My research was a bit more extensive than an off-chance meeting with a knobhead. It doesn't lend itself to posting in a few minutes. I will post it in due course.
Current Affairs EU In or Out
- Thread starter micknick
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My research was a bit more extensive than an off-chance meeting with a knobhead. It doesn't lend itself to posting in a few minutes. I will post it in due course.
roydo
in memoriam - 1965-2024
It was. You apparently did a load of research. I, unlike you, have admitted to be being hung on my vote, which was influenced by a nob head.
Just waiting to see the evidence of your research, or the admittance that you would have voted Leave despite what anyone said.to you.
Floor is yours.
Oh, and I await an apology for being called, or insinuated as, unintelligent.
roydo
in memoriam - 1965-2024
Meaning you will post a ton of links to articles that you perused deeply and arrived at a considered opinion. Or just underlined your original decision to vote leave.
You are not fooling anyone mate.
I am not saying you were wrong to vote leave, thats your call, but just admit you were always going to do so.
I just looked at who all the racists were voting for and voted the opposite. Didn’t really feel the need to do much more research than that tbf
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
He met the wrong clowns.....
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
Wait until Bruce uses the profile on you........
Foot Long Hot Dog
Player Valuation: A packet of pork scratchings
Another untruth. It’s becoming habitual
NilSatisOptimum
Player Valuation: £70m
Indeed and Brexiteers were Trumpers the exact opposite to the snowflake, well that's what I thought, until along came Baby Trump Balloon...
These scare tactics are so May can try and come back with a crappy deal.........
We've had slipperyness over Cameron's negotiation Joe, so what is a good deal for you?
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
WHAT A TRAITOR, HE'S BEEN WORKING WITH GOVE RECENTLY, CAN'T WE TRUST ANYONE?
Conservatives? No – Brexit has shown us what they really are
George Monbiot
They are no longer defending traditional values of national character and continuity, but rather catering to big business
@GeorgeMonbiot
Wed 25 Jul 2018 06.00 BST
It’s a remarkable thing to witness: senior Conservatives attacking big business. It is not just Boris Johnson exclaiming “[Poor language removed] business” – it is their furious and sustained response to the corporations threatening to disinvest after Brexit, exemplified by the resignation of the Welsh Conservative leader after his attack on Airbus.
Most remarkable – and least remarked upon – is an article in the Daily Mail a couple of weeks ago by the former party leader the former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, in which he rehearses what anti-corporate campaigners have been saying for decades. “The public,” he complained, “is urged to accept, without challenge, the views of corporations and their representative bodies such as the Confederation of British Industry.” According to this “fashionable narrative”, the opinions of corporate chief executives “should count for much more than the decisions of voters exercised through the democratic ballot box”.
Advertisement
Who are the authors of this “fashionable narrative”? Among them is a certain Iain Duncan Smith, as you can see from the speech he gave as party leader to the CBI in 2001. Oh, and just about every senior Conservative over the past four decades. Yet this astonishing article passed almost without comment in the rest of the billionaire press. What is going on?
One of the hidden conflicts Brexit has exposed is the contradiction between what Conservativesclaim to stand for – something called conservatism – and what they really represent. Everything conservatism is supposed to defend – tradition, continuity, community, national character, the physical fabric of the nation – is ripped apart by the demands of capital, whose permanent revolution the Conservative party assists and accelerates.
The contradictions run throughout conservative Britain. As a young man, I was amazed to see the burghers of middle England look the other way as their beautiful market towns were turned into car parks and the glorious countryside that surrounded them into chemical deserts. They claimed to love a national character exemplified by independent butchers, bakers and greengrocers, but shopped at Tesco. They didn’t blink while our national institutions – universities, schools, the BBC, the NHS, the rule of law – were vitiated by corporate interests. As a road-building programme driven by the demands of construction companies ripped through ancient monuments and nature reserves, they did nothing, leaving hippies and anarchists to defend our national heritage.
I began to realise that the whole thing was a racket. Conservatism professed to be one thing, but in reality was its opposite. Everything could and should be sacrificed to money and its organised form: corporate power. Stripped of its professed adherence to tradition and continuity, all that is left of conservatism is property paranoia, xenophobia and a patriotism so coarse and ill-defined that it loses all meaning. This makes it easy to manipulate. When transnational corporations cannot be blamed for ripping apart communities and national character, immigrants must be blamed instead. A paper by Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig at Bocconi University found that, while there was no relationship between the number of migrants in a region and the extent to which it voted leave, there was a powerful relationship between the leave vote and what they call “Chinese import shock”: the displacement of local businesses and jobs by imports. Brexit was driven, they say, by the uncompensated effects of globalised trade. But as the instigators of the leave campaign were beholden to financial interests, such effects were unmentionable. So scapegoats had to be found.
