As if that were not cavalier enough, Britain’s place in Europe became dependent on the soap-opera dynamics of the Notting Hill set: it was all tennis in Regent’s Park and weekends at Chequers, Michael (Gove) letting down Dave and what will Sam (Cameron) think of Boris. Johnson insists he didn’t “give a fuck about being prime minister,” while Osborne begs to differ: “It was nothing to do with the EU, Britain’s place in the world. It was Game of Thrones. That’s what Boris Johnson was playing. And he could see the Iron Throne right there about to be vacated.” This stuff was all-consuming at the time – and yet what was at stake, as these Etonians worked out their schoolboy rivalries, was nothing less than the destiny of the UK. That recklessness with the futures of 70m people remains unforgivable – and the guilt belongs to Cameron and Osborne almost as much as to Gove and Johnson.
Whinge whinge about the EU.
It reminds you of things some may have forgotten, including the extent to which this whole thing came about as a wheeze, a clever tactical ploy, plotted by the careless people who were then running the country. In 2013, David Cameron and George Osborne sought to placate noisy Eurosceptics in their own ranks by promising an in/out referendum after the next election – a pledge they assumed they’d never have to honour because they were sure they’d fail to win an outright majority in parliament, whereupon they would cheerfully trade the promise away as a concession to the Lib Dems.
Because allowing the people their say is unforgiveable recklessness, of course.
Right on target for Freedland, yes.
I’m not sure about that failing to get a majority bit. They were up against Milibrain after all.
No, Cameron underestimated the stupidity of Merkel about not allowing a minor change to immigration rules and then massively underestimated how much the public hated them and the political class.
Freedland’s smug wrongness is one of the reasons I stopped listening to R4 in the mornings.
Cameron (PPE) was trying to copy Wilson (PPE), though Freedland (PPE) is too stupid to understand this. Typical short termism: make the issue go away with a referendum, by pretending the European project represents predictable stolidity and not being part of it is the gamble.
They were up against Milibrain after all…
‘massively underestimated how much the public hated them and the political class’
Just as the current incumbent of No 10 is doing…
The old two (and a half)-party system very rarely delivered a hung parliament. 2010 was a complete aberration, as all politicians understood. Anyone counting on another hung parliament to allow them to dodge their manifesto commitments was a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic.
Expecting a hung parliament again in 2015 wasn’t unreasonable. For most of 2012, 2013 and 2014 the Conservatives were behind Labour in the polls, and the predictions before the 2015 election were putting them both on around 270-280 seats each, well short of the 326 needed for a majority.
On the night the Conservatives did better than expected, but still only just squeaked in on 330 seats.
Although I do prefer Ottokring’s theory that Cameron thought he could get a slightly larger figleaf out of Merkel, which he thought would be enough to win a referendum.
It’s difficult to believe that any sentient human could underestimate Merkel’s stupidity after she trashed Germany’s energy production. Complete fool.
Ah the repercussions weren’t quite apparent in 2015. The Jerries thought that they could manage it, especially with locally produced electricity ie local municipalities buying theur own gas turbines.
Trying to blame it on Eton, is he? Oh hang on! Which university did Freedland go to? Oxford. Another of the scum. Rather trust a used car dealer down the Romford Road.
I wonder if the public know just how childish politicians really are? One of the young Grists was tasked by Call me Dave with establishing the increase in gun licences. After spending months making arcane calculations to make sure Dave couldn’t pick holes in them he took the figures to Dave. In typical politician fashion Dave took the sheaf of papers, chucked them on the floor, proclaiming “I can’t be arsed with all this crap? How much?” When told G Jr’s suggestion he cried “I can’t do that! My chums would never forgive me!”. Dave’s chums, who would think nothing of using a pair of Daddy’s six figure Purdys obviously looked on their old chum to charge 4/6 for a gun licence rather than the £1,127 it should have been. Politics in the raw…
Many politicians are weird – egocentric, arrogant types who get a thrill and reassurance out of electoral validation.
