POLITICS CORNER

[Sue]

Its funny how people perceive things in different ways. I always try not to be biased, in this case I support neither of these people or their politics so hopefully I am impartial about the event

[PanBiker]

I would agree that the incident did not warrant parliamentary time but note that no one has rounded on the pantomime jibes of Theresa May which preceded the perceived insult. A lot of experts have commented on what he actually said with the majority in favour of "people". Crazy that the entire Tory Party wasted so much time on this when the country is in meltdown. Yes I am a socialist Labour Party and Jeremy supporter but honestly, can you say that the rabid response to something that was not heard was in any shape productive?

[Sue]

I don’t dispute any of that but surely he knows that any negative on his part will be picked up on by the Tories. He is no fool. Anyway I just felt it needed saying. The two of them are like children in a playground.

[plaques]

Playground sums up the Parliamentary Chamber exactly. Prime Minister's question time is probably the most cringeworthy example of our so called democratic system. The opposition tries to conjure up some questions that the Prime Minister is not prepared for. The Prime Minister in turn tries their best to avoid giving an answer and attempts to deflect the subject onto something totally unrelated where the 'children' can roar and cheer as though point scoring is the be all and end all of the game. We would never tolerate this behavior in a court of law so why should parliament be any different?

[Tripps]

A lot of experts have commented on what he actually said with the majority in favour of "people".

I don't recall that being the case at the time. Sky News

I remember at the time Evelyn Glennie the 'deaf' percussionist said it was woman. I didn't give this too much credence, remembering that she has objected to RAF (USAF) Alconbury being converted to a freight airport (she lives nearby) on the grounds that it would produce excessive noise.

I've just stood in front of a mirror and repeated the words - stupid woman, stupid people stupid woman stupid people, repeatedly. Result - not decisive . Since it does not clearly support my case - I have abandoned plans to make a short video.

I am emphatically not a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, so whatever the evidence, of course it was 'woman'. The opposite of this seems to be very prevalent.

[PanBiker]

I don't recall that being the case at the time

I think it depends entirely on which reports you were following.

Anyway, in the vast scale of things, the whole issue is irrelevant and a total waste of time when the country is facing the biggest dilemma since WWII.

[Stanley]

I think that what we have collectively proved is that running a legislative assembly like a 19th century gentleman's club or a Public School is hopelessly out of date. Ideally the HofC should have a major fire which totally destroys it and the seat of government should be moved lock, stock and barrel to Buxton in a circular chamber.
Remember that in Iceland, the Mother of Parliaments, they sat in a circle.

[PanBiker]

Remember that in Iceland, the Mother of Parliaments, they sat in a circle.

I have been there, Thingvellir, not strictly a circle but a rift valley with a raised rock outcrop at the head where a strong voice can be heard up to 5 miles away in the valley when speaking from the outcrop. The sound of a horn blown can be heard 30 miles away down to the coast and was used to summon the council members in the 10th C. A fascinating place and world heritage site.

[Stanley]

Yes, I stretched the concept a little but you get the meaning!
We are still in the suspended animation of the Xmas and New Year break. An outside observer would think we had all the time in the world! As the old bloke said to the young bloke who was complaining that he hadn't enough time...."Look at it this way Lad, you've got all their is....".
All we can do is hope that May's tactic of timing the debate out backfires on her after January 2nd.
Later.... Jeremy Corbyn calls for an early vote on 'the deal' on January 2nd and is accused by Downing Street of making 'silly demands'. I would have thought that this is a perfectly reasonable proposal, after all, the Cabinet is meeting on the same day.....

[Tizer]

If we could have read TM's lips as she heard about Corbyn's demand she'd probably be saying `Stupid man!'

[plaques]

Of course its a silly idea. Mrs May has still to work out what to do about the possibility of a NO Deal. When the Cabinet has decided the Chief Whip, Julian Smith MP for Skipton, will finger the MP's collars and tell them in no uncertain terms 'forget about the Country this is about the Party'. All this takes time, the longer the better in Mrs May's view.

[Stanley]

Exactly........

[Stanley]

The Vulcan gets his K....(LINK). I'd better not say too much......

[plaques]

Government to spend £108M on extra ferry capacity...The additional crossings - equivalent to about 10% of existing traffic across the Dover strait - will provide up to half a million tonnes a month in extra capacity. BBC news.. All sounds a bit strange to me. Are we expecting the trade with the EU to increase by 10% ? or is it that the expected delays will mean someone has to buy 10% more lorries ? Perhaps someone can explain.

[Stanley]

My view is that it is an attempt to disarm criticism if (when?) the shit hits the fan after March.
I remember Richard predicting that it would all end with the government railing against the perfidy of the monsters running the EU. At the moment May and her cohorts are toning that rhetoric down because now is not time to stir up that hornet's nest but I fully expect him to be right and there is going to be a storm of invective along the lines of 'it wasn't me guv' when the pigeons return to the roost.

[PanBiker]

Out of the pot above they have awarded £14 million and a contract to a company who have no container fleet or any access to ferries. They say the company has been fully vetted but it has only been in existence for two years, hasn't a single transaction on it's books and it's listed assets are £66.00! Smacks of "jobs for the boys" somewhere in the pecking order. Total insanity.

[Tizer]

Government to spend £108M on extra ferry capacity...All sounds a bit strange to me. Are we expecting the trade with the EU to increase by 10% ? or is it that the expected delays will mean someone has to buy 10% more lorries ? Perhaps someone can explain.

I thought the same Plaques, it didn't seem to make any sense. Now I suspect they are worried the French ferries might go on strike or, heaven forbid, even the UK ferries.

