Main Street, Brexitland
Tony Sutton
People in England’s northern towns and cities are scared. Their fears stoked by xenophobic right-wing media, they hate Europe, and they hate migrants. But, most of all, they hate the way they are being squeezed into poverty by a post-industrial society that has turned dreams into nightmares and replaced hope with despair. Tony Sutton returns to South Shields, a place he once called home.
Closing down: King Street, the main shopping thoroughfare of South Shields is broad and car-free – and almost devoid of shops.
British Prime Minister Theresa May has committed herself to a scheme to arrest the economic decline of the north of England. However, the plan, originally proposed by George Osborne, who was axed as Chancellor of the Exchequer after the exit of David Cameron as PM following June 2016’s Brexit vote, is still in a state of incoherence, doubletalk and indecision.
Nothing has yet been agreed, other than the setting up of a think tank – the Northern Powerhouse Partnership – by Osborne, who raised few hopes for speedy action when he said at its mid-September launch: “Trying to turn around 100 years of relative economic decline is not going to happen overnight.” Then he hopped off to the US to take care of his own economic decline, pocketing £500,000 for a few speeches to bankers and hedge fund managers on the financial snout-troughing circuit.
I was in the north, at South Shields, on Tyneside, just before Osborne’s announcement, and I was shocked at the way the town had degenerated since I worked for daily and Sunday newspapers there and at Newcastle upon Tyne, 11 miles to the west. Forty years ago, South Shields was part of a regional powerhouse and didn’t yet need the transformative magical thinking that is now being spouted by May and Osborne. In the 1970s, the town of 75,000 boasted high-paying jobs in shipbuilding and coal mining. Its last-remaining slums had been demolished, major roads were being built and new factories developed. And King Street, South Shields’ main thoroughfare, reflected that prosperity. What could go possibly go wrong? Lots, as it happens.
The rot set in when Margaret Thatcher arrived in Downing Street late in the decade. Her war on unions, especially the mine workers, together with economic policies that encouraged the offshoring of jobs, saw the collapse of Tyneside’s major industries. Eleven years of Tony Blair’s neoliberalism, from 1997 to 2007, continued Thatcher’s work, the area hitting rock-bottom at the end of the 20th-century when South Shields had the highest unemployment rate in Britain.
Pretty as a picture? It’s all fake – Huge decals adorn the front of vacant property.
Thatcher’s political philosophy – “There is no such thing as society,” she had famously claimed in a 1987 interview with a women’s magazine – began a process that led to the elimination of secure, well-paying jobs and their replacement by humiliating zero-hour contracts with one-step-above-poverty wages. This decades-long economic decline played a key part in the rise of the far-right political party Ukip, which took advantage of the increased social turmoil that was not being addressed by the Labour Party, traditionally the champion of Britain’s working class. Encouraged by xenophobic right-wing media, Ukip declared war on migrants, blaming them – along with the European Union – for stealing jobs and robbing British workers of income, housing and benefits. Then David Cameron, newly-elected as Prime Minister, honoured an election pledge to hold a referendum earlier this year on whether or not to stay inside the Europe Union, and the result was a narrow, unexpected, victory for the Brexiteers, a greatly divided land., and then the speedy exit of Cameron as prime minister.
South Shields was one of the “deprived” areas that voted overwhelmingly in favour of Brexit, much to the dismay of bewildered southern-based liberal commentators who couldn’t understand why, in light of all the European cash being injected into northern development zones, their residents would vote “against their best interests.”
Brendan O’Neill, writing in the Spectator, explained:
Britain’s poor and workless have risen up. And in doing so they didn’t just give the EU and its British backers the bloodiest of bloody noses. They also brought crashing down the Blairite myth of a post-class, Third Way Blighty, where the old ideological divide between rich and poor did not exist, since we were all supposed to be ‘stakeholders’ in society.
This peasants’ revolt has sent shockwaves through the elite…and they’re now frantically trying to work out why it happened. They’ve come up with two answers – one fuelled by rage, the other by something worse: pity. The ragers say the plebs voted Leave because they’re a bit racist and got hoodwinked by the shiny, xenophobic demagoguery of the likes of Nigel Farage.
This idea – that the poor are easy prey for demagogues – is the same claptrap the Chartists had to put up with in the 1840s. Their snooty critics frequently told them that, since the poor do not have a ‘ripened wisdom’ they are ‘more exposed than any other class…to be converted to the vicious ends of faction.’ Now, the metropolitan set once again accuse the little people of exactly the same thing.
O’Neill was right. The pre-Thatcher ’60s generation knew their basic dreams would almost certainly see fruition: job-for-life security and regular pay rises would elevate their families into comfort, if not outright prosperity. That was the social contract developed after the end of World War II: Work hard and contribute to society, then society will take care of you. That contract died when Thatcher broke the miners’ union in 1984-85. After that, it was everyone for himself.
On the face of it, today’s political turmoil in Britain has little to do with Thatcher and her successors: It’s about Brexit and immigrants and the average Briton’s deep hatred of Europe, isn’t it? But dig a little deeper and the link becomes more apparent. The real fight is about dignity, security and fear. It’s about a need for lasting, well-paid careers instead of the dumbed-down servility of short-term jobs in the service industry. It’s about the right to affordable housing, instead of having to pay exorbitant rents to slumlords. But, most of all, it’s about a future that offers hope, not despair.
Charity shops (top), betting shops (bottom) – empty store fronts. Welcome to Main Street, Brexitland!
A quick stroll down South Shields’s King Street will give the most-jaundiced observer an indication of the troubled times in which many Britons live. Once a bustling thoroughfare that furnished the dreams of an affluent society, the broad boulevard is now a nightmare of austerity. Many storefronts are empty, their windows displaying stark “For Sale” and “To Let” notices. The businesses that remain are mainly charity outlets, betting shops and pound stores for cash-strapped customers, while those that cater for the wealthier have decamped to big-box citadels elsewhere. Welcome to the shabby new face of Main Street, Brexitland.
This scenario – a nation of distinct, economically-divided societies – is not unique to Tyneside, but is evident across the north of England. And on mainland Europe, where disillusioned residents of Greece, Spain and Italy are also witnessing the collapse of the old world order, as they slide towards poverty in a new Fourth World. Weary of the lies and false promises of their money-grubbing politicians and the hoggish corporations they serve, the people are now sending a stark warning to their political masters in London and Brussels: “If you don’t help us, we’ll suffer more. And, if that happens, we’ll take you down with us.”
