Links - 30th April 2020 (2) (Brexit)

Piers Morgan on Twitter - "UK employment rate hits record high as wages surge higher"
"Another miracle!!!!! Remember, the 'experts' now predicting No Deal catastrophe previously predicted recession & 800k job losses within weeks of a vote to Leave... They know nothing."
At least unlike climate change, the terrible predictions will become evident very quickly. Though of course Remainers won't notice

Boris Johnson receives boost in polls despite damaging week in Parliament - "Two polls published on Saturday evening give the Conservatives a commanding lead over Labour, suggesting that Mr Johnson’s hardline stance on Brexit is cutting through to voters... Whilst Mr Johnson’s own approval ratings have fallen slightly, from 41 percent to 36 percent, he still enjoys a dominant lead over Mr Corbyn, with just 16 percent of respondents considering the Labour leader to be a better candidate for prime minister.The survey also appears to show that a plurality of voters support Mr Johnson’s Brexit strategy, with 37 percent stating that they approved of his handling of the Brexit process. In contrast, only 17 percent backed Mr Corbyn’s approach, rising slightly to 20 percent for Jo Swinson, the Liberal Democrat leader... The findings appear to fly in the face of events in Parliament last week, when Mr Johnson failed to stop Remainer MPs from legislating to delay Brexit or secure the election he believes is required to break the deadlock"

The casual authoritarianism of Remoaners - "In 1945, Clement Attlee said referendums were ‘the instrument of Nazism and fascism’. In 1975, Margaret Thatcher, nodding to Attlee, said referendums are a ‘device of dictators and demagogues’.These quotes have been dug out time and again since the EU referendum, by Remainers horrified by the result. They slot Attlee’s and Thatcher’s remarks into their own warped view that democracy equals fascism. People are so dumb and wicked, goes the thinking, that we’re just waiting to elect genocidal maniacs. Referendums are not democratic exercises because it is all too easy for demagogues to mislead the sheeple... Swinson and Lucas are among those calling for a second referendum on Brexit. But when pushed by separate BBC interviewers as to whether they would accept the result of another referendum if the country voted Leave again, they both said no"

Why the silence over the behaviour of pro-Remain protesters? - "A clip emerged last night on Twitter of two men unfurling a banner at the Westminster #StopTheCoup demo. It read ‘Brexit Now’ on a blue background that mirrored the logo of the Brexit Party. The Remainer protesters went batshit crazy. The men carrying the banner were surrounded. The crowd started yelling ‘fascists out’ and grabbing at the banner. One protester tried to set it on fire. It really did look like the men were about to be attacked. The police were forced to intervene and even told the men that they ‘should leave’. They eventually moved the men further into Parliament Square and away from the main group of Remainer protesters, who applauded as the men were moved on. Compare this clip to the clips that circulated in January showing abuse being hurled at Anna Soubry MP and Guardian journalist Owen Jones. In January, Soubry was apoplectic when a small group of protesters chanted ‘Soubry is a Nazi’ from a distance, interrupting her BBC interview. She said the behaviour was ‘astonishing’. ‘This is what has happened to our country’, she said. She was then approached by the protesters as she walked towards parliament. They questioned her on her Brexit stance and called her a fascist again. Owen Jones encountered the same protesters in Westminster. They called him, among other things, a ‘tampon’ and a ‘horrible little man’.The reaction to these incidents involving Soubry and Jones, both of whom campaigned for Remain, was instant. MPs called for tougher laws. Nicola Sturgeon called the incidents ‘appalling’ and said ‘we all have a duty to stand against this kind of behaviour’. David Lammy MP said the abuse was ‘not only appalling’ but also ‘historically illiterate’. There were immediate calls for legal reform. Dozens of MPs wrote to the Metropolitan Police expressing ‘serious concerns’ about the ‘deteriorating public order and security situation’ in Westminster. Two of the protesters, James Goddard and Brian Phillips, were eventually arrested, charged and convicted for the incidents involving Soubry. Both men received suspended prison sentences. Yet, so far, there is silence from MPs about the treatment of the Brexiteer protesters yesterday... The hypocrisy is astonishing. Remainers are happy for Brexiteers to be mobbed, but cry ‘harassment’ the moment a Remainer MP or journalist is approached in the street. They are happy if Brexiteer banners get vandalised, or if Brexit-leaning MPs get milkshaked. They are certainly happy to call Brexiteers ‘Nazis’ and ‘fascists’, while calling for anyone who uses the same language against Remainers to be locked up. Remainers use the law to their own ends, which is why Brexiteers are arrested and prosecuted for what they say while Remainers are left alone. What a dreadful double standard."

Ash Sarkar just No Platformed a pro-Brexit trade unionist - "The middle-class left gets more ridiculous by the day. Today, Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar announced she has pulled out of speaking at an upcoming People’s Assembly demo, apparently because she couldn’t bear to share a platform with pro-Brexit trade unionist Eddie Dempsey... Bourgeois ‘leftists’ have No Platformed a working-class trade unionist. All because he supports Brexit. There could be no better example of how detached these people are from real radical politics and working-class interests."

Do Remainers even understand how the EU works? - "How many of the most fanatical Remainers in Britain can actually explain how the EU appoints its top jobs? Do they understand what the “Spitzenkandidat” process is, and are they aware of how it has unravelled in recent days? If, as we suspect, the answer is no, then they are in love with the idea of an EU, not the undemocratic, bureaucratic madness that is the actual EU... If it all sounds less than democratic then that’s because it’s supposed to be. The European model is essentially Platonic: a veneer of democracy kept in check by divided powers and a self-selecting political class. It’s a constitutional framework drafted by politicians who didn’t trust their own populations"

The fake workerism of Remainiacs - "The overturners and revokers of Brexit labour under many delusions, but few are as bizarre as the conviction that these EU cheerleaders are somehow on the side of the workers, and the least well-off, in a battle against austerity. You would have thought the fact the EU is the very embodiment of their neoliberal nightmares might have given them pause for thought. Yes, there is the EU’s Social Chapter, which offers workers some protections, but it has always been entirely subordinate to the EU’s founding treaty commitment to the free movement of capital, labour, goods, and services. Anything that threatens this commitment, indeed anything that endangers the capitalist imperative underwriting the stability of the EU, from striking workers to a nation-state spending spree, is ruthlessly dealt with, as Greece has found out to its near-enough eternal immiseration... You might even have thought that the Eurozone’s Stability and Growth Pact, which enforces strict state-spending limits on its members – or at least the least powerful, inflationary ones, like Greece and Italy – would have prompted a few revokers and overturners to question whether pinning their anti-austerity hopes to the mast of the EU was really that wise... Admittedly, it appears sincere. Anti-Brexit forces intone darkly of job losses, economic devastation, and the baleful effects of an austerity that will supposedly only deepen post-Brexit. Every report prophesying, say, the collapse of the car industry in the event of a No Deal Brexit, is seized on by the overturners with an ostentatious lament, proof once more, they’ll sigh deeply, of the ‘economic self-harm’ of Brexit. Likewise, economic fearmongering, be it from the Bank of England or the Confederation of British Industry, is mournfully, uncritically embraced, evidence, they’ll declaim, of the damage Brexit will do to the very people who, in their poverty and supposed ignorance, voted for it. Their pity-the-fools shtick appears sincere, however, only when the politician or pundit is in anti-Brexit mode. But when they shift into their green, environmentalist mode, as they all do, from the Lib Dems to the Guardianistas, their position switches from left to right. Everything for which they apparently shed political tears suddenly becomes a reason to get out the party poppers. A potential slowdown in car manufacturing, or a decline in flying, or, above all, the potential inability to consume as much as we once did – all amount to progress in the green, environmentalist sense."

Every region of England and Wales happy to leave the EU without a deal - except London if extension refused - "Chris Curtis, Political Research Manager at YouGov, added: “Just like in parliament, polling shows that there are no Brexit options that a majority of the public are willing to support."

⚫️ Invisible Brexiter on Twitter - "My Remainer next door neighbour has repeated her opinion that I didn't know what I was voting for and my vote should be annulled. I advise solicitors in England & Wales on matters of EU law for a living. She paints the spirits of pet animals."
Comments: "Same here. I studied European law & practiced European law. I'm a human rights lawyer who has represented thousands of migrants for almost 20 years. I was spokesperson for The NI Anti Racism Network for almost a decade.Apparently voting leave qualifies me as "a gullible racist""
"I’ve got separate degrees in law and politics, plus did a master of laws,  and the bar vocational course. I’ve worked in legislative affairs and law (including in Brussels) for 20 years+.Apparently I didn’t know what I was voting for either."
"I was once told that I was repeating "xenophobic Daily Mail propaganda" when I said that the EU was seeking "ever closer union" between European states...."

Believe me, the Civil Service is trying to sink Brexit. I have seen it from the inside - "A quick scroll though the social media accounts of my colleagues and you will find images of them proudly waving ‘Remain’ placards, campaigning for a ‘People’s Vote’, boasting ‘Jez we can’ and of course the usual apocalyptic messages of doom since the Brexit vote. The double-standards are astonishing. If I so much as followed the activities of Nigel Farage, I have no doubt that I would be called in for questioning. I re-call one conversation with a senior member of staff at the Foreign Office who told me she was ashamed when Boris Johnson was appointed Foreign Secretary as he is so “typically British”. This department is particularly notorious for its anti-Brexit bias. My experience tells me that there is a genuine hatred of those who voted for Brexit. I recall my first day in the Civil Service as a graduate, being invited to a meeting of senior members of staff who spent the good part of two hours in agreement that the public made a “stupid” decision in the EU referendum.On June 24 2016 the mood within the civil service was like someone had died... I have in fact come across senior staff working on our post-Brexit relationships who openly talk down the prospect of a UK-US FTA and encourage anti-Trump hysteria. Many of them even joined the protests against the President’s visit last year. During his visit it was common to hear jokes about Trump’s assassination from the very people meant to be working with our closest ally. The only thing worse than being pro-Brexit in the Civil Service is being pro-Trump. This attitude isn’t confined to their own circles, these views are even being expressed in the presence of foreign ambassadors. In one case during a meeting with a High Commissioner of a close ally, one Civil Servant branded the High Commissioner a “Tory Wanker” in the presence of several foreign diplomats. Fortunately the High Commissioner didn’t hear this highly inappropriate comment, but the remark still remained unchallenged from civil service bosses.But it doesn’t stop there. There is a strong presence of Anglophobia, combined with cultural Marxism that runs through the civil service. It has meant that many Civil Servants, including myself, have been actively discouraged from co-operating with Think Tanks which are seen as being “too right wing” despite sharing our goal of promoting free trade. This attitude also prevails in our work with our closest allies, particularly in the Commonwealth, where we are afraid to be seen as overly keen to work with countries that are run by “rich white men”. Contrary to popular belief, Civil Servants often shape the views of Ministers. This makes the prevalent leftist culture within the Civil Service all the more concerning. These ardent remainer and left wing civil servants are the ones who provide the briefings, select the invites and choose the priorities for Ministers. How did we get to this point? The Civil Service is one of the biggest graduate employers, whilst universities have allowed a leftist culture of political correctness to flourish in recent decades."
Apparently it's bad, in Britain, to be typically British. Is it unfair to say many in the elite dislike/hate their countries?

