“Refugees Welcome” – two cyclists are creating the world’s biggest piece of GPS art in charity ride across southern England

Absolutely hysterical, in both senses of the word.

Jenova20 wrote:

Rendel Harris wrote:

Jenova20 wrote:

 It's seriously been 5 years since the vote. Grow the fuck up.

Leavers carried on fighting the overwhelming result of the 1975 referendum to join the EEC for forty years, as was their right and, indeed, their duty if they believed a mistake had been made. But ever since winning the 2016 vote by a miniscule margin - a margin that virtually every poll since has shown would never be attained again - they have insisted on a form of playground "fainites and no returns", responding with the sort of dummy-spitting fury you exhibit here to the slightest suggestion that the decision has been a mistake. Telling other people to grow up because they won't let you have your own way without debate or opposition for ever and ever is richly ironic.

Lobbying for a vote is a bit different from: breaking parliamentary rules, meeting the EU in private and discussing ways to obstruct parliament, suing the Government multiple times to frustrate and invalidate the Democratic process, attempting to destabilise the Government to bring it down because you didn't get your way, and wishing the UK would burn just so you can say you were right. To say the Remainers have been childish is an understatement, some of them have acted disgustingly or even treasonously.

Not really the site for this debate but...

... it was Leaver MPs (the ERG) who sought to bring down the (May's) government

... it was Johnson's government which illegally sought to override the democractic process by proroguing Parliament.

But don't let facts get in your way.

Steve K wrote:

Not really the site for this debate but...

... it was Leaver MPs (the ERG) who sought to bring down the (May's) government

... it was Johnson's government which illegally sought to override the democractic process by proroguing Parliament.

But don't let facts get in your way.

It wasn't quite that simple.

The ERG did try (and ultimately succeeded) in bringing down May's government but they were aided and abetted by the opposition parties.

This led to the very soft Brexit deal which May had negotiated being replaced by the much harder deal negotiated by Boris.

This delighted the ERG but presumably did not delight Labour and the Liberal Democrats who helped to bring it about.

The proroguing of parliament was deemed unlawful but until that ruling prorogation had not been considered justiciable.

The fact that the Supreme Court ruled it justiciable was a huge constitutional change for the UK.

Ultimately the prorogation was brought about by another huge constitutional change. This was John Bercow's decision to allow the amendment of previously un-amendable parliamentary procedures.

It was this decision by Bercow that allowed the opposition parties and Conservative rebels to essentially take over the running of the government and provoked a constitutional crisis.

That single act by the Remain supporting speaker did more to undermine parliamentary democracy in the UK than any other, going against, literally, centuries of precedent.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/09/john-bercow-decisi...

Good luck Rich. Remainers don't like facts.

Jenova20 wrote:

Good luck Rich. Remainers don't like facts.

Cough-cough - £350 million per week for the NHS...

brooksby wrote:

Jenova20 wrote:

Good luck Rich. Remainers don't like facts.

Cough-cough - £350 million per week for the NHS...

That pledge was met by Theresa May if you missed it, to the tune of £600 million a week (second citation), and Boris is handing the NHS even more from 2023. This is on top of the Covid funding, and in addition to the extra funding to clear the backlog. Proving my point - Remainers don't like facts.

• https://fullfact.org/health/nhs-england-394-million-more/
• https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-the-nhs-funding-boost-...
• https://www.gov.uk/government/news/nhs-funding-bill-enters-parliament

Your first two links conclusively state that the Leave campaign was lying about the £350M a week we would save from not being in the EU. Yes, the government has increased spending but none of that increased spending has come from savings made from leaving the EU. Your own links state this! Who doesn't like facts?

Rendel Harris wrote:

Your first two links conclusively state that the Leave campaign was lying about the £350M a week we would save from not being in the EU. Yes, the government has increased spending but none of that increased spending has come from savings made from leaving the EU. Your own links state this! Who doesn't like facts?

I think this is referred to as "OwNiNg tHe LiBs WiTh FaCtS aNd LoGiC"

The funding announced by May will deliver an extra £394 million per week to the NHS from 2023/24 onwards.

The vast majority of the Financial Settlement (Divorce Bill) will have been paid by 2023/24. Up until this point the UK will still be contributing to the EU budget.

From 2023/24 onwards there will, when these payments largely cease, be additional monies available to the UK government to spend.

This will not cover the entire cost of May's pledge but will cover the majority.

The £350m bus claim is therefore not entirely true but nor is it entirely false.

There were far bigger lies told during the referendum, it baffles me why there is this ongoing obsession with a simple bus advert.

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/brexit-deal-financi...

