Verbal

Yes, but guns are not the problem; people are. Or in this case, those evil-doing toddlers

The desperation of the Brexit camp deepens - it looks like Gove is on his way to political oblivion after all but admitting he was a source for the Sun's front page alleging Her Maj made her pro-Brexit views known. The denial has come from the Queen herself, and the palace has made a formal complaint about the story. So who to believe: the Queen or Gove? Any answers, 'kippers?

I've addressed your 'dodgy statistics' point. It's cretinous - an argument for being ignorant.

No, you're right. We should look at the data for per-capita GDP. The World Banks's top ten, based on actual data 20111-14, are (from high to low): Qatar Macau Luxembourg Singapore Kuwait Brunei United Arab Emirates Norway Switzerland Hong Kong Which of those low-population tax havens, oppressive potentates and economies sitting on globally vast oil and gas reserves do you think Brexit Britain should now be? Yesterday it was Canada - I just wonder what name will be pulled out of the hat by desperate Brexiters today.

Why is it "bullying"? The EU is not obliged to be bound by a referendum result in a particular country, especially in a country that's not actually a member of the EU. The only people bound by the referendum in Switzerland are those in the Swiss Government. If the consequence of the referendum is that treaty agreements have to be varied, that's a two-way discussion between the government and the EU. The Swiss are unlikely to be allowed to retain all their access privileges given the sort of variation the referendum result now obliges the Swiss government to try to negotiate.

If I recall, you're the one who's always referring to 'dodgy statistics'. Why don't you try saying WHY something doesn't convince you rather than pre-dismissing it? On the specific issue of forecasts - prior to 2008 there were a number of forecasts predicting what became the credit crunch. Those forecasts were not only right - the consequence of ignoring them and failing to act was disastrous. Therefore it's always a good idea, surely, to take forecasts at least seriously, whether you find them unpalatable or not. You're also wrong to say that forecasts, "just to be clear" are "just opinions". They're not, at least those that are produced by professional economists. They may be wrong - or right - but they didn't get things right or wrong because they were "just opinions". They ARE evidence because the way the forecasting models treat data. And as inexact a science as economic forecasting is, it's a highly complex analysis about economic performance based on a range of carefully considered variables. Again, you may disagree about the importance of those variables - but it would be helpful to know why you think that. Simply dismissing them, unread, as "dodgy statistics" doesn't do you any favours. Similarly, the Brexit campaign more generally makes the poorest quality of argument possible by bleating constantly about "project fear". All it tells the rest of us is that Brexiters don't have the courage of their convictions or the ability to raise their case above a wholly unappealing knee-jerkism.

Which rather neatly illustrates the comprehension test the Brexiters on here have failed. It's not that remainers are fully committed, hung ho, supporters of the (somewhat caricatured) idea of the EU as a federalised union. Many, if not the majority, of remainers think there are systemic problems with the EU, including a democratic deficit, structural problems of integration with the single currency, unequal development, and so on. Many will vote to remain knowing these problems exist, and may or may not be resolved. The alternative to remaining in the EU, on the other hand, has been so hopelessly articulated, and by such a discredited collection of xenophobes, racists and opportunists, that there is virtually nothing for the reluctant remainers and don't-knows to draw them away from voting to stay. Actually the Brexiters on here are quite representative of the intellectually bankruptcy of Brexit. We have posters who refuse even to open links because they contain reports by economists modelling the damage to the economy from leaving the EU and others who warble on about 'dodgy statistics' whenever evidence is mentioned, as if merely uttering the phrase makes the problem go away. The head-in-the-sand attitude of Brexiters - who squeal "Project Fear!!" whenever someone offers an analysis of the downside of leaving - is truly off-putting to lots of those who might otherwise be persuaded by a dispassionate, reasoned argument for leaving. What we're left with instead is a bunch of 'arguments' that are so fatuous that one can only conclude that they're being expressed to secretly discredit Brexit.

