OPEN THREAD: Brexit – Deal or No Deal?
Theresa May’s proposed “deal” for leaving the European Union has been criticised by MP’s from all across the political spectrum. Cabinet Ministers have resigned, jobs have been refused, letters of no-confidence have been sent.
Where is this going?
Will we see a Tory leadership election? If so, who’s going to win it?
If the deal is voted down by Parliament, a vote of no confidence in Theresa May is almost inevitable.
A vote of no confidence will almost certainly trigger a new General Election.
A General Election Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party would be favourites to win.
This puts the anti-Corbyn Blairite MPs in a difficult position – will they ruin what’s left of their credibility by backing the “deal” proposed by the Tory government? Will they call for an election and hope to replace Corbyn if/when Labour win? Or will we see a third Labour leadership election?
Discuss below.
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This changes everything. Everything we think we know about Brexit is a lie. This is the deal, the whole deal, and nothing but the deal. NO ONE voted for this, and a “People’s Referendum” won’t change a thing. Everyone, whether Leave or Remain, should unite to reject it, or so I would hope. The Whitehall farce, the media circus, the Chequers deal/no deal, the Withdrawal in out, shake it all about …are just mendacious counterfeited distractions. There has only every been one agenda, and this is it.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/emergency-briefing-defence-and-security-david-ellis
Maybe we should have another Referendum on whether we should have another Referendum.
The idea that rather than ‘stupid’ or failure is by design rather than by error has a basis in human ‘psychology’ or more accurately in our psychic-emotional defences. Some of this is reflected in deliberate blocks to true progress or human solutions in fear of losing budgets, funding, markets, protections, privileges and any other attribute of a sense of maintaining or increasing power, or control with regard to protecting such invested identity.
Attachment to a failed or outdated model is an inflexibility or refusal to change that consolidates power in the ‘establishment’ as it clings to the power to outsource (dump) the pain-consquence of its false thinking and resulting actions onto the ‘unworthy’ or un-personed or de-voiced population.
Opening the IDEA of people having a voice (the ‘brexit strategy’) is dangerous and therefore overseen as a ‘managed debate’ in which nothing ‘threatening’ to the existing order is to be allowed – or is to be directed like a shaped charge as the means to remould the system to more ‘efficiently’ run the old model.
The ‘face’ of stupid has been commonly used as a front and a feint for manipulative intent… “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
Underestimating an adversary is the most guaranteed way to succumb. Pride (brash opinion and smug self-righteousness) comes before the Fall. While all sorts of people and events play out the roles of rival or enemy, I hold that unawareness of our own ‘psychic-emotional defences’ operates the primary vector of threat to sanity and peace – not least by the projections of such inner conflict onto outer circumstance over which we then strategise fight or flight response which of course includes the feint of flight or the bluster of fight (aggressive threat magnification).
So does anything in ‘brexit’ really have anything of significance apart from which system of illusion to be managed under? Yes. It is the IDEA of having a Voice. The Idea of consent as a basis for relationships of freedom AND responsibility, and the Idea of relationship as a creative source and nature. These Ideas I give an I to because they are inherent to our being, regardless their suppression, denial, usurpation or replacement with conceptual frameworks of ‘threat or sickness management’ under an illusion of power as protection.
It paints itself into a corner, and as a cornered rat, is liable to seek to kill anything that comes near.
How does one approach a madman with destructive abilities?
Perhaps for a start – DON’T!
Approach anyone as an extension of willingness for any channel of cooperation and communication by which to grow ‘trust’ of a truly shared or grounded perspective.
This works in both or all directions of any conflict where there is the awareness of a need for communication as holding not only a check on destructive outcomes for all concerned, but the only opportunity for any real solution FOR everyone involved. The deceit of the intent to mask war agenda in ‘peace talks’ is the masking of a manipulative intent and framing in the forms or tokens of outward speech or behaviours. The presumption that the ‘enemy’ is a malign intent that can never be actually trusted is the intent to persist IN that act upon and against others – AS IF the victim and thereby ‘justified’. And stories are invented or made up by which to frame and direct all thinking that can then be acceptable or ‘make sense’ – so as to deny a voice to any other view except the ‘sides’ that support the persistence of the conflict that works the ‘destructo-capitalism’ or evaporation of wealth into pain and debt – which makes failure, stupidity and blatant lies, the choice of the ‘lesser’ evil relative to an ‘unknown’ or unpredictable sense of lost control into which every unconscious fear is projected as the ‘greater evil’.
To those conditioned to slavery or state and corporate management, the idea of freedom does not arise – except within the frameworks of such a life experience. The only way to grow the awareness of freedom is through responsibility for choice – which cannot be thrust upon those who fear and refuse it – but CAN be extended as an educational relationship. Without the capacity to evaluate the nature of the outcomes being chosen, what basis is there FOR choice as anything but an engineered outcome?
The old model assigns responsibility to behaviours as the incentive system of moral guilting or accreditation. But behaviours are only the result of the expression or suppression of thinking and perception acted from as IF true.
Responsibility for thought cannot be held under the same system of ‘management’ but has to operate within the freedom to learn by practice – which is denied and demonised by ‘thought-crime’ of a claim to a moral right to shut down Consciousness itself rather than embrace, expand and change. Transformation is the NATURE of our existence and a false god is the idea of ruling or running the ruling narrative over it. This puts us (our mind) at war with Reality – which absurd and insane as that is, demands the sacrifice of all that is true in order to SEEM real in its place.
ANYTHING true is therefore a threat to a false system of truth-control and yet remains the absolute source of support for the seeming power to deny it. Union and cooperation in shared willingness of freely accepted and embraced purpose is the original that the counterfeit masks as the face or form of. By fruits are we known. Everything that is brought forth as solution sprouts many headed progeny of problems that are then used as if new calls for action or fuel to generate more of the SAME fake solutions – which promise or may seem to have worked in the short term as a mitigating management of otherwise intolerable conflicts. But this is the way to grow a store of denials – and not of growing a cultural consciousness of treasure in ‘heaven’ while yet in the Earth Experience.
There is such a thing as truly given, truly shared and truly lived. It cannot appear on a transactional spreadsheet because the qualities are not quantifiable – except as a raising of awareness of coherence.
Anaesthetics are used to suppress or deny the capacity of communication prior to surgical interventions. Certain stimuli can be effected to see if any response indicates capacity of consciousness of pain – or indeed consciousness as capacity to focus, interpret and respond. They can also be used for manipulative and destructive ends. To what degree is unconsciousness imposed upon the apparently unwilling? Or to what degree is unconsciousness demanded by the apparently willing? This I sense is to be weighed in our own hearts – if we have the wherewithal to do so. And then acted from because, ‘if you don’t use it, you lose it’. In no less surety is the observation that ‘what we resist, persists’.
Nothing is ever ‘eradicated’ by denial, but simply put out of mind, beneath its focus, to operate no less actively unseen – AS the framing of such a mind of denial. We often call it hypocritical because it is self contradictory, and yet while expert in uncovering the ‘sins’ of the other, we are so much less inclined to own responsibility for our own – and demand OTHER people change to fit OUR need to remain unconscious. In fact we make versions of them in our own mind that substitute for any real presence and act as if they are fact. This is ‘unconscious’ or sleep walking, and as likely to find reinforcement for blaming a world out there, as conscious honesty is for recognising our own part and response in any breakdown of communication.
Consciousness is presumed or assigned to a placeholder, just as wealth to tokens and derivatives.
‘Deal’ is a business term that stinks of getting one over, or getting the better of, or indeed securing a result by making an offer that cant be refused. New deal? Trade deal? Deals are fleshed out by faceless bureaucrats employed by shadow players behind proxy politicians for mafia like interests. As the big bank money-laundering, pharma fraud, and any other corporate system of regulatory protected plunder scam reveals, organised crime and organised law and order, has a revolving door. When the foxes run the henhouse, the law has to be renewed in our hearts while being called for in true accounting and witness (transparency to verifiability and accountability to law).
Don’t think for a moment that the EU has seized enough power from its constituent states.
https://twitter.com/Tim_R_Dawson/status/1063801536571236354
The pro-EU ideologues must be blinded by dogma not to see this. The EU is like the parasite toxoplasma gondii which infects the brain into not fearing predators.
In 20 years I will be dead but by then, your children and grandchildren will be living under a dictatorship and will probably love their dictators. But I will die knowing that did not cheer the occupying EU army as they marched through the streets as some will.
Wait, what EU army?
The one that conspiracy theorists warned about and were deservedly ridiculed for. The one which on the eve of the referendum, europhiles scoffed at the ridiculousness of the idea. The one which they started talking about in real terms the very next day. The one which Merkel and Macron are now calling for quite openly.
But of course, Brexiteers are just stupid, ill-informed racists for even doubting the benevolence of the EU.
I assume that the person who gave my comment the thumbs down watched the video clip of Guy Verhofstadt and thought, yeah, that’s what we need to do, transfer more sovereignty and powers to the EU. Either that, or they didn’t bother to watch the clip because they were did not want to hear the truth coming from the mouth of somebody for whom furthering the EU’s agenda is a mission.
Oh. I’m sorry , I thought we had already give it to them, have we found some more powers we didn’t know we had and handed that to them as well? those nasty Europeans taking 0.7 % of our total expenditure which we GIVE every year, and those nasty laws they impose on us until you ask them which ones are they, then the idiots can’t tell you, maybe you could, you seem to know what you’re on about?
“I assume that the person who gave my comment the thumbs down…”
I have hit the occasional random, non-cancellable thumb just aiming for the cancellable ‘Reply’ on my informal (tablet) browser rather than my formal (desktop) system. Bad UI ergonomics.
Indeed I have also. But I note the mind’s capacity to project itself into circumstances that are in fact unverified – and react emotionally as if they are true.
As for giving up power of choice or decision making such as is at least hinted at in ideas of soeverignty – to the EU – the question is then to who or to what are the idea of consensual and relational choices or outcomes given up to?
The people fronting the organisation(s) involved are not their backers or handlers, and the ideas that are structuring or framing such decisions as the forming and direction or purpose of the EU, are a mixture of well intentioned risk-aversion, social management, corporate hegemony (transnational powers), and technocratic pretensions. I say pretensions, because I see science is for sale, not just for funding, but for power – just as is every other human activity.
So I see ingeniously crafted systems of control that at certain levels seem justified and for the common good, but that the controls of the system are in shadow, hidden, unaccountable and once in possession of power, beyond any ability to be held in check. Tyranny.
