How is the Tory government doing?

okocha wrote:And it is now becoming even clearer how much the government bungled HS2 from the very start, at eye-watering expense to the tax-payer. Clear disarray over how to proceed from here. 

Also increasingly clear how foolish it has been for Johnson to rely on Trump's USA for deals or support. See Harry Dunn case and threats of tariffs on British motors.

We need to be taking Trump to task for his denial of climate change and his position on Israel and the Middle East but we won't whilst we still cling to the vain hope that we can do deals with the unprincipled lout who claims impeachment is a hoax and a witch-hunt.

We are now hoping that the EU will treat us kindly. Better get begging, Boris!

You need to find a hobby Okocha, something that will calm you and take your mind off Boris & co.

Jacob Rees-Mogg. His company made £103 million profit over the past five years yet paid no corporation tax, as the parent company is based in the Cayman Islands, even though they operate in Great Britain.
No contribution to Hospitals, Schools. Roads, Welfare, Police, Defence etc.
This is why he wants out of the EU before they introduce legislation that would require him to pay tax on this money.
Were you really naive enough to think Brexit, led by some of the richest Tories in the land was for the benefit of Britain?
His family also scrounged a £6.7 million grant to refurbish their 300-bed ancestral home while he voted for the bedroom tax that causes financial hardship for the poor.

Bit of a blow today as India has also gone protectionist and is introducing import tax on a range of goods. Not sure to what extent it affects machinery, plastics and minerals which are our main exports to India but it seems that the wave of nationalism and protectionism is spreading and will impact on trade deals big time.

sunlight wrote:Jacob Rees-Mogg. His company made £103 million profit over the past five years yet paid no corporation tax, as the parent company is based in the Cayman Islands, even though they operate in Great Britain.
No contribution to Hospitals, Schools. Roads, Welfare, Police, Defence etc.
This is why he wants out of the EU before they introduce legislation that would require him to pay tax on this money.
Were you really naive enough to think Brexit, led by some of the richest Tories in the land was for the benefit of Britain?
His family also scrounged a £6.7 million grant to refurbish their 300-bed ancestral home while he voted for the bedroom tax that causes financial hardship for the poor.

La la la la la....nobody wants to hear it I'm afraid because nobody likes to admit when they've been conned. Boris's personal adviser, who also happens to be Rupert Murdoch's gopher and former son-in-law made £220 million in a single day - the day after the referendum. The real architects of Brexit like this bastard are immune to the consequences and stand to make a considerable profit at the expense of the British people.

We'll see how folk feel when prices rise, jobs are lost and services sold off and cut followed by social unrest and nobody ever admitting they voted for it in the first place. I reckon two years.

Here's an interesting perspective on Boris and the UK hedge funds:

What to do if you are a hedge fund manager down to your last billion? Answer: rig global politics in your favour. If that sounds improbable, remember we are talking about folk capable of shorting the entire Japanese economy in response to a natural disaster. Hedge fund managers are megalomaniacs. It goes with the territory.
*
Hedge fund managers hate conservative central banks and quantitative easing.  Instead, they thrive on market chaos and gyrating asset values they can bet against.  Hence the explicit support of US hedge fund managers for Trump and disruptive Trumpian economics.  For instance, a key funder of both Trump and Steven Bannon’s Breitbart News is Robert Mercer, sometime co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a $60 billion computer-powered hedge fund.  Mercer was also a major investor in Cambridge Analytica, the company at the heart of the scandal over misuse of user data collected from Facebook.
Next, hedge fund managers have a particular hatred of the EU because of its drive to put US and UK funds under greater regulation – hedge funds are relatively small in the eurozone countries.  The EU’s new Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive has severely limited hedge fund operations while letting the banks off relatively scot free.  As a result, continental European banks have been able to nab clients (and their money) away from US and UK hedge funds. For this development, the hedge funds blame (rightly) the influence of the big German and French banks on member state governments, the European Central Bank and (above all) the European Commission.
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A major proponent of this line is Sir Paul Marshall, the pro-Brexit co-founder of Marshall Wace, one of Europe’s leading hedge funds.  Marshall argues that in France the ruling “énarques” (graduates of the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration) are stuck in a revolving door between jobs in the big banks and jobs in government or the EU. According to Marshall, the result is that énarques like President Macron protect the interests of the big European banks.  Marshall, by the way, was a prominent Lib Dem, but he donated £100,000 to the Leave campaign.  Recently he made a bob or two out of shorting Carillion shares, helping put the company out of business.
The antipathy of UK hedge funds to EU regulation means it is no surprise that prominent fund managers such as Crispin Odey and Michael Hintze support a hard Brexit and fund Boris.  Brexit is not a cry for help from the English underclass.  It is a carefully stage-managed campaign by global finance capital in the form of the hedge funds.  It is being orchestrated out of hedge fund self-interest and the greed of billionaires.  Boris Johnson is their front man.