1. You've got this the wrong way round. We are not the EU's biggest export market - not by a mile. However, 55% of what the UK earns in goods and services came from other EU member countries. This is why the Brexiters' Project Clueless is so far off-beam. While they prattle on about all the treaties they can sign to repair the damage, they ignore the politics of negotiating those treaties. The EU member-states will have the upper hand in those negotiations - and some, like Germany, will feel more able and ready to compete more aggressively, particularly with the City, for the services we export. That's not 'fear' but reality. 2. You falsely assume that those who support 'remain' do so uncritically. The EU has a democratic deficit, a political inertia when it comes to fast-moving events (like the refugee crisis and the migrant problems that have been piggy-backed onto it), and longstanding structural problems integrating such disparate economies into a single currency. However, the EU's economy is also by far the largest in the world, dwarfing China and the US. A good number of those who intend to vote remain may have changed their vote were the Brexit campaign not conducted so cretinously. The best the Brexiters can manage is their hero, Boris Johnson, waving his arms at a supposed conspiracy of remainers to silence the brave little voices of the leavers. What's needed, instead, is some hard information, some actual evidence, on what the consequences of leaving are. Brexiters prefer to wallow in their hard-done-by puddles of grief, and are severely hampered by a campaign that's led by what must be one of the worst line-ups ever: Farage, Galloway, IDS, with Agent Boris making a complete ass of himself. So in the interests of having a discussion about something with a little bit of evidential meat on it, here's an independent evaluation carried out by three economists from the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic Performance. They model an 'optimistic' impact on the UK economy (which is still damagingly negative) and a 'pessimistic' one which is frankly disastrous - an impact in the UK alone equivalent to the credit crunch, only much more long-lasting. http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/EA022.pdf To whoever made the half-witted comment earlier about how this referendum is not about jobs but about sovereignty, I very munch doubt that British employees up and down the country will think their job is worth sacrificing for any supposed 'loss' of decision-making powers in the Palace of Westminster.

Jeremy Corbyn and his mates have suppressed an investigation into claims of Jew-baiting antics among Oxford student Labour party members. It seems the allegations of the active promotion of a campaign of harassment aimed specifically at Jewish students are not serious enough to warrant attention. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/12181673/Labour-anti-Semitism-row-threatens-to-divide-the-Party.html

Methinks thou hast a point.

Jeremy has to smarten himself up if he's to have any chance.

So who's manufacturing 1.5 million cars a year in the UK? Newsagents?

QED. Where do you think the Indus, Ganges and Yangtze rivers - vital sources of fresh water and energy for the vast majority of the world's population - originate? Where's the tallest mountain in the world, and what surrounds it? Where's the second tallest mountain in the world and what surrounds that? There's a point in northern Pakistan where you can stand and in a single 360-degree turn take in a view of the Himalayas, the Karakorams and the Hindu Kush. Not a bad place to contemplate your question.

Anyone with a passport could tell you the tragedy of man-made global warming is that its impact is very disproportionately felt in the developing world - floods, the disappearance of glaciers, reversing seasons, severe droughts, crop failures and more. So whenever a peevish, southern-counties warming denier pops up it's always with the certainty that they're comfortably-off, smug, anti-science, and have the kind of void of human empathy that makes me worry about the coming demands on the NHS.

Is it possible you could source some actual independent research on this, rather than the naive ravings of a swivel-eyed buffoon? There are some of us who would in principle be willing to be persuaded by an articulate, well-evidenced Brexit argument. But the more this kind of thing gets posted the more hopeless the Brexit position looks.

Then he should go or look for some role models. Here's one. Bernie Sanders isn't (despite his own rhetoric) a socialist - he's an updated FDR Democrat. But his ability to articulate his left-of-centre programme in a popular and populist way puts Corbyn to shame. It doesn't look like Sanders will survive long after tonight's votes, but at least he sounds like he has ideas that are not hopeless retreads of stuff lying around in 1983, and can articulate those ideas with conviction end effectiveness.

It doesn't matter what Labour party voters (ballot box fodder) or Labour MPs (Tory-lite scum) want. It doesn't matter that the Labour party leader was marching against his own official party policy. What matters is what Momentum wants.

Only for federal taxes, not for state taxes, which often form the bulk of an individual's tax burden (property taxes, sales tax, etc). And federal taxes are only deducted after all state and local taxes, meaning many, many people pay little or no federal taxes. So it makes a huge amount of difference if you live in tax-heavy Massachusetts, for example, compared with the tax-haven state of Delaware. These variations in tax regimes can be at least as significant as between, say, Britain and Spain.

