thecrashingisles

So having listened to the "anger and emotions rife on both sides", your ultimate response is to tell one side to get stuffed?

You should get your eyes tested. Why do you think a collection of Russia's foes that excludes their appeasers would be a more likely to be a Putin puppet bloc than a Franco-German one would?

Do you think a trade war would be a reasonable response from the EU?

Having listened to it, how do you think the UK government should approach the protocol?

It was his Protonmail account that got hacked, so not "our" door.

Why do you hold Russia in such high esteem?

No particular reason but I have studied the former USSR quite a bit.

You won the referendum, so there is that.

Lithuania also has the steepest population decline over that period, which should at least make you question the orthodox view on immigration.

Try thinking logically instead of emotionally.

EU expansion changed the economic dynamics quite a lot. I wasn't talking about competition from France and Germany.

If you're not worried about our farmers and industry having no protection from competition from countries in the EU with cheaper labour costs, why are you so worried about competition from Australia?

The point is that the UK itself agreed to define a hard border in a way that ruled out any kind of checks at all. Even if something based on the Smart Border 2.0 proposal were viable, it wouldn't meet the bar that was set in the Joint Report near the beginning of the negotiations.

Do you think Johnson is a Thatcherite in that sense? I don't think he's ideologically committed to privatisation or opposed to state intervention.

EU immigration was never an unlimited source of labour. We saw how migration from E8 countries peaked and went into reverse and the same was happening with E2 countries, so you can't simply attribute any labour market issues to Brexit. I sense that you don't think that an economic model predicated on ever more immigration was something that was sustainable, so shouldn't you be prepared to accept some short-term disruption while we adjust?