Westministers: Happy New Year?

[RedToothBrush]

And so we enter a New Year full of hope that things might just be about to recover from our national nervous breakdown... or perhaps not.

As we have Damien Green ejected from his role as Deputy PM over allegations of inappropriate conduct towards woman and use of porn at the end of last year, 2018 sees a bright new progressive dawn with the appointment to the role of universities regulator of Toby Young. A man who has deleted 20,000 tweets including many which are inappropriate and offensive to women, is a fan of eugenics and hates the working class and disabled.

Meanwhile the NHS is facing a crisis which is totally unexpected to the government and couldn't possibly have been planned for by a man who has over seen it for over five years. Which naturally bodes really well for Brexit planning.

We are apparently planning to join the TPP. Never mind geopolitics we can move the UK to the Pacific region.

We still are not ready for trade talks because the Cabinet can not agree on anything. Not that it sounds like they have actually discussed anything along these lines yet.

Rumours are that the Cabinet - including arch leavers such as Gove - are leaning towards supporting May and a softer option, despite the disgust of Johnson, who once again is the subject of malicious chatter about his sacking in a forthcoming Cabinet Reshuffle.

There is talk of further Tory Party war with the revelation that membership of the party has dropped to a core of just 70,000 hardline authoritarian men, most of whom are over 60. Tory HQ now wants to (perhaps with some good reason to prevent the loons) rewrite the constitution and limit the power of local associations to select candidates. The Tory party is now lining up to be a power struggle between internal authoritarians, who don't like democracy voices or structure.

Meanwhile the Labour Party membership now apparently overwhelmingly looks upon staying in the customs union and single market favourably and is in favour of a second referendum. In opposition to the leadership who are utterly committed to Hard Brexit. Much to the annoyance of Lord Adonis who is pitching a fit about government corruption and incompetence and being accused of being elite because he going skiing. Unlike of prominent Leavers who are in touch with the working class.

And finally Nigel Farage has got a meeting with Barnier. Farage, unlike Clegg, Clarke and Adonis, will not be accused by the Right Wing Press of undermining the government's negotiating position because...

It appears that we are in for another year of Brexit nonsense then.

We've not even heard mention of Gibraltar yet.

More pro remain big companies should start putting out stuff like that - the drip drip drip CAN work in the other direction

I may be overthinking this, but there's a new MN thread complaining about the number of unicorns that have suddenly started appearing on little children's clothes' designs.

Before joining the then EEC, the UK was marginalised & sidelined in trade talks

Jan 2018, Session of HoC International Trade Committee

http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/international-trade-committee/continuing-application-of-eu-trade-agreements/oral/76720.pdf

Lord Hannay (former Ambassador to EU):

“ our experience long ago, before we were in the European Union,
was how easy it is to be marginalised in world multilateral trade negotiations.

I was a very junior member of the British team involved in the Kennedy round in the 1960s.

We were pretty marginal then, but our proportion of world trade was much higher than it is now.

Then, the big decisions in the Kennedy round were taken by the United States, the European Community - of which we were not a member and Japan.

In future multilateral trade negotiations
-if they get going again, particularly if a post-Trump Administration goes back to what I call “classical” American trade policy-
I fear we might be fairly marginal too.

The people in the decisive room would be slightly different: China, India, the European Union, the United States and Japan.*

Would we be there? I do not know.
But we were not there in 1967 when the Kennedy round was concluded.”

It's beyond mad BigChoc and this now:
Threat of 'war' from ukip, NF inciting it and another anti semitic tweet from another serving british mp.
Just watched Made in Dagenham to remind me of when britain led the world in equalities legislation. Nice film.

woman How is a threat of war (presumably against the UK state), from a political group, legal?

And how can UKIP many supporters, genuinely, tolerate such an outrage in their name?

They really do need to be called out for the anti-UK extremists they are - not tolerated, excused, pandered to, conceded to, legitimised, etc.

Certainly not invited onto mainstream television poli-entertainment programmes, treated as British eccentrics/people within the mainstream political spectrum, and legitimised.

