Brexit: ‘Breakthrough’ deal paves way for future trade talks
In the spirit of 1066 And All That, is this a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?
N.B. Do not attempt to answer more than one question at a time. (An exception may be made for the Irish Question.)
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These new disintermediated internet marketplaces can have interesting effects.
It is not all good news, though:
Apart from cost, there are other advantages to setting up a more permanent shop:
Reducing risks from clients brings more risk from state interference.
Is it time to end the war on some consensual sex? December 7th, 2017 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
 To be precise this is why we can’t have politicians who try to explain concepts from economics in a relatively grown up manner. When they give the more highminded strategy a go, along comes the Daily Mirror and the “pan-disability charity” Scope – whose Wikipedia entry is graced by one of those template messages saying, “This article contains content that is written like an advertisement” – to remind them why when attempting to discuss economics with the Great British Public the wiser course is to mindlessly repeat one pre-prepared soundbite. Daring to suggest that some groups might be on average be less productive than others, even in the context of saying that their participation in the labour force is a good thing, only brings on another mass bout of indignation dysentery. All one can do then is try not to breathe in too deeply until people have got it out of their system. Quoth the Mirror:
Quoth Scope:
Quoth Mirror commenter “DiAne”:
December 6th, 2017 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The BBC, along with most of the Remain establishment, is presenting this as if it’s only the DUP which is standing in the way of an agreement between the EU and UK in advance of trade talks. In reality, I suspect a great many Tory MPs, more than a few old-school Labour MPs, and a large percentage of the British population would also object vehemently to Theresa May deciding for herself that Northern Ireland should remain under the jurisdiction of the EU at the behest of the Irish government and their masters in Brussels. Anyone who thinks this is a minor detail being blocked by a gaggle of DUP hardliners really doesn’t understand the issue at all. Or they do, but are spinning it differently for political gain. December 5th, 2017 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The fact is we know nothing about the files Damian Green allegedly had on his laptop, and it is simply untrue to say that any such pictures would immediately result in dismissal from a regular job. This is a hatchet-job, and Theresa May needs to make it her personal mission to destroy the life of this ex-copper who is attempting to bring down senior members of her government. If she doesn’t, this sort of thing is going to become the norm; I’d rather see a bent ex-policeman doing a fifteen year stretch than have the entire political system further undermined. However they go about it, they need to make an example of him. – Tim Newman, sadly missing the fact that Theresa May never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity to do the right thing December 3rd, 2017 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
Many people across the political spectrum remain angry about the conduct of some in Wall Street and the City in the build-up to the financial crisis and, particularly among Mr Corbyn’s political base on the Left, it is widely believed – as he asserted in his video to supporters – that the financial crisis was used as an excuse by the Coalition government, elected in 2010, to row back state spending. Unfortunately, on this occasion, a lot of Mr Corbyn’s allegations fail to stand up to scrutiny. Morgan Stanley – whose directors include Alistair Darling, the last Labour Chancellor – received no rescue from the UK government in 2008, while it can hardly be said to have “crashed” the UK economy. The banks needing rescuing by the UK taxpayer were not the investment banks Mr Corbyn accuses of being “speculators and gamblers” but commercial lenders such as Northern Rock. Nor is it true, as was being widely suggested by Mr Corbyn’s supporters on social media, that Morgan Stanley still owes US taxpayers money in respect of the post-crisis bail-out. – Ian King, pointing out that Corbyn is lying. December 2nd, 2017 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
David Davis, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union has threatened to resign if Damian Green (the First Secretary of State, effectively Deputy Prime Minister) is sacked unfairly. Why, you may ask, is Davis – a Brexiteer – willing to put Theresa May’s already shaky government at risk for the sake of a Remainer like Green? The Guardian link above explains it better than I can:
Mark Wallace of Conservative Home writes,
I took a look inside the College of Policing Code of Ethics: A Code of Practice for the Principles and Standards of Professional Behaviour for the Policing Profession of England and Wales. Under “Standard of Professional Behaviour” section 3.1.7, “Confidentiality”, it said:
Do we want to set the precedent that if in the course of a search a police officer finds evidence of behaviour that is legal but frowned upon they can make it public? December 1st, 2017 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Telegraph reports that the inexorable progress of the Scottish National Party’s “Named Person” scheme has proved exorable after all. That’s two pieces of good news. One, with any luck its opponents will now be able to wear away at this horrible scheme until it falls apart. Two, there is such a word as “exorable”.
