Phil McDuff

"Ordinary hard-working people have genuine concerns about immigration, and to ignore immigration is to undemocratically ignore their needs." Other than the resurgent importance of jam, this is the clearest message we are supposed to take out of Brexit.

So concerned are we that the government’s hands are tied that it must send all the doctors back where they came from. It must crack down on students coming here to get educated in our universities in exchange for money. It must check teenagers’ teeth lest we accidentally extend compassion to a Syrian adult.

Who are “ordinary hard-working people” though? It seems the consensus following Brexit is that they’re the marginalised white working class; the people who have been left behind by modernity, who feel alienated by the “liberal metropolitan elite”. I’m a white man from the north-east, living in strongly Brexit-voting Middlesbrough, so you might expect me to tell you all off for looking down on us from your ivory towers. But the truth is that this outbreak of “the poor proles can’t help it” is both incorrect and patronising.

The working class mostly lack our own voices in the media. Instead, we are reported on. This reporting seems, even now, to believe that the true working-class identity is, as Kelvin MacKenzie put it in the 1980s, “a right old fascist”. Culturally insular, not interested in or smart enough to understand real news, generally afraid of people not like him (it’s always a him).

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/25/white-working-class-brexiters-politicians-bigotry

SAN FRANCISCO — On the morning of March 10, nine days after Hillary Clinton had won big on Super Tuesday and all but clinched the Democratic nomination, a series of emails were sent to the most senior members of her campaign.

At a glance, they looked like a standard message from Google, asking that users click a link to review recent suspicious activity on their Gmail accounts. Clicking on them would lead to a page that looked nearly identical to Gmail’s password reset page with a prompt to sign in. Unless they were looking closely at the URL in their address bar, there was very little to set off alarm bells.

From the moment those emails were opened, senior members in Clinton’s campaign were falling into a trap set by one of the most aggressive and notorious groups of hackers working on behalf of the Russian state. The same group would shortly target the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). It was an orchestrated attack that — in the midst of one of the most surreal US presidential races in recent memory — sought to influence and sow chaos on Election Day.

The hack first came to light on June 15, when the Washington Post published a story based on a report by the CrowdStrike cybersecurity firm alleging that a group of Russian hackers had breached the email servers of the DNC. Countries have spied on one another’s online communications in the midst of an election season for as long as spies could be taught to use computers — but what happened next, the mass leaking of emails that sought to embarrass and ultimately derail a nominee for president, had no precedent in the United States. Thousands of emails — some embarrassing, others punishing — were available for public perusal while the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump, congratulated Russia on the hack and invited it to keep going to “find the 30,000 emails that are missing” from Clinton’s private email server. It was an attack that would edge the US and Russia closer to the brink of a cyberwar that has been simmering for the better part of a decade.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/meet-fancy-bear-the-russian-group-hacking-the-us-election

There is one certainty as we survey our future: Britain must go through a highly complex and unprecedented procedure to detach itself from Brussels after more than four decades of European Union membership. The nation may have voted to leave, but there are many possible ways forward. So there must be torturous talks over several years with 27 states all seeking to protect their own interests, and the outcome felt in homes and firms across the country.

The negotiation results will shape our nation for decades. They could lead to the break-up of the union, disrupt sectors of the economy and alter Britain’s standing in the world. It is little surprise there are strong feelings on both sides of this debate over the best way forward given the hopes and fears. Yet suddenly there seems to be a sense of panic among those that pushed for this break as they close down discussion over the seismic consequences of the electorate’s decision.

This is, of course, depressing – especially when the Brexit camp fought under the banner of democracy and sovereignty. Now they hurl insults at opponents who dare question their wisdom and howl down those who dare offer different perspectives on the way ahead. The ballot offered a binary choice without specifics. But ministers refuse to discuss Britain stance on departure deals, while politicians proposing that parliament should have a say are accused of subverting the will of the people.

I have sympathy for the prime minister, trapped by the electorate’s self-destructive verdict and swirling political realities. Clearly, divisions fuelled by the referendum are worsening, inflaming reluctance among leavers to accept challenge to their one-eyed view of the world after a shock victory. I saw this at the Tory party conference, where as someone opposing the idea of our nation turning inwards, I was constantly accused of being a sore loser. Typical was one leading leave voice who threatened to stop following me on social media since I refused to share his optimism.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/18/brexiters-debate-scared-plan-britains-future

Ken Loach sits with his hands clutching his chair for dear life, his head shrinking into his shoulders, a skinny question mark of a man. Never did a man appear so diffident. And then he opens his mouth.

Loach has spent the past half-century making films that shake with anger, and is just about to release his angriest yet. I, Daniel Blake, winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes film festival, is about a man broken by the British benefits system. His doctor says he is too sick to work after a near-fatal heart attack, but the Department for Work and Pensions decides he is not entitled to sickness benefit. Blake finds himself trapped in a downward spiral after his jobseeker’s allowance is suspended, because he is thought not to be trying hard enough to find the work he is unfit to do. The film is so spare and spartan, it could be a parable. It is also immensely moving – particularly a scene in a food bank, when a young mother Blake has befriended breaks down in a manner that borders on the feral.

“Angry? Mmmmmmm,” Loach says so quietly it barely registers. He talks about the people he and his regular writer Paul Laverty met while doing their research: the young lad with nothing in his fridge who hadn’t eaten properly for three days; the woman ashamed of attending food banks; the man told to queue for a casual shift at 5.30am, then sent home an hour later because he wasn’t needed. “That constant humiliation to survive. If you’re not angry about it, what kind of person are you?”

