They sang us “Auld Lang Syne” and you, Farage, in your turn, made an idiot (me being polite) of yourself.
Now, I’d imagine that most people in Brussels know that you’re a blethering old drunk who smells like a stale ashtray, and, as such, they probably don’t listen to you, your little playmates or, indeed, your mad old Granny Ann.
But I’d lay money on the fact that this clip will have been shown on news programmes around the world, from Greenland to New Zealand; from Japan to Paraguay.
You just showed the world what a set of ill-mannered, immature, boors you are, and your behaviour will have refected not just on your miserable selves, but on your country too.
Furthermore, with a set of extremely difficult negotiations yet to come with the EU, you have done your beloved UK absolutely no favours… and, make no mistake, favours will be what the UK will be looking for.
Even fervent supporters of Brexit will have thought you an embarrassment.
You think I’m joking, but in fact, she is for real.
No really, she’s not a stand-up comedienne, she’s a <snigger> politici… Nah, I can’t say it.
What did she think would happen?
I mean she wasn’t daft enough to believe that we could have our cake and eat it, or that we held all the cards, or that there were no downsides to Brexit, surely?
I’ve always thought of leaving the EU as being a bit like leaving a golf club (not that I’ve ever been anywhere near a golf club).
So, you’re in the Trumpy golf club; you decide to leave. Fair enough… but you’re going to stay in for as long as your last year’s subscription lasts, maybe till you find another club to take you.
But then, after that, you propose that, although no longer a member, you’d like to maybe come in one afternoon a week and play a round with your buddies.
Oh, and perhaps have a few drinks at the bar of a Friday evening.
Perchance bring your other half in for a meal on a Saturday from time to time.
Maybe even have your kids’ Christmas party in the function room, like you’ve always done.
But you make it clear that you do not recognise the authority of the Management Committee, and have no intention of following their silly rules.
Maybe Bullingdon Boys are so used to trashing restaurants that it doesn’t occur to them that normal people do follow other people’s rule?
Will this pose a problem in what we imagine Boris’s plan to be?
Grateful to Stewart Wood on Twitter for pointing this out… and that, in fact, that it was as the result of an amendment put forward by no other than Jacob Rees Brexit.
The £100M Get Ready for Brexit campaign videos must be the worst of all time – ‘You may have to…we don’t really know…check on the website where it will tell you it doesn’t know either’ Cheap greenscreen & graphics too – someone’s making a killing here pic.twitter.com/ZyYGQ0fLeD
It was five years ago today (the National ad is from yesterday) and I guess we can all remember what we were doing back then.
I recall that the weather here was pretty grim, cold, dark and rainy but, for all that, it was a happy day, full of hope for the future and I drove all over the town of Dundee ferrying people who needed help to get to polling stations with a great big smile on my face.
It was a happy day. Everyone was full of enthusiasm and hope. A new dawn sort of thing.
We all started early in the morning and went on till the polls closed. Dog tired we took what was left of the stoviews and sandwiches and headed home to await the result. We were happy, quietly confident, and sure we’d done the best we could.
Well, we all know how it turned out.
And we know what happened to most of the promises, made largely by Gordon Brown on behalf of David Cameron, as soon as, or within weeks of the result being announced.
I can’t see how she could ever be prime minister or even deputy prime minister with most legislation get government would propose being outside her purview
The frigates numbers were reduced and then reduced again; the passport offices closed; the tax offices moved to Croyden… and of course, instead of setting up an English parliament, they introduced EVEL, which pretty much makes a high office impossible for a Scottish based MP. So think on, Jo Swinson.
The Wee Black Book, penned by Stuart Campbell, lays out the lies, or at least those that were known at the time of its publication.
One of the biggest lies was, of course, the fallacy that the only way to stay in the European Union was to stay in the United Kingdom. It was always clear that the EU was far more popular in Scotland (and Northern Ireland) than it was in England or Wales.
And later…
Of course, among all of Cameron’s claims and promises, this turned out to be the biggest whopper of them all.
Better Together used these people and then abandoned them.
