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"

------------------------

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.

peregrina Your childhood area sounds more cosmopolitan than mine

Food was really monotonous for me until the mid-70s, when I went to Uni
Then I discovered pizza and Wimpy bars 😂

My Mum was a good cook but we were very poor, so avoided exotic fruit / veg imports
There was only a fish & chip shop in the next village and a supermarket further away, nothing more exciting there than cardboard-tasting Vesta meals which we normally didn't buy either - the soya used to squeak on the teeth

There was not really any mass-produced junk food either - 3 flavours of ice cream, 3 of crisps, McVities digestives, small choc bars.

I survived a very monotonous, but healthy diet
However, I have become used to so much more variety - and indulgence - in the intervening decades
and would be furious to return to that in my retirement

< fortunately I should be able to stay in Germany >

Meanwhile, in other news ...

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

Who said this? Theresa May - 26th May 2016

Remember this every time that she stands up in Parliament, or in Salzburg, Brussels or anywhere else and begins to spout the same scripted nonsense about 'best deal, free and frictionless trade agreement, world of opportunity etc' that she is determined make the EU agree to.

mother If Scotland had a land border with another EU country, that the EU insisted needed a backstop,
then I'd want Scotland to vote too

The NI vote would be to remove a roadblock that is limitting options for rUK;
otherwise they would have to lump it, like Scotland.

The NI vote was also the most popular solution in school exams here and all those German teens can't be wrong 😂

But, no, we'll probably never agree.

May is prioritising fulfilling the referendum decision over the damage to the economy, travel etc

that's a deliberate decision, just as much as intelligent Leavers deliberately choosing to prioritise nationalist aspirations over the economy

May's ultimate motivation of course, just like Cameron's was, is to minimise damage to the Tory party caused by their decades long bitter split on Europe.

Both prioritised party over country,
which is far more shameful than any choice by Leave or Remain voters,
whether they had sufficient information or were voting in blind ignorance

{What commercial drivers may need to do to drive in the EU and European Economic Area (EEA) when the UK leaves the EU on 29 March 2019.
12:37pm, 21 December 2018: Applications for ECMT permits will now close at 11.59pm on 18 January 2019.}
Another 'technical notice' that has plopped into my inbox.
The relevant but being that it says WHEN the UK leaves on 29 March. The hint of 'might not' or 'unlikely' has gone.

My more way out ideas about who is behind the drone:

If it is indeed intended to apply political pressure, is not vandalism, not ransom and also not from Russia or China etc ....

Then maybe it is to increase public anxiety and pressure to agree the WA,
so culprits could be < dons tinfoil hat >:

• A UK govt black ops team, isolated by layers and cutouts from the person who gave the orders

• A black ops team by a business with a huge amount to lose from No Deal and for whom relocating would also cost hundreds of millions.
  So outsourced privately, with the above isolation precautions.

David Davis has his own pre-referendum statements that he now conveniently forgets, including:

We should not ask people to vote on a blank sheet of paper and tell them to trust us to fill in the details afterwards. For referendums to be fair and compatible with our parliamentary process, we need the electors to be as well informed as possible and to know exactly what they are voting for. Referendums need to be treated as an addition to the parliamentary process, not as a substitute for it [Although in many countries, the dangers of uninformed or even rigged referendums have been acknowledged and as a result, referendums are banned].

As for the duty of MPs and how they should be guided when voting for legislation, Winston Churchill offered some advice:

The first duty of a member of Parliament is to do what he thinks in his faithful and disinterested judgement is right and necessary for the honour and safety of Great Britain. His second duty is to his constituents, of whom he is the representative but not the delegate. Burke's famous declaration on this subject is well known. It is only in the third place that his duty to party organization or programme takes rank. All these three loyalties should be observed, but there in no doubt of the order in which they stand under any healthy manifestation of democracy [Note - no mention of self-interest]

mother Didn't many Scots at that time also have a history of alliances with France
So England would have wanted to avoid a possible Scotland-France kingdom

Since an England-France kingdom was viable only a few centuries earlier, that would have been a worrying possibility

but yes, Scotland is even more intertwined with England than the UK is with the EU
Any sacrifice of the economy there for nationalist aspirations would likely mean falling off an even higher cliff

In fairness though, the Scots seem much better informed about the risks and at least the SN actually had a definite but not very good plan

Possibly too, if the whole UK falls of a cliff edge, then an independent Scotland climbing partially back out again and via the EU or EFTA could look tempting.

If there is No Deal, DEFRA would be in the firing line for any unwanted changed to the nations food supply.

