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  • DavidL said:

    Scott_xP said:
    Fantastic isn't it!

    Celebrating treating people "based on their skills, not where they're from" is a very good thing.

    Or would you rather treat people based on where they're from, not their skills?

    We are losing freedoms. That is the point. As from 1st January 2021, UK businesses and citizens (who do not hold dual nationality) will enjoy fewer freedoms than they do today.
    Every year in the EU we lost "freedoms" as new regulations came in too.

    Win some lose some.
    Name 10, from any year of your choice.
    Fish your own waters, control your won borders, reduce VAT rates to suit yourself, CE marking, control social security, public procurement, set international tariffs, legal jurisdiction, cross border taxation, straight bananas.
    Fish your own waters: the UK government (of its own volition) sold the rights to EU fisherman with no mechanism for taking the licences back. The EU fishermen now have loans from UK banks secured against the rights so there is no means of recovering them without cuasing commerical harm. But it can be done whether a member or not. Will the UK have the same sway to do so as an ex-member as it would have had as a contributing member - thats a good question?

    UK VAT rates differ to the UK in absolute terms and by product and service - it sounds like they can be set to suit the UK.

    CE Marking is an international standard: UK manufactuers will keep it even after Brexit to sell into that market. Member or not the UK has to play by the rules.

    What does control Social Security mean? The UK uses NI, in Germany they have insurance companies for example, can you point me to the EU directive harmonising this?

    The UK today published a set of international tarrifs copy and pasted from the ones already used by the EU. Also as a member of the EU council the UK had the right to infuence the rates of the entire continent. Now it will be a rule taker from the trade deal it signs or from the WHO - which one is better?

    What does legal jurisdiction mean? The UK has different laws to the rest of the EU, can you point me to the EU directive harmonising this?

    What does cross border taxation mean? The UK is missing the right to lay claim to all income earned by UK citizens as the US does?

    Straight bananas - try and stay serious.
    Look we had this debate in 2016.

    You lost.
    I for one will spend the rest of my life nailing leavers to the wall for their utter credulity and deceit. Its a right I'm pleased to have maintained.
    Oooooh! Inneee hard?
    And persistent I would say.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950
    edited May 2020

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    It was about being able to control the level of immigration, not ending it completely. Farage and UKIP didn't want to end it completely.

    He speaks!

    And I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who cited immigration as a reason for their leave vote were happy with the numbers and just wanted to reclaim the abstract principle of being able to control it.
    Why are you trying to introduce numbers into it? Your claim was "end" - that means no numbers.

    Reducing numbers was government policy under David Cameron. Are you trying to bring him into it now? Make your mind up, you're all over the shop.
    No. My original point was that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce the number of foreigners coming to the UK. Or "immigration" as people responded when asked.

    You said no, the racists were all in Vote Leave, whereas Leave.EU was full of foreigner-loving open society liberals (or somesuch). So you yourself accepted that a large number of Leave campaigners were "openly racist" (your words). Just not the particular grouping you favoured.

    You then tried to argue that immigration was not a central strand of the Leave effort. Which is transparently bollocks.

    And then you tried to say that when people said "immigration" as a reason for voting Leave what they actually meant was that they were happy with the numbers of foreigners here and just wanted to be able to control it and wanted Indian plumbers instead of Polish ones.

    Which last I thought unlikely.
    I don't disagree that a strand of the Leave campaign wanted to reduce numbers any more than a significant strand of David Cameron's voters wanted to reduce numbers. That was never disputed.

    Words have meanings, if you wanted to say some wanted to reduce it then say that. Its not what you said. I never said anything about numbers, you've only just introduced numbers into the conversation.

    I never disputed immigration being a central strand either. I disputed "ending immigration" was. As did isam.
    Again, the original discussion began when I pointed out to @RochdalePioneers that he had hitched his wagon to a movement which had a significant racist element.

    Let's take Nigel's poster or that TV advert. Did either say "end immigration"? Not that I can find. Did his poster appeal to those who wanted to end immigration, did it say subliminally they want to end immigration or, if that holy grail was unattainable, to reduce it in any way they could? You betcha.

    And what about your view of Leave.EU. A bunch of open racists you said. Did Leave.EU ever say "we want to end immigration"? Not that I can find.

    So anti-foreigner feeling was a central strand of the Leave campaign.

    Not your bit, of course, Vote Leave was a paragon of inclusivity. But that doesn't obviate the fact that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce immigration and I have no problem with using the term "end immigration" to describe it either because that was the message from significant elements of it.

    Words do matter and in many ways I wish Leave.EU, Nige's poster, and the narrator had had the balls to say what they actually meant.
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 12,881

    One thing that has always puzzled me about gendered pronouns and indeed gendered terms generally – why when we attempt to abolish them do we tend to use the masculine form as neuter?

    The actor/actress thing is bizarre. In standard British English, an actor is male and an actress female. Yet there is pressure in some quarters to abolish the word actress and replace it with, erm, actor – the masculine form.

    This seems to be the opposite of feminist.

    One of the proposals under consideration by the Academie Francaise to make French gender neutral is to use both endings with median periods inside the word. So lecteur becomes lecteur.rice.

    There is also a non-binary/gender neutral pronoun (iel) on the way.

    I fully approve on the basis that socially conservative dullards will hate it.
  • ChrisChris Posts: 11,010

    One thing that has always puzzled me about gendered pronouns and indeed gendered terms generally – why when we attempt to abolish them do we tend to use the masculine form as neuter?

    The actor/actress thing is bizarre. In standard British English, an actor is male and an actress female. Yet there is pressure in some quarters to abolish the word actress and replace it with, erm, actor – the masculine form.

    This seems to be the opposite of feminist.

    Indeed. Angela Merkel's title is given in all German media as '(Bundes-) Kanzlerin'. If you tried calling her 'Kanzler', you might get a thumping!

    The PC 'logic' seems to be: 'women are equal to men, therefore we must abolish all female-specific terms and refer to women as if they were men, because male terms are clearly superior... er, is this right?'
    I think the point is that there is no valid reason to have special terms to distinguish between male and female actors. We don't use special words for female engineers, doctors or writers, so why the exception for actors?
    It's really just a historical quirk of language. English indeed doesn't bother to distinguish the gender of agent nouns in many instances, whereas some other Indo-European languages do as a matter of course.

    And now the Académie Française has agreed to endorse the wholesale introduction of feminine alternatives for previously male-gendered job titles, because in France's version of PC culture, it was the lack of female-specific terms that was the outrage...

    https://www.france24.com/en/20190228-french-language-academie-francaise-feminisation-professions
    It's just a plot to confuse reactionaries. Making it unnecessarily difficult to be as offensive as possible.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,749
    HYUFD said:
    Lead from the front, Chuck. I'm sure Anderson and Sheppard will do a nice line in peasant smocks and britches.
  • isamisam Posts: 40,731
    edited May 2020
    TOPPING said:

    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    It was about being able to control the level of immigration, not ending it completely. Farage and UKIP didn't want to end it completely.

    He speaks!

    And I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who cited immigration as a reason for their leave vote were happy with the numbers and just wanted to reclaim the abstract principle of being able to control it.
    Haha

    Well at least you've confirmed why I hesitated to get involved in this one! A futile debate really, we know what everyone's going to say, and no ones going to give in
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    It was about being able to control the level of immigration, not ending it completely. Farage and UKIP didn't want to end it completely.

    He speaks!

    And I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who cited immigration as a reason for their leave vote were happy with the numbers and just wanted to reclaim the abstract principle of being able to control it.
    Why are you trying to introduce numbers into it? Your claim was "end" - that means no numbers.

    Reducing numbers was government policy under David Cameron. Are you trying to bring him into it now? Make your mind up, you're all over the shop.
    No. My original point was that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce the number of foreigners coming to the UK. Or "immigration" as people responded when asked.

    You said no, the racists were all in Vote Leave, whereas Leave.EU was full of foreigner-loving open society liberals (or somesuch). So you yourself accepted that a large number of Leave campaigners were "openly racist" (your words). Just not the particular grouping you favoured.

    You then tried to argue that immigration was not a central strand of the Leave effort. Which is transparently bollocks.

    And then you tried to say that when people said "immigration" as a reason for voting Leave what they actually meant was that they were happy with the numbers of foreigners here and just wanted to be able to control it and wanted Indian plumbers instead of Polish ones.

    Which last I thought unlikely.
    I don't disagree that a strand of the Leave campaign wanted to reduce numbers any more than a significant strand of David Cameron's voters wanted to reduce numbers. That was never disputed.

    Words have meanings, if you wanted to say some wanted to reduce it then say that. Its not what you said. I never said anything about numbers, you've only just introduced numbers into the conversation.

    I never disputed immigration being a central strand either. I disputed "ending immigration" was. As did isam.
    Again, the original discussion began when I pointed out to @RochdalePioneers that he had hitched his wagon to a movement which had a significant racist element.

    Let's take Nigel's poster or that TV advert. Did either say "end immigration"? Not that I can find. Did his poster appeal to those who wanted to end immigration, did it say subliminally they want to end immigration or, if that holy grail was unattainable, to reduce it in any way they could? You betcha.

    And what about your view of Leave.EU. A bunch of open racists you said. Did Leave.EU ever say "we want to end immigration"? Not that I can find.

    So anti-foreigner feeling was a central strand of the Leave campaign.

    Not your bit, of course, Vote Leave was a paragon of inclusivity. But that doesn't obviate the fact that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce immigration and I have no problem with using the term "end immigration" to describe it either because that was the message from significant elements of it.

    Words do matter and in many ways I wish Leave.EU, Nige's poster, and the narrator had had the balls to say what they actually meant.
    Farage is a racist, but he was also excluded from the official Leave campaign. So no @RochdalePioneers didn't hitch his wagon to them, since they were excluded.

    Just as I said at the start there was a significant racist element in Tony Blair's Labour Party but they were ostracised and on the sidelines.

    Trying to make a leap from "there were some ostracised racists" to "ending immigration was the central plank" is untenable garbage.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950
    Foxy said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    It was about being able to control the level of immigration, not ending it completely. Farage and UKIP didn't want to end it completely.

    He speaks!

    And I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who cited immigration as a reason for their leave vote were happy with the numbers and just wanted to reclaim the abstract principle of being able to control it.
    Why are you trying to introduce numbers into it? Your claim was "end" - that means no numbers.

    Reducing numbers was government policy under David Cameron. Are you trying to bring him into it now? Make your mind up, you're all over the shop.
    No. My original point was that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce the number of foreigners coming to the UK. Or "immigration" as people responded when asked.

    You said no, the racists were all in Vote Leave, whereas Leave.EU was full of foreigner-loving open society liberals (or somesuch). So you yourself accepted that a large number of Leave campaigners were "openly racist" (your words). Just not the particular grouping you favoured.

    You then tried to argue that immigration was not a central strand of the Leave effort. Which is transparently bollocks.

    And then you tried to say that when people said "immigration" as a reason for voting Leave what they actually meant was that they were happy with the numbers of foreigners here and just wanted to be able to control it and wanted Indian plumbers instead of Polish ones.

    Which last I thought unlikely.
    Surely the problem of skilled immigration is that we import our new masters and mistresses, thereby denying social mobility to our posterity?

    Wouldn't we be better importing low skilled serfs, so that our own progeny have the opportunity of escaping the drudgery?
    That is of course a central theorem of those studies which look to explain especially immigration's effect on wages for the lowers skilled - it pushes (in theory) the indigenous population up the skills ladder.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TGOHF666 said:
    Good news! Your imported dishwasher make 3% more margin for your retailer, and the price is merely the loss of the UK farming industry. Marvellous stuff!
    UK farming voted for Brexit.
    I voted for Brexit! At no point did I seriously think that would see the UK sail off the edge of the world as we're about to. I have to assume farmers were of a similar mind - free trade without the political union. Why a country who literally ruled the world thanks to free trade wants to do a unique experiment by becoming the only country in the world to stop free trade is beyond me.
    I think you had to look at your fellow travellers which would have made it a trivial exercise to work out that it was going to be a shitshow. You and others on this site might have had a noble, sensible, and workable idea of Brexit, but 99.8% of the other Brexiters, and 99.9% of the Brexiters in power, or who were likely to be in power, were fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.

    As you are now finding out.
    That's just nonsense and beneath you.

    The fruitcake, loonies and closet [or even quite open] racists were in the vicious Leave.EU grouping during the referendum.

    Vote Leave made sure to do as much as they can to put clear water between the Leave.EU racists etc and themselves - and quite right too.

    Tony Blair was prepared to have Jeremy Corbyn as a fellow Labour MP in his government despite knowing what he was. The Brexiteers in Vote Leave were not prepared to share a platform with Farage etc
    Oh no! You're off on one of your comic black is white really it is exercises.

    So it's a Peoples' Front of Judea thing is it? Vote Leave was chock full of racists while Leave.EU was pure as the driven snow. Or was it the other way round. Would be very interested to see the entry questionnaires for both organisations so that they could filter out the "right" type of leaver for each.
    It was quite clearly the other way around.

    Leave.EU and UKIP were the ones with bloody disgusting images like "Breaking Point" that were roundly condemned by the Vote Leave campaigners.

    There are good and bad people for almost any thinking. Does the fact that there were anti-Semites who voted for Tony Blair's Labour Party make Tony Blair's government and anyone who voted for it anti-Semitic? No, that's preposterous.
    A central strand of Tony Blair's Labour Party was not to discourage Jews from coming to the UK.
    Exactly - though some Labour voters and even MPs wanted that, just as that was not a central strand of Brexit. Leading Brexiteers of Vote Leave were all welcoming of migration and wanted to encourage the world's best and brightest to be able to come here on an equal footing with people who just happened to hold European citizenship.
    A central strand of the Brexit argument was an end to foreigners coming over here. That was overwhelmingly the argument by the leave movement. Just ask our very own @Isam here.

    To say "oh but there was a group which welcomed foreigners, what? You didn't hear about them because everyone was focusing on Nigel's totemic poster but you should have been paying more attention" is naive.

    You may feel uncomfortable about it - and who could blame you - but the promise to exclude foreigners was central to the Brexit victory and hence is being made good by PP.

    You of all people, who was disgusted by Theresa May's purported racism, should be particularly alive to this.
    You're lying or ignorant, that was never a central strand of Brexit. Find me anything, anything at all, from Vote Leave saying we need an "end to foreigners coming here".

    Patel is not seeking to end people coming here either. She's liberalising much of non-EU migration and I welcome that.

    @isam was a Leave.EU/Farage/UKIP voter so was part of the ostracised movement that had nothing to do with Vote Leave.
    Patel is an authoritarian death penalty advocate opposed to all immigration. “Liberal” is not in her vocabulary. This is an authoritarian government. The points based system as it has operated for over a decade is a deliberate disincentive to immigration from outside the EEA - now extended to the whole world. If you seriously believe that anyone will be able to enter the U.K. through it you know nothing of immigration law.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    It was about being able to control the level of immigration, not ending it completely. Farage and UKIP didn't want to end it completely.

    He speaks!

