Politics Thread (encompassing Brexit) - 21 June 2017 onwards

[davieG]

7 minutes ago, Captain... said:

According to reports eu immigrants are not coming in the same numbers. Farmers weren't directly recruiting workers from their native countries they were already here and there were intermediates that would arrange the work with the farmers. These intermediates are trying to establish lives in the UK for their "clients" who can't speak English. Some of these are scumbags who end up putting 20 Romanians in a 2 bed flat and take a substantial cut from their earnings, others are decent honest men.

 

Potential immigrants now know they will not be able to stay indefinitely at least not legally and will seek similar opportunities to establish lives in other EU countries. We don't have the agencies in place to bring in enough seasonal workers to meet demand and cover the shortfall created by those looking to live in the UK going elsewhere. It is probably only temporary and won't take long for more seasonal working agencies to establish themselves, (most likely charging a higher premium) it won't devastate the farming industry but a shortening of supply of labour will push costs and subsequently prices up. It isn't a disaster but it is further indication that we have gone into this whole process wholly unprepared.

It's also an example that the current system was being badly abused.  Is it any wonder then that people voted out based on immigration.

If it exposes that then surely that is a plus even if in the short term it creates a negative situation and the answer is controlled immigration.

[Guest MattP]

 

[bovril]

3 hours ago, Innovindil said:

Why not just post www.theguardian.com and save us all the time? 

Worth it for the Ottolenghi harissa recipes.

[Sharpe's Fox]

"Tory activists plan Conservative answer to Glastonbury"

 

 

Camping. Slow food. Inspirational speakers. A Pyramid stage. It could be Glastonbury, except for one feature: Tory activists.

Organisers of a new “Conservative Ideas Festival” are hoping to revive the spirit and popular appeal of Theresa May’s party after its battering in June’s general election.

George Freeman, the Norfolk MP who chairs Mrs May’s policy board, came up with the idea after Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn took the Glastonbury Festival by storm this summer.

“Why is it just the left who have all the fun in politics?” he said after Mr Corbyn’s appearance.

The Conservative MP, who is widely seen as a centrist, recently emailed potential supporters, saying his idea for a rightwing festival “seems to have struck a chord” and that he had “some wonderful offers of help of sponsorship and venues”.

He told the Financial Times this week that he had raised £25,000 for a one-day event to be held in September.

His initiative is one of the few concrete responses so far to the question that Conservatives have been asking themselves since their poor performance in the June election: how can the party of government make itself even vaguely cool?

The Tory party was a four-letter word for many attendees at this year’s Glastonbury — including, reportedly, Channel 4 presenter Jon Snow — and large crowds were heard singing “Oooh, Jeremy Corbyn”.

The party’s membership has fallen to somewhere below 150,000 — less than one-third that of Labour’s and not far ahead of the Scottish National party and the Liberal Democrats. The party has also fallen behind Labour in opinion polls, while Mrs May’s personal ratings are below those of Mr Corbyn, who was once seen as unelectable.

Mr Freeman — a descendant of the Liberal prime minister William Gladstone and a former biotechnology investor — said he envisions the Conservative Ideas Festival as a “cross between Hay-on-Wye and the Latitude festival”.

He has described it as a one-day “friends and family event” that will be “relaxed” and unlike the “increasingly corporate, expensive, exclusive [political party] conferences” — which he says are no longer a forum for “grassroots renewal”.

The Conservatives will hold their annual party conference in Manchester at the start of October, charging companies £32,500 for a 6m by 6m exhibition stand.

Mr Freeman’s festival is scheduled to take place the weekend before the party conference. Downing Street is aware of his plans but has agreed with organisers that the festival will be held outside the formal structures of the Conservative party.

A project team of more than 20 people, including 10 MPs, is working on the event, Mr Freeman said. The festival will be invitation-only with between 150 and 200 attendees, some of whom will camp.