I don’t see the frying pan of the EU as escaped by jumping into Great Business as usual either. and nor do I see ANY mention of any conflict of interests with Mrs May and her rock of a husband’s business interests. Are we all corporate serfs who have yet to recognize the fact?
Whats best for the dominant or established interests is done in our name because they pretend it is – or want to believe it is – or actually have come to believe it is the same. That they then get us to believe it in principle while offering apparent identity expressions within the frame is perhaps where the real power lies.
What ARE the primary power lobbies operating through Britain? If power in this sense means actual influence?
This is generally what we are not allowed to talk about or are successfully diverted from noticing. Perhaps it is not my/our business or ‘need to know’?
Until of course it so interferes with quality of life as to awaken a need to heal or correct false thinking.
If it were true-thinking the fruits would be evident.
Take it from a European (Romanian):
It only infects the brain of the ignorant brainwashed BBC indoctrinated idiots you lot have become, we won’t be going anywhere, get used to it, you’ve got your silly little blue passport what else do you want?
Huh? I don’t watch television but I cannot bear to listen to Radio Four anymore; every programme seems to be seasoned with some anti-Brexit theme or subtle injection of bias.
Out, no deal, it has been the best outcome for us from the start.
I guess you are not like most Brits in a JAM situation (just about managing), living from pay payket to pay packet.
I guess you have never worked in operations or logistics and fail to understand the depth of what crashing out of the EU will do in the REAL world.
Academics, retirees, affluents, expats, can theorise and wish for whatever they want safe in the knowledge that their own incomes will be unscathed from a no deal.
No deal is an utterly reckless outcome which the neoliberals wish for. Disaster capitalism is their playbook, causing chaos thn sweeping in to grab and transform countries and their assets. They, and anarchists.
Don’t even attempt to educate them, it wouldn’t matter if they lost their jobs and they became homeless, their children taken off them, the morons would still vote leave
Tommy, Reread what you say lest you become the the thing you say you hate.
Education is not force upon anyone. But supported, encouraged or led out as their own desire to learn.
If you write off the human race, even down the generations you can occupy the same template as everyone else who hates life and claims grievance as the basis for vengeful destruction as a moral duty.
There IS no debate in polarised identity, so you are right not to seek to persuade another when they are no even listening. But you CAN observe the self-same attitude and act in yourself. Whoever has the awareness in the position to act from something less conflicted and conflicting than the other(s) for the sake of the whole – but in doing so will risk ‘losing’ their group identity and perhaps meet rejection.
Life IS an education – until of course it is a spontaneous recognition of aligned purpose.
The European Union has been associated with security – at a cost. As does the idea of ‘the state’ as the unified right to endorse violence, or the corporate sector as the infrastructure of supply.
But there is a balance between the law that is made for Man, and the Law to which Man (us) is sacrificed.
There IS no vision for a free and just world within the current frameworks on offer, because they all operate a protection against such a risk, not least because freedom is associated with the power to protect against fears rather than own and transform them.
You’re obviously a highlt educated person coming out with that comprehensive reply.
A more important question how will it affect the Premier League transfer window? Will players be stuck at Calais or will they be coming via the Republic of Ireland?
The British decision rulers were never going to leave the EU. The last two years played out was simply a conditioning of the public to accept a watered down brexit or to be exact, a rejection of brexit. It also takes time to infiltrate and drive into the sand the real party that wants out of the EU, I.e UKIP.
I’m sure that this is going to be very unpopular with a lot of people but it just occurred to me that we are doing this all wrong. The UK voted to ‘leave the European Union’ – verbatim. So we should not have to negotiate our way out; we should just leave and negotiate whatever is necessary from thereon.
This whole negotiation drama is a charade to appease the remainers whilst trying to project the appearance that we have left.
We are not negotiating our way out, we are trying to negotiate some kind of arrangement after we leave,sorry if it seems a bit hard to grasp, we are the ones who have chosen to leave, and who are now trying to tell the 27 remaing countries how to run their club in our favour, are you that blind not to be able to see that.
just for a moment, lets pop into eurozone – have a chat to some normal folk in, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany etc …..see what they think of zee euro…or on second thoughts, perhaps not – as don’t want to burst that oh so wonderully strong and unified E.U bubble…do we ?
“Just for a moment let’s…” compare apples with apples, not oranges.
Britain is a member of the EU, not the Eurozone currency union. We are leaving the EU, not the Eurozone.
Try talking to people who live in the EU but are not part of the Eurozone, for example, Poland, Sweden, Denmark who have control of their own currencies. You’ll find that their socio-economic wellbeing is generally excellent. Look at where Poland came from and look at where it is now, the Polish people are massively better off.
The Eurozone is a different kettle of fish. Under a single currency it is essential for the member states to abide by very strict rules, otherwise the currency falls apart. If that happened there would be chaos, blood flowing on the streets and impacts outside the Eurozone too.
All countries who joined the Eurozone signed up to the rules of the currency zone. If some countries cheated their entry as Greece did, with the help of Goldman Sachs, and if they want to undermine all other countries who use the Euro, then it’s Greece’s own fault and problem to manage. Their leaders decided not to exit the Euro and they have decided to accept the requirements of the Eurozone currency central banks placed upon them to protect the whole zone.
Don’t blame the Eurozone, blame Greek leaders, they have a choice, to leave the constrants of the Eurozone while still staying in the EU, bringing back the Drachma and running their economy successfully as Poland has done withing the EU and keeping their Zloty.
Leaders are targeted, bought, installed, compromised.
Puppet regimes can be installed by brute force. They can also be a bought.
If your ‘leaders’ sell you into imprisonment, is it because they are slaves seeking personal privilege or protection within the prison?
1. Screw the people.
2. Set the narrative to outsource blame and consequence to the people for screwing up.
Banking – financial regulation –
Health – medical regulation
Environment – thought regulation
Industry – health and safety regulation
Politics – Media regulation
Now some but not all regulation operates legally above board and some of what is technically legal is done in extremely obscure or labyrinthine ways and some is an extortion racket that is protected by law or by the power to ignore or not comply to law and remain unchecked.
The mind of the intent to dominate or indeed undermine any rival, threat or challenge to its self asserted right as power, develops and uses a broad spectrum of approaches to achieve it goals.
The concentration of influence in the corporate transnational cartels is inherently corrupting to any former mode of governance. Private agenda given power over the whole is a corrupted or usurped system.
The forms by which a corrupt system operate are like the Walrus and the Carpenter – as far as the oysters are concerned.
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/walrus-and-carpenter
If you are impatient read the ending first.
The average voter simply cannot comprehend most of what you are explaining and indeed, short of instigating a revolution, it’s not really solvable.
Voters need to look at what is put in front of them and make a choice, even going for the best of a bad bunch. Why? Because things have to carry on, businesses need to kee in business and pay their workers, schools and hospitals need to stay open, etc, etc.
We can have intellectual debates and discuss Rothschild, Zionist, Bilderberg conspiracies, etc, but assuming those things are happening, none of us can really do anything about it.
If you and others think that Brexit, a hard Brexit is the revolution needed to free ourselves from these sinister forces, you and they are massivley mistaken. We’ll be hurled into a Disaster Capitalism scenario and taken over by neoliberals. That’s what they intend to do? Is that what you intend? Is that what the average Brexit voter intends?
I haven’t met the average voter and so I cant speak for them.
I wasn’t aware that voting was anything to do with effecting policy in the EU – at least the MEP’s have no such powers.
If you are indicating an imminent election on the EU and therefore desire to influence voters. Go right ahead.
The choices offered may be damned either way – or we would not have been offered a choice by established power.
The City of London had both options covered – wasn’t that what Cameron sorted before calling the referendum on EU membership? Why did he do this? Who are his ‘advisors’?
I lean to the possibility of the idea of sovereignty of the will and away from technocracy or its faceless tech-extended bureaucratic replacement – regardless the front-end ‘face’ applied.
The belief that you have to ‘do something about it’ is not my sense. My sense of voting as that what we give to Caesar we deny God and vice versa. I realize you can dismiss or attack the terms chosen here, but without a true foundation, a world of lies can hardly be ‘powerful, stable or fit for any purpose BUT the protection of the lie as ‘too big to fail’.
So I ‘vote’ to strengthen the culture and consciousness of the world that I value, regardless if most everyone else chooses the valueless (or a negatively operating society and Economy).
I respect your right to inform yourself as best you may in making your choices. That is how I also rest in my own. I am not your keeper, and you can of course learn and grow by your own choices and outcomes.
My sense of sinister forces -includes but extends larger than neo-liberals neo cons and any other ‘liberating ‘con’.
But then so does my appreciation of the way Life actually works – if not the human model or narrative as to how the world works.
Freedom and responsibility are one thing or two facets of one thing.
The ‘average’ anyone isn’t where new perspectives find welcome and alignment in shared purpose.
If comments have to fit a preconceived criteria to give witness to the themes being discussed – where can I see such rules?
My sense of the globalist agenda is many pronged and the apparent relations between Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania is more for the purpose of maintaining the respective populations under ignorance and scarcity – from which the carrot and stick operate like a clockwork orange.
What can you DO about your life?
First one has to undo false narratives so as to align doing with being.
The average mind-in-reaction has no time nor inclination to question its predicament.
I can only speak to or share with those who do.
The life goes on bit is true – but the system goes on or the civilisation goes on is not the same thing.
The science is corrupted, the medical model is a scam, the very basis of our thinking is running on a false currency – but like our financial system – the confidence trick is one of such dependency as not to be able to imagine anything else. Too big to fail. Where perhaps we may agree is that ‘too big to fail’ is the basis of the destructo-capitalism that sacrifices anything and everything still left to plunder to maintain its habit. Writ large it is your neo-whatevers but only as a collective embodiment of a private sense of self-survival in current terms.
Of course those without such influence seek other ways to limit harm or consequence – such as enforced austerity of wealth and sacrifice of freedoms to a state that is supposed to hold the rogue capitalism in check, but the foxes run the henhouse – but for a few residual holdouts who will become, thought ciminals if they persist in non compliance.
In current politics I suppose I sound cynical – but only because I see cynicism (hate) in our very foundations, and dont see any system as being capable of transcending its predicates. But I don’t hold that of human beings – who are inherently capable of recognizing what does not belong in them and releasing it to wholly embrace what does – but of course heavily defended against seeing what would then be no choice at all, because a false seen as false can no longer run in place of – and as if – true.
I don’t support so called ‘trade deals’ as currently being pushed as trade deals so much as trojans by which to legally shift power from what is left of any sovereign will to off shore corporate lawyers – who draft the ‘deals’ in secret.
