L00b

The border in the Irish Sea was 1 of 3 options available to the UK for reconciling its late decision to Brexit, subject to the form of Brexit (undecided at the time of referendum, until late 2019), with its earlier commitment, as a co-signatory and guarantor of the GFA, to maintain peace on the island. Again, debated to death, both in here and pretty much everywhere else. Completely pointless to revisit this and going in circles over it, time and time again. The UK Brexited. It’s done. The GFA predated Brexit by donkey’s years, is still in force, with legal effects that binds the UK, whereby the UK must factor it when considering how to solve its borders with the EU. That’s it. That was hard.

We’ve been over this. Cameron sacked himself, for bringing the referendum about and losing it. May was sacked by her party, for trying to implement Brexit with the UK and NI in a customs Union with the EU. ‘Not Brexity enough!’ said all the MPs of her own party and the opposition who voted her deal down time and again. Johnson was sacked by his party for being Johnson, having implemented Brexit with a border in the Irish Sea after telling the DUP in the hustings that he wasn’t-going-to-do-that-oh-no. ‘Super-duper deal!’ said all the MPs of his party and the opposition who voted for it at the time. ‘Errr…’ now say all the MPs of his party and the opposition (etc) Do you see the pattern yet? Is my preceding post a page or two ago beginning to make sense?

How about it, then? Don’t you ever get tired of being a Putin shill? US and Norway, clearly. Do keep up.

The sole person with, ultimately, all of the blood on their hands over Ukraine, is Vladimir Putin. He alone decided to try and destabilise Ukraine in 2014 and ever since. He alone decided to invade Ukraine sufficiently early before February 2022, to pre-position attacking troops and armour in Belarus. He alone has had the power to halt the Russian invasion at any given time, ever since.

We could dwell at length on who exactly killed Brexit. But in truth, as on Agatha Christie’s Orient Express, everybody wielded the knife. It was Theresa May who squandered her parliamentary majority and thus gravely weakened Britain’s negotiating position against Brussels. It was the political class who could never see the project as more than a damage limitation exercise. And it was the Brexiteers who failed to muster a compellingly modern vision – preferring to glory in buccaneering fantasies of free trade than focus on regulatory divergence to jump-start science and tech. This idea that Brexit itself could have worked, were it not for morons failing to deliver it properly, is the problem that still seems to persist. It was never poor implementation, or weak politicians, or whatever other pathetic excuse this, that and the other shill or rent-a-gob will spout: it was always, and still is, the very notion of an undefined Brexit, that is the problem. Until English politicians and their electorate can actually accept that, there can be no constructive ‘moving on’.

It is on Twitter, someone got footage of the downed UFO 😳

In the very context of this discussion about Brexit and the sub-topic of NI/the Protocol… …<speechless>

Beg to differ (nicely). The Ireland/NI border was brought up in discussions on the run up to the 2016 referendum. ‘Project Fear’, we heard. Bygones. Then May’s deal kept the whole UK within a Customs Union (like Turkey), so not much of a border between Ireland/NI, and zero border between England and NI. The ERG and the DUP screamed blue murder, Theresa May exited stage left. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/nov/14/theresa-mays-brexit-deal-everything-you-need-to-know Then Johnson’s deal kept NI in the Single Market, putting a border in the sea between England and NI, but still less of a border between Ireland/NI. I guess Brexiters weren’t paying much attention to the small print (the Protocol), beyond the ‘oven ready deal’ 3-word slogan. Oh well. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-62071102 Brexit -of whichever form- was always going to increase and accelerate the likelihood of a united Ireland. I’m confident that outcome was discussed in here pre-referendum too. The handling of Brexit by the DUP since, has all but guaranteed it.

I don’t remember you calling for Johnson to be sacked, at the time this aspect of his “oven ready deal” was pointed out? What’s changed?

I am related to one of the psych victim support involved, so am very well placed to know how police procedures and reporting have changed in the matter, in light of those ‘last 10 years’ indeed. Why don’t you educate yourself about it, and move on from under your own rock?

Quite agree. It’s ridiculous. 5 years on, and we’re still no clearer as to what Brexit is or should be:

Yes. Note ETIAS with €7 visa fee starts this November (hardly the deal breaker, but well).

