1. #19501
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    Barnier told the 27 ambassadors that the deadline would pass last Friday. End of negotiations.

    He was immediately ordered back to negotiations, which are continuing?

  2. #19502
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    Quote Originally Posted by Troy View Post
    There appear to have been several climbdowns today by the UK but not enough for a deal yet.
    Is that a Guardian opinion or your own, or do you have credible links to supporting Facts?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Switch View Post
    the deadline would pass last Friday. End of negotiations.
    4 more years.

    4 more years.

    4 more years.

    .........

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    Four years ago when the Kipper/Tory right wing loonies were spouting their propaganda and dribbling rhetoric they criticised the EU because, inter alia, it was a socialist experiment among Eurocrats subsidising industries and undermining competition. Total trash of course but I make the point because now the rabid Brexit numpties are refusing to sign a deal because......wait for it..... they will not be told by the EU they cannot subsidise British industries. Honestly, you simply couldn't write it.

    Naturally, the lower end lumpen peasant English classes do not understand this little anomaly in the Brexit playbook for Kipper fuckwits.

    And that's the crux of this godawful mess, it is the construct of charlatan rabble rousing tenth rate Tory right wing loons leading a credulous rump of bone-achingly stupid English too fucking moronic to realise the degree of their own idiocy. They make Alabaman redneck Trump monkeys look positively intelligent.

  5. #19505
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    Quote Originally Posted by Seekingasylum View Post
    Four years ago when the Kipper/Tory right wing loonies were spouting their propaganda and dribbling rhetoric they criticised the EU because, inter alia, it was a socialist experiment among Eurocrats subsidising industries and undermining competition. Total trash of course but I make the point because now the rabid Brexit numpties are refusing to sign a deal because......wait for it..... they will not be told by the EU they cannot subsidise British industries. Honestly, you simply couldn't write it.

    Naturally, the lower end lumpen peasant English classes do not understand this little anomaly in the Brexit playbook for Kipper fuckwits.

    And that's the crux of this godawful mess, it is the construct of charlatan rabble rousing tenth rate Tory right wing loons leading a credulous rump of bone-achingly stupid English too fucking moronic to realise the degree of their own idiocy. They make Alabaman redneck Trump monkeys look positively intelligent.
    No comment on your favorite civil servant being told by the EU to get back to the negotiations, which he personally has declared, over.
    Its all so difficult for him, because he’s a specious tosser, just like you.

  6. #19506
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    A rare bit of navel gazing from the Grauniad:-


    Hard remainers wouldn't accept a soft Brexit. Now we're all paying the price

    Owen Jones

    Anything other than stopping Brexit was written off as both disastrous for the country and morally untenable

    There are now only two certainties when it comes to Brexit: either Britain and the EU will sign off the hardest possible mutually agreed rupture, or the self-inflicted disaster of no deal will become a reality. None of this wasinevitable. Don’t listen to me; heed the words of Peter Mandelson instead, who has declared that this is “the price the rest of us in the pro-EU camp will pay for trying, in the years following 2016, to reverse the referendum decision rather than achieve the least damaging form of Brexit”. Much too late. The price that will be paid over a generation or more due to a failure to unite around a compromise is steep indeed.


    Hard remainers wouldn't accept a soft Brexit. Now we're all paying the price | Brexit | The Guardian

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    Double
    Last edited by helge; 09-12-2020 at 01:08 AM.