Never? Have you never been to the US and travelled across state lines?

Would that be the same 'pro-leave' newspaper as this one, running as its lead story this evening that a Brexit would cause a global economic shock? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/12175865/Global-economy-will-suffer-a-shock-if-Britain-leaves-EU-G20-warns.html The problem with you Brexiters is that you fall into two camps, both of them amounting to nothing more than an internal Tory party dispute. There are the Brexiters like Cash who've always wanted out and occupy the political fringes with Farage, Galloway, Icke, etc (your natural habitat, based on what you've left behind on here). And then there are the pretend Brexiters like Johnson and Gove who think Cameron's deal can be bettered by a bit of Russian roulette with the British economy, but will ultimately want to rejoin on supposedly better terms. Johnson's cynicism is the added ingredient - a leadership bid that defies his own stay-in beliefs and his own London constituents' overwhelming support for staying in. So what we have in reality is a party on the brink of tearing itself apart - again - over Europe, overlaid by a cynical bid for party leadership. The British electorate is being used to sort out the internal mess for them. If only we had a credible Opposition it would clean up after these idiots.

Oh, and David Icke. You're on the same wavelength as David Icke. Time to stick your head in a bucket of ice? I'm excluding Abbott and Costello because they're beyond useless. They won't make a damned bit of difference to the campaign either way.

You have a weird idea of balance in this contradictory screed. Abbott is both "no good" for the yes/remain campaign (agreed, she's worse than useless), and yet because she's a "proper politician" she counts for more than a "non-politician". How the hell does that work? Besides, the great problem for people like me (a very large number it seems, judging by the polls) who are likely to vote to stay but could be persuaded to vote no with some actual evidence that it would be workable, is that the remain camp (Abbott and Corbyn aside) have some pretty intelligent and articulate advocates. Notably Alan Johnson. And the no/leave campaign is dominated a bunch of cretins - Farage, IDS, Galloway, the BNP, etc. So "balance", in terms of equal numbers, would drag in the cretins - the very people you should be hiding in a coal mine while the campaign is going on.

But by far the most humiliating failure for Corbyn, in terms of its wider effects, is his dreadful handling of Cameron's comeback on the 11,000 more deaths at weekends than weekdays in the NHS. Cameron was quoting from a BMJ paper that Hunt has also referred to frequently. In fact, Hunt's ONLY source for his original 6,000 figure, and the 11,000 used by both Hunt and Cameron, is this paper. Yet the paper: (a) defines "weekends" as Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and "midweek" as Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. So it's saying there are more deaths in four days per week than three days per week; (b) makes no causal connection between the death rates and the quality of medical care: and © makes no claims about whether any of the higher numbers of deaths at weekends were preventable. So junior doctors are having their contracts torn up and their pay cut on the back of one of the most specious claims the Tories have made in recent years about the quality of care in the NHS, and on what one can only call a pack of lies in the "interpretation of the BMJ paper. That Corbyn couldn't offer any semblance of an attack on this when Cameron appeared to stump him with the 11,000 number is frankly atrocious and a betrayal of the junior doctors and NHS patients. We expect Cameron and Hunt to damage the NHS, we expect Corbyn to defend the NHS. He failed. Again.

I don't feel sorry him at all, I'm afraid. Consider the subject-matter: thousands of people dying at weekends in our hospitals. The junior doctors themselves have a quite detailed and, to my mind, convincing rebuttal to this. But Corbyn's chronic inability to master a brief - especially if it's not one of his cherished and contrarian 'foreign policy' issues - is a disaster. It's a disaster above for for the people who look to the Labour party to protect them from the actions of cretinous toffs like Cameron and Hunt.

It may have been rehearsed Lou, but the set up came from a Labour MP shouting at Cameron about what his mum would do. When Labour is reduced to being the straight man for Tory jokes you know it's been a bad day. Aside from that, Corbyn was woeful today - as bad as I've ever seen him. He managed to ask one question that was completely unintelligible, and Cameron simply brushed off his questions about weekend NHS deaths by producing his own figures which Corbyn was unable to challenge. Hopeless.