Westminstenders: From Russia with Love

[RedToothBrush]

Things just got scary.

The colony of US puppet state or a vassel state of the EU?

Why not just let market forces take their course and let Russia buy the UK?

How did we get to stories of spies and mafia who buy politicians?

Just who are our enemies and allies?

Won't someone think of the effect on house prices in Salisbury?

Try not to don your foil hat, brace yourself and resist shouting 'money laundering too loud'.

More turbulence ahead.

Brexit still seems like such a cracking idea doesn't it?

Up until GCSE choices, the history I was taught was very Mish mash. When I opted for gcse history and then a level I was given a choice of which branches to study. I picked similarly in both - for British history it was post industrial Revolution and for world history it was largely European late 19th and early 20th century (wars basically!).
It made my teaching roughly linear and eventually all linked up.

Not to say what we did during those times wasn't patchy either. There were large swathes of American and Irish history barely taught (like most of the UK's dodgy involvement, it was more of a surprisingly the natives got a bit upset way).

Oddly what really brought them together for me was also studying economics a level. They all enhanced each other massively.

May is likely to bungle any problem through her mix of ignorance, stupidity, lack of empathy, arrogance and dislike of non-Anglosphere immigrants

she’s a star
A neutron star: very very dense.

At least she doesn't seem bought by Legatum or sympathising with other enemies of the UK.

Also, when it's not related to Brexit, she may listen to the experts, i.e. Cabinet Sec, Foreign Office, military chiefs, intelligence chiefs

Wonderful when I have to consider the above as good points for a UK PM

BTW history as far as I recall has always been delivered as a mish-mash. One moment we were doing the Vikings, the next term it was Ancient Greece, or Egypt.
Primary history has never followed chronological order -because it's all just fun topic work - learning interesting facts. You talk about how long ago something was and then an intelligent 11 year old asks if Victoria was still the queen when you were born A child's sense of time is so poor (because they've not been alive for very long) that worrying about the exact order of things that happened hundreds of years ago is a bit of a waste of time... Of course, you tell them when it was and put it in context of other things they'll learn - but at that age you need to teach simpler stuff earlier and more complex stuff later and that won't be chronological.

History at my school was taught chronologically right the way up to year 11. At A level we went back in time in order to study the development of democracies, but then moved forward chronologically. But even so ...there's a lot of history out there and we got two hours a week, if that, up to GCSE. It's not surprising that lots of things can't get covered.
Once you're doing GCSE and A level history it's more about teaching skills anyway, the facts they teach you are simply the way they will analyse how good your critical thinking/ understanding bias skills are in exam conditions.

I'm old enough not to have done 'topics' but be part of the chalk and talk generation, but history was still a muddle.

History A level was much better, in that we did British 17th Century history and European history from I can't exactly remember when it started - mid 16th Century I think and stopping just before the French revolution. So we could put British history into Context. I seem to remember an awful lot about Prussia and Fredericks and Frederick Williams, and quite a bit about Russia, especially Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. There wasn't much analysis but I think that was because it was a rather old fashioned exam board, which liked to see students regurgitating solid wodges of accepted facts.

Because I am not young, the Nazis hadn't made it into history. The War, the War, when I was your age there was a war on, was what my parents went on and on about.

I certainly didn't get my knowledge of history from school - it just seeped in somehow,
but I keep getting surprised when people don't know what I consider very basic facts.

Has the massive increase in TV channels from the 3 (boring) channels I had,
social media - which didn't exist,
somehow prevented the transfer of basic general knowledge about even British history from one generation to the next ?

I don't know if it's the increase in TV channels and social media. I asked DD (in her 30s) if she had done anything about the Corn Laws (pertinent now because they split the Tory party.) Yes, 4 times. Then it all seemed to be the Nazis. Given that she only attended one primary and one secondary, I think it sounds more like bad timetabling than anything else.

(paywall) New fears over Brexit timetable

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/new-fears-over-brexit-timetable-q58nnm25b

Britain’s customs system will not be ready in time for the start of its new relationship with the European Union at the end of 2020,
according to a damning report presented in secret to senior cabinet ministers last week.

The readiness assessment, drawn up by senior civil servants, was given to Theresa May’s Brexit war cabinet on Tuesday afternoon.
But ministers did not get a chance to study it properly before the meeting was cut short by a Commons vote.

The cabinet was told it would have to sign up in Brussels this week to a transition phase lasting 21 months from the date of Brexit next March,
with a new trade deal kicking in at the end of December 2020.

David Davis, the Brexit secretary, announced on Thursday that Britain would accept the EU’s target date of March 29, 2019.

Cabinet sources, however, said a study of readiness across a whole range of sectors revealed that
not enough work has been done to prepare key organisations, computer systems and staff for the end of the transition phase.

