The now-enacted will of (some of) the people

[HanoiVillan]

Another hack pretends to be astonished that the face-ripping leopard he delicately nurtured is now running amok, ripping people's faces off:

 

[bickster]

1 hour ago, darrenm said:

You could probably say that Jeremy Corbyn chose his shadow cabinet very well indeed.

You could also say he didn't have much choice

[peterms]

On 07/09/2017 at 09:50, chrisp65 said:

Newsnight last night said that they knew of six other drafts that already supersede that version. Now, admittedly they might only be correcting spelling errors. But clearly this is ‘draft’ in the true sense of the word. Yes, probably handy as a test the water thing, probably useful to put some extreme stuff in there and row back in later versions. But you really can’t kick someone too hard for a leak of an out of date never published document that’s already been through six further updates.
The document apparently still includes mention of foreign workers needing to submit fingerprints. Again, according to Newsnight, that absolutely is not going to happen and is also due to be removed from the document on the seventh re write. 
 

I suspect it was not so much a planned testing of the water, but rather a rushed piece of work produced by a more junior member of staff than would normally be involved, with inadequate checking by more experienced people, leaked by an opponent.

We have been told many times that there aren't enough staff to deal with all the things that have to be done, that they are fighting on too many fronts at once, and that people are being overwhelmed.

In that scenario, a great many things will be done badly.  Some mistakes will be retrieved, others won't.

Working in those conditions will be stressful and demoralising, and some people will get out, leading to a further loss of experience and knowledge which is not easily replaced, creating a further downward spiral.

It's what's been happening to teachers, health workers and others.  It's foolish, dangerous, and destructive to create such a situation.  It's allowing events to dictate what happens, letting yourself be caught up in the maelstrom instead of trying to manage things.

Take back control, my arse.  Shut yourself in a barrel and roll into the sea, more like.

[peterms]

Boyle on Brexit

"David Davis, a Chief Negotiator who looks like he’d end up paying full price on a DFS sofa, "

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When I was a kid, Bank Holiday schedules leant heavily on the disaster movie. While today’s children snuggle up in front of stories of talking animals and plucky mermaids, we were left to make sense of hordes of screaming people being boiled alive or crushed by masonry as a result of arrogant cruise liner Captains and careless architects. And these were not like today’s disaster movies. It wasn’t an excuse for CGI tsunamis and meteor strikes, and we weren’t really hoping that the people would all survive. Indeed, the appeal was sort of that a group of people with pronounced character flaws would get the brutal death they so richly deserved, and the viewing experience was largely one of speculating about the order.

Which brings us to Brexit. Who could be a more fitting choice to pilot this listing ship into shark infested waters than Theresa May? The Tories say “no deal” is better than a “bad deal”, and perhaps the same is also true of prime ministers. Aloof, vindictive, having lost the support of her crew and passengers, she’ll be gone by the first ad break. David Davis, a Chief Negotiator who looks like he’d end up paying full price on a DFS sofa, is another classic piece of casting; exactly the sort of scoffing, joshing presence that we can tolerate in a storyline because his awfulness makes it all the sweeter when steam from a burst pipe blasts him screaming into his constituent molecules.

And then there’s the passengers. I think there’s a mistaken belief that Brexit supporters are naive and have been totally misled. To engage with them, it’s important to understand that they are reasonably clear about what they want, and what getting it might entail. In some ways, austerity may have trained people for Brexit. Hard to threaten people with low growth when that’s all they can remember. I think most Brexit voters understand that it will make travel much harder and don’t care. Just a casual observation based on the few Brexit voters I’ve met, but generally it seems like their xenophobia is stronger than their desire to trace Lord Byron’s footsteps to the Temple of Poseidon. We won’t get free healthcare in Europe. I imagine Bulgarian families are rejoicing that they can take their children to A&E without having to shield them from a scouser getting a stranger’s tongue piercing removed from their foreskin.

