Westministenders: Teetering on the edge

[RedToothBrush]

12 weeks to go.

There is rising confidence in the Extreme Brexiteer camp as well as open comments about how they can deliberately force through No Deal. Remember No Deal is the default. Every political crisis that takes up time makes no deal more likely and the ERG can just be obstructive to facilitate a political crisis. Parliament DO NOT have the ultimate power to stop Brexit - unless the government effectively allow an option to do so. And there is no sign May will let this ever happen. No Deal takes us back to pre-industrial revolution Britain in many social and economic ways. Which will please Jacob Rees-Mogg no end.

No Deal prep is now costing us a fortune - and is no where near sufficient in its scope. Won't someone think of all the extra that could have been put into the NHS.

Parliament returns next week. I hope you have enjoyed your Christmas break. What will happen in 2019 no one knows; the only certainity is turbulance and lurching from crisis to crisis. If we don't get hit by Brexit, maybe it will be the US shutdown crisis or the collaspe in the Chinese economy that will get us. Economists are nervous and thats generally not a good thing for the average person on the street.

Time to get in the euros, stock up on the tomatoes, invest in books and otherwise batten down the hatches financially whilst we await the coming storm in the hope that the forecasters are as good as Michael Fish in 1987.

They can't block it Red tooth
That's kinda my point

but it seems they can vote down bits of legislation required for a "managed" no deal, they'll literally vote down any legislation required to implement it.
Given the situation, and the fanaticism there is for Brexit, I can't decide if this is wise or not. Certainly it plays into the hands of those creating the narrative that Remainers are deliberately sabotaging Brexit and if it goes wrong it's their fault.

Doing this only works if there is a chance May will revoke rather than No Deal. And as I've said before I do think she's reckless and stubborn enough just to do it on principle.

I like Hazard’s mantra...
Revoke! Revoke! Revoke!
Back to work today, hey ho. It will be interesting to see if Brexit is being discussed at all. I can really only discuss it with a couple of people, the rest seem to be blissfully or wilfully ignoring it.

And as I've said before I do think she's reckless and stubborn enough just to do it on principle.

Yes I do too. She had a reputation for being difficult before when she had more sleep. Now she has said she now functions on hardly any sleep, has that approbation of feeling she is guided by God and the cabinet complain that she makes many decisions in private. So there is a sleep deprived, stubborn, solo disciple at the helm.

I hope TM has been fully briefed on each item on that long list from the link last night. It is mind blowing- seeing so many examples of the effect already, just listed all together. Examples include:

“Oxford University Hospitals, which had the highest proportion of EU nurses of any trust outside London, has seen a dramatic exodus of EU staff. In the past year, of 133 departures, 108 were EU nationals. It currently has 450 nursing vacancies.”

“The annual cost to the NHS of securing all necessary visas and other documentation for its overseas staff post-Brexit (i.e. under the new immigration regime) is estimated at £490 million. “

But it’s seeing the collective impact of all 140 things.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1081836120617439233.html?fbclid=IwAR2dRtKXyPcu7B2KRLSmpit2ZliKWs5xTr9vUUMqapjtSyey3ZIOLw234

I saw that Boris has come out from under his rock with no Deal bollocks.
Running out of swear words for that slimy fucker.

I think all you need to know about the protest Vote element of voting for Brexit is contained in the answer to the following question:

'What has voting for Brexit achieved?'

I'd suggest: an emboldening if the Far Right (both at street level and in politics); a step back on being pro-immigration in both main parties; a coded out-reach to (white) nativists in both main parties; no roll-back on austerity; a fatal blow to political process.

'Listening to Leave voters' has significant problems. Never, ever forget that the strongest correlate between voting intentions in the Referendum and anything else (income, age, class, education,) was between a Leave vote and authoritarian attitudes.

The majority of Leave voters are left behind far more in terms of social attitudes than in terms of economics. Most felt that gay rights and women's rights had gone too far; you g people had too much power and autonomy; the UK was too tolerant and didn't give them the respect for their values that was owed them.

