Wubble Wubble

I had not noticed this before, from the Daily Mail, 18th March 2016, presumably an image grabbed from the TV coverage, Odious Osborne getting an eyeful on Budget Day.

Gone with the Trump

The Sun, 29th January

V1 from the Sun's web site

V2 a screen grab from this morning's newspaper review on the Marr show that has an inset of an earlier version with Reagan and Thatcher.

Image from  Hake's Americana & Collectibles.

Conservative Home has an earlier and inferior variant.

And finally, one of the originals.

from Original Vintage Movie Posters.

May's 12-point "plan"

From the Telegraph, 17th January

1. Provide certainty about the process of leaving the EU. 
2. Control of our own laws. Leaving the European Union will mean that our laws will be made in Westminster, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. 
3. Strengthen the Union between the four nations of the United Kingdom. 
4.  Deliver a practical solution that allows the maintenance of the Common Travel Area with the Republic of Ireland. 
5. Brexit must mean control of the number of people who come to Britain from Europe. 
6. Protect rights for EU nationals in Britain and British nationals in the EU. We want to guarantee rights of EU citizens living in Britain and the rights of British nationals in other member states, as early as we can. 
7. Protect workers' rights. Not only will the government protect the rights of workers set out in European legislation, we will build on them. 
8. Free trade with European markets through a bold and ambitious free trade agreement with the European Union. 
9. New trade agreements with other countries. It is time for Britain to get out into the world and rediscover its role as a great, global, trading nation. 
10. The best place for science and innovation. We will welcome agreement to continue to collaborate with our European partners on major science, research and technology initiatives. 
11. Co-operation in the fight against crime and terrorism. We will continue to work closely with our European allies in foreign and defence policy even as we leave the EU itself. 
12. A smooth, orderly Brexit. We believe a phased process of implementation will be in the interests of Britain, the EU institutions and member states.

Article 50

Follow the progress of the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 here

snapshot 27th January

Article 50 states,

Article 50, Lisbon Treaty 

1. Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.
2. A Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention. In the light of the guidelines provided by the European Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. That agreement shall be negotiated in accordance with Article 218(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It shall be concluded on behalf of the Union by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament.
3. The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.
4. For the purposes of paragraphs 2 and 3, the member of the European Council or of the Council representing the withdrawing Member State shall not participate in the discussions of the European Council or Council or in decisions concerning it. A qualified majority shall be defined in accordance with Article 238(3)(b) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.
5. If a State which has withdrawn from the Union asks to rejoin, its request shall be subject to the procedure referred to in Article 49.

source: EU

Article 49 of the Lisbon Treaty states,

Any European State which respects the values referred to in Article 2 and is committed to promoting them may apply to become a member of the Union. The European Parliament and national Parliaments shall be notified of this application. The applicant State shall address its application to the Council, which shall act unanimously after consulting the Commission and after receiving the assent of the European Parliament, which shall act by an absolute majority of its component members. The conditions of admission and the adjustments to the Treaties on which the Union is founded, which such admission entails, shall be the subject of an agreement between the Member States and the applicant State. This agreement shall be submitted for ratification by all the contracting States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements. The conditions of eligibility agreed upon by the European Council shall be taken into account.

source: EU

The European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill 2016-17 looks like this,

source HofC

Miliband in Brighton

The Times, 24 Jan 17

Snowflakes I

The Times, 16th January 2017

Black students 'feel excluded by tutors'

Dominic Kennedy Investigations Editor

Black students are suffering racism because they are expected to ask their lecturers for help and use academic language, according to a students' union.

White staff and students must accept that their behaviour is racist even if that is not the intention, says a report about discrimination at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), part of the University of London.

An excess of white lecturers is creating a racist teaching and learning environment, the students' union claims. SOAS students provoked dismay among some academics last week after it was reported that they were demanding that the "majority of philosophers on our courses" should be from Asia and Africa.

