UKH

Is this just a deliberate distraction from all the bad news on testing? Great for satirists though.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/10/hancocks-breakdown-slides-...

If you believe this then you will believe that email from the Nigerian Prince that died in a plane crash...

Exactly why I'm suspicious of Trump style spin from Cummings. Boris seemed to be using Trump style rhetorical tricks in PMQs as well.

The Speaker wasn't very amused with Matt.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/furious-speaker-sir-lindsay-hoyle-...

It does not matter, the ten million number is out there,  and therefore is true.

Its been done, its happened. Nothing to see here, move along.

This shit has worked for Trump on a daily basis, so why can't it work for our Pseudo President and his team?

How will this government pick the Apollo 1 crew?  Presumably "astronauts" or scientists who can take the blame for the accident that killls them on the launchpad?

Perhaps the analogy carries a certain weight unknown to ignorant politicians - the shoddy work and costcutting that led to the horrendous Command Module that had to be totally reworked to make it safe enough for manned flight after the accident.

Oh come on. I may be gullible but even I can see that if someone's died in a plane crash they can't be sending out emails...

You must think we're daft!

OK dude,  our thoughts and prayers in a testing system that doesn't yet exist with a capacity that doesn't exist using a technique yet to be invented by people who have a bit of a track record for alternative facts. 

DJ Viper had more chance of his VDiff to Indian face in six months quest.

The Guardian article isn’t really about the moonshot is it?

It’s just a rant against some things that the government has or hasn’t done.

Maybe it’s supposed to be funny which is possibly applicable given what a comic of a paper the Guardian has become.

I feel like just giving up with all of it.  What with Andrew Bridgen's drivelling about the EU's unjustified threats to ban our food yesterday, Steve Baker's high dudgeon about revoking everything because of the EU's 'undoubted bad faith' and the hapless Nadhim Zahawi constantly repeating the same bit of script on R4 this morning (you know they've basically given up try to defend the indefensible when they allow him on air), and Matt Hancock getting a laugh in the commons without even having his flies undone, surely it must nearly be over?

Except it isn't.  Not even close.

I think you'll find most newspapers have had lighthearted parliamentary sketches since - since they first began, in fact. If it doesn't appeal to your sense of humour then move on.

It was pretty funny there, there's rarely what you might call spontaneous laughter in the House but Hancock definitely provoked it yesterday. He really is a lost little boy. Shame that quite a lot of people will die, and many more will have their lives blighted,  because of his incompetence.

I only read the bloody article because it was linked in the OP.

The link could have come with a warning so that I wouldn’t have had to be offended!

But apart from you and you know who, the whole of the rest of the population of the UKC fora are communist lefty remainer libtards™, so obviously any link you click on will offend you.

'The politics sketch' does give it away.

Thanks for the bonus. Nothing amuses me more than people lecturing me that something obviously funny for me, in the great tradition of parliamentary satire, isn't. Even some of the loyal Tory backbenchers were struggling not to laugh. Are you a Cheif Constable in the anti- liberal laughter police now?

You were tricked and offended as well.. that's close to a triple bonus.

At leest I can spel!

It was about continuing ineptitude of Hancock. The moonshot was in there, amongst the litany of failures.

It was a 'sketch' item, not a news piece.

It’s good to see that the UKC massive haven’t lost their sense of humour.

Or are you all upset that someone has tried to trivialise what was turning into yet another anti government love in?

Anyway, off to wash the cat now so must run.

I listened to Hancock being questioned on Radio 1 earlier on in the week. Despite the questions being exceptionally straight forward he gave stuttering and evasive answers to which the journalist quickly became impatient with. He came across poorly, certainly not as slick as someone who should be a confident public speaker in charge of major decisions.

On a side note my work place had a "moonshot manager" appear in our organisation structure last year. The name was quickly changed to something vague and bland after it received much reducible by all levels of staff.

"At leest I can spel!" Spelling police and double Muphry's law.

Quadruple bonus.

Anything to make your day a brighter place!

Stop digging and be kind to your hungry cat.

At least I can read.

They're clearly safe to sell us these unicorns and more to the point buy them from mates and donors with our money! Where's the world beating app Matt? Why has our world beating test and trace system choked? Why has the reporting system choked? Where's the outrage...