No need of apologies, so long as ad hominems are kept at bay. Wink emoticon is always friendly, not angry 😉 (3) well yes, of course. Though the GDP performance of the UK since, besides the myriad problems developed in the UK since (in comparative terms viz the EU27);would tend to validate that notion. Of course, still, that all depends on the weight that one ascribes to the economy relative to ‘the rest’ (sovereignty, immigration, healthcare, etc, etc, etc) as a factor of national wellbeing. I happen to believe that, without a strong economy, there’s too little wealth getting created to pay for the luxury of that ‘rest’. Maybe a bit old fashioned. I dunno. (5) you originally asked me for data about both (food poisoning and water poisoning)? Happy to curtail to 1 sub-topic, or stick to these 2, or expand…there’s unfortunately more besides these 2.

Not got the time to spare now, so happy enough to answer a straight ‘no’. Then don’t make it personal by attributing something to me, which isn’t true 😉 The EU is not ‘the Holy Grail’ to me, far from it. It was, and still is, simply the best amongst several types of socio-economic models available in a complex world growing fractious and pulling the trading blanket to themselves in ever-larger blocs, ranging from the splendid isolationism of North Korea (e.g.) to full-fat federalism like the US and Germany (e.g.). That doesn’t make it a ‘Grail’, nor perfect by any means. It pays to filter the mountains of disingenuous manure heaped onto the EU over decades by the UK press and self-serving politicians, to understand what the EU actually is (…thus being the topmost question asked on Google the day after the 2016 referendum, lest we forget 😉) and *also* is *not*, how it actually *works*, etc. to understand what it is that the UK was part of, what it could rightfully expect from that membership *and not*, what it left behind when it Brexited - because all of that full explains why things have been happening the way they have, continue to happen right now, and will continue to happen so long as the model stays as ‘WA + TCA’. It’s dry, complicated, terminally boring. And for that reason, absolutely not reducible to 3-word slogans, nor easy 2-lines solutions to highly complex geopolitical issues, nor pub counter-grade debate (once you get into the detail…and EU membership and Brexit are each all about ‘the details’). EU27 water quality is still regulated by directives so no, I don’t have comparative figures for EU waters. Although at least another one of these ‘old links’ (which I didn’t link, it’s a 2020 or 2021 government paper by Chris Whitty about danger of sewer discharges to public health) mentions 500 blue flag rivers in France compared to the UK’s…2. Edit-dug into my browsing history, here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sewage-in-water-a-growing-public-health-problem

Difficult to find, I’ll grant you that. But it exists. Unsurprisingly so, given the increase in risk vectors (mass occurrence of raw sewage discharges in rivers and coastal areas in past 2 years ; little to no checks on imports, save ofc when prompted by intelligence). https://sas.org.uk/updates/sas-on-poo-watch-ahead-of-the-jubilee-weekend/ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/05/dangerous-strain-of-salmonella-becoming-more-common-in-uk-meat The same pattern of suppression can be observed, e.g. wherein the relatively recent increase in reported food poisoning is allegedly not because of more food poisonings, but because of more reports being made for a ‘same’ level of poisonings. Where have we heard that one before? 😉 If you have nothing to say, then do that. Saves bandwidth and the redundant thread scrolling.👍🏻

Americans and Japanese already ‘voted’ on that one, ages ago. Brit scientists should save themselves the cost of the stamps, I’m sorry to say. The Swiss, whose R&D is heavy with bio/pharma, prefer to keep it all at home. Though Ireland is getting a small look in every now and then…because Americans and Japanese have long gone there for EU-based bio/pharma R&D. Oxbridge is still looking good for bio/pharma and AI…but there’s scant benefit for the UK when that research output is grabbed by the investing partners to exploit elsewhere. And as regards the corpus of researchers, the pool is shrinking, because EU continentals now go study in Ireland instead of the UK (recent stats I saw, Irish Uni STEM admissions by EU27 have been skyrocketing whilst UK STEM admissions by EU27 have been falling off a cliff; been looking recently as kid looking to do medicine, and UK now a no-go (re.later career with UK degree) even though she’s half-Brit).

