Iain Martin
@iainmartin1
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Director London Defence Conference. Director Engelsberg Ideas. Publisher of Reaction. Times columnist. Weekly subscriber newsletter via link below
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The London Defence Conference 2024 takes place 21-23 May at
@KingsCollegeLon
- our theme this year is "Deterrence: building capacity to counter global threats."
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Undecided Tory MPs, the hard of thinking, Johnson was calling you yesterday from his holiday abroad. That's a holiday abroad when parliament is not on holiday. If he told you - from his holiday - that it would be different this time, this is a big clue. It won't.
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Genuinely don't understand the Prime Minister comparing Ukrainian battle for national survival to Brexit. This is an extraordinary moment of national unity in support of Ukraine. Why needlessly reintroduce division?
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Why is Boris Johnson on holiday when the Commons is working?
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Takes quite a special sense of narcissistic self-indulgence to treat the 93 year-old Queen, with a husband in failing health, the way Harry and Meghan have today.
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This is a completely ridiculous performance by the Prime Minister.
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We do not have, and have not had for many months, a functioning democracy with proper parliamentary oversight of the extraordinary powers the state has assumed in the last year. This is what happens when authority is unchecked. Get. Parliament. Back. Properly. Now.
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Baffled by voices demanding rapid end to lockdown. Some of the commentary is borderline deranged. Economy is cratering, sure. Why on earth would we add in patients swamping hospitals, the breakdown of the NHS and perhaps a couple of hundred thousand Brits dying in agony at home?
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It seems somewhat implausible that the Prime Minister, not known for his attention to detail, has overnight in the 12 hours since he lost 148 of his MPs come up with a coherent plan for massive reform of the NHS.
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No indoor mixing? Really? Though most of us are vaccinated and many of us have had Covid. But still no indoor mixing? From the people who last time they banned mixing, leading to the prosecution of thousands of their fellow citizens, held illicit parties. Incredible.
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Thinking back to those years featuring endless analysis about Merkel and how sophisticated, clever and pragmatic she was in guiding sensible German policy. In the end, her Chancellorship has turned out to be a geopolitical disaster.
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Corbyn sitting alone in the Commons with arms folded and that stubborn Corbyn look on his face that says he hasn't changed his mind on a single thing in 60 years. Thank goodness the attempts to make him Prime Minister failed.
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No room on the Beeb 10 o'clock for the vandalising of Churchill's statue.
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Anyone else worried about vaccinating teenagers for Covid? I'm an enthusiast for vaccines, even after several allergic responses to Pfizer. But vaccinating teenagers with a very new vaccine to safeguard oldies who won't take up the offer of the jab is... troubling.
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Is the SNP position to leave the UK vaccination programme to join the EU vaccination programme?
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Throughout his long career in public service Oliver Letwin has been at the scene of political disaster after political disaster. Always overcomplicating. Well, he's excelled himself today. Epic muppetry.
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Is there a longer version of the Boris column somewhere? The version I'm looking at finishes before he lays out a proper plan.
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SAGE modelling 6k deaths per day. This doesn't make sense. That's 180k in a month? More in the UK than in the entire crisis. Nothing like that has happened. Scientists/modellers are going to have to start interacting with the real world or public will not believe briefings.
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Extraordinary. Imagine having the sheer front to get senior cabinet ministers to humiliate themselves today, knowing that you made a second trip. And on the first trip you were, it is claimed, tootling about on 12 April (peak pandemic) 30 miles away.
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Well. If person in question is charged he'll be named. Then there will be this thing called a trial, where the prosecution and defence will present their cases, unless there is a guilty plea. This - trial by jury and presumption of innocence - is a fairly long-established concept
Why have West Midlands Police not told us who committed the knife attacks last night? I think I know the answer.
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Word of praise for the cops tonight in London, policing demos. Stretched by terror threat. Now handling Socialist Worker middle class twats
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This Number 10's bizarre media strategy - flying kites off the record, favouring certain outlets and assorted other weirdness - is not suitable for a global pandemic and a national emergency. Get some professionals in and switch to daily televised press conferences.
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Interesting how badly the PM's most fanatical supporters have misread today's events. Celebrating. Suggests have little understanding of how deep this has sunk in public opinion. Or when combined with the cost of living catastrophe, getting worse by the week, what it means.
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Anyone finding the whole EU27 grilling UK PM then deciding fate of Britain behind closed doors thing making you feel really no dealy?
