News: 1624538205

... it's not going to happen!

Even when it is, it still won't happen.

Even if it is on the side of a bus, people will mis-remember/mis-quote what it said and bend the words to suit whatever they want in order to further their own argument.

They won't appreciate that furthering your own argument by putting forward falsehoods is exactly what they're accusing other people of doing.

You do know that 'Denial' is not a river in Egypt, right?

OK, I'll bite.

What the bus said: "We send the EU £350 million a week" and "let's fund our NHS instead"

What people claim it said: "let's give the NHS an extra £350M/week"

Note that the bus didn't say how much of that £350 million to give to the NHS. Yet people are still claiming that it did (and downvoting a perfectly rational, factual, neutral post)

[1]"Let's give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week."

With your man stood in front of it.

[1] http://www.markpack.org.uk/files/2016/06/Boris-Johnson-promising-the-NHS-350-million-per-week.jpg

Where's the bus??

[1]On fire in Northern Ireland .

[1] https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/bus-hijacked-and-set-on-fire-in-belfast-following-another-night-of-unrest-263409/

there's no bus, there never was. Those pix are fake anyway, and even if they are, they do not portray what they do. I do find it ironic, that those voting for brexit will pay more to waddle along in Europe, left hand on their mobile, right hand on their mobile, posting on the sun comments page about this shameful! behaviour!

He most certainly is not my man. I just don't like bullshit; sorry if that offends you.

You seem to forget that the first part of the statement is false... https://infacts.org/uk-doesnt-send-eu-350m-a-week-or-55m-a-day/

https://infacts.org/

Interesting, a pro-EU website that still manages to violate EU cookie law :-)

The ONS determined that £350m/week was a reasonable figure as it was the gross amount.

However if it had said £250m/week ( the net figure ) not one leave voter would have voted remain.

If £350m/week is outrageous, so is £250m/week.

If £350m/week is outrageous, so is £250m/week.

It's chickenfeed in terms of overall pre-covid public spending of around £3B/week. Or the taxpayer money that's been spunked up againt the wall on HS2, Track&Trace, Crossrail, dodgy PPE, Weapons of Mass Destruction, nuclear power statons we don't need, aircraft carriers with no aircraft, a prison system that doesn't work, handouts to NI/Wales/Scotland, etc, etc. Not to mention the now crippling national debt which our grandchildren will still be paying.

That is irrelevant.

If you think that the £350m/week figure on the bus convinced people to vote leave, then you surely think that they would also have voted leave if it had said £250m/week.

Am I wrong?

Given that the ONS said the figure is fine, this seems very much like sour grapes to me.

Although if you're going to lie about the PPE deals being dodgy, I'm sure you'll find a way to claim that "a lie on a bus won the referendum", despite logic proving otherwise.

The message (on the bus) was carefully worded to imply that the £350m would go to the NHS instead of the EU without actually saying anything of the sort.

And it was done so that the lying cunts who were repeating that particular piece of propaganda could later weasel their way out of actually doing anything by pointing out that that's not what the message said.

The message on the side of the bus was a trap.

The message on the side of the bus was carefully worded to encourage the remain campaign to talk about it /complain about it, and in doing so make the leave campaign's point that the UK was a net contributor to the EU (i.e. that the UK sent the EU lots of money).

Had the bus said £280 million (Gross contribution less rebate = what the UK actually sent to the EU), the bus would have faded from peoples' minds in a few days.

Instead, the remain campaign (helpfully, from the leave campaign's point of view) reminded everyone day in and day out that the UK sent the EU lots of money.

I wonder how many people that complain about the bus actually saw one, in real life (and also, which version: there were in fact at least two variants of the message). And yet, thanks to the remain campaign / remain supporters, we all know about the bus and can visualise it and are quite sure we saw loads of them.

Next you'll be telling me the current PM had nothing to do with the big red bus he was standing in front of or the message written down the side of it five years ago, and the vehicle was in fact some Christine-like possessed coach stalking him and photobombing press events.

There was no bus, we've always been at war with EuroMarket,

Can we all agree that Boris Johnson, aka The Johnson, is the patron saint of liars ?

@Dr. Vagmeister

"Can we all agree that Boris Johnson, aka The Johnson, is the patron saint of liars ?"

