Largely based on misquotes, scare stories and outright lies - if anything us leaving makes that more likely (we have a veto and could veto any plan to remove our veto) but the story about an EU army came out of Trump threatening to withdraw some of the US support for Nato. That is one man I fear more than every EU politician and buerocrat combined and Brexit puts up firmly in his pocket

How about a legally binding referendum with 2 questions (which I think are neutral in phrasing)

Qu1 Do you agree with the deal on the table (assume May's for now) Yes / No

Qu2. If and only if >50% reject the deal would you rather Leave No Deal / Remain

To top it off a further legal promise

For the next 5 General Elections a supplemental question to appear on the ballot - "Should the EU membership question be re-opened ?" with a 60% threshold to do that - that way whether we stay or go nobody can argue there is no chance of people changing later BUT it would also take it away from the normal manifestos/day to day business of the parties/MP's and stop Brexit sucking the life out of politics in the UK for the next 20 years

That only works as long as the inputs to those manufactured goods are from inside the UK, if they need to be imported then their price will rise due to the same exchange rate move and the only advantage to us will be the profit margin's change in value - as we import a lot of our food (not been self sufficient in that since before Napoleonic times) the price of food will rise and thus either the workers making those manufactured good will want a payrise (reducing the profit margin) or it will be the workers who take the hit as reduced living standards. Also as the lower paid you are the greater the % of your income spent on essentials (food and shelter) they will take a disproportionate hit due to those raised food prices (even our Bread is mainly made from imported Canadian Wheat as our commercial varieties are lower gluten content feed rather than milling grade)

So a falling pound only serves as a temporary boost to the economy - if we had a balance of trade surplus it would be a different story but........

The problem is (and i am a remain voter) that the Leave (and remain) campaign are made of several disparate groups, each has it's own "way forward" which leads to "no way forward". If things had been done sensibly then like the scottish Indy ref there should have been position papers and plans published pre referendum, a manifesto as it which both sides explained exactly what they planned or desired re customs union, single market, immigration, further Eu integration, Euro, euro expansion etc.

What we got instead was 2 loose affiliations of individuals spouting sound bites, the leave side's obviously sounded more appealing but neither side actually said what they wanted to do next, that has left us in the position where the side that "won" seem to have promised several things diametrically opposed to each other.

Whatever happens next a lot of people are going to feel betrayed (within and across the referendum sides) and sadly it looks like we will all be worse off for at least the short term (5-10 years)

Whilst taking credit themselves for anything positive (like the working time directive that Labour keep claiming as their triumph despite being a direct implementation of an EU directive the Tories spent about 3 years trying to dodge around)

Is it any wonder that people who couldn't be bothered to research only saw the negatives and not the positives

Maybe because trump had said he wanted nothing to do with the syrian conflict and Putin back them in anything they do so, the syrian regime thought they could get away with it and it met some local targeted aim in that location. Trump ordering that missile barrage was actually very out of character if you look at his previous stance.

You obviously found the rare day they were there and not a day when a car breaks down (which now blocks the whole road) or when the walker had a suspected heart attack and the ambulance staff had to get the stretcher through the fence whilst their ambulance blocked the road or noticed the increased number of crashes on the roundabout since it was but it or the total mayhem when the stretch of M4 from 11 to 10 was shut and all motorway traffic had to use the now narrowed road.

And of course you ignored the perfectly good cycle route already provided through that area along the old road from before lower earley was built cutbush lane - it is directly the other side of the field and follows nearly the same route

I suspect if you delve into this you will find the name sustrans listed - they seem to be a consultancy who specialise in getting sustainable transport grants for councils which saves them spending their own money. For instance from M4 J11 to Winnersh instead of Wokingham spending 80k resurfacing the road from their budget they got nearly £1m of grant funding to build a cycle lane and fence and resurface the road. Nobody uses the cycle lane, the road has had it's speed limit reduced and extra islands so you can't overtake plus the roundabout had to be reprofiled after a couple of crashes due to poor sightlines - but hey Wokingham "saved" £80k. Even the cyclists hate it as they have to stop for the side roads and the fast cyclists just want to keep moving

So unfortunately i doubt the money could have been spent on social care as it would have been a ring fenced grant

Exactly my point - people look at IS and say "all muslims are vile" rather than "look there are a bunch of vile human beings using a a forced interpretation of a religion to try and justify their actions". Hence we end up with the type of propaganda used during Brexit and leading to the kind of comments like this on the nwn Brexit story

You tories have said enough **** put this country in **** over the last 40 years. Leaving Europe, was not just about making money or business. Leavers voted to leave the eu, course billions of pounds being paid into it and we get no help. Plus inmirgrates that should not be in this country in the first place. Workers yes who put back in to the communities. But those who want everything handed to them on a silver platter. And criminals who kill and rape, and rob people. Soon as they come over to the uk, so thanks to the British gov who screwed the British people over for 40 years.

