I think that's how everyone who isn't GBV sees it.

When I started drinking in the 80's, good ale in London was hard to find.

Unless you went to pubs owned by one of the better breweries like Fullers or Youngs, or found a free house, the best you could hope for was a pint of Bass or Directors which were OK for mass-produced beer, but not that prevalent. I'd often find myself drinking lager, which I'm not even that keen on.

The situation now is unrecognisable, and London pubs selling bad ale are the exception.

Paging LFC.

I dont quite get the craft/micro brewing thing, the UK has had tons of small independent brewers for years, they were going through a decline but were still pretty plentiful especially when compared to other countries on a per capita basis.

Now craft beer is somehow new, where I cant see the difference between a craft beer and beer from an independent brewer, small businesses that make beer.

Its a weird marketing thing that has been brought into waaaay to much.

and just to really piss us off there were great pubs just far enough a way to be almost impossible to get to. Drunken 3+ mile walks back to civilisation down unlit country roads was enough to make it a rare excursion.

When I lived in London about 15 years ago I used to go to places selling Samuel Smith's. The Chandos off Trafalgar Square had it for about 1.60 a pint.

For actual southern beer Flowers was drinkable.

True - I think it also depends on how the thing is made. For example it's possible to brew up some nasty fermented sugar water with apple flavouring on a micro scale and your product isn't better than Strongbow just for the virtue of being "micro".

Does craft beer have an actual definition though? Can't small breweries also sell their stuff that way?

It's good to look for what is and isn't CAMRA approved too.

You ducked the point. It was a very simple question.

There are many areas where British sovereignity and culture is under attack. Whatever influence the EU might have had it is nothing like that of the cultural and political interference of the Americans. Nor is any nation sending more immigrants than the Chinese.

Why are you obsessed with the one thing and not the other? Do you just hate Poles or Belgians or something?

For the benefit of the terminally stupid I didn't actually offer an opinion.

I was talking to diebiter. He is an anti-european claiming to be motivated by British sovereignity. I asked him why he is opposed to european interference but not that of other nations.

For the record I don't have much of an opinion on microbreweries. The one time I was in one it was interesting but overpriced and seemed to be self-consciously hipsterish. Seems to be an extension of the modern retail principle of lots of choices of pretentious products I can't really be arsed with.
I probably wouldn't go there again voluntarily but I probably enjoyed it more than going to a traditional pub.

Poles and Belgians, no. Idiots, often.

If Americans (or any other nation outside the UK) were given an opportunity to frame and make laws about what goes on in the UK, I'd vote against that too. I'd vote against anything that gives power to people we cannot collectively remove by not voting for them. Hope that clarifies things for you.


Again - racist accusations as a debating technique. Buy some new tools son. One worn-out hammer doesn't make a toolbox.

if you want any kind of trade deal or international cooperation, like nato/wto/human rights conventions/international criminal court, youre giving outsiders some say in what's going on in the uk and what the uk does.

The EU was only given powers because parliament agreed to abide by them.

This is exactly the same as any country we have a treaty with. To a large extent the Americans and other nations do have the ability to de facto frame and make laws about what goes on in the UK, certainly to the same extent as the EU does-you seem very uninformed.

Your argument would only be logically consistent if you were recommending total isolationism from the rest of the world.

NATO is an interesting example. Europhobes threw up their hands in horror at the mention of a federal european army. Yet NATO is effectively a euro-american federal army. Mostly American. We really have very little say in what NATO is used for.

This is why I used to drink Guinness. You could always count on Guinness. Made in Dublin (except for bottled Nigerian Guinness, which is kind of like Branston pickle and soda), but historically it's a London drink. The British call it 'stout', but the Irish more correctly call it 'porter', because it was originally brewed for Smithfield meat porters to keep them going through the night. Smithfield Market's pubs had unique out-of-hours licences.

i have never really understood why the british care so much about an eu army.

every country pledges some troops. they go on some exercises together every year. some go home, some stay at whatever headquarter you set up. and if strange green men start appearing in estonia forests, or there's an agreement to do some peacekeeping in some dodgy faraway country, they can move out fairly quickly.

it seems harmless enough

This is true to an extent, so it raises the question of what the EU wants to have it's own thing for.

Isn't there the possibility that some people want it to acquire another trapping of statehood?

The current extradition treaty has only been in force since 2007. Its ratification by the US Senate was delayed owing to pro-IRA interests. But in its lifetime the UK has refused over a dozen American extradition requests and the US has not refused a single British request.

We have extradited one supposedly autistic-ish computer hacker to the US, but we have refused to extradite another (Gary McKinnon).

The one-sidedness relates to the fact that the US can extradite for crimes not committed on American soil and the UK has no reciprocal right.

In the most notorious IRA case, that of Joe Doherty, which took place long before the current treaty was in place, the problem was not the treaty (all extradition treaties specify exemption for 'political offences') but the crowd-pleasing behaviour of US federal judges, to the exasperation of the US administration. Doherty was eventually extradited. By that time, never having been allowed bail, he had served the longest prison term without trial in the history of the United States -- far longer than he then served in the UK before the Good Friday Agreement. (I have an interest in Doherty because he murdered someone known to me.)

'our real friends in the world speak English'


https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/835178257242701824

lol at this pathetic clown sucking up to the americans

Is he a hired speaker at these events?

he just shows up where there's an open bar

honestly, the guy is just out to get a couple of bottles of red wine for free


https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/sta...80268451262464

Any views/opinions on how some of you think the pound will do against the dollar over the coming months. Kind of feels we're stuck in limbo atm until more clarity is given but maybe there are more interested or well constructed arguments than my brief assessment.

I'm no forex expert, but I guessed that if the US wants to be weaker, UK might raise rates with inflation, and GBP may be oversold due to fear and greed, I didn't want to be long USD at the moment.

But in theory that should be priced in, so I don't know.

Warning: all opinions on currency speculation are worthless. If someone could consistently predict currency movements with even slightly greater success than chance, they would become a billionaire very quickly.

For what it is worth my opinion on this is that the UK faces bigger problems than the US at the moment. We are going to face some huge bureaucratic trading problems and will be stuck in negotiation paralysis for months. The UK cannot ignore Europe and Europe doesn't like us very much right now. They will have to make things difficult in order to keep the european union together-and if that doesn't hold the whole continent will go into freefall including the UK.

The US will have issues with the NAFTA countries but it is mostly a question of the source of cheap labour drying up-assuming Trump actually follows through. This will be increasingly replaced by automation. Other than that the US is strongly placed in economic terms.

In short: buy dollar sell sterling.

I'd revise this opinion if the government came out with an actual plan for the future and decided to do the obvious thing and turn Britain into a Monaco-style tax haven for financiers. At the moment the government doesn't seem capable of scracthing its own arse.

.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39262081

Lords pass landmark Brexit bill


Let's get this show on the road!