Posts by I ain't Spartacus 10158 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009
Steve Davies 3,
One answer is to abolish corporation tax altogether. It's getting harder to collect in a more globalised world - and it's also hard to judge where it should be collected. So tax dividends and capital gains more instead - and capture that money somewhere where it's much easier to define what's owed.
LDS,
He can be wrong. But this group have a history of talking bollocks on tax. And also love their 100bn tax gaps, as that was the amount of the tax gap in the UK when they did a big report about it 3 or 4 years ago. And it turns out that they included things like companies investing in machinery and knocking it off their tax as part of the "tax gap".
In general whenever someone comes up with a report that talks about huge massive headline figures - it's bollocks done for campaigning purposes and to get shock headlines. When you look closer you find that it's all dodgy adding up and/or dodgy selective use of statistics.
We all know that these companies are under-taxed - and over-use loopholes. So it's not that I disagree that they're a legitimate target. But there's often this pretence of something-for-nothing, that we can spend loads more on services without paying any more tax. And Tax Justice have been guilty fo that. This idea that we can have £100bn extra of spending, and someone else will pay. And that's just not true. People pay taxes, not companies.
Lazlo Woodbine,
that's the problem. £300 is way too much difference. I hope you gave the shop a chance to give you a discount though - and get closer to the web price.
But I think it is a problem that many shops are selling at RRP - when there's enough margin in it for some websites to really discount. And with manufacturers much less in control of pricing than they used to be - that's pretty hard to get away with.
Loyal Commenter,
I bought both my digital cameras (a bridge camera then upgraded to an SLR) on the high street. One from Jessops, one from an independent.
Even for Jessops though, they spent a long time showing me the different ones I wanted to look at - and I said that I'd found the one I settled on for nearly £200 less online. I didn't expect them to match that price (the cheapest I found wasn't a UK site and didn't look all that trustworthy anyway), but that I'd buy from them if they could get close. I think I ended up paying £30 more than the UK site - which is a reasonable amount for half an hour of playing with a handful of models I was interested in trying.
I actually spent less time choosing which SLR to go with. At the time all the Canon's below pro level had such small controls that my sausage fingers could barely use them. I'm not sure I even bothered to turn the thing on I found it so uncomfortable to hold.
Is Wheelie-Bin not a hyphenated name? It's important to get these things right, dontcherknow. Otherwise your newfound domestic staff might leave in high dudgeon.
My friend's receptionist is Miss Flower Bed. The Amazon delivery people tend to just fling stuff over the garden gate.
then bought it online because it was about 25% cheaper than anywhere on the high street...
And now you know why.
Plus the next time you want to try before you buy, there might not be any shops there to do it - because if everyone does this they'll all go bust. For stuff where I have to try it in person, I'll buy from the shop so long as they're within reasonable distance of online prices - or will give me a discount to get there. Expecting them to price-match is unfair.
On the other hand, with no delivery signed for you could have been really evil and complained that no delivery had taken place - and please could you have the record player you'd ordered or your money back.
Friends of mine did that with a coffee table, because they were so annoyed that it had been left in the carpark outside their flat in the pissing rain. As it was a resin polar bear supporting a glass table on its feet (cheesy but fun) it wasn't damaged in the way a wooden one would have been.
Stoneshop,
I didn't actually mind my green scrambled eggs (others couldn't understand how I could eat them). Some friends in the kitchen were playing silly buggers - so someone else's came out blue. Which reminded me of Ford Prefect eating the food on the Vogon ship.
You can change the tastes that we notice in foods by playing with colour though.
But obviously not all green things are bad. Salads can be lovely - I like brocoli (especially served with toasted almonds and sea salt). I'm not sure nori is actually nice though - so much as wrapped round things that are. It's not hugely tasty. Wasabi is also delicious. Key lime pie. Nice blue foods are rarer.
On a more seasonal theme a friend (since purged from my life for obvious reasons) came over for dinner last Christmas. Bringing some pre-dinner snacks. Namely Walkers Brussel Sprout flavoured crisps.
Have you ever eaten green crisps? Well don't. Not that I objected to the colour, just the taste. I like sprouts, but these things tasted of something that's been boiled in Satan's used sock for three weeks.