Incompetence hiding rot.

jk

Touche. My eyesight these days is less than ideal.. you can notch up that particular advantage over this particular liberal.

I need every advantage that I can get.

Probably the only time I’ve ever come close to getting the better of you in years of trying.

It’ll probably never happen again.

World Beating App 2 "This Time We Mean It", coming to a phone near you, 24 September...

BBC News - Coronavirus: England and Wales' contact-tracing app gets launch date
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54118022

If you’ve done washing the cat, here’s some more light hearted reading

CAUTION: CONTAINS POLITICAL SKETCH. MAY TRIGGER RIGHT LEANING SNOWFLAKES  

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/11/tories-trick-cock-up-...

No matter how much of a 360-degree shitshow the government’s handling of the pandemic or its own Brexit process has been, there are people even now claiming that every cock-up or exploding gambit is a genius tactic by our wisers and betters, brilliantly designed to achieve a very specific aim. I guess it makes these cheerleader analysts feel clever. Or to put it another way: every Rorschach blot looks like a fanny if that’s what you’re after.

Thanks for the warning.

Damn - I thought this might be about a previously undiscovered Hancock's half hour episode where he goes to the moon. Oh how I was disappointed!

'As recently as January, Cummings was claiming there are “trillion dollar bills lying on the street” if you just knew how to run government properly.'

Misheard and misunderstood, I think...

"There are trillion dollar bills (for you and your mates), for lying through your teeth, if you know how to run government 'properly'".

I wonder where that £500m Handjob claims to have spent has gone...

It must be tough for you conservatives. You vote for Johnson's Tory party in the expectation that they are better than Corbyn - a horror of a man - and will get your blessed Brexit done. Now it turns out that Johnson is every bit the incompetent idiot that Corbyn is, and he's using your Brexit to introduce a state aid programme, which is the kind of government support for failing businesses that presumably drove you to distraction in the late 1970s. What's more, the always obvious contradictions of Brexit mean that the UK might break up (Conservative AND Unionist Party, in case you forget) and also might break international law, which if you haven't become a completely Radicalised Gammon might stir vague feelings of unease. Oh, and the small matter of tens of thousands of dead due to incompetence at the highest levels of government.

Yet tribalism and a dislike of, well, people on the left like me I guess, mean that you can't even begin to admit any of it. Especially so soon after voting for all this.

Your lucky, lucky cat.

Mighty moonspaff.

You obviously haven’t lost your sense of humour.

I mean, really, you vote for Johnson and look - he can barely make it through a press conference without sounding like an idiot. Unless of course you believe he's a fabulous orator, or perhaps he's one of those politicians who isn't a great speaker, but what an adminstrator!

Johnson is a buffoon.

Still, he's totally representative of your political movement at the moment: destructive, careless, ignorant. Thanks for fostering them on us.

Cheer up.

You’ve only got another 4 and a bit years of them. At least.

It's Friday night, I've a good dinner and a film on the way, enjoyed free of the sneaking suspicion that my fear and xenophobia didn't lumber our country with a "buffoon" whose idiocy has put my fellow citizens in harm's way.

https://avacta.com/avacta-expands-rapid-sars-cov-2-antigen-test-manufacturi...

Good for you.

'Johnson is a buffoon.' He's thick as pigsh*t and doesn't know it, but he has three things that have kept him afloat in his career to date - a sense of humour, (I hate the f*cker, but he can be quite funny), a way with words (definitely facilitated by having no obligation to connect them to reality), and personal charm - in the past, people have warmed to him. Not so sure that's the case now though.

Nobody wants to think about Hancock’s moonshot. Imagine his face...

Sounds like a good assessment to me.

Still, he promised to get Brexit done, which is like catnip to you chaps.

And anathema to you chaps.

Well, I've always preferred being on the winning side rather than the losing. 

Because we are patriots who love our country and don’t want to trash its economy and its place in the world. But I guess if you fell for all those lies - are we going to get that £350m? - it’s too embarrassing to admit. 

Well I did try and persuade you to come over to the Brexit side.

There’s no point rerunning the referendum and Brexit debates.

