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.

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

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. 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

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?

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.

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

Ancient sages believed that molten lava was the hottest substance on earth. But then scientists heated a bit of aluminium to 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit. Scientific understanding evolves. Today we know the hottest substance on Earth is, in fact, the filling of a Greggs pasty. Here is a man who tried to look directly into a Greggs cheese and onion slice.

This is the extraordinary @MarcusFysh on #Newsnight. This is how a Conservative MP treats business nowadays, even trade associations, trying to explain the potential risks of hard Brexit - with arrogance, smugness, and impenetrable stupidity, calling them silly and unpatriotic. NB The food industry representative @MarcusFysh is responding to never mentioned tariffs and never mentioned a “blockade”. He merely said that when it comes to fresh produce like lettuce, tomatoes, avocados or dairy, even small border delays would disrupt supply critically.

Yo, everyone, you can stop spending three quarters of a trillion US dollars on advertising campaigns every year. Heather McDougall has worked out it has no effect on the public whatsoever.

https://twitter.com/heatherm999/status/1023233849055174657

Heather loves “recognisable art, trivia and now - recycling.”

Nobody will "withhold medicines". As with aviation, radioactive isotopes, and a thousand other areas, we simply lack the domestic regulatory framework. International trade is rules-based and after 40 years of conducting it cooperatively our structures for it have atrophied.

https://twitter.com/joofford/status/1023195490022772738

It doesn't mean it can't or won't happen. It means that, for it to happen WITHOUT a disruption in supply, a huge amount of preparation and structural reform needed to have happened ALREADY and the government have simply not done it.

This is simply astonishing. Facebook ads provided to the parliamentary investigation with absolutely NO connection to Brexit, and no markings identifying them as political in any way, used to harvest data for Vote Leave and shape the precise lie then offered to each user. THREAD

https://twitter.com/veritasta/status/1022456169082830849

If you clicked on this link to stop the hunting of whales, for instance, Vote Leave harvested your data, identified you as a particular type and then, presumably, bombarded you with straight up “Vote Leave Or The Bear Gets It” bullshit. WOW

Part of me thinks “wow, they look amazing” but another, bigger part of me thinks “artisanal, schmartisanal, the only way I could justify paying a fiver - yes, FIVE BRITISH POUNDS STERLING - for a single doughnut called Captain America, is if it included actual Captain America”. It seems a price so horribly overpitched I had to check it wasn’t for a box of four or something.

Fabulously awful Hallmark romcom. She’s a career woman who left her home town and high school sweetheart to do career things. Back home for Spring Festival, she’s having second thoughts. Her current bf is SO unthreatening I thought he was her gay best friend for the first hour. Her high school sweetheart seems to chop a lot of wood in a leather jacket, gaze at a lot of stars in a leather jacket and fix a lot of engines. Oh, yes, in a leather jacket.

OMG at Helsinki National Theatre, favourite spot for coffee, fluked table outside, 2 mins later army came, closed street in front and 1000 tourists and photographers appeared. I think he-who-shall-not-be-named is about to pass 10 yards away.

*fashions weapon from sugar sachets*

Labour and Tory “rebels” have settled into a comfy pattern: if Labour votes against gov’t, rebels behave. When they vote against gov’t, Labour is told to abstain. So, all can claim in the future “I tried to stop hard #Brexit” without actually doing it. No principles and no spine. And so, on we sleepwalk to a no-deal disaster, dictated by the disaster capitalists on the hard right, who stand to make a killing, because nobody had the guts to take the political risk of voting with the their conscience and explaining to their constituents why they did it.

Utterly tedious of @bbcnickrobinson to keep challenging Labour with “has the EU said publicly that they support your Brexit strategy?” knowing full well, if the EU did that, headlines would shriek BRUSSELS INTERFERENCE.

Equally tedious of Labour to never have this simple answer. Press office consistently failing to brief people on issues that come up every. single. feckin. time.

The government in meltdown and Labour seven points behind in the latest poll. What will it take to convince Seumas that they have their Brexit bloomers on backwards?

PM on Cambridge Analytica scandal and allegations of rule breaking by the Leave campaign: “If anyone is suggesting these claims call into question the referendum, I say to them that the referendum was held, the vote was taken and we will be delivering on it.” #PMQs #Brexit This is an astonishing response. Valuing political expediency over The Rule of Law and proudly stating it to Parliament.

Whether or not you believe the official preliminary conclusion of the Skripal investigation, what is undeniably interesting and hugely revealing is the people who have jumped in to defend Putin: Trumpsters, alt-right, Assange disciples, anti-West far left. Fascinating bedfellows. For what it’s worth, I think the preliminary conclusion is genuine and based on the best available evidence. This doesn’t make it unbiased or certain, but in my view a politician as risk-averse as May would not pick a fight with Russia on anything other than compelling evidence.

Here are some samples of what Brexiters were saying before the referendum and what they’re saying now. There are hundreds of examples. Please RT, to counteract the nonsense that “everyone knew what they were voting for”. #BrexitShambles #Brexit This is the crux of it. We must not allow a small segment of a narrow majority to hijack a result by inferring answers to questions that were never asked. That is what would be completely antidemocratic.

1. It’s extraordinary how UK has ceded any advantage it could possibly have had in its negotiation with the EU from Day 1. First, by triggering Art 50 prematurely, before it had made ANY preparation or even decided its strategy or aims. Then, calling a GE wasting yet more time. 2. The timing of its triggering Art 50 was the thing that kept the UK, de facto, in charge of the process. It lit the fuse before even working out which way the exit was. And it has been on the back foot ever since and never recovered.

Liam Fox on #Marr claims the EU couldn't penalise the UK with tariffs under WTO rules and simultaneously that the UK could cut tariffs for developing nations. Profoundly worrying that the International Trade Secretary seems to understand so little about international trade rules. Firstly, tariffs are a cost, but not an absolute barrier. The Kingom of Exceptionalistan cannot just make toasters, which may or may not explode on plugging in, export them ito the EU and just pay the tariff. The EU could *absolutely* penalise the UK with non-tariff barriers.