chrisdhunter.bsky.social
EUphile, wine lover, slave to two cats
109 posts
257 followers
587 following
Active Commenter
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They're certainly operating in the interests of Big <Insert Bad Actor of Your Choice, Probably Anti Environmental>
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Damn, I’m at ACE waiting for the 19.10 to LGW. Although having to cross the water from Playa Blanca for a drink would be a bit of overkill when there are plenty of watering holes there.
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It was the the house journal of the Taxpayers Alliance so in thrall to Brexity types.
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Gerard Hoffnung, German by birth so with an outsider’s eye, nailed this in his ‘advice to tourists’ routine with something along the lines of: “It is customary on entering a railway compartment to shake hands with all the other passengers”.
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Chunnel construction begun in 1988 and opened 1994. I was on a behind the scenes visit a couple of months ago and they’re still very proud of their record, especially compared with HS2. Obvs Chunnel much more tightly defined but not exactly straightforward to execute.
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So not an ‘ECHR ruling’, rather a clever brief making the best of U.K. law.
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Any specific cases for example? General wisdom is that few U.K. human rights cases get as far as ECtHR, and U.K. wins most of those.
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A good question, it normally comes from even further away in Peru when it’s out of season here.
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You normally write stuff that makes sense but that’s at best ingenuous. U.K. effectively abandoned SPS checks on imports *from EU via the Short Straight* which is what R-Mogg was talking about. UK always fully checked 3rd country imports via air or sea, nobody has suggested they’ve been stopped.
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Trump's idea of negotiation has always been to use his advantage to bully others into what he wants. When he doesn't have any leverage he is utterly hopeless, because he haw no empathy and is incapable of understanding the motivation of others.
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Betteridge’s Law of Headlines in action…
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I’ve not travelled in E* since Covid, do BF have a presence at departures these days or is it still E* check in staff who do the exit passport scan as at other exit points from the U.K.? (Eg UK passport control at Dover is always empty bc checks outsourced).
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Any call into a nominally European territory outside the EU’s VAT/customs area (eg Channel Islands, Canary Islands, Gib) was enough to make an otherwise EU only cruise into an international one so that the onboard duty free shop could open.
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Correct, you just walk off the platform and onto the concourse at STP, although there are customs and border officials lurking in case someone needs to be checked before leaving the secure area.
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It’s far worse than 90/180, as a crusty old Tory and Brexiter pointed out in a FB Cunard cruise group he admins. I’m not convinced he’s totally serious as he’s screenshotted a Guardian article.
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My French is pretty rubbish, my wife’s is better. We often slip into Spanish half way through a sentence as that’s our most frequently used foreign language. We get credit for trying (even in Paris) and they always make light of bloops. Can’t remember any snottiness in over 30 years of visits.
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That’s a very strange take, Labour has been in govt for less than a year and all the placemen from previous years of Tory govts are still in post. All the issues you mention predate Lab too.
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Yusuf also claimed in BBC SE News interview that KCC giving asylum seekers driving lessons. When interviewer pointed out they’d been in care and so entitled as care leavers he stated they were adults in their 20s. By definition Care Leavers are 18+ and can receive support up to 24yo.
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We lived next door to a senior HO CS near the top of the previous ID card project. A very nice and conscientious person, but the HO as an organisation seems deeply malicious towards out groups of all sorts regardless of govt of the day.
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Yusuf was interviewed on BBC SE News and claimed one example of KCC waste was paying for asylum seekers’ driving lessons. When interviewer pointed out they were entitled as KCC Care Leavers rather than bc they were asylum seekers he claimed they were adults (Care Leavers can get support up to 24yo).
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And Al Capone definitely wasn’t a gangster, simply careless about his tax returns.
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The credit reference agency approach fails when it relies too much on name/DOB matching: an exact match got merged with my credit records thx to a mutual credit provider’s error. Utter pain to resolve. At least govt ID would have a unique identifier if it was done properly.
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It’s a well known bait’n’switch trick by private sellers (or those false auctions that used to plague Oxford Street), but Amazon getting in on the act is surprising.
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The Audit Commission used to most if not all of that stuff on a sound legal basis but the Tories abolished it to save a billion quid.
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Even before Tories launched their austerity disaster in 2010 the very rich London LA where I worked had started a rolling redundancy programme, with some unfortunate depts getting done over twice in a row. I took the money in 2011 and ran away to the seaside to escape the madness.
