Westministenders: May's Turd Way covered in Donald's Glittery Tickertape from his Parade

[RedToothBrush]

Where next?

Auditions for chief turd polisher to Mrs May are in full action, whilst those who don't believe in the turd, wade about knee deep in their own shit, still searching for that illusive plan for Brexit which doesn't stink to high heaven of crap.

After the dual resignation of Davis and Johnson, amongst the stench there is an air of uncertainity and expectation of all hell breaking loose.

In the last 48 hours we have been told that

1. May is more secure having crushed the brexiteers,
2. May about to be ousted by a no confidence vote, triggering a leadership election,
3. The Tory Party are about to split,
4. Brexiteers are in disarray fighting amongst themselves,
5. We will remain in the EU,
6. We get an EEA deal,
7. We will get no deal,
8. A People's vote is inevitable and
9. There will be a General Election.

Which only serves to merely highlight just how little of a clue ANYONE has about what happens next.

What bothers me now, is that Johnson seems not to have surfaced yet and there are rumours that Gove has gone to ground, whilst Donald Trump is practically on the plane and is stirring the pot praising Johnson.

Instead we seem to have a series of junior ministers and Tory HQ figures quitting in a long drawn out coordinated toy throwing out of the pram exercise, to try and get what hard brexiteers want.

If I had to hazard a guess at the general silence from key figures, I might be tempted to say that someone is going to use Trump's visit to throw a political grenade and actively invite him to endorse them.

That might sound ridiculous given that the public hates Trump, but that loses sight of the fact that the people who will vote for the next leader of the Tory Party are overwhelming authoritarian leaning and likely to be those who like Trump and would be impressed by such a move.

I note this tweet today from the wise Sarah Kendzior:

Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior
"There are parallels to past authoritarianism, but what's happening with Trump, in the digital age, is new and transnational. The president's loyalty is not necessarily to a state but to foreign leaders and multinational criminal alliances. The state is just something to sell."

It is clear that others in the parliamentary party will be very alarmed at the prospect. There were Tory MPs who were openly tweeted how please that disgusting Johnson had gone and are no fans of Trump.

May still seems to think that she can get her plan through and approved by the EU in its current form. The White Paper is due on Thursday.

Much speculation is that it will be significant if she fails to produce this on time, as she will have capitulated to the Brexiteers. And this will lead to the EU just giving up on us anyway.

She also announced to the Cabinet today, that preparations for No Deal were to be stepped up significantly.

We still are left wondering who, she is stitching up; the Brexiteers whose heads are currently exploding or the friends she keeps closest to her (friends? or ideological enemies).

The problem is that there just no other viable way forward at the moment, as the country is divided, both Labour and the Conservatives are divided and are more interested in their own future than that of the party and there are far too many ambitious 'celebrity MPs' who want to make their mark. No one gives a shit about ordinary workers or business. Plus there is the divine observation that DGRossetti made at the end of the last thread: The biggest obstacle to Brexit has been Brexiteers

The grab for post-Brexit power shows the whole of Westminister up as the cess pit of self interest it is, with Boris Johnson merely its biggest figure head.

Wait until the GFA officially has its head put on the chopping block awaiting its fate. Perhaps we can flog NI to Donald and get a Brexit Dividend afterall.

I must admit to finding it hard to have a view that is altogether different to this:
James Patrick @J_amesp
There is no way back from all of this. The next seven days simply decide how badly - on a scale of fucked to smouldering crater - it is going to end.

One final predictation, which I am DAMN certain of: Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday are all going to be grim for political watching if you are into democratic values and principles. It will be a 4 day sales pitch for Brand Trump in all its All American Overblown Horror that Brits tend to find utterly distasteful. Expect the red carpet of full of turd glitter to be rolled out for Donald Trump Show. Expect May to embarass herself in her fawning all over him, as if she's star struck. Expect that hideously cringeworthy photo thats totally inevitable.

Politics is going to get worse. It may never get better.

(But yay football gets to cover it all up... Come on England!)

I wasn’t using cunning as a synonym for intelligence really. To me they are different things...Trump demonstrates a sort of cunning, though I doubt he ever really thinks about what he does or intends to do. I don’t know how genuinely intelligent many successful politicians (and business people) are, but if they are, it’s a different order of intelligence from the academic.

Sorry this is long.
Welcome to the world of (new) fascism....

From the Irish Times
www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-trial-runs-for-fascism-are-in-full-flow-1.3543375?mode=amp

“To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” – what we are living with is pre-fascism.
It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.

Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.
One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections – we’ve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities.

Fascism does not need a majority – it typically comes to power with about forty percent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your forty percent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too.

^And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.
But when you’ve done all this, there is a crucial next step, usually the trickiest of all. You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery.^

Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanised. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.

People have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group.

It is this next step that is being test-marketed now. It is being done in Italy by the far-right leader and minister for the interior Matteo Salvini. How would it go down if we turn away boatloads of refugees? Let’s do a screening of the rough-cut of registering all the Roma and see what buttons the audience will press. And it has been trialled by Trump: let’s see how my fans feel about crying babies in cages. I wonder how it will go down with Rupert Murdoch.

To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a “mistake” by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run – and the trial has been a huge success. Trump’s claim last week that immigrants “infest” the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course “vermin”.

And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment – it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.

And the results are quite satisfactory. There is good news on two fronts. First, Rupert Murdoch is happy with it – his Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors. They went the whole swinish hog: even the brown babies are liars. Those sobs of anguish are typical of the manipulative behaviour of the strangers coming to infest us – should we not fear a race whose very infants can be so devious?

Second, the hardcore fans loved it: Fifty-eight percent of Republicans are in favour of this brutality. Trump’s overall approval ratings are up to 42.5 per cent.^
This is greatly encouraging for the pre-fascist agenda. The blooding process has begun within the democratic world. The muscles that the propaganda machines need for defending the indefensible are being toned up. Millions and millions of Europeans and Americans are learning to think the unthinkable.

So what if those black people drown in the sea? So what if those brown toddlers are scarred for life? They have already, in their minds, crossed the boundaries of morality. They are, like Macbeth, “yet but young in deed”. But the tests will be refined, the results analysed, the methods perfected, the messages sharpened. And then the deeds can follow."

Let us protect our freedom with all our democratic power, and continue to be brave with everything we must face.”

I wasn’t using cunning as a synonym for intelligence really. To me they are different things

I find 'trollish' to be a very good descriptor to go alongside the word 'cunning.' That or 'low' - a low sort of cunning. It evokes an image of someone who is ignorant but despicable - willing to shit stir for their own ends, even if they ultimately lose control of what they were aiming to do.

Has DD released his white paper? Weren’t the brexiteers planning on releasing it last week?
I’m doubting that it even exists.

It was released. There was a bit of a discussion about it on here on Thursday but it was so full of gibberish (and spelling mistakes) that we gave up

Pictures from the troubles in london this PM. Police horses were attacked by right wing thugs in Trafalgar Square. Picures of armed white men with baseball bats confronting the police here. The police officers look very young, thin, unarmed and vulnerable.
Horrible.

www.standard.co.uk/news/london/donald-trump-london-march-live-and-tommy-robinson-protest-latest-news-as-thousands-take-to-streets-a3887231.html#comments

Here's a co incidence.
Rees-Mogg moves back into the favourite slot for next CON leader
www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2018/07/14/rees-mogg-moves-back-into-the-favourite-slot-for-next-con-leader/

Pictures from the troubles in london this PM. Police horses were attacked by right wing thugs in Trafalgar Square. Picures of armed white men with baseball bats confronting the police here. The police officers look very young, thin, unarmed and vulnerable.
Horrible.

What a contrast to the People's Vote march, the anti-Trump demo and other peacable protest marches over recent weeks (and certainly hardly comparable in terms of numbers). Right-wingers never seem to be able to demonstrate without it degenerating into violence. Why would you need to take a mask along if you weren't planning on breaking the law in the first place?

We need more counter-terrorism investigation into the UK's pro-Trump/Tommy Robinson activists. No extremist should be allowed to operate in the UK.

We need more counter-terrorism investigation
It would have to start at the US embassy PineappleSunrise reposting this:
Trump ambassador 'lobbied Britain on behalf of jailed right-wing activist Tommy Robinson
UK warned of criticism from US if Robinson not treated more 'sympathetically
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/donald-trump-tommy-robinson-ambassador-britan-right-wing-activist-a8447051.html

I bet marches are banned by October. Or rather 'certain' marches.

What are the odds of marches and demonstrations and even any public gathering being proscribed in the run-up to 29 March and afterwards, if we end up in the No-Deal scenario?

@hopenothate
Steve Hedley, the Deputy Gen Sec of @RMTunion had been assaulted by supporters of Donald Trump/Stephen Lennon this afternoon in London.

I won't post the picture, it's upsetting.

