Reply With QuoteSo the prices of foodstuffs imported from the EU are exactly the same in the Co op tonight as they were last night. And the shelves are as full as normal. Where's all the apocalyptic scenes we were promised?Originally Posted by orkneycadian
1K.Orger
Why wouldn't they be able to balance the books, pray tell? Do you really consider it acceptable that Westminster can dump Welfare Payments onto the SG, with no extra money to pay for them...just to stick it to those of us who think Scotland isn't too wee, too poor or too stupid to be independent and allow people like you to gloat because they have manipulated devolution to prove you were right all along and we can't manage?
Seriously.....do you really think they haven't costed out the payments due to be devolved?
Why do you not assume that they are going to be getting more of Scotland's taxes back to pay for the new responsibilities? In my naivety, I certainly assumed that the assignation of some of our VAT receipts, the first 10p of the standard rate of VAT receipts and the first 2.5p of the reduced rate, which started the transition in April 2019 and should be in place fully by April 2020 was intended to cover the extra responsibilities being handed over to the SG from April 2020 onwards? But obviously you know better.
Banned
So the prices of foodstuffs imported from the EU are exactly the same in the Co op tonight as they were last night. And the shelves are as full as normal. Where's all the apocalyptic scenes we were promised?
1K.Orger
Just have a brexit meal at the park hotel.
Lovely it was
.Orger
You do realise that things aren't going to fully kick in till the end of 2020. We are in a transition period at the moment, so we haven't fully left the EU behind just yet. (another fight in an empty hoose scenario here, eh?)
.Orger
It takes a very peculiar mindset to gloat over something not happening when it was specifically designed by legislation not to happen and you knew it wasn't going to happen but you thought you would pretend it was going to happen just to allow you to gloat.
Empty hoose, right enough.
Last edited by Corky Smeek; 02-Feb-20 at 13:08.
Banned
Ah, so now the prophecies of doom are being postponed until we see what the trade deal negotiations will bring? Not quite what the earlier predictions were based on then? OK, that's fine. We'll stand down, and be ready for Hogmanay, just in case.
Wonder what all that folk outside Holyrood were doing on Friday night? Guess they were 11 months too early.
1K.Orger
Funny really, all this jingoism and gloating, but we are now less sovereign than we were before 11pm last night.....because we are in a transition 11 months, still trying to get the EU to do what they are told to do (ie let us have all the perks without any of the rules) but still have to obey the rules some of us hate (for no real reason) for the next 11 months, and pay money for the privilege, but have no voice at all in the EU Parliament.
Maybe in the next 11 months Unionists and Brexiteers will understand what life in the UK has been like for Scotland for at least the past decades when we stopped playing the Westminster game of near buggins turn elected dictatorships.
.Orger
Well written article on the power of the people. Brexit based rather than Scottish independence but may equally apply in the future I suppose.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics...7pKcxzqTZquAcM
1K.Orger
It would maybe be interesting if it wasn't behind a paywall.
.Orger
That's odd, I didn't pay, just clicked a link sent to me. I'll see if it will let me copy paste content. See below
Last edited by Goodfellers; 03-Feb-20 at 16:54.
.Orger
Brexit has taught us a lot about ourselves – and that national sovereignty really does matter to the people
As a boy, I used to pore over an illustrated Edwardian book called Battles of the 19th Century. One essay in it, about Waterloo, stays with me. It reprinted the headlines of a contemporary French newspaper reporting Napoleon’s escape from Elba in 1815 and his subsequent march on Paris.
The first headline was “The cannibal has left his den”, the second, “The Corsican wolf has landed”, and so on. As the escapee marched successfully north, the tone of the headlines began to change: “Bonaparte is advancing with great rapidity, but he will not set foot inside the walls of Paris”. Then it was “The Emperor has arrived at Fontainebleau”. The last proclaimed: “His Imperial Majesty Napoleon entered Paris yesterday, surrounded by his loyal subjects”.
On Thursday night, I read out the full list of headlines. The occasion was a merry dinner, skillfully assembled by this paper’s columnist Allison Pearson, of about 60 journalists, writers, historians, boulevardiers who have consistently argued for Brexit over these long years – the few who had spoken up for the many. We celebrated absentees who had done so much to persuade the British people to vote Leave, such as Guy Verhofstadt and Jean-Claude Juncker. We even had grace from a distinguished Catholic priest, whom I shall not name lest Pope Francis excommunicate him.
My 1815 comparison was with media coverage in Britain from the moment Boris Johnson resigned from Theresa May’s Cabinet in July 2018, through to when he became Prime Minister last July, won the general election in December and accomplished Brexit at 11pm last night. What began as media execration shifted subtly to grudging admiration and, in some quarters, to adulation.
It would have been unkind (though fun) to point out the agonies of those newspapers which have chopped and changed over the period in question or of broadcasters whose “reality checks” were swiftly overtaken by reality itself. So I refrained. But it is interesting to reflect on what we have learnt – some much more slowly than others – from the process which began when David Cameron called the referendum on our membership of the European Union four years ago this month.
Obviously, we learnt that some claims made by Remainers were untrue. There was no instant economic collapse, no mass exodus, not even a recession. They said that no deal better than Theresa May’s could be obtained and Mr Johnson was the last person capable of getting anything. When, all the same, he did get a better deal, they said that Parliament would not vote in favour of it. All this was wrong.
