IR80 I note you do not deny that Johnson lied and are happy for him to continue to do so. I look forward to the good times he promises for all and the end to food banks.

Boris won, get over it.
Food banks are just for scroungers and the worthless workshy.

And there we have the voice of the right.

Unmarried mothers are the worst.
Prefer fags and booze to feeding their kids then expect a food bank to bail them out.

Brilliant, how badly informed can someone actually be

Quote: IR80 "what always frustrates me is the total lack of villification of absent parents (male or female), these are not party political issues, they are societal, '" here's an example of this kind of moral rectitude so we can have some vilification: https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics ... fer-Acruri

Quote: IR80 "what always frustrates me is the total lack of villification of absent parents (male or female), these are not party political issues, they are societal, '" here's an example of this kind of moral rectitude so we can have some vilification: https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics ... fer-Acruri

Interesting comments - I agree with some but not others

Boris is at least a leader with conviction and will not stand for those - no matter how high up they are - who will not support the agreed position - I bet Hammond didn't think he wouldn't be in the government let alone not an MP 12 months ago, same goes for Gaulke and Grieve. Part of Corbyn's problem was he couldn't lead his party round a position on Brexit and it cost. I think he does care and I do think the less well off will do well under him. Corbyn saw government as a vanity project to keep the likes of Jon Lansman on board. Can a large state owned economy truly prosper - if it doesn't it doesn't matter at least we know. As for his personal flaws we all have them - even you - does it stop him doing a good job not at all. Compared to Clinton or Trump he is a saint.

One thing is certain he will get a better deal out of the EU than Corbyn ever could - he is committed to leaving something neither May nor Labour were ever going to achieve. He has shown some resilience - those early days must have been tough - losing every vote. He out manoevered Corbyn both before and during the election - time will tell how good he is but the increase in the living wage is a very good start.

On wealth - how do you stop great business people being great business people - just by being better they accumulate huge wealth. It isn't money that drives them its progress, its setting new challenges, its doing deals you will never stop the cutting edge accumulating huge wealth whether its Bezos, Rockafeller, Arnault, Gates, Getty its has happened since the day dot. I don't agree with you inherited wealth - look at the 100 richest people for 20 years ago and see how many are still in the 100 - not many. The really rich have made their fortunes in recent times.

I agree a better spread of wealth would be great but that shouldn't be achieved by dragging the top down it needs to be by dragging the bottom up.

Difficult to compare different regimes - Boris has only been in charge a few months and he has inherited the financial issues that Cameron/Osborne inherited. May was a disaster in every role she has ever had so Boris has to be an improvement on that - Hammond was mean for the sake of being mean and he is best gone - good riddance.

Boris isn't some genius negotiator. The only reason he got a deal with the EU is because he went back to them and conceded one of Theresa May's red lines on putting a border down the Irish Sea. That was the EU's original idea but May had said no British PM could find it acceptable to put a customs/regulator border inside it's own sovereign territory, a point which Boris also pledged to the DUP conference. That dealt with the backstop issue in the way the EU wanted it to be dealt with, effectively carving off NI in to the EU's regulatory control.

Now over time this is going to be a real problem, if Boris' government wants the UK to diverge regulations from the EU, because one part of the UK is going to have to follow EU regulations (what Boris would call 'vassalage') and the rest of the UK follow a different set which means increasingly complex border checks on trade between mainland GB and NI, the more regulations diverge.

If Theresa May had brought back that deal, a lot of Boris' cheerleaders in Cabinet and the media would have been spitting feathers about the outrage of dividing the UK like that, Boris just did it because he knows his allies will just parrot his lines to take about it being a 'great deal for NI' (vassalage, that is...)

Corbyn would have found it similarly easy to 'get a deal' from the EU because he would have also conceded things to them (that he agrees with): alignment on social, environmental, consumer rights, free movement of people and so on. He would have moaned about state aid, but given his super tight time scale there wouldn't have been time for a two-way negotiation and most likely when his civil servants explained to him that the EU state aid rules actually constrain governments from giving tax breaks to vested interests he would have probably conceded. He would have put a deal to a referendum which would be similar to a Norway style arrangement.

As for the deal Johnson will get....here's my prediction for 2020. If Boris wants an extension he actually has to ask for it by July, which he won't, so the EU will have the 31 December baked in. Because Boris wants a 'bespoke' deal which allows the UK a lot of room for divergence that makes the detail more complex - you have to negotiate bespoke agreements on every issue, and those are the 6-7 year style negotiated trade deals not the 'off the shelf' ones. There won't be time to go in to that. So Boris will have to decide between whether he really wants to go 'no deal' (for which his government will have to accept the consequences, including what it means for the north and midlands where all his new MPs with small majorities are), or accept a very limited deal which the EU and all 27 member states are willing to sign up for.

Because most of the big EU states are mainly goods/manufacturing-oriented, and the UK is services-oriented, the kind of deal the EU will offer will reflect that. They will want to remove tariffs but not regulatory checks and controls (ie non tariff barriers, Rules of Origin checks), safe in the knowledge that the UK is likely to be more liberal in terms of what standards it accepts, so the barriers for EU exporters going in to the UK will be minimal whereas they will be much tougher for UK exporters proving that their goods meet EU standards.

