The UK is Out - New PM - and whither now for Article 50

Hammerwombat

A straight banana would have been so much easier to deal with in a wimpy banana split.

OutcastLondoner

IronHerb said:

Do you write the Food Review as well Outcast? ;lol

I'm applying for the job. That's actually why I have riot gear, to protect us from straight banana-wielding Belgians ready to lay down the law. The Middle East is nothing in comparison. They only have hummus.

PrestonHammer said:

I think they are called Apple bananas.

I think you're right. In Bangladesh they just call it a banana. The big ones didn't exist until rich people started importing them to show how classy they are, by eating bland mushy things.

IronHerb

Hummus, that can be nasty though...

TheMadcapLaughs

OutcastLondoner said:

All you really need to know is the midget Asian bananas you can't buy in the supermarket are the best. #EndOf

I`m sure the term "midget Asian" isn`t strictly politically correct..........................

TheMadcapLaughs

And talking of bananas, I opened a new pack on sunday morning, reached in to pull one or two from the cluster, and found a large spiders web in the middle of the bunch. Not having a great affinity to spiders (especially the venomous banana dwelling types) I screamed like a pre-pubescent girly and dropped the bunch in the middle of the kitchen floor and ran around like Corporal Jones on amphetamines. I re-entered the kitchen dressed in protective gear (similar to John Goodman in Arachnophobia) armed with a tennis racket and rolled up copy of The Radio Times (Xmas Edition) accompanied by my daughter, whom I assured would be employed only in a covert "spotting" capacity. Her signal would be to scream in a similar vein to her father if "anything moved". After much prodding and poking I plucked up the courage to advance on the abandoned bunch and prodded and poked. My daughter screamed, I leapt back like someone who has an Olympic Gold in leaping back, only to be informed that my daughter was "testing her signal". After removing the tennis racket that was now embedded in the ceiling I again continued to prod and poke and ascertained that the bunch was disarmed and safe. My daughter and I then managed to scoop the bunch using said tennis racket and TV times into a sainsburys carrier bag which was triple tied (the accepted norm when bagging dangerous fruit) and now sits outside the back door at a safe distance from the house. The only worry now is that the cats (we have two) seem to have interfered with the carrier bag in the night and may have inadvertently released a dangerous arachnid into what was once a safe and leafy suburb.

MrsGrey

You know that while you were out of the room getting tooled up, 3 large foreign spiders legged it from the bananas and are now hiding somewhere in your kitchen, don't you.

;sofa

TheMadcapLaughs

;sofa

Sorry, did someone say something????????????????


Mrs G. I`m not even sure if they have the required travel documents.....................

MrsGrey

AdMeus
The banana discussion reared its head once before, back on pg 34 or thereabouts of this thread. ;ok

Your post seems to me to be suggesting reasons why the 'myth' persists. (Unless I have missed your point?)

AdMeus_CaputFilius said:

If you don't read all the information and just focus on section underlines it is easy to see why people misinterpreted the regulation.

Well, yes, I agree. If you don't read something properly, you won't understand it.

My response would be - why aren't people reading it properly?

AdMeus_CaputFilius said:

The real problem is that there is a lot of legislation and regulations out there from the EU regards fruit and vegetables that is produced for marketing and trade purposes - i.e. when you buy the product badged as Grade A or Class 1 that is what you get (as per the EU regulation), if not you can send it back and have it replaced or pay the costs of the lower grade it actually is (claim back a credit if already paid), which when it gets into the public domain is deliberately misinterpreted (for various reasons) or misunderstood.

(my italics)

So we are in agreement on this - some politicians and media outlets knowingly and deliberately promulgated a misrepresentation of the truth (aka lied) to mislead people. To serve an agenda of their own.

or

In other cases, the aim and content of the classification system was genuinely misunderstood. Because people didn't take the time or trouble to read it properly (as you suggest in your other point that I referred to above.)

Unless you are saying that some people aren't capable of understanding it? I'm not sure it's all that difficult to understand, is it? ;hmm

Vorselaarhammer

MrsGrey said:

You know that while you were out of the room getting tooled up, 3 large foreign spiders legged it from the bananas and are now hiding somewhere in your kitchen, don't you.

;sofa

That's just CRAWL MrsG....

AdMeus_CaputFilius

Mrs G,

If memory servers me correctly, when this story first came up back in the mid 1990's it was done a bit tongue in cheek in one of the papers along with a few other stories about EU regulations.