This is an updated version of an article originally published in ColdType issue 130, December 2016
Tony Sutton is the editor of the free ColdType e-magazine – www.coldtype.net – contact him at [email protected]
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It is all very well talking about racism/xenophobia and the like, and then showing streets from teh North East of England, but what the author of this piece has to realise, is that there are towns like this all over the South East of England and this hasn’t just happened since the referendum, it has been happening for a good fifteen to twenty years.
It has happened for a variety of reasons – online shopping, the financial crisis, job insecurity and unchecked immigration, which has resulted in wage stagnation for many people.
That’s very true. You could go to the Medway Towns or Margate and say the same thing. These are the equivalent of the “sacrifice zones” Chris Hodges wrote about. As far as our ruling elite Euro fanatics are concerned, these places might as well be on Mars. The Notting Hill/ Islington set can’t conceive of how anyone could vote for Brexit, just like the smug, self satisfied, well heeled New York/ California elites (generally living in snow white gated compounds) can’t conceive of how anyone could vote for Trump.
So they must all be stupid/ racist/ homophobic/ uneducated/ bigoted/ old/ brainwashed by the evil Putin and his dastardly bots/ or just downright deplorable.
Mark, the places you have mentioned are a bit too close to home for me, and they epitomise the problems which the detached “elite” in all parties ignore. I was talking to a guy I know last night – he voted “remain”, and it was quite a civil conversation but he was in total denial. On the one hand he talked about the “lazy British worker”, until I pointed out that we are both British, so was he including us in that phrase – that didn’t get an answer. Then he talked about how his rather large company would use agencies to emply staff – nothing unusual about that, except that these agencies would send people to Poland to recruit staff, bring them back on coaches, employ them at NMW, and provide accomodation for them, five or six of them living in flats designed for two people.
I asked him how British workers with families could compete with that, or if it was morally right to live and work like that – again no answer, except he said that maybe the people in the UK expected too much.
I’m so tired of defending myself against this relentless ‘Leave voters are racist’ trope. It’s exhausting.
Proper journalists don’t parrot mainstream media narratives – they do a bit of digging.
I voted Leave because of Article 106, the Four Business Pillars and the fact we can never vote out of it. (The French want to leave but they can’t.)
The EU is a toxic, anti working-class, rich bosses club. It is a neoliberal animal designed to further the goals of the ruling class which is supported by those screaming for a second referendum – predominantly the middle-classes and the wealthy.
Please be off Guardian.
I agree, this is more like a piece which you would find in the Independent or regular Guardian. I wonder why Luxembourg has managed to provide 3 EU bosses? I wonder why the Labour MEP’s voted against the election of Jean Clade Juncker, and why that fact now seems to be very much ignored?
But the UK is no less a toxic anti working class rich bosses club. It is also a neoliberal animal designed to further the goals of the ruling class. I don’t personally think it will suddenly be allowed to become any less so after Brexit. Hope springs eternal.
Kathy, whilst I agree with a lot of your very valid points, I would ask that if the UK is a toxic, anti working class, rich bosses club, then why would we wish to pay an awful lot of money to belong to a second even larger version.
The total pay for our PM is just short of £150K per annum, and the total pay for Jean Claude Juncker is around E390K per annum.
At the moment there are only around half a dozen countries actually paying in money to the EU, and we are the 3rd largest contributor.
In Eastern Europe, the AVERAGE wage is around E4K per annum, and in the UK the NMW/LIVING WAGE is around £15K.
The vast majority of EU workers in the UK are not contributing to the UK economy, because their wages here are so low, and what they have will be sent home to buy houses in their own country.
The concept of the EU is great, but the reality is that there is a vast disparity in wealth, and that combined with freedom of movement will result in masses of people migrating from poor countries to rich countries.
It is exactly the points you make in your above response to Mark that is the problem. I am so aware that the way this is all implemented serves the rich bosses of the EU. And of course if you live in appalling conditions but are working towards achieving a better life style back home. You have hope and a goal. This is why people from the UK are competing for work but will only remain hopeless and still in appalling accommodation. But at least we have as much right to leave and go somewhere we could live a better life also. Do what the EU gives us equal freedom to do and travel to a country with better weather and cheep housing and have a new life. I did not vote for either remain or leave. Partly because I will not vote for the system full stop. But if I had had to make a vote. I could not in all honesty vote for either side. I believe remain is giving back the few hard won workers rights and an ability to at least leave this country and take the freedom available to all EU members. Plus the idea of a coming together not of pulling apart and the people united over the whole of Europe. May have a greater chance for change. I would love to feel that leave will bring greater prosperity to the people of the UK but in all honesty I think it will become just another stitch up and non of the problems we now face will change. If anything I think we will lose even more autonomy and wages will downgrade further.
Kathy, why on earth would I wish to leave the UK, when I love the place and was born here? I have worked hard in the UK for 43 years and have no wish to sell up and move anywhere.
There are European countries which I love – France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, but would I like to live there? I am not sure.
You talk about “remain” side giving back hard won worker’s rights, but seem to forget that it was Blair and Brown – both staunch “remainers” who introduced zero hours contracts. It was under the tenure of Blair that immigration, largely from Eastern Europe, started to escalate, and the media started to propagate the notion of the “lazy British worker”.
Sorry Andyoldlabour. I should have framed my post better. I don’t think you personally should want to leave the place/country you love. Just that in general we do all have the same right under EU law to take this opportunity. Obviously this is not applicable for all. I love this country. Not in any patriotic way. But now I just feel trapped in it. I recognize quite a few people may wish to leave in the future.As they have been able to. Without red tape do so. Up till now. Emigration could give me personally a better life in a country where property is not totally unattainable for me to own. In the UK and having lived in some disgraceful rented properties. Landlords are able to push you out on a whim through section 21. I never thought years ago that I would ever feel this way. Or chose to leave the UK. But now I would love to go somewhere where I could live self sufficiently. On the other point you pick up on. I again, in a hurry. Maybe put this clunkily and not explained my self properly. What I had intended to mean was. I am sure that people will not be given any of these rights we have collectively under the EU post brexit if left to the Tories to organize. This is the party that in the 70s and 80s. Broke the backs of the working classes and the unions. Please don’t even get me started on how much I dislike the Blair Labour government. As for the media they are the puppets of the puppets of the puppet masters. So whatever they say is deliberate hate mongering propaganda.
Andyoldlabour,
I just wanted to clarify. I do not mean in the post above that the point you are making in your comment was the problem. I meant what you are highlighting is. I may not agree on Brexit being a solution. I do understand that this is one of the issues that is causing problems and why people are feeling so much hopelessness.