    And I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who cited immigration as a reason for their leave vote were happy with the numbers and just wanted to reclaim the abstract principle of being able to control it.
    Why are you trying to introduce numbers into it? Your claim was "end" - that means no numbers.

    Reducing numbers was government policy under David Cameron. Are you trying to bring him into it now? Make your mind up, you're all over the shop.
    No. My original point was that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce the number of foreigners coming to the UK. Or "immigration" as people responded when asked.

    You said no, the racists were all in Vote Leave, whereas Leave.EU was full of foreigner-loving open society liberals (or somesuch). So you yourself accepted that a large number of Leave campaigners were "openly racist" (your words). Just not the particular grouping you favoured.

    You then tried to argue that immigration was not a central strand of the Leave effort. Which is transparently bollocks.

    And then you tried to say that when people said "immigration" as a reason for voting Leave what they actually meant was that they were happy with the numbers of foreigners here and just wanted to be able to control it and wanted Indian plumbers instead of Polish ones.

    Which last I thought unlikely.
    I don't disagree that a strand of the Leave campaign wanted to reduce numbers any more than a significant strand of David Cameron's voters wanted to reduce numbers. That was never disputed.

    Words have meanings, if you wanted to say some wanted to reduce it then say that. Its not what you said. I never said anything about numbers, you've only just introduced numbers into the conversation.

    I never disputed immigration being a central strand either. I disputed "ending immigration" was. As did isam.
    Again, the original discussion began when I pointed out to @RochdalePioneers that he had hitched his wagon to a movement which had a significant racist element.

    Let's take Nigel's poster or that TV advert. Did either say "end immigration"? Not that I can find. Did his poster appeal to those who wanted to end immigration, did it say subliminally they want to end immigration or, if that holy grail was unattainable, to reduce it in any way they could? You betcha.

    And what about your view of Leave.EU. A bunch of open racists you said. Did Leave.EU ever say "we want to end immigration"? Not that I can find.

    So anti-foreigner feeling was a central strand of the Leave campaign.

    Not your bit, of course, Vote Leave was a paragon of inclusivity. But that doesn't obviate the fact that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce immigration and I have no problem with using the term "end immigration" to describe it either because that was the message from significant elements of it.

    Words do matter and in many ways I wish Leave.EU, Nige's poster, and the narrator had had the balls to say what they actually meant.
    Farage is a racist, but he was also excluded from the official Leave campaign. So no @RochdalePioneers didn't hitch his wagon to them, since they were excluded.

    Just as I said at the start there was a significant racist element in Tony Blair's Labour Party but they were ostracised and on the sidelines.

    Trying to make a leap from "there were some ostracised racists" to "ending immigration was the central plank" is untenable garbage.
    I am not 100% convinced that everyone was as alive to the nuances of each campaign as you might think.

    I'm not sure, for example, that Farage and the huge number of people attending his rallies, understood that he was in fact an "ostracised racist" and they oughtn't to have been there.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950
    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    It was about being able to control the level of immigration, not ending it completely. Farage and UKIP didn't want to end it completely.

    He speaks!

    And I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who cited immigration as a reason for their leave vote were happy with the numbers and just wanted to reclaim the abstract principle of being able to control it.
    Haha

    Well at least you've confirmed why I hesitated to get involved in this one! A futile debate really, we know what everyone's going to say, and no ones going to give in
    I wanted your wordcloud - although no idea of the scientific basis for it!

    :smile:
  • rpjsrpjs Posts: 3,787
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,286
    rpjs said:
    "Back to the fields, foreign workers"?
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,072
    TOPPING said:

    Foxy said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    It was about being able to control the level of immigration, not ending it completely. Farage and UKIP didn't want to end it completely.

    He speaks!

    And I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who cited immigration as a reason for their leave vote were happy with the numbers and just wanted to reclaim the abstract principle of being able to control it.
    Why are you trying to introduce numbers into it? Your claim was "end" - that means no numbers.

    Reducing numbers was government policy under David Cameron. Are you trying to bring him into it now? Make your mind up, you're all over the shop.
    No. My original point was that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce the number of foreigners coming to the UK. Or "immigration" as people responded when asked.

    You said no, the racists were all in Vote Leave, whereas Leave.EU was full of foreigner-loving open society liberals (or somesuch). So you yourself accepted that a large number of Leave campaigners were "openly racist" (your words). Just not the particular grouping you favoured.

    You then tried to argue that immigration was not a central strand of the Leave effort. Which is transparently bollocks.

    And then you tried to say that when people said "immigration" as a reason for voting Leave what they actually meant was that they were happy with the numbers of foreigners here and just wanted to be able to control it and wanted Indian plumbers instead of Polish ones.

    Which last I thought unlikely.
    Surely the problem of skilled immigration is that we import our new masters and mistresses, thereby denying social mobility to our posterity?

    Wouldn't we be better importing low skilled serfs, so that our own progeny have the opportunity of escaping the drudgery?
    That is of course a central theorem of those studies which look to explain especially immigration's effect on wages for the lowers skilled - it pushes (in theory) the indigenous population up the skills ladder.
    I was being slightly tongue in cheek, and certainly the first decades of our postwar immigration policy was just that, import serfs. Indeed we had a problem of brain drain, with educated Britons leaving the country.

    The thing is that the children and grandchildren of those serfs have leapfrogged a lot of indigenous Brits. That wasn't part of the plan.
  • ClippPClippP Posts: 1,667
    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners. TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.
    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.
    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely? TIA.
    It was about being able to control the level of immigration, not ending it completely. Farage and UKIP didn't want to end it completely.
    He speaks!
    And I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who cited immigration as a reason for their leave vote were happy with the numbers and just wanted to reclaim the abstract principle of being able to control it.
    Why are you trying to introduce numbers into it? Your claim was "end" - that means no numbers.
    Reducing numbers was government policy under David Cameron. Are you trying to bring him into it now? Make your mind up, you're all over the shop.
    No. My original point was that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce the number of foreigners coming to the UK. Or "immigration" as people responded when asked.
    You said no, the racists were all in Vote Leave, whereas Leave.EU was full of foreigner-loving open society liberals (or somesuch). So you yourself accepted that a large number of Leave campaigners were "openly racist" (your words). Just not the particular grouping you favoured.
    You then tried to argue that immigration was not a central strand of the Leave effort. Which is transparently bollocks.
    And then you tried to say that when people said "immigration" as a reason for voting Leave what they actually meant was that they were happy with the numbers of foreigners here and just wanted to be able to control it and wanted Indian plumbers instead of Polish ones.
    Which last I thought unlikely.
    I don't disagree that a strand of the Leave campaign wanted to reduce numbers any more than a significant strand of David Cameron's voters wanted to reduce numbers. That was never disputed.

    Words have meanings, if you wanted to say some wanted to reduce it then say that. Its not what you said. I never said anything about numbers, you've only just introduced numbers into the conversation.

    I never disputed immigration being a central strand either. I disputed "ending immigration" was. As did isam.
    Again, the original discussion began when I pointed out to @RochdalePioneers that he had hitched his wagon to a movement which had a significant racist element.

    Let's take Nigel's poster or that TV advert. Did either say "end immigration"? Not that I can find. Did his poster appeal to those who wanted to end immigration, did it say subliminally they want to end immigration or, if that holy grail was unattainable, to reduce it in any way they could? You betcha.

    And what about your view of Leave.EU. A bunch of open racists you said. Did Leave.EU ever say "we want to end immigration"? Not that I can find.

    So anti-foreigner feeling was a central strand of the Leave campaign.

    Not your bit, of course, Vote Leave was a paragon of inclusivity. But that doesn't obviate the fact that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce immigration and I have no problem with using the term "end immigration" to describe it either because that was the message from significant elements of it.

    Words do matter and in many ways I wish Leave.EU, Nige's poster, and the narrator had had the balls to say what they actually meant.
    Farage is a racist, but he was also excluded from the official Leave campaign. So no @RochdalePioneers didn't hitch his wagon to them, since they were excluded.

    Just as I said at the start there was a significant racist element in Tony Blair's Labour Party but they were ostracised and on the sidelines.

    Trying to make a leap from "there were some ostracised racists" to "ending immigration was the central plank" is untenable garbage.
    I am not 100% convinced that everyone was as alive to the nuances of each campaign as you might think.

    I'm not sure, for example, that Farage and the huge number of people attending his rallies, understood that he was in fact an "ostracised racist" and they oughtn't to have been there.
    Has anybody ever done an analysis of the messages put out by the despicable Cummings in support of the Leave Campaign?
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    Foxy said:

    TOPPING said:

    Foxy said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    It was about being able to control the level of immigration, not ending it completely. Farage and UKIP didn't want to end it completely.

    He speaks!

    And I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who cited immigration as a reason for their leave vote were happy with the numbers and just wanted to reclaim the abstract principle of being able to control it.
    Why are you trying to introduce numbers into it? Your claim was "end" - that means no numbers.

    Reducing numbers was government policy under David Cameron. Are you trying to bring him into it now? Make your mind up, you're all over the shop.
    No. My original point was that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce the number of foreigners coming to the UK. Or "immigration" as people responded when asked.

    You said no, the racists were all in Vote Leave, whereas Leave.EU was full of foreigner-loving open society liberals (or somesuch). So you yourself accepted that a large number of Leave campaigners were "openly racist" (your words). Just not the particular grouping you favoured.

    You then tried to argue that immigration was not a central strand of the Leave effort. Which is transparently bollocks.

    And then you tried to say that when people said "immigration" as a reason for voting Leave what they actually meant was that they were happy with the numbers of foreigners here and just wanted to be able to control it and wanted Indian plumbers instead of Polish ones.

    Which last I thought unlikely.
    Surely the problem of skilled immigration is that we import our new masters and mistresses, thereby denying social mobility to our posterity?

    Wouldn't we be better importing low skilled serfs, so that our own progeny have the opportunity of escaping the drudgery?
    That is of course a central theorem of those studies which look to explain especially immigration's effect on wages for the lowers skilled - it pushes (in theory) the indigenous population up the skills ladder.
    I was being slightly tongue in cheek, and certainly the first decades of our postwar immigration policy was just that, import serfs. Indeed we had a problem of brain drain, with educated Britons leaving the country.

    The thing is that the children and grandchildren of those serfs have leapfrogged a lot of indigenous Brits. That wasn't part of the plan.
    I think the problem with the theory is it assumes a country with a fixed proportion of unskilled jobs and a fixed proportion of skilled opportunities.

    The reality couldn't be further from the truth. We don't need ever more unskilled people, I firmly believe we need to have as many skilled people as we can, as few unskilled people as possible and those who are unskilled can take the unskilled jobs with automation filling as many unskilled jobs as possible.

    Efficiency improves by automating old unskilled jobs, not by importing more unskilled people to avoid the need to automate anything.

    I'd rather a country with too many skilled people than not enough. We build each other up that way.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    ClippP said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners. TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.
    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.
    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely? TIA.
    It was about being able to control the level of immigration, not ending it completely. Farage and UKIP didn't want to end it completely.
    He speaks!
    And I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who cited immigration as a reason for their leave vote were happy with the numbers and just wanted to reclaim the abstract principle of being able to control it.
    Why are you trying to introduce numbers into it? Your claim was "end" - that means no numbers.
    Reducing numbers was government policy under David Cameron. Are you trying to bring him into it now? Make your mind up, you're all over the shop.
    No. My original point was that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce the number of foreigners coming to the UK. Or "immigration" as people responded when asked.
    You said no, the racists were all in Vote Leave, whereas Leave.EU was full of foreigner-loving open society liberals (or somesuch). So you yourself accepted that a large number of Leave campaigners were "openly racist" (your words). Just not the particular grouping you favoured.
    You then tried to argue that immigration was not a central strand of the Leave effort. Which is transparently bollocks.
    And then you tried to say that when people said "immigration" as a reason for voting Leave what they actually meant was that they were happy with the numbers of foreigners here and just wanted to be able to control it and wanted Indian plumbers instead of Polish ones.
    Which last I thought unlikely.
    I don't disagree that a strand of the Leave campaign wanted to reduce numbers any more than a significant strand of David Cameron's voters wanted to reduce numbers. That was never disputed.

    Words have meanings, if you wanted to say some wanted to reduce it then say that. Its not what you said. I never said anything about numbers, you've only just introduced numbers into the conversation.

    I never disputed immigration being a central strand either. I disputed "ending immigration" was. As did isam.
    Again, the original discussion began when I pointed out to @RochdalePioneers that he had hitched his wagon to a movement which had a significant racist element.

    Let's take Nigel's poster or that TV advert. Did either say "end immigration"? Not that I can find. Did his poster appeal to those who wanted to end immigration, did it say subliminally they want to end immigration or, if that holy grail was unattainable, to reduce it in any way they could? You betcha.

    And what about your view of Leave.EU. A bunch of open racists you said. Did Leave.EU ever say "we want to end immigration"? Not that I can find.

    So anti-foreigner feeling was a central strand of the Leave campaign.

    Not your bit, of course, Vote Leave was a paragon of inclusivity. But that doesn't obviate the fact that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce immigration and I have no problem with using the term "end immigration" to describe it either because that was the message from significant elements of it.

    Words do matter and in many ways I wish Leave.EU, Nige's poster, and the narrator had had the balls to say what they actually meant.
    Farage is a racist, but he was also excluded from the official Leave campaign. So no @RochdalePioneers didn't hitch his wagon to them, since they were excluded.

    Just as I said at the start there was a significant racist element in Tony Blair's Labour Party but they were ostracised and on the sidelines.

    Trying to make a leap from "there were some ostracised racists" to "ending immigration was the central plank" is untenable garbage.
    I am not 100% convinced that everyone was as alive to the nuances of each campaign as you might think.

    I'm not sure, for example, that Farage and the huge number of people attending his rallies, understood that he was in fact an "ostracised racist" and they oughtn't to have been there.
    Has anybody ever done an analysis of the messages put out by the despicable Cummings in support of the Leave Campaign?
    I think the analysis in 2016 showed they were vote winners. :)
  • FeersumEnjineeyaFeersumEnjineeya Posts: 3,867
    edited May 2020
    TOPPING said:

    Foxy said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    It was about being able to control the level of immigration, not ending it completely. Farage and UKIP didn't want to end it completely.

    He speaks!

    And I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who cited immigration as a reason for their leave vote were happy with the numbers and just wanted to reclaim the abstract principle of being able to control it.
    Why are you trying to introduce numbers into it? Your claim was "end" - that means no numbers.

    Reducing numbers was government policy under David Cameron. Are you trying to bring him into it now? Make your mind up, you're all over the shop.
    No. My original point was that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce the number of foreigners coming to the UK. Or "immigration" as people responded when asked.

    You said no, the racists were all in Vote Leave, whereas Leave.EU was full of foreigner-loving open society liberals (or somesuch). So you yourself accepted that a large number of Leave campaigners were "openly racist" (your words). Just not the particular grouping you favoured.

    You then tried to argue that immigration was not a central strand of the Leave effort. Which is transparently bollocks.

    And then you tried to say that when people said "immigration" as a reason for voting Leave what they actually meant was that they were happy with the numbers of foreigners here and just wanted to be able to control it and wanted Indian plumbers instead of Polish ones.

