Westministenders: Festive Edition

[RedToothBrush]

Good King BBBBaBoris looked out,
on the Port of Dover,
There the shit lay round about,
Deep around the stopover;
Brightly shone the moon that night,
Tho’ the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight,
Delivering stuff for Yule.

“Bugger SAGE and stand by me,
We've all stuff that needs selling,
Yonder peasant, who is he?
Where and what his dwelling?”
“Sire, he lives a good league hence,
The other side the EU;
Though relations maybe tense,
He's trying to get goods through.”

“Oh god I need another wine,
I have many crisis to consider:
We must tell them its all fine,
I must not be seen to dither.”
SAGE and monarch, forth they went,
forth they went together;
Through the nation's sad lament
and really crappy weather.

“Sire, our plight is darker now,
And the covid transmission stronger;
Fails my heart, I know not how;
To keep Tier 2 much longer.”
“Soon we can drop their wage.
And treat them all more coldly
In Britain's new chrony age
A time to rob more boldly.”

In their master’s steps they trod,
On the quest to get minted;
Each and every last sod
Needs to be fingerprinted.
Therefore, Christian men, be sure,
DWP claimants are processing,
Ye who now will bless the poor,
God its all so depressing.

Bollocks Sunak. The posts on these boards show that the country is as divided as ever. And not all the Leave side are happy.

@Peregrina

Bollocks Sunak. The posts on these boards show that the country is as divided as ever. And not all the Leave side are happy.

With any luck the Tories will have to spend the next 2 generations in a pincer grip of pissed off Remainers and Brexiteers.

At the moment the UK is in a combined
Christmas Food
short cold days
COVID lockdowns
stupour

Come the end of January when the vaccination campaign has really started to take effect
and lockdowns are easing

is when Brits will start to realise what they have lost
and I suspect they will not be happy

Seeing Germans free to go to Spanish beaches at Easter
without red tape
when Brits cannot
may not go down well

interesting times ahead

With any luck the Tories will have to spend the next 2 generations in a pincer grip of pissed off Remainers and Brexiteers.

With the current Thatcher and beyond style of Tories, I hope it destroys them. With the more centralist types of Tory who genuinely went into politics because they believed in serving the community that elected them, then I would be happy enough to see them regroup and come back.

@Peregrina

Bollocks Sunak. The posts on these boards show that the country is as divided as ever. And not all the Leave side are happy.

Some leave voters don't seem particularly happy with it.

I think the government likes the division as it takes the heat off of them and stops everyone scrutinising policy and fighting with each other.

All the patriotic stuff is irritating, I'm upset because I think this country could be great, not because I don't like it.

A very measured article about how the rest of Europe sees Johnson's victory.

This paragraph in particular struck a chord with me:
Le Monde said the country was now facing a dilemma from over half a century ago. “The United Kingdom finds itself once again facing a question that was never resolved after 1945: its place in the world,” wrote Philippe Bernard. “Its like Back to the Future, from the 1950s.

Yes Red, I heard Sunak say this on radio news:

Brexit means ‘we can do things a bit differently’.
-e.g. Examining how we make the City ‘the most attractive place to list companies’ in world.

Worrying. Will they be offering a kind of low-tax, low-regulation regime to all manner of global corporations, to attract them here? Or is that prohibited by the Deal?

Off shore money laundering/tax haven, surely not.

A very good editorial from The Observer. Especially note the points made in Guardian pick from BenCaute.

BenCaute, on the same link, goes on to show how the ECJ has been able to protect British business abroad. It's not something which will please the we don't want the ECJ brigade, we will make our own laws.

World this Weekend currently talking about the proliferation of working groups, committees, discussion groups and so on to discuss the nuts and bolts of agreements on just about everything.

It’s barmy. We’ve lost such a lot and gained oodles and oodles of bureaucracy.

@Peregrina

BenCaute, on the same link, goes on to show how the ECJ has been able to protect British business abroad. It's not something which will please the we don't want the ECJ brigade, we will make our own laws.

I should certainly hope the ECJ was protecting British businesses all the time we were an EU member state (i.e. we were paying for it). Question is, was some supra national court needed to do that? answer = no.

Find it remarkable that people think there will be a moment in time when the penny drops for leavers. This will not happen. There will be no collective remorse. The last 4 years have taught us that. The last 2 days have taught us that.

The Brexit deal is death by a thousand cuts, it will happen over years, decades. The negatives will get brushed under the carpet, spun by the the pro Brexit media or blamed on something else.

Most people know that the current housing crisis was in part caused by the great council house sell off but as the consequenes don't affect the majority nobody does anything about it. Replace housing crisis with the loss of Erasmus or the plight of EU citizens in the UK over the last 4 years. Not enough people care, not enough people are paying attention. A few newspapers draw attention to it and then get accused of talking the country down.

The right wing press are already pumping out the patriotism expect this to continue in the longer term. Once covid subsides most people will be too busy making up for lost time -seeing family, going out etc to care about a political issue they are already sick of.

The issue now is not how much a bag of pasta will cost in 2021 but who the next scapegoat will be. Populist ideology thrives on division and once they feel the EU has been defeated they will move onto somebody else. This is the thing to be concerned about.

Question is, was some supra national court needed to do that? answer = no.