Although I stand up neither for remain or leave here. The basic principles behind a united Europe have some merit. It would be great to see the whole world come together and not be pulled apart in war and mistrust. Imagine a world working together in a mutual betterment for all. In principal. This is surely not a bad thing. The freedom to know that if life doesn’t give you the opportunities where you live that you can without visa or fuss. Move to find somewhere where food, shelter and opportunity is better. This is not a bad principal. It is a natural choice that all animals should be able to make. An inherent survivalist need. It is the exploitative aspect that plays out negatively. Not the principal itself. A case for every positive creates a negative is bought into play and as always exploited by the elites. I can’t help feeling that the Brexit referendum was used as a pressure cooker release valve on a boiling point nation. Demoralized and punished by austerity and lacking in any hope for a better future. It seems that the timing of it. In spite of any talk of the elites not really wanting a leave result. Perfectly fitted into place .For the leave result to occur. This had been well fomented by the media. With stories of refugees {swarming} through Europe. Not a mention of our countries dreadful foreign policies of why this was happening. The media aided the rise of UKIP. Though they had less support then the greens it was UKIP who were always invited on to debates. Interesting how UKIP ate itself immediately after handing back the baton, to the Tories. The EU was an easy body to blame for nasty Tory austerity policy. In the same way the Labour broke the economy sound bite was used repetitively. This led to the Tory mantra that they themselves were good with money and could be trusted to bring down the deficit and reduce borrowing. But austerity was not a necessity for the UK. Or was it something enforced upon us by the EU. As for freedom of movement. The UK had the same right as every other EU country to ask people to leave after three months. They chose not to implement this. Blaming the immigration of EU citizens was deliberately stirred up by Cameron. It was not the main reason for job losses and wage stagnation in the UK. This was a wider issue of the ruling classes choosing to take more of the profit for themselves and enslave the people into greater personal dept. The austerity in the UK is selective and aimed at the poorest and the underclass. Those who refused to take the slave labour wages. How can you take a job that costs you more to get to then you are able to earn. When housing and living costs are greater than you could earn. Unless that is. You are so desperate there is no other choice. It was a punishment meted out to the sick and the lame and the fragile. The message is you must work or die. This knock on effect is now becoming apparent for the middle classes. As their wages are now also downgraded in a race to the bottom. As the price of everything continues upwards.This country has a good track record of keeping the peasants under with poor conditions, low subsistence wages, bad housing and rendering any level of self-sufficiency impossible. Thus effectively starving them into submission. If the people have no money they cant spend it in the shops. Towns start to die. The small independent ones are the most vulnerable. But the big corporations just get stronger. And the whole thing just becomes more so. We all become more enslaved and more in dept.
The idea of a “United Europe”, Kathy, was a Nazi idea. It’s based on Nazi plans drawn up in the 1940s.
The problem is, the “whole world has come together” – for the benefit of the 0.1% at the expense of the 99.9%. It’s called Globalism. Its high priests are people like Bliar, Soros, Juncker.
It all sounds very delightful having a human brotherhood that can all hold hands and sing kumbaya but it comes up against some very harsh realities.
A UN study estimated that 750 million people would move from the Third World to America and Europe if they could (ie the white countries.) And you can’t really be surprised. They want whitey’s free stuff. In many African countries, the wage for most people is about £30 a month. In India, £70.
This is actively promoted by people like Macron, Sarkozy, Merkel, Gysi, Levy, Spectre, who have an agenda all of their own. So you get 2 million Third World bogus refugees flooding into Germany in one year, and 200,000 in Sweden. Then you get 1,200 women raped in Cologne on one night, covered up by the police and media. And the same in every city in Europe. And Sweden becoming the rape capital of the world, a patchwork quilt of No Go Areas. With rape and paedo gangs running riot in every crappy little town in the UK, covered up by the police and media. This an elite project that has been forced on people for decades without any pretence of discussion and consultation.
London is now 40% white. If you ask the police, they will tell you the worst racial problem they have to deal with is between West Indians and West Africans, who hate each other’s guts. Like the Ethiopians and the Somalis. And the Ethiopians and the Eritreans. It’s not a story of multiracial multiculti bliss. It never has been. It never will be.
Large parts of London now are just Third World hellholes, with Third World standards. If you let the Third World in, that’s what you get. There are areas in London you just don’t go to, any more than you would a cannibal island in the 1700s. Places like Peckham. White men don’t go there. Black men don’t go there either if they have any sense. And it’s getting worse year by year.
A lot of the traditional East End old London communities have simply ceased to exist. They have moved out as refugees to places like Romford, where some of their friends and relatives live, and they can recreate a little bit of the communities they once had. I have spoken to some of them, who all say the same thing. “Every house in the street I lived in and was born in were immigrants. We were the only whjte people there. We’d had enough.” Accuse them of “racism” and they’ll shrug their shoulders and say, “Yeah. I don’t like them.” This tends to enrage the right on politically correct people, The J.K. Rowlings and the Lily Allens and the Gary Linnekers, who strangely all live in the whitest areas of the country.
That’s the way it is.
You can have a welfare state or you can have mass immigration. You can’t have both.
Immigration in the UK predated the Common Market, but both are globalist projects and people don’t want either of them. The EU will never exist to serve the needs of ordinary people. Just the globalist corporate elite. That’s what it’s there for.
HI Mark
The idea that because the Nazis promoted a united world. Is not a reason to deny that a world built on a mutual peace trust and freedoms should be dismissed. The Nazis wanted a white supremacist world and believed all but the aryan race as inferior and to be extinguished. This is not peace or mutual respect or for the greater good off all. This is elitist supremacist and war provoking. The idea that every one wants to move to the west is based on the western exploitation and interference in non western countries. Exploitation. It is also based on the assumption that the grass is greener. This is mainly promoted by Hollywood and western TV. Where it is always showing high end life styles and good housing and fancy cloths, cars etc.In reality a lie for most. The reality is poverty, racist attacks and a sack of S…. for most. I don’t believe that happy non traumatized people do all want to leave family and home or pull up roots. It is a sense of belonging that is a special and good thing for most. Trauma war and poverty motivate people.
In a world where there is more than enough food for all there is not any reason for any one to be starving other then greed. We should try to look at the world and see where we are, and try to change where we are heading.
Mark, My apologies for my above short and garbled response to your post. I will do my best to reply properly when I have a little more time. I am keen to address some of the comments that you make and would like to give them the time they deserve.
