Politics

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michael scuffil
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Re: Politics

Post by michael scuffil »

That is him, John.

David has already answered your question about red crosses. He said there was an EU law against them on first-aid kits, which there isn't. My German first aid kits all have red crosses on them, not green ones. In fact there are hardly any EU laws about anything that affects normal life, unless you are a pensioner, when you get your full pension if you live in the EU, but not if you live in Canada or Australia, where it's frozen at the level it was when you left.
And most EU laws were made by Brits anyway, as anyone who works in Brussels will tell you.
Nice to know that David wants more regulation (aka permits); I thought the Brexiteers were against regulation.

Frankly I don't care what happens as long as freedom of movement is preserved, which in practice it will be, because we need the workers.
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J.R.
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Re: Politics

Post by J.R. »

michael scuffil wrote:That is him, John.

David has already answered your question about red crosses. He said there was an EU law against them on first-aid kits, which there isn't. My German first aid kits all have red crosses on them, not green ones. In fact there are hardly any EU laws about anything that affects normal life, unless you are a pensioner, when you get your full pension if you live in the EU, but not if you live in Canada or Australia, where it's frozen at the level it was when you left.
And most EU laws were made by Brits anyway, as anyone who works in Brussels will tell you.
Nice to know that David wants more regulation (aka permits); I thought the Brexiteers were against regulation.

Frankly I don't care what happens as long as freedom of movement is preserved, which in practice it will be, because we need the workers.
As I remember, he very much kept himself to himself. Very introvert, but then he was a couple of years or so above me.
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rockfreak
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Re: Politics

Post by rockfreak »

Yes, it's an interesting point by Dr Scuffil about how many EU laws are imposed on us (or not) by the EU. When we've really wanted an opt-out in the past we've usually got it. I'm thinking particularly of the opt-out of the social chapter, when right-wing Tory governments saw their chance to dilute union laws even further and generally take a hatchet to workplace rights. And then there was our opposition to the Tobin Tax, a perfectly understandable proposal by Germany, France and Italy to throw a much-needed bit of sand in the wheels of speculative international finance and try to prevent the disasters of 2007/2008 happening again. Then there's the TTIP which has garnered more opposition on the continent than in London (Cameron is an enthusiastic supporter: Hollande is not, and yours truly has twice been out on the streets of sunny Gravesend handing out leaflets and trying to raise awareness of this devious plot which is undebated in our Parliament, and noting that many are unaware of it, while in Germany a quarter of a million people turned out to protest at one point). Our chief Europhobe, Nigel Farrago, is an ex-commodities trader and I believe that the continued primacy of the unchained, wild-west City of London is his main objective. It was discovered that at one time he had his savings stashed away in offshore tax havens. Which brings me to another point. Juncker notwithstanding, Europe has still made more effort to try and get initiatives going to deal with international tax havens while Cameron and Osborne have all the time been the flies in this particular ointment. Unsurprisingly perhaps when you consider that the Tory party gets half its funding at election time from the City, and the City these days is a major conduit for dodgy money being laundered on its journey from crooked oligarchs somewhere to tax havens (perhaps the BRITISH Virgin Islands). If we come out, this dirty money may be the kind of thing we will eventually rely on - along with our familiar growth industries of management consultancy, nail bars and massage parlours.
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Re: Politics

Post by sejintenej »

michael scuffil wrote: Nice to know that David wants more regulation (aka permits); I thought the Brexiteers were against regulation.

Frankly I don't care what happens as long as freedom of movement is preserved, which in practice it will be, because we need the workers.
That is NOT what I wrote. What I wrote is that I couldn't see how things would work unless there were more controls such as work and residence permits. We currently have a situation where EU nationals cannot be deported to their own original countries if they commit crimes in the UK or if, having been deported they can walk back in again to be deported again only when found guilty of another crime. A second element is those EU nationals who come, do not work but demand and get benefits which are denied to our own nationals. A third element is health tourism. If you can come up with a workable formula (decapitation and "the needle" excluded) which does not include some form of permit, good for you. I have three different countries' work permits in my passports; I knew their laws required work permits so no skin off my nose.