Being served green scrambled eggs is pretty off-putting too. Some people think they already look a bit vomit-y, but it's much worse when they're bright green.
So I went and looked up Question Time online - and the mighty Wikipedia came up. As all the rest of the first page of searches were to articles complaining about him getting so much airtime, I took it.
According to their list of episodes Farage has the 11th most appearances on the show (34). Which he's managed over 19 years (from first appearance in 2000) at an average of 1.7 appearances a year.
Which is not unreasonable for the leader of 2 parties that have consistently been able to poll between 5-15% for the last 10 years - and done considerably better in European elections.
Although that 1.7 a year is higher than anyone else the top 10 - with the top 3 all managing 1.6 a year.
Above him on that list are 2 Tories (Ken Clark and Michael Heseltine), 2 Labour (Roy Hattersley and Harriet Harman), 4 Lib Dems and Shirley Williams (who appeared as Labour a couple of times then became SDP then Lib Dem).
The preponderence of Lib Dems is a similar reason to Farage being on a lot, there are fewer of them, though they've been invited to most episodes since the 80s. Hence all the senior ones with long careers being at the top. UKIP had few other senior people, so we got lots of Farage. The Brexit Party is even more of a one-man band.
Then the 4 Labour and Conservatives were all senior ministers / shadow ministers with long careers - the two Labour ones having been deputy leaders of the party.
So Farage's appearance rate really isn't unusual. He became a European MP in 99 and has been on QT from 2000-2019 less than twice a year since - while he's been UKIP leader since 2009 - and is now Brexit Party leader.
I wouldn't normally complain, but 8 downvotes so far and yet not a single one of you able to summon an argument for why my post is wrong.
You might not like Farage, I certainly don't, but if you believe in democracy then there can be no argument. He has a right to speak, and has got enough people to vote for him repeatedly over the years that should guarantee his party, and him, a platform on our national broadcaster. Anything else would be blatant censorship.
Both his parties being effectively one man bands, does mean we end up with just him and nobody else for variety though. Which is admittedly annoying.
MOV r0,r0,
The BBC used to have something like 450 foreign correspondents - which was more than any other broadcast news organisation in the world. AP and Reuters may have had more I don't know... That's probably dropped with recent cuts - but nonetheless it's a massive global news organisation that broadcasts in something like 60 languages.
And globally has one of the highest reputations as well. You may not listen to the BBC World Service, but an awful lot of people do.
CNN captured the headlines by being new and the first to do 24 hour TV news. But even now I bet more people globally get their news from radio than telly.
John Robson,
Farage gets invites because his party won the last UK nationwide election. By more than 10% too - although came top in would be a better way of expressing it. You might not like it, but nonetheless for the BBC to be impartial they do need to represent that 30% of the people who voted in the European Parliamentary elections.
Admittedly turnout is pretty low in those, and the Brexit Party aren't looking to do too well in the currrent general election - at which point his coverage will drop. According to a Question Time producer I heard on Radio 4's Media Show most of his QT appearances were after UKIP did well in previous European elections.
Obviously it's a judgement call, because the Brexit Party are now down to 3-4% in the polls - but Nicola Sturgeon has taken part in national leaders debates and she's also not standing to be an MP - and her party don't even stand in most constituencies. Admittedly Brexit are only in about half now - but that's stiill more than the SNP. To ignore Farage him would be a gross display of bias I'm afraid, and that's why the Beeb don't do it.
The voice sounds awful though. And Nixon had a really distinctive voice. Deep with odd over-emphasis on certain syllables. Hence the famous quote, "there'll be no whhhitewhhashh at the Whhitehouse."
But some of that poor quality might be put down to rubbishy microphones and recordings.
A survey would have been a wise, make that a very wise move, before the order was inked.
Especially in a listed building - or whatever the Irish equivalent of that is.
I've been involved in building services works in the UK Parliament (which is a services nightmare and needs urgent and seriously expensive maintenance doing to it sharpish) - and on other difficult sites. And you have issues like not being able to remove rusty galvanised steel water tanks because they're in a wooden roof structure (see Notre Dame for details of why you aren't allowed to play with cutting gear) - but anyway the replacements won't fit through any of the accesses. In that case we used the dead steel tanks as a mold to shape a GRP tank - which we literally formed inside it - then re-did the horrible pipework (that we could get to). Except that we couldn't even cut holes in the partitions to put the pipes through - which made that a nightmare as well.