It will take place at a rural venue, with the location kept secret so the festival is not disrupted by Momentum, the pro-Corbyn group, or other political opponents.

Mr Freeman said he hoped the event would become an annual fixture, adding that this year’s festival would be like a “first rave, you’ll remember who you brought”.

One sympathetic Conservative MP said the idea was “very trendy” but would need “a lot of expensive booze” for him to attend.

In the US, the Conservative Political Action Conference is a favourite annual event for activists and leading Republicans, and is occasionally referred to as the “Conservative Woodstock”. The last conference in February featured appearances from Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and then UK Independence party leader Nigel Farage.

In 2013, the Conservative Home website ran a Victory 2015 Conference, where Mrs May paved the way for her leadership campaign by setting out her vision of conservatism.

That conference also featured a session on “Ten Winning Policy Ideas”, including an English parliament, a 10p income tax band and replacing the Human Rights Act.

 

https://amp.ft.com/content/f67fe45c-7909-11e7-a3e8-60495fe6ca71

 

this is absolutely tragic. Honestly the state of this lot is hilarious.

 

 

Edited 5 August 2017 by Sharpe's Fox

[Rincewind]

13 hours ago, toddybad said:

 

Nailed it in one. Saw that the Telegraph published an headline which was made up and were reported after a complaint. The standards committee said the it was was OK even though it was misleading because they had changed it slightly.

Given that it was the Telegraph it would not take much misleading to convince its readers.

[Guest MattP]

15 minutes ago, Sharpe's Fox said:

"Tory activists plan Conservative answer to Glastonbury"

 

https://amp.ft.com/content/f67fe45c-7909-11e7-a3e8-60495fe6ca71

 

this is absolutely tragic. Honestly the state of this lot is hilarious.

Good god that's horrific even I wouldn't turn up to that and I got excited about going to see the train museum in York. 

[Nick]

16 minutes ago, MattP said:

Good god that's horrific even I wouldn't turn up to that and I got excited about going to see the train museum in York. 

It's so Tory - 150-200 people by invitation only...I wonder what the invite criteria will be it'll be I'm sure a festival of people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. 

[Alf Bentley]

On 8/2/2017 at 19:43, Webbo said:

I would say remainers opinions are based on feeling rather than reality. There hasn't been an upsurge in racism, the economic disasters they were predicting haven't happened. Western civilisation is still intact, world war 3 doesn't seem imminent and Scottish independence seems more unlikely than it did before.It's seems what the educated people told us would happen hasn't occurred and what us thickos said would happen has , and yet we're still told it's going to be a disaster despite all the evidence to the contrary . Surely that's more feeling than logic?

 

I was in Ipswich last weekend and got talking to an Albanian cabby who had been in England for 17 years. I asked him about any "upsurges in racism". He said there definitely was a big upsurge in racist abuse around the time of the referendum but that things returned to normal after a few weeks - i.e. most people fine, just the odd idiot. Anecdotal, but from a bloke dealing with the public all day every day. My concern is the risk of another upsurge if there is an economic downturn and no good Brexit deal is in the offing. We've already seen the media fanning hostility against the EU over airport delays, trying to paint this as anti-British revenge for Brexit, when it seems to have been just a mixture of clumsy anti-terrorist measures and poor planning. If the road to Brexit does turn rocky, politicians aren't likely to hold their hands up and accept the blame. I can see them - and parts of the media - blaming the EU, and some of the wilder, more disgruntled elements taking that as a cue to be hostile to foreigners again. I hope that I'm wrong.

 

As for the lack of economic disasters, let's revisit that in 1-2 years, eh? It's true that some of the wilder Project Fear scares have proved unfounded, but a lot of economic news looks pretty ominous: real incomes set to continue to fall, household debt rising towards 2007 levels, interest rates likely to rise within months, growth forecasts being reduced, housing market slowing, City firms and international institutions planning to move well-paid jobs abroad, potential labour shortages in farming & NHS etc. The decline in net immigration can have some positive effects - my brother-in-law has been getting construction work more regularly and thinks it's due to there being fewer East Europeans competing for it. But it can have negative effects too, beyond labour shortages in particular sectors - potentially a lower tax take, meaning that the govt has to choose between deeper cuts, higher taxes and higher public debt.

