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

I'm not sure if I'm stepping on your joke mark, but that conspiracy theory seems at least quite plausibly what's happened? Possibly the "Impact: dinosaur meteor level" has been filed off.

DD & Boris and Liam Fox are there effectively as part of a coalition government, there'd be trouble if they went and weren't replaced by others of the same stripe - unfortunately they may be the most competent of that lot.

it wasn't really a joke, more a caveat attached to the cited source for the reading (lobster is a good magazine! but it does reach for conspiracy by natural inclination)

if that is what happened surely the implications are pretty huge. like he is misleading parliament.

Anne-Marie Trevelyan, a Conservative, asks about new figures showing literacy improving.

May pays particular tribute to Nick Gibb, the minister for school standards, and to teachers around the country.

improving in some sectors

as with any conspiracy it would require an awful lot of people to keep shtum. if it were the case, i'd imagine that there would be a few pissed off civil servants willing to expose davis?

civil service bandwidth presumably too constrained by maintaining the lie that the earth is spherical

Why are we bothering w/ improving literacy when there are no impact assessments to read?

The plans to supply all children with the special glasses are well underway.

DD's options are that he was/is misleading parliament anyway - his best defence seems to be that when Seema Malhotra was asking for these reports, he felt it would be a waste of the committee's time to make sure the clear and obvious distinction was impressed on her in some way unwelcoming ears.

[At a poker game]

Dick Goodwin: I know you're lying.
Charles Van Doren: Bluffing. The word is bluffing.

Why are we bothering w/ improving literacy when there are no impact assessments to read?

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 6 December 2017 13:22 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tick.jpg

I don't think this has to be a big conspiracy - the FOIs imply imply that the departments were basically feeding in information, led by DexEU, in order to produce reports - the standard response is 'we helped, but don't have reports - ask DeXEU' (and ime the civil service's instinct is buck-passing rather than whistle-blowing). So, if DexEU took final responsibility for producing the reports, they could keep a small circle of die-hards who collated the stuff and sat on the existent/non-existent reports.

so Davis can try to get away with fudging the language, but it does look contempt-of-parliament bad for him

One feature of all this is dexeu as an entity whose function is partly to cut-off other parts of the civil service. I don't think you could get to what extent they were sitting on reports or not, maybe we could've had a partial leak of one, if it existed at all.

Their level of staff turnover is reportedly four times as much as other civil service departments so the chances of a disgruntled employee leaking something must be pretty high.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/05/theresa-mays-blue-monday/

lol fintansplaining: "Yet Tusk’s tweet was inadvertently ominous. It was a play on 'I Don’t Like Mondays,' a hit song in 1979 by the Irish rock band the Boomtown Rats. The song in turn was inspired by a mass shooting in a US school playground. Asked why she did it, the shooter, a sixteen-year-old girl, replied, 'I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.' The lyrics, written and sung by Bob Geldof, now a prominent campaigner against Brexit, had her adding that 'I wanna shoot that whole day down.' Within hours of Tusk’s playfully optimistic tweet, Monday’s hopes would indeed be shot down do you see"

omfg

The other departments have Brexit teams as well, my partner interviewed for working on the one in DEFRA (which would be amazing and depressing).

Xp He is awful awful awful if he were only on ilx I would clown him all day

lol! Good job he didn't try shoehorning a clunky Fleetwood Mac ref in there as well.

... something about rumours, that's exactly what I thought too!

Enjoyed Hammond's admission that the Cabinet haven't even discussed what their preferred outcome is. It's like he deliberately picked his moment to drop that one.

Today Hammond says Britain will meet the divorce bill even in the case of no deal. No 10 deny this just hours later. What a mess this rabble are.

neat little highlights reel:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/nobody-said-it-was-easy?utm_term=.eswvLyy1a#.fq5dOQQYL

hammond seems good at this*
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/philip-hammond-uk-productivity-rates-low-because-more-disabled-people-are-in-work_uk_5a281714e4b044d16726b7bd

*gaffeing

Also the story of hammond being banned from flying in any MoD aircraft because of a funding row. What the fuck is going on?

the grown-ups are in charge iirc

https://i.imgur.com/sNrTf8N.gif

not only not in charge but gone on holiday and left us in the house on our own and we need to hope a neighbour calls social services

Moderation in all things including MoDaeration

poor

I didn't have any reports into a better pun

would have bet money on this tbh

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQYtt1-WkAAkoX7.jpg

(ok maybe not the gift of home-made jam but the fact that they got on well) (it's from tim shipman's breezeblock of a book)

I can believe it too. My impression is that McDonnell is the one who truly detests, wouldn't get on at all.

one of the things the deep establishment has always been good at in this country is charming and disarming its stubbornest class enemies

i think they always have charles i in the back of their minds, like great great great uncle charlie who snubbed the bolshy footman and look what happened

i dunno they have TV nowadays they probably have a marginally better understanding of what the lower orders look like and how to behave around them, albeit in a David Attenborough kinda way

She got on like a house on fire with Harold Wilson. Can you imagine having to go from Harold to Ted Heath?

They do rather act like him around ppl I suppose xp

are we talking at a key party or what?

xp

Going from shooting the breeze with cheeky class traitor Wilson to being lectured to by frosty weirdo Heath.

I still see the white heat of his technology revolution every day. I think it's only use these days is as an oversized mobile phone signal booster.

think TV's probably blunted the skill badly tbh: aristocrats* as wary but brilliant diplomats, able to smile and talk their way out of any scrape feudalism can throw at you

*i'm not talking abt the merely posh, or oafs like the bullingdon mob, i'm talking abt the scene in the crown when mary of teck dismisses prince philip's family -- the schleswig-holstein-sonderburg-glücksburgs -- as parvenus, and not from a line that goes back a thousand years (a thousand years breeds formidable survival skills, the kind you don't lose over a few unrocky shallow decades sat in front of mr bean)

The newish snap election book, Betting the House (excellent btw) mentions that Corbyn gave the Queen jam for her 90th, but wouldn't let his staff tell the press.

This before or after he was pipped to the post

by mark s

it was seedless

mark seedless

Ba-dah-BA-DAH!