Apparently: Spain currently has youth unemployment running at 34%. But the socialist government says they need to import 5 million immigrants from Africa in order to fund the old age pensions. ...*puzzled*...?
Unfortunately economies are adversely effected by various things, media scare stories, doom and gloom voiced from the likes of Carney, Philip Hammond et al. Each talking down the economy before it happens which low and behold then happens to have the negative effect they're implying Then there's real life issues such as Toys R US and various high street retailers having a tough time against the move to web and the ecom businesses. Some of this was always going to happen, with or without Brexit being used as the throw away word to pin blame on. This very recently published FT report can still be viewed quite positively, there's still growth and there's still increased investment. It just so happens they're throwing in the term Brexit which gives an excuse to blame, as opposed to saying for example: 'Mark Carneys 13% growth in business investment was a little ambitious, if not completely wide of the mark, what was Mark drinking that day when sat in front of his crystal ball we all wonder? ' https://www.ft.com/content/cf51e840-7147-11e7-93ff-99f383b09ff9
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/tcw-encore-may-and-the-overpowering-stench-of-treachery/ "If there were already a whiff of treachery surrounding Theresa May’s Machiavellian double-dealing revealed in her Soft-Remain (non)-‘Brexit’ plan sprung on her Cabinet at Chequers, the past week has turned it into nothing short of an overwhelming stench. Last Thursday, it emerged that May had not, as she claimed, merely ‘shown’ her plan to German Chancellor Angela Merkel: as many had suspected, it had actually been submitted for approval. At the Chequers ‘summit’, the then Brexit Secretary David Davis was reportedly told by May that her plan could not be changed because ‘I have already cleared it with Angela Merkel’. What an admission! Britain’s head of government requesting approval of her plan for Brexit (if the ‘Brexit’ label can any longer be accurately applied) before its disclosure even to her own Cabinet from a foreign leader who, if not an enemy, must certainly be regarded as an adversary. Was May so naïve as to imagine that its contents would not immediately be relayed to Michel Barnier and the EU’s negotiating team? The unflattering comparisons to Chamberlain’s 1938-1939 appeasement of Hitler which followed were inevitable but hardly excessive. May’s No 10 team reacted by issuing an (unconvincing) denial of the words allegedly used to Davis, but, tellingly, not of their substance. Then, late on Saturday, came the bombshell. Former Minister of State at the Brexit Department Steve Baker revealed the cloak-and-dagger operation mounted by No 10 and presided over by May not only to foil a Brexit which would fulfil the pledges of May’s 2017 general election manifesto, and her Lancaster House and Florencespeeches so as to engineer as a substitute for it the Soft-Remain plan presented to the Chequers ‘summit’ as an unalterable fait accompli, but also secretly to use the Brexit Department’s functions and output as deception and camouflage to fool ministers, MPs and the public into believing that a genuine Brexit was being pursued. Baker’s quotes are political dynamite, and almost defy belief: ‘An establishment elite, who never accepted the fundamental right of the public to choose democratically their institutions, are working towards overturning them.’ ‘The Brexit Department was effectively a Potemkin structure designed to distract from what the Cabinet Office Europe Unit was doing for the Prime Minister.’ May had willingly deceived not just us, the voting public, but even her own ministers and MPs. She mobilised them to defeat the Lords’ Brexit-wrecking amendments in the House of Commons over the past few weeks to preserve the façade of a plausible-sounding Brexit. At the same time, she was presiding over a secret plot cynically to deceive and exploit her own Brexit Department as a camouflage to conceal her Cabinet Office Europe Unit’s backstairs operation to procure her preferred Soft-Remain (non)-Brexit, in collusion with the EU negotiators. In hindsight, it’s easy to see why the Eurocrats refused to negotiate with us on the basis of May’s fabled ‘Red Lines’ if they were at the same time being privately sounded out on what became the Chequers Deal. The ineradicable suspicion is that Brussels was being secretly assured all the time that our ‘official’ negotiating stance was mere theatre for the consumption of the gullible masses, and that the UK would accept whatever crumbs