Prejudice against immigrants from the European Union was a “major” deciding factor in the Brexit referendum, according to a new study.

But people who actually met foreigners living in Britain tended to have a positive experience and this appears to have helped persuade many people to vote Remain, the researchers found.

The results suggest that the Brexit campaign’s emphasis on immigration – dubbed “Project Hate” by the pro-EU camp – was politically astute.

...

Dr Meleady, of the University of East Anglia, said the figures showed prejudice against EU immigrants was a “major” deciding factor in the referendum, but it was unclear whether this would have swayed the result.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-racism-immigrant-prejudice-major-factor-leave-vote-win-study-a7801676.html

Paul Dacre: the most dangerous man in Britain?

Paul Dacre is the Daily Mail's low-profile editor. To some - including many in government - he is a malign force, using his paper to hound minorities and other vulnerable targets, and savage liberalism in any form. To others he is the most gifted journalist of his generation, a moral man with his finger on the pulse of Middle England. Andy Beckett went in search of the truth

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/feb/22/dailymail.pressandpublishing

Paul Dacre: the most dangerous man in Britain?

Paul Dacre is the Daily Mail's low-profile editor. To some - including many in government - he is a malign force, using his paper to hound minorities and other vulnerable targets, and savage liberalism in any form. To others he is the most gifted journalist of his generation, a moral man with his finger on the pulse of Middle England. Andy Beckett went in search of the truth

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/feb/22/dailymail.pressandpublishing

The Queen’s hat looks very, very very much like the flag of the European Union

It has long been known that the endurance of constitutional monarchy at the head of the British legislative system rests on the sacred principle of never, ever, ever pissing about with Royal Ascot and and never before has it been more gravely tested.

Not once in the broad sweep of sixty-five long years of British history has Her Majesty the Queen come close to compromising the fundamental constitutional tenet of political neutrality of the monarchy, but tell her she might not make it in time for the Jersey Stakes at half two and do not, frankly, be surprised if the response you get is: “Whatever you say, but one will not be wearing one’s crown on one’s head, one will be wearing a massive EU flag-hat instead.”

Was it an accident, this nakedly pro-Brussels bonnet? One suspects we will never know the truth, but given one commenter on the Daily Mail website was sufficiently enraged to describe the Queen herself as a “left liberal luvvie traitor!!!” we probably do not need to.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/queens-speech-ascot-eu-flag-hat-a7801611.html

More than 50 Labour politicians, including frontbenchers, have signed a statement claiming young voters backed their party in 2017 because they wanted it to “stop the Tories in their tracks” over Brexit.

The group, made up of dozens of MPs, peers and MEPs on the left and right of the party, claimed the best way to do that was by “fighting unambiguously for membership of the single market”.

In an intervention that will increase the pressure on Jeremy Corbyn to further differentiate his position from that of the Tories, the politicians say “mere access” to the internal market will make working people poorer and hit revenues.

That will make it harder to “bring an end to years of damaging Tory austerity”, they say.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/20/labour-politicians-join-forces-to-fight-against-tories-hard-brexit

... speaking to BBC Radio Ulster's Inside Politics programme last week, Mrs Foster denied sending a letter.

"I'm not quite sure what he was referring to but it certainly wasn't a letter from me and I have no recollection of a letter from me," she said.

"If I had written to him officially as minister of finance or something like that around recognition laws here in Northern Ireland, I have no recollection of it. I certainly didn't write in a personal capacity."

Scottish government publishes Arlene Foster's letter on gay marriage

THE Scottish government has published a letter it received from Arlene Foster about its laws surrounding gay marriage.

The correspondence, signed by the DUP leader, was sent in early September 2015 when she was finance minister in the Stormont executive.

It follows calls to publish the letter when its existence emerged after the Westminster election results sparked fresh criticism of the DUP's opposition to gay marriage.




http://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2017/06/20/news/scottish-government-publishes-arlene-foster-s-letter-on-gay-marriage-1061889

The trickle of mea culpas from the rapidly diminishing band of Corbyn-sceptics following the election result has now turned into a flood, and not without cause. Once widely-held truisms – Corbynism is a ‘movement’ more clicktivist than canvasser, Corbyn himself is electorally toxic, Labour face a 1931-style demolition and the collapse of its Parliamentary presence – have been shown to be categorically wrong. Corbyn ran an energetic, positive, smart campaign, founded on an unashamedly tax-and-spend manifesto. The quick-witted air war was backed up online and through unprecedented numbers of volunteers taking to the streets to engage potential Labour voters and getting them to turn out on polling day. Such mass activism had long been promised by Corbyn’s most vocal supporters, but aside from his own leadership campaigns, had been in sparse evidence on the ground. But there is no doubt that when it came to the crunch, Corbynism cashed its activist cheques. This level of enthusiastic political engagement would simply not have taken place with another leader – although the suspicion persists that a lot of the urgency was the product of retrospective regret on behalf of younger Remainers that they had not done the same (or perhaps even voted) during the EU referendum.

