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Another AfD update, we had the Lower Saxony state elections on Sunday and AfD did better than expected, they overtook the left wing Linke (literally Left) party, but only managed 6%, which means they are present in the Lower Saxony parliament for the first time, whereas the Linke didn't get any seats.

But Lower Saxony and the other western states are traditionally a poor place for AfD, they only seem to do well in the poorer eastern states. They are popular among the unemployed, even though they are the worst possible choice for the unemployed... But "throw out immigrants" seems to be all that those in the East hear and that gets AfD some votes there.

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Mon Oct 16, 2017 3:15 pm
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big_D wrote:
Another AfD update, we had the Lower Saxony state elections on Sunday and AfD did better than expected, they overtook the left wing Linke (literally Left) party, but only managed 6%, which means they are present in the Lower Saxony parliament for the first time, whereas the Linke didn't get any seats.

But Lower Saxony and the other western states are traditionally a poor place for AfD, they only seem to do well in the poorer eastern states. They are popular among the unemployed, even though they are the worst possible choice for the unemployed... But "throw out immigrants" seems to be all that those in the East hear and that gets AfD some votes there.


the vote for AfD has risen in the last election but not high enough to produce a Govt. yet.
your thoughts on the Austrian election please.

reason for asking. i may read many things but i am not on the ground ...

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Tue Oct 17, 2017 4:43 pm
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He is young and charismatic and the CSU in Bavaria are happy with their new "partner", because he is talking about capping the number of immigrants.

There is a general feeling of unuease about having him as president. He is dynamic, and that is probably what got him the votes, he also knows how to kick up a s-storm around his opponents and can use social media.

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Wed Oct 18, 2017 5:09 am
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big_D wrote:
He is young and charismatic and the CSU in Bavaria are happy with their new "partner", because he is talking about capping the number of immigrants.

There is a general feeling of unuease about having him as president. He is dynamic, and that is probably what got him the votes, he also knows how to kick up a s-storm around his opponents and can use social media.


similar to my thoughts. but a trend seems to be coming in to place.
eastern Europe, central Europe, southern Europe along with the UK's exit from the EU ...

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Wed Oct 18, 2017 7:29 am
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Brexit: Theresa May appeals to EU leaders for progress

Theresa May made a personal appeal to EU leaders for the Brexit talks to move on to the subject of trade at a working dinner in Brussels.

The prime minister is reported to have asked for a deal she could "defend" to the British people.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-41684111

The key word here being “defend”. Not “recommend”, or any other number of positive phrases. No, it’s “defend”. She knows that whatever happens she’ll be criticised to the end of the world for it, and whatever deal she does get will result in us being significantly worse off.

This thread (I hate these - why can‘t people just post to blogs and link to them on Twitter?) from Jo Maugham QC kind of outlines the problems we’ll be having.
https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/statu ... 1692205057

Quote:
• So a wee bird has dropped into my inbox what a major newspaper has described as a report from HM Treasury. THREAD (note that he links to images of screen shots form the report he’s been sent)

• It deals with the consequences of us leaving the EU without a deal - exactly what the "wing-growers" are pushing on us now. /1

• "Wing-growers" because their strategy is to leap off a cliff and believe very hard that we will grow wings. Would you like some extracts? /2


There’s a lot in this thread. eg:

Quote:
• But, I mean, lots of countries trade on WTO terms just fine. Don't they? Lots of advanced economies? Are you sure? /10 https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/statu ... 69/photo/1
Image

• So prices are gonna go up for consumers or our producers are gonna get shafted. But the wings. Think of the wings. /11 https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/statu ... 04/photo/1
Image


And so on. There are major problems he sees, one of which seems to be the almost bling religious zealotry of those who wish to leave and think that “everything will be fine” but have nothing solid to back this assertion up. If people can make evidence-based threads like this on the consequences of leaving, and those consequences are so bad, then where are the equivalent ones from those who want a positive outlook?

Quick spoiler: the unicorns have them.

There are about 20 tweets in that thread, plus all the screen grabs. The WTO does not come out of this at all well.

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Fri Oct 20, 2017 9:01 am
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I hope your wings grow before you hit the bottom of the cliff then!

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Fri Oct 20, 2017 10:14 am
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we wont fall of any cliff after we leave the EU. we have red bull ...

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Fri Oct 20, 2017 8:50 pm
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MrStevenRogers wrote:
we wont fall of any cliff after we leave the EU. we have red bull ...
Red Bull's manufacturing base is in central Europe.

