[BartSimpson]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

US food standards go something like "If it doesn't kill rats immediately, then it's fine for people."

Not something the UK wants to import.

Warfarin.

[bootlegga]

Thanos Thanos:

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

….the White House's bust of Churchill...

- Gallipoli
- Hong Kong
- Singapore
- Dieppe
- Tobruk
- Crete
- a parade of appointed morons in command who nearly lost North Africa despite a massive material advantage over the Afrika Korps
- the 1st British Airbourne effectively being wiped out at Arnhem thanks to signing off on Montgomery's delusional scheme for Market Garden
- Prince Of Wales & Repulse senselessly lost in an already-lost region plagued by overwhelming Japanese air strength, for no other reason than to show the flag

Considering how successful Churchill was at getting so many of his own military personnel lost due to inept strategy, incessant under-estimating of the enemy's capabilities, and reprehensible stand-and-die orders as bad as the ones Hitler or Stalin issued maybe it's time to consider that the worship of him should have stopped a long time ago. There's a sound reason why Marshall, King, and Eisenhower never stopped their efforts to keep US personnel from every being put under direct British control when Churchill tried to call the shots.

Churchill was a great orator and strong leader, but his grasp of military strategy and tactics was 20 or 30 years out of date.

[bootlegga]

Martin15 Martin15:

stratos stratos:

Why isn't Canada jumping in and working on trade deals with the UK. Seems to be they would be a prime partner for Canada to expand it's exports with. Or are they and I'm just not seeing any thing about it.

And you won't. Canada will think the EU is a better market for them.
You can be sure the EU will be whispering in Ottawa.

It kind of is - the UK has 66 million potential customers and the EU has 500+ million.

Martin15 Martin15:

One thing I have learned, Canadian companies aren't usually big enough to get lots of foreign business.

You're not wrong, even though I wish you were.

Canadian entrepreneurs grow their company to a certain size and then usually sell out to a big foreign (usually American) multi-national that has far more resources than the Canadian company could ever hope for. That in turn is due to our much smaller consumer base in Canada when compared to any other country in the Top 10 economies.

[BeaverFever]

Thanos Thanos:

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

….the White House's bust of Churchill...

- Gallipoli
- Hong Kong
- Singapore
- Dieppe
- Tobruk
- Crete
- a parade of appointed morons in command who nearly lost North Africa despite a massive material advantage over the Afrika Korps
- the 1st British Airbourne effectively being wiped out at Arnhem thanks to signing off on Montgomery's delusional scheme for Market Garden
- Prince Of Wales & Repulse senselessly lost in an already-lost region plagued by overwhelming Japanese air strength, for no other reason than to show the flag

Considering how successful Churchill was at getting so many of his own military personnel lost due to inept strategy, incessant under-estimating of the enemy's capabilities, and reprehensible stand-and-die orders as bad as the ones Hitler or Stalin issued maybe it's time to consider that the worship of him should have stopped a long time ago. There's a sound reason why Marshall, King, and Eisenhower never stopped their efforts to keep US personnel from every being put under direct British control when Churchill tried to call the shots.

The churchill bust story is another one of the republicans pizzagate lies

$1:

The bust in question, by British sculptor Jacob Epstein, was given to President George W Bush by the British government in 2001 and was placed in the Oval Office. But the statue was not donated, it was simply on loan for Bush’s term in office (a loan which the British government decided to extend when Bush was re-elected in 2004). Churchill disappeared from the White House in 2009, when the loan ended at the same time that Obama moved in.... there are two Churchill busts – the one on loan to Bush from 2001 to 2009, and a second bust which the White House has had since the 1960s and still has to this day

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theguar ... ce-britain

Of course I pointed this out on CKA before but the righties here have highly selective memories that don’t allow them to retain inconvenient facts or ditch convenient lies.

[DrCaleb]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

US food standards go something like "If it doesn't kill rats immediately, then it's fine for people."

Not something the UK wants to import.

Warfarin.

Bovine Somatotropin.

[Sunnyways]

bootlegga bootlegga:

Churchill was a great orator and strong leader, but his grasp of military strategy and tactics was 20 or 30 years out of date.

His delusion of an easier way into Europe via its ‘underbelly’ should have ended with the disaster at Gallipoli in 1915.

[herbie]

People's usual delusions that a PM's direct rule decides if you pancakes rise Sunday morning strikes again.
Churchill's role was to lead Britain which he did when no one else could, keeping it in the war and on the offensive. But he had to rely on the advice of the last gasp of Britain's upper class twits like Mountbatten.
The soft underbelly worked, Sicily fell easily and Italy switched sides. Unfortunately it was the USSR that benefited most from tying up so many troops in Italy.
Now Singapore - yeah that was a total FUBAR but Churchill wasn't the one to blame.