Brexit has managed to get immigration down and exports up, admittedly by making the pound worthless. Unemployment is falling, as the amount of vacancies for hate crime advisors soar. Immigration was always going to go down after a Brexit vote: in much the same way that if you wanted to have fewer visitors you’d fill your front lawn with gnomes holding union jacks and a frothing bulldog. Perhaps this is a natural endpoint of individualism. With a philosophy where people are told that is their sense of self that is important, why wouldn’t they distrust experts, why wouldn’t they look inside themselves for guidance? When we look inside ourselves we tend to find not ideologies, but neuroses. Many people in Britain lately seem to have looked into their hearts and found little more than a dislike of hearing a conversation in another language, a hatred of women, and a gnawing fear that they’re being taken for a mug.

Do you remember during the Edward Snowden revelations when the Head of the Cabinet Office went round to the Guardian’s offices and wanted them to smash their hard drives with a hammer? Because he didn’t really understand what data was. Similarly, we might not have a modern understanding of what sovereignty is. Perhaps a modern concept of sovereignty might involve owning the property in your capital city, or your own railway system. At the moment Britain is in a strange position where we seem to be sanguine about foreigners owning our infrastructure, we just don’t want them picking our fruit.

The EU is flawed and problematic, and all those other words we use when we can’t be bothered explaining what is wrong. For a start, it’s deeply racist, and pretty much stops where the tan line becomes permanent. In fact, even that observation rests on the racist idea that EU countries are white monocultures. Fretting about our freedom of movement while thousands of people drown in the Mediterranean is racist. The rise of Brexit sentiment isn’t the rise of racism: to me it seems to be the swapping of a patrician, structural racism for a more volatile and demotic one. The pre-structural racism of a hideous new society.
Of course, disaster movies were also marked out by moments of unexpected nobility, and sacrifice. So maybe this isn’t a very good metaphor after all. Maybe Brexit is just a little scene in a totally different disaster movie. I suppose it might be more like a brief cutaway to someone angrily trying to fish something out of a toaster with a knife, just before they disappear in the incendiary light of a nuclear explosion.

5

 

[magnkarl]

Two grown men had a brawl in my local last night due to Brexit. One a staunch tory supporter and the other a liberal democrat. It started with the lib dem calling David Davis the biggest idiot he'd seen since Brown and continued when the tory threw his drink in the other guy's face. The police arrived and told them to both to run for a political position instead of hassling the locals and while being pulled out of the door one of them shouted "WE'RE GOING OVER THE CLIFF, I TELL YOU!!". An entertaining Friday night in Winchester. Safe to say they were both trollied and probably best mates.

[snowychap]

I see Mr Davis is on the offensive, today, by way of a Torygraph article that's mostly behind their 'premium' paywall so this is all I can read:

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"Empty vessels make the most noise”, the saying goes. And one thing’s for sure — this week has been a noisy one.

Accusations of a power grab have flown around Westminster as the Repeal Bill entered its Second Reading. And fantastical conspiracies about “watering down” workers’ rights, and health and safety legislation, led to heated debates over the airwaves.

Those vacuous charges – made by opposition members who should know better – do not reflect the realities that underpin the Government’s concerted effort to prepare the country for the day we leave the EU. Because without this Bill the country’s statute book simply would not work after Brexit – causing chaos for businesses, consumers and investors right across the UK. By converting EU law into UK law, wherever practical, at the point we leave...

Alternatively, we could appreciate that there has been plenty of interest about the Bill and plenty of stuff written and spoken about it which couldn't and shouldn't be simply written off as partisan, vacuous, empty noise by the Minister who is supposed to be in charge of the department with the responsibility for Exiting the EU.

Here's another piece by Mark Elliott (this time with Stephen Tierney) on the Lords Constitution Committee's interim report (long so only the opening two paras and the conclusion posted):

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In March 2017, in anticipation of what was then colloquially known as the “Great Repeal Bill”, the House of Lords Constitution Committee took the unusual step of issuing a report on the issues likely to be raised by that legislation. The Committee has now taken the equally unusual step of issuing an interim report on the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill itself prior to the commencement of its passage through the House of Lords. A longer report, which will be preceded by an inquiry, will follow. In remarks announcing the publication of the Committee’s interim report, its Chair, Baroness Taylor of Bolton, drew attention to the fact that the Committee is “disappointed that we have not only been misquoted by the government” — the explanatory documents accompanying the Bill made highly selective reference to the Committee’s March 2017 report — “but that our key recommendations have been ignored”.

