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We have our carnival festival tomorrow - it's usually held in February - we just call it Shrove Tuesday. Germans are really big on Karneval - the one in Köln is particularly famous. It's a chance to poke fun at politicians and the British must be a tempting target right now

That's a gross generalisation. If you look at some of my posts on the Brexit thread you'll see that I argue that the reason that the negotiations are a mess is precisely because they started off with the assumption that the EU is the enemy, with talk of wins and losses. It was not the way to...

Major certainly would have done. There was little anti-EU feeling in the Tory party at the time - there were 13 "********" (in Major's words) who voted against Maastricht but there wasn't a mass movement. As for the country at large, only nine years previously the Labour manifesto proposed...

Where have I been abusive?

I think the idea that the EU is socialist would raise a few eyebrows. If it were, why are the Communist party, the SWP, the Socialist Party and the Bennite left so opposed to it?

This doesn't reflect reality at all: Merkel is a very pragmatic politician, it was she who pushed through the changes that Cameron wanted (giving him more leeway than any other EU leader) and it was she (along with Rutte) who has been most active in trying to keep the UK onside. It will be...

For a start I was astonished that we didn't stay in the CU or the Single Market. All the talk before the referendum was being like Norway or Switzerland. Gove said it. Johnson said it. Farage said it. Hannan said it - the idea of having no trade agreement was never discussed (unless it was...

Free movement has always been part of the EEC/EU, it's an item in the 1957 Treaty of Rome This a complete myth. There was a survey last year of EU countries and in not a single one was there a majority who wished to leave. In pretty much every case, there was a massive desire to remain...

I voted for Brexit but I was wrong. It's not that I'm against Brexit in principle - I wouldn't have voted for it if I was - but the people negotiating it have made a complete and utter horlicks of the whole thing. It's already cost the country a fortune and will hit us even harder in the coming...

Not only that. The original Bill contained a provision for Parliament to scrutinise the WA "line by line". After the GE, this element was removed and whipped through the House, So, not only did the government pass the Bill, it actively discouraged any examination of what it contained. It seems...

That was my preferred option for the UK, yes. But it was clear that if we didn't stay in the CU, that there would be a de facto CU between NI and the ROI

Yes, but that was only temporary, the idea was that it would be replaced by magic technology. I write about technolgy so I knew that was a non-starter so, for all the rhetoric, it was clear what was going to happen. You see similar in the discussion right now about farming and animal welfare...

Of course they didn't exist in that form - as people on this thread keeping reminding us, the choice was Remain or Leave. And it was obvious to me that (once all parties ruled out a hard border) this would very likely lead to closer links between the ROI and NI. This isn't hindsight, I said...

Yes, that's true. But once we'd had the vote that option vanished and it was clear that once that option had gone there were only two ... and one was emphatically ruled out

Well, no-one mentioned it but it was obvious that the Irish border was going to be a thorny problem. There were only two real choices: a hard border between ROI and NI (and that was ruled out by Cameron, May, Johnson, all NI parties and the ROI government) or a border in the Irish Sea, So, if...

But the government has just said that they can't guarantee that we'll keep these standards (and if they won't guarantee them, you can bet your life that they're going to be removed or weakened)

You're being a bit selective on that issue: the drawing of the border in the Irish Sea (and closer ties between NI and ROI) is one of the reasons why some people voted for Brexit.

You must hope that the 3m Hong Kong citizens they've just allowed to apply for visas don't all come at once. Although most of the sensible people on here will realise that you have it the wrong way round: an influx of hard-working, entrepreneurial people is exactly the sort of thing that we need...

That's not quite true: the big four jobs are held by Brexiteers but a lot of the cabinet voted to remain, not just Hancock. Truss, Williamson, Sharma, Shapps, Buckland, Jenrick and many others voted that way