I dunno. He could be a contender but he is in close running with Blair, Cameron, Brown, etc. And thats just the UK

Yay, Brexshit.

Brexit, the gift that keeps giving....

I'll just leave this here:

[1]https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/01/30/uk_government_free_eu_roaming_will_end/#c_3964340

"Under normal circumstances I'd say I told you so. But, as I have told you so with such vehemence and frequency already the phrase has lost all meaning. Therefore, I will be replacing it with the phrase, I have informed you thusly"

[1] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/01/30/uk_government_free_eu_roaming_will_end/#c_3964340

Just wait until it's in the national newspapers that "Britney" was shocked when she uploaded 1000's of photos of her bikini poses from the beach and poolside on all social media platforms she's on and it costs over £3000...

Don't you mean "Chardonnay" ? That seems to be a popular name.

Does she have a bubbly personality?

Yes, but Chardonnay is a bit "european" - she will have to be renamed Lucozade

Nah, that would be Cristal.

She could only be called "Chardonnay" if she comes from the Burgundy area of France.

If she's British, she'll have to be called "Sparkling Sharon".

I don't see why I should subsidise those who want EU roaming - it's not something I need.

If there's enough demand and it can be done profitably, someone will offer it.

Oh so you're expecting your plan to become cheaper now.. lolz

<>

If there's no alternative, no matter how many people want or need a cheaper roaming rate, nobody will do it. Why drop a substantial and essentially free revenue stream when there is no need for competition?

Yes - the Telcos used to love Roaming Charges, as they were a very nice revenue stream. Nobody offered a cheaper rate for this demand back in the Good Old Days when this was super profitable, before the charges were banned - why would they now?

So you do what everyone else in 3rd world newly sovereign countries do and have a dual sim phone and a data-only local PAYG package

"Nobody offered a cheaper rate for this demand back in the Good Old Days when this was super profitable, before the charges were banned"

Well except for Three, who had free roaming between countries with partner networks in 2013 - four years before the EU directive took effect - and expanded it to cover most of the EU plus the USA a year later.

640km ought to be enough for anyone.

I see what you did there.

Your downvoter is showing their youth...

"subject to a charge of 36p per MB. For comparison, that's £3.60/GB."

Did something get redefined when I wasn't looking, or is this out by a factor of 100?

I thought it was a typo - 0.36p per MB. Unfortunately not.

Looking at [1]EE Ts & Cs it's 36p per MB, so potentially £360 per GB.

It's also a bit vague on what your allowance would be if your package allowance is less than 50GB.

[1] https://ee.co.uk/content/dam/ee-help/help-pdfs/price-plans/paym/pay-monthly/roaming-for-paym-customers-01042021.pdf

Well, they're only going to mention the best case, not the less good ones. So I imagine (and feel free to correct me if I happen to be wrong) that all other cases will operate something like "gouge the customer as much as possible for every measly MB".

That's the new imperial GigaBrit, where 2.6736789 old Megabytes equal 1 imperial DigiOunce, which is one seventeenth of the length of the prime ministers nose on a particularly fib filled day.

Yeah, there was a math failure. It's been fixed. Thanks to those who wrote in via corrections@ to let us know.

C.

Is any actually surprised by this? Roaming charges were a massive cash-cow for the mobile operators until the pesky EU stuck their oars in and cut it off.

Disgusting, those unelected eurocrats doing things to help me!

.."eurocrats forcing non-roamers to subsidise roamers"

FTFY

And yet, data plan costs did not increase when the EU banned roaming charges.

Hmmm..

Because before roaming charges offered such value for money, especially when you selected the same operator (O2, T-Mobile, Orange, Vodafone) in the foreign country...

Enforced free roaming was costing the phone companies a fortune, they were already trying other tricks to get the money from somewhere else. The business users won't care about this, their company pays, and for the personal users most hotels & similar places have free WiFi these days. I'd be hard pushed to use 25GB when roaming on holiday (I rarely even go above 5GB at home), so this definitely looks more like a way to grab back some money from captive business users.

I'd be hard pushed to use 25GB when roaming on holiday

I find most hotel "free" WiFi is hardly up to letting you check in for your return flight and I think the default family with kids could easily chew through 25GB during a fortnight's holiday just watching videos - though now they're no longer theoretically permitted to access many of their UK streaming services while abroad, I suppose one Brexit consequence compensates for another.