    Which last I thought unlikely.
    Surely the problem of skilled immigration is that we import our new masters and mistresses, thereby denying social mobility to our posterity?

    Wouldn't we be better importing low skilled serfs, so that our own progeny have the opportunity of escaping the drudgery?
    That is of course a central theorem of those studies which look to explain especially immigration's effect on wages for the lowers skilled - it pushes (in theory) the indigenous population up the skills ladder.
    Yes, this is exactly what happens. If we stop importing menial workers, those potatoes will still need picking and those elderly bums will still need wiping, and those of our indigenous population who end up doing it will not be earning as much as they would otherwise have been doing*. They will be earning more than the migrants did, but that's not likely to be much comfort for them. The whole "low-skilled migrants drive down our wages argument" is simply wrong because of this effect, but remarkably few people seem to grasp the idea.

    Supposing low unemployment, as was the case until covid-19, which may of course change the equation.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    Foxy said:
    The post weekend peak has occurred in every single week, for how long?

    Today is half of *last* Tuesday.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    It was about being able to control the level of immigration, not ending it completely. Farage and UKIP didn't want to end it completely.

    He speaks!

    And I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who cited immigration as a reason for their leave vote were happy with the numbers and just wanted to reclaim the abstract principle of being able to control it.
    Why are you trying to introduce numbers into it? Your claim was "end" - that means no numbers.

    Reducing numbers was government policy under David Cameron. Are you trying to bring him into it now? Make your mind up, you're all over the shop.
    No. My original point was that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce the number of foreigners coming to the UK. Or "immigration" as people responded when asked.

    You said no, the racists were all in Vote Leave, whereas Leave.EU was full of foreigner-loving open society liberals (or somesuch). So you yourself accepted that a large number of Leave campaigners were "openly racist" (your words). Just not the particular grouping you favoured.

    You then tried to argue that immigration was not a central strand of the Leave effort. Which is transparently bollocks.

    And then you tried to say that when people said "immigration" as a reason for voting Leave what they actually meant was that they were happy with the numbers of foreigners here and just wanted to be able to control it and wanted Indian plumbers instead of Polish ones.

    Which last I thought unlikely.
    I don't disagree that a strand of the Leave campaign wanted to reduce numbers any more than a significant strand of David Cameron's voters wanted to reduce numbers. That was never disputed.

    Words have meanings, if you wanted to say some wanted to reduce it then say that. Its not what you said. I never said anything about numbers, you've only just introduced numbers into the conversation.

    I never disputed immigration being a central strand either. I disputed "ending immigration" was. As did isam.
    Again, the original discussion began when I pointed out to @RochdalePioneers that he had hitched his wagon to a movement which had a significant racist element.

    Let's take Nigel's poster or that TV advert. Did either say "end immigration"? Not that I can find. Did his poster appeal to those who wanted to end immigration, did it say subliminally they want to end immigration or, if that holy grail was unattainable, to reduce it in any way they could? You betcha.

    And what about your view of Leave.EU. A bunch of open racists you said. Did Leave.EU ever say "we want to end immigration"? Not that I can find.

    So anti-foreigner feeling was a central strand of the Leave campaign.

    Not your bit, of course, Vote Leave was a paragon of inclusivity. But that doesn't obviate the fact that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce immigration and I have no problem with using the term "end immigration" to describe it either because that was the message from significant elements of it.

    Words do matter and in many ways I wish Leave.EU, Nige's poster, and the narrator had had the balls to say what they actually meant.
    Farage is a racist, but he was also excluded from the official Leave campaign. So no @RochdalePioneers didn't hitch his wagon to them, since they were excluded.

    Just as I said at the start there was a significant racist element in Tony Blair's Labour Party but they were ostracised and on the sidelines.

    Trying to make a leap from "there were some ostracised racists" to "ending immigration was the central plank" is untenable garbage.
    I am not 100% convinced that everyone was as alive to the nuances of each campaign as you might think.

    I'm not sure, for example, that Farage and the huge number of people attending his rallies, understood that he was in fact an "ostracised racist" and they oughtn't to have been there.
    I think Farage knew, he kept whinging about it.

    I put more stock in our elected politicians like Gove and Johnson than loudmouth serial losers like him.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,013
    I can assure you that I hitched my wagon to nobody during the referendum. Farage is the acceptable face of English xenophobia. I'm not even going to call it racism, its just a belief that England is better than everyone else. So anything he had to do with was dog whistle bigotry appealing to bigots. Its the Gillian Duffys of this world. Not explicitly racist, just distrusting and disapproving of anyone who isn't like them. Two of my aunts - both also from Rochdale - typify this world view.

    So that thats Leave.EU in the bin. Vote Leave? The official wing of the lets make a killing off people brigade who plan to profiteer off Brexit by cutting employment rights and lowering standards. I don't blame Cummings one bit - he is a grade A political strategist who absolutely nailed it.

    I don't think for a minute that I don't like the darkies voters voted for the same thing as the lower standards longer working hours for peons voters. Its the same vote on the same ballot paper but for two different silver bullets. My vote? An analysis of the political direction of both the EU and UK that we weren't going in the same direction and inevitably would be relegated to the outer track of the two speed Europe. As there was already a further outer track - EFTA - that was my target. Still is.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,915
    Dura_Ace said:

    One thing that has always puzzled me about gendered pronouns and indeed gendered terms generally – why when we attempt to abolish them do we tend to use the masculine form as neuter?

    The actor/actress thing is bizarre. In standard British English, an actor is male and an actress female. Yet there is pressure in some quarters to abolish the word actress and replace it with, erm, actor – the masculine form.

    This seems to be the opposite of feminist.

    One of the proposals under consideration by the Academie Francaise to make French gender neutral is to use both endings with median periods inside the word. So lecteur becomes lecteur.rice.

    There is also a non-binary/gender neutral pronoun (iel) on the way.

    I fully approve on the basis that socially conservative dullards will hate it.
    What I find hilarious is that out in the real world people like commercial radio DJs will happily refer to Sam Smith as "They" without batting an eyelid (proverbially speaking, it's hard to see on the radio) but on here all the reactionaries get themselves worked up into such a lather about it all.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,013

    Farage is a racist, but he was also excluded from the official Leave campaign. So no @RochdalePioneers didn't hitch his wagon to them, since they were excluded.

    Excluded? Its not like they were banned from participating is it? They were MASSIVELY influential and you know it. Stop being naughty and suggesting they weren't :)
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    Foxy said:

    TOPPING said:

    Foxy said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    It was about being able to control the level of immigration, not ending it completely. Farage and UKIP didn't want to end it completely.

    He speaks!

    And I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who cited immigration as a reason for their leave vote were happy with the numbers and just wanted to reclaim the abstract principle of being able to control it.
    Why are you trying to introduce numbers into it? Your claim was "end" - that means no numbers.

    Reducing numbers was government policy under David Cameron. Are you trying to bring him into it now? Make your mind up, you're all over the shop.
    No. My original point was that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce the number of foreigners coming to the UK. Or "immigration" as people responded when asked.

    You said no, the racists were all in Vote Leave, whereas Leave.EU was full of foreigner-loving open society liberals (or somesuch). So you yourself accepted that a large number of Leave campaigners were "openly racist" (your words). Just not the particular grouping you favoured.

    You then tried to argue that immigration was not a central strand of the Leave effort. Which is transparently bollocks.

    And then you tried to say that when people said "immigration" as a reason for voting Leave what they actually meant was that they were happy with the numbers of foreigners here and just wanted to be able to control it and wanted Indian plumbers instead of Polish ones.

    Which last I thought unlikely.
    Surely the problem of skilled immigration is that we import our new masters and mistresses, thereby denying social mobility to our posterity?

    Wouldn't we be better importing low skilled serfs, so that our own progeny have the opportunity of escaping the drudgery?
    That is of course a central theorem of those studies which look to explain especially immigration's effect on wages for the lowers skilled - it pushes (in theory) the indigenous population up the skills ladder.
    I was being slightly tongue in cheek, and certainly the first decades of our postwar immigration policy was just that, import serfs. Indeed we had a problem of brain drain, with educated Britons leaving the country.

    The thing is that the children and grandchildren of those serfs have leapfrogged a lot of indigenous Brits. That wasn't part of the plan.
    Actually the older AfroCarribean community have been leapfrogged by more recent immigrants.

    The relative "stickiness" of low income etc among some ethnic groups is worth looking at, if we are interested in equality.
  • BannedinnParisBannedinnParis Posts: 1,884

    Foxy said:
    The post weekend peak has occurred in every single week, for how long?

    Today is half of *last* Tuesday.
    THIS

    the stats to look at for VE day, what with it being approaching a fortnight ago, would be an increase in the hospital stats.

    image

    The headline figure (174) is indeed about half that of the previous week.

    I think we're going to heading back into very noisy data.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950

    Foxy said:

    TOPPING said:

    Foxy said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    It was about being able to control the level of immigration, not ending it completely. Farage and UKIP didn't want to end it completely.

    He speaks!

    And I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who cited immigration as a reason for their leave vote were happy with the numbers and just wanted to reclaim the abstract principle of being able to control it.
    Why are you trying to introduce numbers into it? Your claim was "end" - that means no numbers.

    Reducing numbers was government policy under David Cameron. Are you trying to bring him into it now? Make your mind up, you're all over the shop.
    No. My original point was that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce the number of foreigners coming to the UK. Or "immigration" as people responded when asked.

    You said no, the racists were all in Vote Leave, whereas Leave.EU was full of foreigner-loving open society liberals (or somesuch). So you yourself accepted that a large number of Leave campaigners were "openly racist" (your words). Just not the particular grouping you favoured.

    You then tried to argue that immigration was not a central strand of the Leave effort. Which is transparently bollocks.

    And then you tried to say that when people said "immigration" as a reason for voting Leave what they actually meant was that they were happy with the numbers of foreigners here and just wanted to be able to control it and wanted Indian plumbers instead of Polish ones.

    Which last I thought unlikely.
    Surely the problem of skilled immigration is that we import our new masters and mistresses, thereby denying social mobility to our posterity?

    Wouldn't we be better importing low skilled serfs, so that our own progeny have the opportunity of escaping the drudgery?
    That is of course a central theorem of those studies which look to explain especially immigration's effect on wages for the lowers skilled - it pushes (in theory) the indigenous population up the skills ladder.
    I was being slightly tongue in cheek, and certainly the first decades of our postwar immigration policy was just that, import serfs. Indeed we had a problem of brain drain, with educated Britons leaving the country.

    The thing is that the children and grandchildren of those serfs have leapfrogged a lot of indigenous Brits. That wasn't part of the plan.
    Actually the older AfroCarribean community have been leapfrogged by more recent immigrants.

    The relative "stickiness" of low income etc among some ethnic groups is worth looking at, if we are interested in equality.
    A debate probably almost impossible to have I would have thought.
  • BannedinnParisBannedinnParis Posts: 1,884
    There is a slight plateau seen between 4th to about 8th May. Working back approx 2 weeks would mean we're looking for an event that happened between the 20th and 24th April.

    Any suggestions?
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941

    There is a slight plateau seen between 4th to about 8th May. Working back approx 2 weeks would mean we're looking for an event that happened between the 20th and 24th April.

    Any suggestions?

    Are we looking for a specific event, or is it just people not respecting the lockdown as much?
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,013
    Anyway, back from an interesting couple of hours. Phone call from the school my wife works at - she's had an accident and can I come pick her up? She's tripped whilst running to intervene with one of the vulnerable kids they have to look after, has banged up an elbow and done something to her foot they say. So check my two are ok to be left, get in the car and off we go.

    Into the primary school and its eerie walking through dark and empty classrooms towards the rear playground. Mrs RP is on a picnic table with an ice pack - clearly alive and talking but in pain. We try to help her hobble along, can't put any weight on the foot without shrieking so back onto a chair. Meanwhile said vulnerable child has run off and climbed up a fence onto an outbuilding roof...

    Ambulance is called, after many rounds of "is it Covid 19" they organise an ambulance but <2 hours. So we try a few other ways for her to move, ends up crawling on hands and knees through the school and hopping to my car. Call 999 back, cancel the ambulance. Off to A&E, which has been transformed into a Covid triage centre. The next door Urgent Care unit is taking overflow patients from A&E. All other non Covid patients being triaged in Orthopedics. Find a wheelchair, wheel her in, drive home.

    As I pull up an ambulance also pulls up. Which not only hasn't been cancelled, but has been sent to where we live and not where we were. Quick chat - "it wasn't for Covid was it" and they are on their way.

    In summary, I've been into school and seen those workshy teachers. Seen the dozen or so kids being sent in vs the 30 or so they are supposed to have (parents don't want to send their kids in) and then off to a hospital which looked like it was ready to accept wounded from a major incident and everyone else needed to go away...
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,286
    "Nine million easyJet passengers have travel details exposed in cyber attack"

    https://www.itv.com/news/2020-05-19/9-million-easyjet-passengers-have-travel-details-exposed-in-cyber-attack/
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,721

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    I thought that one of the immigration issues that surfaced was the difficulty curry houses were having, back in 2016 or so, in recruiting competent chefs.
    Where do I start with that one ?

    Why don't hey just train people ?
    They tried. Apparently no-one came forward to be trained. The sons and nephews on the existing operators wanted to be doctors, lawyers and so on, and Brits who wanted to be chefs didn't want to work in curry houses!
  • OllyTOllyT Posts: 4,911

    Scott_xP said:
    Fantastic isn't it!

    Celebrating treating people "based on their skills, not where they're from" is a very good thing.

    Or would you rather treat people based on where they're from, not their skills?

    We are losing freedoms. That is the point. As from 1st January 2021, UK businesses and citizens (who do not hold dual nationality) will enjoy fewer freedoms than they do today.
    Every year in the EU we lost "freedoms" as new regulations came in too.

    Win some lose some.
    Yes, one the one hand, I can no longer go and live in France or retire to Spain. But I am no longer enslaved by the EU directive governing the use of pallets in the building sector. Freedom!
    (Note to Brexiteers, I am being sarcastic. You have stolen my European birthright and that of my children, and you will feel my wrath until the day you die).
    People lived and retired in France and Spain before we joined the EU. Non EU nationals stills do.
    Yawn. I have no interest in fighting the Brexit battles again, you morons have won. You should be out there enjoying your freedoms instead of still trying to convince us that you've not done something stupid. But what you're turning this country into, it's not really my country anymore.
    The victors seem to be the most exercised I'm done with it. I wish it had never happened, I will never forgive Dave for allowing it to happen, but we are where we are.

    Attack being the best form of defence, victorious Leave freedom fighters getting their excuses in early?

    I believe in their heart of hearts they understand it will be a false dawn.
    I don't believe this Brexit cabinet has a clue where it is going to go from here. Brexit was a culture wars battle, winning was all that mattered. We are where are so I'm hanging onto my hat for the rapid decline that awaits us.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625

    There is a slight plateau seen between 4th to about 8th May. Working back approx 2 weeks would mean we're looking for an event that happened between the 20th and 24th April.

    Any suggestions?

