Verbal

No, you said that 45 years of EU membership had caused appalling failures in educational achievement among the young in Britain. That's a venomous lie.

Care to explain how this is possible? How exactly did EU membership create Britain's appalling record on literacy, numeracy and technological skills?

The laughs keep rolling in. It seems the May regime is so ludicrously inept in its handling of Brexit negotiations that a wave of panic is sweeping the EU that it must be some sort of cunning plan. No sentient government could be THIS bad, surely. http://www.politico.eu/article/united-kingdom-brexit-eu-david-davis-the-uks-secret-brexit-strategy-so-stealth-even-the-british-cant-see-it/ The Politico piece is getting heavily retweeted by Brexiteers, who must be desperate to believe that behind the uselessness lies anything but uselessness. Where's Baldrick?

Carney has just dropped a bombshell in the rate review press conference. The MPC now predicts that UK investment in 2020 will be 20% lower than had been predicted for that year before the referendum. And all because of the 'uncertainty' created by the chaos of Brexit. This prediction is given added credence by the PMI index, which reveals the lowest business confidence since the midst of the credit crunch.

Lanchester was though. Now Coventry University. Which has stacks of overseas students, though far fewer EU students. The most mobile of EU academics are, obviously, the best ones - the ones with big research grants and big reputations. It's one reason Cambridge, for example, has reported an alarming exodus of EU academic staff. Research funds follow the academic not the institution, so many top-ranking EU academics - the ones any university is most anxious to keep hold of - have upped sticks. This includes literally hundreds at Cambridge.

I think you mean Bolivarianism. As far as I know, no one's standing on, or voting for, a Bolivarian ticket in Britain.

Today, the morning after the election, Venezuela's two main opposition leaders have been carted off, presumably to prison. They were already under house arrest, having boycotted the travesty of an 'election'. No doubt Corbyn will be along with a message of support for them any moment now. Or he might take Ken Livingstone's line yesterday, that Hugo Chavez's failure to 'execute the establishment elite' has in large part caused the crisis.

If the US wanted to contain China's rise, and its influence in the region, it (or rather Trump) wouldn't have knocked TTP on the head. So the conspiracy theorists are talking their usual ********.

Unfortunately, football these days requires brainers.

Gawd luv us, Lord 'Chicks' Pony is back in the manor. Would his ponyship care to comment on the matters raised rather than this pointless rabbit?

I notice that YouGov has Corbyn's polling lead falling around his anti-single market comments. As he continues to squander the momentum he gained from the election, the weird thing about him is that he seems intent on squandering it the most on Europe. While other senior Labour figures continue an unsustainable fudge, he's come out strongly against membership of either the single market or the customs union. The reason it's weird is that, on this issue, Corbyn is no Corbynista. He's a Chavismo. The vast majority of his acolytes are committed to retaining membership, largely, I suspect, because the economic damage of hard Brexit is recognised even by them as far too great. As a Chavismo, however, Corbyn buys into the core Hugo Chavez belief that the EU is a neo-liberal conspiracy against the poor. He votes against joining the EEC, against joining the single market, against Maastricht, and against Lisbon - against anything to with the EU. Not surprisingly, Corbyn is wrong, of course. Dangerously so. The EU is the diametric opposite of 'neo-liberal' - ordoliberal. The central tenet of neo-liberalism is the minimal state. Ordoliberalism is the management of the market for the best outcome for the majority - a kind of state-regulated utilitarianism. This is why, for example, in Germany and France, wages for working class citizens are higher, working and living conditions are better, and health is better. Corbyn doesn't see any of this, evidently. All he sees, Chavez style, is the conspiracy. So he won't be changing tack on membership any time soon. Watch his numbers continue to drop as his own members and Labour voters despair, even while the Tories continue, on Brexit and everything else, to offer the worst example of governance since Chamberlain.

It's not 'spin' to day that investment in electric cars is being moved onshore in the EU following the referendum. That's what's happening. After much lobbying by the government, BMW have allowed the Oxford plant to continue assembling (not manufacturing) Minis. But investment in the real technological cutting edge has been made inside the EU. Not one of the top-selling plug-in cars has its electric motor assembly made in the UK - in an industry that was until recently producing the second-highest number of assembled cars in Europe. (behind Germany).