(article written before Boris was put into Downing St)

Check out the many articles on how hedge funds are currently on a campaign to short British High St chains e.g. Debenhams and methodically putting them out of business.

wanderlust wrote:

gloswhite wrote:

wanderlust wrote:

gloswhite wrote:

xmiles wrote:

gloswhite wrote:

wanderlust wrote:
Although blaming remainers for "not wanting it to work" does come across as an early excuse for faiilure in the making but time will tell.

I don't see this Wander. Without the backing of half the country from the outset, its going to be tougher than it needs to be.

Exactly how is it going to be tougher glos? Just because remainers think it will be a disaster doesn't make it a disaster any more than leavers thinking it will be wonderful won't make it wonderful. This isn't Tinkerbell glos.  

Quite simple really. How can a government negotiate with confidence when there are a large number of its population who will continue to do anything to hamper talks, mainly (because they lost the original argument).

With a remit granted by less than a third of the population any negotiation was never going to have the backing of the country, but we all knew that and as pointed out it above it will have no impact whatsoever on the hardnosed negotiators.
Negotiate with confidence?
Has anyone actually said they have any confidence in the negotiations? Europhiles have always said that taking us out of a situation where we already have strong and proven highly beneficial agreements in place is a incredibly stupid risk.
And I don't even recall the Tories/Leavers ever saying there was any guaranteed outcome so that's hardly a recipe for "confidence" anyway.

If anything is going to undermine the confidence of the negotiators it's the ridiculous position we have put ourselves in i.e. with massively reduced influence and buying power, the stench of desperation that comes from having thrown away a strong hand and the America-first attitude of the very people the remainers have bet the house on.

If anyone had actually bothered to listen to the people we are allegedly going to be negotiating with they would know that they think Britain is in cloud cuckoo land and that we have ABSOLUTELY ZERO CHANCE of getting any sort of deals that are remotely as good as the ones we are pissing away.

THAT will undermine any confidence the British negotiators may have, not what the people think.

As an aside, it seems highly pertinent that today Trump alluded to renegotiating the deal between the US and the EU which he thinks is unfair on the US - as clear an indicator of what we can expect e.g. this - and a measure of what a great deal we had before Britain went mad.

Ironically, any new agreement between the US and the EU is likely to be far better than any deal between the US and the UK as we have so much less to negotiate with than our partners in the EU. Why the hell do you think we voted overwhelmingly to join the EU in the first place if not for massively increased negotiating power in a global economy? Even Thatcher recognised it was our only chance of competing with the super-economies of China and the USA.

As for "losing the original argument" - Britain lost and the corporate foreigners who manipulated the outcome will be the only winners. Plus the British puppets and traitors who facilitated it for personal gain. That includes you Borat.

With a remit granted by less than a third of the population 
As soon as I saw this I thought, 'Here we go again', and I was right. Only, this time its a full-on rant, with nothing new and very much the same, stale, comments. Also, a ridiculous reference to 'Borat' all the time. Have you not noticed yet Wander, that nobody cares that you have a silly name for Boris ?
I don't see the point in going over the same stuff over and over. We know each others views and none of us are going to change, so I'll continue to read , but I no longer see the point in joining your Boris-bashing fests.

