WorkingMummy

I see it the exact opposite way. I see Boris as basically an opportunist and bit a of a clown, but not an actual ideological threat. Whereas Gove, I find genuinely frightening in his political ideology. But both of them would be awful. And so bad for what is now (appallingly) the biggest job the government of this country (which really does have far bigger things it should be worrying about) has to tackle: negotiating clause 50 divorce, followed by a hopeful re-entry as a trading partner of the EU (assuming ALL other EU nations ratify that deal). The worst people to do that are the people who were gunning to go. Imagine how the talks would go! We need someone who took a credible remain line to be PM, who can at least look Merkel in the eye and truthfully say that this is breaking his/her heart and please lets be kind!

Appreciate your words, civilservant. Agree that separatism is not a viable answer. But currently cannot imagine genuinely feeling a sense of cohesion with the extremes that the debate drove the leave campaign to. And certainly do not feel anyone has offered me an idea or a future that I want to commit to form. I appreciate that this sense of personal isolation is what m many leavers have themselves felt about "their" country for many years. I get that. But now I feel it too. And there we have the inevitable pain of divorce in a nutshell. Although a progressive alliance between SNP, Labour and Lib Dems and Greens has been mooted in theory and would rally me if it became an actual proposal.

Hmm. Way to the look on the bright side. I am enjoying the sense of solidarity with Scotland, which like London is basically left leaning in a basically right leaning UK, and outward facing in a basically inward looking Island. The only problem is that Scottish independence is now so much more likely and that leaves the rest of the U.K. (inc London) in the long term hands of the right wing of our politics. It's just so awful.

I know, it is just horrid.

titch juicy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Alan Medic Wrote: > -------------------------------------------------- > ----- > > How about a United Kingdom of Ireland (North & > > South), Scotland & London? > > Yes please Yes please. And in the meantime we probably need a general election sharpish, to stand a chance of forming a progressive alliance to take charge of the article 50 process and to save the country from the far right. There is a reason Le Pen welcomes this result with open arms. Stunned by the abject irresponsibility of those who led the country into this mess, and last night had the arrogant nerve to demand DC lead them out of it. Extremely anxious for the medium term chances of me and my children's (immigrant) father keeping our family life together in SE5. Just heartbroken by this. There are people I have known since primary school whom I have finally "de-friended" on Facebook and the like this morning. The language of the leave campaign, the popularist posters and slogans, left me feeling utterly alienised from them weeks ago. And now there is no reason to continue to try to dialogue with the wholly hateful and irrational arguments then have peddled for ages and are rejoicing in today. In short, the sense of dislocation and divorce is palpable in little chez nous.

Thanks for this - will sign

I agree. This was not a college hush up. To be fair - the college had no opportunity to hush it up, even if it had been inclined. Two Swedish grad students saw the rape actually taking place. (Behind a dumpster in a dark alley btw). They called out, Brock ran, they caught him. They called the police. It was never in the college's hands. Never a college matter. Incidentally, one of the Swedes was so traumatised by what he had seen, he could not at first speak to the police for crying. The victim regained consciousness in police "custody". She was unconscious throughout the police's time at the scene, when taken to the hospital, and when first examined by doctors. I thought the online news commentary you can see via the link in the OP has it right. The judge could identify with Brock Turner. He looks like his son, his friends' sons. Their life stories are all similar. It is easier to distance yourself from someone who doesn't look like you, and doesn't share your background. Easier to bang your gavel down and send them inside for 20 years.

DaveR Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I'm not sure whether race played much of a part in > the Stanford case. The main point is (as Blah > said) that US universities have a very poor record > when it comes to dealing with sexual assaults, > particularly where the alleged assailant/s are > college athletes. > > http://www.athleticbusiness.com/rules-regulations/ > college-athletic-departments-role-in-investigating > -sexual-assaults.html But this guy was dealt with. He was prosecuted (although the prosecution went after a weirdly low sentence from the off). He was convicted by a jury. The victim's impact statement is available online. It is harrowing but precisely and intelligently expressed - I mean it's overwhelming in effect. It was read to the judge just before he sentenced. As was a long and pitiful, barely remorseful letter from Brock. A few friends wrote to say he was not really a rapist (!) and then he got 6 months. In county jail. I also wonder if the fact that the victim was unconscious was held in his favour too. The judge made a comment when handing down sentence that implied he understood to a degree why Brock could not accept the correctness of the verdict. Which again is just so....weird. A defendant's failure to "get it" should aggravate his sentence (and in this jurisdiction could trigger a public protection based addition to the length of sentence. But maybe the judge was really ambivalent about this rape being rape at all. The DPP in this country (Alison Saunders) has been supporting police efforts to change attitudes towards sexual consent through initiatives like the one posted below. It is just so telling that this (v good) video needed to be made. http://www.thamesvalley.police.uk/crime-prevention/keeping-safe/consent-is-everything.htm

....although I've never seen a sentence as crazy as six months for a contested charge of rape. And we have prosecution appeals against unduly lenient sentences over here. Which would certainly be used if this type of sentence was passed.

