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Brexit the economy and house prices part 7: Brexit Harder
Comments
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Question for Leavers from me: The latest opinion poll from the 9th and 10th You Gov has 17% Tory, 19% Labour, 22% Lib Dem and 26% Brexit Party.
Question is why are the Tories polling so low? Don’t Leavers like or trust Boris? Or was the poll too early and The Tories might be in the lead after yesterday’s showing that Boris is the favourite?0 -
But Boris is not PM yet and party machinations are far from complete. The people being polled are in wait-and-see mode.
Even if Boris is PM there's a very strong chance he'll still fail to get us out by 31st Oct and a GE is then inevitable. The conservatives are unlikely to win it. The best chance then would be a vote-share deal with Farage. So much is up the the air that polls are meaningless at the moment IMO.0 -
I appreciate that the Scottish Government has used what powers it's allowed to have to undo the worst of the austerity.
But that still doesn't explain why it makes sense to make it worse in protest of it being bad. Sure, you can make some rich toffs sweat a bit. But none of these weasels really care, about the voters, or about their jobs (many of them will be set for life as an MP or not, even BoJo is on record complaining that an MP's salary isn't enough to live off, and indeed he makes much, much more, writing dodgy newspaper articles).
A fair minded Scot would acknowledge that Scotland was able to abrogate the worst excesses of Tory austerity because the per capita funding Scotland receives is considerably higher than in England.
Scotland did not make different choices it was able to cut less because it gets more money than England.
It amazes me how the obvious connection between the Brexit vote and the specific disaffection of austerity blighted England has not been made more of.“Britain- A friend to all, beholden to none”. 🇬🇧0 -
Then there's this:
https://ukandeu.ac.uk/gravy-train-a-first-taste-of-life-as-an-mep/
At last, I’ve had my first taste of being an MEP: over in Brussels on Monday and Tuesday signing up with the administration and being briefed on and by the bureaucracy. Quite an experience. It was even more absurd than I expected.
When a rather obsessive pseudonymous troll published a series of photos of me eating on the Eurostar, I realised just how much my life had changed. “Brexit Party MEP has nose in trough of gravy train,” the shock-horror expos! was to show me travelling business class.
But if critics think business class travel is the extent of the gravy train, they haven’t been looking very hard. The EU’s financial excesses are grotesque.
It’s creepy enough that just by being elected seems to have given the green light for a stranger to intrude on my privacy to take secret photos, but it’s also bemusing that my secret paparazzi was travelling in the same carriage, at the same costs; presumably a fellow elected official or a EU bureaucrat?
While outraged #FBPE Remainers gloated that I was travelling at taxpayers’ expense, they might like to know it is the EU who recommends business class for expediency. It is paid for by them apparently because these tickets are easier to change if there are travel problems. It’s an exorbitant extravagance, but it is only the tip of the iceberg.
I’ve never really focused on the financial costs of belonging to the EU: my main objection is its undemocratic nature. But I must confess, I’m shocked by the wanton waste lavished on MEPs. The above-mentioned voyeuristic troll tweeted, “my spy tells me she spent much of the journey looking mournfully out of the window as the French and Belgian countryside fled by.” Factually accurate.
I was reflecting on just how grubby I felt being embroiled in an organisation awash with money, perks, chauffeurs, bulging with endless incentives designed to suck you in. It felt potentially corrupting and you don’t have to be a supporter of Brexit to feel queasy about the EU’s obscene opulence.
Don’t get me wrong: on arrival, I was excited, if nervous, about being formally registered in my new role. As a democratically-elected MEP, I feel an enormous responsibility to the over half a million voters in the North West of England who chose three of us from the region to represent them.
Our mandate is to get us out of the EU, but it is also a broader task of popularising the importance of national and popular sovereignty and ensuring that the democratic vote is delivered.