Well, how do we select for them? First of all, we take out anyone that would like to earn the sort of dosh that gets them a Porsche. Secondly, we take out people who like to just get on with things, in favour of people who like public speaking. Thirdly, do you want to get your affair with Sharon the receptionist slapped all over the news? Fourthly, do you want to be harassed by people while out shopping over the price of football shirts and not be able to say “well, don’t fucking buy them, you twat”. Fifthly, despite modern technology, you have to live away from home for most of the week. Sixthly, you have no guarantee of long-term career. Seventhly, you have to do a load of dumb free work before you even get there.
If you’re running a specialist manufacturing company in Swindon, you’d have to be a lunatic to quit. So, we don’t get people as talented as the CEO of a specialist manufacturing company in Swindon. We don’t even get people as talented as the middle management of a specialist manufacturing company in Swindon. We get idiots who are propped up by trade unions to do their bidding. People who are getting a huge pay rise to do it. And we get idiot posh boys that don’t need to earn money and have nothing better to do.
And people who have made money in business don’t go into politics because doing things outside of it achieves more. Mark Zuckerberg learned this hard lesson. He gave $100m to Newark schools and it got pissed away. He gave money to setting up private schools instead.
You also select for people who cannot persuade anybody else to pay them to do anything else. The sole reason I got elected was it was either that or starve after six years unemployment.
Not quite in the same boat (since it was my friend that got elected, I just work for them), but pretty much. I was on the scrapheap because of Con/Lab taxes and regulations, particularly IR35, destroying any chance of earning a semi-independent living and being too damned old at 58 to be taken on by the large corporates doing what I am competent to do.
Sorry, I forgot to say I’ve worked since middle of last month as the gopher for a Reform UK MSP in the Scottish Parliament. The learning curve has been a bit steep, but I’m firing on all burners right now, so I think I’ll be alright. Beats sitting at home doomscrolling.
What fun. You ghosting his newspaper articles yet?
Important part of being a local politician. Get down to the local paper and make sure that as the local MSP they give you a weekly/monthly column. Or the MSP, rather. They’ll not pay for it. This then needs to be written and anyone as important to actually get elected won’t do that. So, it’ll be your job to get it done.
Back when I had that job for Nigel I used to phone him up and say “Well, this piece The X is running in the morning has you saying this and this.” As I had a pretty good idea of the sorts of things Nige would say this worked, me telling him what he had.
How dumb of me. It didn’t occur to me that Canavan’s column in the local rag might be written by someone else.
Thanks Tim!!
And, eighthly and “candidly”, you usually have to serve a long political ‘apprenticeship’ – in activism, in fighting unwinnable seats and/or in local government.
Part of the problem is the rise of the full-time ‘professional’ politician. We could have a majority of part-time MPs if governments ceased to churn out endless amounts of legislation and regulation. After all, we have part-time councillors in local government who often oversee multi-million £ budgets less incompetently than central government does…
You obviously don’t live in Cheshire East
At least with local government you have around 300 of them, so you don’t have all of them incompetent at the same time. There’s only one Westminster government.
Yep. Outside of a few ministers (PM, foreign secretary, home secretary, chancellor) , you could trim it down to a 1 day per week job, tops. The world actually doesn’t change that much every week. Take out everything that doesn’t even need government involved, privatise what can be, and then simplify the rest.
You could reduce transport to nothing more than planning and monitoring. Privatised rail and buses. Roads paid per vehicle that uses them (like the A419 from Swindon to Cirencester). The minister turns up once a week and checks the dashboard on performance, has a quick meeting with the civil servants and fucks off to the pub. If the civil servants are shit, you fire them.
Western Bloke is right.
But it’s worse than that. Because we select for people whose skill is in getting elected (through the whole process; the endless local committee meetings and the selection board, even before they actually get onto a ballot), we end up with politicians whose only skill (if they even have one) is getting selected and elected.
And then we put them in charge of multi-billion pound budgets.
You know, a gun licence in the £1000 range would make sense. Funding the police investigation and giving some revenue left over. Or don’t bother with the police bit. Or charge less but annually. I want my SLR back. Don’t care about handguns, my pistol shooting is rubbish.