I have conversations about access a lot. But even then there are mistakes, assumptions and just plain forgetfulness.
Like the time I sold someone a 2.8m tall water softener to fit in a 2.5m tall plantroom. To be fair, the plantroom was 3m tall when I sold it to them, they just hadn't consulted a structural engineer about the 10 tonne of plant they were planning to put in there - and he made them raise the floor by half a metre in order to fit the strengthening in. Apparently they took the 3m long box with the softener tank out of the room - raised the floor - and then carried it back in and put it on its side. Only noticing a couple of months later when they came to finally install it. Then they blamed me...
As far as I can see, we're basically stuck with ICANN now. They got the IANA contract while managing to create a circular oversight process - where their board are only overseen by smaller committees made up of members of their board - and when they can't cover up the stink, they commission and independent report which they then submit to another sub-committee of their board and ignore it. See the .amazon or .aftica sagas for details and repeats of the process.
So they'll happily sit there and milk the bonuses and 5 star travel - and as long as they don't so totally fuck up that it's worth the effort of completely ripping up internet governance, we're stuck with them. Finding something better risks putting Russia and China in charge of global internet governance instead.
To be fair to Uber, they were very popular early on, as their app was easy to use and there are so many artificial restrictions on city taxi schemes that they're alwways either expensive or there aren't enough of them. Or often both. So a bit of competition cutting through the regulatory capture might improve things. Whereas minicab firms were too small and under-funded to have fancy apps - and even ones that did aren't going to be universal.
However, since then, more news has come out about what Uber get up to. And they're basically indefensible.
FlossyThePig,
Beer is all very well during the match - but if you go to Lords you're still allowed to take in 4 cans, or one bottle of wine per person. No other Test grounds let you - due to ICC awfulness, but Lords told them to get stuffed.
A buttered baguette, a bottle of bubbles a load of smoked salmon should sort you out for lunch. Then pork pies, various cakes and crisps will do for tea. And snacks during - sport can be very tiring... All of which goes nicely with some beer from the bar. Or, if you pack your picnic carefully - security don't tend to want to interfere with your sarnies - you can easily hide a flask of gin and some tonic in there. Which is perfect - you need lemon/lime to go with the salmon, and the rest can go in your teatime G&Ts.
Add a radio for TMS and some waterproof clothing, and you're sorted.
As I understand it, radio listening in the UK is still going up. Which suggests that it ain't dead - even with podcasting listening also zooming up.
Although saying that, podcasting gets lots of media attention, but I only know about 4 people who listen to them. Whenever I recommend a good one to someone, I'm still sort of surprised by the fact that they say they don't bother.
Given that almost everyone has a phone that can handle a podcast app, so it's as easy as tapping your finger about 4 times - then they just magically turn up when you've got WiFi.
Although if anybody can recommend a decent Rugby Union podcast, it would be appreciated
Brian Moore does one (sponsored by the Torygraph). It's a bit short, given how much there is to cover - and it's got Brian Moore in it - and I get the impression some people don't like him. Whereas I do. And it mostly covers international, European level and English Premier rugby. But it's worth a listen - and he often has good guests.
Surely radio waves travel at the speed of sound? Whereas the magical digital DAB stuff is doing light. But like the tortoise and the hare - it's showing off by running in circles round the chips. Plus it's got to go off to somewhere to find that weird underwater popping noise that only DAB makes - I reckon there are giant bubblewrap farms in the arctic - and it's going there that takes all the extra time and so is why analogue signals are quicker.
The advantage of the DAB delay is that it often matches the TV delay - so you can have the radio commentary when watching sport. Not possible with analogue, as that tells you what happens beforehand.
Rock Burner,
I hate you! My Bug died this year, after nearly 20 years of long and happy service. It winked at me every night when I went to bed, and then opened it's eyes every morning (well every time I turned it on actually).
I now have to pick up my stupid bedside radio to work out what the fuck is happening when I try to tune it. Why do all DAB radios have such pisspoor user interfaces? And such tiny screens. They only seem to give you 2 buttons, with each doing 20 different roles, depending on how they feel, or how hard you press them, or whether you're looking at the screen or not when you press it - and if not they'll sneakily come up with a 21st function, to do a complete re-scan of all stations and re-set.
