As somebody who lives not far from the western end of one of the westernmost countries in the EU, most of the population of which is in its eastern half and east of the Greenwich meridian, and thus likely to want to keep summer time all year round, the prospect of it getting light here at about 10am in December is not making me happy. I dimly remember the time the UK experimented with this and it was dismal.
Wasn't that the winter of 1968/69? I was in Edinburgh through that, and Edinburgh's talent for making you miserable in winter reached new depths, crawling out of bed in the murk, arriving at work in it, and then going home in it. I had been trying to forget it all this time.
It can do that anyway. I remember waking up one winter Sunday at one o’clock, and being totally unable to work out, by looking out of the window, whether it was 1pm or 1am.
Yeah, the father who was an international diplomat. So, Boris was born in the US (and, hence if all goes pear shaped has US citizenship and go see his chum currently in the White House) and went to school in Belgium. He's personally benefited from EU membership, and unlike some in the ERG (and elsewhere) appears to be quite knowledgeable about the EU and must recognise the benefits of EU membership.
But, he's not a true believer. He only supports Brexit because it's a path towards personal gain. Among the Brextremists he actually appears almost competent, if the next PM is to be from that group he's in with a good chance. It got him the Foreign Office job, and the glory of quitting that for principles he doesn't really hold. If he'd opted for Remain then he'd just be a clown among some serious politicians and wouldn't have a chance at power.
... But, he's not a true believer. He only supports Brexit because it's a path towards personal gain ... If he'd opted for Remain then he'd just be a clown among some serious politicians ...
I can't help thinking that if Boris had opted for Remain the vote might have gone the other way. Before the campaign, he used to write quite sensibly about Europe in the Torygraph (which seems to have taken a humongous lurch to the right in recent years), and he seemed to be genuinely popular in the wake of the London Olympics.
I got the feeling that the "lovable buffoon" persona might have actually hidden quite a decent brain, and then he jumped on the Leave bandwagon and everything went pear-shaped. I wonder what (or who) induced him to the Leave side?
Funfact: France is already on summer time all year round. We were originally on the same time zone as the UK. During WW2 the country went onto the same time zone as Germany and it's never been changed back.
New Zealand put the clock forward by half an hour (I think it was) during the war and has never put it back. Now we are in NZ summertime it is an extra hour forward of that. It ends on April 7.
As somebody who lives not far from the western end of one of the westernmost countries in the EU, most of the population of which is in its eastern half and east of the Greenwich meridian, and thus likely to want to keep summer time all year round, the prospect of it getting light here at about 10am in December is not making me happy. I dimly remember the time the UK experimented with this and it was dismal.
Not quite that simple. England largely liked it; people like my Dad who was a postman so had a very early start and Scottish farmers had a rather different view.
Read this and weep. And then consider where I am. Look at how much of the population lives east of the Greenwich meridian (Paris, Lille/Tourcoing/Roubaix, Strasbourg, Nancy, Lyon, Marseille...). I very much doubt we'll go for winter time.
Good Lord - my long dormant O Level French (scraped a C in 1983) was up to the task of reading that!
I don’t see why not changing the clocks is a problem regardless of where you live, it’s surely not beyond the wit of man to say: it is winter, here is the new timetable, we will start an hour later.
... But, he's not a true believer. He only supports Brexit because it's a path towards personal gain ... If he'd opted for Remain then he'd just be a clown among some serious politicians ...
I can't help thinking that if Boris had opted for Remain the vote might have gone the other way. Before the campaign, he used to write quite sensibly about Europe in the Torygraph (which seems to have taken a humongous lurch to the right in recent years), and he seemed to be genuinely popular in the wake of the London Olympics.
I got the feeling that the "lovable buffoon" persona might have actually hidden quite a decent brain, and then he jumped on the Leave bandwagon and everything went pear-shaped. I wonder what (or who) induced him to the Leave side?