White, well educated people enjoy unfair leniency in our criminal justice system. I wish I could say they do not.

The whole Stanford rape case has been so wildly unjust. This online news commentary makes the point about privilege very well. I wish I could say that white and well educated people do not enjoy the same unfair leniency in our criminal justice system.

Louisa. Frankly, you have said it all. If you have no interest in finding out what the EU actually does do (because that is too dull for you) then you have no business "taking control" of it. Thank you! At least you said it. And you should be ashamed.

So, Louisa, you regret that EU is "in the driving seat" when it comes to controlling the degree of short-selling City traders can undertake? You think it is awful that in 2013 the rest of the EU out-voted the UK government and "forced" it to put a cap on bankers' bonuses, to prevent grotesquely large financial incentives causing traders to take risks that contributed to the financial crisis? You want to "drive the car" when it comes to climate change and environmental protection? And you want to divorce yourself from the EU's current attempts to get corporations to declare their EU-wide corporation taxes (to prevent tax avoidance)?

I agree rahrahrah. It's not just on immigration that they are having people over, though. Their Sovereignty and their "we all hate EU regulation" positions are both big cons too. Why is no one extolling the virtues of EU regulation? I used to be married to a junior doctor in the 1990s, on a "one in three" rota. This meant that as well working 12 hour days Mon-Fri each week, every three nights he would work all night ON TOP of that. So a "shift" would start Monday 8am and go right through to 5 or 6 pm the NEXT day. Every third weekend he'd do Saturday 8 am to Monday at noon. He would be at the hospital on his feet throughout that time. It was mad. Technically, he was only "on call" overnight (there was a bed in a room off the ward) but his specialty was paediatrics and neonatology which meant he never got to bed. He is a good doctor, a consultant now, but no way would I want him treating my children in the state I used to find him when I picked him up from work. I wouldn't even let him drive the car. Every time I take my kids to A&E, I think, thank God for the EU working time directive. It is far superior to what we had before. These points are rarely made. Leave make that whole thing about Sovereignty. When the real question should not be which set of people make our "laws" - and actually, it's regulation of matters of common interest in a single market, like workers' conditions and consumer rights and safety - but whether those people are doing a better job than we believe any domestic regulation-maker would. Regulation is such a subordinate form of legislation anyway (wherever it is made), it is utter, utter nonsense to make a big an issue of the geographic whereabouts of the regulators and say it's about "democracy", or "sovereignty". It's like saying, "Oh yes, thank God we can set monetary policy at home because we can always vote out the Governor of the Bank of England." I am glad we do set monetary policy at home because I believe we need to be able to separate our interests from Europe's in that regard. But do I want us to be free to set less generous working conditions for our workforce (to give us a competitive edge)? No! I don't! Do I want our construction firms to be able to build new buildings that are less energy efficient than those built in Holland or Norway? No! Do I want the UK to "retake control" over food labelling? No. I have no doubt, the ultra right wing forces represented by Farage and Boris would LOVE to have control over all these things. But I feel much safer having my children's futures in all these areas (where their interests are precisely the same as French, German, Dutch children) in the hands of the EU.

Dogger, not because of our "failure" to join the European single currency they haven't. And given the events of 2008, it was the best decision we made - to ignore his advice and stay out.

James Dyson's pedigree as a fortune teller: "In 1998, Dyson was one of the chairmen and chief executives of the twenty FTSE 100 companies who signed a statement published in The Financial Times in 1998 calling on the government for early British membership of the Eurozone.[22] He claimed that failure to join the Euro would lead to the destruction of the British manufacturing base and said: "It does not mean that the jobs will go tomorrow but will drift abroad over a period and the longer-term future of Britain as a manufacturing nation will be blighted. Ministers had better understand that if we delay entry too long there may be nothing left to save."[source: wikipedia.] So, utterly on the wrong side of that one, then.

I wondered when someone would mention James Dyson. James Dyson has absolutely zero experience in international diplomacy, treaty formation, or trade negotiations. He invented a very good hoover and my kids love those blade dryer thingies of his, but he is in no position to tell you that a trade deal will be "easy" to negotiate. Still less, has he (or anyone here) set out an actual strategy for achieving a BETTER trade deal THAN WE ALREDY HAVE (complete with our Schengen opt-out, security opt-out, fiscal opt-out and the automatic 1/3 discount from our budget contributions that Maggie secured in the 1980s). Secondly, James Dyson deserves a great big kick up his arse (if his head has left any room) for the combination of stupidity and arrogance that led him very recently to comment that we must leave the EU so that HE can be free to recruit graduating UK university students who come from from Hong Kong and China (who presumably he has used as interns during their studies) without the....wait for it... four and a half month process his company currently has to go through with the Home Office to get them work permits and visas!! How shocking!!! Obviously, all our hearts will bleed for that weighty burden of administration which poor Mr Dyson faces but really, that is no bloody argument about anybody's interests other than his own, IMMEDIATELY confronting him. Which is why he would make a ruddy awful trade negotiator.