Whereas the Bug has that nice big screen on a flexible metal stand, that you can pull towards you in bed, and lots of buttons so it's not horrible to use. Admittedly I paid about £90 for mine, and the modern ones are more like £20-£30. But that and my Motorola RAZR (also from about 2003) are 2 of the best tech purchases I ever made.
"Buying carbon credits is a bit like a serial killer paying someone else to have kids to make his activity cost neutral."
That was worth the entry price alone. In fact I stopped reading the piece to steal it, and text it to a friend. Thus having offset my use of the Earth's finite resources of humour, I continued reading.
Given his regular penchant for pushing people out of windows, do you think the BOfH has the same health & safety inspector as the town of Midsomer? Which also has an appallingly high death rate for such a small place.
It wasn't the US that encouraged Iran to expand into Yemen. They did that on their own. It was their work in Yemen and Syria that encouraged Trump to break the nuclear deal - although as it was one of Obama's successes, he was bound to not like it anyway.
It is pretty pathetic that the Europeans have failed to even get their "special purpose vehicle" to protect investment into Iran up and running by now. When did Trump pull out of the agreement? 2 years ago?
I suspect their heart isn't really in it, because the Iranians aren't exactly easy to work with. But it's a pretty massive failure of diplomacy - that's going to make future deals harder to agree.
Look at your salary and image it being worth only two-thirds of that next year and tell me that you'd feel perfectly fine with a 50% price hike for fuel.
After Dad died, we were doing a clear-out and found his salary book from the 70s. Around 74 maybe?
He was getting a 2% pay rise, every month. This was because inflation was over 20% - and the company would go bust if it started paying its staff 24% more at the beginning of the year. But if they waited until the end of the year - he'd only be on 3/4 of his original salary, in cash terms, and he wouldn't be able to afford it.
On the plus side, their mortgage was "only" at about 18% interest - and the face value of it was dropping rapidly in real terms.
It being the 70s, he needed all that money to keep me in brown trousers and purple t-shirts. Often with orange stripes.
Reality isn't too dull. It's just the arrogant tossers who make TV - that have no respect for thier own audiences and assume that only they have an attention span of more than 30 seconds.
Admittedly people watching leave your brain at the door entertainment shows are somewhat like that - as they're probably only half conentrating with phones or conversations being another option. But people watching hour long documentaries about engineering are probably concentrating a little harder - even though this is a sort of hybrid documentary where they've brought in Guy Martin to make it all a bit more fluffy - and do his whole Northern schtick - which partly disguises the fact that he's a mechanical geek with an under-developed sense of self-preservation.
Saw an interview with him, a while after he'd come off his motorbike in a race - and slid through a gravel trap. He had his helmet with him - and the abrasion of the gravel had removed most of the resin from it (I'm assuming it was carbon fibre) - and all that he had left was this sort of semi-rigid softish cloth-like thing that wouldn't protect you from being smacked with a wet salmon.
Watched Guy Martin on the tellybox last night on Channel 4. This time going for the tractor speed record - but driving for JCB by the looks of it, so a lot more resources than his usual stunts.
But they showed a clip of that insane bicycle one he did last year, where he's slipstreaming behind a truck at 120 mph on a pushbike. Phew what a looney!
The one I really liked was the racing tractor they let him drive at a tractor pull event (Snoopy IV). 2 Rolls Royce Griffon engines combined for a mere 8,000 horsepower! It's a very silly sport - that I highly approve of...
Plenty of early rockets were going kaboom. But less of that happened as the programs went on - once they'd perfected the technique. So they were blowing up Redstones and Atlas's for fun before they started doing manned launches - but the number of explodey ones did drop noticeably afterwards.
And they had far fewer explodey problems with Saturn, as I recall. Though I was reading a piece the other day that somebody linked to on here on a piece on Apollo 12, about the Apollo 13 fun and games. Which was talking about all the things that went wrong. So for example they'd used a bunch of fireproofing coatings on their control panels (after Apollo 1) - and these also happened to be waterproof. Which came in amazingly handy after they shut down their spacecraft for most a the trip to the moon and back - such that the control panels were covered in condensation when they went to re-start the command module. And they were lucky that there wasn't a massive short-circuit.
