Westminstenders Continues. Boris is having a bad week. Corbyn resists. Its gonna be a long summer.

[RedToothBrush]

THE BREXIT FALLOUT CONTINUES - THREAD ELEVEN

The dust is beginning to settle and the storm has abated. At least for the moment. The summer is about to start, and so there may be a break in proceeding.

May has had quite a first week both here and abroad.

The ground has not stopped shaking from the political ripples abroad. Made PM on Weds, Nice on Thursday and a failed coup in Turkey on Friday. The political landscape has changed once again.

At home she first cleared out the Govians and called for loyalty. She channelled the ghost of Maggie at the despatch box. She started the process of trying to make friends with Scots, Germans and the French. She is apparently now Merkel's bestie. Sturgeon is already ousted from that position after just days.

Boris, meanwhile has been rinsed by everyone he speaks to because of what he's said in the past. He's also given up his chickfeed job. Oh the hardship.

Now he looking like he's starting to regret deciding to play with the grown up. He's been trying - and it would seem, largely failing - at sucking up to the Americans. There's still no apology, but he has admitted that he has a list that is so long that he's lost track of what he needs to apologise for. I bet he's wishing for his playmates, Dave and George to come back.

Otherwise life carries on as normal, well this alternate new version of normal, with parliament breaking for the summer today. Don't worry the Martian landing is scheduled for a week Tuesday.

UKIP's polling seems to have dropped back post referendum, and things have gone rather quiet. Wolfe, Etheridge, Duffy and Arnott are all standing (Who? When did that happen? Yeah quite. Without Farage they disappeared). They plan to reform and make an assault on seats in the Labour heartlands of the provisional NW, Midlands and NE at the next general election. Hustings in August, new leader announced Sept 15th. Looks of thinly and not so thinly veiled racism to look forward to there then. The Daily Mail best make sure it upgrades its servers in time.

The Labour contest grinds on like a war of attrition. Stalking horse Angela fell at the first fence as Owen Smith (that's the MP not the journalist everyone including the media!) wins the dream unity candidate ticket for an apparent hiding to nothing against the steely stubbornness of Corbyn. Everyone with a pulse is starting to loose the will to live with it all.

The Lib Dems, have a Spokesman for Remain. Old Cleggy's back! Otherwise they seem to have been trying to do a deluded impression of the opposition party. Though with 8 MPs they aren't doing much better or worse than Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet atm.

The Green are having a leadership battle too. It must be very civilised - I've heard not a word about it. Lucas tried to get a vote about PR though the Commons. It failed. Again.

There also is a cross party idea to set up a new iniative of a progressive movement to champion Europe, which seems to be gaining some traction. It may also double as a support group for anyone who thinks the world has gone a bit nuts lately at this rate.

The SNP are pissed off, as they vow differently on everything and once again they feel that Trident has been imposed on them. Sturgeon had a good meeting with May though, and apparently the Union must remain and Scotland holds the key to the future. Though we don't know the key to which door that is - Braveheart or Brave New World.

The Republic of Ireland is making noises about a referendum about Irish Unity, but beyond that nothing about NI has really been on the radar. May is supposed to go visiting soon.

And the Welsh? Baaaaa who cares about the welsh? They made the mistake of voting Leave as well as the English and now have been forgotten, consigned to political irrelevance forever.

Article 50 has been pushed back officially until the New Year, with a first legal hearing on how to activate it due no sooner than the 3rd week in October. Leaving the EU legally will now be no earlier than 2019.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/eu_referendum_2016_/2685902-Westminstenders-Contines-Boris-outmaneovered-everyone-Now-War-and-Peace?pg=1 Previous Thread TEN

Don't mistake ideologues for experts

Politicians, like other people, reject all the experts whose facts they dislike.
Rightwing politics has been in the ascendency since Thatcher, so they tend to reject experts whose facts don't agree with rightwing small state social conservative dogma.

Sometimes real experts are drowned out by politics, or so-called "experts" are just raised from deserved obscure mediocrity because they support certain politics

Ideological rightwing politicians drowned out the real expert Hans Blix on WMDs in Iraq. Drove the real expert David Kelly to suicide.
Even drowned out all the French & German politicians who listened to Blix and who lobbied against war

Rightwing / religious kooks took Wakefield as their expert and refused to listen to the 99.9% of medical opinion after his dodgy research and his financial interests had been exposed.