That’s okay Kathy. All my neighbours in London over the years have been black and Asian and very nice people, like the black and Asian people I met when I was living in their countries. I agree with a lot of what you say. But what I say is true.
I don’t think being sucked into blaming each other helps any of us. It is a classic case of divide and rule. We the people regardless of race or nationality are all being exploited and enslaved by the 1percent. It is up to us to free our minds. The 1percent carve up the worlds spoils for themselves. They start wars, create famines and destroy the planet. Leaving hunger destitution and destruction behind them and leave the husks of a poisoned world for the people. We the people are all being bought and sold and turned into commodity to be exploited and enslaved. We are all victims of circumstance inflicted by the way the game has been set up. If we allow ourselves to be played by blaming our neighbors and each other. We shift the blame onto the innocent and let the guilty go free. It is fear and hopelessness that turns us against each other. It is a game to the 1percent and the game is against us the people. Blaming other cultures for things such as pedophilia and prostitution is pretending White people are better then that. But they are not. These things are just as rife in white culture as in any other. They have been going on throughout history. Women girls boys knock off goods drugs all become commodities when you have nothing else to sell. Dehumanized people dehumanize. The idea that any of this countries ills will change after Brexit is as far as I can see fantasy. Seeded by the 1percent. They feed on our life blood and they fill the peoples heads with lies. When those in power use statements like taking back control and upholding the will of the people. I cant help but feel very very wary. They don’t and never have given a flying F about the people. Why would they start now. I don’t think they have any intention of giving back any control. I think they will take even more control away from us. We will become even more enslaved and exploited. The slave masters name may change but the chains will be the same. The 1percent will do rather well out of it all.
Tis article is spot-on. In Britain it’s been all about me me me since Thatcher. The country is utterly broken and there’s no going back for generations to come, sadly.
The downward spiral is re-inforced by Brexit, a project concocted by the utterly selfish, upper class twat Tory Bullingdon Etonians. They are the same set of parasites and psychopaths who sent millions of their countrymen to die in the trenches and deserts as they lined their own pockets. The working classes swallowed their propaganda hook, line and sinker then, and once again they’ve swallowed their propaganda that’s lead to Brexit and them even supporting a disastrous No Deal.
It’s frightening that the revolutionaries have been completely hoodwinked into fighting for the wrong side, fighting for the upper class greedy murderous twats.
In some ways i agree but then again there is the germans treatment of Greece to support their own disastrously run banks and the claims that southern europe needs to become more productive (as if more productivity was what the world needed, it actually needs far less). Unfortunately neoliberal europe currently seems hellbent on bankrupting nations in order to force them to privatise, not to mention the pre Trump pressure to adopt TTIP.
Personally i am very much pro the european idea but the EU in its current form appears to be assisting in the scamming of its member states. An honest Britain would stay in the EU and openly fight these anti social trends but sadly these trends define the modern conservative party. Which is why i think brexiters have been duped. Farage is a banker for christs sake !! One of the vultures that trumpeted the wonders of the free market that everyone was forced to bail out 10 years ago.
Most of the “upper class greedy murderous twats” want us to stay in the EU, and are frantically trying to shoehorn the country back into it with a bogus second referendum. You could ask people in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Hungary, Poland, and increasingly even France and Germany, what they think of the greedy upper class twats in Brussels.
UK’s xenophobic main street: “run Hackney!” : http://news.met.police.uk/news/nine-men-sentenced-following-unprovoked-assault-353035
As a FIRSTER … and in Order to be of use for the People You are talking about ..the BRITISH COMMONER …YOU SHOULD STOP BRANDING UKIP AS A FAR RIGHT PARTY .. UKIP as seen with my FOREIGN EYES ,,is a Party attempting to PROTECT the COMMON ENGLISHMAN .. contrary to the other political Parites in POWER in Great Britain … who all .. each in its own manner …work along the Goals of the INTERNATIONAL ZIO GLOBO OLIGARCHY
UKIP is a right wing ginger group for useful idiots and bigots.
Without them, there would have been no real opposition to the globalist, corporatist project of the EU. Just a bit of whingeing from disaffected Tories.
They show that a mass movement outside the mainstream is possible in Britain.
It isn’t outside the mainstream. It’s authoritarian capitalist. And those who follow it are economically illiterate xenophobes.
The establishment created it to push the middle ground to the right (again).
Perhaps they’re all just “Deplorables.” All 4 million of them. Like Trump’s 60 million Deplorables, who don’t know what’s good for them and don’t respect their Betters. Bring back forelock tugging, I say.
They arent xenophobes, mistrust of strangers is a natural reflex and no amount of globalist gutmensch browbeating will change peoples instincts, its about self preservation.
You do not “welcome” aggrieved peoples whose livelihood you and your kind have spent the last decade razing to the ground. Citizens are left to carry the brunt of anger and a desire for revenge that was generated by the corrupt anti social self serving politicians running our nations.
However UKIP supporters are most definately economically illiterate. The financial policies that UKIP stand for are the very policies that brought the western world to the brink of economic ruin 10 years ago. Anyone that doesn’t get that should simply be wearing a conical hat with a large letter “D” printed on the front and keeping their stupid mouths shut. Forever.
I’m going to give you a thumbs up on this one olav. I’m a constitutionalist at heart, the bill of rights and magna carta give us in theory, some protection against a tyrannical monarch or government. How our globalist politicians can sell us out and consign our ancient history and constitution to the EU trashcan really gets under my skin. Speaking to many remainers, most have no idea what I’m talking about.
Fact is our politicians are first in line when it comes to cruise missile strikes on countries that have their own constitutional crises. The UK and US have the temerity to “show the way” on how democratic states should be by way of regime change. Theres so much wrong in the world at the moment. I want to leave the EU to protect my constitutional rights, I’m certainly no racist xenophobic bigot, as are many downtrodden Englishmen and women who have been under the boot of lying politicians for many years. We need complete political change in the UK. I see sales of yellow hi viz vests increasing. I refuse to criticise remainers as I respect their opinions, however, the betrayals may not go their way next time. The dishonesty and manipulations of the political classes affect all of us, leave or remain. Divide and conquer, it still works.
You won’t get any political change staying in the EU. Elect a government that wants a new approach and Brussels just sends round the hit men – like it did in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Ireland. The only change you will get out of Brussels is chump change.
