Brexit mega thread : part 9 : Winter is Coming

[Chevyimpala67]

Part 10 of our long running thread.

Not sure what to say, really, other than it is worse than I feared.

Strap in, folks. It's gonna be a rough ride...

Tories can't pin it to Labour after Johnson's campaign on "Get Brexit Done."

However I can see a rapid reverse ferret once they are out of power.

They can & if it suits them, they will... they have pinned the 3 day week on Labour and the GFC... in this regard, the Tories are a lot cleverer/devious/ruthless than Labour, Starmer wouldn't blame that poor womans death in Plymouth on Sunak.. you can bet your life, Sunak would have blamed Starmer if positions reversed... and what about the other 500 per week who die waiting?

I notice the BBC is now focusing on Wales and the NHS, R4 this morning was very probing into Welsh NHS failures under a "Labour Government in that country that has been in since 1999" ... you couldn't make it...

State Broadcaster? Absolutely.

I ve read plenty of posters say Brexit it was a failure of Parliament, all parties supported it and voted for the referendum.... that the Tories were just a small part of it.... the "Get Brexit Done" campaign was after the event and even Schapps air brushed out Bojo, with little comment.

Tell a lie enough times and it becomes the Truth.

With Keir Starmer saying it is Labour policy not to seek to rejoin the single market, and that rejoining would not boost the UK economy, the Tories need do nothing except repeat his words.

Hilary Benn on twitter asking about the latest "levelling up" grants;

wondering why the Prime Minister’s constituency – only the 450th most deprived in the whole country - has got £19m while Leeds Central – the 18th most deprived – has received not a penny for the second time in a row?

I think Rishi told us all about that last year...

This is interesting.

Landmark Ruling in Strasbourg as MPs Challenge UK Government over Failure to Investigate Russian Interference in Brexit

If you want to know how the levellling up grants were divvied up summary information about the process used is publically available. No doubt whatever that Benn knows this. For one thing, they've apparently made 6 bids when the published process appears to say that only 1 bid per area (the highest scoring against the criteria) would be successful.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/levelling-up-fund-round-2-application-guidance

Just because the guidance is publicly available that does not mean that the process is fair and genuinely aimed at the areas where deprivation is highest.

After all, Sunak is already on record saying that he wants to take money away from the poorest areas to give to the richest...

Also

no conversation about the £2bn round 2 of the levelling-up fund should ignore the cut in annual government funding to councils from £41bn to £26bn since 2010
twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1615968158363406336?t=UpoM-N6jyRi3yFVS4Vl0wA&s=19

And let’s not mention EU funding.

This looks entirely fair and even handed...

£45m to Kent CC to “improve the flow of traffic from the UK to the EU” + more border control points & new exit route to ease congestion.

It's like the Morecambe Eden project, just in the shape of a Lorry park

Re the map and I can't believe I'm saying this it looks even worse because the Conservative constituencies tend to be rural so are much bigger geographically, whereas the red (Labour) ones look tiny in contrast because they're urban.

It's not 'levelling up' it's 'rationing', with the rations being doled out by spivs.

I won't say this in the Tories defence because I think the current lot are a bunch of crooks, but there is a lot of poverty in rural areas. They particularly suffer from transport problems for example, which is just not the same in cities. However nice, attractive scenery doesn't put food on the table.

Has anyone mapped the distribution of the 'levelling up' fund to Tory marginals?

@Peregrina, this from The Guardian today:
A Guardian analysis found that Conservative marginal seats, those with majorities of fewer than 8,000 votes, have received 1.5 times the amount of funding per person than all other constituencies under the £4bn budget – £76 a head compared with £53 a head.

Colour me shocked.

For anyone who hasn't yet seen it, Laura Kuenssberg Translator from twitter is doing a rather amusing blog now;

Inflation now so bad that 30p Lee has been renamed as 42p Lee...

"“I managed to start changing the funding formulas to make sure areas like this are getting the funding they deserved. We inherited a bunch of formulas from Labour that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas and that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that.”

Only 22% think there doesn't need to be an independent inquiry into the impact of Brexit.

@verdantverdure - I wasn't commenting on the rights and wrongs of those constituencies getting the grants even though it really does look like pork barrel politics - it was just that it looks even worse because the Conservative rural constituencies cover a larger geographical area.

Agreed. It looks bad by almost every metric I've seen applied to it.

Only 15 years

www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/22/uk-will-be-15-years-late-in-hitting-1tn-annual-export-target-figures-show
Ministers have been accused of leaving a “record of failure and broken promises” as internal forecasts show Britain will be 15 years late in achieving its £1tn annual export target after being hit by Brexit.

Only 15 years

That's an improvement on JRM's 50 years (or was is 100?). Which potentially allows Leavers* to spin this as Grate News.

*A very rare species these days

I suspect the Labour strategy is slowly becoming to win votes by claiming they can "fix" Brexit, rather than actually fix it (by reversing it).

Duplicity is not a Tory monopoly

Farming Today - more (self inflicted) fishing woes

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hf8q