Should the UK remain a member of the EU

[lifetime fan]

1 minute ago, Captain Turdseye said:

Nah, you’re right Gnash. We’re heading into a golden age for low skilled workers in this country. You crack on. 

Boris cares more about the working class and is sorting out poverty in this country. 

[lifetime fan]

He won’t feed starving children but he’s better than the EU. 

[lifetime fan]

Rashid wallbut X12. 

[Gnasher]

Anyone want to give their opinion on the report on Midlands sweatshops? Or are the usual shrills going to drown out debate? 

 

This forum rightly takes the piss out of bad biased journalism but also stands idol and say nothing when Liberal writers get mocked and  attacked. This forum is undoubtedly read beyond our own comfort shores and if posters can't distinguish between good honest writers and mainstream chaff then imo it's not a good look.

 

Not that I really give a fuvk anyway.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

[Colonel Bumcunt]

On 02/09/2021 at 22:47, Section_31 said:

In fairness I think there's a difference between Brexit and Johnson's Brexit, or at least there could have been.

 

Both sides could have sat down like adults and tried to make the best of it, but instead you had the likes of the daily mail spouting stuff like 'traitors' and 'saboteurs' and essentially helping to poison public discourse for a generation.

 

Then you had the likes of Farage going full grift and continuing to shit stir from the sidelines.

 

You had Johnson and pals saying they'd back May's deal, but then undermining it so he could become leader, then doing a deal - any deal - just to say he 'got it done'. Which the media hardly report on even by the pro remain commentators, instead sort of creating the notion that Brexit - any Brexit - was always going to lead here, in terms of things like northern Ireland etc.

 

The Tory membership are to blame for foisting Johnson on us, then the British public for giving him a mandate, coupled with the media for continually letting him do whatever the fuck he wants.

Absolutely right. 

The Brexit referendum was like 9/11 for Europhobes and in the end they shouted the loudest and drove us to the brink of no deal.  Like America invading Afghanistan as an emotional reaction to 9/11, the 'advisory referendum' result just put TNT under what should have been a rational and long-term plan for the Commons to consider our relationship with the EU over the next 20 years.  

Johnson played to a gallery of illogical, over-excited morons.  

[AngryOfTuebrook]

32 minutes ago, Gnasher said:

Anyone want to give their opinion on the report on Midlands sweatshops?

I will.

 

Those sweatshops are literally illegal; but because Capitalist competition incentivises exploitation, laws to protect workers are only as good as the enforcement mechanisms. The only connection between this story (about British companies exploiting British and Asian workers) and Brexit is the fact that Brexit has given us a Government ideologically opposed to the enforcement of workers' rights (which they see as so much "red tape"). This shit is only going to get worse.

[Gnasher]

13 minutes ago, AngryOfTuebrook said:

I will.

 

Those sweatshops are literally illegal; but because Capitalist competition incentivises exploitation, laws to protect workers are only as good as the enforcement mechanisms. The only connection between this story (about British companies exploiting British and Asian workers) and Brexit is the fact that Brexit has given us a Government ideologically opposed to the enforcement of workers' rights (which they see as so much "red tape"). This shit is only going to get worse.

Fair play Angry. 

[Gnasher]

28 minutes ago, AngryOfTuebrook said:

Fair play for posting that part txt Angry,  if we silence good journalists we only succeed in putting a hand over our own mouths.

[skend04]

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-economy-recovery-supply-problems-construction-b1913302.html

 

Construction costs up.

House prices up.

Food prices up.

Building works about to be delayed for who knows how long.

 

I'm sure this is completely the opposite of what those Brexiteers were telling us.

[redinblack]

On 04/09/2021 at 21:04, lifetime fan said:

He won’t feed starving children but he’s better than the EU. 

.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

 

[Gnasher]

Matthew Parris article free from paywall.  Seems to think the right wing loons in his own party have released a socialist nightmare from the EU bottle, no shit sherlock.

 

For some reason he manages to admirably spatter Jeremy Corbyns name all over the beginning of the article, haha.

 

He's spot on in his description of the what the EU is about though.

 

 

https://archive.is/Bd6kg

[AngryOfTuebrook]

9 minutes ago, Gnasher said:

Matthew Parris article free from paywall.  Seems to think the right wing loons in his own party have released a socialist nightmare from the EU bottle, no shit sherlock.

 

For some reason he manages to admirably spatter Jeremy Corbyns name all over the beginning of the article, haha.

 

He's spot on in his description of the what the EU is about though.