Also the centre engine cut out a few minutes early - and I think it was Lovell who commented that this might be our glitch for the mission. But according to the after-action report - that engine shouldn't have cut out as the sensor that did it wasn't reporting a problem - and they weren't sure why it did. But it was a damned good job that it happened - because the rocket had started pogoing and the engine had already deformed its own mountings and was getting rather close pushing itself into its own fuel tanks and ripping the entire rocket apart.
Why not save time by combinig the two tests?
So you do the launch abort test - blow up your Falcon in flight, with the astronauts in the Dragon capsule. Which separates itself off from the exploding rocket. Then - another Falcon, that's you've launched a few minutes later than the first, catches the capsule in mid-flight, mates with it, and takes it off to the ISS as normal.
What could be more exciting than that?
Obviously if anyone offers me a seat on that mission, I'll be jumping at it like a shot washing my hair that day...
Well, they could do what the Tories do and borrow? (Just kidding) Remember, Tories have added £0.9 Trillion to the National Debt in 9 years, which is quite impressive given how they've been slashing expenditure on everything worth having.
Pen-y-gors,
At what point does a comment that's factually accurate move from polemic to outright dishonesty?
The Conservatives came to power with the deficit at about £150 billion a year. They've gradually reduced that to about what £10-15bn. Which they've done by basically increasing governement spending less fast than the economy has grown.
What would you have had them do? Not deficit spend at all, but just cut government spending in the first year by £150bn?
Reducing the deficit more slowly may have resulted in slightly more economic growth or may have resulted in a crisis of confidence in Gilts - and thus the interest the government pays jumping from below £10bn a year to around the £60bn+ a year mark - rather than the £30-£40bn it is now. This was unknown at the time.
So is that deficit the fault of the people who inherited it, or the people who created it? Had the last Labour government been running a small surplus - to reduce the exuberance and inflation of the boom - as the Keynesian economics that Gordon Brown claimed to believe in recommended - the choices of the next government would have been a lot more palatable. A deficit of only say £80bn a year (5% ish of GDP) was sustainable for quite a while, but one at around 10% of GDP was pushing government finances to crisis point rather too quickly for comfort. It's always easy to call for Keynesian deficit spending in recessions - but that option is much harder to do if you haven't run the Keynsian surplusses in the booms first.
JohnMurray,
Governments are not households. And they are not businesses.
You are correct about this, if nothing else. The household fallacy of governments isn't right, but then as you also say neither is government a business. So Labour's talk of borrowing to buy assets that balance off against the government debt is equally foolish. Nationalise stuff if there's an argument for it, but you have to actually pay the costs of doing so - i.e. it's got to be really worth it.
MMT though is sort of bollocks. It may be true that the government can create money and destroy it in tax - that can be one valid way of looking at the economy. However MMT only lets you print money and spend it if the economy isn't at or near full-output. i.e. Helicopter Money can work in depressions because it's not that inflationary because the economy has unusued capacity and so this just boosts the economy closer to where it should be if there wasn't insufficient demand due to the loss of confidence causing the recession.
But rather like it's dead easy to be a Keynseian in a recession (all that lovely spending you call for) - MMT is much less fun in boom time. That's when the ecomomy is running at (or above) full capacity - and that is when government has to tax more than it spends.. For Keynesians to build up the war chest (actually keep government debt low enough) for safe deficit spending in recession - for MMTers because printing money at full capacity is highly inflationary - and once you start down that road it can very easily become a runaway process. Weimar Germany printed money in the early 20s because it had worked fine(ish) during WWI. When they controlled the economy and it was running under capacity. But when they had a need for hard currency to pay off war debt, printing money was disastrous. Because that's the other problem with MMT - it might work in a closed economy with few imports and capital controls - but as soon as you try to pay foreigners for stuff with cash where the ink's still wet - they get awful sniffy and demand extra. Or worse hard currency.
Anon,
All politics is about compromise. See my post above. When you hold out for everything you want, you often get nothing. In first-past-the-post systems you have big parties comprising groups of people with different views - who've made their compromises pre-election. So the voters know roughly what to expect in advance, but smaller single-issue groups of voters get much less influence.