 

Maybe the Brexit negotiations will produce a half-decent deal or maybe we'll just experience rocky times for a couple of years before soaring to a brilliant future. Maybe, though, things will get pretty bad within 1-2 years and might stay bad for a long time. We've had our ups and downs before, but are not in a good place to cope with a sustained downturn now - as regards either the debt/deficit-ridden national economy or the large number of private households who are already just getting by. I feel pretty nervous about where all this is heading - and I'm not nervous by nature. That might be partly down to feeling, but it's also substantially down to real events and real indicators. Again, I genuinely hope that I'm wrong.

[Captain...]

3 hours ago, davieG said:

It's also an example that the current system was being badly abused.  Is it any wonder then that people voted out based on immigration.

If it exposes that then surely that is a plus even if in the short term it creates a negative situation and the answer is controlled immigration.

But that is an assumption that the new system won't be open to abuse and exploitation. How many seasonal immigrant workers will come over for a harvest live in unsafe conditions and then never leave, staying here illegally and being exploited for cheap black market labour? 

 

Brexit will not tackle exploitation just give a different set of regulations to exploit.

Edited 5 August 2017 by Captain...

[davieG]

9 minutes ago, Captain... said:

But that is an assumption that the new system won't be open to abuse and exploitation. How many seasonal immigrant workers will come over for a harvest live in unsafe conditions and then never leave, staying here illegally and being exploited for cheap black market labour? 

 

Brexit will not tackle exploitation just give a different set of regulations to exploit.

When people have the opportunity to change something they rarely give thought in detail as to whether the change will be better because it's  not in their hands to do so.

 

That's why we get governments of different hues at elections why else are people voting for change because they want something better, they rarely get it but they live in hope, what else is there for the people 

[Rincewind]

18 hours ago, Swan Lesta said:

It's so Tory - 150-200 people by invitation only...I wonder what the invite criteria will be it'll be I'm sure a festival of people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. 

I reckon it will be something like this.

 

 

[Guest]

Vince Cable blasts brexit hardliners

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764278/Lib-Dem-leader-Vince-Cable-blasts-hardliners.html

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764278/Lib-Dem-leader-Vince-Cable-blasts-hardliners.html#article-4764278

 

 

Edited 6 August 2017 by Guest

[Guest]

Half of police stations closed as violent crime surges

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764324/40-police-stations-close-violent-crime-surges.html#article-4764324

 

Edited 6 August 2017 by Guest

[Guest]

Growing demand for soft brexit amongst voters

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764656/Growing-demand-soft-Brexit-saw-flop-study.html

[Guest MattP]

2 hours ago, toddybad said:

Vince Cable blasts brexit hardliners

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764278/Lib-Dem-leader-Vince-Cable-blasts-hardliners.html

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764278/Lib-Dem-leader-Vince-Cable-blasts-hardliners.html#article-4764278

Good job Vince Cable is usually wrong about everything.

[Guest MattP]

Although on the point of this, the Mail on Sunday is starting to annoy me, I don't mind a fair balance but it's so anti-Brexit at the minute it's getting ridiculous, so out of sync with its readers as well who tolerated this through the referendum despite I'd imagine being overwhelmingly leave.

 

It's still the best Sunday paper along with the ST for investigative journalism but it's testing my patience at the minute.

[Alf Bentley]

Interesting article focusing on post-Brexit food supplies, food insecurity etc.: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/05/brexit-could-leave-britain-with-a-bare-larder-farmers-warn?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The NFU argues for more home-produced food to counteract food insecurity, as well as a transitional period within the Customs Union & a flexible approach to migrant labour.