Scary stuff, frankly.

And the Leave vote makes perfect sense in those terms. And it IS delivering.

Widespread impoverishment always impacts on women the hardest; widespread removal of a social and economic safety net tends to harden the capacity to enact compassion and fairness; it tends to birth authoritarian movements; it reduced the power and autonomy of the young; it pulls back social progress; and we've seen what's happening with racism.

So, for a lot of these left behind, Brexit is, actually, going pretty damn well.

I'm not sure you will change their minds: it's all their Christmases come at once.

As for comments wrt 'don't you know people are starving now?'

Well, what can I say?

Yes. Yes I do. And I also know that there is still a magnitude of difference between the horror we are seeing unfold and the horror of endemic poverty that could see my old neighbour regarding life in the 1WW trenches as a better option than staying home.

There IS a difference. Sliding that difference risks taking the fight out of all those who are resisting those who would take us back to that place.

Knowing there's a difference - that things CAN and WILL get worse without resistance - is NOT the same as thinking poverty(real, absolute poverty) does not exist right now.

Whose interests does it serve to elude that difference? To void the resistance of nuance?

It is the lazy - dangerous - thinking that permitted and permits still, the resistance to Brexit being painted as lack of concern for social and economic ills.

I find it baffling that people - on the right and left - are buying into this.

It's bloody dangerous, and facilitated nothing but Brexit.

And it's nuts because a lot of people who work frontline with poverty also resist Brexit. Practically, it is clearly not either/or.

Honestly, I'm so tired of this.

Brexit is a right wing project. It's fucking scary. No-one with an ounce of compassion for others should be enabling this.

Applauds cat

On another, related, note, I am currently reading Heroic Failures by Fintan O'Toole. Highly recommended for a very readable - if somewhat depressing - analysis of how we got to where we are today.

I agree that the voting down of any no-deal prep is likely to backfire horribly, both in practical and psychodramatic terms. Just more grist to the Brexiteer mill, imo.

And once more, for emphasis: there's s reason you can't change the minds of many Leave voters by going on about the economic and social costs of Brexit.

They like the social costs : to them, they are benefits. And they are fine about the economic cost required to buy those benefits.

That's why you see them out there on the street, protesting outside Greggs, stopping ambulances, glassing trade union officials.

They want those social 'benefits'. Even if they have to trash the UK to get them.

We may find it a bit unreasonable/irrational. We may think they don't understand. But that is because we don't share those values.

They do understand. Extremely well. They just don't share our point of view.

Not accepting that, dressing it up as pity, is a fatal, fatal misunderstanding - and really will deliver us into the hands of the authoritarians.

I, too, have misgivings about this budget approach.

But ... 🤷‍♀️ I think it tells you how limited our political system is at the moment.

We have a stubborn, incompetent PM, acting without reference to a wide circle of advisors, a leader of the Opposition doing likewise, both facilitating s mind-numblingly damaging policy (Brexit).

I think YC's plan just shows how limited the resources of resistance are.

Terrifying, really.

I fear you are right @thecatfromjapan .

In 1979 65% of residential and nursing home beds were provided by local authorities or the NHS, by 2012 it was 6%. In the case of domiciliary care, 95% was directly provided by local authorities as late as 1993, by 2012 it was just 11%. ( I wonder how much of this 11% is short term discharge facilitation or crisis care )

Is this a better system for those who are in need of these services ? What have been the cost impacts of changing to a majority private provision scheme ? I imagine when it was first proposed it was supposed to save money.

I agree with pretty much everything cat says. This is why I get a bit sceptical about spending so much time and effort listening to leavers. As far as I can see there has been a lot of listening to leavers. News programmes, documentaries, think pieces, interviews in their hundreds have been written dedicated to what leavers think. I can't say I've seen nearly so many about how remainers feel.