were chosen to be dropped from the Brussels table, at whatever cost. Almost simultaneously, from sources close to Airbus came allegations that May’s arch-Remainer inner circle had manipulated it into issuing, in the week preceding the Chequers ‘summit’, its much-publicised dire warnings about the dangers for jobs and exports of a No-Deal Brexit. They were, it was said, agreed after discussions with the Government – presumably signifying that Business Secretary and arch-Remainer Greg Clark had not merely been the willing mouthpiece of pro-Brussels, crony-corporatist big-business, but its persuasive script-writer too. It spoke volumes that, in the midst of all this, both Business Minister Andrew Griffiths’s forced resignation after sending ‘lewd’ texts to two women, and the Government’s award of a £2billion RAF contract, not to its compliant partner-in-deception Airbus but to Boeing, passed almost without comment. Political observers were still trying to digest the Baker revelations when May herself appeared on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday – though not before claiming, somewhat incredibly, in the Mail On Sunday that she was ‘fighting for the Brexit that the British people voted for’, but later contradicting herself by issuing her ‘Back my Brexit, or I’ll abandon any Brexit’ threat. How the latter was meant to assist the former was unclear. Predictably, May’s interview with Andrew Marr did not go well. It culminated in what May obviously intended to be the takeaway soundbite, but which backfired spectacularly. Her remark that ‘People may have voted with their hearts, but I have to be hard-headed’ managed to disparage 17.4million Leave voters by condescendingly portraying them as unthinking and emotion-driven. It emerged later that day that, as if No 10 threatening dissenting ministers with a walk home from Chequers on July 6 wasn’t petty enough, Conservative Central Office was now apparently threatening to withhold centrally-disbursed funds from Brexiteer Tory MPs. Although its enthusiasm for this may be tempered by the prospect of some of the £4million loans extended to it from constituency associations being recalled and used locally to support Brexiteer MPs, it showed May’s claque behaving more like the henchmen of a paranoid Mafia boss than the office of the Prime Minister in a democracy. With the possible, and even then disputable, exception of Blair on Iraq (the strange death of Dr David Kelly is discussed elsewhere on this website today), I cannot recall in recent political history an example of a Prime Minister practising sheer anti-democratic duplicity and deception on a level and scale equivalent to what has been revealed about May in the past week. While pretending to be implementing the democratically-expressed wishes of the British electorate, she has in fact been systematically deceiving her own Cabinet, ministers, MPs, activists, voters, and the public, in order to manifest the wishes of a small coterie which regards both the demos and the institution of democracy with undisguised contempt and as something to be ignored, if not covertly circumvented, if it delivers an outcome uncongenial to them. Moreover, the Party she nominally – I use the word advisedly – leads cannot escape the charge of complicity in her perfidy. Which other ministers were in on the plot? Who knew what, and when? At the very least, that the majority of its MPs, even now, support her desire to mute if not negate the largest mandate for one specific policy in British political history leave them open to that charge. Were her chicanery and double-dealing, and their own charlatanry, restricted to matters of domestic politics, they might, though still egregious, evade the ultimate accusation of treachery. But they are not. They prejudice and endanger not only the enduring public consent for our constitutional settlement and the continuing validity of our democracy, but also the nature of our relationship with a foreign power which, though it may not be an enemy, is arguably an adversary and certainly not, in this matter, a friend. It is this latter element which surely makes the accusation of treachery tenable. The present ‘Conservative’ Party, at least in its higher echelons, has been exposed this past week as a morally bankrupt cesspit of political putrefaction, a rotting husk. In another, perhaps better, time, a Prime Minister accused of what Theresa May stands accused of would have been out of office within days, if not hours. That she is allowed to cling to office, insecure, incompetent and ineffective in everything but betrayal, is the visible manifestation of the overpowering stench of treachery that envelops her and her party".