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Anger over Parliament suspension - "‘Why is it unlikely that people who voted to leave the European Union are not now saying to themselves, but actually you know what? I assume there would be a deal, because that's what we kept being told. It's pretty likely that that is the case, isn't it?’
‘If you follow as I'm sure you do Sir John Curtis, his polling indicates, his analysis of his polling indicates that basically people haven't changed their mind since the referendum, regardless of the arguments about Deal or No Deal, and that the people who are banging on about no deal and the candyfloss of outrage that we've had in the last 24 hours, which go back to the introduction, I think is almost entirely confected, is from people who never wanted to leave the European Union. And you must bear in mind that this is the greatest period of anger furthermore of confected anger, because after 31 October, we will have left, and this is the last time that they have available to thwart [Brexit]'…
‘Michael Heseltine: constitutional outrage… the Speaker of the House…’
‘Let's deal with Lord Heseltine and the speaker because what they had to say is, of course, interesting. Lord Heseltine as deputy prime minister was party to a 19 day suspension of Parliament prior to the 1997 general election. So it wasn't a constitutional outrage then, it is now I think that's confected anger. Mr. Speaker’s interesting because the speaker, by convention and long standing tradition, has no tongue with which to speak or eyes with which to see other than is directed by the House. What he said yesterday was not directed by the House and therefore must be said in a personal capacity not as Mr. Speaker’
‘Was it, I was going to use the word illegal, not the appropriate word. But was it improper?’
‘It was the most constitutionally improper thing that happened yesterday.’"

Average salary in construction soars to £46,000 as UK loses EU workers - "Recruiters Randstrad said average pay in a sector survey had increased to £45,900 a year in 2018, a £3,600 rise in just 12 months.The figures are even higher for site managers and for jobs in London. The average site manager surveyed said they took home £50,500 a year outside the capital, and others reported a £3,000 London premium."
Strange, we were told immigration didn't affect wages

Brexit news: Poll reveals 40% of Remainers would be upset if child married Leave voter - "Labour supporters were more likely to become upset if their child married a supporter from the other end of the political spectrum... 34 percent – of those who identify with Labour say they would be upset if their child married a Conservative... 13 percent of Conservative parents would be upset if their child tied the knot with a Labour supporter.Only 2 percent of Leave voting parents would be very upset by such a marriage... one-fifth of 300 relationship counsellors worked with couples falling out over Brexit."
Great tolerance

This is what EU ‘democracy’ looks like - "After weeks of wrangling, the European Council appointed new EU leaders yesterday. Belgian PM Charles Michel will be president of the European Council. Ursula von der Leyen, of Germany’s CDU, has been put forward to be president of the European Commission, subject to parliamentary approval. And the International Monetary Fund’s Christine Lagarde looks set to take the reins of the European Central Bank.These people, who most European citizens will never have heard of, let alone voted for, are set to take up offices of incredible power at the nod of EU leaders, with no proper, direct mechanism for voters in EU countries to dismiss them or hold them to account. This is what EU ‘democracy’ looks like, and it ain’t pretty. This process of appointments and recommendations, made behind closed doors, is deeply undemocratic, and the appointees and candidates themselves are almost provocatively out-of-touch... The head of the International Monetary Fund was found guilty by a French court in 2016 of negligence for approving a massive payout of taxpayers’ money to a controversial French businessman. She avoided jail and kept her job, and it clearly hasn’t stopped her getting even more work. As chair of the IMF since 2011, Lagarde was also one of the chief punishers of the Greek working class during the debt crisis. She publicly backed punishing austerity measures being enforced on Greece by the IMF and the EU in exchange for bailouts. She did so despite conceding in private, according to former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, that she knew the crippling measures would not work."

James Holland on Twitter - ".@MagicMagid shares the disillusionment I felt when I arrived in EU Parliament a decade ago. As I did then, he thinks he can change it. But as time went by, I realised the reforms the EU needs to survive and thrive were not priorities for the EU elite."

What’s disappointed me in my first two weeks in Brussels - "Only 30 of the new class of 751 MEPs are people of color, and if you look different from your average MEP (as I do), it's not easy.On my first day at work in Parliament in Strasbourg, I was asked to leave by someone who clearly thought I didn't belong."
He was asked to leave while wearing a "F**k Fascism" T-shirt and shorts, and a yellow baseball cap. Clearly this was due to racism

Liberal Democrats fined £18,000 over EU referendum campaign breaches - "The Liberal Democrats and an anti-Brexit group have both been fined for breaching campaign rules during the EU referendum... The party was found to have failed to deliver a complete and accurate spending return from last year's campaign, including failing to provide acceptable invoices or receipts for 80 payments totalling more than £80,000... Open Britain, which was formed out of the official Remain campaign known as Britain Stronger in Europe, has coughed up £1,250 for reporting breaches and failing to provide some invoices."
Since, according to Remainers, the fact that the Leave campaign got fined means Leave has no legitimacy...

The Many Lies of the Remain Campaign - "1. The idea of an EU army was a dangerous fantasy
In November 2018, the French and German leaders Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron joined politicians like Jean-Claude Juncker and Guy Verhofstadt in calling for an EU wide army.Since 2017, an EU initiative known as PESCO (Permanent Structured Cooperation) has been initiated, which is part of the EU’s Security and Defence policy (CSDP), in which member states pursue integration of their national armed forces.
2. Voting to leave the EU would have an immediate detrimental effect on the UK’s economy
During the referendum campaign, Remainer economists from the Bank of England to the IMF, warned that a mere vote to leave would severely impact the UK’s economy... Between June 2016 and 2018, for many metrics ONS figures demonstrate the opposite to what was predicted... The Treasury called the direction of only two metrics correctly, but still with a large amount of error
3. An emergency budget would be necessary upon a Leave vote being delivered
In June 2016, George Osborne and his predecessor Alistair Darling shared a platform and said that a vote to leave would leave a “£30bn black hole” in the UK’s public finances, requiring an “emergency budget” where public services would be slashed and taxes would be raised.
4. Britain would be at the “back of the queue” for a US trade deal
In April 2016, the then United States President Barack Obama visited London and made dire warnings to the Leave campaign following the United States’ intentions regarding a future free trade deal... This turned out to be one of the biggest lies in the campaign. It later emerged that the reason Obama made these comments was not because of his personal belief, but because David Cameron requested him to, in order to try and discredit the Leave campaign.
5. The UK would break up following a vote to leave
Polling in the aftermath of the shock referendum result and David Cameron’s resignation showed that support for Scottish independence surged to up to a 7% lead.However with Theresa May’s appointment as Prime Minister in July 2016, polls reversed back to normal, indicating that a majority of Scots preferred staying in the union.
7. This was a once in a generation decision, and there would be no going back
8. A hard border would be required in Ireland if there was a no-deal Brexit
The Irish border issue was central to Remain campaigning, despite a Common Travel Area existing in Ireland since 1923... the Good Friday Agreement doesn’t specifically say goods or customs checks cannot be made at the border. Emergency border checkpoints were set up amidst the foot and mouth crisis in 2001, and the GFA remained in force. Also, since the Brexit vote was delivered, the British and Irish governments, as well as the EU itself, have said that under no circumstances will any of them erect a “hard border”. In November 2018, the WTO confirmed that its rules would not force a hard border to be put in place.
9. The UK, through Cameron’s negotiation, had “secured a special status in a reformed EU.”
The leaflet claimed that Cameron’s negotiation had secured a “special status” for the UK, when in reality, it had not. Several points were already in the European treaties, so were not a result of Cameron’s renegotiation, and most importantly nothing the EU had assured Cameron was legally binding. Also, absolutely none of what was claimed was exclusive to the UK, as the “special status” inferred.
10. Migrant camps would appear throughout South East England
11. Families would be £4,300 worse off if Britain left the EU
Although the wording sounded like people would be worse off, in reality the forecast stated that people would be better off – it would just be by 6% less compared to if a Remain vote was returned. This figure was also seen as overly pessimistic"
Since, according to Remainers, the fact that the Leave campaign lied means Leave has no legitimacy...

Emma Louisa J 🥂󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇬🇧 on Twitter - "I had a DM from someone taking an exception to the term remoaner. Let me clarify.
Remainer - someone who voted remain, who'd rather remain but accepts Brexit.
Remoaner - someone who voted remain, can't accept the outcome, is usually condescending, smug and abusive to leavers."

It’s Remoaners who are nostalgic for empire - "‘The world of tomorrow is a world of empires, in which we Europeans and you British can only defend your interests, your way of life, by doing it together in a European framework and a European Union’, declared Guy Verhoftstadt, the EU Parliament’s Brexit spokesman, to rapturous applause at the Liberal Democrats’ conference. Verhofstadt is a fanatical Euro-federalist and has been explicit in his support for the EU empire for some time now. He has consistently called for the EU to become an ‘empire of the good’. Perhaps the ultra Remainers are nostalgic for the old world of empire?... But with the EU, such nostalgia is unnecessary. The European empire is already here. Wolfgang Streeck characterises the EU as a ‘liberal empire’. The EU’s fiendishly complex construction disguises its true nature, but there are some aspects we can certainly identify as imperious. Streeck argues that it has a centre (Germany and France) and a periphery (southern and eastern Europe). The centre rewards compliance with fiscal transfers and military protection. National sovereignty is strictly curtailed, particularly on economic matters, and disobedience among peripheral countries like Greece and Italy is punished with austerity measures and the overthrow of elected governments, who are replaced with imperial governors. Meanwhile, core countries are generally free to break the rules. The EU is also expansionary... Brexiteers, on the other hand, at the same time as supposedly pining for a bygone empire, are also labelled as ‘Little Englanders’. Today, a Little Englander is generally used to mean a xenophobe or nationalist. But when the word was first used in the late 18th and 19th centuries, it was applied to opponents of Britain’s imperial expansion. Liberals like William Gladstone and Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who opposed some of Britain’s military ventures, were smeared as Little Englanders. Then, as now, the Little Englanders are hated for their opposition to the empire of the day."