I honestly think the UK political mainstream needs to tolerate a little less, employ criticality a little more, and wake up with some haste.

I hope Hannan hasn't sunk to pandering to those who really believe we are ruled by lizard people
There is a batshit Icke fringe on the far right who might react to yet another faked picture from him.
I presume some if his fans believe them, since he keeps posting the fakes

www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/arlene-foster-seeks-conciliation-with-republic-over-brexit-1.3353557
Cognitive dissonance out and proud/running amok (choose your poison).

UKIP deep in controversy again. It'd be funny if it wasn't so vile.

'Meghan's seed will taint our Royal Family': UKIP chief's glamour model lover, 25, is suspended from the party over racist texts about Prince Harry's wife-to-be.'

If Mr Bolton is ousted by the party’s ruling National Executive Committee on Thursday, it would leave the party having to elect its fifth leader in barely 18 months. His position looks increasingly shaky as there is no recent precedent for the partner of the leader of any political party to have been suspended from that party.

www.google.co.uk/amp/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5266657/amp/Ukip-leaders-girlfriends-racist-Meghan-Markle-messages.html

@ShippersUnbound
Gauke moved towards intervention in the Worboys case after the Sunday Times said we were running a story saying four cabinet ministers backed a judicial review

Adam Wagner on twitter discusses the legal constitutional integrity of this intervention, but I am going to cautiously suggest this is a women' rights win.
Gauke at DWP was lobbied rigorously by the WASPi women, and this is another women's movement lobbying issue. WASPi women are left with no justice, but looks like we may get some semblance of justice here.
Interesting.

Catching up with the news...

Nice bit of cosy Sunday morning confirmation bias from William Keegan at the Observer: www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/14/brexit-last-thing-needed-lot-on-plate-young-people

Thus the “tax take” in this country amounts to 35% of gross domestic product, whereas the average in the European Union I still hope we won’t leave is 40%. He [Neild] points out that, since public spending amounts to a third of GDP, an increase in the tax take here to the European average would finance a 14% increase in public spending, and provide the wherewithal to answer all those critics whose standard response to any suggestion of higher public spending is “where is the money coming from?”.

At which point I cannot resist noting that a prominent Conservative Brexiter once admitted to me that he particularly likes France because of the health service.

Which brings us to the present outcries about the state of the NHS. This is, as usual, against the background of the prevailing view in this country that we should have Scandinavian levels of public service while enjoying US levels of taxation – or, in the extreme rightwing Brexiters’ case, Singaporean levels of taxation.

The scale of the resistance to “tax and spend” in Britain was manifested when Gordon Brown, as chancellor, made Herculean efforts to prepare the nation for a 1% increase in employer and employee national insurance contributions in an effort to bring the health service up to continental standards. Evidently, there is some way to go.

Meanwhile, Andrew Rawnsley points out the bleedin' obvious, which is that there's basically no chance of a second referendum until a shift in public opinion creates the need for one. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/14/how-and-why-britain-might-be-asked-to-vote-again-on-brexit

He doesn't really address for me what is the crucial question, namely what a second referendum would look like. What I think the current fiasco has taught us is that if you're a government holding a referendum, you should first set out the policy X that you want to implement, and then seek a mandate to implement X. It has to be binary: Yes => do X; No => do nothing. What we just had is a kind of inverse referendum: Yes => do nothing; No => do X. The difference is that the No side gets to define X, but since the Yes side is the only one with executive powers, the No side is not constrained by reality and can turn X into whatever they like. So it's very difficult for this not to degenerate into the question "Do you think the government is doing a good job at the moment?", to which of course the answer will always be "Is it fuck?".

It has to be binary for simple mathematical reasons. First you won't get a majority on any one position. Second, a three-way referendum means the vote gets split on one side, leaving it open to accusations of a fix. So you'd either have to come up with a completely neutral third option (and it's hard to think of anything more neutral than 'do nothing') or add a fourth option to balance the ballot... which way craziness lies.