You are right that the nature of events as unfolding is outside the understanding of the common man – and even those who endeavour to understand in more detail fall into all kinds of error – not least because the nature of the defence against being exposed is of a different order. We cannot use the same mind to uncover the deceits by which such a mind is made. Or, you cant solve the problem at the level of the problem.
But we can set or align our purpose in a true appreciation instead of being set against a false – and this, though challenging, is a reclaiming of power from a state of powerlessness, or a waking up in the presence of life to live this and each day well. Negative cooperations seem to join us but only in hate or reaction against mutually agreed threat or enemy.
I am growing the foundation in which we can join in truly shared purpose. Perhaps ahead of my time or perfectly on time – because – here I am.
Limiting the destructive is necessary of course, but so is disinhibiting the movement love as the capacity to be with what is – and uncover the recognition of truth here. Currently only hate is accorded power and love seen as weak and therefore a threat to the maintaining OF power. To a mind under power all threats are the same; as a call to defence.
Thus the State or system denies the very voices that would bring in needed perspectives because they do not FIT or support the sense of being in control or as in Semmelweis – challenge the right to operate such control in whatever manner they are accustomed to doing? ‘Never mind killing mothers in birth and the cascade of misery therefrom – what about Doctors saving face?’ What we take from God we sacrifice to Caesar. And having invested in a lie, defend it while it multiplies – as if our survival. And in formative years, perhaps it was whatever we had to do to survive.
People may not understand HOW they are deceived and may be too fearful to really LOOK, but the recognition of being deceived is the basis from which to open a self honesty that otherwise cannot come in. For truth is always the first ‘casualty’ of a mind at war with itself. But not ‘dead’ so much as covered over and denied.
binra, Great post. Thank You.
and I thought it’d all gone Pear shaped – but as with the wizardry of any manipulated hybrid – shhhhh it’s in the appearance….as when beauty made it’s entrance , all stupefied, by the sweet promises to come…little did it realise – the house was built by scum….and vot iz dis – by 2020 all members must join the currency union – or else…boo hoo “we’ll stamp our feet and cut off your wine quota” etc etc……..but “If you fall I’ll fall with you baby?”..nahhh, .I dont think so somehow – because nights fallin, on the wet dreams home – buts gettin harder to see stars for storm clouds….above the Treaty of Rome. Hey-Ho.
🙂
I’m quite happy to have a difference of opinion about EU membership with anybody but I have no time for anybody who didn’t like the result of the referendum and supports pulling any trick out of the book to reverse it. My God, I have had to live with election results that have not gone the way I wanted going right back to the 1975 referendum when I was three years too young to vote. I have never once cried foul, demanded a rerun or moaned incessantly like a rheumatoid ghoul. Does anybody think that Brexit supporters would have been behaving like this had the result gone the other way. This abhorrent behaviour stems from the arrogance of the remainers believing that the result was in the bag just like the supporters of Hillary Clinton.
If this decision is reversed by any means, by a second referendum or by political cowardice, it will rive the UK to such a depth that the country will have wounds which may never heal. The disappointment of those who cannot accept that the vote did not go their way is a sigh compared to the storm which will be felt in the guts of those who will be betrayed. I doubt there will be any forgiveness.
@ Okulo “I have no time for anybody who didn’t like the result of the referendum and supports pulling any trick out of the book to reverse it.”
Give me a moment.
What if there was vote manipulation?
What if people were targetted and individually served up a personalized adverts on their facebook accounts?
And such adverts weren’t cleared for advertising standards? Or declared in the brexiters spending?
i.e it is clear voter manipulation
FaceButt have refused to say how much they charged for the billion ads, to how many people, or what these ads were.
The purpotrators, the self proclaimed bad boys of brexit and others who set up the data, using Cambridge Analytica, AIQ, and the ovetarching SCL, deep state controlling setup, who proudly claimed how they stole the referendum – are ignored by the politicians, MSM, police and the Electoral Commission.
If they got just one person in 33 to vote for brexit by their manipulation then they stole the result.
You think that is ok?
Remain outspent Leave by over 2 to 1. The referendum was rigged – it was rigged in favour of Remain. And they still lost anyway.
@DunGroanin I could not have created a more accurate caricature of my point if I had spent five years at art school. You illustrate my point with grotesque precision.
If only you were to live up to your soubriquet.
The question is whether the old Western Powers wish to carry on in the old way?
It appears that all the old nations are fixated by economic liberalism as a means of growing an economy.
Austerity as it’s called is in actuality an admission of defeat not a cry of triumph and the US and other acolytes had better come up with something that grows economies not shrink them.
Chomsky calls austerity ” Class War ” and it is just that.
The western governments have always transferred most growth in GDP to the rich and the better off so, nothing new there but the Financial Crash temporarily cost the asset classes dearly but they knew they could rely on their government backers to come to the rescue.And rescue them with no strings attache or quid pro quo they did.
Put simply the Crash is THE reason for austerity.
Relative to this massive problem for the voters Brexit is a symptom not the disease. It is not accidental that the far right immigrant blaming parties are doing well. Yes they’ll blame Europe – yes they’ll blame the USA and the UK will blame the EU.
But this is letting the capitalists and their representatives ( governments ) off the hook.
I can relate more to the UK and will only say that those who blame the EU for the UK’s industrial and Social decline or immigrants on low pay are either ignorant or deceitful.
Now – I don’t recall any EU rule that said you have to close down xy and z industry – do you?
I don’t recall any EU Directive that said you must sell your council houses – do Big Bang in the City of London and close down the pits either.
The truth is that these have all been choices made by the domestic governments not some outside force.
Austerity is a similar choice – no nation has to do it – they choose to do it.
Hilary and Trump choose to do it – the EU choose to do it and lo and behold the only group of nations that isn’t doing it are raising incomes ten to the dozen and growing their economies.
Perhaps our ‘smart’ Old World ‘ governments should consult the successful GDP growers as to how you go about investing in order to grow an economy?
That is never going to happen but it needs to otherwise when the next big country wants to leave the EU the commentators will still be scratching their heads and wondering – ” How did all this collapse of the Western World come about?”
Most Brexiteers have benefited from the UK being in Europe for 4 decades but are denying younger generations the same opportunity. Britains economy was utterly broken until we joined the EEC.
I’m alright Jack and I’m pulling up the drawbridge is the typical Brexiteer mindset. Not all, but the vast majority of Brexiteers who i know are selfish and spiteful bastards.
Just to add, Brexiters possess genuine concerns over democracy and sovereignty, but they are missing the elephant in the room: British democracy is what is broken rather than that of their European neighbours.
That broken democracy also allows the fueling of a dangerous neoliberal worldview by an foreign and offshore based media.
After Brexit the 1% will be dancing around the bonfire of workers rights and human rights and “Red tape” as England, in a disintegrating Kingdom, spirals away into a neoliberal wet dream, but nightmare for everyone else, of a deregulated corporate low tax haven, becoming the sweatshop of the Western Hemisphere.
Respectable Brexiters such as Corbyn and working class voters are regrettably naive and supporting the wrong cause. Once the constituency boundaries are redrawn there will never be another Labour government. Tory neoliberals will rule the roost in Brexit Britain and make the lives of millions of decent people even more miserable than today.
The UN just reported that 1 in 5 British live in official poverty. This should be headline news and people should be out on the streets but the biased media keeps them focused on the nasty Europeans and frothing at the mouth demanding Brexit, unknowingly marching towards a neoliberal nirvana.
The irony of you using broken democracy as an argument is astonishingly arrogant.
All EU laws are de facto UK laws until they are repealed by acts of Parliament, they don’t just vanish into thin air. The British population would have to elect a government who stated in their manifesto that they were going to repeal EU human rights laws for that to happen. And that is never going to happen.
For you to propagate this myth shows that you are either ill informed, misinformed or deliberately spreading disinformation.
It’s not just BREXIT, and you may think It’s all closing in. I know of all sorts of people, of every political persuasion, who have had, not just their comments deleted, but their blogs closed down, and everything deleted without warning, notice or reason.
It’s not just me, but the internet doesn’t work like that. It was designed to maintain communications, even in the event of a nuclear war, by The American Military Industrial Complex. it was made available to everyone by Tim Berners Lee. He gave the World Wide Web away for free. I used to work for the same British company at the same time as his Dad – Conway Berners Lee, who is still alive and well at the age of 97. Any obstacle, can be routed round, often almost automatically or relatively simply.
“Nine Inch Nails – Head Like A Hole”
Tony
You do realize that linking to a video like that is essentially an act of violence against people who are attempting to keep a clear head here while they try to make sense of this messy subject… Let’s by all means enjoy Nine Inch Nails when the mood takes us, but let’s also not give anybody good reason to close our blogs down without warning. Noise pollution and unauthorized shock treatment are recognized offences today.
Sorry wardropper. What exactly is allowed? Is this O.K? I Don’t watch TV.
“Peter Gabriel – Shock The Monkey”
Tony
I’m fairly certain that what we are going to see here is exactly how many figs our “representatives” do actually give for us. Brexit has, predictably, become the proverbial hot potato that nobody has the nerve to handle. They’ll all just run away from it as fast as they can. It’s simply too much hard work, and I am sure a comfortable early retirement suddenly looks very appealing to many of our utterly decadent Westminster relics.
The “Establishment” we are stuck with at the moment belongs in an ancient history book, and anything we can do to hasten its relegation to that domain has to be a good thing for human kind.
Moved out of UK to Spain thanks to being in the EU. Could only do that 40 years ago with millions in the bank. There are aspects of being in Europe that bypasses many of the brexiteers and millions of Brits in Spain are hardly mentioned. The UK got cold feet once they started talking about an EU army and Germany getting access to nuclear weapons would be an interesting scenario after the last world war when most of Europe flattened Germany.
Just some aspects that seem to go over peoples heads. Good and bad.
In the real world, there are still men and women of courage and integrity, and most are much younger than all the occupants of Westminster, including The Civil Service.
Thank God, I never worked for any of them.
They are all completely useless. In fact they are a disgrace.
I know some of them. I mix with them socially, but no one I know would employ any of them.
Tony
While deceit has ever worked the mind of man – both in himself and to others, these times lead me to take nothing at face value. The sideshow politics is a divide and rule by appeal to side with invested identity and against identified threats. As a drama it is exciting, fearful or exhilarating and thus has all the qualities of an addiction or persistent diversion from un-owned and un-faced relational experience. So I am not writing to the drama here.
