Westminstenders: Boom. The Brexit Backlash starts to hit.

[RedToothBrush]

So it turns out that immigration figures that stated students overstayed were wrong. The home office knew this. And sat on it. Since 2015. Under Theresa.

That smells a bit doesn't it?

Imagine it: "Let's do lunch Paul. I'll cover up and give you a nice immigration story for your front page. In return, crown me PM."

Then tonight BOOM. Labour look like they have made a move. Soft very swishy Brexit. Even less brexity than the Beano Brexit that the Tories have been trying to announce on the quiet over the summer whilst Brexiteers are on holiday.

amp.theguardian.com/global/2017/aug/26/labour-calls-for-lengthy-transitional-period-post-brexit
Labour makes dramatic shift on Brexit and single market
Party opens clear divide with Tories, with support for free movement and paying into EU budgets for up to four years

Labour is to announce a dramatic policy shift by backing continued membership of the EU single market beyond March 2019, when Britain leaves the EU, establishing a clear dividing line with the Tories on Brexit for the first time.

In a move that positions it decisively as the party of “soft Brexit”, Labour will support full participation in the single market and customs union during a lengthy “transitional period” that it believes could last between two and four years after the day of departure, it is to announce on Sunday.

This will mean that under a Labour government the UK would continue to abide by the EU’s free movement rules, accept the jurisdiction of the European court of justice on trade and economic issues, and pay into the EU budget for a period of years after Brexit, in the hope of lessening the shock of leaving to the UK economy. In a further move that will delight many pro-EU Labour backers, Jeremy Corbyn’s party will also leave open the option of the UK remaining a member of the customs union and single market for good, beyond the end of the transitional period.

Why would Labour suddenly do this? It's not just because of the youth vote. What about their leave voters?

Faisal Islam on the subject:
2. On Labour Leavers is very very interesting and involves quite the psephological judgement re the election....
...the calculation appears to be that Labour Leave voters had the chance to vote for Theresa May's brand of Brexit, and bar 5 seats, said No
Was that because Lableave voters were already signalled "hard Brexit"? Or many millions such voters much more concerned about other things?

Have Labour been polling their voters on this?

Theresa has also apparently set her sell by date: Friday 30th August 2019.

www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/theresa-sets-date-shell-quit-11061894.amp
Theresa May sets date she'll quit as Prime Minister - giving herself time to see Britain through Brexit

The longer the transition and the squishier it gets, the more the more you wonder.

Mr Barnier will enjoy his coffee and newspapers tomorrow as he prepares for round two of Brexit talks starting next week.

The question on his mind most: Will David Davis remember to bring his notes this time?

The Holocaust of 6 million Jews
Collaboration and collusion of the French with the Third Reich
Deportation of thousands of Jews from the Netherlands to the death camps of Poland

Why don't I speak out about these on a thread devoted to Brexit? Because it's off topic. If I were in France and they had voted in Marine Le Pen and were pursuing Frexit, then yes, I imagine that I would be speaking out, because it would be pertinent to the debate.

The Holocaust of 6 million Jews

Well, since you bring it up the Holocaust remains an excellent reason for why the EU is so important. Working with neighbouring countries rather than retreating into isolationism and nationalism seems even more important when you consider the horrors of the World Wars.

the cat I am not sure that is true, I think we are assuming that the power of argument lies in rationality and evidence and if undermined by reality it should evolve, except that it is not rational, it is emotional. The arguments exploit deeply held values and beliefs that are important to individual identity. The link I posted earlier does suggest there are skilled manipulators really thinking through evolving the messages that will engage people eg exploiting the emotional perceptions that have arisen around the ECJ and the current backpeddling from the reality by Ministers to rally support for JRM, and bring UKIP back in the game. As the article highlights the Leave message is drowning out the Remain one on social media by 4 to 1 and Aaron Banks is a name cropping up again.

Interesting interview with AC Grayling on this morning, it is at 2.46 www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b092953s

The vote to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump shocked the political consensus. But are they proof that democracy is broken, and populism has overwhelmed the mechanisms civil society has relied on to ensure that Western countries are governed in the interests of the many – not the few? A.C. Grayling is the philosopher and author of Democracy and its Crisis.

that is there any chance you could give us some examples of how Brexit is going to benefit us please?

I'm looking for actual, tangible points that the average Joe will be able to say 'I've gained this because we have left the EU'

This is painful.

The whole "No-one is saying we are going to do this ..." or "We are going to do that ..." is totally discredited now.

Nonsense. This "we" thing. The Leave position has been exposed as utterly disparate. There is no "we" to promise or discount anything.