Ireland was instructed to privatise water against the wishes of virtually all the electorate and even the politicians. It just sent its Goldman Sachs clones round to Athens and ordered the Greeks to sack Varoufakis and tear up their economic plans. The Italian government was dismissed by Brussels and replaced with a Goldman Sachs bureaucrat. Or the new Italian government – we don’t like the budget you’ve just drawn up, so we’ve torn it up and thrown it in the bin. The same thing happened in Spain and Portugal – we don’t like the people who have been elected – so we’re replacing them. Sack these key officials you’ve just appointed and put these people in their places instead.
What do you think they would do to a Corbyn government that tried to run the country in the interests of the 99%? Really??
Amidst all the brexit chaos, the tabloids are diverting attention about a 97 year old with a dodgy hip, hearing and eyesight almost killing 3 people in a car crash. And then to cap it all, instead of the pampered old codger being told to rip up his driving licence, he gets a brand new car delivered the very next day, probably for free.
They need to get a grip of these Boy Racers.
and is seen driving it with no seatbelt on, less than 24 hours after breaking a woman’s wrist and nearly killing a baby. daft old parasite that he is.
“They’ve come up with two answers – one fuelled by rage, the other by something worse: pity. The ragers say the plebs voted Leave because they’re a bit racist and got hoodwinked by the shiny, xenophobic demagoguery of the likes of Nigel Farage.”
Three actually. They were all duped by Putin and his propaganda.
I think (hope) John might have his tongue in his cheek. Putin is also to blame / thank (depending on your point of view) for the Yellow Jackets in France. The proof – the YJs are big followers of RT France and have chanted slogans in its praise during their demonstrations (“RT avec nous!”). So Putin is obviously the scheming mastermind behind it all, as usual.
After originally being sneered at and slandered at as Putin’s propaganda tool by the bootlicking French MSM journalists, who owe their jobs to their practically identical opinions, RT France is beginning to find its own tone and is putting out some good home-grown programmes, including talkshows. There is more diversity of opinion than in the MSM (where there is no diversity at all, except for irrelevant bickering between the mainstream identikit parties) and it is also telling some much-needed truth about Syria.
The YJ movement is certainly contributing to RT France’s ratings, much to the irritation of the aforementioned MSM hacks, who are being shown up for the servile propagandists they are. Macron will probably close it down – if he lasts long enough to do so.
RT is a decent news source. They give a platform to those that the Atlantic Bridge parasites and their lackeys expelled from our media over the last decade to be replaced by the globalist borg in the form of nutcases like Luke Harding.
What we are witnessing is a sort of secession of London and the Home Counties from the rest of the UK. A sort of Hong Kong where finance is King. I was in the belly of the beast in the financial district of London – Canary Wharf in Docklands – the other day, an area of tall buildings, wine bars, and aggressive opulence with thousands of yuppies milling around. This was the same socially and politically homogeneous working class enclave where my father was attempting to put out fires in 1940 with the Luftwaffe overhead shedding their incendiaries.
How times change.
Of course under the present dispensation of financialised capitalism cannot last. You cannot keep a population of 64 million fed and sheltered by buying and selling derivatives. The UK runs on debt – public and private. It has clocked up deficits on current account since the mid-1980s in the absurd belief that the rest of the world owes us a living. It doesn’t and it cannot live on tick forever. The UK as a whole is inhabited by speculators and rentiers and manufacturing and industry has been allowed to wither on the vine. And this process of course is having political and social ramifications. Thus Brexit in the UK, the yellow vests in France, the political developments in Italy, Hungary, Greece and Poland.
The #Resistance has begun.
Countries are not businesses. They don’t need to make a profit. Running a trade surplus (as you appear to wish for) means sending real goods and services offshore for other people to use, in exchange for electronic keystroke entries in bank accounts in foreign currency units.
Not such a great deal when people are going without at home.
As it is, foreigners are sending you more real goods and services for electronic keystroke pounds sterling in British bank accounts.
That’s a far preferable deal.
There’s reality, then there’s your political theory.
In the countries with trade and fiscal surpluses, the standard of living is far higher for the average Joe than in those running deficits. Germany, Holland, the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, Austria are all good examples of that. Long term thinking and ensuring that businesses pay enough tax to provide a good social system are vital.
In Britain it’s been all about me me me since Thatcher. The country is broken and there’s no going back for generations to come, sadly, the downward spiral is re-inforced by Brexit, a project concocted by the utterly selfish, upper class twat Tory Bullingdon Etonians. They are the same set of parasites and psychopaths who sent millions of their countrymen to die in the trenches and deserts as they lined their own pockets.
“. Germany, Holland, the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, Austria are all good examples of that. Long term thinking and ensuring that businesses pay enough tax to provide a good social system are vital…”
Small Defence budgets and a willingness to sacrifice the glories won on imperial battlefields are also a helpful means of redirecting income into investment.
MMT of course. Otherwise known as Magic Monetary Tricks. So the rest of the world does owe us a living then: exports are bad, and imports are good. So those impecunious Germans have got it all wrong with the export surpluses and we have got it right with our deficits on current account. Deficits we have to service by bond sales and sales of UK assets. Topsy turvy land.
The UK PLC is a Ponzi scheme. It carries on borrowing through bond sales to finance current expenditure – which is of course exactly how Charles Ponzi operated. The whole process will eventuate in either a default or hyper-inflation. Such was the case with the Mississippi Bubble, the Dutch tulip bubble the south sea bubble, and every other crisis which has taken place since 1971.
So the Brits, who looted us “lesser breeds without the law” of all we possessed for 200 years, destroyed our nations, cultures, and societies, and abandoned us when they had suxked us dry of everything they could, are now wallowing in poverty and despair, while being looted in turn?
How very sad.
Ordinary Brits may have done the donkey work of winning an Empire, but any benefit they got from it as the labour aristocracy was strictly limited. As ever, this is about a class divide that cuts across international lines.
They don’t seem to have been particularly unhappy when their lords and masters were enslaving Kenyans, famine-murdering Indians, and addicting Chinese to opium at gunpoint. I have absolutely no pity for *any* of them. They deserve everything they get and ten times more.
You seem to be advocating some kind of transchronological collective punishment. By that logic, you should be held responsible for the crimes of your local murdering elites, both now and in the distant past.
Let each person be held responsible for their own wrongdoing. Anything else is lunacy.
I agree with the principle of personal responsibility, but there’s also the responsibility of nations for what is done in their name and what their members benefit from. At a minimum, the UK owes serious reparations to India and all the African countries whose wealth it exploited for centuries, leaving the native populations high and dry.