Forget empire — Britain wants less of the world, not more | Financial Times - "It resented the EU as a conduit for global forces, especially immigration, rather than as an obstacle to their full embrace.The regions that shaped and were shaped by empire voted to remain, including London, the old metropole; Scotland, the source of many settlers and administrators; Manchester, not just the empire’s industrial centre but its liberal intellectual heart; and the port cities of Liverpool and Bristol. Inland Birmingham voted to leave, as did the countryside and market towns of Deep England. What those communities seem to want is Nation 1.0 — the sovereign statehood that predated the globalised era, when the population was more homogenous and the economy less exposed to foreign competition. Whatever these impulses are, they are not colonial... What should strike the outside world is the relative absence of imperial neuroses in a nation that used to run a quarter of it. Most voters have no memory of empire. Those who had the chance did not punish postwar governments for their relinquishment of the colonies. No episode poisoned our politics quite as much and as recently as France’s 1960s Algeria crisis. The British regard the empire as a good thing, say the surveys, but this does not amount to an urge for its return or for an integrated Commonwealth as a more realistic consolation prize. Since 1945, intelligent outsiders have overestimated Britain’s frustrated ambition and underrated its sense of resignation, its desire for a quiet life after a draining few centuries as a player. When the American diplomat Dean Acheson said the British had not yet found a role after empire, he rather assumed that we were looking for one. Insiders make the same mistake. The least effective argument for the EU in the referendum campaign centred on its usefulness as a power-multiplier for medium-sized nations. It is not that voters disbelieved this. They just did not care enough... A first-time visitor to Paris from elsewhere in Europe might flinch at the monuments to Napoleon. Over time, it dawns. For the French, he has become a domestic figure: the bringer of order and rational progress to their people, the inventor of the Civil Code and the schools system. They remember the father of the nation, not the prolific warmaker... Introspection is bad enough but the British cannot be guilty of that and the opposite at the same time. Outsiders are free to fault us, if they pick the right fault."

Thread by @danieljohnsalt: "It's a testament to how badly parliament is treating leave voters that I am considering voting for the Tories and Johnson. I have never vote […]" - "It's a testament to how badly parliament is treating leave voters that I am considering voting for the Tories and Johnson. I have never voted Tory in my life but I will if that is what it takes for democracy - not Brexit - democracy to be respected.
Democracy only works when the losers have the balls to accept defeat until next time. That is not what has happened here.
It is disgusting to see this nasty nexus of politicians, academia, media and much of the middle class get together and bully others because they lost. Every nasty malicious trope and insult available has been thrown at 52% of the population who did nothing more than go out and vote.
Remain should be ashamed of themselves. They have brought our democracy and country to its knees and started to unwind our democracy. All because they lost for the first time in decades. All because they have created a world that is utterly slanted in their favor and for once other people - a huge chunk of the population who feel left behind and voiceless actually managed to say something.
Watching parliament braying like a football club mob I have nothing but contempt for them and all they espouse. Liberalism, democracy, equality. These are obviously just words without meaning to them after the way they have behaved.
People from across this country who have been insulted for 3 years must have looked at last night and felt nothing but rage and shame...
I feel sad for those less able, willing and privileged than me to speak up.
Those who are being insulted in streets, offices and homes across this nation.
All because they actually want laws made in this country, to control how trade takes place and to manage who comes into the nation. These are things that nearly every country on this planet does - but apparently you are some sort of extremist to even want it for the UK...
They feel the country should be how they want and they don't care what others think.
These same people will say they are better educated but really they are stupid. Stupid because after all their pontificating they are no better than a mob. A mob that has used the political system, media and every other channel - because they run them - to simply shout down any opposition. In that process they have broken something very profound though perhaps they don't care.
They have broken the very things that makes democracy work.
That we are all equal when we vote. Trust that voting will change something. That the loser will accept the result...
I wonder if in the darkness of the night these people ever sit there and ask what happens when there is nothing but rubble left of the system. Because at the end of the day we traded violence for the ballot box to resolve our political disagreements.But what happens when the consent of the people is no longer asked or simply ignored?Something will give - it's what worries me - that something will snap."

There is no solution to Brexit that will placate Leavers and Remainers – only turmoil awaits - "Labour has been dragged to the position angry Remainers long demanded – a second referendum with Remain on the ballot. Right on cue, the Lib Dems switch to supporting outright revocation of Article 50. The sudden perceived inadequacy of the policy hard Remainers wanted is striking. It is not that everyone is waiting to feel betrayed. But if half the voters on each side are impassioned, around a quarter of the voting public is liable to be inflamed by an unfavourable Brexit outcome. That’s a large minority to feel angry and alienated in an electorate – and it cuts across traditional party divides on either side, giving it a lasting destabilising power in British politics... one option – should the EU indulge the UK with sufficient time to pull it off – could be to hold a second referendum where the Leave option is created by a citizens’ assembly made up of Leave voters, as a way of undercutting the power of elite cues and giving Leavers some ownership of the process."

Cameron 'personally requested Obama's back of the queue Brexit warning' - "A former key aide to Barack Obama has confirmed David Cameron personally asked the US president to warn Britain would be "back of the queue" for a post-Brexit trade deal.Ben Rhodes, an ex-White House adviser, admitted Mr Obama's dramatic intervention in the EU referendum campaign came at the personal request of the former prime minister... At the time, the remarks were furiously rejected by Brexit campaigners, who suspected co-ordination between 10 Downing Street and the Obama camp. They pointed to the president's choice of the word "queue", rather than the typically American usage of "line", as evidence of British involvement in scripting Mr Obama's comments.Mr Rhodes, who recently released a memoir of his time working for Mr Obama, has now revealed that was the case."

If the Establishment’s coup against Brexit succeeds, our institutions will never recover - "Never mind the arguments about backstops and prorogations. The real enormity is this: we voted to leave, but our leaders stepped in and blocked it.When I say “our leaders”, I don’t just mean MPs. I mean the entirety of what used to be called the Establishment: civil servants, big corporates, quangocrats. And, yes, lawyers, too... the fact that this case has ended up in court at all is a sign of the times. Twenty years ago, judges would have declined to hear it on the grounds that you can’t break a nonexistent law. Indeed, the 1689 Bill of Rights, arguably the closest thing we have to a written constitution, explicitly affirms that “proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament”. A prorogation before a Queen’s Speech is a fairly standard proceeding in Parliament... It doesn’t help that our officials move in almost exclusively Euro‑enthusiast circles. Several times a day, I am told that “everyone” can see that Leavers lied, that the gains of Brexit are illusory, and so forth. The word “everyone” is now, in Left‑liberal circles, assumed to exclude the country at large... Had Remainer MPs not seized control of the agenda earlier this month, I suspect we would be on our way to an agreement. By voting as they did, though, the opposition parties have encouraged Brussels to dig in in the hope that Brexit might yet be cancelled.  Do they imagine we can’t see what they are doing? It’s not their deceit that bothers me, so much as their insult to our intelligence. For three years, they have done everything they can to gridlock Parliament so as to block the referendum result that they had previously promised to honour. Now they have the chutzpah to point at their own mess and say: “Look, it isn’t working, we’d better cancel Brexit.”"

I’m sick of explaining the real Brexit story to ill-informed foreigners   - "wherever I go – from the Middle East, to the US, Asia and, of course, throughout the EU – people overwhelmingly parrot the narrative peddled by Remainers: that Brexit is a catastrophic own goal, that Boris Johnson is an "Anglo-Trump", that Britain is somehow “withdrawing from the world”.And some make the lazy – or rather, ignorant and insulting – assumption that Leave voters are far-right, nativist, uneducated racists... Johnson is also, according to one Eastern European acquaintance, a far-right, illiberal authoritarian, whose obvious soul-mate is Donald Trump. How he squares that with Johnson’s liberal, pro-immigration, pro-LGBT sentiments is beyond me. And the mere act of voting Leave is, I’m told, causing unprecedented and catastrophic economic self-harm. (Oh really? The last time I checked, our economy was ticking along just nicely)... Far from withdrawing from the international stage, I say, we are as keen as mustard to sign trade agreements with countries all over the world. Brexit isn’t about insularity, but a demonstration of our desire to do business globally, unencumbered by the lumbering bureaucracy of the EU... Then I come to the punchline – that Brexit is, at its core, about who makes the laws under which we live. Should it be our elected government, or a pseudo-democracy, accountable to the powerful and not the people?... In fact, in my recent experience, only non-EU Switzerland seems properly to understand the Leave agenda. As a client in Zurich remarked to me just a few weeks ago: “The key thing about the EU is never to join in the first place”."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Sajid Javid - "I think you'd also agree that we have seen inappropriate behavior and language across, across Parliament and hopefully, for example, you may soon have my shadow on your program soon… you can ask him about why he thinks it's appropriate to say that MPs should be lynched, why you should praise the bombs and bullets of IRA"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Parliament fury - "'I don't know if you heard Brendan Cox came on the program. Just after seven o'clock. He was also, he said he was shocked by what was said yesterday in the House of Commons. But he also said all politicians to an extent share the blame. He brought up the use of the word coup, dictatorship to describe this government.’...
‘The Prime Minister should not stand up and use words like betrayal, like surrender, like capitulation, which he used yesterday, and which he has used before. Are you comfortable with them?’
‘Well, he didn't use the word betrayal yesterday and-’
‘We will not betray the people who sent us here. We will not. That's yesterday.’
‘Yes. Okay. But you're saying he used the word betrayal. He said, we will not betray. And actually it sounds like this is, you know, a modest difference, but actually the accusations that were leveled at him yesterday in you know, were deeply unfair. The reason that-’
‘Which part was unfair?’
‘Well, he was accused of describing people as traitors. He's never done that’...
‘He still needs to take responsibility for the language he uses. A Labour MP stood up yesterday, a woman who has received death threats, including one calling for her to be beheaded. She talked about what happened to Jo Cox. And she said, moderate your language. And he responded with the word humbug, which means false and deceptive behavior.’
‘So the point I'm making is there has been language used right across this debate, which I think is deeply uncomfortable. We've had Sir Edward Davey, he had to apologize for talking about beheading Boris Johnson, we had you know, people at the Lib Dem conference, cheering and chanting about killing Tony Blair. We've had John McDonnell talk about lynching a female colleague’"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, MPs return to Parliament - "‘A constitutional coup. That's how one cabinet minister said to have described the Supreme Court ruling. Some have been critical of what they described as judges politicizing their role. But the head of the Bar Council has warned against using inflammatory language against judges. The former Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption has previously said that he expected the government to win against those looking to overturn Boris Johnson's progression of Parliament… So did this ruling come as a surprise to you?’
‘No, I haven't said that I expected the government to win. What I said is that the orthodox view was that the government was entitled to do what it did in law, although it was contrary to the conventions of the Constitution. However, if you do something sufficiently shocking, you must expect people to want to push the boundaries out. And that is exactly what the Supreme Court has done.’
‘You've written that one can believe in rights without wanting to remove them from the democratic arena by placing them under the exclusive jurisdiction of a priestly caste of judges.’
‘Yes. Well, the objection to judicial interference in politics is that it undermines the democratic legitimacy of public decision making. The problem that we have here is that the government itself has sought to undermine the democratic legitimacy of public decision making by dispensing with a central feature of our Constitution, namely, that ministers are answerable to Parliament. And what the Supreme Court has done is to invent a brand new rule that is undoubtedly controversial. A brand new constitutional rule, the effect of which is to reinstate Parliament, at the heart of the decision making process. And that is not undermining democracy at all. Nor is it a coup. It is simply replacing what was, ought to have happened by convention, by law, in circumstances where the government has tried to kick away the conventions’
‘But we saw in the High Court didn't we, in the previous judgment, a reluctance to get involved in the political arena. It said that the relationship between the executive and parliament is territory into which the court should be slow indeed to intrude.’
‘That is the orthodox view. That I suspect is what the attorney general advised the Prime Minister. And frankly, it's the advice that I would have given. But when you do something sufficiently shocking as this government has done, you must expect people to change the ground rules. And that's what happened.’...
[Interviewing ordinary people in Aylesbury on Brexit] ‘If they were reflecting the views of the people, then they would get on with it, but I don't think they ever will, to be quite honest. It's been, what three years since we voted out, and we're still waiting. They’re sitting on their bums, in my eyes. Just get out of Brexit will be the best thing for him.’
‘And then there are those who see Boris Johnson as pugnacious and inspiring. For mother of one Claire Smith, the court ruling is just another obstacle as he battles through his Brexit journey’
‘The government of this country and everybody else should just let him get on with what he's doing, because I think he's doing it in the right way.’
‘But the court, the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, has ruled that he was unlawful by suspending parliament.’
‘I don't understand why, why the courts got involved. I mean, I think, you know, he's in charge of the country, the Queen sort of said that it was okay for him to suspend parliament. And I think that he's doing the right thing. I think he's doing a very good job actually’"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, David Cameron v John Humphrys - "‘It was David Cameron, who called the referendum. And this is what he told me the day before the nation voted.’
‘I would accept the instructions of the British people and get to work on Friday morning to deliver them’...
‘That was a false promise, wasn't it? You misled the nation’...
‘I came to feel towards the end of the campaign, that I'd so thrown myself into one side of the argument that I would lack any credibility, if we voted to Brexit, to be the person to deliver that.’..
'Why, hours before we were to turn out to vote, why did you say I will accept the instructions of the British people and get to work to deliver them?'
'At no point did I want people to go to the polls thinking that the referendum was a vote about my future'"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Brexit: no-deal document published - "‘It’s going to be grizzly, it's going to be unpleasant, it's going to be chaotic. You accept that?’
‘No, I don't accept it. Because the thing about yellowhammer is look, it is a planning assumption. But the bit that needs to be added is: and if the government didn't do anything about it, you know, because when we're going through the process of what could happen if there was a no deal Brexit and of course, we don't want a no deal Brexit, we're trying to get a deal. But if there is a no deal Brexit, what is the worst case or even the normal scenarios? And then what do we do about it? Every day, there are meetings in government and it has been four months about, okay, let's paint the worst case scenario, let's paint a normal scenario that we think is likely, and then do something about it. And that's the bit that seems to be missing from some of the reporting. It says if we just sit back and accept it’…
Government does that well, actually. We are often the insurer or the guarantee of last resort, you know, as defense secretary and previously security minister, every day, I was thinking about worst case scenarios. And that's why we have submarines on patrol. That's why we plan the services"
Brexit hysteria is like climate change hysteria - assuming no one will do anything to mitigate the ill effects and then proclaiming that disaster is looming

