blandy

What I meant by "pure WTO terms would require a hard border to the UK" is that with Ireland having tariff free goods from the rest of the EU and being next to N.Ireland, with no border, smuggling cheaper goods into the UK would be rife. It would need a hard border, because of the higher cost of goods coming into the UK (and if the reverse were ever true, to stop illegal outflow of goods etc.). It's true that the WTO doesn't tell nations how to police their borders or what the nature of border security should be, but nevertheless the reality is that border control is necessary to comply with the trade terms, as I understand it. Ergo hard border.

That's a reading which seems at odds with circumstances. Firstly, I'm pretty sure that the GFA included dismantling the various security infrastructure (including border check etc.). Secondly, pure WTO terms would require a hard border to the UK. Also Absence from the CU and SM would require the EU to put up a hard border with the UK. Thirdly, no one on the Island of Ireland (well not no-one, but ykwIm) wants or will accept a hard border. Fourthly, as we've done to death, you cannot have control over immigration and no hard border between the UK and the EU. It has been fundamentally impossible to have both these things. So everything is loaded against having a hard border. Yet May's demands for control of immigration and the nutter hard Brexit lot desire for "just leave" must impose a hard border by its nature (the hard leave). Finally, Ireland has a veto. They do not accept a hard border. They can kill any agreement. Oh and the backstop - it's not made in London, it's an essential part of the EU protecting itself, in that if we leave the CU and SM we cannot have the benefits of them, so there needs to be something in place (which doesn't exist) to protect the integrity of the CU and SM, or N.I (or the whole UK) has to stay in them. Why anyone's making a fuss over something so blindingly obvious, and which has been since before the vote, is quite beyond comprehension.

I don’t think it is. It never should be. I’m not defending the utter tube, but I’d rather he be treated appropriately than some public court of this moments outrage. Racism is just sick, as is racist abuse, yet punishment should still fit the crime, and education should be part of that.

Pretty much this. What, 4 months ago we were going bust, Jack was leaving, We couldn’t keep JT and Sam Johnston, the owner had disappeared from view and all was bleak. We faced a year or more of dirge football and little hope. Look at us all now. Enjoying goals and games and the style and looking forwards and upward.

This thread is a bad influence

Sorry, these things have hardly featured in the "debate". I'm sure no-one has any strong views on them, from the Brexit supporting camps.

It’s worse than that OBE. American business of the renewable energy type, solar, wind, etc. was, is and would do just fine, more than fine out of a change to sustainability in energy. I read somewhere that despite Trump there’s more jobs being created in that area than in Coal and so on. So Trump is not protecting American business, that’s not really it at all. He’s protecting donations to the Republicans and expressing profound ignorance and denial about science and evidence and facts, while giving the finger to, well, pretty much everyone else.

Turns out that was bollocks, though. What they’d been doing was, amongst their ahem, normal work, they’d retweeted some tweets that were critical of Corbyn and retweeted some that were critical of the tories. Scottish paper picked up on it and neglected to mention all the ones critical of the tories. Better story, see. “Govt funded anti Corbyn shadowy org” is better news than “charity media bod a bit unwise on twitter account”.

My reading is mildly less terrible. She's just a control freak. It's not power she seeks, necessarily, for its own ends. She's just socially inept, hooked up on a flaw in her personality which wants to control everything. She's unable to understand or empathise or see the other point of view, or emote. She's small. SHe's not knowingly bad, it's just her perception is restricted and limited to a small Kentish town Conservative perspective. Wider national or world implications or angles just don't mean anything, don't register, they're outside her scope of cognition. She has a narrow sense of duty and a narrow mind and a narrow experience.

Ok, so you asked a question "if it would be a bigger disaster than this deal". I took the question to be sort of perhaps implying you might not think it would be a bigger disaster. You mentioned reasoning. So what's yours, T? What makes the slant of the question sort of suggest you wonder if no deal might be less bad?