A cabinet source said:
“The paper was on the end date for the implementation period. It was only circulated to ministers at the meeting with 15 minutes’ reading time.
It was the EU that has offered December 31, 2020.
Nothing else is negotiable.
But we won’t be ready on everything by then, notably customs.”

Another said:
“The readiness updates showed there were problems with borders and databases, which won’t be ready in time.”

Details of the cabinet paper emerged after MPs on the Brexit select committee called for the prime minister to request an extension of the EU’s article 50 process beyond next March.

The move led to a split in the select committee, with dissenting Tory and Democratic Unionist Party Brexiteers, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, writing their own “minority report” that contradicted the rest of their
…
< now for the fantasists >

Today senior Eurosceptics, including the former cabinet ministers David Jones and Owen Paterson, have written to Barnier and Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president.

The letter warns them to stop bullying Britain during negotiations 🤦🏻‍♀️ - or risk the UK walking away without paying the £40bn exit bill.

“No amount of threats, scaremongering and bullying will make us change our mind”
…
“The alternative is that we just leave, < and crash the economy 🤦🏻‍♀️ >
in which case the people of the UK will simply not tolerate paying to the EU the very large sums being talked about.”

< 🤦🏻‍♀️The EU worries are about trade disruption and a nuclear power going into economic meltdown on its Western borders.

Losing the UK's currently net £8bn per year, about 0.7% of UK GDP, is not an existential crisis,
to a £27 trillion economy like the EU >

peregrina As I said, I gained much of my knowledge of history - plus other things like basic cooking & budgeting - outside school, by some sort of osmosis

I suspect previous generations did, but that this knowledge transfer from older generations and society as a whole has been disrupted somehow

• much shorter attention span, more interesting things to do, no long periods of boredom without entertainment, lack of curiosity about the world and how it came to be like this … ?

Will the rest of the EU call the Moggite's bluff? After all, what status do they have? Which of them hold cabinet positions?

I've just seen an advert for Vauxhall cars on tv. In their branding they are now calling themselves a 'British brand'.

Er... ok then...

I wonder if general knowledge is a bit like language in that it evolves as time goes on until eventually it's unrecognisable from what it was before whilst still be the same thing - if you understand what I mean? Like Chaucer's English is very different to Shakespeare's which is different Dickens' which is different to the language of today.
So the things 'everybody knows' changes as time progresses. To older generations it might seem that younger generations don't know anything because they are surprised by what seem like well known snippets of information that older people think everyone knows. Perhaps younger people know different knowledge and would be surprised at what the older generations don't know (except you can't surprise young people - they all know nobody has ever known anything until they came along ). Maybe they don't know less - they just know different. It's a generation gap. How would anyone know? You don't know what you don't know after all. Otherwise you'd put it right.

Or maybe everyone is just getting dumber. Just my musings

To give an example - Bigchoc didn't studied the war at school because it wasn't classed as 'history' by that point. I did - several times from various angles. in order to study that - something (possibly lots of things) that Bigchoc learned at school has had to be cleared from the curriculum to make room for the rather hefty subject of the 2ndww.

Which means I won't know things that people born close to the war will have learned from school - but equally I probably know a lot of dry facts about the 1930s that someone whose experience of that time is the personal accounts of parents won't necessarily have heard.

I imagine the history curriculum has crept further into modernity since I left just 15 years ago. I learned up to the beginning of the cold war - but young people today will be learning things about the sixties and seventies that I don't know because my knowledge of that time comes from things my parents tell me. But in order to learn about these later decades - something earlier must have been knocked off the curriculum...

And as current affairs turns into history - whether or not people around at the time know about it will depend on how much attention they were paying.

Since the last round of changes in 2013/14 (Gove) the History curriculum has become chronological, beginning in KS2.
www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study
I think some people have a negative view of what children learn “these days”. I am hugely impressed by the teaching my GDs are getting in secondary school and the range and complexity of the subjects that they study. Some of the content is stuff that ai didn’t do until A level and the teaching of strategies for learning is much more sophisticated. The programmes of study are all available on line if anyone wants to look.
I completely agree with pretzl that “general knowledge” changes and people don’t know what they don’t know (or even what questions to ask of young people).
I do think that television has become hugely dumbed down.

I not ai

History GCSE

Subjects History GCSE History (8145) Specification at a glance
This qualification is linear. Linear means that students will sit all their exams at the end of the course. GCSE History students must take assessments in both of the following papers in the same series:

Paper 1: Understanding the modern world

Paper 2: Shaping the nation

Subject content
The GCSE History content comprises the following elements:
one period study
one thematic study
one wider world depth study
one British depth study including the historic environment.