The last general election was in itself a vote very much about Brexit and we know how that went. You might argue that the referendum result wasn’t very democratic but I presume you aren’t going to say the same about the election result?

Care to explain in that case why you support the government going against it's manifesto commitment to the WA. All conservative MPs votes.for it and are now about to vote to disregard it.

Hey Diddle, Diddle!
Matt's on the fiddle,
Johnson jumped over the moon;
The opposition laughed
To see such fun,
And a cabal ran away with 100 billion pounds.

I don’t.

Hancock's Moonshot is the real ale I will one day win a CAMRA award with.

We are going to be affected by Brexit for years, to the extent that it’s really only just beginning. You Brexiters said it would be a good thing for the U.K., now is time to hold you all to account for that. 
 

You clearly find assessing those arguments in the light of current events uncomfortable. 

I’d say - and polling data backs this up, in my view - that it was about both Brexit and the two leaders. I’m going to argue that democracy means holding people to account, and continuing to debate live issues, rather than brush over them with an entirely predictable “that argument is over”.
 

As for democracy, the Leave politicians illegally closed Parliament when it didn’t give them the answer they wanted. And no one voted for Dominic Cummings.  

Call the 10% “fighting stout” Mancock’s Hoonshot.

In a few months time the U.K. will either have a FTA or we’ll be trading on WTO terms with the EU.

While a FTA would be preferable a WTO won’t be the end of the world despite what you believe.

Neither you nor the Labour Party will be holding anyone to account.
Brexit was always going to come down to the final few months of negotiations.

That’s where we are at now and it’s all to play for.

And while we’re bickering about the thickness or otherwise of Johnson and Hancock Cummings is busy setting up an alternative seat of government surrounded by his “weirdos and misfits” and lining his pals’ pockets with massive contracts and public money completely outwith any widely accepted tendering norms.

We are truly lost.

Well, it won’t be the end of your world as you are a pensioner. Those who will lose jobs, or who will see their opportunities reduced because of a smaller economy might disagree. 
 

You clearly think warnings about the long term effect of a no deal Brexit are wrong. Can you explain why those warnings are wrong?
 

What does that mean exactly? That there will be no official opposition asking questions in Parliament, which is after all the traditional meaning of the phrase? 
 

Do you believe that Brexiteers should explicitly *not* be held accountable for the effects of Brexit? 

I love how you think we are in the final few months. Most trade experts I’ve read say ongoing negotiations with the EU are going to be part of our political lives for years. 

You’ve been put in a position that you didn’t ask for.

That might not be fair but it’s the reality.

The UK isn’t going back to its old relationship with the EU.

Why wouldn’t you want the U.K. to get the best deal it possibly can?

Being fair, honest or righteous doesn’t come in to it.

Do you think that the US, China, Russia, EU etc play by the rules?

Do other countries really care if international laws are broken?

It doesn’t seem to have affected the U.K./Japan trade deal.

All that time spent negotiating for something the same or worse than we had already. Not a great way to spend time and resources is it?

But perhaps you think it's worth it to get out of the clutches of the EU? I'm curious about when leave voters started to feel that way. Obviously there were a few people who always hated the EU but prior to the referendum they were just fringe bampots. I never felt my life or the country's prospects were hampered by membership of the EU but as a Scot I do now feel both those things are hampered by membership of the UK.

​​​​​​Yes they do, the US is making a lot of noise about it.

It might well affect the US one: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/09/10/politics/nancy-pelo...

You’ll be joining in the calls for a Scottish independence referendum then?

Because some Americans have such a good understanding of the situation in Ireland?

Cheer lead everything but unable to explain why when asked.  Cult is the word.

You questioned whether other countries cared about the UK breaking international law. I supplied evidence that they do. You're now trying to dismiss that by saying US politicians like Nancy Pelosi don't understand the situation. Does reality ever impinge on your worldview?

Absolutely. But I think there are some lessons to be learned from the Brexit one.

Yes, they do.

And more evasion. Why not acknowledge that the US is indeed repsonding already to the UK disregarding it's signed commitments by putting and trade deal in doubt? 

You’ll be quoting my post where I said that altering the WA was a good thing and that I supported Johnson doing so?

