the day after the deadline: can the union survive brexit and other deep questions

1908 london olympics were just a few years after the atrocities (concentration camps etc) of the boer war

the replies to this

BREAKING NEWS: the full list of big name resignations from the labour party has just been leaked. this could well be the end for jeremy corbyn pic.twitter.com/0JLwD7CcV7

— Jonathan (@demarionunn) March 19, 2018

Loooooool

wow

always happy to see that venerable screenshot, as polled here on ilx

actual laughing here and unable to quite stop

hahaha - shows us the poll, please!

Fighting Baseball for Super Famicom: A League of Fake Americans POLL

That is brilliant

'A national humiliation': Brexiteers furious as Franco-Dutch firm 'wins contract to produce blue passports'

not a happy return for "iconic" blue passport it seems.

"Now we learn that the passports will be printed by a foreign company. And to add insult to injury, we will pay over the odds for them because the value of the pound has fallen since Brexit and they will have to be imported."

I'm getting a warm Ready Brek glow from this.

i don't understand, do they want us to sign trade deals or not?

can't believe that the rapacious anarcho-libertarians that actually run the Brexit campaign give one hoot about this, so it's just the useful idiots getting their first taste of bilkdom

Not going to get all tin foil hat over this but a winning bidder in the passport contract undercutting the market price by more than 10% (£50M less than the next bid, last competition was won at circa £400M) on a tender where the maximum declared profit will be somewhere between 8% and 11% is absolutely sketchy as fuck.

A company might do it on a small contract to get your foot in the door so when a big contract comes around you're semi-incumbent, but this is the big contract. You might do it over a short period to fill gaps in your resource demand so you don't have to cut staff but this is a 10 year contract.

It really makes no commercial sense at all for the company in question to win it at this price. Does that necessarily suggest a different motivation for winning? That's where the TFH brigade enter I think.

idk, i do tenders occasionally and we can often undercut competitor prices based on scale and technology. Gemalto has a stronger position in biometric / epassport tech than De La Rue, i think, and i'd guess that is where a lot of the cost comes in to the design and delivery of modern passports.

I read that as Danny La Rue for a micro-sec.

I don't know the market well enough but assuming Gemalto were a bidder last time it would mean they've reduced their own costs relative to the market pressures - technology could contribute to this but scale wouldn't imo.

(25 years experience assessing tenders, 5 writing them)

Just checked and yes, the 2009 contract was De La Rue, Gemalto and Thales. This time it was De La Rue, Gemalto and Oberthur.

Can someone kindly point me in the direction of the most sweaty palmed and furious commentator on this story please?

I think even much of the pro-brexit commentariat are mindful that they might look a bit ridiculous getting too irate about this, and some are spinning the £50m taxpayers money saved by "Global Britain".

angle

exactly! if Brexit stands for anything it's outsourcing

It really makes no commercial sense at all for the company in question to win it at this price. Does that necessarily suggest a different motivation for winning?

makes perfect sense if they're doing it for the lulz tho

no finer motivation for anything

iconic blue lulz

Absolutely where my mind took me too.

> De La Rue

the irony.

correct me if i'm rong but the really dumb thing about this story afaict is that the british company that lost the contract also get a huge amount of work making documents for lots of other countries, and if those nations reverted to making their own passports like the brexit ears are allegedly arguing we should do, that could possibly be a far worse blow to de la rue

oh right, this graun snippet pretty much implies that:

The chief executive, Martin Sutherland, said: “We have a very skilled, proud workforce in Gateshead and I am going to have face those workers, look at them in the whites of the eyes and try to explain to them why the British government thinks it’s a sensible decision to buy French passports not British passports.

“I would like to invite Theresa May or Amber Rudd to come to my factory and explain to my dedicated workforce why they think this is a sensible decision to offshore the manufacture of a British icon.”

As well as UK passports, the company manufactures identity documents and e-passports for countries as far apart as Trinidad and Tobago, Qatar and Afghanistan.

ah bless it's like when people dressed head to toe in clothes made in the far east protest about foreigners taking their jobs

Why is anyone surprised at the 'offshoring of the manufacture' of a British anything? Where have these people been for the last 40 years?

Signing the offshore agreements and redundancy letters, duhhh!

why would you look someone in the whites of their eyes and not, y'know, the pupil, the part of the eye that they actually use for vision

also how the fuck do you 'manufacture' an e-passport

he might have said "the eyes of my completely white workforce"

that de la rue workforce in full

https://i0.wp.com/havealaughonme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/tumblr_ldx4twZokF1qz7lxdo1_500_large.png

lol!

gazzarra - an e-passport is a regular passport with a chip in it

how very british

fucking hell, the bar to adding the 'e-' prefix to stuff is even lower than i thought then

"Don't shoot until you see the whites"

"Of their eyes?"

"Whose eyes?"

e-eyes

those e-whites in full

https://static.standard.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2016/12/15/09/paulgolding1412a.jpg?w968h681

you don't get that prematurely old looking as my man there by snorting crystal mdma, its mainlining hateful dogma that makes you that ugly.

"Can someone kindly point me in the direction of the most sweaty palmed and furious commentator on this story please?"

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DY7SkhRX0AINO6s.jpg

Kinda glad the Mail seem to have shifted their entire masthead to the left (lol) permanently because it looks so shit stupid and wrong it distracts me from all their other evildoing a little longer.

Ian Drury?

Heck, even my spelling korrector insisted it's Dury!

oof

@britainelects
12 hours ago
Ockendon (Thurrock) result:

CON: 36.2% (+7.8)
LAB: 36.2% (+11.2)
TI: 27.6% (+27.6)

Conservative GAIN from UKIP.

Result determined by drawing of straws/coin toss.

No UKIP (-46.5) as prev.
TI: Thurrock Independents.

CORBYN OUT

these drawing straws shit is feeble, they could at least have a feight for the prize.