Westministenders: The Slow Reveal

[RedToothBrush]

The DUP are playing silly buggers.
The EU are getting nervous and turning down the pressure.
The ERG still want Schroedingers Brexit.
The Budget is coming. So is a government defeat or climb down.
The M26 is closing.

Keep thinking of the glorious freedom your blue passport will give up whilst you search waste tips.

_ A Cautionary Tale for How Brexit Summit Can Collapse_

How Salzburg became such a mess: a combination of accident, miscommunication ... and especially blundering by May
Hope she doesn't repeat this performance at the summit next week

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-11/a-cautionary-tale-for-how-brexit-summit-can-collapse

May’s bungle had started the night before when she addressed her counterparts over dinner.

Despite knowing the objections in the room to her latest proposals, she told them it was “Chequers or nothing.”
“That lost her 10 member states,” according to one diplomat.

Then, when she tried to divide the group by claiming that Belgium and the Netherlands supported her, she lost them too.

Leaders were already irked by an article she had written for a German newspaper and they saw it as bad diplomacy when she started to read parts out to them.

It didn’t help when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban ..., arrived at the summit with warm words for the U.K.

order-order.com/2018/10/12/dup-mays-rumoured-concessions-are-worst-of-both-worlds/
DUP: May’s Rumoured Concessions are “Worst of Both Worlds”

DUP: May’s Rumoured Concessions are “Worst of Both Worlds

blatant placemat.

More on NDAs and Esther McVey:
Still, I am dying to know who Esther’s publicist is. According to the Times, charities and companies working with universal credit claimants have been made to sign a gagging clause to protect the work and pensions secretary’s reputation. There is genuinely a “publicity” clause in the contract between them and the department, which states that the organisations “shall pay the utmost regard to the standing” of the secretary of state, and “shall not do anything which may damage [her]; bring [her] into disrepute; attract adverse publicity to [her]; or harm the confidence of the public in [her]”.

I did not know that her boyfriend is quarterwitted men’s rights MP Philip Davies.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/12/universal-credit-iain-duncan-smith?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

Existing agreements that deliver 12 per cent of the UK’s total trade will be lost if there is a no-deal Brexit,
the government has admitted.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/existing-free-trade-agreements-if-theres-no-brexit-deal/existing-free-trade-agreements-if-theres-no-brexit-deal

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-latest-no-deal-trade-lost-12-per-cent-government-gdp-eu-a8580926.html

Trade agreements enjoyed with scores of other countries, through EU membership, will “cease to apply” if the UK crashes out of the EU next March.

The government said it would attempt to replicate the deals “as soon as possible thereafter”
– but admitted those “third countries” would have leverage to demand better terms.
...
The Independent revealed last month that
no country has yet agreed to “roll over’ any deal,
even if a withdrawal agreement is struck and a 21-month transition period secured.

I didn't think my opinion of Esther McVey could sink any lower,
but the MP for J4MB Philip Davies.🤮

European Commission - Press release

JC: take note - an example of state support from an EU country to attract industry,

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-releaseIP-18-60233_en.htm

State aid:
Commission approves Slovakia's €125 million investment aid to Jaguar Land Rover

‘Third countries’ are not going to agree a roll over when they know they can Better terms by renegotiating

Ireland signs up to French version of the Commonwealth in bid to wield more clout after Brexit

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/11/ireland-joins-french-speaking-club-bid-wield-clout-brexit/?

Ireland has been accepted as a member of the international organisation of francophone nations amid concern that Brexit could leave its English-speaking diplomats out in the cold.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/brexitinc/james-cusick-adam-ramsay/met-police-stall-brexit-campaign-investigations-claiming-polit

The Metropolitan Police has stalled the launch of any criminal investigation into three pro-Brexit campaigns – citing “political sensitivities”, openDemocracy can reveal today.

Despite being handed their first dossier of evidence of potential crimes committed by pro-Leave groups over five months ago,
the police force has made no progress nor logged a formal case into the activities of either Vote Leave,
fronted by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, or Leave.EU, the pro-Brexit campaign bankrolled by Arron Banks.

It's been almost pathetic how many Leave supporters have trotted out the lie that we have all these deals already with all these different countries. When we only have them as part of the EU.

Good article from last year which talks about how we moved away from mutual support and interdependence to corporate greed and neoliberalism in the last few decades. About the environment, but applicable to Brexit and everything really.

The political project of neoliberalism, brought to ascendence by Thatcher and Reagan, has pursued two principal objectives. The first has been to dismantle any barriers to the exercise of unaccountable private power. The second had been to erect them to the exercise of any democratic public will.
Its trademark policies of privatization, deregulation, tax cuts and free trade deals: these have liberated corporations to accumulate enormous profits and treat the atmosphere like a sewage dump, and hamstrung our ability, through the instrument of the state, to plan for our collective welfare.

Neoliberalism has not merely ensured this agenda is politically unrealistic: it has also tried to make it culturally unthinkable. Its celebration of competitive self-interest and hyper-individualism, its stigmatization of compassion and solidarity, has frayed our collective bonds. It has spread, like an insidious anti-social toxin, what Margaret Thatcher preached: “there is no such thing as society.”

www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2017/jul/17/neoliberalism-has-conned-us-into-fighting-climate-change-as-individuals?CMP=fb_gu

It's been almost pathetic how many Leave supporters have trotted out the lie that we have all these deals already with all these different countries. When we only have them as part of the EU.

