Scandal over Downing Street's (illegal) Christmas Party

[exchemist]

Remember all those red kippers who voted enthusiastically to ditch 'EU red tape'? Without having bothered to find out what it meant?

It's to be hoped that voting against your own interests in order to spite other people (Germans/French/Brussels/Metropolitan Elite) could prove to have been a fleeting whim.

The 'One Nation' Conservative Party is dead - only electoral reform could bring it back - and there is no 'levelling up agenda', there are only 'levelling up gestures'.

The joke is that leaving the EU has meant far more red tape, since the UK now has to duplicate all the EU regulations that we used to abide by, as members of the EU. Anyone who has worked in industry, as I have, is well aware that there is no escaping many of these regulations: all countries need to have them, to protect consumers.

For example, the chemical industry has had to abide by the EU's REACH regulations. Now that we have left, there is a monster exercise going on to duplicate the entire database of testing of chemical products. It will take 2 years to complete, and for what? Chemical manufacturers who want to export to the EU will have to carry on complying with REACH anyway. And if they import from the EU, the imports will automatically be REACH-compliant. But they won't comply with this new UK system, unless extra work is done. So lots of extra work, for both civil servants and industry HSE departments. So competitiveness is damaged and taxes have to rise. Fantastic!

This kind of thing is being duplicated across many industries. The Brexitters have failed to grasp that regulating from Brussels, once only, for all 27 countries, does away with a mass of red tape at national level. That's what a fair chunk of our £350m/week paid for. So now we will spend far more than that developing our own systems, to no purpose.

Brilliant!

 

[Yerda]

Feel free to share your thoughts on the subject.

Is anyone else unsettled by the fact that the UK public is more annoyed by a few tories having a garden party than the tories ****ing up the response to a global pandemic because it didn't make their donors wealthier to treat it as a straightforward public health emergency?

Are we all going to pretend that the real issue here is Boris Johnson having wine and cheese with some people and not his government causing the deaths of tens of thousands of people and using the pandemic to siphon billions of pounds of public money to friends and donors of the Conservative party?

The Corbyn years, where I watched this country tell itself the story that the lifetime humanitarian anti-racist activist leader of the opposition was in fact the real racist, were bad enough. This is truly mental.

People are dead who would be alive because these people are completely absorbed by self-interest. We all knew they were like this and yet 18 million deluded absolute fantasy-land living marks choose to pretend that it was a good idea. Much like Brexit.

That's my thoughts.

I know our American cousins will appreciate the distraction from their own national problems.

Ha, we definitely won the game of stupid we were playing with the Americans. They had the good sense to change tack when it turned out the numpty selling them snake oil was in fact a useless con. We elected an even stupider incarnation.

 

[exchemist]

Is anyone else unsettled by the fact that the UK public is more annoyed by a few tories having a garden party than the tories ****ing up the response to a global pandemic because it didn't make their donors wealthier to treat it as a straightforward public health emergency?

Are we all going to pretend that the real issue here is Boris Johnson having wine and cheese with some people and not his government causing the deaths of tens of thousands of people and using the pandemic to siphon billions of pounds of public money to friends and donors of the Conservative party?

The Corbyn years, where I watched this country tell itself the story that the lifetime humanitarian anti-racist activist leader of the opposition was in fact the real racist, were bad enough. This is truly mental.

People are dead who would be alive because these people are completely absorbed by self-interest. We all knew they were like this and yet 18 million deluded absolute fantasy-land living marks choose to pretend that it was a good idea. Much like Brexit.

That's my thoughts.

Ha, we definitely won the game of stupid we were playing with the Americans. They had the good sense to change tack when it turned out the numpty selling them snake oil was in fact a useless con. We elected an even stupider incarnation.

Yet, as so often, the trivial party issue crystallises the underlying problem.

Everything stems from his monumental arrogance, as Rafael Behr so perfectly lays out, with his customary insight, in this article: The Tories said we could have our cake and eat it – now they are stuffed and voters are hungry | Rafael Behr

The same arrogance that makes him think Covid rules don't apply to him is what causes him to sign international agreements and then immediately repudiate them, causes him to make a trivial and contemptuous speech to captains of industry about Peppa Pig, causes him to try to get his mate off for illegal lobbying. It is what causes him to shag around, getting women pregnant and then disowning the resulting children. (I understand all his children hate him.)

The public has now wised up because this latest incident drives home the recognition that Bozo holds them in contempt as well. So now it's got personal. At last.