    You may just be trying to read meaning into noisy data. It is always a good idea to step back and think, each time you try adding meaning. Sub-samples etc.

    For example, multi polynomial trendlines are awesome for finding what you (may not even realise you want) to see.
  • OllyTOllyT Posts: 4,911

    kinabalu said:

    Scott_xP said:
    Fantastic isn't it!

    Celebrating treating people "based on their skills, not where they're from" is a very good thing.

    Or would you rather treat people based on where they're from, not their skills?

    We are losing freedoms. That is the point. As from 1st January 2021, UK businesses and citizens (who do not hold dual nationality) will enjoy fewer freedoms than they do today.
    Every year in the EU we lost "freedoms" as new regulations came in too.

    Win some lose some.
    Yes, one the one hand, I can no longer go and live in France or retire to Spain. But I am no longer enslaved by the EU directive governing the use of pallets in the building sector. Freedom!
    (Note to Brexiteers, I am being sarcastic. You have stolen my European birthright and that of my children, and you will feel my wrath until the day you die).
    People lived and retired in France and Spain before we joined the EU. Non EU nationals stills do.
    Yawn. I have no interest in fighting the Brexit battles again, you morons have won. You should be out there enjoying your freedoms instead of still trying to convince us that you've not done something stupid. But what you're turning this country into, it's not really my country anymore.
    The victors seem to be the most exercised I'm done with it. I wish it had never happened, I will never forgive Dave for allowing it to happen, but we are where we are.

    Attack being the best form of defence, victorious Leave freedom fighters getting their excuses in early?

    I believe in their heart of hearts they understand it will be a false dawn.
    Does Big Daddy himself (BJ) believe Brexit is in the national interest? I sense not.
    England’s greatest unforced error since the Middle Ages.
    He never really did, it was his vehicle to get him to the top.
  • BannedinnParisBannedinnParis Posts: 1,884

    There is a slight plateau seen between 4th to about 8th May. Working back approx 2 weeks would mean we're looking for an event that happened between the 20th and 24th April.

    Any suggestions?

    You may just be trying to read meaning into noisy data. It is always a good idea to step back and think, each time you try adding meaning. Sub-samples etc.

    For example, multi polynomial trendlines are awesome for finding what you (may not even realise you want) to see.
    Oh completely, we're in noisy data territory.

    The absence of any indication of two particular spikes, in any of the data, SO FAR is really really reassuring.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,721
    DougSeal said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TGOHF666 said:
    Good news! Your imported dishwasher make 3% more margin for your retailer, and the price is merely the loss of the UK farming industry. Marvellous stuff!
    UK farming voted for Brexit.
    I voted for Brexit! At no point did I seriously think that would see the UK sail off the edge of the world as we're about to. I have to assume farmers were of a similar mind - free trade without the political union. Why a country who literally ruled the world thanks to free trade wants to do a unique experiment by becoming the only country in the world to stop free trade is beyond me.
    I think you had to look at your fellow travellers which would have made it a trivial exercise to work out that it was going to be a shitshow. You and others on this site might have had a noble, sensible, and workable idea of Brexit, but 99.8% of the other Brexiters, and 99.9% of the Brexiters in power, or who were likely to be in power, were fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.

    As you are now finding out.
    That's just nonsense and beneath you.

    The fruitcake, loonies and closet [or even quite open] racists were in the vicious Leave.EU grouping during the referendum.

    Vote Leave made sure to do as much as they can to put clear water between the Leave.EU racists etc and themselves - and quite right too.

    Tony Blair was prepared to have Jeremy Corbyn as a fellow Labour MP in his government despite knowing what he was. The Brexiteers in Vote Leave were not prepared to share a platform with Farage etc
    Oh no! You're off on one of your comic black is white really it is exercises.

    So it's a Peoples' Front of Judea thing is it? Vote Leave was chock full of racists while Leave.EU was pure as the driven snow. Or was it the other way round. Would be very interested to see the entry questionnaires for both organisations so that they could filter out the "right" type of leaver for each.
    It was quite clearly the other way around.

    Leave.EU and UKIP were the ones with bloody disgusting images like "Breaking Point" that were roundly condemned by the Vote Leave campaigners.

    There are good and bad people for almost any thinking. Does the fact that there were anti-Semites who voted for Tony Blair's Labour Party make Tony Blair's government and anyone who voted for it anti-Semitic? No, that's preposterous.
    A central strand of Tony Blair's Labour Party was not to discourage Jews from coming to the UK.
    Exactly - though some Labour voters and even MPs wanted that, just as that was not a central strand of Brexit. Leading Brexiteers of Vote Leave were all welcoming of migration and wanted to encourage the world's best and brightest to be able to come here on an equal footing with people who just happened to hold European citizenship.
    A central strand of the Brexit argument was an end to foreigners coming over here. That was overwhelmingly the argument by the leave movement. Just ask our very own @Isam here.

    To say "oh but there was a group which welcomed foreigners, what? You didn't hear about them because everyone was focusing on Nigel's totemic poster but you should have been paying more attention" is naive.

    You may feel uncomfortable about it - and who could blame you - but the promise to exclude foreigners was central to the Brexit victory and hence is being made good by PP.

    You of all people, who was disgusted by Theresa May's purported racism, should be particularly alive to this.
    You're lying or ignorant, that was never a central strand of Brexit. Find me anything, anything at all, from Vote Leave saying we need an "end to foreigners coming here".

    Patel is not seeking to end people coming here either. She's liberalising much of non-EU migration and I welcome that.

    @isam was a Leave.EU/Farage/UKIP voter so was part of the ostracised movement that had nothing to do with Vote Leave.
    Patel is an authoritarian death penalty advocate opposed to all immigration. “Liberal” is not in her vocabulary. This is an authoritarian government. The points based system as it has operated for over a decade is a deliberate disincentive to immigration from outside the EEA - now extended to the whole world. If you seriously believe that anyone will be able to enter the U.K. through it you know nothing of immigration law.
    Patel is not opposed to all immigration. She's more self-aware than that.
  • BluestBlueBluestBlue Posts: 4,556

    Dura_Ace said:

    One thing that has always puzzled me about gendered pronouns and indeed gendered terms generally – why when we attempt to abolish them do we tend to use the masculine form as neuter?

    The actor/actress thing is bizarre. In standard British English, an actor is male and an actress female. Yet there is pressure in some quarters to abolish the word actress and replace it with, erm, actor – the masculine form.

    This seems to be the opposite of feminist.

    One of the proposals under consideration by the Academie Francaise to make French gender neutral is to use both endings with median periods inside the word. So lecteur becomes lecteur.rice.

    There is also a non-binary/gender neutral pronoun (iel) on the way.

    I fully approve on the basis that socially conservative dullards will hate it.
    What I find hilarious is that out in the real world people like commercial radio DJs will happily refer to Sam Smith as "They" without batting an eyelid (proverbially speaking, it's hard to see on the radio) but on here all the reactionaries get themselves worked up into such a lather about it all.
    What would happen to their jobs if they used correct instead of politically-correct English?
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,013
    I've seen everything now. GMTV playing audio clips off a rival show to take apart what the minister told the BBC...

    I know that someone inside Number 10 thinks that boycotting certain shows makes the show look bad. But it doesn't. It pours ridicule on the people refusing to be interviewed. Did they learn nothing from Corbyn pulling the same tactic?

    https://twitter.com/GMB/status/1262651493502648323
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772
    Argh

    One thing that has always puzzled me about gendered pronouns and indeed gendered terms generally – why when we attempt to abolish them do we tend to use the masculine form as neuter?

    The actor/actress thing is bizarre. In standard British English, an actor is male and an actress female. Yet there is pressure in some quarters to abolish the word actress and replace it with, erm, actor – the masculine form.

    This seems to be the opposite of feminist.

    I think for actor/actress the translation is to "actor" / "female actor" and so it is relevant to simply abolish the female form.

    We don't have Doctress, so why do we need Actress?

    For something like chairman, then the solution is chair, where the gender is simply removed.

    So it seems to be flexible depending on the words themselves.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,674
    DavidL said:

    Nigelb said:

    TOPPING said:

    Aren't immigrants usually foreigners, Richard? Let's see if the examples you give work if we swap the two words.

    Oh look, they do.

    No, this is wrong.

    To take an illustration I've used before, suppose a nice Swedish family come and live in a small English village. They would be welcomed. There would be no anti-Swedish sentiment. But if 100 Swedish families buy up half the houses in the village, the school starts teaching in Swedish, the pub gives up on English beer and ham, egg and chips, and instead serves only vodka and Smörgåsbord, then the locals would not unreasonably feel that their community is no longer recognisable, and resent it. They might even start hating the Swedish incomers themselves, although it's important to realise that that is a secondary effect.

    There is nothing xenophobic or intolerant about this; it's perfectly reasonable. And whilst my example is artificial, it's not really very different to the impact of incoming EU workers in some specific towns and areas,

    Failure to admit this perfectly natural and unobjectionable sentiment, and equating it with 'racism', is a big mistake - one of the mistakes which led to the disaster of Brexit.
    I know what you mean.
    IKEA has that effect on me, too.
    Whenever I think of Ikea (not often thankfully) I think of matches.
    meatballs
  • contrariancontrarian Posts: 5,818

    Anyway, back from an interesting couple of hours. Phone call from the school my wife works at - she's had an accident and can I come pick her up? She's tripped whilst running to intervene with one of the vulnerable kids they have to look after, has banged up an elbow and done something to her foot they say. So check my two are ok to be left, get in the car and off we go.

    Into the primary school and its eerie walking through dark and empty classrooms towards the rear playground. Mrs RP is on a picnic table with an ice pack - clearly alive and talking but in pain. We try to help her hobble along, can't put any weight on the foot without shrieking so back onto a chair. Meanwhile said vulnerable child has run off and climbed up a fence onto an outbuilding roof...

    Ambulance is called, after many rounds of "is it Covid 19" they organise an ambulance but <2 hours. So we try a few other ways for her to move, ends up crawling on hands and knees through the school and hopping to my car. Call 999 back, cancel the ambulance. Off to A&E, which has been transformed into a Covid triage centre. The next door Urgent Care unit is taking overflow patients from A&E. All other non Covid patients being triaged in Orthopedics. Find a wheelchair, wheel her in, drive home.

    As I pull up an ambulance also pulls up. Which not only hasn't been cancelled, but has been sent to where we live and not where we were. Quick chat - "it wasn't for Covid was it" and they are on their way.

    In summary, I've been into school and seen those workshy teachers. Seen the dozen or so kids being sent in vs the 30 or so they are supposed to have (parents don't want to send their kids in) and then off to a hospital which looked like it was ready to accept wounded from a major incident and everyone else needed to go away... </p>

    Are you unhappy then with the way you were treated by the NHS?
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    edited May 2020

    Anyway, back from an interesting couple of hours. Phone call from the school my wife works at - she's had an accident and can I come pick her up? She's tripped whilst running to intervene with one of the vulnerable kids they have to look after, has banged up an elbow and done something to her foot they say. So check my two are ok to be left, get in the car and off we go.

    Into the primary school and its eerie walking through dark and empty classrooms towards the rear playground. Mrs RP is on a picnic table with an ice pack - clearly alive and talking but in pain. We try to help her hobble along, can't put any weight on the foot without shrieking so back onto a chair. Meanwhile said vulnerable child has run off and climbed up a fence onto an outbuilding roof...

    Ambulance is called, after many rounds of "is it Covid 19" they organise an ambulance but <2 hours. So we try a few other ways for her to move, ends up crawling on hands and knees through the school and hopping to my car. Call 999 back, cancel the ambulance. Off to A&E, which has been transformed into a Covid triage centre. The next door Urgent Care unit is taking overflow patients from A&E. All other non Covid patients being triaged in Orthopedics. Find a wheelchair, wheel her in, drive home.

    As I pull up an ambulance also pulls up. Which not only hasn't been cancelled, but has been sent to where we live and not where we were. Quick chat - "it wasn't for Covid was it" and they are on their way.

    In summary, I've been into school and seen those workshy teachers. Seen the dozen or so kids being sent in vs the 30 or so they are supposed to have (parents don't want to send their kids in) and then off to a hospital which looked like it was ready to accept wounded from a major incident and everyone else needed to go away... </p>

    Sounds like quite the day, hope Mrs Pioneers is swiftly on the mend.
  • MangoMango Posts: 1,013



    I voted for Brexit! At no point did I seriously think that would see the UK sail off the edge of the world as we're about to. I have to assume farmers were of a similar mind - free trade without the political union. Why a country who literally ruled the world thanks to free trade wants to do a unique experiment by becoming the only country in the world to stop free trade is beyond me.

    You were played.

    Repent at leisure over the next decades of shittiness.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,674

    malcolmg said:

    Chris said:

    Nigelb said:

    kinabalu said:

    Alistair said:

    Andy_JS said:
    I do not see what is outrageous about not using gendered language when you do not know the person's gender.
    And it's not the law. Just food for thought. People getting in a tizz for no rational reason. It often seems to me that there is an order of magnitude more "PC gorn mad" flying around than there is PC gorning mad to trigger it.
    What a massive coincidence that you happen to agree with every word of it...
    It's hardly a coincidence when someone agrees with their own comment.
    No, it's hardly coincidence when someone thinks that outrage over PC is excessive and at the same time they consider it to be an ideological good that should spread far and wide, no matter the wishes of the sane majority of the population...
    Please just take your medication like a good girl.
    Do you know BluestBlue is a girl or was that an inappropriate use of a gender pronoun?
    Look out the JOKE police are out of teh doughnut shop.
    Fixed that for you.
    JOCK even
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    TOPPING said:

    Foxy said:

    TOPPING said:

    Foxy said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    isam said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    It was about being able to control the level of immigration, not ending it completely. Farage and UKIP didn't want to end it completely.

    He speaks!

    And I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who cited immigration as a reason for their leave vote were happy with the numbers and just wanted to reclaim the abstract principle of being able to control it.
    Why are you trying to introduce numbers into it? Your claim was "end" - that means no numbers.

    Reducing numbers was government policy under David Cameron. Are you trying to bring him into it now? Make your mind up, you're all over the shop.
    No. My original point was that a central strand of the Leave campaign was to reduce the number of foreigners coming to the UK. Or "immigration" as people responded when asked.

    You said no, the racists were all in Vote Leave, whereas Leave.EU was full of foreigner-loving open society liberals (or somesuch). So you yourself accepted that a large number of Leave campaigners were "openly racist" (your words). Just not the particular grouping you favoured.

    You then tried to argue that immigration was not a central strand of the Leave effort. Which is transparently bollocks.

    And then you tried to say that when people said "immigration" as a reason for voting Leave what they actually meant was that they were happy with the numbers of foreigners here and just wanted to be able to control it and wanted Indian plumbers instead of Polish ones.

    Which last I thought unlikely.
    Surely the problem of skilled immigration is that we import our new masters and mistresses, thereby denying social mobility to our posterity?

    Wouldn't we be better importing low skilled serfs, so that our own progeny have the opportunity of escaping the drudgery?
    That is of course a central theorem of those studies which look to explain especially immigration's effect on wages for the lowers skilled - it pushes (in theory) the indigenous population up the skills ladder.
    I was being slightly tongue in cheek, and certainly the first decades of our postwar immigration policy was just that, import serfs. Indeed we had a problem of brain drain, with educated Britons leaving the country.

