Westminstenders: Disaster Capitalism.

[RedToothBrush]

An 'interesting' week. To say the least.

It has highlighted the purpose, point and weaknesses of the EU. It has revealled that the Irish Border is an ongoing issue which can not be ignored. Not only is it causing shortages in NI but it also reminds us that a zero covid strategy for the UK can not be managed unilaterally; we are not New Zealand.

It shows up the changing geo-politics of leaving. We have applied to join the Asia-Pacific free trade pact just a day after Macron told us to chose out allies and reminded us that geography and history have always tied our fate to France.

The epic fuck up of the EU has lead a rallying cry of support for leaving... but covid is currently hiding much of the reality of the implications of Brexit which will yet come out in the wash.

Brexit and Covid are tied together as conjoined twins of economic disaster though. Once restrictions start to lift, the shit will start to hit the fan. The efforts on where to aportion blame will start but it won't be on Brexit. We've known this for some time. Brexit no longer is relevant. Except of course it is. But who is writing the winner's narrative? Things are as they have always been. There is no squirrel. The squirrel is thinking that Brexit and Covid are separate things when those in charge don't.

In terms of the vaccine suggest, I think its worth reflecting on why it was successful. Johnson played the vaccine procurement like a gambler, who bet on all the horses in order to ensure we got a winner. Throwing the kitchen sink at a problem which shut the entire economy down was always the safe option. Especially when it was also a pretty certain bet that there would be unequal rollout and a shortage when one was found. If you think about it in those terms, it easier to see how this has been a success for the government: if only one vaccine was successful, we'd be grateful we'd invested in so many options. If all the vaccines came in good we'd end up in a good place. It was a win:win strategy, and one that was not that hard to do. We now find that whilst we were cutting the International Aid Budget we were also working on soft power that excess vaccine stocks and production capability bring... I note here its actually much harder to pull off successfully if you are considerably larger like the EU because of the sheer numbers involved - the dynamics always favoured the UK and I think this probably was something the UK was aware of and was worked into strategic planning. Other things will be much harder to get such easy political wins on - not least because they still involve the economics of geography and that being smaller is typically a weakness not a strength in trading - vaccines and supply shortages are the ultimate exception not the rule. The rule is proven by the EU's politicking and the threat of a vaccine trade war.

Thus the Tory Party have seen Brexit and Covid as being intrinsically linked for some time. I don't think everyone else has quite managed to wrap their head around the fact that its near impossible at this stage to disentangle to two because of this mentality.

This current batch of Tories are disaster capitalists after all, and the twin of Brexit and Covid is a gift to their ambition.

I'll just remind you what the goal really is here. Remember Johnson's speech at the Tory Party Conference in October:
www.conservatives.com/news/boris-johnson-read-the-prime-ministers-keynote-speech-in-full

We have been through too much frustration and hardship just to settle for the status quo ante – to think that life can go on as it was before the plague; and it will not. Because history teaches us that events of this magnitude – wars, famines, plagues; events that affect the vast bulk of humanity, as this virus has – they do not just come and go.

They are more often than not the trigger for an acceleration of social and economic change, because we human beings will not simply content ourselves with a repair job.

He is fully signed up to the Cummings/Gove school of thought of burn it down and rebuild afresh.

The idea that he cares about sorting out and repairing the problems Brexit brings, miss the ultimate point: He doesn't want to.

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I remember being very proud of my pepper grinder in 1982. Some people I knew thought it a newfangled, possibly dangerous device.

My mum was unusual in cooking with garlic back in to the early 70s. And tagliatelle was called noodles

Elbow macaroni came in a cardboard box.
happy days

Thanks LQ and DGRossetti. Aldi is looking slightly less abundant in the fresh section and there are some missing items in other sections. They seem to have lots more of certain items like bananas, masking gaps? Some of the other missing items have reappeared. Is it just me or are some of the fruit and vegetables not quite as fresh as normal?

I've checked Sainsburys online and it has some quite random missing items, more than normal. Since March it has some out of stock every time, some that disappear when you update the basket and some that don't turn up on delivery day.

Portugal Vineyards are delivering to UK again, with hefty extra fees. There is an extra £9 charge for paperwork, more expensive shipping, excise duties of £2/3 for wine and up to £8 for spirits per bottle, and minimum £11 charge for DHL to collect the VAT. The sparkling wine I ordered in November has gone from £6 to £10 per bottle including shipping and now fees.

A train journey between Serbia and Hungary is quite the experience. The 'smuggling' is something else. Whole carriages of stuff and notes in passports passed to border control...

The government will use DARVO for as long as possible over Brexit difficulties, as dealing with it would mean admitting they fucked up. Who cares if a few industries go bust? Blue passports and extra jollops of corruption all round!

It's only going to get better with a change of administration. By which point, it will be too late.

Isn't it amazing how the true BeLeavers are now using the rapid vaccine roll out in the UK compared with EU countries as the reason confirming why they voted Leave. Talk about rewriting history. I am 100% sure there was no covid back in 2016 and just over a year ago the excitement was around Bongs for Brexit.

I haven't noticed too many shortages in supermarkets around here (SW London/Surrey), but what I have noticed is the sell by dates. Like many, I suspect, I'm trying to do larger shops less often, but I have to choose carefully, as so much has only two days to go, and very little has more than a week.

And that's ignoring the prices...