 

The short video at the bottom by John Harris, speaking to migrant workers, agencies and businesses in food processing is interesting, too.

 

Another Harris article from a few weeks back, arguing that Brexit needs to happen despite being a terrible idea that will cause massive damage: 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/14/brexit-eu-referendum

[Strokes]

3 hours ago, Alf Bentley said:

Interesting article focusing on post-Brexit food supplies, food insecurity etc.: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/05/brexit-could-leave-britain-with-a-bare-larder-farmers-warn?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The NFU argues for more home-produced food to counteract food insecurity, as well as a transitional period within the Customs Union & a flexible approach to migrant labour.

 

The short video at the bottom by John Harris, speaking to migrant workers, agencies and businesses in food processing is interesting, too.

 

Another Harris article from a few weeks back, arguing that Brexit needs to happen despite being a terrible idea that will cause massive damage: 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/14/brexit-eu-referendum

I'm applying for an allotment when I finally move house, you can be too prepared for these things. 

[Alf Bentley]

5 minutes ago, Strokes said:

I'm applying for an allotment when I finally move house, you can be too prepared for these things. 

 

If you see a bloke in rags outside your fence begging for turnips, take pity on me.

[Webbo]

Britain is importing 42 per cent of its food – the highest figure for half a century. Does that bother you? If opinion polls are right, it probably does. 

Such statistics leave many of us uneasy. We fret that dependency makes us vulnerable to shortages. We want to be self-sufficient. We see food as a strategic resource, of greater value than more frivolous goods. The National Farmers’ Union talks of “rich countries allowing their agriculture to decline and then expecting the rest of the world to feed them” – unintentionally admitting that it is generally the post-agrarian countries that have become rich. 

As we begin to draw up a national farming policy for after Brexit, however, it is worth going back to first principles and asking whether agriculture, which accounts for less than 1 per cent of our economic activity, ought to be in a special category. Why, after all, does the idea of being dependent on food imports unsettle us? We’re rarely bothered about being dependent on imported combine harvesters or telephones. 

The desire for self-sufficiency has its roots not in economic theory but in evolutionary psychology. Life on the savannahs of Pleistocene Africa was a constant search for the next meal. The desire to provide against famine, to hoard, is encoded deep in our genome, and our political opinions reflect our instincts. To some extent, hunter-gatherer intuitions make the whole notion of trade awkward. But those intuitions are especially powerful when it comes to food: back then, there were no combine harvesters to worry about.

Britain stopped being self-sufficient in food in the 18th century. As we began to make and sell more diverse goods, we found it profitable to buy in the nutrition we needed. In consequence, we became the world’s greatest and wealthiest nation – and, at the same time, we began to eliminate malnutrition. It turned out that pursuing self-sufficiency was counter-productive, because it made nations vulnerable to localised disruption and bad weather. Buying food at world prices from dispersed suppliers was, paradoxically, a far surer guarantee against hunger, as there was always likely to be a surplus somewhere.

Most of the world had caught up with this approach by the Sixties, since when starvation has become much rarer. Famines now generally happen only as a consequence of war, except in the handful of states that still reject global markets and seek to grow all their own food. North Korea, for example, pursues self-reliance (“juche”) as the supreme goal of economic policy. It lost more than half a million people to hunger in the mid-Nineties.

Britain adopted free trade – including, with some glitches, in food – for the better part of a century after scrapping the Corn Laws in 1846. The Second World War forced a return to domestic production, which lingered for a while after 1945, but the real shift came when Britain joined the Common Agricultural Policy, which explicitly aimed at European juche through external tariffs and production subsidies. 

In consequence, food became much more expensive, driving up inflation and weakening the economy. People were forced to pay twice over, as taxpayers and as consumers. The cost fell most heavily on the poorest, for whom food purchases represented a higher proportion of the weekly budget. Output-based subsidies encouraged the use of chemical fertilisers and the felling of hedgerows. For Britain, a net food importer with relatively efficient farms, the CAP was an especially bad deal: in 2014, we paid in £4.6 billion and got back £2.9 billion.

