Are we at the stage where the Brexit-woe establishment is funny yet?

There's a glorious article by Rachel Cooke, who seems to have a problem telling the EU apart from Europe and recognising that Croissants existed before 197x, and is nostalgic about Orangina as an exotic. Love it.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/18/europe-made-foodies-of-us-all-brexit

"You know where this is going. Brexit feels to me like grief, and, deep in mourning, I can’t stop thinking of the loved one, and all that she brought me. "

For heaven's sake don't tell her about Elizabeth David and Derek Cooper.

Ferdinand

Recently published by the CER: Britain is one of the more populous countries in Europe, is highly integrated with the European economy, and is 21 miles from France. These facts limit its room for manoeuvre in the Brexit negotiations: https://www.cer.org.uk/publications/archive/bulletin-article/2016/britains-limited-options

Does that mean they paid to join so that they could vote for Corbyn?

Posted By: fostertom"183,541 people paid £25 (within 48hr time slot) to become registered supporters and qualify for a vote in the contest between existing leader Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith."

That's £4.6m into Labour coffers - neat.

"A spokesman for Mr Corbyn said it was "reasonable to assume" that the majority of the new registrations come from supporters of the Labour leader."

Wow, did all those ppl join to vote in support of Corbyn?

Posted By: bot de pailleWow, did all those ppl join to vote in support of Corbyn?

Yes, or to oppose him - but it does look like most of them are to support him.

Me and my missis paid the £25 ea, to back Corbyn - on top of actually joining the Party a week ago for more money, only for the NEC to decree that we're too new to vote, unless we pay an extra £25 for the priviledge, within a 48hr window between opening and closing the online opportunity.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/new-labour-party-members-feel-misled-and-betrayed-at-rule-change-on-leadership-vote_uk_57862784e4b08078d6e7975d

“This decision by the old machine fixers on the NEC is not only unjust to everyone from all sides of the party who have joined recently but also strategically stupid.

“Our best chance of beating Corbyn was to mobilise the renewed energy and engagement of the many against the far left few. Instead, the old right have retreated into a crumbling bunker of established members to fight a battle they suspect they will lose anyway.”

BBCs character assassination campaign against Corbyn

Yep, I heard that interview, too, and thought it really odd and unconvincing. For somebody who's supposedly a professional politician to get that upset about internal party disagreements, however nasty, indicates either she's in the wrong line of work or putting it on.

That's not news, he's been saying that for a while. Hollande is on the back foot politically after Nice, and besides he's only one EU voice.
He's trying to undermine any future Le Pen support by appearing hard line to the UK.

They could just re-use the Gazza puppet.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/eurozone-economy-continued-to-expand-in-july-1469177599

"PMI Data Point to Sharp Slowdown in U.K. Economy Following Brexit Vote"

"The PMI fell sharply to its lowest level since early 2009"

"The U.K. PMI is a measure of activity based on monthly questioning of 600 manufacturing companies and 650 service providers since 1998. It has a close correlation with official measures of economic growth, although it underestimated the scale of the decline in activity in 2009 and the strength of the expansion in 2006 and 2000."

"Markit said the measure fell to 47.7 in July from 52.4 in June, the sharpest one-month drop on record. A reading below 50.0 signals a decline in activity, and a reading above that level indicates an expansion."

http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/692147/jeremy-corbyn-migrant-deal-EU?utm_source=traffic.outbrain&utm_medium=traffic.outbrain&utm_term=traffic.outbrain&utm_content=traffic.outbrain&utm_campaign=traffic.outbrain

Corbyn would BACK free movement of labour if he becomes PM as NHS 'depends' on it

JEREMY CORBYN has said he would seek to negotiate a deal to allow European immigration into the UK if he becomes Prime Minister.

During an interview aired on BBC Newsnight Mr Corbyn said he would want to see a "movement of labour" across Europe including the UK, if he was to win the next general election.

He said: "I would want to see a movement of labour which recognises the need to have similarities of conditions across Europe.

"If we say that we are going to start restricting then it works both ways, it will also restrict British people going to live and work in Europe.

Shock, horror?

Only if you found that things didn't go the way you were expecting.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36864273

The following article is taken from today’s (23 July 2016) Telegraph.

Under the headline: ‘The ideologically charged EU has damaged medical research and training and independent thinking’, Professors Angus Dalgleish and Gwythian Prins, write...

A wild hysteria seems to have gripped our colleagues in universities. How else to explain Paul Nurse, former president of the Royal Society, describing the vote to take back control of our country as “the biggest threat [to science] in living memory”? Or a Cambridge economics don attending a faculty meeting and using her naked. body as a billboard to protest against Brexit?