Yesterday the union defended its "Degrees of Racism" report, which blamed prejudice at the school for black and ethnic minority (BME) students getting poorer examination grades than whites. The report identified "barriers to support, including having to ask proactively for help (which excluded students whose confidence had been undermined by racial exclusion and discrimination)".

It stated: "Some BME students felt silenced also by the pressure to communicate using academic language that - for reasons of structural racism - was closer to the everyday speech of middle-class, white students than to their own". When challenged over racism, white students and staff should react constructively "by listening, being non-defensive, and being committed to learning and changing". There should be "a clear message that behaviour and comments are racist because of their impact, not their intention".

The union said that ethnic minority students felt gagged because lecturers failed to challenge the opinions of whites. Tutors "passively enabled white students to dismiss others' experiences by neglecting to intervene".

It added: "Some participants attributed this to their tutors perhaps feeling obliged to maintain what might appear to be freedom of speech. Whether this was the reason or not, the consequence of not intervening was that BME students remained effectively censored."

Daniel Hannan MEP, who was born in Peru and studied at Oxford, said: "Brave anti-racists fought for generations for everyone to be treated the same. It's sad to see some people now fighting to be treated differently."

SOAS said that, while its attainment gap of 10 per cent was less than the average for the sector, it was not complacent and the report had "helped to spark productive debate".

The union said: "Speaking the truth about racial inequality, being unafraid to talk about racism and positively addressing it can only enlighten and benefit our members of every ethnicity."

dkennedy@thetimes.co.uk

Prioritising moral judgements

Rory Sutherland, Spectator, 14th Jan
"Writing recently at edge.org, one of the founding fathers of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby, answered a question which had long baffled me. Why do people on the left get more agitated about transgender bathroom access or hate speech than they do about modern slavery? Tooby explains: ‘Morally wrong-footing rivals is one point of ideology, and once everyone agrees on something (slavery is wrong) it ceases to be a significant moral issue because it no longer shows local rivals in a bad light. Many argue that there are more slaves in the world today than in the 19th century. Yet because one’s political rivals cannot be delegitimised by being on the wrong side of slavery, few care to be active abolitionists any more, compared to being, say, speech police.’ I might also add that many of the practitioners of modern slavery might be a bit foreign–looking, and so in criticising them you run the risk of violating some leftist tribal shibboleth."

Tristram to the V&A

Times 14th Jan

EU contributions

An interesting piece on Guido,

"All this talk of Brexit being a cliff edge for Britain ignores the other side of the coin, it is a funding cliff edge for the EU. Excluding Germany, Britain’s contribution is more than the total net contribution of the 26 other EU states combined. Guido will repeat this: add up the debits and credits of every member state from France to Poland bar Germany and it comes to a figure less than Britain’s EU contribution."

Labour Party Questionnaire

The labour party send me an 89-question test paper this morning. Here are some of the questions:

5. How can we harness Britain’s higher education sector to help meet our industrial goals? How can current research funding arrangements for universities be improved so that they better serve these goals? How can we strengthen the transition from research to marketability?

26. What would the best industrial balance be in respect of meeting our climate goals in the 4th and 5th Carbon budgets?

77. What is the role of macroeconomic policy in delivering an industrial strategy? What should be the balance between macroeconomic objectives such as aggregate demand, inflation, debt etc?
78. How should fiscal, monetary and regulatory tools be utilised to deliver these goals?

I did my best, but gave up after an hour at Q67.

Mensch on Trump

The x/ny period has been awful with no Daily Politics, Sunday Politics, Question Time or This Week to watch. DPols starts again next Monday and I thought there had been a QT last night, but there wasn't and I realized (but only after 20 mins) that we were watching the last of 2016 from mid Dec.

Apart from Will Self (who I usually enjoy) making an absolute arse of himself, the show was notable for a comment by Louise Mench (sp?) who quoted a comment on Trump that "the media took him literally but not seriously, whereas the voters took him seriously but not literally. A gem.

Mensch blogs at HeatSt.

Intro

For those of us who enjoy politics, 2016 was an outstanding year.
Going forward (ha!) I intend to note here any items worthy of recording.

Nick