It’s difficult to see how this would work without it just turning into another “holocaust reparations” racket. Money that went to Africa would be immediately recycled back to the personal western bank accounts of the West’s puppet dictators in Africa. I doubt that any impoverished African would see a cent of it. I knew an accountant for one of the big mining companies who was in charge of paying multi million bribes to African presidents.
From 1890-1910 Belgium looted Central Africa’s Congo Basin for rubber and ivory and butchered 50% of the population, 10 million people. If you go to Belgium you can see what Leopold built with his loot in Ostend and Brussels. Like most of our National Trust country houses were built with the proceeds of West Indian sugar plantations.The same thing is happening today – a similar number of people have died in The Congo in the resource wars of the past 20 years. I don’t see how you can begin to put a price on the slaughter and exploitation. 100 million slaughtered in North and South America. One billion ounces of silver extracted from Potosi with slave labour by the Spaniards. Gold and precious stones. And the infinitely more valuable mundane loot – potatoes, tomatoes, maize, chocolate, quinine, turkeys. How much should Britain give to Ireland for 800 years of slaughter and oppression? The Mongols could face a hefty reparations bill. So could the Israelis. But the Palestinians have about as much chance of seeing a single shekel as they do of being struck by lightning. Human suffering and justice don’t matter. If you have political clout, like Jews, you may be able to claim back a painting you lost 80 years ago. Everybody else can go whistle. The whole history of the planet is one of slaughter, massacre, looting and exploitation. And that’s true today. And it will be true tomorrow. It’s a jungle out there.
All we have today is US aggression and western imperialism under a new name with new pretexts. Fighting terrorism and spreading freedom and democracy, instead of fighting slavery and spreading Christianity and western civilisation. .
I don’t think giving money to all the bogus western NGOs and charities would do much good either. Oxfam would use the money for more big parties forcing children to have sex with animals. Save The Children would do more undercover work for their CIA bosses and give more humanitarian awards to Tony Blair. Amnesty International and the Red Cross would agitate for more humanitarian bombings and regime changes.
Personally, I would settle for a slightly better deal for African and Latin American countries to be able to export their cotton, sugar and tomatoes without running up against the brick wall of US tariffs and the Common Agricultural Policy. Just the chance to trade a little more easily. Currently if you are a farmer in America you are basically a civil servant. A US beet sugar farmer derives 60% of his income from government subsidy. For a cotton farmer, the figure is 70%.
A UN study put the cost of slavery and imperialism to the African continent at $777 trillion.
$777,000,000,000,000. The current ruling class in West Africa are the big slaving families of the 1700s and 1800s.
Whilst this is superficially attractive as a principle, it would change nothing in the long run. In fact, handing over lump sums would no doubt just feed corruption, as little of that money would end up in the hands of those who truly need it. The best option would be to fundamentally change the structure of trade and other relationships between the developed and developing world. Here I am thinking, as just one example, of the efforts made by what was termed the ‘New International Economic Order’ in the 1970s, to follow the example of OPEC in creating trade cartels that would drive up the prices of overly cheap primary goods exported from poor nations. Of course, the US responded by massively increasing interest rates, which were then used as a weapon to bring the heavily indebted nations to heal and scupper any chances of decent cash crop prices. One of the major strategies of the IMF when implementing the various structural adjustment programmes was to decrease export prices for primary sector commodities, so the trading conditions became even more unequal for those nations. Handing over reparations would do nothing to help these structural economic inequalities, and in fact may even make existing domestic social and political conditions worse.
“By that logic, you should be held responsible for the crimes of your local murdering elites, both now and in the distant past.”
Only if I made no attempt to make amends for their crimes. Did the Brutish even apologise, let alone make restitution for, the vilest imperialist criminal empire the planet has ever known?
“They don’t seem to have been particularly unhappy when their lords and masters were enslaving Kenyans, famine-murdering Indians, and addicting Chinese to opium at gunpoint. ”
How do you come by this important information? The most consistent opposition to imperialism always came from the working class and from its prophets such as William Cobbett.
The lives lived by British factory workers and and agricultural labourers in the period between about 1760 and 1914 (when things really began to improve, as cheap labour was reassigned to the role of cannon fodder) were unlikely to have been significantly better than those lived by the masses on the imperial peripheries.
As to the benefits, in the form of repression of the poor and regressive taxation, which the Empire brought to the compradors, Zamindars etc who waxed fat as brokers for the Empire, one only has to look at the zeal with which they have protected the class structures the British left behind them, to recognise what the Bengal Communists always saw, that there was a real, though often latent, community between the oppressed of the metropolis and the colonies.
What was done to India by the East India Company and its successors was dreadful. And so was what was done to the country people of England and the masses living in the slums of the cities. Nor was their life expectancy very different.
One thing remains very clear: so long as the various communities of labourers and their dependents blame each other for their problems (from urban terrorism to low wages) their exploiters will continue to tighten the screws, whilst developing ever more sophisticated explanations for being allowed by the many to get away with it.
My grandad started work in 1914 at the age of twelve. He was working 60 hours a week for 5 shillings (25p.)
All colonialist empires depend on collaborators. That does not in any way absolve the colonialists. Or their descendants, who still hold on to the wealth looted by their foresires and foredams. And as for the oppressed working class of Bruteain? They had work because the native industries of the colonies were deliberately destroyed in order to convert them into captive markets. Let’s see Bruteain at least formally apologise for the crimes of the Brutish Empire. Let’s see Brutish people demand their government apologise. Until then every single one of them is guilty as far as I am concerned.
No, the ruling class did that pal. There was little benefit for the people at the bottom.
Then the people at the bottom can bloody well loot the ruling class to recompense themselves after returning to us the money their ancestors stole. Everything in Bruteain used by the Brutish at the “bottom”, from the NHS to the railway system Thatcher privatised was built on money looted from us.
If they don’t recompense us then we have every right to gloat at their suffering.
Fair point,and India and china’s economies are on the rise. India needs to kick Monsanto into touch though. The boot really is on the other foot now.
Why use a misleading headline? “Main Street, pre-Brexitland” is what this about.
We need to create a new political system in the UK – One based on true democracy – We were stripped of all we held so dear when we joined the EU ‘like lambs to the slaughter’.
Rather than wasting £11billion on smart meters when you realise that Germany negotiated with the EU that only meters on businesses using over 10,000KWh were necessary that money could have been used to develop and build molten salt thorium reactors.
Two problems solved at once, cheap and reliable power in this country, a revival of our northern engineering companies and even something to export.
So simple, it is outside government thinking.
