The Don’t-Talk-About-Brexit Election - The Atlantic - "the B-word has barely featured in the campaign to choose the next Westminster government on July 4—not in the debates between party leaders, nor in the policy measures briefed to friendly newspapers, nor in the leaflets sent out by individual candidates. The Conservative Party manifesto is a whopping 80 pages long, but uses the word Brexit only 12 times. The word does not even appear as a stand-alone section of the Labour platform, instead falling under the wider heading of “Britain reconnected.” Champions and opponents of Brexit alike have decided that now isn’t the time to talk about this enormous change to Britain’s place in the world. Nigel Farage, the man who led the populist campaign to leave the European Union, rebranded his UK Independence Party as the Brexit Party for the 2019 election. Now, however, his political vehicle is called simply Reform, and he would rather talk about small boats crossing the Channel or the perils of a cashless society. Even the Liberal Democrats, a pro-European party that campaigned the last time around on a pledge to rejoin the EU (and went from 12 to 11 seats as a result), now claim that this is only a “longer-term objective.” As someone who has worked in journalism in Britain for nearly two decades, I can tell you: This is an extraordinary turnaround... Anyone who voted for Brexit to reduce immigration will have been severely disappointed: Net migration was 335,000 in 2016, but rose to 685,000 last year, down from a record high of 784,000 in 2022. And although the economic effects of leaving the European single market were blurred by the pandemic and the energy shock that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one can safely say that Britons do not feel richer than they did four years ago. Above all, voters are bored with Brexit. In April 2019, according to the pollster Ipsos, 72 percent of Britons rated Brexit as one of the most important issues facing the country. Today that figure is 3 percent. “The one thing we found in focus groups that unites Leave and Remain voters is that they don’t want to talk about it,” Anand Menon, the director of the independent think tank UK in a Changing Europe, told me... the Labour manifesto promises to “make Brexit work” with no return to the single market, customs union, or freedom of movement. The B-word has featured more heavily in debates in Scotland, where the majority of voters backed Remain and the governing Scottish National Party is keen to outflank Labour. It is also an election issue in Northern Ireland, where the status of the border with the Republic of Ireland is still fraught. But with both major parties in England extremely reluctant to mention Brexit, the media here have largely followed suit.
Ireland's blind hatred of Brexit has destroyed its borders. Starmer may do the same to ours - "In 2017, when Britain began its disengagement talks with the EU, Ireland laid down two inviolable principles. First, no border: not so much as a matchstick to mark where the EU’s customs territory began. Second, no direct talks between the London and Dublin. If the Brits had anything to say, they should talk to Michel Barnier. Funny how things work out. Over the past week, as asylum claims have surged, Irish politicians have begun to clamour for a bilateral returns arrangement with Britain. They say that 80 per cent of claimants are crossing from Northern Ireland to escape the threat of deportation to Rwanda. And they want those migrants turned back at the… well, the border... Until practically last week, Martin, along with other TDs, was insisting that the border be invisible. Even a traffic camera, of the kind found on every major road in Britain and Ireland, would supposedly risk a return to violence. Yet in reality, there was never the slightest prospect of Britain raising border infrastructure. It was the EU that claimed checks were needed to preserve its single market. But, for whatever reason, the rest of the world, along with a chunk of Remainer opinion here, stubbornly refused to grasp this point, and it somehow became Britain’s responsibility to prevent the EU from raising customs posts. We bent over backwards to do it, accepting what amounted to an internal border on our own territory in order to accommodate a neighbouring country (and getting no thanks for it). Yet, after all that effort, all the hassle of red lanes and the “not for sale in the EU” stickers, Ireland suggested that it was planning to deploy a hundred police officers at the border, before apparently backing down. Ulster Unionists point out wryly that those officers were needed half a century ago. A hundred peelers along the border would have been useful when IRA units were in the habit of withdrawing into the Republic to regroup. But, as Unionists learned long ago, international pressure is never applied to Dublin. Ireland’s own politicians are aware of the irony. “This is the challenge, that we have advocated for an open border on this island,” says Helen McEntee, the justice minister. Still, we may be sure that Joe Biden won’t breathe a word of criticism. These border rows only ever work one way around. Britain is always in the wrong. Funnily enough, the UK never wanted border checks in the first place. When Irish self-government was being negotiated in 1920, David Lloyd George held out until the last minute for a common customs territory, arguing as a “Gladstonian Home Ruler” that it was impractical to have tariffs within the British Isles. But Ireland’s Provisional Government insisted on installing customs posts. Since the Belfast Agreement was negotiated in 1998, there have been two attempts to impose a hard border. Neither came from UK. The first was during the foot-and-mouth epidemic in 2001 when Ireland (not unreasonably, given the importance of its beef industry) sent hundreds of security officers to the border. The other was in 2021 when the EU, piqued because Britain’s vaccine rollout was faster than its own, ordered the border to be shut – a decision it had to reverse hours later. Even bigger than the volte-face over the border is Ireland’s abandonment of the idea that policies within EU competence