Those figures are enough to tell us that, after Brexit, we can give our consumers and our taxpayers a better deal while still supporting our farmers. Buying food at world rather than EU prices would, according to OECD figures, cut grocery bills by 17 per cent. As well as being of huge value in itself, this reduction would free up a lot of money for people to spend on other things, and so boost the economy in general.

How will our farmers cope with new competition? When every other country except New Zealand subsidises its producers, could we really take away their protection and their grants? In purely economic terms, yes we could. I have been surprised by how many farmers in my constituency oppose subsidies, seeing them as keeping inefficient producers in business at the expense of younger farmers, who can’t get started.

Yet the question is not purely economic. Most of us recognise that Britain has an unusual landscape, in that most of our loveliest spaces are farmed. In other developed countries, farming and natural beauty are divorced. To Americans, pretty countryside means the Rockies, to Germans the Black Forest. But when we think of beauty, we think of copses and hedgerows and other signs of cultivation. The splendour of our countryside is a common resource, whose wealth we all share. 

It is right to pay the people who curate that treasure. To put it another way, if the state prevents landowners from realising the full value of their property – in other words, if it bans them from turning fields and moors into golf courses and housing estates – it ought to compensate them. So let’s fund that service explicitly, rather than as an incidental side-effect of food production.

To his credit, Michael Gove flagged up precisely such an approach in his first speech as the minister in charge, speaking of a post-CAP subsidy system that would “support those landowners and managers who cultivate and protect the range of habitats which will encourage biodiversity”. That can be done through a straightforward acreage-based grant – a blunt instrument, but cheap to administer – or through more explicit ecological criteria. 

At present, we give more to wealthy French farmers than to poor African farmers. Outside the CAP, we can tailor our policy to our own countryside, cutting prices while rewarding the stewards of our landscape. Such an opportunity won’t come again. 

 

 

Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph. It's behind a paywall so I've copied and pasted .

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/05/should-embrace-depending-rest-world-food/

 

[Guest]

IVF cut back in 13 areas of England to save money, new data shows

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/aug/06/ivf-cut-back-in-13-areas-of-england-in-bid-to-save-money-new-data-shows?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

 

[Guest]

Downing Street denies UK willing to pay €40bn Brexit divorce bill

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/aug/06/downing-street-denies-uk-willing-to-pay-40bn-brexit-divorce-bill?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

 

What i don't get about this is that the main brexiteers won their battle. £40b seems quite realistic to me for our likely debt on things we had agreed to before leaving. As the brexiteers are getting their way why are they still the ones moaning about us taking steps to keep a good relationship with the eu? It smacks of an irrational dislike of the eu that they seem to want us to leave on bad terms whatever the cost. Genuinally scary bunch of extremists.

[Webbo]

It seems to me that part of the reason for this transition period is is that our contributions while staying in will cover this divorce bill.

[Innovindil]

36 minutes ago, toddybad said:

Downing Street denies UK willing to pay €40bn Brexit divorce bill

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/aug/06/downing-street-denies-uk-willing-to-pay-40bn-brexit-divorce-bill?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

 

What i don't get about this is that the main brexiteers won their battle. £40b seems quite realistic to me for our likely debt on things we had agreed to before leaving. As the brexiteers are getting their way why are they still the ones moaning about us taking steps to keep a good relationship with the eu? It smacks of an irrational dislike of the eu that they seem to want us to leave on bad terms whatever the cost. Genuinally scary bunch of extremists.

Any chance you could give me a list of things we've agreed to that come to £40bill? If it seems a realistic price to you I'm curious to see what it pays for. Not come across it myself yet. 

[SheppyFox]

Do any of you believe any politician will do anything that say they will?  Don't worry about Brexit, our country can scarcely let down the populace anymore than it already is. 

Edited 6 August 2017 by SheppyFox