The Brexit Thread

[Tubby Isaacs]

https://twitter.com/Digbylj/status/1095234163379261440

You had a plan in the same way I had a plan to have Andy Flower caught at third slip. It would have worked if he hadn't bullied me by watching the ball closely, moving his feet and hitting the ball straight back past me along the ground..

[Sporting]

I know a number of British professionals who live and work in Barcelona or Madrid. They are to a person incredibly pissed that these racist idiots get all of the attention.

You can add a Valencia resident to your list.

[johnr]

Assuming Gina Miller is confused and/or dodgy and/or a Tory and/or any other bad thing you care to mention, my comment would be "So what?" WTF does that have to do with the merits of Brexit and options for mitigating or combating it?

I think the point is that it wasn't much about the merits of Brexit at all.

[Ginger Yellow]

Christ, I complain about the European Parliament's absurd procedural foibles a lot but watching the Commons spend 15 whole minutes simply voting for a statutory instrument implementing a directly effective EU regulation puts the most ineffective EU committee hearing to shame.

[Snake Plissken]

Of course, not having paid into the NI system for a number of years means they are prime picking for falling under the restrictions on health tourists that they were so legitimately concerned about.

[Diable Rouge]

http://twitter.com/eucopresident/status/1095747108521627649

[Alderman Barnes]

Alderman Barnes has made the same point, I think.

Thanks for remembering. It's true, though. The British in the EU are always characterised either as ignorant Costa del Sol Brexit pensioners or high-powered Gina Miller elite Brussels lawyers, when the truth is we're a million ordinary people doing a million ordinary things, and most of us were excluded from the vote. That's a lot of people cut adrift. I can't come back now if I wanted to bring my wife with me (not that she'd want to, in all honesty, but still). I can understand the logic in most elections of being away too long to warrant a vote, and I've never voted in a general election since I've been out of the country, but this was a special case. And if we couldn't have a vote, then surely the EU residents in Britain should have been allowed to vote instead.

It's a terrible stitch-up, for which I naturally blame Jeremy Corbyn, and Jeremy Corbyn alone.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

[QUOTE=Alderman Barnes;n2118306


It's a terrible stitch-up, for which I naturally blame Jeremy Corbyn, and Jeremy Corbyn alone.[/QUOTE]

That makes no sense at all. The franchise for the Brexit referendum was out of his control of course. The only thing he can be blamed for, Brexit-wise, is failing to resist it, and undermining most efforts on the part of Labour (and other) Remainers to resist it.

[Nocturnal Submission]

He's being sarcastic.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Yes, I get that, but the sarcasm makes no sense at all either. Nobody on here, absolutely nobody, in any of the 530 pages, has suggested that Corbyn is alone (or even primarily) to blame for Brexit. It's ludicrously pointless and misdirected sarcasm.

[Nocturnal Submission]

Oh, as sarcasm goes, I didn't think it was too bad.

AB can defend it himself, of course, but I presume that he's tapping into the belief among some on the Left that the Labour Party, and its leader in particular, feature far too prominently in critical comment about Brexit, from the referendum campaigning right through to discussions about and strategies around the WA.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Yeah, but Corbyn might encounter less criticism if he hadn't spent the last couple of years basically doing a good impression of Richard Boyd-Barrett after a botched partial lobotomy.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Lol, lobotomy, teehee, gosh that's funny.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

yeah as though he were pacified and made inert by surgery. Boyd barrett would have to lose a chunk of his intellectual capacity and his sense of agency to get you to corbyn, Whatever his flaws, RBB isn't dim. or intellectually incurious. .

[Duncan Gardner]

i know this is prob hypocrisy- having offered to batter Berba with a giant Hovis- but let's cut the mental health sneers eh? You think Corbyn's useless, just say that

[George C.]

More sarcasm, misplaced though, probably.

And giant Hovis?

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Hmm, I'm not using lobotomy as a mental health Smear, i'm using it to describe an operation that has the specific effect of lowering mental abilities and reducing the capacity for action. Because apart from a noticeable and marked difference between the two in these two particular dimensions, these two gobshites are basically the same, From the comfortable professional middle-class upbringing through the unpleasant experience in fee paying schools that lead to them emerging as marxists, and political personas defined pretty rigidly by oppositional stances that can best be summed up as sticking it to the man, in a public attention seeking way, right down to their uncomfortable ease in the presence of the SWP, and an opposition to the European Union that simply seems to miss the point of the whole thing. I trust Posh marxists even less than I trust working class thatcherites. At least they might make money out of it.