My sense is that ‘one hand’ works both or all ‘sides’ of conflict in a way that MAY be to some degree conspired or contrived but is also the nature of the power of denial. Or rather the power given denial of the true feeling – where such feeling is self-conflicted,self-contradictory or chaotic. The mind makes an overlay reality by your own convictions.
The mind as ‘commander’ operates the attempt to counteract and override the ‘weakness’ of conflicted ‘chaos’ of the heart such that it equates control with understanding, power and security. It does so by seeking and finding – and inducing – the conditions for its own persistence as YOUR survival.
The mind is unaware or underestimates the fact that imposing ‘control’ or domination DOES the very thing it purports to defend against by inducing fear, division and … the demand for ‘control’. But some ARE aware of this and see it as the truth or honesty of power in a world of struggle for dominance against death. For the mind ‘lives’ under constant threat of undoing or ‘extinction’ should its false-founded reality be exposed in YOUR awareness.
And so necessary evils or lesser evils that must be suffered or enacted against a sense of greater threat or terror – that is reflected back you you as every kind of threat.
In the media-termed ‘Brexit’ as purveyed in public speech and idea – is little if any of the basis of systematic Corporate capture of governance and society recognised or openly addressed – or allowed to be addressed. Sovereignty of Will – which is our highest human awareness of alignment in truth, is associated by smear with hateful xenophobia and racism. Appeals for sanity and security are associated with corporately drafted and enacted laws and regulations that claim the intent of ‘care and protection’ while always increasing dependency on the state – that presents a face of holding order, for the conditions of farming human beings in the frame of the mind-capture – backed up with the self-censoring of those captured upon their fellows and themself as well as the power of the state. A greater evil indeed!
Against such a ‘breakdown’ of an old outworn paradigm, is ‘too big to fail’ for ANY aspect of a corrupted system that – if corrected, would bring down the whole.
If global domination is by design – as the broad spectrum dominance that systematically works us against ourself and each other then it exceeds the human mind of doubt and division by an intent of such discipline as to work through the generations and across and within all areas of human influence. Rather than give power to such an anti-life principality, I look at where our own guilt, fear and negatively defined sense of self and other, OPEN to and align in destructive intent under the guise of a self-gratifying illusion.
Illusions of self inflation, and illusions of protection from the ‘loss’ of such a status work the ‘mark’. And indeed the market. The redeeming of power is in re-aligning within true cause by disinvestment from false-flagged ‘causal’ associations.
Freedom to live and grow our lives without coercion?
Protection against illegitimate violations of such freedom?
No state of regulatory ‘incentives’ can deliver more than a limited and limiting illusion of freedom – within the trammels of its dictate, and as the violator OF freedom can never recognize legitimacy of challenge to its dictate.
In a world of slaves – who can recognize their freedom but sees not – by ‘seeing’ something else.
“Politics is the entertainment branch of the Military Industrial Complex” Frank Zappa
Semantics matter. There is what is said (the locutionary act): and there is what is not said (the illocutionary act). There is even that which is not said, and not even implied. Then there is what is done regardless (the unspoken perlocutionary act) Brexit is a lie on the last two counts: that which is not spoken, written, or even implied (except very obliquely) is ‘EU Military Unification’.
This has been referred to as an ‘EU Army’, and various other euphemisms, such as ‘aggregation’. David Elliss has just made the salient point: “if it has no name, no terminology, there can be no dissent or action taken against it” (my phrasing).
The most crucial element of Brexit, the surrender of our military, followed by our military procurement, followed by our taxation, to a supra-sovereign Brussels has been mendaciously left out of the analysis. We are being kept in the dark by the MIC and banking fraternity (the Perle Office that has Treason May on puppet strings). No one can talk about it, because it has no name. If it became public, it would affect the calculus of both Leave and Remain. There was a leak (search for ‘KitKat Tapes’ released to the Sun) but nothing came of it. The whole thing was laid out in Cameron’s ‘Best of Both Worlds’ document: our military, including its nuclear capability, are being ceded to the banks and Brussels as the price of Brexit. The Northern Ireland border ‘backstop’ has fuck all to do with it.
I can’t claim we are being lied to: the conspiratorialdeceit and level of planned deviousness is much greater than that. Any scant remaining vestige of democracy (including that world heritage bastion of democracy – Parliament itself (/sarc)) is being consciously averted. By whom, other than a faceless unaccountable bureaucracy, it is not clear. Forget Brexit, this should constitute a crisis of legitimation in the entire entitled administration of rule. But that cannot be triggered by a nameless trigger. “EU military unification: what EU military unification?” We are being played for fools. Our politicians are jokers and knaves, all of them. All the issues and ‘red lines’ that have been thrown up are but sand in the face of the Demos. We do not matter. If it was not for the UK Column, the very few who have become aware of this calculus of deceit would never have known. Just like the rest of the country.
I do not know about anyone else, but I want our country back from the nameless deceivers who have stolen it …silently, whilst in plain view. And not just a tick box input once every five years or so. The very least would be a new Chartist democracy of inclusive representation. With every major institution of state in democratic public control (especially ‘the purse’ of credit issuance). Most especially the media and ideo-cultural information service being a public broadcast service …the very antithesis of the current BBC; providing unbiased information to inform the demos. That would be a start; not a socialist teleology …a transition on the way to humanity.
[UK Column did a detailed analysis of what was said, and what was not said, and what will likely be done about Brexit ‘Withdrawal’ (a sort of Catholic withdrawal without withdrawing? Either way, we’re f*$£*d). The archived version will be available later. I encourage every one to watch it.]
No excuses: here’s the archived version. It’s pretty much the whole show devoted to the topics I raised:
https://www.ukcolumn.org/ukcolumn-news/uk-column-news-16th-november-2018
The option that is not listed is the one that is most likely – a soft coup in parliament – to deprive us of a general election to elect a government with a sufficient majority and clear mandate to implement a manifesto that we vote for.
It is not just about Brexit.
Standby for a ‘crisis’ coalition government as the tory right splits off. The Labour right splits off and joins the tory rump for a grand centrist doctrine supported by all the live PM’s neocon banker muppets- Major through to May trumpeted in and supported by their MSM stormtroopers.
I shall be preparing to take to the streets and march on Parliament and Whitehall.
Btw, Looks if a trolley bus has pulled into O-G today – must be getting the attebtion of the new Atlantic Council type Cyberthought police.
There’s only one way of leaving that can ensure full control over our borders, law making and the judiciary, the key prerogatives of a sovereign country, it’s leaving without a deal.
You are right – we need to become as sovereign as North Korea.
We don’t need International Laws and regulations to tell us how to coexist on this planet. We have our own air and rain, we are going to stick a big glass bowl over it and not let any foreign country or superstate have any of it.
👹
Sorry but that’s delusional nonsense. Slapping automatic WTO tariffs on all imports and exports will decimate our feeble economy, aside from business in chaos and gummed up ports both sides of the Channel.
The EU is not perfect by any means but for the vast majority of Europeans they are better off in it than out (the Eurozone is a separate discussion).
The EU’s success and standing up to US corporations is the very reason that the neoliberals are hellbent on breaking it apart and the reason for Brexit.
From Heath to May, High Treason all the way
And if we still haven’t found a way of stopping it, we’re in for a pretty horrendous 21st Century.
They were never going to let it happen- too many snouts in troughs-
The UK govt. have allowed the EU to bully them, when they sell more to us than we to them!
German car makers the worst affected, plus Irish farmers, etc.
And May Kow-Tows to them!
Even the Chinese stood up eventually…
I voted Leave for those worst affected by a free movement of people- Marx’s dictum that Capitalism needs a pool of
surplus labour is so true. I had a ‘safe’ ‘job for life’ in electronics, many don’t.
You voted leave not because of your persona experience and knowledge but because you thought someone somewhere was ‘worse affected by free movement’ ?
You need to revisit that dog-whistle you reacted to and ask who told you? How? When?
Then you will know Why.
Did you see any of the BILLION facebook ads?
The only thing that almost everyone, both pro brexit and anti brexist people, seem agreed upon is that May’s Brexit deal would be an extremely bad deal for Britain. Perhaps no deal at all (and no money,no billions of pounds, paid to the EU by Britain) until such time as a more acceptable deal is brokered in good faith would be preferable. May has to go. And this deal has to be rejected.
In the 1975 referendum I voted against the then common market, When the result went against us I most certainly didn’t spend the next twentyfive years weeping but thought we’d better make the best of it. The euro changed everything. The appalling treatment of Greece, their democracy taken from them and the imposition of debt so high as to be unpayable at interest rates four times higher than that even the IMF saw as prudent. That caused barely a ripple here and seems ignored by all of those who get a warm feeling on hearing the Ode to Joy.
A good friend who voted remain said to me just before the vote:
‘The EU is going to collapse sooner or later under the weight of its own contradictions. The real question is, do we leave now before it happens?’
When the worm turned in 2016 the result was utterly unexpected but the sense of joy amongst many people was palpable. But as many have observed, the people who really call the shots would never accept that result. As a passionate Brexiteer, and despite the chaos that would ensue, I’m hoping against hope for a no deal exit, but the current machinations seem merely a prelude to the referendum results’ overturning.
In the short term, one thing is sure though, if we do crawl back to Brussels after the results of 2016 are overturned, all we would have left is the memory.
June 24th 2016, ‘twas joy then to be alive!
Yes, it has been the emergence of the euro which has done more than anything else to undermine the EU. A monetary policy without a common fiscal policy was never going to work and the EU is not, never was and never will be an optimal currency zone. The euro is the largest and most recent example of an optimal currency area which doesn’t work. Since the rise of the EMU and the adoption of the euro by participating European countries in 2002, the subsequent ongoing European sovereign debt crisis is cited as evidence that the EMU did not fit the criteria for a successful Optimal Currency Area. Other than arguable cultural barriers such as different languages, the EMU did not adequately provide for the greater economic integration necessary for cross-border risk sharing. As Greece’s sovereign debt crisis continued to worsen in 2015, there was discussion suggesting that the EMU must account for risk-sharing policies far more extensive than the current provisionary bailout system.
The two tier structure of the EU between high productivity, low cost northern core, and the lower productivity and higher cost southern and eastern peripheries has lead to structural trade imbalances between the core and the periphery. The northern core clocks up trade surpluses whilist the peripheries fall victim to continual trade deficits. Since these countries are using the same currency, the option of devaluation is ruled out, so instead they have to institute something called ‘internal devaluation’ – austerity in plain English. Of course austerity only works to make counties poorer; Greece being the prime example. Fiscal transfers as take place within nations between the more affluent richer areas to the less affluent areas are quite possible and actually take place, between say Vermont and West Virginia or Surrey and Merseyside. But fiscal transfers between countries are more problematic and difficult to implement. Of course any reflationary strategies are ruled out the strict adherence to the Maastricht Rules.