These threads have gone very quiet
for the utterly valid reason of
I told you so
Nothing that is happening was not predicted
so we just need to sit tight and observe and record
so that when the worm turns we can say
we told you so

sell by dates

Same here. What's interesting is how some fruit now has no sell by date at all. Just like the poof, gone. Now I used to think that some of the sell by dates were ridiculously early for fruit like apples, but now to have no date? Interesting what we are already getting habituated into...

Also, a friend's DP was coming from France into the U.K. and was questioned x20min about where he lived, what he was doing in the UK etc and all this on a British passport. Why? Seems unnecessary. He said no more than the usual 2 staff and it took a long time for everyone to be processed. When he went back into France on his Irish passport he was waived straight through. Depressing to think we've lost all that.

It’s quite unnerving how things are changing little by little (almost by stealth) and we’re going back in time. I wonder how much people take for granted that over the past couple of decades food has been relatively cheap and always easy to get hold of, whatever the season, and safe to eat with clear sell by dates. It’s likely to continue in this direction, deathly 1000 cuts and all that.

*death by

Anyone catch the brief thread (That I reported . Cookie from MNHQ ) suggesting that anyone who campaigned for the Peoples vote should be ritually disembowelled barred from office ever again ?

Obviously trolling, but the brief list of replies were pretty much on the nose about the desperation of the side that won to deflect from what they actually won. Some wool free eyes there.

On a slightly different note, following Goves demands to the EU. I hope they reply back asking him for clarification about what exactly seems to be the problem, as from the reports they are receiving from the UK press Brexit has been a soaraway success. And then rinse and repeat. Every time make the UK state - publicly - what's going wrong.

Bearing in mind Sir David Frost still wants to extract a lot from the EU side and the UK hasn't much left to offer.

sell by dates
are solely for supermarket stock control and don't say much (if anything) bout freshness of the product. there was/is critisism that 'sell by' dates lead to confusion and food waste.

only 'use by' (perishable items) and best before are mandated.

I wonder how much people take for granted that over the past couple of decades food has been relatively cheap and always easy to get hold of,....

Rees-Mogg has been bleating on about how trade deals with the USA will allow cheap food, which until now has been a bit of a nonsense because our food is cheap, but now you can see why - hormone feed beef and chlorine washed chicken, here we come. Decent food standards are something we have worked hard for - if you are old enough you will remember how Edwina Curry, in Major's Government, was vilified for saying that all eggs were contaminated with salmonella, but it turned out she wasn't far wrong and the egg industry eventually cleaned up its act.

Ditto decent labour standards although they are already going by the board.

In his piece quoted earlier Philip Hammond said how the ultra - right wing had a choice between the options of Brussels or New Jersey and they preferred New Jersey, i.e a country where if you are a white (Protestant) Male things are pretty good for you because you have money but black, latino, female less so.

suggesting that anyone who campaigned for the Peoples vote should be ritually disembowelled barred from office ever again

Damn, I missed that! Would have been entertaining

Bearing in mind Sir David Frost still wants to extract a lot from the EU side and the UK hasn't much left to offer.

In days of yore they’d start a war. I bet there are those in the Conservative party who would consider it a sensible option. Boris’ Falklands moment! We could arm all the redundant lobster boats and attack Calais.

We've talked on these threads before about the entirely foreseeable impact on the movement of horses.

Here's a Brexit voting show jumper expressing buyer's remorse.

I can't read the whole article but you get the gist from the intro.

https://www.horseandhound.co.uk/plus/opinion/william-funnell-travelling-horses-brexit-736727?fbclid=IwAR139ESiZ6cywRB9ztZWIN4iGB7fkB0Y1fflhMzvs2d0FMIlXzXYLeNw8Mc

Of course, if the ultra right wing hadn't ruled out staying in the single market and customs union, and totally ruled out anything to do with the ECJ - we would have had an EEA type arrangement which would have been good enough for the majority and would not have caused these problems. Except that we'd have no say in making the rules.

We won't have any say in making the rules when they get their trade deal with the USA either.

For the H&H article, if you put the headline into a search engine, you should be able to see the whole thing on one of the press readers. I managed to find a copy of the mag as a scan.

A very interesting (long) article from Time is linked to on the Biden page about the informal alliance that grew up after Biden’s win between left-wing activists, business titans, unions, and a wide range of progressives to protect the democratic process. time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ Well worth a read. Why couldn't we do that ...

@DrBlackbird

Also, a friend's DP was coming from France into the U.K. and was questioned x20min about where he lived, what he was doing in the UK etc and all this on a British passport.

I'm reluctant to give the leavers an "out" but a lot of people are getting a harder look at at the moment by "Border" and some of it time may well be down to them at last exercising some diligence when it comes to examining paperwork and making sure people aren't sidestepping some Covid restrictions, e.g. by arriving from countries on the UK red list via an indirect route.

Problem is this then generates long queues, which get photographed, which then get into the MSM and feeds the nonsense about massive numbers of people still entering the UK when in reality it's a trickle compared with pre-Covid numbers.

Hannibals - I had noticed the use by day - after getting caught out a couple of times.
Did anyone see the photo on Twitter on Twitter of a supermarket that has put in a display of potatoes?(to fill shelves that would otherwise be empty)

I just also read a Nick tolhurst thread about just how screwed shelfishermen are going to be......and what happened (EU wrote to the industry bodies mid December- but they believed the uk govt instead) - I mean we discussed on here , but the reality of them wiping out an entire industry is........I am not quite sure I have a word for it.....