....both of which, BTW, are 100% domestic measures, over which the oh so wicked EU has no "control" and for which it cannot therefore be blamed.

That article is full of gems. The amount of misinformation that the Leave campaign dishes out, and people just swallow. My personal favourite, "14 per cent of people now think that 30 per cent of the UK?s Child Benefit budget is sent to children living overseas. 23 per cent of people think that 13 per cent of it does. The correct figure is 0.3 per cent. It means that almost 49 per cent of the population overestimate the figure by more than 40 times." Milliband is bang on in his assertion this morning on Radio 4: immigration is an alibi for the consequences of underinvestment and austerity.

I really dislike that crowd pac questionnaire. It illustrates everything that is wrong with the Brexit debate. It makes a series of assertions and then asks you for your opinion. As if your opinion makes the assertion true or false. Some of the assertions are questions of fact which should be answered by careful research and fact checking, not a wild guess in a multiple choice box. Others are so abstract as to be almost meaningless. "My values are not the values on which the EU was founded." What does that even mean? Others are just too obvious for words. "Co-operation with other European countries on terrorism makes Britain safer." Most irritatingly of all, it does not even begin to address the all important question, HOW exactly, will leaving the EU affect any of these issues. So I dare say leaving the EU will do little to our ability to cooperate with other countries to fight terrorism. It could, however, completely screw the competitiveness of our goods in the market to which we send 44% of our exports. A point not, apparently, significant enough to be covered by the questionnaire. All this test does is diagnose YOUR pre-existing bias. Which I dare say you already know!!

Yes. The only relevance of our trade deficit, is that it shows how fragile our domestic trade position is. ????, sorry to take it back to Switzerland, but Switzerland has a significant trade surplus with the EU. It makes no odds to your leverage as a negotiator for a trade deal. (Unless you are a massive population, which we are not.) Switzerland is 1) similar to us, in that it is responsible for buying 6% of all the EU exported goods, but depends on the EU for about 45% of its own export market and 2) is possibly to the right even of Nigel Farage when it comes to hating immigration And yet... Swtizerland cannot get free trade without free movement of people. I repeat, the Swiss voted in 2014 to impose a cap on EU migration and their govenement has not been able to implement it. You cannot unilaterally change your conditions of trade with the world's largest single market. (As a footnote, it is amazing that the Swiss purchase 6% of all EU exports. Per capita they are WAY more important to EU epxorters than us. There is only 8 million of them!!)

And anyway, ????, I am not sure trade deficit figures are an indicator of how much Europe needs our business. The trade deficit is a comparison of how much WE export to the EU as compared to how much WE import from the EU. So we 65 million buy more than we sell. So what. What matters is the gap between how much WE sell to them and how much WE sell to the rest of the world, compared to the gap between how much THEY sell to us and how much THEY sell to the rest of the world. The EU "depends" upon the UK to buy 16% of its exports. It does not depend on us to sell 86% of its exports. We depend on the EU to buy 45% of our exports. That is a balance of power in favour of the EU. Which is as you would expect. We being a nation of 65 million and it being the biggest single market in the world.

He is not. That is like saying that the CEO of a FTsE 100 company is more powerful than our government when it comes to agreeing trade deals. And it's not Germany its the whole EU. And expensive imports are not the biggest point (because we can unilaterally control import taxes outsde the single market). It's 44% of our exports going into a market now free to impose whatever taxes it wants to make our goods expensive and uncompetitive over there. And our manufacturers not being able to compete with that. It's not like we have anything to sell that can't be sourced elsewhere.

Yes but Louisa we would not be negotiating with Germany. But with the single market. Unless you want to leave the "red tape" of eu regulation in favour of the complete "pain in the arse" (I quote a Swiss lawyer) of the 100s of different micro, bilateral agreements that Switzerland has. And if you are going to cut off the tariff free destination of 44% of our export goods, aren't you cutting off our nose to spite our face? You also create an incentive to the EU to try to press ahead with TTIP trade deal with the US. The US (even without free trade) already buys 15% of all EU goods.

LondonMix Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Working Mummy- did you mean 16% to Switzerland and > 6% to the UK? No - my second sentence was wrong. Have changed it.