Rightwing politicians took the few climate-change deniers among scientists as the experts and ignored the remaining 95% of scientists
Well, they did the same with economists, just more vigorously, because austerity benefitted all the wealthy, whereas denying climate change only benefitted some of them

The idealogues beat the experts on Austerity

Nobel prizewinner Paul Krugmann is only one of many economists who have consistently condemned austerity as pointless cruelty that actually harms the economy.
The politicians ignored him, because they act in the interests of the wealthy, who just want to pay less tax
Towel-folder Osbourne, with no economics training or degree is not an "expert"

Minford, the Brexiters pet economist, was also Mrs T's pet.
The vast majority of economists disagree with him and have always done so.

The idealogues beat the experts on introducing the Euro

The "experts" i.e. all economists who put politics aside, realised that a common currency would only work after the political union was complete, within a real United States of Europe.
It would require e.g. uniform taxation across the USE, investment, money transfers to poorer regions

Countries with deep structural problems, e.g. the UK, can only compete with stronger more efficient economies, e.g. Germany, by devaluating the currency

prettybird same argument, but it was in California, so though it was in English there was all the romance of the auld country, green elf hats, shamrocks and folk songs to contend with........

My original point though was not so much the nuances of the arguments that you had to have but that because Christianity was familiar you didn't have to start by confronting the prejudice that the Catholic religion and it's adherents were somehow inherently violent and being Irish did not expose you to the same degree of risk of being accused of being a terrorist on buses and trains....

Red We have seen the decline of local journalism manifested in our community too. Just five years ago we had a local office producing the local paper and local reporters for each community in the area, and you could meet with them to discuss local issues. There have been some major local issues, our Council Leader thinks we are a particularly Bolshie lot in his fiefdom and we do keep challenging his plans for us, but that reporter understood the issues and the reporting was balanced. Now the local office has been closed completely and the paper is produced miles away, the reporter who covers local issues is miles away too, and frequently regurgitates the Council spin verbatim, and rarely even covers any criticism. Quite frequently they don't even bother to remove the stories from sister papers from the local papers online template so you get weird stories about flashing on a common twenty miles away appearing.

Luckily we have an amazing local blog that is the focus for activism and has helped expose and stop at least one of our esteemed leaders plans, and is now focused on another. However that was originally a one man show and it's success rooted in his very witty and only slightly partisan reporting , he did try to be objective at first but eventually had to own up in the face of relentless Council manipulation of facts. It wasn't sustainable and even went offline when the demands on his time became too great but now there is another issue and local demand has bought him back with a string of supporters (many with a frustrated background in journalism themselves).

And Mumsnet too provided a really useful local forum. Into it's seventh or eighth thread on one local issue.

We soon came to realise that the local council officials were actually reading the Mumsnet local thread since sometimes what was posted there got repeated verbatim in meetings! It gave rise to the mental image of all these middle aged powerful white men in their tweed and brown brogues (that is really how they dress) coming in on a Monday morning to click on to mumsnet to see what the local Mums had cottoned on to now.....

Pepe the frog and the Overton window. Have seen the image but paid no attention to it. Let's just make Pepe rainbow coloured.

www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/05/26/how-pepe-the-frog-became-a-nazi-trump-supporter-and-alt-right-symbol.html

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/benefits-welfare-scheme-department-for-work-and-pensions-tesco-companies-charities-work-benefits-a7163886.html
A list of over 500 places that used benefits claimants as unpaid labour.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/legal-ok-st73lrtvk

Can't read the whole article but the "President Putin’s news service, Sputnik, published a report suggesting that Jo Cox’s murder was part of a plot to sway the EU referendum result
RIA NOVOSTI/REUTERS" bit is enough to give a flavour.

Icke hat on - it's been obvious for a while that mn is full of a likely target for propagandists. So many set-up threads/posts.

^time.com/money/4086901/brain-money-science-studies-fmri/?xid=time_socialflow_twitter^

Money is like Cocaine to your brain.

time.com/money/4086901/brain-money-science-studies-fmri/?xid=time_socialflow_twitter

Just read the article below after seeing it on Twitter. I think this is the best critique of Corbyn I have read.

www.newstatesman.com/2016/07/jeremy-corbyn-and-paranoid-style

Or you could have the alternative view as presented by Sputnik. I'll leave others to decide which is more balanced.

sputniknews.com/europe/20160718/1043220943/uk-media-corbyn-coverage.html

The article(s) in The Times - all 3 pages plus an editorial are well worth £1.50. The most entertaining read for ages. The silly season is truly upon us when Edinburgh Uni forging links with the local Russian culture centre is being touted as a threat to Western Democracy. I am still not over Romanov's less than helpful time as owner of Hearts but even he attracted less hyperbolic hand wringing.