If I were to be cynical (Moi? never!) I would say that the euro was primarily designed to give Germany a permanent and positive trade balance.
Yes indeed, and it gives me no pleasure whatsoever to say that what those Tory backwoodsmen were warning back in the 1980s and before has turned out to be true. Almost imperceptively, step by step, we have ended up with what the Nazis had planned for Europe- a greater Germany co prosperity sphere.
Or as the second Viscount Stangate, one of the few actual socialists to belong to the UK Parliamentary Labour Party since its inception, warned at time of Britain’s entry in the EEC, as the evolving EU was then called: “Once we are in it will become difficult, if not impossible, to get out equitably.”
Or as Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, founding father of the EU said: “We (Jews) intend to turn Europe into a mixed race of Asians and Negroes ruled over by the Jews.”
‘Or as Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, founding father of the EU said: “We (Jews) intend to turn Europe into a mixed race of Asians and Negroes ruled over by the Jews.”’
A bit of a stretch there.
The man of the future will be of mixed race. Today’s races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals.
— Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi
You need to be careful or you’ll break your carotid artery. Whatever Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi was, he was not uncouth. On the other hand he was a committed right winger and, as Nietzsche had foreseen the rise of Jewish power and a material/secular Jewish nouveau power aristocracy in Europe, Coudenhove-Kalergi saw and applauded its beginnings, while the position of Africa in his Pan European movement’s political philosophy provided genteel cover for the solid basis of individual European state’s various colonies in Africa to be developed into an integral platform of a renewed, hegemonic colonization of Africa by the EEC/EU.
There is something seriously wrong in the configuration (probably) or coding (maybe), or both. of this editor.
EWG.pdf ———- You mean this plan?
Michael Hudson has a more sociopolitical take on the Euro(zone). Its relevance to the EU and Brexit lays in the ultimate implications of Gordon Brown’s conditionality stance (the Five Economic Tests) in the context of the relationship of the EU to the Euro(zone), which implications are that, in the end, a bremained Britain vill join the Eurozone (adopt the Euro) because both the EU and the Euro(zone) are expressions of the same deep, fundamental facism. The EU never (pace Varoufakis) had any intention of negotiating a workable Brexit any more than there is within the EU any intention to permit any member states ultimate fiscal indepedence of its ultimate sanction, the Euro. Fish rot from the head down.
He comes across as a bit over the top but I think what Hudson says is in essence correct. Another good piece of his recently on Governments and Central Banks saving the banks and sacrificing the economy.
https://www.unz.com/mhudson/rescuing-the-banks-instead-of-the-economy/
I agree with you. I also voted against remaining in the ‘Common Market’ and since then I haven’t changed my mind. I think forty odd years is enough time to be able to decide whether or not something is working and I’m sure now the EU hasn’t worked, isn’t working and won’t ever work for the UK, not for ordinary people anyway.
So ‘no deal’ is fine by me – the quicker the better!
You’ve benefited from the UK being in Europe for 4 decades but are denying younger generations the same opportunity.
I’m alright Jack and I’m pulling up the drawbridge is the typical Brexiteer mindset.
Not all, but the vast majority of Brexiteers who i know are selfish and spiteful bastards.
No deal was always the only option. This has been a complete waste of two years. What the real Left need to realise is that membership of the EU is a Neoliberal prison. No EU country can elect a socialist government and then have it implement socialist policies as we have seen with Greece. Since the anti-imperialist alliance between Russia, Germany and France was destroyed by the UK and US, then the EU has also become a staunch supporter of Neocon US imperialist foreign policy. The best thing for this country would be to exit the EU with no deal and then elect Corbyn and a proper socialist government. Then real investigations into the great financial drama, 9/11, Iraq, Libya, Syria, QE and the BoE and a full enquiry into how corrupted neoliberal crony capitalism has really become enriching the 1% massively and impoverishing the masses. It turned out that following the orchestrated Great Financial Drama, Neoliberalism was just centrally planned socialism as a redistribution of wealth from the masses to the obscenely rich.
I made that comment earlier in the Courier Mail (Australia):
The brexit negotiations were handled in bad fad faith on both sides. The Tories were trying to make sure that it will fail. The EU would never allow hard brexit and neither the City of London, where the money is. The whole EU would collapse if workers from Eastern Europe, particularly from Poland and the Baltics were sent home. They are needed to be kept happy as these two countries are used to keep the sanctions on Russia.
I am originally from Hungary, have been here for 30 years. Since Hungary joined the EU, the quality of life have deteriorated fast. Everything that had value were taken by the west, the remaining stuff were taken by Hungarian oligarchs, who appeared on the scene after the fall of socialism. Hospitals are rubbish, people are forced out of their homes, poverty everywhere. The elderly are keep saying that life is as bad as after WWII. Poland and the Checks are the same. Romania and Bulgaria are much worse.
Hungary will never enjoy the quality of life that existed in the 80s. People are given up hope. All it remains for the educated work in the UK, which is bad for the UK as the locals can’t get jobs.
The EU is in trouble. Add to that the destruction of Libya and Syria by the UK and France, and the million refugees as a result. There is no light at the end of the tunnel.
It wasn’t socialism that collapsed.
It was communism.
Socialism is alive and well throught the EU, there is need for more of it in the whole world.
Meanwhile in the real world it’s Food First. From SANA Syrian Arab News Agency:
President Bashar al-Assad affirmed that _food security ensured by the agricultural sector is one of the key factors that consolidated Syria’s independent decisions over the past decades_. President al-Assad was speaking with members of the Arab Agricultural Engineers Union.
The delegation members congratulated the Syrian Leadership and People on their imminent victory against terrorism, _hailing the Syrian People as productive_ whose self-sufficiency in the agricultural field was one of the factors of their steadfastness in the war _that targeted the basics of their lives_.
_President Assad considered Trade Unions Political Role as the genuine intermediate between the executive authority and the people_, as well as their Social role given their proximity to all social strata.
The President added that Trade Unions must assume their role in alerting to the problems befalling society, _chief among them being Social Disintegration_ through which the [Capitalist] West can carry out its plans to ignite civil wars.
Dr.Assad re-affirmed that _real advancement_ in any sector requires holding the keys to innovative technology and research.
“Meanwhile in the real world…”
About 510 million people live in the “unreal” world of the current EU. The “People’s Vote” organisers may yet see the, by implication, “unreal” (or non-) people who had previously voted to leave it returned to its “unreal world” fantasy. Perhaps they could find asylum in “real” Syria? Or perhaps you should just have posted your Syria report without the categorization?
@Bob: “About 510 million people live in the “unreal” world of the current EU.”
About 50 Million people lived in what I call the “unreal” world of postwar Britain: a socialist boom slowly eroded by a preoccupation with finance over production, with superpower politics over civil investment, with erosion of trade unions and technical colleges, with buying food rather than growing food, with a reliance on “invisible” banking wizardry rather than visible production. All this “unreality” led Great Britain to its present ignominious impasse; because neither In? nor Out? addresses the real issues. I believe the same fate awaits the EU$A, and for the same reasons.
Dr.Assad, speaking to Trade Unionists about Food Productivity, Technological Advance and Social Cohesion is flying right on the beam. He has proved the realism backing his words by winning against NATZO and the Jihadis who represent “our irresistible armed might” of our EU$A. In answer to your question: No, I do not recommend “finding asylum in Syria” — that’s the coward’s way — but I do recommend the Social Realism of DrAssad and President Putin. Food, technology, social responsibility and above all Honesty should be the main concern of our people and our Leaders.
There is no question that elites want to keep Britain in EU no matter what happens. Letting Britan escape from the clutches of EU with a minimum cost would be a bad example for the other prisoner-countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, etc. No, Britain should be made an example, showing the “futility” of even trying to escape from the EU prison. British people should be mocked and humiliated, accused of “not understanding the economy” and chided for “making the wrong choice”. So, together with their British collaborators, especially British media, they put a wool on people’s eyes. As if all of this was not discussed before the EU referendum, British people were told it was an “economic suicide” to leave the customs union with the EU. Bogus statistics and threats were printed in the Guardian and other MSM to make sure that all Brexit effort should be geared towards “staying inside EU customs union”. This would certainly play into EU’s hand and would leave Britain in a weak bargaining position. British politicians who are in the pockets of EU elite (which is a very long list and certainly includes many supposed “pro-Brexiters” like Theresa May) did everything possible to sabotage a decent Brexit and come out with a deal that is worse than staying in EU. The sheer stupidity of making such a deal will then be used to make calls to abandon Brexit, with or without another referendum. The whole process shows the impossibility of making anything happen under the current bogus system called “democracy”.
Scottish independence gets ever closer. Thankyou Mrs May.
And Irish Unification. Thanks Cameron?
Then the Welsh then London then the North of England leaving just the area of Thanet for Nige and his chums to Lord it over.
Ironically May’s missives about keeping the UK together are going to blow it apart.
Then again as long as the Elites keep the Isle of Man and Jersey ( local offshore islands ) Mogg and his chums
will be quite happy and sleep well in their comfortable beds.
No tax will be paid to the EU or the UK.
A few years ago I visited an ancient copper mine in Wales. It was in operation 4,500 years ago. The archaeologists reckon that it was in operation, being worked with stone tools, for thousands of years. They estimated that perhaps as many as 10 million copper axes were produced there, and 80%+ of the production was exported to the continent. And they did it without the EU or WTO rules or anything else.
What was their life expectancy, and morbidity? Without EU or WTO rules.
But of course! Britain almost single-handedly invented what we moderns call ‘industry’. How insulting the thought that she could never survive without the EU!
Your point is?
We should go back to the early bronze age where you think they had ‘no rules’?
To give you a fuller understanding of which you write try this:
“c. 1800 BC
First industrial-scale copper mines are dug
Shortly after 2000 BC the first deep copper mines were dug. Two of the best known are at Mount Gabriel in County Cork, Ireland, and Great Orme, north Wales. Another major area of prehistoric mining was in mid-Wales. Most Bronze Age mines went out of use in the Iron Age. The scale of metal production was truly industrial. Mount Gabriel is thought to have produced about 370 tonnes of copper and Great Orme 175 to 235 tonnes.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/timeline/neolithic_timeline_noflash.shtml
It is a great time line. You may get apoplectic with :
“Before circa 4500 BC, Palaeolithic and Mesolithic (Early and Middle Stone Age) people were nomads, hunting and gathering wild plants. In the middle of the fifth millennium BC, a new way of life, based on farming plants and animals, was INTRODUCED from the CONTINENT”
As were trolls I heard.