We are in a cafe close to his office in Soho, London. Loach orders coffee and croissants. Meekly, of course, but his meekness is deceptive: even when ordering coffee, he knows exactly what he wants. “I’ll have a little glass of tap water, please, and a tiny drop of cold milk, thank you. Yes,” he continues, “we met so many people who had been humiliated and destroyed and lost all sense of being able to hold their own in the world.”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/oct/15/ken-laoch-film-i-daniel-blake-kes-cathy-come-home-interview-simon-hattenstone

Jemima Goldsmith paid homage to embattled Republican leader Donald Trump on Tuesday evening, but it certainly wasn’t the tribute he might have hoped for.

The associate editor of the New Statesman magazine attended Unicef's annual Halloween Ball dressed as Melania Trump, complete with a plastic version of her husband strapped to her back.



http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/jemima-goldsmith-halloween-costume-donald-trump-groping-melania-trump-a7360676.html

Mark Bowden, the reporter and author of the book Black Hawk Down, was "prepared to like" the aging and increasingly hefty Donald Trump when he set out to profile the mogul for Playboy in 1996. The two men took a trip down to Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort for a weekend, but the reality of The Donald quickly made any affection impossible.

"Trump struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong," Bowden wrote last year in Vanity Fair, recalling his time profiling Trump. "He remains the most vain man I have ever met. And he was trying to make a good impression." Any remaining chance of that went out the window when Trump unleashed his fury on an equipment box at the Mar-a-Lago tennis courts, as Bowden wrote in the profile:

The Donald had his tile man—a genius! the best!—come out just a few weeks ago to lay smooth, rust-colored slate on the platforms between the burgundy clay tennis courts. It looks a lot nicer than plain concrete. Handsome stone water coolers stand at one end of the platform, and there's enough room under a yellow-striped umbrella for four chairs and a small table. Except, today, smack in the middle of each platform there's this...this thing...this little metal box about two feet high and a foot wide with wires and tubes sticking out of it, right where the table is supposed to go. Inspecting the courts with his tennis pro, Anthony Boulle, Donald probes the ugly box first with his foot.

...

Donald kicks the thing. It doesn't budge so he bends over, pissed royally now, and gives the thing a hard shove. It flops over. Water from the ruptured main begins to spout two, three, four feet high, rapidly soaking and then puddling on the carefully combed courts. The Donald, muttering angrily, skips out of the spray and strides off, stepping around the widening pool.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/trump-files-donald-goes-apeshit-water-cooler

David Cameron has been rated one of the worst Prime Ministers in modern history by political experts.

The former Conservative leader came third from bottom in the table of post-war leaders, faring worse than Labour's Gordon Brown, in the survey of academics who specialise in politics and contemporary British history.

The European Union referendum was ranked as Cameron's greatest failure by nine out of ten of the respondents, with one claiming it was the greatest defeat of any prime minister "since Lord North lost America".

Only Sir Anthony Eden, whose reputation was left in tatters by his handling of the Suez crisis, and Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who only lasted a year, were ranked lower than Cameron in the list of 13 prime ministers who have served since 1945.

http://www.itv.com/news/2016-10-13/david-cameron-rated-one-of-the-worst-prime-ministers-in-modern-history/

Prime Minister Theresa May has accepted that Parliament should be allowed to vote on her plan for taking Britain out of the European Union, but asked lawmakers to do it in a way that gives her space to negotiate.

The decision seemed to calm investors after they dumped the pound on concern May was taking a gung-ho approach to the negotiations. The currency took a beating after May signaled her intention to put immigration curbs before the City of London’s interests in pulling Britain out of the European Union.

Parliament will debate on Wednesday a motion from the opposition Labour Party calling for a “full and transparent debate on the government’s plan for leaving the EU” and for Parliament to be able to “properly scrutinize that plan” before she begins formal talks. The request is supported by some lawmakers from May’s own Conservative Party.

In response, May late on Tuesday tabled an amendment that effectively accepted the motion, adding that there shouldn’t be an attempt to block Brexit or “undermine the negotiating position of the government.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-11/may-backs-down-on-parliament-vote-over-her-brexit-terms

May's Five U-Turns in Three Months

Theresa May has not yet been Prime Minister for three months and she has already u-turned on five significant policy issues:

* EU citizens’ right to remain: During her leadership campaign May refused to guarantee the status of EU nationals living in the UK, now the government says they are “100% sure” they’ll be allowed to stay.

* Hinkley Point: May announced a welcome pause on the new power plant, before approving the same deal proposed by Osborne.

* Northern Powerhouse: Reports suggested May had decided to ditch Osborne’s pet project, she’s now said she’s fully behind it.

* Foreign doctors: Jeremy Hunt suggested foreign doctors wouldn’t be able to stay in the country if they could be replaced by British recruits. May then failed three times in an interview to say the policy would go ahead.

* Foreign staff lists: Amber Rudd’s plan to force companies to publish how many foreign staff they employ has now been abandoned.

http://order-order.com/2016/10/10/theresa-mays-u-turns/

UKIP leadership hopeful Steven Woolfe was taken to hospital following an altercation at a meeting of party MEPs, interim leader Nigel Farage has said.

In a statement he said Mr Woolfe had "subsequently collapsed" and his "condition is serious".

Mr Woolfe, MEP for the North West, was taken to hospital in Strasbourg for tests.

...

In his statement, Mr Farage said: "I deeply regret that following an altercation that took place at a meeting of UKIP MEPs this morning that Steven Woolfe subsequently collapsed and was taken to hospital. His condition is serious."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37572377