Paper 1: Understanding the modern world
Section A: Period studies
Options to be declared at point of entry.
Choose one of the following options:

AA America, 1840–1895: Expansion and consolidation
AB Germany, 1890–1945: Democracy and dictatorship
AC Russia, 1894–1945: Tsardom and communism
AD America, 1920–1973: Opportunity and inequality
Section B: Wider world depth studies
Options to be decalred at point of entry.
Choose one of the following options:

BA Conflict and tension: The First World War, 1894–1918
BB Conflict and tension: The inter-war years, 1918–1939
BC Conflict and tension between East and West, 1945–1972
BD Conflict and tension in Asia, 1950–1975
BE Conflict and tension in the Gulf and Afghanistan, 1990–2009

Paper 2: Shaping the nation
Section A: Thematic studies
Options to be declared at point of entry.
Choose one of the following options:

AA Britain: Health and the people: c1000 to the present day
AB Britain: Power and the people: c1170 to the present day
AC Britain: Migration, empires and the people: c790 to the present day

Section B: British depth studies including the historic environment
Options to be declared at point of entry.
Choose one of the following options:

BA Norman England, c1066–c1100
BB Medieval England: the reign of Edward I, 1272–1307
BC Elizabethan England, c1568–1603
BD Restoration England, 1660–1685

Has this been posted?
uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-aerospace/uk-aerospace-industry-could-be-priced-out-after-brexit-lawmakers-idUKKBN1GV003
I quite like the idea that space may actually be the final frontier

I must have been fortunate with history O level - I remember we did world history post 1919, so covered end of WW1 and effects on Germany and rise of Hitler, the effects of the Russian Revolution and rise of Stalin, League of Nations / UN, Irish Independence, US Depression, end of the British Empire, Suez, Arab-Israeli wars, development of EEC and EFTA etc right up to the boycotting of the 1980 Moscow olympics.

Also each paper is only 1 hour 45 minutes instead of the 2 hr 15 mins we got.

My history paper was 3 questions in 2hrs 15mins - you had to know your topic to be able to write for 45 mins on it.

No wonder some of the English conflate English with British when all 4 of the "British Depth Studies" in the History GCSE refer exclusively to England

That might seem petty as I know GCSEs are exclusively English - but then don't say they are British Depth Studies Call them what they are: English Depth Studies.

Words matter.

uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-meeting/eu-convenes-urgent-brexit-meeting-amid-deal-talk-sources-idUKKBN1GV0U8

Urgent talks in Brussels amid speculation of an interim deal.

I’m not sure if I should be hopeful or scared tbh.

It's hype until we hear of details for the Irish border. Maybe on other aspects the UK has caved in on ...

I'm not holding my breath following that Reuters report.

It says DD is meeting Michel Barnier in Brussels in about half an hour from now. Trying hammer out an interim deal before the summit on Thursday.

My view is if it was to be anything significant it would be May and not DD. Unless I suppose there is a major concession from the govt in which case I suppose DD could be the fall guy?

I also like the reference to 'hammering' because based on past observation it's a hammer that is needed to get through to DD anyway.

Think it might be EU going ahead with deals and giving another 3 months on Irish question in light of having to be seen as together due to poisoning issue if that makes sense.

Excellent overview today from veteran Leave campaigner RNorth on what being a 3rd country (i.e. no EEA / EFTA-type deal) would mean for UK exports to the EU:

Not a punishment, just the default consequences of A50

http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=86804
…
It is that, more than anything, which keeps the system working
– the fact that it is populated by people on all sides of the fence who know the rules, know what they are doing and are used to working with each other.

Now, take a day-one scenario where the UK, literally overnight, becomes a third country.
As far as officials in EU Member States go, in the absence of a deal between the UK and the EU, the UK will suddenly cease to exist.

The UK as an EU Member State, accessible on all the EU databases, will no longer be there.
And inclusion on third country databases is not automatic – nor uniform in respect of different sectors and products.
…
One presumes that a company marketing nuts and bolts for general engineering use will be able to market their goods in the EU.
But if they are intended for use in vehicles, and (especially) in aviation, export may not be permitted.
Vigilant border officials will have to check loads to ascertain the intended use of multi-use parts.

Any number of manufactured goods, which require third party certification, will also have to be intercepted and rejected,
and it goes without saying that animals and foods of animal origin will not be permitted entry
Even the pallets on which goods are shipped may be rejected if they have not undergone the correct timber treatment.

What we are dealing with here, therefore, is potential chaos.

Thousands of vehicles each day, crossing over to EU states will have to be checked,
and possibly thousands returned to the UK
< increasing UK port chaos >
until shippers get used to the new rules, and know what to avoid.