by John Ward
What a wonderful thing it would be if both the Brexit trade talks and SPA reform “legality” issue could be solved by the DWP facing the European Commission in a controlled fight to the death. Sad for the relatives, but joyous for the rest of humanity
Nothing is ever quite enough for Brussels, is it? It demands (and gets) a divorce fee, it nails us to a crucifix called the EIB, and it insists that the trade deal can’t be agreed within a year….which is kind of understandable, as we’re paying them a billion Pounds a month to get it.
Two weeks ago, I opined here that the trade talks would open by the creation of something the UK can’t possibly agree to, which then becomes an immovable object, and finally All Britain’s Fault. 72 hours before B-Day, we now know what that something is: hegemony over UK Courts for the European Court of Justice, allowing it to adjudicate on the terms of a trade, fishing and security deal, on which we’re about to negotiate.
This is akin to Manchester United entering Derby-day negotiations with Manchester City by demanding that Alex Ferguson be the referee.
Here we go again.
Very clever of Barnier and co of course to alight on the ECJ as a factory-fitted sticking-point; for they know that the Labour fluffies’ broad fear campaign has always featured loss of workers’ rights – allegedly protected by that Court, although it hasn’t seemed that interested in defending the salary rights of Greek workers. I’ll lay anyone 20/1 that Yvette Cooper rises at PMQs tomorrow and makes the point for her allies in Brussels.
And there’s more: talks between Brussels and the UK will not formally start until after the European governments agree a negotiating mandate late next month. So there we are….two months pissed away, nothing done….oh, and a further demand – EU negotiators have already demanded that Britain follow the bloc’s rules and regulations in areas such as state aid and environmental protection ‘in an attempt to prevent unfair competition’.
Downing Street has already responded via this press release: “the European court is by very definition not a neutral arbiter”. Fine words and all that, but this is going to turn into another Irish Border fiasco.
What we should tell these bare-faced filibusters to do – right now, before any history gets rewritten by all the pro-EU British media – is state very firmly that there will be no talks at all until these two ridiculous dealbreakers are in the dustbin….and set a deadline for their agreement to that of March 1st. If they don’t agree, then we declare the trade deal off – and see how long it takes the German car industry to do a hit-and-run job on von der Meyer.
But we won’t do that, because Sedwill will stir up more fear, the folks in the silly star-studded hats will march to somewhere or other, the BBC will pile in with a two-hour special on why only the ECJ can stop the Coronavirus from killing all of us next week, and NATO aka the Pentagon will turn the screws on lil’ ol’ England via that theyar Spaishul Lashunship.
To restate the Sun headline re this one: we are paying £172bn just to get some trade talks going, but there are no money trees.
We would rather pay hundreds of billions of Pounds to half a dozen hoodlums in a chocolate factory for nothing, than pay 3.65 million of our own citizens back the money they were promised 67 years ago
As promised last week, I am continuing to reissue old posts about the SPA ‘Reform’ scandal, and some of the astonishingly stupid apologists who seem unable to grasp the moral or legal issues involved. Their rationales could easily have been invented by the sociopathic brutes of Brussels.
The first of these now follows….
WASPI ALERT: as long as ethical knuckle-draggers with birdbrain logic can tweet rubbish about the SPA scandal, retired British women will suffer injustice.
The moronically divisive tweet above appeared on Twitter over the weekend. Mr Groves (who looks on his homepage like a 40-something) could be forgiven…..if it wasn’t clear that he is ‘ex-CEO of Partnership Group, ex-NED Guardian Financial Services, ex-NED at ERC. Current marathon runner, angel investor, PE adviser, Chair of Retirement Bridge.’
God help civilisation if the Chairman of Retirement Bridge is this densely ignorant on page 1 of The Book of Demographic Justice.
I’m not going to linger long on a banal and superficial “opinion” with all the profundity of post-drought Saharan puddles. The step by step deconstruction unfolds as follows:
- The missing overture: A promise is a promise. The promise was broken with only the last 20 years of a 60 year term to go, after which blatant lies were told by Westminster and Whitehall about how this had been communicated to Waspi women. Had this taken place in the private sector, the culprits would have gone to jail.
- The multiple of payback is as relevant to the argument as Groves’s self-image as an halo-bearing angel. If politicians are so innately thick as to promise such a return without setting up a invested pension fund, their graves deserve to be dug up and their spine-free bones scattered to the four winds.
- Waspis and their supporters care not a marathon-runner’s self-inflicted ankle injury that 3/7ths of the multiple were paid back “by the young”. In their time when young, the Waspis did the same for their older recipients: it’s how the system works, you witlessly ageist pillock.
- The missing epilogue: Waspis are being asked to accept embezzlement of a huge chunk of their 40-year NI payment record for the following amoral and indefensible reasons. (1) They’re easy meat for DWP meatheads (2) Projects like Connecting for Health, the EU, the Humber Bridge and a hundred other ego-projects pissed away the money to no purpose (3) They’re neither men or Whitehall civi servants – all of whose larger pension entitlements are equally unfunded (4) the Waspi Politburo is about as worldly, noisy and radical as as a 95 year-old fundamentalist Trappist monk.
I tweeted recently about similarly cycloptic thinking by a former Chair of the NHA, no less. But the twat-tweet at the head of this piece from six miles-per-hour thinker Steve Groves makes the NHA bigot look like a viable candidate for Mastermind 2017.
I make no apology at all for the fury of this piece. I am sick to death of the goggle-eyed, self-interested drivel poured out by DWP apologists who – half the time at least – have only their own greedy self-interest at heart. It might be useful, in fact, if Groves could reassure us all that he has no such agenda. Then we could be sure that he acted solely from limited intelligence when deciding to launch his “humble opinion” into the Twitter space.
As opinions go, it has a lot to be humble about.