November 30th, 2017 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
What would be the point of a royal engagement without a Guardian article to miss it? In celebration of the forthcoming nuptials of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Afua Hirsch writes,
Ever charitable, I had initially assumed that Ms Hirsch was too young to personally remember this furore, by which I actually mean briefly successful effort on the part of a few journalists to keep each other in work by pretending to be outraged at each other’s stories, and that was why she portrayed something that happened in the year 2000 as if it happened in the 1960s. But that cannot be the case. She was nineteen at the time it was published. Perhaps her observations were tinged with a wistful desire to re-enact the heroic days of the Civil Rights era. If so, perhaps I should be more charitable after all; seventeen years ago that sort of playacting was not less common than it is now but was more excusable. Whatever. I too remember Baroness Gavron’s remarks and the reaction to them. The previous week a report had been released by the Runnymede Trust called The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. Lady Gavron was one of the authors. Unfortunately but inevitably the authors had received abusive hate mail from the sort of embittered nobodies who used to send hate mail to people they read about in the papers. (Nowadays we have Twitter for that.) But no, the reaction of the mainstream media to Lady Gavron’s remarks did not include talk of “racial dilution”. Note the absence of any names. All Ms Hirsch tells us is that “Some suspected” a clandestine attempt at getting rid of the monarchy through interracial marriages. Well, yeah, in a population of 56 million as it then was, some will suspect almost anything. But if a journalist on any publication other than National Front News had said any such thing they would have been out of a job the same day. At this point the reader might be asking themselves why if it was all so trivial I am claiming to remember Lady Gavron’s remarks across seventeen years? To answer that let’s look again at this passage from Ms Hirsch’s article:
As I remembered it the reason so many had assumed that Lady Gavron was advocating that Charles enter a loveless strategic marriage was not at all that they found the idea of a love match between two people of different race inconceivable. It was because Lady Gavron had advocated exactly that: a strategic royal marriage not for love but in order to send a message. Worse, she had said that it would have been “great” if Prince Charles had been told to marry someone for political reasons, with the assumption that once he had been given his orders on whom to marry he should obey them. To be fair to her, Ms Hirsch does supply a link to a Telegraph article from October 2000 so that one can see Lady Gavron’s exact words. Here is the link again:
It wasn’t someone black, and it may not have been phrased as a command, but Charles probably was pretty much told who to marry, and for reasons to do with what “message” his marriage would send. It did not work out well. One ancient royal tradition that all should be glad to see extinct is that of marriage as a tool of policy. Of course no one in their right minds would insert such a mad device as the monarchy if they were designing a nation from scratch. It is a historical relic. But history is a powerful force, and this nation is not being started from scratch. I hope and believe the monarchy does still have a role, so long as people can be found willing to play it. I hope the whole royal wedding shebang goes off well and a good time is had by all. If Ms Markle being mixed race makes more people feel included in the celebration, that’s great. More importantly I wish Harry and Meghan a long and loving life together. November 27th, 2017 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
However, even if £40bn were enough for the EU, many would ask why the UK should stump up anything at all. This is a political judgement that can perhaps only be made by the people in the room. In favour, £40bn (or more) might be a small price to pay in return for a ‘good deal’ with economic benefits potentially lasting many decades. Looked at this way, £40bn could be thought of a one-off payment equivalent to only a few billion each year (and much better value than HS2!). What’s more, since the ‘divorce bill’ is money that the UK would have to pay anyway if it had remained a member, it would be wrong to regard it as an additional cost of Brexit. Against this, what would the British taxpayer be getting in return, especially if the default position is that the UK could walk away without paying a penny and ‘no deal’ would not be the disaster many fear? ‘Goodwill’ alone is surely not enough, and should in any event be shown by both sides. At the very least it seems reasonable to expect the EU to agree to fast-track talks on a comprehensive free trade deal, including an explicit agreement on a time-limited transition period where trade remains as frictionless as possible. The UK could then make some of the money conditional on the success of these talks – perhaps anything more than the €30bn (£27bn) or so required to cover the period until the end of 2020 and something for pensions. This might just about be acceptable to the British public too. But I don’t envy the job of those trying to sell it. November 25th, 2017 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
From Hansard:
(Emphasis added.) Signatures include:
From yesterday’s Guardian:
Edit: In the comments Jacob asks, “I was wondering what the massacre perpetrated by a Bosnian Serb in Bosnia had to do with Kosovo…” Fair point; in my efforts to make a Drudge-style snarky juxtaposition I failed to make the link clear. Given that we are talking about mass murders rather than day-to-day political point-scoring, I should have done so. The link is that Mladic’s war crimes in Bosnia were part of the Yugoslav War(s), in which Slobodan Milosevic played a notorious role, which included egging on the Bosnian Serbs as well as his own crimes in Kosovo. The British Hard Left turned a blind eye to it all. My intention was to point up how tawdry EDM 392, and by extension the whole business of soft-pedalling the crimes in former Yugoslavia, looks now in the light of yesterday’s conviction of Mladic. November 24th, 2017 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Doctor Who is a bit like the NHS, a mediocre product that many Brits bizarrely think is world-class, and which is forcibly funded by taxation. – Perry de Havilland November 23rd, 2017 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
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