Westminstenders: The wheels on bus start to fall off, start to fall off…

[RedToothBrush]

The wheels on bus start to fall off, start to fall off…

Since Article 50 has been triggered – 8 days ago:

1. A week after a terror attack in London, the government threatened to stop co-operation over security issues with the EU. This was quickly retracted as ‘not being a threat’. Except it was.

2. The ‘Great’ Repeal Act White Paper was published. Its vague, lacks detail, does not have a draft bill and there is no plan for a public consultation over it. It proposes sweeping powers for the government without parliamentary scrutiny using Henry VIII powers.

3. HMRC have said the new computer system planned for launch in 2019, won’t be able to cope with the additional work which leaving the Customs Union would produce. It would be five times the work load which sounds like a lot more red tape.

4. Spain have said they would not oppose an Independent Scotland being in the EU.

5. May’s article 50 letter did not mention Gibraltar and after the publication of the EU draft document on how the Brexit process would be handled, this looks like a massive error and oversight. One of the clauses was that any future arrangements with regard to Gibraltar had to be settled with Spain bi-laterally rather than by the EU and the UK’s agreement with the EU would not apply to Gibraltar, unless Spain agreed. This has been taken as an affront to Gibraltar’s sovereignty, although the document says nothing about sovereignty. Michael Howard, however, decided this was sufficient grounds to threaten our ally Spain with war.

May has not condemned his comments, and laughed it off. Though she was happy to get worked up about the word ‘Easter’ a couple of days later.

Of course, this situation was entirely predictable and was predicted yet this situation seems to have taken the government by surprise. Our reaction, in the context of everything else, has made the UK look like a basket case.

6. The government’s plan to run talks on the UK’s settlement on leaving the EU in parallel with talks on the UK’s future relationship with the EU has been rejected by the EU. Instead we must do things in stages, with advancement to the next stage only possible after completing the last: Stage 1 – Exit, Stage 2 – Preliminary agreement on future relation, Stage 3 – Exit/Transition Deal, Stage 4 – As third country status enter a new deal.

The effect of this also means that deals we currently have with counties like South Korea through the EU need to be revisited. There is no guarantee these countries will want to continue trading with us on the same terms, if they do not want to.

7. The EU has set out its own red lines. Our deal 'must encompass safeguards against...fiscal, social & environmental dumping'. Our transition deal must not last longer than three years and individual sectors, like banking, should not get special treatment.

Donald Tusk has said we don’t need a punishment deal as we are doing a good job of shooting ourselves in the foot, whilst Guy Verhofstadt said Brexit is Brexit is a 'catfight in Conservative party that got out of hand” and hoped future generations would reverse it.

8. May has admitted that we might well have no deal in place by the time we leave the EU. Until now we have been told we would have a deal in two years. She has also admitted an extension of free movement of people beyond Brexit.

9. The Brexit Select Committee published their report which warned about the dangers of exit without any deal, as well as talking about problems relating to the ‘Great’ Repeal Act, Gibraltar and NI. This is sensible and you’d think uncontroversial, but the Brexiteers threw the toys out of their pram saying it was too pessimistic. The government’s job is, of course, to plan for problems no matter how unlikely – such as disasters – and to hope that never happens. It seems that these Brexiteers don’t want to act responsibility or do their job.

10. Questions at the WTO have been asked about how Brexit will affect them. Interest in the subject came initially from Indonesia about Tariff Rate Quotas, but other parties who were watching closely were Argentina, China, Russia and the United States.

11. Phillip Hammond has openly said that there are a number of Tory MPs who want us to not make any agreement with the EU and to crash out in a chaotic exit.

12. Polling has suggested that people want Brexit to be quick and cheap. Not only that, but the word ‘Brexit’ has started to poll badly. Instead the Brexit department are advising officials to use the phrase “new partnership with Europe”. Lynton Crosby, the mastermind behind 2015’s Conservative victory has also warned that the Tories would probably lose 30 seats they gained from the LDs at an early election.