Mark

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Fri Oct 20, 2017 9:21 pm
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timark_uk wrote:
MrStevenRogers wrote:
we wont fall of any cliff after we leave the EU. we have red bull ...
Red Bull's manufacturing base is in central Europe.

Mark


thats why we need WTO it has wings you know ...

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Fri Oct 20, 2017 9:47 pm
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Who actually trades solely under WTO rules?

[...]

What is the biggest economy that does not have any Free Trade agreements other than membership in the WTO?


https://medium.com/@MrWeeble/who-actual ... 6127ce33c6

SPOILER ALERT:

Quote:
there is only one country in the world that trades only under WTO rules. That country:

Image

For those of you not familiar with Mauritania, it’s GDP is $4,714million (0.2% of the UK’s), 50% of its exports consist of Iron Ore, and between 1% and 17% of the population still live in slavery.

It appears that this is the country that Leave.UK wish to emulate. I am afraid that this is not a vision for Britain’s future that I can share.

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Sun Oct 22, 2017 8:58 pm
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We don't want YOU back! Eurocrats crush Remainer's faint hopes of keeping Britain in bloc.


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Officials say a 20-month transition period would see Britain formally leave all the EU’s structures, including the Single Market and Customs Union, on December 31st 2020.

EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier has said this “makes sense” because that date also marks the end of the bloc’s current seven-year spending cycle, which Mrs May has pledged to honour.


Quote:
European negotiators said the UK’s timetable will be tough to achieve but is possible if London “engages” more on the key issues, including ECJ jurisdiction and cash payments.

One top diplomat said: “We will meet successively over the coming month. It’s not so much if we can do it by the first quarter, but if we can get the UK to engage in a way that makes that possible.”


http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/ ... Britain-UK

the ECJ will have no longer any jurisdiction within a sovereign country (the UK). but the whole matter revolves around cash payments. the EU are not getting any more, well not after 2020. they will have to pay to trade with the UK. WTO all the way with the EU.

but the date for leaving the EU makes sense to me as well. no deal from both sides is the best possible option. we can negotiate afterwards.
but i will still wait for the EU to hang on until the 59th minute of the 11 hour, thats their style of negotiating ...

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Thu Oct 26, 2017 9:33 am
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i thought i would post this. it about sums up how i feel but am unable to put it down in writing. i am not trying to rub salt into any open wound ...


Quote:
Robert Peston: 'I don’t appear to be living in the same Britain as much of the rest of the country'


Quote:
In his new book, WTF, broadcaster Robert Peston begins by writing an open letter to his late father Maurice Peston, a Labour peer and academic who had worked at the Treasury and had been special adviser to Roy Hattersley in the Callaghan years.

Dear Dad

I don’t regret for an instant yours and mum’s ideological commitment to comprehensive education. I am glad that unlike most of your Labour peers, you were not a hypocrite who decided that what was good enough for the country was not good enough for your kids; there was never a thought of sending us to fee-paying schools. And I had the time of my life at Highgate Wood School in Crouch End. The only serious tension in the school was between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots, or Bowie fans versus Bolan’s.

My teachers were working-class autodidacts, who did teacher training after national service without the benefit of a university education. The most important things they taught me were self-reliance, the ability to find out things by myself, and the love of learning as a good in itself. But what shocks me today is that an educational experiment that was all about encouraging social mobility and the sense that we’re all in it together has left me more out of touch with most of the country than would probably have been true of my family when I started school in 1971. I was certainly upwardly mobile, but just at the time when social mobility was ossifying. Forty years on, I spend almost all my time with people like me – many of whom went to those posh public schools you and I rejected, Dad – and people like us don’t appear to be living in the same Britain as much of the rest of the country.

I got a sense of my difference and distance from much of Britain when reporting during the EU referendum campaign. In Leicester, I assumed it was a collective wind-up when almost every Asian I met said to me that they would be voting for Brexit, in part because of their concerns about what they perceived to be excessive immigration (although nationally two-thirds of non-whites voted to remain). On the eastern seaboard, and in Kent and Essex, I met white families who said that the political establishment, the leadership of the Tories and Labour, ignored them and didn’t understand that the country they love was going to the dogs.

Nigel (Farage) would sort it out for them, they said – which is not a phrase heard often up North London.