Try 'Poltroon'. It's a good word. I agree that it's churlish and (literally) a bit childish not to look at something you disagree with, as if covering your eyes will make it go away. However, it's equally true that Townsend is a notorious Islamophobe who finds his natural allies among Prison Planet and other neo-fascist analogues. If you want something to challenge your perspective, try Reza Aslan's “No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam.” I don't happen to agree with much it, but it's a very well written textual defence of Islam. The big flaw in both books, and your position, though, is the very idea of reading religious violence back to a textual source in the Koran. All actions carried out in the name of religions are claimed to be 'in the name of' the religion. And insofar as they are, that religion IS a problem. But that doesn't mean that it's a legitimate argument to follow the extremists down the path of saying that the source of violence is in the Koran itself and Muhammad himself. For one thing, the Koran was written from a sort of group memory in the early caliphates, around a century after his death (not unlike large chunks of the Roman Bible). Also, many of the textual justifications for violence come from the Hadiths - religious fragments which have never been part of the Koran, and are crammed with dodgy content designed to suit the needs of a particular medieval despot. But the bigger issue is that the actual source and justification for extremist Islamist violence isn't textual so much as ideological. And that ideology is Wahhabism, an eighteenth century cult built around a woman-hating psychopath, whose ideas about the origins of Islam included advocating the destruction of every last piece of physical evidence that Muhammad and his descendants ever existed. Had it not been for oil, Wahhab's ideas - if that's what they were - would have remained buried in the dust in the backward Persian Gulf (the power centres and great civilisations of Islam had long since moved to Persia, Egypt and South Asia). Nope. You've slung in another random disqualifier, with the unevidenced generalisation that 'everyone was violent back in the 11th century.' To repeat: if your argument is that Islamist violence is inextricably linked textually to the Koran, you're wrong, for the reasons above. Religions are ultimately groups of people who, as groups, emphasise what they want to emphasise from source texts of various kinds, in order to justify their behaviour or beliefs. Just as the majority of Christians don't spend time highlighting the hyper-violence of the Book of Leviticus, because it offends them or is irrelevant to them, the vast majority of Muslims - all but a tiny fraction of a single percent - do not go hunting for textual references to violence in order to justify their day-to-day lives, which are of course completely free of violent impulses. The even bigger point, well understood by most theologians, is that religious adherence isn't in any case really about belief but about ritual. So when you get to corner a Jihadist - as no doubt you will - you'll be woefully disappointed to discover that he has a poorer understanding of the content of the Koran than even you. He will, though, have a really good understanding about how to bang his head on the ground five times a day. So far from having your point having been 'proven', unfortunately you do not have a point at all.

Introducing an arbitrary disqualifier doesn't disguise a losing argument. If violence is intrinsic to a particular religion, and the reason for it is supposed to be textually sourced, then it makes no difference whatsoever when that violence took place. The murderous Crusaders were every bit as certain that their massacres were religiously sanctioned as modern-day Jihadists.

None remotely on the same scale? The death toll from the Crusades - note: a religious attack initiated and sustained by the Latin church - was up to three million. Are the Crusades such a big secret that we only know about them by looking really, really hard?

Couldn't the 'fundamentalist dark ages' also be represented by the Crusades? Today, violent Hindu extremism in India and violent Buddhist extremism in Thailand and Burma - all directed at Muslim minorities - might rake in a few more religions, right?

Morgan Stanley have actually rented 8,000 sq metres in Frankfurt, so they're clearly planning on far more than a couple of hundred employees moving. But this is just the latest of many such announcements. Bank of America have just announced Dublin as their EU onshore base. Deutsche Bank employees have all been told that the bank is planning on a hard Brexit and so will move 4,000 jobs to Germany from London. Citigroup, UBS, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Standard Chartered have also announced detailed plans to move. Switzerland's largest private bank Julius Baer is planning raids on cheap UK assets (because of the all in the pound) but have decided against setting up shop in London because of Brexit. In insurance, AIG are off to Luxembourg, Lloyds 'of London' are setting up in Brussels. Hiscox is relocating some staff to Luxembourg. In private equity, MJ Hudson is off to Luxembourg. In aviation, both Ryanair and Easyjet are planning moves. In media, Eurupe's largest media group Bertelsmann is moving some of its UK operations into Europe. The South African investment group Brait has cancelled a London listing because of Brexit. BMW is to make the electric Mini outside the UK because of Brexit - in a British car industry that has seen a crash in post-referendum investment. And so on and on and on. That's all aside from a hugely long list of companies reporting huge downturns in revenues and profits because of Brexit. So I'm curious - what's the practical evidence of an upside of living in a country with a withering tax base? Perhaps Lord 'Chicks' Pony and fellow members of the economic death cult could tell us. And what's the upside of crippling the services sector in particular - a mere 80% of the British economy - all for a post-EU Brexiphate?