I thought the whole idea of independence was you got to bugger up things yourselves instead of having foreigners do it for you??
Politicians dont like it because
A) they actually have to do some work.
B) they get the blame.
Edit : some politicians relished the challenge eg Gove, because it gave them the opportunity to invent whole tranches of half arsed pointless regulations.
BTW there is a podcast involving Gove on the DT website. The comments are a hoot.
And aren’t we doing a fine job of that?
The voters in my area voted for the nice Nick Clegg because he promised to let them vote to leave the EU,
.
How many of the voters in your area voted for the nice Nick Clegg because he promised not to introduce student tuition fees, and was then forced to do exactly that by call me Dave?
Quite a low student population in my area. More of a “bloody students, **** off!” area.
Clegg wasn’t ‘forced’ to do it, but no politician can resist the scent of the leather seats in a chauffeur-driven ministerial Beemer.
“In 2013, David Cameron and George Osborne sought to placate noisy Eurosceptics in their own ranks by promising an in/out referendum after the next election – a pledge they assumed they’d never have to honour because they were sure they’d fail to win an outright majority in parliament”
But of course, it was the pledge wot did it (along with Miliband and the Lib Dems committing hari-kari by wanting electoral reform and giving up student loads in negotiations). They got a slender majority of 5. No pledge, and a few marginals might have gone the other way.
All this bollocks goes on between politicians (although I think Gove was more sincere) but there’s deeper stuff about invention that changes politics that changes the shape of governments. Something I learned recently is that machinery for harvesting wheat in the USA came along much earlier than machinery for harvesting cotton and tobacco. And cotton and tobacco was what the south produced lots of. So, farmers in the North could do without slaves. In fact, wanted fewer slaves. That’s going to affect how much your state wants slaves.
Lots of Spaniards were pretty fucked off that they couldn’t eat ham under Islamic rule. Producing ham in Africa doesn’t really work. Not enough water and all that. So they eat goats. But it does in Spain. That has an effect on resistance. And after the Moors were booted out, people would place their hams in clear view to show their loyalty.
Most pro-EU people have no idea about the differences in exports between the UK and Germany. Before we left we exported more outside the EU, Germany exported far more inside. If you work for ARM, Church’s, Dyson or the parking meter company I worked for, your wages are paid much more by Americans and Asians than Europeans. Your perception of where your interests lie are not being more in the EU. People exporting luxury cheese feel differently about it, but there actually aren’t many of them. The lefties can’t grasp this, nor that a shift has happened to global trade.
So the only way they can process it is that Boris won by telling lots of fibs and not that we’re now a global trading nation.
Lots of Spaniards were pretty fucked off that they couldn’t eat ham under Islamic rule.
Given the centrality of pork to the European diet and that it’s also the one thing most Mohammedans agree on in terms of it being haram, I have wondered whether the creeping process by which pork is removed from our tables as Islam encroaches will end up being the defining battleground.
That or the British love of our dogs.
Still prefer ham rhoda.
And ‘heart and lungs of a dog’ is an insult in some forrin lands because they are the only bits of a dog that you cannot season enough to cover up the taste of dog.
But at least what the dagos did shows that yes, you can indeed get rid of the ropers……..
See the thing is that there’s a reason that muslims don’t like dogs, and it’s that they didn’t farm. Dogs are a nuisance if you don’t hunt or farm crops. Dogs help you catch animals and deal with rats. And I reckon the alcohol thing is that you struggle to grow vines in the Middle East. You’ve heard of the Bekaa Valley as being a warzone, but it’s also a wine growing area. It’s a bit cooler than the general area. And it’s also a Christian area of Lebanon. How much is that because Christians drink wine?
There’s another side to what might happen with Muslims in the UK, which is that Muslims will adapt to local customs. I always say that if you move to France, you’re going to have to ditch the crown green bowling for petanque as that’s what everyone plays. Move to rural America, you’re going to watch Friday night football (the wrong sort) and go to Church, or be Billy No Mates. It might work for women not to drive if you live in Saudi Arabia, but it’s really impractical if you move to Bracknell. Hindu arranged marriage used to be common in the 1980s in the UK but it barely exists now. But it’s why you can’t have segregation, multiculturalism. Services in English and Welsh only. You’re going to have to learn one or the other to do anything, or be constantly having to ask people to help you.