[PanBiker]

Apparently the rationale behind the £14M award to the barely existing company with no trucks is that the only alternative was to give the money to existing EU haulage companies?

What about the dozens of UK Border Force accredited UK trucking companies listed here?

UK Border Force - Accredited Haulage Companies

[Tripps]

barely existing company with no trucks

I think they have been engaged to supply ships not trucks - but they don't have any of them either - no business track record at all, and the company assets seem to be £66. What could possibly go wrong?

I see that Sajid Javed has bravely cut short his African safari holiday to rush home to deal with the current migrant situation. I think that he alone, is an enormous 'pull factor' in the story, being the son of an immigrant father, and being of exceptional ability, was eductaed here, and became a multi millionaire managing director of Deutsche Bank. His siblings have been similarly successful. I'd say he was more of a role model, than a deterrent to people risking their lives to cross the Channel.

[Stanley]

That struck me as well David.....
Mrs May is back at work tomorrow chairing a Cabinet Meeting which is going to do something. Why do I keep thinking of the Monty Python Knights? This story started as an adventure, rapidly descended into farce and is now a tragedy.
My only hope is a miracle in the shape of a massive Parliamentary revolt and a note to Brussels cancelling the request to leave. At that point the whole of the EU collapses in helpless laughter and the UK tries to pretend it was all part of a cunning wheeze to reform the Union.

[PanBiker]

Back to the £66 company. A spokesperson came on last night to clarify the £14 million award. Apparently the company will not see the money until it has secured a shipping fleet for crossing the channel. So this begs the question how is a firm with no assets working out of mothballed port facility going to spend it's sixty odd quid? Or is this going to be a case of the feeding the 5000 with a basket of fish? Someone is telling porkies. I'll put this because it is.

[Tizer]

Magic money tree, Ian - i.e. bank loans (with a quiet word in the ear of the bank manager from the Government).

My only hope is a miracle in the shape of a massive Parliamentary revolt and a note to Brussels cancelling the request to leave. At that point the whole of the EU collapses in helpless laughter and the UK tries to pretend it was all part of a cunning wheeze to reform the Union.

As I've said many times, I think we'll find we simply can't leave the EU. Matthew Parris in his weekend Times column has written a good article on all this and he also mirrors my frequent rant about how in a representative democracy it's the government that makes the decisions, not the public. And now is the time to do so. If they haven't the courage to make the decision themselves then we'll need to have a second referendum because so much has changed since 2016.

[Stanley]

I heard him on R4 yesterday saying much the same thing Tiz and adding that he thought there was a good chance the Tory Party would fragment in the aftermath.
I said in 2010 that the course the Tories were taking which was essentially repeating the failed policies of the 1920s and 30s could have only one conclusion, failure. Like them or not, the parties that produce 12 or 13 years in office are the ones that have an agenda and principles, even if I think they are wrong. Their supporters need to see that they have hard objectives and are pursuing them. At the moment ethics and principles are absent. All we have are palpable lies, obfuscation and aspirations. Every 'policy announcement' is in effect another exercise in kicking the can down the road whilst perceived ills and injustices increase and with them the erosion of society. Re-read Piketty 'Capital in the 21st Century'.
If someone promised to ditch all the big money projects, actually attack to money laundering ethos in the City, start moving towards a Wealth Tax and inject direct funding to make up the cuts they would get in with a landslide.....
We enter an interesting three months!
By the way, the Cabinet Meeting today will either end in a punch-up or another set of aspirations about making the deal work by going back to Brussels and doing Brinkmanship. This will fail and more time will be wasted. Time for Parliament to step in and act decisively.

[Tizer]

A top story in the FT today...
` Brexit drives wedge between Labour members and Jeremy Corbyn: Almost three-quarters of party want second referendum on quitting EU, research shows'
`Jeremy Corbyn is at odds with the vast majority of Labour’s membership on Brexit, according to a new poll of more than 1,000 party members. Mr Corbyn, the Labour leader and long-standing critic of the EU, believes the government should uphold the result of the 2016 EU referendum. But almost three-quarters of members want a second referendum to try to reverse Brexit, according to the research by YouGov for the ESRC Party Members Project, funded by the Economic Social and Research Council. The findings are awkward because Mr Corbyn seized the leadership of Labour in 2015 promising to give the party grass roots a whip hand over policy decisions....'

`...Researchers questioned 1,034 Labour members, of which 83 per cent said they had voted Remain in the EU referendum. They also talked to a representative sample of 1,675 voters from across the political divide. The survey showed that 89 per cent of Labour members believed the UK was wrong to vote to leave the bloc. This belief was shared by 73 per cent of Labour voters.' LINK

[plaques]

This is a section from Wiki on the Financial Times ...
The FT's editorials tend to be pro-Europe, supporting the European Union in the context of a common economic market and opposing political integration. The FT was firmly opposed to the Iraq War.

In the general election in the UK in 2010 the FT was receptive to the Liberal Democrats' positions on civil liberties and political reform, and praised the then Labour leader Gordon Brown for his response to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, but on balance it backed the Conservatives while questioning their tendency to Euroscepticism.

At the subsequent general election in 2015, the FT called for the continuation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that had governed for the previous five years.

In the 2017 UK general election a Financial Times editorial reluctantly backed Theresa May (Conservative Party) over Jeremy Corbyn (Labour Party) while warning about her stance on immigration and the eurosceptic elements in her party.

The first question to ask on any research like this is 'what was the question? and were there multiple choices? Second, who did their research?
I tend to discount all so called research especially from rightwing papers mainly because they have their own agenda and in this case to stir the mud.
It has been said many times on this site that to have a second referendum, which may possibly overturn the first one, will still leave Mrs May and the Tories in power. No wonder Corbyn is trying to avoid it.