    The thing is that the children and grandchildren of those serfs have leapfrogged a lot of indigenous Brits. That wasn't part of the plan.
    Actually the older AfroCarribean community have been leapfrogged by more recent immigrants.

    The relative "stickiness" of low income etc among some ethnic groups is worth looking at, if we are interested in equality.
    A debate probably almost impossible to have I would have thought.
    Yes, it is far more important to add another page to the tax code. Because that one more page might map out the entirety of human behaviour and Make The Rules Perfect...... Absolutely no chance that it will introduce another loophole/introduce a change in behaviour. That require 10 more pages...

    Put the tax code on a postcard and look at *people*. Nah... too hard.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941

    I've seen everything now. GMTV playing audio clips off a rival show to take apart what the minister told the BBC...

    I know that someone inside Number 10 thinks that boycotting certain shows makes the show look bad. But it doesn't. It pours ridicule on the people refusing to be interviewed. Did they learn nothing from Corbyn pulling the same tactic?

    https://twitter.com/GMB/status/1262651493502648323

    Are they still infatuated with the number of tests?
  • BannedinnParisBannedinnParis Posts: 1,884
    angry fat man shouts at moon
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,674

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    I thought that one of the immigration issues that surfaced was the difficulty curry houses were having, back in 2016 or so, in recruiting competent chefs.
    Where do I start with that one ?

    Why don't hey just train people ?
    Alan, it is a 25 year apprenticeship
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,674
    DougSeal said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TGOHF666 said:
    Good news! Your imported dishwasher make 3% more margin for your retailer, and the price is merely the loss of the UK farming industry. Marvellous stuff!
    UK farming voted for Brexit.
    I voted for Brexit! At no point did I seriously think that would see the UK sail off the edge of the world as we're about to. I have to assume farmers were of a similar mind - free trade without the political union. Why a country who literally ruled the world thanks to free trade wants to do a unique experiment by becoming the only country in the world to stop free trade is beyond me.
    I think you had to look at your fellow travellers which would have made it a trivial exercise to work out that it was going to be a shitshow. You and others on this site might have had a noble, sensible, and workable idea of Brexit, but 99.8% of the other Brexiters, and 99.9% of the Brexiters in power, or who were likely to be in power, were fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.

    As you are now finding out.
    That's just nonsense and beneath you.

    The fruitcake, loonies and closet [or even quite open] racists were in the vicious Leave.EU grouping during the referendum.

    Vote Leave made sure to do as much as they can to put clear water between the Leave.EU racists etc and themselves - and quite right too.

    Tony Blair was prepared to have Jeremy Corbyn as a fellow Labour MP in his government despite knowing what he was. The Brexiteers in Vote Leave were not prepared to share a platform with Farage etc
    Oh no! You're off on one of your comic black is white really it is exercises.

    So it's a Peoples' Front of Judea thing is it? Vote Leave was chock full of racists while Leave.EU was pure as the driven snow. Or was it the other way round. Would be very interested to see the entry questionnaires for both organisations so that they could filter out the "right" type of leaver for each.
    It was quite clearly the other way around.

    Leave.EU and UKIP were the ones with bloody disgusting images like "Breaking Point" that were roundly condemned by the Vote Leave campaigners.

    There are good and bad people for almost any thinking. Does the fact that there were anti-Semites who voted for Tony Blair's Labour Party make Tony Blair's government and anyone who voted for it anti-Semitic? No, that's preposterous.
    A central strand of Tony Blair's Labour Party was not to discourage Jews from coming to the UK.
    Exactly - though some Labour voters and even MPs wanted that, just as that was not a central strand of Brexit. Leading Brexiteers of Vote Leave were all welcoming of migration and wanted to encourage the world's best and brightest to be able to come here on an equal footing with people who just happened to hold European citizenship.
    A central strand of the Brexit argument was an end to foreigners coming over here. That was overwhelmingly the argument by the leave movement. Just ask our very own @Isam here.

    To say "oh but there was a group which welcomed foreigners, what? You didn't hear about them because everyone was focusing on Nigel's totemic poster but you should have been paying more attention" is naive.

    You may feel uncomfortable about it - and who could blame you - but the promise to exclude foreigners was central to the Brexit victory and hence is being made good by PP.

    You of all people, who was disgusted by Theresa May's purported racism, should be particularly alive to this.
    You're lying or ignorant, that was never a central strand of Brexit. Find me anything, anything at all, from Vote Leave saying we need an "end to foreigners coming here".

    Patel is not seeking to end people coming here either. She's liberalising much of non-EU migration and I welcome that.

    @isam was a Leave.EU/Farage/UKIP voter so was part of the ostracised movement that had nothing to do with Vote Leave.
    Patel is an authoritarian death penalty advocate opposed to all immigration. “Liberal” is not in her vocabulary. This is an authoritarian government. The points based system as it has operated for over a decade is a deliberate disincentive to immigration from outside the EEA - now extended to the whole world. If you seriously believe that anyone will be able to enter the U.K. through it you know nothing of immigration law.
    You could just as easily have missed out "of immigration law" there.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,047

    DavidL said:

    Scott_xP said:
    Fantastic isn't it!

    Celebrating treating people "based on their skills, not where they're from" is a very good thing.

    Or would you rather treat people based on where they're from, not their skills?

    We are losing freedoms. That is the point. As from 1st January 2021, UK businesses and citizens (who do not hold dual nationality) will enjoy fewer freedoms than they do today.
    Every year in the EU we lost "freedoms" as new regulations came in too.

    Win some lose some.
    Name 10, from any year of your choice.
    Fish your own waters, control your won borders, reduce VAT rates to suit yourself, CE marking, control social security, public procurement, set international tariffs, legal jurisdiction, cross border taxation, straight bananas.
    Fish your own waters: the UK government (of its own volition) sold the rights to EU fisherman with no mechanism for taking the licences back. The EU fishermen now have loans from UK banks secured against the rights so there is no means of recovering them without cuasing commerical harm. But it can be done whether a member or not. Will the UK have the same sway to do so as an ex-member as it would have had as a contributing member - thats a good question?

    UK VAT rates differ to the UK in absolute terms and by product and service - it sounds like they can be set to suit the UK.

    CE Marking is an international standard: UK manufactuers will keep it even after Brexit to sell into that market. Member or not the UK has to play by the rules.

    What does control Social Security mean? The UK uses NI, in Germany they have insurance companies for example, can you point me to the EU directive harmonising this?

    The UK today published a set of international tarrifs copy and pasted from the ones already used by the EU. Also as a member of the EU council the UK had the right to infuence the rates of the entire continent. Now it will be a rule taker from the trade deal it signs or from the WHO - which one is better?

    What does legal jurisdiction mean? The UK has different laws to the rest of the EU, can you point me to the EU directive harmonising this?

    What does cross border taxation mean? The UK is missing the right to lay claim to all income earned by UK citizens as the US does?

    Straight bananas - try and stay serious.
    Look we had this debate in 2016.

    You lost.
    I for one will spend the rest of my life nailing leavers to the wall for their utter credulity and deceit. Its a right I'm pleased to have maintained.
    Oooooh! Inneee hard?
    And persistent I would say.
    Persistent you may be, but on the fishing issue, you're simply wrong, unless you've just explained your argument very badly.

  • Wulfrun_PhilWulfrun_Phil Posts: 4,572
    edited May 2020

    Farage is a racist, but he was also excluded from the official Leave campaign. So no @RochdalePioneers didn't hitch his wagon to them, since they were excluded.

    Excluded? Its not like they were banned from participating is it? They were MASSIVELY influential and you know it. Stop being naughty and suggesting they weren't :)
    Cummings stopped Farage from participating in the official campaign because he (I think rightly) feared that Farage would on balance put off those who mattered from voting Leave, since he's a Marmite figure whose appeal was limited to UKIP types and zealots. If you're arguing that nonetheless Farage was massively influential, then you're arguing either that Cummings was wrong or that Leave won in spite of rather than because of Farage.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    malcolmg said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    I thought that one of the immigration issues that surfaced was the difficulty curry houses were having, back in 2016 or so, in recruiting competent chefs.
    Where do I start with that one ?

    Why don't hey just train people ?
    Alan, it is a 25 year apprenticeship
    To reheat pre-part-cooked food* from the giant curry making place near Manchester....

    *I was strolling back with a flatmate through Brick Lane at the dead on night. He was surprised by the sight of giant lorries disgorging racks of the stuff. I wasn't - that's why most of the places on Brick Lane tasted the same.

    ** Note that the celeb-chef branded chains do similar.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    Mango said:



    I voted for Brexit! At no point did I seriously think that would see the UK sail off the edge of the world as we're about to. I have to assume farmers were of a similar mind - free trade without the political union. Why a country who literally ruled the world thanks to free trade wants to do a unique experiment by becoming the only country in the world to stop free trade is beyond me.

    You were played.

    Repent at leisure over the next decades of shittiness.
    He hath repenteth, even did a stretch in the Lib Dems for his most grievous sin.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,674

    Dura_Ace said:

    One thing that has always puzzled me about gendered pronouns and indeed gendered terms generally – why when we attempt to abolish them do we tend to use the masculine form as neuter?

    The actor/actress thing is bizarre. In standard British English, an actor is male and an actress female. Yet there is pressure in some quarters to abolish the word actress and replace it with, erm, actor – the masculine form.

    This seems to be the opposite of feminist.

    One of the proposals under consideration by the Academie Francaise to make French gender neutral is to use both endings with median periods inside the word. So lecteur becomes lecteur.rice.

    There is also a non-binary/gender neutral pronoun (iel) on the way.

    I fully approve on the basis that socially conservative dullards will hate it.
    What I find hilarious is that out in the real world people like commercial radio DJs will happily refer to Sam Smith as "They" without batting an eyelid (proverbially speaking, it's hard to see on the radio) but on here all the reactionaries get themselves worked up into such a lather about it all.
    Who is Sam Smith and what is a "They" I ask myself.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    malcolmg said:

    DougSeal said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TGOHF666 said:
    Good news! Your imported dishwasher make 3% more margin for your retailer, and the price is merely the loss of the UK farming industry. Marvellous stuff!
    UK farming voted for Brexit.
    I voted for Brexit! At no point did I seriously think that would see the UK sail off the edge of the world as we're about to. I have to assume farmers were of a similar mind - free trade without the political union. Why a country who literally ruled the world thanks to free trade wants to do a unique experiment by becoming the only country in the world to stop free trade is beyond me.
    I think you had to look at your fellow travellers which would have made it a trivial exercise to work out that it was going to be a shitshow. You and others on this site might have had a noble, sensible, and workable idea of Brexit, but 99.8% of the other Brexiters, and 99.9% of the Brexiters in power, or who were likely to be in power, were fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.

    As you are now finding out.
    That's just nonsense and beneath you.

    The fruitcake, loonies and closet [or even quite open] racists were in the vicious Leave.EU grouping during the referendum.

    Vote Leave made sure to do as much as they can to put clear water between the Leave.EU racists etc and themselves - and quite right too.

    Tony Blair was prepared to have Jeremy Corbyn as a fellow Labour MP in his government despite knowing what he was. The Brexiteers in Vote Leave were not prepared to share a platform with Farage etc
    Oh no! You're off on one of your comic black is white really it is exercises.

    So it's a Peoples' Front of Judea thing is it? Vote Leave was chock full of racists while Leave.EU was pure as the driven snow. Or was it the other way round. Would be very interested to see the entry questionnaires for both organisations so that they could filter out the "right" type of leaver for each.
    It was quite clearly the other way around.

    Leave.EU and UKIP were the ones with bloody disgusting images like "Breaking Point" that were roundly condemned by the Vote Leave campaigners.

    There are good and bad people for almost any thinking. Does the fact that there were anti-Semites who voted for Tony Blair's Labour Party make Tony Blair's government and anyone who voted for it anti-Semitic? No, that's preposterous.
    A central strand of Tony Blair's Labour Party was not to discourage Jews from coming to the UK.
    Exactly - though some Labour voters and even MPs wanted that, just as that was not a central strand of Brexit. Leading Brexiteers of Vote Leave were all welcoming of migration and wanted to encourage the world's best and brightest to be able to come here on an equal footing with people who just happened to hold European citizenship.
    A central strand of the Brexit argument was an end to foreigners coming over here. That was overwhelmingly the argument by the leave movement. Just ask our very own @Isam here.

    To say "oh but there was a group which welcomed foreigners, what? You didn't hear about them because everyone was focusing on Nigel's totemic poster but you should have been paying more attention" is naive.

    You may feel uncomfortable about it - and who could blame you - but the promise to exclude foreigners was central to the Brexit victory and hence is being made good by PP.

    You of all people, who was disgusted by Theresa May's purported racism, should be particularly alive to this.
    You're lying or ignorant, that was never a central strand of Brexit. Find me anything, anything at all, from Vote Leave saying we need an "end to foreigners coming here".

    Patel is not seeking to end people coming here either. She's liberalising much of non-EU migration and I welcome that.

    @isam was a Leave.EU/Farage/UKIP voter so was part of the ostracised movement that had nothing to do with Vote Leave.
    Patel is an authoritarian death penalty advocate opposed to all immigration. “Liberal” is not in her vocabulary. This is an authoritarian government. The points based system as it has operated for over a decade is a deliberate disincentive to immigration from outside the EEA - now extended to the whole world. If you seriously believe that anyone will be able to enter the U.K. through it you know nothing of immigration law.
    You could just as easily have missed out "of immigration law" there.
    So how do people from outside the EEA get here now?
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,674

    malcolmg said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    I thought that one of the immigration issues that surfaced was the difficulty curry houses were having, back in 2016 or so, in recruiting competent chefs.
    Where do I start with that one ?

    Why don't hey just train people ?
    Alan, it is a 25 year apprenticeship
    To reheat pre-part-cooked food* from the giant curry making place near Manchester....

    *I was strolling back with a flatmate through Brick Lane at the dead on night. He was surprised by the sight of giant lorries disgorging racks of the stuff. I wasn't - that's why most of the places on Brick Lane tasted the same.

    ** Note that the celeb-chef branded chains do similar.
    I was of course jesting, it is only 15
  • SockySocky Posts: 404

    We don't have Doctress, so why do we need Actress?

    Well, arguably given that the luvvies* job is to be a certain character, and that will have a gender, it is relevant.

    In engineering, parts that fit together are often described as male or female, or even sometimes master/slave. Lets just hope the wokies don't find out.

    *gender neutral term
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,576
    .

    Dura_Ace said:

    One thing that has always puzzled me about gendered pronouns and indeed gendered terms generally – why when we attempt to abolish them do we tend to use the masculine form as neuter?

    The actor/actress thing is bizarre. In standard British English, an actor is male and an actress female. Yet there is pressure in some quarters to abolish the word actress and replace it with, erm, actor – the masculine form.

    This seems to be the opposite of feminist.

    One of the proposals under consideration by the Academie Francaise to make French gender neutral is to use both endings with median periods inside the word. So lecteur becomes lecteur.rice.