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Surely it won’t make a blind bit of difference unless U.K. pax have a magic way of avoiding having their passports stamped. EES is what’ll actually speed things up by automating Schengen 90/180 recording (& checking for ETIAS when that happens).
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You’ll be fine judging by the number of people on FB saying they take frozen ‘proper British’ bacon and sausages to Spain in their checked baggage. Like that stupid Heinz Beans advert but for real and with perishables.
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I agree about the FR border pre Brexit. Totally laid back unless they were on a work-to-rule, which confounds all the 'But UK wasn't in Schengen' deflection about UK pax being hindered by passport control now.
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Which is EES (& which supersedes e-gates). Both Dover and Le Shuttle have built areas for Registration which'll be the most time consuming bit, exactly how they'll handle pax already registered isn't clear but there's a lot of space to handle that before customs control that didn't exist a year ago.
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Short Straight crossings and Le Shuttle will be handled by EES terminals so nothing will change until the fourth quarter of this year at the earliest. In practice nothing will happen at EU airports where e-gates currently unavailable to 3rd Country pax until EES happens.
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That benefit won't be realised until EES does all the Third Country pax checks for Schengen 90/180. Until EES goes live, in fourth quarter of this year at latest guess, border police will continue to be needed to stamp passports. It's being touted as good for Brits but that's a nothingburger.
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It’s a non-thing as far as I can see, going through an e-gate and then queueing for a passport stamp can’t be any quicker than simply queueing for a stamp. At least until EES goes live to automate Schengen 90/180 recording/checking for Third Country pax.
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I'll bet Thames House is nowhere near the James Bond style whizziness as The Park even if it's more upmarket than previous MI5 HQ buildings. In any case the contrast between the The Park and the unglamorous Goswell Road emphasises how far the Slow Horses are beyond the Pale.
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The ambience of the Apple TV+ Slow Horses scenes around the City and Smithfield reminds me very much of the area in the mid-90s, even though the adaptation is set in the present day.
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They've been a thing for quite a few years, and when he's not on air there are one or two Israeli spox who use the same technique of attacking the interviewer to keep UK journos on their toes.
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And that's without the people who were nominated without their knowledge, people who agreed to be nominated just to make up the numbers but didn't want/expect to be elected, and outright ghost candidates of which there are (allegedly) more than a handful in Kent...
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We imported US beef that met EU standards when we were in the EU, just as we imported Australian beef. Never in any great quantities, but enough for US restaurants to be able to have USDA beef on the menu.
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DW and I spent some time drinking tea in the American Garden (named for the redwoods planted many years ago) near our home and wondering whether it perhaps wasn't too late in our lives to pack up and leave for somewhere where things are run better (or at least no worse) than the UK.
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It's a feature, not a bug, of UK 'democracy'. Civics seems to be neglected in schools, so ill informed public not obliged to vote don't participate fully. Which leads to poor outcomes especially with FPTP voting rather than a proportional system.
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Your final prediction is looking a bit unlikely, at least in the short/medium term (which could be minutes or months depending on Trump's attention span). With any luck UK attention will be concentrated on EU rather than US unicorns.
www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
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Gravity theory of trade tends to win, and has application in history: there was an item on the radio a few days ago about how it's being used to predict where ancient lost cities were based on proximity to known cities and trade routes.
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Very depressing that Labour continued the Tory delusion that snuggling up to US (whichever colour the administration might be) could ever compensate for overall loss of trade due to Brexit. Covering all bets fruitless diversion from moving back towards EU as main trading partner.
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The 'ever closer union' was discussed widely in print and on the air prior to the 1975 referendum. Steve Analyst (@EmporersNewC) compiled a long thread on Twitter. Pretending that UK 'only joined the EEC' and subsequent treaties were betrayals perhaps the greatest Brexiter lie.
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Aided and abetted by prominent Leavers like Dan Hannan saying just that.
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The 2016 referendum ‘mandate’ has been discharged so democratic decision no longer an issue. Remainers/Rejoiners position as valid as that of the Eurosceptics who refused to accept the legally binding 1975 referendum and never stopped whining about it.
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Labour’s tone and diplomacy may be welcome after years of Tory stupidity and childish belligerence. But on the substance, the differences between the parties are much smaller. Both have told us we can have stuff we can’t because both fundamentally expect the EU to square our circle for us. It won’t.