bmcgrath.bsky.social
British European, competition lawyer and proud centrist dad
91 posts
265 followers
614 following
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And something else, which hasn't really been processed yet: a betrayal of British businesses, who are being misled into legally dangerous positions by an activist public body. The basic reality is that a company which trusts the EHRC will find itself in far greater danger than one which doesn't.
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According to the FT, it was actually sold for €1, which is rather ironic (though less neat).
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You can get Lipton but I wouldn't want it. That's my point (may have been a bit unclear). TBF, you can get very nice high end tea bags in Germany and elsewhere but many multiples more expensive and not a proper cup of tea, as I would define it.
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Regular items brought back to the UK from Germany are pretty mundane: Aronal and Emex toothpaste, Tempo tissues (A fraction of UK price) and deo.
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Clipper Tea Bags. Getting decent tea bags anywhere outside the UK (OK, except Ireland) is pretty much impossible. Lipton Yellow Label? No thanks... I always used to stock up on Marmite when studying in Germany. Speculated as to whether it was banned outside UK.
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One of Hackney's impressive and presumably expensive EV charging stations got installed near us and survived for about a week before a car ploughed into it. They hadn't even commissioned it...
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Fingers crossed (though I’d prefer Zurich to Geneva)!
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You go out and make the argument.
Consistently saying that argument can be made another day, or Labour has a plan, won't work.
The way you win is to make the case for Europe unity now, every day, without fear, and knowing they'll push back, but that your cause it right.
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A bit like Brits watch too much American politics and so hear “federal” as “highly centralised elective monarchy”, they also watch too many war films and assume universal ID means leather-trenchcoated people shooting you in the street if you don’t have it.
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It was special. My recent trip to Orkney on @caledoniansleeper.bsky.social was admittedly more comfortable (and a better breakfast!) but I couldn't give that as an example as it involved a flight for the last leg.
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It has to be my March trip to Venice with my dad on the @europeansleeper.eu
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56% of Britons say the UK was wrong to vote to leave the EU, including 18% of Leave voters
yougov.co.uk/politics/art...
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The “surrender” thing and the endless war metaphors were always in poor taste. But when they were first made, war had not returned to Europe and NATO was not hanging by a thread. So forgive me if I no longer have any patience whatsoever with people who pretend that UK and EU are enemies. Pathetic.
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You are very welcome to the club.
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My firm opinion is that any conversation about changing UK-EU structures only becomes feasible once this is underpinned by shared attitudes. All reports, and my own conversations, suggest we are nowhere near that right now. /end
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a society where "bad immigrants" are demonised is a society where no immigrant can truly feel welcome, because aren't we all just one wrong turn or accident away from being unemployed? on disability benefits? unable to care for our children without state help? just no such thing as a safe immigrant
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Next would be
Paris 🇫🇷 / Bruxelles 🇧🇪 - London 🇬🇧
Yes as my #CrossChannelRail project showed, there are operational headaches through the Channel Tunnel, but there is - at least on the core routes - spare capacity too
Extend to Köln 🇩🇪, Frankfurt 🇩🇪, Basel 🇨🇭 or Zürich 🇨🇭 too if you want
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Firstly, on Farage, how is it possible that he has got away with clean hands from what was ultimately his Brexit, his internationally recognised disaster? Not forgetting his ties to Putin, Trump, racism, and a garage sale of the NHS.
If it were raining soup, Labour would be outside with forks.
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i've done a snap take which will be on the Guardian website before too long but would add: Reform's superpower is the ability to have policies that don't work & nobody cares. Brexit is the biggest eg but it's since moved on to a ton of other things that patently won't work either. Copying them..
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We might well be surprised by how much can be achieved in the productivity/growth space by not undermining civil society, championing sectors where we have competitive and/or comparative advantage (professional services; precision engineering; arts; HE), encouraging private sector efficiency capex.
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Dan Jarvis, the security minister, says Glastonbury should "think very carefully" about inviting Kneecap to appear at the festival. On the moral-panic-about-pop-meter, we are now approaching the early days of rave music.
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This is a major misunderstanding which some internal political commentary in the UK is still suffering heavily from; that little Britain has anything more substantial pull over negotiations with the world's strongest trading bloc. None who negotiates trade will make a significant win