  8. #19508
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    The co-chairs of the EU-UK Joint Committee – European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič and the UK Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the Rt Hon Michael Gove – yesterday held a political meeting to address the outstanding issues related to the implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement. Ensuring that the Withdrawal Agreement, in particular the Protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland, is fully operational at the end of the transition period, i.e. as of 1 January 2021, is essential. The Protocol protects the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement in all its dimensions, maintaining peace, stability and prosperity on the island of Ireland.
    Following intensive and constructive work over the past weeks by the EU and the UK, the two co-chairs can now announce their agreement in principle on all issues, in particular with regard to the Protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland.
    An agreement in principle has been found in the following areas, amongst others: Border Control Posts/Entry Points specifically for checks on animals, plants and derived products, export declarations, the supply of medicines, the supply of chilled meats, and other food products to supermarkets, and a clarification on the application of State aid under the terms of the Protocol.
    The parties have also reached an agreement in principle with respect to the decisions the Joint Committee has to take before 1 January 2021. In particular, this concerns the practical arrangements regarding the EU's presence in Northern Ireland when UK authorities implement checks and controls under the Protocol, determining criteria for goods to be considered “not at risk” of entering the EU when moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, the exemption of agricultural and fish subsidies from State aid rules, the finalisation of the list of chairpersons of the arbitration panel for the dispute settlement mechanism so that the arbitration panel can start operating as of next year, as well as the correction of errors and omissions in Annex 2 of the Protocol.
    In view of these mutually agreed solutions, the UK will withdraw clauses 44, 45 and 47 of the UK Internal Market Bill, and not introduce any similar provisions in the Taxation Bill.
    Next steps

    This agreement in principle and the resulting draft texts will now be subject to respective internal procedures in the EU and in the UK. Once this is done, a fifth regular meeting of the EU-UK Joint Committee will be convened to formally adopt them. This will take place in the coming days and before the end of the year.


  9. #19509
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    Quote Originally Posted by Switch View Post
    Is that a Guardian opinion or your own, or do you have credible links to supporting Facts?
    See above...It was not public when I posted but it is now.

  10. #19510
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    Quote Originally Posted by Troy View Post
    See above...It was not public when I posted but it is now.
    Can you explain how this amounts to “several climb downs by the UK”?

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    Quote Originally Posted by helge View Post
    This agreement in principle and the resulting draft texts will now be subject to respective internal procedures in the EU and in the UK. Once this is done,
    Brexit - It's Still On!-w91eaoh-jpg

    Déjà vu ?

    Quote Originally Posted by OhOh View Post
    4 more years.

    4 more years.

    4 more years.

    .........
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails Brexit - It's Still On!-ducks-row-png  

  12. #19512
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    Production at Honda's Swindon plant has been halted due to a shortage of parts.

    The facility produced just under 110,000 cars last year, but will be closing permanently next year.

  13. #19513
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    Quote Originally Posted by cyrille View Post
    Production at Honda's Swindon plant has been halted due to a shortage of parts.

    The facility produced just under 110,000 cars last year, but will be closing permanently next year.
    And??


    Honda has confirmed it will close its Swindon car plant in 2021, with the loss of about 3,500 jobs. ... Honda said the move was due to global changes in the car industry and the need to launch electric vehicles, and it had nothing to do with Brexit.

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    And nobody but a dunce would believe it's nothing to do with BREXIT.

    Japanese diplomacy came with the deal.

    Just one mighty coincidence?

    Nah, and you conveniently missed the first part.

  15. #19515
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    Quote Originally Posted by cyrille View Post
    And nobody but a dunce would believe it's nothing to do with BREXIT.

    Japanese diplomacy came with the deal.

    Just one mighty coincidence?

    Nah, and you conveniently missed the first part.
    Time you stopped pretending to be a dyed in the wool, hair shirt socialist.

  16. #19516
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    pretending to be a dyed in the wool, hair shirt socialist.
    he was educated for free and had his health cared for for free thanks to the uk taxpayer before jumping ship and legging it for a tax free perk filled posting abroad.

    what could be more socialist than that.

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    Quote Originally Posted by cyrille View Post
    And nobody but a dunce would believe it's nothing to do with BREXIT.


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    ^ So why ask the question?


    ad hom, puerility and shooting messengers is all you brexiters have - looking back at the posts here it's been this way for quite some time now.


    And 'taxexile' really was an unfortunate choice of username, wasn't it.

