Westministenders: BAH HUMBUG said Mr Rees-Mogg

[RedToothBrush]

"At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge Rees-Mogg, ... it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."

"Are there no prisons hostels?"

"Plenty of prisons hostels..."

"And the Union workhouses foodbanks." demanded Scrooge Jacob. "Are they still in operation?"

"Both very busy, sir..."

"Those who are badly off must go there."

"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."

"If they would rather die," said Scrooge ^Rees-Mogg, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

He continued "Besides I do not believe that anyone would die without them. I think Theresa is right, there are many complex reasons why nurses go to food banks. The real reason for the rise in numbers is that people know that they are there and Labour deliberately didn't tell them. To have charitable support given by people voluntarily to support their fellow citizens I think is rather uplifting and shows what a good, compassionate country we are"

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This thread is dedicated to Mrs8 and anyone else who is working to make life just a little better in the difficult circumstances that ALL politicians are currently doing their best to ignore (despite what they profess).

No Deal = even more poverty and destitution.

MERRY CHRISTMAS & HERES HOPING FOR A HAPPIER NEW YEAR
especially to those of you, who might be having a tough time or facing real uncertainity.

Gatwick now open.

Agree with everything you say born.

And really, shouldn’t the fact that Putin said this. actually make everyone seriously question Brexit? I mean you’re in the wrong company if you agree with him. We know he has an agenda.

^Vladimir Putin has said the UK should not hold a second referendum on Brexit, insisting Theresa May must “fulfil the will of the people”.
Offering public support that the embattled British prime minister could probably do without, Putin said he understood May’s position in “fighting for this Brexit”
“The referendum was held,” the Russian president said from Moscow during his annual press conference, which is broadcast on national television. “What can she do? She has to fulfil the will of the people expressed in the referendum.”
Britons may see some irony in a lesson on democracy from a fourth-term president who has co-opted or crushed any substantial opposition in his home country. In a statement, the former foreign secretary David Miliband, who has backed a second referendum, said it was “an insult to the United Kingdom that he should be lecturing us on our democratic process”.
In a nod to recent accusations of election meddling, Putin coyly suggested he was hesitant to give advice on Brexit “lest they accuse us once again of something”. But he then went on to criticise the idea of a second referendum or “people’s vote”, which could offer the possibility of Britain staying in the EU.
“Was it not a referendum?” the Russian president said. “Someone disliked the result, so repeat it over and over? Is this democracy? What then would be the point of the referendum in the first place and what is the sense of direct democracy?”

www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/dec/20/vladimir-putin-theresa-may-brexit-fulfil-will-of-the-people

Gatwick now open.

Partially open.

Does anyone else find the limp government response to this crisis concerning? Either something major has gone down that no one is talking about (but I don't think so: too public an operation and someone would have talked) or major incident planning for critical infrastructure is seriously inadequate. And the govt and civil service are so overloaded with Brexit that there are no resources or brainpower to handle this.

Pmk

Hopefully this crap situation at Gatwick might add to the "chip chip chip" at people's stubbornness about how No Deal would be.
There are only so many things about which you can go "this is nonsense, i could do a better job sorting it" before you start looking like a blustering Vernon Dursley full of hot air.

Place mat king

So we have a drone around Gatwick, IT problems at Heathrow and issues with a junction box with the Eurostar.

I know things sometimes just happen but am I the only one who thinks it’s a lot of problems with our travel system all in one go? Aka someone is behind pulling some strings?

@Andrew Adonis

Pro-Brexit - Putin, Trump, Orban, Salvini
Anti-Brexit - Varadkar, Merkel, the rest of the EU

Er, which side should we be on?

The fact Putin is supporting a No Deal with no second referendum makes me want to ensure we do have a second referendum and no Brexit.

Pms

Should say pmk but, you know, pms works too

Where, your MP brings to mind a character I saw in a movie. This guy's new neighbor told him he lived a boring and stogy life, that he was only living at 50% when he could be living at 100%.

The new neighbor's idea of 100% living included riding your bike out into traffic and letting go of the handlebars, driving the wrong way down a one-way street with considerable traffic, etc.

The new neighbor convinced the guy that he should sleep with the new neighbor's wife and about the time he was ready to do it he discovered that the new neighbor was running a very big scam on him, this whole 100% living idea was part of this big scam.

This whole Brexit thing to me reeks of people having been told that they were only living at 50 percent when they could be living at 100 percent by leaving the EU on very short notice.

I really wish that all this people desperate to recreate the WW2 home front experience by leaving the EU with no deal would actually read some contemporary accounts of WW2. Then they might realise that people's experiences were actually of being bored, frightened and frustrated in turns.