Many of the English Brexiteers were the usual suspects, the traditional hardcore of anti-metropolitan, anti-immigration, anti-Europeans – white, male, retired homeowners, living in the country. But the more important new noise was coming from those on lower incomes, also predominantly white, whose living standards had been flat or declining for years. Here is the Brexit coalition of the older haves and the younger (but not young) have-nots: there were clear majorities for leaving the EU among those retired, the unemployed and those not working but looking after the home; and Brexit was backed both by those who own their homes outright, with no mortgage, and those in council homes and other social housing.

Victorious Leave was a coalition of those who feared they had lost control of their country and those who feared they had lost control of their livelihoods. They wanted an end to the humiliation of kowtowing to foreigners and an easing of the never-ending struggle to make ends meet. Boris, Gove and the leaders of Vote Leave promised all that. Whereas from the other side, the Stronger In camp, it was all dire warnings from David Cameron and George Osborne that things would only get sh***** if we left the EU. It was hope versus fear. And for millions who didn’t think their lives could get much worse – and who quite liked the idea of giving a bloody nose to the posh boys, Cameron and Osborne – hope inevitably won.

Osborne and Cameron believed that economics, the robust claim that Brexit would make us poorer, would always beat arguments that leaving would give us more control over our lives and laws, and – especially – over immigration. They didn’t realise that national self-determination would be such a powerful message to voters. And more importantly, after their years of austerity that were taking a heavy toll on vital public services, Cameron and Osborne had no credible response to the Leave campaign’s claim that Brexit could save the NHS by giving us control of the £350 million a week we send to Brussels – even though that claim was spurious, at best.

I suspect, Dad, that you, like me, would have said in the immediate aftermath of the vote that poorer people who voted for Brexit were cutting off their noses to spite their faces, that the lower growth in national income that would flow from Brexit would hurt them, the poorest and most vulnerable, the most: it would lead to fewer job opportunities for them, a further squeeze in their already depressed incomes, and an extension of austerity in public spending that would see their benefit payments cut further and a worsening in the vital services provided by schools and hospitals. And although Theresa May delayed by five years the moment when the budget was supposed to be balanced, austerity was not abandoned, so public services and benefits will remain under pressure for years.

But poor people who voted for Brexit were not wrong, in that it was probably the best opportunity they would ever have to give the establishment a proper kicking, for ignoring them, for forgetting they exist. During most of the previous thirty-odd years, Britain and most of the rich West had been run on a deceitful prospectus. Labour and Tories had argued, and even for the most part believed, that they were governing for the whole nation. But that was tosh. They were governing for themselves and for those who work in the City and the service sector in London and the South-East. They were governing for property owners. They were governing for a highly skilled, internationally mobile elite of corporate executives, bankers and entrepreneurs. This is not revolutionary rhetoric, it is observable fact, which cannot be ignored by left or right.

These three themes, the long-term neglect of depressed places and people, worsening inequality, and the perceived unfairness of financial globalisation, have brought us directly to where we are today. We are a divided country – in fact in the West, we are divided countries – at a crossroads, where hate and mistrust are more prevalent and more mainstream than at any time that I can recall, and with respective populations uncertain whether they can still rally and unite around a single flag and a set of basic, civilised values. Dad, we would not be in such a mess if your voice, and others like yours, warning that you can’t allow millions of people to be left behind and then expect them to feel grateful, had been heeded. I wish you were here to help me solve the puzzle of what needs to be done to restore the march of progress, rather than fatalistically accepting fracture and managing endemic failure.

You died in a great NHS hospital that was operating at dangerously close to full capacity, from multiple infections you picked up while in the hospital. It was the worst, the most tragic luck. Your doctors were magnificent – so diligent, so expert, so hard-working. Shortly before you died, you made characteristic light of your perilous condition, when you told the consultant physician that as an economist, you could see the marginal utility of trying to keep you alive was probably now less than the marginal cost. You broke my heart with that display of selflessness, humour and rationality – the qualities that defined you. They are also great British virtues. Which is why neither you nor I would ever give up on this country we love.

Dad, you would be shocked, appalled, by how fragile it all feels. So, tell me please, what the f*** do we do now?


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking ... t-country/

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Sun Oct 29, 2017 7:58 am
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Brilliant ^^

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Mon Oct 30, 2017 1:09 pm
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Interestingly that post is both for and against Brexit and for and against Europe.

Many of the themes, epsecially the last two call for a strengthening of unity and would be accomplished by bolstering up the EU, not walking away from it...