The election result also clearly demonstrates that Corbynism has not destroyed the party’s parliamentary presence. Labour has made some promising gains, particularly in England, and as Paul Mason notes, seem to have somehow picked up votes both from the liberal and green metropolitan left, and a decent sized portion of the former UKIP vote. This was undoubtedly a remarkable and wholly unexpected achievement, one which few in the top echelons of either party thought possible up until the moment of the exit poll. But while Labour are rightly still celebrating a welcome electoral step forward, not to mention capitalising on the total collapse of Theresa May’s authority as Prime Minister, unpicking the reasons why Corbyn was able to bring this unlikely electoral coalition together reveals that many of the criticisms levelled at the Corbyn project continue to hold. Indeed, in some ways this election has merely postponed a true reckoning with the contradictions and regressive tendencies that run through the Corbynist worldview. In particular, Corbyn’s success postpones once again the moment of reckoning at which the left finally recognises that the acceptance of Brexit and the end of free movement constitutes a fundamental, generational defeat, one for which gains in the House of Commons, however welcome, are scant recompense. With this in mind, then, this article is not yet another mea culpa. It is rather an attempt to take stock of what has changed and what has not, in the form of some first thoughts on how this election result – and in particular Corbyn’s Green-UKIP alliance – was possible.

This was the first post-deficit election

Direct comparisons with previous elections (whether on seats or vote share) are misleading. Each election takes place in an entirely different context, which shapes what can and cannot be said within the campaign, and what is regarded (rightly or wrongly) as ‘credible’. Much of the day to day grind of politics consists of the battle to shape that context (as can be seen with the struggle over the ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ interpretation of the referendum result, a battle which until Thursday night at least, May seemed to have comprehensively won). The 2015 election was dominated by discussion of the deficit and debt. The endless repetitions of how the Tories were still ‘clearing up Labour’s mess’ trapped Ed Miliband in political-economic territory from which he could never win  –  every word from his mouth was framed by the context of how Labour’s supposed overspending had led to the crash and the ‘deficit’. This frame has, incredibly, now virtually disappeared. Labour were careful to cost their manifesto nonetheless – demonstrating that the difference between their position and Miliband’s cannot be explained by mere hard left ‘will power’ – and the Tories failure to bother doing the same, lazily assuming the line from 2015 still held sway, left any attacks they made on Labour’s spending plans seem hollow and hypocritical. But it was the combination of austerity finally starting to bite the lower middle classes in a way it hadn’t in 2015 (school cuts and the NHS winter crisis cut through in a huge way) and Brexit that really wiped the economic slate clean. The Leave promises of an extra £350m a week for the NHS, regardless of their veracity, put public spending for services back on the ‘credible’ electoral playing field in a way that we have not seen since 2005. Add in May’s own desire to boost infrastructure spending, and Corbyn and McDonnell had the space to make spending commitments that were just not available to Miliband. They made the most of it.

The left’s instinctive trust in Corbyn allows him to successfully triangulate

The idea that Corbyn is a truly authentic man who has stuck to his principles through thick and thin is prevalent even amongst his fiercest critics. It is also his greatest weapon when it comes to keeping the left (and the youth vote) onside while in reality triangulating as ably –  if not more so –  as any Blairite. Labour’s policy on immigration in this election was well to the right of the 2015 manifesto. Miliband was pilloried by the left for proposing ‘controls on immigration’, which slogans on mugs aside, amounted to a two year ban on EU migrants receiving benefits. Corbyn’s manifesto went even further than May herself by pledging to end free movement of people from the EU come what may in the Brexit negotiations. While the effect of this was to almost entirely drain the ‘immigration debate’ from the election in a way unimaginable even six months ago, this was only due to the total capitulation of both Corbyn and the broader left on the issue. The immigration policy in Labour’s 2017 manifesto was more extreme in concrete terms than what most of the Leave side were proposing in the referendum -  in essence assuring full withdrawal from the single market, whatever the consequences -  and yet Corbyn’s supporters on the left accepted it because they refuse to believe that Corbyn himself, as a man of principle, can really mean it. While every word Miliband (or indeed virtually anyone else who is not Corbyn) is treated with suspicion, despite the pro-single market arguments of the contemporary Blair being inherently far less punitive on immigration than Corbyn’s position, Corbyn is given the benefit of the doubt every time, even when the policy is written down in black and white. This is triangulation of the highest order, enabling Labour to appeal to hardline anti-migrant UKIP voters while also keeping the trust of the ‘cosmopolitan’ urban left. It is doubtful any other Labour leader would have been capable of achieving this. Yet the faith in Corbyn’s supposedly unshakeable core beliefs is such that his party’s policies on immigration barely register amongst people who would be incandescent with rage if another Labour leader even vaguely gestured towards them.

http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/2017/06/13/reassessing-corbynism-success-contradictions-and-a-difficult-path-ahead/

Theresa May has cancelled the 2018 Queen’s Speech to smooth the path for Brexit reforms as a deal with the DUP hangs in the balance.

The Prime Minister announced that a two-year parliamentary session will be launched on Wednesday rather than the traditional one-year session.

The step breaks with historical precedence and was last taken in the early days of the Coalition as it scrambled to create stable government in 2010.

Government sources last night insisted the move was planned before the election and would give time for laws needed for Brexit to be fully debated.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/17/theresa-may-cancels-2018-queens-speech-dup-pact-hangs-balance/

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1 Government USED Quick Removal Deep Flaws.

May possibly be used as garden gnomes although you could find other uses, but they do need a good home.

Removal may incur some costs to the buyer.

Feet should be planted quite deep and at least 1m apart as when they congregate together they tend to get the knives out.

This can frighten the neighbours. Feed with a mixture of manure and compost but not too liberally as you do not want
to promote growth.

Plant in a shaded area but with some light as they have a tendency to migrate over to the dark side and you never know who they might get into bed with. Prickly and full of gristle their Teflon coating means that they are not very bio-degradable, so they are not very good for the environment. Wildlife are strangely repelled by them and foxes hate them.

Removal imperative as new stock arriving soon. Quite happy for them to be shipped overseas.