This is only part of the story. If you go back further to the 90s, Boris built his 'journalistic' career on making up stuff about Europe. I'll try to find you a good link because it's quite hard to summerise but there is an argument to be put that the huge amount of inaccurate EU reporting in the UK press is due to him. He created a whole genre of reportage that was sensationalist and misleading. However, contemporaries report that their editors were screaming at them as to why they didn't have the story Boris had... the 'because it's not true' defence apparently didn't work. And you can see how it sold papers. (I haven't posted on the thread about this but I have very strong feelings about the irresponsibility of our media).
I think that Boris's decision to support Leave is incredibly logical when you appreciate what Boris sincerely believes in: He believes in Boris.
Let's look at the situation in 2016; Boris had a popular persona but he wasn't that popular with the party die-hards who ultimately elect the leader. The Tory party membership was overwhelmingly pro-leave (and still is). I think what Boris was trying to do was to campaign vigorously for Leave and then he would be a darling to this wing of the party when Remain won. He would thus be very well placed to succeed Cameron in 2020 or whatever. Conversely, if Leave actually won, then Cameron would go and he must be the obvious successor. Obviously, it didn't work out quite like that but if you don't care about the outcome and are only interested in your own career, then it's the completely rational thing to do.
What AFZ said. Boris Johnson's normal mode of operation is to make up shit. He did it in Europe when he was a journalist there, and I think he got into trouble for it.
This whole Brexit thing is just about increasing the political value of Boris Johnson. A little while before the referendum campaign he was loudly and predictably trumpeting the value of the EU.
I would simply say "worst kind of opportunist". Why is he currently a politician rather than still a journalist and TV personality? Because he saw an opportunity in politics to promote Boris far more effectively than being a journalist.
I'll try to find you a good link because it's quite hard to summerise but there is an argument to be put that the huge amount of inaccurate EU reporting in the UK press is due to him.
Boris himself: I was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party – and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power.
What AFZ said. Boris Johnson's normal mode of operation is to make up shit. He did it in Europe when he was a journalist there, and I think he got into trouble for it.
This whole Brexit thing is just about increasing the political value of Boris Johnson. A little while before the referendum campaign he was loudly and predictably trumpeting the value of the EU.
BJ has aptly been called The Ambient Lie. His total incompetence as Mayor of London resulted in such expensive fiascos as the Boris Bus, the plans for the Garden Bridge, and the Boris Cableway; as Foreign Secretary his totally false statement in the HoC about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has made life far more difficult for her in prison in Iran on what I strongly suspect were trumped-up charges anyway.
He is a lying, self-obsessed, expensive piece of shit who ought to be doing serious time in prison for squandering public funds on his vanity projects. Instead he appears to be popular with the Tory grassroots, which tells you as much about them as it does about him.
When he was Mayor of London he did some good things. I am not sure how much of it was him or his team or something left over from Ken Clark’s time.
He left London with a string of expensive vanity projects that don't work - his "routemaster" buses, the garden bridge, the cable car. The bikes were left over from Ken Livingstone.
And Boris also got rid of the congestion charge, which had made traffic in London actually functional.
Not that Ken was blameless: the bendy buses were not suitable for central London, nor did they fit the existing bus stops. And the boom in ugly skyscrapers started under Ken.
Don't talk about ugly buildings, there is one near the Tate, which makes me wince every time I go past. Do politicians employ anyone with a sense of aesthetics in relation to buildings, or is it just the money, money?
Erm Johnson actually extended the congestion charge - or at least tried to. It still exists. He wanted to extend it West, but I cannot remember whether that whole thing was in his time ad wheterh he acheived it.
The achievement he will be remembered for is the wasting of money on the Garden Bridge and the Water Cannons. He was a dismal failure. Jenny Jones - now in the HoL but a council member during his time - was always tweeting about how useless he was. Unprepared, lazy, all bluster.
