that so many people still think its a good idea, is evidence that people are doubling down on the tribalism & are going to be in for a painful come down when it doesnt deliver what was promised.
Absolutely. This is why I keep saying that howling insults at the other side and celebrating the inevitable job losses and suffering that brexit will bring about is self defeating, even if we disagree with the other side. Where will it end? How low do we have to go before everyone comes to their senses? I don't want to be melodramatic but history is littered with examples of previously stable and successful societies which descended into chaos and violence. We can either carry on down our spiralling holes of hatred, or we can break out of them before we reach a point of no return. I know what I would prefer, and if that means accepting brexit, then so be it.
Last post from me on this.
I also object to the middle class jibes. I still work for a living and both me and my wife are from mining families.
Now I've retrained as a nurse I'm obviously part of the chosen elite and deserve the hatred of those poor souls who weren't as fortunate as me.
I know what I would prefer, and if that means accepting brexit, then so be it.
I see absolutely no evidence that accepting Brexit will resolve anything, I can assure you that my brother & his wife will just find something else to blame crap on.
a poorer country will be an even more bitter & divided one, and even more fertile ground for extreme views.
Now I’ve retrained as a nurse I’m obviously part of the chosen elite and deserve the hatred of those poor souls who weren’t as fortunate as me.
I'm not saying they're justified, just pointing out that's how they think. Whether we like it or not, this is the reality. We can either recognise it and do something about it, or carry on retreating into our respective corners. As always with these things, the solution is understanding the other side and showing empathy, even if that is unpalatable.
I see absolutely no evidence that accepting Brexit will resolve anything, I can assure you that my brother & his wife will just find something else to blame crap on.
To clarify I'm talking about the softest brexit possible not a no deal scenario. Preferably that would be a customs union + single market option with free movement, at the very least a customs union for obvious reasons. And for the record anyone wanting a no deal is quite frankly an idiot, but I think only a small minority are in that camp.
I don’t want to be melodramatic but history is littered with example of previously stable and successful societies which descended into chaos and violence. We can either carry on down our spiralling holes of hatred, or we can break out of them before we reach a point of no return.
Totally agree. I’m more than happy to work, pay my taxes and contribute to society. I won’t rant on about, and never have. At the % I pay, that is really quite awesome of me.
If I lose my job, there’ll be less in the pot for those really in need.
Where’s the upside again?
Or just pass the acid and we’ll all take a trip together?
One last time, although I’m going to bed now, so I won’t see the contortions that have to be gone through to get an answer.
WHY IS BREXIT A GOOD THING AND WHY SHOULD IT HAPPEN?
What's all this mention of class stuff, we all sh-t in the same bucket, I think some/a lot brexiteer's were most definitely not told the true negative effects of leaving the EU, personally I think we should never of joined to start with.
We should of kept our farms and stayed as much self sufficient as we once were instead of selling farms and land/posh house barn conversions or building shit housing estates on arrible land.
Politicians should of planned for an EU Failure.
Proper fkup
**** me.
I was only joking about the acid.
And for the record anyone wanting a no deal is quite frankly an idiot, but I think only a small minority are in that camp.
leaving without a deal has polled consistently at around 30% - its propa brexit!
We should of kept our farms and stayed as much self sufficient as we once were
When was this?
What were we eating?
My biggest fear is not that they’ve an agenda. I used to think that. I now don’t think they have. That’s crediting them with far too much intellect
Now? We’ll crash out, no deal, and look to the people who wanted this and say “right... you’ve got what you wanted. What now?”
And I know they’ll have about as much idea as there was the day after the vote.
There’s no plan. There’s no vision. There’s no anything. Just....
What?
Empty rhetoric and broken promises
I've worked on a few cattle farms and they have all but gone both meat and dairy, turned into poncy horse stables and the fields only for hay.
We are not as self sustainable as we were before we joined the EU.
Society has changed completely we rely on supermarkets at the best price and unfortunately their is not enough food in the uk alone to feed happy go lucky shoppers who want everything on the shelves all year round.
Leaving the EU, it has been quoted today that ;
So what are you saying? Eat turnips instead of salad?
Aye they be lucky to get Turrnips around these parts. Lol
Praps a few magic mushrooms ay!
50p a bag of all sorts of em.
So be seeing you next weekend then (giggles not maybe)
It’s easier to throw a turnip at a brexiteer than slap them with a limp romaine lettuce
Blimey, what a tangled web we weave.
Actually, apologies the first bit of your post said much the same as mine, although I would take the other conclusions from the twitter source with a pinch of salt until the judgement is published.
It is somewhat ironic how the Miller case keeps on helping the Brexit process.
