That ship might have sailed:
No no no, that’s the bridge they bought that somebody sold them
Being the tories, they won’t raise taxes to pay for moving it over, either. Fortunately, I hear BoJo has a friend who runs a shipping company.
Can you really blame them though? It’s going to look so much better than the Dartford Crossing.
shrug It’s global I guess? :)
I’m just glad to see Raab no longer in that role and Truss emphasizing something that really is vital and something the governments natural inclination would probably be to fuck up.
I wish Boris would just get rid of Patel and Raab, but the politics of keeping them around are really shrewd, shame they are utter incompetents who should be allowed to run a whelk stall (even by the low standards of UK politics they stand out). But Boris would never let that get in the way of doing the politically expedient thing.
As in they are fall guys? Or to meet a diversity quota in the case of Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Javid?
Both clever moves to be fair.
Sunak and Javid are amongst the “actually get stuff done” guys. Along with Gove and Truss. Further down the totem pole Zahawi would also be in this category. Kwarteng is very smart and definately a Johnson loyalist, I think the hope is that he will also make it into this group - BEIS is a big brief from the perspective of levelling up, so it definately wouldnt be given to someone Boris would be certain would screw it up.
As an aside, the fact that Gove and Javid are key members of the Johnson administration really shows his genius as a politician - there’s a lot of bad blood there but he’s been able to find the mutual self-interest in them continuing to work together.
It’s Raab and Patel I’m talking about when I say the politics of keeping them around are really shrewd.
They both appeal to the base - and more from a paleocon than a thatcherite angle - and they’re both pretty useless. By keeping them around Boris ensures:
- His strongest rivals to his right are incompetents. Fire them and someone less useless might rise up (given the bench behind them it seems unlikely but…)
- They can take some of the flak for saying some of the reprehensible things it is expedient for the government to say, and also take some of the flak for failing to actually act on it
- It gets him political cover from the right for his other more competent (ITS RELATIVE) ministers to do stuff that Boris believes are necessary(*) but are unpopular with the right.
(*: To secure re-election. What other kind of necessity is there, in Boris Johnson’s world?)
I don’t know about Raab but I’ve read that Patel is well regarded and supported by the grandees of the right-wing of the party. Demoting her could incite rebellion (or at the least loud grumblings).
Yes this is absolutely true and I should have stressed the political cost of moving Patel more.
Truss is an idiot, frankly…but a useful one to Boris…
If I were Scotland or Ireland I’d run for the exits. Being tied to a nation actively engaged in destroying itself that could care less if you burn to the ground with them makes zero sense.
Scotland are actively doing so (though hamstrung by a number of factors - not least that their last attempt failed). Northern Ireland is hamstrung by it’s even more complicated history.
Cannot put a price on freeeeeeeeeeeeeedom.
(yes, aware of the irony)
Dunno, given Wallace’s fate, I might have been ok with letting the English run the show and me keeping all my innards intact.
On a more serious note, it is a minority of a minority exercising dominion over a majority, and deliberately antagonising those who would fall naturally in the middle, reframing the great debates in such a way that people will cut off their noses to spite their faces.
I was using the Wallace freedom as a memetic shortcut for this kind of thinking, whereby our “freedom” from the EU is worth screwing ourselves over financially, plus ruining our international reputations, etc etc.
AT the very very best, Brexit might have led to us expending a huge deal of effort to stand still, but now that effort has been expended, and we are slipping.
Shameful display.
My hope now is the blatant attempt to change the rules to protect his cronies will actually bite Johnson in the arse, and make people see the scale of the deception perpetuated.
But of course, some/many people have committed to a side/tribe and attacking a political position is now tantamount to attacking them, so good luck with that.
I wonder when we can re-join the EU?
If I’m the EU, I’m making you dropping the pound if you want back in.
I know very little about UK politics, but this seems unlikely for a generation. The vote was so close (twice, right?) it feels like it’d be too risky for a politician to run on a platform of re-entering. And there are enough vested interests in staying out that they’d put up a fierce fight full of half-truths and deceptions (again).
There was just the one vote. The idea is that the old people who voted for it will be dead soon and young people have tended to vote the other way. Not sure how accurate that is :)
I still find it boggling that a single vote, with such a narrow margin, was used to make such a major change to the UK, which is going to take a generation to fix.
There ftfy.