must not be discussed bilaterally. Again, this principle was laid down very clearly during the Brexit talks... Varadkar was not interested in pragmatic solutions. He seemingly wanted Brexit to be reversed or, if that proved impossible, at least punished. He aimed to do so by flipping what he saw as the historical imbalance in power. Instead of being the stronger party in talks with Ireland, Britain would be the weaker party in talks with the EU. Yet Ireland is now demanding an intergovernmental deal with the UK on the return of immigrants. In other words, Britain would be obliged to take illegals back from Ireland, but unable to return them to France... Meanwhile, other European countries are moving towards their own versions of Rwanda-style scheme, considering third-country destinations for deportations, and the federalist European People’s Party has endorsed the idea. How bizarre it would be if, just as the rest of Europe is coming around to Britain’s way of thinking, Starmer were to follow through on his commitment and scrap the scheme. Where do you suppose that would incentivise illegal immigrants in Europe to move? No wonder Brussels wants a Labour victory."
Poland's prime minister got one thing wrong about Britain - "although Poland’s success plainly has much to do with membership of the EU, Tusk’s second point – that Britain’s economic torpor is explained by its decision to quit the EU – isn’t so easily argued. It may be true, though it is impossible to prove, that the UK economy would have performed more strongly had it stayed in the EU. Personally, I believe it would have done. But if we look at the EU’s three biggest remaining economies – Germany, France and Italy – they have all performed equally badly if not worse than the UK since the vote for Brexit. IMF forecasts, moreover, suggest that Britain will continue to outperform from next year onwards to the turn of the decade, though the differences are admittedly marginal. In other words, if Poland is poised to overtake the UK in income per head, it will also be overtaking France, Germany and Italy. This would strongly suggest that whatever future economic success Poland enjoys, the EU will no longer be the primary explanation. After more than three decades of growing fat on the pig’s belly, Poland’s years of easy growth may be drawing to a close. Meanwhile, the UK has overtaken China to become the world’s number-two destination by value after the US for greenfield foreign direct investment, and its service industries’ exports are booming as never before. These realities do not chime with the idea of a country in terminal decline."
That creaking sound? It’s the United Kingdom starting to break apart - "The slow collapse of the United Kingdom creates an opportunity in all three nations to do things differently. An independent Scotland and Wales could cast aside the culture of corruption enabled – perhaps necessitated – by the UK’s outrageous campaign finance rules. They could reclaim their politics from Westminster’s gross subversions of democracy, its royal powers and the pompous rituals designed both to glorify and to conceal them. They could – and there are plenty of people in both nations with this ambition – create 21st-century governments built on proportional general elections, participatory democracy and continuous policy adjustment, distributive economies and an ethos of public service."
From 2021. When you hate England so much you want your country to break up
Ironically, Scotland had super high profile corruption cases after this
Sargon of Akkad: "The left is pushing the breakup of the UK very hard at the moment. Which is odd, because that is going to clear the field for English nationalism, which will be decidedly anti-woke."
Melissa Chen on X - "The fateful decision by the UK to turn towards Europe via the ECC - the precursor to the EU - and AWAY from the Commonwealth precipitated the loss of confidence in British values, and the decline of Britain 🇬🇧 itself. Roughly 2.5 billion people - out of a global population of eight billion - live in the 56 Commonwealth countries. Four of which, amusingly, were never colonized by the British but elected to join anyway (explain THAT, Frantz Fanon). >60% of the Commonwealth's population is aged 29 or under. Globally, a third of all young people aged live in Commonwealth countries. The biggest country by population is India, which accounts for about half of the total. Also, America should get over the Boston tea party and subsequent 1776 thing, and just JOIN THE COMMONWEALTH. India made an exception (because it didn't want to recognize the monarch as a head of state and joined as a Republic), so the USA can too. We share a common language and cultural, intellectual and political traditions. Together with America, the GDP per capita of the Commonwealth would be untouchable, and it would facilitate the kind of globalization that is in the American AND British national interest, and it would serve as a hedge against the emergence of a less benign international order based on civilizational power politics. With the USA (as a net energy producer) and Canada involved, the Commonwealth will also be energy secure against a feckless German-led Europe and its self-sabotaging climate policies that only serves Putin's (and the New Axis's) interests. This version of globalization - anglocization - will not only serve Britain better than the Euro nonsense, and build upon the legacies of the British empire - English Common Law systems, etc. - but also, the world. The only real draw back is that the Americans will clean up in the Commonwealth Games medal count but no one watches that anyway so who cares. What we need more than ever is an affirmation of the values and culture that unite the anglo countries - and yes that already includes the Five Eyes nations - and a model of trans-civilizational co-operation and knowledge sharing, which will do more to spur economic development for countries lagging behind, rather than cavorting with already rich but useless European countries in exchange for sovereignty. Europe is done. Lean in and double down on the Commonwealth. America, get over yourself and JOIN! Happy Commonwealth Day!"