It would be delightful to imagine that people such as Duncan Smith and Johnson are seeking to defend democracy and popular sovereignty from the perennial threat of corporate power. Nothing could be further from the truth. Intimately associated with the campaign to disentangle us from the EU is an effort to entangle us further with a more distant and less amenable power: the United States. Food, environmental and workplace standards must succumb to the maelstrom of US corporate lobbying and the demand that everything on Earth is exchangeable for something else.
As foreign secretary, Johnson granted free use of rooms in the Foreign Office to the Initiative for Free Trade, a group of dark-money thinktanks that see Brexit as an opportunity to rip down public protections. The trade secretary, Liam Fox, is seeking to force the UK into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, whose radical assault on standards, and secretive offshore courts, present a far greater threat to national sovereignty than does the European Union. US and UK banks have already seized their chance, threatening to walk away from London after Brexit unless they get further tax cuts and a new round of deregulation. They have plainly forgotten what caused the last financial crisis. Broadly speaking, Brextremists such as Fox, Johnson and Duncan Smith favour the most ruthless and antisocial businesses over more responsible ones.
Even so, the unusual conflict between transnational corporations and senior Conservatives should also discomfit defenders of the European Union. Why are big companies so keen to stay in? Because the EU, in essence, is a vehicle for their expansion. By regularising standards within the bloc and striking trade deals that are, to a large extent, fashioned by business lobbyists, it helps big companies to sweep away smaller competitors, and extends corporate power at the expense of democracy. As I’ve long argued, as a Eurosceptic remainer, the EU is like democracy, diplomacy and old age: the only thing that can be said for it is that it’s better than the alternative. The alternative is hideous.
If established corporate power is perceived as an obstacle by senior Conservatives, it is not because a higher principle is at stake. It is simply because it conflicts with There is a more immediate aim: a Brexit that can be played to the advantage of one faction and the disadvantage of another.
But as the contradictions emerge between what the Conservatives profess to be and what they are, it is instructive to watch the party split, as it did around the repeal of the Corn Laws, over the competing interests of different forms of capital. Expect this struggle to continue. But don’t expect to see anything resembling conservatism to materialise, on either side. Perhaps it is time they renamed their party.
Conservatives? No – Brexit has shown us what they really are
George Monbiot
They are no longer defending traditional values of national character and continuity, but rather catering to big business
@GeorgeMonbiot
Wed 25 Jul 2018 06.00 BST
It’s a remarkable thing to witness: senior Conservatives attacking big business. It is not just Boris Johnson exclaiming “[Poor language removed] business” – it is their furious and sustained response to the corporations threatening to disinvest after Brexit, exemplified by the resignation of the Welsh Conservative leader after his attack on Airbus.
Most remarkable – and least remarked upon – is an article in the Daily Mail a couple of weeks ago by the former party leader the former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, in which he rehearses what anti-corporate campaigners have been saying for decades. “The public,” he complained, “is urged to accept, without challenge, the views of corporations and their representative bodies such as the Confederation of British Industry.” According to this “fashionable narrative”, the opinions of corporate chief executives “should count for much more than the decisions of voters exercised through the democratic ballot box”.
Advertisement
Who are the authors of this “fashionable narrative”? Among them is a certain Iain Duncan Smith, as you can see from the speech he gave as party leader to the CBI in 2001. Oh, and just about every senior Conservative over the past four decades. Yet this astonishing article passed almost without comment in the rest of the billionaire press. What is going on?
One of the hidden conflicts Brexit has exposed is the contradiction between what Conservativesclaim to stand for – something called conservatism – and what they really represent. Everything conservatism is supposed to defend – tradition, continuity, community, national character, the physical fabric of the nation – is ripped apart by the demands of capital, whose permanent revolution the Conservative party assists and accelerates.