Of course, even a 2020 election might prove challenging with a transition deal still likely to be unresolved as Brexit drags on. Government strategy is, apparently, to hope that Remainer's anger will have dissolved by 2020.

Eight days in, and the Brexit Bus looks like it strayed into 1980's Toxeth and got torched, its wheels nicked, and graffitied with obscenities over its £350million pledge.

Oh, I saw that episode recently. And they traced one of the people who reported her who just tried to change the narrative. I was in IKEA this week and they have a selection of smiley buttons around the store for you to randomly feedback on the staff. I thought of that episode as I pressed the most positive - don't be a snitch.

I think it was also in that episode where they explained how the killing started. A man of a disabled child wrote to Hitler/an SS officer (can't remember but think it was an SS officer as this was used as a way of removing Hitler from the decision. But I'm not 100% sure I'm remembering that correctly - happy to be corrected) but asking for permission to kill the child. It was seen that this event triggered a train a chain of events - removing disabled children, people who were "different" etc. Brilliant series, should be shown in schools if it isn't already.

I watched most of that series too, and it was sobering. Especially the woman who tried to deny that she had reported the woman who was different. When confronted with a paper with her signature her response was 'why drag that up after 50 years'. A better defence, and one I would have understood much more, would have been that she had been young and naive and now regretted it.

I can give a small anecdote of my own with regards to East Germany. An acquaintance taught at a university there. The department she taught in had three known Stasi informants, out of twenty staff. When Communism fell and the truth became known, there had been eleven informants in the department.

And another warning from British history on how British people and governments turning a 'blind eye' causes horrific consequences:

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/papers-reveal-islanders-collaboration-with-nazis-1560945.html

^Whitehall documents released on the German occupation of the Channel Islands reveal the extent to which the Jersey and Guernsey administrations collaborated with the occupation, and the Home Office's determination to sweep complaints under the carpet after the war.

No Channel Islanders were prosecuted for war crimes or collaboration, despite extensive evidence of their help in deporting English and Jews, fraternising with the Germans and operating a black market. At the end of the war the British even agreed to redeem marks in pounds sterling, enabling those who had accumulated wealth under the Germans to keep it.

One of the most telling documents, which shows that British officials and politicians chose to ignore local anger, is a private memorandum from a senior judge to the Home Secretary, James Chuter-Ede, in 1945. Lord Justice du Parcq had been asked by Home Office officials to comment on allegations of collaboration within the Jersey and Guernsey administrations.

He criticises the role of the Channel Island governments in the deportation of 2,000 English and Jews to concentration camps in 1942, on Hitler's orders. 'I think that a strong case can be made . . . that the authorities ought to have refused to give any assistance in the performance of this violation of international law^.

Several of the files on the British government's involvement in this have been withheld or removed.

The film Hotel Terminus, although ostensibly about Klaus Barbie, is revealing about how silence enabled the Nazis to do what they did in France.

Shoah should be compulsory viewing. Old, long and authentic.
www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-shoah-1985

And it's so easy to spot the old tricks being used so successfully in British workplaces, the NHS, schools, the Home Office, the press, and social media now.

I didn't C&P the last para of that FT article. For those who don't have a subscription:

Meanwhile, business lobbies seeking to influence Downing Street would be wise to tread a careful line, expressing their concerns only in private meetings rather than through public campaigns.

Officials have made clear that any critical statements in the media about immigration, trade, or the rights of EU residents will be punished with an immediate cessation of access, according to one big business lobby.

Profoundly depressing.

Wrt Vichy. Le Pen is spirutual heir to Pétain & Vichy.

Claiming that 'France and the Républic' were in London during the war ignores the fact that the number of Free French who had managed to get out was small, and the vast majority of French were stuck in France either under Nazi occupation or the collaborationist regime.

It makes sense coming from de Gaulle, who as leader of the Free French and prov Républic, was opposed to Vichy. And who announced that France was the Républic as a way to unite the country. But not from Le Pen.

I think Le Pen's comments reflect the fact that many French still have not faced up to this bit of their past, and are in denial about it.

