Off Topic The Politics Thread

[Willhoops]

Big Dom Raab has drawn the short straw this morning to make an absolute **** of himself on the news channels, insisting all guidance was followed which will be reassuring to people who had to miss funerals and weddings.

Yes and not getting to say a final goodbye to their loved ones, maybe if they’d taken wine and cheese with them all would have been ok.

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

Yes and not getting to say a final goodbye to their loved ones, maybe if they’d taken wine and cheese with them all would have been ok.

A small donation to the Tories would have sufficed.

 

[Stroller]

Where’s that from and who wrote it Strolls?

Have to say I don’t think this departure is especially important or damaging, just mildly amusing. As is obvious to everyone the demands on NI were a logical impossibility, that only the deluded would have pursued in the first place.

Simon Hoare, the Tory chair of the NI Select Committee, was on the radio yesterday. He said his committee had heard evidence from all sections of the NI community and business pretty continuously. Apparently many businesses are beginning to see the benefits of having a foot in both the U.K. internal market and the EU Single Market. He said that no section of the NI community had ever mentioned the ECJ as an issue. He did concede that there was a small ultra unionist faction which might have objections ‘but they have objections about a lot of things’.

It's by Sean O'Grady in the Independent.

Yes, it seems that NI is prospering from remaining in the Single Market.

 

[ELLERS]

Frost just been interviewed and said his decision had nothing to do with Brexit or NI. He said Boris and him have agreed all the way. He went on to say Boris was right man for job.
That’s put all those weird theories to bed.

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

Frost just been interviewed and said his decision had nothing to do with Brexit or NI. He said Boris and him have agreed all the way. He went on to say Boris was right man for job.
That’s put all those weird theories to bed.

If you believe all of that you’ll believe ****ing anything.

 

[ELLERS]

If you believe all of that you’ll believe ****ing anything.

Blimey you took your time. Following up my posts again.
Look right mate.

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

Blimey you took your time. Following up my posts again.
Look right mate.

Would have to be a long way right to see you.

 

[Willhoops]

Would have to be a long way right to see you.

Post of the year contender

 

[ELLERS]

Post of the year contender

I thought you would be on another forum Wills.
Actually I have seen better ones on the QPR match day threads…. But you wouldn’t have seen them.

 

[ELLERS]

Would have to be a long way right to see you.

Bless you don’t like it do you.

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

Bless you don’t like it do you.

Yeah I’m devastated a couple of old Tory apologists with some pretty thinly-veiled vulgar views aren’t all that keen on my politics.

 

[Willhoops]

I thought you would be on another forum Wills.

What do you mean by that?

 

[ELLERS]

Yeah I’m devastated a couple of old Tory apologists with some pretty thinly-veiled vulgar views aren’t all that keen on my politics.

Just keep looking right and you might see him one day.

 

[Willhoops]

I thought you would be on another forum Wills.
Actually I have seen better ones on the QPR match day threads…. But you wouldn’t have seen them.

Ah edited still not answered the question. No surprise… snide as ****.

 

[Goldhawk-Road]

An interesting analysis...

Frosty the “No Man” has gone. It ought to be no great surprise, though it’s a punchy story and adds to the sense of an administration disintegrating before our very eyes. As my colleague John Rentoul has pointed out, there was plenty of uncoded criticism of Johnson’s policies in Lord Frost’s last speech, and Frost can’t be alone in his despair at how the prime minister is running the country.

Odd, though, that there wasn’t much about Brexit in the now former Brexit minister’s resignation letter. Frost simply asserted “Brexit is now secure. The challenge for the government now is to deliver on the opportunities it gives us”, meaning the usual Thatcherite small-state stuff Johnson actually has little time for. “Secure” means basically unchanged from when the pair signed it off in 2019 and 2020.

Johnson, by return of email, kindly mentioned all the stuff Frost had done on Brexit, including, “crucially” that he “highlighted and sought to address the destabilising impact of the Northern Ireland Protocol”. Highlighting and seeking to address is a fairly meagre index of success; Frost had demanded: “Our preference would be to reach a comprehensive solution dealing with all the issues. However, given the gravity and urgency of the difficulties, we have been prepared to consider an interim agreement as a first step to deal with the most acute problems, including trade frictions, subsidy control, and governance. Such an agreement would still leave many underlying strains unresolved, for example those caused by diverging UK and EU rules over time.”

Such an interim agreement is exactly where it has ended up, and where it is going to end. It is in fact the final agreement.