Possibly, but her whole time as HS and her deepest of red lines has been about "them coming' over 'ere" - she's an ideological small minded, home counties type of little Englander, obsessed with immigrants and immigration. SHe's also way beyond her level of capability, like Corbyn is.

mos' def it would be a bigger disaster than this "deal". It's the whole nub of it really. What we get now is we pay less than 1% of the national budget into the EU. For that we get the whole trade gubbins - al the trade with the other EU nations, the trade with the RotW (much of) which the EU has negotiated deals for, we get the medicine, aviation, free movement of people and capital, we get the financial sector selling big into yurp, we get the mobile phone roaming, the nuclear the environmental...the workers rights...loads of stuff. No deal we get...nothing. Nothing at all, save for not paying the less than 1% of our national budget. We lose our ease of travel, our medicine (X-ray materials etc.) we've already lost Galileo, some EU bodies have moved out of London, the NHS is much more desperately short of nurses and doctors, Russia, the US, Aus NZ etc, have already objected formally to proposed WTO membership for the UK (on a continued split of the share we have with the EU). It's an absolute clusterpork if we have "no deal". No sane observer thinks or believes any different. Look at the detail. It might keep the Blue passport and no brown people mob happy until they end up being on the receiving end of the shitty stick, but for civilisation, just no... I don't like a lot of the EU and the way it works, but practicalities are what they are. May's deal is worse than what we have now. Hard brexit is worse, much worse, than May's deal. Remaining in is scuffy, a bit humiliating and not massively palatable, but it's easily the leat bad option. This last 2 years has exposed the utter incompetence and inadequacy of the Tories and Labour, the huge gaping flaws in our system, but also how unpleasant the EU rulership also is. No one wins out of any of it, but no deal and hard Brexit is for Johnson's vanity, the bank balances of some tory toffs, the temporary delight of some utter shitclowns like IDS and Redwood and it's a menace for everyone else.

It's not a stall you need for your Unicorn - it's a strong stable, surely?

Might as well add to the steaming pile of tory excrement by picking a new head dung beetle to be king or queen of the turds. I mean WTAF!

It will be seen as that by many people, because they were promised x,y and z and they haven't been given it. Instead they will be told that essentially they can't have what theywere promised and not only that, but also there's going to be another ref that will potentially remove any trace of possibility they will ever get their promised utopia. We might look at it differently, but thats how many will see it This wbole thing has been portrayed as black and white, when neither black nor white has been remotely possible or satisfactory. Ultimately the whole thing has been a clusterpork by the combined political and associated cast.

It is it's the album that I scored highest on my iTunes rating system, every track got 5 stars. Might be worth checking out Clarice Jensen - For This From That Will Be Filled which goes a step further down the route taken.

@Chindie on fire!

It's bang out of order. They're broadly right about Corbyn and Milne etc. but that's beside the point. Channelling taxpayers money to this "charity" which then used (some of) it to critique the (dreadful) opposition party leader and his aide is utterly discreditable. There ought to be some serious flak about it, and in normal times the junior minister or whoever responsible for that area should have to resign. Corbyn's a lamentable arse, but this sort of thing should be stopped and an example made.

He didn’t state that. He stated that much of it wasn’t. It’s not the same thing. It matters because it’s like if you did a dossier that said I’d done 4 murders and then someone was able to corroborate only a quarter of what your dossier alleged, it still corroborates that I’m a murderer. Further, the nature of significant parts of intelligence material is always likely to be difficult to corroborate. This means a degree of scepticism has to be applied, absolutely and that efforts should be made to gain further evidence in that direction and so on. This is what the FBI and Mueller are doing. It is certain that some of the dossier contrywill not be possibly to corroborate, likely that some is false and equally highly probable that significant parts are true. We already know some of it has been verified and used. In a way it’s analogous to “project fear”. All those government reports etc. Some will be already shown to be accurate, some appear fanciful, some close enough as makes no difference. There back on topic!

