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Is Brexit actually going to happen?

Will we have a brexit?


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That report massively overstates what Starmer said, which anyway was followed up by a clarifying piece of spokespersonry that muddled things still further. Labour is still flexibility and cake.
Yeh. You know a thing or two about overstating, of course, such as your claim the president of the EFTA court was making overtures on behalf of EFTA to the UK

Not so sure you're right about sks's comments being overstated here, tho, seemed reasonable reporting to me
 
I don't think so, I think they feel that a free(ish) trade deal is achievable and want to get to that bit asap. Then we can sign those cracking free trade deals with the independent powerhouses like New Zealand.

I think you are right about some of the Tory party. But I think they know that also know that any decent free trade deal is going to look so much like continued membership, including probably some sort of free movement, that their headbangers (some of whom I do think have Murdoch's disaster capitalism glinting in their eyes) and ageing activist party who think Mr Churchill's new Austin motors will be all the rage in the colonies won't buy it.

I reckon any "impact assessments" or whatever term they can come up with show such a fucking catastrophe for anything other than remaining in the single market in some form that it would be impossible for any responsible MP to vote against that. Those really terrible economic predictions released around the budget statement the other week were all assuming some sort of "good" Brexit. Imagine what a no-deal Brexit looks like economically.

Europe was always going to destroy the Tory party and Theresa May is just trying to delay the execution as long as possible.

Odds at online bookies for an election in 2018 are now evens I believe.
 
Hungary faces enormous, and expensive-to-fix, problems with air and water pollution. It has some of the worst arsenic contamination of water in the world, which costs a lot to put right. A lot of EU money has gone towards fixing that.

Information about what EU money is spent on is freely available on the internet.
 
For some reason Hungary also seems to have a stubbornly high suicide rate.

Same with Finland, which suggests that there's either something about Finno-Ugric language and concepts which engenders despair, or that Uralic tribes were particularly, and heritably, gloomy.
 
Hungary faces enormous, and expensive-to-fix, problems with air and water pollution. It has some of the worst arsenic contamination of water in the world, which costs a lot to put right. A lot of EU money has gone towards fixing that.

Information about what EU money is spent on is freely available on the internet.
Indeed

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The EU rightly ignored the nonsense about glyphosate being dangerous to human health.

Instead of wasting time humoring pseudoscientific scare campaigns we should be looking at the fundamentally problematic issues in modern agriculture to do with soil depletion and so on.

In fact the EU set up the Soil Framework Directive to do just that. But it was scuppered thanks to the help of the UK government and farming lobby.
 
Actually, I now think that the only possible Brexit is a softest of soft Brexit - as close to staying in both the CU and the SM as can possibly be achieved.
If a hard border is out of the question, and so is regulatory and customs divergence from the rest of the UK, it's the only option left.
And the cost of that would be free movement, ECJ jurisdiction and joining the EEA.
Nothing else is remotely feasible
 
Actually, I now think that the only possible Brexit is a softest of soft Brexit - as close to staying in both the CU and the SM as can possibly be achieved.
If a hard border is out of the question, and so is regulatory and customs divergence from the rest of the UK, it's the only option left.
And the cost of that would be free movement, ECJ jurisdiction and joining the EEA.
Nothing else is remotely feasible

True as far as goods are concerned, IMO, but there's nothing logically forcing the continuation of the status quo wrt services and employment at this stage, and you can't logically do that without freedom of movement, so quite a bit of a shift would be needed to make it possible. Excluding services would probably have been considered a hard Brexit at the time of the referendum, but I guess things have drifted somewhat.

Trivia: "Brexit" seems to have been added to my spellcheck dictionary.
 
Same with Finland, which suggests that there's either something about Finno-Ugric language and concepts which engenders despair, or that Uralic tribes were particularly, and heritably, gloomy.

An innate tendency towards suicide, even if it could be genetically transmitted, would for obvious reasons be unlikely to persist in any population for long.
 
An innate tendency towards suicide, even if it could be genetically transmitted, would for obvious reasons be unlikely to persist in any population for long.

Evolutionary advantage and disadvantage are far more complicated than that. For a start, suicidality is a part of the human condition. It hasn't been bred out of us. It has persisted in the global population. Presumably there is some positive consequence for the long-term success of a tribe, to balance the obvious impact that suicidality has on numbers. Perhaps there's something about the existence of depression, self-hatred, low self-esteem and so on which are bad for the individual and good for the tribe; perhaps they are allied to the capacity for shame and guilt and therefore mitigate the excesses of self-interest. Maybe it's something to do with the capacity for self-sacrifice in tough times. No idea. But there clearly is some associated evolutionary advantage which explains why humans have evolved with a tendency to suicidality.

We might not be happy with suggesting that this capacity for suicidality manifests to greater or lesser extents in racial groups. That depends on whether you want to believe in racial differences, and the very concept of race. The alternative, considering the Finno-Ugrics, is to link it to linguistic communities. How one does that, depends on your view of whether language is a shaper or a translator of reality, and whether it is innate or acquired.

Anyway, this is all a little off-topic on a discussion about our great national act of self-harm.
 
An innate tendency towards suicide, even if it could be genetically transmitted, would for obvious reasons be unlikely to persist in any population for long.

I believe in Hungary there is a concept of national sorrow. That being said I've traveled to many of the old Eastern block countries and they all seem to have it in their own way. I also think Hungary doesn't have the taboos around suicide that other countries may have. As you say, none of this is innate.
 
Evolutionary advantage and disadvantage are far more complicated than that. For a start, suicidality is a part of the human condition. It hasn't been bred out of us. It has persisted in the global population. Presumably there is some positive consequence for the long-term success of a tribe, to balance the obvious impact that suicidality has on numbers. Perhaps there's something about the existence of depression, self-hatred, low self-esteem and so on which are bad for the individual and good for the tribe; perhaps they are allied to the capacity for shame and guilt and therefore mitigate the excesses of self-interest. Maybe it's something to do with the capacity for self-sacrifice in tough times. No idea. But there clearly is some associated evolutionary advantage which explains why humans have evolved with a tendency to suicidality.

We might not be happy with suggesting that this capacity for suicidality manifests to greater or lesser extents in racial groups. That depends on whether you want to believe in racial differences, and the very concept of race. The alternative, considering the Finno-Ugrics, is to link it to linguistic communities. How one does that, depends on your view of whether language is a shaper or a translator of reality, and whether it is innate or acquired.

Anyway, this is all a little off-topic on a discussion about our great national act of self-harm.
Surprised no reference to auld durkheim
 
Don't know if this has been referenced yet, but head of hmrc said last wednesday that they don't see a need for a border between northern Ireland and RoI. Quite an interesting session that.

Parliamentlive.tv
 
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