“generally” is quite useless when we are discussing this very specific situation.
Re: the bolded. People have seem him deliberately muss up his hair before going to meet the press.
What exactly does the “look like an idiot” strategy gain him?
The position of Prime Minister, apparently.
If he comes across as a clown, people won’t take him seriously - which puts him at an advantage. (Think of the old detective show “Columbo”)
It makes him appealing to morons, who think that “why, he’s just like me! A moron!”
And morons vote.
As I suspected. It’s always seemed impossible to me that one could have hair that unkempt and disheveled through the course of natural processes.
How smart could he be if he couldn’t even complete the Upper Class Twit contest?
He never could get past the “take the bra off the debutante” stage.
Oh, he has run himself over!.. What a great twit!
PRC, DPRK, possibly.
I’ve been given to understand that it used to happen in USSR quite frequently.
It happened in Russia just last year.
It won’t be long before Season 6 of The Crown goes into production. *Somebody *will have to play Boris. Just sayin’.
Not Daniels, though. Eric Christian Olsen.
If you want someone to play a low-rent version of the America-hating fuckstick, who better then the guy who played the low-rent version of Lloyd Christmas?
I think British comedian and actor Matt Lucas, aka George Dawes, would be perfect for playing Boris Johnson, in either tragedy or farce.
I get that you’re trying to be sarcastic, but that is, in fact, the democratic way. You try to get laws passed that you think will make things better. If you fail, you keep trying. Democracy is not supposed to be a one-and-done situation. It’s an ongoing process of political refinement. It’s a method to try to determine and represent the will of the people. It’s not a football match where once you win, the game is over and the result can’t ever be changed. It’s not a game at all. The results of an election have real consequences on people’s lives. The idea that someone who is looking at a massive disruption in their life and/or career should just shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, we lost a vote, so I guess I just have to accept that my life is fucked now,” is perverse, and represents a fundamental misconception of how representative government is supposed to work.
Yet that is how it does often work - maybe it should allow for representation and campaigning - but successful representations that against the run of the philosophy of the current administration are generally rare.
At the election of the Cameron government we had a choice of austerity lite (Labour) or austerity hard (Conservative)
UK voted Conservative partly on the basis that austerity hard would last 3 years, that was on 2010 and nine years later we are still in austerity - such that virtually all central government departments and all local authorities are still having to cut back. We should all realise it was an out and out lie but guess what - we have to get on living under that lie.
We campaigned hard against those austerity measures but in the end we had to suck it up - the result is that our police, probation, courts and prisons are all utterly screwed and crime is on the up - yet the number of prosecutions are going down. We made representations, we had marches through London, lobbying etc
We never changed a thing, we had to suck it up, and you know why we had to suck it up - because the election results were against us.
It makes me smile that one of the major criticisms of the Brexit campaign that it was based on a lie - because we have been lied to on every general election since God wore short pants. In other words referendum promises are meaningless - we haven’t yet had the lies of the Remain campaign scrutinised, because they will not fully come to light until we have actually left - then we will find that the extremes of doom and gloom are grossly exaggerated by such a scale as to also be lies.
So tell me about democracy in the UK, practical experience has shown me that in theory you can campaign for change but it won’t work and its a system that suits the major political players no end, both those currently in power and those who hope to hold it in the future.
The whole of the Remain campaign is based upon fear and the Leave campaign is based upon the unknown and unknowable, no-one actually truly knows the effect of leaving the EU on whatever terms and both sides claim to know authoritatively what will happen - in that both sides are lying through their teeth, none of them knows, and Remain conveniently fail the mention the effect of federalisation of the EU through proposals of ‘harmonising EU nation tax rules’ Joint EU armed forces, increasing EU budgets etc.
Remainers only know they are voting for what they have now - they have no idea of the longer term effects of closer integration of the EU, and they don’t seem to want to discuss this - they seem to want a safe and fluffy world.
Brexiteers claim they are voting for a longer term view with limited understanding of the short term effects.This has risks, is certainly not as obviously safe and fluffy as remain but might have great potential, with the emphasis on the MIGHT.