I thought I made some very pertinent points about our negotiating position - if you can call it that - and the key factors that will determine the level of "confidence" the negotiators are likely to have.

To be fair, you did. I had an off day, where all this negativity was just getting me down.

xmiles wrote:

xmiles wrote:

gloswhite wrote:

xmiles wrote:

gloswhite wrote:

wanderlust wrote:
Although blaming remainers for "not wanting it to work" does come across as an early excuse for faiilure in the making but time will tell.

I don't see this Wander. Without the backing of half the country from the outset, its going to be tougher than it needs to be.

Exactly how is it going to be tougher glos? Just because remainers think it will be a disaster doesn't make it a disaster any more than leavers thinking it will be wonderful won't make it wonderful. This isn't Tinkerbell glos.  

Quite simple really. How can a government negotiate with confidence when there are a large number of its population who will continue to do anything to hamper talks, mainly (because they lost the original argument).
How does Tinkerbell come into this? 
Nothing worse than a grown man calling on a flighty fairy to back him up.

How exactly are people "hamper[ing] talks"?  

You seem to think that merely believing in something, no matter how preposterous, makes it real. Hence the Tinkerbell reference - which I suspect you were able to work out for yourself glos.

glos I see that you are not going to reply to WL but I hope you will reply to me. Mine is a genuine enquiry. I really want to know how you think people are able to hamper talks when they have no direct involvement in the talks.

If you look back to the negotiations, and how the EU refused to budge, you will see that they were able to pile on pressure because they were aware of how much of the UK public were against any change, (also advised by that duplicitous scrote, Blair). They know many of those people are still prepared to demonstrate, protest, and will try to influence the upcoming trade negotiations. (Such as the proposed US trade deal). 
I'm not talking just about the public but also the companies who will want to influence things in their favour. There is a very short window for the settlement of any trade deal, and I believe that many companies will still try to be disruptive in their efforts to get what they believe is a good deal for them. This is fair enough, but I think some of this will be driven by the rancour of the previous situations, and such a division will force any team to negotiate with a weakened hand.

I don't agree with your logic on this glos but thanks for the reply.

Where I do agree with you is that the rancour has not gone away. Hardly surprising when the wishes of the 48% of people who voted are completely ignored and the brexit being delivered is nothing like the brexit promised during the referendum campaign.

gloswhite wrote:If you look back to the negotiations, and how the EU refused to budge, you will see that they were able to pile on pressure because they were aware of how much of the UK public were against any change, (also advised by that duplicitous scrote, Blair). They know many of those people are still prepared to demonstrate, protest, and will try to influence the upcoming trade negotiations. (Such as the proposed US trade deal). 
I'm not talking just about the public but also the companies who will want to influence things in their favour. There is a very short window for the settlement of any trade deal, and I believe that many companies will still try to be disruptive in their efforts to get what they believe is a good deal for them. This is fair enough, but I think some of this will be driven by the rancour of the previous situations, and such a division will force any team to negotiate with a weakened hand.

I think you've hit on the crux of the problem Glos, albeit with a different interpretation of the scenario than the one I and others would consider accurate.
Absolutely nothing was promised to the electorate by the Leave campaign.
What they actually said was they'd scrap existing trade deals and arrangements - that much they could guarantee.
As for replacing those deals, they promised ZERO.
It may have been ASSUMED by people who voted leave that the UK would be able to get favourable or indeed better trade deals, but that assumption is based on a gross overestimation of Britain's current economic strength and bargaining power.
We have enjoyed economic strength and bargaining power internationally as part of the EU, but to coin an analogy, when the baby wildebeeste are separated from their herd they are easing pickings for the predators.
In this scenario, the EU has to protect itself (and thereby becomes a predator itself) and once we decided to cut ourselves off, they were always going to negotiate hard for the interest of their own members - regardless of what the British electorate may or may not have been perceived to have been thinking.
Varadkar made it fairly clear just today.