For anyone interested in wartime France - resistance/collaboration - the famous Le Chagrin et la Pitié is really worth watching.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/12/catastrophe-looms-at-ports-after-brexit-shipping-industry-warns

we've already talked about this on these threads, but this is the first time I've seen the comments about lack of infrastructure made properly public (as opposed to Richard North etc). I wonder how TM will react to the implied criticism.

I read the Le Monde article by using Google Chrome and pressing the "translate" button -I'm sure its not 100% but good enough to make the sense very clear. Very interesting, thanks Misti.

Ninon thanks have watched extract, will try to get the whole thing (with subtitles!)

www.theguardian.com/politics/shortcuts/2017/apr/11/deep-england-brexit-britain?CMP=share_btn_tw
This is ‘Deep England’: warm ale, village greens and cheeky milkmen
Forget Little Englanders – Deep Englanders believe that life was better before the evils of industrialisation, foreign competition and, you know, immigration

Definitely a thing. Know of some.

Trump also has Holocaust-deniers and minimisers in the alt-right white supremacist clique he chose at the heart of his administration

I'm still staggered at his WH mouthpiece, Sean Spicer:

"“We didn’t use chemical weapons in the second world war.
You know, you had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”

That any WH spokesman can make an official statement like that and not be sacked immediately.

It shows how standards under Trump have plummetted, that noone is surprised
So many outrages;
one can't react with the same intensity as when (much lesser) outrages happened v occasionally in a "normal" administration

Timothy Snyder thinks Spicer's gaffe might not have been a mistake:
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/11/sean-spicers-hitler-holocaust-speak-volumes

Some really interesting posts on MLP's comments and the context of these, Misti, Red and others. Lots of food for thought, thanks. I've ordered the BBC's 'A Warning From History' series to watch too.

At some deeper unconscious level Snyder may be right but I also think it reflects just how ignorant and intellectually challenged both Trump and his spokesman are (by that I do not mean stupid, I mean that their intellects are untrained / lazy and therefore unable to analyse or martial facts in any sort of way that even aspires to be objective). I don't suppose Spicer was actually not aware of the gas chambers, it is just that he didn't bother to recover that knowledge when he was considering that issue, or even to consider the issue in any depth. It is of course why they appeal to a raft of voters who either are stupid or, perhaps more dangerously, are not stupid but without a rigourous education prefer that sort of unchallenging rhetoric. Even in the west and east coast cities I have encountered intelligent professional people who lack both knowledge and perspective of the rest of the world, or any curiosity about it. People are again missing the point that for many Trump supporters this will not be an issue, indeed it will be reassuring That Spicer made the gaffe they might have made themselves.......

I think on a not so subconscious level, Spicer didn't see Hitler as having attacked his own people, as in his tiny mind he didn't consider that the Jews and others were people German

The Barnes article was good, and I don't think anyone has posted (life is a bit frantic at the moment so catching up is patchy) Grayling's latest article which talks about the same image problems we are creating for ourselves in the rest of the world. He believes Brexit will eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions but unless remainer MPs unite to provide a political alternative the victory will be for unrestrained cold hard capitalism that will benefit the rich like JRM and Banks who want to get richer at the expense of fairness and equality, and in the process the rest of the world is watching with its head in its hands....... Though of course as I remember a trader who had been most successful in exploiting Leason's bringing down of Barings that you knew from the way that prices were moving that the bank was being brought down and watched in horror, but at the same time it was self inflicted and somebody was going to benefit so it might as well be you. There is something of the same instinct in the way countries like Australia, which both Barnes and Grayling mention (and I had the same experience when in Australia in April / May last year), but also India, China etc. will react.

www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/this-brexit-battle-is-cold-hard-capitalism-vs-civilised-co-operative-order-1-4968498

pretty - that I think is the problem - the 'othering' of the Jews. Instead of saying that the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews, let's start saying how many Germans, Poles, French, etc. were murdered. Bring it home that those who were killed were once someone's next door neighbours, the local shop-keeper, their child's teacher, their doctor or dentist. And for heaven's sake - let us be vigilant now, and speak out. No, we are not where Nazi Germany was in the 1930s yet, but we could be. Some Leavers get very touchy about comparisons to Nazism and Fascism and as far as I am concerned - tough. We do know where it might lead - we can't plead the ignorance that the 1930s
Germans could.