The authoritarian legacy of the Remain campaign - "One of the most repeated truisms of today is that much of the youth have given up on democracy... This trend is usually attributed not only to political immaturity, myopia and ignorance, but also to genuine disillusionment with our ‘dishonest’ politics. Or it’s blamed on a broken economic system that has left so many young people without long-term employment and without the prospect of ever being able to afford a house. It is perhaps no surprise that in these precarious, insecure times the young would exchange freedom for safety – which is the eternal promise of the dictator. Not everyone agreed with the conclusion that this is specifically a youthful problem... Such anti-democratic sentiments have been made patently clear ever since 2016. We have been constantly scolded by a certain section of the population that 52 per cent of the UK voted the ‘wrong’ way in the Brexit referendum – supposedly out of sheer ignorance. The masses had apparently been duped by the media or by a number on the side of a bus. There shouldn’t have been a referendum in the first place, snobbish Remainers continue to crow, as important matters shouldn’t be left to the ‘low-information’ masses. We must hold another referendum, they say, but this time the great unwashed need re-education in order to vote the ‘right’ way. And vote for what? To re-enter an organisation that is itself anti-democratic. The European Union has repeatedly ignored national referendum results on treaty ratifications over the years. If anything epitomises the technocratic, anti-democratic essence of our times it is the EU. You can’t even vote out its unelected rulers."
Guy Verhofstadt on X - "#Brexit is a failure of the Union. There is a lesson to learn from it: to deeply reform the Union. To make it into a real Union, a Union without opt-in, without opt-outs, without rebates, without exceptions. Only then we can defend our interests and defend our values."
Clearly doubling down on an unpopular agenda is the answer
Four years after Brexit: Where does the UK stand after leaving the EU? - "ONS data from September 2023 also reveals that economic activity was 1.5% higher than before the pandemic, roughly comparable to France and higher than Germany (0%), but lower than Japan (3.5%) and the US (6.1%)... 'Take back control' was the slogan of Brexit campaigners in regard to migration policy, which they considered too relaxed due to European policymakers. Nonetheless, according to French newspaper Le Monde, immigration has never been so high to Great Britain: 682,000 moved to the UK between June 2022 and June 2023, twice than before Brexit... Le Monde remarks the “real dynamism in aid to Ukraine” coming from London, but criticized that Brexit has “above all resulted in a reinforced alignment with the United States”."
This misunderstands what "take back control" means and proves the point that Brexit wasn't about xenophobia, since the UK actually has more migration now
The Great Realignment is only just getting started - "“I thought the British accepted election results”. This comment, made to me last year, unprompted, by a Lebanese friend (Hi, Aamir!) I hadn’t seen for 20 years did two things. First, it focused my mind even more intently — if that were possible — on the job of covering Brexit for various outlets. Secondly, it alarmed me. “In my part of the world,” he continued, “when people don’t accept election results, well, then there is war”. “This is Britain,” I said limply. “We don’t do that anymore”. Meanwhile, 400,000 marched through the streets because they wanted to reverse the 2016 EU Referendum. “That,” he said — pointing out the window at a throng of people with loudhailers, face paint, EU flags, and a spirit of general bonhomie — “does not look like acceptance. And it does not look British”. My father made a related observation while watching footage of Lady Diana’s funeral: “Those people do not look British. What happened to the British?” Before you leap to conclusions, miss, and break your neck, this was not a comment on immigration or diversity in either case. Both Lady Di’s funeral and the big People’s Vote marches were, like Extinction Rebellion protests, whiter than my Dad’s native Aberdeenshire. It was a reflection on national character, which appeared to be retreating from the emotional restraint that Britons developed in response to the religious “enthusiasm” of the Civil War... Long before the likes of Rob Ford, Eric Kaufmann, or Matthew Goodwin appeared, Davies was warning that technocratic, expert governance was “politically exhausted” and what gets called “the global rules-based order” is about to pass its use-by date, let alone its sell-by date. Brexit, Davies argues, was a catalyst for the realignment now nearly complete. As in chemistry, it speeded up the reaction without itself being consumed by it. “The question is not so much that of social conservatism versus social liberalism,” he says. “Instead the key issue is that of identity, and in particular the tension between globalism and cosmopolitanism on one hand and nationalism and ethnic or cultural particularism on the other”. In parallel, economics has become a second-order concern... Anyone with eyes can see the extremity with which Wokies persecute liberal leftists and centrists, sometimes accompanied by even grimmer nastiness than is directed at Tories. Given the form cultural traditionalism takes in the UK — it doesn’t revolve around issues like abortion, gun laws, or same-sex marriage, for example — it’s also harder to accuse Nationalists here of bigotry or racism and make the claim stick. They want immigration controlled at the national level. Very few of them want it stopped altogether. They’re cool with gay marriage. They just don’t want trans women playing women’s rugby. Like my friend Aamir, Davies is critical of the behaviour from Remain “elites”, particularly their willingness to entertain conspiracy theories, turn Parliament into a global laughing stock, and reject election results."