Drunk on an anti-Brexit dream, Varadkar risks plunging Ireland into a no-deal nightmare - "Varadkar is drunk on a dream – the dream of being the first Taoiseach in Irish history to be able to lord it over the old colonialists next door thanks to having enlisted collective European muscle to bring the British bulldog to heel. This is both reckless and graceless. Reckless because Ireland has so much to lose if his gambit goes wrong. A no deal Brexit will surely bring another crash to our continent’s most notorious boom and bust economy; celtic tiger one minute, everything on tick the next. It is also reckless because a no deal will lead to him being the first Taoiseach in modern times to face the awful prospect of being instructed to install border infrastructure by a foreign power (the European Union). What a mockery of Irish nationalism that would make. And graceless too. Graceless because this is not how any country should treat a fundamentally friendly neighbour. When Ireland was last on Carey Street, a decade ago, the UK Government lent it the not inconsiderable sum of £3.25bn directly to help it out of a tight spot. On top of that, some £14bn of UK taxpayers’ money used to bail out RBS and Lloyds ended up being deployed to keep their even more desperate Irish subsidiaries afloat. And remember, this was at a time when we were short of a few bob ourselves. And graceless, I suggest, because generations of those working-class English lads who have traditionally formed the backbone of the British Army risked and in many cases gave their lives for the cause of bringing peace to Ireland and defeating the terrorists of the IRA. And remember, the British Army was deployed on the streets of Northern Ireland in the first instance to protect nationalist communities, not loyalist ones."

Germany’s ailing economy can’t afford a no-deal Brexit | The Spectator - "The UK was the ‘sick man’ when we ‘joined Europe’ in 1973. Now, with Britain on the cusp of leaving, the European Union’s largest economy is decidedly out of sorts. After failing to recover over the summer, Germany is now almost certainly in recession"

The Remainer elite is laughing in the face of our history - "The Lib Dem conference exulted with the Brussels mandarin, Guy Verhofstadt, when he called for “a European Union empire”. What? Progressive liberals applauding imperialism? To please the EU imperialists, the Lib Dems then voted to scrap Brexit, without even a nod to the 17.4 million who backed Leave in a referendum that Lib Dem leaders had long demanded. As power and loyalty have fled to Brussels, so national governments and institutions have lost strength. Brussels chooses our new rulers with little reference to the “member states” who have replaced nations. Thus the new European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and her eight vice presidents were recently selected behind closed EU doors, in today’s equivalent of “smoke-filled rooms”. Our unknown new rulers rejoice in Animal Farm‑ish titles: “Commissioner for a Stronger Europe in the World”, “Commissioner for an Economy that Works for People” and “Commissioner for Protecting Our European Way of Life”. (The EU’s way of life does not recognise our Christian heritage, which was specifically banned from the European constitution, despite the pleas of Pope John Paul II.) These new imperial controllers have almost unchecked power and are now launched on an accelerated path towards Ever-Closer Union. How on earth do Lib Dems, let alone Tory “rebels”, think that that will be good for Britain, let alone the rest of Europe?Just look at Italy. Since the euro was imposed, it has lost 15 per cent of its manufacturing base and youth unemployment has risen to 30 per cent. As the author Tim Parks wrote in a recent essay, Italians realise that their leaders are powerless and unending control from Brussels “amounts to the infantilisation of national politics”. True throughout much of the EU."

David Lammy says comparing ERG to Nazis ‘not strong enough’ - "David Lammy has said comparing the hard-Brexit European Research Group of Tory MPs to Nazis and proponents of South African apartheid was “not strong enough”, and suggested that the Brexit debate had allowed proponents of hard right views to flourish.The Labour MP, who is a vocal campaigner for a second EU referendum, was asked on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show whether a comparison he previously made to the election of Adolf Hitler’s party in Germany and to South African white supremacists was appropriate."
Clear moderate language that there's no need to check, since he's not a Brexiter

Piers Morgan hits back at Labour MP who told him to go 'f*** yourself' in row over Boris Johnson's inflammatory Brexit language - "Neil Coyle launched a furious rant against the GMB host on the same day Labour had criticised Boris Johnson for using "incendiary language."... “You're a sad, sick little man. For you to stoop this low is shocking. Grim.”... Mr Coyle then flew into a foul-mouthed rage, fuming: “It's early doors Piers but I say this hand on heart: go f*** yourself. You're a waste of space, air and skin.“Trying to use Jo against us whilst encouraging the fascists is shocking even for a scrote like you. You make me sick.”But Piers simply quote-tweeted the Coyle, writing: "A Labour MP..."... The PM sparked outrage in the chamber after he was asked to temper his language by Labour MP Paula Sheriff."

Jess Phillips willing to stab Jeremy Corbyn 'in the front, not the back' - "A Labour MP has said she is willing to stab Jeremy Corbyn in the "front" as she said she has personally berated him over shoot to kill and deselection threats... "The day that it becomes you are hurting us more than helping us, I won't knife you in the back, I will knife you in the front."... Miss Phillips said Mr Corbyn's comments on shoot to kill were "worse" than when he after failed to sing the national anthem at a Battle of Britain remembrance service in September.  After the Paris attacks, Labour MPs openly criticised him after he told the BBC he was “not happy” with a “shoot-to-kill” policy if terrorists were attacking Britain and questioned the legality of killing Jihadi John.She described his shoot to kill comments as "pernicious" and said the public had just " wanted to hear just after Paris that if a man walks down your street with a big gun and he's got a bomb strapped to him that we will shoot him in the head. Immediately. Ten times.""

Labour's John McDonnell 'said gutless wimps opposed to Sinn Fein should have knee-caps shot off' - "Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell allegedly called for the "ballot, the bullet and the bomb" to unite Ireland - and joked that 'gutless wimps' who refused to meet Sinn Fein should be knee-capped at the height of the Troubles... Mr McDonnell suggested with black humour that Labour councillors who boycotted the meeting should have their "knee-caps shot off"... It comes after Mr McDonnell apologised in September of this year for remarks he made in 2003, calling for Irish republican terrorists to be honoured.Mr McDonnell had told a meeting in London: "It's about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of (hunger striker) Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table."

John McDonnell stands by insults aimed at ex-Tory minister Esther McVey - "Shadow chancellor John McDonnell today refused to retract claims an ex-Tory minister was a 'stain on humanity'... 'This is a man who talks about the struggle through threats and intimidation and bullying.'And he doesn't just talk about it, he whips up that culture.'"

John McDonnell caught in second Thatcher assassination row as old footage shows him joking idea has ‘massive support’ - "John McDonnell has been criticised after new footage emerged of him repeating the suggestion that he would like to "assassinate" Margaret Thatcher despite previously claiming he was "sorry" for the remarks. In 2010, Mr McDonnell caused a furore by suggesting he would like to travel back in time and kill Margaret Thatcher in the Labour leadership contest. He subsequently apologised after he was condemned by both Tory and Labour MPs.However on Monday new footage of Mr McDonnell from 2014 emerged of him joking about the incident and insisting that there was "massive support" for assassinating Mrs Thatcher, a year after she passed away... Footage of the event, which published on the Guido Fawkes political blog on Monday, also shows Mr Corbyn’s new shadow education secretary Angela Rayner laughing at the comments."