    There is also a non-binary/gender neutral pronoun (iel) on the way.

    I fully approve on the basis that socially conservative dullards will hate it.
    What I find hilarious is that out in the real world people like commercial radio DJs will happily refer to Sam Smith as "They" without batting an eyelid (proverbially speaking, it's hard to see on the radio) but on here all the reactionaries get themselves worked up into such a lather about it all.
    What would happen to their jobs if they used correct instead of politically-correct English?
    Your understanding of 'correct' is an interesting one.

    Are you arguing such usages are grammatically incorrect, or merely that they offend your sense of style ?
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    edited May 2020
    malcolmg said:

    malcolmg said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    I thought that one of the immigration issues that surfaced was the difficulty curry houses were having, back in 2016 or so, in recruiting competent chefs.
    Where do I start with that one ?

    Why don't hey just train people ?
    Alan, it is a 25 year apprenticeship
    To reheat pre-part-cooked food* from the giant curry making place near Manchester....

    *I was strolling back with a flatmate through Brick Lane at the dead on night. He was surprised by the sight of giant lorries disgorging racks of the stuff. I wasn't - that's why most of the places on Brick Lane tasted the same.

    ** Note that the celeb-chef branded chains do similar.
    I was of course jesting, it is only 15
    It's about 15 minutes... The number of curry places that actually cook the food from first principles and need actual chefs is on a par with the number of pubs that actually make burgers from fresh mince and need chefs.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,721

    malcolmg said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    I thought that one of the immigration issues that surfaced was the difficulty curry houses were having, back in 2016 or so, in recruiting competent chefs.
    Where do I start with that one ?

    Why don't hey just train people ?
    Alan, it is a 25 year apprenticeship
    To reheat pre-part-cooked food* from the giant curry making place near Manchester....

    *I was strolling back with a flatmate through Brick Lane at the dead on night. He was surprised by the sight of giant lorries disgorging racks of the stuff. I wasn't - that's why most of the places on Brick Lane tasted the same.

    ** Note that the celeb-chef branded chains do similar.
    Often wondered about that. Rule of thumb when eating in a pub ...... once upon a time, anyway. Never eat anywhere that has more than about four mains on the menu.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,047

    Argh

    One thing that has always puzzled me about gendered pronouns and indeed gendered terms generally – why when we attempt to abolish them do we tend to use the masculine form as neuter?

    The actor/actress thing is bizarre. In standard British English, an actor is male and an actress female. Yet there is pressure in some quarters to abolish the word actress and replace it with, erm, actor – the masculine form.

    This seems to be the opposite of feminist.

    I think for actor/actress the translation is to "actor" / "female actor" and so it is relevant to simply abolish the female form.

    We don't have Doctress, so why do we need Actress?

    For something like chairman, then the solution is chair, where the gender is simply removed.

    So it seems to be flexible depending on the words themselves.
    We did have words like janitorix at one time - it's surprising we never got Doctress in some ways.

    I'm with Anabobazina on this one.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    Socky said:

    We don't have Doctress, so why do we need Actress?

    Well, arguably given that the luvvies* job is to be a certain character, and that will have a gender, it is relevant.

    In engineering, parts that fit together are often described as male or female, or even sometimes master/slave. Lets just hope the wokies don't find out.

    *gender neutral term
    The wokies have already been through computer science, and got angry about master/slave
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,618
    edited May 2020

    One thing that has always puzzled me about gendered pronouns and indeed gendered terms generally – why when we attempt to abolish them do we tend to use the masculine form as neuter?

    The actor/actress thing is bizarre. In standard British English, an actor is male and an actress female. Yet there is pressure in some quarters to abolish the word actress and replace it with, erm, actor – the masculine form.

    This seems to be the opposite of feminist.

    Indeed. Angela Merkel's title is given in all German media as '(Bundes-) Kanzlerin'. If you tried calling her 'Kanzler', you might get a thumping!

    The PC 'logic' seems to be: 'women are equal to men, therefore we must abolish all female-specific terms and refer to women as if they were men, because male terms are clearly superior... er, is this right?'
    I think the point is that there is no valid reason to have special terms to distinguish between male and female actors. We don't use special words for female engineers, doctors or writers, so why the exception for actors?
    Common usage. In British English, we retain several gendered terms and to avoid them would lead to confusion and/or Americanism.

    We have barmaids and barmen, not bartenders (US). We have waitresses and waiters not servers (US). We have princes and princesses not, erm, gender-neutral royalty.

    Sure, we don't anything like as many gendered terms as, say, the French (where almost everything is gendered), but common usage dictates that we do have some.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,674

    malcolmg said:

    DougSeal said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TGOHF666 said:
    Good news! Your imported dishwasher make 3% more margin for your retailer, and the price is merely the loss of the UK farming industry. Marvellous stuff!
    UK farming voted for Brexit.
    I voted for Brexit! At no point did I seriously think that would see the UK sail off the edge of the world as we're about to. I have to assume farmers were of a similar mind - free trade without the political union. Why a country who literally ruled the world thanks to free trade wants to do a unique experiment by becoming the only country in the world to stop free trade is beyond me.
    I think you had to look at your fellow travellers which would have made it a trivial exercise to work out that it was going to be a shitshow. You and others on this site might have had a noble, sensible, and workable idea of Brexit, but 99.8% of the other Brexiters, and 99.9% of the Brexiters in power, or who were likely to be in power, were fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.

    As you are now finding out.
    That's just nonsense and beneath you.

    The fruitcake, loonies and closet [or even quite open] racists were in the vicious Leave.EU grouping during the referendum.

    Vote Leave made sure to do as much as they can to put clear water between the Leave.EU racists etc and themselves - and quite right too.

    Tony Blair was prepared to have Jeremy Corbyn as a fellow Labour MP in his government despite knowing what he was. The Brexiteers in Vote Leave were not prepared to share a platform with Farage etc
    Oh no! You're off on one of your comic black is white really it is exercises.

    So it's a Peoples' Front of Judea thing is it? Vote Leave was chock full of racists while Leave.EU was pure as the driven snow. Or was it the other way round. Would be very interested to see the entry questionnaires for both organisations so that they could filter out the "right" type of leaver for each.
    It was quite clearly the other way around.

    Leave.EU and UKIP were the ones with bloody disgusting images like "Breaking Point" that were roundly condemned by the Vote Leave campaigners.

    There are good and bad people for almost any thinking. Does the fact that there were anti-Semites who voted for Tony Blair's Labour Party make Tony Blair's government and anyone who voted for it anti-Semitic? No, that's preposterous.
    A central strand of Tony Blair's Labour Party was not to discourage Jews from coming to the UK.
    Exactly - though some Labour voters and even MPs wanted that, just as that was not a central strand of Brexit. Leading Brexiteers of Vote Leave were all welcoming of migration and wanted to encourage the world's best and brightest to be able to come here on an equal footing with people who just happened to hold European citizenship.
    A central strand of the Brexit argument was an end to foreigners coming over here. That was overwhelmingly the argument by the leave movement. Just ask our very own @Isam here.

    To say "oh but there was a group which welcomed foreigners, what? You didn't hear about them because everyone was focusing on Nigel's totemic poster but you should have been paying more attention" is naive.

    You may feel uncomfortable about it - and who could blame you - but the promise to exclude foreigners was central to the Brexit victory and hence is being made good by PP.

    You of all people, who was disgusted by Theresa May's purported racism, should be particularly alive to this.
    You're lying or ignorant, that was never a central strand of Brexit. Find me anything, anything at all, from Vote Leave saying we need an "end to foreigners coming here".

    Patel is not seeking to end people coming here either. She's liberalising much of non-EU migration and I welcome that.

    @isam was a Leave.EU/Farage/UKIP voter so was part of the ostracised movement that had nothing to do with Vote Leave.
    Patel is an authoritarian death penalty advocate opposed to all immigration. “Liberal” is not in her vocabulary. This is an authoritarian government. The points based system as it has operated for over a decade is a deliberate disincentive to immigration from outside the EEA - now extended to the whole world. If you seriously believe that anyone will be able to enter the U.K. through it you know nothing of immigration law.
    You could just as easily have missed out "of immigration law" there.
    So how do people from outside the EEA get here now?
    Malmesbury, You are either being obtuse or just not getting my wonderful jokes.
  • MundoMundo Posts: 30
    Nigelb said:

    .

    Dura_Ace said:

    One thing that has always puzzled me about gendered pronouns and indeed gendered terms generally – why when we attempt to abolish them do we tend to use the masculine form as neuter?

    The actor/actress thing is bizarre. In standard British English, an actor is male and an actress female. Yet there is pressure in some quarters to abolish the word actress and replace it with, erm, actor – the masculine form.

    This seems to be the opposite of feminist.

    One of the proposals under consideration by the Academie Francaise to make French gender neutral is to use both endings with median periods inside the word. So lecteur becomes lecteur.rice.

    There is also a non-binary/gender neutral pronoun (iel) on the way.

    I fully approve on the basis that socially conservative dullards will hate it.
    What I find hilarious is that out in the real world people like commercial radio DJs will happily refer to Sam Smith as "They" without batting an eyelid (proverbially speaking, it's hard to see on the radio) but on here all the reactionaries get themselves worked up into such a lather about it all.
    What would happen to their jobs if they used correct instead of politically-correct English?
    Your understanding of 'correct' is an interesting one.

    Are you arguing such usages are grammatically incorrect, or merely that they offend your sense of style ?
    For me, the biggest irony is that this entire subject is usually summed up by the most masculine of terms: “Bollocks”
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,047
    Nigelb said:

    .

    Dura_Ace said:

    One thing that has always puzzled me about gendered pronouns and indeed gendered terms generally – why when we attempt to abolish them do we tend to use the masculine form as neuter?

    The actor/actress thing is bizarre. In standard British English, an actor is male and an actress female. Yet there is pressure in some quarters to abolish the word actress and replace it with, erm, actor – the masculine form.

    This seems to be the opposite of feminist.

    One of the proposals under consideration by the Academie Francaise to make French gender neutral is to use both endings with median periods inside the word. So lecteur becomes lecteur.rice.

    There is also a non-binary/gender neutral pronoun (iel) on the way.

    I fully approve on the basis that socially conservative dullards will hate it.
    What I find hilarious is that out in the real world people like commercial radio DJs will happily refer to Sam Smith as "They" without batting an eyelid (proverbially speaking, it's hard to see on the radio) but on here all the reactionaries get themselves worked up into such a lather about it all.
    What would happen to their jobs if they used correct instead of politically-correct English?
    Your understanding of 'correct' is an interesting one.

    Are you arguing such usages are grammatically incorrect, or merely that they offend your sense of style ?
    The description 'politically correct' clearly implies non-correctness. Otherwise it would just be called 'correct'.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    malcolmg said:

    malcolmg said:

    DougSeal said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TGOHF666 said:
    Good news! Your imported dishwasher make 3% more margin for your retailer, and the price is merely the loss of the UK farming industry. Marvellous stuff!
    UK farming voted for Brexit.
    I voted for Brexit! At no point did I seriously think that would see the UK sail off the edge of the world as we're about to. I have to assume farmers were of a similar mind - free trade without the political union. Why a country who literally ruled the world thanks to free trade wants to do a unique experiment by becoming the only country in the world to stop free trade is beyond me.
    I think you had to look at your fellow travellers which would have made it a trivial exercise to work out that it was going to be a shitshow. You and others on this site might have had a noble, sensible, and workable idea of Brexit, but 99.8% of the other Brexiters, and 99.9% of the Brexiters in power, or who were likely to be in power, were fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.

    As you are now finding out.
    That's just nonsense and beneath you.

    The fruitcake, loonies and closet [or even quite open] racists were in the vicious Leave.EU grouping during the referendum.

    Vote Leave made sure to do as much as they can to put clear water between the Leave.EU racists etc and themselves - and quite right too.

    Tony Blair was prepared to have Jeremy Corbyn as a fellow Labour MP in his government despite knowing what he was. The Brexiteers in Vote Leave were not prepared to share a platform with Farage etc
    Oh no! You're off on one of your comic black is white really it is exercises.

    So it's a Peoples' Front of Judea thing is it? Vote Leave was chock full of racists while Leave.EU was pure as the driven snow. Or was it the other way round. Would be very interested to see the entry questionnaires for both organisations so that they could filter out the "right" type of leaver for each.
    It was quite clearly the other way around.

    Leave.EU and UKIP were the ones with bloody disgusting images like "Breaking Point" that were roundly condemned by the Vote Leave campaigners.

    There are good and bad people for almost any thinking. Does the fact that there were anti-Semites who voted for Tony Blair's Labour Party make Tony Blair's government and anyone who voted for it anti-Semitic? No, that's preposterous.
    A central strand of Tony Blair's Labour Party was not to discourage Jews from coming to the UK.
    Exactly - though some Labour voters and even MPs wanted that, just as that was not a central strand of Brexit. Leading Brexiteers of Vote Leave were all welcoming of migration and wanted to encourage the world's best and brightest to be able to come here on an equal footing with people who just happened to hold European citizenship.
    A central strand of the Brexit argument was an end to foreigners coming over here. That was overwhelmingly the argument by the leave movement. Just ask our very own @Isam here.

    To say "oh but there was a group which welcomed foreigners, what? You didn't hear about them because everyone was focusing on Nigel's totemic poster but you should have been paying more attention" is naive.

    You may feel uncomfortable about it - and who could blame you - but the promise to exclude foreigners was central to the Brexit victory and hence is being made good by PP.

    You of all people, who was disgusted by Theresa May's purported racism, should be particularly alive to this.
    You're lying or ignorant, that was never a central strand of Brexit. Find me anything, anything at all, from Vote Leave saying we need an "end to foreigners coming here".

    Patel is not seeking to end people coming here either. She's liberalising much of non-EU migration and I welcome that.

    @isam was a Leave.EU/Farage/UKIP voter so was part of the ostracised movement that had nothing to do with Vote Leave.
    Patel is an authoritarian death penalty advocate opposed to all immigration. “Liberal” is not in her vocabulary. This is an authoritarian government. The points based system as it has operated for over a decade is a deliberate disincentive to immigration from outside the EEA - now extended to the whole world. If you seriously believe that anyone will be able to enter the U.K. through it you know nothing of immigration law.
    You could just as easily have missed out "of immigration law" there.
    So how do people from outside the EEA get here now?
    Malmesbury, You are either being obtuse or just not getting my wonderful jokes.
    Playing Choo Choo has it's moments
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    Nigelb said:

    .

    Dura_Ace said:

    One thing that has always puzzled me about gendered pronouns and indeed gendered terms generally – why when we attempt to abolish them do we tend to use the masculine form as neuter?

    The actor/actress thing is bizarre. In standard British English, an actor is male and an actress female. Yet there is pressure in some quarters to abolish the word actress and replace it with, erm, actor – the masculine form.

    This seems to be the opposite of feminist.

    One of the proposals under consideration by the Academie Francaise to make French gender neutral is to use both endings with median periods inside the word. So lecteur becomes lecteur.rice.

    There is also a non-binary/gender neutral pronoun (iel) on the way.

