Westministenders: The bookends to a year of political chaos. Just how far have we come?

[RedToothBrush]

The 15th June 2016.

The Thames was filled with a flotilla of boats in a publicity stunt for the Leave campaign to draw attention to fisheries. Nigel Farage and Kate Hoey in their heads thought they were Leonardo and Kate, but the moment was rather more titanic in nature and could not have been more Alan Partridge if they had tried. Coming up behind was Bob Gedolf in a shameful and cringeworthy display of swearing and abuse that really didn’t help the Remain camp in anyway. Largely unnoticed was a small boat with a family following it all unfold…

The next day things went from fiasco to horror.

Farage unveiled the Dog Whistle Poster and Jo Cox was murdered. And the UK seemed set on its course for 7 days later when the world was turned upside down by the referendum itself.

14th June 2017.

Fast forward 365 days later and another tragedy unfolded. This time of a very different nature but with no less political significance.
Grenfell.

A moment of national shame. A symbol of so many things that had come to pass in the previous twelve months.

The election just the previous week had changed the direction of travel we seemed to be headed and left the Prime Minister exposed and looking wildly out of touch. The Maybot was given one more chance.

And the Maybot seems to be failing the test of her party who had the grace to grant her a second chance.

The Queen dressed in the same shade of blue, May delivered her ‘victory speech’ in, ignored the security threat and visited the ranks of the poor and the forgotten. A deliberate message to May not to forget who she serves? A Queen who feels aggrieved and angry by May’s behaviour? Who knows.

As for Brexit. The government looks lost. Adrift. The ‘Fight of the Summer’ over the EU’s plan for talks sounds out the window despite the denials from the Brexit Department. Hard Brexit is still on the cards. Apparently. But what does anyone believe now? May’s and the Brexiteers domination of the agenda is shattered, its power starting to be questioned.

What next?

This evening the anger is building.

Who knows, what will happen. Some of it might be predictable, but the future is far from certain and we have definitely entered a new era. We just don’t know who will lead it, or what its ambition or what the end goal now is.

What we do know, more acutely than ever is that we are all human and the wise words of Jo Cox about having ‘More in Common’ ring though ever more strongly.

Once again we feel ‘on the brink’.

I mean we hear so much about how bad Brexit will be, surely there must be something good about it, it can't all be bad if we leave?

I personally am still sitting on fence, neither for or against Brexit.

I have some questions.
My understanding is that May has not yet finalised a deal/plan with the DUP. I thought she told the queen that the tories will band with 'our friends the DUP' therefore the QS will be on that basis.

Ummm... can the QS go ahead without a deal?

soso
You can get rid of foreigners. That's about it.

lazy according to Robert Peston, reported here, the DUP deal was 'done and dusted' last week. Just not announced yet. Curious.

www.itv.com/news/2017-06-19/whatever-happened-to-daviss-and-mays-brexit-row-of-the-summer/

Hashi and of course you can get rid of foreigners already even in the EU. Countries like Germany and the Netherlands manage it quite well. It's just the UK that's crap at keeping track of little things like who's here, whether they are self supporting and all that stuff.

So apparently 'taking control of our borders means' 'being allowed to continue muddling along being crap at this stuff'.

Very true pointy
Maybe its that you get the feeling of being in control. Like Wile E Cayote before he realises there's no ground under him.

*h

hester thanks. I missed that.

Hashi - yes please remember it's not all foreigners David Davis is aiming to get rid of...EU immigrants only make up about 5% of the British population, according to the best available data.
So we can get rid of them including 10% of registered doctors and a total of about 5% of English NHS staff...

Yes and farm workers and builders. And our jolly UK workers will take their place! We might all have to take first aid courses to stand in for the nurses and start building our own houses but what ho we with be strong again!

Oh yes because people are always stronger when they pull together apart.

Who did the work before we ever joined the EU? Or the COMMON MARKET as it was called then? We first joined because of trade. I dont remember us signing up to have all our laws etc to be took over by the EU. We rely so heavily on cheap labour from abroad that we no longer bother to train our own workforce. We should be looking at why farmers etc pay so little wages, why we pay so little for our food.

We need to look at big business making huge profits and who exploit the workforce. Why is there so many foreign workers in NHS? Why is our education system so lousy that we can't train our own doctors and nurses? Why is their pay so low? We had our own workers years ago why not now? We have become apathetic in this country since the EU has took over everything. Perhaps Brexit may be a good idea so this country can go back to having home grown workforce.