In its newly published interim report, the Committee observes that the Bill “raises a series of profound, wide-ranging and interlocking constitutional concerns” that fall into three principal categories: namely, the rule of law and legal certainty; the relationship between Parliament and the executive; and the stability of the UK’s territorial constitution. In this way, the Bill implicates a network of fundamental constitutional principles; as the Committee puts it, “it is difficult to think of areas of constitutional concern that are not deeply engaged by the Bill”. In this post, we outline the Committee’s key points in these three areas and comment on some of the principal issues arising from the report.

...

Concluding remarks

It is difficult to overstate the constitutional importance of the EU (Withdrawal) Bill. For all that it is presented by some as mechanical device that will “cut and paste” EU law so as to make it part of domestic law, and for all that it is regarded by others as a purely technical measure that enables dull but necessary behind-the-scenes legal rewiring to be accomplished, it is, in fact, one of the most constitutionally significant pieces of legislation to come before Parliament in several decades. And, just as it is hard to exaggerate the constitutional import of the Bill, it is difficult to overestimate the constitutional concerns to which it gives rise. In its report, the Committee concludes that the Bill “is highly complex and convoluted in its drafting and structure”, that it is “drafted in a way that renders scrutiny very difficult”, and that “multiple and fundamental constitutional questions are left unanswered” by it.

The Committee will return to those questions when it conducts its forthcoming inquiry on the Bill. But, for the time being, the Committee’s interim report serves as an important warning that the Bill, as presently drafted, is deeply flawed, and that it risks bequeathing a post-exit legal system that affronts both the rule of law and the separation of powers. As the Bill now begins its passage through Parliament in earnest, it will be for MPs and peers to decide whether fundamental constitutional principle ought to be sacrificed on the altar of Brexit. This is not, of course, to suggest that Brexit cannot be accomplished in a constitutionally satisfactory manner; but if that objective is to be secured, the Bill will need to be the subject of radical surgery as it progresses through Parliament.

 

Edited September 10, 2017 by snowychap

[blandy]

3 hours ago, Tory idiot said:

Brexit – causing chaos for businesses, consumers and investors right across the UK

He got that bit right

 

[Jon]

On 09/09/2017 at 13:51, magnkarl said:

Two grown men had a brawl in my local last night due to Brexit. One a staunch tory supporter 

It was you, wasn't it .... 

[wazzap24]

On 09/09/2017 at 13:51, magnkarl said:

Two grown men had a brawl in my local last night due to Brexit. One a staunch tory supporter and the other a liberal democrat. It started with the lib dem calling David Davis the biggest idiot he'd seen since Brown and continued when the tory threw his drink in the other guy's face. The police arrived and told them to both to run for a political position instead of hassling the locals and while being pulled out of the door one of them shouted "WE'RE GOING OVER THE CLIFF, I TELL YOU!!". An entertaining Friday night in the Winchester. Safe to say they were both trollied and probably best mates.

 

[Xann]

Who made TTIP toxic for Europe?

Why our very own Tories, of course.

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The Government is using Brexit to take control away from citizens and give it to corporations

We will lose our rights, if the Government gets its way, to sue for compensation in court when they act illegally and infringe our rights at work, or our right to a clean and healthy environment

The government promised they would take back control after Brexit, but not from us.

To listen to David Davis you would think that the Great Repeal Bill was nothing more than a tedious administrative errand. His rhetoric suggests that despite the name, it will repeal nothing. It is simply something we need to do in order to translate EU law into UK law in time for Brexit. Nothing else will change. Those who disagree are just trying to cause trouble and frustrate the outcome of the EU referendum.

The Great Repeal Bill will start to be debated in early September. But leaks already show that Davis is wrong – fundamental rights and powers that ordinary citizens currently enjoy will be scrapped.

This week we have discovered, for instance, that British citizens will no longer be able to sue the government for breaking the law. We will lose our rights, if the government gets its way, to sue for compensation in court when the government acts illegally and infringes our rights at work, or our right to a clean and healthy environment.