Hmm. I'm a long way from being an expert on this stuff, but I do wonder whether anyone's looked at the electrical substations around Grenfell. I don't live so far away, and had some electrical fitters bolt out the door after coming to fit an appliance and 'socket and see' testing...something or other (earth loop impedence?). Whatever it was, they said the problem was in surges from the local substation - a problem they encounter frequently in London - and that the National Grid was 'uninterested' in addressing the issue. So the problem may not be with the appliance....possibly.

Trailer for unmissable, but often unwatchable documentary about a group of extraordinarily courageous young journalists in Syria, whose heroism and truth is denied by Assadists among the Corbyn cult, because they fight ISIS while accusing Assad of being the bigger threat.

The terms were clearly set out. Losing membership of the single market and the customs union doesn't have a prayer of getting through this parliament. And it's not simply because the leading Brexiteers are as thick as mince. Although they are. Here's Andrea Leadsom celebrating Jane Austin as 'one of our greatest living authors.' https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/887996769371652097/video/1

Does anyone still believe that hard Brexit - renouncing membership of the single market and the customs union - has any hope of getting through this parliament? It doesn't have a prayer.

I know plenty of exceptions to this, libeltim, and it's a cruel generalisation for those who've reached their 60s and 70s and are in a state of penury that this should be hung on people of a particular age. Most of my older neighbours here up north are living on the state pension alone. £150 a week for everything isn't a picnic. There have been some huge beneficiaries, it's true, but most of the explosive growth in the value of property happened from the mid-1990s onwards, and again between 2011 and 2016, which means there were large numbers of Gen X beneficiaries too. The 'wealth transfer from the young' idea plays too hard on the politics of envy. If Labour is to win power - and I don't believe it will under the present leadership - it needs to appeal, among others, to the very people you're demonising. But then that's the problem with Corbynism: it sees traitors and vote-murderers everywhere, as if anyone who had the temerity to vote even for Labour 1997-2010 was guilty of near-genocide (fanboy TM). Interesting to note, by the way, the claim by Corbyn himself immediately before the election that he will 'deal with' (implying he'd cancel) the billions in graduate debt. After the election this was downgraded to an 'ambition' by the execrable McDonnell, and then finally ruled out altogether by shadow education secretary Angela Raynor, who said the debt cancellation 'won't happen'. How refreshingly different is Corbyn...

And when you reach your Brexit Caliphate, and discover it's actually an economic Mosul, here is your god: http://www.li.com/legatum-institute This bunch of know-nothings apparently have the undivided attention May and Davis, which accounts, in part at least, for the staggeringly ignorant nonsense that emanates from the Cabinet. Just to be clear, a breakdown in EU talks isn't some magical route to the sunny la la land imagined by Gove - only true-believing Jihadists would believe that.

Yep, confirmation that Lord Pony has the comprehension skills of a toddler. Interesting news tonight, after David 'thick as mince' Davis empty-desked Barnier and walked away from heading negotiations after fifteen whole minutes: EU negotiators are saying they will put talks on hold - 'stall them' - until Britain decides it wants to engage seriously in the talks. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-halt-brexit-talks-michel-barnier-brussels-david-davis-a7847641.html Might it have been a good idea for May et al to work out what they wanted from Brexit before actually starting negotiations? Tick tock.

In fairness, 'deeply divided' applies the Labour too, in relation to Brexit. Here's the excellent Stephen Bush (of the New Statesman but writing in the Standard): "The difficult truth is that Labour’s official line on Brexit sounds stupid because it is stupid..." http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/stephen-bush-divided-labour-hasn-t-a-clue-or-a-clear-leader-on-brexit-a3589501.html So if a chaotic Brexit happens, which looks highly likely, it will ONLY be because politicians from both main parties are in a state of collective paralysis, a kind of mutually assured destruction, which can't prevent an exit that guarantees wiping out the currency, public finances, and large swathes of the service sector (a mere 80% of the economy).