    I fully approve on the basis that socially conservative dullards will hate it.
    What I find hilarious is that out in the real world people like commercial radio DJs will happily refer to Sam Smith as "They" without batting an eyelid (proverbially speaking, it's hard to see on the radio) but on here all the reactionaries get themselves worked up into such a lather about it all.
    What would happen to their jobs if they used correct instead of politically-correct English?
    Your understanding of 'correct' is an interesting one.

    Are you arguing such usages are grammatically incorrect, or merely that they offend your sense of style ?
    Sometimes it's just a linguistic choice, but sometimes they are literally incorrect and change the meaning of what is said.
  • DavidL said:

    Scott_xP said:
    Fantastic isn't it!

    Celebrating treating people "based on their skills, not where they're from" is a very good thing.

    Or would you rather treat people based on where they're from, not their skills?

    We are losing freedoms. That is the point. As from 1st January 2021, UK businesses and citizens (who do not hold dual nationality) will enjoy fewer freedoms than they do today.
    Every year in the EU we lost "freedoms" as new regulations came in too.

    Win some lose some.
    Name 10, from any year of your choice.
    Fish your own waters, control your won borders, reduce VAT rates to suit yourself, CE marking, control social security, public procurement, set international tariffs, legal jurisdiction, cross border taxation, straight bananas.
    Fish your own waters: the UK government (of its own volition) sold the rights to EU fisherman with no mechanism for taking the licences back. The EU fishermen now have loans from UK banks secured against the rights so there is no means of recovering them without cuasing commerical harm. But it can be done whether a member or not. Will the UK have the same sway to do so as an ex-member as it would have had as a contributing member - thats a good question?

    UK VAT rates differ to the UK in absolute terms and by product and service - it sounds like they can be set to suit the UK.

    CE Marking is an international standard: UK manufactuers will keep it even after Brexit to sell into that market. Member or not the UK has to play by the rules.

    What does control Social Security mean? The UK uses NI, in Germany they have insurance companies for example, can you point me to the EU directive harmonising this?

    The UK today published a set of international tarrifs copy and pasted from the ones already used by the EU. Also as a member of the EU council the UK had the right to infuence the rates of the entire continent. Now it will be a rule taker from the trade deal it signs or from the WHO - which one is better?

    What does legal jurisdiction mean? The UK has different laws to the rest of the EU, can you point me to the EU directive harmonising this?

    What does cross border taxation mean? The UK is missing the right to lay claim to all income earned by UK citizens as the US does?

    Straight bananas - try and stay serious.
    Look we had this debate in 2016.

    You lost.
    I for one will spend the rest of my life nailing leavers to the wall for their utter credulity and deceit. Its a right I'm pleased to have maintained.
    Oooooh! Inneee hard?
    And persistent I would say.
    Persistent you may be, but on the fishing issue, you're simply wrong, unless you've just explained your argument very badly.

    The quotas are agreed with the EU and the rights are allocated by the UK Government. That was the case before Brexit and it will be after now. It is what is being debated right now after all.

    The rights have been largely sold, certainly in English waters as helpfully clarified to me, and there is no mechanism for their return. Its like the freehold of a house that has been sold it can only be sold on again and maybe returned to its original holder - for a price.

    Furthermore the Spanish, French and Dutch fishing companies have used the rights as security with various banks which will make it even harder for the UK Government to forcibly take the rights back. Basically they don't plan to. The upshot: there will not be any additional rights to quotas made available to fishermen (fisherpeople if you prefer), as the existing quotas are not going to change even after negotiation. With the property argument it is like arguing over who owns the land a house is on but with no power to either demolish the house or change who lives in the house.

    The market access for our fisherpersons is also complicated: they really are in a no-win scenario and certainly aren't helped by the UK Government having sold the rights so widely and without clear possibility of return.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772

    Anyway, back from an interesting couple of hours. Phone call from the school my wife works at - she's had an accident and can I come pick her up? She's tripped whilst running to intervene with one of the vulnerable kids they have to look after, has banged up an elbow and done something to her foot they say. So check my two are ok to be left, get in the car and off we go.

    Into the primary school and its eerie walking through dark and empty classrooms towards the rear playground. Mrs RP is on a picnic table with an ice pack - clearly alive and talking but in pain. We try to help her hobble along, can't put any weight on the foot without shrieking so back onto a chair. Meanwhile said vulnerable child has run off and climbed up a fence onto an outbuilding roof...

    Ambulance is called, after many rounds of "is it Covid 19" they organise an ambulance but <2 hours. So we try a few other ways for her to move, ends up crawling on hands and knees through the school and hopping to my car. Call 999 back, cancel the ambulance. Off to A&E, which has been transformed into a Covid triage centre. The next door Urgent Care unit is taking overflow patients from A&E. All other non Covid patients being triaged in Orthopedics. Find a wheelchair, wheel her in, drive home.

    As I pull up an ambulance also pulls up. Which not only hasn't been cancelled, but has been sent to where we live and not where we were. Quick chat - "it wasn't for Covid was it" and they are on their way.

    In summary, I've been into school and seen those workshy teachers. Seen the dozen or so kids being sent in vs the 30 or so they are supposed to have (parents don't want to send their kids in) and then off to a hospital which looked like it was ready to accept wounded from a major incident and everyone else needed to go away... </p>

    And I thought that I had a trying day. Sympathies.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,576

    One thing that has always puzzled me about gendered pronouns and indeed gendered terms generally – why when we attempt to abolish them do we tend to use the masculine form as neuter?

    The actor/actress thing is bizarre. In standard British English, an actor is male and an actress female. Yet there is pressure in some quarters to abolish the word actress and replace it with, erm, actor – the masculine form.

    This seems to be the opposite of feminist.

    Indeed. Angela Merkel's title is given in all German media as '(Bundes-) Kanzlerin'. If you tried calling her 'Kanzler', you might get a thumping!

    The PC 'logic' seems to be: 'women are equal to men, therefore we must abolish all female-specific terms and refer to women as if they were men, because male terms are clearly superior... er, is this right?'
    I think the point is that there is no valid reason to have special terms to distinguish between male and female actors. We don't use special words for female engineers, doctors or writers, so why the exception for actors?
    Because you're suggesting the abolition of a couple of Oscar categories ?
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    It's my understanding the rights to the waters have not been sold in perpetuity.
  • Fysics_TeacherFysics_Teacher Posts: 6,060

    There is a slight plateau seen between 4th to about 8th May. Working back approx 2 weeks would mean we're looking for an event that happened between the 20th and 24th April.

    Any suggestions?

    My birthday?
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625

    malcolmg said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    I thought that one of the immigration issues that surfaced was the difficulty curry houses were having, back in 2016 or so, in recruiting competent chefs.
    Where do I start with that one ?

    Why don't hey just train people ?
    Alan, it is a 25 year apprenticeship
    To reheat pre-part-cooked food* from the giant curry making place near Manchester....

    *I was strolling back with a flatmate through Brick Lane at the dead on night. He was surprised by the sight of giant lorries disgorging racks of the stuff. I wasn't - that's why most of the places on Brick Lane tasted the same.

    ** Note that the celeb-chef branded chains do similar.
    Often wondered about that. Rule of thumb when eating in a pub ...... once upon a time, anyway. Never eat anywhere that has more than about four mains on the menu.
    Rule of thumb - you are eating in a place the reheats part cooked food to a formula. Unless you specifically aren't.

    Such as Franca Manca... and there your point about short menus holds. Its about training staff do a small number of things by rote.

    The number of places that actually cook food, with an actual real chef creating in the back are quite small.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772
    malcolmg said:

    DavidL said:

    Nigelb said:

    TOPPING said:

    Aren't immigrants usually foreigners, Richard? Let's see if the examples you give work if we swap the two words.

    Oh look, they do.

    No, this is wrong.

    To take an illustration I've used before, suppose a nice Swedish family come and live in a small English village. They would be welcomed. There would be no anti-Swedish sentiment. But if 100 Swedish families buy up half the houses in the village, the school starts teaching in Swedish, the pub gives up on English beer and ham, egg and chips, and instead serves only vodka and Smörgåsbord, then the locals would not unreasonably feel that their community is no longer recognisable, and resent it. They might even start hating the Swedish incomers themselves, although it's important to realise that that is a secondary effect.

    There is nothing xenophobic or intolerant about this; it's perfectly reasonable. And whilst my example is artificial, it's not really very different to the impact of incoming EU workers in some specific towns and areas,

    Failure to admit this perfectly natural and unobjectionable sentiment, and equating it with 'racism', is a big mistake - one of the mistakes which led to the disaster of Brexit.
    I know what you mean.
    IKEA has that effect on me, too.
    Whenever I think of Ikea (not often thankfully) I think of matches.
    meatballs
    Yeah, fair enough. Their food is much better than their furniture.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,618
    Dura_Ace said:

    One thing that has always puzzled me about gendered pronouns and indeed gendered terms generally – why when we attempt to abolish them do we tend to use the masculine form as neuter?

    The actor/actress thing is bizarre. In standard British English, an actor is male and an actress female. Yet there is pressure in some quarters to abolish the word actress and replace it with, erm, actor – the masculine form.

    This seems to be the opposite of feminist.

    One of the proposals under consideration by the Academie Francaise to make French gender neutral is to use both endings with median periods inside the word. So lecteur becomes lecteur.rice.

    There is also a non-binary/gender neutral pronoun (iel) on the way.

    I fully approve on the basis that socially conservative dullards will hate it.
    I suspect that that 'solution' has zero chance of success – on the basis that it is utterly ugly and the French abhor ugliness in their language.

    More likely is the solution upthread where feminine forms of several professions are licensed by the AF.

    That seems a more sensible approach, and kind of makes my point that defaulting to the masculine as neuter (as a feminist approach) is faintly absurd.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    DavidL said:

    malcolmg said:

    DavidL said:

    Nigelb said:

    TOPPING said:

    Aren't immigrants usually foreigners, Richard? Let's see if the examples you give work if we swap the two words.

    Oh look, they do.

    No, this is wrong.

    To take an illustration I've used before, suppose a nice Swedish family come and live in a small English village. They would be welcomed. There would be no anti-Swedish sentiment. But if 100 Swedish families buy up half the houses in the village, the school starts teaching in Swedish, the pub gives up on English beer and ham, egg and chips, and instead serves only vodka and Smörgåsbord, then the locals would not unreasonably feel that their community is no longer recognisable, and resent it. They might even start hating the Swedish incomers themselves, although it's important to realise that that is a secondary effect.

    There is nothing xenophobic or intolerant about this; it's perfectly reasonable. And whilst my example is artificial, it's not really very different to the impact of incoming EU workers in some specific towns and areas,

    Failure to admit this perfectly natural and unobjectionable sentiment, and equating it with 'racism', is a big mistake - one of the mistakes which led to the disaster of Brexit.
    I know what you mean.
    IKEA has that effect on me, too.
    Whenever I think of Ikea (not often thankfully) I think of matches.
    meatballs
    Yeah, fair enough. Their food is much better than their furniture.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingvar_Kamprad#Fascist_involvement
  • It's my understanding the rights to the waters have not been sold in perpetuity.

    The FT had a very detailed feature on it, which I now cannot find and its useless anyway unless you have a subscritption anyway of course. Anyway the gist was that there is no mechanism of return other than a forced purchase which might cause issues for the various UK banks who have lent against the securities. Basically it isn't happening and there doesn't appear any desire to do it in UKG.

    You also have to ask, why? Why were the rights sold so widely when the UK is apparently a "Coastal Nation"? (the most meaningless term I've ever heard; surely all nations with coasts could say that). Does it indicate that there simply weren't any UK buyers but plenty of Spanish and French takers? It gives the impression to me that fishing is a niche industry, which we all know and it is one not many UK operators seem to want to expand within.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,618
    Just seen the (unofficial) Tuesday numbers.

    Goodness me they look very low indeed for a Tuesday (almost always the worst day of the week).

    Presumably they will rise slightly... but even so?
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149
    edited May 2020
    Socky said:

    We don't have Doctress, so why do we need Actress?

    Well, arguably given that the luvvies* job is to be a certain character, and that will have a gender, it is relevant.

    In engineering, parts that fit together are often described as male or female, or even sometimes master/slave. Lets just hope the wokies don't find out.

    *gender neutral term
    Let's hope they don't find out about Great War British tanks either.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    edited May 2020

    Just seen the (unofficial) Tuesday numbers.

    Goodness me they look very low indeed for a Tuesday (almost always the worst day of the week).

    Presumably they will rise slightly... but even so?

    https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/COVID-19-daily-announced-deaths-19-May-2020.xlsx

    or do you mean the 227 for all settings?

    Yes, they are continuing to fall.
  • JonCisBackJonCisBack Posts: 911

    Dura_Ace said:

    One thing that has always puzzled me about gendered pronouns and indeed gendered terms generally – why when we attempt to abolish them do we tend to use the masculine form as neuter?

    The actor/actress thing is bizarre. In standard British English, an actor is male and an actress female. Yet there is pressure in some quarters to abolish the word actress and replace it with, erm, actor – the masculine form.

    This seems to be the opposite of feminist.

    One of the proposals under consideration by the Academie Francaise to make French gender neutral is to use both endings with median periods inside the word. So lecteur becomes lecteur.rice.

    There is also a non-binary/gender neutral pronoun (iel) on the way.

    I fully approve on the basis that socially conservative dullards will hate it.
    What I find hilarious is that out in the real world people like commercial radio DJs will happily refer to Sam Smith as "They" without batting an eyelid (proverbially speaking, it's hard to see on the radio) but on here all the reactionaries get themselves worked up into such a lather about it all.
    Is that a thing? People referring to themselves as "they"? Really?

    Why? He knows he's a bloke surely? wot?
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,047

    DavidL said:

    Scott_xP said:
    Fantastic isn't it!

    Celebrating treating people "based on their skills, not where they're from" is a very good thing.

    Or would you rather treat people based on where they're from, not their skills?

    We are losing freedoms. That is the point. As from 1st January 2021, UK businesses and citizens (who do not hold dual nationality) will enjoy fewer freedoms than they do today.
    Every year in the EU we lost "freedoms" as new regulations came in too.

    Win some lose some.
    Name 10, from any year of your choice.
    Fish your own waters, control your won borders, reduce VAT rates to suit yourself, CE marking, control social security, public procurement, set international tariffs, legal jurisdiction, cross border taxation, straight bananas.
    Fish your own waters: the UK government (of its own volition) sold the rights to EU fisherman with no mechanism for taking the licences back. The EU fishermen now have loans from UK banks secured against the rights so there is no means of recovering them without cuasing commerical harm. But it can be done whether a member or not. Will the UK have the same sway to do so as an ex-member as it would have had as a contributing member - thats a good question?

    UK VAT rates differ to the UK in absolute terms and by product and service - it sounds like they can be set to suit the UK.

    CE Marking is an international standard: UK manufactuers will keep it even after Brexit to sell into that market. Member or not the UK has to play by the rules.

    What does control Social Security mean? The UK uses NI, in Germany they have insurance companies for example, can you point me to the EU directive harmonising this?