Absolutely peregrina

I'm repeating myself but - really worth reading Snyder's On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons on the 20th Century.

(Short and punchy - not long and involved).

Really good Guardian review here

^^ Twenty Lessons from the 20th Century that should say

Interesting point in hoe TM is much more dangerous than DT and how she says in what thing but is sneakily doing the other.
Short but to the point imo

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2017/apr/12/theresa-may-is-more-dangerous-than-donald-trump-opinion-video

Ninon I'm going to end up buying some books again.....

Ninon and Snyder's book pages on the walls in the funky Silicone Roundabout in London too now.

I also do not believe Spicer's comments were a gaffe.

www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_wires/2008Jul19/0,4675,WTOQuotingGoebbels,00.html
Here is an article from 2008 as reported by Fox News.

How can you go from that to last night without having some idea of what you are saying and how offensive it is?

After previously being accused of tactics like Goebbels, if you were really that offended, why would you then do the same? If it is being used as a tactic, imo it has to be deliberate given the history here. You have to ask the question, why was Spicer hired for the job in the first place?

A lot of people are calling for Spicer to be sacked. I think his comments are precisely why he won't be sacked. Its a nice smoke screen for other things going on. Whilst everyone is enraged at him, they are not paying attention to other things in the Trump administration.

And if he keeps on doing it, some people start asking those questions - quite innocently rather than with any degree of genuine malice - about how you have to blame the government of Germany or France and not their people at that time. It absolves them of any responsibility for anything that happens now, by making this narrative that they are just powerless against the machinery of the state and their actions and voices have no power themselves.

It is not only about constructing some sort of social hierarchy of race and a way to sanitise the past but it also helps to suggest that the power of people does not exist and can not stand up to the instruments of government.

Think about who are threats to the Trump administration and it is easy to work out why this is being done. The threat does not come from the democrats. It comes from the media and protest groups. It comes from organisations like Black Lives Matter. How does Trump marginalise them?

There is also a model to follow in modern day politics that comes from the Kremlin. Even if not controlled by Russia, there is clearly a great deal of admiration and understanding of this within the current White House.

Much of the far right movement is about creating this idea of society as being something different to what it is in reality. Distorting what society itself is, would naturally be part of that.

This is why lies and shock are important as it moves what people are talking about and makes them think about things in a way they wouldn't have previously, if the idea hadn't been put in their heads in one way or another. It repeatedly plays on the idea of pride of some kind and tries to inflate it. Being humble about how you might have fucked up, is not part of that. Its a promotion of deliberate arrogance.

I find it inconvincible that a man like Spicer, would not be familiar with Goebbells. Or that at least, people close to him who have made a fortune off using such tactics (Mr Bannon for example) would not have encouraged him use these tactics to their fullest extent.

A lot of Trump's crew's behaviour is playing to their core vote. Preaching to the converted and enabling.

It's very difficult for Jewish groups to have a voice. But the support of all anti racist activists has to help.

Kehinde Andrews argues well in that link BluePeppers that May's a fascist, and here are her 'others' : I wonder if these 'unemployed' or 'inactive' EU British are mums, carers and the disabled.

^EU migrants of working age living in the UK who do not have a job account for a city the size of Bristol, new figures have revealed.
One in seven of the 2,733,000 EU migrants aged 16-64 - a total of 390,000 - are unemployed or “inactive”^
.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/12/eu-migrants-without-job-make-city-size-bristol/

Reuters is reporting too on the alleged Russian hack of the Brexit referendum website. Very quiet in British press about it. When Mensch and Adam Khan in US have made Russian links such a successful campaign.