OneGuyFromBarlick

There won’t be any talks on trade until we leave for the very simple reason that until we leave we remain a member of the EU, and a member of the EU cannot negotiate its own trade deals. This is not some obtuse technicality – it is set out in a legally binding international treaty we freely signed u...

Here we are – the two most recent papers produced by the EU’s negotiating team, one on the financial settlement and the other on the rights of EU nationals in the UK and the rights of UK nationals in the EU. Very informative I think. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/publications/eu-position-papers-ar...

The PM banging on as usual about her being the right person to sit across the table and negotiate the Brexit terms with the EU. Must come as a surprise to the EU this as the European Commission has been formally appointed as EU negotiator. This is in black and white in the following statement: http:...

Seems the Tories think we have a Presidential system in this country as all the nonsense that dribbles through my letterbox from them makes no mention of the candidate here in Wirral West (who is the runner up in the recent Greater Liverpool mayoral election rather than the previous MP and 3x candid...

Here it is, hot off the press - the Annex to the European Council Decision on opening the negotiations with the UK under Art 50. https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/annex-recommendation-uk-eu-negotiations_3-may-2017_en.pdf These are the Directives for the negotiations as the EU sees them. For...

Ah, M Barnier is giving a press conference right now. He says as a negotiator, his focus will be on ‘ ..facts, figures, laws and solutions.. ’. Whoops, that’s our difficulty right there. Facts are rather passé in UK public life and have been for some time. You can essentially say what you want, forc...

Tory leaflet dropped through the door last night. ‘ Strong and stable ’ is the phrase de nos jours . If I could paraphrase, the leaflet essentially said: ‘ We are the party of strength and stability, securing stabilised strength and strengthened stability through strong and stable strength and stabl...

It’s genius from May I guess if she thought the Brexiters now own the process and so if it goes to hell in a hand cart the Brexiters own the failure and the way is prepared for a massive U-turn. That’s the conspiracy theory. The alternative is it’s a cock-up – as M Heseltine said yesterday, they are...

What you have to remember about David Davis is this. He was a former FCO Minister. He is also a, quote: ‘committed eurosceptic’, being a Maastricht rebel. Despite this, he didn’t know that the EU negotiated as one on trade and EU members could not negotiate alone one of the most basic facts out ther...

Compliance with a lot of EU requirements will be necessary for on-going relationships, and certainly a trade deal. If you want to sell your widgets to Europe then you’ll have to comply with the product standards for widgets. If you want to sell your cauliflowers then you’ll have to comply with the r...

Mr Juncker has given an interview and noted that the EU will not look to ‘punish’ the UK in the Art50 negotiations. Of course they won’t. The notion of anyone being ‘punished’ is a uniquely UK view in which for example the EU will punish us by landing us with an exit bill; or ‘punish’ us by not givi...

Yes it was that photo. For some reason the smallish windows and brickwork threw me and I’d no idea what the shop was at the time. The mention of it being an opticians jogged my memory: I got I think my second pair of spectacles from there.

Richard Broughton

Haven’t looked on this part of the site for a while but it remains my favourite thread. I note the photo a few posts ago of Rainhall Road in 1979. What at that time was the property to the left of what I reckon would have been Margaret Sharples’? It was the young lad who made jewellery until a short...

The policemen and women right by the entrances to Parliament tend to be older, personable and avuncular characters with a smile and chat for anyone passing by and making eye contact. They are always chatting and joshing with the passing public and the MPs and staff who walk through and perhaps why s...

I think the Electoral Commission is most likely bound in the amount of fine it can levy, informed by it only having civil powers. The CPS will consider whether anything criminal occurred and this may result in greater punishment. True to form of course, the response from the Tories is that of a chil...

Just realised in my post above that I used the term ‘non-EU migration’, which implies there is ‘EU migration’. It’s worth noting that across all the other Member States, ‘EU migration’ is not recognised as a term. It is seen as the ‘freedom of movement’ of people, one of the fundamental and insepara...

I detect rather more to Boris’s ‘come off it, sunshine’ remark to the former PM than that. It’s in the strangeness of Old Etonian, Oxford-educated Bullingdon boy and classics scholar Boris resorting to the ‘working man’s’ vernacular. Why would he do that? Oh yes, the former PM Mr Major was a humble ...

‘’……………hard, clean Brexit with minimal or no payments to the EU’’ Ah yes, the payments to the EU. This is the latest little softener being prepared. When the Brexit calamity actually hits, this is one of the things that we will be encouraged to blame on a malign EU. This bill will be the EU 'punish...

You might say good health in our leaders is the exception rather than the rule. Churchill had a stroke and was basically incapable. Eden essentially had a nervous breakdown over Suez. Wilson was in the early stages of the dementia into which he descended and knew it, hence some argue his resignation...

Headmistress mode? I prefer the rather less tasteful but doubtless more likely image posted by someone online yesterday. Essentially, she (we) will debase themselves before a circus orang utang, grateful for any dung it chucks from its stool pile. I couldn’t have put it better myself. We all know mo...

My first bank account was with the Yorkshire Bank in Barlick (manager: Mr Deddicoat). I think I was the only person at Leicester University who held a Yorkshire Bank account, and I used to toddle to the one branch in that city, on Belvoir Street. I also recall schlepping across London one time I was...

‘…..tell the UK population, half of which voted to leave the EU, that they will soon have to do the jobs that the EU workers have been doing for us in recent years.’ I’m looking forward to that too Tiz. ‘ People of Lincolnshire, Come into the Fields! ’ I can visualise the Soviet era poster: a head-...

Boris’s crass comment about escapees facing punishment beatings as portrayed in WWII films is par for the course for him as well as for a country with an infantile obsession (still!) with WWII, sticking it to the square heads and the Nazis. More interesting is the notion that somehow the EU will ‘pu...

‘…to be the biggest off-shore tax haven in the world…’ Certainly would fit with UKIP’s favourite economist, Patrick Minford. He is quite open about Brexit being the opportunity for the UK to operate under WTO only, not bothering to strike any trade deals at all. He acknowledges that this will destro...

A few recipes GOOSNARGH CAKES 1/2lb Flour, 6oz Margarine, 1 ½ oz Castor Sugar, ½ teaspoon Corriandy (sic) powder, ½ teaspoon Carroway Seeds Rub in fat and cut in rounds ½ inch think. Bake in moderate oven for 15 minutes. Do not turn. Dust with castor sugar Mrs D Kin SPANISH EGGS 3 Eggs, 1 ½ oz Marga...