The myth of xenophobic Britain - "Since moving to Britain from Russia as a boy in the 1990s, I have been continuously shocked by the British attitude to foreigners: the mix of healthy curiosity, warmth and acceptance that is, globally speaking, the exception, not the rule. As someone with dark hair and dark skin, I experienced more xenophobia in my own country than I have in my new home... my parents taught me that the best way to give ignorance power is to take it seriously. When did we decide that endless outrage about stupid people saying stupid things was the best way to improve the world, one Facebook post at a time? To be clear, for the permanently offended: I am not saying that racism, xenophobia and stereotypes are harmless. They aren’t, and they must be resisted: the sooner Bond villains stop speaking with terrible Russian accents, the better.As a comedian, I have travelled the length and breadth of Britain, poking fun at British idiosyncrasies from my viewpoint as an outsider. Routines where I ridicule the locals are often better received than jokes about Russia or my marriage. By contrast, a British comic who made fun of the locals in Russia would be the one in stitches, not the audience. This tolerance of others, of free speech and of freedom of choice, is the reason Britain and the West are an example and a draw to the rest of the world... many prominent voices have become convinced that half of our fellow citizens are racist xenophobes. As someone who voted Remain, I find this allegation to be disrespectful, hugely damaging to society, and, most importantly, untrue.Oddly, the hordes of mainstream journalists gleefully labelling millions of people racist for exercising their democratic rights offer little by way of explanation for how half of voters became such horrendous bigots... The truth, however, is that, over the time I have lived in Britain, this country has witnessed unprecedented levels of migration. Whether you think this is good or bad is irrelevant – any honest discussion of immigration has to begin with this fact. In 1995, net migration to the UK was 76,000 people. I was among them. By 2015, net annual migration had reached 330,000. This dramatic change in the pace of immigration has caused an abrupt shift in attitudes: according to figures from YouGov and Ipsos MORI, as late as 1997, just three per cent of the British public thought that immigration was a major concern. Today, this figure hovers around 50 per cent. While this was happening, successive governments, starting with Labour under Tony Blair, sought to dismiss rising concerns about immigration through the effective combination of deceiving the public and smearing anyone who called them out on the lie.This has led to the self-censorship of moderate voices in the immigration debate, thus polarising the conversation... Where ignorance cannot be used to explain away worries about the scale and pace of immigration, as in the case of someone like the articulate conservative author Douglas Murray, people simply dismiss him as a ‘gentrified xenophobe’, the thinking man’s racist. God forbid we should engage with his arguments. This potent mix of lies and slander remains the dish du jour... Just as we can support our troops while being opposed to war, we can appreciate the contribution immigrants make while acknowledging that a society’s ability to integrate them is not limitless... The growing chasm between the stories being told about Western culture and the reality of our daily interactions is the reason that we have grown so utterly distrustful of politicians and the media. When truth becomes unspeakable in the public square, when nuance and detail are replaced with Twittermobs and bad-faith arguments, all of us withdraw further and further into our echo chambers."

Brexit Is a Cultural Revolution - The Atlantic - "The Brexit saga has now been going on for so long that, despite the daily twists and turns, it is starting to feel as though nothing ever changes... For the first time since the country opted to leave the European Union in the summer of 2016, a withdrawal agreement won a majority in the House of Commons. This is all the more remarkable because the deal proposed by Boris Johnson is very similar to the one Theresa May put forward earlier this year, only to see it go down in ignoble defeat at the hands of some of the same members of Parliament who now gave it their blessing... Brexit was never really about public policy in the first place. Britain’s fight about Brexit is best understood as a civil war over the country’s culture... Brexiteers never trusted May. For May, who voted for Remain, Brexit was always a technical challenge of public policy that the cruel gods of politics had inexplicably forced her to solve in return for her spot in the limelight. If only she accomplished this devilishly difficult task, she believed, she could go on to be a good old-fashioned prime minister.Johnson, however, has always understood that Brexit is as much a symbol as a cause... Once Brexit ceases to be the all-consuming topic of British politics, Johnson is likely to take the same approach to different policy areas: In tone, he will remain a strident populist. In substance, he is likely to pursue comparatively moderate policies. A few key decisions he has made already point in that direction. After years of restrained government spending, he has substantially increased investment in a broad range of areas, from policing to education. And though he has at times used derogatory language about minority communities, he is taking steps to welcome more high-skilled immigrants to Britain: Reversing a rule set by his predecessor, for example, he is granting two-year work visas to students who complete an undergraduate degree in the country. In a fragmented political system—and at a time when the Labour Party is headed by the most unpopular opposition leader in living memory—this recipe may just give Johnson a dominating position for the next decade. His populist style is allowing him to squeeze out the Brexit Party, consolidating support for himself on the right of British politics; his comparatively moderate policies, as well as his history as a popular mayor in highly diverse London, ensure that he does not inspire the same fear and mistrust among ethnic or religious minorities as far-right populists such as Trump often do."
Yet liberals' hatred of Boris once again shows that words speak louder than actions

Jeremy Corbyn crowned the least popular Opposition leader since records began - "The devastating blow comes as he was ridiculed for his muddled Brexit position after he refused eight times to say if he is pro Leave or Remain... An Ipsos MORI poll found that a whopping 76 per cent of Brits are dissatisfied with Mr Corbyn while just 16 per cent are happy with him.It means the hard-left Labour boss has a satisfaction score of minus 60 – the lowest of any Opposition leader since their records began in 1977.This is even lower than Michael Foot, who scored a minus 56 in August 1982.Mr Foot led Labour to a devastating defeat against Margaret Thatcher the following year with a manifesto dubbed “the longest suicide note in history”.

EU leaders: united over Brexit, divided over much else - Reuters - "Ironically, on the question of actually adding two more member states, North Macedonia and Albania, the leaders bickered and agreed to disagree.They made no headway on setting the bloc’s next long-term budget, and failed to set tougher climate targets ahead of December’s U.N. global conference on climate change in Chile.While several leaders celebrated the unity that the 27 member states had maintained during the tortuous talks with Britain, their lack of summit achievements reflects strains and mistrust between them on a host of issues.“The EU faces many very difficult choices,” said Guntram Wolff, director of the Brussels-based Bruegel think tank. “One of the core problems is that on many issues France and Germany do not see eye to eye.”"

Rees-Mogg and his son need police escort as Remain campaigners target them with vile abuse
Presumably since they are evil racists, it's good to harass them

Blair’s reckless population explosion sowed the seeds of Brexit, though few will now admit it - "As figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) confirmed this week, the last 20 years have seen the population rise faster than at any time in history.Even though the rate of increase has slowed, the total is due to hit 70 million within a decade, fuelled predominantly by immigration, either directly or by the children of recent arrivals... These bald statistics go a long way to explain our current politics. It is not immigration per se that is problematic but the pressures brought about by a rising population. However, for many years, we were not allowed to talk about it because the debate was always framed in a racial context. Bizarrely, political discourse has raged around the creaking NHS, the crowded trains, the snarled up roads, the lack of homes, the crammed prisons, the cost of pensions and the woeful state of social care, all without ever focusing on the cause for fear of being denounced as racist.There were two ways to address this matter. Either stop adding to the population with a policy of net zero immigration. Or accept that the increase was unstoppable, even welcome in view of the fact that we had so many more older, economically inactive people, and ensure the infrastructure was in place to cope.Unfortunately, successive governments did neither. The Blair government opened the public spending spigots but sprayed most of the money at a burgeoning public sector rather than services. New hospitals that were built through the Private Finance Initiative actually had fewer beds than existing buildings to make them more affordable. The impact of the PFI deals is still being felt, not least the exorbitant cost of paying the interest on the loans... There were many causes of Brexit but historians will surely look at the impact of population growth on public sentiment in England (Scotland’s has hardly changed) and how that fed into an animus against the EU"

The real reason why MPs are dead against no-deal - "By now, it has become overwhelmingly apparent that the dire predictions of apocalypse now if the UK leaves with no-deal have been ludicrously exaggerated. The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has admitted that his previous warnings were wrong. He now says the country’s borders and banks are increasingly well prepared for no deal, softening the blow to growth and avoiding the worst of the potential chaos if no transition is agreed.Civil servants, writing under cover of anonymity, have testified to the fact that the country is in fact prepared.The former Bank of England Governor Lord King, who would ideally like to leave with no deal after a six-month delay to avoid a “short-run dislocation cost”, says nevertheless that the predictions of economic ill-effects from no-deal have been overstated and a “scare story”, that it’s not obvious there would be any jobs lost at all and that the UK should not want to remain in a EU which is facing “disastrous” outcomes from monetary union...  why are MPs refusing to support no-deal on the grounds that it would be “national suicide”, a view which Mervyn King characterises as “a collective nervous breakdown”? The answer is that leaving with no-deal is the only way actually to leave the EU. Since the EU would never agree to terms that really did allow the UK to operate as an independent country, Remainers could be pretty certain that any deal to which its negotiators agreed would inevitably leave the UK still under its thumb.Leaving with no-deal is therefore, to them, an utter disaster because it is the only way to deliver Brexit. Which is why these MPs, with the connivance of the Speaker, are now tearing up constitutional convention and parliamentary rules in order to stop it."

Peter Hennessy On Britain In Transition | History Extra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "It was a different outfit we were joining. The Treaty of Rome, everybody knew, or everybody knew if they were paying any attention. The first sentence of the Treaty of Rome of 57 talks about ever closer union with the Brits somehow persuaded themselves that once we got in all this French philosophical waffle would be taken care of. And the hard practical Brits with this superb diplomatic service would essentially run the place. And it was, above all a free trade arrangement. That it wouldn't be seen as some great political Federation in there in the making. That it was to boost economies. So we lullabyed ourselves about what it would be like. And I remember Richard Wilson, the former Cabinet Secretary saying to some of my MA students at Queen Mary some years ago now that we Brits are very funny, we go into our big constitutional changes as if under anesthetic, we wake up so many years later saying we didn't really mean it to be like this"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Brexit delay & general election - "‘Downing Street says that if Boris Johnson doesn't get his way they'll make MPs vote day after day on whether to have an election and not bring forward any business to the House of Commons... what's happened to do or die, die in a ditch? Isn't the Prime Minister a man of his word’
‘Look, we tried everything possible to get Brexit done by October 31. And you'll recall your listeners will recall that so many people said you won't be able to get a deal. We got a deal. We prepared for a no deal outcome just in case. Despite that, Parliament at every opportunity has decided to dither and delay. Led by Jeremy Corbyn, they've asked for more delay’...
'‘If the opposition parties... don't trust the government then agree to a general election. Vote for a general election, let the British people decide who should govern them... they can't, on the one hand, make Parliament deliberately dysfunctional, turn it into a zombie parliament. So we can't get on with the business of governing. And at the other, on the other hand, refuse to actually then have [an election]'"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, #GE2019 - "‘He said, I will deliver Brexit. No ifs or buts, do or die. Would you like to apologize now on behalf of the Conservative Party for breaking your word again on this?’
‘No, because it's Parliament that's blocked delivering Brexit and that's why we need a general election’"

Comedians claim anti-Brexit jokes are damaging their careers as audiences outside London walk out in offence - "A number of comedians have described scripting their take on Britain leaving the European Union for Left-wing audiences in London, only to face unamused audiences when they take their acts out to the rest of the country... Aaron Brown, editor of the British Comedy Guide, said: "I consume a lot of comedy – mostly TV, also some live – and would say the comedy world’s reaction has been almost exclusively negative."Many jokes essentially paraphrase as 'shooting ourselves in the foot', and the rest rely on lazily branding 52 per cent of the voters as racist. "One would have hoped comedians would be able to find comic mileage in their evident disengagement from half of the public, but there instead seems to be little to no such acceptance and analysis of the referendum result, instead merely anger and lashing out at stupid people making the wrong decision, as they see it."