As a rhetorical strategy, during the campaign, the very disparateness of this discourse - the attribution of future volition and action to unattributable future actors, the ability to promise a range of disparate outcomes, the ability to (faux-authoritatively) discount a range of disparate outcomes - kind of worked.

The Leave rhetoric was marked by its very disparateness, its ability to be everywhere and nowhere, promising a range of things that were conflictual, disparate and in no way hung together. It utilised a political atopia - in that it was able to be ungrounded, untethered, unallied with any particular position, or actual party, that would have insisted on a degree of consistency and accountability.

Ironic, really, that such a discourse was so rootless, when an appeal to a rank and debased form of nativism was so often utilised.

The fractured disparateness rings false now. And have to say, not only is that because the Leave discourse is now in a position where it is becoming actual, accountable and thus able to be called upon, examined for consistency and asked to answer for itself in terms of real life effects, nor is it because Leavers can no longer just shunt everything off to an imaginary future (things are happening right now, in the real world).

It is also because there has been an awful lot of analysis of how paid-up social media workers (50 centers and Kremlin-bots) operate. The honing in on tiny points, the attempt to derail, the splitting, the making sites unworkable simply through bunging them up.

How unfortunate to sound like one of those.

Anyway, that's the last I'll say on this.

Bigly
Well, since you bring it up the Holocaust remains an excellent reason for why the EU is so important

Keeping the peace in Europe for 70 years had far more to do with NATO, having almost quarter of a million US and British troops occupying Germany and being nuked up against a far larger Soviet conventional arsenal than the overpaid EU bureaucrats deciding how to defraud their own banking laws and agricultural subsidy schemes.

Where was the EU in preventing the atrocities in Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia? Not much progress was made until Britain managed to get the US involved (yet again). As I recall, the French contribution (under the UN flag not the EU) to the genocide at Srebrenica (within our lifetime)... nothing for the EU to be proud of.

Place marking

Ah so the EU should not be anything more than a trading bloc but they should take the blame for not being an armed peacekeeping force when they've never pretended to be that.
And also there are apparently no other routes but warfare. Speaks volumes

That We already trade with Asia. How do you propose that we increase that trade. Currently we mainly trade in services (70% of the our economy) aside from really high tech engineering they can do everything else cheaper themselves and their trade is focused on their neighbours anyway. Banking, accountancy, management consultancy, creative, education, science, tech, architecture all have a competitive advantage in Asia. Their unique selling points though derive from expertise rooted in being part of EU frameworks such as financial passporting, science frameworks, Erasmus, and attracting the brightest and the best from across Europe. The UK brand is now irreparably damaged by a vote that is seen as irrational, proof that democracy is the enemy of good stable government was Ji's verdict, by the continuing failure of good governanace and will be further damaged by losing access to the single market and customs union.

So what do you propose we trade with them that will have a competitive advantage once we have lost the ones we currently have? Jam? Smoked Salmon? Stuff? The only suggestions I have heard.

Meanwhile Germany has increased its trade with Asia much faster than we have, there is no suggestion that they needed to leave the EU to do that.

Have a laugh ...

www.facebook.com/veryBrexitproblems/videos/985748024901050/

ron I'm going to think about what you said.

I don't think that political discourses are necessarily rational (in fact, one of my favourite political essays of all time is one by Jacqueline Rose on the role of the subconscious and fantasy identity-formation in political belief) or that there is a conscious agent determining and guiding them.

(That's my position statement.)

I am, genuinely, interested in how political discourses evolve. I think they do. I know this is going to make me sound like a bit of an art student from the 90s but I guess I think of them as organic, historical-conceptual hybrids, that can't not evolve as material history evolves.
I guess i see political discourses as (in part) narratives of identity for both individuals, groups, and ideas. They have a powerful existential dimension - people's hopes and wishes for how they might live are expressed through them - and they are literally words to live by. Therefore there is a hugely powerful incentive for them to evolve as the reality (and imaginary) through which people live evolves.

There is real pain when the narratives don't fit with people's experience and hopes, either because the discourse hasn't yet been evolved or because it is fracturing and revealing lack of fit. There is real joy when people feel they are liberated through it.

I also think the evolution can be small as well as large. In fact, I would expect to see small, micro-adjustments, and also individual adjustments.

I have to say, I often look through MN and think about the evolving discourses of feminisms (and also for discourses about being a mother and a parent).

What I find fascinating about the Leaver discourse we're seeing paraded on this thread at the moment - and some other places - is that it hasn't evolved. It's still doing a lot of the things it did before.

ron I realise that what you're also suggesting is that there is also a successful vibrancy out there in the wider reaches of SM.