…there’s a reason that muslims don’t like dogs, and it’s that they didn’t farm.Dogs are a nuisance if you don’t hunt or farm crops.
Not so. Agriculture became a vital part of the Muslim life after the migration to the fertile oasis of Medina in 622 CE. And Mo praised farming, elevating it to an act of worship and a communal responsibility.
Muslims also hunted with dogs – with sight hounds like salukis and sloughis. And they bred canaan dogs from the wild pariah dogs to herd and guard their goats.
Islam sees dog hair and saliva as unclean, so keeping dogs as pets is impractical for muslims, but keeping working dogs is possible and permitted.
It’s one of the ironies of life that Muslims think dogs are disgusting.
I’m in the Jules from Pulp Fiction camp.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call a dog filthy but they’re definitely dirty. But, a dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.
…
…
“a vital part of the Muslim life after the migration to the fertile oasis of Medina in 622 CE.” There are serious scholars who don’t believe that Mecca was the Holy City. Their guess is that it was Petra. Where, then, was “Medina”? Dunno – maybe somewhere not too far from Petra?
Just as the Old Testament is full of myths, and the New Testament contains some obvious bollocks, there’s no need to take all the Koran literally.
Apparently, no archaeological finds at Petra support Dan Gibson’s hypothesis; and finds at Mecca contradict it. Gibson’s hypothesis relies on the circumstantial evidence of the orientation of early mosques towards Petra, which can be explained by the unsophisticated astronomy of the time.
The Koran refers to farmers going to their fields and workers tending their olive trees. That rules out Mecca entirely. It leaves Petra as a possibility. Further evidence against Mecca is the physical description of the city and its terrain – it’s just wrong, apparently.
Why do you think there was some great advance in astronomy in the century after the Prophet? Is this documented?
The history and geography of all sacred books is not reliable. So you can’t draw conclusions about, say the location of Mecca from Koranic descriptions. Archaeological evidence – which, IIRC, is absent at Petra but present at Mecca – is qualitatively superior.
The advance was not in astronomy itself, but in Muslim understanding of astronomy. Muslim learning only took off in the 8thC.
After they had started conquering Greeks and Persians and started learning their science.
You can’t take it as gospel.
Long old walk from Medina to Petra though between 600 and 700 miles depending upon the route you take. It would also take several weeks to a month (even these days) through rather hot and horrid desert terrain. Chances of dying of heat exhaustion and dehydration remain as high as they ever were. Koran or no Koran.
You’ll take my bacon sandwich out of my cold, dead hand.
They will.
Though they were second-class citizens, non-muslims could eat pork (and drink wine) in al-Andalus.
…and how are you enjoying being a second-class citizen in your own country? I’m not so sure the ability to eat pork and drink wine is a sufficient offset for having your country given away by traitors in Westminster.
The ‘Gravity Theory’ of trade still works (after a fashion) in Germany for physical goods. It really does cost measurably more to export a Beemer to Portugal or Greece than to Poland. But, being an island, once your container is at Felixstowe, it’s not hallway to Hamburg, it’s halfway to anywhere.
And, of course, much more of UK trade is in services than is typical for EU nations.
You see, I think Britain shifted to the sort of trade that worked. Exporting nuts and bolts doesn’t because of cost of shipping. So you do services and the sort of manufacturing where cost of shipping doesn’t matter much. What does it cost to ship a pair of £400 Church’s brogues? Or an Aston Martin?
The thing to know about the gravity theory of trade. The thing that even all too many economists don’t recall. It’s *economic* distance that matters, not geographic. Tariffs, languages, legal systems, currencies and, obviously, transport methods all count. Newcastle spent many, many, centuries trading more with London than with Carlisle after all. One was sea transport, the other over the absence of roads. Such examples multiply. There’s good reason the Catalan Empire extended across the Med to at least Naples etc rather than a quarter of the distance into Navarre. Equally, for many centuries, the Frisian islands were closer to London than North Wales was. etc.