Tories call for investigation into £3million that George Soros funnelled into anti-Brexit campaign - "His New York-based Open Society Foundation sent the money to the pro-EU Best for Britain group via a London outpost, circumventing a ban on foreign donations to political organisations... Since 2017, BfB has received £2.7 million from Mr Soros's foundation. The sums have been revealed in the accounts of the foundation's London branch, which shares an office building in Westminster with other anti-Brexit organisations, including Open Britain and the European Movement.Both of these groups have played a critical role in the People's Vote campaign for a second referendum... Andrew Percy, who is standing for re-election for the Tories in Brigg and Goole, said: 'I am calling on the Electoral Commission to urgently investigate whether a breach of spending rules has taken place, and to clarify how Best for Britain is spending these overseas millions.'The rules are clear: foreign donations on this scale cannot be spent on an election campaign."
Funding sources and conflicts of interest are only a problem when they are on the "right"

Driver 'forced by Essex Police to remove Brexit slogan' - "Two anti-Brexit campaigners say they were pulled over on to the hard shoulder of the M25 and told by police to remove a slogan from their car.Passenger Peter Cook said the officer was "extremely aggressive" towards them over the phrase "bollocks to Brexit"."He said it [the slogan] was a public order offence"... In November 1977, Nottingham Magistrates' Court ruled "bollocks" was not an obscene word in the case of a record store manager who had been arrested for displaying the Sex Pistols' debut album Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols."

The Prime Minister Who Cried Brexit (Ep. 392) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "CAMERON: I love coming here. It’s the only place where your politics is almost as crazy as our politics at the moment. The difference being that at least in the U.K., you can watch one television channel and find out roughly what’s going on. Here, if I watch Fox, I think the president is doing brilliantly. If I watch CNN, I think he’s about to go to prison... nine out of 10 members of Parliament did actually vote to have a referendum. But I accept there are some people who won’t forgive me for holding a referendum. They didn’t think it was a good idea. And they’re furious that my side of the argument lost...
Cameron was adamant that a Brexit referendum was just a matter of time. After all, Euroskepticism has deep tendrils in the U.K., going well beyond the Conservative Party.
CAMERON: Yes, of course. I mean, the thing I like reminding people is that, well, sometimes I do it as a quiz — can you name a British political party that didn’t support a referendum?
DUBNER: The answer is, there is none.
CAMERON: There isn’t one. Between 2005 and 2015, the Labor Party, the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, the Green Party, they all, one stage or another, supported a referendum on Europe. So it was— it’s not just that the Conservatives were interested in this issue. It was an issue running through British politics...
There were two problems I’d mention. One is, when Poland and the other seven Eastern European countries joined the E.U. back in 2004, the U.K. government said, “We expect about 14,000 people to come and live and work in Britain.” And in the event, it was actually more like a million people came. So that had created a sense amongst the British people that the politicians just didn’t have a good handle on the numbers, and that created a worry.
The people must not be allowed to make the Wrong Decision

Britain 'one of least racist countries in Europe' - "Prejudice against immigrants in the UK is “rare” and comparable with that in other wealthy EU and largely English-speaking nations, according to analysis of the largest public European and international surveys of human beliefs and values.  Around three in 20 Brits (15 per cent) would object to having migrants as neighbours, around 10 per cent would object to neighbours of a different race, and 10 per cent would rather not have neighbours of a different religion... The findings, published in the journal Frontiers in Sociology, challenge prevailing attitudes on Brexit, the nature of prejudice, and the social impact of modernisation... “Prejudice against immigrant workers or minority ethnic and religious groups is rare in the UK, perhaps even slightly rarer than in equivalently developed EU countries."... With half a million combined respondents, Prof Evans said the World and European Values Surveys provide a large, cross-sectional view of people’s attitudes, beliefs and opinions in 100 countries.The researchers analysed responses from these and the European Quality of Life surveys, to found out how ethnic and religious prejudices vary between nations at different stages of socio-economic development... “We found a high level of tolerance for ethnic and religious diversity is typical of prosperous European and Anglophone nations, whereas ethnic and religious prejudice is much more common in poor countries... “We show that a single root prejudice – that all the feelings about specific groups spring from a single generalised feeling of tolerance or intolerance towards diversity in ethnicity and religion – holds across the whole globe."... “Spillover in attitudes about different groups means that events and examples that lead people to feel more warmly towards one minority will also increase their warmth towards others.  “For example, a well-publicised act of personal heroism by a Buddhist would likely ever so slightly increase the general public’s positive feelings towards Buddhists, but also towards immigrant workers, towards people of African descent, towards Muslims, and, indeed towards all minority ethnic and religious groups." “Equally promising, the strong gradient of prejudice decreasing with national development – economic growth and institutions that support personal freedom and markets – suggests that contrary to fashionable belief, modernisation is a powerful force for good as far as tolerance for diversity is concerned.”"
Leftists will just claim they were lying
Of course, the least racist people keep banging on about how racist they are

UK unemployment falls to lowest level since 1975 - "UK unemployment fell to its lowest level since January 1975 in the three months to October this year.  The number of people out of work fell by 13,000 to 1.281 million, Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show.  The employment rate rose to an all-time high of 76.2%"
Brexit has been such a disaster!

Tories call for investigation into £3million that George Soros funnelled into anti-Brexit campaign - "The billionaire financier known as 'the man who broke the Bank of England' is facing a possible investigation into nearly £3 million that his foundation channelled into a campaign aimed at bringing down Boris Johnson.Tories have called for an urgent Electoral Commission probe into George Soros's American organisation after The Mail on Sunday discovered that it funnelled money into a campaign trying to block Brexit at the ballot box. His New York-based Open Society Foundation sent the money to the pro-EU Best for Britain group via a London outpost, circumventing a ban on foreign donations to political organisations. Best for Britain (BfB) has designed a website telling people how to vote tactically for Remain-backing candidates, which, if successful, would wipe out Mr Johnson's hopes of a majority.
Of course, as we know, funding is only nefarious if it's from the Koch brothers

No 10 probes MPs' 'foreign collusion' amid plot John Bercow to send 'surrender letter' to Brussels - "Downing Street has launched a major investigation into alleged links between foreign governments and the MPs behind the 'Surrender Act' which could force Boris Johnson to delay Brexit"
Of course, as we know, foreign intervention is only nefarious if it helps "The Right"

EU headquarters built by undocumented migrants, workers claim - "The EU is facing embarrassment over claims that its new Europa headquarters, also known as the Space Egg building, was built with the help of undocumented migrant workers who at times went without pay... At its unveiling it was said to symbolise all that is best about the union... “Several team members did not have Belgian residence papers. None of us got a contract, we were not insured.”"
But according to Remoaners, exiting the EU will gut worker protections

EU referendum: Did 1975 predictions come true? - "A common complaint from those who voted to remain in the EEC in 1975 is that they were hoodwinked - they thought they were voting for a trading arrangement but ended up with a bossy "superstate".This is not entirely true. Sovereignty - the ability to run our own affairs - was very much an issue in the 1975 referendum.Enoch Powell, the maverick right wing Tory who had just become an Ulster Unionist MP, and left wing Labour cabinet minister Tony Benn - the loudest voices in the Out campaign - talked endlessly about it.In its leaflet to voters, the Out campaign warned that the Common Market "sets out by stages to merge Britain with France, Germany, Italy and other countries into a single nation," in which Britain would be a "mere province".The In campaign openly acknowledged that being a member of the EEC involved "pooling" sovereignty with the eight other nations who were members at the time.But it said Britain could not go it alone in the modern world and it assured voters that British traditions and way of life were not under threat.The In campaign also stressed that all the big decisions in Europe would be subject to a prime ministerial veto - something that no longer holds true 41 years later - and that there was no need for Community-wide laws apart from for a "few commercial and industrial purposes". Today's Leave campaigners would take issue with that "few"."
Remainer logic: if there were lies, the referendum is invalid. Therefore the UK's 1975 referendum on stayin in the EU was invalid and the country should never have even needed to have a Brexit referendum!

Jack Dart - "The leavers are still banging on about how us Remainers can’t accept Brexit. Yeah, we fucking well don’t accept Brexit. When someone offers us a fair referendum, that isn’t plagued with lies, deceit, illegalities, foreign interference, misleading dark ads, and racist posters from Nigel Farage, we’ll let it go. In the meantime, you can look forward to a hugely divided country, where over half the people didn’t vote for your damaging, xenophobic-led, inward looking, isolationist view of the world. We’ll battle you all the way to the end, because Brexit is a fraudulent con played on the British people by the most elite in our country. I’ll never stop fighting it, and I suspect others won’t either."
Comments: "Jack, if Brexit is a project by the "most elite in our country", then why did the banks, FTSE 100 companies, most of Parliament, and the majority of science and academia support Remain?  How do you ideologically square this circle without falling into untenable cognitive dissonance?"
"There have been two elections since the referendum and both times the voters backed parties who were backing Brexit."
"You keep saying Brexit is a scam pushed by the "elites", but all the academics, celebrities and europhilic aristocrats could barely pull a single Labour seat in the north. Cornwall is bluer than the Atlantic"

New Service Blocks EU Users So Companies Can Save Thousands on GDPR Compliance - "A new service called GDPR Shield is making the rounds this week and for all the wrong reasons. The service, advertised as a piece of JavaScript that webmasters embed on their sites, blocks EU-based users from accessing a website, just so the parent company won't have to deal with GDPR compliance... The new regulation brings a wealth of protections to user privacy but is a nightmare for companies doing business in Europe. The reasons are plenty, but the humongous fines for failing to meet GDPR standards are at the top of the list for most companies (€20 million/$24 million or 4% of a company's annual worldwide revenue —whichever is higher). There's also the 72-hour deadline to reveal data breaches and the necessity of hiring a so-called "Data Protection Officer." Plus, GDPR also mandates that companies must inform users on what data they collected about them, allow them to review the data, and even let users delete the data from the company's servers if they so wish. Any company that has data on EU users is subject to the new GDPR regulation and can be fined, regardless if the company is not based in a EU state.  As such, smaller companies that can't afford the exorbitant (consultation, legal, and technical) costs of becoming GDPR compliant, are hoping that nobody notices they're breaking the law or pulling out of the EU market altogether. Examples of companies and services that have withdrawn from the EU market because of GDPR include Verve (online marketing), Ragnarok Online (online game), Super Monday Night Combat (online game), Unroll (email subscription service), Brent Ozar Unlimited (software supplier), Tungle (gaming software provider), and Drawbridge (cross-device identity service)  The list is probably bigger, as not all companies have made their decision public."
Together with the banning of memes, it's no wonder many people think the UK will be better outside of the EU

GDPR, One Year On: 42% of US News Sites Block Visitors From EU - "When the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced one year ago, many US news sites opted to block all traffic coming from the EU until they could develop a solution. However, one year on, this is becoming the permanent state of affairs.We tested over 500 US news sites to find out which comply with the GDPR, and found that 42% do not allow users from inside the EU to access content, while 9% offer those in the EU a web experience with less content than US users.Access to basic US news from Europe varies widely by state. For example, 90% of the sites examined in Nebraska are not accessible to users in Europe without a VPN, while 80% of news sites based in California and Nevada remain accessible and GDPR-compliant. This means that US expats looking to keep up with news from their hometown are being prevented from staying aware of events impacting their family. Journalists in Europe looking to keep up to date on regional politics could also be affected, further hampering the free flow of news."