Aodhán Connolly, of NIRC, said people in Northern Ireland would be hardest hit. “Our households already have half of the discretionary income of British households and less than those in the Republic of Ireland. A no-deal Brexit will hit us first and hit us hardest. This is not acceptable.”
Surely this is all part of a Catholic plot led ny Jacob O’Reece Mogg to make reunification more attractive.
Rabid politicians have broken the UK. It will recover - eventually.
It's what happens in the "eventually" that's the problem.
When we wake up to our new reality, we'll find that a huge trading bloc that was our partner is now a ruthless competitor, and not only that, has snaffled most of our large profitable international trading entities.
Meanwhile, our large "friend" across the Atlantic will prove to be the sort of friend whose unspoken agenda for over 100 years has been the dismantling of the British empire. Fortunately, our chefs will rise to the occasion with new and ingenious recipes for red slime.
But the good news is that our Establishment class will be on the ascendant again. With the increases in their fortunes from shorting British industry, and their tax evasion tactics secure, they will be able to restore their family mansions (with a wee bit of help from the taxpayer), and staffing them will be no problem because there's plenty of cheap labour.
And there will be a surge in royal babies to keep us distracted.
See, there's always a silver lining. 🙂
We are not as self sustainable as we were before we joined the EU.
Way before that. First world war the country suffered and second world war it suffered again due to the reliance on imported food and the Germans played on that.
The country hasn't needed to be self sustainable as it can import freely from EU where a lot of food can be grown more efficiently due to climate.
The UK could easily become self sufficient in food - give grants to growers, allow south west to be covered in poly tunnels, use automated planting/picking etc,. but there is/was no need to ever do that.
We also have the problem that forming is becoming less efficient. Arable yields are, as far as I can remember, falling in relation to the fertilisers that we use, so the energy balance is not in our favour. Likelwise, farmers rely on diesel and that's only going to increase in cost, along with the farm machinery that will need servicing. I can't think of a manufacturer that actually makes tractors in the UK, so they will get tariffed when imported.
I do wonder what could be done to make the UK self-sufficient in food. Maybe giving farmers a fair amount of money for their produce would be a good start, but that would hit people like Tesco hard and they would fight against that, or just pass it straight on to consumers.
The UK could easily become self sufficient in food
Prove it.
unfortunately their is not enough food in the uk alone to feed happy go lucky shoppers
But but ...all the pesky incomers will be going back no?
We are not as self sustainable as we were before we joined the EU.
A far right version of chairman Mao's cultural revolution, is not something to applaud and welcome.
Prove it.
I have proved it, the theory anyway -
"give grants to growers, allow south west to be covered in poly tunnels, use automated planting/picking etc,. "
Or do you expect me to actually get a job in government as a minister, get the policy through parliament, give it five years and then evidence it?
Is it actually a good idea, though?
That is the other great unanswered question for me:
Even if ‘Britain Can Make It Alone’, which we palpably cannot, but even if we could, who says this is actually a good idea?
Brexit is nonsense. The knots people tie themselves up in trying to find even the vaguest reason why it might not be all that bad are indicative of something that is just a stupid idea.
Bollocks to Brexit.
The UK could easily become self sufficient in food – give grants to growers, allow south west to be covered in poly tunnels, use automated planting/picking etc,. but there is/was no need to ever do that.
Even if the first half of that statement were true - and I'm far from convinced that it is - it's not simply that we don't need to. If we were to attempt to grow, say, pineapples we'd need land, labour, some form of artificial climate control... we'd essentially need to build another Eden Project the size of Wales. Or, we could just import them from somewhere sunny at tuppence a hundredweight.
Or do you expect me to actually get a job in government as a minister, get the policy through parliament, give it five years and then evidence it?
I expect you to be able to backup your statements with facts not unicorns and rainbows. You'd need to actually prove its feasibility before making it policy.
One of the reasons we are in this mess is people espousing their ill-informed opinions as fact when the realities are entirely different and inherently more complex.
'Throw money at it / greenhouses / technological solution' is not proving anything.
the theory anyway
Brexit was great in theory to some ....how's that panning out for us?
Politicians in theory are great ...and that's not so good right now either
We could go a long way towards self-sufficiency of people didn't throw away quite so much food (which could still be eaten, rather than food waste like bones etc). Best figures I have got suggests that each person in the UK will throw out ca. 67 kilos of food each year (seems a lot! - 4.4m tonnes in total according to this story... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/10/uk-throwing-away-13bn-of-food-each-year-latest-figures-show) .
Since your average lamb has about 13 kilos of meat on it after bones, that means that the equivalent of over 5 lambs per person are grown in the UK just to end up in landfill.
So that is the equivalent of 340 million lambs being produced just to be thrown out as waste. (we only produce 12 million lambs as a nation 🙂 )
Or if you are a Vegan, then consider it to be approximately 10 trillion iceburg lettuces being grown for nothing!
