tonyh29 Posted October 28, 2016 Share Posted October 28, 2016 2 hours ago, HanoiVillan said: The point here is that if Theresa May believes leaving the single market would be detrimental to Britain's interests, then she shouldn't do it, at least until a genuinely viable alternative has been found. I'm not aware that the UK works on the will of one person , Cameron wanted to bombed Syria for example but parliament over ruled him Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Posted October 28, 2016 Share Posted October 28, 2016 43 minutes ago, tonyh29 said: I'm not aware that the UK works on the will of one person , Cameron wanted to bombed Syria for example but parliament over ruled him Parliament is indeed sovereign. Indeed, the will of the H of P > the result of a referendum (which is in effect little more than a gauge of current voter sentiment. That gauge could be well different now, to what is was even 4 months ago) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HanoiVillan Posted October 28, 2016 Share Posted October 28, 2016 22 minutes ago, tonyh29 said: I'm not aware that the UK works on the will of one person , Cameron wanted to bombed Syria for example but parliament over ruled him Theresa May is the de facto head of the Brexit negotiating team. She sets out where the 'red lines' are, as far as her government is concerned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyh29 Posted October 28, 2016 Share Posted October 28, 2016 19 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said: Theresa May is the de facto head of the Brexit negotiating team. She sets out where the 'red lines' are, as far as her government is concerned. I'm not sure that is true either , if her party want to leave the single market and she doesn't and thus follows your lead and says No , we wont do it ... how long do you think she would be in charge for ? you only have to look across the despatch box to see what happens when you lose the support of your MP's ..May doesn't have the luxury of being propped up by Unions and know it all students Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrentVilla Posted October 28, 2016 Moderator Share Posted October 28, 2016 Just now, tonyh29 said: you only have to look across the despatch box to see what happens when you lose the support of your MP's.... You carry on anyway? 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HanoiVillan Posted October 28, 2016 Share Posted October 28, 2016 2 minutes ago, tonyh29 said: I'm not sure that is true either , if her party want to leave the single market and she doesn't and thus follows your lead and says No , we wont do it ... how long do you think she would be in charge for ? you only have to look across the despatch box to see what happens when you lose the support of your MP's ..May doesn't have the luxury of being propped up by Unions and know it all students I take your point. Obviously there is a balance that has to be reached between her own back-benchers and her own views and the views of the public and what's best for the public. Sometimes that can be extremely difficult. Still it is her job and she very much wanted it, so my sympathy is strictly limited. I suspect being 20 points ahead in opinion polls is probably persuading more than a few waverers that she's the right horse to back for now too. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Awol Posted October 28, 2016 Share Posted October 28, 2016 4 hours ago, Jon said: Parliament is indeed sovereign. Indeed, the will of the H of P > the result of a referendum (which is in effect little more than a gauge of current voter sentiment. That gauge could be well different now, to what is was even 4 months ago) "This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide." The words on the EU referendum leaflet delivered to every home in the country. The result may not be legally binding on the Government but it is certainly morally binding. May understands that and the implications for public trust in the political process if the Government fails to keep its word. I still find it amazing how many people inside and out of Parliament refuse to understand that. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MakemineVanilla Posted October 29, 2016 Share Posted October 29, 2016 17 hours ago, Awol said: "This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide." The words on the EU referendum leaflet delivered to every home in the country. The result may not be legally binding on the Government but it is certainly morally binding. May understands that and the implications for public trust in the political process if the Government fails to keep its word. I still find it amazing how many people inside and out of Parliament refuse to understand that. Or, it could be the case that those inside Parliament understand it perfectly but can't resist the political mileage which pretending otherwise affords. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blandy Posted October 30, 2016 Author Moderator Share Posted October 30, 2016 On 28/10/2016 at 17:35, Awol said: "This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide." The words on the EU referendum leaflet delivered to every home in the country. The result may not be legally binding on the Government but it is certainly morally binding. May understands that and the implications for public trust in the political process if the Government fails to keep its word. I still find it amazing how many people inside and out of Parliament refuse to understand that. You're right, the government is absolutely obliged to implement "leave the EU". I don't think anyone inside parliament refuses to understand that, though. Plenty outside maybe do, or maybe want them not to implement it. The big debate is much more about what leaving should involve, whether it should mean complete isolationism or be pretty much just a technicality are the two extremes with a whole range of views in between Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xann Posted October 30, 2016 Share Posted October 30, 2016 3 hours ago, blandy said: You're right, the government is absolutely obliged to implement "leave the EU" Oh right. So you're letting this one ride, after a 52/48 split huh?.. No intention on delivering - Brexit can go **** themselves. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blandy Posted October 30, 2016 Author Moderator Share Posted October 30, 2016 2 hours ago, Xann said: Oh right. So you're letting this one ride, after a 52/48 split huh?.. No intention on delivering - Brexit can go **** themselves. It wasn't just the NHS thing where the Brexit people lied/promised the undeliverable - there's an enormous list off utter pish that they promised. From lower taxes to dishing out the £350 million to multiple different places while at the same time maintaining the funding various sectors get from the EU's spend in the UK, and giving us all pay rises and how much stronger the UK Union will be and how we'd already be setting up trade deals with every man and his dog outside the EU. It was all a big pile of bollex. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post chrisp65 Posted October 30, 2016 Popular Post Share Posted October 30, 2016 Yeah, but 'they' won, so now anybody that thinks any of it was a scam and a lie has to shut up and just take whatever secret deal the incompetent nutjobs and privateers negotiate on behalf of their favoured businesses and banks. It's called democracy. So come on, let's just stop questioning things and put all our quiet trust in the right wing of the tory party to fight hard on behalf of the everyday people of Britain. 9 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mockingbird_franklin Posted October 30, 2016 Share Posted October 30, 2016 i'll let Ian Hislop explain something a few people have forgotten about democracy 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HanoiVillan Posted October 30, 2016 Share Posted October 30, 2016 95% of the time I think Nick Cohen is an insufferable arse, but I do admit that when he's good, he can be very good indeed and his column in the Observer today was worth a read I thought: Theresa May lied and lied again to become PM Theresa May appeals to a stereotype that has a deep grip on the English psyche. Sober and commonsensical, she behaves with the moral seriousness we expect from a vicar’s daughter. She may be a little clunky, but what a relief it is to have a straightforward leader from the heart of the country after the flash, poll-driven phonies of the past. I am not saying her public image is all a pretence. No focus group told her to campaign against the modern slave trade when she was home secretary. There were few Tory votes in stopping the police targeting young black men, either. But the dominant side of Theresa May is more superficial than David Cameron and more dishonest than Tony Blair. It is a tribute to the power of cliches to stop us seeing what is in front of our noses, that so few have noticed that the only reason she’s prime minister is that she put ambition before principle. Last week, Downing Street spin doctors were trying and failing to downplay the importance of a secret speech she gave to Goldman Sachs on 26 May, which was leaked to Nick Hopkins and Rowena Mason of the Guardian. In private, May was unequivocal. “The economic arguments are clear,” she told the bankers. Companies would leave the UK if the UK left the EU. In public, however, she made just one speech during the referendum campaign. You forgot it the moment you heard it. May never mentioned the danger of companies fleeing. Her economic case, such as it was, came down to a flaccid, pseudo-impartial argument that “there are risks in staying as well as leaving”. As an orator, May was hopeless. As a politician on the make, she was close to perfect. When Craig Oliver, Cameron’s former chief of communications, wondered if she was secretly an “enemy agent” for the Leave side, he was being too Machiavellian. May was just making the smart move. She kept her views about the economic consequences of Brexit quiet, so that the Conservative right would accept her as leader if Cameron lost. Failing to state your honest opinion on the most important decision Britain has taken in decades may seem cowardly enough. But the consequences of May’s pretence do not stop with one referendum. Her manoeuvres have forced her into a position where she must make arguments she cannot possibly believe, on behalf of causes she cannot possibly believe in. Her behaviour shows that, far from “taking back control”, Brexit is depriving us of the ability to take decisions, giving privileges to the special interests the Leave campaign claimed it was fighting against, and imposing burdens on the taxpayer far greater than the mythical £350 million a week that Vote Leave said we sent to Brussels. Example: May opposed a new runway for Heathrow. Maybe she was just thinking about her constituents whose peace will be wrecked. Maybe she was worried about cramming an expanded airport into a dangerously overcrowded corner of London. The point, post-Brexit, is surely that the environmental or logistical arguments no longer matter. As her government admitted, May had to approve Heathrow to prove to sceptical markets that she had a “commitment to keeping the UK open for business now and in the future”. Her objections to the Hinkley Point nuclear power station were just as reasonable. Chinese investment threatened handing control of a part of our energy supply to a potentially hostile foreign power. As pertinently, Hinkley’s proposed reactor is fantastically expensive and next to impossible to build. (A forerunner in Finland is nine years behind schedule and €5.2bn over budget.) When May called in the decision to go ahead with Hinkley, she looked like the proud prime