So with these constraints, the closest I can come to a rational referendum decision is: Reverse A50 - Yes => remain; No => continue with whatever deal is negotiated with Brussels. But even that doesn't work because the government would have to argue (presumably) the status quo position, rather than the change position, which would be tantamount to admitting they got a shit deal. I suppose the other option is: Accept negotiation position - Yes => continue along this path; No => then what? and again this gives license to the No side to promise unicorns again...

At the same time, even if there is a big shift in favour of staying in the EU (say 60% support before massaging the don't knows), it seems some sort of vote would be needed to cancel out the previous referendum result, so there's a bit of a catch-22.

Maybe I'm overthinking this and it's all terribly simple.

Warm clothes taken from homeless in Chatham High Street

www.kentonline.co.uk/medway/news/clothing-taken-from-homeless-man-in-chatham-high-street-158405/

Police forcibly remove homeless man’s warm clothes in -4 temperatures after wrongly assuming he stole them

evolvepolitics.com/police-forcibly-remove-homeless-mans-warm-clothes-in-4-temperatures-after-wrongly-assuming-he-stole-them/

There's a statistic of 120 000 people having died due to this gov's policies and comparing it unfavourably to british deaths in wars over the last 80 years. Does that sound right or wrong to people?

Does that sound right or wrong to people as in, do those statistics sound inaccurate? Straight question.

woman Horrifying comments under the kentonline report:

Over half think the police officer was justified to remove warm clothing, just because the homeless man was a known shoplifter - and also imo because being homeless is regarded as being lesser and other

There are many non-homeless people who shoplift - some will even be on MN

Is it really the law that the police can confiscate warm clothing - without a warrant - that someone is wearing, just because (they believe) that person has minor convictions and no goods receipt ?

I wonder if people think that law should apply to naice mc people, who forgot to pay for some goods when distracted say by their meds or their noisy toddlers, or who stole "for a laugh" when teens

😯

woman Whatever the number who die because of inadequate funding for public services, I think the only statistics most people - and 100% of Tory / UKIP voters will believe
are those die of starvation / insulin issues because they ran out of money after their benefits were refused or stopped

Even then, most will blame the victim for not managing better, for ever getting into that situation

When did most of British society become so pitiless ?

I'm really not leftwing, certainly compared to most Westministenders, but the general kicking of those who are down, the relish of many that other people are suffering for their bad choices, does shock me

I'm not claiming that in the 1960s and 1970s (which I remember) there was limitless money, particularly not for those who made bad choices .
However, there was not the relish at their pain

Has anyone seen this thoughtful piece by Andrew Rawnsley on how we might get to a second referendum? He's not terribly optimistic but concludes:

As of today, I’d say it does not look that likely that there will be another referendum before Britain takes it formal leave of the EU. What we can begin to see is how and why either Jeremy Corbyn or Theresa May or both could end up in circumstances in which they are forced to embrace the idea.

When did most of British society become so pitiless
I was somewhat bemused by things I saw happening in public services about 6-7 years ago. Now I think about it, I see it was a sort of concerted policy. Erosion of legal rights to fair treatment, democratic accountability and the ability of trades unions and social pressure groups to affect change, and some rather more scurrilous planning on the part of 'them in charge'.?

Legal challenges to watch atm:
Article 50.
Labour women challenging Labour over its rule change on the definition of women.
Professor Pollock/ Stephen Hawkins led legal challenge to accountability in NHS.

Private Eye on the Pollock challenge.

Dividing us all up, so that there are "lesser" - furrin / scrounger groups that the rest of us are supposed to kick

It all fits in with this "hostile atmosphere'` for illegal / all immigrants, in which much of the population are required to check on them:
banks, schools, hospitals, landlords - difficult to live life without being checked by one or more of these.

Just like all the benefits programs on TV are encouraging us to judge those on benefits

I've never thought a 2nd referendum is likely, or even desirable

It would make authoritarians even more impatient of the democratic political process and
it would politically damage any govt that did this

unless Remain opinion increased to 60%+ and stayed there

• in which case, there is no need for a referendum and the govt can just stop Brexit

More possible:
Late 2020, near the end of the transition, the govt finally realises it hasn't done enough / anything to soften the economic impact
so pleads for a further extension, then the next govt pleads for another .....