  19. #19519
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    The English morons have surrendered already to EU strict demands and conditions

    so much for being independant and free on 1.1.2021

    we OWN your ass !!!

  20. #19520
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    ^ Boris dilemma - betrayal or chaos..

  21. #19521
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    Quote Originally Posted by lom View Post
    Boris dilemma - betrayal or chaos..
    Don't be so hard on Boris

    All he wants is a statue...next to Churchill's

  22. #19522
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    Quote Originally Posted by sabang View Post
    A rare bit of navel gazing from the Grauniad:-


    Hard remainers wouldn't accept a soft Brexit. Now we're all paying the price

    Owen Jones

    Hard remainers wouldn't accept a soft Brexit. Now we're all paying the price | Brexit | The Guardian
    Owen Jones lol


  23. #19523
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    Our time in the EU was a calamity for Britain and a disaster for Europe.


    As de Gaulle recognised, it would have been better for everyone if we had never joined the European Union

    ALLISTER HEATH
    9 December 2020 • 9:30pm
    Allister Heath

    Charles de Gaulle was right: Britain should never have joined the EU. Thanks to his turbulent years at Four Carlton Gardens, he understood us better than our own establishment ever did.

    We stood apart, a free-trading, Atlanticist and global island with a very different conception of Europe’s future. We were never going to fit into the Jean Monnet model of EU state-building or even his own more nation-centric version, De Gaulle argued when he gloriously vetoed our application twice during the Sixties. And so it turned out. Our approach was exactly what Brussels was seeking to stamp out.

    Why didn’t we listen? Why did we waste 47 frustrating years as ambivalent members? To future generations, the opportunity cost will look staggering. If anything, Le Général underestimated how hard it would be for the UK to become European: he thought we would have to undergo a fundamental transformation of our economics and politics. He assumed we would never try; but in fact our political classes, declinists desperate for a post-imperial outlet, did their best, trashing our political system and the democratic compact between people and government. In the end, even that wasn’t enough.

    The reality is that the EU has never been about genuinely free trade: it has always been about the construction of a new state, supposedly to avoid war. That meant bringing down internal borders and harmonising, while erecting a Zollverein. The British couldn’t understand this: whereas we saw a liberalising and pro-competition programme, it was actually an attempt at using internal commerce as a vehicle for a political project.

    To use Hayek’s terminology, the vision was constructivist. One assumption was that trade was a top-down exercise, permitted and promoted by bureaucrats, rather than a spontaneous, truly international process. Another was that whoever controlled money was the true sovereign, and therefore that the EU should have its own currency.


    We will never fully recover from our long, debilitating membership of the EU. Historians have a term for this: it’s called “path dependence” or “branching histories”. The past matters and changes us irrevocably.

    It’s not just that our destiny would have been radically different had we never joined or had we left in the Eighties: all important periods in our history leave an indelible mark. We still drive on Roman roads, and Londinium remains our capital; post-Brexit, we will continue to use kg and cm. Just as critically, every important period of history has only ever ended at great cost. Did Eurosceptics fully grasp the costs of disengagement from the EU? No. Do we still believe that Brexit is the way forward regardless? Absolutely.

    On economics, Neil Kinnock had the last laugh. We have absorbed swathes of the European social-democratic model, not least high minimum wages: the Vote Leave agenda was very different to the Bruges one outlined by Margaret Thatcher in 1988.

    In one of the most powerful speeches of the 20th century, she argued that “we have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels”. Yet we are now leaving, and the size of the state is unlikely to shrink, even if competitive pressures will, in time, incentivise a pro‑growth supply-side agenda. The EU’s protectionism towards any economy it doesn’t control – rationalised as “defending the integrity of the single market” by inane “trade experts” – is forcing us to hire customs agents.