In more proportional systems you get small parties, and much more chance for the electorate to vote their actual beliefs (without being forced into tactical voting) - but the outcome is way less predictable and comes down to the post election horse-trading.
In neither case does anyone get what they want without compromise. I voted for Brexit hoping for something like the Norway option, expecting that the more remain politicians would coalesce around that as the least-worst option. We nearly got a no-deal Brexit, which only about 10-15% of the electorate (and MPs) wanted - now it looks like we're on for a Canada free-trade deal style Brexit, which is a compromise I can live with, but many other soft-leavers would prefer remaining in the EU to.
So be careful trying to portray the people you disagree with as the "nasty" ones who won't compromise. In post-referendum polling about 65% didn't want Freedom of movement, similar numbers wanted Single Market access - and when put to the choice it was about 55-60% for staying in the Single Market. With only 60-odd hard leave MPs and 450-odd remain voting ones (out of 650) you'd have thought that a Parliament much more remain dominated than the population (but with 80% elected on "leave" manifestos in 2017), would have jumped at the chance of the Single Market compromise position. May and Corbyn are both unsuited to compromise though and were given little help to become so.
Fred Dibnah,
May's deal strongly implied some sort of strong customs arrangement. It was what she was negotiating for and was the idea of the whole UK backstop - that if the EU wouldn't agree any deal that let NI leave the EU customs union then the whole UK should stay in some sort of arrangement - which also kept a lot of industry happy. And would involve a lot of continuing regulatory alignment between the UK and the EU. Basically as close to membership as May could get without accepting Freedom of Movement.
As far as I can see it, and everything May said and did from her speech at the 2016 party conference onwards was pretty much consistent with this, her two principles were dumping freedom of movement and being able to do independent trade deals. She was after the closest future arrangement she could get that allowed both of those - hence the Chequers deal, and the various shades of customs agreement she tried to get.
My reading of the post referendum polling (unreliable because most people are very unsure about hypothetical polls so you get loads of "don't knows") is that most people wanted to get rid of freedom of movement. A large minority of remain voters included. I think it was about 60-65%. But similar numbers also wanted to keep Single Market access. When polled about choosing one or t'other there was a decent majority for keeping FoM and staying in the Single Market. So even though May didn't see that, had there been a big move from remainer types to coalesce round that as a compromise, more moderate leavers like Johnson and Gove (and large chunks of the Conservative party) would be happy - as would quite a lot of moderate remainers (i.e. most of the rest of Tories and quite a lot of Labour).
The problem was that with Brexit faltering a large number of politicians on the remain side decided to go all out for the win, and having a second bite of the referendum cherry. This destroyed May's premiership - and her deal was so shit that it polarised opinion still further. Rather than Brexiteers mostly saying, "oh well it's too hard" a bunch decided that if no acceptable terms for leaving were on offer - then we should go the whole hog and hard no-deal Brexit. Hence a tiny group of MPs (the ERG and the "Spartans"), with fewer than 60-70 people would have been the only ones getting what they wanted. And make no mistake, no-deal Brexit was looking increasingly likely - by miscalculation rather than design - but we couldn't keep going on extending the deadline - yet not even voting the hold a second referendum so that was always going to take 9 months to organise, which was too long for an extension.
Whereas if enough soft Brexit and remain MPs had voted for full Single Market access in the indicative votes - then May might have gone off and negotiated that. Which would be much easier to do.
People went for the high risk winner-takes-all approach. On both sides obviously, as that was clearly what Johnson was going for with his divisive tactics as PM - and May's deal could have got through with the ERG hard-Brexiteer types too. But I think that's why this Parliament deserved to be put out of our misery.
Personally I don't think remaining in the EU is a viable option, after voting to leave it. Not unless there's massive changes, which there's no appetite for. The Brexit Party wouldn't go away, and some future Conservative government in 5-10 years time could just win and take us out, citing the unfulfilled referendum result. There's a good chance of another major Eurozone crisis in the next recession, or the one after - the structural problems of the Euro have barely been touched. And there'd be an awful lot of betrayed Brexit voters complaining about every minor foible of the EU. Hard Brexit will entrench a small (ish) group of very unhappy remain voters too - though I suspect there's fewer of them, at least a third of voters have wanted to leave the EU since the 70s (though I think numbers dipped in the mid-80s) - Single Market membership with some policies to address the issues created by freedom of movement could have been a nice sweet spot that upset everyone the least.
