bmcgrath.bsky.social
British European, competition lawyer and proud centrist dad
85 posts
256 followers
611 following
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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
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A reason why Liberal Democrats in cultural terms come across as so much more relaxed about who they are is that they can ideologically embrace a bourgeois identity that a mostly equally bourgeois Labour leadership fears is a betrayal of Labour's party myth
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10/ Keep in mind that Patel—the most lawless FBI director in agency history—only took about 60 days on the job to arrest a judge for actions she took in her own courthouse.
Those of us who have been saying that Trump is moving toward autocracy at blinding speed should repeat that admonition today.
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Instead of it solving 'Europe', we've seen indiscretion, indiscipline, and impatience plague the party - and it's become more of sect than a church, shifting away from relatively moderate, mainstream, Conservatism towards the populist radical right, shrinking both its talent pool and its appeal. 2/
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Fond memories of when discovering the Thameslink connection from King's Cross Thameslink (as it then was) to Blackfriars felt like a secret hack for my journey to work on New Bridge Street.
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At what price is flexibility though? I needed to book a day return from London to Warrington for work and figured an open return was the right option - until I saw the price: over £350! And that was second class. Fixed return train was still £160 but really…
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Agreed but they need to do something about this. I had a smooth journey from Berlin to London yesterday and check in at Brussels Midi was definitely the low point (a queue for security that was eventually processed but still led to departure being delayed by 8 minutes). Paris can be even worse.
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And so to the original post from @pascallth.bsky.social. He is correct. This would put the far right on the back foot; it woulf reenergise Labour; and it would cause a flood on investment into the UK.
The time to start is not 2029. Europe is being threatened today. Set the UK agenda now.
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