I wonder if a Gove resignation would be a sign that he thinks No Deal inevitable and wants to jump ship before it happens 🤔

After all, both DD and Raab seem to have avoided any flak from Brexiters
for their own gross incompetence, ignorance, arrogance and lack of prep during the negotiations

Didn't many Scots at that time also have a history of alliances with France

the Auld alliance. Still alive and well in 1990 when I lived in Paris ... whilst I (and fellow English friends) struggled to get chatting in French, the one Scottish member of our party could gabble away for hours. Seems not only can the average Parisian distinguish between an English and Scots accent. They (apparently) find French spoken with a Scottish accent alluring.

Typical example why we should have little faith that the end product works and is on time,
when the govt outsources It / big projects

and this is an example when there was no great time pressure or very new circumstances to design for

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-46561779?

An Army recruitment drive ... a website that cost three times its budget and was 52 months late, a National Audit Office report has found.

Outsourcing giant Capita was awarded the £495m contract for Army recruitment in 2012 - but has failed to hit soldier recruitment targets every year since.
...
the £113m website 😱
.....
Capita has consistently missed the Army's recruitment targets, with the total shortfall ranging from 21% to 45%, the NAO said.
...
The Commons Defence Committee was told in October that the Army currently has 77,000 fully trained troops, compared with a target of 82,500.
< not all of them would be available in the UK post-Brexit, either >

DG I find English "spoken with a Scottish accent alluring." too !

a website that cost three times its budget and was 52 months late, a National Audit Office report has found.

What's the betting that an open source project could have been taken and adapted for one hundredth the cost ?

I live in Birmingham where the council spunked £2,000,000 of taxpayers money on a bespoke website that I could have delivered for £20,000 - and which would have worked.

FFS - when I worked for a not-that-big company, we were happily handling 3,000,000 customer records without issue.

Philip Coggan@econbartleby 😂

Monday: hard cheese
Tuesday: sour grapes
Wednesday: rat au vin
Thursday: nuts
Friday: crackers
Saturday: leaves mean leaves
Sunday: humble pie

DGR the words of this song actually brought a tear to my eye!
We’re standing on the verge of a historic mistake.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=ncHAwux70u8

{I love history from a very long time ago }
Is that because it is a bit sanitised and you weren't considering people being hacked to death and tortured? Parts where 'a third of the population died from starvation or disease'.
Unfortunately Brexit looks set to be a significant turning point and we are living through it.

That's not an attack on you Mother, just a sort of observation.
There are many things we do that it is best not to remember too much detail about.

Me too, mother

My history lessons started with learning about the earliest human history from the stone age to the Romans,
then jumped to the Norman invasion and Magna Carta,
a bit about the life of mediaeval serfs - being given beef at lunchtime meant you had a good lord & master -
a brief trip to the Civil War

and then on to Victorian England in the most boring detail

• I remember Cardwell's army reforms (abolished flogging, buying commissions, introduced breech-loading rifles) which was neither of interest nor use to me

and just the leadup to WW1, but neither of the WWs themselves

So great chunks of history missing, including anything about Ireland or the Empire or the Napoleanic wars or ...
I investigated and learned some of the missing bits myself, later on.

For Farage and Brexit Pollster, a World of Gamblers and Gambling
The odds were long against the Leave campaign, but the men around Nigel Farage somehow came up winners.

www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-12-21/for-farage-and-brexit-pollster-a-world-of-gamblers-and-gambling

In addition to the world of supporters around Farage regularly making or taking big bets, add one more gambler he was in touch with that night: Damian Lyons Lowe, the owner of Survation. He also was a key political operative and adviser to Farage as well as the man who tipped him about the private hedge fund poll. Six sources familiar with Lyons Lowe’s betting record say he has a history of gambling on politics—in the very contests in which he’s polling. Lyons Lowe also declined to comment.

The timely betting by Farage's inner circle around the crucial election raises new questions amid concerns from lawmakers and regulators about whether private polling is undermining the integrity of the country's markets and its democracy.

[...]Lyons Lowe, the pollster for Farage’s UKIP and his pro-Brexit group, began conducting polls as a sideline during the late 2000s—while he was still doing different work for banks in the City of London. Gambling was at the heart of his new hobby. Lyons Lowe conducted online surveys and also ran a website with others called “Special Bets.” That’s the name bookmakers give to unconventional wagers—basically, all wagering other than sports.

He started Survation in 2010. The firm’s profile grew as it began publishing polls in British media outlets showing increasing support for Farage’s UKIP, which then hired Survation to carry out research, becoming a top client.

@HesterThrale thanks for the link.