OneGuyFromBarlick

The lady's comments are very interesting and probably typical of many Eurpoeans, and I don't blame them at all for being both disgusted and amused. How ironical that we are disgusted and amused at the Americans and their Trump fiasco, whilst not noticing that the rest of Europe is laughing and pointing at us!

That point of view has come back to me from EU friends I trust. meanwhile May and the Tories still keep acting as though we still had the empire and could 'punch above our weight'. (Essential when you have armed services so underfunded that we couldn't repel a boat load of Isis if they landed!) I have argued for years for reality about our place in the world. Not insignificant but nearer Sweden than the US.

We get a reminder this morning of how blunt an instrument referendums are. The Bolivian referendum on whether to accept the peace deal has produced a slight majority against. The get out is that the total number of votes cast is below the required level so the result can be ignored. ( I got that wrong, it's the Hungarian referendum that is below required number. They have just voted not to accept EU immigrant quotas.)

Yes, 98% of voters were against but too few turned out to make it a legally acceptable result. I think it was only about 40% turn out. That in itself is an indication of how things are moving in Europe and perhaps globally - people becoming even more disengaged with politics. Which is bad news for democracy. The membership of political parties is declining too. (Yes, I know the membership of the Labour Party has risen post-Jeremy but I have some concerns about the motivation of those new members and it seems more like fighting within a party than competing between parties).

At worst, the suspect members will only be a small minority Tiz.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

The title would have been longer than the bill if Clause 1 had just said, we're off, byee.

More seriously the world has changed since the results, and if UK were to consider re-joining the terms might be much different (Euro, and all that). Much talk on Question Time tonight with MPs trying to reconcile 'Democractic vote of the UK Population' and posistion of being MPs as representatives to do the best thing for the UK, which to my mind are not always the same thing.