Ed – i pg11.
That & torygraph biz are only papers I’ve seen today.

Trouble is I really can’t see the current govt being competent enough to steer policy suitably

Well that’s just it. We are experiencing a double whammy – we’re having to negotiate the most incredibly difficult and tricky thing the country has done since the war, and we’ve got the least competent leadership in living memory to try and do it.

He’s not saying anything that isn’t blindingly obvious in this article, nor anything that wasn’t blindingly obvious in 2016, but still:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/07/brexit-regulation-britain-eu-agencies-sajid-javid

I reckon we should just demand Guernsey and Jersey be handed over in exchange for something in the trade negotiations.

I see you have forgotten about Alderney (the only true Channel Island) and the other, smaller islands. Good, although I would take significant schadenfreude at the idea of Brecqhou being handed over to the French given the Barclay’s pet paper’s opposition to the EU.

Maybe he was being Sarkastic?

Maybe he was being Sarkastic?

It’ll be a cold day in St Helier before we give the channel islands to France.

Sarkastic?

That deserves a round of applause.

Chatting to people living and working on the islands, about how little concern was shown for them during the EU debate, was embarrassing. We’re selfish arses in England, aren’t we.

The Channel Islands aren’t part of the UK tho.

I am being told again and again that with out our money the E.U. is finished and they need us way more than we need them. This is from a successful business man.

I don’t agree and got royally patronised.

The Channel Islands aren’t part of the UK tho.

Yes. But personally I thought my ‘St Helier’ pun deserved better.

The Channel Islands aren’t part of the UK tho.

Which is why they didn’t get a vote, despite their status being dependent on us being in the EU. It’s worse than Gibraltar in a way… they at least got a vote (not that they were listened to).

my ‘St Helier’ pun

I enjoyed it.

The Channel Islands were already part of the Duchy of Normandy when Willie One invaded in 1066, so technically we belong to them…

*tuts* Sarkasmus !

Crown dependancy tax havens:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-jersey-48354081

However Mr Christensen said that the EU system was “flawed from the start”, and that they would not blacklist it’s own members or their dependencies.

An EU Commission spokesperson said that, by international standards, no member state can be described as a tax haven and the criteria for non-EU countries is the same.

No financial passport until the lot are shut down if I were Barnier.

I am being told again and again that with out our money the E.U. is finished and they need us way more than we need them. This is from a successful business man.

The easiest way around this is to not equate “successful” with logic or intelligence.

i’m worried that the fact this thread is going cold, that Boris’s plan on keeping quiet about brexit is working…..

I await with interest evidence that freeports in the UK will be economically beneficial, not having seen any to date. I'm also interested to see whether trading partners including the EU will definitely include them in trade deals. https://t.co/HuzOS0VHN9

— David Henig (@DavidHenigUK) February 10, 2020

Yep it’s a cunning plan:

Phase 1: talk about Brexit until people are thoroughly sick of hearing about it.
Phase 2: get elected on the promise that you’ll make it all go away.
Phase 3: stop talking about Brexit and cook up any deals you like while no one is looking.

Ah, the job creating Freeports canard is back. See the other thread. We had them while in the EU… all the new trade deals the EU had arranged, and had in the pipeline, made them an anachronism… so they died off… the government let the legislation lapse that would enable more. There’s still lots of them in the EU, but they’re dropping out of use as well… due to all the new FTAs that the EU is signing around the world, which enable, er, free trade.

Welcoming back freeports is like welcoming the government giving out gas masks, having just deliberately used poisonous gas on its own population (in the hope that some of it’ll float over the channel and Irish Sea to show those foreigners who now has control).

alcolepone, the thread will fire back into life when johnson announces the gov decision on HS2 which is likely to be this week.

Right from the off this hads been a far right neoliberal idealogical project, driven entirely by dogma. Trivial things like reality aren’t allowed to make any unwelcome appearences

I’m somewhat waiting for the Commonwealth option … should be fun watching as the nation with the largest GDP explains why they should be in charge and why the want FOM.

I see Boris’s “bird” and his main “bitch” (sorry I know a bit 70s) are having a do over what Bojos next cabinet should look like?

Dont get elected if you want control, just lead the PM round by his knob and squeeze his balls….

Sorry apologies

Oldman – never apologise for being honest and truthful.

Always best to be the power behind the throne rather than sitting in the hot seat.

Cummings is dangerous. Anyone who is given to quoting Nietzsche to the exclusion of other thinkers needs watching. The scoundrel’s philosopher of choice when it comes to pushing general nastiness.

I’m starting to wonder if the roost is going to be big enough for all the chickens coming home?

https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/10/checks-on-eu-bound-goods-inevitable-gove-tells-business-leaders

Just been reading that. Absolute madness! Complete and utter insanity!

