Westministenders: Reality Bytes

[RedToothBrush]

Tonight the Corbyn and McDonnell Labour Party supported the Tory Party in improving the tax allowance for higher rate tax payers.

Yes you read that right. Did you even blink?

You've been so conditioned into seeing non existant opposition which seems to go against everything the Labour Party stand for that you no longer are shocked.

That's what 2 and a half years of Brexit has done to you.

You no longer care that Boris Johnson got £14,000 from the Saudis a couple of days before the Khashoggi murder. You know longer care that the former Defence Secretary is employed for £75,000 a year to advise a major Saudi Investor.

You are just happy that Trump hasn't started a war with Iran or North Korea yet. And hasn't started a civil war. (Though he's trying hard and next week is his best opportunity to stir it all up). You aren't surprised to hear that predictions are that the Democrats will fail to make gains in the mid terms.

You've suffered the 4657 story about how Therea May is just about to be challenged for the leadership.

You've heard about the squad set up at the Home Office to clear up all the cases the media get their hands on as the latest burning injustice. You are hearing that EU nationals who have been promised they are 'safe' are being subjected to questions about their right to stay. And you just shrug and say, "Yeah well thats the Home Office for you. The Bastards". And you do mean it, but you are so jaded by it all. And you worry that another 12 months from now, you won't even be interested in another story like that, and the press will stop printing them as they no longer interest the reader. What happens to your friends, your family, or even you then? Who is going to care then?

And then you have today.

A day where you hear that Bannon is being investigated by the Senate Intel Committee, Farage has been upgraded to the FBI's Really Naughty List and Banks has (FINALLY) been refered to the NCA. (We were only speculating on the possibility, on the 26th March...)

And you go 'Ooooooooo maybe there is hope'.

Maybe we COULD remain in the EU and avoid Turnip Soup and wiping your arse with leaves because of the national bog roll shortage. Or at least get a decent deal which suits us as a nation. Maybe, just maybe!

And that lasts for about 2 minutes before you log into twitter and the very first thing you see this:

Tom Newton Dunn @tnewtondunn
Excl: David Cameron tells friends he’d like a return to frontline politics, and fancies Foreign Secretary
www.thesun.co.uk/news/7639377/david-cameron-return-to-politics/

And you let out a high pitched screech as if you are were a dying cat as you remember this is 2018, and it just wants to beat the life out of you.

On the plus side, it shows you do still care enough to think 'Don't let that fucking bastard anywhere near power ever, ever again.'.

Ho hum.

Keep on, keeping on. Don't let the bastards win.
Keep caring. It matters.

I've been conducting an increasingly bizarre correspondence with my Tory ( hugely marginal constituency) MP on Brexit who seems to be living on the planet Zorg.

So comforting to get an intelligent and warm hearted response from my MEP - a truly kind and committed man who has helped me in the past.

Gave me a shred of hope.

North Cornwalls Scott Mann, wrote in reply to me earlier this year...

After months of negotiations and travelling all over the continent, the EU offered us barely anything. It is has a set of principles to harmonise trade, regulations, laws and people, and it was unwilling to change for Britain

That's why we must leave the EU, the single market, the customs union and the ECJ. The negotiations are tough, but I am confident that we make a decent offer to the EU which is mutually beneficial

How did someone who clearly has zero grasp of the issues become a bloody MP?

@jasjas73 my mp responded with similar drivel

Why do people vote for these idiots?

Wasn't it Cornwall, who immediately after the result was announced, asked Westminster to guarantee that the money they got from the EU would be replaced? To be given a firm NO.

On the thread about 'charting our nemesis' you could look up the map which shows how EU money is distributed. You could be really nerdy and add up the amounts, I noted £23M for farmers for a start, and ask the clot whether the amounts are barely anything.

However, I went to a discussion the night before the Referendum and one person whose husband was from Cornwall said that all his relatives were voting Leave, so it was difficult to have too much sympathy for them. I see last night's chart shows that the county has changed its mind.

On the subject of Cox quoting Milton, we are again back at the question of religion and reaction against the EU as some sort of modern day political expression of the Roman Catholic Church. Areopagitica was written in the early years of the English Revolution, in reaction to Charles I' s rule and suspected drive to take England back to Catholicism. It is a reversion to a vision of England which at its very core is defined in opposition to the continent. With such a vision driving Brexit there can be no alliance with Europe, let alone any close relationship with it.