    The UK today published a set of international tarrifs copy and pasted from the ones already used by the EU. Also as a member of the EU council the UK had the right to infuence the rates of the entire continent. Now it will be a rule taker from the trade deal it signs or from the WHO - which one is better?

    What does legal jurisdiction mean? The UK has different laws to the rest of the EU, can you point me to the EU directive harmonising this?

    What does cross border taxation mean? The UK is missing the right to lay claim to all income earned by UK citizens as the US does?

    Straight bananas - try and stay serious.
    Look we had this debate in 2016.

    You lost.
    I for one will spend the rest of my life nailing leavers to the wall for their utter credulity and deceit. Its a right I'm pleased to have maintained.
    Oooooh! Inneee hard?
    And persistent I would say.
    Persistent you may be, but on the fishing issue, you're simply wrong, unless you've just explained your argument very badly.

    The quotas are agreed with the EU and the rights are allocated by the UK Government. That was the case before Brexit and it will be after now. It is what is being debated right now after all.

    The rights have been largely sold, certainly in English waters as helpfully clarified to me, and there is no mechanism for their return. Its like the freehold of a house that has been sold it can only be sold on again and maybe returned to its original holder - for a price.

    Furthermore the Spanish, French and Dutch fishing companies have used the rights as security with various banks which will make it even harder for the UK Government to forcibly take the rights back. Basically they don't plan to. The upshot: there will not be any additional rights to quotas made available to fishermen (fisherpeople if you prefer), as the existing quotas are not going to change even after negotiation. With the property argument it is like arguing over who owns the land a house is on but with no power to either demolish the house or change who lives in the house.

    The market access for our fisherpersons is also complicated: they really are in a no-win scenario and certainly aren't helped by the UK Government having sold the rights so widely and without clear possibility of return.
    You're confusing two issues - unsurprisingly as the word 'quota' covers two different things. The first is the sale of UK fishing 'patches' (within our quota) to foreign-based fishing interests. I am sure what you say about how these have been sold and the difficulty of repatriating them has some validity.

    The second, more pertinently, is that the UK fishing quota in totality is allocated to the UK under the Common Fisheries Policy, wherein EU members pool all fishing resources. This total quota given to the UK does not reflect the fishing that would be controlled by the UK if the law of the sea was applied and the UK had the rights to fish (or indeed sell the rights) in its own territorial waters. Other countries get part of 'our share' in their own national quotas. This has not been 'sold' to them by the UK Government, because it has never been the UK Government's to sell.

    It is the latter that will be 'taken back' when we leave, in line with any other sovereign nation. The rest of the EU will have greatly reduced fishing quotas subsequently, which is likely to cause problems. If you think about this, you will understand why the EU is so keen to insist on some sort of 'fishing deal' as part of the trade agreement. If it were simply a case of Spanish and French fishing fleets having 'bought' the rights a long time ago, they wouldn't need a deal, they would just rightly expect the legal rights of these fishing fleets to be respected.

    Hope that helps.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,047
    DavidL said:

    malcolmg said:

    DavidL said:

    Nigelb said:

    TOPPING said:

    Aren't immigrants usually foreigners, Richard? Let's see if the examples you give work if we swap the two words.

    Oh look, they do.

    No, this is wrong.

    To take an illustration I've used before, suppose a nice Swedish family come and live in a small English village. They would be welcomed. There would be no anti-Swedish sentiment. But if 100 Swedish families buy up half the houses in the village, the school starts teaching in Swedish, the pub gives up on English beer and ham, egg and chips, and instead serves only vodka and Smörgåsbord, then the locals would not unreasonably feel that their community is no longer recognisable, and resent it. They might even start hating the Swedish incomers themselves, although it's important to realise that that is a secondary effect.

    There is nothing xenophobic or intolerant about this; it's perfectly reasonable. And whilst my example is artificial, it's not really very different to the impact of incoming EU workers in some specific towns and areas,

    Failure to admit this perfectly natural and unobjectionable sentiment, and equating it with 'racism', is a big mistake - one of the mistakes which led to the disaster of Brexit.
    I know what you mean.
    IKEA has that effect on me, too.
    Whenever I think of Ikea (not often thankfully) I think of matches.
    meatballs
    Yeah, fair enough. Their food is much better than their furniture.
    And the food ain't great.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    Carnyx said:



    Socky said:

    We don't have Doctress, so why do we need Actress?

    Well, arguably given that the luvvies* job is to be a certain character, and that will have a gender, it is relevant.

    In engineering, parts that fit together are often described as male or female, or even sometimes master/slave. Lets just hope the wokies don't find out.

    *gender neutral term
    Let's hope they don't find out about Great War British tanks either.
    I don't know - the Male tanks had the bigger.....

    No, lets not go there.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,749
    Maybe JC is taking Trump's hydroxychloroquine for the Evangelical team.

    https://twitter.com/barneyfarmer/status/1262738289347325953?s=20
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,749

    Carnyx said:



    Socky said:

    We don't have Doctress, so why do we need Actress?

    Well, arguably given that the luvvies* job is to be a certain character, and that will have a gender, it is relevant.

    In engineering, parts that fit together are often described as male or female, or even sometimes master/slave. Lets just hope the wokies don't find out.

    *gender neutral term
    Let's hope they don't find out about Great War British tanks either.
    I don't know - the Male tanks had the bigger.....

    No, lets not go there.
    And they had two of them so we're in very odd territory.
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146

    kinabalu said:

    Scott_xP said:
    Fantastic isn't it!

    Celebrating treating people "based on their skills, not where they're from" is a very good thing.

    Or would you rather treat people based on where they're from, not their skills?

    We are losing freedoms. That is the point. As from 1st January 2021, UK businesses and citizens (who do not hold dual nationality) will enjoy fewer freedoms than they do today.
    Every year in the EU we lost "freedoms" as new regulations came in too.

    Win some lose some.
    Yes, one the one hand, I can no longer go and live in France or retire to Spain. But I am no longer enslaved by the EU directive governing the use of pallets in the building sector. Freedom!
    (Note to Brexiteers, I am being sarcastic. You have stolen my European birthright and that of my children, and you will feel my wrath until the day you die).
    People lived and retired in France and Spain before we joined the EU. Non EU nationals stills do.
    Yawn. I have no interest in fighting the Brexit battles again, you morons have won. You should be out there enjoying your freedoms instead of still trying to convince us that you've not done something stupid. But what you're turning this country into, it's not really my country anymore.
    The victors seem to be the most exercised I'm done with it. I wish it had never happened, I will never forgive Dave for allowing it to happen, but we are where we are.

    Attack being the best form of defence, victorious Leave freedom fighters getting their excuses in early?

    I believe in their heart of hearts they understand it will be a false dawn.
    Does Big Daddy himself (BJ) believe Brexit is in the national interest? I sense not.
    England’s greatest unforced error since the Middle Ages.
    Id have said getting involved in World War 1 myself
    Personally, I concur. However, that the First World War error was “unforced” is not universally accepted. I think it was, but many fine historians think that the UK had no choice. Or, if it did have a choice, it was only possible to delay, not stop the horrific armed conflict.

    The Brexit fiasco was entirely unforced and self-inflicted.
  • AndrewAndrew Posts: 2,900
    edited May 2020
    A curiousity going forward here is that excess mortality is about to dip back to normal levels - although we'll still have deaths registered as caused by covid, the net pandemic effect will be zero. It'll be interesting to see how the media and public understand and/or react to that (not insignificant) difference, and how it then leads govt policy.


  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,047

    Carnyx said:



    Socky said:

    We don't have Doctress, so why do we need Actress?

    Well, arguably given that the luvvies* job is to be a certain character, and that will have a gender, it is relevant.

    In engineering, parts that fit together are often described as male or female, or even sometimes master/slave. Lets just hope the wokies don't find out.

    *gender neutral term
    Let's hope they don't find out about Great War British tanks either.
    I don't know - the Male tanks had the bigger.....

    No, lets not go there.
    Cock

    ...pit?
  • DavidL said:

    Scott_xP said:
    Fantastic isn't it!

    Celebrating treating people "based on their skills, not where they're from" is a very good thing.

    Or would you rather treat people based on where they're from, not their skills?

    We are losing freedoms. That is the point. As from 1st January 2021, UK businesses and citizens (who do not hold dual nationality) will enjoy fewer freedoms than they do today.
    Every year in the EU we lost "freedoms" as new regulations came in too.

    Win some lose some.
    Name 10, from any year of your choice.
    Fish your own waters, control your won borders, reduce VAT rates to suit yourself, CE marking, control social security, public procurement, set international tariffs, legal jurisdiction, cross border taxation, straight bananas.
    Fish your own waters: the UK government (of its own volition) sold the rights to EU fisherman with no mechanism for taking the licences back. The EU fishermen now have loans from UK banks secured against the rights so there is no means of recovering them without cuasing commerical harm. But it can be done whether a member or not. Will the UK have the same sway to do so as an ex-member as it would have had as a contributing member - thats a good question?

    UK VAT rates differ to the UK in absolute terms and by product and service - it sounds like they can be set to suit the UK.

    CE Marking is an international standard: UK manufactuers will keep it even after Brexit to sell into that market. Member or not the UK has to play by the rules.

    What does control Social Security mean? The UK uses NI, in Germany they have insurance companies for example, can you point me to the EU directive harmonising this?

    The UK today published a set of international tarrifs copy and pasted from the ones already used by the EU. Also as a member of the EU council the UK had the right to infuence the rates of the entire continent. Now it will be a rule taker from the trade deal it signs or from the WHO - which one is better?

    What does legal jurisdiction mean? The UK has different laws to the rest of the EU, can you point me to the EU directive harmonising this?

    What does cross border taxation mean? The UK is missing the right to lay claim to all income earned by UK citizens as the US does?

    Straight bananas - try and stay serious.
    Look we had this debate in 2016.

    You lost.
    I for one will spend the rest of my life nailing leavers to the wall for their utter credulity and deceit. Its a right I'm pleased to have maintained.
    Oooooh! Inneee hard?
    And persistent I would say.
    Persistent you may be, but on the fishing issue, you're simply wrong, unless you've just explained your argument very badly.

    The quotas are agreed with the EU and the rights are allocated by the UK Government. That was the case before Brexit and it will be after now. It is what is being debated right now after all.

    The rights have been largely sold, certainly in English waters as helpfully clarified to me, and there is no mechanism for their return. Its like the freehold of a house that has been sold it can only be sold on again and maybe returned to its original holder - for a price.

    Furthermore the Spanish, French and Dutch fishing companies have used the rights as security with various banks which will make it even harder for the UK Government to forcibly take the rights back. Basically they don't plan to. The upshot: there will not be any additional rights to quotas made available to fishermen (fisherpeople if you prefer), as the existing quotas are not going to change even after negotiation. With the property argument it is like arguing over who owns the land a house is on but with no power to either demolish the house or change who lives in the house.

    The market access for our fisherpersons is also complicated: they really are in a no-win scenario and certainly aren't helped by the UK Government having sold the rights so widely and without clear possibility of return.
    You're confusing two issues - unsurprisingly as the word 'quota' covers two different things. The first is the sale of UK fishing 'patches' (within our quota) to foreign-based fishing interests. I am sure what you say about how these have been sold and the difficulty of repatriating them has some validity.

    The second, more pertinently, is that the UK fishing quota in totality is allocated to the UK under the Common Fisheries Policy, wherein EU members pool all fishing resources. This total quota given to the UK does not reflect the fishing that would be controlled by the UK if the law of the sea was applied and the UK had the rights to fish (or indeed sell the rights) in its own territorial waters. Other countries get part of 'our share' in their own national quotas. This has not been 'sold' to them by the UK Government, because it has never been the UK Government's to sell.

    It is the latter that will be 'taken back' when we leave, in line with any other sovereign nation. The rest of the EU will have greatly reduced fishing quotas subsequently, which is likely to cause problems. If you think about this, you will understand why the EU is so keen to insist on some sort of 'fishing deal' as part of the trade agreement. If it were simply a case of Spanish and French fishing fleets having 'bought' the rights a long time ago, they wouldn't need a deal, they would just rightly expect the legal rights of these fishing fleets to be respected.

    Hope that helps.
    So the patches sold will continue to exist and will remain held by the non-UK companies.

    However the UK's access to fishing waters will increase (or you could say return), in size in a scenario where EU fisherfolk are not given any access? If so the UKG is negotating the EU access to UK waters while still not being able to open up the pre-sold patches to their own fisherkind?

    So Brexit gives the UKG the opportunity to negotiate its fishing quotas at the same time as it negotiates access for its far larger services industry to the Single Market and to use the leverage to maintain the same quotas as a trade-off for maintaining the same level of access for its service industry?
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,013
    Back from hospital. Mrs RP now with duff foot in one of those velcro fastening boot things. Not broken, definite soft tissue injury on top of her foot. Rest it up,go back in a fortnight. Speedy service from the hospital! Ah well, its a distraction from work. And tomorrow I get a nice lunchtime bike ride to go and rescue her car
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,343
    edited May 2020

    malcolmg said:

    TOPPING said:

    @isam thank god you're here. Please tell @Philip_Thompson that Brexit was about the foreigners.

    TIA.

    Hold on! You never claimed it was "about the foreigners" for some like isam. I wouldn't disagree with that.

    Your preposterous claim you keep rowing back from is that it was central to all that it was about "ending immigration". Not reducing, not controlling, simply ending it.

    So @isam do you believe that "ending immigration" completely was central to Brexit? Putting aside Farage etc that you supported do you think Gove, Boris etc were campaigning to "end immigration" completely?

    TIA.
    I thought that one of the immigration issues that surfaced was the difficulty curry houses were having, back in 2016 or so, in recruiting competent chefs.
    Where do I start with that one ?

    Why don't hey just train people ?
    Alan, it is a 25 year apprenticeship
    To reheat pre-part-cooked food* from the giant curry making place near Manchester....

    *I was strolling back with a flatmate through Brick Lane at the dead on night. He was surprised by the sight of giant lorries disgorging racks of the stuff. I wasn't - that's why most of the places on Brick Lane tasted the same.

    ** Note that the celeb-chef branded chains do similar.
    Often wondered about that. Rule of thumb when eating in a pub ...... once upon a time, anyway. Never eat anywhere that has more than about four mains on the menu.
    Rule of thumb - you are eating in a place the reheats part cooked food to a formula. Unless you specifically aren't.

    Such as Franca Manca... and there your point about short menus holds. Its about training staff do a small number of things by rote.

    The number of places that actually cook food, with an actual real chef creating in the back are quite small.
    Comes expensive. To my mind the perfect restaurant would have exactly one thing on the menu per course per day, changing daily, and if you don't want it you can go to Burger King. No choosing, veggies allowed in about once a month as a treat, vegans on the first Friday in Lent, list of available allergens 300 pages long translated into Amharic available for those who like a long read....
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,043
    Andrew said:

    A curiousity going forward here is that excess mortality is about to dip back to normal levels - although we'll still have deaths registered as caused by covid, the net pandemic effect will be zero. It'll be interesting to see how the media and public understand and/or react to that (not insignificant) difference, and how it then leads govt policy.


    People are dying with covid on their certificate who would have died anyway from complex array of problems?
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