I am always on a heightened state of alert when around serious believers of any variety - otherwise I am likely to say something very insensitive and inflamatory

I don't condone any of that but so called christians do pretty much the same and we don't brand all christians the same way - I don't remember a clamour to stop all Roman catholics entering the country when the IRA did the hyde park or manchester bombings - also FGM is related to location not strictly religion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_vie...ital_mutilation, if you want a christian version of IS look up Lords resistance Army in Uganda/Congo.

Note I am not saying that we must respect cultural norms or any bull like that - I am saying religions of all types are used by nutters/sadists to justify their actions (I include the US far right in that group as well)

The reason brexit and islamophobia have become linked seems to be due to the whole campaigning tactic (full of factual inaccuracies) used by some of -

Europe's SE Border is being inundated by refugees form Islamic countries, as some muslims are terrorists it therefore must be true some of the refugees are terrorists, Europe has no internal borders checks and everyone wants to come to the uK which is paved with gold, therefore calais will fill with islamic refugees including terrorists and the EU will make us take some and we are bound to therefore be forced to take terrorists by the Eu and even if not we are full up anyway and Rotheram proves all muslims are nasty people we don't want so let's leave the EU and "take control of our borders" and all will be lovely and shiny and we will live happily ever after.

I won't even begin to point out the factual and logical fallacies other than to point out if the government actually gave a tosh about immigration and their 100k target they might not have let in 160k non eu immigrants last year that we have always had 100% control over

But all these problems are far more to do with an aging population than immigration. HUge generalisations coming up and they are all "on average"

Go back 40 years and the average man worked until a retirement at 65 and then only survived a couple of years to take a pension and be a burden on the welfare state - his wife lived longer but was given a pitiful pension anyway so regularly went to live with the family or in an old peoples home . You usually had 3 generations alive and people had no problem with children sharing rooms. Now a lot of the current pensioners retired before the age of 65, they are living as couples still in big houses, the divorce rate went up (more housing needed for that), most people aim to have a room per child if possible and very few want an elderly relative living with them ( people try and stay in their own homes as long as they can) even though children knowing their great grandparents is now not rare - from 1961-2011 the number of 1 or 2 person households grew from 44% to 64% of all households (england outside london).

http://www.lse.ac.uk/socialPolicy/Research...family-size.pdf

If the number of 1&2 person households has grown by 50% whilst the population has grown from 52.2m to 64.9m which is about 20% then it is obvious the housing problem is more a factor of household size than population size. Even more when you consider that the change in 1&2 person is of a rate whilst population is an absolute so 1&2 person households are 50% more of a base which is 20% higher to start with.

I got it from this site while trying to find evidence of my knowledge that h2 is used for fertilizer - maybe it is a precursor compound

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/...ap-natural-gas/

The thing is that every barrel of crude that comes out of the ground is split into different types of hydrocarbon (factions) form the heaviest Tar to the gaseous bits, whilst there is differences in the make up of different crudes (Brent crude has a lot of lighter factions and alberta oil shales a lot of the heavier) they are all mixes - the reason diesel became comparatively more expensive per litre than petrol (it used to be cheaper) was because of supply and demand (we bought lots more diesel cars) it came back to parity with the worldwide reduction in transportation due to the economic slump. If you banned diesel cars completely then the oil companies (refinery part) would have to charge more for the petrol element to make the same profit out of each barrel they refine.

Diesel cars are also on average a lot more efficient per mile than a petrol as well as pumping out less naties per litre burnt - Although I will admit PM10'S from worn diesels are very bad for lungs.

Hydrogen cars will compete with agriculture for Hydrogen as EVERY farm in the uk and I would guess europe uses Ammonia based fertilizers; that ammonia is made by reacting Nitrogen in the atmosphere with Hydrogen N2 + 3H2 => 2NH3, if you increase transportation use of hydrogen you will push up food prices as farmers will have to pay more for fertilizer (a major input cost). All of these uses of hydrocarbons are interconnected - if you want to make it last we need to get away from hydrocarbon based transport and that is NOT hydrogen fuel cells until you can generate the H2 by splitting water using non hydrocarbon generated electricity or you are robbing peter to pay paul

Yes I know but far more people understand what you are talking about when you say MAFF rather than the department for environment, food & rural affairs

It is quite simple (if totally stereotyped) - The germans follow rules to the letter, the french look for ways to do as little as possible whilst pretending to follow the rules, whilst we don't just follow the rules but over complicate/rewrite and generally guild the lilly on everything.