Even the most coherent advocates of gravity theory of trade break down in tears if you ask them if their model obeys an inverse square law better than the most obvious alternative.
And the same gravity theory advocates claimed the UK’s biggest trading partner was the EU, it wasn’t even close the UK’s biggest trading partner is the UK, non-EU second, EU third if you want to group. I hate them, SImon Henig, talking about you.
I find Cameron a particularly repulsive cunt. He had a chance to steer the country out of the mire created by Blair. Instead he doubled down and has royally fucked both party and country.
His only positive is the EU vote and that was by mistake.
Him, his family and all their friends should be taken on helicopter rides.
The “heir to Blair” as he called himself…
The mistake is seeing Blair as different from Cameron. They both believed the country should be run by people like them. They believed they had a right to rule.
And the country continues to be run by people like them. Whichever of the two parties you vote for. Mandelson. Oxford. May. Oxford. Johnson. Oxford. Handycock. Oxford. Truss. Oxford. Sunak. Oxford. Starmer. Oxford. Their malign influence is everywhere. Is it a wonder you continue down the same dead end street? That nothing ever changes. More government. More control. More taxes. More shit.
Burnham, Cambridge.
BiS, the problem with your Oxbridge theory is that the Prime Ministers who didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge were even worse.
Look at who you’ve got:
OK, you’ve got Churchill. But then:
(I’m including Bonar Law on the bad list because, even though he died soon after becoming PM, he had previously propped up Lloyd George)
So not going to Oxford or Cambridge doesn’t help; nor does not going to university at all. There’s clearly a deeper problem with our political system.
Yes Game of Thrones, but the opportunity, the opportunity was there because of years of established nobbling of the euro question. And its the political equivalent of the cartel problem. As one cartel member can’t be relied upon not to free ride (or dob in the others) so an opportunist politician can’t be relied upon not to fill an open niche to further their chances of tea at Bucks Palace. No one thought any different of the Boris/Gove/Cameron thing at the time either. This account is just filling in a few details.
Who cares about tea at Bucks Palace? Sure, at one time, getting tea with the King meant something. If you were in the musket-making business. you’d want to meet him as you might get him to buy some muskets, but it’s just reality TV and you’re meeting a Kardashian. Which is like a girls and gays thing.
Maggie understood it. She had the electoral mandate and Liz didn’t. She did the curtseying and decorum and then did whatever the fuck she wanted.
Yes. Only meant it in terms of being PM.
“these Etonians”
He names four people, two of whom are not Etonians. This is BiS-level prejudice but then it is the Guardian.
Prejudice is why I don’t cuddle snakes.
Not cuddling snakes? That’s prudence, not prejudice.
I don’t cuddle Prudence either.
Britain is a swamp of lies and disinformation – and we got here on the Brexit bus
Yes, nobody had thought to tell lies in British politics before Brexit. Good job we imported all those millions of violent, low IQ brown people to pay our pensions and Net Zeroed our energy grid to lower costs, or we’d be in real economic trouble.
If the proponents telling lies invalidates a democratic vote, that applies to every election since the days of Solon. A reasonably clued-up 10yo should be able to work that out.
With mentions of Romford and Bracknell, this thread is becoming a history of “places I have lived”. Any chance of a hat-tip to Basildon?
Funny i was thinking the same thing on last post about the IRS guy in Fairfax county Va. I’ve lived there. Very nice it is too (nicer than Bracknell i would say, though not been to Romford)
Romford Road is actually Stratford>Forest Gate, East London. Now lost territory to the Islamic hordes but once notorious for dodgy motors. That said, knew the Pole who owned three of the car dealers. Parachuted into Arnhem & was one of those never captured. Very educational on the subject of shooting captured Germans. “They no hande hoch I shoot them. They hande hoch I shoot them anyway.”
He would probably have said the same about the Russians too.