erat_forte

Its also no different from driving a car requiring a crash helmet, or walking on the pavement requiring a crash helmet. Its a very good hill to die on, much better than compulsory voting.

Very good

I only once stayed in an AirBnB place when I was working a couple of days away from home. It was an elderly gent living on his own in the countryside, in a slightly rambling cottage that he had inherited from an uncle. Very basic, looked like nothing had been changed since 1960. In the evening I got a fireside seat and a glass of wine and a couple of hours of conversation. In the morning I got a nice breakfast cooked by him in a kitchen from a museum of rural life. It was perfect. But I realise that this is not the norm on Airbnb.

The Scottish political system is hardly a model of transparency and accountability!

Foreigners taking the jobs he would have had if he had been working?

Isn't it in general a good thing if people give up jobs that require so much driving and take jobs that are closer to where they live? In what world does driving half an hour out and half an hour back every single day in a fossil-burning machine just to do your daily work make any sense?

How will the economy "recover"? What will change to make things cheaper? Things seem to be being driven by supply shortages, which themselves are being driven by resource shortages. Are there new untapped resources available to be exploited for low enough cost to be worthwhile?

I always thought decimal time was a great idea and we should campaign for its introduction as a Brexit Opportunity. That would be one in the eye for the French!

It is fascinating how running an international land border through hundreds of farms and fields and local supply chains would be so easy to implement though high-tech electronic systems that no-one would notice, but running the same border through a sea crossing with three or four established port facilities on each side is an impossibly intrusive nightmare of beurocracy and paperwork.

Yes that is actually quite reasonable, since the "anger and emotion" is coming almost entirely from the DUP, that is the same party that used dodgy funding to pay for pro-Brexit adverts in English newspapers, held the balance of power in Westminster and forced through the hardest of Brexits (including a deliberate international humiliation of the Prime Minister). Their behaviour is utterly unreasonable by any sensible rational legal or democratic perspective. They even ran a court case to get their position stated in law, and the court ruled they were wrong. So give that the option is to A) tell these chancers to get stuffed, or b) go against a negotiated agreed and voted-on international agreement and also go against the advise of all international allies, I think telling the chancers to get stuffed would be my preferred response. What would yours be?

You mean the DUP unionist orange types? They are 100% Irish, but they are under some kind of delusion that they are Brits.

I'll back Putin, don't underestimate how good Alex is at schmoozing the people he needs to.

Yes but apart from all that it's going really well isn't it?

This is a very interesting statement because I think it reveals a huge conceptual error in a lot of thinking about Brexit. The UK is not "leaving" the EU in the way that my group of mates "leaves" a nightclub. That is almost precisely missing the point by 180° It would be more accurate to say that Brexit is the process of changing the legal and regulatory relationship between the UK and the other member states of the EU. Erecting a border is not like building the Maginot Line. Instead it is the process of drafting a legal code which is different in one place from what it is a few yards down the country lane (or a few tens of miles across the sea depending on where you are looking). The treaties and agreements are to do with how those two legal codes interact, and what procedures are required to comply with both legal codes as a person or object moves from one of the two jurisdictions to the other. In other words, Brexit is precisely about what happens after the set date, because these legal relationships and differences and mitigations are ongoing from the set date into the forseeable future. Brexit is for ever, not just for one day.

A number of the more radical Irish nationalists are saying, go ahead. Be my guest. Give in the the DUP demands. Let a hard border be set up between counties Armagh, Tyrone, Derry, and counties Cavan, Monaghan, Donegal. A proper WTO hard border between the EU and a non-EU country. Then you can profit by running a sweepstake on how many days or weeks until the vast majority of middle-of-the-road people in Northern Ireland are clamouring for a united Ireland.