I have no objection whatsoever to EU nationals who come here, work, speak English, don't live in culture ghettos and obey our laws. (I know some Brexiters who disagree with this last but we have to remember that an ancestor of almost every single OB was an immigrant - 1066 in my case).
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Re: Politics

Post by rockfreak »

After a long lay-off during which my letters didn't go in due to pressure on space (well that's what I tell myself) I'm back in today's Grauniad (2 July) with another burst of erudition and wisdom, this time about the limits of central bankers to influence economies: Carney finally admitting what the great American economist JK Galbraith concluded many decades ago.
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Re: Politics

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rockfreak wrote:After a long lay-off during which my letters didn't go in due to pressure on space (well that's what I tell myself) I'm back in today's Grauniad (2 July) with another burst of erudition and wisdom, this time about the limits of central bankers to influence economies: Carney finally admitting what the great American economist JK Galbraith concluded many decades ago.
Pardon my ignorance, but what was it ? Not an euphemism relating to merchant bankers, perchance ?
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rockfreak
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Re: Politics

Post by rockfreak »

Sorry John, I should have explained fully. Central banks are national banks like the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve in America and the European Central Bank. Much credence is given to central bankers like Mervyn King, Carney, Ben Bernanke and that supposed doyen of the genre Alan Greenspan. Their utterances are treated like those of the Oracle at Delphi and they are commonly believed to be able to perform miraculous feats in the way of kickstarting downturns, or (alternatively) damping down inflationary trends. But Galbraith was the American economist who wrote the seminal book about the Wall Street crash of 1929 and who was Roosevelt's disciple in the 1930s during the New Deal, and he always believed that central bankers and their activities were vastly overrated. They manage monetary policy - the base interest rate, 0.5% at present, plus the ability to pump extra money into the economy in an emergency - what we now call quantitative easing. They don't manage fiscal policy - tax and public spending; government and the Chancellor manage that. So you can see that the Bank only ever has control of half the economy. If the Chancellor isn't doing his bit to balance things then the central banker will be limited, and if you've got an unbalanced and crap system of capitalism in the first place (as we've had for the past 37 years) then there's not much anyone can do. Galbraith once said that the efforts of the US Federal Reserve since its inception in 1913 had been of deep and unrelieved inconsequence. And you can see what he means when you look at the boom and bust patterns of the last few decades, since Reagan and Thatcher. When the economies have boomed they've boomed and when they've busted they've busted. And what have either the Fed or the Bank of England done to stop it?
What I said in my letter to the Guardian was to quote Galbraith who once said that "people and institutions will spend, borrow and lend when they feel confident to do so, and not because of where the interest rate is at any given time." In other words, cut interests to zero if you want but until people have jobs and job security they will shut their purses and the goods in the high street will remain unsold. You can recapitalise the high street banks too if you want but why would they lend money to shops and businesses that they expect to fail because the people aren't buying? Better to do what Roosevelt did in the 1930s - stop throwing money uselessly at banks and businessmen and throw money and jobs at the people instead. Bring forward infrastructure schemes that will be of use in the long term, cream off some of the useless wealth of the speculator and oligarch class via taxation and invest it in hi-tech, new-tech, green-tech, just like other northern and western European states have done.
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Re: Politics

Post by rockfreak »

One of the few bright spots on the horizon in the last few days has been the complete defenestration of the Bullingdon Boys. By all accounts Cameron went back into No 10 after making his resignation speech and then completely lost his usual arrogant, supercilious Old Etonian manner and burst into tears like a big girl's blouse. After being stabbed in the back by crafty little Michael, blustering Bozza resigned in a hail of barely audible non-bluster. And then young Gideon, having once been touted as a possible leader, disappeared and seemed to be vying for the Monica Lewinsky Award for whoever could keep their head down longest. Who would have thought it. I call it The Fall of the House of Buller, a gothic tale by Edgar Alan Poe.
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Re: Politics

Post by Angela Woodford »

Jeremy Corbyn? I would be interested in your opinion, rockfreak.
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Re: Politics