On R4 Grayling has just called it “a new kind of attack” and did not rule out that it could be a foreign government when specifically asked, just that it wasn’t a conventional terrorist attack.

Interesting ...

@wherearemychickens

You've probably sent the message to your confused MP, but you could provide a simple example.

Imagine a UK company that usually sells 100 items a week to Germany. Last week they sold 101 items - so a percentage increase of 1%. They also sell items to Mauritania - if they are lucky an average of one a week. Last week they sold 2 items to Mauritania - an increase of 100%. According to Brexit logic, the company should stop selling to Germany and instead concentrate on Mauritania - which is of course complete bollocks. What should be happening is that the company uses the strong and stable sales to Germany to provide a foundation for expansion into other markets. Unfortunately the government, and Brexit supporters in particular, are a collection of people with experience as a GP, a civil service clerk, several moneylenders and career political bench-warmers - none has any industrial or export business experience to speak of and they couldn't run a whelk stall between them.

If your MP is still in doubt of the folly of WTO, you could provide a suitable quote from a leading Conservative politician, made before the referendum. For real fun, you could ask the MP to identify the person who said:

“We export more to Ireland than we do to China, almost twice as much to Belgium as we do to India, and nearly three times as much to Sweden as we do to Brazil. It is not realistic to think we could just replace European trade with these new markets”

“In a stand-off between Britain and the EU, 44 per cent of our exports is more important to us than eight per cent of the EU’s exports is to them. The economic arguments are clear. Being part of a 500-million trading bloc is significant for us. One of the issues is that a lot of people will invest here in the UK because it is the UK in Europe.” ‘

“The reality is that we do not know on what terms we would win access to the single market. We do know that in a negotiation we would need to make concessions in order to access it, and those concessions could well be about accepting EU regulations, over which we would have no say, making financial contributions, just as we do now, accepting free movement rules, just as we do now, or quite possibly all three combined. It is not clear why other EU member states would give Britain a better deal than they themselves enjoy.” ‘

Bigchoc Varadkhar is just hedging his bets. Admits no need for anything (not even his contingency planning) as long as custom and regulations are aligned.

SF's answer to everything is hold a border poll.

Havana, those are great quotes - I'm guessing Theresa May?

I have sent the email - showed it to my husband this morning and he couldn't disagree with any of it, but my tone /might/ be a bit ranty (I did start by telling him he appears to have drunk the Brexit Kool Aid) :)

I think I might follow it up today with a more researched piece with evidence for all the things I've disputed. As there were at least 10 things he's been ridiculous about, it might take me some time...

Havanananana

I don't know, I was going tò guess David Davis but that all sounds far to clever for him.

Apparently Trump wants to free America of all the post war commitments. Scary stuff.

howabout I agree there, which is why I think that claims Varadkar has chosen an Ireland-E26 border - and hence why can't he offer that for Brexit - are wrong too.

He has to keep things ambivalent, so he has not said which option he would choose

Also, Brexit seems to have given support for reunification such a boost that SInn Fein calls for a poll are no longer just propoganda.

Polls also indicate that a No Deal Brexit would increase this support.
So I am even more unwilling to let the NI border - which may not exist in 10 years - push us in that direction.

However, NI polls consistently show a large majority in favour of NI remaining in the SM+CU, even if GB doesn't, i.e. NI / GB checks
e.g. 65% here

So polling NI - not on the reunification, but on this - could clear away roadblocks to HoC agreement
No MPs could claim NI was being railroaded if they vote for it.

I'm sure the EU would extend for an NI poll too.

I would compare your analysis of NI with Scotland, as I know more about how people here are actually thinking Bigchoc. If you ask people now in Scotland they will mainly say SM + CU as that hedges their bets.

However if England leaves the SM + CU that creates a border at Gretna and completely changes the calculation. Most people have not really thought through how they would vote in Indyref2 if they actually had to choose between a trading relationship with England versus the EU.

I very much suspect the NI polling quoted above reflects the same sort of thinking.

Article reflecting a lot of our discussion here:

There’s a national emergency all right – but it isn’t Brexit

This week, more than half of teachers surveyed by the National Education Union expressed fears that some of their kids won’t have enough to eat this Christmas. They reported a boy turning up wearing his trousers back to front, in order to hide the holes in the knees, and a class where one in three children sleep in their uniforms because they have no pyjamas.

If anything qualifies as a national emergency, it should be this. A new generation growing up without adequate food and clothing ought to be leading TV bulletins and shaming government ministers into action. What dominates instead is blue-on-blue match commentary, because Jacob Rees-Mogg is box office while poor people can be slipped in just before the “And finally”.