priority, and so we will work through [the EU’s chief negotiator] Michel Barnier,” the source said. “Britain used to be pragmatic. That doesn’t seem to be the case any more, and we need to protect our interests.”

Sorry if this is a bit off topic but dorothy - is that really correct?

Mistigri I would cry with happiness if my MFL A level students were given eight hours a week! It's half that... four hours

Don't they only do 4 subjects? How many teaching hours do they have altogether?

RTB I don't think kids here in France get regular MFL exposure, except to english in pop songs. But they still manage to run bilingual programmes in schools. The programme DD is on is part of a European programme that enables students in France, Germany, Italy and Spain to obtain a "double diploma" (their home country high school leaving diploma and a foreign one). Dd's school is not middle class at all and the background of the students is very mixed even though entry to the language programme is selective. Languages aren't the preserve of the elite here.

Yes it is correct. Not all schools are the same but at the school where I teach this is what they get, even though they only have four or even in year 13 three subjects. Some "bigger" subjects get five lessons a week but because we only have small groups in mfl apparently we need less time
I find it shocking that this is then called full time education! The free periods are meant to be used for private study but are more often used by students for working up to 25 hours a week, which greatly interferes with their progress.

I think another factor in our poor ability in MFL is our lack of knowledge of our own language. My generation (schooled in the 80s/90s) were taught virtually no English grammar. eg I progressed pretty successfully through the education system and have a higher degree yet my knowledge of English grammar ends at what a verb and a noun are. I can write decent-ish English but only because I read a lot of books and can "hear" how a sentence should sound.

It is very, very hard to learn a new language if you don't understand grammatical structure. I only realised this when a friend tried to teach me Greek logically by breaking down the sentence structure. It made perfect sense but I had no idea what she was talking about because my knowledge of the terminology was non-existent. Same with all my friends. It's actually quite embarrassing tbh.

RTB and woman I found this article interesting on what might be causing the two polls to diverge: www.ncpolitics.uk/2017/04/is-the-conservative-lead-21-points-or-9-points.html/

My generation (schooled in the 80s/90s) were taught virtually no English grammar. eg I progressed pretty successfully through the education system and have a higher degree yet my knowledge of English grammar ends at what a verb and a noun are.

I was of a generation (secondary school in the 60s) where we did learn Grammar, but mine was the last year (1967) for there to be a specific grammar section on our O level English language paper. I remember thinking at the time this was not a good step.

This was a whole trend, in foreign languages as well. Language teaching had been an extremely dry exercise in learning wodges of grammar and how to conjugate verbs etc. but after 5 years of learning French you could go to Paris and not be able to ask for a cup of coffee in a cafe, or book a hotel room. Then the language teaching pendulum swung, too much the other way, IMO.

I went to a language class as an adult, where the teacher tried to teach some grammar, and the younger students, who could speak the language reasonably well, were hostile to grammar and didn't know, and seemed proud of not knowing what e.g. the definite article was. As has been said, learning some grammar helps to take that language learning to a higher, or more complete level. Otherwise you can get stuck at what I have seen referred to as pidgin German or pidgin French - yes you get by, but only just.

howabout Sorry, this is a very delayed reply to your question. This is purely anecdotal, but I think EU students like coming to the UK for cultural reasons (more similar to their own views / values / way of life than the US) and because it's close to home, so they can see their friends and family often. Some EU students do seem to use British universities as a sort of stepping stone to later go on to the US for further study or work. The cultural issue doesn't seem to be so relevant for British students, who find it more easier to consider American universities for further study.

Yep, still couldn't tell you what a definite article was! It's actually been a real source of frustration and became very obvious to me when I spent some time at Oxford surrounded by people who had been to public school. All knew Latin and grammar and I realised there was a massive hole in my knowledge. I should have addressed it really but I have actually been put off by my complete lack of knowledge- I'm almost scared of grammar

I should add that I went to a decent state school and have attained a high level of education.

Thanks missmoon. A reminder that there are usually reasons for polling discrepancies. It's not a perfect art. (Remember the outlier LA times polls in the US election where the presence or absence of a single black male respondent from the sample caused noticeable variation).

Dorothy that's quite shocking. My DD on a science bac course has over 30 hours of timetabled lessons including 11 hours of MFL teaching (if you include the 4 hours of history taught in spanish).

bolshy totally agree about grammar. You have to be taught the foreign grammar though: knowing your own isn't enough. Grammar is important: DH has a translation business and sometimes does proof reading of other translators' work. Poor grammar knowledge leads to translation errors.

Knowing your own at least helps with the building blocks though!

It particularly frustrating as I really enjoy learning languages and think I would pick them up more quickly if I had a better grounding in grammar. With each language I have to start from scratch, as it were.

OTOH here in France there is too heavy an emphasis on grammar (of the native language). Some of it is required in order to write correctly - you can't spell French unless you can identify verb tenses, subject, direct and indirect objects, mood. But some of it seems to involve getting school kids to name parts of speech that make no functional difference to how words and sentences are written or understood.

No education system is perfect.

