@torstenbell.bsky.social can you deal with this one too. It'll mean the revival of the Midlands and the North.

Culture didn't, but couldn't it be argued that civilisation did? If we define civilisation as the sort of enduring stuff that requires concordance and coordination on a large scale: engineering, town building, common laws, organised trade & travel, and a broad peace.

2/10
While this is widely believed, it isn't true. Foreign capital inflows don't fund fiscal deficits. They fund current account deficits, and they must be matched domestically either by higher US investment, higher US unemployment, or higher US household and fiscal debt.

He's the same man then as he is now. His new-found acceptance of Brexit was as unprincipled as his campaign for a second referendum. He's always been a poor politician and his inexperience shows.

That majority was the result of Starmer's 2nd ref shenanigans. The ballot taught him a lesson and he understood that, having stood on defying the first vote and having tanked a lot of Labour MPs in the Midlands and North, he couldn't be seen to do it again.

I'm sure it was, but I, like the vast majority of the public, did not see it. Didn't vote in the referendum either, but that's another matter.

Nobody in the general public reads Acts of Parliament, and few MPs do either.

But yes, rather like the repeated manifesto promises to reduce immigration, MPs have simply refused to keep to their basic promises, and that's a huge part of why we are where we are.

Given that most members of parliament were remain supporters, why then do you think they went through with it eventually, rather than simply cancelling it?

Politicians are political realists and politics is reality. The vote as a plebiscite and on a constintuency basis gave them an asnwer.

Yes exactly my view. The important thing is that those 1m jobs would largely be outside London and the SE, which would go a long way to reviving many of the regions. This in itself would solve other problems by creating opportunity outside of London and taking some pressure of the capital.

There are better ways to structure a referendum, but it is not something that can be done retrospectively. Designing a second vote before the first had been implemented was a non-starter as its proponents want to use it as a straight reversal (recall Theresa May's struggles).

This was actually at the heart of the problem. London benefited; most of the rest of the country did not, as the gov ran an economic model dependent on London financial services sold to the EU & low value domestic consumer services. Regional inequality & wage stagnation were rejected by the public.

It is not politically tenable, in a long-democratic nation, to march an entire nation up a hill to cast their ballot, which delivers the largest single vote on an issue in national history, and then turn around and say it won't be actioned.

Tesla was the first and is still a leader in some segments. They showed the world wanted electric cars and showed they can be profitable. I would always love them but also I am not going to miss them and Musk most of all.

This is actually a good point - it should have been sold as that so that people understood its main purpose.