And what an amazing setting to pursue such noble aims. The buildings are imposing: a vast campus with hairdressers, shops, tens of thousands of staff, researchers, endless committee rooms and auditoriums, top of the range technology, smoking booths (phew), bars, every conceivable amenity. A real city on the hill. As someone new to this official politics game, I confess I was wowed, impressed, a little thrilled to be so close to power. But then I checked myself…
Listening to briefings detailing descriptions of how the parliament works was sobering and I realized just how powerless MEPs really are. Any plans to make trouble ran into the practical reality of the way time is stitched up via the arcane Group system, allowing little possibility of speaking.
Incredibly, the EP isn’t even a talking shop: it actually blocks people from talking!
Facing the stark reality of joining a body that cannot initiate change, restricted to amending proposals, it feels more like a rubber stamp of legislation handed down from the unelected EU Commission on high. Enough to make a democrat’s heart sink. We do get to elect the next Commission president, but this seems small fry compared to having real democratic, mandated power.
I kept wondering how all the pro-EU MEPs could justify being mere insignificant cogs in a toothless technocratic wheel. Yet the paraphernalia and trappings, the payments and pay-offs are obviously an important prop in the grand illusion that your job matters. Surely no-one would throw such extravagant rewards at you unless you are crucial, right?
For example, according to recent Treasury figures, the annual cost of an MEP is three times the cost of an MP in the House of Commons. Indeed, most Remainer MEPs are easily flattered into believing they deserve every penny. But this is delusional. Wherever you stand on the Brexit divide, I think voters deserve a more honest critique of the ludicrous excesses on offer to MEPs.
Never mind the business-class travel, surely even Remain-and-Reform advocates might be keen to challenge whether every new MEP needs a free iPad, two offices in Brussels, one in Strasbourg, an office and staff budget for the UK.
It was jaw-dropping to hear administrative staff – who made us all feel incredibly welcome (despite the irony of us being a group committed to leaving the very institution they were initiating us into) – spell out what benefits are on offer.
We were issued with a mind-boggling 110-page booklet “on Members’ financial and social entitlements.” I had to get the finance staff to repeat exactly what the “daily subsistence” meant. Apparently, on top of a hefty salary, you are paid just to turn up to work. Actually, you automatically collect £300 plus if you sign in to the building, which MEPs do regardless of the fact that the Parliament is infrequently in session.
Then there is a general expenditure allowance paid as a lump sum into MEPs’ personal bank accounts on top of our salary, without having to provide any receipts or proof of expenditure. It’s a lavish anti-transparency measure only recently upheld by Eurocrats. The allowances – i.e. extras, bits and bobs – costs £35 million-a-year for 751 MEPs. Do the maths.
Unsurprisingly, the website for UK MEPs seldom mentions these perks. Rather, we read grandiose claims for the importance of the number of committees they sit on, the foreign delegations they join and boasts that “MEPs, as individuals and working in their political groups” are having “a real impact on the drafting and amendment of European legislation.” I suspect that the financial rewards reinforce the sense of one’s own inflated importance.
I officially start as an MEP when the parliament meets in Strasbourg on 2 July. I am still gob-smacked that every month the Brussels machine moves its 751 members and its (our!) 7,500 staff to France at a monthly cost of €114 million. This is an obscene, modern-day Versailles. While I’m going to try and enjoy every moment of what I hope will be a short stay, I will be documenting its real inner workings.
If the EU insist on business class Eurostar, the very least I can do is repay them by writing a regular expos! of its excesses as I travel home. Watch this space.
By Claire Fox, Brexit Party MEP-elect for the North West Region0 -
I am so very sure that our own Parliament/Assemblies are squeaky clean in comparison ha de ha.
Why do those who have been elected to the EU Parliament deride it so much? Bet they won't be giving any of the so called perks away.
They should not have stood for an entity they despise. Such tokenism and hypocrisy. Surely they knew or researched the T+Cs before standing for election. Oh no, that would have meant they would not have been elected in the first place if people knew! Easy to say after the event, and forgive me for being cynical.
They will not change anything. And that's good, because the EU has been good for all of us up to the current mayhem.
They should just give up their seats right now and put their money where there mouths are. But any guesses that they will. Nah.0 -
John Longworth MEP lifts the lid on the EU gravy train.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/06/14/mad-first-week-brussels-brexit-party-mep/
Everyone would laugh, except for the Germans. Not because they had no humour, but because they had no English and it would take an extra 10 seconds for the translator to get to the verb at the end of the sentence.
