Westminstenders: Operation Yellowhammer 1q

[RedToothBrush]

Boris Johnson is clearing the decks for a leadership challenge.

I guess that means that the Brexit we get all depends on what George, Michael and Boris decide over lunch and how good Operation Yellowhammer is.

Just an inkling of what may be to come. I suspect, like icebergs (another ironic comparison) there's a lot under the surface that can't be seen.

SchrodingersRat Fascinating. so down to less than 1000 votes.
It is no co incidence that the usual suspects have been targetting Sweden for years to try to strengthen the extreme right. Population 11m?
Your ex pat votes, also the fact that voters who cast early can change their minds(?) makes it a freer and fairer system than ours. And government's campaign to educate the public about false propaganda have clearly bourne fruit.
Good explanation article here on the results:
Only 13 percent of women voted for them, according to an exit poll, and nearly 25 percent of men did
www.politico.eu/newsletter/brussels-playbook/politico-sweden-election-playbook-dead-heat-far-right-fizzles-overseas-vote-crucial/?utm_source=POLITICO.EU&utm_campaign=741ad277c4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_09_05_11_33&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_10959edeb5-741ad277c4-189667717

Kudos to the main parties for refusing to govern with Nazis. (so far).
Imagine if that could happen here.......

Ah, Sir Clive.
His C5 was way ahead of it's time, and at the rate of Brexit progress, about to make a comeback.
I managed to 'blow up' one of his other products and got replacements free (bar postage) 5 times. Maybe if it was better designed it wouldn't have failed I suppose!

@ChrChristensen
Voter turnout in Collapsing Multicultural Marxist Hellhole™ Sweden: 84%
Voter turnout in Freedom-Loving Home of Democracy USA: 55%

Ah, Sir Clive. His C5 was way ahead of it's time

Not it wasn't. It was shit. And a paradigm of why he's not the genius he says he is. (He put much more effort into the C5 than he ever did computing).

The quote I noted was about the QL, which he was selling as a "32 bit" computer, despite the fact that even Motorola didn't spec the 68008 as a "32 bit processor" (it was internally, but had 8-bit busses, so needed 4 cycles per load).

I had to give a presentation on Uncle Clive, as part of my degree ... managed to get undergraduate entry to the British Library as part of it.

All things being equal though, I have a soft spot for the calculator, which Hewlett Packard executives refused to believe ran on one of their own chips ...

Media coverage of Swedish Democrats v odd. Rob Ford has some good stuff on this on Twitter.

16% is right at the bottom end of what polling suggested and way below their >20% peak.

Nice to hear Swedish politician Carl Bildt very effectively disabusing interviewer of ideas about stunning success of Swedish Democrats - saying that they did less well than expected - and rubbishing any prospect of Sweden leaving the EU. About 30 min in if listening on iplayer.

That’s World at One

Medicine and food stockpiling will give a mini boost to the economy but it will be almost inevitable that there will be a mini recession - say those naughty experts.

www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/stockpiling-no-deal-brexit-boost-uk-economy-recession-cebr-research-a8529831.html

Someone posted about this a while ago: the alliances between english tories and Nazis in EU parliament. Still a shock to see it in black and white. Article's from July.

Conservatives enter alliance with Swedish far-right in European Parliament

Sweden Democrats has its roots in white supremacy and wants immigrants to return to their country of origin

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/conservatives-sweden-democrats-european-parliament-far-right-reformist-group-a8430281.html

That short-lived boom - although misleading - would be seized on by Brexiters as showing that Brexit will be good for the economy

It would hinder pressure for a last minute U-turn, to at least sign the WA

One factor that could cause economic problems & shortages for the 3 months before Brexit

• re the police contingency plans from 1 Jan -

is that Sterling might go into freefall once the markets decide that no deal is probable

This could happen any time from late November, when Barnier / the Commission / major EU countries would probably very publicly warn EU businesses & organisations to act on the assumption of no deal.

Some of the resulting spike in import prices for food, raw materials, components etc would follow up to 6 months later, due to business hedging
However, it would probably still trigger large-scale business / jobs flight out of the UK, as the reality of no deal bites

In some ways it's all going to plan, BigChoc, almost to the month.

Cameron's group from the beginning allied the Tories with the far right / fascist parties of Europe

Entirely for Tory party internal politicis, pandering to Brexiters, which even then meant allying with the far right

Merkel publicly expressed her disagreement at the time
because he removed the Tories from the EP cemtre-right grouping, which would have otherwise been the largest group in the EP

His actions also strengthened the power of the far right in Europe, by giving them a far more powerful EP base than they would otherwise have had.
They have used this to help them grow.

People in future years may rate May as the UK's worst ever PM
but I would say that is Cameron:

he strengthened the far right and then blundered into a referendum which they were able to skew,
all because he kept putting the Tory party's internal problems before the good of the country

He actually had plenty of time to plan and think about the consequences of his actions
but he was a lazy-arse Bullingdon Boy, too posh to plan

May has been under the cosh of events since becoming PM
(or before - probably having to agree to certain policies in order for Loathsome to stand down)
she has always been reacting to one crisis after another, without time to think & understand what she is doing

Of course, she is totally unsuited to the job of PM - ignorant, arrogant, stubborn, closed-minded, xenophobic ... -
but even an Attlee or a Churchill would have had great problems coping with the toxic mess that Cameron left for his successors.