Currently, a European ruling means an individual can seek damages if the government has failed to properly implement the law. But the government says that no similar domestic law exists, so there will be no legal mechanism to get such redress in future.

There will be plenty more where this comes from. The Great Repeal Bill, after all, awards our government powers that no modern government has enjoyed in peacetime. And far from simply changing the words “European Union” into “United Kingdom”, ministers will gain the ability to make radical changes to fundamental human rights and environmental protections that simply don’t make sense when taken out of an EU context.

As if this weren’t bad enough, Trade Secretary Liam Fox is touring the planet looking for unsavoury regimes we can sign deregulatory trade deals with. And at the heart of those trade deals, in all likelihood, will be special “corporate courts” that allow foreign businesses the power to sue governments for regulations they judge to be “unfair”.

That’s right – as British citizens lose their ability to hold the government to account in court, foreign multinationals will gain rights to sue the government in secret arbitration panels for passing a regulation or standard that those corporations believe will damage their profits.

We know this because these “courts”, formally known as Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), already exist in hundreds of investment deals in which countries all over the world have been secretly sued for such radical actions as putting cigarettes in plain packaging, placing a moratorium on fracking, removing toxic chemicals from petrol. No appeal is allowed. And we know that the British government has been one of the most vociferous in the world in putting the case for such courts.

 

Independent

 

[snowychap]

 

[peterms]

 

[Chindie]

Vote on the Repeal Bill tonight I believe.

Time to see how many of our MPs actually possess a brain and a spine attached to it. Because that Bill is evil, anti-democratic, something straight out of the tinpot dictator playbook. But they'll vote for it because they're simpering idiots who fear their seats and being decried as against the people's will, when that isn't the point.

[HanoiVillan]

I know there's absolutely more serious stuff going on tonight, but this series of tweets is awesome:

Some of the most shocking and/or entertaining in the series:

Since it's maybe slightly harsh to make fun of people at their very lowest moment, I made one of what my wife insists is the dumbest thing I've said as well:

 

[snowychap]

I see the BBC allowed the government a 3 minute unofficial political broadcast today by allowing that twerp Fallon on to be 'interviewed' (i.e. set up to give a prepared load of old crap about 'last night's great result' and a supposed 'mandate').

 

 

[Jon]

On ‎12‎/‎09‎/‎2017 at 07:55, snowychap said:

I see the BBC allowed the government a 3 minute unofficial political broadcast today

 

Quelle surprise.

[choffer]

[magnkarl]

Juncker's speech today was interesting. I'm not sure how aware he is of pissing off countries like Sweden, Poland, Denmark and Hungary. 

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...by calling for all EU states to adopt the euro and offering technical and financial help for countries that need it. With non-euro Britain leaving in 2019, only eight states accounting for 15 percent of EU GDP will be outside the euro zone. However, the likes of Poland and Sweden are wary politically of being drawn into the single currency.

He also wants all states to join the banking union which is quite ironic as back in the day he voted against this as the Luxembourg PM when he was fleecing other states with his tax haven.

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Juncker also wants all states to join the European Banking Union, making bank supervision common across the bloc and more common standards in labour and social policies.

There were also mentions of how Europe should be proud of how it helped so many refugees, ironic considering Germany, Sweden and Denmark are bearing the brunt of all immigration into the union. EU as a union has helped refugees in a very lackluster way.

We've got Davis, they've got Junker. Two men incapable of seeing the future before it hits them in the face.

Edited September 13, 2017 by magnkarl

[Chindie]

Hammond claims we want a bespoke deal that basically means our financial services sector is allowed to service the EU, and that we won't accept anything that aims to prevent that.

Great Hammond. Unfortunately I don't think it's our choice to decide what deal at get from the EU, so you can say you won't accept out all you want... I also would be worried in his shoes that the rest of the EU is effectively wooing as many insurers and banks as they can to grab a few jobs.

He also thinks the talks with the EU have gone well and it's only media spin saying they haven't. Except there's quite a lot of quotes, Mr Hammond, from Barnier, implying and outright saying it's been a farce so far. I think the spin might be closer to home...

[Davkaus]

I don't see why the EU are being so unreasonable about this. Just give us everything we want, and we'll be on our way.