EU referendum, brexit and the aftermath

It's a not uncommon Catholic name, there's one at my daughter's school.

Most of the time it's shortened to Nancy, like Sven's ex- which no-one calls Annunziata Dell'Olio.

(Comes close to a Spanish friend of ours who is called Puri - short for Purificación.)

Does she wee fresh drinking water?

Remain United, a new initiative to promote tactical voting in the EU elections to reduce the Brexit vote. Launched by Gina Miller
https://www.remainunited.org/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/09/nigel-farage-european-elections-remain-vote-brexit-party-gina-miller

Donations running at about £3000 per hour https://chuffed.org/project/remain-united

So ... now that the football's going OK again, can we take 'Brexit' back? :)

Tactical voting doesn't make all that much difference then it seems

It's fairly shit either way that the green party won't get a single candidate.

Seems to suggest all English people should vote Lib Dem, all Scots SNP and all welsh Plaid. At least that's a simple message.

Do Northern Ireland not get a vote?

Also, the total column is wrong on the second table, which is an odd mistake to make.

Who do I need to vote for to stop Stephen Yaxley-Lennon winning a seat up here in the NW?

Oh, they've got a lot of candidates--it's getting them elected that's the problem. :)

Guardian suggesting that

Corbyn will seek to make the Euro elections about social justice, not Brexit. This is what the party says in its news release about the Labour manifesto.

How is this remotely possible? Who agreed that this was a suitable line to try to take? I simply don't understand it - I doubt that a single vote will be vote with 'Social Justice' as the leading contributory factor. It doesn't make it past a cursory sense check.

Even if you were minded to vote on 'Social Justice', at the European Elections - you still wouldn't be able to because you'd still have to vote based on Brexit because your European Representative might not be there in six months to try to influence 'Social Justice'.

Well, it just about worked at the last general election. Whether it will work with a European election I don't know. As often said, the problem with the 'Brexit' vote is that it's a combination between jingoists and people who genuinely believe that it's the European Union which is responsible for social ills. Labour needs to win back the second category of voter (whether they're jingoists or not), as they include many of its traditional voters. The issue is not as toxic for Labour, but electorally just as problematic (unless the Tories really implode over it).

Also, the problem with the EU hasn't been the basic concept. The problem has been that for a long time it has been dominated by European Conservatives. That means it has favoured policies for European industry (France's and Germany's most prominently), largely through the vehicle of the Single Market, which has meant that fewer large players have come to dominate the European economy than before. This has resulted in 'consolidation', job losses, devastation of regional economies, and has also opened the door to 'new' kinds of worker exploitation by the likes of Amazon, against which the EU has not found an effective counter-measure. It's not hard to see why some leftwingers go against it, as it is far from perfect. That's all before mentioning the over-hasty introduction of the Euro, largely driven by that idiot Helmut Kohl, which has had the effect on smaller southern countries like Greece that I think has very much influenced the perception in Britain that the EU is some kind of foreign dictatorship keen to take over Britain (no thanks to Merkel's and Schäuble's completely inept handling of that crisis). You can see how social justice issues and all that stuff about sovereignty mesh. I do think that social justice is the vastly more important issue; whether voters are going to see it that way remains to be seen.

Those tactical voting stats are depressing, I'll be kind of holding my noise and voting Lib Dem. I'm not have my vote for Labour being considered a pro Brexit vote(again).

I'll be kind of holding my noise

You have a funny accent, are you holding your nose, by any chance? :)

I don't usually read the Telegraph, but this made me think of your comment. So many things in this story are very sad. (I don't know anything about secondary schools etc though so I don't know how or whether it all fits together. )
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/20­19/05/05/children-find-foreign-languages­-stressful-signed-gp-headteachers/

Thanks, always sad to hear about how things are. I expect that as usual the nonsensical British exam system will be to blame. Tests are always stressful for children, but making so much riding on just one exam at the end of a term/whatever period that is usually too long must prolong this.

As it happens, for foreign languages exams are probably an even worse assessment method than in subjects like mathematics. Language teaching needs to be conversational, first and foremost, with a component of writing (e.g. essays), and that must also be reflected in the assessment method. Continuous assessment in small increments that can provide constant and steady feedback is extremely important.

I have no doubt that in many cases it'll be the parents making the decision that learning the language is 'stressful' for their child because of the likely impact on grades, but children are often caught between the two kinds of pressure from the school and from the parents.

Anyway, it's a bad state of affairs and if I were to instigate any kind of education reform it would be to get rid of exams in their current form.

Excuse my ignorance on the matter but how are languages taught abroad?

I imagine there's a lot of inconsistency there, too, but I was taught pretty much as I say above. ^ I was lucky in having very good teachers, though, and as teaching is a difficult job, I'm sure some teachers wouldn't be able to execute the above well, even if willing.

Obviously, one of the main factors making teachers' jobs a fraction easier is that if English isn't your first language you have every reason to want to learn (a) English and (b) possibly other important languages near where you grow up.

It's interesting with children's exposure to English via the Internet today. I wonder if that makes the job of English teachers easier or harder, or a bit of both.

Northern Ireland has Single Transferrable Vote, which is nearly impossible to use tactically. It is a true proportional system.

SF is remain, DUP is leave, it is the 3rd seat that needs a Remainer in. With Alliance doing very well, I hope they will unseat the UUP which are light leaver.

I'll be kind of holding my noise

You have a funny accent, are you holding your nose, by any chance? :)

Yeah, that as well!

https://twitter.com/Dan010173/status/1126169067835023360?fbclid=IwAR0Okj4xM9s95vDwLUtUhQ46TWuy2m1LQRNe9aWTRuMi2NAMwNsTQVv0BA0

Chat on the Brexit party leaflets. Some people seem to get them even though they are not on the electoral roll.

Which seems strange to me, is that normal?

Have we had this from Andrew Gwynne yet?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/06/labour-brexit-shift-remain-local-elections-andrew-gwynne

“On Brexit, what Labour is trying to achieve is much harder and more complex than those who say we need to simply swing behind remain admit,” he wrote in the Guardian.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-48234306

Wrightbus makes hydrogen bus. London tfl is buying a few. All good news, the irony is that the owner* is a big brexiter and funding is European...

My girlfriend got a Lib Dem letter today. I got a Brexit party one a couple of weeks ago. What's that all about?

Why didn't we get one of each?

This headline;

http://www.falmouth-anchor.co.uk/2019/05/10/super-callous-fragile-racist-sexist-ukip-ahole-carl-benjamin-visits-truro/

super callous fragile racist sexpest is atrocious.

Um-dittle-ittl-um-dittle-I

Now I can see the pictures from the article (for some reason they didn't load on my phone), I realise this was the wording from one of the posters the protestors had prepared.

First picture is strong #accidentalrenaissance