Cameron was always the accidental leader of the tory party. David Davis might have managed it better. None of the tory men on offer were clever, wise nor moral. Pretty toxic mixture. Shame when there are clearly some singular and pragmatic tory women MPs about. Again, Sweden managed to at least curtail their nazis by having so many women in politics. One woman, I don't know her name, faced down mr sweden democrat nazi pants, on Swedish TV debate this week to considerable effect.

Sadly, very few systems achieve stability. Successful evolution is predicated upon change, and reaction to that change. So here's the change.

The new facts about Neanderthal man, are fascinating, with the added bonus that they are anathema to the xenophobic bigots currently leading the charge.

imo, Cameron wasn't an accidental leader at all:
he planned very carefully how to become leader of the party

and then he planned carefully how to detoxify the Tory party sufficiently, so that he could become PM in 2010

Unfortunately, he didn't plan a damn thing after he became PM
Like May, all his efforts were focused on pandering to the rightwing and avoiding a Tory internal war.

May was the accidental leader
... because most of the other possible candidates hd too much self-preservation to pick up the poisoned chalice of Brexit

@DGR (apologies for off the wall direction).
I was talking to a Russian engineer many years ago about the Sinclair Z80 and bemoaning the fact that because they used such a cheap connector, by the time you had spent 20 minutes 'programming' it, if you then knocked it AT ALL, it would reset blank.
he commented that he had no trouble with the Russian version as they used a better connector, having 'copied' all the rest of it.
Sorry for that, as you were....
Actually, the Daily Mail article about Britain NOT winning WW2 was pretty interesting (I read it yesterday). Despite being in that paper it would be interesting to know how much was true. It was '10 Myths' debunked.

Place marking.

@DGR (apologies for off the wall direction).

It's a diversion, while we wait for the world to end ...

I was talking to a Russian engineer many years ago about the Sinclair Z80 and bemoaning the fact that because they used such a cheap connector, by the time you had spent 20 minutes 'programming' it, if you then knocked it AT ALL, it would reset blank.

Z X 80 ? Don't recall that having too many problems (mind you, it only had 1K memory )

Now the ZX81 on the other hand, with it's infamous 16K Rampack ... although almost every edition of "Your Sinclair" (a magazine the British Library were horrified to realise they had never had a copy of, despite the law ....) had what we would nowdays call "a hack". Blu tack usually ...

he commented that he had no trouble with the Russian version as they used a better connector, having 'copied' all the rest of it.

Well, yes, all very amusing. However, just to fight Uncle Clives corner, if the ZX81 had been a penny more, it's less likely it would have made the UK the world leader in desktop/personal computing. Although looking back, I'm sure he wonders why he bothered, as we managed to piss that away even quicker than North Sea Oil. And for all the Russian smugness, it's worth noting we never saw the Lada/Polski equivalent of the ZX80/81/Spectrum/QL/OPD ... bearing in mind the US tech embargo of the cold war.

I used to be able to write Z80 assembler in hex direct, what went wrong in my life .

Yes correction, ZX81, my memory is loose too!
I had the 16K rampack. Had I soldered ALL the connections I might not have abandoned it and managed something useful.
Back in 'real madness land', Mrs May was never going to get out of the mess unscathed.

I just accidentally clicked on the Brexit Arms thread and ... it's hilarious.

Lots of stridently filthy remoaners who AFAIK are not regulars in here.

Cameron was always the accidental leader of the tory party. David Davis might have managed it better. None of the tory men on offer were clever, wise nor moral.

Really? I think he was a very deliberate leader, in that he always wanted the job, and he was seen as a slightly Blair-like figure who could detoxify the Tory brand. And in the very early days, he did talk a good talk, if you were a right-of-centre social liberal. I think a lot of centrist people were on board with his broadly socially liberal, fiscally conservative politics (except that in the end it turned out that his government was neither socially liberal - gay marriage aside - nor fiscally conservative. If the 2010 administration was covered by the sale of goods act you'd have got your money back).

The irony is that the Brexit debacle has shown that there are/were some competent Tories, but by and large they are/were the ones with technocratic instincts who are not seen as leadership material because they are pragmatic rather than populist. I'm thinking of people like Andrew Tyrie (now retired, probably because he knew what a disaster Brexit was shaping up to be) and Dominic Grieve. I don't agree with their politics but I do agree with the way they do politics - I dare say I am in a small minority though.

The brexit arms thread is great it's so LIGHT HEARTED and NORMAL.

Found common ground no one likes spam.

^imo, Cameron wasn't an accidental leader at all:
he planned very carefully how to become leader of the party
I remember the conference speech he gave in 2005. He was the young pretender? Davis was supposed to be a shoe in, but his speech fell apart? Career wise, I can see how Cameron wanted the job, but I thought that speech and ovation was the lucky twist which got him in?