Westminsterenders: The Ersatz ImitationThread

[OlennasWimple]

I am no RedToothBrush, so I'm not going to try to emulate her exception OP style.

Here, though, in the interests of carrying on our conversations about WTF is going on with Brexit and the weird political world we find ourselves in right now, is a sort of continuation thread

(Hurry back Red, we need you!)

Why aren't the building works happening? Because Davis swears that it can be done electronically. So why aren't we seeing a flood of job ads for computer programmers to build the said electronic aps? Answers on the back of an old envelope please - which after all is where most of their planning appears to have been done.

Randomly-please can we also put the 2017 figures in context in case anyone thinks it's a lot.

The £8.1 billion sounds big but it is teeny, tiny peanuts.
it's just 1% of total UK public spending which was £780.3 billion.For eg
£156 billion on pensions
£140 billion on Health
£41.3 billion on Education.


In 2018, total UK public spending is expected to be £814.0 billion.

That's why it was so disingenuous for Boris, Leadsome, Farage etc to exploit normal people (who think in terms of tenners) by talking about saving the EU budget.

lonelyplanetmum

of course with figures like that in play, (you omitted the uncollected/evaded tax of hundreds of billions, by the way) then trying to shave a few million off peoples disability benefits is even more despicable.

www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-brexiteers-foolishness-gives-ireland-control-1.3179299?mode=amp

Explaining the Irish Government's change in tone last week

No one is stoking the intergenerational divide in my family more than df who has decided that at 72 well he decided it long ago but he's 72 now he knows everything better than everyone else. Including that if we go to an area local to me that he's not been to for over 20 years himself we will be perfectly safe despite the fact the area is massively crime ridden now. I even got my dh to explain it, you know as he's a man and us silly women can't know anything. Nope, dh is too young to know better. Sorry, slightly off topic ranting I know.

Fwiw my slightly older mil realises that at times she may have outdated information. Which helps me regain the ability to not judge all older people the same.

This is the same df who voted leave then asks how I know certain things like our vat level being set higher than it 'has' to be. Well I researched it df. 'Didn't say that in the papers'. Odd that. Ffs.

But if that's happening, why isn't Dover a big building site? We will need to massively increase customs capacity to check stuff in & out. We will (at least) need to have increased border checks in Northern Ireland. So why aren't the government buying up sites along the border?

I made this point after the budget. No money for the big civil projects that brexit will require = government isn't planning for any of this. Whether it's deliberate or just incompetence I couldn't say, but I think the odds of brexit not happening are rising all the time. So, too, is the risk of a chaotic unplanned brexit.

OTOH, the chances are diminishing with each passing week that we end up with any sort of planned brexit, whether hard, soft or half-cooked. There is no time, no political will, no money, and precious little know-how.

Perhaps it's wishful thinking but I'd put the chance of no brexit well above 50% now. Its far and away the most likely outcome.

I'm starting to wonder if there is a Brexit version of fiscal drag.

With every passing week, the number of net Leavers will be declining faster than net Remainers, whilst at the same time the number of net Remainers will be increasing faster than net Leavers.

Just waiting will eventually ensure that a rerun of the referendum would be Remain, let alone the people who have changed their mind ....

At what point can you see it not happening, Misti? I hope you're right but, with the past 14 months of rabble-raising rhetoric, who is going to have the guts to roll back on the Tory side? At the moment, I can't picture how the narrative would unfold - although clearly, it would be in everyone's interests if it did.

Meanwhile notice how we are sending our food abroad ....

www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-norfolk-40857471/federal-cedar-uk-barley-shipped-to-southern-spain

A ship that can carry more than 10% of the UK's predicted barley export is set to leave British shores.

The Federal Cedar is due to carry the crop, grown in the East of England, to help farmers in southern Europe struggling with drought conditions.

It will be turned into animal feed, grain trader Gleadell Agriculture said.

The ship is due to set sail from Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk, to southern Spain.

This is the same df who voted leave then asks how I know certain things like our vat level being set higher than it 'has' to be. Well I researched it df. 'Didn't say that in the papers'. Odd that. Ffs.

Hashi I just found out my DS voted for Tories last GE because she believed their tax rate would increase by what I calculated to be about 200% of their current tax loading, if Labour had won. She also thinks my "obsession" with the uncertainty EU citizens face is very boring because "someone she knows" says we are all whining about nothing. When asked why she didn't vote LD, rather than embrace the Labour manifesto or stick the knife into my family by backing the self-styled "Brexit is Brexit" leader, she explained that sh didn't like Tim Farron's face.

But the most shocking bit was that after I asked he to spend 10 minutes reading the documents affecting EU citizens (and the Labour manifesto to debunk her ridiculous claims which include the possibility of losing her home ) she launched into a blistering attack about how my parents brought us up to never discuss politics because it was disgustingly rude and I had no right to ask her to read any information about politics ever again.

My DF (scientist) was a LD campaigner for a quarter century and we grew up with a photo of DF in a hug with the then leader David Steel over the fireplace. My DM (teacher) introduced me to the Greens. Both were outspoken regarding education and debate as the foundation of democracy.