No, you won’t, will you? Because I never said such a thing.

However, I might just change my mind and support Johnson’s actions now.

Not very sensible or logical or grown up but if it annoys you it will be worth it.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the level to which our Brexiting country has descended. 

While I’m operating at my pre juvenile level - you can stay out of it, you don’t even live here!

Err, your previous post in reply to me asking you.

Since you clearly are a xenophobic, reactionary, quite happy to be ruled by thugs providing there are your thugs, why not just be open about it. It would at least remove dishonesty from your list of vices.

Instead of insulting me, why don’t you quote my post where I said I support Johnson’s actions.

I’ve read the whole thread and can’t find it but I’ll admit that I could be wrong and I’ll happily apologise if I’m mistaken.

Me "> Care to explain in that case why you support the government going against it's manifesto commitment to the WA. "

You "> I don't [care to explain why..]

And if you find what I wrote insulting, perhaps look at your views again. It's just descriptive.

This is me stating that I don’t, or didn’t, support the government’s actions yet you’ve taken it to mean that I do support it?

I’m obviously missing something here?

Or did you take my ‘I don’t’ to mean ‘I don’t care to explain’?

That would make sense.

Just to clear up the confusion - I don’t support the government’s actions in altering the WA.

It’s very Trumpian- as described in the ‘Trumpian  death cult’ article I posted yesterday. 

Well that's something. Thanks for the clarification.

It was Corbyn who fostered the Tory victory. Millions, like me, could not vote Labour with that equally incompetent alternative, whether or not we actually turned blue (I didn’t).

This is undoubtedly part of the story, yes. And I agree that Corbyn was equally incompetent. But there were plenty of seats where the LD’s came second so I’m not buying that as the whole story. There was another option but many preferred the Conservatives because they wanted Brexit at any cost. 

It's <b>very</b> nearly the word...

The give away here is the use of the passive verb in your first sentence. That’s a common way people deflect blame away from themselves. 

The reality is that I - and in fact the whole country - was put in this situation by people like you following political leaders like Johnson and Farage (who let’s not forget spent his youth chanting Hitler Youth songs). 
 

The pound is now considered an “emerging market” currency, our economy has been weakened, our rights removed. You supported this, and no amount of linguistic pussyfooting obscures this. 

Not in the immediate future. But long term, the logic of the 60s and 70s still holds true. 

That’s why I’m aghast at what’s going on. The government is willing to wreck our future for the sake of state aid and fish. Fish! It’s literally the least important part of our economy, but it’s of symbolic importance to elderly fools. So we must sacrifice our livelihoods to fulfil your fantasy vision.

Literally every trade negotiator I have read says quite the opposite. 

Why yes they do, because having a stable international system benefits us all. A point well understood by Churchill, the Brexiters hero, once again suggesting that you people live in some simplistic fantasy world.

Do you want a world based on rules, or simply power?  

'Why wouldn’t you want the U.K. to get the best deal it possibly can?'

That was the one Mrs Thatcher got you   But you broke that.

Did you know there's a clause in the EU/Japan deal that the conditions in that alter so that they're always better than any other xx/Japan deal

You have some strange ideas of Brexit voters. 

We had a very lengthy, detailed and emotional debate about Brexit.

Then we had a general election were the result was swung very convincingly by a pro Brexit vote. Voted for by people like me and millions and millions of others. Johnson didn’t get his huge majority due to a few disillusioned nutters.

Yet you still can’t accept this.

You know better.

And maybe you do but unfortunately our democratic system doesn’t allow your superior knowledge to overturn the votes of the population.

Have you ever wondered why you’ve never managed to convince enough of the population that Brexit is a bad idea so as to be able to win either a referendum or a general election?

You carry on being right.

Meanwhile the world, including many despicable governments, continues to trade because that’s what drives our economic and political systems.

I suggest that it’s you that’s living in a fantasy world.

I didn’t know that.

Is it a two way thing?

As in, can the deal alter for the benefit of either Japan or the EU based on future deals that both might do?
Or is it only the EU that can benefit?