The point I was making was that the story was based on fact, although not all the facts of the story were reported at the time or since, so therefore it is not a lie but a misrepresentation of the facts. Due to this misrepresentation there has been a lack of understanding in regards to classification system and it's intent, because people did not take the time or trouble to actually look it up.

Because the original story has been repeated many times now, people take it as fact - like other stories that are not exactly a lie and are based on fact, if repeated often enough, become the truth people will believe.


TMC - Nothing wrong with spiders, lovely creatures. We have a Giant House Spider living in the garden under a planter and another in the Garage, look fearsome but are harmless (Harriet and Henrietta). We also have a Noble False Widow hanging out in the Conservatory (Maggie).



That one is Harriet, the gap she is in between wooden batons is just over three and a quarter inched wide (Henrietta is a bit smaller, but not much).



That one is Maggie.

ASLEFshrugged

No Charlotte?

TheMadcapLaughs

Admeus. If I may say this. But that gives me the willies. ;scary

AdMeus_CaputFilius

TMC,

I can understand why people are uneasy with them, but those ones are tiddler's compared to some that I have woken up with on my travels - not to mention scorpions, giant stag beetles, an Armadillo, couple of snakes (one being a Fur-De-Lance which was a bit twitchy as they give a nasty bite and are venomous) amongst other things - even had a couple of howler monkey sticking their heads in the tent.

Aslef - ;hmm Potato's?

ASLEFshrugged

You say potato and I say....

I once stayed in a cottage next to a river with ducks on it. My mate Geoff was always the last one up and we were always late going places. We fed the ducks and they'd come right up to the cottage.

One morning he was still asleep so we laid a trail of bread from the river into the cottage and into his room. When the ducks were all inside we shut the door.

When ducks are alarmed they quack a lot

And poo.

A lot.

Geoff got up early the rest of our holiday

ASLEFshrugged

Labour hold Stoke Central suggesting that a vote for Leave doesn't translate into a vote for UKIP, also that Paul Nuttall's tweed cap and jacket look might work if you're inspecting your 3000 acre estate in a Range Rover (with a couple of Labradors in the back) but not on a bloke from Bootle stomping the streets of Stoke.

Tories win Copeland. Labour's majority had been steadily falling from 29% in 1997 to 6.5% at the last General Election, changing the boundary to include four rural wards in 2010 certainly boosted the Tory vote but also the nuclear industry is changing the people, by which I mean an increase in middle income owner occupiers (74%, national average 63.5%) rather than Tory voting mutants.

Yeoldhammer

Labour turned in to a joke. Corbyn offered something different but he isn't credible opposition. He can't play the political game. If he doesn't go Labour are done for not sure why Labour members want this guy as leader, he simply isn't a winner. You need to be in power to make change and that won't happen with Corbyn.

TheMadcapLaughs

From what I can gather the nuclear power issue was the major factor in Copeland. The Tories being openly supportive of the nuclear industry and Corbyn being a beardy hippie transgender marxist luddite CND hipster didn`t help the Labour cause. I do wish the Tories would stop banging on about being the "true party of working people" as I find that claim right up there with anything Trump has said and done and is the fakiest of fake news. I don`t like Paul Nuttall.

TheMadcapLaughs

Admeus. I don`t think I could travel to a place where there is a likelihood of meeting anything with more than four legs that you can actually hear running across the floor. The biggest spider I have seen in real life (apart from huge hairy things at zoos) was one in our apartment in Turkey. We had to call a maintenance man to come and get it, who funnily enough when he saw it called a "more senior" maintenance man to come and get it. None of us slept very well that night.

ASLEFshrugged

Yeoldhammer said:

Labour turned in to a joke. Corbyn offered something different but he isn't credible opposition. He can't play the political game. If he doesn't go Labour are done for not sure why Labour members want this guy as leader, he simply isn't a winner. You need to be in power to make change and that won't happen with Corbyn.

The thing the Labour members liked about Corbyn is that he wasn't any of the other candidates who stood for the leadership, a bunch of Blairite clones still spouting the same Tory-lite stuff that worked in 1997 but failed in 2010 and 2015 (one mention of the word "aspirational" is enough to qualify).

