Part of the brexit promise was that there would be no drop in standards, and that our standards would always be level with or above those of the EU. So signing up to EU standards should not be an issue (even if we also have additional ones); it would just reinforce the promise. (?Would that make it the one and only brexit promise that was delivered?)
Brexit, for once some facts.
- Thread starter flecc
- Start date
A hoax is a humorous deception, I don't quite get the funny in this slice of the shared delusion called life (although cummings publishing boris' messages about Hancock did make me chuckle)
now is now.
all the brexit promises have been long forgotten.
We'll soon have kangaroo steak pie in supermarkets.
The issue is that signing up to the higher EU standards might block US food exports to us, scuppering a UK-US trade deal.
GM crops which the EU won't accept, for example.
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Oh yes, of course any UK-US trade deal will almost certainly involve breaking yet another brexit promise ... I'd forgotten that for the moment.
From the Financial Times
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prime minister Boris Johnson referred to the inability of his health secretary, Matt Hancock, to increase coronavirus testing capacity at the start of the pandemic as “totally ******* hopeless”, according to private messages disclosed by his former top adviser. Dominic Cummings released the damaging WhatsApp messages on his blog on Wednesday. They show that Johnson considered sacking Hancock in a message he sent to his former aide on April 27 2020, revealing that he thought the provision of personal protective equipment was “a disaster”. Johnson added in the message: “I can’t think of anything except taking Hancock off and putting [Michael] Gove on.” The comments undermine Downing Street’s insistence that “the prime minister has full confidence in the health secretary”, showing Johnson’s own doubts about the abilities of Hancock during the health crisis. Downing Street on Wednesday said: “[No 10] does not plan to engage with every allegation made. The PM has set out that we’ll hold an official inquiry next year . . . our focus is on recovery from the pandemic,” adding that Johnson had full confidence in Hancock. “The PM has worked very closely with the health secretary throughout this pandemic and will continue to do so,” said No 10. In his blog post, Cummings said Johnson had a “clear plan to leave at the latest a couple of years after the next election”, adding “he wants to make money and have fun not ‘go on and on’.” No 10 dismissed the claims as “utter nonsense”. In May, Cummings revealed in parliamentary testimony that he had repeatedly demanded Hancock’s sacking for failings and “lies” at the start of the pandemic. Hancock has denied ever telling any untruths to Johnson. A second WhatsApp exchange from March 27 2020 showed Cummings complaining that the health department had turned down ventilators on price grounds. Johnson replied: “It’s Hancock. He has been hopeless.” The third exchange occurred on the same date showing Cummings complaining that the US had gone from 2,200 tests a day to 27,000 to 100,000 in just a fortnight. Hancock, by contrast, was “sceptical” about the UK reaching 10,000 daily tests by the following week, according to Cummings. Johnson replied: “Totally ******* hopeless.” Hancock eventually set a target of 100,000 daily tests in early April, which was met a month later. Britain’s lack of testing capacity at the start of the crisis has been a focus of criticism of the government.