minister of the newly independent nation that Vote Leave promised us. Until, that is, Xinhua, the official news agency of the Chinese Communist party, explained Britain’s new place in the world. “A kingdom striving to pull itself out of the Brexit aftermath” could not afford to “deter possible investors from China”, it warned. After a brief moment of defiance, the submissive May agreed. Her defenders say that she is responding to the will of the British people. I won’t go on about how a 52-48 vote was hardly the people speaking as one. Instead, you should understand her by looking at how, after abandoning her beliefs, May refused to level with the public and confront them with the hard choices ahead. Rather than speak plainly, she has embraced the Leave campaign’s big lie that Brexit will be painless. To maintain the illusion, her ministers scramble in secret meetings to cut deals with special interests. Whatever bribes they have offered Nissan will only be the start. Farmers, the City and corporations with muscle will all want taxpayers’ money to compensate them for their losses. The bill will be picked up by small businesses, which cannot afford lobbyists and, of course, by the taxpayers, who will fund the right’s illusion that we can have Brexit without pain. As I said, May had the reputation as a reforming home secretary and some of that reputation was deserved. But as she presides over an upsurge in racial violence and the gobby resurgence of ignorant-and-proud-of-it nationalism, it’s worth remembering another moment in her time at the Home Office, which shows how willing she is to live with lies. You can trace the origins of today’s yobfest to 2013, when the right manufactured a pseudo scandal about “health tourists” exploiting the dear old NHS. Pressed by the BBC to say how much money thieving foreigners were stealing from the health service, May could not give an honest reply, for the Royal College of GPs had already explained that the supposed “problem barely existed”. May did not care. The perception that there was a scandal mattered more to her than the reality that there was none. The electorate had the “feeling that people who are here illegally were accessing services”, she said, so she must maintain the pretence. Now she is a prime minister of pretences, running a government where feelings matter more than fact. She pretends that we should leave the EU, even though she knows we should remain a member of the single market. She offers us the illusion that we are taking back control, even as we lose our freedom to act. She cuts deals in secret, in the hope that the public will never realise that her land of make-believe is an expensive place to live. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/30/theresa-may-lie-and-lied-to-become-prime-minister 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xann Posted October 31, 2016 Share Posted October 31, 2016 Quote Taxpayers will pick up the bill should the cost of storing radioactive waste produced by Britain’s newest nuclear power station soar, according to confidential documents which the government has battled to keep secret for more than a year. The papers confirm the steps the government took to reassure French energy firm EDF and Chinese investors behind the £24bn Hinkley Point C plant that the amount they would have to pay for the storage would be capped. The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy – in its previous incarnation as the Department for Energy and Climate Change – resisted repeated requests under the Freedom of Information Act for the release of the documents which were submitted to the European commission. Grauniad Like fracking then. We don't want it, but it's us the taxpayer that covers the risk, whilst their suited chums rake in profits. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyh29 Posted October 31, 2016 Share Posted October 31, 2016 1 hour ago, Xann said: We don't want it Who made you Lilly Allen to speak on our behalf Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xann Posted October 31, 2016 Share Posted October 31, 2016 7 minutes ago, tonyh29 said: Who made you Lilly Allen to speak on our behalf It's Halloween innit Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xann Posted October 31, 2016 Share Posted October 31, 2016 Quote Nissan's post-Brexit deal could lead to 'colossal' bills for taxpayer Opposition politicians raise concerns after business secretary caves in to pressure to reveal details of talks with carmaker Nissan was convinced to stay in the UK with a promise of no tariffs or extra bureaucratic burdens on the car industry after Brexit, the business secretary has finally revealed, prompting fears that sector-by-sector deals could cost the taxpayer “colossal amounts of money”. Greg Clark caved in after four days of pressure in an interview on Sunday to reveal some details of how the government convinced the Japanese manufacturer to produce a fleet of new vehicles at its Sunderland plant. The Tory minister said he wrote to Nissan with a series of four assurances as he went “all out” to allay concerns about Brexit, promising that the government was confident of securing a deal that would keep the car industry competitive. Grauniad Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrisp65 Posted October 31, 2016 Share Posted October 31, 2016 Turns out that Amber (list your foreign workers or we will publicly shame you) Rudd has looked deeply in to Orgreave and decided there is nothing we can learn about whether the government of the day used the police as an enforcement arm of tory party policy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrentVilla Posted November 1, 2016 Moderator Share Posted November 1, 2016 South Yorkshire Police? A tool of the 80's Tory Right? I just can't see it myself..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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