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EU In or Out


Alex MacLeod

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Er and what does GPS mean ?       General Postal Strike?

And as for the Dutch cheese trader needing to go to London for his permits every few days etc.,  why?  Can he not just get them through his computer and printer for goodness sake? Isn't that what "Online" means , and is for? 

just asking!!!!!

 

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Just watched the Prime Minister's latest pathetic statement. How dare that arrogant misguided woman lecture me and tell me what I want and tell me what is good for me.

She assures me that she will not stand for an extension beyond the end of June. Then again she gave the same assurance that she had no intention of calling a General Election and would, under no circumstances, extend the date of Brexit beyond the 29th of March.

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38 minutes ago, snorbens_caleyman said:

Mrs Snorbens and I have just agreed that we are taking to the streets on the People's Vote March in London on Saturday.

First time we have ever done anything like that.   We are so f***ing mad with what is going on that taking to the streets is the only option. 

Well done and good luck to you both. One thing is for sure, you will have ample company with many millions more with you in spirit.

MPs are already getting death threats from right wing extremists as a result of the Prime Minister's reckless words. Not only incompetent but deadly dangerous.

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Abundantly clear from the start that a full English Brexit would be fatally unhealthy. A Coninental Brexit would be a bit better but Scotland would be better off skipping Brexit altogether and rejoicing the neighbours for lunch which would be far more convivial without the grouch who constantly argues about splitting the bill and reminiscing about how they once owned the restaurant. 

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On 3/20/2019 at 10:30 PM, snorbens_caleyman said:

Mrs Snorbens and I have just agreed that we are taking to the streets on the People's Vote March in London on Saturday.

First time we have ever done anything like that.   We are so f***ing mad with what is going on that taking to the streets is the only option. 

I hope you both had an enjoyable day together with the 999,998 who accompanied you.

However, I suspect that the Prime Minister had the curtains drawn at Downing Street and her ear plugs in whistling a patriotic tune and trying to wish you all and the near five million who have now signed the Revoke Article 50 petition away.

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40 minutes ago, Kingsmills said:

I hope you both had an enjoyable day together with the 999,998 who accompanied you.

Thank you!  I think we considerably swelled the numbers - we really must get onto our diets.

We didn't make it to Parliament Square though.  If you know London, we came out of the Tube at Marble Arch (north end of Park Lane) at 12:30pm.  The start of the march was at Hyde Park Corner, at the south end of Park Lane, but to minimise congestion there the organisers had asked everyone to come from the north end.

So we joined the back of the march a few hundred yards down Park Lane.  The march started at 1pm - but it was 3pm before we got out of Park Lane!  Then along about 2/3 of Piccadilly, right into St James's, and then left onto Pall Mall towards Trafalgar Square.  Very, very slow, all the way.  We used local knowledge and hit the sidestreets nearer Trafalgar Square, but it was still 4:30 before we got there. Long after all the speeches, and lots of folk were going home.  We were beginning to feel sore after four hours of either standing or shuffling, so we decided not to go off down Whitehall to Parliament Square.  Though I saw on the 6pm news that people were still arriving there at that time.

All ages and types of people on the March.  Everyone extremely good-natured and very friendly.  I'd even call it fun.

As you say, I am sure that Treeza will totally ignore it, but you have to do what you have to do.

I'll put some pictures up in a few minutes - I have some in both camera and phone.

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Pictures of crowds are just pictures of crowds, and you can see them on the news.  Here are some of the placards that we encountered.

control.JPG.a71b50a78e96a7c40fa757c2068f4777.JPG     drunk.JPG.e7f3febad92baa61fd0a3ab31683839f.JPG      unicorn.JPG.2f49abea4fdd848e016c819ddf53820e.JPG      shite.JPG.10c5d7b0b535bcd18569690f910d8f3a.JPG

     teuchters.JPG.5bbf897599563a3c0da7fd3e721f29f2.JPG

The lady with the "teuchters" placard is living in London now, but was originally from Helmsdale.   That's meant to be the mountain Suilven in the background.   She said that she met some folk off the crowdfunded bus from inverness this morning, and they looked... well... rough!  Must have been a good trip. 

Finally, here is what the best equipped protestors were drinking from.

bottle.jpg.15056b376496139c341b2c5c55b18898.jpg

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  • 1 month later...

Looking increasingly likely a straight and stark choice between leaving on WTO rules and risking hundreds of thousands of jobs or revoking Article 50 and remaining.

Whilst all logic suggests the latter will prevail we cannot underestimate the xenophobic nutters and their populist appeal to the lowest common denominator. No scope for complacency.

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Cameron called the referendum in an attempt to unite his party but it has rather spectacularly back fired.  Latest polling suggests that the Tories might actually slip as low as 6th in Scotland.  What is really extraordinary is that in the UK as a whole, a party that did not even exist at the time of the referendum is set to win more votes than the Tories and Labour combined.  Cameron's miscalculation appears to have changed the face of British politics for ever.  Interesting times ahead.

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The ghosts of Neville Chamberlain and Ramsey MacDonald have ceased to argue about which one of them was the worst Primd Minister since the union of the parliaments both recognising that the present incumbent is now unchallengable in that respect.

Perhaps though, only until the next one.

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Well, the inevitable has happened and May is gone.

Just as inevitable is the fact that her successor will be an extreme brexiteer determined to pull the United Kingdom out of the most successful economic and cultural union in history on a no deal basis with the inevitable economic and cultural disaster that will ensue leaving the UK isolated, insular and xenophobic.