If you read the comments made by BenCaute, the answer is yes. If you haven't bothered to read it, I will give you a choice extract:

Back in the 1980s the Danes were concerned that anyone could set up a UK ltd company for one pound and start trading in Denmark, knowing that if the company were sued the liability would be limited to just one pound.

The Danes introduced a blanket requirement that a company was only validly incorporated if it had minimum capital of 100,000 DK. It looked to be of equal application, but there was only one kind of company it applied to: the UK ltd ones.

The effect was that the company simply 'wasn't there' for Danish purposes. It was recharacterised as a sole tradership/partnership. Net result, "shareholders" had unlimited joint and several liability.

The company brought a claim and it was referred to the ECJ. The ECJ held that by virtue of freedom of establishment a company properly formed in one member state was properly formed in every members state. The Danish rule was struck down.

So my understanding - until now a British company could have set up in Denmark with £1, because it was legal to do so in the UK, then be sued and only pay £1, courtesy of an ECJ ruling.

Now they need to stump up their 100,00-DKr to be set up legally. No bad thing - why should any firm get away with a £1 liability and let the taxpayers pick up the tab?

Question is, was some supra national court needed to do that? answer = no.
Answer is - depends on the nature of national governance and sense of what is right. We know from previous actions of this government that 'legal' is open to interpretation in a way that hasn't been true in the past. Legal for the people does not equate in any way with legal for the government. The ECJ was a sensible check on EU member states based on what they had agreed to. That is the problem with the UK government, they want 'what they agreed to' to be variable depending on circumstance.

Question is, was some supra national court needed to do that? answer = no.

If the UK doesn't want its [sometimes arcane] laws and practices to be found illegal by national courts in EU member states with whose legislation those laws and practices clash and with whom it nonetheless wants to carry on doing business, what recourse will it have without a supranational body overseeing national jurisdictions? UK courts can't very well rule on such matters.
So, in the type of case cited, German or Danish legislation may well prevail, to the detriment of UK firms. Unless they move their business to an EU member state, taking the jobs with it...

Interesting Peregrina I read that example totally the other way. I can't now say who's right and who isn't. My reading of it was that this bit...

"The company brought a claim and it was referred to the ECJ. The ECJ held that by virtue of freedom of establishment a company properly formed in one member state was properly formed in every members state. The Danish rule was struck down."

Meant that the ECJ had ruled that companies could incorporate in Denmark for £1, just as they could in the UK. It was the Danes requirement for DKr100k capital that was struck down.

TBH I think agree with you, I think that the £1 company establishment is mad. I also countries should be able to establish the rules by which companies incorporate there.

I heard Sunak wanking on about free ports - and how now we are allowed them.... which is absolute bollocks - we have always been allowed them, but with stipulations to prevent money laundering and the use by criminal gangs..... it got me thinking. A large part of Sunaks FIL's wealth was obtained by setting up Freeport's in India. Do we know much about his business dealings?

It also got me thinking about culture- and how Sunak has been raised in a culture of have and have nots, with no real belief in "levelling up" ....... anyway, I came to the conclusion that I always come to - it's going to be an increasingly shit place to live/be if you are a have not. And a few will make a fortune....

The one thing they made sure of in the "deal" is that we're out of the anti tax avoidance regulations.

Can't imagine why the Tories would want that...

Loiuse, we read exactly the same thing, and I think came to the same conclusion. I think it's wrong that a country can set up companies with £1 capital and when it goes tits up, let someone else e.g taxpayers, pick up the tab, but that's apparently OK in the UK.

I agree @GhostofFrankGrimes.

I think now is the time to turn the page and concentrate on what we can build instead. And in 10, 20 years time, once the U.K. has found it’s real place in the world, esp on world affairs/diplomacy, it might join the eu back.....
I’d rather see people concentrating on creating an ideal (like the nhs) than to live in the (grand) BRITISH past of ‘when we were in the eu....’

anyway, I came to the conclusion that I always come to - it's going to be an increasingly shit place to live/be if you are a have not. And a few will make a fortune....

I agree, but we have to recapture the spirit that some people had in the 1930s and 40s of having a vision of a better future.

davidallengreen @davidallengreen
There is some fascinating stuff in the detail of this agreement

It is not the end of Brexit - it is a truce until 2026

I also agree with @GhostofFrankGrimes - the penny never dropped, for decades, that the EU wasn't the cause of people's grievances but just a convenient "other" to be scapegoated by the manipulations of the media and the ringleaders.

Anything negative that happens because of Brexit will be waved away as due to other factors or UnBeLeaving or WouldHaveHappenedAnyway.

Anything positive that happens despite Brexit will be bigged up as a triumph of ToryBrexitannianSovereignty.

Find it remarkable that people think there will be a moment in time when the penny drops for leavers. This will not happen. There will be no collective remorse. The last 4 years have taught us that. The last 2 days have taught us that.

There was a comment (on here or on another thread?) about apathy and the above is an example of this, I agree that the penny probably won't drop for a lot of people, especially if it happens slowly. It was described as a "slow puncture" somewhere else and that sums it up.

Most people I know aren't bothered about Brexit, they think everything will be fine. Family aren't bothered as they are retired and don't have to worry about jobs or the economy and tend to have a everything is fine attitude about covid/brexit/inequality or whatever the Telegraph tells them.

@mrslaughan Unfortunately, I think Sunak will be "levelling down".

@TonMoulin and @Peregrina Yes, let's hope for a better future.