Post: #2001

Sure would be interesting to know the behind-the-scenes machinations and maneuvers that went on.

Post: #2002

My prediction is that it will be a prolonged farce...

eventually they will leave, but keep special status whereby it will be business as usual, except with respect of EU immigration to UK which will be capped at certain yearly numbers. But what they limit in Romanians and Poles and Turks, they will gain through Pakistani and Hindus and Chinese.

Move along, nothing to see

Post: #2003

Confirmation that BBC News is totally biased and betrays the TV licence payer.

Quote:This very silly tweet from BBC journalist Ed Ram has swiftly been deleted. The Beeb’s impartiality out in full force on reshuffle day. Well done Ed for giving the game away…

UPDATE: A BBC spokesman comments: “We’re not commenting.”

Post: #2004

(07-12-2016 02:45 AM)Bushido Wrote:  Surprise, surprise. Former European Commission president becomes non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs!

http://en.rfi.fr/europe/20160710-barroso...e-portugal

Yup. He's been a participant at Bilderberg conference mere four different times (1994, 2003, 2005, 2013)

And is still a sitting member of their "Steering Committee" (read "Direction & Influence Committee")

And during his tenure as the European Commission president, he has been instrumental in discussing the Turkey's membership, as well as "persuading" Irish citizens to vote again Re: Treaty of Lisbon.

Post: #2005

Post: #2006

James Delingpole (who I like a lot) seems pretty happy with the new line-up.

Quote:Theresa May’s new Cabinet: Brexit Is On!
By James Delingpole

My first reaction on new British Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet appointments: I’m happy, hope you’re happy too…
As an ardent Brexiteer, certainly, I feel a lot more optimistic about the future than I did two days when I penned this gloomy piece for the Spectator. (Gosh, I sounded so angry and bitter I could almost have been a Remainiac…)

Yes, of course, Amber Rudd is going to make a ghastly Home Secretary. Heaven knows, she was already promoted far beyond her talents as head of the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Plus, she actually believes all the greenie crap. Plus, she came across quite appallingly during the EU Referendum campaign: strident, vindictive, easily bought, self-serving and a bit thick.

But the thing you need to remember about the position of Home Secretary is that it’s a poisoned chalice. So much can go wrong for you – and almost certainly will for her. So it won’t be too long before Rudd’s fox is shot, I’m guessing.

On the bright side, meanwhile, we’ve got a healthy quota of Brexiteers in the positions that could really make a difference:

David Davis: Secretary for exiting the European Union. Sound!

Liam Fox: International Trade. Sound!

Boris Johnson. Foreign Secretary. Well whether he’s sound or not is anyone’s guess – I personally believe he’ll be great – but if nothing else you’ve got to admit, his appointment is truly a piece of top trolling by Britain’s new Prime Minister, suggesting that she might even have a hidden sense of humour.

Already, I’m enjoying greatly the wailing and gnashing of teeth it has caused among the wankerati…



…and at left-liberal institutions like BBC, whose first reaction, naturally was to compile an appalled round-up of responses from all the foreigners Boris has offended so far.

Apparently we’re supposed to feel embarrassed that this man is now representing us abroad. I’m not. I think it’s jolly well about time that Johnny Foreigner was reminded that we’re the world’s fifth biggest economy (fair set to be the fourth biggest, post Brexit, I’d say) and that we either ran or civilised or invented well over half the globe and that, not so long ago, we were sending gunboats up the Yangtse to enforce our opium trade (and quite right too!).

Not that Boris is actually the jingoistic buffoon he sometimes pretends to be: he’s well-travelled, supremely cultured, intelligent, entertaining and witty and I’ve little doubt that the most of the various diplomats and dignitaries on his mission to promote the new, post-EU Great Britain will warm to him hugely.

I think at this stage in Theresa May’s premiership, we need to give her the benefit of the doubt – fearing the worst, but hoping for the best.

No. She certainly wouldn’t have been my first choice of leader – not on her political track record so far in which, it seems to me, she has embodied some of the worst aspects of conservatism: dirigiste, authoritarian and leaden.

Andrea Leadsom would have been a much bigger win for us small-government revolutionaries.

Even better, in my view, would have been Michael Gove. (He and May don’t get on: hence his defenestration from her cabinet. But I can’t see him remaining in the wilderness for too long – as the cleverest, most talented MP in the Conservative party, he’s just too good not to use).