I have two children in primary school who have to do constant SPAG tests (spelling, punctuation and grammar), usually on a computer - I tear my hair out at how boring it is for them having to click on the modal verbs and subordinating conjunctions. I am extremely grumpy about it and firmly believe that it is part of Gove's plan to stop them having any critical faculties rather than a way of teaching them to pick up MFL. (Having whined about MFL teaching and now English teaching, I would like to say that I think there are some things that English schools do really well.)

Even though we learnt grammar, we didn't learn about subordinating conjunctions, and personally, I don't think it's necessary in the primary curriculum. Nouns, verbs, pronouns, adverbs and adjectives I felt were quite sufficient. The more structured grammar can come later!

I see Treesa observes a "sense of people coming together" after the Brexit.

She needs to be told she's either deluded or lying.

"Coming together" would entail backing a fucking stupid idea, and some of us aren't going to be doing that.

Sorry about the language, I don't normally swear on forums, but honestly, some people...

That should be "after the Brexit vote". Too annoyed to even type properly.

Re posting from another thread, and watching Turkish referendum today,
wondering if some of the features of Erdogan's administration seem eerily familiar:

Things like: a strange seizure of power; electoral intimidation; vilification of 'enemies'; accusing EU , especially Germany of being Nazis; hysterical nationalism; decimation of public services, particularly higher education; making travel difficult.

Is he another secret poster on mums net

Under Ataturk, in the 1920s, Turkey aspired to be a secular social democracy.

www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/magazine/inside-turkeys-purge.html?hpw&rref=magazine&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

"It was a strange attempt at a coup, at least at first. “What kind of military coup is this?” Turks asked one another when they first saw the soldiers on TV or Twitter occupying the Bosporus Bridge in Istanbul. It was only 10 p.m. — coups happen before dawn, Turkish elders pointed out. The internet and the phone lines had not been shut down; TV stations, for a while, anyway, were still broadcasting freely. The Turkish military would never have staged a coup like this, they said. Turks know their coups; many had lived through four of them already.

Since then, news periodically ripples through Twitter or Facebook that new lists have been released. They are often posted after midnight, and in the terrifying hours that follow, people go online and check for their names, which will also be visible to their neighbors, their bosses, their parents, their sons and daughters. This is how the listed learn that they have lost their jobs, their pensions, their passports. Once on a list, you are stuck in Turkey — with little means to survive. You are subjected to a form of professional death, and in some cases a form of social death: children bullied at school, families vilified in their neighborhoods. The government metes out other punishments too during this extended state of emergency, or Olaganustu Hal, which can also be read as Extraordinary State. Some people are put out of work. Others are arrested, imprisoned or tortured.

The lists aren’t just of people. Entire organizations, however innocuous seeming, show up on them: the Holistic and Alternative Medical Foundation, the Love Trees Protect Forests Live Humanely Foundation, the Gastrointestinal Oncology Foundation, to name just a few. Many of these are not Gulenist but Kurdish or leftist. If it seems as though Turkey’s purge lists are touching every part of its society, that’s because they are.

In February, the Turkish government released a new list — and this time, it was sinister in a new way. The latest wave of purges hit academia again, not just Gulenists or Kurds but especially liberals and leftists, which meant that the purge was spreading. Hundreds of academics, some of the most prominent and well known in the country, found their names on the lists. They, too, face the prospect of losing their passports and their pensions and being unable to seek state employment in Turkey again."

Patty - I've just listened to the news in the radio still in bed having a lie in and couldn't stop myself saying, "Fuck off" to the radio when I heard that.

She's very obviously not been to Scotland (and when she did she made sure not to talk to any real people)

I don't think May has been to my corner of Oxfordshire either. With any luck and a good deal of hard work, it's hoped that a message will be sent to her on 4th May.

See lots of comments like this on my Twitter feed:

@fidelmacook: This woman lives in a parallel universe.
Brexit 'must bring us together' says Theresa May in Easter message https://t.co/eiupghWMJp

(Fidelma Cook is a normally apolitical columnist who writes humorously in the Glasgow Herald about her life in the South of France, having emigrated there about 10? years ago)

Fucking deluded is the expression is use

Grammar, including parsing was taught in 1960s Glasgow, hence Govey's interest. There is even a KS1 (aged 5-7) 'test' in which children have to spot 'fake' English words. When children's English vocabulary is still forming, this seems the daftest of tests. Michael Rosen is great on this.
www.theguardian.com/education/2015/nov/03/morgan-grammar-test-right-answer-spag-english-spelling-punctuation-grammar
He points out too, that as there are different grammatical theories, e.g. functional, the tests are inaccurate anyway.
michaelrosenblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/how-gove-wangled-grammar-test-in.html
And the mysterious financial paper trail, which leads to publishing houses making a killing out of new GCSEs and KS1 tests. (Gove, to Murdoch to Pearson)

Mistigri because of 'cuts' taught time post 16 has been cut down to the bone. It's very hard for schools to fund a range of 6th form subjects. It's difficult for kids to get in to 6th forms, they need higher and higher GCSE points in order to do so, and have to achieve points to continue to year 13. Lots of teens are thrown out of schools and 6th forms as a result. Not good for youth mental health. Or just plain cruel.

Thanks for the poll breakdown missmoon different methodologies for different folks.

Do Christian values include deporting children Mrs May?

'must bring us together'
Does not mean 'Will' or 'is doing'.

I.e. another soundbite.