Andrew Sullivan: NY Times Abandons Liberalism for Activism - "One of the frustrating aspects of reading the U.S. media’s coverage of Brexit is that you’d never get any idea why it happened in the first place. Brexit is treated, automatically, as some kind of pathology, a populist act of wanton self-harm, an absurd idea, etc etc. And from the perspective of an upstanding member of the left-liberal media establishment, that’s all true. If your idea of Britain is formed by jetting in and out of London, a multicultural, global metropolis that is as lively and European as any city on the Continent, you’d think that E.U. membership is a no-brainer. Now that the full hellish economic consequences of exit are in full view, what could possibly be the impulse to stick with it?... allow me to suggest a parallel version of Britain’s situation — but with the U.S. The U.S. negotiated with Canada and Mexico to create a free trade zone called NAFTA, just as the U.K. negotiated entry to what was then a free trade zone called the “European Economic Community” in 1973. Now imagine further that NAFTA required complete freedom of movement for people across all three countries. Any Mexican or Canadian citizen would have the automatic right to live and work in the U.S., including access to public assistance, and every American could live and work in Mexico and Canada on the same grounds. This three-country grouping then establishes its own Supreme Court, which has a veto over the U.S. Supreme Court. And then there’s a new currency to replace the dollar, governed by a new central bank, located in Ottawa. How many Americans would support this? How many votes would a candidate for president get if he or she proposed it? The questions answer themselves. It would be unimaginable for the U.S. to allow itself to be governed by an entity more authoritative than its own government. It would signify the end of the American experiment, because it would effectively be the end of the American nation-state. But this is precisely the position the U.K. has been in for most of my lifetime. The U.K. has no control over immigration from 27 other countries in Europe, and its less regulated economy has attracted hundreds of thousands of foreigners to work in the country, transforming its culture and stressing its hospitals, schools and transportation system. Its courts ultimately have to answer to the European Court. Most aspects of its economy are governed by rules set in Brussels. It cannot independently negotiate any aspect of its own trade agreements. I think the cost-benefit analysis still favors being a member of the E.U. But it is not crazy to come to the opposite conclusion. More to the point, the European Economic Community has evolved over the years into something far more ambitious. Through various treaties — Maastricht and Lisbon, for example — what is now called the European Union (note the shift in language) has embarked on a process of ever-greater integration: a common currency, a common foreign policy and now, if Macron has his way, a common central bank. It is requiring the surrender and pooling of more and more national sovereignty from its members. And in this series of surrenders, Britain is unique in its history and identity. In the last century, every other European country has experienced the most severe loss of sovereignty a nation can experience: the occupation of a foreign army on its soil. Britain hasn’t. Its government has retained control of its own island territory now for a thousand years. More salient: this very resistance has come to define the character of the country, idealized by Churchill in the country’s darkest hour. Britain was always going to have more trouble pooling sovereignty than others. And the more ambitious the E.U. became, the more trouble the U.K. had. As I said, I would have voted Remain. But I understand the legitimate arguments to Leave, and also would have respected the result of a referendum which attracted more votes than any general election in history. In 2016, both sides insisted that this was it: a clear and irrevocable choice. And when Leave won the referendum, it was incumbent to honor that result, as had been the case when a referendum in 1975 backed membership. That’s what democracy is: the peaceful acceptance of political defeat. And that’s why the refusal of the elites to accept their defeat would be a very mixed blessing."