But here’s the thing we should keep in mind. Right now, there is an entire industry willing Britain’s exit from the EU to prove a spectacular disaster. That industry includes: President Obama; Christine Lagarde; the European Commission; Goldman Sachs and all the other big banks; George Soros; most of the leaders in the EU member states, though probably not Angela Merkel oddly enough for she’s an arch-pragmatist; the BBC; the Guardian; the New York Times; the Washington Post; all the US TV channels except Fox; the vast majority of the British, European, and US commentariat.

Already, they are rubbing their hands with glee that May has appointed so many Brexiteers into key positions related to leaving the EU. And these frustrated Remainers actually believe that this is a win for their malign cause because they are convinced that these Brexiteers are going to screw up and be seen to screw up.



Our job, now, is to hold our side to account and make damn sure they don’t cock things up. This will be good for Britain; good for most of the world; but, perhaps most important of all, an endless source of misery and frustration to all those reprehensible, unpatriotic, slithy, EU-cock-sucking, anti-democratic, control-freakish, smugly elitist, copper-bottomed wankers out there who did everything they could to stop Brexit happening.

Well those bastards lost and now we’re going to show them why they lost.

Viva la Revolución, boys and girls. Brexit is on its way!

Post: #2007

In 2006 BJ wrote an article about how, while on the British Airways airplane, he was automatically assumed to have 'sleazy male' intentions just for sitting next to underage children... that happen to be his.

When I read that article I thought he was one of ours.

Quote:By Boris Johnson
09 Nov 2006

"Hovering above me was a silk-clad British Airways stewardess with an angelic smile, and she seemed to want me to move. "Please come with me, sir" said the oriental vision.

At once, I got her drift. She desired to upgrade me. In my mind's eye, I saw the first-class cabin, the spiral staircase to the head massage, the Champagne, the hot towels.

"You betcha!" I said, and began to unbuckle. At which point, the children set up a yammering. Oi, they said to me, where do you think you are going? I was explaining that the captain had probably spotted me come on board, don't you know. Doubtless he had decided that it was outrageous for me to fly steerage, sound chap that he was. I'd make sure to come back now and then, hmmm?

At which the stewardess gave a gentle cough. Actually, she said, she was proposing to move me to row 52, and that was because — she lowered her voice — "We have very strict rules".

Eh? I said, by now baffled. "A man cannot sit with children," she said; and then I finally twigged. "But he's our FATHER", chimed the children. "Oh," said the stewardess, and then eyed me narrowly. "These are your children?" "Yes," I said, a bit testily. "Very sorry," she said, and wafted down the aisle — and in that single lunatic exchange you will see just about everything you need to know about our dementedly phobic and risk-averse society. In the institutionalised prejudice of that BA stewardess against an adult male, you see one of the prime causes of this country's tragic under-achievement in schools..."

Quote:I mean, come off it, folks. How many paedophiles can there be? Are we really saying that any time an adult male finds himself sitting next to someone under 16, he must expect to be hustled from his seat before the suspicious eyes of the entire cabin?

Quote:What about adult females? Every week there is some new tale of what a saucy French mistress is deemed to have done with her adolescent charges behind the bicycle sheds; and, disgraceful though these episodes may be, I don't hear anyone saying that children should be shielded from adult women. Do you?

Quote:To all those who worry about the paedophile plague, I would say that they not only have a very imperfect understanding of probability; but also that they fail to understand the terrible damage that is done by this system of presuming guilt in the entire male population just because of the tendencies of a tiny minority.

Quote:It is insane, and the problem is the general collapse of trust. Almost every human relationship that was sensibly regulated by trust is now governed by law, with cripplingly expensive consequences.

Post: #2008

Giving Boris the Foreign Secretary job is akin to Pompeii giving Julius the European campaign. Getting him out of sight and on someone else's doorstep. If he screws up then she can just replace him and he goes into the back benches and stays there.

The MSM is also clamoring for women to be in positions of power because they're women. I'm sure that isn't a potential disaster at all.

Post: #2009

(07-14-2016 09:09 AM)Daddy Chains Wrote:  In 2006 BJ wrote an article about how, while on the British Airways airplane, he was automatically assumed to have 'sleazy male' intentions just for sitting next to underage children... that happen to be his.

When I read that article I thought he was one of ours.