 

 

https://archive.is/Bd6kg

He's spot on in his description of the two Brexit "dreams". The inconvenient problem is watchacallit - oh yeah, Reality.

 

The Tories have had a chance to realise their Brexit dream and they've failed spectacularly. Maybe one day (in about 2053) a left-wing Labour government will have a chance to realise the left-wing Brexit dream; I don't see that as having any more prospects of success.

 

 

[Gnasher]

1 hour ago, AngryOfTuebrook said:

He's spot on in his description of the two Brexit "dreams". The inconvenient problem is watchacallit - oh yeah, Reality.

 

The Tories have had a chance to realise their Brexit dream and they've failed spectacularly. Maybe one day (in about 2053) a left-wing Labour government will have a chance to realise the left-wing Brexit dream; I don't see that as having any more prospects of success.

 

 

Here's the full article, I blame Michael Foot and Jeremy Corbyn.

 

 

 

Brexit Britain has taken a sharp turn to the left

The Corbynite dream of a big state and worker power is coming true while the right’s global Britain has stalled

Matthew Parris

Saturday September 04 2021, 12.01am BST, The Times

There is no shortage of lorry drivers, at least not in the longer term. In the immediate future we need more of them, but training up drivers and getting them through their HGV test needn’t take too long, and if employers keep upping the wages then soon enough there will be no shortage of people attracted to the job. As in the care sector, this latest supposed employment crisis is one more example of the adjustments we’re going to have to make, and pay for, now we’re out of the continent-wide pool of labour created by the EU single market.

 

 

This column will offer no comment on whether such changes are for the better or worse. Instead I want to draw attention to the irony of what’s happening. A right-wing revolution — Brexit — appears to be serving left-wing policy goals instead of creating the economic landscape that Brexiteers dreamt of. Jeremy Corbyn was right about the possibilities for the left that Brexit opened up, and what’s happening is closer to his playbook than to that of the Brexit right.

 

Always a closet Brexiteer, Corbyn’s dislike of the EU comes straight from the textbook of the socialist hardliners, stretching in an unbroken line from Michael Foot to Peter Shore and Tony Benn to Corbyn himself. Foot’s 1983 election manifesto was clear: Labour would “introduce the necessary legislation to prepare for Britain’s withdrawal from the EEC, to be completed well within the lifetime of the Labour government”.

The left’s argument for this was equally clear: that the (then) Common Market was a capitalist club; that it was obsessed by competition and restricted any government’s scope for economic intervention by (for instance) subsidising industry, or rescuing failing businesses; and that membership was (in that 1983 manifesto’s words) “bound to conflict with our strategy for economic growth and full employment, [and] our proposals on industrial policy and for increasing trade”.

In the years since, the socialist logic against membership has only strengthened. With the coming of the single market, EU restraints on state subsidy became tougher and, in Marxist terms, the bargaining power of labour against capital was undermined by the free migration of cheap labour, skilled and unskilled. Part of the burden of training and investment in the domestic workforce was lifted. Though some surveys have suggested otherwise, common sense insists that wage increases must have been suppressed in the care and healthcare sector, the catering and food industries, agriculture, and the building, decorating, plumbing and electrical trades.

That was the left’s analysis, and the post-Brexit dream that flowed from it was obvious. Leaving the EU would empower the British state to get its hands back on the levers of economic control, and the native workforce would no longer be undermined by cheap foreign labour.

 

The right’s post-Brexit dream could hardly have been more different. It was for a bonfire of controls, and of a Britain walking tall in a globalised world and striking great new trade deals around the planet. “Cut the EU red tape choking Britain after Brexit to set the country free from the shackles of Brussels” was a Daily Telegraph headline in 2017. As foreign secretary, Boris Johnson (the Financial Times reported) would tell EU diplomats of his vision of making Britain a low-tax, lightly regulated, “buccaneering” country.

The 2019 Tory manifesto enthused about the “new freedoms” our economy would enjoy. Later that year Johnson foresaw us “exploding out of” EU restraints, and “breaking our shackles” like “the Incredible Hulk”. In February 2020 the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, described the “global Britain” we would become, liberated to make our own trade deals.

Nor was the right’s vision purely economic. Uncle Sam would be by our side as we walked tall. Freed from an EU that Tory Brexiteers deplored as anti-American, we could deepen our special transatlantic relationship with our English-speaking cousins.