I feel sorry for our friends and neighbours in England, Wales and Northern Ireland who, in all probability will have no choice but to endure these consequences.

However, we in Scotland will have a choice. There will of course to challenges and difficulties in taking an independent course but we have the oportunity to be an outward looking, confident, welcoming internationalist nation rather than facing the certainly of what lies ahead if we do nothing.

 

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I could see a right-wing Brexiteer PM giving Scotland more devolved power, with Westminster having less control over Scotland than it does now. 

I suspect that none of the usual suspects - Johnson, Raab, etc - cares a jot about Scotland.  Since they would draw virtually no support from there, they could be happy to give it more power if that was the price to avoid being remembered as the PM who oversaw the break-up of the Union. 

You would still lose the benefits of EU membership, of course. But a cunning PM could certainly make independence a very difficult question.

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The really worrying thing about Boris Johnson is that I am convinced that he doesn't believe in Brexit.

Rather, on the eve of the referendum campaign he took the calculated view that to be seen to campaign for Brexit would further his own political ambitions and that he remains determined to hold that position even in the knowledge of the damage that will do to the United Kingdom.

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You've probably not seen much of Boris in the media recently.  That might seem strange as there has clearly been an undeclared leadership contest going on prior to May's statement today.  Apparently his advisers have told him to keep a low public profile in case he says or does something stupid which might be seized upon by the media!  Nothing could demonstrate his total unsuitability to be Prime Minister than that.  If he wins the contest then he will have an awful lot of public exposure, but by then, it will be too late.

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10 hours ago, DoofersDad said:

You've probably not seen much of Boris in the media recently.  That might seem strange as there has clearly been an undeclared leadership contest going on prior to May's statement today.  Apparently his advisers have told him to keep a low public profile in case he says or does something stupid which might be seized upon by the media!  Nothing could demonstrate his total unsuitability to be Prime Minister than that.  If he wins the contest then he will have an awful lot of public exposure, but by then, it will be too late.

That's the worry DD and there's not much better with the other candidates. I hope we get the timing right for indyref 2 and people have the courage to go it alone as Westminster is a total shambles. 

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3 hours ago, IBM said:

That's the worry DD and there's not much better with the other candidates. I hope we get the timing right for indyref 2 and people have the courage to go it alone as Westminster is a total shambles. 

Agreed. We have been told too often and for too long that we are incapable of running our own affairs, often by fellow Scots like Ruth Davidson, David Mundel and Gordon Brown that too many have, in the past, believed that to be so.

However, given the extreme right wing disaster that is now the United kingdom, surely even many of the doubters will be persuaded next time around.

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1 hour ago, Kingsmills said:

We have been told too often and for too long that we are incapable of running our own affairs

The only person of any credibility who trots out that line this century is your good self!

Just like EU in or out debate, we could leave a union and run more of our own affairs, it's just a question of whether the pros outweigh the cons.

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32 minutes ago, Kingsmills said:

Agreed. We have been told too often and for too long that we are incapable of running our own affairs, often by fellow Scots like Ruth Davidson, David Mundel and Gordon Brown that too many have, in the past, believed that to be so.

However, given the extreme right wing disaster that is now the United kingdom, surely even many of the doubters will be persuaded next time around.

I didn't used to be a supporter of independence.  My father, being a old-fashioned Highlander, didn't have much trust in people from the Central Belt, and thought that there wouldn't be much difference in the Highlands being governed from Westminster or from Edinburgh. In fact he reckoned that the huntin' shootin' fishin' brigade from England probably knew more about the Highlands than many folk from the Central belt.  He wasn't impressed with the Scottish parliament when it was first set up, reasoning that the if the MSPs had wanted to stand for office, then they had already had three other opportunities - local government, Westminster parliament and European parliament - and so they must have been the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel!

I guess that some of this rubbed off on me, but since I had left Scotland in 1978, with no thought of returning, I wasn't much bothered about the whole independence thing.  Although my wife and I did notice the big change over the years after devolution, from a nation whose main identifying characteristic was hatred of its nearest neighbour, into a self-confident, forward-looking country.

After two or three years of Cameron's first government (the coalition), the word I most often used to describe them was "incompetent".  So, as the indyref neared, I found myself thinking what I would do if I had a vote.  And, given the shambles that Cameron's government was, and the mess they were making of running the country, I realised that I was thinking "You're better off out of this. Go for it!".  And I came to realise that I supported independence.

The years since then have revealed new and unimagined depths of incompetence in Westminster.  I don't think that a change of government would help.

Before the indyref, I saw on TV some economist who had been asked whether the average family in Scotland would be £1.5K better off or £2.5K worse off, or whatever the numbers were.  "Look," he said, "no one knows.  However, what we do know is that at the end of the day, Scotland would still be a reasonably prosperous country in north-west Europe.  Of course there are differences, but on the whole all countries in NW Europe have pretty similar standards of living.  There's no reason why Scotland should be any different.".

So there you have it.  Yes there are serious questions about an independent Scottish economy, which need proper answers - not least about trade with England.  And it's easy for me to say "Go for it!", because I don't live in Scotland.  But I'd still say it.

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Mistakes will be made but one mistake we are unlikely to make is to elect a right wing, xenophobic, insular and inward looking executive.

On that basis, it would appear an independent Scotland would have at least one advantage over the UK from the outset.

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