I thought McDonnell had got assurances from the EU that there would be no obstacles to nationalisation? How could there be when most other EU countries have state-owned utilities and transport? Anyway, if we're out on our arse we can do as we please.
I detect that people are worn down by the entire debacle ... keep it up I say until the only idea left is remain and live
I detect that just as many will tire (if the haven’t already) of negotiations to the extent that, like me, they yearn for a hard Brexit and **** everybody.
Interesting comment on Today programme today by political commentator Bronwen Maddox who said that if the EU zealots in Brussels come back on May's speech with another brick wall, it will push her to a harder Brexit. Italian election tomorrow. I'd like to see a cat among the EU pigeons.
Mentioned before Goldie, that 5star (not the 80's band) were going to do well. I read up on it this week. Polls showing that the Eurosceptics will do the best. I bet they are quaking in their boots in Brussels. Can you imagine the 3rd biggest wanting out of the EU?
He's my MP. Has the personality of earthworm but isn't as intelligent. I cannot abide the man - sycophantic cock end.
Merkel gets her coalition. Funnily most Germans didn't want her yet she manages to get back in power...Good luck with that. Maybe the cynic in me thinks it was coincidence that it is announced the day of the Italian elections? https://www.ft.com/content/d4993360-1f81-11e8-a895-1ba1f72c2c11 I also see that the usual suspects are trying to use project fear in Italy as well. https://www.express.co.uk/news/worl...opean-Union-Juncker-LeU-Liberi-e-Uguali-video Desperate days for the EU me thinks especially with France demanding modernization. The main player Germany in a coalition. Italy about to vote in a Eurosceptic party. Not forgetting their biggest contributor leaving.
Every single thing about this “How much we will save on tariffs after Brexit” thing in The Sun the other day was completely wrong. So much so that The Sun chose to delete it off of their website though it still went out in the real paper. please log in to view this image From The Sun’s original online article about our post-Brexit tariff “savings”. Now I don’t just mean it was a little bit wrong. Everything was wrong in about a dozen ways. I mean you won’t believe how bad it was. Let’s start with using unrepresentative retail prices. Mozzarella-type (not even real mozzarella) cheese they have as £1.50 for 125g. Hmm.. you can get 125g Tesco Everyday Value Mozzarella for 47p. That’s the first thing. Then they’re using the retail price as a starting point instead of the price at import where tariffs are actually paid by the importer. So the savings are well inflated already. Then, as if that wasn’t stupid enough, they messed up doing basic arithmetic with percentages. If something costs £2 with a 50% tariff on it you don’t get back to what it was before the tariff addition by taking 50% off the final price. If your end price is £2, it would have been £1.33 before 50% was added to it not a pound (£1.33 +50% = £2). A 9-year old child would know that. Then there’s the fact that they chose a whole bunch of products that we get tariff free already for various reason. Viking Bikes are British so no tariff. Mozzarella comes from Italy and most ciggies sold in the UK are made in Poland & Germany, so no tariff imported from the EU. Then there’s the LG TV from South Korea. But we have a free trade deal with South Korea, so there’s no tariff there. Let’s look at the cigarettes for a moment. Now this is really bad. First of all they’re almost certainly coming from Poland as said earlier, but if not then they would have to be coming somewhere outside of the EU where we don’t have a free trade agreement and also from a country that isn’t one of the 47 developing countries that a have an exemption to all tariffs. So let’s assume that for a moment and carry on. Firstly they ignored the huge excise duty that the UK (not the EU) put on ***s. Plus the distributor’s costs and retailers margin, all of which are, in reality added to the cost after the tariff has been added. So If you take off the excise duty and margins and, I nearly forgot, the 20% VAT, you end up with an import cost of about £1.30 for a pack of 20 cigarettes. It’s on this price that you’d actually calculate and add the tariff. So 57.6% of this is about 75p. So on a packet of ***s costing £10.70 the potential saving (in fantasy land) would actually only be about 75p and not the £6.16 that The Sun said it would be. That’s quite a difference. But remember there’s no bloody tariff on them anyway! Well at least they got one thing right. Nike. It’s a US brand and we’ve not got a free trade deal with the States, so there would be tariffs on those trainers right? Well actually no, there wouldn’t. Nike have got subsidiaries and factories all over the world including 16 factories in Italy no less, 5 of them making footwear (http://manufacturingmap.nikeinc.com). So no tariff on them either. Basically nothing they picked would actually have a tariff on it. But I’m not even finished! They had butter on the list remember? For God’s sake, the UK makes loads of butter. We we can’t get rid of enough of the stuff. It’s