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

Seceding.

No wavering in Havering when it comes to the May local elections for the Tories, but they are in a shitload trouble everywhere else.

oops, I possibly missed your sarcasm!

Haha I was 99% sure but didn't want to make assumptions about the racial make-up of Havering. Seems I could've assumed away!

Think Daniel has had his answer, but just want to point out that the local MP was responsible for this quote about passport colour:

The humiliation of having a pink European Union passport will now soon be over and the United Kingdom nationals can once again feel pride and self-confidence in their own nationality when travelling, just as the Swiss and Americans can do.

National identity matters and there is no better way of demonstrating this today than by bringing back this much-loved national symbol when travelling overseas.

the real salient issue about passports in some areas is that many people that don't possess one have been struggling to eat because UC will impede applications to those that don't have them.

and I'm not making this shit up, one of my local MP's Tracy Brabin (yes, the ex-Corrie one!) got very angry about this recently.

Hi,

Just enquiring...

This whole "fish protest" featuring JRM and NFarg and so on.. Pre-booked the front pages of tomorrows newspapers as a resounding triumph? and so on?

more stunning diplomacy from bj today: "Boris Johnson says World Cup in Russia will be like Hitler hosting Olympics in 1936"

just ignore him

bit harsh on respected ilxor dot com poster nickb imo

oi!

we went to the Olympics in 1936 tbf

and in 1980

and in 2008

and i haven't heard BoJo saying owt about the Qatar World Cup

and in 1980

How else would a pasty faced Scotsman have ever won the 100m gold?

don't forget the England football team sieg heiling Hitler in '38.

would be in favour of boycotting every olympics tbh

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!