June 30, 2016

UK in breach of international human rights

June 29, 2016

"The good of the country!!!!"

"You have to think of the good of the country!!!! You can't let your own intra-party squabbles and your egotistical desire to hang on to power drag us all down ... Erm ... Erm ... Why are you all laughing?! THIS IS SERIES!!!!1! Now some of you are crying ...."

June 29, 2016

The truth behind the Labour coup, when it really began and who manufactured it

Now we can argue Corbyn's faults, what's "best" for Labour right now, yadayadayada, but it's clear that this company has orchestrated events from the (sole) planted heckler of Corbyn at the Pride rally that the media so eagerly promoted before the weekend to the staged timing of the resignations up to the no confidence vote.

The Canary's a partisan outlet, but you can research Portland Communications online, check out other aspects.

I'll say it again: Chilcot. Chilcot. Chilcot.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but maybe someone can persuade me that the timing of this attempted coup, co-ordinated if not instigated by a PR firm staffed largely by Blairites, doesn't stink to high heaven.

I'm all ears.

June 28, 2016

Amid chaos, Sturgeon finds time to troll Gove

While the other parties are flailing and fighting ...

Background details on these *hack ptt* experts here: http://news.scotland.gov.uk/News/Standing-Council-on-Europe-25c6.aspx

June 27, 2016

Favourite Brexit memes

Dark humour's a British specialty in times of trouble. This might sink like a stone, but I've seen so many I really like over the past few days, I thought it might not be a bad idea to gather some of them together.

Here's a starter.




ETA: If you want to nominate big gifs, maybe link to them rather than pasting them below? - Not all of us have high-speed broadband!

June 27, 2016

Scotland welcome to join EU, Merkel ally says

Not sure how this plays into what I'd been seeing as Merkel's good cop versus Junckers' bad cop routine towards the UK as a whole in the aftermath of the vote.

The cost and terms of joining are the devil in the detail, of course, but it's a 180-degree switch from the stance during the independence referendum, when we were told such a thing could never happen.

June 25, 2016

Brexistential Crisis

Repost: Brexistential Crisis – what would Cassandra say?

In January Colin Hay, SPERI’s co-director, predicted that Britain would vote to leave the European Union in 2016. Today as that prediction (in the manner of Cassandra) comes to pass we’re reposting Colin’s article which goes on to make two further predictions about the break-up of Britain and a second financial crisis.

...

Prediction 1: Britain will vote to leave the European Union in 2016

I never thought I would write, type or say these words (and I have now done all three). But the brutal reality, at least for the sooth-saying political economist, is that Cameron’s Conservative administration may prove to be the last of a Britain in Europe. Until recently, that did not seem very likely. When the spectre of an in/out referendum on EU membership was first unveiled, there seemed little prospect of Brexit. Indeed, it was presumably precisely because there was so little prospect of Brexit that such a referendum could be contemplated as a means of lancing the simmering boil on the question of Europe in the Conservative Party.

...

Prediction 2: Brexit will lead to break-up

But that, of course, would not be the end of it. Far from it. For, as we all know, Brexit would be, and is, simply unacceptable to Scotland. It is in fact quite difficult to imagine how Brexit would not lead to a second Scottish independence referendum; and scarcely less difficult to imagine how a second Scottish independence referendum under such conditions would not lead to a massive majority, in effect, for the break-up of Britain.

...

Prediction 3: The second crisis is on its way

A final prediction is certainly no less bleak. In a sense, it is independent of the others in that it takes neither Brexit nor break-up for it to come true – though either and certainly both together could well be precipitating factors or accelerants. The brutal reality, once again, is that the British economy is more fragile today than it was in 2007 on the eve of the crisis. A second crisis looks extremely likely, if not perhaps immanent. Despite the rhetoric of deficit reduction and rebalancing, the economy is more polarised and distorted than ever before; Britain is more reliant than it has ever been on consumption-driven growth; private debt is at near-record levels and even more responsible than in 2007 for the modest growth Britain now enjoys; Britain’s balance of trade position has deteriorated further since the crisis and there is essentially no productive investment in the economy; Britain’s infrastructure is dilapidated and decaying, with austerity in effect committing the government to an indefinite public investment strike; and, above all, the housing market (which has been primed, pumped and stoked more vigorously and frenetically since 2011 than ever before) is now massively over-valued and exhibits all the signs of a bubble on the verge of bursting. What makes this worse is that any such second crisis would take place in a context of massive public debt, interest rates already at an historically unprecedented low and with the world economy on the verge of a deflationary stagnation. It is not at all clear what could or would be done.