I'm going to have to go and check that out. Despite my best efforts, my own SM is still too echo-boxy and I tend to miss that sort of thing.

cat you're definitely onto something here, and i find it fascinating too. Political discourse does evolve normally.

Look at the last ge for instance. Sure there's always some old harking back to political lines but where the conversation was at the time the he was called to where it ended up on election Day changed very significantly.

The lack of evolution is highly odd in itself.

HashiAsLarry

So the EU should not be anything more than a trading bloc but they should take the blame for not being an armed peacekeeping force when they've never pretended to be that

Not quite. Free trade should be about free trade (for any countries or groups of countries that want to eliminate the barriers to trade). Peace Keeping should be for the United Nations (France needn't bother next time), defence should be for nation states and allies (e.g NATO).

Just stop claiming the EU has "kept the peace" when it clearly has not.

There's more to peace than armament though. The fact you can't see that speaks volumes.

@ LurkingHusband

My favourite post-Brexit image is of an angry mob, advancing with torches in hand, on a fairytale castle, shouting: "You promised us unicorns. We demand our unicorns."

I suspect the castle will be empty, however.

I am never convinced by the argument that NATO kept the peace. Would European countries have gone to war with each other again? I suspect not, having been devastated by the last one. To me all it seemed to do was foster the Arms race between the USA and USSR. But I am no expert on military matters.

Ron I've found the article you referred to. It was very interesting. Thank you.

This is truly shocking, our lives really are in the hands of self interested fools

"I can assure you Prime Minister, awful though the Grenfell disaster was, the outcome of your actions on
fracking, the lack of effective regulation and monitoring actually in place (not just in box ticked documents),
will lead to a far greater disaster and cost the country far more in terms of lives lost and businesses destroyed.
The amount of gas that can be recovered by fracking is small. Approx. 3%-5% of U.K.’s total needs of approx.
3tcf/annum. It is very different from conventional in terms of gas produced and risks to the environment.
Onshore the risks also affect the general public and local business. The national interest is not served by damaging
local industries and destroying our farming sector. Just the rumour of fracking waste contamination will be
enough. Please recall the BSE crisis. This will dwarf it. My colleagues on the Technical Working Group at the EU
Commission have informed me that the EU would be minded to impose exclusion zones for 30km around each
fracking well for ALL produce. Brexit only complicates that further and will strengthen their resolve to protect
their publics and also their markets with a very justifiable excuse. The U.S.A. has been able to frack and produce a
lot of gas without such damage mainly because it is a vast country with a relatively tiny population when
compared the U.K. Also it is important to note, contrary to popular belief (mainly amongst non-professionals in
the field) the regulations in the U.S. relating to fracking are considerably more robust than the U.K. (I can happily
provide specific examples). They also have a balanced approach to inspections. By this I refer to a balance
between goal setting/self-regulation and prescription (min standards). We do not and I can prove this with
actual examples fracking company CEOs have given me."

docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b0aabf_24228a8169334b54a490f59e19581f6b.pdf

peregrina it also doesn't work as an argument when a lot of ardent brexiteers are all for Trump pulling out of nato. Unless war is the ultimate goal. A lot of money to be made in war.

be a coincidence nope LH, but current crop of anti EU fascist arse wipes, was to whom I was referring.

election Day changed very significantly.

Which is why our visitors are doing their shifts. Some worried souls.
Super injunctions or not, the mood's changed.

Trump and Erogan are not great adverts for totalitarianism really, which is also quite useful.

Even if Trump wants distraction wars, he can't even get Tillerson to back him up.

Peregrina if you have such hatred and disdain for the UK and its history, why do you live here?

When all other arguments fail...

Glad you live here Peregrina

There's more to peace than armament though. The fact you can't see that speaks volumes.

Gosh, I'm glad someone else could see that I was not talking about arms. I was talking about sharing knowledge and culture, whether that is regarding crime or scientific development. I was talking about how working with others for a common interest and formally aligning yourself as part of a group promotes the perception of people from different countries as having more things is common than separate them. In that way it helps to prevent the sort of racism and othering that has been on the rise since Brexit started, the sort of racism that leads to people thinking those of a different colour or religion are fundamentally less then they are and it is ok to attack them for it.

Retreating into nationalistic isolationism is already leading to increased hate crimes against minorities and increasingly disturbing rhetoric about other countries in the EU, particularly when we start discussing immigration. War is not just a matter of who has the biggest bombs it is also about perceptions of others and ourselves. Brexit is making us a more intolerant and dangerous country.