The loss of a tax office or two was, of course, terrible for the people who worked there (especially after they had been so used by the UKOK campaign) and for the towns concerned, but, compared with the disaster that would have been Brexiteven if it had been handled well, it was comparatively small beer.
And, as we all know, it has been anything but well handled from day one.
Cameron promised that if he lost he would stay on to sort the mess out. He resigned as PM on the morning after the EU vote and as an MP shortly after that and buggered off to his shed to write his memoirs and make himself some money. With the Big Society well and truly forgotten as a legacy, his memoirs turned out to be a sulk at Johnson and Gove.
No one of any talent wanted the job he vacated, of course, and in the end, we, or rather the Tory Party, was left with a choice of the appalling Theresa May, a woman of little charm, no empathy and little political skills and the idiot’s idiot, Andrea Leadsom, who appeared to think that she was better suited to the job because she was a mother and May was not.
Add to that the endless list of talentless, lazy and incompetent ministers that May appointed, her signing of Article 50 before any plan was in place and her eventual resignation as the Conservatives split with visceral hatred, to leave us with the Incredible Hulk, Boris Johnson, and an even more incredibly incompetent band of hard-right wingers, making the UK a laughing stock.
It might be fair to say, too, that throughout all this, the Labour Party hasn’t shown the slightest sign of any kind of competence. And that has been obvious to the public. Even with prime ministers as incompetent and bumbling as May and Johnson, Corbyn has never been shown in the polls as a credible prime minister.
And all of this was thrust on Scotland against the will of the Scottish people.
I’ve said for some time that the only reason that we are not the biggest laughing stock in the world is that, compared with the USA and its moronic leader and his fractured government, the UK is relatively unimportant.
And so, today, with most opinion polls (except those initiated by Scotland in Union) showing a surge in the desire to take our own affairs in hand, we still have hope that in the not too distant future we shall be able to do just that, and take our place in the European family of nations as a small independent country.
All the indicators are that Europe will welcome us. The other Nordic and Celtic nations in the EU and EEA have already made it clear that they will.
Maybe yet we can build a society that will look a little more like that which we really want.
If we don’t take this chance, then we don’t deserve the chance. We shall deserve to remain a vassal state doing the will of our bigger neighbour and cut off from Europe.
I suppose the answer is that David Cameron promised an EU referendum in order to dissuade members of the Conservative Party, MPs and voters alike, from switching to UKIP.
His argument, as I recall, was that if people voted UKIP the likelihood was that they would get but a few MPs, who would be in opposition and who would have no power to offer a referendum. MPs crossing the floor might or might not be re-elected. (In the event only one of the floor crossers was reelected and he subsequently left UKIP and sat as an independent MP.)
However, if people voted Conservative, he, their prime minister, would call a referendum on Britain’s (and Gibraltar’s) future in the European Union.
Of course, Cameron didn’t believe for a second that he would have to actually call a referendum. When he was making these promises, the polls showed very clearly, that a Labour win was on the cards.
And even, had Labour not won, for the Conservatives to form another government they would have needed a coalition with the Lib Dems, and Cameron knew that Nick Clegg would make coalition dependent upon there being no referendum. (Clegg subsequently lost his seat in the 2017 election called by Theresa May to boost her majority, which left her in minority government, dependent for her existence on a hastily arranged, ill-advised and very expensive confidence and supply arrangement with a party from Northen Ireland. A party which back Brexit, against the will of the Northern Irish people.)
Smug, and satisfied as ever, Cameron thought he had it all in the palm of his hands.
Then disaster.
No one had reckoned what a chaotic, useless and ultimately disastrous campaign Ed Miliband would run. He started off looking like little could stop him from becoming the next prime minister and ended up resigning and returning to the backbenches.
But Cameron, in a way, had also lost. He was left with little alternative but to call a referendum.
Still, the Eton boy, Oxford and Bullingdon culture pertained. He would win. Nothing would stop him. (And when Nicola Sturgeon reminded him that he might lose, he told her not to be silly.)