Yup, prettybird

They've stormed a bus.
The bus was stormed by demonstrators and the driver and a small number of customers got off

The demonstrators have caused a significant amount of damage to the bus which meant it had to be towed away

Supporters chanted "Free Tommy Robinson" and hurled missiles and smoke bombs at police. Right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders also delivered a speech

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tommy-robinson-protest-london-far-right-police-arrest-geert-wilders-a8391596.html

I assume that those of us who live relatively near Chequers could go there sometime when all the Trump furore has died down and see how good the mobile signal is.

I haven't been there myself but do go walking in Bucks and some of the country areas do have poor signals - and given that mobile conversations are not secure - (remember Princess Di and 'Squidgygate'?) they are probably happy to keep it that way at Chequers.

Not really sure JRM wants to be leader though. It means he has to deliver on his own bullshit, which he's seen is harder than it might seem. Also it's a hell of a risk, and JRM doesn't really strike me as a risk taker. He's all about other people taking the risk.

I feel more and more confident about dismissing talk of him becoming leader, or running for it. Because that's all it is. Like a lot of how Brexit was achieved. Unchallenged talk.

If nothing else, the mechanism for selecting the leader of the Conservative party does carry very real jeopardy. In some ways, becoming leader of the Conservative party takes bravery ... maybe more bravery than fighting a war. And no one has ever accused JRM of being brave.

I wondered still if Grease-Smug was still too Catholic for the Tories. I know the rules about Royals marrying Catholics have changed which might make a difference, but I expect not in the Tory shires. High Church Anglicanism, which is more Catholic than the Roman Catholics, would be fine.

I believe IDS is a Catholic, but he was leader at the time when they were out of office and had no hope of getting back in, so was just a caretaker.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-northern-ireland-44834738

I really can’t get my head round how anyone can sink this low. Those poor kids having all their work destroyed. DH’s mum lives in Derry and she’s terrified.

Tory MP apologises for tweet of Sadiq Khan image with pig balloon

Trying to ingratiate himself with the Trump / Robinson fans ?
Now backing away from what he did

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/13/tory-mp-apologises-for-tweet-of-sadiq-khan-image-with-pig-balloon

The Conservative [BREXITER] MP Michael Fabricant has apologised for tweeting a cartoon image of Sadiq Khan being mounted by an inflatable pig

"Separately, Channel 4’s FactCheck has asked Fabricant why he apparently had the flag of apartheid South Africa on the mantelpiece of his office.
It appeared in the background when he was interviewed by Channel 4 News this week."

Hmm, yes, JRM having to get on with the DUP.

Trump's visit has boosted the extremists here. Moggmentum were out with their baseball bats attacking the police in London this afternoon. He can and probably willl be PM; the 'catholic' stuff won't matter. He's a wannabee Evelyn Waugh catholic; they piss in the same pot as the 160 000 families who own us.

Wifi signal is great at Chequers peregrina; it's only 6 miles from Aylesbury and 2 from Wendover. It drops off further into the hills towards Ivinghoe Beacon.

DH’s mum lives in Derry and she’s terrified Anyone with half a brain on this island would be too.

Nothing is being reported in msm about the 'unionist' violence and racism or lack of gov in NI.

Nothing's being reported about the boot boys this pm in London either.

But here's a picture from today in London.
I don't think the man with the baseball bat is a remainer.

Trump's visit has boosted the extremists here.
Was always going to happen

Which was why it was not the brightest idea to arrange a visit of this nature at this time.

I suspect May privately rather regrets it in hindsight.

Police horses were attacked by right wing thugs in Trafalgar Square

Something else to thank Christopher Chope for, since he voted against the private members bill to make this a separate offence.

Of course Mrs May rushed to invite Trump before her disastrous election performance. If she'd bided her time until the election, she could have quietly shelved the invitation.

Another Minister has resigned...

...and not over The Turd Way

www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/business-minister-andrew-griffiths-quits-12918866.amp?__twitter_impression=true
Business minister Andrew Griffiths quits as Sunday Mirror reveals his 2,000 sex texts
Theresa May's former chief of staff said: "I am deeply ashamed at my behaviour which has caused untold distress to my wife and family

The minister for small business Andrew Griffiths has resigned from the Government after sending depraved social media messages to two female constituents.

The contents of the texts will be revealed exclusively in tomorrow's Sunday Mirror.

And

"I entirely accept that pending this investigation it is right the Whip is withdrawn.

At this moment in time, I'm not sure May can spare anyone the whip can she?!