Some people just aren't interested in knowing facts. It has taken me a long time to understand that. And it still disappoints me.

In prev post, I didn't mean DS. I meant my evil twin DSis.

My DS is really great and also really clever. Just for the record.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonhardt-income-inequality.html
Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart

This is for the US.

I wonder what the UK version of the same chart would look like.

Divided one of my colleagues has a son aged 21 who voted Tory this year. He likes all the benefit cuts because apparently anyone claiming benefits is just a scrounger. When my friend explained that without benefits, she would not have been able to cope as a single mum, work her way up, fund her own university education in her thirties and get her highly skilled current job, he didn't want to know. She is still very disappointed in him.

Well pointythings - let's hope that the son never loses his job, or becomes disabled and unable to work. Perhaps his mother should boot him out, assuming he lives at home, and tell him to stand on his own two feet.

He doesn't live at home, Peregrina, he lives in rented accommodation with his gf. But his mum hasn't half let him have it, relations are frosty. I'm on her side, he's being a cocky little dick.

divided
Yes, I have come to that conclusion with my df and others too. Facts are alien to him. As is consistent reasoning! Need to be better at adjusting my reaction to that because I find it completely mind blowing.

Ken Livingstone once wrote that the genius of Margaret Thatcher was to realise if you treated people as middle class, they voted as middle class ...

£150m a week? So that's about £2.50 each. I wonder how many minutes of a doctor's time that buys you.

£2.50 a week - can you even get a coffee in Costa for that?

Some good news - at least Spain is being responsible wrt Brexit deal / negotiations
< now we just need the UK govt to start acting responsibly. Drums fingers ..... >

Spain will not “jeopardise” Brexit negotiations by attempting to reclaim sovereignty over Gibraltar, its foreign minister has said.
Alfonso Dastis told ABC, a Spanish newspaper:

“I won’t make an agreement between the EU and the United Kingdom conditional on recovering sovereignty over Gibraltar
. . . what I don’t want to do is jeopardise an EU-UK agreement by subjecting it to a need to alter Gibraltar’s status at the same time.”

(paywall) May’s Brexit plans ‘as bad for Britain as appeasement’

< Former UK negotiator joins former head of the Foreign Office, Sir Simon Fraser, in taking the most unusual step as a retired top civil servant, to make severe public criticism of the govt >

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/mays-brexit-plans-as-bad-for-britain-as-appeasement-v7mzmtv03

Theresa May’s Brexit strategy is as harmful to the national interest as appeasement was in the 1930s, a former British EU negotiator has claimed.

As Downing Street announced it would publish the government’s proposals for a new post-Brexit customs regime within weeks, Sir Michael Leigh said

he could think of no decisions made in more than 50 years as “harmful to Britain’s interests”
as those taken by Mrs May and her predecessor.

“You have to go back to the Suez crisis in 1956 or to Munich in 1938
to find decisions taken by a British government that will turn out in time to have had such negative consequences for the United Kingdom,”
he told the online news site Business Insider.

Sir Michael, who served as the European Commission’s director-general for enlargement until 2011,
added that voters were currently in a state of “inebriation” because the initial estimates of the impact of the economy “have not yet been realised”.

But he warned: “We are only beginning to feel a trickle of the economic effects.
It will take time for the public to realise that in one area after another,
the public ‘goods’ that they’ve been taking for granted and that have been provided by the EU, gradually will disappear.”

Sir Michael was joined in his criticism of the government by a former head of the Foreign Office, Sir Simon Fraser, who accused ministers of being “a bit absent” from Brexit negotiations because of cabinet divisions.

Spain taking a grown-up line is, unsurprisingly, being trumpeted as a great British victory against the evil tyrants: "See how they quake at our majestic glory!"

I'm sure if Spain thought it could get away with taking advantage of Brexit to try to change Gibraltar's status, it would. Lord knows, it's rankled with the country long enough.

I'm equally sure that Spain's political class knows that any such attempt would make the country look very, very bad to the rest of the EU (or most of it, anyway).

It's realpolitik, not morality. But at least realipolitik is being grown-up. If only we could rely on our shower to be as sensible.

At what point can you see it not happening, Misti? I hope you're right but, with the past 14 months of rabble-raising rhetoric, who is going to have the guts to roll back on the Tory side? At the moment, I can't picture how the narrative would unfold

The point is that for brexit to occur in a "planned" manner, someone has to (a) have and (b) implement a plan. Implementing a plan (ie initiating, progressing and completing large public sector projects) requires a lot of time, money and expertise. All of these are in critically short supply. Ergo, no "planned" brexit will take place.

An unplanned, chaotic brexit could still happen - this is definitely still a major risk. But I think the more likely scenario is either a second referendum which rejects brexit entirely, or some other political manoeuvre that allows the UK to step back from the brink.

I'd love you to be right Mistigri, but am not yet hopeful. We still have to rid the country of the causes which gave rise to such a split vote.