Also on the subject of Rees Mogg and him being a Catholic- he is a traditionalist who's repeatedly stated that he believes in the Church's doctrine and its '2000 year old knowledge'.
His politics and religious stance fit perfectly within a current of reaction against Pope Francis's perceived excessive moral liberalism. It is a growing movement supported by ultra conservative elements in the US Catholic Church. They're the kind of people who go so far as to call the Pope a heretic.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.politico.eu/article/pope-francis-heretic-vatican-liberal-conservative-war/amp/

JustAnotherPoster00 Tue 06-Nov-18 13:10:34
"The replacement of sex by gender is a political decision, fuelled by a very small minority of very politically active individuals."
- Didnt both womens sufferage and feminism both start out this way?

The difference between suffragettes and trans activists is that everything the suffragettes asserted wrt women and what they were capable of was true, and verifiable fact. I.e. that women did not have female/inferior/cotton wool brains, that women were not such slaves to their hormones that they could not think straight, that women had the aim of upsetting the natural order/emasculating men, and undermining the Empire...

A similarity between anti-suffrage campaigners and trans activists is the focus on gender roles, which the suffragettes sought to overturn. For trans activists as for the anti-suffrage men and women, gender stereotypes are everything. They are gender conformists, deeply conservative.

Of course, most of the anti-suffrage slander of the suffragettes and the suffrage movement was accomplished by women who were unaccountably opposed to women's suffrage, offering a parallel with women who are trans activists.

A lot of the focus of the anti-suffrage women was the negative impact of women'[s suffrage on men, the family, the Empire. In other words, women were told they had no right to put themselves first and that they should consider the impact of their campaign on groups and structures that were deemed more important than them. Their assertions that women mattered and that women could and should stand up for themselves were unacceptable. We see much the same dynamic today. Women are very welcome to support all the progressive causes, but when women stand up for their own rights and those rights clash with entities that are deemed more important, we are reminded where we really stand, in no uncertain fashion.

NB - No desire here to derail, just an exploration of a suggestion.

No intention to detail either but two brilliant articles I read last night On how other countries are reporting our humbling. There seems to be a global realisation that our hubris is over and our nemesis begins. Two brilliant articles - one on our global role diminishing, and the second on the BBC’s reporting of it here. Apologies if posted before.

“Perhaps we should step back from the bloviated rhetoric. Humiliation is too strong; a national humbling is more accurate. The philosophy of Brexit was that, freed of EU constraints, the UK would take its rightful place in the world. This is indeed what is happening, but alas that place is not as the great power of their imagination.”

“Mr Trump is pro-Brexit because he wants to see a weakened EU, not to play benefactor .....Nor will sentimental attachments affect Commonwealth nations. Too many Brits fail to grasp that former colonies do not look back to the empire with unalloyed affection.”

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/brexit-is-teaching-britain-its-true-place-in-the-world-1.3688454

”No doubt, if the shift of public opinion against Brexit continues, the BBC’s silence will end and, like a weather vane, it will swing with the prevailing wind. It will receive no plaudits from me. No one should praise journalists who speak out when, and only when, they are certain that public opinion is with them. Not just journalists, but anyone engaged in political life should learn from the BBC’s abject performance. Whether you are on the left or the right, there will be times when you will be frightened of saying what you believe for fear of offending your friends, breaking a taboo or going against the ephemeral consensus of the day. Allow that fear to dominate you and you will end up like the BBC: platitudinous, frightened, and irrelevant.”

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/07/12/how-the-bbc-lost-the-plot-on-brexit/

@math Exactly
TRAs are the privileged playing at being the victim - which of course requires denying biological fact & the history of oppression

Some Australians refer to the British as 'whinging poms'. Others just say 'Pommy basta5ds' (I believe).
I think the UK 'NEEDS' to exit, just so that it can learn that it is not 'special' and that the rest of the world has moved on in the last 100 years or so.
It will be painful of course.

lonely That line could be written in the history books as a summary of Brexit;

how that accelerated the decline of Britain from once being the world's superpower to the permanently Sick Man of Europe
and like some sick men, being a complaining grump all the time

"The philosophy of Brexit was that, freed of EU constraints, the UK would take its rightful place in the world.

This is indeed what is happening, but alas that place is not as the great power of their imagination.”