Rich_cb wrote:

The £350m bus claim is therefore not entirely true but nor is it entirely false.

So if I go into a shop and hand over £10 but then claim I actually handed over £20, am I being "not entirely true but not entirely false" or am I lying through my teeth? And is it OK for me to lie because someone else actually told a bigger lie in the same shop the same day?

It was an exaggeration. If you want to be absolutely binary about it then, yes, knowingly exaggerating something is dishonest.

If the bus had said £250m per week then it would have been accurate.

Would the bus advert have been less impactful with £250m on the side?

I doubt it. The exaggeration was therefore entirely inconsequential.

In the context of political campaigning, cherry picking or exaggerating figures is a pretty common and pretty insignificant occurrence which, as I said earlier, makes the ongoing prominence afforded to the bus advert rather strange.

Far more worrying was the deliberate deception instigated by the Treasury itself. This barely gets a mention anywhere and certainly never from Remain supporters.

Rich_cb wrote:

Far more worrying was the deliberate deception instigated by the Treasury itself. This barely gets a mention anywhere and certainly never from Remain supporters.

What deception was that?

They put out predictions of job losses, house prices etc. in the event of Brexit.

They were fairly apocalyptic in tone and garnered a huge amount of press coverage.

What was not readily mentioned was that the predictions were based on the premise that the Bank of England would decline to make any intervention whatsoever.

This was a ridiculously implausible scenario and it was presented as a realistic prediction. This was obviously hugely beneficial to the Remain campaign.

The use of a government department to produce deliberately misleading information knowing that such information would have a huge influence on a referendum was incredibly worrying in the context of our democracy.

Predictions often involve a certain amount of guessing, so I'm not sure that's really deliberate deception. Is there a specific prediction that you're referring to? I'm not trying to defend the Treasury, but am interested in how disingenuous they've been.

I accept that predictions do involve a certain amount of uncertainty but deliberately basing a prediction on a premise you know to be incredibly unlikely is misleading.

The predictions were mainly about unemployment and house prices. I'll try and find a link.

Edit:
https://amp.ft.com/content/d05c4b60-20d8-11e6-9d4d-c11776a5124d

Sorry, I can't see that as it's paywalled

https://www.google.com/search?q=Fact-checking+the+Treasury%E2%80%99s+lat...

It should load through Amp as it's quite an old article now

Rich_cb wrote:

https://www.google.com/search?q=Fact-checking+the+Treasury%E2%80%99s+lat... It should load through Amp as it's quite an old article now

The first link to the FT is still paywalled - doesn't seem to work with or without amp.

The second link (https://theconversation.com/fact-check-do-the-treasurys-brexit-numbers-add-up-58086) has this verdict:

Quote:

In short, the Treasury estimates are credible. Yet they are conservative: there are at least two ways in which the estimated losses from Brexit could increase. The report could have factored in the EU reforms being pushed by the UK government into the main numbers. It could also have used a definition of productivity that didn’t flatter the UK (like GDP per hour worked rather than GDP per capita). These are both included in section three, part three of the report, if anyone wanted to look at them. But I think the decision was correct to downplay these, given the uncertainty.

I seem to be able to read it, I don't have a sub to the FT, strange.

The FT were considerably less impressed by the report.

"Are the Treasury’s methods convincing?

No. There appears to be a lot of reverse engineering going on. Politics required lost jobs, a recession and lower house prices and officials chose methods that delivered that outcome — just.

All parts of the analysis are open to criticism and the Treasury’s reluctance to talk about margins of error or what are the real driving forces behind the results speaks volumes.

Dave Ramsden, chief economist at the Treasury and lead official on this report, has recently written about how the independent Office for Budget Responsibility “has ended the perception of bias associated with the forecasts that were previously produced by the Treasury”. This report will not escape a perception of bias."

"Another questionable element of the Treasury analysis is that it assumes no monetary or fiscal policy response. If the BoE cut interest rates and restarted quantitative easing, it could mitigate some of the negative effects, but it has cautioned that if a sterling fall raised expectations of inflation or if the economy’s capacity to supply goods and services was hit, it might not be able to act. Likewise, the government might respond to a downturn with spending increases or spending cuts.

Given these complications, the assumption of “no change in policy” is reasonable as a reflection of the choices available, but it is not reasonable as a prediction of the future, which is how David Cameron and George Osborne characterised the work."

Could be something to do with my various script blockers.

Your quoted bits don't really strike me as "deliberate deception" - I'd sum up that summary as the Treasury being biased.

The FT said it was not reasonable to present the report as a prediction of the future.

Yet that is how Cameron and Osborne presented it.

I think that's deliberate deception.