Doncha just love the EU.
I do not believe that at all. German people can speak and understand English far better than UK people can speak and understand German. It is taught from kindergarten there.
Honestly that is just ridiculous! But some people fall for it. Obviously. UK has to feel top dog. But it's days are numbered as a believable force in Europe now. Everyone is laughing at this kind of nonsense. No wonder.0 -
I do not believe that at all. German people can speak and understand English far better than UK people can speak and understand German. It is taught from kindergarten there.
Honestly that is just ridiculous! But some people fall for it. Obviously. UK has to feel top dog. But it's days are numbered as a believable force in Europe now. Everyone is laughing at this kind of nonsense. No wonder.
So you choose to ignore the main thrust of the articles which is the ludicrous waste of taxpayers' money to keep MEPs sweet and focus instead on a comment about the language skills of the Germans. No surprise there.
Of course English is taught in German schools and I have met many Germans who are reasonably fluent but struggle when it comes to dealing with bureaucracy. I have good conversational skills in three languages other than English but I too struggle when confronted by officials. That kind of thing is not in the school curriculum.0 -
I am so very sure that our own Parliament/Assemblies are squeaky clean in comparison ha de ha.
Why do those who have been elected to the EU Parliament deride it so much? Bet they won't be giving any of the so called perks away.
They should not have stood for an entity they despise. Such tokenism and hypocrisy. Surely they knew or researched the T+Cs before standing for election. Oh no, that would have meant they would not have been elected in the first place if people knew! Easy to say after the event, and forgive me for being cynical.
They will not change anything. And that's good, because the EU has been good for all of us up to the current mayhem.
They should just give up their seats right now and put their money where there mouths are. But any guesses that they will. Nah.
I bet you would be the first to complain about the allowance the Lords get for turning up, and most of them do not get a salary on top!
And it is ridiculous that the parliament has to move so much just so as not to upset the French!
They really should sort themselves out and stop behaving like they are entitled to the cream when they are imposing serious limitations on their members. But that would require a change of attitude from the dinosaurs at the top.What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare0 -
Then there's this:
https://ukandeu.ac.uk/gravy-train-a-first-taste-of-life-as-an-mep/
At last, I’ve had my first taste of being an MEP: over in Brussels on Monday and Tuesday signing up with the administration and being briefed on and by the bureaucracy. Quite an experience. It was even more absurd than I expected.
When a rather obsessive pseudonymous troll published a series of photos of me eating on the Eurostar, I realised just how much my life had changed. “Brexit Party MEP has nose in trough of gravy train,” the shock-horror expos! was to show me travelling business class.
But if critics think business class travel is the extent of the gravy train, they haven’t been looking very hard. The EU’s financial excesses are grotesque.
It’s creepy enough that just by being elected seems to have given the green light for a stranger to intrude on my privacy to take secret photos, but it’s also bemusing that my secret paparazzi was travelling in the same carriage, at the same costs; presumably a fellow elected official or a EU bureaucrat?
While outraged #FBPE Remainers gloated that I was travelling at taxpayers’ expense, they might like to know it is the EU who recommends business class for expediency. It is paid for by them apparently because these tickets are easier to change if there are travel problems. It’s an exorbitant extravagance, but it is only the tip of the iceberg.
I’ve never really focused on the financial costs of belonging to the EU: my main objection is its undemocratic nature. But I must confess, I’m shocked by the wanton waste lavished on MEPs. The above-mentioned voyeuristic troll tweeted, “my spy tells me she spent much of the journey looking mournfully out of the window as the French and Belgian countryside fled by.” Factually accurate.
I was reflecting on just how grubby I felt being embroiled in an organisation awash with money, perks, chauffeurs, bulging with endless incentives designed to suck you in. It felt potentially corrupting and you don’t have to be a supporter of Brexit to feel queasy about the EU’s obscene opulence.