So, do we opt for safe fluffy and satisfied or do we chance it and go for entrepreneurship, world trade and outward looking - The EU generally has protectionist view of the world, can’t get its act together at any speed and has a completely sclerotic reaction to any world event - it is a talking shop, its like being tied to a middle aged aunt that knows what is good for you, it likes rules and regulations, it does not like free trade - but that’s fine - we can live in an EU world of mediocrity where others decide our laws for us. we can at least be comfortable - rather like hobbits in middle earth.
Somehow we will all live through this, we won’t starve, and it won’t be armageddon - it has taken 40 years to get to this position in the EU, both Remainers and Leavers are stupid to think that somehow it will all be settled on a particular date and time, it’ll take many years of European and World trade relations before we can truly measure the effects.
Neither Leave nor Remain wish to acknowledge this, instead we have a childish shouting match, a plague on both of your houses, its all fog and smoke, none of you really know what you are talking about, your opinions are like arseholes, everybody has their own
Wow, you’ve really swallowed a lot of lies, haven’t you?
I thought this bit was particularly stupid:
No one is suggesting armageddon or mass starvation or that everyone will simply drop dead all at once. What people are worried about is that their lives will suck more and more each year, until they find themselves and their children living in a country that no one cares about, that has no real ties to any other country and which occupies a leper’s place in the global society.
Posts like this just seek to help make that a reality, IMO.
I once admired the British system of government. The P.M. has huge power but can be overridden at any time by a majority vote of the House of Commons.
But they can’t override him if they’re not allowed to convene. :eek:
Is there any precedent for a P.M. to unilaterally prorogue to avoid losing a vote of confidence?
Of course it wasn’t completely unilateral. Elizabeth D.G. Regina endorsed the order. Is it indeed her duty to endorse every tweet or fart of the P.M. no matter how putrid?
BoJo is so much like Trump; do they even go to the same barber? I suppose BoJo will build a wall on the Irish border and “Ireland will pay for it” ?
I’m afraid you’re too late! Once upon a time the British pound really was 240 pennyweights of sterling silver. Now it’s worth just 1.33 pennyweights, or 1/15 of an ounce.
I’ve an ex-pat English friend who needs to exchange a largish sum of British money but is waiting until “after Brexit when the exchange rate will be much better.” Any predictions?
Yeah, what a bastard Johnson is. How dare he try to implement the decision made in the referendum? Doesn’t he realize that politicians should ignore the electorate because they know better? Cunt!
Good old hyperbole there kid, typical view of the extremes at both sides of the debate - both sides of it seem to believe in an either/or outcome and neither will be true.
In any case, why would any other nation care about us unless it is in their interest to do so - you seem to have a naive view of international relations.
Scifi
As have you, as have pretty much all of us, and its now boiling down to which set of lies you choose to believe.
There was loads of similar factless argument about us not joining the Euro as a currency, it was going to be a disaster, the pound would collapse, our international relevance would disappear, that those who wanted us to retain our own currency were nothing more than profiteers trying to line their own nests.
What happened? It was the Euro that pretty near collapsed, it was money raised by the EU in the London markets along with support from EU governments including ours that kept it afloat.
Turns out the Euro currency was a joke because it allowed in nations whose national economic policy was to spend and devalue their own currencies, which is unsustainable in a regionalised currency. Result is that several Euro nations are pretty much in hock to the European Central Bank, and particularly to the favours of Germany
It resulted in GDP budget spending rules being introduced to prevent individual member nations spending the Euro into oblivion and the effect of that in recent years is that Italy now runs into trouble with the ECB over its spending plans.
Italy, and Greece, and Spain, and to a smaller extent Ireland now have to tread very much more carefully and cannot spend their way out of recession - they are being prevented from national self harm by ECB. You can readily argue that’s a good thing but it also shows how much sovereignty they have lost and how much power Euro governance has gained .It also limits the control that member nations they have over their own affairs
When we had the debate over the Euro I was all for ditching Sterling and going with the Euro, I was all for more EU integration and believed all the pro Euro lies about the Euro currency, about Sterling becoming irrelevant, weak and that sterling was a washed up currency - turns out the opposite and less than popular view of the right wingers was spot on. It kept us out of the Euro financial crisis and allowed us to set our own monetary policy.