    The precious common law heritage that helped ensure the rise of freedom and the blossoming of the Industrial Revolution has been permanently impaired. Yes, the Government will roll back the European Court of Human Rights (a non-EU institution) and other excesses, but decades of membership of the EU’s legal order have changed the legal profession. Britain as a whole has become blander, less unique and less eccentric, our approach more Cartesian and rationalistic.

    EU membership has also accelerated the decline of Scottish and Northern Irish unionism. Yet while the end of the UK would be a high price to pay for regaining our self-government, Brexit would really just be a casus belli, rather than the primary driver of any rupture.

    Some of the permanent changes from our time in the EU were hugely positive, of course: we will benefit enormously from the millions of hard-working Europeans who have made Britain their home. The City was turbocharged after the euro launched in 1999, and its dominant position will now be very hard to undermine.

    But it’s not just that we should never have joined: the EU should have kept us out for its own good. Yes, in the short term it benefited from having us. We handed over billions in transfers. Its mercantilists saw us as a captive market. Its ideologues believed our membership proved Europe was the EU, the legitimate continent-wide hegemon, the successor to a great civilisation. This fooled them into thinking they could expand without dilution, absorbing Eastern Europe.

    That fatal conceit means that the EU project is now in crisis. The acquis is no longer guaranteed, at least when it comes to territory. More countries would have to leave before full centralisation (one way of making the euro viable) is possible, but that is anathema to Brussels.

    UK membership also served as a crutch for the EU. We were a bridge to America, a decentralising influence, a reformist force, especially in trade in services and agriculture. Some countries used to hide behind us, knowing we would defend markets and national interests. All of that is gone, and yet the EU has refused to adjust. It will become more socialist and anti-innovation, accelerating its decline. There will no longer be any counterweight to the Franco‑German axis. Brussels remains infantilised geopolitically, dependent on US subsidies to Nato, sucking up to Russia, China and Iran.

    Brexit will be a positive shock for Britain, jolting the country out of its stupor; but it has left the EU reeling with disbelief, its central convictions overturned, its certainties blown to smithereens. Like all bureaucratic dinosaurs, it cannot adapt, even to an extinction-level event. Why didn’t it listen to de Gaulle?

    Our time in the EU was a calamity for Britain and a disaster for Europe
    as i have been saying all along, the sooner we are free of them the sooner we can take the hit, apply the salve, deal with the pain, reboot recover and regain our independence. its the only way.
    Last edited by taxexile; 10-12-2020 at 04:06 PM.

  24. #19524
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    The rising euro is slow torture for Europe's Covid-battered economy, and the ECB can't stop it .


    The ECB’s trade-weighted euro index is just shy of an all-time high despite Europe suffering the most economic damage of any region globally

    AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD
    9 December 2020 • 8:42pm
    Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

    The ECB is out of usable ammo and faces a near impossible task.


    The Ninth Circle of currency hell is a rising exchange rate when you are in recession, in deflation, and your central bank is running near empty.

    Japan knows this torture well. The European Central Bank’s Mario Draghi tried heroically to save euroland from a similar fate, but his magic came too late and the underlying mercantilist structure of monetary union defeated him. Covid-19 is closing the trap.

    The ECB’s trade-weighted euro index is just shy of its all-time high. It has jumped 7pc this year even though Europe has suffered the greatest economic damage of any region in the world, and is more or less doomed to a third wave of the pandemic before the EU gets around to vaccine deployment.

    This is procyclical currency tightening into the teeth of a double-dip downturn.

    The euro surge since 2015 has been largely due to crashing currencies in emerging markets, and the post-Brexit plunge in sterling. The new twist is the sliding dollar.

    Split government in Washington is a formula for austerity-lite. A Republican Senate - should this be confirmed by the Georgia run-off elections - will not fund Joe Biden’s green rearmament plan.

    There will be no repeat of Ronald Reagan’s budget-busting neo-Keynesian expansion in the early 1980s, which sucked in foreign capital and propelled the dollar higher.