DunGroanin, thanks for that timeline. 4,500 BC as the start of City Culture from The Continent and 1800 BC as the start of deep mining for copper and tin in Britain (Bronze Age) fits in well with the flourishing of The Old Silk Road, a trade route that spanned the whole of Eurasia from Britain to China via Greece, Rome, Egypt, Syria, Persia, Afghanistan and India. Goods and Ideas flowing back and forth across the EurAsian land mass (and by sea). Have you read, The Shape of Ancient Thought? I am halfway through it.
The Chinese and Russians are working on a New Silk Road under the concept of A MultiPolar World. Might make In-or-Out of the EU$A seem a rather narrow ground for discussing the future of Britain. The old sea dogs of the British Merchant Marine, who saw “the dawn come up like thunder from Rangoon to China Bay”, let out a much longer line than the thread these present posts are hanging on.
What is fascinating about this political crisis is that there is a time limit on sorting things out, of the end of next March, and that the stakes for the country are so high. Someone has to defuse the bomb. It is hard to see how we can simply muddle through.
My guess is May’s deal will collapse and that she will be forced out fairly soon. At that point a caretaker Tory leader, such as Hunt, will be appointed and ask for more time from the EU, with Article 50 suspended. This would also stave off a Labour government.
I think this interim Conservative administration would also fall, and that a Labour government is likely before the middle of next year. It may well be they end up negotiating the final deal, which will probably include membership of the Single Market and Customs Union. With the right leadership, I believe this option would have the support of the country, and we could then move forward.
” Labour government is likely……. end up negotiating the final deal, which will probably include membership of the Single Market and Customs Union.” In other words Remain with all the geopolitical issues of EU expansionism to the East for more missile bases on our neighbours (Russia) border. More impoverishment of countries like Greece etc. I hope Corbyn stays true to his historic mantra and avoids such an outcome.
The 2016 referendum should have required a 75/25 majority in order to change the status quo – anything less would simply create a fermenting division. A new poll should now be implemented for many reasons – but we must respect the default position is now for Brexit and insist that a 75/25 majority for remain would have to be attained for Brexit to be abolished.
That is the only way through the impasse.
Maybe any MP or Tory or Labour government should also need a 75/25 majority to be elected. Or maybe the 1973 referendum to join the Common Market should have required a 75/25 majority as well. Anything less simply creates a fermenting division.
How could anyone ever advance such an argument, Mark? What’s so magic about 75/25, why not 74.5/25.5, better still some other permutation of the two numbers, over which we would argue even longer and more bitterly than we are at each others throat over Brexit.
But even if we were to agree on your 75/25, the probability of ever achieving it would be close to nil. And not just on the Brexit. Demanding a result anywhere near 75/25 on a complex issue such as Brexit would cement the status quo forever.
Until the nervous breakdown of the remainers, after each and every election conducted on the basis of an openly unfair FPTP system, everyone has accepted the results even though most of the MPs don’t get anywhere close to securing 50% of the constituencies’ votes. Why cannot the remainers live with the decision of the over 17.4mn people, or 52% of those who bothered to say what they want?
The 50-50 split is the way it has aways been, it’s the only way.
Quite right. I’m sure that at the next election MPs or party leaders will say, “I only won by 52%. That’s just not enough, so I’m going to refuse to take my seat/ form a government until I get 75%.”
At least 55/45.
11 people of every 20 voting – a reasonable majority.
That is a clear 1 person majority of every 10 voters Certainly not one vote out of 33, which is the obviously unfair basis of brexit.
Why not unanimity?
What a mess! I feel a bit sorry for TM. She was handed a poisoned chalice by that craven coward Cameron who went into hiding after he lost the vote.
TM has no choice but to try to implement some form of Brexit. No choice.
I voted remain, but I have to some extent changed my mind. Ever get tired of being asked if you want cookies when you go on a website? Courtesy of the EU bureaucrats. The crass new data protection rules. Courtesy of the EU bureaucrats. And the new copyright rules that threaten the internet itself. All courtesy of the bureacrats of the EU.
I think we would be well rid of that aspect of European influence.
With that said, I still detest the brexiters. What I could never understand is why anyone fell for the “taking back control” con. Do you seriously think that Boris and his chums in the Euroskeptic wing of the Tory party wanted to give you, the public control?! Are you completely stupid? Boris and his pals want more control for themselves, so they can sell what’s left of this country to their neo-con chums stateside. They don’t give even a morsel of shit for the people of this country. “Elites”?! They are the bloody elites.
John, so you feel a bit sorry for Saint Theresa, “handed a poisoned chalice by that craven coward Cameron who went into hiding after he lost the vote.” ? What an apt confirmation of Solzhenitsyn’s prophesy, 1978:
Clip from Full Spectrum Domino BTL Saker Vineyard, November 15, 2018:
I read his Harvard speech in 1978 as a young teenager in my school library. …
‘A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.”
Who knew how long it would take things to unravel? The artists are truly the canaries in the mineshaft.”
Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard 1978 commencement address– A World Split Apart:
https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/a-world-split-apart
What is really obscene about the current UK government at this particular moment is the buying of billions of US weapons of war ( which on past facts do not even work as proposed ) while at the same time the daily consumer costs have been elevated by 200 per cent in the last two years, on every day usage from 250% thinner paper products to 100% on fresh fruit and megre vegetables. No wonder the press has not commented upon these astronomic price/profit taking ?
She didn’t have to take the job.
Another example of a total incompetent dropped into a role to keep someone else out.
Just like Major, to keep Heseltine out. At least Hezza knows about how to run a business!
We certainly seem to have come to a political fork in the Road and it will be interesting to see how that reveals itself in the coming days. When I started looking into the EU, back in the run-up to the referendum. I read in it’s own manifesto that all countries would be militarily and fiscally tied to the European Project by 2025.
It is my thought that the EU Army was also on the cards, as they systematically carried out, under the guise of austerity & funding cuts, which slowly dwindled the power of individual European militaries. This in readiness, to make every EU country Soverign militaries unable to function independent of one another, then the move for the left over militaries, under the guise of NATO and UN peaceful collaborative missions, to finally hand over powers to Brussels. This alongside the slow militarisation of our then Police Authorities, under the guise of lack of law, growing threat from terrorism in order to arm and eventually to also privatise the Police Forces with common purpose ideals and doublespeak as the new rule of law.
I also considered that the UK is obviously (whether I agree or not) a nuclear Power and I’m sure Brussels would like some say on how that power is wielded?
I also started to look at the inception of the Parliament of Mayors https://globalparliamentofmayors.org/ I think they first met to convene in 2015. I tried to understand its reason for being and how the UK in one way or another (to weaken it) was broken apart, divided as an independent soverign Isle and regionalised for want of a better word.
These regions, of which the change has already started – started growing the regions by calling them Greater Manchester and installing Mayors (not elected by the people living there, but by politicians) to oversea these greater areas, where local authorities merged and more power was given to the Mayoral position. By installing the power at regions level, there would be no need in the modern world for Soverign Parliments, they would become obsolete.
This also ties in with the Rockefeller project 100 Resilient Cities https://www.100resilientcities.orgnd and how the Foundation had already identified the 100 Cities which would become super population centres and how work had already begun to address the areas individual SWOTs (Strengths, weaknesses Opprtunities and threats) in a global age and how to overcome them.
It also ties in with the withdrawal of parliament being talked about (parliament is old and decrepit and in need of an almighty revamp (In more ways than one!) to the tune of millions over several years) in this age of apparent austerity that does not make much sense, although I get that the House is a historically important To our nations history.. I started to get the feeling, these could potentially be interconnected and perhaps once the house is closed down, it may actually never get used as a seat of power ever again… perhaps such soverign and political places will become insignificant and it was all in the long game…Or maybe I was starting to bark up too many wrong trees!
I am not saying any of these endeavours are not good for our continent, they probably are (if I was hoping for the Star Trek, everyone works for the greater good, receives universal income to live a comfortable life and enjoy using their best abilities and assets to bring about a better world) But, its not and the EU has become corrupted by power and greed, just like any other tin-pot dictatorship and the globalists who are the few, want to enslave the many, not lift them out of poverty for human kind sake.
I now in relative terms we have never been better off, a book on factfulness I read said on 9% of the world now lives in relative poverty – but what is the baseline and who defines poverty these days. Here in the UK you are deemed in poverty if you don’t have a certain size of plasma screen TV and access to super fast broadband – not if you don;t have a balanced daily meal each day and can afford your heating and god forbid you don;t pay your BBC licence fee..the clanger calls and Crapita will deliver you to its doors – all on behalf of a government that works to your behest…
My apologies for the war and peace, I think the buggers got to me today and writing was a helpful release!
Very interesting research.
It is all about the long game and as you pointed out – the manifesto for a United States of Europe, for better or for worse.
There is absolutely no discussion on whether this is a positive or negative for the citizens of Europe, the fact that it is being implemented almost ‘under the radar’ gives me cause to doubt its net positive. Ireland has already signed up to PESCO – the EU army, losing its historic and constitutional neutrality with barely a squeak, infact most people I speak to don’t even know it has happened, or even how this affects them, maybe the uproar will only happen as their sons and daughters start getting conscripted.
Italy’s inability to pass a budget that works for its citizens should also be raising a flag about the ‘goodness’ of the EU project. To say nothing of the state of Greece and rampant privatization of all its nationally owned resources.
Also – thank you reminding us that the UK, again, for better or worse, is a Nuclear Power, this is being overlooked completely in all negotiations – giving the appearance that the UK is a weak state. The EU, with its ambitions for its own army, will not want an unfriendly nuclear power on its doorstep.
The dishonesty of the players involved – politicians, media, finance et al, in controlling the narrative is mind blowing.
Hi Lorraine
I did respond to you, but my response seemed to get lost in the ether! Either way, I agree with what you say. My feeling is all the chaos, censorship and dishonesty is engineered and just masks the fact that the Emperor has been butt naked for a while. Neuro Lingustic programming, helps with the group think narratives. Alongside the use of the Overton window to change the unthinkable into the accepted norm. It’s amazing how much film/news/media/current trends/products/celebs/sports personalities etc are used to sway you one way or another!
TheThinker
Very good research, much on the lines of my own. Methinks you are a fellow UK Column subscriber? If not, you should be: especially when they have Mark Anderson on. He reports on all things ‘globalese’ (resilient cities et al). Very minor detail: EU Army = EU Military Unification.