Mueller in the US may do more with the Briish ICO report than any British agency - it ties in to the Trump gang

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/cambridge-analytica-arron-banks.html

The defunct political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica violated British law when it used improperly harvested Facebook data
to aid Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign,
< significant, because Mueller uses his teeth, unlike cowed UK agencies >

and would face a significant fine if it were not already in bankruptcy, Britain’s top data protection watchdog found Tuesday.
< so easy to escape even fines in the UK >
...
The 112-page report underscored how modern political campaigns rely on Facebook data and other consumer information, extracted or bought by consulting firms with little oversight and few protections for consumers.

An investigation in March by The New York Times, The Observer of London and The Guardian
revealed how Cambridge Analytica - at the time an upstart data firm bankrolled by the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer -
had improperly obtained and exploited Facebook datata_ from as many as 87 million users around the globe.*
...
The commissioner’s investigation revealed that
political campaigns in Britain had exercised little restraint in exploiting consumer data, despite the European Union’s relatively strict data laws.

Political groups were acting more like online businesses and internet marketing firms to target and engage voters, the report concluded.
“We have uncovered a disturbing disregard for voters’ personal privacy,” the commissioner found.
...
In Washington, the special prosecutor, Robert S. Mueller III, has obtained records of Mr. Banks’s communications with Russian diplomats.

Quietrebel Yup, the civil war ref of these fools is creepy.
What's the word for public school gammons?

So. That crash out. Looks like we are in the last few days or hours before it's official now.

Voter suppression looks like it was on a military scale in US yesterday.

Media and political suppression of the majority who want to stay in the EU also well 'enforced' here too.

Things are about to get very sticky, I'm thinking.

Parliament is on a recess until 12.11. now, as there's not much going on

Glastonbury might be brexited.

Cross brexist truckers on cross brexist site.
Kevin Hopper at Brian Yeardley said he had no idea if his roadies would be able to take all the necessary equipment overnight from London to Paris

And he warned next year’s entire summer festival schedule – including Glastonbury – could be hit as bands wouldn’t be able to “nip in and out” of Britain

brexitfeed.blogspot.com/2018/11/british-hauliers-are-turning-down-eu.html

It is a reversion to a vision of England which at its very core is defined in opposition to the continent.
That an interesting idea and a feeling i can relate to from the other side. As a French person, I’ve always felt that Britain was somehow separated and in opposition.
Maybe this is also because Britain is an island. Because of geography, it can’t havw the level of mixing and interconnection you have in the continent. (See how easy it is now to go from France to Germany or Belgium to the Netherlands. If you aren’t careful, you wouldn’t even anymore know you are in a different country.)

On a good news, it seems that Trump has been defeated.

In bad news, it looks like Trump has not been defeated...Senate results are v. disappointing, no?

It was always highly unlikely that the Democrats would win the Senate: the majority of the seats that were up for grabs were already blue - and the Republican seats that were up for reelection were in states that had voted Republican in the presidential election

MyBrexitisIll - Britain being an island doesn't explain why Scotland manages (and managed) to see itself as European. It's not a new thing - it goes all the way back to the Auld Alliance.

This dislike of "things continental" seems to be a specifically English trait

In Washington, the special prosecutor, Robert S. Mueller III, has obtained records of Mr. Banks’s communications with Russian diplomats.
Yes! Thank you, BigChoc

More support for Trump would be more support for Brexit, so this helps damage Brexit. This is another domino not falling the right way. The domino of Brexit was supposed to cause the Dutch and the French to be the next to vote in an extreme right government. They didn't.

prettybird indeed interestingly, Scotland has always been turned towards the continent (Scandinavia and indeed France) but isn't that also in great part because of its own perennial opposition to England? Scotland being the significant other nation on the island and perhaps not quite so obsessed with ruling the waves?
I think the fundamental issue with Brexit is that the imaginary 'waves' to be ruled in this day and age no longer exist. This is not the 17th century.

As a French person, I’ve always felt that Britain was somehow separated and in opposition.

From my reading of history, right up till England lost Calais (Mary Tudor ?) certainly as far as the English nobility were concerned, there was no difference between "England" and "France" - which is why we had the 100 years war, plus endless campaigns in France beforehand.

It was only when the Royal family lost the claim to any possessions in France that they become insular and distinct. In fact, one way of reading the English attitude to Europe is as the longest case of sour grapes in history.

Successive archaeological discoveries over the years have repeatedly put paid to the "Britain as different" myth. But, as we know Brexiteers prefer pictures to words, and fantasy to fact.