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Alex Andreou

@sturdyAlex

Oct 8, 2018

1. An oft-repeated lie is no less a lie. I’m so tired of this inane “the majority of our trade is outside the EU” nonsense, I’m going to do a short thread about it. TLDR version: it’s bollocks. Feel free to share it.

2. The statistics quoted by people claiming that “the majority of UK trade is outside the EU” almost invariably make the mistake of confusing the EU countries as a market with the EU as a trading framework. Only by doing so, is such a claim sustainable.

3. In fact, the trade for which Brexit removes all basis, is not only trade with EU members, but all trade done with third parties through EU trade agreements - from Norway to South Korea. By exiting, the UK will simply no longer be a party to that entire legal framework.

Read 5 tweets

Alex Andreou

@sturdyAlex

Sep 8, 2018

Why have percentages of Leave vs Remain have stubbornly stuck so close to each other for eighteen months and now we’re suddenly seeing such a dramatic shift in poll after poll? Well, I have a little theory. #Brexit THREAD.1

Bear with me. One of the intellectual difficulties with Brexit has always been that, by virtue of offering two such distinct and mutually exclusive paths, the counterfactual would always be difficult to prove. This is why experts were attacked. 2

You say “See? Brexit didn’t bring economic ruin.” I point out “Economy is showing worrying signs and we haven’t left yet.” Similarly, in the event of a post-Brexit economic collapse, there will be no way to prove it wasn’t due to other factors and would have happened anyway. 3

Read 9 tweets

Alex Andreou

@sturdyAlex

Aug 23, 2018

@DominicRaab

Discussing contingency planning on #r4today, @DominicRaab persisted with the lie that a No-Deal “will affect the EU as much, if not more in some areas, as they will affect us”.

Name some of those areas, please, Mr Raab or perhaps @DExEUgov. I am really curious.

@DominicRaab

We’re not talking about loss of trade, but about disruption of critical supply chains and a regulatory void. Name an area, like medicines, in which EU face disruption to supply. Name an area, like aviation, in which EU step into a similar legislative abyss. @DominicRaab @DExEUgov

@DominicRaab

Isn’t it high time you cut the lies and stopped peddling the notion that facing tariffs on a few products representing 3% of trade to the EU is equilibrant to food shortages or grounded planes or hospitals running out of insulin? @DominicRaab @DExEUgov

Read 4 tweets

Alex Andreou

@sturdyAlex

Aug 21, 2018

https://twitter.com/montie/status/1031803530955374593

One can be both accurate AND disingenuous. Your camp’s line, for years, was “why should the UK pay to bail Greece out”. You have consistently used my country’s misery to strengthen your anti-EU cause and cynically rediscovered “solidarity” when it boosted your nationalist agenda.

https://twitter.com/montie/status/1031803530955374593

When an exemption to all future bail outs after Ireland’s was negotiated you posited it still wasn’t enough, because the UK would still pay indirectly, and continued to use the image of the lazy feckless PIIGS leeching off the British tax payer. Where was your solidarity then?

When Greece struggled under the weight of a million refugees in a single summer, when bodies were washing up in our beaches, from a war Greece did nothing to create (and the UK was instrumental in), Eurosceptics shrieked to “close the borders”. Where was your solidarity then?

Read 4 tweets

Alex Andreou

@sturdyAlex

Aug 16, 2018

Unis offering cash bonuses for students because, as BBC put it, “this year it’s a buyer’s market”. If you’re looking for why the country is going backwards, start at the monetisation of education. No Aristotelian improving the self to improve the world. Just a path to a salary.

In Greece, my parents’ generation used to tell us: “να σπουδάσεις να γίνεις άνθρωπος”. It means “you study to become human”. And, no, this is not elitism, because it doesn’t mean degrees or letters after a name. It means a curiosity about and interrogation of the world around us.

Until education is seen as a worthwhile thing with inherent personal and societal value, we will continue to drown in this tsunami of proud ignorance, lack of critical thinking and anti-intellectualism; continue to struggle against the notion that opinion is equilibrant to fact.

Read 5 tweets

Alex Andreou

@sturdyAlex

Aug 13, 2018

The gov’t plan on tackling homelessness and rough sleeping has zero chance of working because it seeks to deal with the effects while every other one of its policies exacerbates the causes. No strategy has a chance of working until this is treated as a national issue. 1/THREAD

My own experience of homelessness and rough sleeping is not atypical. I’ve campaigned in this area for a decade and spoken to hundreds of people sleeping rough. The fundamental issue is that homelessness is treated as a “local” issue. The result is that local authorities 2/THREAD

see homeless people not as people in need, but as a drain on their siloed resources and a drag on their local statistics. Their first and primary instinct is to not allow you onto their books in the first place. They do this by asking people to prove “local connection”. 3/THREAD

Read 9 tweets

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