An article just showed up in today's Washington Post that the leave website, http ://www.voteleavetakecontrol.org/, has suddenly been wiped completely clean, no interviews, no "fact sheets", nothing, and the report says there's a ton of online speculation that they're hiding what they had claimed....
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]]>FACT Since 1973, the Government has sent over £500 billion to the EU, three times the annual NHS budget.
FACT The EU now costs the UK over £350 million each week - nearly £20 billion a year.
FACT Our EU contributions are enough to build a new, fully-staffed NHS hospital every week.
FACT EU regulation costs small businesses millions every week, energy rules cost consumers and businesses millions more.
]]>So, if Westminster thinks they could opt to maintain membership on current terms (particularly with the special favors that the UK has been getting for years), they should check carefully. If letting the UK remain is a choice that the EU bureaucracy would have to make, they might well put the screws on as a condition of readmission as well. (And it's not clear that Brussels will be willing to discuss this ahead of time even if the UK asks; see once again that chorus of statements that there will be no negotiations on anything until Article 50 has already been invoked...)
]]>Sure, the mafia in Albania, Romania and so on (as well as the organized gangs of 'gypsies' who are not gypsies at all) have run a little bit rampant.
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Ask the Polish and Czech nationals and they will tell you that the UK is a wonderful place. Sure, they send money back (which due to economies is scaled into vastly better-than-local wages, creating its own pressures in their home countries).
More importantly, it's called 'soft power'.
Have a poll in Poland or Czechoslovakia on whether or not the UK should leave the EU and their views (positive / negative) of the UK.
Hint: NATO says thank-you-very-much.
]]>More than that, it says: "The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period."
That 'shall' (if their legalese is like our legalese) means that it's mandatory. You can leave early with an agreement, or, you leave in 2 years without one. (unless we say you've got longer, which we won't because it says 'unanimous' and that's unlikely in the extreme)
So in the event that the negotiations are unsatisfactory, and no agreement can be reached, you still go.
]]>Corbyn's problem is not getting media attention; it's that the media hate him.
The right-wing media think he's Dracula (an old-school center-left Labour guy, i.e. soft socialist) and will accuse him of blood drinking at the drop of a needle.
Meanwhile, the left-wing media are no better; The Guardian for many years now has been a stomping ground for New Labour apparatchiks, and the likes of Poly Toynbee are incandescent with rage that "their" party, the party of the Parliamentary Labour Party of Jack Straw, Tony Blair, Gordon Broon, the Millibands, and so on has been taken over by an "old Labour throwback", i.e. an exemplar of the grass-roots of their own party base and the sort of guy they thought they'd gotten rid of in the late 1980s.
Finally, the BBC was brought to heel by Tony Blair and is now a mouthpiece for the government, whoever they are -- which means New Labour (see above) or the Conservatives (also see above) for the past 37 years. They don't even remember what impartial means.
The knives are out and the only people standing with Corbyn are ... about 80% of the rank and file of his own party, who are un-people in mass media terms. Embarrassing, that.
]]>Corbyn has the mass of the party behind him and I suspect that what's happening in the Parliamentary party is that the small minority who don't agree with the party membership (per Tony Benn, apologies if I go for sense over exact words "New Labour is the smallest political party in Britain. The trouble is that its entire membership is in the Cabinet.") are being asked not to let the door hit their backsides on the way out.
Labour had a similar problem before the 1983 General Election, and it's part of why the Tories got the landslide they did: if Corbyn is attempting to get the splitters out far enough ahead of the next election that they can't do for the chimp Johnson what the SDP did for Thatcher, I hope it succeeds and think it's a bloody good leadership decision. They'd probably already be out if Clegg and the Coalition hadn't toxified the Lib Dem brand.
]]>I agree the media is against him: but whats the counter-evidence to prove these problems are just media spin?
]]>This is the character of the attacks on Corbyn: stuff that doesn't really stack up but uses loaded words to sound plausible.
I mean, there's no solid evidence that Cameron ever did stick his dick in a dead pig's mouth: I keep repeating it because it's hilarious. (And by the time I was at the same university a couple of years later the same crowd were daring each other to shit in the street. On the steps of notable public buildings for maximum points. So the pig thing is at least plausible. That said, there was some stuff I did when I was a student I wouldn't care to have brought up all these years later either.)
]]>He has an E grade for 2 A levels. He started a course in Trade Union Studies at North London Polytechnic but left after disagreeing with his tutors about the curriculum.
I don't see how you can describe that as anything other than a poor education record for the current leader of the opposition.
]]>If you like, we need to be heading towards the feared New World Order - which American nutjobs think is global socialism, and the U.K. left think is neoliberal domination, but really needs to be about stopping countries screwing each other over for short term gain.
(And Greece's problems, like so many countries, come down to politicians repeatedly focusing on the short term and passing the bomb to the next one)
2) I think the threat of automation is being exaggerated -we employ masses of people in China because they are quick to learn and cheap to program. 25 years in the software industry has taught me that just because you can identify a task can be automated that doesn't mean it's cost effective to do so.
I've just spent 2 months of analysing a companies very manual business process to come up with a design for automating them, and it came out around 450 days work. They can't afford to pay for this, even though it would pay for itself in about a 3 year period.
So while it seems obvious to me that the most effective way to rewire a house would be using a team of small robots, the most effective way to repair a roof would be using a drone, there is this gap where things are possible but not economic.
Hairdressing was another one that was cited. It would fail in the grounds that I personally lack the vocabulary to accurately say how I want my hair cut. It strikes me as a harder AI problem to crack than a number of more 'skilled' jobs.
And finally - Corbyn. Once the Blairite traitors have been kicked out, along with the 40% of us who voted for a different leader, will we have a party or a cult of personality? Isn't there something scary about a political party where 100% of candidates will have been vetted by the membership on the single question - are you loyal to Jeremy Corbyn. (And ironically, not the party he wanted to build, but in refusing to work with him, the one that may be created).
The other question some people should ask themselves is why the rebellion in the PLP is larger than just the clear Blairites. It is getting dangerously easy to use that to dismiss ANY questions or criticism of Corbyn.
(My gut feeling is that once the Blairites have been expunged, the Corbynites will then split along the Leave/Remain fault line which clearly splits them already, if it wasn't for their alliance against 'Tory light traitors'. Because if you are invoking the language of traitors now, you will be doing it for ever smaller and smaller niches of thought. As every good right wing nationalist propaganda merchant knows, it saves having to win a rational argument.
Which is a shame, as he has some good rational argument winning policies, which have been shown to work elsewhere in Europe.
]]>The OED finds an origin in the surname suffix -ki more likely, even if it's quite noncommital about it.
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