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On
@GMB
Morgan is just shouting at
@GavinWilliamson
over and over again about resigning. What is the point of these angry absurd media pile-ons? Is Trumpian. Almost medieval in its relentless and unforgiving cruelty.
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Comically bad from Blackford. Historically illiterate drivel. Scotland was a European trading nation cut off by the Act of Union?! No. Scotland was bust after the Darien disaster. With the Union it boomed - and then ran much of the Empire (although now attributed to England)
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What a bunch of mugs we all were. May/June 2020 people didn't see friends or family, socialised by sodding Zoom. If we did go out for essential work there were no parties. Was endless propaganda produced with taxpayers money warning us. Lawbreakers fined. Meanwhile, in Number 10.
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Well done to the RMT. After a pandemic, and in the middle of a war, what the capital really needed was a tube strike. Well done everyone. Here's to rapid automation and driverless trains.
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Good grief. It's like international politics with Postman Pat.
Marching and calling for a ceasefire and peace so that more innocent children don’t get killed is not really the definition of a hate march.
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Clever by Starmer, essentially backs UK policy but then moves calmly onto Russian money in the UK and its role in politics.
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The UK govt makes a proposal. Compromise talks? The EU's response is Verhofstadt tomfoolery, Varadkar urging a British second referendum, Merkel and Macron too busy to meet the UK PM. What a dreadful organisation the EU is. It's almost as though we should leave...
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Why was anyone flying in from Brazil in January and February? Cases were at almost 60k daily, scientists worried by new variants.
@YvetteCooperMP
did ask about this in January.
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Question: if Rishi Sunak's wife was Belgian or from Luxembourg, working internationally for, say JP Morgan, and a non-dom here, would there be this storm?
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Am I the only person who has never seen Game of Thrones? Not one minute of it. Don't even know what channel it's on. The newspaper and Twitter coverage etc assumes everyone has seen it and is interested.
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Have had plenty of disagreements and spats with Alex Salmond in the last 25+ years. But that was extraordinary evidence, delivered with dignity and mastery of detail, today. Made his successor look like a pygmy.
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Have written
@thetimes
column for tomorrow on Britain not having a functioning government. Gray report and response made for a deeply, deeply depressing and dispiriting day. The abject failure of leadership. The Tory party seeing it through the prism of electoral game-playing...
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Is there any difficult problem Oliver Letwin can't make worse?
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Have always been up for compromise on Brexit but watching the outcome of that EU farce in Brussels and treatment of May (not usually sympathetic) am leaning towards the hardest possible Brexit. They are the most appalling shower.
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Jeremy Corbyn.
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Won't be long now until the NEU starts advocating the permanent closure of all schools, freeing up the NEU for full-time activism.
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Parliament is not obliged to do what a PM wants. When a Prime Minister cannot get a Parliament to do what they suggest they can resign or try for a new Parliament via an election. That's the system.
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What a cold-hearted, cruel, appalling performance by Biden this evening.
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My tweet that Boris performance tonight was impressive has met with considerable negative response. Thought he was pretty good. Many did not.
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Watching an illicit copy of Fawlty Towers ahead of it being cancelled.
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Catching up with Corbyn interview. Oh my goodness. He doesn't know what government bonds are. He doesn't know that it's government debt.
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Boris Johnson's fault. Blew up his own premiership in successive acts of epic idiocy, then he insisted in a huff Sunak had to be stopped, and all his friends insisted it must be so, and the result was Liz Truss in Number 10. Well done everyone involved.
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Is the BBC on a mission to get itself closed down?
"British things… turns out there’s hardly any.”
@MrNishKumar
and
@HHTV_
are spilling the tea on British stuff in
#HorribleHistories
#Brexit
special ☕️ Streaming now on
@BBCiPlayer
👉
@RealMatBaynton
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Boris Johnson has accepted the post of Deputy Prime Minister...
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If being on a bad Zoom quiz last year is a crime then about 40m people are going to need arresting. Not sure this is a smoking gun.
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For years now (at least 5) PMQs has been a total waste of time. It got so bad I'd tune in for the pre and post-match TV analysis but often try to avoid the ghastly thing itself. Starmer's arrival changes that. Have to watch it. Boris struggles badly with the format.
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An extraordinary story. What on earth are they thinking? Calamitous decision by Number 10.
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Swinson tells Beeb that there won't even be a legal text by Saturday. But it was published half an hour ago by Barnier's team.
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From July. Completely wrong, it turns out.