The truth is that British research need not suffer once we leave the EU, because like Switzerland or Israel - which has more listed start-ups on the Nasdaq than the EU combined - we shall still have access to the EU’s Horizon 2020 and framework fundinglcompeiitions. Great Britain will also have the heft to obtain special associate status on our terms as Europe’s leading research nation and will also remain a member of all the key international intergovernmental research and technology co-operation organisations - from the European Space Agency to the G8 Research Councils - which have nothing to do with the EU.

Brexit simply offers a far brighter future for research and education, and not just because we will regain sovereign control of government grant-making with our tax money. The vote also means that we shall escape deeply detrimental present and planned expansions of the EU’s power.

The EU Clinical Trials Directive had disastrous consequences for academic research. It destroyed innovative new approaches and treatments overnight and, according to one Cambridge professor of pharmacology, was the cause of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Too little, too late, it is being rewritten. In one case it halted, overnight, major cell therapy immunology-based research – the £5 million plus cost of compliance was too expensive for the charity funding the study. In consequence, this therapy is starting to become mainstream 10 years later than necessary.

There are other examples where EU directives have directly damaged patient care. The Working Time Directive obstructs and reduces high-quality specialist training. The president of the Royal College of Surgeons, Clare Marx, confirms that abandoning it will improve patient safety. The college calculates that it costs trainee surgeons 3,000 hours of precious experience. Miss Marx rightly adds the potentially and actually fatal dangers to patients from lax EU medical language requirements and inadequate standards for clinical instruments. This is concrete evidence that the NHS will be safer out of the hands of the EU. In understated words, Miss Marx says that Brexit is “quite an opportunity”.

In the humanities, we escape the EU’s intensifying indoctrination of students in “EU studies” mandated under Article 126 of the Maastricht Treaty, which jemmied open the window into national control of education by giving the EU Executive Agency for Education a role in “policy co-ordination”. That dangerously bland term gives powers to “evaluate educational outcomes” - and hence shape curricula. So through Brexit We have escaped future programmes to brainwash our children.

Likewise, British universities will no longer be obliged to acquire an “Erasmus Charter for Higher Education” - under which inspectors will make “quality assessment” of “cooperation” as a condition of receiving funding. Safely named a “partner country” Britain’s higher education institutions will not be required to have this ideological imprimatur.

Finally we can ditch the most flexible propaganda instrument in the humanities, which is the award of “Jean Monnet Chairs” - posts for university professors, designed “to deepen teaching in EU Studies...mentor the young generation of researchers’ in EU Studies... and organise activities... targeting to policy makers local, regional, national.”

It is simply not true, as Paul Nurse has said, that Brexit will impede the movement of qualified researchers. In fact, on a global stage, the opposite will be the case. British universities, like their American counterparts, will be able to lift their eyes from the continental to the global stage, with no bias towards students or staff from one area or another.

Instead they will freely be able to recruit the finest minds from across the planet. These minds will prove the entrepreneurs and discoverers of the future. At the moment we are turning some of them away.

From our combined research experience of over 8O years, may we make the basic point about academic life? Productive intellectual collaboration and especially path-breaking insights depend on individuals - on Crick with Watson; on James Lovelock; on Erasmus writing In Praise of Folly to Thomas More: not on ideologically charged institutions like the EU.


ProfessorAngus Dalgleish is Foundation Professor of Oncology at St Georges University of London; Professor Gwythian Prins is Emeritus Research Professor at the London School of Economics. The fee for this article has been donated to the Cancer Vaccine Institute.

Just because someone supports Brexit, or is a UKIP supporter for that matter, doesn't make them unworthy of an opinion, nor what they say propaganda.

Posted By: owlmanJust because someone supports Brexit, or is a UKIP supporter for that matter, doesn't make them unworthy of an opinion, nor what they say propaganda.

Of course, everyone is entitled to an opinion. However, an article in a national newspaper is rather more than that, and I certainly want to know the background of anyone writing such a piece expressing strong opinions in favour of leaving the EU. Knowing the writers background is essential to evaluate the worth of an piece of writing in these days of apparently independent (but actually biased) information.

As the article starts by bad mouthing a leading scientist and includes at least one outright lie, I think propaganda is a justifiable description. If a pro-remainer used similar techniques they would equally be guilty of propagandising.

The main problem I see is that science projects will loose out on EU funding before an alternative can be put in place. The UK hasn't even started to think about what sort of research it wants to fund let alone started to accept applications for funding.

Suppose you need funding for a five year research project starting in 2018. Prior to the Brexit vote you might have been just about to submit your application for funding. Now you don't even know if, where or when you be able to apply for the UK alternative. It would be very tempting to take up that job you were offered at a German university which has no such funding problem.