Westminster: Brexit is the hard right's weapon of mass distraction

[BigChocFrenzy]

The fervour and divisions over Brexit have suspended normal party politics.

The staggering incompetence & unsuitability of Corbyn as a leader, together with the resulting impotence of Labour has removed the normal checks & balances in UK politics.
There is a vaccum where the Official Opposition should be, so Theresa May is under pressure only from her right.

I fear Thereas May and the Tory rightwing are taking advantage of Brexit to complete the destruction of the post-WW2 social contract and the welfare state.

Meanwhile, the constraints of civilised discourse have been loosened and those with racist or social Darwinist views now feel free to spout their poison openly.

Putin is pouring petrol on all the fires and Arron Banks is lurking < sinister emoticons required >

Zoe Williams:
"Behind a smokescreen of bogus patriotism, ideologically driven cuts to the NHS and all our public services are unpicking the bonds of nationhood"

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/05/brexit-theresa-may-falklands-war-nhs-cuts

"We should be marching against the crisis in adult social care, the closure of care homes, the systematic exploitation of carers, the £4.6bn cut from social care budgets this decade.
We should be .... asking:

“What exactly is the plan, if we’ve decided we can no longer afford to care for the elderly and the disabled?
What do we do with them instead?”

"We should be marching against cuts in education funding"

"Every morning we wake up to someone on the radio explaining, despairingly, that you can’t fix the hospital bed crisis until social care is fixed, and you can’t fix that until council tax brings in more, and it can’t bring in more because wages are too low."

"But when everything breaks at the same time, that is not a coincidence: it is a plan.

As surely as Margaret Thatcher had an economic plan on employment, rights, industry and wages,
this century’s Conservatives have a plan on public services, which is to smash them beyond all recognition."

What a disgusting thing to say.

Is it?

Farage has even been very publicly endorsed for his political values by David Duke, leader of the Klu Klux Klan. Farage was they key figurehead of the Leave campaign. From long before the referendum was even announced, to the current day.

I'm not sure how it's possible to avoid the associations here, however "uncomfortable" they may be.

That's the thing I've always noticed when I go to/lived in France. Good food isn't/wasn't cheap but people were prepared to pay for a decent saucisson or good fromage or fresh vegetables or some nice patisserie. Supermarkets, although prevalent, haven't destroyed the local boucheries, patisseries, boulangeries, epiceries to the same extent that our local shops have disappeared.

I'd be interested to see the figures for food waste in France versus the UK. I get the impression that for all our cheap food, we throw away an awful lot of it.

Bring it back on topic, I wonder if we'll have to learn to appreciate our food more post-Brexit as it becomes more expensive? Maybe there is an upside

Alternatively, our food supply will continue its downwards decline and we will have to accept unlabelled antiobiotic filled, chlorine washed chicken, steroid ridden beef and GSM grain through our new free trade deal with the US

Worth remembering that the eastwards expansion of the EU was very much a British pet project. The British were for a long time in favour of a wider, shallower EU, whereas other northern and Western European countries might have preferred a more select club with deeper political integration.

It was pushed by Britain at the behest of the US State Department, in the interests of playing geopolitical games in Russia's former back yard.

Makes you wonder if in fact the US should be considered Europe's foremost adversary.

Happy International Women's Day to everyone < fistbumps around the thread>
< shares Lindt loot with woman in feminist solidarity >

Wrong...
Nope
It's a completely logical assumption to make

As I said yesterday - you voted with him and his cronies despite all the above

Interesting how even the most pro brexit newspapers are quite downbeat ATM isn't it?

Any predications for Phils budget?

Meanwhile there's more and more reports of people being told to go get private medical insurance and reapply for residency in 5 years or go home, even if they've been tax and ni payers here for over 30 years until they've become carers or retired and lived off their partners.

Any predications for Phils budget?
Austerity to continue/possibly worsen whilst borrowing goes up to fund project clusterfuck

Me too peregrina.
My last demo was the poll tax!!

I'm considering joining the lib dems....just considering mind 😊

Hashi...dh and I are putting plans in place to get private medical cover
We are going to need it soon 😞😞😞😡

I agree the food btw
But food prices have already gone up...

Math, I was educated in a comprehensive school in the early 80s. It was in a poor area with a lot of problems - lurches between inadequate and requires improvement at each inspection these days.

I was taught in history about Ireland and Cromwell's atrocities. The texts were child-friendly with cartoons, but didn't pull any punches - there was a shocking account of a church or hall being burned with people inside and it explained about the potato famine.
Ireland was treated as part of the UK and the history was presented in the same way as the bad treatment of English poor people by those in power - during the Industrial Revolution, for example. There was no documented link to the problems of the current day, but the teacher herself touched on this from time to time.
Nothing about India, but the information was there, ie not banned.

This was before the National Curriculum, mind you...

Math It's unfair to say all Leavers support the fascist Farage or the fascist murder of Jo Cox MP.
Same as it's unfair to say NI Remainers support the IRA, who committed acts of terror for 30 years (and may resume if May's Brexit breaks GFA terms)

Condemning everyone makes it more difficult to condemn those who are really wicked.

An idea who lets the bats out of the belfry overnight ....