So I am very much in broad agreement with you. However, I could not let this pass unquestioned:
“I now in relative terms we have never been better off, a book on factfulness I read said on 9% of the world now lives in relative poverty – but what is the baseline and who defines poverty these days[?]”
You are right to question the mathematicised definition of global poverty. Neoliberal ideologues (such as Steven Pinker, Christopher Lakner, and Branko Milanovic (the latter two being of the World Bank)) have long been trying to pass off versions of this fallacious statistical manipulation as fact. It forms the basis of the ‘Rising Tide’ (lifts all boats) and ‘Trickle Down’ neoliberal violent iniquities.
It works like this: treat the mitigation of poverty as a percentile increase – which shows that the poorest are increasing their ‘wealth’ as fast as the richest. Happy days and a humanist neoliberalism? The debunking is simple and absolute. If you earn $250,000 and you increase that by 1% …nice. That’s the kids education paid for this year. If you are in the bottom half of humanity (>3bn actual humans who deserve a life) earning $2.50 …I don’t even have to write it to show what an insult to humanity this manipulation is.
Economist Muheed Jamaldeen has shown it will take the bottom half of humanity 250 years to ‘make it’ into the global petty-bourgeoisie, earning a whole $11 a day (the global median or middle class income). Neoliberal lies, damn lies, and statistics. Or in this case graphs …Growth Incidence Curves (GICs): which are reproduced as the ‘Elephant Graph’ (see link). To be fair to Lakner and Milanovic, they were aware of the inadequacy of the representation:
Other ideologues, such as Pinker, do not include the caveat, and try to pass off the statistical ‘growth’ as real. The reality is that the worlds poorest did not increase their relative ‘wealth’ (i.e. ‘humanitarian aid’ rice and contaminated water to mouth existence) at all: it all went to the top 1% [82% of global wealth went to top 1% last year: Oxfam].
https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2018-01-22/richest-1-percent-bagged-82-percent-wealth-created-last-year
It’s the oldest cliche in the world: but the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. It’s a fact. Only, we are now reaching new, hitherto unseen, levels obscenity in disparity and savage inequality. That some of the relatively rich use ‘Elephant Curve’ GICs and statistics of “9%” to try and obfuscate and justify this …well, it’s more like 80% of humanity in relative poverty (>5.5bn lives – based on consumption figures (20% of humanity consume 86% of resources (80% left with 14%: [UNDP] ) >3bn live on less than $2.50 a day; >1.3bn on £1.25 …pick your own ‘relative’ and ‘extreme’ poverty parameters – but it’s still more than ”9%” [I’m using WEF’s own figures from 2014]). Even the WEF are worried (that they won’t be able to carry on the exploitation much longer).
Those lives are obfuscated, and rendered irrelevant by statistics …dehumanised, destroyed human lives consigned to eternal poverty by an inhumane calculus to justify the existence of the neoliberal global elite.
https://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/whats-happening-on-global-inequality-putting-the-elephant-graph-to-sleep-with-a-hockey-stick/
When paid for by the super-majority: in a ‘capital’ of human lives, violence, and choleric children …is the contribution of the global WEF ‘Davos’ elite worth it? Let’s not fall for the brutality of a statistical justification that says it is. The world’s top earners could make poverty history, and not even miss a zero from their accounts …but for a graph?
Hello BigB
Thank for your considered response along with very interesting links. Calling me out on that remark was quite right and really I should not be taking things such a statistics in a book as gospel without further research. The book I talked about interestingly is a 2nd year reading book for Sociology students, who also just accepted that if it said it, then it must be true.
Yes, I am a fellow subber to your other ask, I stumbled across the Column some time ago whilst rooting around after reading Agenda 2030 and looking into Common Purpose and all its effects. That then led me down all sorts of interesting rabbit holes, which had me truly looking through the looking glass! When I found The Column, I found I knew almost everything that was there already and I’d put the pieces together. It was reassuring there were other people out there like me not accepting the legacy media narratives.
TT
I hoped you watched the Column today. Clarifying the terminology for EU Military Unification turned out to be more crucial than I thought this morning. Somehow, even through our own limited social networks, we have to make it known what is going on under the Brexit deception plan. (See my comment above.)
I don’t think that they would be handing out texts to potential future sociologists with my interpolated 80% figure. It might precipitate a social revolution: heaven forbid!
The UK has been living in a nostalgic fantasy world for decades, wallowing in past glories. Turning defeats, magically into huge victories. Like Dunkirk, like the disaster that Churchill really was.
Britain’s diminished role in the world, the loss of the Empire, can’t be reversed. There’s no going back. That’s why the UK joined the European Union in the first place. Better to be part of something bigger and stronger, than a mere US protectorate obeying orders. An influential European state on a par with others, like Germany and France, which after their decline were determined to find a new role for themselves, a partnership after decades of war decided nothing.
Now the UK chooses to diminish itself even more by pulling out of Europe and losing the influence it has, with no real practical alternative, clinging to dreams instead. It’s madness and a tragedy.
The whole idea of a referendum was ridiculous. Especially given the poor state of public discourse in the UK. For these things to work, the question has to be extremely simple, asking something that’s incredible complex beyond words, is absurd and incredibly dangerous and risks leading to disaster, as has now been proved, by what looks like the meltdown of the entire political system, which is incapable of delivering the result people imagined they were voting for because it doesn’t and can’t exist.
The idea that the UK could have or keep the advantages of EU membership without binding itself to the responsibilities at the same time, being ‘out’ and ‘in’, was always a bizarre fantasy and an impossibility doomed to failure with dire consequences to follow, as we are seeing unfold now.
How is it better to be part of the EU?
You could ask the people of Greece that one. Or Spain. Or Ireland. Or Portugal. 50% + youth unemployment. Policies that are identical with the IMF. Or Hungary and Poland, who are being ordered to accept a mass influx of Third World immigrants? If you had to choose a few adjectives to describe the EU, what would they be? Corrupt, arrogant, remote, anti-democratic? Is it in any way an organisation that serves the interests of ordinary people? Or those of billionaires like Soros and the huge tax dodging corporations? Do any of the EU institutions inspire the respect and confidence of ordinary people? Or is it a job creation programme for corrupt, discredited and failed political has beens?
Is the current situation a unique opportunity, that will never come again, to break free of this organisation?
Correct, more or less, but you omit the fact that the EU has also become an institution that lives within a bubble, is essentially undemocratic, and is more concerned with its own well-being than that of the citizens it supposedly exists to serve.
When you consider England’s Imperial record, with the tens of millions killed in genocides in India, China, Ireland, Scotland, Australia and North America, anything that happens to the place now is simply Nemesis, or just retribution. Unfortunately the oligarchic and hereditary parasites, for whose benefits the vast crimes against humanity were committed, will be the last to pay, as usual. I do smell the whiff of civil war, but that stink is pretty universal at present, from one end of the planet to the other.
Democracy = rule by the people. Regardless of whether you are in the remain or leave camp, what is unfolding before our eyes shows the truth…the uk is an elected dictatorship. Remainers have absolutely no need to worry, the uk dictators never had any notion to allow us to leave the EU, and have been subverting democracy for 2 years.
Originally, I was happy to remain, not now. I don’t want to live in a dictatorship and remainers be careful what you wish for, EU army is on the way. Would anyone be happy for the Government to have a referendum on paedophilia so they no longer have to protect their friends in high places? We would all vote no, our government refuses to let our decision stand, how would we feel if our kids were then victims?
Project fear was ridiculous, I’ve even read recently we may run out of sandwiches, and the result should be void due to Russian interference. UK politics, media, subverters of democracy, all in the gutter. I accepted the decision of the 52% and my opinion changed, moaning until you reverse the result…disrespectful and dishonest. UK has the audacity to preach to the world how good it is, and bomb anyone it disagrees with. Its the UK that needs regime change. Just hope the 48% will be happy when our armed forces are merged with Europes. While were at it, there was obviously Russian interference in the world cup, can we have the last few games replayed until we win? please therese, please…and your own brexit minister hadn’t seen the deal until it was released, that shows it all. What was he doing then, for his big salary and all expenses covered role?
Two months ago May was saying this… makes her look rediculous
————————————————-
While both sides want a deal, we have to face up to the fact that – despite the progress we have made – there are two big issues where we remain a long way apart.
The first is our economic relationship after we have left.
Here, the EU is still only offering us two options.
The first option would involve the UK staying in the European Economic Area and a customs union with the EU.
In plain English, this would mean we’d still have to abide by all the EU rules, uncontrolled immigration from the EU would continue and we couldn’t do the trade deals we want with other countries.
That would make a mockery of the referendum we had two years ago.
The second option would be a basic free trade agreement for Great Britain that would introduce checks at the Great Britain/EU border. But even worse, Northern Ireland would effectively remain in the Customs Union and parts of the Single Market, permanently separated economically from the rest of the UK by a border down the Irish Sea.
Parliament has already – unanimously – rejected this idea.
Creating any form of customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK would not respect that Northern Ireland is an integral part of the United Kingdom, in line with the principle of consent, as set out clearly in the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.
It is something I will never agree to – indeed, in my judgement it is something no British Prime Minister would ever agree to. If the EU believe I will, they are making a fundamental mistake. Anything which fails to respect the referendum or which effectively divides our country in two would be a bad deal and I have always said no deal is better than a bad deal.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article203068.html
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Perhaps Mark Sedwill the guy who ‘masterminded’ the gov’s response to Salisbury and airstrikes on Syria dictating the agenda? https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/cabinet-minister-esther-mcvey-in-13591899
I can imagine that the EU is quaking in its boots at your display of British bull-dog spirit.
General elections can be fixed through postal votes once they’ve been processed and checked. The slips are then put in containers waiting in council offices to be mixed in with the polling station votes on election day.. A ‘cleaner’ could enter the offices overnight and swap the bags for bags filled with just Tory votes The postal vote is very important because it’s usually is about 20% of the total. Therefore, swapping containers would be very effective in marginal seats.
This is the United Kingdom not the US. We count our votes.
Postal votes are also useful as ‘canaries’, to indicate which constituencies require ‘adjustment’.