So we have a free market that is meant to be based on common standards and therefore a fair playing field - but if you take germany as the centre we fall far to 1 side and france the other. Over the years our EU commissioners have actually been pretty good at fighting our point on points of law/regulation but then Westminster adds stuff back in. If we have access to the common market still we HAVE to stop our own ministries adding to the regs and thus making us uncompetitive, in this case it has been MAFF at the behest of the public (via RSPCA). Maybe rather than the RSPCA freedom food label we need a EU standard label, we can mark food as being down to that standard rather than up to our higher one. Scaring people about the EU worked for Brexit so why not our domestic industries - a bonus is that the EU standard labelling could likely be sold to the EU during the A50 negotiations as a positive - "not only do we want to be part of a common market still and at least comply with it's standards but we will label all eu standard produce as exactly that prominently"

No it is because we chose to have a free marketplace for animals whilst setting our standards higher - either it had to be closed or we all needed the same standard. Personally CAP is one of the few things I am glad to see the back off - but it is sucha cornerstone of european trade I think it is one of the firs things you will see re-agreed, too many vested interests holding guns to the governments heads . "bread and circuses" (or cheap ready meals and strictly)

Fair point - forgot them but you hopefully you see what i mean about having ot have a proxy in the EU to argue our point on standards if we are outside but bound by them (either by formal agreement or having to for trade reasons)

But they aren't willing to pay or our supermarkets would not be full of irish and polish bred Pork. I believe if you go to Eire there are some signs advertising how Tesco are one of their largest exporters and most of that is meat and veg. Richmond sausages are pretty much down at the bottom of the quality scale but people buy them and treat a wiltshire pork sausage an an expensive luxury. They only care about animal welfare on their screens not in their baskets (unless a donkey gets into their findus curry)

http://www.irishexaminer.com/business/tesc...ort-327853.html

However, the Indecon report paints a healthier picture of Tesco Ireland. It shows the supermarket now ranks as the world’s biggest single buyer of Irish food and drink and is responsible for nearly 47,000 Irish jobs — 14,500 directly in stores, head office and depots.

Annually, Tesco supports more than 13,000 Irish farm families, who supply their produce to the company; while the report notes it is now working with nearly 500 small and medium-sized local suppliers.

Seems fair to me

especially as no matter what people say about escaping UE red tape etc there has to be harmonisation of standards to have easy international trade. yes some of the stuff about max wattage on kettles or hoovers is mad, but having an international standard for toy or electrical safety or how to measure electrical efficiency is just common sense, and most of it is just about equivalency. Like when BS5750 became iso9000, the only problem the UK ever had was we gold plated everything over and above what the EU asked - like motorcycle tests, the EU harmonised and said a certain maneuver had to be at 50kph, the DSA rather than say "lets call that 30mph" decided that it had to use 32mph and so as local roads are 30mph limits this test had to be performed off road rendering a whole load of smaller test centers unsuitable etc etc.

My worry is that having left we will actually have less ability/incentive to question inconsistencies caused by our non use of metric for example and driving on the left (imagine a new EU customs directive on vehicles that set tariffs on all cars & components not built to EU spec and then that spec being defined as LHD - who would oppose it)

I am a remainer but as far as I can tell this is nothing to do with stopping article 50

tell me where I am wrong but before yesterday - May was going to press the button starting the 2 year countdown with no public idea of what the strategy for the negotiating was.

Today

There needs to be a debate in parliament where all the different sides can speak to their constituents and hopefully come up with an agreed position as to what we want to see in our agreement with Europe, the negotiators can then go in able to say "these are our immovables, what do you want form us in terms of money or concessions to say yes to them and start from there. Surely that is better than going into a time limited negotiation with a blank sheet of paper.

In my mind a full hard WTO Brexit is is only as supported by the leave vote as full schengen/Euro integration would have been by a stay vote - they are the 2 extremes and the average position of the uk populace is somewhere half way (as can be seen by how tight the vote was), the scrutiny is more likely to lead to a solution that doesn't tear the country apart

But charities are not allowed to be political and the BL are a charity - they are only allowed to campaign politically in a way directly related to their object - so they can lobby re War pensions or medical treatment for injured servicemen but NOT over whether to go to war for example.

Therefore how can their symbol be in itself political

As i stated before on average it can not be saving the tax payer money as no reading, newbury and hants all have permit systems and paid staff checking that they didnt before

Well this started with West Berks which covers all of Calcot and Tilehurst (parts of the large town Reading) deciding it did not want to pay RE3 (Reading, Wokingham & Bracknell's waste contractor) for those people to drop off waste in their own town - everything else stems from that