I think it really should be a team effort.
Could we please not talk about decapitation as a joke right at the moment? I’m still shuddering about that poor teacher…
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I think “too many cooks spoil the broth”… 
Quite agree…just an example of silly comments that I think is spoiling a really useful chat board
I’m hoping that Biden being the favourite for the US election may have some impact on Doris’s decisions on the EU trade talks. Of course it would be foolish to take anything for granted. Let’s hope there can be some momentously good news in 2020.
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How about an effective Covid vaccine, or Trump going down in history as the sitting President who failed to win re-election by the widest margin ever.
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It came from Alice in Wonderland, not radical Islam.
Well, that’ll make Cummings even more determined to get rid of the second chamber of the UK’s parliamentary democracy.
As I have said before, the unelected chamber is looking after our democracy better than the parliamentary arse lickers elected in the new intake and the Uber Right.
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The Motley Fool is an intervention that is as old and as valued as history.
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Yes, I got that. But I felt in poor taste to continue to use this allegory in the circumstances.
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I had no intention to offend against good taste and I regret any offence experienced. The murderous assault on the teacher had slipped my mind, and I was only made aware of the minor faux pas by comments on this thread.
Decapitation was only directly referenced once and with no obvious or intended connection with the crime itself.
I make no apologies for introducing or responding to quirky comments which don’t necessarily break the thread for everyone, and which are a sturdy tradition on Survive France, as @cat Catharine always reminds readers.
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Seconded.
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I cannot remember any election with so much riding on it.
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Interesting letter in The Guardian today from Veronica Hardstaff, former member of the European parliament fishing committee:
In the late 1980s, grants from Europe were made available for fishing communities to modernise their boats and tackle. This funding had to be match-funded by national governments. Other governments supplied this funding, unlike the UK. The result was that British fishermen were unable to compete with the bigger, more efficient boats, and many sold their quota to French, Spanish or Dutch fishing companies. The quotas were introduced to preserve fish stocks.
The reason the future of fishing is so fraught in the Brexit negotiations is that other European nations paid British fishermen to be able to fish for what had been British quotas.
I knew UK fishermen had sold their quotas and were now trying to get them back (ie. have their cake and eat it) - but not that this, like so many other brexit issues, including the probably decisive issue of immigration, goes back not to EU rules, but to UK government policy mistakes in the 1980s.
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It has been jolly convenient for successive UK governments, having the EU to blame for their cockups and wilful misguidedness, I don’t suppose Brexit will change that either 
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It’s a huge national tragedy I’ve seen unfolding through most of my life. The UK took a disastrous wrong turn in 1979 with the election of the Thatcher government - and almost all of the UK’s ongoing structural problems stem from that - not only brexit, but its dysfunctional housing markets, unbalanced services-heavy economy, low productivity, etc - even the probable break-up of the UK itself.
It is of course tremendously difficult to maintain the European Social Model (free enterprise but within a broadly socialist framework - free education, healthcare, worker and environmental protections, etc) in the face of the race-to-the-bottom of a neo-liberal globalised market-driven world.
I just hope that France learns the lesson provided by the UK, and continues the struggle for a half-decent social contract.
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I think that the Unions represented a far bigger danger to the UK (Scargill, Red Robbo, Print Unions et al) and Thatcher was a necessary cure for this. Blaming her is a bit like blaming the surgeon for amputating a gangrenous limb.
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This was precisely part of the mistake Alex. Why do you think productivity in France is up to a third higher than in the UK? Some of this difference is due to the unbalanced services-heavy economy - also propagated by Thatcher - but this is too small a difference to be the main factor. Nor is there much difference in how hard people work - and if anything it is the other way: Brits work harder.
No - the real difference is investment - or rather the type of investment, which is driven in France by high labour costs, and behind this the continuing high levels of organisation in labour. Businesses and other employers in France virtually have to be high-wage-high-skill. Thatcher’s attacks on the trade unions were in fact a case of the cure being worse than the disease - just another aspect of the larger story of the decline of the UK into a low-wage-low-skill economy.
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