The contradictions run throughout conservative Britain. As a young man, I was amazed to see the burghers of middle England look the other way as their beautiful market towns were turned into car parks and the glorious countryside that surrounded them into chemical deserts. They claimed to love a national character exemplified by independent butchers, bakers and greengrocers, but shopped at Tesco. They didn’t blink while our national institutions – universities, schools, the BBC, the NHS, the rule of law – were vitiated by corporate interests. As a road-building programme driven by the demands of construction companies ripped through ancient monuments and nature reserves, they did nothing, leaving hippies and anarchists to defend our national heritage.
I began to realise that the whole thing was a racket. Conservatism professed to be one thing, but in reality was its opposite. Everything could and should be sacrificed to money and its organised form: corporate power. Stripped of its professed adherence to tradition and continuity, all that is left of conservatism is property paranoia, xenophobia and a patriotism so coarse and ill-defined that it loses all meaning. This makes it easy to manipulate. When transnational corporations cannot be blamed for ripping apart communities and national character, immigrants must be blamed instead. A paper by Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig at Bocconi University found that, while there was no relationship between the number of migrants in a region and the extent to which it voted leave, there was a powerful relationship between the leave vote and what they call “Chinese import shock”: the displacement of local businesses and jobs by imports. Brexit was driven, they say, by the uncompensated effects of globalised trade. But as the instigators of the leave campaign were beholden to financial interests, such effects were unmentionable. So scapegoats had to be found.
It would be delightful to imagine that people such as Duncan Smith and Johnson are seeking to defend democracy and popular sovereignty from the perennial threat of corporate power. Nothing could be further from the truth. Intimately associated with the campaign to disentangle us from the EU is an effort to entangle us further with a more distant and less amenable power: the United States. Food, environmental and workplace standards must succumb to the maelstrom of US corporate lobbying and the demand that everything on Earth is exchangeable for something else.
As foreign secretary, Johnson granted free use of rooms in the Foreign Office to the Initiative for Free Trade, a group of dark-money thinktanks that see Brexit as an opportunity to rip down public protections. The trade secretary, Liam Fox, is seeking to force the UK into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, whose radical assault on standards, and secretive offshore courts, present a far greater threat to national sovereignty than does the European Union. US and UK banks have already seized their chance, threatening to walk away from London after Brexit unless they get further tax cuts and a new round of deregulation. They have plainly forgotten what caused the last financial crisis. Broadly speaking, Brextremists such as Fox, Johnson and Duncan Smith favour the most ruthless and antisocial businesses over more responsible ones.
Even so, the unusual conflict between transnational corporations and senior Conservatives should also discomfit defenders of the European Union. Why are big companies so keen to stay in? Because the EU, in essence, is a vehicle for their expansion. By regularising standards within the bloc and striking trade deals that are, to a large extent, fashioned by business lobbyists, it helps big companies to sweep away smaller competitors, and extends corporate power at the expense of democracy. As I’ve long argued, as a Eurosceptic remainer, the EU is like democracy, diplomacy and old age: the only thing that can be said for it is that it’s better than the alternative. The alternative is hideous.
If established corporate power is perceived as an obstacle by senior Conservatives, it is not because a higher principle is at stake. It is simply because it conflicts with There is a more immediate aim: a Brexit that can be played to the advantage of one faction and the disadvantage of another.
But as the contradictions emerge between what the Conservatives profess to be and what they are, it is instructive to watch the party split, as it did around the repeal of the Corn Laws, over the competing interests of different forms of capital. Expect this struggle to continue. But don’t expect to see anything resembling conservatism to materialise, on either side. Perhaps it is time they renamed their party.
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
DON'T LISTEN TO THIS MAN'S ARGUMENTS, HE'S JUST IN IT FOR HIMSELF!
HE SHOULD BE LESS OF A COWARD LIKE HIS NAMESAKE, WHAT AN EMBARRASSMENT.
Never in over 50 years of working life have I seen the UK facing such an abject future, casued by the complete failure of our political establishment to govern, to communicate clearly with the public and, most importantly, to be honest with the electorate. We have many senior politicians who are seemingly consumed with their own ambition and vanity, with little regard for the best interests of the country.
It is clear that either a negotiated settlement along the lines of the Chequers agreement or an exit from the EU with no deal are both going to result in the UK becoming a much poorer and less influential country than anybody was led to believe during the appallingly conducted referendum campaign.
As a businessman, recently retired as chairman of Lloyd's of London, I can see all too clearly the consequences for the economy, for employment and for the provision of basic services.