Given how the EU has, until now, kept the worst excesses of the UK parliament in check, I hate to think how much worse the UK would have been without its EU membership over the last several decades...

I grew up in the EU generation, I have only known the EU and I wouldn't want to live in a UK without it. (Which is good, as I don't currently live in the UK.)

On several occassions the UK government has tried to legislate things that are harmful to the UK population (but good for business and spies) and these policies and laws have been rebutted by the EU. Whilst the EU might get in the way on some things, it does seem to stop the worst excesses of the misuse of power and the corruption of society. If the UK had its way, the UK population would have less data protections than US citizens, which are considered among the worst in the "free world"...

I certainly saw the country going down hill when I was living in the UK. When I moved to Southampton, I could leave the French windows open when I went shopping and I often forgot to close the windows on the car, when I got home from work late. Back then, my neighbour would knock on the door the next morning and tell me that I had left the windows open. The CDs were still in the car, as was the radio and my coat and briefcase were still on the back seat and the chequebook still in the coat pocket... The last couple of years were worse and I started locking doors and closing windows when I went out and I used to make sure I locked the car.

I spoke with my old neighbour earlier this year, now the estate has been taken over by unemployed "scum" (his words) and they can't even leave the cars on the street at night without having tyres slashed, aerials ripped off or the car broken into. They wouldn't even thnk about leaving the French windows open now, if they went up stairs to the toilet, let alone left the house!

Likewise, my mother moved to Alton in the mid 90s. She used to walk the couple of hundred meters to the chippy or the Indian takeaway. By 2005, she was taking the car those few hundred meters, because she no longer felt safe walking there! This is in a sleepy little town in Hampshire, not some run down ghetto in a major city! You couldn't leave your car in the car park next to the flats at night, because the local youths used to race in the car park - the police only dealt with it half-heartedly, they would drive into one end of the car park with blues-and-twos going and let the racers scarper out the other end of the car park!!

In Germany there is still a strong sense of family and young people still learn a reasonable amount of discipline, at least the current young-adult generation. The next generation seems to be getting more violent and less respectful, which is what I observed in the late 1980s at school, each successive year was more violent, less disciplined and more anti-social than the previous year. There were obviously exceptions, but the majority of each successive year in the school seemed to worse than the one before.

At college, I had a death threat, because I caught somebody vandalising the pool tables to get free games (breaking the pocket over the release mechanism, breaking the glass around the chute etc.) and had him banned (I was the Common Room and Refectory Chairman on the Student Council). A flaming death threat because somebody was actually caught red-handed doing something wrong! I didn't take it seriously at first, but a friend of mine who knew the person who got banned warned me, that he carried a large knife around with him. Luckily nothing ever came of it, but that was a new experience for me.

Germany isn't that bad, yet, but I still see it moving that way, especially with the likes of AfD on the march.

In Germany, I still leave windows open when I go out. In Bavaria, I forgot to lock my car and after a week of not having used it, found it wasn't locked when I went to get into it.

I have a German friend who is a motorbike nut, he used to leave his garage unlocked and the keys in the ignition of his bikes (he has now moved and doesn't have a garage at the new place, so they are kept in a container on his work premises now). He gave his friends an open invitation, if they were in the area and wanted a ride, just remember to fill the tank when you brought the bike back (and a "you bend it, you mend it" policy to damage). He also never locked the patio door, so you could always walk in and make a coffee or grab a beer. I can't think of many large towns in the UK where you could get away with that.

I saw this move to violence and isolation sweep across the Atlantic from the USA to the UK when I was growing up and I see it moving across Europe now (and coming from the former Eastern Block), with central Western Europe being still relatively untouched, compared to the USA, UK and the former Soviet states.

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Mon Oct 30, 2017 5:22 pm
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Preparations to leave the EU have already cost the government half a billion pounds and will lead the headcount in Whitehall to balloon by at least 8,000 workers by the end of next year, the government has admitted.

The Brexit secretary, David Davis, told the cabinet there had been a “significant acceleration” in work to get Britain ready for its EU departure, with 300 programmes under way across the government.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... are_btn_tw

That‘s a huge amount of money, and there is absolutely no guarantee that we’ll be any better off once this process has been seen to completion. We also do not yet know what the final bill for this admin will be yet - but I’m expecting it will at least triple between now and March 2019.

Next, we’ll have people griping that we’re spending too much on foreign aid. Well, here’s the plughole of waste.

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