Worth thinking about if we are thinking of become self sufficient any time soon.
Any notion that we can "go it alone" would mean we'd need a clear Government strategy supported by investment - called industrial policy. Since 2000 it's been promised but never delivered - they invited sectorial bids from industry. Some of us spent years working on proposals, working with other employers to get co-funding for investment - securing funding for 10 year programmes and 2 years later they canned the lot. Whilst we work within 5 year parliamentary cycles we won't achieve anything of substance - just mealy-mouthed mendacity to secure votes and then pi$$ing-off when it comes to delivering anything!
Being self sufficient in farming is a needless fantasy. Even the Romans were importing wine and olives, its likely the our neolithic ancestors were trading tin for earthen ware.
I doubt there's a time in our recorded history that we've ever been self sufficient.
he UK could easily become self sufficient in food
you call it an obesity epidemic, I call it stockpiling...
Lamb and lettuce.
Anyone else craving a kebab?
This is all just more of the stuff that got us into this mess. 10 different people promised 10 different types of Brexit, one to please the "shut the borders" lot, one to please the "invest in the North" lot, one to please the "Singapore" lot, one to please the "kick out the muslims" lot, one to please the "the EU is about to collapse" lot, one to please the "regulate the bankers" lot , one to please the "Canada/Norway" lot etc etc.
And now that it's happening we're going to be a high-tech economy, and we're going to be like Singapore, and we're going to invest in the whole country, and we're going to all be self-suffiicent hunter-gatherers after the [s]Red[/s] Khmer Rouge, white and blue Brexit.
have proved it, the theory anyway –
“give grants to growers, allow south west to be covered in poly tunnels, use automated planting/picking etc,. ”
No that isn't proof, it's an idea. You don't grow grain in polytunnels and we import masses of the stuff. Have a read of Jay Rayner's "A Greedy Man in a Hungry World". Localisation of production (i.e. growing stuff where conditions are best suited) is a given in food production. It's efficient, even factoring in the food miles and carbon footprint of transport.
Very good.
Anyway… 1850… that's my punt for when the UK was last just about self sufficient as regards food. Been a few changes in diet (and the make up of the UK) since then.
No that isn’t proof, it’s an idea
It's an idea that could clearly easily work. We wouldn't grow pineapples, you don't need pineapples to be able to live and they are not a key part of being self sufficient.
The choice would go down (i.e no pineapples) but by selectively growing what grows well in the UK (in poly tunnels where necessary to help production) it could be done if a government really wanted to do it.
However, they don't want to do it and we as a country don't need to do it.
Sunlit uplands.... no I can't see them from inside a poly tunnel desperately trying to grow citrus fruit to stop the scurvy and rickets
what a silly mess this is - like any self-respecting project manager would with a project at work that is a banjaks, stop the entire show and start again with a better plan.
I expect you to be able to backup your statements with facts not unicorns and rainbows. You’d need to actually prove its feasibility before making it policy.
One of the reasons we are in this mess is people espousing their ill-informed opinions as fact when the realities are entirely different and inherently more complex.
FFS, get some perspective. I was just giving my opinion that with the required desire we could produce a lot more food (limited in choice but enough to feed people). I have not performed a feasibility study and I won't be making anything policy and I am aware that there are complexities to it.
It was just an opinion on a bike forum and I am hardly espousing anything as fact here and really don't think I can be responsible for the mess we are in with Brexit by posting that opinion.
limited in choice but enough to feed people
Like a famine in Africa, wonder if there will be any European aid for the humanitarian crisis in Britain?
Not sure what point I'm trying to make but it all seems so long ago and yet it wasn't.
How did we **** it up so badly?
It’s an idea that could clearly easily work.
If it can 'clearly easily work' you can provide us with some kind of fact based evidence; sometimes referred to as 'proof'.
It’s an idea that could clearly easily work. We wouldn’t grow pineapples, you don’t need pineapples to be able to live and they are not a key part of being self sufficient.
I would prefer the current arrangement.
Not sure what point I’m trying to make but it all seems so long ago and yet it wasn’t.
How did we **** it up so badly?
I think that the Olympics is a perfect example of how we got here, it was a private enterprise raid on tax payers with promises of long term benefits. Even those of us who thought that during the build up, had our spirits lifted in a summer of optimism. But after the show was over, and the promises were shown to be lies, all the supposed public benefits were handed over again to private enterprise and everyone realized we were conned.
Brexit is just another heist on a bigger scale, only we will never have a summer of optimism to look back on.
I think that the Olympics is a perfect example of how we got here
As well as the reasons you mention, it was the very definition of London and the South East benefitting at the cost of everyone else. There wasn't much enthusiasm for the Olympics up here in the Pennines.