The Curious Case of RS Archer - "RS Archer is, apparently, a novelist who created the “David Saunders” book series. A man of many talents and diverse experiences, he also has “a background of military service” and is heavily involved in some kind of mysterious family business. His profile picture on his popular Twitter account shows him to have lean, Bondesque good looks. Archer lives in France, in grand luxury. He is always reporting to his Twitter followers about how he is eating the best steak in Europe or drinking Château Batailley, Pauillac Grand Cru Classé from 2009. He has “a house in Switzerland” and ponders buying a 1968 Mercedes-Benz. Chiefly, though, Archer is known for his politics. He is ardently anti-Brexit and anti-Johnson — claiming, for example, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine “began with Brexit” — though he also mocks left-wing extremes of verbal sensitivity and trans activism. Archer earned online attention with a Twitter thread in which he talked about his idiot Brexiteer neighbours who had “made no arrangements” for Britain’s departure from the EU and faced deportation. Their equally idiotic — as well as drunk and violent — son attempted to travel to France to bribe the mayor, with hilarious consequences. Archer’s thread was shared more than 50,000 times. At this point you might have realised that something strange is going on. Does that story not sound a little too perfectly calculated for Remainer prejudices? How can an author, of all people, live in such grand style? Why have you never heard of the “David Saunders” book series? (Is that not a terrible name for a main character?)... Ninety thousand people follow Mr Archer and engage with his blatant fabrications. He claims to have met a Zurich banker who told him that US and European financiers were looking forward to selling off the NHS (6000 retweets). He reports that a new ferry service from Belgium will bypass England and go straight to Scotland (1000 retweets and, by the way, untrue). He makes up a “scathing comment” by a “US spokesman” saying there “are no winners with Brexit” (1000 retweets). Yes, RS (it rhymes with “arse”) is a prolific purveyor of “fake news”. There is nothing unique about that, of course, but what I find fascinating is how he — or whoever is behind “him” — has manufactured a character. It is Remainer wish-fulfilment. Not only do his claims say exactly what middle-class liberals wish to hear, but his whole persona is a kind of seductive fantasy. He is rich. He is sophisticated. He is urbane. He is always “owning” dunderheaded Brexiteers and then laughing it up with cheerful, friendly continentals. Of course, there is intrinsic comedy to this in that Remainers love to flaunt their superior intelligence and education, yet are being taken in — not as a whole, of course, but in thousands of cases — by such a blatant fraud. But something else is going on. It is a symptom of the parasocial nature of online life. Parasocial interaction, wrote the sociologists Richard Wohl and Donald Horton in the 1950s, is “one-sided, nondialectical, controlled by the performer, and not susceptible to mutual development”. It is the “relationship” we have with celebrities, but also with people we follow on social media." Liberals are silent about misinformation that plays to their biases
Lidl's largest warehouse opens in Bedfordshire - "German supermarket Lidl has opened its largest warehouse in the world, in Bedfordshire. The regional distribution centre at Houghton Regis near Luton is expected to service 150 stores and create up to 1,500 jobs, the company said." Damn Brexit!
Meme - "How the EU made you powerless
- By gradually removing your country's sovereignty and seizing power though a series of "treaties" over the past 40+ years.
- By gradually replacing all of the laws and your ancestors established, with laws that are almost impossible for a citizen to change democratically.
- By exercising its stolen authority over an increasing number of policy areas, stripping away the power of your parliament and of your vote.
- By creating faux democracy where its elected MEPs have no power to propose legislation, and where all power resides with its unelected EU commission.
- By increasing constituency sizes from 100 thousand in the UK to 1 million in the EU, diluting your voice, and transferring power from the people to big corporations and lobby groups."
The three classic British sitcoms that forecast Brexit - "Classic BBC sitcoms Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers and ‘Allo ‘Allo, from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, hold clues as to why Britain voted for Brexit, an academic has suggested. Gavin Schaffer... found clues in the comedies that reflected public ambivalence towards the EU and a desire to stand apart from “the Continent” decades before the vote in 2016."
Britain is stagnating because it is behaving like an EU country - "The deleterious impact of Brexit is debatable but the idea that we have used it to follow a different economic path is for the birds. We haven’t used the freedom to create a dynamic, low-tax, free-enterprise economy. Far from it. We are still behaving like an EU country even though the bloc is stagnating, crushed under the soaring cost of welfare. Mr Streeting may have his eye on Sir Keir’s job but he could at least come up with a more coherent reason for toppling him."
