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

Mandelson unlikely to have been joining in with the groping in fairness but he's an absolute past master at turning a blind eye.

Robert Tchenguiz in there I see, funny how these things come around.

A lot of random sons and grandsons of established businessmen there. There are so many well known names on there already that there's no way this story doesn't snowball.

It's probably done for Dragon's Den in any case.

A possibility the Graun may have out-Graun'd itself by confusing Mandy with Jon Mandelson yesterday.

In other news about this event, it transpires the Indy ran a diary piece 8 years ago with the same content as the FT story and nobody noticed. (last item on page)

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/slackberry-hornby-considers-guru-to-aid-rehab-1876933.html

*Mendelsohn*

If my phone autocorrects one to the other then I've even made their excuse for them.

one of the B-plots from McMafia has some uncomfortable/spot-on resonances with this story

huh who could have foreseen this

Universal credit is on course to deliver only marginal taxpayer savings despite driving through huge cuts in benefit payments to many claimants, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

The independent forecaster warned that even these relatively slender £1bn savings – amounting to just 2% of the social security budget – could be knocked off course if ministers were forced to reverse potentially unpopular cuts built into universal credit affecting tax credit recipients, disabled people and self-employed claimants.
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It said political uncertainties and problems with the design and implementation of the much-delayed project, currently around five years behind schedule, meant universal credit presented a “significant risk” to public spending.

The OBR pointed out that some of the gross savings from universal credit were predicated on driving through cuts to relatively large numbers of families. The Resolution Foundation has said cuts to the generosity of universal credit will leave 1m working households an average of £2,800 a year worse off by 2022.

But but Dunkirk, Gary Oldman as Churchill...

speaking of which...

NEW - Trump told Theresa May she could be the new Churchill pic.twitter.com/ldiBzwK5P0

— Ben Riley-Smith (@benrileysmith) January 24, 2018

"While the remark was not an explicit Continued on page 5"

Fucking Churchill, what a curse that cunt is on this country.

Gary Old ham should have been shot after Prick Up Your Ears. May should have been shot after the last election. These are the only parallels I can draw between May and that pile of drivel.

and Dungkirk ffs! what a pox Nolan is on this country as well.

May should have been shot after the last election

generous imo

and Dungkirk ffs! what a pox Nolan is on this country as well.

Seriously though, I had a conversation with a Spanish colleague of mine on how Churchill will probably be forever casting his morbidly obese shadow over this country - as long as it exists - and asking if there was any similar blight on their history. They only had Franco and the Inquisition to put up with though.

and there's not like a million post-75 Spanish movies painting Franco as the saviour of the universe

Any minister of war unwilling to capitulate to Hitler would have done the same job as him, and without smelling liked he's crapped himself in a pub most of the time. Not that they would have been worthy of any adulation at all, either.

this isn't the place because fuck the imperialist pig but there might be an argument that Churchill's willingness to fight a dirty, total war was relatively unique amongst senior UK pols at the time and may have played some part in keeping us in the war until Pearl Harbour but i'm sure the guy made as many gung-ho mistakes as he did smart decisions

cf. the Galipoli campaign

WWI was unmitigated manslaughter all round tbf, was thinking specifically of WWII

his conduct at Yalta was abysmal and he was an open laughing stock.

oh yeah as i say i just ponder his importance as a scumbag between say 1940 and 1942, once the big boys were in play it was an irrelevance mostly

the breaking of the enigma code did more to keep the Uk from capitulation, more than any of his military decisions imo.

and his aversion to communism ensured years of bloodshed and a victory for homegrown fascism in Greece. I'll stfu now!

it's a contentious subject wrapped in angry hyperbole, and i'm not remotely knowledgeable to know where the truth may fall: but the place to look for the unravelling of the churchill wartime halo is the bengal famine

(xxp) thanks to the Poles for the work their codebreakers had already done, and iirc their airmen were invaluable in the Battle of Britain; without those two things we might never have made it to '42

it's a good job we have treated our Polish immigrants with respect and consideration ever since

i think calz is largely right but i understand the desire to want to give the man nothing because of what he believed and because of Bengal and Gallipoli and gassing Iraq and etc

as i say, my one small quibble is whether there was another UK politician of the era who'd've kept the UK in the war for long enough to lay the seeds for the ultimate defeat of the Nazis

yeah The Bengal famine was the second holocaust really (in numbers as well) and it was just str 8 requisition and starve like holodomor.

Churchill was seriously unpopular by 1942, the year of a string of military disasters, Singapore, Tobruk, Dieppe, quite widespread impatience for the opening of a second front, failure of Cripps mission and Quit India blowing up.

Would make for a much better, less stultifyingly clichéd film, Churchill and his government in 1942- in some ways the real 'darkest hour'.

"as i say, my one small quibble is whether there was another UK politician of the era who'd've kept the UK in the war for long enough to lay the seeds for the ultimate defeat of the Nazis"

has there ever been a serious shortage of sociopath arrogant pricks in Parliament? That's all it took imo.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/syphilis-mummy-in-basel-related-to-boris-johnson-2018-1

this is a non-story but good work with the headline anyway

is that thing really considered a well preserved cadaver?

rude way to talk about a sitting MP

oh it's that one.

You have to take the rough with the slightly less rough in all these cases. There is no view of the defence of the UK and its interests in the 30s and 40s (and in this case the interests of much of Western Europe as well) that doesn't involve taking a shit-ton of nasty imperial baggage along with it.

Whoever was the war leader would be historically implicated in all sorts of bad shit, but I'm arguing, probably not very well, that there were enough other shitheads who could have done the propaganda, made the decisions, perhaps even with less of the bluster and a bit more 20/20 sobriety vision. That war ministry is absolutely rammed with shitheads!

It mor bothers me that he's painted as the guy who saw the dangers of fascism. Yeah, maybe in the Tory party, but Labour and folks on the left had been wanting action since the start of the Spanish civil war.

He was more anti-communist than anti-fascist, to the core!

Trotsky? Hello? (xp)

tbh, lol @ brit politics thread turning into ww2 thread

ilx's blitz spirit is something to be celebrated imo #twoworldwarsandoneworldcup

I'm weeping actual tears at that London Underground scene in Darkest Hour. I have seen anything quite like it.

They only had Franco and the Inquisition to put up with though.

The conquistadors...?

maybe in 80 years, civilisational collapse notwithstanding, some total arsehole will make a movie about how Boris invented bicycles and taught us the value of love and tolerance.

would have to find some way of bringing his syphilis-ridden mummy into it as well.

civilisational collapse notwithstanding

well there's your first stumbling block

To be fair to Dunkirk 80% of that movie is soldiers desperatley trying not to drown, elbowing each other to get on ships, ganging up on others suspected of being spies, etc. It only goes full Greatest Generation at the end, everything before it is surprisingly anti-rah rah.

It always makes me laugh that Boris Johnson's two big things are Shakespeare and Churchill, it's like he googled "British culture" and went to work from there.

Shakespeare was culturally minor for 150/years or so aftet his death iirv

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/donald-trump-says-he-respects-everything-theresa-may-is?utm_term=.eoonGPE6q#.kg9y2VOvP

"We're on the same wavelength in, I think, every respect," he added.

Praise from Cesar Romero

the last 5 minutes of Dunkirk seemed studio mandated to me to get that patriotic good awards vibes going for it. the rest of the film is pretty damn harsh about humanity.