Well, 14m of your Brexiters out of a population of 66m, so yes, a lot of you, and of course geographically well spread across England, which helps. But large numbers of people can believe absolute nonsense: currently about one in five Americans believes in some or part of the QAnon conspiracy theory. That’s 60m people who think Hillary Clinton drinks the blood of murdered children. Obviously Brexit isn’t that bonkers, but it’s still fairly vaguely tethered to reality. So numbers are a poor defence - there are simply a lot of poorly informed people unaware of how the world works. 

Polling also shows that, for the last few years, a majority of respondents have believed we are wrong to leave the EU. Many Brexit voters are of course are old and stubborn, and want to return us to the imagined world of their youth - a world that doesn’t exist any more. They will instead blame foreigners because it’s easy and it comes naturally to almost every human being. They also blame people like me, in fact anything rather than look in the mirror. 
 

Of course we will continue to trade, but we will do less of it. Fewer large and productive companies will want to base themselves here, because it’s better for them to be inside the EU. It will be harder for young Brits to get those jobs because you’ve removed their freedom of movement rights. All analysis - undertaken by people who understand trade and economics, rather than retired schoolteachers who read the Telegraph - suggests we will trade less, be less productive (that’s the key to long term success) and be poorer. Thanks mate, good work there!
 

Anyhow, let’s move on from rational argument into the wild world of rhetoric:

350m for the NHS

Turkey about to join the EU

Easiest deal ever.

We’ll just be like Norway. 
We’ll have hundreds of deals ready to go the day we leave.

The German car makers will stop us getting a bad deal.

We hold all the cards, they need us more than we need them.

Not a shred of fantasy in that little lot is there?

Seems designed to achieve nothing else then showering buddies with more money from the great big magic money tree as well as building a highly centralised ID and population surveillance system.

Mass testing is a very good idea but it needs to be done from the bottom up, not top down, unfortunately that wouldn’t be compatible with their thirst for power and control.

This lot are Traitors de facto, whether through actual or feigned incompetence.  Brexit, Democracy, Lies, Coronavirus, and now thinking of "mothballing" our tanks in favour of some wacko ideas from the Mekon

https://www.army-technology.com/features/uk-main-battle-tank-fleet-not-a-lo...

Everything they do is serving Vladimir's interests

Clear and present treason, either by intention or negligence or stupidity?

My opinions on Brexit and its supporters are clear. However I think we should be extremely wary of labelling our fellow citizens and political leaders as traitors. That’s not a good path to go down. 
 

Stupid, greedy, shortsighted and so on are fine, but we should note there is an element of legitimacy - they won an election, after all - but what they are doing is the epitome of idiocy. 

I always look forward to your excellent spelling, but such a cavalier attitude towards hyphenation is very disturbing.

even an idiot should recognize when they are helping an unfriendly power by reducing the capabilities of blocs they still allege they think are friends and considering removing our own armoured capability in favour of some unproven capability, not to mention destruction of faith in democratic principles.  The KGB/GRU could not intentionally achieve more!

The Brexit referendum was years ago.

We then had years of detailed debate about the pros and cons of leaving.

If people wanted Brexit stopped they shouldn’t have said so in a poll they should have got their arses in gear and voted in the last election.

You also make the mistake of trotting out all the well known quotes from various politicians.

You have failed to note that maybe the electorate are smart enough to make their own minds up, rightly or wrongly, without the help of politicians.

Brexit wasn’t something thought up by a few nutters who then persuaded millions of people to follow them.

It was just the first real chance that many people felt that they had to voice their displeasure at what they saw as a system that was failing them.

In many ways the EU carried the can for domestic policy failures.

A few years ago I watched all of The Sopranos. Whilst some people who fell foul of Tony and his gang just suffered bad luck, lots of the people they do over get to that point because of some flaw. They want easy money, or an easy life, and this makes them prey for the gangsters.

So it is with the gangsters that run Russia. Someone like Johnson - dumb, over confident, weak-willed about money and sex - is a prime target for the mob. The only thing is that the stage is Downing Street and the Kremlin rather than suburban New Jersey.

Apologies.

My already low standards have slipped considerably since I retired.