Under Blair (although started by Kinnock) power was concentrated by the leadership and the PLP with the wider membership generally ignored. Corbyn wants to spread the decision making or as some describe it "democratising" the party. Unlike Blair who would have parachuted his preferred candidates into by elections Corbyn has allowed the local constituency parties to select their candidates, At Copeland Corby gave his backing to Rachel Holliday but instead the local party chose Gillian Troughton.

Vorselaarhammer

In her victory speech, Mrs Harrison said: "It's been very clear talking to people throughout this campaign that [Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn doesn't represent them.

ASLEFshrugged

And how many of the 11601 people who voted Labour did she speak to?

A pretty pointless statement, she'll go far in politics....

IronHerb

He's pretty much a Michael Foot clone, principled but not seen as a leader.

ASLEFshrugged

Foot wasn't as bad as the media like to remember him, Labour were well ahead in the polls until the "moderates" split to form the SDP and it was neck and neck right up until the Falklands. If it hadn't been for a bread shortage in Buenos Aires Thatcher could have been a one term Prime Minister.

This was when polls were reliable, apart from a couple of percentage points here and there they were pretty much spot on for the 1983 election result.

Yeoldhammer

ASLEF i do like Corbyn he is different and as you say trying to appeal to people on a more local framework. But he is losing the fight against the Tories, we had austerity for 5 years and Miliband couldn't even muster a challenge against the Tories in the last election. I don't think Corbyn will fair much better and i think potentially worse than Miliband and this when the Tories are dismantling the NHS and juggling a Brexit. Im sorry if Labour cannot win an election off the back of those two issues alone then they will rapidly descend to obscurity with the Lib Dems.

ASLEFshrugged

The Lib Dems have been far worse than this, from 1951 until 1964 they had only o 6 seats (back when they were just the Liberals).

In the five by-elections the Lib Dems have contested since the Referendum they have increased their share of the vote in all of them, even the ones that voted Leave, they'll be looking to seats they lost to the Tories or came second in 2010 and 2015 that voted Remain like Eastbourne, Eastleigh, Bath, Cheltenham, Kingston and Twickenham for gains in 2020.

Up until now the focus for Labour has not been losing seats to UKIP, I suspect after Stoke Central their going to switch focus. At least I don't see Corbyn listening to the twonks who told him to eat a bacon sandwich or that the Ed Stone was a good idea.

Thanks to our FPTP voting system even if Labour only got the 26.7% they're averaging at the moment they'd still get 196 seats. Obscurity isn't that easy.

chicagohammer

I recall when Michael Foote was leader and could not imagine him greeting the President of the United States at the White House, I just could envision it happening without squirming.

Now I positively squirm at the thought of the President of the United States turning up at 10 Downing Street.

Funny old world

claretandbluesky

How on earth are the Tories seemingly succeeding in re-inventing themselves into the party of the people after tearing out the heart of Communities under Thatcher and never replacing them, and much more recently under years of austerity under Cameron and Osbourne.

Are people so consumed with the narrative that the EU caused all the problems and not tory party policy? or is Corbyn viewed as such a lame duck that they are unbackable?

In my view despite a far from perfect EU and a genuine problem with immigration the Tory party are massively more to blame for the inequality and issues faced by working people, yet they have not only succeeded in passing blame but are being carried aloft on the shoulders of their new supporters as the saviours, perplexing to say the least.

claretandbluesky

I hear what you are saying BBB as I have always felt Corbyn a really nice guy but the job needs so much more, I know loads of really nice guys but I wouldn't recommend them to run the country.

I think he had found his role as a voice to ensure Labour policy was always internally questioned, he is not the one to be the leader of the party. There was something sad about a man who had voted against his party over 400 times or whatever the figure was calling a 3 line whip now he is in charge, and then speaking of sacking people afterwards for voting against it. It was the moment he became so aware of his position he asked people to not do what he has done through conscience all his political life.

The greatest thing you have mentioned BBB is that he has become irrelevant, the Tories don't even fear him, they feel like they have no opposition at present and act accordingly.

Vorselaarhammer

Foot / Kinneck / Corbyn - Not PM electable = Labour Leader..

Blair was a Tory with a velvet glove.

Unions / Socialism is not relevant in enough of the country to be an electable platform.

Tory are working class for the working class that see it as their responsibility and have the ability to pull themselves up.

This is how my Dad and his friends saw it anyway.

MrsGrey

billybondsbeard said:

The trouble with our current system, and with Brexit, is that so many people now feel disenfranchised.

But, sadly, the solutions they are voting for are not going to deliver any change in that regard.