The year the EU took over Italy - "EU intervention in Italian politics reached its height in the summer when it helped to appoint a largely pro-EU government... when so many key issues from immigration to the economy – and even who governs the country – are influenced by the EU and conditional on Brussels’ support, many Italians feel there is little point in voting anymore."
The EU when it says it promotes democracy means governments must do what it tells them to

Tony Blair sought EU funding while trying to stop Brexit - "Tony Blair was bidding for contracts with the European Union for his “institute for global change” as he publicly campaigned to overturn Brexit"
Of course, according to Remoaners everyone on the Remain side was pure and good, while Leave was backed by rich Tories wanting to make big money off Brexit. Because as we know conflict of interest is an issue only if you're on the wrong side

Reality Check: Has immigration held down wages? - "The claim: Immigration has held down wages in the UK.
Reality Check verdict: Current research suggests there was a small, negative impact on the wages of low-skilled workers, which was outweighed by other factors such as the impact of the financial crisis and rises in the minimum wage... The assertion that immigration put a small amount of pressure on wages for lower-skilled workers is supported by a paper from the Bank of England... that is an overall figure, and the impact on some individual sectors and regions will have been considerably bigger... It is by definition hard to find figures on the extent of the hidden economy and how much it uses migrant workers"
Ironically, this seems to defy the laws of economics, where a rise in supply leads to a fall in price

David Reynolds On The Long History Of Brexit | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘The party that was more suspicious of the European community at the beginning, and by beginning I mean, not so much the 1960s but the 1970s because we didn't join until 1973, was the Labour Party. The Labour Party was more antagonistic to the European project as a capitalist club. Tories were more broadly supportive’...
'There was a growing frustration in much, in parts of England at a sense of alienation from London, because they felt, people felt, we don't have a say in our, in, we don't have a political say in the country in the same way as the Scots or the… Welsh do. Yet England is 85% of the United Kingdom. And that's what's been called the devolution deficit, the sense that there hasn't been a devolution of power to the regions within England… you can certainly see a sense of English alienation with a towards... the rest of the United Kingdom, which has gone in parallel with a sense of antagonism towards the European Union'"
As liberals say in the US, land doesn't vote and democracy should be one man one vote. So England is being oppressed

Post-Brexit Britain will be like Nazi Germany, claims Lib Dem peer - "Post-Brexit Britain will be “reminiscent” of Germany under the Nazis, a peer has said, as he claimed people are crying themselves to sleep over the UK’s exit from the EU.Lord Greaves used a debate on Boris Johnson’s Withdrawal Bill in the House of Lords to draw comparison between Britain after January 31 and Germany in the 1930s... Lord Greaves, who has been a Liberal Democrat peer since 2000 and sits on Pendle Borough Council, later appeared to row back on his comments, insisting he had compared Britain to Weimar Germany, not to the Third Reich."

The ruled have given the rulers a lesson – and made Britain stronger in doing so - "Obviously, we learnt that some claims made by Remainers were untrue. There was no instant economic collapse, no mass exodus, not even a recession. They said that no deal better than Theresa May’s could be obtained and Mr Johnson was the last person capable of getting anything. When, all the same, he did get a better deal, they said that Parliament would not vote in favour of it. All this was wrong... we have learnt a lot more about ourselves. Despite all the genuine pain, we have learnt something to our advantage.We have learnt, which we had already suspected, that our elites are in a poor state. Large swathes of them really did think – perhaps think still – that EU membership was a subject too difficult for the mass of voters to understand and therefore to vote on.Worse, we have learnt that those elite views were held not only by unelected bureaucrats, judges, university professors etc, but also by a large number of people – MPs – who live by the ballot box. If MPs think voters cannot be trusted with deciding under whose authority they should be ruled, do they think the same about voters’ right to elect them? The most shocking gap that opened up after the referendum and – even more so – after Theresa May’s botched general election in 2017, was that between voters and Parliament. Eight-four per cent of the voters in that election backed parties (Labour and Conservative) who had promised to get Brexit done. Yet some Tory MPs and most Labour ones then proceeded to try to make Brexit undoable... It seemed briefly as if the parliamentary system which Brexiteers usually extol had broken down. These were uncomfortable lessons to learn about many of the people who run this country, but happier lessons came from the public’s response. Three times after the referendum itself – in the 2017 election, in the European elections of 2019, and in the general election in December – electors had the chance to go back on their original decision. They never did so. Politicians who had tried to frustrate Brexit, most notably every single candidate who had left the Conservatives or Labour in the name of Remain, was punished at the ballot box. There is little evidence that this was because of increased support for Leave – although Leave held up astonishingly well against the BBC/Labour/Liberal Democrat/SNP and Green propaganda barrage. It was more because voters showed a clear understanding of their own constitutional function.If you are asked to decide something by voting, the majority of them seemed to think, your decision must be implemented... Two things follow which will help us from this day forward. The first is that, almost alone in the whole of Europe, a mainstream political party has channelled the growing popular revolt. The oldest, wiliest party in the world – the Conservatives – belatedly but successfully gave a lead. So Britain has not suffered a traumatic collapse of political order.The second is that 17.4 million voters changed the subject. It had suited European elites for too long to ensure that the main sound in modern politics is the steady tap of the counting house. People like Philip Hammond simply could not believe that people ever vote except for economic reasons. Since the EEC referendum of 1975, the word “sovereignty” had been pushed to the edge of discourse, declared dead or irrelevant, its loss soothed by a stream of money. This was to conceal the fact that sovereignty does matter and was deliberately being passed away from us to a centralised European power."
Ergo Remoaners pivoting from claiming that a majority really support remain to a lot of less convincing adhoc claims (e.g. blaming the media or saying voters are stupid)

EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration - "A meeting of 21 scientists in Parma, Italy, concluded that reduced water content in the body was a symptom of dehydration and not something that drinking water could subsequently control.Now the EFSA verdict has been turned into an EU directive which was issued on Wednesday.Ukip MEP Paul Nuttall said the ruling made the “bendy banana law” look “positively sane”... Rules banning bent bananas and curved cucumbers were scrapped in 2008 after causing international ridicule"

EU vacuum cleaners ban 2017: everything you need to know - "The new vacuum cleaners energy label rules will reduce the maximum wattage from 1,600W to 900W for any vacuum cleaner manufactured or sold in the EU"
Overturned later, but still

Brexit: Why It Matters for Future of Democracy - "If the European Union were merely the European Market, Brexit would be foolish: The United Kingdom has enjoyed a kind of privileged access to the Common Market because it retains its own powerful currency rather than the Euro, which in reality is managed on behalf of Germany and against the interests of Southern Europe. But the European Union is not just a market but a political project, really a kind of institutionalized utopian project. European Council president Donald Tusk said, “I fear Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also Western political civilization in its entirety.” It’s easy to point and laugh at such an extravagant statement, but Tusk was verbalizing the incredible challenge Brexit presents to a certain kind of European mind, a mind conditioned to the idea that democracy inheres not in popular sovereignty — democratic peoples governing themselves — but in the elite administration of human rights, insulated from democratic passions and prejudices. It is this worldview that has shaped the construction of the European Union. The EU is governed by an unelected Commission and an unelected Court, both joined to an elected Parliament with no real legislative power. Can you impeach a European commissioner? Can you vote for one? Or vote to remove one? No, non, nein! The European project that the Commission promotes and protects is guided by a spirit of ever-closer union, not the laws and treaties it makes. The European Union does not respect votes that go against that spirit, such as Ireland’s vote against the Lisbon treaty; instead, it forces reruns. It does not respect its own commitments, either: Angela Merkel’s welcome to 1 million refugees and migrants in 2015 totally blew apart the supposedly solemn Dublin Accords. It plays favorites: The pro-EU Emmanuel Macron is allowed to temporarily blow through the budgeting and debt requirements imposed on member states, but those same requirements are enforced with fervor against populists such as Italy’s Matteo Salvini. And it has no qualms about interfering in the politics of its member states: During the Euro crisis, recalcitrant national governments in Italy and Greece were replaced by a combination of pressure from above in the form of the Commission and the European Central Bank, and from sideways in the form of captured native interests. In short, untethered from real democratic input, the EU at once suffocates European life with regulation and unmoors it with lawless caprice.The response of the European Union to Brexit isn’t rebuke and repentance, a newfound willingness to accede to the wishes of the democratic peoples within it. No, it’s doubling down. MEP Guy Verhofstadt has said that Brexit has underscored the need 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.” Lest you dismiss his words as empty, it is Verhofstadt who has been chosen to lead the next Conference on the Future of Europe, which is already preparing to recommend removing the last true badges of sovereign and democratic control from national parliaments: their freedom to tax and appropriate money as they see fit. Doing this is likely necessary to save the Euro. But the price is the loss of self-government on the continent where self-government was born into this world. Having bought off almost every party save for nationalists and populists, the European Union is, ironically, guaranteeing the very thing it was created to stop: the ascendance of nationalist parties to domination of Europe. Brexit is not just a way to preserve British democracy by restoring independence and sovereignty to the United Kingdom’s Parliament. It is a way of recovering the very things a democratic constitution enables: the conciliation of diverse interests and the political moderation of the people that comes with it."

Why is CBBC trolling Brexiteers? - "The BBC has not exactly covered itself in glory with its Brexit reporting. (Witness the BBC reporter vox-popping Brexiteers celebrating in Parliament Square on Friday night, asking them about why they thought it was a ‘very white crowd’.) There is nothing snowflakey about being irritated by our supposedly impartial, taxpayer-funded broadcaster routinely pouring scorn on more than half of the voting population. That even the kids’-TV department took Brexit Day as an opportunity to get some digs in shows how deep this unthinking, or perhaps unashamed, hostility to Brexit and Brexit voters runs. But this bizarre case also tells us something about the Brexit wars in general. Namely, that while we Brexiteers won the political battle to have our vote implemented, we lost the cultural battle long ago. The narrative that Brexit is ugly and racist and driven by colonial nostalgia (against all the evidence to the contrary) was cast years back. And the doubling down of various elite Remainers in the wake of Brexit Day shows there is little reassessment going on even now. As Matthew Goodwin put it at the weekend, ‘while Leavers won the battle, Remainers could end up writing the history’. That really would be horrible."