These rival visions — socialist freedom to move left versus Tory freedom to move right — were diametrically opposed. But because they agreed on the one thing that in the heat of the 2016 referendum seemed to matter — whether to leave — few seemed to care that this was only first base.

And after that? It’s becoming obvious who got the prospects right, and it wasn’t the Tory Brexiteers. As events now demonstrate, the returns on investment in the Anglo-American “special relationship” were never secure. Ignored by Washington and shorn of what solidarity we had with our own continent, the UK cuts a rather lonely and confused figure in the world this month. None of the great new trade deals we had hoped to secure seem to be in the offing, the prospect of any sweetheart deal with the US is surely receding, and our new deals so far largely replicate the ones we had as EU members. The increasingly “globalising” world that Brexit Britain, turning its back on the EU single market, would be joining has if anything gone into reverse, as prospects loom of a chilling of trade with China.

None of this spells disaster and the UK will plod on. Remainer prophecies of doom have not come to pass nor, I suspect, ever will. But Brexit was to be transformative, and there’s really only one sea-change I detect so far. As a country we are moving steadily left. Even as a new generation of Tory boys lay posies at the shrine of a woman they never knew, Thatcherism itself is dying. There will be little serious opposition to a state bailout of our steel industry, or any other industry, if it should come to that. I can think of no nationalisation today that would meet sustained public or political resistance and it’s happening to the railways already. Tax rises are no longer anathema. Public sector pay deals will have to reflect Brexit-related labour shortages.

Much of this would have happened without Brexit: only when or if we get a Labour government will the removal of the EU brake on intervention matter much. No, it is what has not happened that most strikes me. Noiselessly the post-Brexit, small-state dream of the right has evaporated like a dawn mist, and with it the Tory case for ever provoking our Brexit convulsions in the first place.

 

The clarity of the British right’s economic analysis has always been prey to chronic attacks of nationalism. Brexit was one of them. My old party put faith before reason and spleen before brain, and four years of yelling at each other followed. Oh what a waste of time, effort and anger this has all been.

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[AngryOfTuebrook]

I do love that "always a closet Brexiteer" stuff; as if Jeremy Corbyn has ever been a closet anything.

[Arniepie]

As a county we are moving steadily left?

What is he basing that on exactly?

 

[Gnasher]

4 minutes ago, Arniepie said:

As a county we are moving steadily left?

What is he basing that on exactly?

 

Leaving the capitalist EU.

[Arniepie]

3 minutes ago, Gnasher said:

Leaving the capitalist EU.

And by blaming foreigners for everything?

Is there any more evidence of this socialist utopia we are morphing into?

[Gnasher]

4 minutes ago, Arniepie said:

And by blaming foreigners for everything?

How do you equate not being in the EU as "blaming foreigners"? What about Asian doctors or Philippino nurses? Aren't they as vital as workers from say Poland?

 

Your second question is answered with labour finally becoming as equal as capital, as Parris rightly points out.

4 minutes ago, Arniepie said:

Is there any more evidence of this socialist utopia we are morphing into?

See above.

[Arniepie]

As for public sector pay deals ,we are in the middle of another 2 year pay freeze

To go on top of the previous 8 years.

[Gnasher]

1 minute ago, Arniepie said:

As for public sector pay deals ,we are in the middle of another 2 year pay freeze

To go on top of the previous 8 years.

I don't disagree, we've seen stagnation on wages for almost two decades, it's eu/Capitalist policy, low wages, low inflation. 

[Arniepie]

5 minutes ago, Gnasher said:

How do you equate not being in the EU as "blaming foreigners"? What about Asian doctors or Philippino nurses? Aren't they as vital as workers from say Poland?

 

Your second question is answered with labour finally becoming as equal as capital, as Parris rightly points out.

See above.

So to clarify .. advocating gun boats be sent to incercept migrants,stopping free schools meals,increasing ni contributions which will not have the slightest impact on the higher earners,continuing public sector pay freezes..are all evidence of us becoming more left wing?

[Gnasher]

2 minutes ago, Arniepie said:

So to clarify .. advocating gun boats be sent to incercept migrants,stopping free schools meals,increasing ni contributions which will not have the slightest impact on the higher earners,continuing public sector pay freezes..are all evidence of us becoming more left wing?

If you read the article again I think he's talking about the political philosophy as a whole, mainly the correlation between labour and money, rather than any individual right wing policy from the present government.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

49 minutes ago, Arniepie said:

As a county we are moving steadily left?

What is he basing that on exactly?

 

The massive majority for the right wing of the Tory Party.