Sostenueto As far as the NHS was concerned, we relied heavily on Commonwealth staff. Fruit picking used to have mobile gangs of (Irish?) travellers.

Something like 87% of laws are domestic and nothing to do with the EU. Some of the other 13% of laws are EU ones, but I found out the other day that some are referred to as 'British Laws' because we promoted them. Other laws are a reflection of international agreements. So the 'take back control' claim was baloney, and even May in her excuse of a white paper admitted that - we never lost sovereignty, it 'just felt like it'. So we potentially wreck the country on a feeling? If it was fiction, you would think it was a joke.

But otherwise yes, why do we pay so little for food, why can't we be bothered to train staff, why were and are farm wages low? Good questions.

We have become apathetic in this country since the EU has took over everything.

I'm curious as to exactly what and when you think the EU took over.

It is so easy to get a foreign worker already trained to work here. We don't have to invest in training that worker, there's plenty of them and they work cheaply. We have become a lazy nation who cannot be bothered to invest in their young, to give hope to the younger generations. In my day apprenticeships were so common. Not everyone is academic. Where are the apprenticeships? Where are the trades teaching the future generations? Half the country seems to think this country cannot stand up on its own. Maybe it was that attitude that made people vote for Brexit? It is only business that profits from cheap labour which drives down wages for the working class.

We rely so heavily on cheap labour from abroad that we no longer bother to train our own workforce
This in itself isn't true. There's a stigma attached to certain jobs that they're beneath people. Especially the low skilled and slow paid, like fruit picking.
Wrt training in higher skilled jobs, the costs involved in training which are often at the burden of the individual are massive put offs. Other countries, within the eu and outside have better funded training programs. Then again, the eu aren't stopping us that.

Sos It's true that worker rights now mostly originate from the EU but equal pay, maternity rights etc - the Government intend to implement these into British law anyway. We will need to comply with a lot of EU regulations to carry on trading with existing partners - just not have any say in them. Personally, as a consumer, would much prefer to buy a product that conforms to recognised health and safety standards than be told by an unregulated supplier that is 'unnecessary'. May's battles at the Home Office with various EU bodies seems to be unravelling as incompetence and defiance rather than whether the existing framework is robust.

Yes re commonwealth staff. My aunt trained as a nurse in the1960s/70s. Her pictures show loads of commonwealth nurses from the carribean mainly and doctors from African countries and India

I remember going to the nurses houses. so many accents! Good times

Where did the straight cucumber come from? My generation could buy fruit and veg in all shapes and sizes. We need to invest in our own future. We survived before 1973 and we can survive again. Yes it does feel that EU has taken this country over. But that's because successive governments have made it so. We had to go metric we had to do this, that and the other. Regulations for thus that and the other, a lit if them EU regs, some good some bad. I just think that thinking the EU is the bees knees is not the attitude we should have. We should he thinking that Great Britain is the bees knees.

What country has the capability to just rely on it's own work force? There are 180 nationalities in Amsterdam (population 800k), 300 languages spoken in London. High employment rates and skills shortages.

You can still buy non straight cucumbers, my local Asda does as do the market stalls and farms shops.

There's classifications, but no bans, so if someone buys a box of class x cucumbers they know what they're getting. Butt they're not banned.

Massive myth put forward by the likes of bojo.

You all have great arguments. Yes commonwealth workers in the 50s and 60s remember well, London docks full of these workers. It is not that farm work is below people its the conditions and the wages. Just when are farmers going to get more automated? A.lot of work us now done by automation on farms but farmers DO exploit workers which us not right.

sostenueto An EEA / EFTA Brexit (in which we would still have FOM for workers) would not be very damaging.
However, the government has chosen a "hard" Brexit which could be catastrophic for the UK.

We are losing access to hundreds of agencies that license new medicines, regulate the nuclear industry etc
There may not even be any replacement agreements in time to permit necessities like international air travel, supplies for our nuclear power stations.

These are highly knowledgeable articles from longterm Leaver Richard North about the disastrous consequences of the current Tory Brexit policy to leave the EEA too:

http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=86405

"the disruption to our trade would not just be a car crash or a train wreck, it would be a whole fleet of jumbo jets crashing down on our entire economy."

http://eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=86370
"One can genuinely see a state of emergency being declared, with the Army called out to escort truck-loads of food to besieged supermarkets"

http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=86375

"chaos at our ports"
"bare shelves in our supermarkets"

The risk to NI peace because no one yet knows how to avoid a hard Irish border for goods and services:
http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=86473