He deserves to be taken to court for London certainly. One or two good things happened in his time as Mayor, but as I said it is hard to tell if it was him or his team. Certainly Len ams Sadique have done better jobs.
I doubt Boris Johnson did anything in office that was actually illegal.
These things are vanity project that - for shame - our political system was unable to stop him emptying the public purse on planning.
The Boris Island idea was bonkers. Not only was it obviously never going to work as an airport, not only would it have been massively expensive, it lay geographically outside of the sphere of responsibility anyway.
And yet somehow, instead of throwing the bits of paper on which he'd scrawled this nonsense back in his face, he manages to persuade others to spend money on these utterly ridiculous plans.
Rees-Mogg just got totally owned on Parliamentary history in the HoC.
Oliver Letwin was talking about the importance of the Standing Orders of the HoC - and Rees-Mogg started talking about the Tudor period. Because he (R-M) is an utter moron.
Misconduct in Public Office is a serious offence; if his monkeying about squandering public money, and then lying to Parliament - because that's what it was - about poor Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, don't count, then they damned well ought to.
My gut feeling about today is that Parliament will produce a soft Brexit. As I say d before if we have a soft Brexit we might as well say st in, which I would like very much. I can’t really see how May can object to a soft Brexit and I suspect the EU would go for it as well. It will not be painless but might be bearable.
I think May will object to a soft Brexit, as it would split the Tory party. I thought that she could ignore all the votes, but there seems to be legal opinion that she cannot. But maybe she will ignore that.
Misconduct in Public Office is a serious offence; if his monkeying about squandering public money, and then lying to Parliament - because that's what it was - about poor Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, don't count, then they damned well ought to.
It's your skipping lightly over the "bring to trial" stage that I object to.
Asking for people to be thrown directly in jail without a proper trial is no different to other expressions of populism, regardless of which political side they originate from, and as somebody who regularly sees people who have been thrown into jail go on to sit there for up to several years before getting to trial at all, I'm not in favour of the practice.
Misconduct in Public Office is a serious offence; if his monkeying about squandering public money, and then lying to Parliament - because that's what it was - about poor Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, don't count, then they damned well ought to.
It's your skipping lightly over the "bring to trial" stage that I object to.
Asking for people to be thrown directly in jail without a proper trial is no different to other expressions of populism, regardless of which political side they originate from, and as somebody who regularly sees people who have been thrown into jail go on to sit there for up to several years before getting to trial at all, I'm not in favour of the practice.
That's the practice in the UK - people are imprisoned on remand until trial.
Usually people who are rich and powerful avoid this indignity.
Misconduct in Public Office is a serious offence; if his monkeying about squandering public money, and then lying to Parliament - because that's what it was - about poor Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, don't count, then they damned well ought to.
It's your skipping lightly over the "bring to trial" stage that I object to.
Asking for people to be thrown directly in jail without a proper trial is no different to other expressions of populism, regardless of which political side they originate from, and as somebody who regularly sees people who have been thrown into jail go on to sit there for up to several years before getting to trial at all, I'm not in favour of the practice.
It's a fair point. And a very important one.
I do think there is a difference between the populist sentiment of wishing to lock up one's enemies and the desire for justice and accountability for those who have tried to arrogantly place themselves above such things. I suspect that shipmates were very much expressing the latter but I agree with your caution at the huge danger of allowing ourselves to tread that path without the vital care for due process.
Usually people who are rich and powerful avoid this indignity.
They may and do indeed usually avoid the remand stage, which is what I was referring to, but as @alienfromzog points out, they shouldn't bypass the trial stage.
Remand imprisonment is seriously overused here, and bail is virtually non-existent.
Usually people who are rich and powerful avoid this indignity.
They may and do indeed usually avoid the remand stage, which is what I was referring to, but as @alienfromzog points out, they shouldn't bypass the trial stage.
Remand imprisonment is seriously overused here, and bail is virtually non-existent.