I think a lot of those Leave supporters, as opposed to Brexiteer MPs, genuinely don’t understand how trade deals work so don’t realise it’s a lie. In the same way, they believe we can all go on holiday to Italy if there’s No Deal because we could go there before we were in the EU and anyway, just go on holiday to the USA instead.

The Leave campaigners who play on the ignorance of others should hang their heads in shame.

I have mentioned a few times on these threads how on 5 November 1991, I was at the HSMU (Health Service Management Unit) at Manchester Uni as part of the Executive Development Programme had just joined (an accelerated promotion scheme being piloted by the NHS (in Yorkshire and Trent Regional Authorities) to encourage supposed high-flyers in from industry) and we had a talk from Robert Maxwell which is why I can say for sure what the date was of the Kings Fund.

He explained how the NHS and Welfare State was built on people's experience of WW2, the 30s and even WW1, breaking down class barriers and building a sense of collective societal responsibly.

He went on to say that ever since then, there had been a move back to the individual and away from a sense of society. With. The. Exception. Of. Scotland.

I looked around the room and, of the c15 people who had been recruited onto the EDP, every. single. one. of. us. were either Scottish or Scottish educated.

27 () years later, I don't think much has changed . If anything, I think that process has continued - and that explains the continued disparity in the way that the Scots vote and the results in WM.

He went on to say that ever since then, there had been a move back to the individual and away from a sense of society. With. The. Exception. Of. Scotland.

Why do you think that was? It can't be Devolution because that happened later.

I honestly don't know. and I don't remember him giving any further explanation

Maybe it's to do with the old clan system and that technically, even with the "Union of the Crowns", sovereignty is supposed to continues to reside with the Scottish people.

But it does explain why Scotland continued to vote Labour - and moved to SNP when Labour lost its soul stopped understanding Scotland's different needs and the SNP itself moved to the left (and grew support as a result).

I've always been significantly left of centre, so I've always had a sense of collective responsibility. My dad was a doctor and my mum was a teacher, so I was brought up to believe in equality of opportunity for all but particularly regarding health and education.

Enlightenment values prettybird or irn bru or both. True though.

Maybe tablet too

That too prettybird

I do remember in the run up to the devolution vote in 1997, where we were also asked if we wanted tax varying powers of +/- 3p in the £, Marti Pellow being interviewed on R1 or R2.

He said that even though he would almost definitely have to pay extra, that was worth it because those that needed it more would get the benefit. And that's what most Scots thought, as we voted for it, even though (or because ) we knew that it would only ever be used for the +3p in the £ extra tax and never likely to be the -3p in the £.

Marti Pellow

Yes pretty do you think for some reason Scottish people are more ready to pay for their services and haven’t fallen for the individualism mantra so much.

Randomly George Osborne was being interviewed on TV yesterday (C4 News - a piece about Universal Credit?) and repeated that old Tory line in defence of austerity. Something like ‘We also have a duty to the taxpayer not to spend huge amounts on public services...’
Of course most taxpayers, apart from the very very rich ones, are users of public services too. They may be prepared to pay more tax so the NHS and schools can function; homelessness is reduced; and people on benefits don’t struggle, get into debt and have to use food banks.
Exactly which taxpayers are they trying to protect? Hmmmm...

The Scottish Government last year re-acquired the right to vary income tax

The previous +/-3p in the £ right was allowed to lapse when iirc the HMRC upgraded its systems/after 10 years of Labour/LibDem coalition. Iirc, the original legislation had also been written badly so that any change had to be the same on all rates of income tax, so it would be have been very regressive, with no ability to change the thresholds plus there was a threat? belief that any extra income that the Scottish Government gathered in, would have been taken off our allowance funding from WM. So Scots would've ended paying more in taxes, but still not have any extra to fund what we believed to be important.

John Swinney, when he was Finance Minister, managed to finally get that budget loophole closed to guarantee that extra funds raised would not be counterbalanced by reduced Barnet formula.

So when the new Scottish income tax regime came in, under which higher rate earners do pay a bit extra but lower earners pay less, the BBC did "Vox pox" to get comments. They obviously worked really hard to find anyone to criticise it, as the "worst" they could find was someone who said, "I'd rather not have to pay extra and I want to see it used well, but the people who work for me are paying less and that's a good thing".

Unfortunately, it's just tinkering at the edges, as corporate tax, tax loopholes, excise duty and VAT are all still retained powers.

What gets me about austerity apologists supporters is that they seemingly are quite happy in their hypocritical belief that the super rich need more money to motivate themselves to "do more" while the poor need to be made poorer in order to motivate them because apparently they enjoy having to go to Food Banks

I hope you're right prettybird. Most of my family have moved towards supporting SNP, something that was unthinkable 20 years ago. I don't argue with anti-SNP Scottish pals now, as I suspect what is unfolding is more likely to cause them to think again, than anything I might say. .

hurricanefloss - my mum taught Marti Pellow English. She was apparently his favourite teacher

Her description was that "he was a pleasant enough lad"