Full article: http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/2016/06/24/repost-brexistential-crisis-what-would-cassandra-say/

June 25, 2016

There are liars and then there’s Boris Johnson and Michael Gove

Nick Cohen


Where was the champagne at the Vote Leave headquarters? The happy tears and whoops of joy? If you believed Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, the Brexit vote was a moment of national liberation, a day that Nigel Farage said our grateful children would celebrate with an annual bank holiday.

Johnson and Gove had every reason to celebrate. The referendum campaign showed the only arguments that matter now in England are on the right. With the Labour leadership absent without leave and the Liberal Democrats and Greens struggling to be heard, the debate was between David Cameron and George Osborne, defending the status quo, and the radical right, demanding its destruction. Johnson and Gove won a dizzying victory with the potential to change every aspect of national life, from workers’ rights to environmental protection.

Yet they gazed at the press with coffin-lid faces and wept over the prime minister they had destroyed. David Cameron was “brave and principled”, intoned Johnson. “A great prime minister”, muttered Gove. Like Goneril and Regan competing to offer false compliments to Lear, they covered the leader they had doomed with hypocritical praise. No one whoops at a funeral, especially not mourners who are glad to see the back of the deceased. But I saw something beyond hypocrisy in those frozen faces: the fear of journalists who have been found out.

The media do not damn themselves, so I am speaking out of turn when I say that if you think rule by professional politicians is bad wait until journalist politicians take over. Johnson and Gove are the worst journalist politicians you can imagine: pundits who have prospered by treating public life as a game. Here is how they play it. They grab media attention by blaring out a big, dramatic thought. An institution is failing? Close it. A public figure blunders? Sack him. They move from journalism to politics, but carry on as before. When presented with a bureaucratic EU that sends us too many immigrants, they say the answer is simple, as media answers must be. Leave. Now. Then all will be well.

Full article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/25/boris-johnson-michael-gove-eu-liars

June 25, 2016

Thanks for saying this.

The last few days have been like playing Whack-A-Mole while trying hard to stay patient and not get hides or fall out with folks for no productive reason.

I've followed US politics closely for years, I'm married to an American, and although I'll chip in on some conversations about US politics, I wouldn't dream of making some of the grand assumptions and pronouncements about it that I see about UK politics here on an hourly basis.

DU has a fairly numerous UK sub-community and a currently increasingly active UK Group. We're certainly not in lockstep, but we have relevant perspectives and experiences and views that so often seem to get lost or ignored among the stream of opinions from afar that swamp threads. That's been more and more apparent in the last few tumultuous and traumatic days.

That's not so much a complaint as an observation.

June 25, 2016

"The left" in the UK lost the ability to counter that sort of missplaced blame

(the blame for the ills motivating most folks who would be subsceptible to leftist arguments) under New Labour and Blair.

I'm talking about blaming the EU (and immigration) for the most pressing ills that people are complaining about in their everyday lives, when it's the policies of successive UK governments, including Labour itself in more recent times, that are the primary causes.

They disrespected, ignored and effectively dismantled a local infrastructure in the Constituency Labour Parties that was embedded in communities, because they thought it was less troublesome to rely on more "modern" methods of communicating with and attracting voters on those rare occasions when they could be bothered even thinking about voters - every four or five years when they needed to mobilize to keep them in power. (CLP's could be a major thorn in the side of the New Labour leadership because they brought unwelcome resolutions to conference and tended to weed out non-local right-wingers from standing as candidates, which meant that the leadership couldn't reward loyal apparatchiks by parachuting them into safe seats without a serious fight.)

The old CLPs were indigenous. They tied in with long-established initiatives like the Workers' Educational Association that would be able to help people explore and identify the political reasons behind the ills their communities were experiencing, and local union branches that had earned people's trust by being there for them when they needed them.

Once they as a result had to rely on the media for their main form of outreach, they had to suck up to it - so Blair courted the likes of Murdoch, and it skewed Labour's priorities and meant that policy became hostage to other agendas and messaging that could turn on a hairpin if Labour, on increasingly rare occasions, looked like it might do anything to seriously challenge the status quo and big business interests. It also led to a greater emphasis on fundraising because there were advertising and costly photo ops to fund that didn't come cheap, which along with the denigration of union funding meant that they needed to rely increasingly on rich sponsors from the business community.

They lost touch. They've reaped the whirlwind of that most notably in Scotland, but it applies everywhere. There's no way to rebuild that from scratch nowadays. There might be a chance to recoup some of it in a smaller way with the groundswell of popular support for Corbyn, but the PLP is suspicious of that for the very reasons I outlined above for why they turned away from the CLPs in the first place, and seems keen to alienate that new blood at the earliest opportunity.

So these local communities have to find their own fragmented sources of information elsewhere. And that's generally the mainstream media and the conventional wisdom of the pub and modern workplace and what their neighbours think etc.

And so here we are.