Boris Johnson's recklessness means we're going to have an NHS summer crisis.
The Johnson Variant is already out of control - and we're heading to 100,000 cases a day.
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If the new PM says she will get Britain working again, that means by definition she is inheriting a country that isn't working. How can Boris be as great as she claimed if the country he ran doesn't work?
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Anyone else quite depressed by the app scandal? When they originally announced it I thought "that'll go wrong" but banished the thought on the basis that there are smart officials in the system and someone must have known what they were doing. But no. It went badly wrong. Grim.
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The notion of Sir John Major as a neutral, impartial witness on Tory sleaze and Boris Johnson... I mean, for goodness sake, stroll on!
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What a mess Sturgeon has got the SNP and Scotland into. Money and time wasted on legal games rather than fixing ferries, education and healthcare.
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The Boris Commons car crash actually looks even worse on the 6pm news than it did live.
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First trip into central London since start of March. (Many weeks) late to this - but the economy doesn't stand a chance with compulsory masks on public transport and in all shops. Not a chance.
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It had better be more than this. Six weeks away... two households can meet outside? That's it? When 30m people have been vaccinated?
EXC: V GOOD FRIDAY! Two households will be to meet up outside at Easter under PM's lockdown lift
Five-month ‘Roadmap to Recovery’ will allow outdoor mixing in parks and possibly even gardens by April 2
Covid war committee meet Sunday to finalise plan...
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In a serious company, or the NHS, or the army, any leader or officer talking to his or her team like this would get the sack.
Dominic Cummings ended the weekly spad meeting with “I’ll see half of you next week”. Gone down like cup of cold sick.
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Adonis now backing Brexit - extraordinary Facebook post clarification today from
@Andrew_Adonis
reads like a hostage statement dictated by Seumas Milne.
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Beeb (that the Nats want to shut) at 10pm opens with Nat "triumph". They didn't get an overall majority. They haven't made any progress. Why on earth does the BBC management allow this rubbish?
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Hardly anyone seems bothered, but still strikes me as extraordinary and worrying that we have a packed centre court and football matches but not a properly functioning parliament or parliamentary democracy until September at the earliest.
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Vote Leave's secret agent Donald Tusk is turning out to be nearly as helpful to the Brexit cause as Jeremy Corbyn.
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BBC trying to get itself shut down, part 95.
BBC Studios’ Science Unit announces series with Greta Thunberg.
@bbcstudios
’ award winning Science Unit announces a brand new series with Swedish environmental activist
@GretaThunberg
at Showcase 2020 event.
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Boris sounded like a man at the bar in the first class lounge of the Titanic ordering another round of drinks and telling funny stories just after midnight as it becomes clear there is insufficient lifeboat capacity. (My column for
@thetimes
)
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No it won't.
History will look upon
@jeremycorbyn
with much kinder eyes, I am sure of that. Thank you for stepping up and changing politics forever, unleashing a hope in millions. We will build from the ashes of our defeat, more organised & determined than ever.
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Is it possible significant parts of the media are - since Covid, Cummings, Boris fiasco, Truss drama - addicted to outrage, the pursuit of the next resignation and a focus on bizarre, baffling stories that in the olden days (twenty years ago) would not have got past a newsdesk?
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Fuel crisis 2000 was one of the maddest, most irrational and febrile moments in recent British politics. To be fair, Blair gripped the problem, communicated clearly and the panic passed. This is when PMs earn their salary.
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And yet Queen is massively popular, while far left leader of the Labour party is not. Happy Christmas!
Privileged wealthy hereditary monarch bunged £76m a year, sitting in front of a golden piano in the palace she's billing taxpayers £369m to tart up, kills satire by lecturing the nation to pull together
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Young Britain has made huge sacrifices in the last year. Locked up. Endured educational and economic harm to protect older Britain. And now they are rewarded with a media moral panic about littering and rule-breaking?
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Nicola Sturgeon says today that she knows Alex Salmond very well and he makes lots of big claims that don't stand up. Did she know this when in 2014 she campaigned to put him in charge of breaking up the country and currency on a false prospectus? Or has she learned this since?
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Campaigner speaking to MPs today: "My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 16 years old. I come from Sweden. And I speak on behalf of future generations." On what basis can someone claim to speak for future generations? Was there a vote? How? Radical Green religion looks post-democratic
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Winner: Idiot of the week.