I didn't know that, Eutychus. Your point still stands, of course.
FWIW, I guess a lot of people in the UK would simply like to see BoJo and Company removed from our ken - perhaps put into some sort of Star-Trek style holographic playground, where they could pretend to be Polly Titians, without harming anyone.....
Misconduct in Public Office is a serious offence; if his monkeying about squandering public money, and then lying to Parliament - because that's what it was - about poor Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, don't count, then they damned well ought to.
I think is the point - it is not "I don't like him, lock him up". It is "He seems to have committed crimes with public money and in public office" - in particular, making a British citizen suffer more while FS, which is at the least unbelieveable negligent.
And yes, it is a shorthand for "He has actions that he should answer for in a court of law". this is hell, I think that might be understood.
I am not one who swears much but Parliament is fucking stupid. No body agrees on anything. We need the whole thing put back to the voters if Parliament can’t make its Fucking mind up.
End of rant.
I am not one who swears much but Parliament is fucking stupid. No body agrees on anything. We need the whole thing put back to the voters if Parliament can’t make its Fucking mind up.
End of rant.
I think you need to keep your powder dry, if you can. This is the way that coalition government and politics works in much of Europe - it initially looks like there is no majority for anything until eventually after some horse trading there is some way forward a majority can live with.
The problem here is not with the novel process, it is with an antiquated parliamentary system that is not used to making big decisions via compromise. And obviously that there is incredible time pressures to learn quickly how to do it.
When I suggested that BoJo ought to be doing time, I was assuming that this would be at the end or in the course of a proper legal process - and I hope a fairer one than Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has endured.
Please don't accuse me of wanting to lock him - or anyone else - up without trial. Indeed, I think that having his appalling misconduct over several years displayed in a court of law would of itself be beneficial.
But politicians do have a history of avoiding punishment for their misdeeds. The only example that comes to mind of one who didn't would be John Stonehouse back in the last century, jailed in Australia for insurance fraud I believe.
I am not one who swears much but Parliament is fucking stupid. No body agrees on anything. We need the whole thing put back to the voters if Parliament can’t make its Fucking mind up.
End of rant.
I think you need to keep your powder dry, if you can. This is the way that coalition government and politics works in much of Europe - it initially looks like there is no majority for anything until eventually after some horse trading there is some way forward a majority can live with.
The problem here is not with the novel process, it is with an antiquated parliamentary system that is not used to making big decisions via compromise. And obviously that there is incredible time pressures to learn quickly how to do it.
Yes I do agree with you I was just frustrated with the whole thing.
Something could very well come out of this process I am behind it really. I just blew my top.
I am not one who swears much but Parliament is fucking stupid. No body agrees on anything. We need the whole thing put back to the voters if Parliament can’t make its Fucking mind up.
End of rant.
I think you need to keep your powder dry, if you can. This is the way that coalition government and politics works in much of Europe - it initially looks like there is no majority for anything until eventually after some horse trading there is some way forward a majority can live with.
The problem here is not with the novel process, it is with an antiquated parliamentary system that is not used to making big decisions via compromise. And obviously that there is incredible time pressures to learn quickly how to do it.
Yes I do agree with you I was just frustrated with the whole thing.
Something could very well come out of this process I am behind it really. I just blew my top.
Totally understandable. I move between rage, incomprehension, fear and back several times a day.
I am not one who swears much but Parliament is fucking stupid. No body agrees on anything. We need the whole thing put back to the voters if Parliament can’t make its Fucking mind up.
End of rant.
I think you need to keep your powder dry, if you can. This is the way that coalition government and politics works in much of Europe - it initially looks like there is no majority for anything until eventually after some horse trading there is some way forward a majority can live with.
The problem here is not with the novel process, it is with an antiquated parliamentary system that is not used to making big decisions via compromise. And obviously that there is incredible time pressures to learn quickly how to do it.
Yes I do agree with you I was just frustrated with the whole thing.