Well,well
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prime minister Boris Johnson referred to the inability of his health secretary, Matt Hancock, to increase coronavirus testing capacity at the start of the pandemic as “totally ******* hopeless”, according to private messages disclosed by his former top adviser. Dominic Cummings released the damaging WhatsApp messages on his blog on Wednesday. They show that Johnson considered sacking Hancock in a message he sent to his former aide on April 27 2020, revealing that he thought the provision of personal protective equipment was “a disaster”. Johnson added in the message: “I can’t think of anything except taking Hancock off and putting [Michael] Gove on.” The comments undermine Downing Street’s insistence that “the prime minister has full confidence in the health secretary”, showing Johnson’s own doubts about the abilities of Hancock during the health crisis. Downing Street on Wednesday said: “[No 10] does not plan to engage with every allegation made. The PM has set out that we’ll hold an official inquiry next year . . . our focus is on recovery from the pandemic,” adding that Johnson had full confidence in Hancock. “The PM has worked very closely with the health secretary throughout this pandemic and will continue to do so,” said No 10. In his blog post, Cummings said Johnson had a “clear plan to leave at the latest a couple of years after the next election”, adding “he wants to make money and have fun not ‘go on and on’.” No 10 dismissed the claims as “utter nonsense”. In May, Cummings revealed in parliamentary testimony that he had repeatedly demanded Hancock’s sacking for failings and “lies” at the start of the pandemic. Hancock has denied ever telling any untruths to Johnson. A second WhatsApp exchange from March 27 2020 showed Cummings complaining that the health department had turned down ventilators on price grounds. Johnson replied: “It’s Hancock. He has been hopeless.” The third exchange occurred on the same date showing Cummings complaining that the US had gone from 2,200 tests a day to 27,000 to 100,000 in just a fortnight. Hancock, by contrast, was “sceptical” about the UK reaching 10,000 daily tests by the following week, according to Cummings. Johnson replied: “Totally ******* hopeless.” Hancock eventually set a target of 100,000 daily tests in early April, which was met a month later. Britain’s lack of testing capacity at the start of the crisis has been a focus of criticism of the government.
Well,well
BJ has total confidence that Hancock will be his human shield.
There is absolutely no need to import any meat products into NI... It is a major producer!. Beef, Pork, Chicken, Turkey, Duck, are all native. To which one can add eels, oysters, mussels, farmed salmon, white fish..
Indeed, I wasn't the only one in here to forecast that Hancock was scheduled to be the fall guy. Well deserved mind you.
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And Goats meat, as well as Goats cheese and milk, since Goats are also native to the whole of Ireland.
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You'd think that Hancock was appointed by someone other than Johnson.
Every single ministerial appointment is Johnson's and he is entirely responsible whether they are heroic or hopeless. (Can't think of any in the former category...)
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Goats meat?. I have never seen it for sale. So I don't think so, but certainly Goats Cheese has become very much an artisan product... My wife is an addict. Mutton and Lamb, is less associated with NI than more Westerly parts
Quote:
"There are two goat meat farms in Northern Ireland – Broughgammon Farm located on the sprawling moss land outside Ballycastle and Tynedale Farm on the road to Saintfield from Lisburn. Both produce goat that has been embraced by chefs here and throughout the UK."
And Broughgammon retail goat meat boxes online with various cuts.
Early days, but it has been growing over the last four years.
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Many years ago, one butcher in Reading sold goat.
Gave rise to an odd mixture of cultures in the queue. A mix of Home Counties - smart and well-off. (It was that sort of extremely long-established butchers.) And a rather Jamaican flavour.
Not much of a human shield, I don't know anyone who doesnt think him deeply complicit in the avoidable deaths of the pandemic, far from an innocent fall guy
Is that a picture of the singer from The Pogues?....THis from the Irish Times Fintin O'Toole of today
"Blessed are the makers of processed pork products, for they shall come to symbolise British pluck in the face of the foreign foe. The invention of the “sausage war” as a cover for the flagrant breach of an international treaty is absurd. But we have to remember that we are trapped in a nightmare where the more absurd the imagery is, the more seriously we have to take it.
To understand what is going on with the Northern Ireland protocol we have to ask: why sausages? Why did Boris Johnson confront Emmanuel Macron at the G7 summit over the weekend: “How would you like it if the French courts stopped you moving Toulouse sausages to Paris?”
The question, as it happens, makes no sense. The Saucisse de Toulouse is made all over France, so even in the unlikely event of a blockade, Parisians would have no trouble finding some for their cassoulets.
And as an emblem of the allegedly terrible deprivations inflicted on the plain people of Ulster by the protocol, the sausage seems, on the face of it, even less apt.
If we go back to February 2020, we will find a very different official story: that the protocol would be great for the Ulster sausage.
