Brexit Megathread - Part 2 because it's not over by a long shot

[vera99]

Well getting to a 1000 posts didn't take too long so here we are.... everybody welcome!

@vera99

As much as I loathe Cumming's he had a key role in the vax programme he and Vallance had a cunning plan took it to Boris who wasn't that bothered about the detail but just said do it. He would have probably agreed to hang fire and wait if that had been the advice. The point being that he never drills down into the detail and gets on top of his brief so I'm not going to give him even that 'success'.

news.sky.com/story/dominic-cummings-hearing-the-inside-story-of-the-timeline-of-the-weeks-before-covid-lockdown-12317517

24 March

Patrick Vallance texts Dominic Cummings about vaccines, saying he wanted to set up a vaccine taskforce outside of the Department of Health.

Mr Cummings said, even before that, experts - people like Bill Gates - were saying that it should be possible to create vaccines to tackle COVID, but Sir Patrick is the one who came up with the idea and deserves the most credit.

Mr Cummings said the approach of the people he was talking to - to build vaccine programmes in parallel - was something the traditional Whitehall accountancy processes "couldn't cope with", because they were not used to spending billions on something that might not work.

He said the programme went on to work because it had one person with overall responsibility, Kate Bingham, who reported to the PM, not the Department of Health.

He said there was little formal discussion about whether it should go ahead in the way it was suggested, the PM - when he came back off after being ill - signed off on it in "about 90 seconds"..

It wouldn't surprise me if the taskforce idea came from John Bell.

I had to look him up could well be. Success has many parents but failure is an orphan!

www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n490

Louisecollins It is an interesting argument that brexit supporters are converned about training opportunities, pay and life chances for young people.

These are the same brexit supporters who ended Erasmus, along with the chance for young people to form alliances with our nearest neighbours. to travel, and work abroad with no restrictions.

Odd dichtomy. Or maybe it's just any old justification , as ever?

Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s former Chief of Staff on twitter:

The absolute state of David Frost trashing the deal he negotiated + hailed as a triumph - despite many, yours truly included, warning it was a dud - and worse now using it to further undermine our relationship with some of our closest friends in an increasingly dangerous world
twitter.com/GavinBarwell/status/1447947452372377608?t=nIbE0rg1OZjPXS2QH0C5qg&s=19

Adam Schwartz
Lord Frost:

"We knew that some aspects of the Protocol as it stood when they were agreed in October 2019 were problematic. We didn't particularly support them... We knew we were taking a risk... It turns out, we were right. These were risky proposals and they haven't worked". t.co/cJGYnI7CkB

Frost saying he's been proved right because his suspicion that he negotiated a terrible deal was correct, but that he was still right to approve his terrible deal.

In all my years of following politics, I've never heard a more shameless attempt to cover up someone's own failure.

I think Johnson is going to need a bigger freezer

wewereliars don't be so silly - Erasmus and the like involves people going off to foreign climes when they should be picking spuds and working down the mines/up the chimneys in Neo-Victorian Britain. Also those young people need to develop their Blitz spirit.

pointythings struggling to keep my temper to be honest.

The country has been trashed, and useful idiots still trying to pretend it's anything other than a deliberate bin fire in order to enrich a few billionaires is sending me over the edge at the moment!

I watched it all wordsmithed to perfection but a greater litany of calumny uttered by a senior government minister I have yet to hear.

Shame on you, time for the EU to show some teeth. I hope the peerage was worth his soul.

[quote vera99]I had to look him up could well be. Success has many parents but failure is an orphan!

www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n490[/quote]
I've worked with both ;)

Good enough for me doubletweenqueen ! The good guys ...... that said in a previous life I had to work in an admin sense with a lot of Professors in the Life Science arena and there was a mixed bunch with a fair proportion of misfits and pointy heads. I remember having made up name badges for a networking event and having a Prof down as Dr - he made me get it changed at pace when we were busy as hell trying to manage check-in!

Erasmus was only for Araminta and Jasper to go on a gap year funded by the taxpayer, remember? Luckily, everyone's taxes have been used entirely wisely over the last 18 months or so.
See?
Brexit is a Good Thing.

Keep up with the denial of reality at the back, there...

That Frostybollox about suspecting all along they were signing a bad international treaty but doing it anyway and now being proved right is just insane.
How can anyone take these pillocks seriously?
If he had a heavy Glaswegian accent, he'd never get away with it.

Boris in his freezer:
twitter.com/secrettory12/status/1447917575984275457?s=20

@wewereliars

Louisecollins It is an interesting argument that brexit supporters are converned about training opportunities, pay and life chances for young people.

These are the same brexit supporters who ended Erasmus, along with the chance for young people to form alliances with our nearest neighbours. to travel, and work abroad with no restrictions.

Odd dichtomy. Or maybe it's just any old justification , as ever?

For me, it's the latest 'initiative' (slogan) from the Gvmnt to try and make a positive spin out of the shortages of workers in key sectors, and The Faithful have just latched onto it like a rubber ring in rapids. Nothing more. As someone else said somewhere here (apologies, as I forget who, but thought it was astute) - why was the focus during the 'transition period' not to train and fill the skills gaps that were already apparent and likely to become worse through the upcoming deadline? Pay, conditions, training, licences - HGV etc - could have been addressed in a timely way - the issues were known? Why weren't steps taken to the visa system beforehand, so we didn't meet the current crisis? Perhaps it was happening? Perhaps Covid is solely responsible for us losing our EU workers all at once? I don't think so, but ready to allow the possibility.

I don't see how anyone can argue that allowing the country to reach crisis could be anything other than a failure of leadership. So the spin that this is a massive opportunity is rather galling.

Also - Education, training, upskilling - these aren't new concepts for the current Gvmnt to claim as their own new initiative!! What have they been doing for 11 years, and why isn't there more outrage about the lack of progress? The UK seemed to grind to a halt on June 24th, 2016.
(I am outraged, unless you couldn't tell)

Will Hutton
@williamnhutton
Professor David Card, one of the winners today of the Nobel Prize for Economics, showed how mass immigration had negligible impact on real wages - just as Bank of England studies showed the same results. Its productivity that lifts wages. The Johnson conference speech was wrong.

Phht - who is he? Nobel prize winner? Clearly he doesn't know anything - you must just go to your mate down the Pub for the answers.

"Rubber ring in rapids"

You can run but you can't hide ....

The Care sector has been hit extremely hard by covid and brexit, I wonder how leavers would like solve their worker shortages.

Two world wars one world cup let's hope that's enough ...

"The British government is escalating its border conflict with the EU to distract from its own Brexit problems. The EU can tolerate this no longer. The knottiest timber requires the sharpest wedge."

www.sueddeutsche.de/meinung/brexit-nordirland-boris-johnson-zollgrenze-1.5437354!amp

Lufthoheit

The problem with the EU doing anything, is that it will once again be used as a nice excuse. EU bullying us.

But the NI Protocol is different - the USA has a big investment in it, so I do wonder how much of this is Frost playing to the Telegraph and Mail audience at home.

I remember at the time, the murmurings that Boris's miraculous deal was actually Theresa May's deal, plus the NI Protocol that the EU wanted but she would not accept..
Boris's deal was a political fudge, or capitulation for his, and his party's benefit - and not actually in the country's interest.
It's so important to hold them to account.

@DuncinToffee

The Care sector has been hit extremely hard by covid and brexit, I wonder how leavers would like solve their worker shortages.

And now by the hikes in energy costs :(

How do we hold them to account though? Normal rules don't apply these days.