So, then he lost, and although he had previously promised to stay on and sort out the consequences of his referendum, he resigned as prime minister, and although he had further promised to stay on and serve his constituents, he resigned his seat in parliament, and took to a seriously expensive shed (£25,000) at the bottom of the garden to write his memoirs. (Apologies to Jacob for the comma before “and”.)
Being so sure of himself, as is his way, Cameron had failed to think about the consequences of his original plan and consider that it might, just might, go wrong.
And so today, having gone through 3 years of chaos with Theresa May dithering, holding an unnecessary election, losing cabinet members, signing an agreement with the EU, which was then rejected three times in parliament, and finally resigning to be replaced with something even worse… we are facing a hard Brexit, where there will likely be massive job losses, losses of rights, rising prices, falling standards, chaos and possibly riots. And, although it probably won’t initially affect the mainland, a possible return to civil war in Ireland.
Ironic, isn’t it, that this whole project was designed to keep the Tory Party together.
A thick posh boy plan gone horribly wrong.
The Tory party is split like never before, indeed some Tory MPs have crossed the floor and some are threatening to bring down the Tory government. A Tory ex-Prime Minister is threatening to take the government to court. Labour is split, and has lost MPs, and is utterly unfit for purpose. UKIP has split and largely been replaced by a party which has no policies except getting the UK out of Europe. The UK is split by countries and may end up dissolved. And Ireland is facing civil war.
Bravo, Dave, you wanted your legacy to be the “Big Society” (whatever happened to that?) and now it will be the probably break up of your precious union and of your party.
It seems that Good Morning Britain deleted this tweet very rapidly after putting it up… but on the internet, there’s always someone who’s kept it for sentimental reasons, or something! Stuff on the net never really goes away, eh Piers?
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Boris, seemingly determined to make Hunt prime minister, has appointed none other than Ross Thomson to be his campaign manager in Scotland and his advisor on Scotland and Scottish affairs. Presumably Ross will be hoping to take over from Fluffs as the McTea boy in chief at Downing Street.
But given that Boris has to get there first, he might have been advised to choose someone who knew just a little about Scotland or was at least slightly in touch with the country, as his advisor.
Ross is telling anyone who will listen that Boris is the prime minister to put the fear of whatever into Nicola Sturgeon. (You may remember that, yesterday, it was Hunt that was saying that distinction fell to him!)
So, as we said yesterday… just two words on that. “Jim” and “Murphy”!
I’d also point wee Rossy in the direction of material that suggests a somewhat different or contrary conclusion.
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Dutch PM Mark Rutte hits the nail on the head: “I hate Brexit from every angle…I’m so sad that you're doing this. You will have a diminished role on the world stage, your economy will suffer, it will have a huge impact on society” 🇪🇺pic.twitter.com/cNKAjt7MD7
— Dr. Jennifer Cassidy (@OxfordDiplomat) June 20, 2019
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I bet the 2-3% of people who pushed the “leave” vote over the line in England and Wales weren’t as aware as they might have been that companies would go bust and jobs would be lost as a direct result of their choice.
I suspect that many were simply rejoicing at £350 million a week for the NHS and getting rid of foreigners from their care homes and farms and shops and factories leaving lots of jobs for “hard-working decent British families up and down the country”, as they are wont to say.
It’s such a pity that the Leave Campaign wasn’t as honest as it might have been.
Unfcknbelievable!! Jeremy Hunt if businesses have to get ‘wiped out’ because of No Deal Brexit then so be it.. 😱 Just unreal!!!pic.twitter.com/cbp4JVzFq6
There may be little point in electing Boris as prime minister. His own side has threatened to bring him down and start the process all over again if he tries to take the UK out of the EU without a deal.
The problem is that Hunt has more or less made the same promise (see above). Leave on October 31, come what may.
So whoever is the next prime minister may find himself in the records for all the wrong reasons and beat George Canning as the shortest ever serving PM (119 days). At least Canning had had a relatively distinguished career before that.
But, can you just imagine a second contest within a couple of weeks? Quite apart from the laughing stock that the UK would be around the world (about which I care little), we’d be obliged to suffer Leadsom and McVey and the wee goblin Gove, appearing on tv, radio and social media all over again.
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 