A lobotomy is a horrendous procedure that tells you considerably more the people carrying them out than the victim. And a curious feature of life in ireland was that it transpires that most lobotomies carried out in ireland were likely carried out on people who were committed to 'care'. who shouldn't have been there, (Sexually active, or an orphan with an inheritance) because that was another fucked up barbaric thing that we did. Though if it makes people uncomfortable I'll leave it at that, other than to stay that Corbyn is a fucking dim bulb, a cardboard cut-out fee-school marxist straight from central casting. and when it comes to matters of enormous import, he is staggeringly stupifyingly inert.

[Amor de Cosmos]

A large part of the generations who went through education knew that because of an economy that was pretty good, they literally could walk out of school on a Friday for good, and walk into a job on Monday (and walk out on that on Monday, and into a new job on Tuesday. Skills were generic and didn't require qualifications, so most walked out of school with no school-level qualifications not least because a) there wasn't a qualification for them to achieve until 1963 and b) between 1963 and 1973, the exam they took (the CSE) was taken in the final year, which wasn't compulsory until 1973.

Some might go onto some form of vocational education if there were sector-skills qualifications in it (my Mum went to a course at the local technical college to do a 12-month hairdressing course) but these weren't dependent on any qualifications, not least becasue few had them.

Secondary Moderns had their own qualifications from 1963, called CSEs (Certificate of Secondary Education) and Grammars had the General Certificate in Education O-levels since 1951, which were the entry qualification for the GCE A-levels, which were the passport to University for the grammar school kids.

The top mark in CSEs was Grade 1, which was equivalent to a GCE Grade C, so whilst people with excellent CSE results could get into a college to study A-Levels, because they didn't have the GCE O-level, they'd often have to spend the first year redoing a GCE they'd already in effect passed, whilst their grammar school fellow students would spend 2 years on the A-level course, meaning much better chances of getting into HE.

I went to Secondary Modern. Left when I was 15, then went to the local College of Further Education where I spent three years scraping together the minimum number of GCEs required to go to art-school. In many ways it was the highlight of my educational career, at least until I did a Masters and Doctorate in later life. Relatively few people went to University in 60s, but most had some form of post secondary education even if it didn't extend beyond the local C of F Ed or Tech. There were kids from public, grammar, and sec mods. Some full-time, others on day or block release. The differences in upbringing and experience were eye-opening, and for the open-minded enormously educative. My oldest and closest friends are from that period in my life. Firstly, my wife, who went to private school prior to Cof F Ed, then to teacher's training college. They also include a current Labour MP (who was "asked to leave" his grammar school — as I had been a few years earlier) a guy who became a tool and die cutter and my best football mate. Several who, like myself, went on to art school, and eventually had lives as graphic designers, interior decorators, or ceramic artists — we were all from sec mods, as were a couple of others who eventually went on to university, both to study economics, one now runs his own consulting company in the Middle East, the other worked for the UN for many years. My point is Secondary Moderns were no kind of dead end. To the best of my knowledge none of us did, or were likely to, vote Leave. (the economists I'm not sure about, I haven't seen the UN guy for years but back in the day he was a Trot.) Post Secondary Education, wasn't Uni or nothing back then, there were a diverse range of educational possibilities each with their own personality and culture, far more than, in my experience, is the case today.

[NHH]

Where wee you AdC? London? My parents generation in a northern mill town was vastly, light years different. No one joined the professional classes, although some by dint of luck and graft ended up solidly middle classs, economically speaking through their own businesses.

[Snake Plissken]

Jess Phillips the first to fold and declare that she'll vote for Mays deal. My surprisedness is not total.

[Flynnie]

Jess Phillips the first to fold and declare that she'll vote for Mays deal. My surprisedness is not total.

Gotta keep her name in the news somehow.

[Benjm]

For a while I have thought that listening to JP is like being stuck in a lift with someone banging on about how you couldn't possibly understand something because you don't have children. Then on Peston's show last night she actually said that she took decision making on behalf of her constituents as seriously as if they were her children.

If I wanted to hear someone reading out old Hadley Freeman columns in a West Midlands accent I could do it myself.

[Gangster Octopus]

Yeah, but Corbyn might encounter less criticism if he hadn't spent the last couple of years basically doing a good impression of Richard Boyd-Barrett after a botched partial lobotomy.

Who or what is a Richard Boyd-Barrett, and why should I know anything about him/it?

[Nocturnal Submission]

You shouldn't, unless you take an interest in the domestic politics of the Republic of Ireland. It's just another one of Colm's parochial allusions.

[Duncan Gardner]

He's George Best's unacknowledged son. Possibly