Why? Because Northern Ireland has lots of fine sausage-makers, including Karro Food in Cookstown, Cranswick in Ballymena and the wonderful Finnebrogue Artisan in Downpatrick.
Not only is the protocol not causing a sausage famine in the six counties, it is a great boon for these pork peddlers. Says who? Well how about the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs, whose Minister is one Edwin Poots.
Boris Johnson’s gibberish may be surreal but it's also dangerousVIEW NOW
In February 2020, Poots’s department exultantly pointed to the great advantage that Northern Ireland sausage-makers would enjoy because of the protocol: unfettered exports to both Britain and the EU. There is in fact a huge opportunity for them. The UK was selling £17 million (€19.8m) of sausages a year to the EU, with almost half of that going to the Republic. Now, only Northern Ireland sausages can be sold to the EU. The protocol really puts the sizzle into this export trade.
So if you were going to pick out an object to epitomise the evils of the protocol, the last one should be the sausage. But the decision to bang on about bangers has nothing to do with ordinary logic – and that is precisely what makes this whole charade at once so ludicrous and so dangerous.
In February 2020, Edwin Poots’s department exultantly pointed to the great advantage that Northern Ireland sausage-makers would enjoy because of the protocol: unfettered exports to both Britain and the EU. File photograph: PA
The “sausage war” tells us, firstly, that Northern Ireland matters, well, not a sausage. You can only pick on good news for Northern Ireland and turn it into an intolerable outrage if what is actually happening there is entirely irrelevant to you.
But if this is not about the decimation of the Ulster fry, what is it about? The bleak answer lies in the return to a habit deeply ingrained in English nationalism: the use of basic foodstuffs as weapons in proxy wars against nasty Europeans.
Before God Save the King was widely adopted, the unofficial national anthem of England was The Roast Beef of Old England: “Then, Britons from all nice Dainties refrain / Which effeminate Italy, France and Spain; /And mighty roast beef shall command on the Main.”
In 1996, when the European soccer championship was being played in England, a Tory minister Gillian Shephard objected to the use of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy as the tournament anthem on the grounds that it is German. Britain was then engaged in a “beef war” with Germany because the nasty Krauts were refusing to eat British beef for fear of mad cow disease.
Readers of a certain age may remember the Tory agriculture minister John Gummer force-feeding his own four-year-old daughter Cordelia a beef burger in front of TV camera crews and newspaper reporters, as an act of patriotic heroism. All that was lacking from the photo op was a cow with a red-white-and-blue rosette saying “I’m mad, me!”
The tabloid headlines ran throughout the 1990s: “Germans urged to call truce in ‘mad cow war’”; “Kohl’s beef blitzkrieg”, “French set to back down as Germans hot up beef war”; “Beef War: I’ll Bring Britain To Its Knees”; “Battle lines drawn for new beef war”; “Time to retaliate”. Substitute sausage for beef on this menu of red-blooded chauvinism and its’s once more with feeling.
The appetite for this farcical fodder is, among the Tory base, insatiable. Serve any old piece of meat with some jingo sauce and they swallow it whole. The “sausage war” was cooked up in the back kitchen because the smart boys know it will always go down well with the customers.
This reversion to old habits is a way of keeping the political benefits of Brussels-bashing even after Brexit. Phoney belligerence may have served its rational purpose but it is still far too useful politically to be dispensed with.
The rational thing would be for the Brexiteers to declare victory and move on. But reason is a poor substitute for the ancient pleasures of the patriotic food fight.
And of course the sausage wars help to distract from all the porky pies. Who cares if Northern Ireland chokes on them?
Johnson can‘t sack anyone. He is so flawed & morally bankrupt himself that he has absolutely no authority. I imagine they all have so much shite on each other that they are all safe.
Nope he is the brand new leader of the DUP... Poots by name, puits by inclination. Mrs Foster was kicked out because she was excessively liberal ... She failed to VOTE AGAINST a proposal allowing gay rights to be discussed .... note not even discussed