These links are the pointy bit of the surface of the iceberg. Like literally every other Brexit-related issue (and here, I definitely mean all those issues directly and unambiguously derivable from Brexit, such as this smuggling of sub-standard goods into the UK), it’s taken a long time for the scales to fall off enough peoples’ eyes about such issues, then for the issues to make it through the wall of rethoric and political filtering into the public space, wherein only now are you starting to hear about it in the MSM. It’s a constant drip-drip for the last 3 years, which successive governments and complicit opposition have done all they can to suppress and stage-manage, lest people start to get really angry about it all…Liverpool torches-and-pitchforks -levels of anger. Dodgy meat, and dodgy everything, has been the name of the day for unscrupulous tradespeople on both sides of the Channel since 1st February 2020, cross-Channel couriers were tweeting about it with photos in the first week of it. You do yourself no favours, nor to your fellow Brits, when you maintain this absurd denial of reality. Start demanding action from your government. Or keep seeing the NHS under strain from people with food poisoning, water poisoning, (…)

Lenin died in 1924, long before the USSR gained enough geopolitical weight to ‘matter’. Stalin died in 1953 and was certainly in power at the time of the Berlin airlift, the Korean War and many others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_related_to_the_Cold_War Stalin even sided with the US against the UK in Indonesia 😆 The USSR abandoned its invasion of Afghanistan in 1989, after 10 years and 14k to 26k military deaths and 56k wounded (0.5m to 2m civilian deaths, 3m wounded). NATO never got involved there in that time. Only the US, with advisors and manpads. How much of a part that ‘ankle-biting’ played at the time, is still being debated today.

No recall of the Korean War, then? The Berlin airlift? The CIA shipping Stinger missiles by the container to the Mujahideen in the 80s? Proxy wars in Africa throughout the same period? The US, the UK and a whole host of others had been at Russia and reciprocally over geopolitical influence since the end WW2 non-stop.

That video is posted in the tweeter thread that I linked earlier. No faces, no IDs, no context - nothing: for all the viewer knows, it’s genuine or staged, with equal likelihood of either. If it’s genuine, it’s a job for the Police to investigate and make arrest for harassment (/etc.) If it’s staged, it’s done its job of exciting the rent-a-mob to grab their torches and pitchforks. But well. “Sandal-wearing long-haired nimby lefties wanta hug a fighting age brown male” looks to be the sum total of critical thinking going on 🙄

I don’t imply anything, the links are in my earlier post, with quotes and sources. You can empty however many magazines’ worth of ammo shooting at the messenger, whether me here or the Financial Times, British Farmers Union, DEFRA, etc. Doesn’t make the message any less true. But it does make you look rather…simple 😏

Or perhaps they were a rabble, suitably roused?

Posted in Conservatives thread last night. Twitter link in there has videos embedded, and some interesting claims about the organising that preceded it. Not surprised there’s little coverage of it in the MSM.

Didn’t I just write that unscrupulous EU sellers will flog that meat to the UK, in that post you quote? And provided links that prove just that? 🙄 Where do you think those UK-based criminals get their meat from? What you do personally is completely irrelevant to the point. It’s enough of a problem to have the UK farming industry and the government concerned about it. In case you forgot, there’s a cost of living crisis on. People desperate to buy produce as cheap as they can get it. How cheap do you think that meat off Romanian white vans is, compared to Tesco or Sainsbury’s (who have taken to secure-package it like DVDs)?

But being out of it certainly increase chances of it: Brexit leads to unsafe meat and African Swine Fever warnings as UK border checks on food stop (inews.co.uk) UK farmers sound alarm on lack of border checks | Financial Times (ft.com) As a UK consumer, you get lucky some of the time... Lowestoft: 'Illegally imported' food seized from Romania | Eastern Daily Press (edp24.co.uk) ...but if you want to be lucky all of the time, then UK needs to start implementing its own import checks, because 'white van euro meat' is certainly enough of a 'thing' to have British farmers up in arms about it, and trading standards manning the barricades. Those checks are 3 years overdue, and Defra is still only saying "we'll have a go towards end 2023". Then again, bringing in those checks , means food not getting through Dover as fast as before, so more shortages on shelves and higher prices while supply chains adjust. I'll bet the government knows this well. Tricky one, in fairness. This is EU (edit: or non-EU) meat that is unfit for consumption within the EU, and which no EU27 buyer would touch with a bargepole. But the UK is not within the EU anymore. So UK buyers for that meat are fair commercial game now - particularly (still) without SPS checks. It's not the EU's job to police its export products, it is the job of the (each) importing country (refer 'checks' point above).