[Thanos]

Churchill was involved in the tactical level as much as Hitler was, specifically with ordering Hong Kong to be pointlessly reinforced against overwhelming Japanese strength, in the ordering of the naval sortie into an area already dominated by Japanese airpower that cost the Royal Navy the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, and the abysmal decision to not let the Australian division retreat from Tobruk. And there's no way that Churchill couldn't have put the brakes on Dieppe, no matter how hard that fool Mountbatten was pushing for it, when it became more and more known by British intelligence that the Germans were acutely aware that there was going to be a massive and imminent raid on the French coast.

The only thing that made his bad decisions somewhat less disastrous than they could have been was the US refusal to ever allow American soldiers to come under direct British command. The Americans had their own terrible moments and failures, like Kasserine or Slapton Sands, but nothing on the scale of what happened to British and Commonwealth personnel due to the ineptitude of the high command. Churchill was a great charismatic leader, but that faded too as the war went on as shown by how willingly the British voters ousted him from office even before the conflict was over. As a military leader though? He was absolutely terrible.

[Sunnyways]

Thanos Thanos:

Churchill was a great charismatic leader, but that faded too as the war went on as shown by how willingly the British voters ousted him from office even before the conflict was over. As a military leader though? He was absolutely terrible.

The British people were sick of the war by that stage. A novel like Put Out More Flags captures the fatigue of a nation and the the lack of interest in the Eastern Front. Morale was far poorer than the post-war propaganda suggests and Churchill's defeat should have been no surprise. The appalling thing is that he was allowed to return as PM when clearly unfit for office.

Brexit is an enormous amount of energy spent to achieve remarkably little. A medium-sized country like Britain will find out how much freedom it has won when it negotiates on its own with giants like the US and China.

[Thanos]

Myth replacing reality also distorts one thing. The immediate post-Dunkirk aftermath in Britain almost created a near panic, especially at the government level. The British were not rarin' for a huge fight at that particular moment, not with the near-crippling loss of ground force equipment they'd just suffered in France. If Hitler had sent an honest and verifiable peace proposal to Britain at that exact moment following Dunkirk, one that repatriated all British POWs in German hands and let the British to keep the Royal Navy & their colonies in exchange for a cease-fire then odds were very good that it would have been accepted. Churchill being made PM stopped that, but if Lord Halifax's peace-party in Parliament had pushed the issue harder then Churchill might have been stopped before he made the "we will never surrender" speech that shored up British & Commonwealth resolve.

[Sunnyways]

herbie herbie:

People's usual delusions that a PM's direct rule decides if you pancakes rise Sunday morning strikes again.
Churchill's role was to lead Britain which he did when no one else could, keeping it in the war and on the offensive. But he had to rely on the advice of the last gasp of Britain's upper class twits like Mountbatten.
The soft underbelly worked, Sicily fell easily and Italy switched sides. Unfortunately it was the USSR that benefited most from tying up so many troops in Italy.
Now Singapore - yeah that was a total FUBAR but Churchill wasn't the one to blame.

The soft underbelly theory didn’t work. It was based on outmoded British ideas of using its navy in the Mediterranean and a very reasonable British fear of fighting the Germans in France again. The Allies took two years to occupy Italy.

[Sunnyways]

OK, this is a useful thread to revive because it was hard to tell at first whether Brexit was a good idea or not. However, a few years on, the smoke is beginning to clear and Bregret is really beginning to set in:

$1:

Guy Hands, a leading City figure, has called Brexit a “complete disaster” and a “bunch of total lies” that has harmed large parts of the economy.

Speaking on the third anniversary of the UK’s departure from the EU, Hands, the founder, chair and chief investment officer of the private equity firm Terra Firma, said: “It’s been a complete disaster. The reality is it’s been a lose-lose situation for us and Europe. Europe has lost more [in financial services] but we’ve lost as well. And the reality of Brexit was, it was just was a bunch of complete and total lies.”

$1:

“The only way that the Brexit put forward by Boris Johnson was going to work was if there was a complete deregulation of the UK and we moved to a sort of Liz Truss utopia of a Singapore state and that was just never going to happen,” Hands, a former donor to the Conservative party, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... eu-economy

[Sunnyways]

More evidence on the effect of Brexit, this time from the Bank of England. It’s being mentioned in the same breath as Covid and Putin here, hardly good company to keep:

$1:

Overall, the Bank said that while it believed the UK was still heading for a recession, the downturn may be shorter and shallower than previously expected.

The Governor, Andrew Bailey, said Brexit was one of a series of “significant economic shocks” to have had an impact along with the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing rise in energy costs.

https://www.standard.co.uk/business/bus ... 57542.html

[DrCaleb]

The Tories lied about Brexit? Say it ain't so!

[Sunnyways]

The Labour Party is becoming anxious about inheriting this Brexit mess:

$1:

An extraordinary cross-party summit bringing together leading leavers and remainers – including Michael Gove and senior members of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet – has been held in high secrecy to address the failings of Brexit and how to remedy them in the national interest, the Observer can reveal.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... -of-brexit