Not a racist, just someone who believes people should be killed for expressing their opinions.
Big difference.
Unbelievable. We have local elections coming up in May, among them the mayoralty of London, and these are the levels of electioneering the Tories have sunk to:
From that same article: “The video also warned of “squads of Ulez enforcers dressed in black, faces covered with masks, terrorising communities at the beck and call of their Labour mayor master, who has implemented a tax on driving, forcing people to stay inside or go underground.” You’d think we’d have heard about that before now.
It seems Bulgarian AIs work cheaply. More than actual skilled campaign advertising firms.
Sheesh.
Oh my. If it’s not exactly an “end of days” atmosphere, then at least 'How long, o Lord, how long?"
Nor it just the Tories:
Though Labour’s current problem is, to be fair, a lot smaller and may yet come to nothing
The terrible bind here is that with every Tory failure and scandal, it becomes clearer and clearer that this country desperately needs a general election, and less and less likely that Sunak will be motivated to call one.
We’ll shortly have nationwide local council and mayoral elections, which will be yet more evidence of how much the electorate want shot fo the Tories, and yet another reason why a Tory PM ain’t going to put his head on the block.
The other story that is making life tough for the Tories right now is Liz Truss’s re-emergence hawking her book on her time in Downing St. This largely consists of her appearing in the media to say that her ideas were natural Tory ideas, she sees nothing wrong in them, she’d do them again if she got the chance and as it happens she believes there are large elements of the current Tory party who agree with her.
There is one party who will benefit hugely from former Tory PM Truss going around saying she has the backing of the Tory party for her self-evidently destructive but true-blue Tory policies, and oddly enough it isn’t the Tories.
Probably one party hugely, another party pretty well but not quite so much, and in Scotland who knows?
Some more on Truss:
This is Truss’s Island. It is a little-regarded and remote place, halfway round the bend.
:: rimshot ::
In other Rishi news, the EU recently offered a deal allowing young Britons to study and work in the bloc for up to four years, and it woudl be reciprocal. It’s most assuredly not unrestrained free movement: there are strict age limits and requirements, and it’s similar to what the U.K. is trying to work out with France. And of course the PM has rejected it out of hand because ending free movement was the biggest “victory” for the Bexiteers.
And they wonder why the Tories’ support among 20-somethings is hovering around 10%. Generations of young people, most of whom weren’t eligible to vote when the 2015 referendum happened, who want to travel, work and learn abroad easily, form relationships unconstrained by geography, learn foreign languages and so forth, got absolutely screwed when their elders voted to slam the doors shut. This offer from the EU must have seemed like a glimmer of hope, but the government responded within 48 hours with an emphatic “screw you, we got to throw out the Poles like we wanted, be quiet.”
Prophetic words.
The article indicates that the government may also be having trouble finding airlines which are willing to fly the deportees to Rwanda.
And it would apply to a relative handful at most and cost more per person than any other option.
Skimming through this thread, I just realised I misattributed this quote. @pjd was quoting a Tory politician, but I made it look like pjd said it.
My apologies, pjd.
Here’s the press quote that pjd quoted:
This is misleading in several ways.
- The Labour party have said that they will not change this policy.
- We were told during the Brexit argument that the EU would not allow any “cherry picking”. But now it appears that they are proposing special rules for the UK. It seems that the UK is an attractive destination for young workers. Who knew?
- The UK is perfectly capable of making, and entitled to make, such agreements with individual EU countries. The offer apparently made by the EU is one-sided and pre-empts that. It applies to all EU countries.
- It’s really sad that they are. More than half of Britons are now saying that Brexit was a mistake and they wouldn’t vote for it now, but Labour are so terrified of riling up the Farage gang and putting sugar in the petrol tank of reelection that they won’t breathe a word of even fixing the shit that’s gone wrong with it. For once, I hope a major party is hiding their true intentions, and when they get back in power they say “Right. Let’s try and repair what we can.”
- The EU’s “cherry picking” is offering Brits some, not all, of what the other members of the bloc already have. Such a deal wouldn’t be showing favoritism to a country that, lets me honest, went out of their way to insult the rest of the EU in every way they could on the way out.
- You’re describing cherry picking. By saying they can establish their own à la carte deals with countries of their choosing, the Tories are stating, in true Little En-ger-land style, “We’re fine with the French, but we don’t want any of those Romanians moving in here.”
My overall point in the post was that, is there any wonder why young people are steering so wide of the Tories? They’re angry that their work and life opportunities have been terminally curtailed by the results of how their elders voted in 2015, this one positive development comes along, and the out-of-touch billionaire who’ll likely up and move to the U.S. as soon as he’s out of politics, smugly tells them “Nope, we got the end of freedom of movement, and we don’t care what you want.” and that’s that.
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I don’t see how the Labour party rejecting it makes anything Veryfrank said in any way “misleading”.
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The EU don’t see youth mobility schemes as “cherrypicking” - they already have a couple of youth mobility schemes with third countries, so there’s nothing radical about the notion that they might have one with the UK
The aim here is, in fact to avoid UK cherrypicking of a different kind — not that the UK would cherrypick youth mobility, but that it would cherrypick youth mobility with selected EU countries only. The UK had been approaching individual countries, those that UK residents mainly want to go to, with a view to negotiating youth mobility schemes with those countries. The EU responded, not by offering a youth mobility scheme to the UK as has been widely reported, but by seeking a negotiating mandate from its own member states to approach the UK and agree an EU-wide youth mobility scheme.
The UK has pre-empted this by saying that it’s not interested in a youth mobility scheme with the EU. As noted, the Labour party is backing this, but from an EU point of view that’s neither here nor there; it’s the position adopted by the UK government that matters. Because the UK has taken this position the initiative will go no further; there’s no point in the EU seeking a negotiating mandate for negotiations that the UK won’t enter into.
- Describing an EU initiative towards a youth mobility scheme covering all EU countries as one-sided is a bit bizarre. It embraces all EU countries, obviously; how is that “one-sided”?. It’s “one-sided”, I suppose, in the sense that the EU has initiated it, but in the same sense the UK decision to approach, say, France is “one-sided”.
The interesting point that emerges from all this is that, with little public notice, the UK was approaching France and others to negotiate youth mobility schemes, but has now come out and said in a rather public fashion that a youth mobility scheme is not acceptable because it’s inconsistent with the Brexiter commitment to end freedom of movement. Here on planet Earth, a youth mobility scheme is nothing like freedom of movement. But with the UK government having gone on record as saying that it is, that’s going to make it difficult for them to defend negotiating youth mobilty schemes in general. So presumably their efforts with France etc will now be quietly buried.
It is consistent with previous Leave rhetoric to claim that the UK should be able to negotiate agreements with specific EU members and that the EU acting as the unified trading bloc it’s long been is somehow specifically intended to annoy Britain post-Brexit.
To be fair, that’s what I understand Starmer to be doing in relation to the EU - but anything that looks like freedom of movement isn’t on their “what we can” list.
Could the EU block country-by-country mobility agreements?