Churchill was a genocidal racist colonialist who intentionally killed MILLIONS of Indians in the middle of WWII
If people actually wanted to honor the leader who defeated Nazism, it'd be Stalin. But they'd NEVER build a statue of him. Ever
Because this isn't actually about WWII
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When Stop Brexit crowd manipulate procedure (trying to make the Commons be the executive) and pledge to use any means necessary (other than, you know, voting for a sodding Brexit deal) they self-define as noble. When Johnson fights back that's a "coup". Apparently.
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It is quite incredible this. Senior SPADs - some of whom who have been completely found out in this crisis and had their arses saved by civil servants working round the clock - now trashing the civil service. Absolutely contemptible.
"for ministers and their aides, the primary target of their ire is the civil service and what they see as the state machinery’s inability to deliver. Over the past fortnight, Downing Street political team has been increasingly at odds with Mark Sedwill"
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Unforgivable. Total capitulation by Tory leadership, embedding UK military/security in EU structures. They've lied all along. Hell to pay
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That the Conservative parliamentary party is tonight holding a party hosted by the Prime Minister is too perfect. But will the PM know it's a party?
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"Dom wants to get the judges sorted." What is this? The Godfather?
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This illustrates the new political divide perfectly. Ultra liberals are appalled. Opponents of ultra-liberalism see a self-indulgent protestor breaching security and heading for the Chancellor three years after an MP was assassinated.
This is so upsetting. The climate-change protestors were, according to the police and friends who were there, wholly peaceful. Why on earth does Field react with such ferocity? The violence of his intervention is quite wrong.
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Genius. Absolute genius. Middle of a European war with UK and EU govts working round the clock on crisis and rearmament against Putin tyranny. Now's the moment to... trigger Article 16?
🗣My speech to
@EastBelfastCA
last night ⬇️
The Northern Ireland Protocol was always unfinished business. That's why we said Boris' deal was a tolerable path to a great future.
We surely now all agree the NIP does not deliver what it promised.
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Baffled by grade inflation fury - much self-referential heartless strutting going on, as though olden golden days were an era of deserved attainment rather an exams racket. The young have had a dreadful time. We'll look back + grades went up a bit during a pandemic? So what?
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As a leave voter, watching this week from the gallery, it is clearly about stopping Brexit. Have never felt more alienated from the Commons or more Brexity.
It's to give a chance to a newly united parliament to finally sit down to work together to find a way through and to halt approaching cliff edge. Parliament is getting act together, putting aside party politicking to answer a difficult question that people pretended was easy
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It wouldn't be the end. Because Leave would not accept the result, unless we won. We learnt this from People's Vote. Best of three or five, maybe. A referendum rerun settles nothing. Answer is to leave the sodding EU.
Matthew Parris vg here on what should surely by now be blindingly obvious: only a second referendum can bring an end to the Brexit debacle
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Govt is now presenting shortages as a steely Thatcher-style struggle to reorder the economy. But the memoirs, Lawson for example, show how obsessively they prepared. Before the miners strike they stockpiled coal and increased power capacity. This govt doesn't seem as... organised
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If Boris is avoiding TV debates because he's worried about people ganging up on him, wait until he hears about PMQs.
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Final sticking point is apparently EU wanting to know what happens to the Stop Brexit guy shouting on the news and to Femi. UK govt promises both will receive post-Brexit transitional relief (map of way to the Job Centre).
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The Tory faux outrage about Starmer owning a nice field reminds me of Tory attempts to take down Blair in 94/95. He went to a smart school! He owns a nice house! Didn't work.
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Still necessary to repeat this, it seems. No country, certainly not the UK, would sign up to have its territory divided by a foreign power, or to be locked in someone else's customs union in perpetuity with no right to leave.
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If the UK is unprepared for no deal, why did the PM who said a no deal outcome was better than a bad deal fail to prepare for no deal?
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Johnson under pressure on workers rights. Fascinating here to watch so many MPs struggle with the concept that they - or their successors - will decide. They've got so used to the EU deciding this stuff they can't get their heads round the idea they and British voters can do it.
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"Defund the police" is a slogan so perfect for Trump's reelection campaign that it might as well have been secretly developed by the RNC.
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Energy crisis could become a Poll Tax moment. Tory leadership contest happening in a parallel universe.
@MartinSLewis
is right. (My latest column for
@thetimes
)
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Well done to the person at Waterloo who on the hottest day of the year jumped onto the track in pursuit of their dog, requiring all 24 platforms to be shut down and all power and air con turned off on waiting trains packed with people. Well done.
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