Neither Frost nor Johnson, for obvious reasons, sought to highlight and address the fact that the radical renegotiation of the withdrawal agreement (WA) had not been the success they had hoped for. Perhaps it was mission impossible; perhaps Frost messed up; perhaps Johnson was just trying it on. But in any case Frost was a flop, and yet another fall guy for Boris Johnson, who has now got bored with it, really does want to “get Brexit done”, and has decided to settle largely on EU terms and get on with the urgent task of political survival.

In retrospect, it does look like Johnson signed the WA in bad faith, just to win the 2019 election and with every intention of unpicking it at a later date. Therefore, after Michael Gove’s polite ways had got him nowhere, he sent Frost over to Brussels to play the madman, and to see what he might get. It was an extension of the Dominic Cummings school of diplomacy – do things they don’t expect: disrupt expectations. So Frost threatened to collapse the UK-EU trade and cooperation treaty, revert to WTO terms and dare the EU to impose a hard border in Ireland. Article 16 was always about to be triggered, with grim consequences. It wasn’t (except by the EU, briefly).

The British strategy did not work. We were not smarter than them, after all. The Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) has not been scrapped or re-written; the European Court of Justice retains de facto, and arguably de jure, its role in adjudicating the laws of the single market that apply to Northern Ireland; the French have quietly been given more fishing licences; and the new checks and controls between Britain and Europe (if not Ireland) will be implemented in the New Year. The war is over, and guess who lost.

It was a failure of power politics, as well as tactics. We cannot get away from the fact that the EU is roughly eight times the size of Britain’s economy, and Britain relies on its exports to Europe more than Europe needs its exports to Britain, proportionately. So Frost’s grand Command Paper on the NIP from July, his elegant, learned speeches, his tough talk and his threats were basically ignored by Maros Sefcovic and Ursula von de Leyen, who can spot a bluffer when they see him waddle into the negotiating chamber.

Johnson, unsentimental at the best of times, has betrayed the Unionists and his own party again, because he can’t fight on so many fronts as he is currently faced with. So Frosty was ordered to throw the towel in, eat all his grandiloquent words and withdraw his extravagant threats, and generally left looking a bit of a numpty. As minister for Brexit, and with the renegotiation talks and Brexit effectively over, Frost was out of a job. For that reason too it was more than natural he would resign. Stating his authentic Conservative credentials on the way out may help his chances of getting a job with Johnson’s successor. A reasonable gamble.

It is a humiliation though, and for Britain. Apart from medicines shipments to Northern Ireland, some extra goodwill and a face-saving pretence that the present state of the negotiations is merely “interim”, the attempted renegotiation of a Brexit has been no more successful than any previous attempt by the British to backtrack on treaty commitments. Not the Brexit most hoped for, then.

Utter failure, rewarded with a peerage

I'll be honest, I'd sooner get my political news from the Beano than the Independent. Whoever decided to call the rag "Independent" obviously had a sharp sense of irony. The article is so obviously anti Brexit and anti Government, it could have been written by James O'Brien.

Negotiations on NI are far from at an end - ask the Unionists whom the EU will ultimately have to appease and accomodate if they don't want to face unrest. Let's see how Truss does.

Meanwhile on the top job, Rishi Sunak waits in the wings as a safe pair of hands.

 

[Stroller]

I'll be honest, I'd sooner get my political news from the Beano than the Independent. Whoever decided to call the rag "Independent" obviously had a sharp sense of irony. The article is so obviously anti Brexit and anti Government, it could have been written by James O'Brien.

Negotiations on NI are far from at an end - ask the Unionists whom the EU will ultimately have to appease and accomodate if they don't want to face unrest. Let's see how Truss does.

Meanwhile on the top job, Rishi Sunak waits in the wings as a safe pair of hands.

Do you believe that Frost resigned over Plan B covid restrictions then?

 

[Goldhawk-Road]

Do you believe that Frost resigned over Plan B covid restrictions then?

It seems likely he was unhappy with the way the government was going before that particularly with high taxes and the net-zero approach. I also think he may be positioning himself for a change of prime minister. He's known to be close to Sunak.

 

[Stroller]

It seems likely he was unhappy with the way the government was going before that particularly with high taxes and the net-zero approach. I also think he may be positioning himself for a change of prime minister. He's known to be close to Sunak.

So the Brexit Minister's resignation had nothing to do with Brexit.

 

[kiwiqpr]

A small donation to the Tories would have sufficed.

TorIes not interested in small donation's

 

[Goldhawk-Road]

So the Brexit Minister's resignation had nothing to do with Brexit.

He says not. Remainer newspapers will try to read in more. Truth is, Frost is the only one that knows.