So according to Pob, smart borders will be in place within 5 years.

Given the record on IT projects I’m guessing ten years and 50 billion quid later we still won’t have a working system.

And during that decade, big business will quietly shut up shop and relocate to the E.U. to save themselves the hassle

Still…. blue passports eh?

Still…. blue passports eh?

Today’s wheeze is the bridge isn’t it?

He ho… let the Hunger Games begin…

I’m in northern Italy. The radio in the taxi had a five minute piece about Brexit, followed by a good three minutes on the Irish elections. So it’s still in the news.

I’m starting to wonder if the roost is going to be big enough for all the chickens coming home?

It’s amazing the gall to talk about the necessity of border checks like he’s just figured it out, and half the country haven’t been saying it all along.

Gove’s comments continue the trend of ‘walking back’ multiple unequivocal statements made by the tories upto the GE; now they have total control we’re beginning to see what brexit will really mean.
Statements made by johnson and his senior acolytes prior to the GE are now being shown to be nothing more than empty words.
Yes, I know that many here – and elsewhere – were calling bollocks to all of johnson’s words but surprising numbers either believed him or didn’t care.
Either way there will be a huge price to be paid for this madness – economic pain being the most obvious.

We will have to see on Thursday what the cabinet reshuffle looks like, if there is an ingress of ERG nutters then thats the way its hoing.

Currently there are no signs of anything other than a hard brexit, in reality Boris has little choice if he wants to keep his majority post brexit then he needs the masses on his side and a hard Brexit delivers that on multiple levels by telling “jonny foreigner” to get stuffed, instigate the Blitz spirit (i.e suffer for your pride poor people) zero tariffs (cheap yankee chicken yee haa) shit loads of cheap imorted tat

Anything else has to many political compromises and trade offs.

Still…. blue passports eh?

Apparently they’ve still got loads of the red ones left, so they’re not going to do the blue ones for a bit. Or so I heard.

Frictionless Border you say?

Gove has just shot one of the unicorns in the face…🦄

‘Frictionless trade with the EU will end in 2020’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51453189

Edit: seems that the bbc are several hours behind the papers

Frictionless Border you say?

Of course. Don’t go giving us this Project Fear stuff being banded about by… [checks notes]… Vote Leave’s Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. The bait and switch is complete, the conmen win. Have a nice wasted decade all.

kelvin
…Have a nice wasted decade all.

OTOH I think some of us will have a very fruitful decade. 🙂

If that’s a reference to Scotland not getting dragged through all this shit along with the rest of us… I fear you’ll be sadly disappointed.

I don’t think we will be beside you for the entire shitshow Kelvin. Just think; Carlisle will be like Tijuana.

Well, Wangerland is becoming more and more likely… but it’ll take more than a decade to come about, if it does.

We will have to see on Thursday what the cabinet reshuffle looks like, if there is an ingress of ERG nutters then thats the way its going

His present cabinet is full of brexiteer ultras. Not your ERG lot though. Gove, Patel, Javid, Truss, Kwatang etc are a bit of a different animal. They are absolutely rabid, fanatical free-marketeers who want to see complete deregulation of all areas and absolutely everything to be thrown open to ‘the market’

These people are very different from your Bill Cash/Mark Francois style headbangers though. They’re not your misty-eyed, nostalgic, flag-waving ‘two world wars and a world cup’ loons. They’re not fussed about much of that. They’re looking very much to the future. They’ve just used those union-jack-clad Faragists as convenient allies to get us to where we are now. They’ve now served their purpose and can be discarded

Given the size of his majority, and the complete absense of anything resembling an opposition, It’s difficult to see Boris changing direction. He’s well and truly on board with all of this. We are now finally really seeing what the final post-Brexit UK will look like.

See how ‘No Deal’ has now been re-branded as an ‘Australia-style deal’. Well… thats just a no deal crash out thats been given another name to make it more palatable to people who aren’t paying too much attention to the detail. The end result will be exactly the same.

They’ve always intended to crash us out. And they’ll use the resulting economic and cultural chaos to remodel our society into some US/Ayn Rand dystopian uber-neoliberal nightmare where we become a completely deregulated tax haven/sweatshop off the coast of Europe. A subservient satellite of Trumps America.

Something to look forward too, eh?

Make the most of the next year, because at the end of it time will be being called on a lot of things we presently take for granted as part of living in a civilised society. The project they have in mind is going to make Thatcherism look like a tiny bit of economic rearranging

The EU have rejected the tories proposals on financial services outright – as was always obviously going to happen.

Barnier says EU will not give the UK “open-ended” equivalence recognition for financial services. That means one of the UK government’s demands (see today’s Financial Times’ splash) has been shot down immediately.