Just to look at it from their perspective for once, it could equally be argued that it was the UK negotiators who "refused to budge" - perhaps because they had made promises they weren't able to keep.

xmiles wrote:Where I do agree with you is that the rancour has not gone away. Hardly surprising when the wishes of the 48% of people who voted are completely ignored and the brexit being delivered is nothing like the brexit promised during the referendum campaign.

For your own sanity please let it go.

This new 50p Brexit coin says on it " Peace and prosperity and friendship with all nations ". Just after Britain has told europe where to go, which will cause economic ruin.

sunlight wrote:Just after Britain has told europe where to go, which will cause economic ruin.

Boring.

Natasha Whittam wrote:

sunlight wrote:Just after Britain has told europe where to go, which will cause economic ruin.

Boring.

Today I received a quarterly gas bill and had my doom head on, so my appologies for overly forewarning the tribulation of the impact of the market of Flanders when we leave. I am not merchant class whom are the most aggrieved. I sorted my mood with a block of Galaxy.

sunlight wrote:This new 50p Brexit coin says on it " Peace and prosperity and friendship with all nations "

...reflecting the true spirit of many of those who voted to leave the community I'll be stockpiling them - currently you only need two of them to buy a 4 pack of Twirls at Asda and with food prices already rising faster than inflation I'm hoping these commemorative coins will keep pace.

That said, the Royal Mint have seen the funny side of it and are allowing people to mint their own.

sunlight wrote:This new 50p Brexit coin says on it " Peace and prosperity and friendship with all nations ".

Apparently they were going to mint a Brexit coin three years ago, but the people tasked to design it couldn't agree on the wording, the value or what they were going to do with the border.....


...I'll get me coat.

We could possibly blame JK Rowling for it. Or Piers Morgan.

This Huawei thing is interesting.
Boris has OK'd their participation in the UK 5G network based on reassurances from GCHQ that they pose no threat. However our main intelligence sharing partners - France, Germany, Spain and notably the USofA are all scared shitless of Huawei and have claimed that Huawei share intelligence with the Chinese Government - and therefore would not want integrated info systems with the UK.

So with existing intelligence sharing arrangements with our European partners already being under threat because of Brexit why would Boris potentially jeopardise relationships with the USA, especially given that not only security but any trade deal we might get would be heavily dependent on information exchange?

Trump has already expressed his disappointment and has dispatched Mike Pompeo to fly to the UK to put Boris in his place so Huawei might get cut out yet, but then he would piss off the Chinese.

Currently we have a trade surplus with the USA (exporting more to them than we import) - something that Trump wants to address going forward, but we have a trade deficit with China so in theory it would be better to get in bed with the Americans as it stands.

Seems to me that Boris is playing a very risky game by getting involved in spats between the big 3 trading blocs (USA, China and the EU) at a time when he has bet the house on getting deals with all of them. If he thinks we can play them off against each other there's a very real chance they'll all take the EU approach i.e. well f*** off then.

Boris announces the high profile HS2 project will go ahead which will benefit regular commuters to and from London. Unsurprisingly, a benefit for the few at the expense of directing vast amounts of public money away from the needs of the many.
A "good news day" from a Tory PR perspective, which has also made it a very good day to slip in the bad news which is that proposed Tory expenditure which will be outlined in the budget and is expected to be designed to shore up the Northern vote is based on the Chancellor's projected economic growth rate of 2.8% - and today it came out that the economy had actually flatlined with ZERO growth at the end of 2019 i.e. on the verge of recession.
Obviously this will be written off as a "blip" and even if it turns out to be that, we're still a mile away from 2.8%.

HS2 is a massive waste of money, what is the point? Billions and billions to make the train to London slightly faster 

The money for HS2 could be used in much better ways like improving the shambles that is Northern rail now and also for the so called Northern powerhouse they like to talk about but actually do nothing.

Norpig wrote:HS2 is a massive waste of money, what is the point? Billions and billions to make the train to London slightly faster 

The money for HS2 could be used in much better ways like improving the shambles that is Northern rail now and also for the so called Northern powerhouse they like to talk about but actually do nothing.

Totally agree Norpig.

This is a classic illustration of the sunk cost fallacy. The money is gone, wasting more money on it makes no sense.