No offence or cheap shot was intended. I mean it genuinely. Sorry. They can indeed join the dots themselves.

I’m not big on US politics, but two things strike me about that contribution. Firstly it’s partisan to Republicans and Trump and secondly when it says much of the dossier want corroborated by the FBI, that’s potentially missing the point completely. If some of it was corroborated that may have been sufficient for the system to agree to further action. Without going completely OT, enough of it has since been found correct to be of real alarm.

We seem to be at cross purposes Dave. I’m talking about not the end of last season, but the one before when we finished mid table. I’m no Bruce fan at all, but I think at the end of 16/17 he just about squeaked enough credit to earn another 12 months. Though I remember being at Blackburn for the last game of that season and kind of re-affirming my view that, no, this bloke is a bad fit for Villa. Yet at the time the evidence and arguments to support my view were less clear than they were after we lost the play off final to Fulham. Still, like I said it’s sll fine lines.

I get where you’re coming from, in that he’s a better manager for Villa than Bruce was ever going to be. I never wanted Steve Bruce as manager...but... The thing with me is that unless things are disastrous managers have to be given time. 12 months ago I wouldn’t have been at all sad to see Bruce go, because I’ve never rated him and don’t like his football outlook, yet given the mess he inherited the extra season was just about deserved. I remember saying to @TRO that he wouldn’t take us up, but I was almost wrong, and that’s the thing - it is fine lines and managers deserve a decent opportunity to show their worth. The better owners can’t be changing manager every year. The same applies to Dean Smith, if he has a bad spell, as he will, the owners have to give him a chance to recover things. Regular upheaval is the enemy of progress. Give managers time, really is my message. Let’s be positive and say that Deano took over at nigh on the perfect time with the perfect board and that wouldn’t have been the case 12 months ago.

Not that radical. The sort of thing Trump might say about reporting re Mueller, perhaps? As we know, press (media) reporting has to walk a line between reporting things which for which there is evidence and asserting what that evidence means. SO for example, Farage was caught visiting Assange is a fact. Farage is/was a "mixer" with Trump and the two appeared to be "on the same page" on aspects of politics. A paper might leave it to the reader to join the dots as to whether Farage is/was a conduit between Assange and Trump. Now the Guardian (say) doesn't much like (hates?) Farage and his ilk (with good reason). Just because the subject of some "connections" is someone who might be popular with twitterers or momentum or whoever, doesn't suddenly mean that it's a hatchet job (or that it isn't). cry of "Fake News" about CC's twits on Seamus and Corbyn just seems to me like...well, "it's covering someone(s) we think are great, so it can't be true, it must be a MSM set up". Aside from this particular little aspect, and to stay on topic, CC has uncovered all kinds of links and shenanigans about Brexit funding, Russia, Facebook, Cambridge analytica etc. As people have commented, it's hard to follow, and I'm sure she's made mistakes in some of her direction, looking for more, but I think the general responses from the Brexiteers like Aaron Banks, Andrew Neill, Farage and so on suggest she's got to them, when they thought they'd be clear. Now she's followed a line of enquiry/investigation that wavers towards maybe some in Corbyn's camp, it's a bit much to pull up our skirts and jump on a chair in horror and alarm. The left of Milne and Corbyn are every bit as manipulative as Farage and Banks. The ideology is different, and arguably less malign, but the (some) methods are universal across all politics. My perception is Corbyn and Milne etc. are every bit as susceptible to being manipulated by Russia as are Banks and Trump and Farage. Different weak points, but ultimately same result. Whether it's "Spot of Presidential power interest you, at all?" or "oodles of mining cash any interest?" or whatever, there's always a weak point, particularly with ideologues. Caveat. I have no idea if CC is dizzy on recent accolades and going off on one, or if she's found something else worth picking at, but I just see the responses from supporters of Corbyn on Twitter as exactly what you'd sadly expect and just mirrors of the Trumpites in America.