He may just be....
In any case, one thing is certain.
British international politics is about to get really, really interesting....

Post: #2010

(07-14-2016 09:39 AM)Foolsgo1d Wrote:  for women to be in positions of power because they're women. I'm sure that isn't a potential disaster at all.

Yeah, women can be great pests and foot soldiers and useful idiots if you want to sic them on someone. But expecting their useless + corrupted natures to lead, and then lead sensibly, is not only a fool's errand, but your ensured doom.

Nationalists (Brexit) 1 = Globalists 1

Post: #2011

Boris as foreign secretary is great! He's going to get along very well with Trump. America and Britain will be best buds in killing the EU together.

Post: #2012

A slight detour but in 2007, Boris Johnson wrote an article about hypergamy and why it has cause women to run out of men to marry.

I'll tell you why women are running out of men to marry

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/perso...marry.html

Post: #2013

Cabinet In Numbers: Just 6 Brexiteers

Quote:Guido has been crunching the numbers for May’s new Cabinet. There are only six Brexiters, the same number as in Cameron’s last Cabinet. There are only eight female members, one more than previously, hardly a march of the women. Most of the key Cameron and Osborne allies have gone though there remain nine Cabinet members who could be described as Friends of George. And there are just two ethnic minorities, though that is representative of the wider population. It’s still a heavily male, Remain Cabinet…

Post: #2014

3 of those Brexiteers are Foreign Secretary, Seceraty of State for Exiting The EU and Secretary of State for International Trade. At the very least, there are Brexitteers in key positions for dealing with the exit.

Post: #2015

Don't know if this was posted yet but it's entertaining :

Post: #2016

Why they will lose is because of what he says around 6:30: he dismisses a majority of the UK as neo-nazis. He dismisses a majority of the country as un-smart.

They simply do not understand their opponent.

It's too late for them to reach out, as he proposes. You don't trust people (the Left) who have painted you as monstrous.

Post: #2017

A lesbian (Justine Greening) as Education Secretary...let's hope that she can keep her personal politics out of the curriculum (yeah, right).

Post: #2018

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-20/bo...ts/7643228

Quote:Boris Johnson refuses to apologise for insults to world leaders, wants focus on serious issues



British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson says it would take far too long for him to apologise for the "rich thesaurus" of rude comments and insults he has directed at world leaders and others over the years.

Mr Johnson, a former journalist with a talent for trenchant comments that his critics say sometimes tip over into untruth, said his utterances over a three-decade career had often been "misconstrued". Appointed Foreign Secretary, to widespread surprise, in a government reshuffle following Britain's vote to leave the European Union last month, Mr Johnson first made his name in the early 1990s as a foreign correspondent in Brussels writing highly coloured stories about the EU. Since then he has continued to court controversy, for example accusing US President Barack Obama of nurturing an ancestral dislike for the British empire. He also wrote an obscene limerick about Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan. In the run-up to the referendum, he fronted the campaign to leave the EU, lending support to claims on government spending and immigration that critics said were at best misleading. Appearing at a London news conference with US Secretary of State John Kerry, Mr Johnson was asked if he was going to apologise for his disobliging remarks about world leaders. "We can spend an awfully long time going over lots of stuff that I've written over the last 30 years ... all of which in my view has been taken out of context, but never mind, some serious issues call us today," Mr Johnson said. He was then asked if he wanted to retract his comments about Mr Obama, or whether they were an indication of the kind of diplomacy he intended to practise in his new job. "I'm afraid that there is such a rich thesaurus now of things that I have said that have been one way or another, through what alchemy I do not know, somehow misconstrued that it would really take me too long to engage in a fully global itinerary of apology to all concerned," Mr Johnson responded.

He stuck to his guns, even when accused by another reporter of having a long history of exaggerations and "frankly outright lies". "Let me just repeat my point, which is that I think people are more than welcome to rake over stuff I've written over many, many years but I think [the] most important thing is to get on with the very heavy agenda we have before us today, and to try and sort out, if we can, some of the intensifying problems we are seeing particularly in Syria," he said. Mr Johnson was clearly not surprised by the questioning on his past remarks from the British and US media. He tried to brush off the first couple of questions with a prepared answer but became more irritated.