I simply don't believe this can be true. One can argue about different definitions of intelligence as much as one likes, but it won't talk away a good Oxbridge degree. I don't think Johnson's as clever as he thinks, but I don't think he's thick. I think this is one of few ways he can be distinguished from Trump, who clearly is pretty dim. I think Johnson's behaviour is more than adequately explained by his supreme arrogance, deep immorality and utter cynicism - all characteristics which he of course shares with the buffoon across the water. 

I agree with you on that at least.

Given where the money is likely to end up, Handjob's Cummshot is more appropriate...

Honestly don't know as I haven't read it, but I re.ember it as a  interesting fact ' when it was signed

Thanks anyway.

He had the most expensive and intensive education money could buy from the year dot. A lot of Etonians get to Oxbridge, and a lot get firsts (which Bunter didn't.) I don't know what they put in the water at Eton but it seems to get results. I still don't think he's too bright though; I really don't believe he has  a grasp of even the most basic statistics, science or economics; his garbled speech shows he flounders with the basic concepts.

Interesting to see how successful Oldham has been with its council worker-delivered testing strategy. While infection rates soar across every other borough in Manchester, Oldham has brought the rate down by over 30% in the last month.

https://on.ft.com/2Rhxj2E

Oh for goodness sakes. We get that you hate the guy. But your inability to recognise his intelligence is your weakness, not his. He’s not a scientist or economist. He studied Classics and is a skilled wordsmith, good enough to command a prominent column in a national newspaper, and then to talk himself into No. 10 Downing St. Surely there are sufficient weaknesses in his character that you don’t have to debase yourself with falsehoods?

The f***er can hardly string a sentence together and his column success is probably more down to the controversy he generated than the quality of his writing.

Well, surprise surprise, when you let people organise solution from the bottom up at a local level it works far better than when you try to control everything from the desk of Dominic in number 10.

Being very good at manipulating and lying is indeed a form of intelligence. But that’s not really the type of intelligence we normally look for in a good leader.

As for the “moonshot” terminology, since Google adopted it for their multiple attempts to diversify beyond search into the likes of autonomous driving, it’s been a by-word in the investment community for expensive and unproductive.

For all the intensive Oxbridge admissions coaching Eton would provide, he didn't just get in, he won a scholarship. Getting a 2:1 is an impressive achievement - though he was famously upset not to get the first to which he felt entitled (by virtue no doubt of simply being Boris). Estimates of the median IQ of an Oxbridge undergrad seem to hover around 110-125, so I guess it depends whether one regards that as particularly bright or not. Personally, I think it's a lot more damning to regard Johnson's actions as being deliberate rather than the result of stupidity - this seems to me to be letting him off the hook somewhat. I confess that his consistently poor oratory was at first something of a surprise to me. It's always the simplistic jingling alliteration and clunking rhyme of the populist catchphrase, rather than the elevated diction or wit of a Churchillian period. And his physical gestures are as comically puny as Trump's. But of course it plays well in the Express. Churchill knew history would be kind to him because he intended to write it himself. I somehow think it will take more than a few rambling columns in the Telegraph to rescue Johnson's reputation in the eyes of posterity.

His columns were probably ghosted anyway - writing for public media is hard work, something of which Johnson is singularly inapable

Maybe we can agree to differ? He has knack with words - I've always conceded that. (I've also pointed out that it helps that he has never been handicapped by trying to be accurate - if a piece called for an almost entirely fictitious EU policy then he had no problem including it. )

But I genuinely believe he has not extended his knowledge or expertise in the last 20 years - I genuinely think he's flaky on things like the difference between median and mean, bacteria and viruses, algorithms and computer programs, ('rogue algorithm' FFS), what the 'R' number represents; and his ignorance is killing us.

I don't feel I am debasing myself by calling him: the emperor has no frigging clothes. (I wouldn't have said that 12 months ago, BTW, I thought there was more to him than that.)

They need to wake up to the strategic value of companies like ARM too.  These pirates in power understand asset stripping rather than real value

Indeed. Allowing the Chinese to buy ARM was a bad idea. A sad day.

They didn’t! SoftBank is Japanese.

Oops. Could have sworn it was the Chinese. Maybe it was the joint venture I was thinking of.

Now playing catch up with the news of NVidia... Including the fact that their market capitalisation is bigger than Intel...