Something could very well come out of this process I am behind it really. I just blew my top.
Totally understandable. I move between rage, incomprehension, fear and back several times a day.
Please don't accuse me of wanting to lock him - or anyone else - up without trial. Indeed, I think that having his appalling misconduct over several years displayed in a court of law would of itself be beneficial.
Thanks for this clarification.
I think, in passing, that this exchange, and the feelings being expressed, might nevertheless offer some useful insights into the minds and hearts of other people crying "Lock Her Up" and similar. Behind the rhetoric of vigilante justice and insurrection there is a lot of fear, just as fear is being expressed here.
Comments
Wasn't that the winter of 1968/69? I was in Edinburgh through that, and Edinburgh's talent for making you miserable in winter reached new depths, crawling out of bed in the murk, arriving at work in it, and then going home in it. I had been trying to forget it all this time.
Thank you. That Made My Day, so to speak....!!
But, he's not a true believer. He only supports Brexit because it's a path towards personal gain. Among the Brextremists he actually appears almost competent, if the next PM is to be from that group he's in with a good chance. It got him the Foreign Office job, and the glory of quitting that for principles he doesn't really hold. If he'd opted for Remain then he'd just be a clown among some serious politicians and wouldn't have a chance at power.
I got the feeling that the "lovable buffoon" persona might have actually hidden quite a decent brain, and then he jumped on the Leave bandwagon and everything went pear-shaped. I wonder what (or who) induced him to the Leave side?
New Zealand put the clock forward by half an hour (I think it was) during the war and has never put it back. Now we are in NZ summertime it is an extra hour forward of that. It ends on April 7.
Not quite that simple. England largely liked it; people like my Dad who was a postman so had a very early start and Scottish farmers had a rather different view.
Good Lord - my long dormant O Level French (scraped a C in 1983) was up to the task of reading that!
Or you could open one for yourselves...
This is only part of the story. If you go back further to the 90s, Boris built his 'journalistic' career on making up stuff about Europe. I'll try to find you a good link because it's quite hard to summerise but there is an argument to be put that the huge amount of inaccurate EU reporting in the UK press is due to him. He created a whole genre of reportage that was sensationalist and misleading. However, contemporaries report that their editors were screaming at them as to why they didn't have the story Boris had... the 'because it's not true' defence apparently didn't work. And you can see how it sold papers. (I haven't posted on the thread about this but I have very strong feelings about the irresponsibility of our media).
I think that Boris's decision to support Leave is incredibly logical when you appreciate what Boris sincerely believes in: He believes in Boris.
Let's look at the situation in 2016; Boris had a popular persona but he wasn't that popular with the party die-hards who ultimately elect the leader. The Tory party membership was overwhelmingly pro-leave (and still is). I think what Boris was trying to do was to campaign vigorously for Leave and then he would be a darling to this wing of the party when Remain won. He would thus be very well placed to succeed Cameron in 2020 or whatever. Conversely, if Leave actually won, then Cameron would go and he must be the obvious successor. Obviously, it didn't work out quite like that but if you don't care about the outcome and are only interested in your own career, then it's the completely rational thing to do.
AFZ
This whole Brexit thing is just about increasing the political value of Boris Johnson. A little while before the referendum campaign he was loudly and predictably trumpeting the value of the EU.
He is the worst kind of opportunist politician.
Here's a good link (New Statesman).
Here's the key quote:
AFZ
Another tRump.
Why do people fall for it?
He is a lying, self-obsessed, expensive piece of shit who ought to be doing serious time in prison for squandering public funds on his vanity projects. Instead he appears to be popular with the Tory grassroots, which tells you as much about them as it does about him.
And Boris also got rid of the congestion charge, which had made traffic in London actually functional.
Not that Ken was blameless: the bendy buses were not suitable for central London, nor did they fit the existing bus stops. And the boom in ugly skyscrapers started under Ken.