Yet, over this four-year, bitter though almost completely non-violent civil war, I would argue that it is not really about Brexit that we have learnt much more. Even now, we cannot confidently state when we shall get a trade deal or how good it will be. We may predict Britain’s success or its humiliation, but neither side can know the truth. Our inability accurately to foresee the eventual outcomes should restrain Leavers from triumphalism and Remainers from suicide.
What we can say is that we have learnt a lot more about ourselves. Despite all the genuine pain, we have learnt something to our advantage. We have learnt, which we had already suspected, that our elites are in a poor state. Large swathes of them really did think – perhaps think still – that EU membership was a subject too difficult for the mass of voters to understand and therefore to vote on.
Worse, we have learnt that those elite views were held not only by unelected bureaucrats, judges, university professors etc, but also by a large number of people – MPs – who live by the ballot box. If MPs think voters cannot be trusted with deciding under whose authority they should be ruled, do they think the same about voters’ right to elect them?
The most shocking gap that opened up after the referendum and – even more so – after Theresa May’s botched general election in 2017, was that between voters and Parliament. Eight-four per cent of the voters in that election backed parties (Labour and Conservative) who had promised to get Brexit done. Yet some Tory MPs and most Labour ones then proceeded to try to make Brexit undoable. From this flowed procedural outrages, led by the Speaker, John Bercow, which decided to chuck away our key convention that we must be governed through the House of Commons. Mr Bercow replaced it with the idea that we must be governed by the House of Commons. This quickly meant that the country could barely be governed at all. Hundreds of MP set themselves up as a special caste deliberately unresponsive to the people who elect them, indeed deliberately blocking what those people had decided. This had not happened before in the era of universal suffrage. It seemed briefly as if the parliamentary system which Brexiteers usually extol had broken down.
These were uncomfortable lessons to learn about many of the people who run this country, but happier lessons came from the public’s response. Three times after the referendum itself – in the 2017 election, in the European elections of 2019, and in the general election in December – electors had the chance to go back on their original decision. They never did so. Politicians who had tried to frustrate Brexit, most notably every single candidate who had left the Conservatives or Labour in the name of Remain, was punished at the ballot box.
There is little evidence that this was because of increased support for Leave – although Leave held up astonishingly well against the BBC/Labour/Liberal Democrat/SNP and Green propaganda barrage. It was more because voters showed a clear understanding of their own constitutional function.
If you are asked to decide something by voting, the majority of them seemed to think, your decision must be implemented. When MPs told such voters to vote again – and tried to make it sound nice by calling it a “People’s Vote” – the majority of the electorate was not flattered: “We’ve told you already,” they said. Their way of putting a stop to all this was to vote for the Tories last December. It is fascinating that many of the most excluded places in England and Wales (different in Scotland) did this with the most gusto.
Two things follow which will help us from this day forward. The first is that, almost alone in the whole of Europe, a mainstream political party has channelled the growing popular revolt. The oldest, wiliest party in the world – the Conservatives – belatedly but successfully gave a lead. So Britain has not suffered a traumatic collapse of political order.
The second is that 17.4 million voters changed the subject. It had suited European elites for too long to ensure that the main sound in modern politics is the steady tap of the counting house. People like Philip Hammond simply could not believe that people ever vote except for economic reasons. Since the EEC referendum of 1975, the word “sovereignty” had been pushed to the edge of discourse, declared dead or irrelevant, its loss soothed by a stream of money. This was to conceal the fact that sovereignty does matter and was deliberately being passed away from us to a centralised European power.
The ruled have given the rulers no end of a lesson in our country’s special subject – parliamentary democracy. So now it is much stronger than when that great word Brexit was born.
1K.Orger
Sorry you had to C&P it, Goodfellers...because it wasn't interesting. It was just another Brexiteer justifying the implementation of an advisory vote without a section 30 order. It will be very interesting to see, if it comes to the crunch, and there is an "advisory" vote on independence with that level of a margin, if the powers-that-be in westminster will be so keen to honour it, given we have even had people on here suggesting that 70% of the registered vote was what would be necessary for independence to prevail.
The Sovereignty in the UK lies with Parliament...not with the government, and Bercow was quite correct to insist that more MPs than the Tory/DUP representatives should have input into that or any decision...particularly in a situation in which the vote was so close and more than a quarter of the registered voters didn't vote at all. King Henry VIII powers have no place in a Parliamentary Sovereignty or, if it comes to that, in any Government which purports to be democratic.
Unfortunately we are now blessed, in your eyes, or cursed, in mine, with a Government with a majority which can and will allow it to do exactly what it wants, because there is no mechanism to stop them...and a lot of damage can be done to the UK and its citizens in five years. The UK now is more divided than it has ever been, even more so than at the time of or since the first independence referendum, and under this Tory Government, I see no propect of that division being healed.
Banned
How ironic that the doomsday predictions that were being jokingly bandied about in relation to us leaving the EU turned out to be more relevant to staying in the EU rather than leaving it. It is after all, freedom of movement that has got us into this mess. Freedom of movement of course applies equally to virii, as it does to people. It's thanks to that that the panic buying actually happened, that the pound took a hit and that rather unpredictably, we find ourselves facing the worst economic depression for 300 years.
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