We are getting more exaggerations from the Remainers about the disastrous effects of leaving, but when you actually look at the trade figures and examine the actual import and export situation then you notice that we are in surplus in trade with services - which are largely in the financial sector and not subject to GATT tariff rules and will continue as before, and we are in huge deficit on manufactured goods which will become significantly more expensive if we leave on GATT terms.
We pay into Europe and that money funds loads of projects in Europe, the money we get back is highly conditional and represents a tiny fraction of our contributions - we pay to support little small holder farms to produce goods that are too expensive, and these are supported by the Common Agricultural Policy and in return we get to buy those goods in our shops at higher prices than we would pay if we were on the world market - EU agriculture is protected by subsidies and a EU tariff wall - so we get hit through our taxation and again through the higher prices in the shops.
Euro CAP subsidies are at the absolute epicentre of the trade disagreements with other nations, especially the US. Get rid of CAP completely and we reduce the EU budget dramatically and we free up world trade. It would also reduce EU member contributions
The EU is an anti-competitive organisation, it is anti free markets and limits free trade to within the EU itself, the UK has always been a world facing economy and the EU tariff zone is on impediment to world trade. Yes the EU signs up on trade agreements, but its default is still protectionism.
If we do leave with a EU trade arrangement that is not based upon GATT then we will have to pay for access, so in effect we will not have left the EU - We will pay more but the access will obviously not be the same as being a fully paid up member.
Its worth noting that the EU budget has expanded by 20% in the last 10 years, and the weight of that falls completely disproportionately on the 3 net contributors, that’s France, Germany and UK, that number will not decline in years to come, it will only go up. Its likely that the EU budget will continue to increase, we will pay more, whilst our so-called friends in Europe soak us dry.
Once we leave, do you think German tax payers are likely to be content with making up for our missing contributions? Do you think French taxpayers will? I don’t think so. Add to that that our trade with the EU will become more expensive under GATT so our imports from EU will fall in value dramatically because will will either not buy or we will find alternative sources, most of which will be cheaper.
So, EU will have to reform its spending and the member states will have to revise their expectations of the free lunch they have been having at our expense.
It’s likely that our currency will fall in relation to the Euro, this will add a double hit to EU imports, because there will be the 20% GATT tariff plus the devaluation of sterling - it means that Euro goods will cost anything up to 40% more than they do now - so EU trade imports will simply collapse, interestingly our goods will become relatively cheaper because of the decline in the value of Sterling which may well completely counter the effect of GATT tariffs into EU.
THINK ABOUT THAT.
Is there a risk, oh you bet there is, but staying means paying, it means being taken for a milk cow while EU spending goes up on our tab, our industries being transferred lock stock and barrel to other EU nations funded by EU development grants.
I also want to see end of freedom of movement, I worked in prisons long enough to see lots of EU offenders at the highest levels of crime and loads of them are EU citizens with criminal records longer than most folks lives - they should never have been allowed in, yet we cannot exclude them nor deport them - even when they have completed their prison sentences and have been released. People coming to live and work in the UK should be subject to Criminal background checks - after all we don’t let any scumbag work with vulnerable people which is a type of check we do on our own citizens.
I also cannot imagine why EU nations would want our scumbags over in their countries either but over to Europe they go - criminal background checks would be a reciprocal arrangement.
I have not even slightly started on about how legislation is made in the UK and the EU and the impact of Euro politics upon that legislation, but for now its worth noting that EU legislation when issued in the form of directives currently tends to be left leaning, which to me is not necessarily a bad thing, however the political outlook of the Euro parliament is not static and there will come a time when it is more right leaning - in either case it is not something I am happy about since we cannot decline to incorporate EU directives in to our law - even if we vote against it in Strasbourg.