Smart Meters enable market pricing of energy which gives energy companies a lot of flexibility to manage the ‘yield’ from their customer base. This type of pricing — pricing that appears almost like a lottery to the end user — is what you get when companies’ market matures — instead of thinking up innovative ways of efficiently delivering service and increasing your product portfolio you just look endlessly for ways to sell the product you have at the highest price possible. The goal is to appear cheap but to make sure the product isn’t.
“Smart Meters enable market pricing of energy which gives energy companies a lot of flexibility to manage the ‘yield’ from their customer base.”
And feed (with the emphasis on the “fee”) a lot of their collateral data into the big state surveillance system.
It’s dog eat dog,
It’s all just me, me, me.
And it won’t stop,
With tunnel vision greed.
Look around and tell me what you see
We’re going down towards calamity.
So say goodbye, there isn’t long to go,
We take, we take, goodbye tomorrow.
This is a good article but I take issue with the notion that the “rot set in when Margaret Thatcher arrived in Downing Street”. I think that Thatcher’s role tends to be over-emphasized because she was in effect the visible manifestation of something that had long been in the pipeline. The Tories learned a great deal from Heath’s humiliating defeat with the miners of a previous decade. The Ridley Plan, written as early as ’77, showed the basic tactics to be used e.g. building up of coal stocks, plans to import coal from non-union foreign parts, non-union lorry drivers to be recruited by haulage companies etc. Also by the time the mid-80s arrived, there was a much weakened trade union movement and the NUM could be more successfully isolated than before. Thatcher was just the cabaret act at the front of the stage while this well-prepared scenario was rolled out.
My mother was politically active in her youth and she used to tell us back in the 60s that the ‘good times’ — those “You’ve Never Had It So Good” times — were going to get clawed back. The post-war consensus came about partly because ordinary people were fed up with the economic and social system that brought about first of all WW1 and the Great Depression so needed bribing to participate in WW2 (and post-WW2 there was competition with socialism and even communism — the first order of business was to defeat the Reds at home and abroad). Once the establishment became secure they started the clawbacks, clawbacks that accelerated with the breakup of the USSR.
The Cold War never really went away, though. What’s going to be interesting is what happens with China; it was supposed to be just a larger version of the Philippines but has become a technologically advanced society with an economy to rival the US’s in size. The US can’t compete with it without changing its social structure — education, for example, cannot be just a profit center — so it will try to tear it down, something that could easily become a proper war.
I’ve always been struck by the huge gap between presentation and events in British politics. Just as all that cute 70s sit-com stuff was being rolled out and you had Morecambe and Wise with their eager guest stars participating to create a spurious sense of “classless” camaraderie, the most vicious class war was constantly going on. Edward Heath invoked the Emergency Powers Act no less than five times between ’70 and ’74.
Britains first neoliberal ‘budgets’ (where fiscal balances replaced full employment as the primary policy aim) occurred under the Callaghan Labour government. Was it Dennis Healy? Thatcher just carried the madness further.
“Thatcher’s role tends to be over-emphasized because she was in effect the visible manifestation of something that had long been in the pipeline.”
Excellent point Makropulos, Thatcher is a perennial scapegoat used to paper over long held plans.
Me thinks you have forgotten the devil, the late Sir Keith Joseph who provided the so called imtellectual case, for breaking the limited power of the unionised workers ?
“Thatcher was just the cabaret act at the front of the stage while this well-prepared scenario was rolled out.”
You can’t mount a circus good enough to misdirect attention from the actual disappearancing of the bread with a naff ringmaster.
“The Ridley Plan, written as early as ’77”
And before that there was Selsdon Man.
Thatcher was a cabaret act, alright, singing songs that were classics in the C17th, songs about how the poor only worked if starving while the rich needed wealth and leisure to systematise such observations. And that is not to mention the clergy busy producing variations on the theme of The Devil making work for idle hands.
Brendan O’Neill never explains. St Brendan, the patron saint of Brexit, only proselytises. He’s a revolting propagandist.
No wonder his rag Spiked! now only allows comments via facebook. Those who understand the reality of the world today will find that very amusing … hate speech is free speech they crow on Spiked! Only if you belong to St Brendan’s elite media. If you’re one of the peasants you can have your speech censored by NATO.
Do you have anything to say about the substance of the piece? Or are you content with sniping and personal insults?
When I saw the name Brendan O’Neill appear I was suspicious – but his quote given above seems true to me. Just because someone is generally and arse, doesn’t mean they are always wrong.
The underlying reality that the racism in this debate is actually on the side of the snobbish remainers, who see in Europe a bastion against Eurasia- aka Russia plus the re-emerging victims of Empire, led by China- and an outpost for the Empire, built on the conflation of European and White, Headquartered in Washington.
You want racism? look at the rhetoric directed at Russians, look at the treatment the EU/NATO/USA mete out, often enough using their ‘white’ colony Israel, to the people of the Middle East-the Yemenis, the Iraqis, the Iranians, the Syrians. Not to mention the subjects of the kleptocratic tyrants the ‘West’ favours in the Gulf lands, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
The occasional old fashioned bigotries of the working people-whipped up by Tories since the C19th and their fascist allies- has no future. As the campaigns against austerity and inequality and to preserve the NHS gain traction and the cause of international Peace, grows with it, the bigots will fade away. But the promoters of wars and genocide, well rewarded members of the political castes will continue to call for ‘Europeans sticking together’ to see if they can squeeze another generation or two of privilege out of the idea of Empire.
You want racism? look at the rhetoric directed at Israelis, a drop in an ocean of Islam.
When you DO bad things (like setting up the only explicitly racist state in the world) people SAY bad things about you. Something our chums in the Kikenreich can never understand.
Never heard of Pakistan? The UK is full of them
I know dozens of Islamic states and only one Jewish state: who are exclusivists?
Zionist drivel.
Let’s have a written constitution for the UK declaring this country to be the nation state of the White British Christian Gentile People who alone are allowed to have full civil rights, own land and property, enter the country as migrants, and realise their aspirations here.
After all, there are dozens of non-White, non Christian, countries. What’s wrong with having just one country for White British Christian Gentile people? Who could possibly object to that?
I’m sure the Board of Deputies and all the goy Friends of Israel wouldn’t mind.
Trust Antonym to bring his/her obsession with Islam and how the religion supposedly condones violence and all kinds of abuse (and how other religions don’t endorse such viciousness – as if Hindu extremists don’t lynch Christian missionaries in India, Buddhist extremists don’t thump Rohingyas in Myanmar and Jewish settler extremists don’t kick Christians and Muslims alike) to throw the discussion off track.