Two losses for trans-Atlantic twits: Brexit finally happens, impeachment collapses - "How much punishment must liberal elites on both sides of the Atlantic endure before they learn not to try to undo the will of voters? That such trickery only invites fiercer and more decisive popular backlashes?... “Brexit is a defeat, a rebellion against the concept that working together makes Europeans stronger,” German Marshall Fund fellow Rosa Balfour told the New York Times. As usual, the Gray Lady turned to a spokesman for the professional-managerial classes.They believe that global liberalism is destined to overcome nations, borders and other vestiges of the dark, unreasonable past. Thus, a vote for Brexit was a blow to the very concept of cooperation.Of course, ordinary Europeans know that cooperation between nations doesn’t require a massive, unaccountable bureaucracy running a whole continent — a pseudo-Christendom without the beauty and soul of the real thing.As Brexit pioneer Nigel Farage said in his swan-song speech to the European Parliament on his way out: “If we want trade, friendship, cooperation, reciprocity, we don’t need a European Commission, we don’t need a European court, we don’t need these institutions and all of this power.” He added: “We love Europe, we just hate the European Union.” Along the way, Farage recounted all the ways Brussels had run roughshod over the popular will in its quest for “ever-greater integration.” When European voters rejected EU power grabs at the ballot box, they had the measures rammed down their throats anyway, via treaties and bureaucratic fiat. In other cases, disobedient voters were simply forced to vote again until they reached the “right” outcome... Every element of establishment power — from the Bank of England to the BBC, from the universities to the Church of England, from the civil service to the world of high finance — mobilized in the effort to kill Brexit. They tried every trick in the book. They endlessly slow-pedaled Brexit in Parliament. When Johnson temporarily and legally suspended Parliament in an effort to end the endless discussion, they got activist judges on the high court to stop him.They tried to destroy the lives of Brexit activists. The Electoral Commission fined a young Brexiteer £20,000 because he checked the wrong box on an application form.And, of course, they pushed the ludicrous notion that Brexit was the nefarious work of — you guessed it — the Russians... If that pattern of elite misbehavior sounds familiar, it’s because Democrats and Never-Trump elites have for three years been up to the same thing here in the United States. They took President Trump’s victory as an insult to their professional-managerial honor — and they were determined to punish him and his voters.Instead of taking stock of their own policy failures, which had battered working-class Americans of all races, they resolved that Vladimir Putin had hypnotized half the country with his Twitter bots and planted a Manchurian Candidate at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.The Mueller report utterly debunked that theory. The special counsel concluded that there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.For liberals, the sane thing to do at that point would have been to focus on booting Trump from office the normal way: by trying to beat him fair and square at the ballot box in 2020.But no: The trauma of 2016 was too wounding. Trump shouldn’t have become president, and so they would use impeachment to retcon history and erase the Bad Orange Event. They came up with a cockamamie Ukraine impeachment theory based on third-hand information and no evidence of lawbreaking. And now that’s going exactly nowhere.Especially in an age of populism, the way back to the electorate’s heart lies through politics — not procedural tricks. The sooner the left learns this, the sooner its agony will end."
Strange how Remoaners claim that Brexit was backed by billionaires to make themselves money when the elites love the EU so much

‘The EU is an empire’ - "For economic sociologist Professor Wolfgang Streeck, the EU is a ‘liberal empire’...
After the end of Communism in 1989, the EU became a geostrategic project, closely intertwined with the US’s geostrategy in relation to Russia. From the original six countries cooperating in the management of a few key sectors of their economies, the EU became a neoliberal empire of 28 highly heterogeneous states. The idea was and is to govern those states centrally by obliging them to refrain from state intervention in their economies... The EU’s de facto constitution consists of the Treaty of European Union, which is practically impossible to revise, and the rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union, which only the court itself can revise. The neoliberal core of the EU as an institution and the results of European integration were intended by its framers to be eternal and irreversible. This is shown by the hard opposition in Brussels to a British exit, and in the intention to make that exit as unpleasant as possible. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, visible in the inability of EU institutions to respond constructively to claims for more national autonomy, as expressed by various ‘populist’ countermovements. These movements are now blocking the process of European integration and there is a large risk that the insistence of Berlin, Paris and Brussels on prolonging and extending the established European institutions will lead to serious conflict between European nations, such as we have not seen since 1945... I think that the neoliberal and geostrategic nature of the post-1990 EU would not be capable of generating anything like the legitimacy needed for a political regime to be viable. All sorts of sentimental narratives had to be invented to make people forget the disempowerment of national democratic politics that is at the core of the EU construction. Today, the left-liberal ideal of internationalism has been hijacked by neoliberal anti-statism, and international solidarity is identified with free markets... Nowhere in the history of socialism, for example, can we find the idea that workers are morally obliged to let themselves be competed out of their jobs by workers in a country where wages are lower. Rather, solidarity always meant that workers cooperate, in the sense of organising together, to protect themselves against being played against one another by employers.Then there is the European Monetary Union, which acts like an international gold-standard regime. The gold standard has been known since the 1930s to be incompatible with democracy and international peace... EU propaganda enlists people’s desire for peace and friendship to rob them of their most important institutional heritage: the nation state. The nation state is the only site of a politics amenable to anything like a redistributive state or an egalitarian democracy.
spiked: Why has the left become so attached to the EU?
Streeck: I wish I knew. Maybe because they confuse the EU with Europe? The EU is a deplorably undemocratic institutional construct that is so complex that you cannot understand how it works without extensive investigation – and even then you may not quite grasp what it is about. This means that you can read almost anything into it. You can identify it with personal dreams of a world that is free from historical burdens. Or you can see it as the embodiment of a pleasant consumerist lifestyle: rights without obligations, free travel, no taxes, immigrant labour, an international labour market for English-speaking university graduates. ‘Europe’ is your oyster: a playground for the new middle-class, the bobos, as the French call them: the bourgeois bohemians, the self-appointed cosmopolitans who believe that by importing cheap labour for their households they are doing something for the progress of mankind. Many people today want to leave their national historical baggage behind. To many British citizens, the UK means colonialism. They seem to believe that ‘Europe’ never had colonies, so they want to be ‘Europeans’ rather than ‘little Englanders’. This is even worse in Germany, for understandable reasons. If you are abroad, anywhere in the world, and you meet someone who says they are ‘from Europe’, you can be sure they are from Germany.
spiked: To what extent does the EU resemble an empire?
Streeck: The EU has a centre and a periphery, with a steep gradient of power between the former and the latter. The centre imposes and enforces its political and economic order on the periphery, in the form of the common currency, the ‘four freedoms’ of the common market, and a general requirement of adherence to ‘European values’. Moreover, compliance is rewarded by fiscal transfers, in particular, the structural and social funds... Peripheral countries that do not follow the rules, such as Greece under the SYRIZA government, are punished by central institutions like the European Central Bank, while central countries like France are exempt from punishment. Sometimes wayward governments in peripheral member states are replaced by the centre with imperial governors, as happened with the replacement of Silvio Berlusconi by Mario Monti in Italy, or of George Papandreou by Lucas Papademos in Greece. And exit from the empire is, while possible, made as difficult as possible, in order to prevent peripheral countries negotiating terms of membership more suited to their particular situation... the pro-EU left is urging people to be grateful for the blessings dispersed from the European structural funds. The assumption appears to be that if European pacifiers of this sort are removed, the left and those it is supposed to represent will do nothing, remain seated, safety belts fastened, and suffer in silence. I do not share that view.The British pro-EU left has, for fear of Thatcher and her current and future acolytes, sold its anti-capitalist birthright for the thin gruel of a European minimum entitlement to a few days of parental leave. People can ask for more, as they have successfully done in all other rich European countries. But the right tells them that these measures would mean less employment – and they seem to believe it! Britain is one of the richest countries in the world. But the left has been persuaded that it requires European tax money to have a regional policy, even though this has made no difference at all to regional inequality."

Defending the 'European Way of Life' is Outrageous, Apparently - "Frans Timmermans (Netherlands) is very unpopular in Poland and Hungary, against which he led an EU crusade during the last Commission term. He will be in charge of “creating a European Green Deal.”... Didier Reynders (Belgium) will be taking over the Justice portfolio, but wait until they find out about the time he appeared in blackface. In other words, members of the new European Commission cabinet, supposed to stand up for fairness, justice, transparency, democracy, and equality for all, don’t exactly have a sterling record. One was investigated for nepotism. Two others were accused of plagiarizing their Ph.D. theses. One spent 33 days in jail for alleged corruption, two were involved in the misuse of public funds, four are former communists, one was accused of pressuring police (as a minister) to release his son from custody, one was not investigated for corruption only because parliament granted her immunity, and one quit as head of a research institute over corruption allegations.Clearly there’s a lot to be offended by with this bunch. Yet the only outrage that arose this week had nothing to do with the fact that the sole originators of legislation within the EU have checkered pasts. Von der Leyen’s biggest crime, at least if you believe Twitter and European media, is the creation of a portfolio called “Protecting Our European Life.” For EU lovers, the fact that this portfolio includes the department on migration shows that the Commission wants to appeal to the far-right... The Commission has fired back at critics, saying, “His [the responsible commissioner’s] mission letter explicitly states that ‘The European way of life is built around solidarity, peace of mind and security.'” A spokesperson added that the “European way of life” is “built on the principles of dignity and equality for all.”The two definitions are clashing: “European” is used by identitarians to describe ethnic white people. Meanwhile, the European Union is attempting to redefine “European” to mean pro-EU. This is why “the UK is leaving Europe” (as opposed to “the European Union”) is a common line... The fact that a bureaucratic name has drawn so much consternation shows everything that’s wrong with the EU’s superficial and dogmatic brand of politics."

More than three million EU citizens apply to remain in the UK – with just six rejected
Strange how a few articles were griping about so many people being rejected
Guess Brexit won't be a disaster after all, since so many EU nationals want to stay

Brexit News: Dutch MP savages EU's relucatance to give Britain a good Brexit deal - "“They wanted to make one example to any country in Europe, that if you try to do this, it will be a big mess“It was a big disincentive to Leave the European Union.“Indeed, people are afraid in my country, to other countries if you look at polls of people who want to leave the European Union it is at its highest point in five years time.”"

EU crisis: Netherlands REFUSES to pay more as Brexit budget blackhole row erupts - "Dutch Prime Minister said the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Sweden and Denmark – dubbed the “frugal five” - should not contribute more in the face of the EU’s financial woes following Britain’s exit from the bloc and migration pressures. He said: "We are net payers and I don't see why we have to pay more.”."