cheaper than the stuff we import like the Danish stuff that Rutger Hauer puts on his spuds. He’s bloody Dutch, anyway. Why the heck do they get him to advertise Danish butter? Anyway, never mind that. Imported butter. Lurpak. That’s from the EU of course. Plus we get loads from Ireland too. Kerrygold right? EU. And British butter is cheaper than that too! We don’t need any more imported butter we’ve got loads. So no tariffs on butter, ok? Now wait a minute I know what you’re thinking .. Anchor Butter, it’s from New Zealand right? WRONG! The brand was bought by Arla back in 2012. It’s now made in Wiltshire. You don’t see those ads with the dancing cows that eat grass all year round anymore. But for some reason (nostalgia maybe?) despite Anchor no longer being New Zealand butter we do still import a bit from there. However according AHDB Dairy (a division of the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board), we’re importing about 96% less from New Zealand than we did 12 months months ago. You know why? Because we’ve got loads of it here already on our doorstep and it’s cheaper than the stuff shipped half-way across the world. We don’t import it from anywhere else outside of the EU. So no tariffs on butter. But let’s give the Sun a break here let’s look at their savings. Let’s ignore the prior maths catastrophe for a second and look at the tariff figure they used. So the tariff they had for butter was 50% .. bloody hell that sounds a bit much, I mean 57.6% for ***s is understandable perhaps but 50% on butter? Have they got that right? No! Of course they haven’t. It’s the bloody Sun! According to the tariff website at https://www.trade-tariff.service.gov.uk/trade-tariff/commodities/0405101120?country=NZ#import (I’ve become quite familiar with this site over the last few months) the tariff on New Zealand butter is 70 Euros per 100 kg. Hm, where the bloody hell did 50%? Come from? God knows. Anyway what does that tariff mean for our block of butter? Well a standard block is 250g. So that’s 4 blocks to a kilo and 400 blocks to 100kg. So to get the amount of tariff on a single block we need to divide 70 Euros by 400, which comes to 17.5 euro cents. That’s about 15p. 15p, not a pound as The Sun says but 15p. But of course this is a fantasy anyway because we don’t need to import any bloody butter from New Zealand when there’s loads on our doorstep. God, there’s more maths trouble but I’m kind of bored of it now. But you know what, The Sun getting stuff like this wrong is kind of what you’d expect isn’t it. But here’s the annoying thing. Who’s this on Twitter re-tweeting the Sun’s figures? Economists For Brexit. Who are they? That’s the group of “Economists” led by Patrick Minford. Minford and his team were the only economists in the world who predicted that Brexit would result in an economic benefit to the UK. I mean literally the only economists in the World. Everyone else thinks he’s off his rocker, but Jacob Rees Mogg, Michael Gove, Ian Duncan Smith, they think he’s brilliant. And here he is, or at at least someone tweeting on his behalf, endorsing this shocking awful maths catastrophe that bears no relation to reality. please log in to view this image I despair. https://medium.com/@jim_cornelius/e...fter-brexit-thing-in-the-sun-the-480a968d84c6
There are as always at least three possible interpretations. The author has less mathematical intelligence than an average 9 year old OR The Sun's investigative journalists have less intelligence than a flea OR both or either are just being economical with the truth.
H I hope you felt better after you posted that - as rants go its an absolute belter Agree with every word though.
It wasn't mine, I found it on the net and copied it (a little bit of playing Kiwi at his own game). I posted the link at the bottom of the piece, but I really should have made it clearer that it was a copy. It is a pretty good rebuttal though, isn't it?
something else from the net stroller can i assume its true as its from the guardian the british one sb while everyone is getting upset about trumps steel tarriffs what about our own EU imposes import duties of up to 73.7% on cheap Chinese steel UK Steel warns tariff on hot-rolled steel might not be high enough to discourage China from further dumping of cheap steel Graham Ruddick Fri 7 Oct 2016 18.00 BST Last modified on Tue 28 Nov 2017 13.31 GMT please log in to view this image A worker examines rolls of steel at a plant in Taiyuan, China. Photograph: VCG via Getty Images The European Union has slapped tariffs of up to 73.7% on Chinese steel after manufacturers were forced to cut jobs due falling prices and demand for the material amid an influx of cheap imports from Asia. Thousand of job have already been lost in the steel industry in Britain in the last year with thousands more at risk as the sector remains under pressure. Industry leaders have partly blamed the squeeze on the sector on China’s dumping of cheap steel in Europe as it struggles to find buyers for its products domestically. The EU has agreed to impose import duties of between 13.2% and 22.6% on Chinese hot-rolled steel, which is used in pipelines and gas containers, and 65.1% and 73.7% on heavy plates, which are used in civil engineering projects.
