The Political Thread

[Steve Green]

"Stop talking the UK down, remainers"

Oh.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/uk-business-is-too-lazy-and-fat-and-prefers-to-play-golf-says-liam-fox-tbqpt5r97?CMP=Spklr-_-Editorial-_-TWITTER-_-timespolitics-_-20160909-_-Politics-_-579189718&linkId=28584786

[The Legendary Shark]

"Dr Fox said that companies were not ready to take advantage of the trade deals he was planning is not ready to negotiate."

[TordelBack]

The name 'Conservative Party' has always amused me: entirely independent of politics, in my head 'conservative' is a universally negative descriptor, reserved for the dull, intellectually lazy and unimaginative. It's like calling yourself the 'Everything's Grand As It Is Party, no need to do anything really,  I'll just be over here alpahabetising my Cliff Richard records. Oh and Vote Me, the others are commies and they want to make you eat lentils'.

[Steve Green]

True, but Labour sounds pretty dull as well.

[I, Cosh]

The name 'Conservative Party' has always amused me: entirely independent of politics, in my head 'conservative' is a universally negative descriptor, reserved for the dull, intellectually lazy and unimaginative.

Very much this. I was relatively old before I figured out that they themselves didn't necessarily share that interpretation.

[I, Cosh]

True, but Labour sounds pretty dull as well.

Works better as a description of who they represent (or represented, at any rate) rather than what they stand for.

Bring back the Whigs, I say.

[IndigoPrime]

So that's two of the three people basically in charge of Brexit having been slapped down by May, who's stated they offered personal opinions rather than government policy – and one of those was in the bloody Commons, when answering questions from MPs. Shambles doesn't really cover it. (Oh, and if Brexiters are keeping track, Boris officially climbed down on his key pledge of the points system for immigration, which now joins EU funding matches and £350/week for the NHS in the Brexit promises bin.)

Of course, it's hard to blame Davis and Fox entirely, given that May clearly doesn't actually have a policy. Nor any idea about how Brexit should be. Nor, increasingly it seems, a clue or any vestige of actual competence.

[Banners]

I know Fox is getting a lot of stick for this and is no paragon of virtue, but in terms of big business, he's right isn't he? In my experience, the bigger the company, the less agile they are, and the less interested they are in doing anything progressive or disruptive.

And surely as a supposed leader, he should kick butt every so often. Alex Ferguson wasn't successful because he was sycophantic and fawned over his players all the time.

[IndigoPrime]

First, he's supposed to be representing British trade and fighting for our future, and he's essentially just branded British business as lazy and not hungry. So immediately that's cost the UK in terms of deals. Secondly, he seems to have taken a template that he's perhaps used to (the fat-cat exec playing golf) and used that as a label for British business as a whole. It's bullshit. Heads of companies are rightly reacting with fury at such generalisation, and the inference about British working culture is deeply insulting. We work longer hours for worse pay and with worse holiday than the majority of equivalent EU countries. In return, we have efficiency and moral issues.

He could choose to address this. He could talk about solutions and new ways of working. Instead, he doubles down on the MUST WORK HARDER mantra that underpins practically everything this government says. Not, also, that it's Someone Else's Fault. Failure of the economy won't be down to Brexit, but "lazy" execs who won't ramp up exports because "it might be too difficult or too time-consuming or because they can't play golf on a Friday afternoon", rather than, say, them not having the time, or conditions being crap, or the future being entirely uncertain, or their business being unsuitable for export.

Also, given the Remainers keep getting shit for "talking down Britain", it's pretty fucking rich for this to come out of one of a Brexit leader mouth.

[Jim_Campbell]

Of course, it's hard to blame Davis and Fox entirely, given that May clearly doesn't actually have a policy. Nor any idea about how Brexit should be.

As a notional remainer, she has to keep her hands off Brexit, or the Leavers will howl that she's deliberately sabotaging it. She's put the thing in the hands of explicitly pro-Leave politicians so, when they completely fail to deliver, she can point to their enthusiasm for the cause and say that even the people who really, really wanted this couldn't make it work.

[sheridan]

I always assumed "righties" wasn't a thing because "lefties" was meant to be derogatory, not descriptive.  There's loads of insulting terms for right wingers, though: Tories, Nazis, LibDems, Blairites - Bennites will probably be one when the Labour party splits at the end of the month, too.

Well, half of those are self-descriptions, so can hardly be termed insults...

[Jim_Campbell]

Tories hedge their bets on scrapping EU worker protection. Who could possibly have seen that coming?

[IndigoPrime]

Davis argues the referendum wasn't advisory, sending lawyers I follow on Twitter into simultaneous headdesking. No provision now to keep NHS funding pledge, nor, for that matter, any other pledge made by Leave. Workers rights bonfire on the way. My own MP has responded that he "hopes" existing nationals "using their legal rights to reside" should be able to stay (which is more sinister than it sounds — the inference is those who've lived AND worked here for five years, meaning my wife wouldn't necessarily be eligible by default, despite us having lived in the UK for over a decade). Davis has also ruled out any kind of EEA/EFTA option, yet still doesn't seem to understand the basis of international trade, EU law regarding trade, and the manner in which business exports are conducted.

I had at least some optimism about this process initially, on the blind hope May would prove to be competent. She's rapidly proving otherwise, even managing to piss off a chunk of Tories with inept evidence-free policy such as grammar schools and allowing faith schools to actively discriminate while her party simultaneously has a go at immigrants for not integrating (and for Muslims having their own Muslim-only schools). And although I've finally had conversations with non-swivel-eyed Leave voters, whose own acceptable scenarios at least crossover with my own, it's pretty clear this government has no interest in such compromise.

Prior to the vote, we were told this was all about sovereignty. Bullshit. We now have a government aiming to bring more power to our own parliament by excluding it from the most important process to happen to this country since WW2. (Parliament will also not be told about the discussions being had. No transparency, which is insane. We will have to rely on the EU giving us information about the future of our own damn country.) We were told it wasn't about immigration. Yet now the righter-wing of the Conservatives doubles down on the 'fact' that OF COURSE people were voting to curb immigration. (Really? I didn't see that on my ballot paper.)

And then there's the likes of The Sun screaming about "EU spite" because the EU's ESTA-style system will block Brits travelling to the EU. The reasoning, apparently, is that while it's perfectly fine to have a highly restrictive points system for coming to the UK, British tourists shouldn't be inconvenienced, because we're bloody well British, dammit. And without irony, the same piece says it makes no sense to have such restrictions, because Germany and France have been border-free for decades, and applying that to the UK would be crazy. GERMANY AND FRANCE HAVEN'T JUST VOTED TO LEAVE THE EU, YOU SHITHEAD 'JOURNALISTS'. Gah. Meanwhile, we have government sources simultaneously saying that the revised immigration system will at one be limited only to high-skilled labour yet will also provide the farmers the low-skilled labour they need to ensure British crops don't all rot in the fields.

No-one has a clue. Or, even more worrying, they do know what they're doing, and seek to make a small minority of wealthy people very happy.

[The Legendary Shark]

No-one has a clue. Or, even more worrying, they do know what they're doing, and seek to make a small minority of wealthy people very happy.

More or less my entire argument in a nutshell. 

[Old Tankie]

Inflation continues to be very low, employment continues to be very high.