The achievement he will be remembered for is the wasting of money on the Garden Bridge and the Water Cannons. He was a dismal failure. Jenny Jones - now in the HoL but a council member during his time - was always tweeting about how useless he was. Unprepared, lazy, all bluster.
And yes, he should be in prison.
These things are vanity project that - for shame - our political system was unable to stop him emptying the public purse on planning.
The Boris Island idea was bonkers. Not only was it obviously never going to work as an airport, not only would it have been massively expensive, it lay geographically outside of the sphere of responsibility anyway.
And yet somehow, instead of throwing the bits of paper on which he'd scrawled this nonsense back in his face, he manages to persuade others to spend money on these utterly ridiculous plans.
Oliver Letwin was talking about the importance of the Standing Orders of the HoC - and Rees-Mogg started talking about the Tudor period. Because he (R-M) is an utter moron.
OK, we'll put him in the stocks for the afternoon.
It's your skipping lightly over the "bring to trial" stage that I object to.
Asking for people to be thrown directly in jail without a proper trial is no different to other expressions of populism, regardless of which political side they originate from, and as somebody who regularly sees people who have been thrown into jail go on to sit there for up to several years before getting to trial at all, I'm not in favour of the practice.
That's the practice in the UK - people are imprisoned on remand until trial.
Usually people who are rich and powerful avoid this indignity.
It's a fair point. And a very important one.
I do think there is a difference between the populist sentiment of wishing to lock up one's enemies and the desire for justice and accountability for those who have tried to arrogantly place themselves above such things. I suspect that shipmates were very much expressing the latter but I agree with your caution at the huge danger of allowing ourselves to tread that path without the vital care for due process.
AFZ
Mind you, if BoJo were in jug (but presumably only post-sentencing), at least he'd be treated to a Proper Haircut.
Remand imprisonment is seriously overused here, and bail is virtually non-existent.
I didn't know that, Eutychus. Your point still stands, of course.
FWIW, I guess a lot of people in the UK would simply like to see BoJo and Company removed from our ken - perhaps put into some sort of Star-Trek style holographic playground, where they could pretend to be Polly Titians, without harming anyone.....
I think is the point - it is not "I don't like him, lock him up". It is "He seems to have committed crimes with public money and in public office" - in particular, making a British citizen suffer more while FS, which is at the least unbelieveable negligent.
And yes, it is a shorthand for "He has actions that he should answer for in a court of law". this is hell, I think that might be understood.
Maybe we can stop focusing on Boris Johnson now.
When the crazies keep peeping over the parapet it's hard to resist taking a pop at them.
Yes - it is just frustration at incompetence. And fear. Not expressing myself clearly and properly.
End of rant.
I think you need to keep your powder dry, if you can. This is the way that coalition government and politics works in much of Europe - it initially looks like there is no majority for anything until eventually after some horse trading there is some way forward a majority can live with.
The problem here is not with the novel process, it is with an antiquated parliamentary system that is not used to making big decisions via compromise. And obviously that there is incredible time pressures to learn quickly how to do it.
Please don't accuse me of wanting to lock him - or anyone else - up without trial. Indeed, I think that having his appalling misconduct over several years displayed in a court of law would of itself be beneficial.
But politicians do have a history of avoiding punishment for their misdeeds. The only example that comes to mind of one who didn't would be John Stonehouse back in the last century, jailed in Australia for insurance fraud I believe.
Yes I do agree with you I was just frustrated with the whole thing.
Something could very well come out of this process I am behind it really. I just blew my top.
Totally understandable. I move between rage, incomprehension, fear and back several times a day.
Several times an hour for me.
Thanks for this clarification.
I think, in passing, that this exchange, and the feelings being expressed, might nevertheless offer some useful insights into the minds and hearts of other people crying "Lock Her Up" and similar. Behind the rhetoric of vigilante justice and insurrection there is a lot of fear, just as fear is being expressed here.