    The Federal Reserve will instead keep its foot to the floor on quantitative easing. It will keep flooding the world with dollar liquidity and will keep signalling easy money into the 2020s.





    A dollar bear market is now underway in tooth and claw. Calvin Tse from Citigroup says the dollar may drop by a further 20pc as foreign funds loaded with US assets take out currency hedge positions, reinforcing the downward spiral.

    He sees a replay of the secular dollar slide in the early 2000s after China joined the WTO and drove a crescendo of globalisation, with the difference this time that much of the impact could be “front-loaded”.

    That is an absolutely ghastly prospect for the ECB as it meets this week to map out its monetary strategy for 2021 and decides what to do about core inflation hitting a record low of 0.2pc and heading for zero soon.


    “Euro appreciation is a deflationary shock for the eurozone at a very tricky time,” said Robin Brooks, chief economist for the Institute of International Finance. “Every ECB forecast projects that core inflation will return to target but it never happens. Instead there has been a shocking level of stagnation.”

    The eurozone’s ideology of ‘export-or-die’ and its hair-shirt fiscal regime - Stability Pact, Fiscal Compact, etc - combine to produce a structural current account surplus near 3pc of GDP. This addiction to surpluses is a recipe for a higher currency over time.

    Switzerland counters its strong-franc headache by vast purchases of global assets. This has reached a point where the balance sheet of the Swiss National Bank has ballooned to 130pc of GDP and its foreign holdings have hit $1 trillion, rivalling the Abu Dhabi wealth fund. It even owns $8bn of shares in Apple.

    But Switzerland may soon be listed by the US Treasury as a currency manipulator. The eurozone is certainly too big a beast to play this game. Washington would retaliate immediately. “The world is in a low-grade currency war,” said Mr Brooks.

    This leaves the ECB almost powerless.

    Eurozone interest rates at minus 0.5pc have reached the ‘reversal rate’ where further cuts do more harm than good. Complicated ‘tiering’ measures shield banks from further collateral damage but that is a blunt way to inject economic stimulus, and it does not hold down the exchange rate. “The ECB can’t do much about euro appreciation without shooting itself in the foot,” said Citigroup.

    Markets are expecting another €500bn of pandemic QE on Thursday. The new mantra is ‘duration’. The focus is on keeping the intervention going for longer - to back-stop Club Med, though nobody admits it - rather than trying to pull off another shock-and-awe lift to confidence.

    Gilles Moëc, a former Banque de France official and now at AXA, says there is a “hard limit” to QE volumes and it is not far away. A ruling by the European Court effectively forbids purchases above 50pc of any country’s debt stock. Deviation from the capital key (ie GDP share) is a legal minefield and the German Verfassungsgericht is watching like a hawk.

    Mr Moëc said the ECB has become adept at deploying its pocket bazooka for maximum effect, leaving investors guessing which bonds are likely to be bought. But again, there are limits. “We should not be under any illusion about the central bank’s remaining capacity,” he said.

    There is another snag. This QE is compressing yields and shielding states that are essentially insolvent. Global funds are rushing in to exploit a few extra basis points of yield and capital gains from Club Med debt as long as this lasts. The buying stampede has driven bond yields below zero on maturities out to five years in Italy, and ten years in Portugal. It is also are pushing up the euro exchange rate as a side-effect.

    The ECB has shut down the price signals across the spectrum of sovereign and corporate bonds, and in doing so it is preventing a cascade of defaults. This maybe a necessary evil right now but it does not constitute meaningful economic stimulus.

    Only fiscal expansion can achieve that in these circumstances. It is not happening. The ECB says eurozone fiscal policy will be “contractionary” in 2021.

    The Recovery Fund is largely an irrelevance at this point. It does not kick in until late 2021 and then runs for six years. Italian budget documents show that only half of the money flowing to Italy (which Italy also pays for as a net contributor) is ‘accretive’. The rest displaces spending already planned. It merely switches the source of borrowing.