Breitbart: a rightwing plot to shape the future

"Breitbart intends to expand its operations into more countries in the hope of assisting more far right leaders gain power"

"And in Britain, this operation will be at the heart of a new political venture, likely to be launched in a matter of months, to create a new far right party and run by multi-millionaire Arron Banks and Nigel Farage.

Based on the social movement model of Italy’s Five Star Movement but with the nationalist and populist politics of Trump, this new party will sweep aside UKIP and hope to capitalise on the uncertainty and compromise that will undoubtedly accompany Brexit.

While Banks and Farage will lead this new party, it will be Breitbart that provides the engine power.

It was this that Farage was discussing with Bannon at the White House.

"Breitbart’s key funder Robert Mercer supplied Farage’s anti-EU campaign, Leave.EU, with the data tools (Cambrudge Analytica) that helped secure the Brexit vote"

http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/features/breitbart/

"Breitbart publishes falsehoods and peddles half-truths.
Its unsubstantiated conclusions are drawn from its existing prejudices and published to advance its agenda; Breitbart is a click-hate echo chamber.

It fits comfortably within a contemporary movement of people, political parties and philosophical currents that seemingly aim
to undermine the current liberal democratic progressive consensus and the societal norms that are derived from it.

While Breitbart regularly publishes content that is anti-feminist, homophobic and transphobic, central to its politics is a rejection of multiculturalism, manifest as opposition to immigration and liberal refugee policies"

The offline soldiers in his “political war” here in the UK have been Ukip.

“We effectively became the Ukip comms office,” one Breitbart employee told the Spectator following the 2015 general election.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/07/breitbart-threat-to-europe-postwar-liberal-consensus

Redpoll:
If I had my thinking it would be an American version of the health system- You get exactly what you pay for.

As per usual its the burden of needing more has to fall on honest Joe taxpayer, normally by those who put nothing in

LOL. A fine example of being just about as wrong as you can be.
www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2014/10/09/walmart-health-insurance-could-leave-a-really-sick-worker-broke/#655405e83e83
American taxpayers effectively subsidise large corporations like Walmart that pay their employees far less than a living wage, and do not provide health insurance for huge numbers of employees. The result is that the working poor rely on their county health systems, and guess who pays for that.

Oh and the whole premise of paying premiums to an insurance company is that you are contributing to the costs of everyone else insured. That is apparently why premiums keep on costing more. Sometimes you pay for what others get.

I personally would prefer to pay for what others get in a system where everyone got pretty much the same.

woman12345 Tue 07-Mar-17 20:52:36
The good thing is, we don't need to check out what the euro breitbart is publishing today.
Yup.

It isn't fair to say they support it but it is fair to say they deemed it unimportant in the scheme of things.

Talking of our own often wilful ignorance of our history, and our recent actions I've just realised we're are shafted in the Eurovision now. We could field Adele singing the most beautiful song she has ever written and we'd still get nil point

Goodness, how very generous!

www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/surreys-6m-windfall-extra-special-12708033

Happy International Women's day to BigChoc, Ron, Peregrina and those of you who consider women like me as decent human beings even though we voted differently to you.

To those of you who don't think that, it seems inappropriate to wish you happy IWD as you are so fixated on finding and stoking division that solidarity with other women is clearly not high on your list of priorities. I'll leave you to it.

Woman:
So the lack of funding for the language school by Foster, was a particularly bad move?

There are famine walls and famine roads - the remains of public works schemes instituted by a government determined to break the Irish of their fecklessness and teach them that there is no such thing as free food - and famine mass graves, usually in fields at the back of the former workhouses, many of which became county hospitals upon independence, and many famine memorials both humble and jarring. People remember their grandparents pointing out such and such a dry stone wall or a dead straight road and talking about ships sinking before they left the harbour.

The actions of Arlene Foster wrt the language school were an example of a Unionist hard line performance designed for a certain Unionist audience, but also intended as an in your face message to nationalists that they were the minority and the majority felt like spitting on a cultural preoccupation that was important to it. A bit like continued insistence on Orange parades through Catholic areas.

I can't abide stoking division so i am going to stoke division. Could make this shit up sometimes.

Well tbf they were always going to walk out sf are headcases. They know it only helps them walking out and sayING the government are being unreasonable.

Au contraire - not headcases but seasoned political operatives who have gone from strength to strength. Sinn Fein will run rings around TM.
They ditched the old leadership just in time.

Blimey, busy this morning! Keep up the good work ;)

I don't think Fillon will get anywhere close, but he was the candidate of the right and needed somebody to get those votes but Juppe will not replace him. The question is who will the right voters vote for?

I saw a very interesting graphic, prior to Fillon's big collapse but after the scandal broke, which showed how votes might redistribute in a Macron vs Le Pen second round. It is by no means simple and you can't necessarily predict how people will vote from their first round preferences (for eg it appears that some first round Le Pen voters plan to abstain in the second round - I assume this is kind of the French equivalent of Bernie Bros voting for Jill Stein).

Anyway, at that point - when Fillon still had a projected 20% in the first round - his vote split roughly into thirds in the second round: one third to Le Pen, one third to Macron, and one third abstentions.

What do you suppose Arron Banks wants to achieve with his new party that this group of Tories aren't already pursuing? How much further right can we go?

Perhaps some of our new friends could help us out with this one if they've sobered up this morning.