Rich_cb wrote:

The FT said it was not reasonable to present the report as a prediction of the future. Yet that is how Cameron and Osborne presented it. I think that's deliberate deception.

Deliberate deception by Cameron and Osborne - quite possibly. This is becoming somewhat nebulous as we're now comparing FT's opinion to Cameron/Osborne's opinion. I don't have much opinion on the FT, but Cameron and Osborne wouldn't be high on my list of favourite people.

I think the Treasury was implicated in the deception too.

Obviously under direction from Osbourne and Cameron but it's still, IMHO, highly inappropriate.

hawkinspeter wrote:

Predictions often involve a certain amount of guessing, so I'm not sure that's really deliberate deception. Is there a specific prediction that you're referring to? I'm not trying to defend the Treasury, but am interested in how disingenuous they've been.

It was beyond negative predictions: They wheeled out Obama and got him to sign a public statement, written in British English by someone at Downing St, saying that he wouldn't sign a trade deal with us if we left. David Cameron personally got the head of a trade union sacked for saying that he was pro Brexit (can't remember the name). George Osborn threatened voters with a punishment budget the day after a leave vote if Remain lost. The Government spent £9 million on propaganda leaflets to everyone which were left out of the financing both sides agreed to stick to. The electoral commission authorised Vote Leave's spending, then reinterpreted the rules after Leave won and tried to prosecute them for their spending.

The contest was rigged in Remain's favour and they still lost. Imagine how many extra Leave votes we'd have had without the interference, threats, and rigging in Remain's favour.

Jenova20 wrote:

It was beyond negative predictions: They wheeled out Obama and got him to sign a public statement, written in British English by someone at Downing St, saying that he wouldn't sign a trade deal with us if we left.

..and has Obama signed a trade deal with us since we've left?

Edit: In the interest of trying to find facts about this, I found this article which I presume is what you're referring to: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/22/barack-obama-brexit-uk-back-of-queue-for-trade-talks

Quote:

The US president used a keenly awaited press conference with David Cameron, held at the Foreign Office, to explain why he had the “temerity to weigh in” over the high-stakes British question in an intervention that delighted remain campaigners.

Obama argued that he had a right to respond to the claims of Brexit campaigners that Britain would easily be able to negotiate a fresh trade deal with the US. “They are voicing an opinion about what the United States is going to do, I figured you might want to hear from the president of the United States what I think the United States is going to do.

“And on that matter, for example, I think it’s fair to say that maybe some point down the line there might be a UK-US trade agreement, but it’s not going to happen any time soon because our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc, the European Union, to get a trade agreement done”.

He added: “The UK is going to be in the back of the queue.”

That seems different to how you portrayed it, but anyhow, we do not seem to have signed a trade deal with the U.S. yet and it seems quite reasonable that it wouldn't be their top priority.

hawkinspeter]</p>

<p>[quote=Jenova20 wrote:

That seems different to how you portrayed it, but anyhow, we do not seem to have signed a trade deal with the U.S. yet and it seems quite reasonable that it wouldn't be their top priority.

Because it's a lie, and is directly contradicted by both Obama himself, and by David Cameron. Obama was urged by Cameron to interfere in the referendum.

https://www.politico.eu/article/how-barack-obama-came-to-david-camerons-...

"Rattled by tighter-than-expected poll numbers, Cameron asked Obama to make the trip during the referendum campaign rather than wait until July when the president was also scheduled to be in Europe.

White House officials insist the president will not meddle in Britain’s internal debate over Europe, but acknowledged that if he happened to be asked his view, “as a friend, he will offer it.” Cameron aides expect the intervention to be an important moment, particularly in motivating young voters."

Just curious, are you actually interested in cycling at all or do you just come here to bang on about Brexit?

Rendel Harris wrote:

Just curious, are you actually interested in cycling at all or do you just come here to bang on about Brexit?

I'd be quite happy if people just moved on. Unfortunately the left is largely intolerant of others and incapable of this, just like how they protest for years after losing Democratic elections here and in the US.

Jenova20 wrote:

I'd be quite happy if people just moved on. Unfortunately the left is largely intolerant of others and incapable of this, just like how they protest for years after losing Democratic elections here and in the US.

Is that supposed to be ironic?

From my recollection, there was a significant storming of the capitol protest just earlier this year and it wasn't the "left". Personally, I think this partisan left-v-right is way too simplistic and is a hangover from a far more simplistic, tribal way of thinking. (c.f. football supporters shouting insults at the opposing team supporters)

Since the 9/11 attack, far-right extremists killed more people in the US than did American-based Islamist fundamentalists

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/08/post-911-domestic-terror