We know that in most cases where Islamic extremism exists, it is being funded or otherwise aided and abetted by Saudi and other Gulf oil sheikhdom interests, and those interests in turn are being funded and armed by US and European and other Western governments. Even the Libyan terrorists responsible for the Manchester bombing attack not so long ago turned out to have been brought to Britain by MI5 and MI6 with the connivance if not the approval of Theresa May (though she had to have known – unless she’s even more stupid than she looks) when she was Home Secretary.
Go shove your obsession with Islamic violence elsewhere, Antonym, no-one here is interested. Maybe if you’re so keen on it, you should join a Salafi or Saudi-funded Wahhabi sect.
Yes, Islam the religion of Peace came till the walls of Vienna in 1683 funded by “others”. Or to Nigeria. Or Bangladesh, were hundreds of thousands of non Muslims were slaughtered in 1971.
On the other side Hinduism and Buddhism are well known – in your circle – to be violent ideologies. Just check for proof who in the UK were into gang sexual abuse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexual_abuses_perpetrated_by_groups#United_Kingdom
shouldn’t you be reading the Gatestone institute shit, Antonym? it’s further up your hasbara road than off-g
If you are a Jew than I’m a Muslim…
And once again it’s Antonym and his one note symphony.
This is page one of the Zionist playbook. Throw up a smokescreen, like an octopus squirting out black ink. Blame Shady Wahabia. Blame the Oil Companies. Blame those violent Muslims/ who ever. Oy vey! Just don’t talk about Israel. And never, ever, criticise Israel unless you have first criticised everybody else in the world, and then only on terms permitted by the Board of Deputies, after lengthy, sycophantic, fawning praise of the Kikenreich.
Not just MENA but inside the EU itself.
The racist statements meted out by the MSM to justify the destruction of Greece was quite breathtaking – including claims of DNA i.e. ‘modern Greeks have no genetic connection to ancient Greeks’; lazy and drinking ouzo all day; scroungers and welfare cheats [we had a skeletal welfare system] etc. etc. etc. As country after country in the Mediterranean littoral fell to the euro the general theme was extended to the whole European south.
What’s true in South Shields doesn’t necessarily apply as broadly as you imply across the north. Newcastle has its bigots but it’s not teeming with fear and xenophobia; it voted Remain, albeit by a slim margin. But your larger point is true enough, the Tories have neglected the north. We get a lot of EU funding for arts, science, and education, probably compares well with what London throws our way. It’ll be missed for sure if Brexit goes through.
Indeed, it’s racist to imply that white working class people from northern England are racist.
White people throughout Europe are scheduled for demographic replacement by the Brussels elite, who want completely open borders and uncontrolled Third World immigration, in an apocalyptic Camp Of The Saints. Listen to these people in their own words, Sarkozy, Bernard Henri Levy, Merkel, Gregor Gysi, Von Berg, Barbara Spectre, Soros. It’s all on Youtube. The aim is to completely break down the nation state and any sense of national identity, with people who are easily controlled and can be shovelled around like so much cement to build their Globalist European Superstate Utopia. Sarkozy said his most important task was to bring about miscegenation in France, and he would use as much force as necessary to achieve this. Levy, who coincidentally manufactured most of the lies used to justify the destruction of Libya, has demanded that at least 2 million black Africans be brought into France annually. Creatures like Merkel, Gysi, Van Berg, and the German Left lose no opportunity to declare how much they hate their country and people and want to see white people reduced to a minority in the population as soon as possible. Bringing 2 million unassimilable Third World immigrants into Germany and 200,000 into Sweden in 2015 just represents this plan in action, which goes way back to Coudenhove-Kalergi. That the same thing was clearly on the cards for the UK may have been a factor in Brexit. You can’t deliberately destroy a society without some reaction. Like the election of Trump was partly a reaction to the planned demographic replacement of white Americans, openly touted by the Democrats as a means of gaining permanent power. Bliar openly accelerated immigration into the country “to rub their noses in it”, ie the Deplorables so despised by the Islington Set. Call this racism if you like. It probably is – anti white racism by the Globalist Elite. If this has provoked a reaction, whose fault is that? When you openly despise people, what right do you have to expect their support?
But the Common Market/ EEC/ EU has never generated much affection in the UK population. The most it has ever achieved is a very grudging acceptance. It was never intended to meet the needs of ordinary people, It was always a corporatist and globalist project. Arrogant, venal, corrupt, remote, irrelevant, wasteful, bureaucratic, undemocratic and anti democratic. As such it just typifies political systems throughout the western world generally.
People have cottoned on to the fact that these systems don’t exist for their benefit and never will. Because they aren’t intended to. They are designed to serve the interests of the 0.1% Hence the effort to divert them with Identity Politics and Grievance Culture. Ethnic minorities, feminists, gays, trannies, 57 varieties of degeneracy and perversion.
Two stories about the EU may help to explain public disaffection and contempt more than any “racism.”
I got to know some council officials in the area where I was working, including the Returning Officer, the guy in charge of the ballot boxes and the pencils at election time. I got chatting to him about his job, and asked him out of interest who the Common Market MEP was for the area. He didn’t know – he didn’t have a clue. I asked a couple of reporters from the local paper shortly afterwards. They didn’t know, never heard of him (her?) Frustrated, I persisted. I asked a Labour councillor I knew socially. No idea – never heard of him. I tried again a couple of times with the same result, and gave up. Whoever it was, nobody had ever heard of him/ her. You wouldn’t know who it was if he jumped up and bit you.
About the same time, a Common Market MEP for somewhere completely different was stopped coming through Customs and found to be in possession of cocaine, gay pornography and gimp masks. He had to resign, which surprised me, because I thought he’d just brazen it out like they all do. One of the EU bosses said on television that it was a great tragedy because Mr. Gimp Mask was such a distinguished figure in the EU who had made such a tremendous contribution over 20 years. But nobody had ever heard of the f***er. His own wife (if he had one) probably wouldn’t know who he was. His own dog wouldn’t know who he was. He had just merged into the wallpaper in Brussels for the past 20 years.
Does anyone reading the site know the name of their Common Market MEP? If so you’re a better man than I am. If you went out and asked 10,000 people at random, how many people do you think would know? I would go round Ladbroke’s and put my last dollar on zero.
How can any institution like that have any legitimacy? Really? Seriously??
Miscegenation?! It’s a term I’ve come across ONLY in the lexicon of white supremacists.
I was just quoting old Sarko himself, Vaska. It’s the term he used. If it’s good enough for the illustrious President de La Republique, it must be good enough for peasants like me.