I voted for Brexit for what may sound like an unusual reason. I had to do some work for the Local Authority and got to know some of the local council officials. One of these was the Electoral Returning Officer, the man in charge of the ballot boxes and the pencils. I asked him who the Common Market MP/ MEP/ whatever, was. He didn’t know. Nobody else I asked did either, like some local reporters. I made quite a few enquiries but I could never find out. Whoever it was, you wouldn’t know him if he jumped up and bit you. He/ she? obviously just merged into the wallpaper in Brussels and lined their pockets and strutted around feeling important. Whatever you think of Westminster MPs, at least you know who they are. I would guess, seriously, that maybe 1 person in 100,000 know who their Common Market MP is. With this crew, their own wives and their own dogs probably don’t know who they are. It just seemed to me that these people might as well be on the moon so far as most people were concerned.
Other people who voted either way may well have had better reasons than me for voting how they did. But I think the Brussels elite have brought this on themselves. If I was Juncker, or Verhofstadt, or whoever, I would have gone round kicking people’s a*ses and told them – you have to put yourselves about/ get yourselves out there/ get yourself known/ it doesn’t matter if people hate, loathe and despise you, just so long as they know who you are.
A lot of people probably take a different view and they may be right. But the Common Market/ EU has never inspired much affection in most of the UK population. The most it has ever achieved is broad indifference.
I think the only reason the withdrawal process dragged on as it has is that most people in Westminster and Brussels, the City and the MSM, just don’t want it to work and have been trying to sabotage it from the moment the Referendum result came in. I think the withdrawal process should have been straightforward. Announce that Britain will continue to trade as before with the EU, with no tariffs or quotas being imposed, and that situation will continue until such time as tariffs and quotas are imposed on British exports. Announce that EU nationals living in Britain will be free to carry on living and working here with no change, and that situation will continue so long as the rights of British nationals living in the EU are respected.
It is possible May will hang on a lot longer than most people think. Do the Tories want another election? Who do they want? Johnson? – he bottled it after Cameron resigned. Gove? – seen as a drunken backstabber by a lot of his party. Davies? – maybe. Could the Tories win another election after the Brexit fiasco? – Doubtful. Could Labour win? – Maybe, if only by default. The City/ Spooks/ MSM/ Deep State/ most backstabbing Labour MPs/ the Board of Deputies/ Israeli Embassy would have a collective epileptic fit at the thought of Jezza moving into 10 Downing Street. Another Referendum? – Maybe. There’s enough Soros money behind one. But would this resolve anything? What would the result be? And would that be respected? Suppose Britain just cancelled Brexit and went crawling back to Brussels. How would that work out? How long would that take to renegotiate? And what extra demands would Brussels make? Would any decisions along these lines be accepted by the 17 million who voted for Brexit?
This is going to run and run for years, whatever the outcome over the next few days. Roll the dice and see what happens.
Corbyn will NEVER be allowed to become PM-by one means or another.
‘If we cannot get a General Election, in line with our conference policy, we will support all options remaining on the table, including campaigning for a public vote. ‘
Jeremy Corbyn
Leader of the Labour Party
This is the part that strikes me – taken from Jeremy’s email to Labour party members.
His and the party’s commitment to the ‘public vote’ , a betrayal of the referendum has maybe sealed his fate.
If a general election is not held – more likely not, then the Labour party will be handed the poison chalice of betraying the referendum.
I have maintained that the the referendum was more about signing us in to the new, more integrated EU, complete with its own army and loss of printing your own currency, and that the result would be used to quiet those genuinely opposed to such a loss of sovereignty.
Now, after 2 years of fear mongering – ‘ the hospitals will have no drugs/nurses/doctors’, ‘we need to stockpile food’ and many, many others, and absolutely no positive talk of the advantages of printing your own money, or anything else that comes with making your own laws, we arrive here.
Theresa May has done her job well to bring us to this point, a deal that is worse than leaving! – it is Labour that will be resigned to the history books, if the referendum is rerun – I know the mandate is only for a vote on the deal, but how difficult will it be to succumb to pressure to add in another line -to remain.
If remain wins, then Labour will not be able to keep any of its manifesto promises – you cannot nationalise the railways, the water or the NHS under EU rules – they will be toast, and worse, held responsible for the actions of
the Conservatives, who will regroup and win.
‘Betraying the referendum’-translating from the gibberish, betraying the stupid, jingoistic, imbeciles who were lied to by the very oligarchic scum who have screwed them for generations, and will screw them even more royally after Brexit. Donkeys led by monsters.
I voted to remain and did have a little sympathy for TM having to negotiate the withdrawal agreement, as it was never going to be a ‘walk in the park’. I am a Labour member and a staunch supporter of Corbyn as leader and have admired his attempts to steer the Government’s input into the negotiations. But let’s get real, whether you voted leave or remain, two years on and the realisation about the future of the UK is stark. MP’s have to choose between the deal which is on the table or not. The likelihood of rejection is almost certain and the UK could leave the EU with no deal, which I believe would be disastrous for the economy and the citizens of the UK. The option of a ‘peoples vote’ or second referendum must be kept open and it could be a choice between the deal which is on the table, no deal or the status quo. I disagree with you that EU rules prevent a Labour Government from renationalisation. Many EU countries still run their utilities in public hands. Countries who have had to have bailouts from the Troika, such as Greece have only been given them with conditions of privatisation. The EU is far from perfect and is in desperate need of reform, which was why Corbyn’s campaign in the referendum. You can only change things from ‘within’, not from ‘without’. Some people will say the people spoke at the referendum two years ago, but things have changed very significantly since then and the future of the UK is at stake. I believe, with the proposed deal, now having been put in the public domain and people have listened to their representatives views, the campaign for a people’s vote will gather momentum and support up and down the country, which any Government would be unwise to ignore.
“You can only change things from ‘within’, not from ‘without’.”
Stafford Beer says “arse about face.”
I think, thankfully, we are heading for another General Election. Hopefully when this one starts the parties will have aligned their policies with their intentions regarding membership of the E.U. Perhaps then there will be an honest contest and whoever wins will actually want to deliver what they campaigned upon. This may mean some parties have to fracture but that would be no bad thing
If there is an election, there will be a hate campaign against Corbyn based on the entirely false and filthy accusations of the new ‘Supreme Crime’, ‘antisemitism’ that will dwarf anything so far seen.
I think we can be sure that there will be lots of accusations and lies about all the candidates. This media battle sometimes seems to dwarf the battle of ideas
The only ‘idea’ any Rightist has or has ever had or will ever have is that other people are The Enemy, Within or Without. Hence our terminal predicaments.
The Tories will try and get by with a leadership election and a unity candidate winning with a landslide. We will then be instructed that this ‘democratic exercise’ provides person X with a huge mandate that obviates the need for a ‘destabilizing’ general election.
Watso, Umnna, Kinnock, Phillips and all the rest of the People’s Vote party, bringing down Theresa May, forcing an election, letting Corbyn in? You’ve got to be f***ing joking. These people have been quoting opinion polls for the last couple of years, if those polls don’t suggest Corbyn is going to be seriously trounced, they’ll find the words to explain why we should all accept May’s bad deal and renegotiate a glorious reentry later. Anything is acceptable except a Labour government.
It’s hard to imagine the Conservatives voting for a GE because in the subsequent campaign they would truly divide into hard Brexiters and the May pretend version, costly as it is. Unfortunately Tories are cowards and will be keen to collect at least another 2 years salary and the chance of some cushy government job now there are so many around. They’ll end up saying May is marvellous, a Boudica of her age etc etc and the deal she struck is just right! Meanwhile the Labour Right will do everything they can to keep the Tories in office rather than their own Party; it’s just the way they are. To try and avoid constituency anger they may abstain but that has the same effect of course. The DUP have only one friend in the World – Mrs May so the idea they’ll gun her down is fanciful. Another Billion or so will see them discovering flickering light at the end of the May tunnel and they’ll back her too.
So she’ll scrape through in my opinion.
I thought just losing a vote of confidence triggered it?
The British ruling class’ main aims of stopping Brexit and preventing Corbyn from becoming PM are throwing up massive contradictions and creating strange bedfellows. The main engine for class domination in Britain, the Conservative and Unionist Party, is tearing itself apart and potentially opening the way for a left Labour government. It can’t be long before plan B is dusted off – a national government to “save” the country from both Brexit and Corbyn: the so-called “People’s Vote” movement is part of this, heavily backed by Soros, Blankfein and friends. The problem for the Labour class-collaborators, LibDem and Tory “moderates” and the CBI/civil service etc. is that it will engender a massive rightwing backlash, which they may not be able to control. The only positive escape is by standing firm, for Brexit, for Corbyn and for a left led government with plenty of extra-parliamentary support in the streets, something the centrists have not, ironically, been shy in deploying in recent weeks.-
The Blairite MPs will leave the Labour Party and get together with what’s left of Tories and Liberals. Then we will see if the Corbyn support is strong enough in the constituencies. If the country can’t see the sense in Labour’s Brexit strategy it’s going to be chaos.
I don’t think they’ve got the bottle myself, after the debacle of the SDP, Woy Jenkins and Shirley Williams and the rest. Hence the non stop smear campaigns against Jezza by the MSM/ Spooks/ Board of Deputies/ PLP Blairite Backstabbers.
The SDP was never a ‘debacle’. It did its work-to keep Thatcher in power.
Why would a general election happen given that that would require 2/3rds of parliament to vote for it?
No it wouldn’t. A simple majority in a House of Commons no-confidence vote is enough. That’s how the 1974-79 Labour government fell.
I think there are new rules in play by Cameron vis: triggering an election. 66% of MPs have to vote to bring the government down in Parliament.
One way is via the Queen if she is asked by the Commons to ask if any party can form a government with a majority. If that majority can prove it has the numbers it can govern on its own.
Problem is we are now in ABC ( Anything But Corbyn ) territory.
For the centrists what would be required would be a government of National Salvation, meaning saving Neo Liberalism and its alleged good points.
The guise would on the surface be to save us from a No Deal Brexit but in actuality it is to save them and their capitalist masters from a new government which will start to unwind the Thatcherite concensus that has ruled the UK for forty years.
Ironically whilst the rest of the EU is producing very right wing parties the nation considered the most Bourgoise in the EU has a chance of a left wing government.
Keynesian not communist as some are led to believe.Reflationary – not austerity deflationary as the current government is.
Then again being as many commentators confuse investment as spending ( wasteful) then the parameters of the debate will be limited I fear.
There will be a lot of work to do if Labour is elected and the blockers will not come from the EU – the blockers will come from inside the UK and some of the Labour Party itself.
But isn’t it still the case that if a PM is aware they can’t secure a majority in the Commons then they go to the monarch and inform them? Sometimes (Ted Heath Februsry 2974) they’re given time to see if they can get a majority via perhaps a Coalition.
Paul
As far as I know it can be anyone who makes the approach – even Vince Cable.