Thought I'd start a new thread as this is going to be a major talking point this year...have not made up my mind yet...(unlike bucksfizz)....but thinking of voting for an exit as Europe is not doing Britain any good at all it seems....

Theresa May ‘betrays’ families that voted for Brexit, says Alan Milburn
Social mobility chiefs quit in protest at neglect of poor

Tim Shipman, Political Editor
December 3 2017, 12:01am,
The Sunday Times

Theresa May’s claim to be building a “country that works for everyone” was dramatically undermined last night after the public body responsible for boosting social mobility resigned en masse in protest at her failure to tackle the issue.

The board of the Social Mobility Commission which includes two former cabinet ministers — one Tory and one Labour — resigned after concluding that the government’s focus on Brexit means that its ability to tackle social mobility “is zero”.

In a stunning rebuke for May, Alan Milburn, the commission’s chairman, accused ministers of abandoning the voters who had backed Brexit and of doing “nothing” to remove the grievances that had led to the referendum vote.

The commission’s annual report last week found that Britain has 65 “cold spot” areas where social mobility is constrained, of which 60 had voted to leave the European Union.

At the current rate, it would take 15 years to narrow the ability gap between rich and poor at the age of five, 20 years for wages to return to the same level in real terms as they were before the financial crash and 80 years to close the gap in higher education participation rates.

Milburn said there was “zero prospect” of ending the achievement gap in GCSE exams.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Milburn, a former Labour health secretary, declared: “There has been indecision, dysfunctionality and a lack of leadership.” He compared the commission’s attempts to tackle the problem in the face of government inaction to “pushing water uphill”.

Failure to act would be “deeply corrosive of our cohesion as a nation,” he said, warning that it would fuel “seething political alienation” and create a “breeding ground” for political extremism.

The others who have resigned include the deputy chairwoman Baroness Shephard of Northwold, a former Tory education secretary; Paul Gregg, professor of economic and social policy at Bath University; and David Johnston, chief executive of the Social Mobility Foundation.

The mass resignation is hugely embarrassing for the prime minister, who began her premiership with a speech on the steps of Downing Street pledging to tackle the “burning injustices” that hold back poorer people. She declared “the mission of the government I lead” would be to “make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us”.

In his resignation letter Milburn said he did not doubt May believed in improving social mobility but added: “I see little evidence of that being translated into meaningful action.”

He told this newspaper: “The worst position in politics is to set out a proposition that you’re going to heal social divisions and then do nothing about it. The prime minister has said a lot about her desire to improve social mobility. Talking the talk is all very well, but you also need to walk the walk. I see precisely no chance of making progress. They are so concerned with Brexit that there is no bandwidth to focus on any of this stuff.”

Milburn said the government needed to do more to tackle “the faultlines in education”, poor wages and housing if they wanted to boost social mobility.

He warned that the people who would suffer would be those voters who had voted for Brexit and harboured legitimate grievances about their life chances. Milburn said: “The correlation between the worst parts of the country for social mobility and the Brexit vote is almost absolute.”

The resignations come after a standoff between the government and commission over support. Justine Greening, the education secretary, had been fighting to see Milburn’s term of office extended but Downing Street had refused to commit.

The number of commissioners fell to four in recent years. Milburn’s attempts to recruit Danny Kruger, a former speechwriter to David Cameron, plus a Labour and a Liberal Democrat supporter, were blocked by No 10. “Danny was viewed as the wrong sort of Tory,” he explained.

Shephard declined to comment, but a friend said: “Gillian is livid.”

She had better get her act together or she'll push people towards Labour , will she mess up again .

My political hero, Jacob Rees-Mogg, talks assertively and calmly to Andrew Marr on Brexit (3 Dec 2017) about "not paying a large sum of money to the EU without actually getting agreement before we actually leave the EU on 29 March 2019 so as not to reduce our negotiating clout", the Irish border question (ie. there's no need to have one and it is merely a matter of political choice) and more. He also reminds us, that "having a transition period would mean, that we would not have actually left" and that NI is "as much British as Somerset":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib9N6kIdFA0

He is also 'in favour' of a Trump visit in that it should happen out of a sense of duty from our country to its people towards assisting its security by the maintenance of a strong American friendship.

Personally speaking, I cannot wait for Jacob Rees-Mogg to become our Prime Minister.

Judy heard Somerset and Cornwall are considering a referendum on leaving Little England.

Day after day
Alone on a hill
The man with the foolish grin
Is keeping perfectly still
But nobody wants to know him
They can see that he's just a fool
And he never gives an answer

But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning round

Well on the way
Head in a cloud
The man of a thousand voices
Talking perfectly loud

But nobody ever hears him
Or the sound he appears to make
And he never seems to notice

But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning round

And nobody seems to like him
They can tell what he wants to do
And he never shows his feelings

But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning round, oh oh oh, round round round round

He never listens to them
He knows that they're the fools
They don't like him

The fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning round

Oh, round round round round, oh

Does anyone actually take Fred 's posts seriously any more ?

i rarely read any of anyone's here any more

RIP

Sadly missed.

:-)

Is this one of your rare occasions ?

Typical tory, Brexiters and far righters!

Day after day.......

The old chap has a very thick skin .

EM's tweet contribution:

Ed Miliband

@Ed_Miliband
What an absolutely ludicrous, incompetent, absurd, make it up as you go along, couldn’t run a piss up in a brewery bunch of jokers there are running the government at the most critical time in a generation for the country.
8:23 AM - Dec 5, 2017

He must be commenting from experience , i would think really , just look at Labour now .

Twitter is an opinion sewer. Why give it time, let the morons play.

Or maybe you just don't like to admit that Red Ed has a point?

hilary,

If the post is to me, it is my view no matter who tweets.

Cheers,
KidA

In case you didn't notice, KidA, it was Maggie Dismay's inability to engage with the public, coupled with Labour's skillful use of social media, that captured the youth vote and lost the Tories their overall majority earlier this year.

So, whatever you might think of Twitter personally, the fact is that Ed Miliband has 3/4 million Twitter followers, Jeremy Corbyn has 1.6m followers, and, for the Labour party, it's a powerful medium for getting their message across. Gary Neville retweeted Miliband's tweet with a favourable comment, and he has nearly 4m followers, so it's only a fool who discounts the reach of social media.

Meanwhile, back in the Bat Cave, Maggie Dismay doesn't even have 0.5m Twits who follow her.

Only to be found they conned people with lies and where totally unaware of costs for their pipe dreams , and still don't know now . Is that what you want .

But there are no problems with the goalpost negotiations or skills with which Theresa and cronies are trying to achieve.

I think they should find a dark room and lie down for a while and consider their positions.

This government is not fit to govern.