Don’t get me wrong: on arrival, I was excited, if nervous, about being formally registered in my new role. As a democratically-elected MEP, I feel an enormous responsibility to the over half a million voters in the North West of England who chose three of us from the region to represent them.
Our mandate is to get us out of the EU, but it is also a broader task of popularising the importance of national and popular sovereignty and ensuring that the democratic vote is delivered.
And what an amazing setting to pursue such noble aims. The buildings are imposing: a vast campus with hairdressers, shops, tens of thousands of staff, researchers, endless committee rooms and auditoriums, top of the range technology, smoking booths (phew), bars, every conceivable amenity. A real city on the hill. As someone new to this official politics game, I confess I was wowed, impressed, a little thrilled to be so close to power. But then I checked myself…
Listening to briefings detailing descriptions of how the parliament works was sobering and I realized just how powerless MEPs really are. Any plans to make trouble ran into the practical reality of the way time is stitched up via the arcane Group system, allowing little possibility of speaking.
Incredibly, the EP isn’t even a talking shop: it actually blocks people from talking!
Facing the stark reality of joining a body that cannot initiate change, restricted to amending proposals, it feels more like a rubber stamp of legislation handed down from the unelected EU Commission on high. Enough to make a democrat’s heart sink. We do get to elect the next Commission president, but this seems small fry compared to having real democratic, mandated power.
I kept wondering how all the pro-EU MEPs could justify being mere insignificant cogs in a toothless technocratic wheel. Yet the paraphernalia and trappings, the payments and pay-offs are obviously an important prop in the grand illusion that your job matters. Surely no-one would throw such extravagant rewards at you unless you are crucial, right?
For example, according to recent Treasury figures, the annual cost of an MEP is three times the cost of an MP in the House of Commons. Indeed, most Remainer MEPs are easily flattered into believing they deserve every penny. But this is delusional. Wherever you stand on the Brexit divide, I think voters deserve a more honest critique of the ludicrous excesses on offer to MEPs.
Never mind the business-class travel, surely even Remain-and-Reform advocates might be keen to challenge whether every new MEP needs a free iPad, two offices in Brussels, one in Strasbourg, an office and staff budget for the UK.
It was jaw-dropping to hear administrative staff – who made us all feel incredibly welcome (despite the irony of us being a group committed to leaving the very institution they were initiating us into) – spell out what benefits are on offer.
We were issued with a mind-boggling 110-page booklet “on Members’ financial and social entitlements.” I had to get the finance staff to repeat exactly what the “daily subsistence” meant. Apparently, on top of a hefty salary, you are paid just to turn up to work. Actually, you automatically collect £300 plus if you sign in to the building, which MEPs do regardless of the fact that the Parliament is infrequently in session.
Then there is a general expenditure allowance paid as a lump sum into MEPs’ personal bank accounts on top of our salary, without having to provide any receipts or proof of expenditure. It’s a lavish anti-transparency measure only recently upheld by Eurocrats. The allowances – i.e. extras, bits and bobs – costs £35 million-a-year for 751 MEPs. Do the maths.
Unsurprisingly, the website for UK MEPs seldom mentions these perks. Rather, we read grandiose claims for the importance of the number of committees they sit on, the foreign delegations they join and boasts that “MEPs, as individuals and working in their political groups” are having “a real impact on the drafting and amendment of European legislation.” I suspect that the financial rewards reinforce the sense of one’s own inflated importance.
I officially start as an MEP when the parliament meets in Strasbourg on 2 July. I am still gob-smacked that every month the Brussels machine moves its 751 members and its (our!) 7,500 staff to France at a monthly cost of €114 million. This is an obscene, modern-day Versailles. While I’m going to try and enjoy every moment of what I hope will be a short stay, I will be documenting its real inner workings.
If the EU insist on business class Eurostar, the very least I can do is repay them by writing a regular expos! of its excesses as I travel home. Watch this space.
By Claire Fox, Brexit Party MEP-elect for the North West Region
Right. This would be the same Claire Fox who supports IRA bombing campaigns and believes child pornography should not be illegal? From that well-known lefty liberal rag The Spectator:
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/05/the-twisted-truth-about-nigel-farages-brexit-party/0
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