Westministenders: Money, money, money

[RedToothBrush]

The big developments are that the government have signalled they are prepared to pay more and to involve the ECJ when it comes to citizens rights on condition that we move to talk of trade. But no apparent progress on NI. Which is significant with Ireland threatening to veto.

The EU has not changed its stance at all. Since Day 1.

There is always a worrying omission and lack of commitment to retain the Charter of Fundamental Rights. The bonfire begins.

Talk is of Green still going in a reshuffle, possibly with Gove replacing him as Deputy PM.

Coalition talks in Germany have broken down, and the British have got excited about it, whilst the German response have largely been a slight shrug.

Its been a much quieter week, despite the budget. Thank goodness. There are lots of outstanding issues that are lurking in the background like the Green one though.

The main message coming from the budget, has not been any new policy, but the dreadful economic forecast for the next few years.

@SimonFRCox
UK politics feels very unsettled now. But IMO this is going to escalate seriously in run up to Brexit - & more so after >

Brexiters are right: EU mem’ship has huge effect on UK. 2.

EU constrains UK ... & underpins it’s economy & international relations. 3.

UK Gov has no coherent plan to replace the underpinning - nor to deal with losing it. 4.

Leave narrative is that Brexit means freedom from constraint - signfocance of losing underpinning massively downplayed. 5

Scale of EU economic & institutional underpinning will get clearer, in fits & starts, as Brexit approaches 6

Decisions depending on future EU approval / membership will start to be taken differently 7

Euro Capital of Culture now. Soon “Open Skies”: airlines may refuse bookings for flights to/from EU/UK 8

Will UK conference organisers, hotel bookers start to see slow take up for 2019 - incl “all Europe” tours? 9

Anyone planning to do X-border business with UK after March ‘19 will start factoring in Brexit. 10

Last few months have surely cut % of business planners who trust that it’ll all be sorted in time 11

“Brexit avoidance” will build to a head by March ‘17: cross-border trade will be systematically reduced 12

Queues at borders (both ways) & shortages across UK for people and goods. 14

By now, a very divided country. Brexiters with high, pent-up expectations. Remainers angry & demoralised. 15

Gov will struggle to meet expectations with falling tax base & Brexit-induced crises 16

Scenario is great opportunity for populism - of left and right. Offering drastic, evidence-free solutions. 17/

Im concerned that by 2020 UK will look back at 2017 with envy. 18/18

I am puzzled at the compartmentalising of history in the syllabi mentioned.

I only did long survey courses in Irish and modern European/western history in Ireland for the old Intermediate Cert and Leaving Cert exam cycles. My DCs in the US did AP US History, with one doing AP European History as well, and were taught using the same comprehensive survey type of course. They all did their high school's honours level introduction survey course too, called World History and for good reason.

curriculumonline.ie/getmedia/da556505-f5fb-4921-869f-e0983fd80e50/SCSEC20_History_syllabus_eng.pdf
This is what Irish history students are tackling for the Leaving Cert. (See page 14 and then p. 20 on, approximately, for topics.) It is very chronological. I actually can't imagine how any sense of elapsing time and the context of events can be conveyed by the chopped up, bit of this, bit of that approach.

It's worth noting that this is what every History student in the country is doing, in both private and state schools, in every county, and everyone sits the same exam.

All spun as the EU being nasty to us, as has losing out on the EU Capital of Culture.

I actually can't imagine how any sense of elapsing time and the context of events can be conveyed by the chopped up, bit of this, bit of that approach.

Quite so - one moment, you did the Vikings, and then jumped (backwards) to the Ancient Greeks, and had no idea which periods related to each other.

Peregrina

It was this Scottish new Higher Maths question that caused the pass mark to be dropped to 34% in 2015.

I went to university to read English, with a bad History A-level, unclear who came first in English history, the Romans or the Anglo-Saxons. (But with good knowledge of Ferdinand and Isabella.) Then voraciously read library books, starting with the formation of the planet, so that at least I had my “English” history in the right order. Anyway, what I wanted to say was, I hope this is actually true - www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/23/jeremy-corbyn-brexit-tories-labour-eu What do you clever people think?

Labour's being leant on by the same crew that stopped tory rebels.
We're going off the deep end and it's not going to be pretty.

Peregrina - I did see that "impossible" question and wondered what the problem was as the solution was with the guidance, turning the internal triangles (albeit one with a line you had to draw for yourself) into isosceles triangles (And applied maths was not my strength which is why it is just as well I'm not doing CfE Maths and Physics exams )

Do we know how that is being done, woman? Personal blackmail? Physical threats? Promises of personal reward? The survival of the Tory party shouldn’t matter to Corbyn.

Just a hunch. mrsquagmire No evidence, no crime

A political explanation could be the synergy of rapturist disaster capitalists and trotskyite socialists both of whom believe in the collapse of bourgeois capitalism before they get to their particular nirvana.

For us it's like being hostages in a Carry On version of the Jonestown massacre.

Whatever, it's getting boring.

I guess maybe my school was unusual in teaching history in chronological order (even if they did compress 1000 years into two academic years and then spend one academic year on a twenty year period.) The GCSE I took was chronological as well, but very heavily Russian based, but like Olennas was as much skill based as it was knowledge based. A level went back in time a bit from GCSE (to the 18th century for the democracy stuff) and then went forward chronologically.

I'm envious of some of the topics being taught at GCSE these days as they sound very interesting, but I'm not sure how they match up to each other, it seems very disjointed. But I guess there's no such thing as bad knowledge, and no one can know everything so there is as much merit in learning the history of medicine to gcse standard as there is learning about collectivisation and the 5 year plans.