Beware misconstruing market cap. Intel is a much bigger company than Nvidia, but it’s one whose profits are much less appreciated by investors, being slow rather than fast-growing. Market cap is a product of earnings and valuation multiple. Intel is valued at 10 x it’s $23bn 2019 earnings, Nvidia at 100(!) x it’s $3bn earnings for last year. Quite a contrast.

Oh, I understand the often distorted capitalisation. But I was still surprised by the Nvidia figures.

The market is applying a very high rating to Nvidia’s prospects of hoovering up the majority of chip demand in the surge of AI-focused data centre growth. Rather too high in many commentators’ reckoning.

What did you actually win?

jk

Government have taken control of all the testing sites across Greater Manchester, can't get a test here now either.

I’ll let you know in January.

People he hates are getting hurt.

Cool, not long to wait now to find out who's fault the next completely unforeseeable brexit hicup is.

Jk

Really?

Actually it’s going better than some predicted.

And the BBC say they can't find right wing comedians.

Assuming you are not on a wind up, can you tell me what has gone well? 

Thanks 

We’ve left the EU.

In a few months time we’ll either be trading with the EU on WTO terms or we’ll have a FTA.

None of the promised plagues - mass unemployment, mass exodus of companies, etc has happened.

All in all things are looking quite rosy.

But then there’s that Covid thing.

It's a great name for a new route though

Except that is a big fat lie but hey, one more, who cares, the bigger the lie the better.

So nothing has actually gone well or even looks like it will go well... 

It was sold on the basis of making things better so if the best you can say for all that upheaval and discord is that it hasn't made things worse then why did we bother?

And do you honestly think now's the time to be assessing how well Brexit has gone? Ten years from now would be a better time to assess that.

Ok so can you answer a few things for me?

Can you explain how we have better control of our borders now, what are we spending the £350million a week on and what EU laws, that were forced upon us, have we rescinded? Apart from the human rights one of course...

I keep expecting you to post a fishing rod emoji, a crying laugh emoji and then sign with "end off" or "fact"

E

That would be dishonourable.

“In a few months companies trading with the EU will be doing so in considerably poorer conditions.”

Remember that the apostles of Leave told us a hard Brexit was absolutely not on the cards. We’re just going to be like Norway! No SM or CU would be a Bad Thing, they said. So they failed to fulfil their promises to you, the Leave voters, and instead you guys are trumpeting this broken promise as an unequivocally good thing. 
 

Guess we’ve always been at war with Eurasia. 

Actually the most solid predictions are long run, so won’t be apparent yet. But best estimates put the cost of Brexit so far as about £1500 per person due to lost growth, increased inflation, etc. Much of those short run adverse effects were predicted quite accurately. 

Your choice: despair at what’s happened, or looking like a fool.

I’m sat in a campsite just outside Abertystwyth surrounded by scores of people who despite their fears about Covid, Brexit and gosh knows what else are still managing to look happy and are apparently having a good time.

You should try it some time.

Never fear Dido Harding is recruiting crack new Lab technicians to increase capacity.

https://twitter.com/askbryn/status/1306556945533415424

Not even going to try justifying the shift from the promised 'no hard Brexit, remain in the single market' stance to what were heading for, then? Not even an attempt to put the blame on the dastardly Europeans?

I'm picturing a campfire Brexit Bonfire of Red tape and a big singalong

There’s a young lady from Belgium parked next to us.

We’ve lulled her into a false sense of security by appearing to be nice to her.

She should know that us Brits aren’t to be trusted.

This looks like a textbook definition of gaslighting to me.

If I knew what gaslighting meant then I could give you a reply.

I’m having too much fun to be bothered googling it.

Why not simply reply to the original post, which I think is written in easily understood English.

Which OP?

Offwidth’s of 11 sep?

I meant mine, that you responded to this afternoon. 

Why would I want to go over things that have been done to death on this forum?

You’re not going to change what’s happened.

You’re stuck with Brexit and with a Conservative government for another 4 years.

You seem to believe that’s a result of idiots being easily led.

That’s a poor excuse for losing a referendum, the argument for a second referendum and a couple of elections.

You’ll find the whole process a lot easier if you just go with the flow.