"Spend, spend, spend. The financial freedom to do whatever, whenever. Bathe in caviar! Buy a yacht! Live like a king. Is that what being a billionaire feels like? ‘Actually, it doesn’t feel very different from not being a billionaire,’ shrugs Peter Hargreaves, wrestling with a complicated coffee machine in the kitchen of his Somerset home. ‘I feel very proud of how successful I have been but, apart from that, things are pretty much the same.’ Hargreaves, 71, is the baker’s son from Clitheroe in Lancashire who went on to amass a personal fortune of £3.2 billion from his financial services company, Hargreaves Lansdown. He is one of the richest men in the UK and lives in discreet splendour in a lush fold of countryside with his wife Rose. A shareholder but no longer a director or employee of Hargreaves Lansdown, he has just been given a dividend of £60 million from the company he founded in his spare room with partner Stephen Lansdown 37 years ago. Which is nice. ‘Well, it doesn’t burn a hole in my pocket. I don’t really do very much with it,’ he says, although he does support selected charities. 'Some people think that because they have a lot of money they have to spend it. That has never been part of my psyche at all. I mean, we live very modestly. My wife drives a six-year-old Range Rover and my car is three years old.’ Is he still careful with money? ‘Very. I wouldn’t throw out a pot of yoghurt just because it was past its sell-by date. We never waste anything. For what earthly reason should I be wasteful just because I am wealthy? Yet I can honestly say that I think I must be the happiest and most contented billionaire on the planet.’ In his well-upholstered semi-retirement, one imagines that Hargreaves should be living a life of luxury and ease, relaxing on the sunlit uplands of his oodles of cash while indulging in his favourite hobbies of gardening and Egyptology. Instead, he is furious. ‘What are the Government doing?’ he cries. In recent years he has become the Leave campaign’s biggest individual donor, having given £3.2 million to the Brexit cause. This month he hit the headlines for stating that if a successful businessman such as him were in charge of Brexit negotiations, things would be very different. ‘I guarantee my entire wealth that we would get free trade,’ he said, exasperated by the lack of progress and the fact that talks have been left in the hands of civil servants who ‘don’t have a clue’ and ‘haven’t made a deal in their lives’. His wife was surprised to hear this on the news (‘Your entire fortune?’ she wondered) but her husband’s conviction can’t be shaken. ‘These people have gone from academia into politics and done nothing of value. How can they have any comprehension of how to run anything?’ he says. ‘But the best option is no deal. That would give us free trade with Europe because the three biggest economies in Europe, outside Britain, are huge exporters to the UK. ‘That’s Germany, France and Italy. And those three economies would absolutely demand free trade from the EU. We just should have said to the EU, we’re gone, goodbye.’ Like many Brexiteers, he loathes the Remainer arrogance prevalent in the Westminster bubble. ‘They think Brexit is a bad idea and that they know better than the populace. But the average person who works in the Nissan car factory in Sunderland is smarter than any MP in the House of Commons. ‘He or she knows how many beans make five. They are smart people, even if they didn’t go to Oxford and Cambridge, Eton and Harrow and all these places. They manage their affairs well and have more understanding of what’s going on in this country than any MP. With one exception. Can you guess who?’ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/a...r-Peter-Hargreaves-started-buffoon-Boris.html
Think the (long!) article above talking about May getting authority is nonsense. But it does inadvertently show the power base in Europe, regardless of anything Duke has to say: Germany. With Merkel on side, it has a great chance of passing thru. You need people to agree, so what’s wrong with running thru the plan with an alli that you know can sway a vote?
Hang on a cotton picking minute..............Does this mean you won't be able to retire to France? S**t !!!!. Mt Verhofstadt, can we come back in please?
You know they get the internet in France, right? And probably with subsidies from EU to build super fast infrastructure....
No they don't, No they don't. Please tell me they don't. Is it not called L'interwebs or something and isn't compatible with ours?
That’s a point that been missed too I think. When out, will our internet be compatible with the EU internet?
Mark Carney reckons interweb will cost 700% more and Lord Adonis says we'll have to go back to Freeserve dial up. So it must be true.