Post by LongGone »

I must admit I haven't followed the labyrinthian aspects of party politics in the UK (quite enough to keep me occupied over here), so the behavior of of Johnson and Farage puzzles me. Normally, if a politician successfully promotes an idea, it is used as a springboard to further their ambition. Here they both seem to have immediately done everything they can to remove themselves from directing the very thing they have brought about. Are they seen as playing a long game, or deciding they don't have workable solutions?
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Re: Politics

Post by rockfreak »

Angela Woodford wrote:Jeremy Corbyn? I would be interested in your opinion, rockfreak.
Jeremy has shown that there's an appetite for a more egalitarian social democracy, especially among the young. After all, I think that's what we thought we were getting that blissful morning in May 1997 when Blair got in, but he merely proved to be a pale blue version of Thatcher. Labour's performance since JC's arrival has actually been impressive - two Labour mayors and some improved by-election percentages. But the adversarial set-up at PMQs with people baying at each other across the gangway and and the vicious attacks on any Labour leader by a press whose centre of gravity is far more right-wing than when I was younger, means that a Labour leader needs to be tough, loud and quick thinking. This is not entirely new. I believe that Hugh Gaitskell nearly resigned because he got so fed up with trying to make himself heard in the Commons.
Just to touch on the public schools theme again; in Wounded Leaders Nick Duffell believes that the arrogant, supercilious put-downs and mindless sophistry so beloved of Cameron and his ilk derive from the assumptive attitudes taught at the public schools and that they have infected our entire style of national debate. After all, the Scottish Parliament in the round seems to be a much more civilised affair (from what little I've seen of it on the TV news).
So regretfully, I don't think Corbyn has what it takes, in this atmosphere, to hold the other party's feet to the fire and this is more a reflection of our national politics and, of course, our disastrous first-past-the-post voting system as much as anything else. Who instead? I simply don't know but at least Jeremy has nudged Labour's debate away from kneejerk Blairism.
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Re: Politics

Post by rockfreak »

LongGone wrote:I must admit I haven't followed the labyrinthian aspects of party politics in the UK (quite enough to keep me occupied over here), so the behavior of of Johnson and Farage puzzles me. Normally, if a politician successfully promotes an idea, it is used as a springboard to further their ambition. Here they both seem to have immediately done everything they can to remove themselves from directing the very thing they have brought about. Are they seen as playing a long game, or deciding they don't have workable solutions?
It's difficult to say with Boris who now resembles a barrage balloon that has been shot at and fallen to earth in a heap. The papers are darkly concentrating on all sorts of contorted conspiracies by Gove and Mrs Gove which I can't quite follow. Farrago is an ex-commodities broker and it doesn't surprise me that he's returned to the City where he can go on making lots more money. He's said to be not much bothered with political detail and he probably didn't much fancy having to stay around and come up with useful suggestions that might get us out of what I imagine is going to be the most godawful mess that will now ensue.
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Re: Politics

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I positively believe that Farrage will still be string-pulling behind the scenes.
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Re: Politics

Post by Angela Woodford »

[quote="rockfreak"

It's difficult to say with Boris who now resembles a barrage balloon that has been shot at and fallen to earth in a heap. [/quote]


And now repaired, and refuelled, and back in the air again!
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Re: Politics

Post by rockfreak »

Angela Woodford wrote:[quote="rockfreak"

It's difficult to say with Boris who now resembles a barrage balloon that has been shot at and fallen to earth in a heap.

And now repaired, and refuelled, and back in the air again![/quote]


Yes, remarkable isn't it. I thought Theresa was sounding halfway credible until she reintroduced Boris. One person who does get a good swiping in the press today is the irrepressible Hilto. Melissa Kite of the Spectator (so hardly a lefty pundit) says: "Cameron's obsession with form over substance had surpassed anything I could invent. It was government by blue-sky thinking. His policy guru Steve Hilton had 100 ideas an hour - 99 of them rubbish, it was often said." She then talks about "the reign of modernising pseuds wandering about Downing Street in their bare feet for effect."
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