They will also agree limited agreements on transport/aviation to allow planes to fly, but ones which don't extend the benefits of the Single Aviation Act to the UK, which will cause problems for airlines ownership and incentivise them to relocate to the EU.

Boris will accept this kind of deal, because he will be able to sell 'tariff-free' as 'free-trade'. There may be some posturing over the year but as the EU runs the clock down to December he will be forced to take what he can. The media won't scrutinise it much so he can sell it internally and the EU will have what they want.

Probably a semantic distinction, but I think you’re confusing ambition and ruthlessness with conviction. Lad doesn’t give a poop, which can be a useful trait. leading us to...



Indeed - ultimately Corbyn’s ‘new politics’ was an attempt to avoid politics, so he could hold on to his precious principles. Integrity doesn’t win a fight, and nor does pretending you’re not in one because you wish you weren’t. In fairness, for all that he played it badly, fate dealt him a poop hand in some ways. On the other hand it gave him Theresa May and Boris Johnson, as well.



Everybody has flaws, but a lot of people have redeeming features too. What are Johnson’s positive qualities? The best I can come up with is ‘charm’, but even then it is the charm of a charlatan, so it is more of a mask than true virtue or even a talent.




If it isn’t the money that drives them, then they’ll be cool with paying a little more tax to support the society that provided the basis on which they could build their success, yeah? A better educated, healthier society with better infrastructure will no doubt support them and their successors in contributing to further progress. Within sensible parameters (such as Labour’s plan to tax earnings over £80k at 45p rather than 40p) I think the UK could benefit from some rebalancing.



So I read that as not being a case for immediate redistribution of existing wealth. Are you saying then that new wealth generated by our economy should benefit poorer people first?



You saw his efforts as Foreign Secretary?

My expectations are so low (ranging from clown car comedy disaster to death camp dystopia), that he’ll struggle to fail to meet or exceed them. Nice to know i’m unlikely to be disappointed!

This is petty, but... the whole ‘Boris’ thing, I find this national faux-familiarity a bit weird, bordering on the sinister. 1. It’s not like you’re his mate. 2. If you were you’d be calling him Al.

People who didn’t go to one of the major public schools and Oxbridge aren’t really people at all to Johnson (or Cameron before him). Even if you made it to Oxford, you’d be a ‘tug’ (minor public school) or ‘stain’ (state school). It is a very English type of class deference that keeps them in power, and makes ‘ordinary’ people think they have shared values and interests. But then, I don’t even think the Queen Mother’s smile was unusually lovely, Gawd rest her!

There's an irony about Corbyn and principles in that pretty much the only issue on which he changed/compromised his lifelong views was on Brexit, seemingly between the time he gained the Labour leadership in September 2015, and the referendum in June 2016.

If he hadn't become Labour leader, I reckon he'd have been out with Kate Hoey and Gisela Stuart as part of Labour Leave, bringing up a lot of quotes from his old friend Tony Benn who was a long-time campaigner against the UK being a member of the EU. You could really see this by his reaction to the referendum result, when all the other big figures in Labour were saying it was a disaster, he came out the next morning to tell David Cameron he should trigger Article 50 straight away and start the process. Seems like JC found it easy to get over that defeat!

The big irony then is that Corbyn's great unique selling point was his authenticity. You knew he took political positions because he sincerely believed them not because he was compromising to chase power. But he did compromise with the Labour party on coming out (reluctantly) for Remain. And now he is told that he lost because Labour lost the trust of leave voters through vacillating for so long and then seemingly sliding towards Remain.

It was the sole issue on which Corbyn compromised his real views and as a result his position on Brexit was always incoherent because he is useless at 'playing politics' or taking positions for strategic benefit. He isn't a tactician and never was, his background was as a campaigner. He is quite an effective speaker about issues he cares about because he believes them so strongly, so his peaks were in the two Labour leadership elections that he fought, and the 2017 election. Once he was put onto this sitting on the fence on Brexit he was nonplussed.

I bet Corbyn wishes now, that he had campaigned for Leave in 2016. He could have been an effective campaigner there for the form of leave that he would have wanted, a kind of 'socalism in one country' version of coming out of the EU to pursue a domestic industrial policy, some aspects of which Johnson is now leaning towards. He would have loved having an argument about the [iform[/i of Brexit, with the Tories, if he had the authentic guarantee of having been a leave campaigner from the start (which he had been since he joined Parliament in 1983).

In practice though, if he'd have declared himself for Leave before the referendum, he would have torn the Labour party apart and immediately lost a large chunk of his youth support base. There would probably have been a leadership challenge in early 2016 when he was having all those problems with his shadow Cabinet before the referendum, and he might have been susceptible to being toppled by say Yvette Cooper or Clive Lewis back then.

I don’t despise Cummings. I think he has some interesting ideas, though maybe a tendency to run too far with them.

My point wasn’t about Oxford or Cambridge broadly - I know many fine people who have studied and taught there, and I have hung out and dined at Colleges at both (including ‘properly’ at Cameron’s old College, Brasenose - the others were just conferences and the like) - but a specific subset of its student body, who are spoilt, conceited, obnoxious and good at winning elections.