He did get a break from Mr Kerry, who said the US ambassador in Brussels had referred to Mr Johnson as a "very smart and capable man". Mr Kerry added: "That's the Boris Johnson I intend to work with." "I can live with that," said a rather sheepish-looking Mr Johnson, prompting Mr Kerry to reply: "It's called diplomacy Boris."

Post: #2019

(07-14-2016 09:09 AM)Daddy Chains Wrote:  In 2006 BJ wrote an article about how, while on the British Airways airplane, he was automatically assumed to have 'sleazy male' intentions just for sitting next to underage children... that happen to be his.
...

Of course they wouldn't dare insist on asking a protected minority male to move, despite them being statistically many times more likely to abuse a child.

I wouldn't move, and I'd make a scene if it came to it. I'm sick of this bullshit. Last year I was taking a picture of my son at a playground where a school excursion happened to be taking place. I was told by one of the future-cat-lady brigade that "you need to stop taking photos because we don't allow people to take photos that might have other people's children in them."

She was quite surprised when the well groomed, well dressed man politely told her to "fuck off and die". I have no tolerance for this kind of thing any more.

Post: #2020

May Tells Merkel: No Brexit Until 2017

Quote:“We will not invoke Article 50 until our objectives are clear, which is why I’ve said already this will not happen before the end of this year,” May said in Berlin, referring to the formal EU mechanism to leave the bloc.

Post: #2021

Nigel Farage Announces European Referendum Tour

Quote:Proclaiming his support for new British PM Theresa May, former UKIP head Nigel Farage explained "she has said ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and I believe her," before announcing plans for his European Referendum Tour during a much at the Republican national convention yesterday. Farage told Politico that he would start a tour of European cities in September to help spread the appetite for referendums on EU membership beyond the UK.

Quote:“One of the joys of not continuing as party leader is having more time, so I will be traveling around Europe helping other independence movements, but I won’t be telling them how to vote,” Farage said.

“We should be celebrating a diverse Europe of independent nation states, and if I can do anything to help that, then I will,” he added. “I’m going to go to Athens in September and have a big symposium about alternatives to the euro.”

Introduced to the crowd by Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson as “probably the most articulate person practising politics on any continent,” Farage thanked the internet rather than his rhetoric for the Brexit success.

“The growth of the internet has radically transformed politics. UKIP could never have really gotten off the ground if it wasn’t for the internet and YouTube.”

Farage threw his support behind new Prime Minister Theresa May’s overhaul of the U.K. government, but his support came with a sting in the tail.

Quote:“She has said ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and I believe her,” Farage said, adding that Boris Johnson’s appointment has “got to be a good thing.”

Talk of the next country to follow the U.K. toward the EU exit has focused on Denmark and the Netherlands, but, as Politico noted, Farage said he thinks Ireland could provide competition in a race to the EU’s exit door.

Quote:“I think there’s a well of Euroskeptic thinking in Ireland that is quite deep,” he said, citing the two referendums in which Ireland has rejected European treaty change. “I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised” if Ireland had its own referendum on leaving the EU, he said.

The outspoken British politician also had some advice for Donald Trump...

Quote:While Farage refused to provide a direct endorsement of Donald Trump, he said the Republican candidate is on the right track by focusing on voters who feel left behind by globalization and high migration levels. Trump’s primary campaign data strategist Matt Braynard told POLITICO that “100 percent focus was put on disenfranchised voters.”

According to Farage, in the U.K. “a lot of them had felt so unrepresented they stopped voting. And in the Brexit referendum lots of those little people thought to themselves this is one time our vote can count. It’s a victory for the little people.”

Farage said he believes that Trump’s wealth is irrelevant to his ability to connect with working class voters. “They’ve had enough of being patronized, of being ignored. They want someone to listen to them. It’s irrelevant that he’s rich … They want to feel someone gets it. If you can engage those people and inspire those people, it’s the little people that can change the world.”

Finally, Farage suggested his resignation was more of a sabbatical than a retirement. “If this was not to happen [Brexit], I would find it irresistible to put my shoulder to the wheel again,” he told the cheering audience.

