RentingForever

Except that most estates are mixed now. Buy a "not social housing" new build and chances are you have a social housing tenant next door.

Since Leave was mostly the dying political fart of the Boomer generation, I doubt there would be riots. Some angry letter writing and tutting at the allotment association, maybe.

All of her 'problems' stem from caring too much about what other people think about her, what she "should" have achieved at a certain age, and comparing herself to other. Let that go, learn to be comfortable in your own skin and your own small achievements, and happiness follows.

Not at all. The *funding* of Brexit was not the result of mass donations: £15m of leave. eu's £24m funding came from just five wealthy individuals. You have to question what's in Brexit for the rich to spend so much. The *politics* of Brexit is mostly Tory civil war and jostling for power. The *decision* to Brexit was a majority (just) combination of an anti-establishment howl by ignored communities impoverished by policies stemming from the 2008 crash and given perhaps their only truly democratic choice in their lives, and the dying political fart of a Boomer generation lost in nostalgia for the immediate postwar years.

The EU is gearing up to clamp down on tax evasion and tax havens. A big proportion of those are British territories. That’s what’s behind most of this IMO.

If you want some respite from the Winter: I'm off to Gran Canaria in December. Low-to-mid-twenties temperature and low Easyjet prices. All of the Canaries are a good option IMO. Otherwise: any European city with an Xmas market. Austria/Switzerland if you want the full snow-and-gluhwein experience.

Ah, I see. My misunderstanding about how the 40% relief is applied then, and I'm not disadvantaged by the budget. Phew! All done via payroll, not SIPP, so no problems there. Fiendishly complicated though, isn't it?

This budget hammers me. I was just over the 40% threshold which meant I paid 20% on the bulk of my income, but got 40% tax relief on all of my pension contributions. This huge jump on the higher-rate threshold is more than I can expect my salary to rise next year, so I'm back on 20% tax relief - will cost me about £200 a month I reckon (I was putting a lot into the pension). They were moaning about the cost of pension tax relief pre-budget; this seems to be how they squeezed in some changes.

Worth mentioning that Spain hasn't played its Gibraltar card yet. Still a lot of twists and turns to come...

I did this in 2003. Had a fabulous time! Best of luck.

Not so different from now, then.

You can't polish a Johnson.

Even if it's true that education is an indicator of whether you voted Brexit or not I don't think you can make the step (implicit in many opinions here, if not actually stated aloud) from that to say that people without degrees who voted Brexit did so because 'they're stoopid'. People with fewer qualifications have not done well from the status quo of the last thirty years, to put it mildly. The EU is a major plank of that status quo. Given their only opportunity to have a meaningful democratic vote (which our constituency-based first-past-the-post system usually denies them) for once in the lives, voting to shake things up - a bit of creative destruction - is a perfectly respectable choice.

It's smoke and mirrors. The game is allowing Boris et al to claim this is Brexit money to give themselves some justification for Brexit, providing cover for their arses when they later cave in over the SM and CU.

This canard again. The stats showed that Brexit had a majority among older people and among those without degrees. But the two are correlated - older people are less likely to have degrees because access was much more limited when they were young. So the age effect probably accounts for the education effect. There's absolutely no evidence that Brexit was voted through by the "least intelligent people" (and if it were, are you saying their votes are worth less?) Anyway, May's 'plan' seems to be getting clearer. Drag it out so that both sides are exhausted and she can play brinkmanship. Give the Brexiteers something to crow about - the phony £350m NHS extra they can claim is the Brexit Bonus. Then make them swallow the only Brexit that parliamentary arithmetic allows: political Brexit (no more ever closer union), but remain in the trading arrangement (pretty sure this will end up with us in some form of SM and CU, if not the actual institutions). And that sounds like a decent compromise result to me that most people could live with: the Brexiters get their extra money and political separation from the EU 'ever closer union' project, the Remainers get to live in a country where we haven't closed off our biggest market and been thrown to the international neoliberal wolves, the EU get to keep their rules and system intact and good relations with a big neighbour/trading partner, and the Irish get to not start killing each other again. It all sounds too reasonable... surely there's a rabid Rees-Mogg or DUP fundamentalist around the corner to put a spanner in the works?