With Brexit - I used to genuinely think it wouldn't happen, that they would have to call a halt to it at some point, but I'm getting less convinced of that. It is a religion now. I wish we could just fast forward to the point where Brexit has made it onto the gcse history syllabus where it is taught as a weird blip that ground Britain into the dirt before we somehow (??????) managed to put things right, and things became OK again. In the meantime, I am looking into applying for jobs on the other side of the world - something I was never even tempted to do before June 23rd 2016 .

The Guardian is the only source I can see for this development. Fwiw Polly Toynbee says Corbyn said he would now vote Remain - “A lifetime of instinctive 'capitalist club' Euroscepticism has been shed. Passionate distress over Brexit from his young supporters and his trade union allies has brought him round. Besides, the facts have changed. His vague, abstract distaste for the EU has given way to facing the hard reality of what Brexit means: inflicting most harm on those he cares about most. ... My hunch is that the harder Corbyn hits out over Brexit, the stronger Labour’s support will grow. And the word is, that’s what we shall hear from now on.”

Well, it would certainly be a simple way to get 50% in the polls mrsquagmire but the socialist workers party moves in mysterious ways, and we've effectively got a DUP versus an SWP government atm.

^Ireland under threat of snap election over future of deputy PM
Opposition Fianna Fáil party wants Frances Fitzgerald, of Fine Gael, to resign over handling of police whistleblower scandal^

www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/24/ireland-faces-snap-election-over-future-of-deputy-pm

Wonder how this will affect things?

Thanks for the link to that blog bigchoc. Very interesting.more reading for the commute!

We Found 45 Suspected Bot Accounts Sharing Pro-Trump, Pro-Brexit Messages That Twitter Missed In Evidence To Congress

The social media giant is facing serious questions over its efforts to deal with fake propaganda accounts after BuzzFeed News uncovered a network directly connected to the Russia-linked accounts Twitter submitted to Congress.

www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips/we-found-45-suspected-bot-accounts-sharing-pro-trump-pro?utm_term=.hhjnJdOx#.rjOQVKLq

Same here
895 new houses being built
No 1st surgery as promised so out current one is being extended to provide 2 extra consulting rooms
Which they don't be able to recruit Drs for
🤔
Apparently we will be getting a new primary school - but I will believe that when I see it

I studied History in a very traditional grammar school. We started with From Ur to Rome and then went chronologically through an incredibly anglocentric curriculum designed to instill in me a belief in all things British being great. A level was the English Civil War and 18th and 19th c British History. It was more down to Henry Treece and Jean Plaidy that I went on to study it at university where I was lucky to be exposed to Latin American history and lectures by EP Thompson.

My DDs has a good grounding in history starting with their own school and local community, widening as they were given the skills and enthusiasm. At GCSE and A level they learnt about 1930s Germany (and yes they see the parallels) the American Civil Rights movement, the troubles in Northern Ireland (and isn’t that a reductive term, if that degree of death, torture and hatred has been unleashed in the UK I doubt they would be just troubles the impact of the race to colonise Africa, 1970s Britain. They may not be experts on all history but they know that different perspectives exist and how to research them.

The problem with the current system of examining history is that it is all there for imaginative history teachers but equally for the lazy and narrow minded they can pick the modules that allow them to stick to their anglocentric knitting.....

One of the factors driving the history curriculum is of course the market, whether exam boards are guided by developments in the academic study of history (emphasising different perspectives and currents in history, the material and social as well as the political) or implicitly racist government dogma, at the end of the day they have to provide schools with the modules they want to teach, hence offering modules that appeal to both extremes......

Marking place. Thanks Red.

Have people spotted this from the Richard North blog today?
“....All this, though, must be seen in the broader context of the scene set by Mrs May. According to a source directly in touch with her, with whom I talked earlier in the week, the decision to leave the Single Market was taken solely by the Prime Minister, after discussing the issues only with her then closest advisor, Nick Timothy.

Crucially, neither Mrs May nor Timothy had the first idea of the consequences of taking the UK out of the Single Market, nor any understanding of what the country's new "third country" status brings.

Without having consulted with other political colleagues, or more widely with business or industry – much less those of us who had done the background research – Mrs May led us blindly into a trap of her own making. She created a political environment where it is virtually impossible to devise or sustain "a coherent policy on Brexit".

Something of this is finding its way into the legacy media, where we see explored the political pressures which drove Mrs May to make her momentous decision.
But it is thus confirmed that the foundational decisions of Britain's withdrawal strategy, which is shaping the Brexit negotiations and the entire future of the UK, were taken, in essence, by two people. Not even the Cabinet had a chance to debate the issues. ”
Astonishing if true. 😮

So leaving the single market and customs union is more the will of Nick Timothy and adopted by Theresa May than 'the will of the people'.

I'm not sure if I buy this Corbyn/Toynbee thing. Just a couple of days ago his party voted with the government not to keep the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Disclaimer I haven't heard or seen what was said at PM's questions and am willing to be proved wrong.

But I still think a political lifetime of being Eurosceptic and protectionist, plus his fear of alienating Labour (or ex-Labour) Brexiters, is not that easily thrown over.

Rhiannon an amendment to keep the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights was proposed by Corbyn. The Government only won the vote to reject that amendment by 10 votes (311 to 301).

To quote the Independent "Labour had originally intended to vote for a Conservative amendment to the bill – also calling for the EU Charter to be retained" but that Tory amendment was dropped.