Post: #2022

Post: #2023

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6e211944-4ec8-...edition=uk

Twenty years ago I had lunch in London with a senior civil servant. This was at the tail-end of the decadent London lunching era and, after a lot of wine, he asked me what I thought of the minister he worked for. I said I’d interviewed the minister and he seemed a nice bloke. “The man”, said the civil servant, leaning across the table for emphasis, “is an animal!”
Anyone who remembers the 1980s television comedy series Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister knows that British civil servants and ministers are forever locked in a silent power struggle. That struggle will shape the form that Brexit ultimately takes. British voters chose Brexit; Theresa May’s new government has promised to implement it. But, in practice, civil servants will mostly sort out how exactly it is done. And these people are good at getting their way.

In the first episode of Yes, Prime Minister, the new prime minister, Jim Hacker, egged on by the government’s chief scientific adviser, concocts a whizzo scheme for a conscription army. Hacker, delighted with himself, exclaims: “Why didn’t I think of this before?” and the chief scientific adviser replies: “Because we only just met.”

That’s the relationship between civil servants and their minister in a nutshell: they know more than he does.

All of this is wonderfully explained in a surprise bestseller that appeared in Germany this year, 18 years after the death of its author, the sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Der neue Chef (“The New Boss”) is a collection of some of Luhmann’s 1960s writings on the art of what we would now call “managing up”. The book is quietly, almost silently humorous. Luhmann starts with the scenario that now faces British civil servants: the arrival of a new boss. This, says Luhmann, is “one of the few exciting events in everyday bureaucracy”.

Luhmann advises any underling feeling awed by his boss: “It is helpful to imagine that one’s superior has no clothes on.” Then, he says, the underling should realise that leaders lack time and capacity to lead: “Their attention has its limits too, their day too has only 24 hours . . . The superior would be lost if the underlings passed all problems on to the top.” Because underlings outnumber leaders, they have more decision-making capacity.

This is how British ministries traditionally function. The typical minister takes office knowing almost nothing about his ministry’s actual work. His main aim is to avoid getting into trouble either with the prime minister or — more importantly — with the tabloids. The civil servants’ aim is to make the big decisions. Chris Mullin, a Labour minister under Tony Blair, described in his 2009 memoir A View From the Foothills how this works. Every day Mullin’s private secretary would place files in his in-tray, “usually with a little handwritten note attached, boiling the issue down to a single sentence”. Each file came with the civil servants’ recommendation. “All I have to do”, wrote Mullin, “is signify agreement or disagreement by making my mark on the top of the page.” Usually, he signified agreement.

The new government will have to make bigger decisions than Mullin ever did. Brexit is the British civil service’s largest ever peacetime project. A bureaucracy shrunk by the Tories will now have to unpick 40 years of European law and negotiate a new relationship with the EU, while also conducting trade talks with half the world.

The basic question for the UK is: what kind of Brexit do you want? Do you want to be like Norway, with full access to the European single market but no limits on European immigration? Or do you want to be more like Moldova, shut off from the single market but also from immigration? The politicians don’t want to make this choice, because the Moldova option would mean economic decline and the Norway option would upset anti-immigrant voters. Nor does May want to call a general election to clarify the choice.

That means that for the next few years, the Norway-or-Moldova choice will likely be made on a messy case-by-case basis by civil servants. Usually, the minister will just signify agreement.

 . . . 

Senior civil servants are educated people living in London, so they probably didn’t vote for Brexit. Indeed, Whitehall’s most powerful department, the Treasury, made a public case against it. If civil servants are left to handle the negotiations, Brexit will end up looking more like Norway than Moldova.

The civil servants’ boring decisions — for instance, on the precise legal form of any British “immigration brake” — probably won’t get much attention from Britain’s true rulers, the tabloids. As the FT’s political editor George Parker has remarked, these papers have almost no correspondents in Brussels despite their insistence that Britain is run from there. Nor is the British public very interested in granular technocratic detail, judging by the largely fact-free campaign for Brexit.

In Yes, Prime Minister, the all-powerful civil servant Sir Humphrey ensures that Hacker’s whizzo conscription scheme never happens. Now, by executing Brexit, Sir Humphrey can take back control of his country.

Post: #2024

David Cameron has now resigned as an MP.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37342152

I wonder what cushy little £250k per year job he has lined up?

Post: #2025

(09-12-2016 11:09 AM)roberto Wrote:  David Cameron has now resigned as an MP.

I wonder what cushy little £250k per year job he has lined up?

Former German Chancellor Schröder just stepped down from his position on the advisory board for the Rothschild Bank a few days ago, so there'd be a free seat available for Cameron and his tremendous expertise.