Momentum are getting stronger

Once we had coal mines and loads of trawlers, not to mention a steel industry. Can't see them coming back. Sicily and Italy can do milk, fruit and veg as well as lemons.

If everyone wants fresh lemons, then someone will supply them, and as they don't grow here as well as in they do in Sicily then they will come from Sicily. But milk is produced here, and meat, and fruit and vegetables.

Once we had a thriving industry extracting sugar from sugar-beet, but then the big suppliers went over completely to cane sugar.

I don't think that figure is correct whitewave - I think we import about 25% of our food from the EU, possibly another 25% from elsewhere in the world.

DH was wondering about a goat this morning ....

Problem is, I can't find much to buy these days that isn't made in China
Are you following this story MaizieD?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/new_silk_road

I must say I am impressed listening to Carrie Gracie chatting away in ?Mandarin to people she is interviewing. DGN is doing an intensive course so that he can teach it here to British schoolchildren.

Well it also depends on if the lemonade seller is actually making the lemonade or simply importing it and selling on. If he is making it what percentage of his workforce are from the EU? And will he have enough staff after Brexit to keep going? If he is importing he is likely to have substantial price increases. As for the duck is it a British duck? I have my doubts. Suspect it is an EU duck and has no right to be here bothering our lemonade sellers!

That's actually a really interesting and complex question Elegran as it covers so much.
Lemons imported from Sicily, sugar from Brazil. A global supply chain inside and outside the EU.... I'll have a think about it in the sunshine

We will be digging for Britain soon if the government doesn't get its ass in gear. 80% of our fresh food comes from the EU. What planning has gone into this fact? Zilch

So true Maizie, I remember I'm Backing Britain! I daresay if they were minded to the govt. could return to taht with some examples across sectors of British products - though as has been said earlier, sadly we no longer seem to produce many things other than services (and look where that got us...)

how do we encourage spending on things made in this country

Oooh, that has a back to the 60's ring to it. We're going to be 'Backing Britain' of course.

Problem is, I can't find much to buy these days that isn't made in China

Primrose Do you have any helpful suggestions for the lemonade seller? I don't think anyone else here cares about whether his business continues to do well, that would be planning getting the money (and continuing to get it into the future) so as to do what he wants with it once he has it, and would be considered as the dreaded Capitalism chasing the profit motive.

I wish GN had an emoji to convey existential despair.

?

Elegran Possibly less sarcasm than:

".... I think you'd find if you could be arsed to rake around as much as you seem to about Tories.

" .... I'm quite flattered that you've even rubbed two brain cells together with regard to my political views."

but I wouldn't say there's much "grace" in telling people you'd like them to tell them to fuck off.

baggs is swearing acceptable? I've refrained so far though often been tempted!

But with more grace.

Any answers to my request for advice for the lemonade seller? (which everyonbe will recognise as an allegory for how do we manage exports when we no longer have the EU umbrella, and how do we encourage spending on things made in this country by the small businesses who are ignored by successive governments in favour of wooing multinationals)

Well, in effect Baggs that is what you have just done.

Better than telling some of you to fuck off with your "you this..., you that..." stuff, which is what I wanted to say sometimes.

p

Come to think of it, I have p, a few times, asked a shop to stock certain items that I want and that they weren't selling. Usually they did get in the requested items, sometimes as a permanent addition to their stock and sometimes as a special purchase, e.g. when the local village shop got in a whole box of a certain bread flour for me so long as I bought it all (because they didn't think other customers would want it).

The duck film was also a jokey way for me to look at how I felt about some posts directed AT me, a defuser, a way of coping. It was for my benefit more than anyone else's. It worked too .

But the lemonade seller might have investigated the grape market and discovered a new set of customers, and a new income source.

Here is a question - how would the lemonade seller get his existing customers to buy their lemonade from him, and stop so many of them driving to the next town for orange squash?

And how would you persuade the lemonade seller to spend less of his profits in the next town and more among his fellows?

Thank you bags for your explanation of the little cartoon film. I must admit it left me puzzled. Mind you I think the duck would be in the oven now left to me.

Might I suggest yous talk about Momentum now instead of about me?

Contrary will do, but contrarian is better. I take a contrary view to a post or posts to find out more, to challenge what appear to me to be assumptions, and so on. It's a common discursive device. Where people actually engage rather than talking down to me and telling me what I think, they quite often enhance and modify my view. Which is the whole point of the exercise.

The duck film was more a comment on the kind of responses my posts get, the tone of responses that seem to lecture me, that seem angry with me, that tell me what sort of person I am rather than debating the issue, that snipe at me, and so on. Me being a duck getting unphased by it all is what I aim at. I hope that helps people's understanding (faint hope! I must admit).

I intend (typed untend first; freudian skip? blast! slip (onehanded typing as right is out of commission)) to find out more about JRM as well as following moggmentum.

"a level of rudeness that decides other people's views and discussion can be treated with any degree of disrespect and mockery."

Now, where have I seen that level of rudeness before? If you can't take it, ladies, don't dish it out.

There have been jeers at posters' low IQ, at their doubt about things to which the afficionados have already and irrevocably fixed their attitudes and allegiancies, at their supposed hidden agenda of boosting Tory power by mentioning what they see as possible weaknesses in Labour strategy, and even a post accusing someone of being a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet.

Not all those by the same posters above, but the overall attitude of superiority and contempt apples to many who post on these threads.

The film doesn't stand for anything. It's just a film . What you want to know is what Baggs made of it and why she identifies with the duck. I can see several possibilities:
1. She never gets what she asks for and when she does she doesn't like it.
2. She likes asking for things people haven't got.
3. She is just contrary.
Can't decide which applies.

bags poor show - eleo is probably the most moderate of all the posters. She doesn't deserve to be treated like that.

I would also like to know what the film stands for.