Johnson's deal will be a less close relationship (a direct consequence of the choices made by remain campaigners) - Labour winning would be highly unpredictable. They want us to join the Customs Union but have co-decision or veto over EU trade policy - something Norway, Switzerland and Turkey haven't been allowed. I can't see them getting very much, then who knows how their second referendum would go, when they came back with May's deal again, with a slightly reformed backstop.
If those MPs were so responsible, why did they fight tooth-and-nail in Parliament for do-or-die remain, and not attempt to vote for a sensible compromise that everyone could live with?
If there had been fewer people campaigning for a second referendum, and voting down everything else, they wouldn't have got what they wanted - but they might have got us to something like Single Market membership. Which I think is a compromise that most voters could live with.
But that died in the joys of voting for unreastic things like eternal delay to any decision and extensions of the Article 50 process with no even vague suggestion of why.
OK, I admit that neither main party's leadership helped. But May even went back to the House for indicative votes to see if people would compromise, and they didn't. This attempt to claim that one set of people are the "sensible / clever / honourable" ones and everyone who disagrees isn't - is one of the main things that's caused the polarisation in politics. And that's as much the fault of people like Ken Clarke (who I'm otherwise a big fan of) as it is Rees Mogg.
The ERG are about 30 people. And Johnson isn't one of them. He actually voted for May's deal, as the least worst option at the time. Then despite it being supposedly "impossible" went off and negotiated a new one (minus the worst bits) - and has now said (and written into that agreement) that he wants a free trade agreement with the EU.
Apart from his views on the EU, I think he's much more of a Cameroon than any of them. Whereas the ERG are more Thatcherite-than-thou and certainly more Thatcherite than Thatcher ever was.
BinkyTheMagicPaperclip,
Labour are planning to nationalise companies without fully compensating shareholders, raise corporation taxes, print money to fund green spending, vastly increase borrowing and only increase taxes a bit. OK the last is clearly a lie - even they can't be so stupid as to think that you can get much money taxing the top 5%. Even gnoring the fact that dropping the top tax rate from 50% to 45% increased government revenue...
Oh, and I forgot, sieze 10% of the shares of every corporation with more than 250 employees to "give" the shares to the employees. Though they won't actually get the more than a few hundred quid of the dividends, as they'll go as taxes.
I was assuming that Labour would be slightly more cautious, as they were last election. But it looks like the Left are cutting loose and going the full 1983 at the moment.
Those are economically disastrous policies that will knacker the economy and drive loads of businesses out of the country. There'll be no more money for the NHS, because the country won't have it.
Voting Labour is a very poor idea indeed.
Oh and you might want some proof on the Tories being Islamaphobic. It's not them that are being investigated by the Equalities Commission (only Labour and the BNP have been so far) - and there aren't lots of muslim Tories quitting in disgust at their party - unlike the jewish MPs and members who've left Labour. I'm sure there are some nasty old racists in the Conservative Party, as there are in the country at large - but I've not seen the evidence that this is much more than whataboutery yet - although I'm not impressed they haven't done more to sort it out.
I'm not a fan of Johnson. But despite his "free and easy" / lazy way of talking about politics - he's not the lightweight he's accused of being. He was a shit foreign secretary, but a better mayor of London. However despite being told it wasn't possible and he wouldn't try - he managed to get an acceptable agreement out of the EU negotiation team, something May failed to do, and in my view that deserves credit.
Whereas I think Corbyn genuinely is a political lightweight - and is just as bad as Johnson at shooting from the hip. His language is more measured, but he can't stick to a political message and changes policy on the hoof in interviews, because he's either too lazy, thick or dishonest to stick the policy agreements he makes with his shadow cabinet team. Plus the tolerating anti-semites and terrorists, so long as they conform to his worldview. And he'll share a platform with the Hamas leadership, but refused to with David Cameron to campaign in the EU referendum. In my view he's got a broken moral compass. I don't think he's unpatriotic, so much as reflexively "anti-Western" in his opinions - so Isreal's sin is being US-backed rather than jewish. So my opinion of him is that he's a bit thick - rather than being particularly nasty - but that's not exactly a recommendation to be PM.
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