Apart from the effect on manufacturing industry and the services sector (the latter being sacrificed by the government on the altar of Brexit), there will be disruption to the provision of the basic public services such as agriculture, healthcare and air transport.
We are constantly being told by the Brexiters it will all be fine. We will keep our sovereignty and we will be able to negotiate our own trade deals with ease. This is fanciful. Lloyd's is the most global of all British institutions. Personal experience tells me that negotiating overseas rights is a long and painful process. If we are trying to do it as a small economy, the leverage we have is limited and far less than operating as a trade bloc, which is the EU. We would lose all the EU trading rights with third countries.
It is also worth remembering that 44 per cent of our trade is with the EU. The great majority of UK economy is in the services sector - financial services alone contribute 12 per cent of gross domestic product.
I agree with many of the warning comments made in recent weeks by many business leaders. But almost all of these comments are coming from overseas businesses. It is high time that UK business spoke up and galvanised the public to understand the true realities of what the country is facing.
There also appears to be a silent majority of MP's from each of the major parties who seem terrified of putting their heads above the parapet. They need to co-operate, or even coalesce, to provide the public with sensible government. The case for remaining in the EU needs to be restated and constrasted with the now much clearly alternative. Membership of the EU has drawbacks, but overall the benefits in terms of trade, security and fellowship overwhelm the narrow shortsighted nationalism espoused by those who wish to return to an Edwardian age.
Of course there needs to be a second referendum once the route that we are persuing becomes clear. That woute will bear no resemblance to the picture painted by our politicians at the time of the first one.
John Nelson
Chairman, Lloyd's of London 2011-17
HE SHOULD BE LESS OF A COWARD LIKE HIS NAMESAKE, WHAT AN EMBARRASSMENT.
Never in over 50 years of working life have I seen the UK facing such an abject future, casued by the complete failure of our political establishment to govern, to communicate clearly with the public and, most importantly, to be honest with the electorate. We have many senior politicians who are seemingly consumed with their own ambition and vanity, with little regard for the best interests of the country.
It is clear that either a negotiated settlement along the lines of the Chequers agreement or an exit from the EU with no deal are both going to result in the UK becoming a much poorer and less influential country than anybody was led to believe during the appallingly conducted referendum campaign.
As a businessman, recently retired as chairman of Lloyd's of London, I can see all too clearly the consequences for the economy, for employment and for the provision of basic services.
Apart from the effect on manufacturing industry and the services sector (the latter being sacrificed by the government on the altar of Brexit), there will be disruption to the provision of the basic public services such as agriculture, healthcare and air transport.
We are constantly being told by the Brexiters it will all be fine. We will keep our sovereignty and we will be able to negotiate our own trade deals with ease. This is fanciful. Lloyd's is the most global of all British institutions. Personal experience tells me that negotiating overseas rights is a long and painful process. If we are trying to do it as a small economy, the leverage we have is limited and far less than operating as a trade bloc, which is the EU. We would lose all the EU trading rights with third countries.
It is also worth remembering that 44 per cent of our trade is with the EU. The great majority of UK economy is in the services sector - financial services alone contribute 12 per cent of gross domestic product.
I agree with many of the warning comments made in recent weeks by many business leaders. But almost all of these comments are coming from overseas businesses. It is high time that UK business spoke up and galvanised the public to understand the true realities of what the country is facing.
There also appears to be a silent majority of MP's from each of the major parties who seem terrified of putting their heads above the parapet. They need to co-operate, or even coalesce, to provide the public with sensible government. The case for remaining in the EU needs to be restated and constrasted with the now much clearly alternative. Membership of the EU has drawbacks, but overall the benefits in terms of trade, security and fellowship overwhelm the narrow shortsighted nationalism espoused by those who wish to return to an Edwardian age.
Of course there needs to be a second referendum once the route that we are persuing becomes clear. That woute will bear no resemblance to the picture painted by our politicians at the time of the first one.
John Nelson
Chairman, Lloyd's of London 2011-17
It's an almost schizophrenic situation isn't it? On the one hand you've got Brexiteers banging on about the importance of 'trading with the world' and this being a major reason for leaving the EU, whilst on the other hand Brexiteers have a go at businesses that do 'trade with the world' when they have the temerity to suggest that Brexit is a crap idea.
They've been cuckolded by this 'will of the people' nonsense.
- Status