In that time the impression I have got is that when you get through the 'poor old me' routine it comes down to mostly (of course not all) white, usually male folks upset about the fact that they are no longer top of the tree. That they now have to deal with women and people who don't look exactly like them having equal rights to the top branches and they don't like it. Sure it's all talked about as concerns about immigration but when you then point out the benefits of immigration you quickly get to the racism at the heart of it. It is very similar to the trump voters and growing alt-right in the EU to the extent that they overlap and share influences.

Sure listen if you want, but there are some principles I am just not prepared to move on and I will not pander to people's misogyny and racism. While we sit and wring our hand about how if we just listened some more everyone would be nice these people are pulling our county backwards and dismantling the amazing steps towards equality that we had taken. At some point you have to accept that some people are not nice, reasonable people and stand for what you believe in and that's going to mean that people who want to go back to the Victorian era of white male privilege aren't going to like it. Tough shit.

At that's my rant for today. Thank you, have a nice day.

Yeah I'm with bigly here. No longer so interested in listening to people who don't listen to others. Your Brexit and our gilets jaunes (and the MAGA folk across the pond) are all the product of white, mostly male, entitlement.

Sorry for de-rail, someone mentioned it previously and it is an area that crosses over into my area of work

Yes, that's my rant over, too, Bigly. And, yes, I, too have values I'm not going to compromise on. 🙂

Hear, hear Bigly

Facts are useful, Frumpety. No need to apologise.

Interrupting a little psychological off-loading (and, perhaps, discourse development - ranting can sometimes be an act of defining what you think in a smog of blather) with facts is never a derail.

The only thing that I can see which will come home to the deprived Leavers, who are pleased to see e.g. women and gay rights rolled back, is the appeal to the NHS. Do they really want to see a time when they are scared stiff of paying for Doctors bills? Paying for maternity care, e.g. no epidural unless you pay? It's the one thing that by voting for '£350 million a week, let's spend it on the NHS' they can definitely say that they were voting for a better service and not no service unless they can pay.

Completely agree Bigly.

We’ve made too much progress on the equality front (although not enough) to let it go now, to suit people who want to go backwards.

Thanks Cat , I am all for a rant or psychological off-loading, best not get me started though, my house looks like we have been burgled and I really need to give it some attention on my day off

And being white and predominantly male, have less investment in the NHS, especially maternity and childcare. So the promise of more money for the NHS is the one they will accept will be broken.

Brexit is a right wing project. It's fucking scary. No-one with an ounce of compassion for others should be enabling this.

Applauds Cat too.

It's a real cognitive disconnect, isn't it, Peregrina?

But people can be very weird.

I now have my very favourite piece of Brexit writing. It's in the new Nietzsche biography ('I Am Dynamite'). There's a chapter called 'Llamaland' & it's a detailed look at the Paraguayan venture pursued by Nietzsce's sister, Elizabeth. This is often alluded to in passing in other biographies.

Anyway, the author draws parallels between those who embraced the rising anti-semitism (which later became Nazism) and our own, dear 'Left Behinds'.

She writes about Elizabeth's attempts to establish a colony of German nativists in Paraguay. Given the analogy between the early nativists and the Left Behinds, the chapter becomes a parable for a terrifying musing on the joy that is the Brexit project, and the post-Brexit utopia we have to look forward to. Complete with illegality, criminality, fraud, cynical exploitation, and a cast of thoroughly dislikeable characters.

And people were prepared to sacrifice their health, livelihoods, children's lives and their own lives for it. 🤷‍♀️

Of course, the truly awful sting in the tail is that, while the Paraguayan venture was exposed for the scam it was, along came Nazism, which was more successful.

It's definitely, definitely a sobering read (although the author has a very light touch).

@tompeck on Twitter is covering the whole Lorry/Traffic-jam Brexit modelling going on today. And is very funny.

Just flagging it up if you want to practise your ability to dry laugh (or weep-cry) this morning.