    In short, the rising euro is tightening macroeconomic policy in the midst of a recession, and there is no monetary or fiscal stimulus to offset this.


    For the world economy as a whole, a weak dollar is pure nectar. It lowers debt costs on $13 trillion of global offshore liabilities denominated in US currency and acts as a form of ‘risk-on’ rocket fuel through a complex interplay of derivative contracts.

    The Bank for International Settlements said this week that emerging market dollar debt has tripled to 10pc of GDP since 2008, leaving the bloc highly-leveraged to dollar moves. A big chunk of this money is raised on three-month maturities (because it is cheaper) and has to be rolled over continuously. The BIS calculates that a 1pc rise in the dollar shaves 0.3pc off economic growth for these countries.

    The King Dollar reign of the last eight years pushed these countries into a depression (ex-China). Now the effect may be working in reverse. A weaker dollar is a form of global QE. It points to another emerging market and commodity supercycle along the lines of the pre-Lehman glory days. At least that is the Goldman Sachs theory.

    The problem for Europe is that pain of a surging euro will hit long before the benefits of global recovery feed through. It raises the likelihood of deep scarring and hysteresis from the Pandemic.

    Once emerging markets do start sucking in European imports, it will help Germany and Holland much more than Italy or France due to their different export gearing and market niche.

    The northern hawks on the ECB’s Governing Council will demand an end to further bond purchases. Once speculative funds begin to sniff this, there will be a sudden stop for Club Med debt markets.

    However you slice it, there is no way out of the fundamental conundrum. No monetary policy can be designed to bridge the North-South chasm, at least as long as EMU remains a confederacy of autonomous fiscal states. But that is a crisis for a future date.

    The imminent danger for the eurozone is that it will miss the first phase of global recovery of lockdowns, and then the southern half will be priced out of the second phase by an exorbitant exchange rate.

    European leaders have long hankered for a mighty euro to match the dollar as a world-class asset. Be careful what you wish for.

    The rising euro is slow torture for Europe's Covid-battered economy, and the ECB can't stop it

  25. #19525
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    I rathr think you are the only person I am aware of who still drinks deeply the soma from the Telegraph well of right wing illusion, Tax.

    A E-P and the totally insane Batty Ali Heath are idiots recycling the utter twaddle the UK was a free wheeling free trading powerhouse before it joined the EU.

    The UK under the past three decades has climbed from the trough of post-war inefficiency and grotesquely bad management practices to lead the EU into a world where its power, influence and economic strength were sufficient to counter the hegemonic bullying of China and the deprdations of a mad Putin. But now no more.

    The £ sterling is heading south yet again on the news a WTO exit is imminent, 4% is the hit on GDP and a decade of losses amounting to over a £ trillion is certain. The UK internationally is already sidelined and is rapidly becoming a rather pitiful nation dining below the salt in a borrowed suit inherited from a long lost past. Its union is in the process of fracture with Scotland certain to leave and NI will surely re-unite with Ireland.

    There is no salve, Tax, there is no transient hit and there will never become a glorious moment when everyone prances with unicorns on sun-dappled uplands of plenty.

    It was always an illusion Tax, a right wing coup of happenstance manipulated by charlatans leading the stupid and credulous that has fostered a disaster from which nothing could ever be gained .
    There is no trade available to Blighty from the world that can ever make up for the loss of giving up our unfettered relationship to 500 million consumers on our doorstep.

    But worst of all, Britain has become a parochial little island again, marooned in its isolation and adrift from the world in its soon-to-be futile inconsequence.

    But as I said before it will serve a purpose, it will be the bargain basement, Poundland tat consumerfest destination of choice for tourists looking for bargains from a shabby state peddling cod history, cheap booze, crap food and poor value.

    The poor are certainly going to get poorer but the sleaze bag Tories will coin it until the worm turns and Labour yet again will have to sweep up the shit.

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