Why Ossie? - I can think of many other criteria that are better ways of measuring how a country is performing and how this truly affects the population in terms of quality of life.
The article looks interesting - I've had a quick peruse and printed it off to read later in detail. It doesn't surprise me that May and Corbyn wanted to leave - Corbyn and McDonnell always seemed luke warm about the EU and were really only going through the motions for reasons of duty to the party and backside-covering - Theresa May's fence-sitting was for personal gain, she played her hand wonderfully but I wasn't much impressed at the time that she didn't nail her colours to the mast. However, I think her pitch on the EU since she has taken office has been right, and I hope she sees off all those like Clegg and Miliband in 2017 who want her to be explicit about forthcoming EU negotiations which will hand the likes of Michel Barnier and his deputy Sabine Weyand a clear advantage over the UK in the talks.
I wrote measure of the economy as it encompasses more than any other economic related measure than I can think of, and is widely recognised as one of the major measures of an economy, not a messure of "quality of life". Good beer, curries and the people are all positive factors of that in the UK, but not the economy!
And in other news... I'm reading that it is being proposed that people be required to produce id when going to the voting station in elections. Apparently that will help prevent voting fraud. I didn't realise that it was seen as a problem. Today, without any id, you get asked who you are and where you live so it can be recorded that you came to vote and you can be issued with a voting slip. I've no problem showing id on arrival to vote. All I can assume is that it prevents people from pretending they are someone else - someone who they know is unable to vote that day - and voting twice as a result. OK, I get that. Is there any other reason people know of? I'm much more interested in tightening up on postal voting. I don't want to deny the vote to people who cannot get to their registered constituency on voting day. I am very concerned how easy it is to live right next door to your voting station yet get postal votes for you, your spouse and those children living with you which are then filled in by the family patriarch on behalf of each one of them.
A little corner of France is set to pay tribute to Britain's decision to leave the EU after a town's mayor created a "Rue du Brexit". Julien Sanchez, a member of France's far right National Front (FN), suggested the name in order "to pay homage to the choice of the British people" following the referendum. The road will sit next to Rue Robert-Schumann and Avenue Jean-Monnet - regarded as founders of the EU
Festive politics competition. I'll buy a pint for anyone who can quote anything that Theresa May has said this year other than 'Brexit means Brexit' or the 'citizens of nowhere' crap. Or 'these leather trousers don't half make my gusset clammy'.
She definitely said "Better out than in!" when she first met Merkel after becoming PM. Those that ascribe this to the results of a binge on prawn madras and keema naan are just engaging in conjecture though. For my pint I'll either have a pint of lager (bland and non-descript in honour of our PM) or a pint of bitter (more akin to my feelings towards politics in 2016).
Ah, you didn't comment on that so I presumed you hadn't seen it. This was supposed to be a joke. Perhaps I should have added a smiley face.
Excellent programme on Radio 4 now, called The New World, Nothing but the Truth, about 'post truth'. Really interesting stuff about how we take 'facts' whatever they say, to reinforce our own values and opinions. Very good for self awareness and very even handed (though, ironically in the context of the programme, if you believe the BBC is biased, you won't change your mind). Core conclusion is that I can't really trust what I think. And neither can you. Just because we like a particular story doesn't mean it's true. Personal conclusion is that May's calls for 'unity' and promises to do stuff that will make us all happy (besides being fatuous) are inevitably doomed to fail.
The social media explosion has been a big factor in this. People forming groups with like-minded others that exclude contrary opinions, or 'facts' that don't fit their biases.
Have a listen to the programme mate. It's like a very gentle Adam Curtis thing. There was an interesting bit on 'migration' of opinion, so people who share the same basic values tend to live in the same places. They promised maps on the programme website, but I can't find them. Even I could see the bias in that research though. People who naturally lean towards imagination and comfort with ambiguity were called 'open'. Those who favoured tradition and certainty 'neurotic'. Great comments from a very right wing, true conservative Republican congresssman. He had been in Congress for 12 years, but changed his mind about climate change, and promptly massively lost the party primary for the next election. As he pointed out, there is nothing party political about climate change, but the narrrative has been told from the liberal perspective. He was a denier simply because Al Gore was a believer. Conservatives will not buy a liberal story, and vice versa. He changed when his son urged him to, went to Antarctica etc, and it cost him his job.