And for those of you still not tempted to scale the paywall the original unsexed up version of the Times story as told by the Herald in September 2015.

www.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/13785698.Kremlin_mouthpiece_sets_up_UK_base_in_Edinburgh/

I will be kind of disappointed if the Times haven't found the Trump/Corbyn/Putin/NS HQ by tomorrow.

Matthew Paris is also on song having declared allegiance to TM last week he is now fretting about 5th column socialists within the Tory Party - only slightly paraphrasing

"I detect among the Tories a waning zest for the buccaneering liberalism that will safeguard - if anything can - our economic future outside the EU.......Inch by inch we economic liberals may be losing ground. Socialism is at its most dangerous when it creeps........ There hasn't been a lot of humour in JC's politics but he could yet have the last laugh".

The article(s) in The Times - all 3 pages plus an editorial are well worth £1.50.

Don't do Murdoch.

Sorry, should say I don't.

I only do in the vein of "know your enemy" Swedish.

You can know your enemy. It doesn't mean you are obliged to line their pockets at the same time.

Thanks for the link to the New Statesman article, Vista. I agree, I think the journalist nailed it.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/30/secret-memo-older-people-should-lose-right-to-a-guaranteed-state/
Triple lock to go?
If the economy is going to go, the way that it looks then it will have to, as it will be unaffordable. I bet that's going to go down well.

Howabout But the media bias against Corbyn is not a unique phenomenon. The coverage of Miliband before the last election was hardly complementary.

Thanks for the tip about using a different browser Red.

Since I am a pensioner, I would much rather see the triple lock replaced by a double lock, if the money saved was diverted to the NHS or the disabled. I would be annoyed if it just led to more handouts for the already mega wealthy or more bribes for tax dodging firms.

The New Statesman article is very good. These bits struck me forcibly:

Their opponent is an “unelected” Prime Minister commanding a majority of just twelve, who was a senior figure in the government that just caused Britain’s biggest crisis since the war, and is now forced to negotiate a deal that either cripples the economy or enrages millions of voters who were conned by her colleagues into believing they had won a referendum on immigration. Just before leaving office, George Osborne abandoned his budget surplus target – effectively conceding it was a political gambit all along.

A competent Labour leader, working with other parties and disaffected Remainian Tories, could be – should be - tearing lumps out of the government on a weekly basis. Majority government may be a distant prospect, but forcing the Tories into a coalition or removing them from government altogether by the next election is entirely achievable."

What I find incredibly frustrating is that, without a competent Opposition, the narrative of the problems involved in Brexit are still being diluted - and I suspect the chances of a Brexit deal that sacrifices economy for popular immigration controls is increased.

I read up-thread suggestions that a 'sacrifice' of the economy, putting us at a level with, say Portugal, might not be so bad. I have to admit, I found that thought extremely depressing. I can't help but feel that so much of what we take for granted would be lost in such an outcome. Not just through a direct effect on the economy but also as a longer-term, knock-on effect in all the other industries, particularly the creative industries, that add so much to the 'flavour' of life in the UK.

(I think you can tell I'm in Brexit-depression mode again.)

YY re. local papers, Red. Most local papers are now not local at all but produced nationally, with a couple of pages filled with nominally local content. And, yes, they function primarily for advertising. It's depressing to red about the employment practices, too.

I worked on a local newspaper for work experience at school, years ago and it was great: a proper newspaper, with lots of reporters - and subs! - and a printing press (very old, me!). It's astonishing that ll of that has disappeared. And you are absolutely right about the impact this has in terms of political communication.

The local papers in my area also end up giving huge prominence to very small pressure groups, especially the cpre.

This is then translated into huge objection to development in all the local papers, which is taken up by the politicians, but when you look at it is about 20 people objecting. It does end distorting the narrative of local news, because the headlines are those the cpre has put forward or petty crime.

The county and district councils in my area are going to have a huge reorganisation soon with changes to boundaries etc. I've seen very little about this in the press.

To deal with the Daily Telegraph limit Peregrina (and others) you go into your browser settings and delete all of the Telegraph cookies. Access is then restored.

This is a real tweet. This morning. Verified account.

Andrea Leadsom MP Verified account @andrealeadsom
Building a #bee hotel is a great way to help pollinators in our gardens #beesneeds

I have no further comment to make on that.

There are things going on, but I have plans for the day so this is your lot from me for now at least.