Eventually, the situation is regularised as 99% Remain, with limited voting rights at heads of govt level, but not MEPS

• the EP realised belatedly that all their money over the years actually financed UKIP infrastructure in the UK and enabled it to grow.

Also UKIP collaborated effectively with other far right parties in the EP and wider EU.

Dividing us all up, so that there are "lesser" - furrin / scrounger groups that the rest of us are supposed to kick

In If Voting Changed Anything They'd Abolish It by Ken Livingstone (good luck getting a copy), he salutes the "genius" of Thatcher. Saying she turned the pyramid model of society - where the lower tier (the working class) could outvote the middle and upper (go figure) into an egg-shape. The result being the middle classes held sway.

(And this is where the quote about democracy never being able to last comes from).

There's a quote from somewhere: If you treat people like middle class, they will vote middle class

Femi‏
@Femi_Sorry
A simple 2nd referendum would again let politicians pretend Brexit is whatever you want it to be:
"You want a Brexit with Single Market Access? Sure! We can do that. You want a hard Brexit on WTO rules. Sure! .... What? Those things are worlds apart? Yeah but Brexit means Brexit"
Again, not an electoral expert, but (whether you think "No Deal" should be on the table or not), if we simply re-run the referendum, without a clear view of the deal, and with Brexit voters still believing "well, nothing's certain yet, it might work out as promised"...
We Lose.
....which may be precisely why Nigel Farage says he's open to a "Second Referendum" rather than a #FinalSay on the deal.

I'm sure this is more slipperiness and wanting to appeal to all but it seems slightly positive that all Corbyn's "no to single market" didn't necessarily mean no to a single market but no to his own take on what that means. I think. Although the more I read it, the more confused I'm getting.

Faisal Islam‏Verified account
@faisalislam
Corbyn says “I don’t quite understand why [Sturgeon] keeps saying join the Single Market when leaving the EU means leaving the Single Market”
Corbyn says to Peston though “you could” rejoin like Norway, but Norway Econ different to UK
Pesto points out McDonnell did report which says that the manifesto commitments (eg nationalisations) made last year could be delivered in Single Market, Corbyn replies that “these things should be clarified in our relationship before we enter into a special trading relationship”
Such a semantic dance going on over this:
Membership of Single Market, now defined by Labour and Government as EU membership, ie in its decision-making fora.
Participation in Single Market is staying integrated with it economically while leaving politically - ie Norway/ EFTA-EEA
This formulation is being used already by Government in relation to the transition/ implementation phase - and when it came to it, Corbyn didn’t rule out the latter, while semantically making the first point. Govt currently rules out latter.
Corbyn reset himself a test for a EEAish relationship with the EU - the clarification of rights to state intervention policies in the 2017 manifesto - this provides him space to claim a win if, as he wants, he gets to negotiate
Similarly on Customs Union: “There will have to be a customs union with the European Union, obviously...” says Corbyn: “I think there should be a look at some aspects of it tariff heavy against developing countries”

Smile ? UKIP leaders since June 2016:

Farage
Diane James (18 days)
Farage again
Paul Nuttall
Steve Crowther
Henry Bolton (the "anti-Nazi" choice)
.... next ?

Paddy Power have odds of 5/1 for a referendum before next year. Down from 12/1 before Christmas. Is that just because of what NF said or is there something else at play here? Personally I don't think it likely.

Significant or empty rhetoric?

amp.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/14/jeremy-corbyn-labour-vote-against-eu-withdrawal-bill?__twitter_impression=true

Corbyn said on Sunday that he would direct his MPs to vote against the EU withdrawal bill at its third reading because of concern about a lack of protection for parliamentary democracy and human rights. “If our tests are not met by the government, we will vote against the bill,” he told ITV’s Peston on Sunday.

“We’ve got a vote coming up this week on the EU withdrawal bill,. wWe’ve set down our lines on that which are about democratic accountability, protection of workers and environment and consumer rights, human rights across Europe.”